Slide 1)
- Hey everyone, my name is Keely. In the interest of our theme this week, “Body, Mind, Espíritu, resilience”, I am going to talk about Maria Sabina. Bringing recognition to her the ways in which her healing practices and beliefs have become misrepresented and misunderstood over time is a form of resistance against the history of western consumerism and colonialism in relation to Indigenous culture.
Slide 2)
- María Sabina was an Indigenous women born and raised in Huautla de Jiménez, Mexico, a mountain village in Southern Mexico. She is known for her healing and spiritual connection to her sacred saint children, that being psilocybin mushrooms. Her first time engaging in taking the mushrooms, she was under 10 years old and eventually realized that she possessed a special gift that allows her to heal others with the mushrooms.
Slide 3)
- “Maria Sabina differentiates herself from sorcerers and other types of curers who bewitch and use hallucinogenic plants as source of personal power…” (tandfonline)
- By eating the mushrooms, and subsequently vomiting them, the malignant spirit is taken from the body.
- Maria Sabina explained that after ingesting the mushrooms with the ill-person she is attempting to heal, “The God that lives in them enters [her] body” (pg 93) She explains that once she arrives in the place she should be, everything is clean and everything is known; she hears voices that speak to her and this is how she connects with the bad spirits that have taken over the sick individual.
Slide 4)
- In the words of Maria Sabina, “These young people, blonde and dark-skinned, didn’t respect our customs. Never, as far as I remember, were the saint children eaten with such a lack of respect...They take the children at any time and in any place...from the moment the foreigners arrived to search for God, the saint children lost their purity. They lost their force; the foreginers spoiled them.” She says “Before Wasson, I felt that the saint children elevated me. I don’t feel like that anymore. The force has diminished.” (pg 86-91)
Slide 5)
- Wasson took a practice that was used humbly and selflessly, and turned the mushrooms into a individualistic, consumerized and psychedelic seeked out experience.
- Him and other Westerners would travel to visit Maria Sabina and they would enter her home without an invitation, they took many photographs of her including during her healing ceremonies and used and/or sold those photos when they were back home.
- To those who do not know the deep rooted untold stories of Maria Sabina and her Saint Children, she has been misrepresented as a “hippie”, a “druggie”, and her image has been understood through the interpretation of R. Gordon Wasson and other westerners who had the privilege of visiting her.
- The story of Maria Sabina exemplifies the ways in which a significant amount of drugs that modern western society either utilizes as an agent in pharmaceuticals or otherwise deems as illegal or unethical, have been taken from the practices of indigenous peoples against their consent or knowledge.
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