By Cultural Survival — 2011
Maria Alice Campos-Freire is one of the Council of 13 Indigenous Grandmothers, a group of women dedicated to promoting peace and understanding through Indigenous wisdom.
Read on www.culturalsurvival.org
CLEAR ALL
María Sabina was well-respected in the village as a healer and shaman. She’d been consuming psilocybin mushrooms regularly since she was seven years old, and had performed the velada mushroom ceremony for over 30 years before Wasson arrived.
The following is a version of an interview I held over several days in September 2006 with my mother, Doña Julia Julieta Casimiro, one of the most distinguished representatives of the traditions of the thousand-year-old Mazatec culture, which is centered in the northern mountains of the state of...
The growing popularity of "authentic" ayahuasca rituals in Western circles can present multiple problems, including indigenous fetishization, a lack of cultural context for traditional ceremonies, and potential abuse from untrustworthy shamans, all of which can be problematic or sometimes even...