María Sabina Magdalena García was born in 1894 in Huautla de Jiménez, a remote Mazatec town in the Sierra Mazateca of Oaxaca, Mexico. She died in the same town in 1985, an old woman who had outlived her own legend and had reason, by then, to wish she had never become it. Between those dates she carried a ceremonial tradition that had been practiced in the Sierra for centuries — and, through one evening in 1955, became the unwilling source of the modern Western encounter with psilocybin.
This article tells the history. We cover the Mazatec ceremonial context as best the historical and ethnographic record allows, the specific events of the Wasson visit in 1955, what happened in the decade that followed, and how the Mazatec people themselves have written about the consequences. We have tried to write this carefully. The story has often been told badly.
The Mazatec Cultural Context
The Mazatec are an Indigenous people whose ancestral territory lies in northern Oaxaca, in a rugged region of the Sierra Madre Oriental. The population today is estimated at around 200,000 speakers of Mazatec languages. Their society predates Spanish contact by more than a thousand years, and their religious and healing practices, while syncretized with Catholic elements over the colonial centuries, retain pre-Columbian roots.
Ceremonial use of certain mushrooms — known in the Mazatec language as ndi xitjo, often translated as “little ones who spring forth” or “saint children” — is part of a broader healing complex practiced by curanderas and curanderos. These practitioners hold a position in Mazatec society that does not translate cleanly into English. Curandera is sometimes rendered as “healer” or “shaman,” but neither captures the full role. The position involves diagnosis of illness, intercession with ancestral and spiritual entities, recitation of long traditional prayers and songs, and the administration of plant and fungal medicines in carefully managed contexts.
The mushrooms used in the Mazatec ceremonial tradition include several Psilocybe species — particularly P. mexicana, P. caerulescens, and P. zapotecorum — that grow wild in the high cloud forests of the region. They are gathered seasonally, in pairs, and offered in ceremonies that traditionally take place at night, in darkness, with specific prayers and songs. The ceremonies are described in the ethnographic record as healing rites, not recreational events. They are conducted in response to specific concerns: illness, family difficulty, spiritual diagnosis, decisions of significant weight.
It is essential to understand that this is a tradition. It existed before Western researchers arrived to document it. It existed before “psychedelic” was a word. The Mazatec did not consider their practices part of a broader category of “psychedelic culture.” They considered them part of their own continuing religious and medical inheritance.
Before the Encounter
What the world outside the Sierra Mazateca knew about these practices, before 1955, was approximately nothing. The Spanish chroniclers of the sixteenth century, particularly Bernardino de Sahagún, had documented the existence of teonanácatl — “flesh of the gods” — among the Aztecs, recording that the consumption of certain mushrooms had been part of pre-Columbian religious life across central Mexico. The Catholic Inquisition had subsequently classified these practices as idolatrous and worked, in the colonial centuries, to suppress them.
After Spanish suppression efforts, scholarly Western awareness of mushroom ceremonialism in Mexico effectively disappeared for nearly four centuries. By the early twentieth century, most academic accounts treated teonanácatl as a historical curiosity, possibly an error in Sahagún’s text, possibly a reference to peyote rather than mushrooms. The Austrian anthropologist Blas Pablo Reko challenged this view in the 1930s. The Mexican botanist Roberto Weitlaner and his daughter Irmgard reported in 1936 that mushroom ceremonies continued in Oaxaca. Yet these accounts received little international attention.
The tradition itself had continued, of course, with or without external recognition. The Mazatec had simply persisted with their practices for centuries, hidden from outside scrutiny by geography, language, and indifference. The mushrooms grew. The curanderas learned the prayers. The ceremonies were conducted. The Western academic and popular world remained almost entirely unaware.
The Wasson Visit, 1955
The encounter that changed everything began with R. Gordon Wasson, an American banker and amateur ethnomycologist who, with his wife Valentina Pavlovna Wasson, had spent more than two decades researching the cultural history of mushrooms. The Wassons had become convinced that mushroom religion had once been widespread in human prehistory, and they wanted evidence.
A series of correspondences and introductions, including the work of Reko and the Weitlaners, led Wasson to Huautla de Jiménez. In June 1955, accompanied by photographer Allan Richardson, he traveled to the town, met with the local presidente municipal, and was eventually introduced to a curandera named Cayetano García’s wife — and then, through her, to María Sabina.
On the night of June 29-30, 1955, María Sabina conducted a velada — an all-night healing ceremony — at which Wasson and Richardson were the participants. The ceremony involved the consumption of paired mushrooms (likely P. caerulescens or a closely related species), prayers in Mazatec, songs, candlelight, and many hours of darkness. The men experienced strong subjective effects.
What María Sabina understood about her guests is impossible to recover with certainty. Several accounts, including her own later statements, indicate that she conducted the ceremony in good faith as a healing rite, having been led to believe by her introducers that these foreigners needed her help. What Wasson understood about the cultural context of what he was being given is also clear in retrospect: he understood that he was a guest at a sacred ceremony, and he proceeded to publish details of it in an American mass-circulation magazine two years later.
”Seeking the Magic Mushroom”
The May 13, 1957 issue of Life magazine carried Wasson’s seventeen-page article titled “Seeking the Magic Mushroom.” It was, in its time, an extraordinary piece of journalism. It introduced an Anglophone audience of millions to a phenomenon they had never heard of, accompanied by Richardson’s photographs of the ceremony, of the mushrooms, and of María Sabina herself.
The article gave the phrase “magic mushroom” its first major circulation in English. It named María Sabina, named Huautla de Jiménez, and described in detail the ceremony she had conducted. Wasson did not provide an address, but he provided enough information that anyone determined to find her could.
This was the rupture. Within a few years, a steady stream of foreigners — initially academics and ethnographers, then journalists, then, increasingly, North American and European seekers — began arriving in Huautla. They came not to participate in healing ceremonies, in the Mazatec sense, but to take mushrooms in a context they shaped for themselves. They came in numbers the town had no infrastructure to absorb. By the early 1960s, the figure of María Sabina had become an icon in the emerging psychedelic counterculture, her name appearing in books, songs, and the pilgrimage routes of an internationalized drug tourism.
The Aftermath in Huautla
For María Sabina personally, the consequences were severe. Mexican authorities pressured local officials to discourage the visitors. María Sabina was arrested at one point; her son was killed in a separate incident in the late 1960s. Her home was burned, possibly by neighbors who blamed her for the disruption to the town. She lost standing in her own community, where she was held responsible by some for revealing sacred practices to outsiders.
In interviews she gave in her later years, she expressed regret in a specific way. The mushrooms, she said, had lost their power. She did not mean this pharmacologically. She meant that the mushrooms, used outside their ceremonial context — taken in the wrong spirit, in the wrong setting, for the wrong reasons — had ceased to function as the sacred medicines she had known. Whether this is best understood as a literal claim about spiritual reality or as a metaphor for cultural rupture is a question different readers will answer differently. What is clear is that the encounter with the outside world had transformed something she had considered fixed and inheritable into something contested and bruised.
The Mazatec community at large absorbed multiple shocks at once. Outsiders disrupted local economies, brought legal trouble, demanded ceremonies that did not fit traditional patterns, and treated a religious practice as a tourist attraction. Some practitioners adapted, conducting ceremonies for outsiders for payment. Others refused. Many young Mazatec moved away from ceremonial practice entirely, partly in response to the upheaval. The tradition continues to this day, but it has been altered by the long aftermath of the encounter.
A Note on Cultural Borrowing
The Mazatec tradition is sometimes invoked, in contemporary psychedelic discussions, in support of broad claims about the universality, antiquity, or therapeutic legitimacy of psilocybin use. These claims are often poorly grounded.
The Mazatec ceremony is a specific cultural practice. It involves specific prayers, specific songs, specific relationships among participants, and specific cosmological frameworks. It is not a generic precedent for taking mushrooms. The ethical question of whether outside parties have any right to draw on it — and under what circumstances — is one that Mazatec writers and community leaders have themselves addressed, often critically of the appropriation they observe.
In 2020, a group of Mazatec leaders issued a public declaration objecting to the commercial use of Mazatec ceremonial imagery and to the appropriation of their traditions by the global psychedelic industry. The declaration emphasized that the Mazatec do not consider their ceremonial practices to be the common cultural property of humanity. They consider them their own.
Researchers and writers who engage with this material seriously generally hold themselves to a few principles: cite the tradition specifically rather than as generic “ancient wisdom”; credit Mazatec voices rather than relying entirely on Wasson-era sources; recognize that Mazatec ceremonial use is not a recommendation for casual or commercial use; and acknowledge the real harms that the 1955 encounter and its aftermath caused.
What María Sabina Said
In her dictated autobiography, recorded with Mexican poet Álvaro Estrada and published in Spanish in 1977, María Sabina described her life, her training as a curandera, and her relationship to the mushrooms. The English-language edition, María Sabina: Selections, is the closest thing to her own voice that English readers can access. It deserves to be read directly rather than through paraphrase.
Two excerpts often quoted from her account capture something of her position. The first concerns the nature of the mushrooms: she described them as teachers, as voices, as a means by which a knowing larger than her own could speak. The second concerns the encounter with outsiders: she said, in plain terms, that before Wasson nobody had used the mushrooms as he did, and that something had been broken that could not be repaired.
The two statements stand in tension. The tradition was real. The encounter was a wound. Both things are true in her own telling.
What This History Asks Us to Hold
A responsible treatment of this material does not ask the reader to choose between two simplistic frames. It does not ask us to celebrate María Sabina as the patroness of the psychedelic age, nor to dismiss the cultural value of psilocybin research because of its colonial history. It asks us to hold both: that the Mazatec tradition is a real, living cultural inheritance; that its global exposure produced real harm; that the molecule it brought to global awareness has nonetheless become the subject of serious scientific research with potential medical applications; and that the people whose ancestors carried the tradition through colonial suppression deserve to be acknowledged, credited, and consulted when their inheritance is invoked.
The Mazatec tradition is not the only Indigenous psilocybin tradition in the Americas, and the Indigenous traditions are not the only chapter of human relationship with these fungi. But the Mazatec story has a particular weight because the encounter it represents is the door through which most of the contemporary Western conversation about psilocybin entered. Walking through that door without acknowledging who was standing on the other side, and at what cost to them, is the part of this history that most contemporary discussions still fail to address.
Further Reading
Readers who want to engage this history seriously should start with primary and Indigenous sources rather than psychedelic-movement secondary literature. Álvaro Estrada’s María Sabina, su vida y sus cantos (in Spanish) and its English translation are essential. The 2020 Mazatec community declaration is available online in both Spanish and English. The work of Mazatec writer Inti García Flores and other contemporary Indigenous scholars offers context that Wasson-era sources cannot provide.
For the Western side of the encounter, Wasson’s own 1957 Life article and his subsequent books — particularly The Wondrous Mushroom — provide the historical record of how the outside world saw what happened. Reading them alongside Mazatec sources reveals how differently the same events can be told.
This article is part of the Magic Mushroom Institute’s history series. We document the cultural and historical context of psilocybin use as carefully as the sources allow. We acknowledge the harms caused by the events described above and credit the Mazatec people as the bearers of the tradition that brought psilocybin to global attention. Last reviewed April 2026.