PHANTASMA: CECI N’EST PAS UN CHAMPIGNON

When I was young I spent childish good times in gumboots out in cow paddocks eeling or collecting mushrooms in buckets. The rain, fog, big bulls or the creeping fingers of mists slipping down from the fragrant native bush never dampened my enthusiasm, as mum’s mushrooms on toast beckoned at the end of each adventure

– Fiona Pardington

And all the time they could, if they liked, go and live at a place with the dim, divine name of St. John’s Wood. I have never been to St. John’s Wood. I dare not. I should be afraid of the innumerable night of fir trees, afraid to come upon a blood-red cup and the beating of the wings of the Eagle. But all these things can be imagined by remaining reverently in the Harrow train.

–G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)

In many ways the Mushrooms: The Champignons Barla series of photographs is simply yet another arrow in Fiona Pardington’s thematic quiver of Eros and Thanatos, the Aristotelian and encyclopaedic collecting policies of the nineteenth century museums, the eighteenth century Wunderkammer cabinet of curiosities, and a pronounced Francophilia. The Musée de l’Histoire Naturelle in Nice, driven by the celebrated naturalist, Antoine Risso (1777-1845), was the first museum to open its doors in that city, in the Place Saint François (the old city square) in 1846. Jean-Baptiste Vérany (1800-1865) compiled its rich collections of birds, molluscs, minerals and fossils, but of interest to us is the private collection of plaster and wax models of fish, flowering plants, and especially fungi of the South of France by Jean-Baptiste Barla (1817-1896). Barla’s collection became part of the museum in 1863 when it moved to its own premises on the site of the current museum, donated to the City of Nice in 1896. It was here on a visit to Nice in April 2011 that Pardington discovered the mycological collection and photographed it for four fungus-filled days.

It is only natural that a culinary culture like the French would be fascinated by fungi. The playwright and satirist Molière named his most famous fictional creation Tartuffe for the old French for truffle, and even named his country estate “Perigord” for the region in France where the black truffle grows. The French invented the cultivation of mushrooms, growing them in the limestone caves at Bourré in the Loirre Valley since the reign of Louis XIV. Every regional cuisine of France uses its own locally growing fungi: truffles, champignon de Paris, channterelle, pleurote (oyster mushrooms), and cèpes (porcini). If you can eat it, the French probably have a sauce that goes with it, and consequently the French know their fungi. The Larousse Gastronomique contains extensive notes on the cooking of mushrooms, and the poisonous ones to avoid. Models like the Barla collection were originally created and circulated around the French municipalities on the typically pragmatic orders of a recently restored Napoleon III so that the public might be educated about which mushrooms were and were not safe to eat.

Among the images of Mushrooms we find a rambunctious cavalcade of names, forms and colours. Each unique specimen is made a character portrait, invested with a personality and supernatural presence as if one had stumbled upon them in some ancient primeval wood. Most of these specimens are poisonous. One of the most deadly fungi of all, though not found among these images, is the Amanita phalloides, the Death Cap or Destroying Angel discovered in 1727 by a French botanist who gave it its Latin name for its phallic appearance rudely jutting erect from the maternal earth. As the common names suggest, A. phalloides is deadly poisonous, and unfortunately resembles some edible mushrooms such as the common Puffball. The fifth century BC Athenian tragedian Euripides lost his wife and three children to a meal of this toadstool. It was used to deliberately poison the Roman Emperor Claudius in AD54 (so that Nero might don the imperial purple) and Pope Clement VII in 1534 to prevent him aligning with France (a few days after commissioning Michelangelo to paint The Last Judgement for the Sistine Chapel), and also caused the accidental death of Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI in 1740.

Mushrooms and toadstools, the fruiting bodies of the fungi family, have long held a peculiar place in human culture and imagination. Some of those which appear in these works are infamous. The white-freckled blood-red cap of the Amanita muscaria or Fly Agaric is notorious for its use by the shamans of many cultures from throughout Eurasia to achieve communion with the divine other realm, though unlike the Psilocybe genus (so called “magic mushrooms” or just plain “shrooms”) they have rarely been sourced for recreational purposes outside of wedding feasts in the Lithuanian hinterland (served in vodka). Among the Turkmenic peoples of Siberia the A. muscaria was first consumed by a shaman and consumed by the rest of the tribe in the much safer form of the Shaman’s urine. A similar practice may have been observed in ancient India, giving rise to the legend of Soma described in the Rig Veda. It has been reported that the Sami sorcerers of Lapland would consume A. muscaria that had seven spots on their caps and claims that it was used by the Parachi-speaking tribes of Afghanistan, and the Ojibwa and Tlicho tribes of North America. It has even been suggested that the Viking Beserkers used A. muscaria to achieve their battle frenzy. The A. muscaria is perhaps the archetypal image of a toadstool (a English children’s argot word, as noted by literary opium addict Thomas de Quincy in his “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts” (1827), a place where toads were imagined to sit). Arising suddenly from the earth in a season when most other plants are dying, and bearing none of the green of spring foliage, it is easy to see how such an ominous growth would be associated with the magical, the underworld, and the dead – particularly given their frequently poisonous nature.

The abrupt eruption of fungi, particularly in circles, was attributed to shooting stars falling to earth, lightning strikes, mephitic terrestrial vapours, witches, fairies and evil spirits, beliefs persisting in rural parts of Europe well into the nineteenth century. A common folk belief was that dire things would befall any mortal foolhardy to step inside a fairy ring, ranging from being struck lame or blind, or losing one’s way or wits, to being abducted to serve in the realm of Faerie where time moves differently to our world. It was a common rural superstition that cows that grazed in a fairy ring would produce sour milk. The Ivory or Trooping Funnel Clitocybe geotropa is now known as Infundibulicybe geotropa (geotropa deriving from the ancient Greek for “earth turn”). Like misery, it loves company and frequently forms fairy rings – one such being reported in France as a half mile across and estimated at eight centuries old. In ancient Egypt only pharaohs were permitted to eat mushrooms, which they believed were reincarnations of the gods that travelled down from the heavens on bolts of lightning.

This is an association certainly not lost on Pardington:

I loved fairy rings and always made a point of trying to stand inside one on the slim hope of catching a glimpse of a fairy. Being an obedient child, I was informed I should never touch Amanita muscaria, that alarmingly festive creature that that pushed up boldly beneath the arms of dark nested pine trees in a park we lived nearby. Magic was afoot in mushroom season and I was not about to miss it…. I felt close to the earth at these times, endlessly fascinated by its secrets. When I lay on my stomach on the ground and looked closely at the delicate furls underneath the mushroom’s hat, I imagined glancing down to see changelings left by cruel fairies in place of children. The fact I was an avid reader from a very young age meant that I was steeped in fairytales and fairy law, my knowledge extended over Christmas holiday visits to my grandma’s, where I would read her occult Man, Myth and Magic weekly magazines, often scaring myself stiff, at the same time revelling in the power of the unseen, occult worlds and to me mushrooms were the outposts, fairy arena, villages or guard-towers of magical kingdoms and occult territories.

The Flemish painters subtly included toadstools in their depictions of Hell. It is A. muscaria which appears so liberally in picture books of tales collected by the Brothers Grimm, its hyphae baroquely populating the undergrowth of haunted forests full of witches, wolves and menacing anthropomorphic trees. In illustrations from the nineteenth century onward, and in that peculiarly tenacious Victorian genre of fairy painting, they are homes to the little folk, which in more recent times underwent metamorphosis into the more cheerful kitsch incarnation of the Smurf (Les Schtroumpfs in French-speaking countries) village and the giant toadstool (by-product of an extraterrestrial mineral) in Hergé’s L’Étoile mystérieuse (1942), an adventure of boy reporter Tintin later translated as The Shooting Star. One wonders if the Mushroom in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) on which the caterpillar sits smoking who-knows-what in his hookah, was related. Certainly Alice’s dramatic changes in size upon eating pieces of it suggest some kind of hallucination.