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Shamanic voices by Dr Joan Halifax

High above the Mazatec village of Huautla de Jimenez, next to Nindo Tocoxho, the Mountain of Adoration, is a humble daub and wattle hut of three tiny rooms. Its walls are crumbling, the uneven earthen floors seem to be eaten with age, and the interior of the dwelling is barren except for the simplest altar and a few pieces of rudimentary furniture.

In the winter of 1977, I came to this place at the kind invitation of Alvaro Estrada to meet the holy woman and healer Maria Sabina, the shaman who introduced Gordon Wasson to the ancient cult of the wondrous mushroom in 1955.

Maria Sabina was born on March 17th 1894 and her years of suffering were engraved deeply in her strong brown face and in the bend of her tiny body. She was dressed in rags, like the poorest Mazatec, and was surrounded by ever curious villagers and children …..

Her right forearm was covered with cruel wounds from the bites of a jealous relative who had attacked her a few days earlier. A terrible question rose in my mind:

Why is it that visionaries and saints like Maria Sabina, Black Elk, and Ramon Medina Silva must always lead a life full of suffering. Even now, as an old woman too frail to take the psilocybin mushroom, her suffering continues. And so it must be, I learned, for behind the mask of pain, a light seemed to emanate from the eyes of this woman, a quality that imparts to those who are with her a sense of the divine awakened.

As the eminent ethno-mycologist Wasson has described her, Maria Sabina is a woman: