Topic: Maria Sabina

[nichi]

I am a shooting star woman, says
I am a shooting star woman, says
I am a whirling woman of colors, says
I am a whirling woman of colors, says
I am a clean woman, says
I am a clean woman, says
I am a woman who whistles, says
I am a woman who looks into the insides of things, says
I am a woman who investigates, says
I am a woman wise in medicine, says
I am a mother woman, says
Holy Father, says
I am a woman wise in medicine, says
I bring my lord eagle, says
I bring my opossum, says
I bring my lord eagle, says
I bring my whirlwind of colors, says
Father in heaven, says
Saint Christ, says
Father scribe, says
I am a spirit woman, says
I am a woman of light, says
I am a woman of the day, says
I am a Book woman, says
Holy Father, says
I am a saint woman, says
I am a spirit woman, says
I am a woman who looks into the insides of things, says
I am a whirling woman of colors, says
Holy Father, says
With the saint, says
With the saintess, says
Holy Mother, says
I am a spirit woman, says
I am a saint woman, says
I am a Lord eagle woman, says

 
mesoamerican indian - mazatec - maria sabina




María Sabina was the Mazatec curandera from Oaxaca, Mexico who encountered R. Gordon Wasson on his trip to Mexico in 1955. On June 19th, 1955 she introduced him to psilocybin mushrooms during a healing ceremony. He became the first Westerner to experience the effects of these psychedelic fungi, followed shortly thereafter by Valentina Wasson. Wasson wrote about his experience with María and the psilocybin mushrooms in an article for Life Magazine in 1957.

In the Life Magazine article, Wasson referred to María Sabina as "Eva Mendez" in an attempt to protect her privacy, but the attempt failed. Over the coming years, María Sabina was inundated with visitors from the United States. The onslaught of "young people with long hair who came in search of God" disrupted her village and led to her arrest on more than one occasion by local federales. She sometimes turned visitors away, and sometimes introduced them to the mushrooms they sought, occasionally charging a fee, and often not.

María Sabina died in 1985 at the age of 91.
http://www.erowid.org/culture/characters/sabina_maria/sabina_maria.shtml

Selections, by María Sabina

Edited by Jerome Rothenberg with texts and commentaries by Álvaro Estrada and Others 204 pp. Poets for the Millennium series, edited by Pierre Joris and Jerome Rothenberg
The University of California Press, 2003
Cloth: $50 (ISBN 0-520-23360-3); Paper: $16.95 (0-520-23953-9)
 

For those unacquainted with the Mazatec Indian shaman María Sabina despite her international renown, this very attractive, pocket-sized little book reprints a selection of her curing chants and the autobiography first published in Spanish by Álvaro Estrada in Mexico (Siglo XXI Editores, 1977) and later, in English with the help of Henry Munn (Ross-Juhanison Publishers,1981) in Santa Barbara. There is more.

The book is the second in a series called ‘Poets for the Millenium’ described by the University of California Press as ‘global in scope, experimental in structure, and revolutionary in content’... providing ‘valuable introductions to poets who have been at the forefront of innovative and visionary poetry from the beginning of the XXth century to the present day.’ (The first book in the series was devoted to André Breton.) At the same time, the editor, Jerome Rothenberg, has tried ‘to avoid the impression that María Sabina is being presented here as herself a kind of experimentalist. (Henry Munn’s new essay, below, makes her traditionalism, however different from our own, abundantly clear)’ (p. xix).
      The best place to check out Rothenberg’s argument for the inclusion of this book in the series is the two page text ‘Some Oral Poetries’ in volume two of ‘Poems for the Millennium’ (University of California Press, 1998, pp.485 — 6). Here he writes of oral poetries individually made but community-related which exist outside of literature and writing as commonly understood, which are not anonymous nor timeless as ‘primitive’ arts are often said to be but exist alongside our own poetries and often influence them, especially if we belong to an educated stratum of the originating community.
      But, and here reside some of my difficulties, the reader soon understands that this Mazatec ‘curandera’ is being presented as a poet, in her aspect as a poet, for us contemporary non-indigenous and altogether foreign poets rather than as a poet in her society and for herself: the presentation is an Ethnopoetic act in the context of Rothenberg’s long standing effort to enrich our production and consumption of poetry. Beside mention of the excitement of clients hearing her during her ‘veladas’ (curing sessions), I would certainly have liked more in the book on any Mazatec conception or definition of ‘poetry’ or of the ‘poet’ — should there be such.
      Thus the continuing and ever acute problem of cultural borrowing and appropriation which has dogged Ethnopoetics from its inception cannot help being raised. The whole presentation is angled in the direction of María Sabina as poet. There is one valuable essay by Henry Munn on the linguistic ethnography of María Sabina’s chants (the Mazatec origin of the metaphors, symbols and expressions used and the limited extent to which these are strictly hers) which raises the vast problem of ‘originality’ in any poet’s lexical usages and a very short extract of a piece by R. Gordon and Valentina Pavlovna Wasson. But there are also four contemporary poets’ essays: Homero Aridjis’s tale of how he helped María Sabina in a medical emergency on one occasion; Anne Waldman’s account of how her derivative poem ‘Fast Speaking Woman’ was created; a contemporary Mazatec poet Juan Gregorio Regino’s homage to María Sabina and Rothenberg’s comments on his own poem about her: ‘The little Saint of Huautla.’
      The field-working honesty of this last piece, recording how a performance of one of the author’s translations failed to be of any interest to María Sabina and how he was charged for a session which, in Mazatec belief, should have been free leads Rothenberg to his melancholic realization that decades of visits by outsiders since Jean Johnson’s in 1938 and, as participants, the Wassons on June 29 — 30, 1955, were killing off, or indeed had killed off, the original spirit of the chant sessions (a situation already amply mentioned by María Sabina herself and the Wassons). This wrenches the book around in the direction not so much of poetics as of anthropology.
      The book does record the fact that, traditionally, the sessions were always medical, i.e. related to the practice of curing, and were not thought of as poetic performances, however much the language given by the hallucinogenic mushrooms used was conceived as divinely inspired ‘language’ and however fine it was to hear and read. It is also made clear that the sessions were not a search for vision per se as they were for outsiders coming to ‘look for God.’ If María Sabina was a poet then, and an original one in the Mazatec context (Munn’s essay, though excellent for what it does accomplish, is not complete or precise enough on this point for my taste), she was, to a large extent, ‘un poète malgré elle.’ A reader curious to go further could look at some of R.J. Weitlaner’s work — for instance his 1952 ‘Curaciones mazatecas’ in the Anales del Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia.’
      Among other questions raised for me are the extent to which María Sabina’s personality impressed these commentators as part of her originality but we do not have enough data about other ‘curanderos’ to measure this comparatively. Certainly the authority and, one might say, precision with which she speaks and holds her sessions confirms a personal sense that the mushrooms do indeed invest one with exactly those qualities. As Wasson has pointed out in his article in Peter Furst’s ‘Flesh of the Gods,’ (Praeger, 1972) beauty is very much in the ear of the hearer on these occasions: we still hardly have the terminology to describe what he has called the ‘bemushroomed’ state.
      A great deal of María Sabina’s chanting, as Munn’s piece will attest, recalls other chants and prayers to anyone familiar with Mesoamerican shamanism. The litanical style in which pairing is important and incremental accretion drives the inspiration: the shaman associating one statement after another, either culturally-conditioned or imaginatively self-derived, with her/ his frame of mind at the time as well as the session’s circumstances and those of the audience are very familiar. Likewise, the extent to which the performer’s cosmology frames the journey or trip of the performance and its important loci: a mountain, a lake but also a heaven or hell, etc. Likewise the notion, possibly pre-Columbian, of a “sacred book” given by spiritual powers and containing ‘everything in the world’: in our heroine’s case, according to Rothenberg, ‘a hypostatized Book of Language that allows her, though illiterate, to read.’ Likewise also, a great many expressions, such as ‘your hands, your feet’ or ‘beneath your eyes, beneath your mouth’ to give one example, or numerologies like ‘thirteen x and thirteen y’ (from a pre-Columbian number and/ or that of Christ plus the twelve apostles). Likewise, again, possible social status implications in seeing which of the ‘curanderos’ syncretize with a ‘higher religion’ and are thus inspired by Christian deities as well as indigenous ones. This was the case of María Sabina herself.
      Where does this leave me?
      William Carlos Williams M.D. did not, to my knowledge, chant his poems at the prone bodies of his patients yet, in espousing the view that human beings could die for the lack of whatever it is poetry brings, he had some idea of what he would have liked to see poetry do. Heroically, against the blinding evidence that, in our time and place, it does very little (and of course the word ‘does’ also needs analyzing), our poets, in order to remain poets, have to hold some belief in poetry’s power and usefulness. In the end, is the poet among ‘us’ fascinated by the poet among ‘them’ because he or she is useful in a very concrete and practical sense... and we are not?

http://jacketmagazine.com/25/tarn-sab.html

[tangerine dream]

Ha!
You must be psychic! I was just going to look her up.  (isn't she awesome?  I love her) Thanks V .
love you!

[nichi]

Author: Bruce Rimell

The Mazatec phrase chota chine (or xuta chjine) is often translated as 'wise one'. I believe that this is a mistake which misleads us about true Mazatec ways of thinking but also causes us to miss an important point about our lives.

Throughout salvia divinorum and Mazatec related articles on the internet, we are commonly told that the Mazatec phrase to refer to a shaman or curandero is chota chineand this is often translated as ‘wise one’ or ‘one who knows’.

Armed as I now am with a Mazatec dictionary of the Chiquihuitlan dialect of the Mazatec language, I now have reason to believe that this translation is deeply misleading; it actually says more about us Westerners than the Mazatecs. I also feel that the correct translation of this phrase leads us not to only to understand the Mazatec world-view a little better, but also leads us to a deeper vision of what shamanic techniques of ecstasy and healing actually mean.

Let’s begin with words. In the book ‘Maria Sabina Selections’, Maria Sabina is often described as a chota chine, a wise one. In the famous mushroom velada, she begins as many native Mexican curanderos do, by presenting her credentials to the spirits and saints:

Chjon jintaya nka tso
Chjon fanyeya nka tso
Chjon chjine nka tso 

It is said: I am a woman who shouts
It is said: I am a woman who thunders
It is said: I am a wise woman (*1)

In the dialect of Chiquihuitlan, the phrase for curandero is written xuta chjine, pronounced roughly as “shoo-ta chhee(n)-neh”, where the ‘chh’ represents a strongly breathy ‘ch’ sound and the ‘ee(n)’ a nasalized ‘ee’ sound. (For those that understand phonetic and tonal notation, xuta chjine is pronounced šu:ta čhį:ne) (*2)

Here, then, are the dictionary definitions given for both of these words (*3). Although some of the examples given may seem mundane, in language, it is very often the mundane and everyday implications of a word which are closest to the heart, and thus give the clearest impression of what that word means:

xuta : person, relatives or members of one’s family, friend, (lover) 
 
cha xuta vixan boyfriend (male person to marry)
na xuta vixen girlfriend (female person to marry)
xuta hani foreigner, especially of European descent (red person)
xuta vincha nascuan curandero (person who places tobacco) 


chjine : prepared, ready, being a master in, having a customary role in which one excels
 
comida chjine prepared food
tjin chjine café I have made some coffee (coffee has [been] prepared)
chjine ndyaja firemaker (master of the horn??)
chjine tyjo musician (maestro of wind instruments)
chjine ya carpenter (woodmaster)

In considering the word xuta we see that it has a wider context than the English word ‘person’, and which barely touches on the idea of ‘one who is’. We see that it carries very familiar and affectionate connotations in referring directly to members of one’s own family or the lover one is about to marry. On the other hand it also indicates a more standard type of person, such as a foreigner, with whom one has no connections.

Similarly, chjine has a number of connotations, but it is certainly clear that the word in no way relates to such translations as ‘wise’. When following a noun, it tends to refer to something that is prepared, completed or ready, and when chjine itself occupies the initial position, it carries tendencies of maestro, master (*4) at doing something, one who excels at a certain job.

We may also note the inherent practicality of the word chjine, in that it refers to doing, acting in a certain way and jobs that have to be done, to working at something so that it is complete (whether making a fire or preparing food), or being a functionary at a ritual event (musician). It is this inherent practicality that I believe is missing from the notion of chota/xuta chjine as translated by Westerners.

A number of translations for this phrase are clearly possible, and it is not to say that the Mazatecs understand the xuta chjine in several ways, but that the English language does not really carry the right nuances to translate the phrase in a single way. A number of (for English speakers) disparate concepts are (for Mazatec speakers) here united:

xuta chjine : a person who is prepared for something, a person who excels in doing a certain thing, a friend or relation who is ready [there for you?], a maestro person, a master or mistress in a certain art, a person who has been completed [in their understanding of something] 

Thus, we see that xuta chjine bears no resemblance to ‘one who knows’ or indeed ’wise person’. It is much more powerfully practical than such ideas.

One of Western literature’s best fictional creations is, in my opinion, Terry Pratchett’s elderly female witch, Granny Weatherwax. (*5) Living as she does in the tiny, mountainous and very wet kingdom of Lancre , in many ways she resembles such Mexican curanderos as Maria Sabina very powerfully. Her character is harsh and unforgiving on the surface, but underlying this is a powerful knowledge that life is not about concepts or ideas, but about living it, being it, putting oneself directly in the path of trouble and seeing how one’s own strengths match up to the task at hand.

Highly dismissive of philosophy, she is often exhorting people to ‘put in some skin’, that is: stop talking about it and just start working at it.

And it is this kind of attitude which, it seems to me, is at the heart of the Mazatec understanding of what a curandero should be: chjine prepared, ready to place oneself in the heart of things, there in the moment when needed.

A wise person is one who knows, one who is adept at philosophy or knowledgeable in a certain field. S/he may be able to provide deep insight into life, but it is a conceptual, or theoretical insight. Wisdom, in English, is not inherently practical: wisdom is potential. A person can be wise by talking or by writing. S/he doesn’t actually have to do anything. Of course, wise words can indeed spur the speaker or listener into action, but that, in the English way of conception, is deeds, not wisdom.

A person who is chjine, however, has gone one step further from wisdom in their development. They have translated their knowledge into the ability to act, and this is what chjine is: the translation of previously-learned knowledge so that one is always prepared or has the ability to act. Chjine is still potential – it is not deeds, but it is a deeper, more realised potential: it is wisdom applied to the situation at hand. It is the potential for practicality.

In effect, chjine provides the bridge between knowledge and action, and a xuta chjine is one who has fully realised this bridge and is able to be practical, to ‘put in some skin’. S/he is not a theoretical holder of knowledge but a fully realised actor-upon-the-knowledge-s/he-holds.

This practicality of the Mazatec way of thinking is also evident in another phrase often used to refer to curanderos: xuta vincha nascuan – literally: person who places tobacco. Here we see it is not the potential that the curandero holds which is the focussed point, but the action that the curandero customary does: placing tobacco in the mouth to begin the divination process. We may compare this with one of the translations of chjine given above: one who is a functionary in a certain ritual act.

/...../Maria Sabina spent much of her childhood exploring the hallucinogenic plants and mushrooms that grew around her native village, and in doing so gained knowledge of their power. But it wasn’t until she felt able to perform her first healing ceremony – the knowledge of the saint children translated into ability to act – that she became chjine (*6).

chjine the realised potential of knowledge, the practical ability to act

xuta chjine one who has realised their potential and has the ability to fulfil it
 

(*1) Another interpretation of these types of opening dedication in native Mexican shamanic healing ceremonies is that it is the spirits of the mushrooms speaking through Maria Sabina, and thus, it is the mushroom spirits who are here presenting their credentials to the assembled humans. Among ethnobotanists and ethnopharmacologists, the tendency is to follow this interpretation (Blosser, Wasson), whereas anthropologists and mythologists tend to follow the interpretation given in the main body of the text (Houston, Campbell, Eliade). My opinion is that there is room for both to be true in certain contexts.

(*2) Maria Sabina lived in the village of Huautla de Jimenez . In the dialect of that village, the phrase for curandero is rendered chota chjinenčò:t a čhį:nę with an additional nasal vowel ę at the end of the word. Chiquihuitlan dialect lacks the ‘o’ sound of Huautla dialect.

(*3) Jamieson Capen, Carole - Volcabularios Indigenas 34: Diccionario Mazateco de Chiquihuitlan, Oaxaca Summer Institute of Linguistics

(*4) Chjine doesnt carry any kind of gender connotation as the words ‘master’ and ‘maestro’ do.

(*5) See Pratchett’s books such as ‘Equal Rites’, ‘Witches Abroad’, and especially ‘Carpe Jugulum’ which is essentially a vehicle to expound on Granny Weatherwax’s personal philosophies on the nature of magic, being a witch and how to live on’es life.

(*6) Many people find it strange that Maria Sabina was in contact with considerably powerful and esoteric knowledge, and could produce some of the finest poetry during her healing ceremonies, yet she would also happily drink beer out of bottles and laugh at bawdy jokes and songs with her friends. For me, this shows she never lost sight of the inherent earthiness and practicality that chjine implies.

[nichi]

Ha!
You must be psychic! I was just going to look her up.  (isn't she awesome?  I love her) Thanks V .
love you!

((((((((Tangie))))))))
love you too!

[tangerine dream]

Something happens to me when I read about old mazatec Shamans (olmecas, too).
I feel so overwhelmingly full of (an emotion I can not descibe).  But it makes me want to laugh and cry and dance and sing at the same time.  Thanks for posting these V.  You made my day!

[tangerine dream]

Chjon jintaya nka tso
Chjon fanyeya nka tso
Chjon chjine nka tso 

It is said: I am a woman who shouts
It is said: I am a woman who thunders
It is said: I am a wise woman (*1)



(*6) Many people find it strange that Maria Sabina was in contact with considerably powerful and esoteric knowledge, and could produce some of the finest poetry during her healing ceremonies, yet she would also happily drink beer out of bottles and laugh at bawdy jokes and songs with her friends. For me, this shows she never lost sight of the inherent earthiness and practicality that chjine implies. [/font]

 

[nichi]

Account of Mushroom Healing Ritual with Maria Sabina and Don Pablo



CLOCK WOMAN IN THE LAND OF MIXED FEELINGS: THE PLACE OF MARIA SABINA IN MEXICAN CULTURE by Heriberto Yépez

[nichi]

Something happens to me when I read about old mazatec Shamans (olmecas, too).
I feel so overwhelmingly full of (an emotion I can not descibe).  But it makes me want to laugh and cry and dance and sing at the same time. 

I know one thing ... when I read that chant today (posted in the first), I was immediately pulled to it, goosebumps and all. Everything I've read thus far has left an "Oh!" from deep within.

I'm sad for her she was naysayed in her time ... it seems to me that she was a dead-serious woman. 

[tangerine dream]

Tongue Women: Women with power over words.

(also Crying Women and Night Chanting Women)

I somehow already know this stuff.

(yeah,  i've got the goosebumps, too)

[nichi]

Tongue Women: Women with power over words.

Ahhhh!

[tangerine dream]

"To an increasing number of Mexicans, half a century after her ‘discovery,’ she is María Sabina Great Power Woman, Spirit Woman, Doctor Woman, Psychedelic Woman, Comics Woman, Feminist Woman, Clock Woman whose time is just beginning"

[nichi]

CHILDHOOD
Wasson (Estrada 1976) reported that María Sabina was born on the 17th of March, 1894. According to parish records María was baptized exactly one week after her birth. Her mother María Concepción said her daughter's birth was the day of the Virgin Magdalene (July 22).

According to a verbal account given to Señor Alvaro Estrada, Doña María first consumed the sacred mushrooms with her sister María Ana at an early age (possibly somewhere between the ages of 7 to 9-years-old). Doña María Sabina recalled that she and her sister were out in the woods tending the family's animals when they stopped under a tree to play games in the shade as little children often do when by themselves with no adults around. María looked to the ground and noticed several beautiful mushrooms growing under the tree and realized they were the same mushrooms used by a local curandero Juan Manuel to cure the sick.

Doña María reached down to the earth and carefully harvested several of the mushrooms exclaiming "if I eat you, you, and you, I know that you will make me sing beautifully." She slowly chewed and swallowed the mushrooms, then urged her sister María Ana to do the same. Slowly, young María began to realize that the mushrooms contained a very potent magic, one that she would never forget.

In the following months Doña María and her sister consumed the fungi several times. Once her mother had found her laughing and singing gaily and asked of her "what have you done?". However, she was never scolded for eating the mushrooms because her mother knew that scolding would cause contrary emotions.

According to Joan Halifax (1979) Doña María was eight years old when her uncle fell sick. Many shamans in the surrounding Sierras near her village had attempted to cure him with various herbs, but his condition only worsened. Doña María remembered that the mushrooms she had eaten while playing with her sister had told her to look for them if she ever needed them and that they would tell her what to do when she needed help.

Doña María went to collect the sacred mushrooms and returned to her uncle's home where she ate them. Immediately, Doña María was swept away into the world of the mushrooms. She asked them what was wrong with her uncle and what could she do to help him get well. According to Doña María, the mushrooms told her that an "evil spirit" had entered the blood of her uncle and possessed him. She would have to give him a special herb, but not the same herb which the other shamans and curanderos had previously given him. Doña María then asked the mushrooms where the herbs could be found and the mushrooms told her that there was a place on the mountains where the trees grew tall and the waters of the brook ran pure. In this place in the earth are the herbs which will cure your uncle.

Doña María knew the place the mushrooms had shown her and ran from her uncle's hut to find the herb. Just as the mushrooms had shown her, the herb was there. When she returned to her uncle's home she boiled the herbs and gave them to her uncle. Within a few days, her uncle was cured, and María knew this would become her way of life.

As Doña María grew older she became fully initiated into her role as a sabia (a wise one). She quickly became respected in her village as an honest and powerful sabia, and in her community she was a blessing to those who sought her services. For decades she practiced her healing arts, and countless hundreds of sick and suffering people sought out her magic. Except for her three marriages, where she was expected to care only for her husband, she continued her sacred practices throughout her life.

Being of the Mazatec (Nahua-speaking) people, María Sabina performed her ceremonies in Mazatec (in This Week magazine, Valentina Wasson, 1958 wrote that the ceremony was spoken in Mixtec). Like the pseudonym of Eva Mendez which R. Gordon Wasson gave to María Sabina, this latter report was also published with the intent of keeping her identity a secret from those who would abuse her livelihood.

Like many of the Mazatec shamans, curanderas, and healers, María Sabina referred to the mushrooms as xi-tjo, si-tho or 'nti-xi-tjo, meaning "worshipped objects that spring forth" ('nti=a particle of reverence and endearment, and xi-tjo=that which springs forth). Some Mazatecs refer to the mushrooms by saying "that the little mushroom comes of itself, no one knows whence, like the wind that comes, we know not when or why."

The sacred mushrooms which María Sabina used during an all night velada (vigil) are usually harvested in the evening when the moon is full, although sometimes they are gathered in the day1. Mushrooms gathered in the moonlight may sometimes be harvested by a young virgin. After the mushrooms are collected they must be taken to a church. There they are placed on an alter to be blessed before the holy spirit. If the virgin who picked the mushrooms comes upon the carcass of a dead animal, one which had died along the path she follows, she must then discard the mushrooms and find a new path back to the field where the mushrooms grew. There she must gather up more fresh mushrooms and then find a new trail leading back to the church, hoping and praying that she will not come across any more dead animals. Once the mushrooms have been consecrated on the alter they are ready for use.

The velada would begin in total darkness so the visions would be bright and clear. After the mushrooms were adorned and blessed by María Sabina, she would slowly pass each one through the swirling smoke of burning Copal incense. The mushrooms are always consumed in pairs of two, signifying one male and one female. Each participant in a ceremony consumes five to six pairs; though more will be given if requested. Because the spiritual energies of the sabia would always dominate the velada, María Sabina would normally consume twice as many mushrooms as her voyagers, sometimes up to twelve pairs.

In the tradition of Mazatec shamans and curanderas, María Sabina would first chew the mushrooms, hold them in her mouth for a while, and then swallow them. The mushrooms should be consumed on an empty stomach and eaten over a 20-30 minute period. She decides who is to take them and the spiritual energies of the sabia always dominate the sessions. These sessions are usually conducted at night, in total darkness so that the visual effects from the mushrooms will be fully effective. A candle or two may be used but is seldom necessary. As the energies of the mushrooms pour themselves into the spiritual voyagers, Doña María would chant, slap, and pound her hands against various parts of her body, creating many different resonant sounds while invoking ancient incantations.

The thumping chants would totally fill the space of her hut and go beyond the walls to the far horizons of infinity. The chants were used to invoke the mushrooms power and varied depending on the various illness or ailment which the healer is called upon to cure2 (Krippner & Winkelman, 1983; also see Aromin, 1973 in Krippner & Winkelman, 1983). Being a devout Catholic her entire life, she would often blend ancient Mazatec rituals with Christian elements, such as the Eucharist of the Catholic religion. When the mushrooms were not in season, María Sabina would employ other sacred plants with Christian rites3.

All accounts of María Sabina attest to the fact that she was indeed a humble and holy woman--a saint. Wasson himself described Doña María as "a woman `without blemish, immaculate, one who has never dishonored her calling by using her powers for evil. . .[a woman of] rare moral and spiritual power, dedicated in her vocation, an artist in her mastery of the techniques of her vocation (Wasson, 1980)." In her village, Doña María was exalted as a "sabia" (wise one), and was known among many as a "curandera de primera catagoria" (of the highest quality) and an "una señora sin mancha' (a woman without stain).

Father Antonio Reyes Hernandez is a man of the cloth, a man with the love of God in him, and the Bishop who resides in the parish of the Dominican church which Doña María belonged to. In 1970, when Father Antonio had just completed his first year as the Bishop of Huautla, Alvaro Estrada (1976) had inquired of Father Antonio if his ecclesiastic elders in the church hierarchy opposed the pagan-like rites of the shamans and sabias in Oaxaca and elsewhere in México as his conquering predecessors had during the last three centuries. Father Antonio replied that "the church is not against these pagan rites--if they may be called that. The wise ones and curer's do not compete with our religion. All of them are very religious and come to our mass, even María Sabina. They don't proselytize; therefore they aren't considered heretics, and it's not likely that any anathema's will be hurled at them."

Father Antonio never admonished or condemned her for her work in the village. He was aware that her rituals and practices had been handed down to her through the ages from her ancestors. He also knew that her services were valid treatments for those who sought her shamanic talents. Father Hernandez always recognized her work with the sick and suffering as the mark of a true Christian--one willing to help the less fortunate. Although he knew that Doña María used the mushrooms and pagan practice to heal and cure, he also understood that María Sabina's nature was not of a demonic spirit, "nor was it" satanic or even heretic. He appreciated her spirituality and treasured her work as a long termed good standing member of his church.

A Bishop interested in experiencing the visionary effects of the mushrooms came to María seeking guidance. However, he was turned away since it was not the season for the mushrooms and there were no mushrooms available for a ceremony. The Bishop had asked María Sabina if she would teach her children her talents. María Sabina told the bishop that her talents could not be taught to others but could only be achieved by those whose wisdom had been already naturally attained. However, it is said that before her death in 1985, Doña María spent most of her final years teaching others her talent in the communication of the mushrooms (Krippner (1983, 1987).

As Doña María believed in the power of Christ, so she also believed in the power of the mushrooms. She gave of herself to her church and likewise to the mushrooms. While working for the church, her mass was spoken in Latin and her chants were always spoken in Mazatec, and it should be remembered that although Doña María was unlettered she was not illiterate.

Doña María was quick to notice that Wasson and his friends, being the first foreigners to (seek) out the `saint children' (mushrooms), had no sickness or illness to cure. They came only out of curiosity, or to find God (Estrada 1976). Before Wasson and the others strangers came to Huautla, the mushrooms had always been used to treat the sick. Doña María foresaw the diminishing effects in her ability to perform her duties. She claimed that as more outsiders used the mushrooms for pleasures, or "to find God," the magic of the mushrooms slowly ebbed from her spirit. Her energy, and the energy of the mushrooms, was slowly fading away.

While María Sabina felt this debasement of her powers and relationship with the mushrooms was caused by the young foreigners who frivolously sought out and abused the sanctity of the sacred mushrooms, it should be noted that seeking and finding one's own god may also be a cure for many of mankind's psychological ills, woes, and faults.

The Coming of the Foreigners
In the beginning, the first travelers who came to Oaxaca in search of the sacred mushrooms were polite and kind to María Sabina. They displayed mutual respect for her personage. Many came bearing gifts and pesos for her services. Doña María received many people (young and old) into her home and performed for them the sacred ceremonies of her ancestors. One of the greatest gifts one could present her with for her services were photographs of her and her family. Some travelers would offer her gifts of no value and many gifts she considered useless. One tourist offered her a large dog in payment for her time, but she refused. She was too poor to afford feeding the animal. Although poor, María Sabina was spiritually enriched.

Doña María had also been widowed twice in her lifetime and once one of her sons had been brutally murdered before her very eyes. She claimed to have witnessed the crime in a vision prior to its happening. This supports the Wasson's assertions that the mushrooms have telepathic properties. In 1984, María Sabina had found a third husband.

Her three room home in Oaxaca where Doña María performed her ceremonies was created of mud with a straw thatched roof and a dirt floor. The interior of her humble dwelling whose walls were crumbling with age had uneven earthen floors which were almost barren of furniture except for the simplest alter. A candle provided the only light since there was no electricity. On a few occasions she was presented with a mattress or two, but she rarely accepted gifts beyond the value of her daily needs.

After Wasson published literature on his rediscovery of an ancient practice which utilized hallucinogenic mushrooms ritualistically in Oaxaca, many young foreigners from the United States, Canada, Europe and South America, began their long treks and tedious pilgrimages into Mexico. Soon Doña María took notice that many native Indians and Mexicans alike were debasing her customs by peddling mushrooms to the tourists in order to feed themselves and their families. During this period, many came seeking the mushrooms and many came only to be turned away.

By 1960, María Sabina realized that she was known the world over. This new found fame brought her much grief, and the agony it caused her soul was evident in her eyes and face. It brought turmoil and profanation to her village and upon her work.

The lack of respect and the total disrespect which the foreigners displayed towards her "saint children" shook the very foundations of her wisdom, strength, and world. Like the ancient mysteries of the "temple of Dionysus" where silence of the ancient rites was golden, María Sabina claimed that before Wasson came, "nobody spoke so openly about the `saint children'. No Mazatec before ever revealed what he or she knew about this matter (Estrada 1976)".

After Wasson had attended his first voyage with her, every one seemed to know who she was and what she did. When Wasson was first introduced to María Sabina in 1955, it was only because of an introduction by her friend Cayetano (Wasson, 1957, 1980; Allen, 1987). He was a trusted friend, and María felt that Cayetano's requesting her to meet with the stranger who had traveled from afar in search of a "sabia" was harmless. Upon first meeting Wasson, María Sabina believed him to be a sincere and honest man, and felt that he would respect her ways and never bring shame to her world. Although she cautiously accepted Wasson when Cayetano approached her, she would later accept many into her home, and there were also many whom she would turn away.

María Sabina placed her trust in Wasson and his friends, especially when she allowed them to tape and photograph her during an all night mushroom velada. She gave Wasson and Alan Richardson, his photographer, permission to tell her story to others. Doña María hoped that Wasson would not profane her image nor divulge her anonymity to the world in an improper manner. Because Doña María neither read nor wrote (her language has no written words) she would never fully know exactly what Wasson had written of her life.

By 1960, Doña María had decided that if "foreigners come to her without any recommendations [whereas Wasson had one], she would of course still show them her wisdoms" (Wasson, 1980).

During the 1967 summer of love, many drugs and rampant drug use spread from out of the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco into the main stream continental United States of America. Many young hippie types and college students soon traveled to México in search of the magic mushroom which they had read about or heard about from their friends (Swain, 1962; Finkelstein, 1969; Sandford, 1973; Weil, 1980).

Doña María soon began to understand the breadth of her fame when over the years she remembered the pilgrimage of "the young people with long hair who came in search of God" but lacked the respect for the mushrooms and greatly profaned them. Later, Doña María realized that "the young people with long hair didn't need [her] to eat the little things." She said that these "kids ate them anywhere and anytime [they could find them], and they didn't respect our customs." Doña María also claimed that "whoever does it [mushrooms] simply to feel the effects can go crazy and stay that way temporarily, but only for a while."

Wasson recognized the traditional values of the religious motivations of the Mazatec shamans and sabias, explaining that "performing before strangers is a profanation and that the curandera who today, for a fee will perform the mushroom rite for any stranger is a prostitute and a fakir" (Metzner 1970), yet María Sabina did perform rituals for strangers, sometimes for a fee and sometimes not. At times, she had been known to charge for services which she used to provide for free.

At one point an American tourist once ate too many mushrooms and completely flipped out. He caused "much turmoil" and anxiety in an otherwise once quiet and peaceful community. Another tourist, with a live turkey dangling from his mouth, ran stark raving mad through the streets of Huautla. This incident necessitated intervention by local policia who apprehended him before he could do harm to himself or others. This incident, along with several others, soon led to the expulsion of thousands of long haired thrill seekers from Mexico.

The actions of these young people created many scandals. With the influx of drug-oriented young people, local authorities began to prohibit the use of mushrooms. By 1976, the thousands of foreign invaders began to drastically diminish, allowing the federales to slowly move out of the area. To the native peoples of Oaxaca, the bad elements had finally subsided and peace had once again returned to the village.

Throughout the years Doña María had been hassled many times by local government officials because of her use of the sacred mushrooms with the foreign intruders. On several occasions she was arrested and jailed for her activities and on one occasion her home was burnt to the ground. A journalist who interviewed her in 1969, tried to intervene for her in this matter. He personally requested that the governor of Oaxaca "leave in peace the most famous shamaness in the world, whom anthropology and escapism have ruined" (Estrada, 1976).

As noted above, Federal authorities, army and police included, began the expulsion of hundreds of young foreign travelers, who came to Mexico "in search of the mushrooms and God" (Jones, 1963; Unsigned, 1970).


May The Force Be With You
Doña María believed in the sacred force of the mushrooms with the same enthusiasm that many people came to believe in "the Force" of George Lucas and Luke Skywalker. As the years passed since Wasson first came to Huautla de Jiménez, Doña María felt the force of the mushrooms diminish within her spirit. Doña María realized that with the coming of the white man, the mushrooms were losing their meaning. Doña María claimed that "before Wasson, I felt that the `saint children' elevated me. I don't feel like that anymore. The force has diminished. If Cayetano had not brought the foreigners...the `saint children' would have [probably] kept their powers. From the moment the foreigners arrived, the `saint children' lost their purity. They lost their force; the foreigners spoiled them. From now on they won't be any good. There is no remedy for it."

This revelation from María Sabina most assuredly rings of the truth. The debasement of the mushrooms by casual thrill-seekers is widespread throughout the planet. Apolonio Teran, a fellow sabio (wiseman) was once interviewed by Alvaro Estrada. Estrada asked Apolonio about the breach of sanctity of the mushrooms by debasement wondering if the mushrooms were still considered to be a sacred and powerful source of medicine.

Apolonio claimed that "the divine mushroom no longer belongs to us [the Indians of Mesoamerica]. It's sacred language has been profaned. The language has been spoiled and it is indecipherable for us...Now the mushrooms speak NQUI LE [English]. Yes, it's the tongue that the foreigners speak...The mushrooms have a divine spirit. They always had it for us, but the foreigners arrived and frightened it away..." Later Wasson (1980) agreed that "since the white man came looking for the mushrooms, they have lost their magic." This could mean that the magic is gone forever among the shamans and native peoples who worship them.

Wasson believed that Doña María's words rang of truth. In exemplifying her wisdom, Wasson stated that "a practice carried on in secret for three centuries or more has now been aerated and aeration spells the end (Estrada, 1976)."

Before Wasson's death (December 1989), he felt that he alone was responsible and accountable for what must surely be a sad and tragic end to a culture whose traditions and customs involving the sacred use of teonanácatl spanned and flourished majestically for almost three millennia. It now appears that the use of mushrooms among native peoples of Mesoamerica are in their final stages of extinction. Soon the cultural use of mushrooms and other sacred plants could vanish from the face of the earth.

Wasson's eloquent approach in presenting María Sabina's world to the public is without a doubt, beyond reproach. He presented a most unique tale of María Sabina and her sacred mushrooms. His writings took us where no man had gone before and he presented to the world her story as no other person would have. Wasson brought María Sabina and her world into view of the public eye. He told of her chants, her way of life, her reasoning, and of her magic with her fellow village members, all who visited her seeking her advice and divination. Wasson orated her virtues with the highest respect and the finest regards and what he put to paper was only the truth as she revealed it to him and as he first saw and heard it.

Wasson knew that María Sabina was relevant to the balance of nature within her community. He held an extreme profound reverence for the woman and her work. At the same time he displayed features of her spirituality without bringing shame upon her heritage. He presented her to the world with an integrity that brought enchantment with what he wrote. Wasson's discoveries in Mesoamerica and his integral interpretations are what María Sabina would have written and described if she had been able.

Because of Wasson's intrusion into her life and the myriad who followed, a part of María Sabina's world and way of life was taken away. However, the vast treasures of ethnomycological knowledge and wisdom which Wasson extracted from her world became public only because she shared it with the outsiders. This knowledge will now remain a part of history because it was recorded by an honorable man who cared about what he had observed, experienced, and wrote of.

María Sabina was many things: an earth woman, a mother, a sabia, a poet, a healer, a curer, a believer, an achiever, and a curandera who stood at the very edge of her universe and glimpsed the secrets and meaning of life. Doña María had shared her secrets of magic and plant knowledge with the outside world. Only through hope and prayer will the benevolence she provided to the world be fully understood and appreciated. Through the pursuance of R. Gordon Wasson's persistency in following his dream of the trail of the magic mushrooms, Doña María has truly presented mankind with a magical key (mushroom) concerning some plausible answers surrounding some of the mysteries of our religious beginnings and maybe the origin of the earth.

Doña María may be gone, but her spirit and her wisdom still remain. Reach out and take the wisdom she was so willing to share. Take it with care and share it with love and respect. Can you see her face in the dark? Can you hear her chanting?

Notes
1. María Sabina used many different species of the sacred mushrooms for divination. She preferred Psilocybe mexicana Heim, the preferred species of the Mazatec shamans. However, the mushrooms which she shared with R. Gordon Wasson and Alan Richardson were Psilocybe caerulescens var. mazatecorum.
2. The sacred mushrooms are usually consumed when fresh but may sometimes be served when dried. In pre-Columbian México the mushrooms were served and eaten with chocolate and/or honey. A trait left over from the times of the Aztec priests, a cultural tradition handed down through centuries of use by their ancestors. In some regions like Juxtlahuaca, the Mixtec shamans grind the mushrooms into a fine powder and brew a tea with the ground material.

Metzner (1970) reported that "in the land of the Mixe (Mijes) there are no curanderas. Most of the Mixe know and share the secret of the mushrooms and how to use them. One might take the mushrooms alone but will always have an observer present, to help guide him or her in their journey. The reason one might seek the mushrooms are medical and divinatory: to find a diagnosis and/or cure for an otherwise intractable condition; to find lost objects, animals or people; to get advice on personal problems or some great worry."

Although María Sabina had gracefully preserved within her the power and wisdom derived from her relationship with the mushrooms, she only used them for good purposes. She also incorporated old traditions, blending them with certain Christian values and ideologies to divinate a particular situation, thereby diagnosing it correctly for the person in need of healing.

Singer and Smith (1958) believed that "the religious healing ceremonies of the Mazatec are also directed by the curanderos [or curandera], but more emphasis is given to the revelations obtained by the intoxicating persons, so that the use of the mushrooms in Huautla is at least partly divinatory rather then medical." Metzner (1970) felt that "the use of mushrooms for the [sole] purpose of divination is accepted as a matter of fact. Demonstrations of its capacity to bring about altered states of consciousness combined with brilliant kaleidoscopic visions of glorious colors and patterns have been convincingly made." Aguirre-Beltran (1955) claimed the healer (whether shaman or curandera) "looked not at the context of what it was in these plants that make them do their magic, but felt that the Indians' thoughts on these plants possessed two different aspects in their use in treatment:


the mystical force that the plants projected into ones mind; and


the actual diagnostic power that the use of the plant brings out."


Beltran was positive that the "sacred herbs, deities in themselves, act by virtue of their mystical properties; that it is not the herb itself that cures but the divinity, the part of the divinity or magic power with which it is imbued."

In considering the outcome of these ancient pagan practices in traditional societies, we cannot forget that in María Sabina's world the velada and mushrooms that she feeds upon provide the guideposts to her spiritual existence. Doña María had already foreseen the diminishing effects in her ability to perform her duties as the mushrooms became known to the outsiders. She claimed that the more outsiders who used the mushrooms for pleasure or "to find God" caused the magic of the mushrooms to slowly ebb from her spirit. Her energy and the energy which were within the mushrooms was slowly fading away. Metzner (1970) wrote that the "practice which she employed was all that remained among a primitive and illiterate people today of a practice which was once so widespread throughout the mighty and powerful [Aztec] empire" that 300 years ago, a catholic conqueror named Cortez and a hoard of conquistadors almost succeeded in obliterating from the face of the earth any knowledge pertaining to their use and existence.3. When the mushrooms are not in season, Mazatec shamans and curanderas (including María Sabina) employ several other common psychotropic plants for divination.

One such plant is Salvia divinorum, a member of the mint family which is rich in essential oils. Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann (1980) reported that it was a plant used ceremoniously by María Sabina. Mazatec shamans and sabias refer to this plant as "Hojas de la Pastora" (leaves of the shepherdess). Doña María Sabina referred to it as "la hembra" (the female) (Wasson, 1962). Salvia's divinatory powers can be experienced by rolling twelve to sixteen mature leaves into a plug and holding it between the cheek and gum for fifteen minutes. Profound visual effects will be noticed with eyes closed or in total darkness. Dried Salvia leaves can also be smoked for milder effects.

When the Salvia herb is not available for use in divination, the Mazatecs employ two different species of Coleus found in Oaxaca. Coleus pumilus is referred to as "el macho" (the male). Two other varieties of Coleus blumi are referred to as (1) "El nene" (the children) and (2) "el ahijado" (the godson). The psychoactivity of Coleus is debated.

Another popular plant, a perennial, is the [Mexican] morning glory Turbina (Rivea) corymbosa, whose seeds contain lysergic acid amides. Also known as ololiuhqui. In Oaxaca, Mazatec shamans refer to the seeds as "Semillas de la Virgen" (seeds of the Virgin). 50 to 300 ground seeds are soaked in cold water for 1 to 3 days and the filtered liquid is consumed in the evening. However, María Sabina had never used these seeds in any of her ceremonies.

From María Sabina, Saint Mother of the Sacred Mushrooms,
From Mushroom Pioneers
by John Allen

[nichi]

The Mazatec Indians - The Mushrooms Speak
- by Henry Munn 

HENRY MUNN has investigated the use of hallucinogenic plants among the Conibo Indians of eastern Peru and the Mazatec Indians of the mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico. Although not a professional anthropologist, he has resided for extended periods of time among the Mazatecs and is married to the niece of the shaman and shamaness referred to in this essay.(1)

Outline of Use

The Mazatec Indians, who have a long tradition of using the mushrooms, inhabit a range of mountains called the Sierra Mazateca in the northeastern corner of the Mexican state of Oaxaca. The shamans in this essay are all natives of the town of Huautla de Jimenez. Properly speaking they are Huautecans; but since the language they speak has been called Mazatec and they have been referred to in the previous anthropological literature as Mazatecs, I have retained that name, though strictly speaking, Mazatecs are the inhabitants of the village of Mazatlan in the same mountains.

The Mazatec Indians eat the mushrooms only at night in absolute darkness. It is their belief that if you eat them in the daylight you will go mad. The depths of the night are recognized as the time most conducive to visionary insights into the obscurities, the mysteries, the perplexities of existence.

Usually several members of a family eat the mushrooms together: it is not uncommon for a father, mother, children, uncles, and aunts to all participate in these transformations of the mind that elevate consciousness onto a higher plane. The kinship relation is thus the basis of the transcendental subjectivity that Husserl said is intersubjectivity. The mushrooms themselves are eaten in pairs, a couple representing man and woman that symbolizes the dual principle of procreation and creation.

Then, they sit together in their inner light, dream and realize and converse with each other, presences seated there together, their bodies immaterialized by the blackness, voices from without their communality.

In a general sense, for everyone present, the purpose of the session is a therapeutic catharsis. The chemicals of transformation of revelation that open the circuits of light, vision, and communication, called by us mind-manifesting, were known to the American Indians as medicines: the means given to men to know and to heal, to see and to say the truth.

Among the Mazatecs, many, one time or another during their lives, have eaten the mushrooms, whether to cure themselves of an ailment or to resolve a problem; but it is not everyone who has a predilection for such extreme and arduous experiences of the creative imagination or who would want to repeat such journeys into the strange, unknown depths of the brain very frequently: those who do are the shamans, the masters, whose vocation it is to eat the mushrooms because they are the men of the spirit, the men of language, the men of wisdom. They are individuals recognized by their people to be expert in such psychological adventures, and when the others eat the mushrooms they always call to be with them, as a guide, one of those who is considered to be particularly acquainted with these modalities of the spirit.

The medicine man presides over the session, for just as the Mazatec family is paternal and authoritarian, the liberating experience unfolds in the authoritarian context of a situation in which, rather than being allowed to speak or encouraged to express themselves, everyone is enjoined to keep silent and listen while the shaman speaks for each of those who are present.

The Mazatecs say that the mushrooms speak. If you ask a shaman where his imagery comes from, he is likely to reply: I didn't say it, the mushrooms did. The shamans who eat them; their function is to speak, they are the speakers who chant and sing the truth, they are the oral poets of their people, the doctors of the word, they who tell what is wrong and how to remedy it, the seers and oracles, the ones possessed by the voice. "It is not I who speak," said Heraclitus, "it is the logos."

Intoxicated by the mushrooms, the fluency, the ease, the aptness of expression one becomes capable of are such that one is astounded by the words that issue forth from the contact of the intention of articulation with the matter of experience. At times it is as if one were being told what to say, for the words leap to mind, one after another, of themselves without having to be searched for: a phenomenon similar to the automatic dictation of the surrealists except that here the flow of consciousness, rather than being disconnected, tends to be coherent: a rational enunciation of meanings. Message fields of communication with the world, others, and one's self are disclosed by the mushrooms The spontaneity they liberate is not only perceptual, but linguistic, the spontaneity of speech, of fervent, lucid discourse, of the logos in activity.

For the shaman, it is as if existence were uttering itself through him. From the beginning, once what they have eaten has modified their consciousness, they begin to speak and at the end of each phrase they say tzo-"says" in their language-like a rhythmic punctuation of the said. Says, says, says. It is said. I say. Who says? We say, man says, language says, being and existence say. (2)

Outline of a Ritual

Cross-legged on the floor in the darkness of huts, close to the fire, breathing the incense of copal, the shaman sits with the furrowed brow and the marked mouth of speech. Chanting his words, clapping his hands, rocking to and fro, he speaks in the night of chirping crickets. What is said is more concrete than ephemeral phantasmagoric lights: words are materializations of consciousness; language is a privileged vehicle of our relation to reality. Let us go looking for the tracks of the spirit, the shamans say. Let us go to the cornfield looking for the tracks of the spirits' feet in the warm ground. So then let us go walking ourselves along the path in search of significance, following the words of two discourses enregistered like tracks on magnetic tapes, then translated from the native tonal language, to discover and explicitate what is said by an Indian medicine man and medicine woman during such ecstatic experiences of the human voice speaking with rhythmic force the realities of life and society.

The short, stout, elderly woman with her laughing moon face, dressed in a huipil, the long dress, embroidered with flowers and birds, of the Mazatec women, a dark shawl wrapped around her shoulders, her gray hair parted down the middle and drawn into two pigtails, golden crescents hanging from her ears, bent forward from where she knelt on the earthen floor of the hut and held a handful of mushrooms in the fragrant, purifying smoke of copal rising from the glowing coals of the fire, to bless them: known to the ancient Meso-Americans as the Flesh of God, called by her people the Blood of Christ. Through their miraculous mountains of light and rain, the Indians say that Christ once walked-it is a transformation of the legend of Quetzalcoatl-and from where dropped his blood, the essence of his life, from there the holy mushrooms grew, the awakeners of the spirit, the food of the luminous one. Flesh of the world. Flesh of language. In the beginning was the word and the word became flesh. In the beginning there was flesh and the flesh became linguistic. Food of intuition. Food of wisdom. She ate them, munched them up, swallowed them and burped; rubbed ground-up tobacco along her wrists and forearms as a tonic for the body; extinguished the candle; and sat waiting in the darkness where the incense rose from the embers like glowing white mist. Then after a while came the enlightenment and the enlivenment and all at once, out of the silence, the woman began to speak, to chant, to pray, to sing, to utter her existence: (3)

My God, you who are the master of the whole world, what we want is to search for and encounter from where comes sickness, from where comes pain and affliction. We are the ones who speak and cure and use medicine. So without mishap, without difficulty, lift us into the heights and exalt us.

From the beginning, the problem is to discover what the sickness is the sick one is suffering from and prognosticate the remedy. Medicine woman, she eats the mushrooms to see into the spirit of the sick, to disclose the hidden, to intuit how to resolve the unsolved: for an experience of revelations. The transformation of her everyday self is transcendental and gives her the power to move in the two relevant spheres of transcendence in order to achieve understanding: that of the other consciousness where the symptoms of illness can be discerned; and that of the divine, the source of the events in the world. Together with visionary empathy, her principal means of realization is articulation, discourse, as if by saying she will say the answer and announce the truth.

It is necessary to look and think in her spirit where it hurts. I must think and search in your presence where your glory is, My Father, who art the Master of the World. Where does this sickness come from? Was it a whirlwind or bad air that fell in the door or in the doorway? So are we going to search and to ask, from the head to the feet, what the matter is. Let's go searching for the tracks of her feet to encounter the sickness that she is suffering from. Animals in her heart? Let's go searching for the tracks of her feet, the tracks of her nails. That it be alleviated and healed where it hurts. What are we going to do to get rid of this sickness?

Purpose

For the Mazatecs, the psychedelic experience produced by the mushrooms is inseparably associated with the cure of illness. The idea of malady should be understood to mean not only physical illness, but mental troubles and ethical problems. It is when something is wrong that the mushrooms are eaten. If there is nothing the matter with you there is no reason to eat them. Until recent times, the mushrooms were the only medicine the Indians had recourse to in times of sickness. 'I heir medicinal value is by no means merely magical, but chemical. According to the Indians, syphilis, cancer, and epilepsy have been alleviated by their use; tumors cured. They have empirically been found by the Indians to be particularly effective for the treatment of stomach disorders and irritations of the skin. The woman whose words we are listening to, like many, discovered her shamanistic vocation when she was cured by the mushrooms of an illness: after the death of her husband she broke out all over with pimples; she was given the mushrooms to see whether they would "help" her and the malady disappeared. Since then she has eaten them on her own and given them to others.

If someone is sick, the medicine man is called. The treatment he employs is chemical and spiritual. Unlike most shamanistic methods, the Mazatec shaman actually gives medicine to his patients: by means of the mushrooms he administers to them physiologically, at the same time as he alters their consciousness. It is probably for psychosomatic complaints and psychological troubles that the liberation of spontaneous activity provoked by the mushrooms is most remedial: given to the depressed, they awaken a catharsis of the spirit; to those with problems, a vision of their existential way. If he hasn't come to the conclusion that the illness is incurable, the medicine man repeats the therapeutic sessions three times at intervals. He also works over the sick, for his intoxicated condition of intense, vibrant energy gives him a strength to heal that he exercises by massage and suction.

His most important function, however, is to speak for the sick one. The Mazatec shamans eat the mushrooms that liberate the fountains of language to be able to speak beautifully and with eloquence so that their words, spoken for the sick one and those present, will arrive and be heard in the spirit world from which comes benediction or grief. The function of the speaker, nevertheless, is much more than simply to implore. The shaman has a conception of poesis (4) in its original sense as an action: words themselves are medicine. To enunciate and give meaning to the events and situations of existence is life giving in itself.

"The psychoanalyst listens, whereas the shaman speaks," points out Levi-Strauss:  When a transference is established, the patient puts words into the mouth of the psychoanalyst by attributing to him alleged feelings and intentions; in the incantation, on the contrary, the shaman speaks for his patient. He questions her and puts into her mouth answers that correspond to the interpretation of her condition.

"A pre-requisite role-that of listener for the psychoanalyst and of orator for the shaman-establishes a direct relationship with the patient's conscious and an indirect relationship with his unconscious. This is the function of the incantation proper. The shaman provides the sick woman with a language by means of which unexpressed and otherwise inexpressible psychic states can be immediately expressed. And it is the transition to this verbal expression-at the same time making it possible to undergo in an ordered and intelligible form a real experience that would otherwise be chaotic and inexpressible-which induces the release of the physiological process, that is, the reorganization, in a favorable direction, of the process to which the sick woman is subjected." (5)

These remarks of the French anthropologist become particularly relevant to Mazatec shamanistic practice when one considers that the effect of the mushrooms, used to make one capable of curing, is to inspire the shaman with language and transform him into an oracle.

The Mushrooms

The mushrooms, which grow only during the season of torrential rains, awaken the forces of creation and produce an experience of spiritual abundance, of an astonishing, inexhaustible constitutionof forms that identifies them with fertility and makes them a mediation, a means of communion, of communication between man and the natural world of which they are the metaphysical flesh.

Agriculturalists, the Mazatecs are a people of close family interrelationships and many children: the clusters of neolithic thatch-roofed houses on the mountain peaks are of extended family groups. The woman's world is that of the household, her concern is for her children and all the children of her people.  But the world of her children is not to be her world, nor that of their grandfathers. Their indigenous society is being transformed by the forces of history. Until only recently, isolated from the modern world, the Indians lived in their mountains as people lived in the neolithic.

There were only paths and they walked everywhere they went. Trains of burros carried out the principal crop-coffee-to the markets in the plain. Now roads have been built, blasted out of rock and constructed along the edges of the mountains over precipices to connect the community with the society beyond.

The children are people of opposites: just as they speak two languages, Mazatec and Spanish, they live between two times: the timeless, cyclical time of recurrence of the People of the Deer and the time of progress, change and development of modern Mexico.

In her discourse, no stereotyped rite or traditional ceremony with prescribed words and actions, speaking of everything, of the ancient and the modern, of what is happening to her people, the woman of problems, peering into the future, recognizes the inevitable process of transition, of disintegration and integration, that confronts her children: the younger generation destined to live the crisis and make the leap from the past into the future. For them it is necessary to learn to read and to write and to speak the language of this new world and in order to advance themselves, to be educated and gain knowledge, contained in books, radically different from the traditions of their own society whose language is oral and unwritten, whose implements are the hoe, the axe, and the machete.

The Medicine Woman's Discourse

Seated on the ground in the darkness, seeing with her eyes closed, her thought travels within along the branching arteries of the bloodstream and without across the fields of existence. There is a very definite physiological quality about the mushroom experience which leads the Indians to say that by a kind of visceral introspection they teach one the workings of the organism: it is as if the system were projected before one into a vision of the heart, the liver, lungs, genitals, and stomach.

In the course of the medicine woman's discourse, it is understandable that she should, from astonishment, from gratitude, from the knowledge of experience, say something about the mushrooms that have provoked her condition of inspiration. In a sense, to speak of "the mushroom experience" is a reification as absurd as the anthropomorphization of the mushrooms when it is said that they talk: the mushrooms are merely the means, in interaction with the organism, the nervous system, and the brain, of producing an experience grounded in the ontological-existential possibilities of the human, irreducible to the properties of a mushroom.

The experience is psychological and social. What is spoken of by the shamaness is her communal world; even the visions of her imagination must have their origin in the context of her existence and the myths of her culture. The subject of another society will have other visions and express a different content in his discourse. It would seem probable, however, that apart from emotional similarities, colored illuminations, and the purely abstract patterns of a universal conscious activity, between the experiences of individuals with differing social inherences, the common characteristic would be discourse, for judging by their effect the chemical constituents of the mushrooms have some connection with the linguistic centers of the brain. "So says the teacher of words," says the woman, "so says the teacher of matters."

It is paradoxical that the rediscovery of such chemicals should have related their effects to madness and pejoratively called them drugs, when the shamans who used them spoke of them as medicines and said from their experience that the metamorphosis they produced put one into communication with the spirit. It is precisely the value of studying the use in so-called primitive societies of such chemicals that the way be found beyond the superficial to a more essential understanding of phenomena which we, with our limited conception of the rational, have too quickly, perhaps mistakenly, termed irrational, instead of comprehending that such experiences are revelations of a primordial existential activity, of "a power of signification, a birth of sense or a savage sense." (6)

What are we confronted with by the shamanistic discourse of the mushroom eaters? A modality of reason in which the logos of existence enunciates itself, or by the delirium and incoherence of derangement?

"They are doing nothing but talk," says the medicine woman, "those who say that these matters are matters of the past. They are doing nothing but talk, the people who call them crazy mushrooms." They claim to have knowledge of what they do not have any experience of; consequently their contentions are nonsense: nothing but expressions of the conventionality the mushrooms explode by their disclosure of the extraordinary; mere chatter if it weren't for the fact that the omnipotent "They" forms the force of repression which, by legislation and the implementation of authority, has come to denominate infractions of the law and the code of health, the means of liberation that once were called medicines.

In a time of pills and shots, of scientific medicine, the wise woman is saying, the use of the mushrooms is not an anachronistic and obsolete vestige of magical practices: their power to awaken consciousness and cure existential ills is not any the less relevant now than it was in the past. She insists that it is ignorance of our dimension of mystery, of the wellsprings of meaning, to think that their effect is insanity.

"Good and happiness," she says, naming the emotions of her activized, perceptualized being. "They are not crazy mushrooms. They are a remedy, says. A remedy for decent people. For the foreigners," she says, speaking of us, wayfarers from advanced industrial society, who had begun to arrive in the high plazas of her people to experiment with the psychedelic mushrooms that grew in the mountains of the Mazatecs. She has an inkling of the truth, that what we look for is a cure of our alienations, to be put back in touch, by violent means if necessary, with that original, creative self that has been alienated from us by our middle-class families, education, and corporate world of employment.

"There in their land, it is taken account of, that there is something in these mushrooms, that they are good, of use," she says. "The doctor that is here in our earth. The plant that grows in this place. With this we are going to put together, we are going to alleviate ourselves. It is our remedy. He that suffers from pain and illness, with this it is possible to alleviate him. They aren't called mushrooms. They are called prayer. They are called well-being. They are called wisdom. They are there with the Virgin, Our Mother, the Nativity."

The Indians do not call the mushrooms of light mushrooms, they call them the holy ones. For the shamaness, the experience they produce is synonymous with language, with communication, on behalf of her people, with the supernatural forces of the universe; with plenitude and joyfulness; with perception, insight, and knowledge. It is as if one were born again; therefore their patroness is the Goddess of Birth, the Goddess of Creation.

With prayers we will get rid of it all. With the prayers of the ancients. We will clean ourselves, we will purify ourselves with clear water, we will wash our intestines where they are infected. That sicknesses of the body be gotten rid of. Sicknesses of the atmosphere. Bad air. That they be gotten rid of, that they be removed. That the wind carry them away. For this is the doctor. For this is the plant. For this is the sorcerer of the light of day. For this is the remedy. For this is the medicine woman, the woman doctor who resolves all classes of problems in order to rid us of them with her prayers.

We are going with well-being, without difficulty, to implore, to beg, to supplicate. Well being for all the babies and the creatures. We are going to beg, to implore for them, to beseech for their well-being and their studies, that they live, that they grow, that they sprout. That freshness come, tenderness, shoots, joy. That we be blessed, all of us.

She goes on talking and talking, non-stop; there are lulls when her voice slows down, fades out almost to a whisper; then come rushes of inspiration, moments of intense speech; she yawns great yawns, laughs with jubilation, claps her hands in time to her interminable singsong; but after the setting out, the heights of ecstasy are reached, the intoxication begins to ebb away, and she sounds the theme of going back to normal, everyday conscious existence again after this excursion into the beyond, of rejoining the ego she has transcended:  We are going to return without mishap, along a fresh path, a good path, a path of good air; in a path through the cornfield, in a path through the stubble, without complaint or any difficulty, we return without mishap. Already the cock has begun to crow. Rich cock that reminds us that we live in this life.

The day that dawns is that of a new world in which there is no longer any need to walk to where you go. "With tenderness and freshness, let us go in a plane, in a machine, in a car. Let us go from one side to another, searching for the tracks of the fists, the tracks of the feet, the tracks of the nails."

It seemed that she had been speaking for eight hours. The seconds of time were expanded, not from boredom, but from the intensity of the lived experience. In terms of the temporality of clocks, she had only been speaking for four hours when she concluded with a vision of the transcendence that had become immanent and had now withdrawn from her. "There is the flesh of God. There is the flesh of Jesus Christ. There with the Virgin." The most frequently repeated words of the woman are freshness and tenderness; those of the shaman, whose discourse we will now consider, are fear and terror: what one might call the emotional poles of these experiences.

There is an illness that the Mazatecs speak of that they name fright. We say traumatism. They walk through their mountains along their arduous paths on the different levels of being, climbing and descending, in the sunlight and through the clouds; all around there are grottos and abysses, mysterious groves, places where live the laa, the little people, mischievous dwarfs and gnomes. Rivers and wells are inhabited by spirits with powers of enchantment. At night in these altitudes, winds whirl up from the depths, rush out of the distance like monsters, and pass, tearing everything in their path with their fierce claws. Phantoms appear in the mists. There are persons with the evil eye. Existence in the world and with others is treacherous, perilous: unexpectedly something may happen to you and that event, unless it is exorcised, can mark you for life.

The Indians say following the beliefs of their ancestors, the Siberians, that the soul is sometimes frightened from one, the spirit goes, you are alienated from yourself or possessed by another: you lose yourself. It is for this neurosis that the shamans, the questioners of enigmas, are the great doctors and the mushrooms the medicine. It is the task of the Mazatec shaman to look for the extravagated spirit, find it, bring it back, and reintegrate the personality of the sick one. If necessary, he pays the powers that have appropriated the spirit by burying cacao, beans of exchange, wrapped in the bark cloth of offerings, at the place of fright which he has divined by vision. The mushrooms, the shamans say, show: you see, in the sense that you realize, it is disclosed to you. "Bring her spirit, her soul," implores the medicine woman to whom we have just been listening. "Let her spirit come back from where it got lost, from where it stayed, from where it was left behind, from wherever it is that her spirit is wandering lost."

A Shaman Speaks

With just such a traumatic experience, began the shamanistic vocation of the man we will now study. In his late fifties, he has been eating the mushrooms for nine years. Why did he begin? "I began to eat them because I was sick," he said when asked. (7)

No matter how much the doctors treated me, I didn't get well. I went to the Latin American Hospital. I went to Cordoba as well. I went to Mexico. I went to Tehuacan and wasn't alleviated. Only with the mushrooms was I cured. I had to eat the mushrooms three times and the man from San Lucas, who gave them to me, proposed his work as a medicine man to me, telling me: now you are going to receive my study. I asked him why he thought I was going to receive it when I didn't want to learn anything about his wisdom, I only wanted to get better and be cured of my illness. Then he answered me: now it is no longer you who command. It is already the middle of the night. I am going to leave you a table with ground tobacco on it and a cross underneath it so that you learn this work. Tell me which of these things you choose and like the best of all, he said, when everything was ready.

Which of these works do you want? I answered that I didn't want what he offered me. Here you don't give the orders, he replied; I am he who is going to say whether you receive this work or not because I am he who is going to give you your diploma in the presence of God. Then I heard the voice of my father. He had been dead for forty-three years when he spoke to me the first time that I ate the mushrooms: This work that is being given to you, he said, I am he who tells you to accept it. Whether you can see me or not, I don't know. I couldn't imagine from where this voice came that was speaking to me.

Then it was that the shaman of San Lucas told me that the voice I was hearing was that of my father. The sickness from which I was suffering was alleviated by eating the mushrooms. So I told the old man, I am disposed to receive what it is that you offer me, but I want to learn everything. Then it was that he taught me how to suck through space with a hollow tube of cane. To suck through space means that you who are seated there, I can draw the sickness out of you by suction from a distance.

What had begun as a physical illness, appendicitis, became a traumatic neurosis. The doctors wheeled him into an operating room-he who had never been in a hospital in his life-and suffocated him with an ether mask. And he gave up the ghost while they cut the appendix out of him. When he came to, he lay frightened and depressed, without any will to live, he'd had enough. Instead of recuperating, he lay like a dead man with his eyes wide open, not saying anything to anyone, what was the use, his life had been a failure, he had never become the important man he had aspired all his life to be, now it was too late; his life was over and he had done nothing that his children might remember with respect and awe. The doctors couldn't help him because there was nothing wrong with him physically; contrary to what he believed, he had survived the operation; the slash into his stomach had been sewn up and had healed; nevertheless, he remained apathetic and unresponsive, for he had been terrified by death and his spirit had flown away like a bird or a fleet-footed deer. He needed someone to go out and hunt it for him, to bring back his spirit and resuscitate him.

The medicine man, from the nearby village of San Lucas, whom he called to him when the modern doctors failed to cure him of the strange malady he suffered from, was renowned throughout the mountains as a great shaman, a diviner of destiny. The short, slight, wizened old man was 105 years old. He gave to his patient, who was suffering from depression, the mushrooms of vitality, and the therapy worked. He vividly relived the operation in his imagination. According to him, the mushrooms cut him open, arranged his insides, and sewed him up again. One of the reasons he hadn't recovered was his conviction that materialistic medicine was incapable of really curing since it was divorced from all cooperation with the spirits and dependence upon the supernatural.

In his imagination, the mushrooms performed another surgical intervention and corrected the mistakes of the profane doctor which he considered responsible for his lingering lethargy. He went through the whole process in his mind. It was as if he were operating upon himself, undoing what had been done to him, and doing it over again himself. The trauma was exorcised. By intensely envisioning with a heightened, expanded consciousness what had happened to him under anesthesia, he assumed at last the frightening event he had previously been unable to integrate into his experience. His physiological cure was completed psychologically; he was finally healed by virtue of the assimilative, creative powers of the imagination. The dead man came back to life, he wanted to live because he felt once again that he was alive and had the force to go on living: once exhausted and despondent, he was now invigorated and rejuvenated.

The cure is successful because not only is his spirit awakened, but he is offered another future: a new profession that is a compensation for his humble one as a storekeeper. The ancient wise man, on the brink of death, wants to transmit to the man in his prime, his knowledge. What he encounters is resistance. The other doesn't want to assume the vocation of shaman, he only wants to be cured, without realizing that the cure is inseparable from the acceptance of the vocation which will release him from the repression of his creative forces that has caused the neurosis with which he is afflicted. It is no longer you who command, he is told, for his impulse to die is stronger than his desire to live; therefore the counterforce, if it is to be effective, cannot be his: it must be the will of the other transferred to him. You are too far gone to have any say in the matter, the medicine man tells him, it is already the middle of the night. By negating the will of his patient, he arouses it and prepares him to accept what is being suggested to him.

He shows him the table, the tobacco, the cross: signs of the shaman's work. The table is an altar at which to officiate.. When the Mazatecs eat the mushrooms they speak of the sessions as masses. The shaman, even though a secular figure unordained by the Church, assumes a sacerdotal role as the leader of these ceremonies. In a similar way, for the Indians each father of a family is the religious priest of his household. The tobacco, San Pedro, is believed to have powerful magical and remedial values. The cross indicates a crossing of the ways, an intersection of existential paths, a change, as well as being the religious symbol of crucifixion and resurrection. The shaman tells him to choose. Still the man refuses. You don't give the orders, says the medicine man intent upon evoking the patient's other self in order to bring him back to life, the I who is another. Whether you want to or not, you are going to receive your diploma, he says, to incite him with the prospect of award and reputation.

Living in an oral culture without writing, where the acquisition of skills is traditional, handed down from father to son, mother to daughters rather than contained in books, for the Mazatecs wisdom is gained during the experiences produced by the mushrooms: they are experiences of vision and communication that impart knowledge.

Now he is spoken to. The inner voice is suddenly audible. He hears the call. He is told to accept the vocation of medicine man that he has hitherto adamantly. refused. He cannot recognize this voice as his own, it must be another's; and the shaman, intent upon giving him a new destiny, sure of the talent he has divined, interprets for him from what region of himself springs the command he has heard. It is your father who is telling you to accept this work. A characteristic of such transcendental experiences is that family relationships, in the nexus of which personality is formed, become present to one with intense vividness. His superego, in conjunction with the liberation of his vitality, has spoken to him and his resistance is liquidated; he decides to live and accepts the new vocation around which his personality is reintegrated: he becomes an adept of the dimensions of consciousness where live the spirits; a speaker of mighty words.

In his house, we entered a room with bare concrete walls and a high roof of corrugated iron. His wife, wrapped in shawls, was sitting on a mat. His children were there; his family had assembled to eat the mushrooms with their father; one or two were given to the children of ten and twelve. The window was closed and with the door shut, the room was sealed off from the outside world; nobody would be permitted to leave until the effect of what they had eaten had passed away as a precaution against the peril of derangement. He was a short, burly man, dressed in a reefer jacket over a tee shirt, old brown bell-bottomed pants down to his short feet, an empty cartridge belt around his waist. In daily life, he is the owner of a little store stocked meagerly with canned goods, boxes of crackers, beer, soda, candy, bread, and soap. He sits behind the counter throughout the day looking out upon the muddy street of the town where dogs prowl in the garbage between the legs of the passers-by. From time to time he pours out a shot glass of cane liquor for a customer. He himself neither smokes nor drinks. He is a hunter in whom the instincts of his people survive from the time when they were chasers of game as well as agriculturalists: inhabitants of the Land of the Deer.

Now it is night-time and he prepares to exercise his shamanistic function. His great-grandfather was one of the counselors of the town and a medicine man. With the advent of modern medicine and the invasion of the foreigners in search of mushrooms, the shamanistic customs of the Mazatecs have almost completely vanished. He himself no longer believes many of the beliefs of his ancestors, but as one of the last oral poets of his people, he consciously keeps alive their traditions. "How good it is," he says, "to talk as the ancients did." He hardly speaks Spanish and is fluent only in his native language. Spreading out the mushrooms in front of him, he selected and handed a bunch of them to each of those present after blessing them in the smoke of the copal. Once they had been eaten, the lights were extinguished and everyone sat in silence. Then he began to speak, seated in a chair from which he got up to dance about, whirling and scuffling as he spoke in the darkness. It was pouring, the rain thundering on the roof of corrugated iron. There were claps of thunder. Flashes of lightning at the window.

One who eats the mushroom sinks into somnolence during the transition from one modality of consciousness to another, into a deep absorption, a reverie. Gradually colors begin to well up behind closed eyes. Consciousness becomes consciousness of irradiations and effulgences, of a flux of light patterns forming and unforming, of electric currents beaming forth from within the brain. At this initial moment of awakenment, experiencing the dawn of light in the midst of the night, the shaman evokes the illumination of the constellations at the genesis of the world. Mythopoetical descriptions of the creation of the world are constant themes of these creative experiences. From the beginning, the vision his words create is cosmological. Subjective phenomena are given correlates in the elemental, natural world. One is not inside, but outside.

Through the fields of being there are many directions in which to go, existences are different ways to live life. The idea of paths, that appears so frequently in the shamanistic discourses of the Mazatecs comes from the fact that these originary experiences are creative of intentions. To be in movement, going along a path, is an expressive vision of the ecstatic condition. The path the speaker is following is that which leads directly to his destination, to the accomplishment of his purpose; the path of the beginning disclosed by the rising sun at the time of setting out; the path of truth, of clarity, of that revealed in its being there by the light of day.

He begins to name the towns of his mountainous environment, to call the landscape into being by language and transform the real into signs. It is no imaginary world of fantasy he is creating, as those one has become accustomed to hearing of from the accounts of dreamers under the effects of such psychoactive chemicals, fabled lands of nostalgia, palaces, and jeweled perspectives, but the real world in which he lives and works transfigured by his visionary journey and its linguistic expression into a surreal realm where the physical and the mental fuse to produce the glow of an enigmatic significance.

His existence intensified, he posits himself by his assertions: I am he who. The simultaneous reference to himself in the first and third person as subject and object indicates the impersonal personality of his utterances, uttered by him and by the phenomena themselves that express themselves through him. Arrogantly he affirms his shamanistic function as the mediator between man and the powers that determine his fate; he is the one who converses with all connoted by father: power, authority, and origin. Where there is foreboding and trembling, the medicine man tranquilizes by exorcising the causes of disturbance. His work lies among the nerves, not in the underworld, but on the heights, places of as much anguish as the depths, where the elation of elevation is accompanied by the fear of falling into the void of chasms. This is perhaps why, throughout Central and South America, the conception of illness in the jungle areas is the paranoic one of witchcraft, whereas in the mountainous areas is prevalent the vertiginous idea of fright and loss of self. (

The mushroom session of language creates language, creates the words for phenomena without name. The white lights that sometimes appear in the sky at night, nobody knows what to call them. The mind activated by the mushrooms, from out of the center of the mystery, from the profoundest semantic sources of the human, invents a word to designate them by.

The ancient wise men, to describe the kaleidoscopic illuminations of their shamanistic nights, drew an analogy between the inside and the outside and formed a word that related the spectrum colors created by the sunshine in the spray of waterfalls and the mists of the morning to their conscious experiences of ecstatic enlightenment: these are the whirlwinds he speaks of, gyrating configurations of iridescent lights that appear to him as he speaks, turned round and round and round himself by the turbulent winds of the spirit. Clowns are frequent personae of his discourse, the impish mushrooms come to life, embodiments of merriment, tumbling figments of the spontaneous performing incredible acrobatic feats, funny imaginations of joyfulness. Personalities are more serious. Others. Society. The faces of the people he knows appear to him, then disappear to be succeeded by the apparition of more people. The plurality of incarnated consciousnesses becomes present to him. Multitude. His is an elemental world where cruel, predatory birds wheel in the sky; where the star of the morning shines in the firmament. Outside the dark room where he is speaking, the mountains stand all around in the night.

It is significant that though the psychedelic experience produced by the mushrooms is of heightened perceptivity, the I say is of privileged importance to the I see. The utter darkness of the room, sealed off from the outside, makes any direct perception of the world impossible: the condition of interiorization for its visionary rebirth in images. In such darkness, to open the eyes is the same as leaving them closed. The blackness is alive with impalpable designs in the miraculous air. Even the appearances of the other presences, out of modesty, are protected by the obscurity from the too penetrating, revealing gaze of transcendental perception. Freed from the factuality of the given, the constitutive activity of consciousness produces visions. It is this aspect of such experiences, to the exclusion of all others, that has led them to be called hallucinogenic, without any attempt having been made to distinguish fantasy from intuition.

The Mazatec shaman, however, instead of keeping silent and dreaming, as one would expect him to do if the experience were merely imaginative, talks. "I am he who speaks. I am he who speaks. I am he who speaks with the mountains, with the largest mountains."

For the Mazatecs, the mountains are where the powers are, their summits, their ranges, radiating with electricity in the night, their peaks and their edges oscillating on the horizons of lightning. To speak with is to be in contact with, in communication with, in conversation with the animate spirit of the inanimate, with the material and the immaterial. To speak with is to be spoken to. By a conversion of his being, the shaman has become a transmitter and receiver of messages.

Classical Conceptions

The shaman, says Alfred Metraux, is "an individual who, in the interest of the community, sustains by profession an intermittent commerce with the spirits or is possessed by them." (9)

According to the classical conception, derived from the ecstatic visionaries of Siberia, the shaman is a person who, by a change of his everyday consciousness, enters the metaphysical realms of the transcendental in order to parley with the supernatural powers and gain an understanding of the hidden reasons of events, of sickness and all manner of difficulty. The Mazatec medicine men are therefore shamans in every sense of the word: their means of inspiration, of opening the circuits of communication between themselves, others, the world, and the spirits, are the mushrooms that disclose, by their psychoactive power, another modality of conscious activity than the ordinary one.

The mere eating of the mushrooms, however, does not make a shaman. The Indians recognize that it is not to everyone that they speak; instead there are some who have a longing for awakenment, a disposition for exploring the surrealistic dimensions of existence, a poet's need to express themselves in a higher language than the average language of everyday life: for them in a very particular sense the mushrooms are the medicine of their genius. Nonetheless, there is a very definite idea among the Mazatecs of what the medicine man does, and since the mushrooms are his means of converting himself into the shamanistic condition, the essential characteristics of this particular variety of psychedelic experience must be manifested by his activities.

"I am he who puts together," says the medicine man to define his shamanistic function: he who speaks, he who searches, says. I am he who looks for the spirit of the day, says. I search where there is fright and terror. I am he who fixes, he who cures the person that is sick. Herbal medicine. Remedy of the spirit. Remedy of the atmosphere of the day, says. I am he who resolves all, says. Truly you are man enough to resolve the truth. You are he who puts together and resolves. You are he who puts together the personality. You are he who speaks with the light of day. You are he who speaks with terror.

It is immediately obvious that a discrepancy exists between the Indian conception of the mushrooms' effect and the ideas of modern psychology: whereas in experimental research reports they are said to produce depersonalization, schizophrenia, and derangement, the Mazatec shaman, inspired by them, considers himself endowed with the power of bringing together what is separated: he can heal the divided personality by releasing the springs of existence from repression to reveal the ecstatic life of the integral self; and from disparate clues, by the sudden synthesis of intuition, realize the solution to problems. The words with which he states what his work is indicate a creative activity neither outside of the realm of reason or out of contact with reality. The center of convergent message fields, sensitive to the meaning of all around him, he expresses and communicates, in direct contact with others through speech, an articulator of the unsaid who liberates by language and makes understood. His intuitions penetrate appearances to the essence of matters. Reality reveals itself through him in words as if it had found a voice to utter itself.

The shaman is a signifier in pursuit of significance, intent upon bringing forth the hidden, the obscure into the light of day, the lucid one, intrepid enough to realize that the greatest secrets lie in regions of danger. He is the doctor, not only of the body, but of the self, the one who inquires into the origins of trauma, the interrogator of the familiar and mysterious. It is indeed as if that which he has eaten, by virtue of the possibilities it discovers to him, were of the spirit, for perception becomes more acute, speech more fluent, and the consciousness of significance is quickened. The mushrooms are a remedy to which one has recourse in order to resolve perplexities because the experience is creative of intentions. The way forth from the problematic is conceived of, the meaning of resolved. The shaman, he is the one in communication with the light and with the darkness, who knows of anxiety and how to dispel it: the man of truth, psychologist of the troubled soul.

I Am He Who Speaks

The effect of the mushrooms lasts approximately six hours; usually it is impossible to sleep until dawn. In all such adventures, at the end, comes the idea of a return from where it is one has gone, the return to everyday consciousness. "I return to collect these holy children that served as a remedy," the shaman says, calling back his spirits from their flight into the beyond in order to become his ordinary self again.

What began in the depths of the night with the illumination of interior constellations in the spaces of consciousness ends with the arrival of the daylight after a night of continuous, animated speech. "I am he who speaks," says the Mazatec shaman.

I am he who speaks. I am he who speaks with the mountains. I am he who speaks with the corners. I am the doctor. I am the man of medicines. I am. I am he who cures. I am he who speaks with the Lord of the World. I am happy. I speak with the mountains. I am he who speaks with the mountains of peaks. I am he who speaks with the Bald Mountain. I am the remedy and the medicine man. I am the mushroom. I am the fresh mushroom. I am the large mushroom. I am the fragrant mushroom. I am the mushroom of the spirit.

The Mazatecs say that the mushrooms speak. Now the investigators (10) from without should have listened better to the Indian wise men who had experience of what they, white ones of reason, had not. If the mushrooms are hallucinogenic, why do the Indians associate them with communication, with truth and the enunciation of meaning? An hallucination is a false perception, either visual or audible, that does not have any relation at all to reality, a fantastical illusion or delusion: what appears, but has no existence except in the mind. The vivid dreams of the psychedelic experience suggested hallucinations: such imaginations do occur in these visionary conditions, but they are marginal, not essential phenomena of a general liberation of the spontaneous, ecstatic, creative activity of conscious existence.

Hallucinations predominated in the experiences of the investigators because they were passive experimenters of the transformative effect of the mushrooms. The Indian shamans are not contemplative, they are workers who actively express themselves by speaking, creators engaged in an endeavor of ontological, existential disclosure. For them, the shamanistic condition provoked by the mushrooms is intuitionary, not hallucinatory. What one envisions has an ethical relation to reality, is indeed often the path to be followed. To see is to realize, to understand.

But even more important than visions for the Mazatec shaman are words as real as the realities of the real they utter. It is as if the mushrooms revealed a primordial activity of signification, for once the shaman has eaten them, he begins to speak and continues to speak throughout the shamanistic session of ecstatic language.

The phenomenon most distinctive of the mushrooms' effect is the inspired capacity to speak. Those who eat them are men of language, illuminated with the spirit, who call themselves the ones who speak, those who say. The shaman, chanting in a melodic singsong, saying says at the end of each phrase of saying, is in communication with the origins of creation, the sources of the voice, and the fountains of the word, related to reality from the heart of his existential ecstasy by the active mediation of language: the articulation of meaning and experience. To call such transcendental experiences of light, vision, and speech hallucinatory is to deny that they are revelatory of reality. In the ancient codices, the colored books, the figures sit, hieroglyphs of words, holding the mushrooms of language in pairs in their hands: signs of signification.

Notes

(1) HENRY MUNN has investigated the use of hallucinogenic plants among the Conibo Indians of eastern Peru and the Mazatec Indians of the mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico. Although not a professional anthropologist, he has resided for extended periods of time among the Mazatecs and is married to the niece of the shaman and shamaness referred to in this essay.

(2). The inspiration produced by the mushrooms is very much like that described by Nietzsche in Ecce Homo. Since the statement of Rimbaud, "I is another," spontaneous language, speaking or writing as if from dictation (to use the common expression for an activity very difficult to describe in its truth) has been of paramount interest to philosophers and poets. Sap the Mexican, Octavio Paz, in an essay on Breton, "The inspired one, the man who in truth speaks, does not say anything that is his: from his mouth speaks language." Octavio Paz, "Andre Breton o La Busqueda del Comienzo," Corriente Alterna (Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno, 1967), p. 53. (Back)

(3). The shamanistic discourses studied in this essay, were tape-recorded. I am indebted for the translations to a bilingual woman of Huautla, Mrs. Eloina Estrada de Gonzalez, who listened to the recordings and told me, phrase by phrase, in Spanish, what the shaman and shamaness were saying in their native language. As far as I know, the words of neither of these oral poets have hitherto been published. They are Mrs. Irene Pineda de Figueroa and Mr. Roman Estrada. The complete text of each discourse takes up ninety-two pages. For the purposes of this essay, I have merely selected the most representative passages.

(4). "... the Greek word which signifies poetry was employed by the writer of an alchemical papyrus to designate the operation of 'transmutation' itself. What a ray of light! One knows that the word 'poetry' comes from the Greek verb which signifies 'make.' But that does not designate an ordinary fabrication except for those who reduce it to verbal nonsense. For those who have conserved the sense of the poetic mystery, poetry is a sacred action. That is to say, one which exceeds the ordinary level of human action. Like alchemy, its intention is to associate itself with the mystery of the 'primordial creation'..." Michel Carrouges, Andre Breton et les donnees fondamentales du surrealisme (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 195O).

(5). Claude Levi-Strauss, "The Effectiveness of Symbols," Structural Anthropology (Doubleday Anchor, 1967), pp. 193-95.

(6). "In a sense, as Husserl says, philosophy consists of the restitution of a power of signification, a birth of sense or a savage sense, an expression of experience by experience which particularly clarifies the special domain of language." Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Le Visible et l'invisible (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1964).

(7). The story of how he began his shamanistic career, together with the information to follow about fright, payments to the mountains, and practices in relation to the hunt, are quotations from an interview with Mr. Roman Estrada whom I questioned through an interpreter: the conversation was tape-recorded and then translated from the native language by Mrs. Eloina Estrada de Gonzalez, the niece of the shaman, who served as questioner in the interview itself.

(8. "Finally, the illness can be the consequence of a loss of the soul, gone astray or carried off by a spirit or a revenant. This conception, widely spread throughout the region of the Andes and the Gran Chaco, appears rare in tropical America." Alfred Metraux, "Le Chaman des Guyane et de l'Amazonie," Religions et magies indiennes d'Amerique du Sud (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1967).

(9). Ibid.

(10). It is necessary to express one's debt to R. Gordon Wasson, whose writings, the most authoritative work on the mushrooms, informed me of their existence and told me much about them. 

[nichi]

From Heriberto Yépez, RE-READING MARÍA SABINA

/...../When she calls herself, let’s say, "opossum-woman" she is not referring to the animal but to a string of myths. Munn (using as sources the books of Carlos Incháustegui) synthesizes how the opossum represents for Mazatecs the power to play dead and gain invulnerability, the task of stealing fire--which is key because stealing fire creates ‘culture’. So if at first "opossum-woman" can bring images of Sabina identifying with ‘nature’ reading her more carefully brings us to the fact that Sabina chants are an interweaving of artificial meanings, and not an animistic exercise or ‘flow-of-words’ or a simple litany of plants, objects and characters. From the Moon to the Water, Sabina quotes cultural artifacts. Signs-with-histories. She re-constructs the order of words, meanings, contexts, subjects, cultures and things.

When reading
      I am opossum-woman

We should read,
      I am the interplay of nature and culture-woman.
      I am the performance-of-death-woman.
      I am the recasting-of-myths-woman.
      I am the keeper-and-changer-of-the-meanings-of-‘opossum’-woman

Our traditional understanding of Sabina (Paz included) falls very short of what she was really doing. Words for her are a therapeutic instrument, and a way to depict visions, but also a self-conscious flesh that remakes and investigates prior texts.

There’s nothing spontaneous, naïve, automatic or unconscious in María Sabina’s poetic praxis. Sabina is not a poet of the unconscious but of self-consciousness itself, a poet of cultural rereading and rewriting.

Sabina represents a critique on those who believe (like Paz and most mainstream poets) that poetry is a voice that comes from nowhere, ‘inspiration’ or the unmediated unconscious, an ahistoric otherness, those who consider poetry is an individualistic practice by essence or solitary compromise, she challenges those who find the idea of having just a single identity possible, of who try to produce a voice without a context, an impossible purity.

But Sabina is also a critique on those who believe there can be radical experimentation without healing, or see the poet as a sophisticated specialist whose social role is just writing, those who act in the mere sphere of literature, and who don’t break up the boundaries that separate the different domains of their own culture. ‘Poets’ without radical wisdom, wisdom that comes from the roots; ‘poets’ who don’t go to the roots of society, to cure ignorance, sickness, injustice and poverty.

Sabina was without a doubt a poet. She was not only a poet, but more importantly poetry’s wholeness. Her activity’s goal was totality. She reached for the impossible. Searching for a book-beyond-the-book. Having a new poetic body. Breaking the differences between writing, reading, chanting, talking, dancing and silence. Removing pain from others. Fighting for the survival of a great culture. Investigating sounds, meanings and languages. Increasing wisdom. Teaching. Being radically self-critical, recognizing when one fails, when one is dying.

Being a writer is easier.
http://www.ubu.com/ethno/discourses/yepez_review.html

[nichi]

Maria Sabina - Curandera, Shaman - (1896-1985)

The Transmission of the Eucharist: A Homage to Maria Sabina

The True Hallucinogens --3: The Sacred Mushroom: Teonanactl and the Lady of the Alder

Quotes from Maria Sabina:

It's that in me there is no sorcery, there is no anger, there are no lies. Because I don't have garbage, I don't have dust. The sickness comes out if the sick vomit. They vomit the sickness. They vomit because the mushrooms want them to. If the sick don't vomit, I vomit. I vomit for them and in that way the malady is expelled. The mushrooms have power because they are the flesh of God. And those that believe are healed. Those that do not believe are not healed.

[....] I have cured many children. Sometimes I give the children a little bit of Little-One-Who-Springs-Forth. I vomit for the children if they don't. Before beginning the vigil I ask the name of the sick person. In that way I search for the sickness and in that way I cure. If the sick person doesn't tell me the cause of his or her malady I divine it. When the sick person sweats, that reveals that he or she is going to be healed. Sweat gets rid of the fever that comes from the sickness. My words oblige the evil to leave.

For a strong toothache seven or eight pairs are eaten, that is enough. The children are taken at night; the vigil is celebrated in front of images of the saints of the Church. The saint children cure the sores, the wounds of the spirit. The spirit is what gets sick. The Curers don't know that the visions the children show reveal the origin of the malady. The Curers don't know how to use them. The Sorcerers don't either. [....] The mushrooms give me the power of universal contemplation. I can see from the origin. I can arrive where the world is born.

[....] I am not a Curer because I do not use eggs to cure. I don't ask for powers from the Lords of the Mountains. I am not a Curer because I do not give potions of strange herbs to drink. I cure with Language. Nothing else. I am a Wise Woman. Nothing else.

[....] I am wise even from within the womb of my mother. I am the woman of the winds, of the water, of the paths, because I am known in heaven, because I am a doctor woman.

I take Little-One-Who-Springs-Forth and I see God. I see him sprout from the earth. He grows and grows, big as a tree, as a mountain. His face is placid, beautiful, serene as in the temples. At other times, God is not like a man: he is the Book. A Book that is born from the earth, a sacred Book whose birth makes the world shake. It is the Book of God that speaks to me in order for me to speak. It counsels me, it teaches me, it tells me what I have to say to men, to the sick, to life. The Book appears and I learn new words.

I am the daughter of God and elected to be wise. On the altar that I have in my house is the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe. I have her in a niche. And I have Saint Mark, Saint Martin Horseman, and Saint Magdalene. They help me to cure and to speak. In the vigils I clap and whistle; at that time I am transformed into God.

http://www.erowid.org/plants/mushrooms/mushrooms_quote1.shtml