As word spread of her sister’s healing, Sabina’s talents became known locally, and many of the community’s ill were brought to her doorstep for vigils. One day, a local authority asked Sabina to meet with “blonde strangers” who were in search of a Wise One. Among them was ethnomycologist R. Gordon Wasson and his mushroom-enthusiast wife, Russian-American pediatrician Valentina Pavlovna Wasson. Sabina allowed the duo to participate in the ritual and take her photo, and the Wasssons later shared the experience in both Life Magazine and This Week, a Sunday magazine inserted into numerous newspapers. The publicity sparked a new and wide interest in psychedelic mushrooms. The couple also collected spores of the fungus, which they then brought to Europe. Subsequently, the mushrooms’ primary ingredient, psilocybin, was isolated in a lab for the first time.

Thereafter, foreigners flocked to Huautla to meet with Sabina, who willingly shared her ceremonies with them. The region was soon overrun with such seekers, and many of them began taking the mushrooms without ceremony, which went against Mazatec tradition. “These young people, blonde and dark-skinned, didn’t respect our customs,” Sabina told Estrada. “Never, as far as I remember, were the saint children eaten with such a lack of respect.”

At another point in her conversation with Estrada, however, Sabina voiced a lack of regret around her role in the popularization of her culture’s sacred medicine. “Before Wasson, no one spoke so openly about the children. No Mazatec revealed what he knew about the matter,” she said. “Nevertheless, I think now that if the foreigners had arrived without any recommendation, I would still have shown them my wisdom, because there is nothing bad in that.”

Sabina died in poverty, but her legacy is rich—and not just because it sparked a global obsession with magic mushrooms that has culminated in today’s revolution in psilocybin-centric mental healthcare. Her incantations, which have been recorded both in audio and in writing, are considered important works of art, and she is known not just as a “Wise One,” but also as a poet.

“One should respect the little mushrooms,” she once told Estrada. “At bottom, I feel they are my family. As if they were my parents, my blood. In truth, I was born with my destiny. To be a Wise Woman. To be a daughter of the saint children.”