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

My father had just died and we were very poor. I used to go into the forests with my sister to pasture the beasts. We were hungry, but we knew that there were mushrooms and that the mushrooms were our friends and that from them only good could come. So we looked for them, and we ate them as they were - raw, just gathered.

Then I did not know how to distinguish the sacred mushrooms as el derrumbe, San Isidro, pajaritos or from those that were not.  I ate them, without knowing what they were, just because I was so hungry. But one day, I don’t know how long a time had elapsed, I began to have visions.

My hands had ripped from the earth the Teo-nanacatl, and the teo-nanacatl had entered my mouth and my soul.

The goats were grazing on the mountain, and I was there sitting on the grass as though drunk. My soul was coming out of my body and was going toward the world that I did not know but of which I had only heard talk. It was a world like this one, full of sierras, of forests, of rivers. But there were also other things – beautiful homes, temples, golden palaces. And there was my sister, who had come with me, and the mushrooms, who were waiting for me - mushrooms that were children and dwarfs dressed like clowns, children with trumpets, children that sang and danced, children tender like the flesh of the flowers.

And the mushrooms talked, and I talked to the mushrooms, crying “What are we going to do?”

I said, "We are so poor. How are we going to live? What will happen to us?"

And the teo-nanacatl answered with the words of hope and peace, saying that they would protect us, that when we needed something, we should go to them and they would give it.

When I returned from my first trip, my sister returned, too, and she had seen also the same things and heard the same words. From then on, I wanted to get to know better those friends that I had just met and to distinguish the sacred mushrooms from those that were not; and so I made my grandmother, who knew many things because she had learned them from her husband and from my father, explain many things. And my grandmother told me everything with pleasure because she saw that I was destined to become the priestess of the teo-nanacatl.