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María Sabina Magdalena García was born in Huautla de Jiménez, Oaxaca (1894–1985). She was a Mazateca healer and shaman, a wise woman who inherited the gift of healing through the balm of song and language. Throughout her life she served as a priestess guarding the great secrets of sacred fungi, known as “holy children”.

In the 1950s she became a national and international celebrity, after Robert Gordon Wasson and his wife Valentina Pavlovna —father and mother of ethnomicology— shared their traditional knowledge about the ceremonial and medicinal use of fungi in several publications. Thus began a parade of science, art, literature and entertainment celebrities that arrived in Oaxaca, searching for the shaman, including Albert Hofmann, Aldous Huxley, Walt Disney and The Beatles.

The poetic songs of María Sabina are part of an esoteric language that Mexican healers and priests know as hualtocaitl, the language of the Divine.