"There is a world beyond ours, a world that is far away, nearby, and invisible.  And there is where God lives, where the dead live, the spirits and the saints, a world where everything has already happened and everything is known."

Sounds very much like something you might encounter reading the Bible, describing the heavenly attributes of afterlife, doesn’t it?  It does to me.  Except it’s not, at least not in the Biblical sense.  These are the words of the famed Mazatec shaman, Maria Sabina, as relating to the world sacred mushrooms take her.  It is a world that speaks a language of its own, one Sabina was known to understand and consult, seeking answers for those around her asking questions.  All of which, at least, is according to R. Gordon Wasson.

Mr. Wasson was a New York City banker, vice-president of J.P. Morgan Company.  Married to a pediatrician, both wrote Mushrooms, Russia and History, considered the standard reference on ethno-mycology, or the human use of fungi, specific, in this case, to hallucinogenic mushrooms.  It is a two-volume work, published in 1957, two years after Maria Sabina spoke those words to Wasson, right before giving him access to the sacred mushrooms, becoming the first white man accorded such privilege.

Gordon Wasson and Albert Hofmann began a friendship shortly after Dr. Hofmann in 1958 first isolated, inside his Sandoz laboratory, the active ingredient in hallucinogenic mushrooms, naming it psilocybin.  Invited by the Wassons in the fall of 1962 to join an expedition back to Mexico in search for another magic plant, ska Maria Pastora, or "leaves of the shepherdess," used among the Mazatec in medicinal and religious ceremonies, the Hofmanns eagerly accepted.  Another goal was finding Maria Sabina, in the hopes of sharing with her Hofmann’s laboratory psilocybin, seeking her opinion as to how it compared to mushrooms in the raw.