GLOSSARY · WORDS AND HISTORY

Mazatec

An Indigenous people of the Sierra Mazateca in Oaxaca, Mexico, whose healers use psilocybin mushrooms in night ceremonies. Outsiders’ accounts of Mazatec practice, above all Wasson’s 1957 article, shaped the Western history of these mushrooms.

The Mazatec are an Indigenous people of the Sierra Mazateca of Oaxaca, Mexico, centred on towns such as Huautla de Jiménez. A 2024 bibliography names them among the Mexican peoples who have used psilocybin mushrooms in healing and ceremony, alongside Nahua, Totonac, Mixe, Zapotec and Chatino communities (Spiers et al., 2024).

Mazatec mushroom ceremony is a night vigil, or velada, that blends Catholic and older elements. The best-known outside account is R. Gordon Wasson’s 1957 Life article on a 1955 velada led by María Sabina (Life, 1957). A team including Irmgard Weitlaner-Johnson was the first known group of outsiders to witness and write about a Mazatec mushroom ceremony, in 1938 (Spiers et al., 2024).

The attention came at a cost. Mazatec researchers have written about the exploitation María Sabina and her people suffered, and calls for reparations have followed (Spiers et al., 2024). The linguistic anthropologist Paja Faudree describes Mazatec authors working to manage a “representational hangover” from outsiders’ accounts (Faudree, 2015). This site describes the practice as culture and history, not as something to copy.

Sources

Last checked October 26, 2026.