I had some interesting experiences when Dani and I went to the Dia De Los Muertos festival at Hollywood Forever Cemetery last Saturday (Nov. 28). We went with our dear friend Muggy, and later met Noelle and Launa. We had a splendid time wandering around inspecting the wide variety of altars and getting trashed drinking margaritas and beer.

There were more than a hundred done in countless different styles, from traditional Mexican altars commemorating a deceased loved one, to odes to beloved deceased musicians plastered with old vinyl records and musical instruments.

Ironically, the one that struck me the most was nothing more than a framed picture propped against a tree with a few votive candles and some flowers strewn before it.

The picture was of one María Sabina García, a renowned Mexican shaman. Her story resonated so strongly with some of the developments in our society that is seemed to me almost an allegory in itself.

It speaks to the yearning and seeking by young people in western industrialized countries to find a spirituality that has been lost by many as great numbers of post-modern, educated types have become disenchanted with spirituality through western Judeo Christian practices and have been drawn to what seemed like more exotic, esoteric indigenous spiritual and religious practices, in their home countries as well in other countries. This quest has morphed and meandered and transmogrified into all of the familiar and more exotic forms we see today - from people becoming bona fide shamans and yogis, to dabbling in anything smacking of meditation or drugs, to radically pierced, scarified and tattooed modern primitives, to hypnotic primal dancing at raves.

While this is an earnest quest, Sabina's story is one example of how people in this quest can mis-use, misunderstand, co-opt, commodify and transform that which they have loved, desired and emulated.

-------------------------
(Wikipedia) María Sabina García (1888 - November 23, 1985) was a Mazatec medicine woman who lived her whole life in a modest dwelling in the Sierra Mazateca of southern Mexico. Her practice was based on the use of the various species of native psilocybe mushrooms such as Psilocybe Mexicana.

Sabina was the first contemporary Mexican curandera, defined in New Age parlance as a native shaman, to allow Westerners to participate in the healing vigil known as the velada, where all participants partake of the psilocybe mushroom as a sacrament to open the gates of the mind. The velada is seen as a purification and as a communion with the sacred.

In the 1955, the American banker and ethnomycologist R. Gordon Wasson visited her hometown of Huautla de Jimenez, Oaxaca, and experienced a velada with her. He also brought spores of the fungus, which he identified as Psilocybe mexicana, to Paris. The fungus was cultivated in Europe and its active ingredient was duplicated as the chemical psilocybin in the laboratory by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann in 1958.

American youth began seeking out Sabina and the "holy children" as early as 1962, and in the years that followed, thousands of counterculture mushroom seekers, scientists, and others arrived in the Sierra Mazateca, and many saw her. By 1967 more than 70 people from the US, Canada, and Western Europe were renting cabins in neighboring villages. Many of them went there directly after reading a Life Magazine article written by Wasson about his experiences.

Sabina cultivated relationships with several of them, including Wasson, who became something of a friend. It is rumored, without validation, that many important 60s celebrities visited María Sabina, including rock stars such as Bob Dylan and John Lennon.

While she was initially hospitable to the truth seekers thronging to her, their lack of respect for the sacred and traditional purposes caused Sabina to remark, "Before Wasson, nobody took los niños simply to find God. They were always taken to cure the sick."

Many of the travelers were penniless, and they contributed little to the local economy, especially when they learned to find the mushrooms on their own.

Late in life, María Sabina became bitter about her many misfortunes, and how others had profited from her name. She also felt that the ceremony of the velada had been desecrated and irremediably polluted by the hedonistic use of the mushrooms: "From the moment the foreigners arrived, the 'holy children' lost their purity. They lost their force, they ruined them. Henceforth they will no longer work. There is no remedy for it."