The University of Arizona Press
Carne de Dios
A Novel
Paperback ($19.95), Ebook ($19.95)
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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.
Homero Aridjis’s novel, vividly translated by Chloe Garcia Roberts, tells the story of the motley crew of bohemians, researchers, and holy fools, both real and imagined, who descend on the town of Huautla de Jiménez searching for inspiration, distraction, and salvation in the sacred mushrooms. These seekers melt in and out of a narrative infiltrated by the slipstream logic of dreams. As John Lennon plays jazz on the patio of the Hotel Grande, Juan Rulfo contemplates horror movies, and Allen Ginsberg recites mantras at Philip Lamantia’s wedding, María Sabina’s life is increasingly thrown into turmoil.
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.
This English translation includes an introduction by the translator and an afterword by the author.
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.
Homero Aridjis’s novel, vividly translated by Chloe Garcia Roberts, tells the story of the motley crew of bohemians, researchers, and holy fools, both real and imagined, who descend on the town of Huautla de Jiménez searching for inspiration, distraction, and salvation in the sacred mushrooms. These seekers melt in and out of a narrative infiltrated by the slipstream logic of dreams. As John Lennon plays jazz on the patio of the Hotel Grande, Juan Rulfo contemplates horror movies, and Allen Ginsberg recites mantras at Philip Lamantia’s wedding, María Sabina’s life is increasingly thrown into turmoil.
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.
This English translation includes an introduction by the translator and an afterword by the author.
“The Beat poets stoned in Mexico were all María Sabina’s visionary children.”—Lawrence Ferlinghetti, co-founder of City Lights Booksellers
“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. Sabina’s ritual litanies meet Beat seekers of trance and travel, and one thinks of the ecstatic litanies of Ginsberg’s ‘Howl.’ The transcendent poetry and vocal elements in Homero Aridjis’s rich book of consociational poetic Time and sacred Space keep the universe aspin. What a great conjoining.”—Anne Waldman, author of Fast Speaking Woman
“Imagine a batch of Holy Children (i.e., magic mushrooms) colliding with a batch of unholy Beatniks in a remote part of Mexico. Such a collision resulted in this simultaneously surreal, lyrical, comic, and brutal Mexican novel expertly translated by Chloe Garcia Roberts.”—Lawrence Millman, author of The Last Speaker of Bear
“It is with a poet’s touch, honed over many years of practice, that Homero Aridjis reimagines a world in which figures from the Beat past coincide with the shadow presence of the real and legendary Mazatec shaman/poet María Sabina. By turns a fiction and a work of poesis, Aridjis’s book chronicles a juncture and a clash of actors and symbols that is the mark of the greatest poetry of our time and of all others.”—Jerome Rothenberg, author of Technicians of the Sacred
“One of Latin America’s finest pens, the book we’ve all been waiting for! Aridjis renders a true-to-life portrait of the mysterious curandera whose name has become synonymous with the medicine of ‘magic’ mushrooms and 1960s hippie counterculture. A woman, small in stature but immense in reputation, from the mountains of Oaxaca, who has captured the global and cultural imagination for more than half a century, María Sabina, is depicted here with the grace and reverence her legacy deserves, while at the same time raising questions about the appropriation that has long been a pastime of norteamericanos seeking an ethnic—and dare I say, magical—experience south of the border. Only a novelist, poet, and environmentalist of Aridjis’s skill and position could handle such a delicate subject and make it a compelling read. And this careful translation offered by Chloe Garcia Roberts wholly elevates the textual and visual experience of Aridjis’s writing. What an achievement! What a story!”—Tim Z. Hernandez, author of They Call You Back
“Carne de Dios re-creates the world of Mazatec poet and shaman María Sabina (1894–1985), whose mushroom ceremonies brought the U.S. Beat generation to Mexico in search of esoteric knowledge, drugs, and sex. Homero Aridjis, Mexico’s greatest living poet, overturns much of the mythology surrounding Beat mysticism as it comes face-to-face with an ancient spiritual tradition. This artful and accomplished translation brings Aridjis’s vision to life and captures the extraordinary power and insight of his poetics so well that the reader may wonder if they, too, are hallucinating as they read.”—James López, University of Tampa
“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. Sabina’s ritual litanies meet Beat seekers of trance and travel, and one thinks of the ecstatic litanies of Ginsberg’s ‘Howl.’ The transcendent poetry and vocal elements in Homero Aridjis’s rich book of consociational poetic Time and sacred Space keep the universe aspin. What a great conjoining.”—Anne Waldman, author of Fast Speaking Woman
“Imagine a batch of Holy Children (i.e., magic mushrooms) colliding with a batch of unholy Beatniks in a remote part of Mexico. Such a collision resulted in this simultaneously surreal, lyrical, comic, and brutal Mexican novel expertly translated by Chloe Garcia Roberts.”—Lawrence Millman, author of The Last Speaker of Bear
“It is with a poet’s touch, honed over many years of practice, that Homero Aridjis reimagines a world in which figures from the Beat past coincide with the shadow presence of the real and legendary Mazatec shaman/poet María Sabina. By turns a fiction and a work of poesis, Aridjis’s book chronicles a juncture and a clash of actors and symbols that is the mark of the greatest poetry of our time and of all others.”—Jerome Rothenberg, author of Technicians of the Sacred
“One of Latin America’s finest pens, the book we’ve all been waiting for! Aridjis renders a true-to-life portrait of the mysterious curandera whose name has become synonymous with the medicine of ‘magic’ mushrooms and 1960s hippie counterculture. A woman, small in stature but immense in reputation, from the mountains of Oaxaca, who has captured the global and cultural imagination for more than half a century, María Sabina, is depicted here with the grace and reverence her legacy deserves, while at the same time raising questions about the appropriation that has long been a pastime of norteamericanos seeking an ethnic—and dare I say, magical—experience south of the border. Only a novelist, poet, and environmentalist of Aridjis’s skill and position could handle such a delicate subject and make it a compelling read. And this careful translation offered by Chloe Garcia Roberts wholly elevates the textual and visual experience of Aridjis’s writing. What an achievement! What a story!”—Tim Z. Hernandez, author of They Call You Back
“Carne de Dios re-creates the world of Mazatec poet and shaman María Sabina (1894–1985), whose mushroom ceremonies brought the U.S. Beat generation to Mexico in search of esoteric knowledge, drugs, and sex. Homero Aridjis, Mexico’s greatest living poet, overturns much of the mythology surrounding Beat mysticism as it comes face-to-face with an ancient spiritual tradition. This artful and accomplished translation brings Aridjis’s vision to life and captures the extraordinary power and insight of his poetics so well that the reader may wonder if they, too, are hallucinating as they read.”—James López, University of Tampa
224 Pages
5.5 x 8.5 x 0
Published: October 2025Paperback ISBN: 9780816554140
Published: October 2025Ebook ISBN: 9780816554157