María Sabina was a Mazatec healer, a sabia or “wise woman”, from Huautla de Jiménez in Oaxaca, Mexico. A scholarly bibliography gives her years as 1895 to 1985 and says she called the mushrooms “saint children” (Spiers et al., 2024); Wikidata gives 1894 as her birth year, so the date is unsettled.
On the night of 29–30 June 1955 she led a velada, a night vigil, attended by R. Gordon Wasson and the photographer Allan Richardson (Life, 1957). Life printed his account on 13 May 1957 under the pseudonym “Eva Mendez”, without naming the town (Life, 1957).
Visitors found Huautla anyway. By the mid-1960s it had become a countercultural pilgrimage destination, and she was stigmatised in her own community for the changes (Spiers et al., 2024). One study reports that officials blamed her for incidents involving foreigners and that her house was burned more than once (García de Teresa, 2022). Several papers say Wasson published without her consent (Magar et al., 2026), though no primary record of any agreement has been found. Her case is now central to debates about credit and benefit-sharing with Indigenous communities.
Sources
- Spiers et al., 2024, Journal of Psychedelic Studies
- Seeking the Magic Mushroom, Life, 13 May 1957
- García de Teresa, 2022, Journal of Illicit Economies and Development
- Magar et al., 2026, Journal of Psychopharmacology
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