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Woodsman wrote: There are so many great effective natural substances.
MARIA SABINA
Curandera, Shaman
1896-1985
Maria Sabina, Mazatec healer, curandera, and Shaman. A native of Huautla de Jimenez, in the State of Oaxaca, Mexico, passed away in 1985 at the age of 91. She is famous for the role she played introducing the sacred mushroom ceremony velada to the world.
In the early 1930's, prior to Maria's rise to prominence, Robert J. Weitlaner, witnessed, but it is not recorded he participated in, the Mazatec mushroom ceremony just northeast of Oaxaca. On July 16, 1938, his daughter Irmgard, with an anthropologist who eventually became her husband, Jean Bassett Johnson, together with two others, Bernard Bevan and Louise Lacaud, attended a mushroom rite in Huautla. Johnson later gave a full account of the event and were the first white persons "recorded" to attend such a ceremony (although it is said they did not participate in the ceremony or ingest the mushrooms).
Throughout the intervening years numerous reports have surfaced, although none offically recorded, of other white men having actually participating in the ceremony. Of those, there is only one of any note, that being a mysterious halluciogenic bio-searcher and mushroom hunter from the Taos, Santa Fe, New Mexico area. He is said to have had several species named after him and known as well, to have been married to a very powerful curandera Shaman himself (see).
In 1955, Gordon Wasson and Allan Richardson, made history by becoming the first documented --- or at least widely publicized --- white men KNOWN to have participated officially in the nocturnal mushroom ceremony. Under the guidance of Maria Sabina, Wasson and Richardson each consumed six pairs of the mushroom Psilocybe caerulescens var. mazatecorum after which they began to feel the effects, manifesting visions of geometric patterns, palaces, and architectural vistas. The results of that experience was published in Life Magazine, May 13 1957, in an article titled "Seeking the Magic Mushroom." That article is considered the inspiration for Dr. Timothy Leary and others to try similar mushrooms and halucinogens.
"I was eight years old when a brother of my mother fell sick. He was very sick, and the shamans of the sierra that had tried to cure him with herbs could do nothing for him. Then I remembered what the teo-nanacatl [mushrooms] told me: that I should go and look for them when I needed help. So I went to take the sacred mushrooms, and I brought them to my uncle's hut. I ate them in front of my uncle, who was dying. And immediately the teo-nanacatl took me to their world, and I asked them what my uncle had and what I could do to save him. They told me an evil spirit had entered the blood of my uncle and that to cure him we should give him some herbs, not those the curanderos gave him, but others. I asked where these herbs could be found, and they took me to a place on the mountain where tall trees grew and the waters of a brook ran, and they showed me the herb that I should pull from the earth and the road I had to take to find them...[After regaining consciousness] it was the same place that I had seen during the trip, and they were the same herbs. I took them, I brought them home, I boiled them in water, and I gave them to my uncle. A few days later the brother of my mother was cured."
Maria Sabina had visions on the "little saints" that someone (Wasson) was coming and would take the tradition to the world after 500 years of secrecy under Spanish rule. As a result of that action, giving the secrets of the "little saints" to outsiders, her son was murdered and her house burned to the ground. During the later years of her life she lamented that "the power of the sacrament had been lost in the clouds," and ending up speaking English instead of the Mazatec. She lived to age 91, passing away on November 22, 1985.
Carlos Castaneda, the best selling author that wrote many, many books where he outlined how he became a sorcerer's apprentice under the auspices of a Yaqui Indian shaman he called Don Juan Matus is reported to have a connection to Maria Sabina. Anthropologist Jay Courtney Fikes in his book Carlos Castaneda, Academic Opportunism and the Psychedelic Sixties (1993) even goes as far to suggests that rather than being one individual, the chance exists that Don Juan was actually a composite of two or possibly even three authentic Indian shamans, of which one was Maria Sabina and the other, although not mentioned by Fikes but others, being the Cahuilla spiritual elder and Bear Shaman, Salvador Lopez. Now, while it is true the Cahuilla band of Indians happen to be located in California only a few hours east of UCLA where Castaneda was a student --- and he could have easily accessed Lopez for information --- a Sabina meeting, however, is considered by most as highly unlikely. The problem with Sabina is that she is not known to have ventured very far (physically) from her birthplace. Castaneda's wife Margaret Runyan confirms that her husband made frequent field trips to Mexico in the time he was supposedly apprenticed to Don Juan, and even though it has been recorded that Castaneda met briefly with Dr. Timothy Leary at the Catalina Hotel in Zihuatanejo sometime during the summer of 1962 --- somewhat unsuccessfuly it has been said --- NOTHING other than inuendos has surfaced that substantiates any sort of meeting between the curandera and Castaneda.
However, according to Richard de Mille in his book The Don Juan Papers (1980), in that Don Juan had the ability and knowledge to transmit the use mushrooms similar to the curandera, said to have been learned from his teacher's teacher, Elias Ulloa, it adds a certain amount of credibility to reports that have surfaced indicating Castaneda traveled with Don Juan to the mountains southwest and northwest of Valle Nacional in the State of Oaxaca to collect mushrooms.
Ultra Swain wrote:Another interesting theory was that the witch burnings and werewolf sightings in Europe were caused by the local populace eating grain with the wheat rust that is the precursor to LSD. Fucking peasants can't hold their mud.
It is more of an idea than a theory, no?Ultra Swain wrote: Another interesting theory...
Stiv wrote: Yeah I think it was what's called Ergot poisoning.
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