Cute as Children, but Not Handsome as Adults: María Sabina, Life Magazine, and Cold War Propaganda

Ben Feinberg, Ph.D

Gordon Wasson’s 1957 article in Life Magazine about his mushroom ceremony with the Mazatec curandera María Sabina arrived wrapped in several layers of familiar myth. Another story of a courageous and mobile white man accessing a hidden world and made whole through an immobile native woman, like Cortés and La Malinche, John Smith and Pocahontas, or Jake Sully and the naked blue woman in Avatar, it introduced the United States to a new source of spirituality and self-realization and became a creation myth for an emergent global psychedelic community... continue reading.