A woman wise in medicine

A practice older than any of us

Humans have been in relationship with psilocybin mushrooms for thousands of years. Spanish colonial records describe Indigenous peoples in Mesoamerica consuming sacred mushrooms they called teonanácatl, often translated as “flesh of the gods.” When colonization came, these practices were condemned and pushed into hiding, surviving quietly in remote communities that refused to let the tradition die.

That refusal is the only reason psilocybin reached the rest of us at all. So I want to say this plainly: the history of psilocybin is not a story of discovery. It's a story of people who protected something sacred at great cost, long before the outside world was paying attention.

Who María Sabina was

María Sabina Magdalena García lived her entire life in Huautla de Jiménez, in the Sierra Mazateca region of Oaxaca, born into a family of healers. She took part in her first velada, a sacred healing ceremony, when she was only around seven years old.

She called the mushrooms los niños santos, the holy children, or little saints. She didn't understand them as a “drug”. She understood them as a doorway, a way to look into the causes of someone's suffering and find the words that could help them heal. For decades she served her community as a curandera, guiding the sick through all-night ceremonies. Her chants, which arrived as spontaneous poetry she believed was given to her, are some of the most beautiful spiritual language of the twentieth century. The verse at the top of this post is one of them.

What happened inside the velada

Here is what I love about the velada: it was never about enjoyment or even comfort necessarily. Held in darkness through the night, it was intimate and sacred, and its entire purpose was healing. Healer and seeker would take the mushrooms together, and María Sabina would sing, calling in the little saints, weaving in Catholic prayer alongside older Mazatec cosmology, letting the words come as she believed they were meant to.

The goal was always the same: to find the root of a person's suffering and help restore them. When I think about what responsible facilitation reaches toward today, this is it. Psilocybin is not a shortcut. It's a medicine held inside relationship, ceremony, and care.

When the outside world arrived

In the summer of 1955, an American banker and amateur mycologist named R. Gordon Wasson traveled to Huautla and convinced María Sabina to let him take part in a velada. In May of 1957, he published his account, “Seeking the Magic Mushroom,” in Life magazine. A magazine editor coined that phrase, “magic mushroom,” for the headline, and almost overnight psilocybin was introduced to a mass audience.

For María Sabina, the cost was devastating. Seekers and curiosity-hunters descended on her small town by the hundreds, most of them with no reverence for what they had come to take. She faced persecution and rejection from her own community. Her home was reportedly burned down, and she lived her final years in poverty before she died in 1985. She came to believe that once the mushrooms were shared with outsiders who came for the wrong reasons, something sacred had been lost, and that the holy children had given up some of their purity.

Her story is a warning, and I think it belongs at the very center of this work. It warns us about losing the sacred through carelessness, about extraction, about broken trust and consent. My intention is to respect and honor María and her work by learning from her story, bringing to bear the lessons learned even from the long distance of reading about her. My takeaway is that we must hold this medicine with humility, reciprocity, and reverence rather than treating it as a product.

Carrying her forward

As psilocybin moves into regulated, therapeutic settings, I hope we remember María Sabina not as a footnote in a counterculture story, but as who she was: a master healer, a poet, a mother, a woman wise in medicine. The things we now call best practices, the intention-setting, the safety, the ceremony, the integration, are not new inventions. They are echoes of what she was already doing in the dark of an Oaxacan night.

To work with these mushrooms is to inherit her lineage, and I believe that inheritance asks something of us. It asks for humility. It asks for gratitude. It asks that we hold this medicine with the same care she did. When we sit with someone in ceremony, we are continuing something María Sabina gave her whole life to protect.