*Please note this book is in English. 

Born at the end of the 19th century in the region of Oaxaca known today as Cañada, she had the hard childhood of poor peasants: chronic hunger, agricultural work, teenage marriage. She discovered for herself the healing power of certain mushrooms, the "holy children", which, through luminous visions, transmitted to her the millenary knowledge that she was to use to cure hundreds of suffering people. Twice married and twice widowed, she had many children but most of them died early. In the mid-twentieth century, her fame soared outside her immediate surroundings due to her meeting with Robert Gordon Wasson, a successful banker who was to become the pioneer of ethnomycology; from then on, Huautla became a place of pilgrimage for hippies, scientists, writers, people in search of an altered state of consciousness, and in her old age María Sabina suffered the active rejection of her neighbours for having shared her knowledge. Álvaro Estrada offers in these pages a kind of oral autobiography of "the sage of the mushrooms". After lengthy conversations in Mazatec and after witnessing the rituals she used, the author succeeds in presenting the Western world with a fascinating worldview in which the simplicity and rawness of a life full of hardship are interwoven with stories of great mysticism. Vida de María Sabina is the unrepeatable testimony of a way of understanding health, the relationship between nature and the human character, between the earthly and the transcendent; thanks to Estrada's transcriptions and translation, today's readers can approach the healing - and even poetic - words of the famous shaman from southern Mexico. According to Octavio Paz, this book - translated into English, French, Italian, Portuguese and other languages - is an "extraordinary document whose interest is twofold: anthropological and human". The empathy established between Estrada and María Sabina was undoubtedly the key to it: for the discoverer of LSD, Albert Hofmann, "it was only thanks to the author's personal and cultural relationship with the great shaman that such a vivid and truthful portrait of this extraordinary woman could be made".