The secrets that the mushrooms revealed to me are enclosed in a big Book that
they showed me and that is found in a region very far away from their world, a
great Book. They gave it to me when Ana María fell ill ... and seemed almost
near death. So I decided to return again to the teo-nanácatl. 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-nanácatl 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, María 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 realised I was
reading and understood all that was written in the Book and that I became as
though richer, wiser, and that moment I learned millions of things. I learned
and learned ... I looked for the herbs that the Book had indicated to me, and I
did exactly what I had learned from the Book. And also Ana María 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 the moon because the more you
go inside the world of teo-nanácatl, 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 because everything had already been
accomplished. The murder had already been committed, and it was useless for me
to say to my son that he should look out because they would kill him, because
there was nothing to say. They would kill him, and that was it. And I saw other
deaths and other murders and people who were lost - no one knew where they were
- and I alone could see. And I saw stolen horses and ancient buried cities, the
existence of which was unknown, and they were going to be brought to light.
Millions of things I saw and I knew. I knew and saw God: an immense clock
that ticks, the spheres that go slowly around, and inside the stars, the earth,
the entire universe, the day and the night, the cry and the smile, the happiness
and the pain. He who knows to the end of the secret of the 'teo-nanácatl' can
even see that infinite clockwork.
The Mazatec Wise Woman, Maria Sabina (1894-1985 )