Maria Sabina, Shaman and Visionary

 

"There is a world beyond ours; a world that is far away, nearby and invisible. And that is where God lives, where the dead live, the spirits and the saints, a world where everything has already happened and everything is known. That world talks. It has a language of its own. I report what it says."

These are the words of Maria Sabina, a Mexican Mazatec shamanic healer of the last century.  A  shaman and visionary - not a poet in any ordinary sense - Maria Sabina lived out her life in the Oaxacan mountain village of Huautla de Jimenez, and yet her words, always sung or spoken, have carried far and wide, a principal instance and a powerful reminder of how poetry can arise in a context far removed from literature as such. Seeking cures through language - with the help of Psilocybe mushrooms, said to be the source of language itself - she was, as Henry Munn describes her, 'a genius who emerges from the soil of the communal, religious-therapeutic folk poetry of a native Mexican campesino people."

But Maria Sabina did not herself consider her chants in such a way: she was as humble in her approach to her healing as she was dedicated, and her life, which was hard enough, was devoted to her healing practices.  "I don't know in what year I was born, but my mother, Maria Concepción, told me that it was in the morning of the day they celebrate the Virgin Magdalene, there in Rio Santiago. None of my ancestors knew their age.

"The sacred mushroom, the teo-nanácatl,  takes me by the hand and brings me to the world where everything is known. It is they, the sacred mushrooms, that speak in a way I can understand. I ask them, and they answer me. When I return from the trip that I have taken with them, I tell what they have told me and what they have shown me.

"I was four years old when my father died and used to go into the forest with my sister to pasture the beasts. We were very hungry, but we knew that there were mushrooms and that the mushrooms were our friends. The mushroom was in my family as a parent, a protector, a friend. But then I did not know yet how to distinguish the sacred mushrooms as el derrumbe, San Isidro, pajaritos, or from those who were not. My grandmother told me everything with pleasure because she saw that I was destined to become the priestress of the teo-nanácatl.  

"The mushroom is similar to your soul. It takes you where your soul wants to go. And not all souls are the same. Many people of the sierra have taken it and are taking it, but not everybody enters into the world where everything is known. The secrets the mushrooms reveal to me are enclosed in a big Book that they showed me and that is found  in a region very far away from their world, a great Book. They gave it to me when my sister Ana Maria fell ill. I took many, many more mushrooms than I had ever taken before: thirty plus thirty. I loved my sister and was ready to do anything, even to make a long trip, just to save her. I was sitting in front of her with my body, but my soul was entering the world of the teo-nanácatl and was seeing the same landscape that it had seen many other times, the landscapes that it had never seen because the great number of mushrooms had taken me into the deepest of the depths of that world. 

A duende, a spirit, came toward me. He asked a strange question: "But what do you wish to become, you, Maria Sabina?"  I answered him, without knowing, that I wished to be a saint.  Then the spirit smiled, and immediately he had in his hands something that he did not have before, and it was a big Book with many written pages. "Here," he said. "I am giving you this Book so that you can do your work better and help people who need help and know the secrets of the world where everything is known. "

"I thumbed through the leaves of the Book, many written pages, and I thought that unfortunately I did not know how to read. Suddenly I realized that I was reading and understood all that was written in the Book and that I became as though richer, wiser, and in that one moment I learned millions of things.

"I learned and learned. When I came to myself I was there, sitting in front of my sister. I looked for the herbs that the Book had indicated to me, and I did exactly what I had learned from the Book. And my sister Ana Maria got well.

"I didn't need to see the Book again because I had learned everything that was inside it. But I again saw the spirit that gave it to me and other spirits and other landscapes; and I saw, close by, the sun and the moon because the more you go inside the world of the teo-nanácatl, the more things are seen. And you also see our past and our future, which are there together as a single thing already achieved, already happened. I saw the entire life of my son Aurelio and his death and the face and the name of the man who was going to kill him because everything had already been accomplished, and it was useless for me to say to my son that he should look out, because there was nothing to say. 

"Millions of things I saw and I knew. I knew and saw God: an immense clock that ticks, the spheres that go slowly around inside the stars, the earth, the entire universe, the day and the night, the cry and the smile, the happiness and the pain. He who knows to the end the secrets of the teo-nanácatl can even see that infinite clockwork."

Excerpts from: 'María Sabina: Her Life and Chants', by Álvaro Estrada. Translation and commentaries by Henry Munn, with a retrospective essay by R. Gordon Wasson and a preface by Jerome Rothenberg. Published by Ross-Ericson, Inc., 1981.