«I realized that young people with long hair didn't need me to eat those little things. The kids ate them wherever and whenever they wanted, and they didn't respect our customs»
— Maria Sabina.
— Maria Sabina.
Humans have been using psilocybin, a naturally occurring psychedelic compound found in magic mushrooms, for more than 10,000 years. Until the mid-20th century, the context was religious. That all changed on June 29, 1955, when a JP Morgan vice president named R. Gordon Wasson traveled to Mexico with a photographer to the clay hut of Mazatec curandero (witch doctor) Maria Sabina, and they became, in Wasson's words, «the first white men in history to eat the divine mushrooms».
A subsequent Life magazine article written by Wasson in 1957, «In Search of the Magic Mushroom», opened Pandora's Box, which, among other things, witnessed the birth of the American psychedelic counterculture, the desecration of the mushroom ritual, and the eventual banning of psilocybin in many parts of the world. The article also eventually led to Sabine's downfall as hundreds of people from the West came to see her.
Wasson's intentions were sincere, albeit naive. As an amateur ethnomycologist, he had spent the previous thirty years traveling with his wife, Valentina, documenting various cultural attitudes toward wild mushrooms.
«We weren't interested in what people learn about mushrooms from books, but what uneducated villagers have known since childhood-the folkloric heritage of the family circle. It turned out we had stumbled into a new area of research» — Wasson recalled.
Many cultures around the world have worshipped mushrooms and created elaborate religious ceremonies around their consumption. Wasson set out to find out what kinds of mushrooms were worshipped and why. He was particularly interested in the Aztecs and early Spanish missionary accounts of the Aztec ceremony of eating teonanacatl, or «flesh of God» mushrooms.
Wasson made several trips to Mexico in search of those who still practiced the mushroom ritual, but it wasn't until 1955 in the village of Huautla de Jimenez in Oaxaca that he succeeded. He visited the town hall and asked an official if he could help him learn the secrets of the divine mushroom. «Nothing easier» — the official replied. The official took Wasson to the mountainside where the mushrooms grew in abundance and then to the hill where Maria Sabina lived.
Maria Sabina was highly respected in the village as a healer and shaman. She had been using psilocybin mushrooms regularly since she was seven years old and had performed a ceremony with the mushroom velada for more than 30 years before Wasson's arrival.
The purpose of the all-night velad was to communicate with God to heal the sick. The spirits, if successfully contacted, would tell Sabina the nature of the illness and how to heal it. Vomiting from the sufferer was considered an integral part of the ceremony. Each participant in the ritual took psilocybin mushrooms while Sabina (who usually took twice as many) chanted incantations to invoke the divine.
«Am I not good? I am a woman creator, a woman star, a woman moon, a woman cross, a woman of the heavens. I am a man of clouds, a man of dew on the grass» — she says to the spirits.
A lifelong Catholic, Sabina has woven Christian elements into the Masatec ritual, guiding participants through their visions. Surprisingly, unlike her predecessors, the local bishop did not consider Sabina's ritual heretical. «The Church is not against these pagan rituals — if they can be called that. The sages and healers are not in competition with our religion. They are all very religious and come to our Mass, even Maria Sabina» — said Father Antonio Reyes Hernandez.
Sabina was wary of Wasson when he arrived but agreed to perform the ritual after assurances from a village official who was a trusted friend. Wasson and his photographer stumbled through the night as Sabina performed the velada, and their minds were eventually blown. «For the first time, the word ecstasy took on real meaning. For the first time it didn't mean someone else's state of mind» — Wasson later wrote. Sabine's reluctance to introduce Wasson at the ceremony had less to do with the fact that he was a foreigner than with the fact that Wasson and his colleague did not need healing.
«It is true that Wasson and his friends were the first foreigners to come to our city in search of holy children, and that they did not take them because they were suffering from any illness. Their reason was that they came to find God» — she recalled.
Wasson returned to the States with a pretty darn cool story. It piqued the interest of Life magazine, which funded further trips to the village to cover and photograph the Masatec ritual. It also caught the attention of the CIA, which was in the midst of its covert Project MK ULTRA drug mind control program. Wasson became an unwitting agent of the program after the CIA secretly funded Wasson's trips to Mexico during 1956 through a front organization called the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research.
«In Search of the Magic Mushroom» went viral in 1957 upon publication. Opinions differ as to whether Sabine approved the use of her photographs for the article. Wasson, for his part, changed Sabine's name to Eva Mendes and did not reveal the name or location of the village.
In all, Wasson witnessed nine mushroom ceremonies, each conducted by Sabina. On one trip he was accompanied by the eminent French mycologist Roger Heim, who identified species of magic mushrooms and sent samples to Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who had synthesized LSD twenty years earlier. Hofmann was able to isolate the chemical structure of psilocybin and create a synthetic version. His pharmaceutical company Sandoz began sending doses to research institutes and clinics around the world.
Psychologist Dr. Timothy Leary, a rising academic star at Harvard, traveled to Cuernavaca, Mexico in 1960 after reading an article. Despite his professional success, he described himself during this period as «an unnamed institutional employee who drove to work every morning in a long line of commuter cars and went home every evening and drank martinis...like a few million liberal middle-class intellectual robots». He bought some mushrooms from a local curandero and, instead of partaking in the mushroom ritual, ingested them by the pool of his summer villa.
«I learned more about my brain and its capabilities and psychology in five hours after ingesting these mushrooms than I had learned in the previous 15 years of studying and doing research in psychology» — Dr. Timothy Leary
Leary returned to Harvard and, after receiving doses of psilocybin from Sandoz, began the Harvard Psilocybin Project with his colleague Dr. Richard Alpert. Aldous Huxley, who had a lifelong interest in altered states, was on the board of directors.
The tendency of Leary and his colleagues to exaggerate the positive aspects of the psychedelic experience and downplay the negative had serious consequences when psychedelics left the confines of laboratories and appeared on the streets of San Francisco, Palo Alto, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the early 1960s.
«Part of the negative reaction that swept psychedelics out of research labs and out of the hands of doctors and therapists. Сan be traced in part to thousands of cases in which people took psychedelics in non-research settings, were unprepared for the frightening aspects of their psychedelic experience, and ended up in hospital emergency rooms» — writes psychedelics researcher Rick Doblin.
Leary and Alpert didn't just test psychedelics under controlled experimental conditions. They held picnics every weekend and encouraged their students to do the same. As soon as this became known to the authorities, Leary and Alpert were fired. Shortly thereafter, Leary began his public campaign urging the youth of America to «Tune in, Engage, and Fall Out». Alpert traveled to India and returned bearded, wearing a dhoti and calling himself Ram Dass. By 1966, psilocybin and LSD were banned in the United States.
Beatniks, hippies, celebrities like Bob Dylan and John Lennon, scientists and seekers of all stripes flooded the village of Huautla de Jimenez after the Life article was published. Sabina turned few away, though she often expressed misgivings about Wasson's familiarity with mushrooms and always emphasized what she believed to be the mushroom's true purpose.
The publicity was disastrous for the Masatec community, who accused Sabina of bringing misfortune to the village and desecrating the velada ritual. Sabina's house was burned down, and the feds frequently raided her residence, accusing her of selling drugs to foreigners. Hippies rented cabins in neighboring villages. Tourists failed miserably and wandered naked through the town. One might ask why Sabina turned away so few foreigners. Some believe it was her kindness, others her humble acceptance of her new role as cultural ambassador of the masatec mushroom ritual. It is also known that she sometimes charged tourists for her services.
In the 1970s, Mexican authorities banned the use of psilocybin mushrooms. The influx of tourists went down, but in Sabina's eyes the damage was already done.
«From the moment foreigners arrived in search of God, the holy children lost their purity. They have lost their strength; the foreigners have corrupted them. From now on they will not be good for anything. There is no remedy for this» — she said.
Wasson, for his part, agreed. He expressed remorse for the rest of his life for his role in popularizing the recreational use of magic mushrooms. «A practice that has been conducted in secret for three centuries or more is now aerated» — he wrote. «Aeration means the end».
Sabina died in poverty at the age of 91 in 1985. Today in Oaxaca, her image can be seen on T-shirts, in restaurants and cabs. More than forty years after research into their therapeutic effects was effectively banned, magic mushrooms are now being used in a way much closer to what Maria Sabina believed to be their true purpose: to heal the sick.
In clinical trials being conducted around the world, hundreds of cancer patients, drug addicts, and those suffering from anxiety and depression report profound, life-changing, and mystical experiences. For many participants, the benefits of a single dose of mushrooms last for a long time. In a 2006 study examining psilocybin's potential to catalyze religious experiences led by Dr. Roland R. Griffiths, more than 70 percent of participants self-rated the experience as one of the five most important in their lives. Nearly one-third rated it as the single most important experience.
In studies from New York University and Johns Hopkins University, the results of which were published simultaneously in November 2016, about 80 percent of cancer patients showed clinically significant reductions in anxiety and depression lasting about eight months after the first dose. Study participants were given psilocybin in a bowl and guided through the experience while they wore an eye mask and listened to soothing music. They were encouraged to «trust, let go and be open».
The researchers cautioned that the positive results should not be taken as an endorsement of the recreational use of hallucinogenic mushrooms: