Maria Sabina was much more than an indigenous healer: “I am wise from the very womb of my mother, that I am a woman of the winds, of the water, of the roads, because I am known in heaven, because I am a female doctor.” Born in the late 19th century in the Oaxacan region that we know today as Cañada, she had the harsh childhood of poor peasants: chronic hunger, agricultural work, teenage marriage. She discovered for herself the healing power of certain fungi, the “holy children,” who, through luminous visions, passed on to her the millennial knowledge she was to use to heal hundreds of suffering people. Married twice and twice a widow, she had many children but almost all died soon. In the middle of the 20th century, his fame soared out of his immediate environment due to his encounter with Robert Gordon Wasson, a successful banker who was to become the pioneer of ethnomicology; from there, Huautla became a place of pilgrimage of hippies, scientists, writers, people in pursuit of an altered state of consciousness, and during his old age Maria Sabina suffered the active rejection of her neighbors for having shared her knowledge.
Álvaro Estrada offers in these pages a kind of oral autobiography of “the wise of fungi”. After long conversations in a Mazatec and after witnessing the rituals she used. The author manages to present to the Western world a fascinating worldview in which the simplicity and rawness of a life full of difficulties are threaded with stories of great mysticism. Life of Maria Sabina is the unrepeatable testimony of a way of understanding health, the relationships between nature and human character, between the earthly and transcendent; thanks to the transcriptions and the translation of Estrada, today’s readers can approach the healing - and even poetic - words of the famous shaman of southern Mexico.
According to Octavio Paz, this book – translated into English, French, Italian and Portuguese, among other languages – is an “extraordinary document whose interest is twofold: anthropological and human.” Undoubtedly, the empathy that was established between Estrada and María Sabina was key to this: for the discoverer of the LSD, Albert Hoffmann, “only thanks to the personal and cultural relationship of the author with the great shaman could a portrait so alive and truthful of this extraordinary woman be made.