María Sabina Magdalena García (22 July 1894 – 22 November 1985)[1] was a Mazatec sabia (wise woman),[2] shaman and poet[3] who lived in Huautla de Jiménez, a town in the Sierra Mazateca area of the Mexican state of Oaxaca in southern Mexico.

[3] María Sabina's interactions with the Western world, starting with R. Gordon Wasson, have been described, from an indigenous perspective, as "a story of extraction, cultural appropriation, bioprospecting, and colonization.

"[8] María Sabina was named by foreigners the first contemporary Mexican curandera to allow Westerners to participate in the healing ritual known as the velada.

The fungus was cultivated in Europe and its primary psychoactive ingredient, psilocybin, was isolated in the laboratory by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann in 1958.

Wasson wrote a book about his experience of the ritual in a 1957 Life magazine article, Seeking the Magic Mushroom; María Sabina's name and location were not revealed.

[8] The information was contained in an account of his and his wife's first velada with Aurelio Carreras, María Sabina's son-in-law, on 15 August 1953, two years before they consumed the mushrooms themselves.

Their lack of respect for the sacred and traditional purposes caused María Sabina to remark: Before Wasson, nobody took the children simply to find God.

As the community was besieged by Westerners wanting to experience the mushroom-induced hallucinations, Sabina attracted attention from the Mexican police who believed her to be a drug dealer.

[citation needed] The book Sacred Mushroom Rituals: The Search for the Blood of Quetzalcoatl, by Tom Lane, has several chapters by the author on the experiences he, his wife, and a friend had at her home in a velada with María Sabina and her daughter Appolonia.

After publishing his book on ethnomycology, Russia, Mushrooms and History, Wasson wrote María Sabina and her Mazatec Mushroom Velada with George and Florence Cowan and Willard Rhodes, which included four cassette recordings and the musical score of Sabina's veladas, with lyrics translated from Mazatec to Spanish to English.

[23] Sandoz was marketing them under the brand name Indocybin—"indo" for both Indian and indole (the nucleus of their chemical structures) and "cybin" for the main molecular constituent, psilocybin.

María, her daughter, and the shaman, Don Aurelio, ingested up to 30 mg each, a moderately high dose by current standards but not perhaps by the more experienced practitioners.

[24] Chemical compounds derived from the Psilocybe mushrooms Sabina introduced to Wasson now form part of pharmaceutical products which are patented and now worth billions of dollars.

[25] However, Mazatec indigenous communities who are responsible for discovering and stewarding the medicinal properties of psilocybin mushrooms do not hold any of these patents, and as such do not benefit financially at all from their contribution.

Munn wrote that María Sabina brilliantly used themes common to Mazatec and Mesoamerican spiritual traditions, but at the same time was "a unique talent, a masterful oral poet, and craftsperson with a profound literary and personal charisma".

Mexican musician, Jorge Reyes, included prerecorded chants of María Sabina in the track "The Goddess of the Eagles", in his album Comala.