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Alvaro Estrada  - Vive de Maria Sabina [the life of Maria Sabina]

They gave it to me when Ana Maria fell ill. Suddenly, she would fall on the ground, and her body used to become black and like stone. She used to fall on the ground, and she lay there like a black stone.

The curanderos had tried to cure her with herbs and magic rites, burying eggs in some parts of the room where my sister lay. But Ana Maria was ill and seemed almost near death.

So I decided to return again to the teo-nanacatl. I took many, many more than I had ever taken before: thirty plus thirty. I loved my sister and was ready to do anything, even to make a very long trip, just to save her. I was sitting in front of her with my body, but my soul was entering the world of the teo-nanacatl and was seeing the same landscape that it had seen many other times, then landscapes that it had never seen because the great number of mushrooms had taken me into the deepest of the depths of that world.

I was going ahead until, at one point, a duende, a spirit, came toward me. He asked a strange question:

"But what do you wish to become, you, Maria Sabina?"

I answered him, without knowing, that I wished to become a saint. Then the spirit smiled, and immediately he had in his hands something that he did not have before, and it was a big Book with many written pages.

"Here," he said. "I am giving you this Book so that you can do your work better and help people who need help and know the secrets of the world where everything is known."

I thumbed through the leaves of the Book, many written pages, and I thought that unfortunately I did not know how to read. I had never learned, and therefore that would not have been of any use to me. Suddenly, I realized I was reading and understood all that was written in the Book and that I became as though richer, wiser, and that in one moment I learned millions of things.  I learned and learned.

I also learned that for curing Ana Maria I had to anoint her belly with herbs and destroy all that the curanderos had done for her, disinterring the eggs and throwing them away. Suddenly, when I had understood that, I saw there, in the world where I was, the room of my sister and the floor of beaten earth and the buried eggs that came out by themselves from the earth in the spots where they had been hidden.

When I came to myself, I was there, sitting in front of my sister, but the floor was full of scattered eggs that had been broken. I had not moved from there; the eggs had come out by themselves. I looked for the herbs that the Book had indicated to me, and I did exactly what I had learned from the Book. And Ana Maria got well.

I didn't need to see the Book again because I had learned everything that was inside it. But I again saw the spirit that gave it to me and other spirits and other landscapes; and I saw, close by, the sun and moon because the more you go inside the world of teo-nanacatl, the more things are seen. And you also see our past and our future, which are there together as a single thing already achieved, already happened. So I saw the entire life of my son Aurelio and his death and the face and the name of the man that was to kill him and the dagger with which he was going to kill him