Customer Reviews

Maria Sabina: Her Life and Chants (New Wilderness Poetics ; V. 1)

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I lived with her in the late 60's. I met someone who was well acquainted with Maria Sabina; he introduced me to her family, and I spent quite a bit of time in Hautla de Jimenez with her, participating in and learning about the Velada. Maria had a view of the world and the cosmos that was much closer to archaic than modern realities. She had journeyed into the heart of the Dreamtime so many times that she was a wide open transmitter, and would become possessed of a Divine ecstasy when she chanted and sang. Maria had a very special spatio-temporal map, whose pathways she followed when she sang--the rhythms that she made and her tones were like a key in a lock to spring open other dimensional Gates along the winding way of the magician at midnite. I was surprised to discover that her Catholicism had formed a strange gnostic hybrid with her indigenous spiritual heritage. The Eucharist was a quite literal reality, for her. She was many things to many people, healer, guide, prophetess, pscyopomp. It is difficult to talk about the visionary, mystical character of the Night Vigil, because it is dependent upon a personal karmic dynamic. I won't extrapolate from my experiences to a set of general principles. This book may be important for someone who wants a little more background information about her and wants a good translation of one of her veladas. The woman was an existential Saint. The significance of this is hard for sophisticated modern urbanites to entirely grasp--we have few parallels in our culture. She was an extremely advanced and individuated master of spiritual healing. When she sang, it was as if her voice shaped space and time in such a way as to draw the perceptible boundary of other, superluminal, dimensions. There really is no parallel in modern western culture. This book provides a little insight into her personal history, but if you are unfamiliar with her original cultural context, you will not be able to read between the lines, which is essential to understanding.

Although it is only recently that I have moved beyond stereotypes of illicit drugs as merely dangerous, I do have a gut feeling of having missed a lot through not being able to read of Maria Sabina sooner.

Although "Maria Sabina: Her Life and Chants" is long out of print, it is a most impressive account of her life and its various facets. Though in her later life Maria was disappointed at how the counterculture misused the sacred mushrooms which she devoted her life to, she never at any stage bogs herself down in this and Estrada focuses on the complex details of translating her work from Sabina's native Mazatec language to English (via Spanish). Estrada is especially wise about the difficulties of working with an oral account vis-à-vis more typical written accounts.

Nonetheless, what manages to attract me so much to "Maria Sabina: Her Life and Chants" is the joyfulness and simplicity of the chants, which link in a close but loose manner highly traditional Catholic mysticism, especially focused on the Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, with the Native American sacramental use of psychedelic mushrooms for which she is far more famous. The chants involve not only Maria Sabina herself but also relatives who generally play smaller roles, and the effect is very clear and joyfully gorgeous even in the English translation which cannot of course capture its full effect. One can imagine it as forming a loose but genuine family of people who carried out the celebration when reading it.

The biographical account is less surprising for those who have read the journal biography Saint Mother of the Mushroom and Selections but the story is really interesting and much more accessible than just about any biography I have read. There were many complexities in Maria Sabina's life, but she is very clear in illustrating both them and the sophisticated rituals involved in traditional shamanic use such as sexual abstinence, so that the reader should have no trouble following through her long yet simple and (mostly) fulfilling life.

All in all, this is a very worthwhile look at a remarkable woman, which is worth the effort to find.

This book is not for everyone. You have to be into researching shamanism to appreciate it.