MARÍA SABINA, SPIRIT WOMAN (1979)

Join us as we honor and celebrate the Mazatecan shamanic healer María Sabina, the “Saint Mother of the Mushrooms,” with a rare screening of Nicolás Echevarría’s breathtakingly intimate portrait MARÍA SABINA, SPIRIT WOMAN (1979).

Filmed deep in the misty mountains of Oaxaca, Echevarría follows Sabina’s daily life, as she expounds upon her spirituality and wisdom of humanity's (often fractured) relationship with the divine spirit of nature. Recognized by the people of the Sierra de Oaxaca as a powerful holy woman, Sabina was one of the last priestess healers who knew the ritual mysteries of the hallucinogenic mushrooms that grow in the region. It was she who was visited by R. Gordon Wasson, the ethnomycologist who – after experiencing one of her shamanic psilocybin rituals– brought word of hallucinogenic fungi to the world at large. Wasson’s reports would lead the likes of psychonautic pioneers such as Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary, Carlos Castaneda and Albert Hofman to trek to Mexico to experience the ritual firsthand in Sabina's mountain homestead — before returning northward to spread the gospel to the consciousness-exploratory 60s counterculture. But she condemned the way in which “the West” came to adopt “magic mushrooms” for recreational use, desecrating the spiritual power they hold in indigenous ritual traditions.

Echevaría’s gorgeously shot and hypnotic film allows us, with reverence, to witness the sacramental use of the teonanacatl mushrooms – which Sabina referred to as “The Little Children” – in their traditional medicinal practice. Echevarría’s camera was given extraordinary, as it captured the mystery and magic of the powerful indigenous ritual, as Sabina prepares and performs a psilocybin ceremony for locals in need of physical healing, by way of the fungal teachers’ powers of psychic and emotional cleansing.

A truly beautiful gift of a film, María Sabina, Spirit Woman is an important document which contains some of the only footage ever recorded of Sabina, preserving the words, wisdom, and practices of one of the last indigenous healers of her kind, who now stands as one of the most important figures in the history of entheogenic medicine.

Dir. Nicolás Echevarría, 1979, 81mins, Mexico, Unrated, Spanish and Mazatecan w/ English Subtitles, Color, Digital.

Special thanks to Mónica Martínez Orihuela at Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía (IMCINE) and Sylvie Shamlian & Nicolas Pedrero of Spectacle.

Please email [email protected] or phone 323-663-2167 with any questions.

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Host or Publisher The Philosophical Research Society