strange transformation. Everything assumed a Mexican character.” In
1962, Hofmann joined Wasson on one of his return trips to Huautla,
during which the chemist gave María Sabina psilocybin in pill form. She
took two of the pills and declared they did indeed contain the spirit of the
mushroom.
It didn’t take long for thousands of other people—including,
eventually, celebrities such as Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and Mick Jagger
—to find their way to Huautla and to María Sabina’s door. For María
Sabina and her village, the attention was ruinous. Wasson would later
hold himself responsible for “unleash[ing] on lovely Huautla a torrent of
commercial exploitation of the vilest kind,” as he wrote in a plaintive
1970 New York Times op-ed. Huautla had become first a beatnik, then a
hippie mecca, and the sacred mushrooms, once a closely guarded secret,
were now being sold openly on the street. María Sabina’s neighbors
blamed her for what was happening to their village; her home was burned
down, and she was briefly jailed. Nearing the end of her life, she had
nothing but regret for having shared the divine mushrooms with R.
Gordon Wasson and, in turn, the world. “From the moment the
foreigners arrived,” she told a visitor, “the saint children lost their purity.
They lost their force; the foreigners spoiled them. From now on they
won’t be any good.”
• • •
WHEN THE NEXT MORNING I came downstairs, Paul Stamets was in the
living room, arranging his collection of mushroom stones on the coffee
table. I had read about these artifacts but had never seen or held one, and
they were impressive objects: roughly carved chunks of basalt in a variety
of sizes and shapes. Some were simple and looked like gigantic
mushrooms; others had a tripod or four-footed base, and still others had
a figure carved into the stipe (or stem). Thousands of these stones were
smashed by the Spanish, but two hundred are known to survive, and
Stamets owns sixteen of them. Most of the surviving stones have been
found in the Guatemalan highlands, often when farmers are plowing their
fields; some have been dated to at least 1000 B.C.