María Sabina

And we can see this in healing ceremonies for generations, most famously by the Mazatec people of Oaxaca, Mexico.

And there's a healer as well named Maria Sabina who is kinda very well-known in this space.

Then it kinda entered the world in the 1950s, and that's when people started using it in a more recreational space.

And then there was a Swiss chemist who actually isolated psilocybin in a lab, and that is really where things started to take off when we started looking at the impact of psilocybin on the brain, on mental health, brain health, and everything like that.

You mentioned Gordon Wesson.

He's a fabulist, really, in a sense, isn't he? Because he sort of doesn't really tell the truth about Maria Sabina, but he does alert the world to the fact that there are these fungi out there that have these psychedelic effects, right? So when do people in this country recognise, sort of consciously recognise, that Liberty Cap is a psychedelic and, you know, that there's a reason to take it for those purposes?

Knowledge of Wasson and what's happening with Maria Sabina and that story starts coming into this country in newspapers in the late 1950s.

That is about psilocybe cuventus.

And when it's discussed, it's always discussed as this very foreign, exotic mushroom.

And this town has kind of a complicated history.

Maria Sabina is from this town.

She's, if if listeners are not aware, she's the shaman that a lot of people credit for introducing psilocybin mushrooms to the West.

And there was a, how I learned the story at the time was that a banker from the West went to this town and wrote an article, sat in ceremony with her several times, wrote an article about it.

Yeah.

He participates in a traditional Aztec mushroom ceremony with a healer named Maria Sabina.

This woman is, like, kind of an ancient shaman living in Central America that kinda preserves the entire ritual when a lot of the sort of mushroom ceremonies were, like, suppressed.

Yeah.

Wasson learned of a Mazatec Indian shaman in the village of Waula de Jimenez, who could still perform an ancient ritual.

The shaman's name was Maria Sabina.

On the night of June 29, 1955, Wasson and a photographer, Alan Richardson, participated in a balada, a healing ceremony, where Maria Sabina consumed a massive dose of psilocybe mushrooms.

She chanted, she sang, she entered a trance-like state, and she communicated with spirits.

The mushrooms she used were the same ones that had been used by the Aztecs centuries earlier.

That would come from Humphrey Osmond in the same year.

And here comes this article in one of the most mainstream respected publications in America, describing a Wall Street banker participating in an indigenous mushroom ceremony in Mexico.

the article is accompanied by stunning photographs colour images of maria sabina in her ritual garments of mushrooms growing in the mexican highlands of wasson himself looking transformed what made it explosive wasn't just the content it was the source This wasn't some beatnik poet or fringe character.