​“María Sabina—great seer and poet of Indigenous Mexico and the world—sets the ground in this powerful fantasy of worlds in alignment and collision."
—Anne Waldman,
author of Fast Speaking Woman
In the remote mountains of Oaxaca, the Beatniks have arrived.
María Sabina, the renowned Mazatec healer, spends her days in the small town of Huautla de Jiménez selling produce at the market and foraging under the new moon for the sacred mushrooms that grow near her home—her Holy Children, Carne de Dios, or Flesh of God. But her life changes forever when an amateur mycologist from New York, with a cameraman in tow, visits her to experience for himself the mushroom ceremony, or velada, he knows only from whispers in anthropological records. When he publishes an unauthorized article about his experience in LIFE Magazine 1957, the stage is set for an explosive encounter between the burgeoning international counterculture and the woman who became an unwilling icon of the psychedelic revolution.
Carne de Dios is a masterful and often humorous blend of history, myth, and poetic imagination, captured in a translation that mirrors the hallucinatory beauty of Aridjis’s original Spanish. Aridjis’s intimate portrayal of María Sabina, informed by his personal connection to her, serves as both a tribute to her enduring legacy and a critical reflection on the wave of global interest in mushroom culture still gaining momentum today.
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Available for purchase from UA Press or Harvard Bookstore
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