Maria Sabina. Original image by Don Juan Peralta (CC0)
Gordon Wasson gets the credit for jump-starting the psychedelic revolution by writing about his life-changing experience with psilocybin mushrooms, but it never would’ve happened without the Mazotec curandera Maria Sabina who took him on that journey. The consequences for her were tragic — and a notorious example of how so much can go so wrong when white people go into Indigenous cultures they don’t really understand.