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A History and Critique of Previous Studies of Mazatec Shamanism

Edward Abse

Anthropology Program / School of World Studies

Virginia Commonwealth University

It was around the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century when the

Mazatecs made their first brief appearance in the annals of anthropology, only to

disappear again until the 1930s, from which time ever afterward outsiders’ interest in

their culture tended primarily to focus upon a particular dimension of their shamanic

traditions—with special attention to the discovery of their use of psychoactive

mushrooms as a sacramental oracle in all-night ritual seances of divination and healing.

Americanist scholars of the time were well acquainted with documentary records penned

by Catholic missionaries during the early colonial period in New Spain about certain

“idolatrous” customs of the indigenous peoples involving, in the words of one Spanish

friar, “some fungi or small mushrooms… of such a kind that, eaten raw and being bitter,

they drink after them or eat with them a little bees’ honey; and a while later they would

see a thousand visions…” (Motolinía [c.1556] 1971:32). Indeed, there were many

scattered references in the early Spanish chronicles regarding what the natives called in

their own Nahuatl language teonanácatl, or “flesh of the gods,” but by the 1900s it was

generally believed that all religious ceremonies related to the consumption of these

mushrooms—as well as even the Indians’ botanical knowledge and ability to discern their

identity from amongst the flora of Mexico—had centuries ago been consigned to oblivion

by the repressive practices of the Catholic Church.1

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However, living evidence of the so-called mushroom cult was later to turn up

again in the remote mountainous areas of southern Mexico. In 1936, Robert J. Weitlaner,

an ethnologist of the Mexican Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, spent four

days in the central town of the highland Mazatec region, Huautla de Jiménez, in pursuit

of further information for his research on the continued use of pre-hispanic calendars

amongst the Indians of the state of Oaxaca. In this he was not to be disappointed, but

while there he happened also to learn from a Mazatec merchant by the name of José

Dorantes that their shamans regularly employed special mushrooms in divinatory rituals,

and this shopkeeper was even able to procure for Weitlaner specimens of one kind of the

mushrooms they used for this purpose (Weitlaner and Weitlaner 1946; Johnson 1940). It

was clear to Weitlaner that he was most likely now in actual possession of the legendary

teonanácatl, and he sent the samples to Dr. Blas Pablo Reko in Mexico City, a physician

and accomplished ethnobotanist who had previously published articles on the subject,

who in turn forwarded them to the Botanical Museum of Harvard University for scientific

identification (Schultes 1940:434).

Two years later, in the summer of 1938, a team of four anthropologists including

both Jean Basset Johnson, a young graduate student from Berkeley, and Irmgard

Weitlaner, Johnson’s fiancée and Robert Weitlaner’s daughter, were sent on follow-up

expedition to the Mazatec Sierra in order to further investigate the Indians’ use of

mushrooms in their rituals. Aided in their efforts by contacts provided by the same

shopkeeper who originally had informed Robert Weitlaner of such practices, this small

party of researchers were the first non-indigenous outsiders in over three hundred years to

witness the ceremonial ingestion of sacred mushrooms and to describe the proceedings in

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print (Johnson 1939a and 1939b). The single ritual that they were able to attend was

presided over by a male shaman in his seventies, who was the only one present actually

to partake of the mushrooms, in this case apparently in order to enhance the power of his

healing chants as well as his visionary ability to decipher the significance of patterns

revealed in successive throws of a number of maize kernels tossed onto the surface of his

altar table.

The shaman spoke no Spanish, and, although no member of the research team was

at all familiar with the Mazatec language, with the assistance of an interpreter they were

able to record a general description of the sequence of procedures involved, including the

shaman’s divinatory pronouncements and various sorts of invocations and prayers

addressed to God, the Holy Trinity, and a host of Catholic saints and virgins as well as to

such autochthonous deities as the spirit-owners of the mountains and rivers, the lords of

thunder and “Masters of the Earth,” the stars, sun and moon. They also documented the

material objects and natural substances employed during the rite as well as the functions

and meanings of each. Beyond what they learned from direct observation of this

particular ritual, over the course of some weeks the group also gathered information from

several different Mazatec communities regarding ideas concerning the supernatural

causes of illness and about other methods of healing and divination practiced by the

shamans of the region. The resulting brief catalogue of the team’s findings was soon

published in an article by Johnson, which presented these materials with the intention that

“the essential unity and cohesiveness of the witchcraft [sic] beliefs and practices in the

Mazatec territory is readily seen…” (Johnson 1939a:137).

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Despite all that had been achieved in the 1930s with the final rediscovery and

botanical identification of teonanácatl as well as the production of a compelling

preliminary survey ethnography of Mazatec shamanism, obviously much remained

unknown that was worthy of further investigation.Yet almost twenty years would pass

before other researchers began to arrive in the Mazatec Sierra seeking to extend our

knowledge about their ritual practices and the role of the sacred mushrooms in Mazatec

forms of religious experience and expression.

The first and most influential of those specialists to visit the region in the 1950s

was Robert Gordon Wasson, who was not an anthropologist but rather a former journalist

and independent research scholar, a banker and vice president of J.P. Morgan & Co. in

New York City. For over twenty-five years prior to his encounter with the Mazatecs,

Wasson and his Russian wife, Valentina Pavlovna, a physician, had been studying every

conceivable aspect of the role of mushrooms in Indo-European and Asian cultures,

pursuing the comparative investigation of etymologies, myths, folklore, peasant customs

and so forth associated with whatever species of edible or poisonous spore-producing

fungi. The Wassons’ interest in this field of study that they themselves were later to

christen “ethnomycology,” apparently grew out of a trivial rift in their marriage relative

to a contrast in sensibilities they chose to designate as “mycophilic” (hers) and

“mycophobic” (his) which they attributed to their different cultural upbringings.

Although of seemingly eccentric inspiration, they were nevertheless serious and devoted

scholars who carried out library, archival and field research all over the globe--in

correspondence and eventually even active collaboration with leading authorities in the

respective disciplines that were of relevance to their work, including, for example,

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anthropologist Weston LaBarre, ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes, and the French

mycologist Roger Heim.

Over the course of their early research, the Wassons were able to discern what

they believed were unmistakable historical continuities within separate world traditions

expressive of inordinately strong emotional attitudes toward mushrooms in general,

whether of adoration or aversion, which they hypothesized must be related to some

widespread but long-forgotten referent of considerable importance—perhaps even of

religious significance. Although the Wassons were as yet unaware of the existence of any

hallucinogenic species of fungi, eventually they began to speculate whether their

evidence of “mycophilia” versus “mycophobia” between various cultures might not

derive from the respectively corresponding sentiments of reverence and taboo associated

with a more globally distributed pre-historic cult of some sort of a “divine mushroom”

(Wasson 1972:187-188).2

In September of 1952 the Wassons’ curiosity was turned toward the Americas

when they were belatedly informed of the discoveries made in Oaxaca by a tip sent in a

letter from the poet Robert Graves, notifying them of the Harvard ethnobotanist Richard

Evans Schultes’ paper on the identification of teonanácatl. Five months later they were in

touch by mail with Dr. Blas Pablo Reko who referred them to a Miss Eunice Victoria

Pike, a Protestant evangelist of the Summer Institute of Linguistics/Wycliffe Bible

Translators who since 1936 had been living for several months each year in the Mazatec

town of Huautla, and who Reko suggested might have more intimate knowledge than

anyone else they might contact regarding the locals’ religious life (Wasson and Wasson

1957:242). Soon thereafter, in response to his written inquiries regarding the Indians’

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customs related to the mushrooms, Wasson received an extensive and tantalizing reply

from Miss Pike sufficient to persuade him and his wife actually to go to Huautla in order

to “obtain specimens of the sacred mushrooms, for purposes of identification [of the

previously undocumented varieties mentioned in Pike’s letter] and trial consumption by

ourselves, to learn about the present state of the cult, and to attend the mushroom rite”

(Wasson and Wasson 1957:245).

When the Wassons arrived for the first time in Mexico in the summer of 1953,

they were accompanied on their journey to the Mazatec Sierra by anthropologist Robert

Weitlaner, the same who had obtained the first samples of the mushrooms for botanical

classification. While there, the party experienced considerable difficulties in meeting with

any shamans; as Wasson was later to report, “for days no one gave us so much as the

name of one, and our [Mazatec] friends spoke of them like real but rather mysterious

characters who forever remained offstage” (Wasson and Wasson 1957:254-255).

Eventually, just prior to their scheduled departure, they were able to engage one Aurelio

Carreras to perform a ritual for them. Just as during that ceremony witnessed by Jean

Basset Johnson and his team back in the 1930s, the shaman was the only one to ingest the

mushrooms. Before beginning his ministrations, Aurelio Carreras explained to Wasson

that “different curanderos had different styles…. Some chant and sing and even

shout….[However] he always remained composed and never raised his voice” (Wasson

and Wasson 1957:255). Indeed, the divinatory rite they observed on this occasion was

identical in all its essentials to that which Johnson had written about years before, and

likewise primarily involved the ceremonial manipulation of objects such as wild tobacco,

cocoa beans, copal tree resin incense, parrot feathers and turkey eggs, the making of

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bundled parcels of offerings, and the repeated casting of maize kernels in sortilege

(Wasson and Wasson 1957:256-264).

Although obviously impressed by his initial experience in Huautla, Wasson on

first attempt had been unable to fulfill all of his desired objectives and was to return to

the Mazatec Sierra time and again over the years for brief stints during the summer,

always in the company of either his wife or other colleagues. In 1955, two years after his

inaugural visit, he was able to attain his most longed-for goal of actually sharing in the

sacrament of the mushrooms in the context of a ritual during which the presiding shaman

gave full and sustained voice to the mushrooms’ inspiration in the form of chants and

song.

According to her life history as told to Álvaro Estrada, the shaman María Sabina

experienced the following vision under the influence of the mushrooms only a few days

prior to her first encounter with R.G. Wasson, who on this trip was accompanied by the

photographer Allan Richardson:

“I should tell of the incident that preceded the arrival of the first foreigners to

come before me….[A group of us] we took [the mushrooms]. This time I saw

strange beings. They looked like persons but they were not familiar, they didn’t

even look like fellow Mazatecs. “’I don’t know what’s happening. I see strange

people,’ I told [my friend] Guadalupe. I asked her to pray because I felt a certain

uneasiness at that vision.” (Estrada [1977]1994:65-66, my translation)

Subsequent to this disturbing hallucination, María Sabina was approached by a

high official in the indigenous town government for whom she served as spiritual advisor,

the síndico Cayetano García, and at his importuning she reluctantly consented to attend to

the “’blond men’” he said “’had come from a faraway place’” in order to find a shaman

and in search of the mushrooms (Estrada [1977]1994:66). Wasson earlier that day out of

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desperation had entered the municipal palace in Huautla in order to seek out the town

president and to solicit his help in locating a “first class shaman” who could celebrate a

rite for them, and had found Cayetano García there in the office, seated as acting

Presidente in the temporary absence of his superior.

The síndico was sufficiently impressed with Wasson’s respectful knowledge of

matters sacred to the Mazatec that he agreed to help, recommending a shaman whom his

wife later that afternoon would describe to Wasson as “a woman without blemish,” una

Señora sin mancha, that is, “one who had never used her power for evil” and “who had

brought [their own] children through all the diseases that take a frightful toll in early

childhood in the Mazatec country” (Wasson 1957:289). The síndico sent his brother

Emilio as interpreter along with the two outsiders to María Sabina’s home, and when they

first were introduced she made something of a humble impression upon Wasson, who

described her merely as “a woman in her fifties, grave in demeanor, with a grave smile,

short of stature like all Mazatecs, dressed in the Mazatec huipíl [the traditional

embroidered frock]” (Wasson and Wasson 1957: 289). Yet he was soon to be amazed by

María Sabina’s considerable talents revealed when performing in her enhanced capacity

as a “woman of knowledge,” under the influence of the sacred mushrooms.

After sundown on that same day of June 29, 1955 Wasson and Richardson were

welcomed as full participants in an all-night curing ritual presided over by María Sabina

with the assistance of her daughter Apolonia. The event took place in the enclosed lower

chamber of Cayetano García’s home, and in the company of ten members of the García

family, including the síndico’s parents, brothers and a number of their children. Along

with the other adult supplicants present, the foreigners were both served with their own

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portions of six pairs of mushrooms to ingest, while the shaman and her apprentice

consumed thirteen pairs each. The experience to follow was to have a profound effect on

both Wasson and Richardson; indeed, later the enthused ethnomycologist Wasson was to

record his understandable “joy at this dramatic culmination to years of pursuit,” which he

felt was likely also to mark an important moment of discovery in the history of the

science of humankind’s religious beginnings—one that he would insistently claim for

themselves:

There is no record that any white man had ever attended a session of the kind we

are going to describe, nor that any white men had ever partaken of the sacred

mushrooms under any circumstances. For reasons deeply rooted in the mortal

conflict of Spaniards and Indians, it is unlikely that any recorded event of the kind

had ever taken place…We were attending as participants in a mushroomic

Supper…which was being held pursuant to a tradition of unfathomed age,

possibly going back to a time when the remote ancestors of our hosts were living

in Asia, back perhaps to the very dawn of man’s cultural history, when he was

discovering the idea of God (Wasson and Wasson 1957:290).

In the midst of the ritual, despite Wasson’s determined attempts to remain the

detached observer, the effects of the mushrooms were quick to take “full and sweeping

possession” of him. To the accompaniment of María Sabina’s chanting and plaintive

canticles, her singing and spoken invocations and oracular utterances, as well as the

repetitive footfall of her dancing to Apolonia’s rhythmic percussive clapping of hands

and slapping of knees, forehead, and chest, Wasson saw before him the unfolding of

innumerable visions that “grew one out of the other, the new one emerging from the

center of its predecessor,” revealing a seemingly endless sequence of kaleidoscopic

imagery including , inter alia, “geometric patterns,” “colonnades and architraves, patios

of regal splendor, the stone-work all in brilliant colors, gold and onyx and ebony, all most

harmoniously and ingeniously contrived,” “artistic motifs of the Elizabethan and

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Jacobean periods in England—armor worn for fashionable display, family escutcheons,

the carvings of choir stalls and cathedral chairs,” “landscapes…of a vast desert…, camel

caravans making their way across the mountain slopes,” “landscapes…of estuaries of

immense rivers,” and so on. As for his own and Richardson’s immediate reception of

these hallucinations, Wasson states that

…the visions seemed freighted with significance. They seemed the very

archetypes of beautiful form and color. We felt ourselves in the presence of the

Ideas that Plato had talked about….[F]or us at that moment they were not false or

shadowy suggestions of real things, figments of an unhinged imagination. What

we were seeing was, we knew, the only reality….Whatever their provenience…

our visions were sensed more clearly, were superior in all their attributes, were

more authoritative, for us who were experiencing them, than what passes for

mundane reality. (Wasson 1980:16)

While, as Wasson further explains, “space was annihilated for us and we were

travelling as fast as thought to our visionary worlds,” he was at the same time or alternately

also aware of the goings-on around him in the room, and kept intermittent notes throughout

the night on details of the shaman’s performance. This initial experience, then, was to

establish the disjointed parameters of Wasson’s research on Mazatec shamanism for years to

come, as well as those of others who were to follow even quite literally in his footsteps, up

the steep slopes of the neighborhood of El Fortín in Huautla and right to María Sabina’s

door. On the one hand, Wasson was keen to explore in writing that most intensely

autobiographical dimension of his subjective experiences while under the influence of the

mushrooms, as if in repeated testimony to his authority as a competent witness to that

cherished discovery uniquely his own (cf. Duke 1995). Nowhere does Wasson inquire into

the Mazatecs’ own visionary experience; indeed, at the end of many years of research and in

retrospect he is left to wonder, “What precisely do our Indian friends see, with their different

background?” (Wasson 1980:27). On the other hand, over time Wasson was able to

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document a significant amount of valuable information regarding the outward forms of the

Mazatecs’ ideas, rules and taboos with respect to their sacred mushrooms, as well as about

certain important aspects of Mazatec cosmology, shamanism and ritual practice—if

primarily focusing on only one kind of ceremony and almost exclusively with attention to

the performances of the one religious specialist he held in highest esteem, that is, María

Sabina.3

Both sides of Wasson’s interest in his experiences amongst the Mazatecs were

subsumed within the broader space-time perspective of his and his wife’s more ambitious

project; by his own admission, what he learned about the Indians’ shamanism was always

only incidental to the pursuit of solving the puzzles emergent from out of the couple’s

earlier research. In his final publication on the subject, Wasson unambiguously declares

his long-standing motivations in prelude to a book-length review of all his findings to

date regarding “mycolatry” in Mesoamerican cultures past and present, prominently

featuring two opening chapters on the Mazatecs:

From the beginning the entheogenic [i.e., psychoactive] mushrooms have

interested me solely for their role in Early Man’s religious life….The use of

mushrooms, if I am right, spread over most of Eurasia and the Americas, and as

Stone Age Man has emerged into the light of proto-history these strange fungi

may well have been the primary secret of his sacred Mysteries. To document this

belief of ours (and held only by us) seemed worthwhile, and to dissect the corpus

of a still living culture, i.e. in Mesoamerica, where the mushrooms played their

traditional role, was an opportunity quickly to be seized. (1980:xv-xvi)

For Wasson, then, in the final analysis the trappings of Mazatec shamanism in the

present were to realize their significance only to the extent they were relevant to this deeper

and wider age-area context; that is, when taken as evidence comparable with Indo-European

and East Asian parallels and therefore useful for the making of plausible historical

triangulations in the reconstruction of a presumed common origin in a Paleo-Siberian cult

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(e.g., Wasson 1980:41,52). The mushroom ceremony of the Mazatecs, which Wasson refers

to as “this unique survival of a practice going back to the Stone Age,” most transparently

revealed “the Secret of Secrets of the Ancients, of our own remote forebears, a Secret

discovered perhaps sporadically in Eurasia and again later in Mesoamerica [and which] was

a powerful motive force in the religion of the earliest times” (Wasson 1980:xix, 53).

In short, the Mazatecs’ shamanic practices were ultimately only the most intact

and still-animate specimen with which to crown his and Valentina Pavlovna’s collection

of ethnomycological materials arranged in such a way that “[b]y refraction and reflection

the Secret crops out in fossil meanings, fossil sayings, fossilized folkloric bits of our

various languages” (Wasson 1980:53). Insofar as these were the props employed in a

grand drama of (re)discovery of which Wasson was both the author and protagonist,

María Sabina was cast as the privileged repository and conduit of a timeless primordial

phenomenon—or, as Michael Duke, Wasson’s most astute critic, puts it, as “a mere

vessel of archaic knowledges and traditions” (Duke 1995:128). In selectively presenting

María Sabina as the embodiment of an archetype, in accordance with his bemushroomed

visions of her as “…The Shaman, the focus for woes and longings of mankind back, back

through the Stone Age to Siberia. She was Religion Incarnate…the hierophant, the

thamaturge, the psychopompos, in whom the troubles and aspirations of countless

generations of the family of mankind had found, were still finding their relief”

(Wasson1980:28), Wasson effectively succeeded in effacing the actual social and

historical contexts in which Mazatec shamans and those whom they attend both exist and

interact with one another, their spirits and an intransigent world.4

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Almost uncannily, just as Wasson had portrayed Mazatec shamanism as simply the

repeat performances of a paleolithic song and dance before the dawn of history, the study of

Mazatec shamanism itself was for years to exhibit the near-futile gestures of an obsessive

repetition compulsion. After Wasson first published his account of adventures in the Sierra,

a series of other investigators would come in search of much the same, each testifying to

their own subjective experiences wide-eyed before visions bestowed upon them by the

mushrooms and describing mysterious doings behind the closed doors of a shaman’s altar

chamber—most often again that of María Sabina. As my friend and colleague Benjamin

Feinburg explains:

Wasson continued to write of Huautla, and his publications were soon joined by

the works of various Mexicans [e.g., Benítez 1964; Cortés 1972; Roquet 1972;

Tibón 1983; Val 1986]. These works form a strangely uniform body of literature.

Each publication recycles, almost intact, the same information that appears in all

the others….[T]his intertextuality highlights the fact that this literature seems to

be more about establishing itself as a discourse on mushrooms based on Wasson’s

ur-text than forming an on-going study of Mazatec mushroom practices.

(Feinberg 1996:252; cf. Duke 1995 for a comprehensive critical review of this

literature)5

Advances in the ethnography of Mazatec shamanism would have to wait until the

late 1980s and the publication of studies by anthropologists Eckart Boege (1988) and

Federico Neiburg (1988), both affiliated with the Mexican Insituto Nacional de

Antropología e Historia. Unlike previous accounts which were almost invariably the

result of only brief visits to Huautla de Jiménez, their combined observations are the

product of Neiburg’s longterm fieldwork in San José Tenango and Boege’s repeated

sojourns in a number of different communities in the area (primarily Jalapa de Díaz), as

supplemented by the findings of student research teams placed in various locations

throughout both the Mazatec highland and lowland regions under Boege’s direction

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between 1975 and 1980. Neiburg’s monograph is especially concerned with the history

and functioning of the traditional indigenous form of governance, or Council of Elders,

while Boege’s provides a more comprehensive cultural overview of Mazatec

“cosmovision” and ethnoecology, social organization and politics, as well as myths and

rituals, from beginning to end with an emphasis on the reproduction of a separate ethnic

identity in opposition to intrusive hegemonic forces operative in the region by this time,

including agencies and representatives of the State, capitalism and various Catholic

reform and Protestant evangelical movements.

Shamanism figures prominently in Neiburg’s explanations of the legitimacy of the

elders’ political leadership in more conservative communities of the Sierra, and is central to

Boege’s analysis of Mazatec culture in general, what he refers to as a tradición milenaria, or

“millenarian tradition”—a concept that is key to his interpretative framework, and which

plays upon the latent ambiguity of the attributive term in Spanish. While milenaria is

literally translated as “thousand-year-old,” Boege characterizes Mazatec ethnic identity as

“millenarian” insofar also as it actively serves to mediate what he refers to as

“contradictions”—both internal to the group (in relations between what he calls “partial

social identities” based on differences of residence and kin-group loyalties, age and gender),

as well as between humanity and nature in relation to “the sacred”—in the tenuous

maintenance of approximation to what he calls “the Mazatec utopia” wherein the

community’s cohesion and well-being are assured under the authority and direction of the

elders (Boege 1988:passim, especially 86-89). These contradictions in Mazatec society and

cosmos are repeatedly resolved through rituals characterized as reenactments of “key

elements” of their myths, whether functioning to establish relations of reciprocal alliance

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between families and in the fulfillment of debts to the spirits, or performed in order to

reestablish “equilibrium” in cases of social conflict, natural disasters, or illness. However,

according to Boege, a distinctively Mazatec collective identity is not only “forged in

common social practice,” but also “in contradiction with other social groups,” as manifest in

the confrontation and struggle “between the group, class, [and] ethnic culture of agrarian

origin, on the one hand, and nation, State, dominant class and dominant culture, on the

other”(Boege 1988:22-25):

In a given historical moment, the group constructs its identity as it appropriates and

develops both its material and symbolic conditions of existence (including a

conception of time and space). This appropriation relies upon a tradición milenaria

[or “thousand-year-old tradition”] of knowledge of and interrelationship with the

geographic environment. With the concept of tradición milenaria I do not refer to a

group immobility but rather to that dynamic in which the group proceeds in

relationship with the exterior [whether nature or representatives of the dominant

national culture] by means of its own [material and symbolic] resources.

Ethnic identity acquires a special relevance with a growing awareness of

itself in the face of others and when the systemization, elaboration, and development

of central aspects of the culture itself become manifest politics….The ethnic group is

not isolated from the nation’s system of social classes, therefore each social class—

in the interior of the group—will attempt to appropriate for itself the [group’s] ethnic

identity or will try to destroy it in order to legitimize its [own] project. Nevertheless,

since the majority of the inhabitants…are workers of the land, their social values,

concepts and practice pertain in general to one of the exploited classes: the

peasantry. Membership in an ethnic minority and in the classes of those who work

the land are going to be the axes of formation of ethnic identity.

This identity enters into such contradiction with new processes of

exploitation and domination that we can consider it a threatened identity.

Transformation, readaptation, transaction, destruction, and resistance are perhaps the

concepts capable of guiding the analysis of the group situation [rather than the

obsolete idea of] “acculturation.” (Boege 1988:22, my translation)

Boege’s emphasis on a majority subaltern class of indigenous farmers as the

exclusive bearers of an authentic Mazatec culture and on the imperiled coherence of an

ethnic identity rooted in the on-going pursuance of traditionally Mesoamerican forms of

subsistence maize agriculture, was to have important implications for the scope of his

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inquiry into Mazatec shamanism as well as for his ultimate interpretation of the role of

shamanic practice in the contemporary situation. To begin with, both Boege and Neiburg

bring back into view an important dimension of Mazatec shamanism long ignored in the

persistent enthusiasm for a selective focus on secret mushroom ceremonies of divination and

healing. Not since the first brief ethnographic reports on the Mazatecs published by

expeditionaries in the early 1900s had other investigators mentioned even the existence of

more public shamanic rites of sacrifice and collective feasting for the enhanced fertility and

protection of cornfields (Starr 1900:78; Bauer 1908:251-253).6 Although Robert

Weitlaner’s initial trip to the Mazatec Sierra in the 1930s had resulted not only in the

discovery of teonanácatl but also in the publication of the first detailed account of a

traditional Mazatec agricultural calendar which served to schedule the Indians’ farming

activities, the associated annual round of shamans’ ritual interventions in subsistence

production had somehow escaped his attention (Weitlaner and Weitlaner 1949).

By the time of Boege and Neiburg’s fieldwork in the 1970s, while the sequence of

farmers’ specific labors in the cornfields was still realized and coordinated in observance of

the traditional agricultural calendar in many communities of the highlands, the shamanic and

collective ritual activities that once marked crucial seasonal moments in the growing and

harvest of corn were already well on the wane, if they had not yet been altogether

abandoned. Boege’s description of this set of rituals of petitionary exchange with deities of

the Earth and Sky—which he refers to as “a privileged space for the analysis of the vision

the Mazatecs have of nature within [sic] the axes of time and space” (Boege 1988:132)—is

essentially a reconstruction based on information in Weitlaner’s article regarding the yearly

cycle combined with that derived from his own interviews with certain Mazatec “men of

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knowledge,” including the shamans Don Sabino of Nueva Patria (in collaboration with

Amadeo Calleja and his son Maximino) and Don Pablo Mariano of Piedra de Amolar,

Ixcatlán (with the assistance of schoolteachers Nicolás Mariano and Adrián Cortés) (Boege

1988:138-157; cf. Neiburg 1988:74-79). As this instance suggests, not only do Boege’s and

Neiburg’s ethnographies enhance our knowledge regarding the particulars of a previously

long-neglected aspect of ritual practice—one which I argue was fundamental to the

Mazatec shamanic complex—but their studies also make the unprecedented contribution

of recording information about various aspects of a number of different shamans’ ritual

experience and activities, as well as about their traditional and changing role in the lives

of their respective communities.

In his one-paragraph summary critical review of publications on Mazatec

shamanism to date, Boege rightly observes that “each of them contributes some knowledge,

but they do not tell us very much about the social context in which the men and women of

knowledge are situated” (Boege 1988:158, my translation). Beyond merely extending the

ethnographic inventory of the variety of forms of Mazatec shamanic practice, then, and as

already alluded to above, Boege sets out in his analysis “to clarify the context and social and

politico-ideological role that the Mazatec [shamans] play, in a historical moment in which

the ethnic group is frontally assaulted by the hegemonic ideological apparatuses of [both]

national and international profile” (Boege 1988:158, my translation).7 Thus, while both

Boege and Neiburg provide excellent ethnographic-cum-ethnohistoric descriptions and

insights into the role of shamanism in traditional social organization, the emphasis of

Boege’s interpretation lies elsewhere, that is, where the reproduction of past “utopia” meets

with present disruptions:

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[I]t is they [the shamans] who conceptualize [the traditional] vision of the world in

the most systematic manner; they are situated at the center of family and collective

action of the group. They do not come from outside but rather emerge in the very

bosom of the ethnic-peasant society. They have a power that frequently escapes the

lines of organization of state power. They penetrate into individual life but their

action is always a collective fact. Frequently they have been a bulwark of ethnic

resistance of oppressed groups when open opposition is not possible and the

[Catholic reform and Protestant] missionaries [attempt to] impose the dominant

conception of the world. They are the ones who in part play a prominent role or even

lead in the production, circulation and consumption of symbolism in order to

maintain the precarious equilibrium of the group’s cohesion in the face of internal

and external adversity.” (Boege 1988:158-159, my translation).

According to Boege, “the processes of economic, political, and social centralization

in which the campesinos [indigenous peasants] increasingly come to give up producing for

themselves,” lead to what he calls a “refunctionalization” of Mazatec shamanism as “a

countercultural space” for ethnic resistance to establishment powers (Boege 1988:217):

In an environment of [such] ravaging pillage on the part of powerful persons linked

to the apparatus of the State, the destruction of the [agricultural subsistence-cum-

moral] economy is made possible….The shaman repairs on the symbolic plane this

process of possible disequilibrium. Even when this repair does not directly resolve

the contradictions, the formulation of the problem in a shamanic manner (rather than

its obliteration or total loss of awareness of the experience) maintains resistance

alive in the face of acts of power. (Boege 1988: 219, my translation)

The threatening hegemonic forces that Boege refers to include the introduction of an

exploitative cash crop economy (mostly small-landholding coffee farming in the highlands,

large-scale agribusiness sugar cane production in the lowlands) and the formation of

government-controlled peasant laborer organizations such as the Confederación Nacional

Campesina, as well as the Partido Revolucionario Institucional national ruling party’s

increasingly successful implementation of a strategy of “indirect rule” through the

empowerment of local-level cacique political bosses in a number of Mazatec communities

(Boege 1988:40-56, 235-241). However, he not only discusses processes of economic and

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political exploitation, but also the work of various agencies in the region that effectively

function to “reeducate” the indigenous people into accepting a vision of the world that

legitimizes these new inequalities, in subtle ways producing the Mazatecs’ consent and even

collaboration in their own oppression. In this regard, Boege describes the pernicious if

oftentimes well-intentioned role played by government functionaries such as the personnel

of the Instituto Nacional Indigenista (the Mexican counterpart to our Bureau of Indian

Affairs), and by Mazatec schoolteachers trained and employed by the Secretaría de

Educación Pública who promote bilingual language programs that effectively serve to

alienate indigenous youth from their elders and native culture as well as to deprive the

Mazatec language of its efficacy through enabling the institutionalization of Spanish as the

only perceived promising avenue of worthwhile advancement in life (Boege 1988:241-250).

Against such formidable adversaries, Boege arrays various congeries of Mazatec

shamanic practice, including the proud telling of stories of ritual interventions having

succeeded in the healing of illness where the application of modern medical treatments have

failed; divinations of sorcery that result in the actual killing of those who have unjustly

enriched themselves at the expense of their fellow Mazatecs; and the post facto

interpretation of the deaths of construction workers on the Miguel Alemán hydroelectric

dam project in terms of the Earth Lord spirit’s revenge (Boege 1988:219-227). While Boege

rather grudgingly admits that much of this so-called “resistance” occurs merely in what we

might call, following Victor Turner, “the subjunctive mood of ritual” and is without material

consequence, he is more concerned to assert the value of such discourse and activities for

the ethnic group’s resilience of identity and solidarity in opposition to changes imposed

upon them from the outside:

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To put oneself on equal footing with the established power is, at least in the domain

of the ideological, a recurrent element in Mazatec culture. In the domain of politics

we observe various cases in which the struggle of the oppressed is displaced to the

the religious domain in order [eventually?] to return to the socio-political….The

opposition and survival strategy dramatized [in this way] represents the fantasy of

the oppressed of placing themselves at parity and in confrontation with the

established power. It is the rage of the oppressed that is expressed in this form when

it cannot open other avenues of struggle.…Nevertheless, it remains an area

impenetrable by official action: the specific form in which resistance is developed

within the symbolic dimension on the part of the ethnic group, in the face of

processes of domination. It is a creative act that mobilizes the deepest elements of

the ethnic culture to resist….The realm of the imaginary is, in spite of the [neo-

colonial] situation in which they live, the bastion of the ethnic group’s ideological

unification….It is about a society that has to mobilize all its knowledge and

conception of the world in order to confront the exterior….The realm of the

imaginary is the glue of group identity precisely when the past and [myths of] origin

are mobilized in order to project them into the future….It is about a theorization of

the political work that strengthens and brings together, at least for a time, the fight

against an arbitrary process that profoundly has affected them. (Boege 1988:220-

224, my translation)

Apart from the more dramatic examples Boege exhibits of shamanic interventions or

interpretations pointedly directed at specific institutions and acts of power, he furthermore

suggests that the Mazatecs’ maintenance of secrecy in the continued pursuance of their ritual

traditions, especially with regard to their so-called mushroom cult, is in itself an active form

of resistance (Boege 1988:223). This is especially important insofar as Boege sees the

enduring practice of shamanism as the front line of defense in “the everyday fight over the

interpretation of the facts of power,” that is, against the imposition or acceptance of the basic

assumptions of a hegemonic worldview as promulgated by, for example, “all the kinds of

religious missions that enter [the Mazatec region] with the blessings of the State” (Boege

1988:163,223).

Indeed, Boege ascribes a central role to the Protestant evangelical sects in what he

argues is not only in effect but also intention a coordinated conspiracy of State, Capital and

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the new churches to undermine the ideological aspects of the Mazatecs’ resistance as well as

“to break their forms of internal organization” (Boege 1988). Specifically, Boege refers to

the new morality’s prohibitions against relations of compadrazgo, or fictive/ritual kinship

bonds of alliance between families, as well as against the celebration of community Saints’

Day fiestas and other traditional forums of association; he also describes the different

techniques the sects employ in the attempt to transform the Mazatecs’ vision of their world,

toward obtaining their renunciation of the traditional “millenarian” pursuit of a social

“utopia” in the present in exchange for individual or collective salvation in some

indeterminate future, either after death or at the Second Coming of Christ:

Their [the Protestant sects’] mission is to desacralize nature, banishing the sacred to

the sky and linking religious production, once autonomous, to the dominant

apparatuses. In [Mazatec] ethnic identity, the relationship between humanity and

nature is just as important as the alliances between families. If this relationship

equally founded upon [an orientation towards] the sacred is broken, the determinant

elements of social cohesion [also] will break apart. (Boege 198:234, my translation)8

So far I have tried to provide a synopsis of Boege’s contribution to Mazatec

ethnography and to convey a sense of his idea of contradiction that is central to the analysis;

however, it is crucial here also to present certain criticisms of his methodology with

important implications for the interpretation of Mazatec shamanism. While it is not

altogether clear whether his use of the term “contradiction” is not a misnomer, certainly the

so-called contradictions Boege describes as internal to traditional Mazatec social

organization and cosmology (why not instead “oppositions”?) are not of the same order of

reality nor of the same kind of structural relevance as those he describes as existing between

Mazatec culture and those hegemonic apparatuses and forces that threaten to realize its

negation (why not instead “conflict”?). Indeed, it is in the difference and distance between

Boege’s reconstruction of traditional Mazatec social and religious life, on the one hand, and

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his Gramscian analysis of more recent hegemonic and counterhegemonic developments, on

the other, that we encounter real contradictions in Boege’s own handling of the ethnography

of the Mazatecs.

Overall, Boege’s presentation of materials regarding the Mazatecs’ institutions,

beliefs and practices is structured much in the manner of a “salvage” ethnography, inasmuch

as it involves the the more or less indiscriminate conglomeration of mythical-cum-historical

memories of an idealized past and the documentation of isolated incidents of performance or

recall of customs now rarely observed together with a rendition of current ideas and

practices in a telescoping of time frames towards the textual assemblage of one reified

Mazatec social structure and culture—one whose authenticity and very survival are said to

be at stake and under siege in the present. The book is in the final analysis a kind of nativist

manifesto, and Boege’s outspoken political agenda—advocating the development of an

instrumentalist ethnicity as a focus for resistance—shapes the purposes of his ethnography

towards the recovery and defense of an essential “Mazatec-ness.”9 While Boege himself

admits that the collectively shared and self-conscious pan-Mazatec ethnic identity which he

envisages is merely latent at best amongst the people themselves, he claims to discern the

emergence of the Mazatecs’ own coherent “implicit alternative project” (similar if not

identical to the one he proposes) in the various disparate instances of resistance he is able to

record (Boege 1988: especially 286-297).

Although Boege’s many examples of Mazatecs fighting back far exceed those

performed in the dimension of shamanism—and include even the openly violent struggles

of the oppressed class of campesino farmers for the acquisition of lands or in defense of

them, for control over their local governments in opposition to cacique political bosses, and

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so on—in his hypothetically rendered project of ethnic resistance, the Mazatecs’ shamans

are allocated the exalted position of champion defenders of community and the traditional

Mazatec way of life. In this regard it is important to note that the bulk of the valuable

information Boege provides about shamanism does not represent explicit instances of

resistance at all, except insofar as he might claim (and as alluded to above) that simply

continuing to practice their traditions constitutes resistance in and of itself (while such an

interpretation offers little in the way of illuminating the richness of the collected case

materials at issue). However that may be, much of what Boege describes as the all-important

traditional social and political contextualization of shamanism as well as those ritual

practices central to the collectively integrative functions he emphasizes were in many

communities even during the time of his fieldwork already irrevocably a thing of the past.

Ironically, it is for this very reason that Boege stresses the importance of contemporary

shamans, since “these wise ones survive even the destruction of the council of elders,” for

example, and according to Boege it is they who are left to see to the maintenance of the

conventional inherited worldview and the projection of the past into the future--as if the

traditional symbolic system might somehow be reproduced (or, as Boege repeatedly puts it,

“produced, circulated and consumed”) intact and essentially unchanged even when divorced

from its native social morphology (Boege 1988:159).

Now, looking back on almost a century of occasional contributions by

anthropologists and others to the study of Mazatec shamanism, it is R. Gordon Wasson

and Eckart Boege whose writings stand out as the most ambitious and in some ways

culminating of earlier tendencies, in some ways foundational of later trends in approaches

to the subject. That is, while Wasson had his imitators, as explained above, there are also

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those who, like Boege and either directly under his influence (as his students) or serving

as mentors to the development of his own perspective, have sought to characterize

contemporary Mazatec shamanism in terms of a kind of ethnic resistance (see Boege

1988:14-15, and, respectively, for example, Portal 1986 and Barabas and Bartolomé

1973). What is perhaps most striking when comparing the two divergent paradigms thus

represented is that, despite their otherwise incommensurable lines of approach to the

subject, Wasson’s and Boege’s interpretive tangents intersect at a point of similarity in

the temporal distortion of Mazatec shamanic ideology and practice. A defining aspect of

both their perspectives is the framing of Mazatec shamanism as an inherently static

cultural form; while Wasson acknowledges and Boege even emphasizes certain empirical

changes in the content and/or performance of the Mazatecs’ shamanic ritual conventions,

these are subsumed within the overarching atemporal conceptualizations motivated by

their separate projects and deemed, respectively, either as merely accidental or as

adaptive adjustments made in service to the continued survival of age-old traditions.

Both Wasson and Boege briefly note the more obvious aspects of the

amalgamation of Catholic imagery with indigenous Mesoamerican religious ideas in

Mazatec shamanic practice, while neither makes any attempt to delineate the parameters

of such a syncretism or to specify what social or religious variables, for example, might

have structured the syncretic process. Wasson merely qualifies his primordialist

rendering of Mazatec shamanism with the comment, “Not that the shamanism practiced

in Oaxaca has been unaffected by four centuries and more of contact with Christianity:

Catholic elements blend with the pagan mushroom rite and the Indians see no

incompatibility….The synthesis is complete” (Wasson 1980:xxi-xxii). Boege similarly

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asserts the seamless integration of “parts and fragments of [Mazatec] myths with the

Christian religion” in the shamans’ cosmology and takes the occasion only to assimilate

this fact of historical change to his Gramscian classification, “that which we observe

today as the ‘imaginary’ and the ‘symbolic’ managed by the men and women of

knowledge is a condensed and reformulated precipitate of what once would have been a

hegemonic conception of the world, that with the [Spanish] conquest became subaltern”

(Boege 1988:162-163, my translation). So much for the question of the past history of

Mazatec shamanism.

As for the future, Wasson sees little to none in store for what he proclaims to be

the last vestige of an ancient Mesoamerican religion and direct inheritance from

paleolithic Siberia. The following passage is essentially the same death knell he

repeatedly tolls in each of his many publications on the subject: “We know that today

there are many shamans who carry on the cult….With the passing of years they will die

off, and, as the country opens up, this unique survival of a practice going back to the

Stone Age is destined to disappear” (Wasson 1980:xxi).10

As is certainly entailed in

Boege’s scheme of things reviewed above, for his part such an end to the practice of

their shamanic traditions would be catastrophic for the Mazatecs’ culture in general and

preemptive of any possibility of the full development of a pan-regional ethnic identity

that he foresees, and he is not so pessimistic.

Neither does Boege fail to recognize recent changes at least in the social position

and organization of Mazatec shamanism, but again these are construed as adaptive

realignments made in response to the ravaging onslaughts of external interference and

oriented toward ensuring the continued survival of inherited “millenarian” traditions. The

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contradictions in Boege’s analysis are perhaps nowhere as clear as where he himself

juxtaposes what is admittedly for the most part a reconstructive contextualization of

Mazatec shamanism with a witness to that context’s unravelling in the assertion that

while he sees subsequent changes in the pattern of recruitment to the role of shaman, the

fulfillment of the office remains the same, albeit now in the more “dispersed production

for domestic consumption” of that “symbolic complex…that is [or was] the pivot of

power which links political action with the sacred explanation of human life and nature”

(Boege 1988:159).

According to Boege’s regional survey ethnography, in those communities where

the traditional form of indigenous self-government, a council of elders, remains intact, it

is head-of-household men who fill the highest ranks of a hierarchy of shamans which has

structured relations and even overlapping membership with this political body; while in

those communities where the council of elders has been destroyed, it is widowed women

and homosexual men who now constitute the majority of shamans (Boege

1988:72,162,171-173). Despite such a radical displacement of Mazatec shamanism from

the center of local power in the latter instance—which is more representative of current

political trends and the shape of things to come—these new recruits are supposed by

Boege to take up the baton where the elders left off in the maintenance of the traditional

Mazatec conception of the world and the promotion of community solidarity, with their

shamanic practices now “refunctionalized” to the extent that this responsibility also

entails resistance to the very hegemonic forces that were the cause of the council of

elders’ undoing (Boege 1988:217ff.).11

453

What I am suggesting overall, then, is that in both Wasson’s and Boege’s influential

accounts Mazatec shamanism is at once over- and underinterpreted. That is, while they each

provide valuable information as well as excellent ethnographic observations on various

aspects of the subject, the ostensible significance of the materials they present is argued with

reference to time frames or temporal conceptualizations (and even teleologies) that are

neither particularly germane to the understandings and intentions of the Mazatecs

themselves, nor especially enabling of insight into the actual transformative processes

involved in the on-going changes wrought in Mazatec shamanism over the course of real

time. As a result, the textual representation and analysis of Mazatec shamanism has thus far

been caught between tendencies toward the extremes of Wasson’s ahistorical essentialism,

on the one hand, and of Boege’s anti-historical “resistance” interpretation, on the other.

Ultimately, Wasson’s romantic nostalgia for the past and Boege’s equally romantic hopes

for the future have served to divert attention away from a focus on how Mazatec shamanism

is historically constituted as ever-transformationally emergent from and in response to

present circumstances.

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Endnotes to Appendix

1 For a comprehensive review of the surviving reports by Spanish ecclesiastical

authorities on the ritual use of teonanácatl in both preconquest and colonial-era

ceremonials of the Aztecs and other indigenous peoples of New Spain, see Schultes 1939

and 1940.

2 According to Wasson’s published recollections, it was during the 1940s that either he or

his wife first came up with this grand “conjecture” (Wasson 1972:187). Interestingly, it

was in 1939 that the Swedish academic Ake Ohlmarks published a book describing the

central importance of Amanita muscaria, fly agaric mushrooms which contain a

dangerous toxin capable of producing hallucinations when absorbed in sub-lethal

quantities, in the religions of several peoples of Northeast Asia. In this treatise, Ohlmarks

claimed that the mushroom was employed by shamans all across Siberia, and that its

ingestion served to account for the renowned bizarreness of their behavior and visionary

delirium in ritual performances (Ohlmarks 1939, cited in Hutton 2001:100-101).

Although it seems too much of a coincidence to have been otherwise—and while he

nowhere cites Ohlmarks’ work—Wasson remained equivocal as to whether his and his

wife’s more boldly ambitious theories followed from knowledge of this discovery

(Wasson 1972:187-188).

3 To put in perspective the actual extent of these contributions, it is perhaps important to

note that Wasson was able to present the sum total of this more strictly ethnographic

information on Mazatec shamanism in the space of twenty pages of one chapter in his

culminating work on the subject of the role of the divine mushroom in Mesoamerican

religions (Wasson 1980:31-50). In this regard, what is instead arguably his most important

acheivement are the results of a collaborative project organized by Wasson for the

recording, transcription, translation and textual analysis of a complete mushroom ceremony,

María Sabina and Her Mazatec Mushroom Velada (1974), produced in cooperation with a

team of experts including the linguists George and Florence Cowan and ethnomusicologist

Willard Rhodes.

4 Even in the case of María Sabina, Wasson seems not to have been very interested in the

shaman’s life history as an individual and it would be fellow citizens of Huautla who

later were to record her autobiography for publication (Estrada 1977 and García Carrera

1986).

5 Wasson’s legacy was not only to have implications for the textual representation of

Mazatec shamanism, but also to provoke unanticipated real-world effects in both the

Mazatec Sierra and the United States. In 1957, the Wassons first published the results of

decades of their cross-cultural research, including their experiences amongst the Mazatecs,

in their book Mushrooms, Russia and History. Almost simultaneously, on May 13th, 1957

Wasson’s account of his personal encounter with the mushrooms and María Sabina,

illustrated by Richardson’s photographs, appeared in Life magazine in a feature entitled,

“Seeking the Magic Mushrooms.” Prior to the publication of this article for a mass audience,

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the general public was unaware of the existence of hallucinogens, and the event would mark

a watershed in the social history of mid- to late-twentieth century American life. For

example, amongst Wasson’s avid readership was the Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary,

who subsequently went on quest to Mexico and underwent something of a conversion

experience having ingested “magic mushrooms” poolside in the luxury resort town of

Cuernavaca. Leary then returned to Harvard where he initiated his controversial experiments

with human subjects under the influence of psilocybin (the psychoactive alkaloid in the

sacred mushrooms, first synthesized in the laboratory by the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann

in 1958). Leary was later dismissed by the university, thereby unleashing the leading

prophet of the psychedelic movement of the 1960s. As for María Sabina, in consequence of

her starring role in Wasson’s “discovery” she was to suffer unwanted celebrity for the

remainder of her life. Her name and reputation spread throughout the world of cosmopolitan

psychedelic counterculture, and her home in Huautla became the unfortunate focus of many

an international hippie pilgrimage. Between 1963 and 1968 the central town of the Mazatec

Sierra was increasingly invaded by young foreign and Mexican flower-child mushroom

enthusiasts who went about “tripping” or “freaking out” in public and in broad daylight, in

various stages of undress and in flagrant violation of the Mazatecs’ religious taboos

associated with the sacred mushrooms. Eventually the municipal president requested federal

government assistance in order finally to resolve the situation, and the Mexican army was

sent to Huautla to expel the intruders. The entire region was then officially closed to

outsiders and guarded by military checkpoints along the road of approach from Teotitlán de

Camino in the foothills of the Mazatec Sierra, not to reopen until 1976 (Estrada 1996;

Feinburg 2003:130-133).

6 With the minimal exception of Incháustegui 1967:48; see also Álvaro Estrada’s

explanatory remarks on the autobiography of María Sabina in Estrada 1977:29-30 n.7.

7 It is important to point out that Boege’s generalized interpretation is somewhat biased

by his more extensive experience in the eastern lowland riverine region of the Mazatec

territory, in the District of Tuxtepec, which has been subject to the repeated traumas

occasioned by massive State and World Bank development projects, such as the

construction of the Miguel Alemán hydroelectric dam in 1947-1955 which resulted in the

flooding of most of the area and displaced over 22,000 Mazatecs (Boege 1988:241-246;

Bartolome and Barrabas 1973). In contrast, the mountainous western highland region, in

the Sierra Madre Oriental (District of Teotitlán), and home to the two-thirds majority of

the population—where both Neiburg (1998) and I carried out our separate

investigations—has thus far been spared direct intrusions of such magnitude. However,

similar to what occurred earlier in the lowlands when peasant organizations affiliated

with the national Partido Revolucionario Nacional (PRI) served to empower local-level

political bosses at the expense of the traditional authority of the elders (Boege 1988:235-

241), in the highlands also all but one of the various councils of elders of the different

communities by now have succumbed to displacement from power by the machinations

of state-level PRI party politics.

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8 It is perhaps important to contrast Boege’s rather dark vision with the comparatively

limited success of Protestant churches in the Mazatec region. A Pentecostal sect, the

“Evangelio Completo” (with headquarters in San Antonio, Texas), was able to attract

only some three hundred converts in the lowland community of Jalapa de Díaz (out of a

total population of almost 20,000) during Boege’s fieldwork there (Boege 1988:265-285).

In the highlands the new churches generally have had little effect, although the Jehovah’s

Witnesses and other Protestant movements have made significant inroads in the

municipality of Chilchotla, where almost 10% of the population has converted to one sect

or another, some of whom have founded their own new smaller communities of Monte

Sinaí, La Trinidad, and Monte Horeb. Of course, the relative failure to establish

congregations of Mazatec converts might well be taken as evidence in favor of Boege’s

interpretation of Mazatec shamanism as a “bulwark of resistance.” Eunice Pike, the

American Protestant missionary of the Summer Institute of Linguistics whose letter first

inspired R.G. Wasson to come to the area, eventually published a description of her

frustrating experience in this regard—albeit from the other side of the issue and instead in

terms of a problem of cross-cultural (mis)understanding—in an article entitled

“Mushroom Ritual vs. Christianity” (Pike and Cowan 1959).

9 In view of the Mazatecs’ actual circumstances at present, it would be easy to dimiss

Boege’s “Mazatec utopia” as an altogether unreal abstraction if it were not for the fact

that his model in significant ways corresponds to many of the Mazatecs’ own nostalgia I

heard expressed during the time of my fieldwork, both in the sometimes wistful longings,

sometimes bitter resentment voiced particularly by older persons and in the more florid

revelations of certain shamans’ prophecies which forcefully call for a return to their own

versions of how things used to be and should be now (as discussed in Chapter Five of

this dissertation).

10

It was this conviction that allowed Wasson to justify—or at least to rationalize—his

betrayal of María Sabina’s trust by publishing photographs of her rituals after having

acceeded to her demand that he not show them “to any but our most trusted friends” and

his effectively having violated what he himself, at least, dramatically portrays as the

Mazatecs’ tenets of secrecy as regards their shamanic traditions, in the following mea

culpa: “A practice carried on in secret for centuries has now been aerated and aeration

spells the end. At the time of my first [mushroom ritual] with María Sabina, in 1955, I

had to make a choice: suppress my experience or resolve to present it worthily to the

world. The sacred mushrooms and the religious feeling concentrated in them through the

Sierras of Southern Mexico had to be made known to the world…at whatever cost to me

personally. If I did not do this, ‘consulting the mushroom’ would go on for a few years

longer, but its extinction was and is inevitable”(Wasson in Estrada, Munn, and Wasson

1981:20). For a complete analysis of Wasson’s ethical dilemmas and their apparently

rather disingenous resolution, see Duke 1996:81-119. I have written elsewhere of my

own difficulties in finding a better way properly to respect Mazatec concerns for secrecy,

while also wrestling with the unanticipated complexities of “informed consent” (Abse

2007).

457

11

Boege’s findings with respect to a shift in the genders of recruitment to the role of

shaman from (married) males to (unmarried) females and/or third-gendered men turn out

to be something of a red herring at least insofar as regards the interpretation of historical

transformations of Mazatec shamanism that I was able to document in the highland

Mazatec region, while the empirical generalization he makes appears to hold true enough

for the lowland region where Boege carried out most of his own fieldwork (perhaps

especially so in the municipalities of Jalapa de Díaz and Soyaltepec).