Sacred Mushroom’s Secret
Street Art Break in VR
Like viruses sometimes jump across species, potentially bringing disease, so does knowledge sometimes jump across cultures, potentially bringing disruption.
Patient One is always difficult if not impossible to identify.
Here on a wall along the Calle de Ignacio Aldama in Oaxaca, Mexico, we see an exception.
Her name is Maria Sabina, she was a Mazatec curandera, or shaman, who lived in the tiny village of Huautla de Jimenez in southern Mexico and died there in 1985 at the age of 91.
It’s what happened 30 years earlier that sent history off in a new direction, in 1955, when a mushroom lover and wealthy banker named R. Gordon Wasson visited the village with his wife and asked to take part in one of her valendas, sacred healing mushroom ceremonies.
Marina Sabina agreed.
No outsider had ever participated before. This is where secret information made a cultural jump.
Mazatec cultural traditions are pre-Colombian. Maria Sabina came from a family of healers, links in a long chain of knowledge transmission.
Wassan took mushroom spores back with him. Soon after, Albert Hofman, the Swiss chemist who synthesized LSD, synthesized psilocybin from the fungus spores. Later, Wassan completed the loop by taking synthetic psilocybin pills back to Maria Sabina, who said they felt the same as her mushrooms.
Many psilocybin-based compounds are now patented and worth billions of dollars. The Mazatecs do not hold any of those patents.
Maria Sabina was not prepared for someone like Wassan, who claimed to need help with anxieties about his son, which he later admitted to have made up.
She and the people of Huautla de Jimenez were even less prepared for what followed. Although he promised not to disclose the location of the village, he did, in a book he published about ethnomycology. By the early 1960s, a few outsiders began seeking her out — and then celebrities came.
John Lennon. Bob Dylan. Keith Richards.
The village was overwhelmed. State authorities thought it was all drug dealing and created more havoc. People were killed.
After a few years, the Police realized all they had to do was block the one road leading to Huaulta de Jimenez. Things settled back down there.
But outside the village a new genie was out of the bottle, unaccompanied by Maria Sabina or any helping healer.
The centerpiece of my first psilocybin experience was not healing or even greater self-awareness. It was The Chambers Brothers playing “Time” for about an hour at a place called The Electric Factory, in Philadelphia.
Maria Sabina later expressed regret over what became of the sacred mushroom. She said that it was for healing, not for fun or mystical highs.
I regret that I did not make better use of the opportunities I had when I had them.
But Maria Sabina might be feeling better about things now. The early wave of pleasure seeking has subsided and a new wave of respectful use of the magic mushroom has emerged. And it is all about healing, reducing anxieties, releasing stuck vigilance systems and alleviating depression.
She is pictured here with Xoloitzcuintli, a hairless Mexican dog that serves a strong guardian and protector in almost all indigenous traditions of Meso-America.
The God-Dog Xolo had a cosmically important job — guarding the Sun during its passage through the land of death. The Xolo also carries each of us through the difficult passage after death.
Recent research involving psilocybin has focused on death anxiety, with a team from Johns Hopkins reporting substantial reduction in their very first study, 2016.
Xolos have become very popular and Maria Sabina has also been rediscovered. El Tri, one of Mexico’s most successful rock bands has a hit song named after her.
She is also remembered in this work of street art by Erica Sanchez.
Tom’s work has not appeared in The New York Times, New Yorker Magazine, The New Republic, the New England Journal of Medicine, or anything New at all.
He only publishes in obscure journals and, once upon a time, PBS Program Guides. Otherwise he just gives his work a URL and sends it packing on the web at places like Medium and Sub-Stack, where he enjoys a modest following.
