Benoît Coquil came across María Sabina on a T-shirt in Oaxaca. Like almost everyone. There is one where an extremely wrinkled indigenous elderly woman appears, with long earrings, seemingly scrutinizing the viewer as if about to diagnose an incurable ailment, probably that of being alive. There are others where she is smiling in a flowery blouse. And others, the majority, where she is smoking, squinting with eagerness, as if about to disappear behind a cloud of smoke, like the evil witch.
On July 22, María Sabina would have turned 126. A Mexican healer from the Teotitlán district of Oaxaca, destined to go down in history for healing members of her Mazatec ethnic group with ancestral medicine, but who ended up transcending cultural boundaries, becoming a hippie icon, a pilgrimage center for psychedelic tourism, and a narcotic inspiration for John Lennon, Jimmy Hendrix, Walt Disney, and chemist Albert Hoffman, all thanks to former JP Morgan vice president Robert Gordon Wasson.
In Cositas (Seix Barral), Benoît Coquil, a professor of Latin American Civilization and Literature at the University of Picardía, Amiens, narrates the astonishing real story of the last natural psychotropic, Psilocybe, and how it became an international phenomenon due to the unimaginable encounter between a Montana banker and a Mexican sorceress.
In the mid-20th century, nothing in María Sabina's horizon could have foreseen that her elderly face would end up on millions of cups, pens, and T-shirts. A peasant who did not attend school, raised by her maternal grandparents, who taught her to cultivate the land and silkworms. At 14, her best option was to be married off, although she became a widow four years and three children later. That's when she began to reclaim the knowledge of her ancestors, the mushroom ceremony, which she called "sacred children." As Benoît Coquil describes it: "Psilocybe seems insignificant, very discreet. It goes unnoticed. A slender, single-piece body; on top, a simple earthy brownish beige hat, slightly worn at the edges. You will often find it near a cornfield or in a meadow, sheltered from the sun. Psilocybe, like all the others, stays in the shadows. And, like all the others, it is only there for a few days, after the rain. It is just passing through (...) But it quietly kills under that common appearance. Under the earth-colored cape and hat, despite its short stature and slim silhouette, Psilocybe has the features of a magician."
Her second marriage was to a sorcerer named Marcial, who began to beat María when he thought she surpassed him in power, and who would end up murdered by the sorceress's children. A prediction, from former mayor of Huautla, Erasto Pineda, who said he would die from a shot in the back, fueled the legend that the mushrooms gave María supernatural powers. It is at this point in the story that Gordon Wasson appears, who in 1955 was on his honeymoon with the Russian-American pediatrician Valentina Pavlovna, with whom he shared an unusual hobby: mushrooms.
"It will surely speed up or slow down your heart. Perhaps it will show you your dead. It will be terrifying or reassuring."
The banker had read in New York an article by Robert Graves talking about the friars who arrived with the conquest of America, who had documented mushrooms ingested in ancestral rituals. Off he went with his newlywed wife to the Mazatec mountains, where he met María Sabina, with whom he could chat and try the mushrooms under the promise not to reveal everything that happened there. Something Gordon must not have understood well because he recorded her chants, photographed her under the effects of the mushrooms, and upon returning, published an extensive report in Life Magazine (1957) that sparked a rush, leading hundreds of people to venture to María's village and to almost all mountainous regions of Mexico to discover the power of visionary mushrooms.
"It will surely speed up or slow down your heart, dilate your pupils. It usually does. Without a doubt, it will make you experience euphoria and tears. It will not show you anything of its own, rather it will make you see inside yourselves. Perhaps it will show you your dead, those who came before you. Your dead and also your imminent death. It will be terrifying or reassuring, impossible to know in advance. If there is an afterlife, Psilocybe will make you touch it with your fingers," Benoît recounts.
"Well... yes. In fact, I tried it after writing the book, which may seem strange. I did it in France, at my home, with some friends. I grew the mushrooms in my garden because it is very easy to get little boxes with them to plant. And then you take them with honey, or with chocolate, or as an infusion.
"Well, maybe it wasn't as strong for me because it all depends on the doses. I didn't have visual hallucinations, or very few. I didn't see my death, or my dead. It lasted almost all night. There were several stages. One of a lot of laughter, which lasted quite a while, in fact, I wanted it to end at some point. Then there was a much more contemplative stage, of observation. I was in my garden, and it appeared to me as a land of adventures, with many things to see and admire. You see much better at night too because your pupils are dilated. Mostly there were moments of contemplating nature, and then another stage, much more introspective, where thoughts are a bit obsessive. The visions are totally different depending on the cultural universe."
"And is it true that it inspired Walt Disney to create his cartoons, or that John Lennon saw his own death when he tried it...?"
"Well, I haven't had any signs that would allow me to fully verify that they took it with María. Both Lennon and Walt Disney were very fond of psychedelic substances, and it is very likely that they tried psilocybin mushrooms, either with María or with another shaman."
During one of Gordon Wasson's trips (known as Gordo Guasón to the locals), a CIA agent sneaked in as a photographer. We are not only witnessing the birth of the hippie counterculture and the beginning of scientific interest in psychedelics. We are also in the midst of the Cold War, with programs like the secret MK-Ultra experiment, to develop new drugs for use in interrogations and torture, aiming to weaken the individual and force confessions through mind control and psychological torture.
At a time when psilocybin is back at the center of scientific and therapeutic debate, the novel asserts that before science, there were shamans, and that there is no future without memory. "It seems to me that we are at a moment in history where we also see the limits of Western pharmaceuticals, and little by little we are recognizing ancient uses. Healers like María Sabina are a bit more recognized, and Valentina Wasson as well, who was completely hidden by her husband at the time, as happens throughout history, and specifically in the history of science. Valentina was the first to realize that Psilocybe could be used as therapy in the form of a molecule."
"We are at a moment in history where we see the limits of pharmaceuticals, and we are recognizing ancient uses."
Although Wasson's encounter provided a certain economic stability to María, she would soon be accused by members of her community of profiting from her people's culture. The misuse of her knowledge by many of her visitors also led María to consider it a mistake to have revealed it to the world. She even believed that her "little things" or "magic children" were offended and had stopped speaking to her. Her culture was soon made invisible while her knowledge and even her image were, and still are, exploited by the West, a scenario that in the 1960s debated between scientific capitalism and the search for an existential way out through Mazatec shamanism.
"I was interested in exploring the paradoxes of the characters. For example, Gordon Wasson was a banker, very Western, deeply involved in capitalist industry, but at the same time, he was an adventurer passionate about hallucinogenic mushrooms. He was a scholar, raised in a religious environment, and interested in the theme of transcendence, but at the same time, he was interested in collecting money for the article he sold to Life. Chemist Albert Hoffman is also contradictory. You can tell he has a somewhat adventurous and avant-garde spirit, but he was the one who first synthesized the substance and made the molecule available to the pharmaceutical industry."
By the early 1960s, mushrooms had become a narcotic drug, and María was eventually arrested by federal agents, who seized everything in her shack as evidence, which was probably the same thing that was in her ancestors' shack, or in the shacks of the friars who arrived with Christopher Columbus. In fact, Gordon Wasson is called the "Christopher Columbus of magic mushrooms."
—You talk about cultural appropriation and even the plundering of Western humanity, but isn't everything cultural appropriation? Even importing corn, cacao, tomatoes, or avocados from the Americas.
—I see limits to this idea because there is trade. There's a problem when someone profits from something that hadn't been commercialized before. And I'm not saying the mushrooms are Mazatec, because psilocybin grows all over the world. But, for example, the name of the mushroom is Psilocybe Wassonii, because Wasson named it after the discovery, and even talking about a discovery is questionable. Western science completely appropriated the thing.
After her arrest, María Sabina told the mayor: "You know our people don't use the tobacco that that wretch claims I sell. She accuses me of bringing gringos to my house. They come looking for me, take pictures of me, talk to me, ask me questions, the same ones I've already answered many times." María Sabina was released and lived the last years of her life in extreme poverty, living off the money she charged her patients for treatment. She would die on November 23, 1985, of a pulmonary thromboembolism. Gordon Wasson, who had also been born on the 22nd, but in September, would also be with her on the 23rd, but in December of the following year, just in case they couldn't further connect their lives.
"And what would have happened to María if Gordon Wasson hadn't appeared in her life?"
"I think the same thing would have happened three, four, five, 10 years later." And Wasson believes it too, as he knew that his revelation to the world was also a betrayal of María, who had expressly asked him not to tell.