On the night of June 29, 1955, in a house in the mountain town of Huautla de Jiménez, Oaxaca, a Mazatec healer named María Sabina shared her mushrooms with two visitors from New York. One was R. Gordon Wasson, a vice president of the bank J.P. Morgan. The other was his photographer, Allan Richardson.

Two years later Wasson described the night in Life magazine, and psilocybin mushrooms entered Western popular culture. The usual telling stops there, with the banker as discoverer. The rest of the record is less flattering, and most of the bill was paid in Huautla.

A healer, not a guide

María Sabina was born in the Sierra Mazateca, probably in 1894. She was not sure of the year herself, and when she died on November 22, 1985, press reports could not agree on her age. She spoke only Mazatec and could not read or write. Her ceremonies, called veladas, were held at night and built around long chanted verses. She called the mushrooms her saint children and said they spoke through her.

The purpose was medical. The liner notes to a 1957 Folkways record made by the Wassons say the mushrooms were used chiefly in connection with sickness, and quote a young Mazatec who explained that they were a gift to people too poor to afford a doctor. Nobody in Huautla ate them for recreation, or as a private spiritual quest.

Wasson had been visiting the region since 1953, pursuing a theory about the place of mushrooms in early religion. In 1955 a town official, Cayetano García, recommended a healer he described as first class, and hosted the ceremony at his own house. According to a history of the mushroom trade published in the Journal of Illicit Economies and Development in 2022, Sabina was paid 50 pesos. By the account Michael Pollan gives, as summarized on Wikipedia, Wasson secured the ceremony with a false story, telling her he was anxious for news of his son.

Seeking the magic mushroom

Life ran Wasson's essay on May 13, 1957, with Richardson's photographs. A note told readers that names of people and places had been changed to protect privacy. The healer became Eva Mendez and her people the Mixeteco. Days later Wasson's wife, the pediatrician Valentina Pavlovna Wasson, published her own account in This Week magazine.

The disguise is sometimes described as a promise of anonymity that later leaked. It was thinner than that. The same year, the Wassons issued the Folkways album, whose notes name both María Sabina and Huautla de Jiménez, and a privately printed two-volume book, Mushrooms, Russia and History, that did the same. The edition was only 512 copies, but anyone determined to find her now could.

The journal history adds a detail that undercuts the pose of the disinterested scholar. Before the article appeared, Wasson had arranged with a Huautla contact, Herlinda Martínez, to buy mushrooms by the thousand, and asked her to keep quiet about the coming publicity. She wrote back that people would start charging more.

The chemist and the pills

Wasson's collaborator, the French mycologist Roger Heim, managed to cultivate the mushrooms in Paris and in early 1957 asked the Swiss firm Sandoz to analyze them. The job went to Albert Hofmann, the chemist who had discovered the effects of LSD in 1943. In his memoir Hofmann says his team isolated two new compounds, named them psilocybin and psilocin, and published the result in March 1958. The structure and a laboratory synthesis followed that November.

In October 1962 Hofmann traveled to Huautla with Wasson and gave María Sabina synthetic psilocybin tablets during a ceremony. By his account she judged them equal to the mushrooms, and he left her a supply. Advocates of psychedelic medicine like to retell the scene as a blessing from the source. It is also the moment a Mazatec sacrament became a Swiss pharmaceutical, with no payment to, or agreement with, any Mazatec.

The CIA's two thousand dollars

The intelligence connection sounds like folklore, but it is documented and it is narrow. In August 1955 a University of Delaware chemist, James Moore, telephoned Wasson, proposed to isolate the active agent, and offered money from the Geschickter Fund for Medical Research. Wasson accepted a grant of 2,000 dollars, and Moore joined the July 1956 expedition alongside Heim and Richardson.

The Geschickter Fund was a conduit for MKUltra, the CIA's program of research into mind-altering drugs. That emerged in the late 1970s, when the writer John Marks obtained agency files under the Freedom of Information Act. The released documents describe Wasson as unaware of where the money really came from.

Two corrections are in order. The CIA money paid toward the 1956 trip, not the 1955 ceremony that made Sabina famous. And the funding was never hidden in the ordinary sense. Wasson's Life essay names Moore as a member of the party and thanks the Geschickter Fund in print. What nobody outside the agency knew was what the fund was. As for results, it was Hofmann, working from Heim's cultures, who identified psilocybin.

What it cost Huautla

Outsiders began arriving almost at once. The journal history records that by 1960 an American operator was selling a 295 dollar tour that advertised witches and a mushroom ceremony, and that Sabina was holding veladas at a hotel for 400 pesos. The price of mushrooms climbed as the price of coffee, the district's cash crop, collapsed. A healing rite was becoming a product.

Mexican authorities responded with force. In September 1967 police and immigration agents deported 32 Americans. In July 1969 soldiers arrived by helicopter to clear what officials called two thousand hippies from a nudist camp. They caught fifteen people, nine of them Mexican.

Sabina was blamed by officials and by conservative neighbors for the disorder. The police came to regard her as a drug dealer. Her house was burned, more than once according to a 1967 letter in Wasson's own correspondence. Hofmann assumed the arsonists were angry townspeople or an envious rival. A son was murdered. The novelist Chloe Aridjis, writing for the British Council, says she ended her life poor and ill.

One popular embellishment deserves caution. John Lennon, Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger are routinely listed among her visitors. None of the sources consulted for this article documents such a visit, and the most detailed history of the period names no celebrity at all.

Her own verdict survives through Álvaro Estrada, the Mazatec writer who recorded her life story in the 1970s. Before the foreigners, she said, the mushrooms had lifted her. Afterward, as Harvard's Center for the Study of World Religions quotes her, "They lost their force; the foreigners spoiled them."

Wasson's papers are now kept at the Harvard Botany Libraries. María Sabina had believed that a wise woman should not profit from her wisdom. For the night of June 29, 1955, she was paid 50 pesos.