Mazatec Culture
As with the living traditions around iboga and ayahuasca ceremonial practice, the Mazatec culture in Mexico continues its living tradition with psilocybin mushroom ceremony. It has now been almost 70 years since American ethnomycologist and banker R. Gordon Wasson first experienced psilocybin ceremony with Mazatec healer Maria Sabina. In that time, we have seen developing psychedelic-assisted therapies, a number of which are working their way into allopathic and integrative medicine settings.
Anthropologist Nicholas Spiers has been spending years with the Mazatec community of today and can offer us an update on their experience. Slowly, we work toward a world in which these living traditions are not simply existing in parallel to clinical psychedelic medicine, but rather interacting with the larger world of holistic and integrative medicine.
Video Lecture: Mazatec Culture and Psilocybin Mushroom
(run time approximately 33 minutes)Please watch the following lecture by Nicholas Spiers .
- Introduction 80
- Maria Sabina, the Legacy of Wasson, and Tropes about Mazatec "Shamans" 408
- Tropes About Sacred Mushrooms 218
- Biocultural Context 143
- Chjota Chijne 166
- Psilocybin Mushrooms 214
- The Velada 252
- The Dieta and Reciprocity 271
- What Might Reciprocity Look Like for Us? 246
