Maria Sabina

María Sabina was born outside of Huautla de Jimenez in the Sierra Mazateca towards the end of the 19th century, perhaps in 1894 although Sabina herself was not sure. Her parents were bothhumble campesinos, her mother María Concepcion and her father Crisanto Feliciano, who died from an illness when she was three years old. She had a younger sister María Ana. Her grandfather andgreat grandfather on her father's side were also wise men, skilled in using the mushroom to communicate with the Gods. After the death of her father her mother took the family to live with herparents, and Sabina grew up in the house of her maternal grandparents.[3]

María Sabina was the first contemporary Mexican curandera, defined as a native shaman, to allow Westerners toparticipate in the healing vigil that became known as the velada,[4][5] where all participants partake of the psilocybin mushroom as a sacrament to open the gates of the mind. The velada is seen as apurification and as a communion with the sacred.

In 1955, the US ethnomycologist and banker R. Gordon Wasson visited María Sabina's hometown of Huautla de Jimenez, Oaxaca, and participated in avelada with her. He also brought spores of the fungus, which he identified as Psilocybe mexicana, to Paris. The fungus was cultivated in Europe and its active ingredient was duplicated as thechemical psilocybin in the laboratory by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann in 1958.

US youth began seeking out María Sabina and the "holy children" as early as 1962, and in the years thatfollowed, thousands of counterculture mushroom seekers, scientists, and others arrived in the Sierra Mazateca, and many met her.[6] By 1967 more than 70 people from the US, Canada, and Western Europewere renting cabins in neighboring villages. Many of them went there directly after reading "Seeking the Magic Mushroom", a 1957 Life magazine article written by Wasson about his experiences.