Date of Graduation

5-2025

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing (MFA)

Degree Level

Graduate

Department

English

Advisor/Mentor

Viswanathan, Padma

Committee Member

Padilla, Yajaira M.

Second Committee Member

Jensen, Toni L.

Keywords

Translation; biography; Maria Sabina; Poet; Healer; Mexico

Abstract

Maria Sabina was born Maria Sabina Magdalena Garcia in 1894, in the principality of Huautla, located in Oaxaca, Mexico. She’s known as a healer and poet, though she would most likely refer to herself as a woman doctor, whose language becomes beautiful with the help of the psylocibin mushroom, which she affectionately refers to as little saints or holy children. In 1953, American banker, R. Gordon Wasson and his wife, pediatrician Valentina Pavlovna, were the first non-Indigenous people to witness one of Sabina’s ceremonies. Novice ethnomycologists and anthropologists, the couple traveled to Southern Mexico to witness a ceremony in which the mushrooms were used to heal. A few years later, they returned and participated in one of the ceremonies and Wasson published an article in Life magazine describing the experience. Though he initially kept Sabina’s identity a secret, it was later revealed in an introduction to another of Wasson’s books, and seekers began looking for Sabina, not to cure any illness, but rather, to find God. Alvaro Estrada met Sabina in 1967 and endeavored to learn more about her life, interviewing her between September 1975 and August 1976. These interviews were recorded in Mazatec and transcribed by Estrada into Spanish, which would later become her autobiography, La Vida de Maria Sabina: La sabia de los hongos or The Life of Maria Sabina: The Wise Woman of the Mushrooms. He included Spanish translations of audio recordings made in actual ceremonies by Gordon Wasson in 1956, which were released on vinyl in 1957 and titled “Folkways.” Wasson would later translate her autobiography into English in 1981 with the title Maria Sabina: Her Life and Chants. A very recently reprinted volume of Maria Sabina’s work by Jerome Rothenberg, titled Maria Sabina: Selections, provides context for her healing songs, incorporating the names of the people being cured, their ailments, and the environment, adding insight into the words Sabina chose for that specific ceremony. Sabina could not read or write and therefore was unable to check her own biography for accuracy, and so, the term “auto” is questionable, though the text is based on her interviews. The municipality of Huautla is approximately 6,000 feet above sea level, located Northwest of the capital city of Oaxaca, in the Sierra Madre mountains. The region has a rainy season, making it a fertile place for not only mushrooms, but the cultivation of corn, coffee, and other fruits. The lush, green terrain attracts many bird species, and the Mazatecan language has elements of whistling, which at times could be mistaken for birdsong. Mazatec has many dialects, made more unique by mountain isolation, as well as Zapotec and Mixtec roots. Other features of the language are complex tonal systems and dental/glottal pronunciations. In the translation of her biography, I had to trust the transcriptions of Alvaro Estrada, which he notes in his introduction, were taken with great care. My translation of Sabina’s biography is through the lens of religious syncretism, myth, and an element tantamount in her value system; language.

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