"Walt Disney had a fondness for hallucinogenic substances"

BarcelonaIt was during a trip to Mexico, while strolling through the Oaxaca market, that Benoît Coquil (Brittany, 1989) found a T-shirt that caught his eye. "It featured the face of an old woman with gray hair and a cigarette dangling from her lips, and underneath it read: María Sabina, priestess of magic mushrooms", he recalls. Coquil, a professor at the Jules Verne University of Picardy and a specialist in Argentine literature, had never heard the name of this Mazatec healer and shaman. "I asked a Mexican friend to tell me things," he continues, "and he told me that Sabina had ended up becoming an icon of the movement hippie and of the psychedelic counterculture thanks to the rituals she practiced with hallucinogenic mushrooms."

Intrigued by the figure of the shaman, Coquil began to investigate the consultations she made with the spirits thanks to the lysergic effects of psilocybin. (1898-1986) and Valentina Pavlovna Guercken (1901-1958). Wasson was a banker on Wall Street and Pavlovna was a pediatrician, but they had a common hobby that led them to María Sabina: mycology." Coquil continued stretching the thread of mushrooms. "The interest was purely literary: I come from Brittany, and there is not much of a mushroom hunting tradition there. I had never gone looking for it with my family," he admits. In the physical, historical and psychotropic journey that finally presents Cosettes —that Periscope Editions now published with the translation of Marta Marfany—there is a chapter in which he reviews which are the most mycophilous peoples of the world: there are the Chinese, the Slavs, the Italians, the Provençals and the Catalans.

A story of cultural appropriation

The novel begins with the description of the psilocybe, a "slender, spindly, single-piece mushroom, with a simple earthy beige-brown top, slightly worn around the edges." Despite its fragile appearance, it can cause visual and auditory hallucinations in those who consume it. Cosettes covers a good part of the 20th century with Gordon and Valentina Wasson. Their biographies are skillfully intertwined with the description of historical events: the effects of the Crash of '29, the synthesis of diethylamide (later known as LSD) by Albert Hofmann, and the acid experiments carried out by the CIA in the United States. "As it is a very global story, the narrator goes from one place to another and makes some digressions," Coquil argues. "Behind the appearance of fun and an adventure novel, I tell a story of cultural appropriation and degradation: those same mushrooms that María Sabina considers sacred end up becoming a business. The use of bowls in the West has transformed the native cultures of each place into exotic ones, and how it uses what it wants for purposes that had little to do with their original use."

The life journey of the Wasson couple structures the novel, which features some illustrious guests, such as the animator, businessman, and director Walt Disney (1901-1966). "He was the architect of entertainment during the 20th century and ended up representing the world as a theme park," says the author of Cosettes–. Through films like Fancy and Alice in Wonderland we can see Disney's fondness for hallucinogenic substances." In the novel, Coquil has Disney have a bad trip on mushrooms: "I found it funny that his adorable creations ended up turned into monsters that chased him." Another real-life character who appears in the book, 9999 from the Museum of Natural Sciences in Paris, took mushrooms on several occasions," he says. "He was an erudite, cultured, and incredibly serious man who nevertheless wanted to launch himself into experimenting with a substance that had unpredictable effects."

The precision and plasticity of Benoît Coquil's descriptions make the reader wonder what the author's experience with the finished bowl was like before trying them," he explains. "In the end, I went with two friends to a house with a garden and we consumed a relatively moderate dose. At first, the experience is fun. Then you enter a phase where your perception sharpens. You end up perceiving time in a much more compressed way: ten minutes under the influence of mushrooms can be two hours." Coquil has "very clear memories" of her personal adventure. "The garden I was in seemed gigantic to me. And the moonlight illuminated it as if it were daytime. Some familiar faces appeared in the trees. Luckily, it wasn't a negative experience at all. And it wasn't very different from what I had written in the novel."