The Mazatecos are the people who more purely have preserved the teonanacatl rituals. It was precisely a Mazatec shaman: Maria Sabina, who spread, despite herself, the power and strength of the « Niños Santos” the Holy Child of the teonanacatl mushrooms.
Maria Sabina was a native of Huautla in the Mexican
state of Oaxaca. She was born in 1894, and since young life lived in
poverty and sacrifice. She recounts that when she was a child tending sheep in
the mountains and at one moment she went hungry.
Mushrooms offered available food. It was at
that moment that she had her first contacts with the Niños Santos.
Over the years, inspired by her large family, her
grandfather, her grandmother, her uncles, connoisseurs of traditional Mazatec
traditions, she began using mushrooms to heal people.
Her fame spread to neighboring regions and beyond, to
the capital and abroad.
Among those who heard about the existence of María
Sabina was the ethnic mycologist Gordon Wasson and his wife Valentina Pavlovna.
In June 1955 the couple traveled to Oaxaca and attended an evening singing with
Maria Sabina in Huautla. Both consumed teonanacatl and were very impressed by
the experience. At that time María Sabina was 61 years old.
Following on from this point Pavlovna Wasson set out
to study the theme. They invited Professor Roger Heim, an expert mycologist,
who joined a research team that would have to devote to work on teonanacatl in
subsequent years. Valentina Pavlovna died soon after, but after three
years as a result of these exploration the book Les champignons hallucinogènes
du Mexique s was published , whose principal authors were Roger Heim and Gordon
Wasson himself.
Almost twenty years later, a student of Mazateco
origin named Alvaro Estrada, devoted himself to the task of collecting
the history of the life of Maria Sabina from her own lips and translated it
into Spanish. In 1977 the first edition of Alvaro Estrada book “Life of Maria
Sabina, the Sage of the Fungi «prefaced by Wasson himself was published.
The global diffusion of the power of teonanacatl made
many people travel to Huautla to meet Maria Sabina or to obtain their «dose» of
mushrooms.
External influence and its impact on medical practice
and the power of the Niños Santos was discussed by Maria Sabina in this way:
« Before Wasson, I felt that the saint children raised
me. I no longer feel that way ... If Cayetano had not brought to foreigners,
the Niños Santos would retain their power .... From the moment foreigners
arrived ... the Niños Santos lost their power. They lost their force,
they were decomposed. From now on they no longer serve. There is no remedy. «13
Wasson himself, who reproduced this statement of the
Mazateca shaman, lamented the process that he had unwittingly sparked some
years earlier.
«These words shake me, I, Gordon Wasson, I am
made responsible for the end of a religious practice in Mesoamerica that goes
back millennia ago.»(The little mushroom) will no longer serve. It is hopeless.
«I fear telling the truth, showing her wisdom. A practice carried out in secret
for centuries has been brought to light, and the light announces its end. «
One of the visitors who received Maria Sabina in
Huautla was the eminent writer and researcher Fernando Benitez, who died
recently. Benitez was one of the most important personalities in the study of
native cultures of Mexico.
His work «The Indians of Mexico», in several volumes,
is one of the most important milestones in world anthropology.
Not so long ago he presented a conference on the power
of mushrooms which is very expressive in this regard.
«Back to the hallucinogenic mushrooms.»
“I was one of the first to try. I went to Huautla, I
came into contact with the magic priestess María Sabina. I ate mushrooms and
chocolate to remove the bitterness. The ceremony had several stages: first of
crazy laugh, laugh to tears, which already meant the beginning of catharsis and
of which you relieve you crying. Then I entered a period of extraordinary
visions, a display of Persian carpets of wonderful drawings. Then I went to the
sounds; I heard sounds I had never heard, I saw things illuminated by a light
that they don’t have.
I stood four hours in the rain, without feeling. A
friend came and asked me: Who are you? I said, I am God, I do not need glasses.
I see.
I took the glasses and smashed them on the floor. The
shaman Maria Sabina tended me in bed and covered me with some blankets, until I
could return to the world, purified, clean and, of course, infinitely wiser and
more sensitive. It was the most important experience of my life. «
From "Peoples, Drugs and Serpents". Danilo Antón, Piriguazú Ediciones.
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