# From the Book of Language to Self-Help Memes: Shifts in Huautla's Role Mediating Mushroom Encounters ## From the Book of Language to Self-Help Memes: Shifts in Huautla's Role Mediating Mushroom Encounters 2025 Conference Anthology Ben Feinberg, *Professor, Warren Wilson College* ![Tree roots](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_21_9__1920x825/public/2025-11/pexels-yaroslav-shuraev-4937143.jpg?h=9c728ef8&itok=8Hldyhf0) ## From the Book of Language to Self-Help Memes: Shifts in Huautla's Role Mediating Mushroom Encounters **Abstract:** This paper explores the changing social and symbolic elaboration of mediation in Mazatec thought and life. Just as mushroom curers mediate with a powerful living landscape on behalf of their clients, the town of Huautla and its bilingual commercial class have historically had the role of mediators between powerful external institutions (coffee producers and buyers, the state) and the people of the countryside, who also produced most curers. Based on ethnographic research over more than 30 years, as well as access to the journal of one of Wasson’s companions, this paper asks how the role of Huautla’s mediators has changed since Gordon Wasson first took mushrooms with María Sabina—and especially in the current period of the “Psychedelic Renaissance.” We find that the mediating role has progressively moved away from the *chjota yoma* healers, first to Huautla’s centrally located intellectuals, and finally outside the region altogether. Further, the figure of María Sabina, and of the healer more generally, has progressively succumbed to an abstracted memeification of Western self-help tropes that may marginalize people in the region who are not fluent in that discourse. --- One night in the early 1900s, María Sabina—already a widow and mother of three in her early 20s—consumed at least 30 pairs of landslide mushrooms in a desperate attempt to cure her ailing sister. Suddenly, a table appeared out of the darkness in front of her, along with mysterious male figures—the “Principal Ones.” Books and papers sprawled across the desk, and music played.[1](#footnotes) “Take this book,” a Principal One told her, “and read.” “This is the Book of Wisdom,” he continued. “It is the Book of Language. Everything that is written in it is for you… Take it so that you can work.” Incredibly, though she had never learned how to read or write, the young woman was able to decipher the vibrating characters on the page. As she read, she knew that she had the power to cure her sister. She spoke these powerful words: > “Heal yourself with the light of the sun and the rays of the moon. With the sound of the river and the waterfall. With the swaying of the sea and the fluttering of birds. Heal yourself with mint, neem, and eucalyptus. Sweeten with lavender, rosemary, and chamomile. Hug yourself with the cocoa bean and a hint of cinnamon. Put love in tea instead of sugar and drink it looking at the stars. Heal yourself with the kisses that the wind gives you and the hugs of the rain. Stand strong with your bare feet on the ground and with everything that comes from it. Be smarter every day by listening to your intuition, looking at the world with your forehead. Jump, dance, sing, so that you live happier. Heal yourself, with beautiful love, and always remember … you are the medicine.”[2](#footnotes) Actually, she said nothing of the sort. But if you have googled “Maria Sabina” since 2020, or encountered María Sabina on a Facebook post sent by a well-meaning acquaintance, you more than likely saw a meme with this quote superimposed on the old woman’s face, labeled as “Advice from María Sabina, Mexican healer and poet.” Producers and consumers of these memes are not concerned with the specificities of María Sabina’s life or historical milieu; they take as a given that her worldview can be subsumed within the cliched tropes of self-focused Western consumerist wellness culture, just as Gordon Wasson assumed that her story could be subsumed within his master narrative of evolution from primitive to modern—as a survival of an earlier stage of human development whose wisdom does not pertain to a specific cultural and historical moment but belongs to the universal past, now available for a new class of universal experts—like him—to represent and explain.[3](#footnotes) As Woodruff and Hatsis point out, the meme’s imaginary version of María Sabina resembles the Pocahantas myth that legitimizes the conquest of North America; it is a form of conquest that “tears María \[Sabina\] from her culture and places her into a more easily-digestible paradigm for the ‘cannabis and yoga’ demographic of the 21st century American public.”[4](#footnotes) Her actual experience was far more interesting. I won’t discuss it here, except to point out that by receiving the divine book, María Sabina, like other curers from the region, realized her inborn destiny to become an intermediary between humans and living entities from another real, powerful world. She enlisted the added power of the mushrooms’ *ngan’ió,* or force, as they co-produced a powerful language.[5](#footnotes) Her language, like her vibrant personality, was more powerful than most, perhaps because of her location kitty-corner with her Earth Lord neighbor atop the sacred mountain Nindo Tokoxo. Her practice was shaped by her specific location, and it produced and was produced by specific spatial relationships with human and non-human others both in the Sierra Mazateca and beyond. > Psychedelic assemblages[6](#footnotes) go beyond the individual experience with mind-altering chemicals; they include the shifting context-bound interpretations of that experience, along with the social relationships bound up with and produced through psychedelic interactions. In the Sierra Mazateca, mushroom-based curing rituals highlight the importance of mediation. Curers mediate with multiple powerful entities on behalf of their clients, in ways that recognizably mimic forms of mediation with the human powers of the everyday world: she is a “lawyer woman,” “a book woman”[7](#footnotes) who travels to spaces of power. Interacting with these forces is *xcon*, both sacred and dangerous, and intermediaries may benefit their client but also betray them, or bring harm to themselves.[8](#footnotes) In the everyday world, people in the Sierra Mazateca recognize another division of labor focused on mediation with strong but tricky Others. The central town of Huautla—the region’s market and intellectual center—mediates between the dispersed farmers and the outside world. Historically, its dominant, educated, and bilingual commercial class—called *chjota xon* (paper or book people)—have mediated between the mostly monolingual peasant farmers, the *chjota yom*a (humble people), and the most important forces impinging on them—the foreign-owned coffee plantations that proliferated after the 1880s, the state, and the global economy. As Citlali Rodríguez Venegas writes, this elite “mediation is a *xcon* position, of power and danger, in which diplomatic skills and the mastery of language are fundamental (my translation).”[9 ](#footnotes)The mediation work of the curers, who tended to be *chjota yoma*, replicates and appropriates some aspects of the paper people’s mediation; they become literate and mobile lawyers who “read” magical texts. María Sabina, through her powerful poetic language, became not only a neighbor but a colleague of Chikon Tokoxo, the light-skinned Earth Lord who visited her hut that first evening, his face like a shadow. This paper, based on conversations and observations in the Sierra Mazateca over the last 38 years, will review key moments in the history of Huautla’s intermediary role in the changing psychedelic assemblages of the last 100 years—and show how globally and locally circulating psychedelic discourses have transformed María Sabina from a lawyer woman actively negotiating with powerful entities to a passive meme voicing self-care cliches. Specifically, I call attention to three moments of mediation and draw attention to the shifts in mediators and the material of mediation. First, after the first mushroom-seeking foreigners arrived in the 1950s, members of Huautla’s elite recognized this interest, and became hosts and tour guides for visitors, managing their relationships with the *chjota yoma* curers while maintaining their own cosmopolitan distance from these traditions. Later, Huauteco intermediaries took over the role of serving mushrooms to outsiders, sometimes deploying a more generic “indigenousness” to signal authenticity. More recently, as the Psychedelic Renaissance has multiplied spaces for the “legitimate” consumption of mushrooms, a new class of expert mediators has replaced actual physical connections to the Sierra Mazateca with vague invocations of Huautla or just a dislocated Indigenousness as an abstract and unrooted signifier, which may be deployed anywhere in the world. ![María de Jesús García Galván shows a photograph of her great-great-grandfather, Othon García, the first Municipal President of Huautla.](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__720x720_scale/public/2025-11/IMG_7502.jpeg?itok=8jHWSKJ6) María de Jesús García Galván shows a photograph of her great-great-grandfather, Othon García, the first Municipal President of Huautla (1877-82, 1884-85, 1887-88). Her family are *chjota xon*. (Photo by author). ### 1. 1950s: Providing Access to the Coelacanth After Gordon Wasson arrived in 1953, but before his *Life* magazine article[10](#footnotes) detailing a mushroom ceremony with María Sabina came out in 1957, a new category of foreign outsiders began to flock to Huautla. The first trickle included scientists, avant-garde intellectuals, beatniks, and even CIA agents, followed in the 1960s by a wave of American and Mexican countercultural hippies.[11](#footnotes) Huautla’s elite had to adjust to a new form of mediation. In the past, they had emphasized progress and modernity—presenting themselves to outsiders as entrepreneurial *gente de razón* (people of reason) who publicly downplayed any connection to “backward” Indigenous culture. But the new visitors valued this *chjota yoma*-practice, and sought direct connections with monolingual healers like María Sabina. Of course, they could not make these contacts by themselves; they needed bilingual intermediaries. On Wasson’s 1957 expedition, he brought along his wife, daughter, and two young family friends. One of these was Oakes Plimpton, scion of an illustrious and aristocratic New England family and the brother of celebrated writer George Plimpton. Oakes shared his travel journal[12](#footnotes) with me, and it sheds light on the emergent psychedelic assemblage of the period, and how both outsiders and members of Huautla’s commercial class constructed visions of the relationships among the various social groups in play.[13](#footnotes) In a droll, patrician style, Plimpton expressed his condescension towards almost every aspect of life in Mexico and Huautla. He found the mole “excruciating,” Indigenous women “not handsome,” the music “inept,” the liquor “perfectly foul,” and the techniques of animal husbandry, governance, and virtually everything else “unprofessional” and “inept.” On the other hand, his experience with the mushrooms was ecstatic and powerful: “I was as pure as a saint and one with God (if there is one). And one with the primitive Shaman, who, for all her sorcery, earthly spitting, foul aguardiente, was next to Truth and so was I!”[14](#footnotes) Plimpton’s tone—of excitement mixed with condescension—demonstrates how even the most open-minded Americans arrived in Huautla with a casual acceptance of a worldview that framed their hosts in terms of backwardness, inferiority, and the desperate need for outside help to progress from passive tradition-bound villagers to modern citizens. The “scientific” visitors to Huautla sought a lost source of wisdom, profound and powerful for the adventurer who seeks it, yet they assumed that their local interlocutors had no ability to understand its meaning. Plimpton’s journal reminded me of Cortés’ letters home from Yucatán. The people there, he told the king, decorated themselves in “extraordinarily repulsive” ways, but he emphasized that these flawed creatures still had the potential to become extraordinarily profitable subjects for the King, once transformed into Christians, because of their gold, silver, and fine lands, which could “not be bettered in all Spain.”[15](#footnotes) For Plimpton and Wasson, María Sabina’s ceremony represented, like the recently discovered coelacanth,[16](#footnotes) a fossil scene of the primordial past. They took the curer’s language and ritual as nothing more or less than a reenactment of the moment when Primitive Man encountered the mushroom and, lacking modern understanding, invented religion. The shaman’s role, despite her brilliance, was to be a resource—an object from the past doomed to endlessly play out her part in this reenactment for the benefit of others better equipped to make sense of it.[17](#footnotes) Plimpton (2013, 85-86) observed that Huautla’s commercial elite were already adapting, and that the *Life* article had “acquainted the acculturated Indians such as \[their host\] Herlinda \[Martínez\] with the mushroom rite, and let them know that their village has something to be proud of, rather than ashamed of.” Herlinda, for her part, decided to join Plimpton for their second ceremony, as long as it was clearly understood that her motivation aligned her with the progressive values of the Americans, rather than the ignorant, static culture of her peasant neighbors.[18](#footnotes) She insisted that she was taking them for “scientific” purposes only, not because of any “religious” belief. Apparently, this scientific motivation did not impress the child saints themselves; as soon as the effect began, they carried her “promptly to hell”—she endured great distress, vomiting repeatedly, insisting that she was about to die, and demanding cup after cup of water.[19](#footnotes) Herlinda may not have enjoyed the sacred mushrooms, but they were already benefiting her. Her intercultural fluency had already enabled her to become an intermediary who not only hosted outsiders (and was able to serve sufficiently plain meals to guests like Mrs. Wasson, who could not stomach tortillas, beans, or chilis), but was able to supply 50 kg of mushrooms to the company working to identify the active chemical.[20](#footnotes) Herlinda was among the first of many cultural intermediaries to take advantage of outsiders’ scientific and spiritual interests. Huautla maintained its role as a necessary intermediary, as the people of the paper mediated access not just to coffee but also to curers, who were still understood to be humble people. ### 2. The 1970s to 2000s: Ceremonies in Households Many of the countercultural visitors who came to Huautla in the 1960s bypassed Huautla’s interlocutors, camping instead by a nearby river where they consumed mushrooms unconcerned with local norms and created their own utopian community.[21](#footnotes) The situation became untenable, and in 1969, soldiers evicted them and set up a roadblock denying foreigners access to the region for six years. By the 1970s, a new pattern emerged—certain households became specialists in hosting outsiders who ate mushrooms in a ceremony. Those households with cultural capital and experience as mediators had an advantage in establishing these relationships, and most lived in Huautla, although a few charismatic curers outside the center, such as Ricardo Rocha in a nearby village, were also able to attract these guests. While these specialists absorbed the influx of tourist mushroom seekers, in rural communities, other curers continued to serve their local clients exclusively. One Huautla-based curer in particular was an innovator in aggressively marketing herself. Julieta Casimiro, in the very center of town, saw an opportunity in the hippie encampment. At first, she said, she cultivated her relationships with outsiders in secret, “because it was frowned on to give child saints to foreigners. That is, we worked against our culture and ran the risk that comes with opening your doors to those who don’t belong.”[22](#footnotes) By 1994, when I lived in Huautla, Julieta employed a network of children and outsider hangers-on who actively recruited clients as they arrived in town. When Julieta became a member of the International Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers, a group of First Peoples women who periodically met in different locations, her magical mobility was no longer limited to her attraction of strangers to her space of power; now she, too, was free to wander the earth. Julieta represents the leading edge of a shift, as Huautla’s mediators shifted from the role played by Herlinda in the 1950s, of facilitating the connection between visitors like Wasson with *chjota yoma* curers like María Sabina, to directly controlling the entire interaction. Her rise to fame generated further shifts in the interactive psychedelic assemblage. On the level of meaning, publicly circulating representations of Julieta ignored the context-specific premises of the Mazatec worldview in favor of generic imagery of commodified Indigenousness and “native wisdom.” At the same time, in private, she cited her connections with powerful flesh-and-blood outsiders as proof of her superiority, parallel to and more important than connections claimed by María Sabina with the more ephemeral, powerful Others. While María Sabina highlighted power from her intimate relationship with her Earth Lord neighbor, Julieta’s husband told me that, “People come here from all over the world... I can communicate from this house with any government in Europe… This house has been the center of power for six hundred years.” Just as shamanic mediation through sacred beings such as the *chikones* is *xcon* (powerful and dangerous), Julieta’s embrace of her global network entailed risk. Her daughter complained that “the people from here” disdain her for inviting in so many foreigners. But she asserted that the family doesn’t care what others say about them; her neighbors don’t understand the reverence her mother receives abroad. They are defiant; they are family; and they will stack their global chips on the table against any local critics. ![Andrés, the grandson of the well-known curandero Ricardo Rocha. ](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_4_5__480x600/public/2025-11/IMG_1520_0.jpeg?itok=kxJuhNlx) Andrés, the grandson of the well-known curandero Ricardo Rocha. (Photo by Author) ![Andrés thumbs through his grandfather’s book, where clients signed their names. The author’s name is on the top of the left page.](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_4_5__480x600/public/2025-11/IMG_4415.jpeg?itok=6qmhpxJD) Andrés thumbs through his grandfather’s book, where clients signed their names. The author’s name is on the top of the left page. ### 3. The Global Psychedelic Renaissance and Huautla Today, as this conference demonstrates, the so-called Psychedelic Renaissance has plowed into the mainstream, no longer limited to shadowy corners. What has this meant for Huautla’s role in new psychedelic assemblages—the meanings and social relationships associated with mushroom use across cultural borders? I conclude with a few anecdotes from my recent visits. First, many of the households that developed relationships with foreigners through mushroom ceremonies seem to have fallen on hard times, unable to pass on the business from one generation to the next. In January 2025, a few hours’ walk from Huautla, I ran into a man named Andrés, the grandson of the late Ricardo Rocha. Andrés and his father lived in poverty, but he was the proud owner of Ricardo’s great book, in which visitors who participated in his ceremonies signed their names. We pored over the names, and we found mine on the page from 1994. Andrés invited us to a ceremony, as he was continuing his grandfather’s legacy. As I signed my name afresh, I noticed that mine was the first entry in the last two years. I told Andrés that psychologists in my country were using mushrooms to treat various ailments. He was befuddled. “But that’s not the same,” he insisted. “Because the power comes from here, from the Earth, from Chikon Tokoxo.” Arriving back in Huautla the next morning, I passed a store where several men were drinking. One jumped up enthusiastically upon spying a foreigner. He was Julieta’s son and urged me to visit his house. He was intoxicated and radiated desperation. Things weren’t going well; the foreigners had stopped coming since his mother’s death, and her 10 children were fighting over the inheritance. He pulled out a photo of his mother and kissed it. He called her “the Queen of Huautla and the Mushrooms.” He could get me mushrooms, he said. Well, not mushrooms, but a synthetic version created by scientists in Guadalajara, and he showed me a bottle labeled as such. He insisted, unlike Andrés, that it was the same as the real thing. A year earlier, I was in Huautla in July during the annual celebrations of María Sabina’s birthday. I walked over to the village of San Agustín Zaragoza to visit my friend Felicitas and her mother Rosalía, the niece of María Sabina and a curer like her aunt. Felicitas also lived with her adult son, who made about $9/day as an agricultural worker. She had no coffee, so she served us *atole de maíz* (corn gruel). She invited me to say goodbye to her mother before we left, pulling down a sheet that afforded privacy to the old curandera’s bed. Rosalía, sick for many months now, had wasted away to bones and bruised skin, but still she reached out to me, and spoke in Mazatec. As María Sabina’s *chjota yoma* niece lay dying in poverty in her village, I learned about another Huauteco following a very different path into the wider world. I had met an Israeli neuroscientist in a Huautla café, searching for an opportunity to experience what she had studied scientifically in its original context. She felt uneasy about the lack of authenticity in a ritual with Julieta’s daughter, and pressed me to name an alternative shaman. I failed at this task, and she left Huautla for Mexico City, but not before informing me, with some enthusiasm, that she discovered that there was a Mazatec man with an advanced education in psychology who conducted mushroom rituals for foreigners in the artsy expat haven of San Miguel de Allende. Here, according to the English language website, anyone who can afford the price ($5600-$6600) can experience a “Magical Mexican Medicine Journey… 7 Magical Days of Ancestral Earth Medicine, Sacred Ceremony, Healing Nature, Peaceful Surroundings, Delicious Healing Foods, Ancient Sites, in beautiful San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.”[23](#footnotes) The timetable is laid out—instead of the “diet” of abstinence, paying pilgrims can expect every luxury, from “delicious organic farm to table” meals, restorative yoga, swimming, visits to hot springs, and shopping trips to the “culturally rich downtown”—though they can be assured that their home base is a “beautiful very safe luxury boutique hotel.” Surrounded by comfort, security, and a mélange of signifiers of spirituality from a variety of homogenized, New Ageifi-ed traditions, visitors (especially “Leaders, Entrepreneurs, Creatives & World Awakeners”[24](#footnotes)) can engage in “Powerful & Legal Mazatec Traditional Mushroom ceremonies” curated by expert psychedelic facilitators, several of whom are claimed to be “indigenous”— and one of whom (Hugo) is described as “a \[sic\] Mazatec Medicine Man, guardian of the ancient indigenous traditions.” I had never heard of this man, but this retreat center’s successful marketing seems to represent a shift in the dynamics of the relationships between the social classes of the Sierra Mazateca, as some *chjota xon* make the final move from being intermediaries between outsiders and the secrets of humble people of wisdom like María Sabina and her niece to directly usurping their role, erasing them and their mountain communities altogether in collaboration with foreign entrepreneurs. Who needs the Sierra or its confusing peasants and Earth Lords when it all can be reduced to a commodified, mobile “tradition” that can be packed into a suitcase and a handful of universalized tropes and sold to similarly mobile tourists in the safety of a luxury boutique hotel in a secure expat enclave? As the critical folklorist Charles Keil elegantly put it back in the 1970s, “when the bourgeoisie runs out of peasants to convert into folk, or simply tires of trying to kiss frogs into princelings, it goes on to attempt even greater magic by kissing its ugly self… As always, the pros do it better.”[25](#footnotes) Following Keil’s model of the development of folkloric appropriation, entrepreneurs like Ashe no longer need Indigenous people, communities, or rituals to market Indigenous “traditions”; they can embody these roles themselves to create a more accessible product. By 2025, Hugo, and the participation of any Huauteco, was scrubbed from the website, replaced by “shamans” described without any specificity as “Indigenous” (the organizer claims Peruvian indigenous ancestry). As Rosalía died in poverty and Hugo briefly prospered, one of the competing factions of María Sabina’s Huautla descendants promoted a celebration of her birthday. On the Facebook page devoted to this event, hoping to draw more tourists than the similar event held by their rival faction, they posted a link to the shaman’s image with the familiar phony meme, exalting their ancestor while simultaneously winking her out of existence in a self-replicating circle of globalized sameness. While the mediation associated with mushroom use retained its role as a site, expression, and source of power, the actors, forms, locations, and functions of this mediation changed dramatically after Wasson’s first visit. María Sabina performed hidden negotiations with the powerful beings. Then, Huautla’s commercial class facilitated interactions between foreigners and curers. Hippie visitors had largely ignored Mazatec intermediaries, creating their own imaginary utopia based on direct consumption, until they were expelled. Then, some Huautla households resumed their role, sometimes co-opting the ritual process and modifying it for the new context. Today, the Psychedelic Renaissance has largely removed the perceived need for actual real-world visits to Huautla, turning the town and its traditions into a symbol of a vague and nonspecific “indigenousness,” an origin myth for a tradition now controlled by international experts—scientists, writers, and tourism entrepreneurs—who can bring what they find important about Huautla—their version—to wherever is convenient and comfortable. This is a very incomplete story, and I am sure there will be more change, as the people of the Sierra creatively adjust, as they always have, to these changes. ![the niece of Maria Sabina, Rosalia, holding a photo of her aunt. ](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__720x720_scale/public/2025-11/IMG_5961.JPG?itok=Wzfrr-5j) Rosalía, the niece of María Sabina, holds a photograph of her with her aunt in San Agustín Zaragoza. (Photo by author). Author Biography ### Ben Feinberg Ben Feinberg received a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Texas at Austin in 1996, and has been a professor at Warren Wilson College since 1997. He has conducted research in the Sierra Mazateca region of Oaxaca, Mexico, for over thirty years—focusing on issues of identity and representation, primarily involving the discourses surrounding the use of psychedelic mushrooms and the exploration and meaning of the area’s vast cave system. He is the author of *The Devil’s Book of Culture: History, Mushrooms, and Caves in Southern Mexico* (University of Texas Press, 2003). ![Headshot of Ben Feinberg](/sites/g/files/omnuum4346/files/styles/hwp_1_1__480x480/public/2025-11/Screen%20Shot%202025-11-09%20at%202.56.49%20PM.png?h=8bd01c60&itok=ocnN_1jb) ### Footnotes 1 Alvaro Estrada, “The Life,” in *María Sabina: Selections*, ed. Jerome Rothenberg (University of California Press, 2003), 21-22. [\[Return to Section\]](#section1) 2 “A Poem That Had to Be Shared One Day,” The Wellness Almanac (blog), May 18, 2023,[ https://thewellnessalmanac.com/2023/05/18/a-poem-that-had-to-be-shared-one-day/](https://thewellnessalmanac.com/2023/05/18/a-poem-that-had-to-be-shared-one-day/). [\[Return to Section\]](#section1) 3 Benjamin Feinberg, *The Devil’s Book of Culture: History, Mushrooms, and Caves in Southern Mexico* (University of Texas Press, 2003), 34-35; Ben Feinberg, “A Symbol of Wisdom and Love? Contesting María Sabina in Counter-Cultural Tourism in Huautla, Oaxaca,” in *Cultural Tourism in Latin America: The Politics of Space and Imagery*, ed. Michiel Baud and Annelous Ypiej (Brill, 2009), 94–114. [\[Return to Section\]](#section2) 4 Eden Woodruff and Tom Hatsis, “Memeing Maria Sabina: How Social Media Whitewashes Culture,” *Psanctum Psychedelia* (blog), 2022,[ https://www.psanctum.org/post/memeing-maria-sabina-how-social-media-whitewashes-culture](https://www.psanctum.org/post/memeing-maria-sabina-how-social-media-whitewashes-culture). [\[Return to Section\]](#section2) 5 Edward Abse, “Toward Where the Sun Hides: The Rise of Sorcery and Transformations of Mazatec Religious Life” (PhD diss., University of Virginia, 2007), 58; Henry Munn, “The Mushrooms of Language,” in *Hallucinogens and Shamanism*, ed. Michael J. Harner (Oxford University Press, 1973), 86–122. [\[Return to Section\]](#section2) 6 Joshua Falcon, “The Politics of the Self: Psychedelic Assemblages, Psilocybin, and Subjectivity in the Anthropocene” (Ph.D. diss., Florida International University, 2022), . [\[Return to Section\]](#section3) 7 Estrada, “The Life,” 45. [\[Return to Section\]](#section3) 8 Citlali Rodríguez Venegas, “Relacionalidad Mediadora, Alteridad Y Niños Santos en la Conformación de la Ciudad Mazateca de Huautla de Jiménez (Oaxaca)” (Ph.D. diss., Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2021), 39. [\[Return to Section\]](#section3) 9 Rodríguez Venegas, “Relacionadad Mediadora, Alteridad Y Niños Santos en la Conformación de la Ciudad Mazateca de Huautla de Jiménez (Oaxaca),” 31. [\[Return to Section\]](#section3) 10 R. Gordon Wasson, “Seeking the Magic Mushroom,” *Life*, May 13, 1957. [\[Return to Section\]](#section4) 11 Marcos Garcia de Teresa, “Selling the Priceless Mushroom: A History of Psilocybin Mushroom Trade in the Sierra Mazateca (Oaxaca),” *Journal of Illicit Economies and Development* 4, no. 2 (December 2, 2022): 177–90,[ https://doi.org/10.31389/jied.101](https://doi.org/10.31389/jied.101). [\[Return to Section\]](#section4) 12 Oakes A. Plimpton, *1957 Expeditions Journal* (iUniverse, 2013). [\[Return to Section\]](#section4) 13 Ben Feinberg, “Cute as Children, but Not Handsome as Adults: María Sabina, Life Magazine, and Cold War Propaganda,” *Chacruna*, June 16, 2020,[ https://chacruna.net/cute-as-children-but-not-handsome-as-adults-maria-sabina-life-magazine-and-cold-war-propaganda/](https://chacruna.net/cute-as-children-but-not-handsome-as-adults-maria-sabina-life-magazine-and-cold-war-propaganda/). [\[Return to Section\]](#section4) 14 Plimpton, *1957 Expeditions Journal,* 71. [\[Return to Section\]](#section4) 15 Hernán Cortés, “Letter to Charles IV,” in *Victors and Vanquished: Spanish and Nahua Views of the Conquest of Mexico*, ed. Stuart B. Schwartz, trans. Anthony Pagden (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000), 81-82. [\[Return to Section\]](#section5) 16 Mathew Lyons, “Discovery of a Living Fossil,” *History Today*, December 12, 2022,[ https://www.historytoday.com/archive/months-past/discovery-living-fossil](https://www.historytoday.com/archive/months-past/discovery-living-fossil). [\[Return to Section\]](#section5) 17 Feinberg, “A Symbol of Wisdom and Love?” 94-114. [\[Return to Section\]](#section5) 18 I discuss this elsewhere in “Cute as Children, but Not Handsome as Adults: María Sabina, Life Magazine, and Cold War Propaganda,” *Chacruna* (2020). [\[Return to Section\]](#section5) 19 Plimpton, *1957 Expeditions Journal*, 89. [\[Return to Section\]](#section5) 20 Plimpton, *1957 Expeditions Journal*, 75. Garcia de Teresa, “Selling the Priceless Mushroom.” [\[Return to Section\]](#section5) 21 Alvaro Estrada, *Huautla En Tiempo de Hippies* (Grijalbo, 1996); Ben Feinberg, “‘I Was There’: Competing Indigenous Imaginaries of the Past and the Future in Oaxaca’s Sierra Mazateca,” *Journal of Latin American Anthropology* 11, no. 1 (2006): 109–37; Osiris García Cerqueda, *Huautla: Tierra de Magia, de Hongos... y Hippies 1960-1975* (Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, 2014); Eric Zolov, *Refried Elvis: The Rise of the Mexican Counterculture* (University of California Press, 1999); “Hippies Flocking to. Mexico for Mushroom ‘Trips,’” *The New York Times*, July 23, 1970, sec. Archives,[ https://www.nytimes.com/1970/07/23/archives/hippies-flocking-to-mexico-for-mushroom-trips.html](https://www.nytimes.com/1970/07/23/archives/hippies-flocking-to-mexico-for-mushroom-trips.html). [\[Return to Section\]](#section6) 22 Jesuita Natalia Pineda Casmiro, “Doña Julia Julieta Casimiro,” *Bomb* 98 (Winter 2007),[ http://bombmagazine.org/article/2880/do-a-julia-julieta-casimiro](http://bombmagazine.org/article/2880/do-a-julia-julieta-casimiro); Citlali Rodríguez Venegas, *Mazatecos, Niños Santos y Güeros En Huautla de Jiménez, Oaxaca* (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2017). [\[Return to Section\]](#section6) 23 “Magical Medicine Journey in San Miguel de Allende,” Magical Medicine Journeys, Xochitl Ashe, September 1, 2023,[ ](https://www.xochitlashe.com/magical-medicine-journey-in-san-miguel-de-allende.html) [\[Return to Section\]](#section7) 24“About Xochitl Ashe,” Xochitl Ashe, June 25, 2025. [\[Return to Section\]](#section7) 25 Charles Keil, “Who Needs the Folk?,” *Journal of the Folklore Institute* 15, no. 3 (1978): 263–64. [\[Return to Section\]](#section7) ### Bibliography “A Poem That Had to Be Shared One Day,” *The Wellness Almanac* (blog), May 18, 2023,[ https://thewellnessalmanac.com/2023/05/18/a-poem-that-had-to-be-shared-one-day/](https://thewellnessalmanac.com/2023/05/18/a-poem-that-had-to-be-shared-one-day/). About Xochitl Ashe. Accessed June 25, 2025. [https://web.archive.org/web/20240721062851/https://www.xochitlashe.com/…](https://web.archive.org/web/20240721062851/https://www.xochitlashe.com/ ); Abse, Edward. “Toward Where the Sun Hides: The Rise of Sorcery and Transformations of Mazatec Religious Life,” PhD diss., University of Virginia, 2007. Estrada, Álvaro. *Huautla en Tiempo de Hippies*. Grijalbo, 1996. ———. “The Life.” In *María Sabina: Selections*, edited by Jerome Rothenberg, 1–82. University of California Press, 2003. Falcon, Joshua. “The Politics of the Self: Psychedelic Assemblages, Psilocybin, and Subjectivity in the Anthropocene.” PhD diss., Florida International University, 2022.[ https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/4918](https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/4918). Feinberg, Ben. 2006. “‘I Was There’: Competing Indigenous Imaginaries of the Past and the Future in Oaxaca’s Sierra Mazateca.” *Journal of Latin American Anthropology* 11, no. 4 (2006): 109–37. ———. “A Symbol of Wisdom and Love? Contesting María Sabina in Counter-Cultural Tourism in Huautla, Oaxaca.” In *Cultural Tourism in Latin America: The Politics of Space and Imagery*, edited by Michiel Baud and Annelous Ypiej, 94–114. Brill, 2009. ———.“Undiscovering the Pueblo Mágico: Lessons from Huautla for the Psychedelic Renaissance.” In *Plant Medicines, Healing and Psychedelic Science: Cultural Perspectives*, edited by Beatriz Caiuby Labate and Clancy Cavner, 37–54. Springer, 2018. ———. “Cute as Children, but Not Handsome as Adults: María Sabina, Life Magazine, and Cold War Propaganda.” *Chacruna*, June 2020.[ https://chacruna.net/cute-as-children-but-not-handsome-as-adults-maria-sabina-life-magazine-and-cold-war-propaganda/](https://chacruna.net/cute-as-children-but-not-handsome-as-adults-maria-sabina-life-magazine-and-cold-war-propaganda/). Feinberg, Benjamin. *The Devil’s Book of Culture: History, Mushrooms, and Caves in Southern Mexico*. University of Texas Press, 2003. García, J. Guadalupe. *La Sierra de Huautla en La Gesta Oaxaqueña*. GHZ, 1955. García Cerqueda, Osiris. *Huautla: Tierra de Magia, de Hongos... y Hippies 1960-1975*. Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, 2014. Garcia de Teresa, Marcos. “Selling the Priceless Mushroom: A History of Psilocybin Mushroom Trade in the Sierra Mazateca (Oaxaca).” *Journal of Illicit Economies and Development* 4, no. 4 (2022): 177–90.[ https://doi.org/10.31389/jied.101](https://doi.org/10.31389/jied.101). Keil, Charles “Who Needs the Folk?” *Journal of the Folklore Institute* 15, no. 3 (1978): 263–65. Lyons, Mathew. “Discovery of a Living Fossil | History Today.” *History Today*. December 12, 2022.[ https://www.historytoday.com/archive/months-past/discovery-living-fossil](https://www.historytoday.com/archive/months-past/discovery-living-fossil). “Magical Medicine Journey in San Miguel de Allende.” Ancestral Healing Mentor for Leaders and Entrepreneurs. Accessed August 27, 2023.[ ](https://www.xochitlashe.com/magical-medicine-journey-in-san-miguel-de-allende.html)[https://web.archive.org/web/20230923153728/https://www.xochitlashe.com/…](https://web.archive.org/web/20230923153728/https://www.xochitlashe.com/magical-medicine-journey-in-san-miguel-de-allende.html. ); Munn, Henry. “The Mushrooms of Language.” In *Hallucinogens and Shamanism*, edited by Michael J. Harner, 86–122. Oxford University Press, 1973. Pineda Casmiro, Jesuita Natalia “Doña Julia Julieta Casimiro.” *Bomb* 98 (2007).[ http://bombmagazine.org/article/2880/do-a-julia-julieta-casimiro](http://bombmagazine.org/article/2880/do-a-julia-julieta-casimiro). Rodríguez Venegas, Citlali. *Mazatecos, Niños Santos y Güeros en Huautla de Jiménez, Oaxaca*. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2017. ———.“Relacionadad Mediadora, Alteridad Y Niños Santos en la Conformación de la Ciudad Mazateca de Huautla de Jiménez (Oaxaca).” Ph.D. diss., Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2021.[ ](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1llzGWHHdXJhsn2-0GNJWqNYzVYxREjiVIxKXN1LfEMk/edit?usp=drive_web&ouid=112695529404045448570&usp=embed_facebook) *The New York Times*. “Hippies Flocking to Mexico for Mushroom ‘Trips,’” July 23, 1970.[ https://www.nytimes.com/1970/07/23/archives/hippies-flocking-to-mexico-for-mushroom-trips.html](https://www.nytimes.com/1970/07/23/archives/hippies-flocking-to-mexico-for-mushroom-trips.html). Wasson, R. Gordon. “Seeking the Magic Mushroom.” *Life*, May 13, 1957. Woodruff, Eden, and Tom Hatsis. “Memeing Maria Sabina: How Social Media Whitewashes Culture.” *Psanctum Psychedelia* (blog). December 12, 2022.[ https://www.psanctum.org/post/memeing-maria-sabina-how-social-media-whitewashes-culture](https://www.psanctum.org/post/memeing-maria-sabina-how-social-media-whitewashes-culture). Zolov, Eric. *Refried Elvis: The Rise of the Mexican Counterculture*. University of California Press, 1999. #### Suggested Citation Feinberg, Ben. “From the Book of Language to Self-Help Memes: Shifts in Huautla's Role Mediating Mushroom Encounters .” In Psychedelic Intersections: 2025 Conference Anthology, edited by Jeffrey Breau and Paul Gillis-Smith. Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School, 2026. © License: CC BY-NC.