Saint Children, Psilocybin, and Epistemic Rupture

Project on the Tina and R. Gordon Wasson Ethnomycological Collection

In 1957, two nationally syndicated magazine articles—“Seeking the Sacred Mushroom” in Life Magazine by Gordon Wasson, and “I Ate the Sacred Mushrooms” in This Week Magazine by Tina Wasson—brought the existence of psilocybin-containing mushrooms from the Sierra of Oaxaca, Mexico, to the attention of mainstream Anglophone culture. In the following years, many foreigners traveled to the Sierra to find these fungi for themselves. However, there has been little constructive work on the impact on the region by this influx of foreigners, and even less work on the impact to the fungi themselves. María Sabina, the healer who provided mushrooms to the Wassons, reportedly said, “from the moment the foreigners arrived to search for God, the saint children [mushrooms] lost their purity. They lost their force; the foreigners spoiled them. From now on they won’t be any good. There’s no remedy for that” (Estrada 1981, 90-91). 

This project follows Sabina’s insistence that these fungi have lost their force given their use by foreigners, drawing from the records of the Wassons as “patient zero,” which is implicated in María Sabina’s fungal prognosis. Drawing from the Tina and R. Gordon Wasson Ethnomycological Collection at the Harvard Botany Library, this project will investigate the curing modality that Sabina practiced alongside the currents in allopathic medicine as psilocybin, the psychoactive alkaloid derived from the fungi used in clinical research since the late 1950s, became the drug of choice in psychedelic-assisted therapy. This line of research traces a broader trend in psychedelic-assisted therapy, in which mystical-type experiences have become crucial metrics for success of a given treatment, and clinicians pay special attention to parts of a care-seeker’s life and experience that are typically outside of the bounds of evidence-based biomedicine.

Project point person: Paul Gillis-Smith