María Sabina.
Shaman and Mazateca poetizer

María Sabina was a Mazatec shaman and poet from Mexico (1894-1985), known among her people as Chjota Chjine, ‘the one who knows’. She cured using mushrooms of the Psilocybe genus in ceremonies that lasted all night. She sang her poetry on long evenings alongside her ‘holy children’, as she affectionately called these visionary mushrooms that grow in her native Huautla de Jiménez, Oaxaca. A wise woman who practiced medicine and clairvoyance, uniting pre-Hispanic indigenous traditions with the Catholic religion.

Trichocereus Pachanoj (Jill Plugh and Steven F. White©, 2022).

* Video material

Maria Sabina,
the woman who
looks inward.*
───
Song of
María Sabina.
───
The sacred
mushrooms.
───
Mixtec Codex.
───

Maria Sabina, the woman who looks inward.

Extracto del documental María Sabina, mujer espíritu, de Nicolás Echeverría, 1978. Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía, Secretaría de Cultura, México.

Song of María Sabina

I am a clean woman, she says

I am a groomed woman, says

I am a woman who looks inward, says

I am a woman of light, says

I am woman day, says

I am a woman who thunders, says

I am a wise woman in medicine, she says

I am a wise woman in Language, says

I am a woman Christ, says

Oh, Jesus Christ, says

I am a big star woman, says

I am a female star, God says

I give woman Cross star, says

I am woman Moon, says

I’m a woman wolf, says

Oh, it’s Jesus Christ, says

I’m a woman from heaven, says

Oh, it’s Jesus Christ, he says

I am the woman who knows how to swim, says

I am the woman who knows how to swim in the sacred, says

Because I can go to heaven, he says

Because I can go swimming on the sea water, he says

That is very soft, he says

That is like earth, says

It’s like the breeze, says

It’s like the dew, says.

Song of María Sabina.

Manuel Estrada,

Vida de María Sabina, 1977.

The sacred mushrooms

The oldest evidence of the use of these mushrooms in Mesoamerica is found in the so-called ‘Mushroom-Stones’ of the Mayan area, which date back approximately two thousand years. Later, they appear represented in the ritual of the mushrooms that is related in the Vienna Codex, a pictographic manuscript on the beliefs of the Mixtec people, dated in AD 1450. The most suggestive information on the knowledge of this class of fungi in northern South America can be found in the pre-Columbian gold work of Panama and Colombia, in which various half-human, half-animal characters are represented who wear fungiform headdresses on their heads.

Mixtec Codex

The Vienna Codex or Vindobonensis is one of the few pre-Columbian pictographic manuscripts of Mesoamerica that are preserved today. It was made by the ancient Mixtec people of Mexico. It comprises a long stucco-covered deerskin screen with pictographs recounting the origin myths of its rulers. In fifty-two painted plates, which read from left to right and in a zigzagging manner, he narrates his birth from a tree in a place called Apoala. The deities and ancestors, the rituals and ceremonies in which they participated, and the founding of the Mixtec people are illustrated.

The page demonstrating the manufacture of pulque, the fermented maguey drink, is followed by the page where the gods introduce the visionary mushrooms into the world.

Teonanácatl and pulque among the Mixtecs

Quetzalcoatl, entity of life and knowledge, emerges from Apoala with a woman on his back who has three mushrooms on her head. One of them resembles a teonanácatl. They are accompanied by the Dark Lord, Pilzintecuhtli, who carries two similar mushrooms in his hands. At the bottom of the page Quetzalcoatl submerges in the river and emerges in Apoala on the same date.

The ceremony of taking power of the Mixtec rulers was celebrated with the sacred pulque, a kind of mead fermented from the mucilage of the maguey plant (Agave salmiana). The most important deities attended the ritual: 9 Wind, 7 Rain, 7 Flower, 9 Grass, 1 Death and the Sun, wearing their long red tunic, the attire of great lords.