Nicolás Echeverría: Maria Sabina, Spirit Woman / 1979 (English+Hungarian subtitles)

As we learn through Estrada’s account, Sabina occupies the highest position in the Mazatec shamanic hierarchy. Those shamans who are able to transform themselves into animals (nagualism) are in the lowest level and are called the sorcerers; they have “a great capacity for doing evil and for turning other people into naguales.” Then there is the curer who uses “massage, potions, and devices such as his own language, in which he invokes the Lords of different places, mountains, and springs.” Finally, there come those whose words are healing, the Wise Ones— those, like María Sabina— who do not practice “evil nor use potions to cure,” because their healing “involves the ingestion of the mushroom, through which [they] acquire the power to diagnose and cure the sick person.” (Marcel de Lima: The ethnopoetics of shamanism)