Research & Culture7 min read

Wasson, María Sabina and Hofmann: How Psilocybin Reached the West

Psilocybin mushrooms have been part of human life for a very long time, especially in Mesoamerica, where they were used in healing and religious ceremonies for centuries. But the story of how they reached Europe, North America and eventually the shelves of the modern world is surprisingly recent. It happened in the 1950s, and it centres on three people: R. Gordon Wasson, an American banker with a passion for fungi; María Sabina, a Mazatec curandera in the mountains of Oaxaca; and Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist already famous for discovering LSD. It's a fascinating story, and also a cautionary one.

Mushrooms before the West noticed

Long before any of these three met, Indigenous peoples in what is now Mexico and Central America used mushrooms in sacred contexts. Spanish chroniclers in the sixteenth century wrote about a mushroom the Aztecs called teonanácatl, often translated as something like "flesh of the gods" or "divine mushroom". Colonial authorities and the Church treated these practices as idolatry and tried to stamp them out. The ceremonies survived quietly in remote communities, especially among the Mazatec people of the Sierra Mazateca in Oaxaca, but for centuries outsiders knew little about them. Some Western scholars even doubted the mushrooms existed at all.

R. Gordon Wasson: the banker who loved mushrooms

R. Gordon Wasson (1898 to 1986) had an unusual double life. By day he was a vice president at J.P. Morgan & Co. in New York. By passion he was an amateur ethnomycologist, someone who studies how different cultures relate to fungi.

That passion began on his honeymoon in 1927, when his wife, Valentina Pavlovna Wasson, a Russian-born paediatrician, delighted in gathering wild mushrooms in the Catskill Mountains while he recoiled in horror. The couple became fascinated by why some cultures love mushrooms and others fear them, and they spent decades researching the question together, leading to their book Mushrooms, Russia and History (1957).

Reports of a living mushroom ceremony in Mexico drew them south. After several trips, in June 1955 Gordon Wasson and photographer Allan Richardson took part in an all-night mushroom ceremony, called a velada, led by María Sabina in the town of Huautla de Jiménez. They are often described as the first outsiders known to have participated in a Mazatec mushroom ceremony and written about it. According to later accounts, Wasson gained access partly by telling the community he was worried about his son and wanted the mushrooms' help to find out how he was.

María Sabina: the wise woman of Huautla

María Sabina (1894 to 1985) was a Mazatec sabia, or wise woman, and curandera, a traditional healer. For her, the mushrooms were sacred. She called them the "saint children" and used them in veladas to diagnose and heal illness, both physical and spiritual. Her ceremonies involved chanting, prayer and song in the Mazatec language, often through the night, by candlelight, with family members present.

Her chants have since been recorded, transcribed and studied as remarkable oral poetry. She spoke of the mushrooms as a source of language, telling her what to say and showing her the nature of illness. It's worth noticing how different this context is from recreational use: the mushrooms were medicine and sacrament, used for a purpose, within a tradition, under the guidance of an experienced elder.

Life magazine, 1957: the story goes global

On May 13, 1957, Life magazine published Wasson's first-person article, "Seeking the Magic Mushroom", with Richardson's photographs. Life was one of the most widely read magazines in North America, and the article introduced millions of readers to the idea of a mushroom that could produce visions. Six days later, Valentina Wasson published her own account in This Week magazine. The phrase "magic mushroom" in the title wasn't Wasson's choice: a Life editor added it against his wishes, and it has stuck ever since.

The article set off a wave of curiosity, and before long outsiders were finding their way to Huautla and to María Sabina herself.

Albert Hofmann: from mushroom to molecule

Wasson collaborated with French mycologist Roger Heim, who identified the mushroom species and managed to grow some of them in his laboratory in Paris. Heim sent samples to Albert Hofmann at Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, Switzerland. Hofmann had famously discovered the effects of LSD in 1943, and he was well placed to investigate the mushrooms' chemistry.

In 1958, Hofmann and his colleagues isolated the two main active compounds from Psilocybe mexicana and named them psilocybin and psilocin. They soon worked out how to make them synthetically. Sandoz went on to supply pure psilocybin to researchers and physicians under the brand name Indocybin, which made the first wave of clinical psilocybin studies possible. As with LSD, Hofmann tested the mushrooms on himself during his research, and he later wrote about this period in his memoir, LSD: My Problem Child.

In 1962, Hofmann travelled to Mexico with Wasson and visited María Sabina, bringing synthetic psilocybin pills. After a ceremony with the pills, she reportedly said they carried the same spirit as the mushrooms, and she appreciated having an alternative for times when mushrooms weren't in season. For Hofmann, this was a meaningful confirmation that the molecule he'd isolated was the heart of the mushroom's effect.

The flood of visitors and its cost

What happened next is the uncomfortable part of the story. Through the 1960s, seekers, hippies, artists and celebrities descended on Huautla looking for mushrooms and for María Sabina. Many weren't interested in healing or tradition, just in getting high. The community suffered. Local authorities and federal police clamped down. María Sabina was blamed by some neighbours for bringing trouble to the town. Her house was burned, she was briefly jailed, and she was ostracized.

Later in life, she expressed regret about having shared the ceremony with outsiders. She felt that the mushrooms had lost their purity, that they no longer spoke to her in the same way after being used so casually by foreigners. She died in poverty in 1985.

In the 1970s, Wasson also expressed misgivings about the publicity his writing had brought to the Mazatec community and its ritual. Today, many people in the psychedelic community see this as an important lesson about respecting Indigenous knowledge, consent and the communities from which these traditions come.

From Huautla to Harvard and beyond

The Life article reached a Harvard psychologist named Timothy Leary, who tried mushrooms in Mexico in 1960 and soon launched the Harvard Psilocybin Project, using Sandoz psilocybin. The famous Good Friday Experiment of 1962, led by Walter Pahnke, gave psilocybin to divinity students during a church service to study religious experience. Leary's increasingly public advocacy and the growing counterculture helped turn psychedelics into a political issue, and by the early 1970s psilocybin was tightly controlled internationally. Research went quiet for decades until the modern revival, which we cover in our clinical research guide.

Meanwhile, Psilocybe cubensis, a different and easier-to-grow species than the ones María Sabina used most, spread worldwide, helped along by home-growing guides like the one published by Terence and Dennis McKenna in 1976 (see our McKenna post). Nearly every strain you see today, from Golden Teacher to Penis Envy, is a cultivated variety of cubensis.

What this history teaches modern users

There are a few lessons we think every mushroom user can take from this story:

Context matters. María Sabina's ceremonies had intention, structure, an experienced guide and a community around them. The modern ideas of set and setting are, in a sense, a rediscovery of that wisdom. Read our set and setting guide.
Respect the tradition. Psilocybin culture owes a debt to Mazatec and other Indigenous knowledge keepers, and that deserves acknowledgement.
A guide helps. Whether it's a curandera, a clinical therapist or a sober friend, having someone steady beside you changes the experience. See Trip Sitting 101.
Purpose deepens the experience. Going in with an intention, rather than just for a laugh, is how many people find meaning in it.

What a ceremony-style dose looks like

Accounts of María Sabina's ceremonies describe participants eating several pairs of fresh mushrooms, and the experiences were clearly strong. Fresh mushrooms are around 90 per cent water, so a given weight of fresh mushrooms is much weaker than the same weight dried. If you're working with dried cubensis, rough bands are a microdose of about 0.05 to 0.25 g, a low dose of about 0.5 to 1 g, a moderate dose of about 1 to 2.5 g and a strong dose of about 2.5 to 3.5 g. Potency varies by strain and batch, so always start low. Our dose sizes guide has more detail.

A quick safety note

Psilocybin is a controlled substance in Canada. Avoid it if you have a personal or family history of psychosis or bipolar disorder, are pregnant, have a heart condition, or take lithium, MAOIs, tramadol or antidepressants without medical advice. You must be 19 or older to shop with us. Never drive after taking mushrooms. For the longer view, read our short history of magic mushrooms.

Sources

This guide is general information, not medical or legal advice. If you have health questions, talk to a health professional.