The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross: A Study of the Nature and Origins of Christianity Within the Fertility Cults of the Ancient Near East by John Allegro (1971-05-03) The book relates the development of language to the development of myths, religions, and cultic practices in world cultures. Allegro argues, through etymology, that the roots of Christianity, and many other religions, lay in fertility cults, and that cult practices, such as ingesting visionary plants to perceive the mind of God, persisted into the early Christian era, and to some unspecified extent into the 13th century with reoccurrences in the 18th century and mid-20th century, as he interprets the fresco of the Plaincourault Chapel to be an accurate depiction of eucharistic ritual ingestion of Amanita muscaria. Allegro argued that Jesus never existed as a historical figure but was rather a mythological creation of early Christians under the influence of psychoactive mushroom extracts such as psilocybin. [1]

Allegro's book The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross (1970) argued that Christianity began as a shamanistic cult. In his books The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross and The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth (1979), Allegro put forward the theory that stories of early Christianity originated in an Essene clandestine cult centred around the use of psychedelic mushrooms, and that the New Testament is the coded record of this shamanistic cult. [23] [24] Allegro further argued that the authors of the Christian gospels did not understand the Essene thought. When writing down the Gospels based on the stories they had heard, the evangelists confused the meaning of the scrolls. In this way, according to Allegro, the Christian tradition is based on a misunderstanding of the scrolls. [25] [26] He also argued that the story of Jesus was based on the crucifixion of the Teacher of Righteousness in the scrolls. [27] Mark Hall writes that Allegro suggested the Dead Sea Scrolls all but proved that a historical Jesus never existed. [28] Allegro’s claim that the name of Jesus was rooted in an ancient Sumerian name for a mushroom that means “semen, which saves” is a great example of the self-promoting, weirdo academic playbook. All you have to do is:J.M. Allegro (1956). "Further Messianic References in Qumran Literature". Journal of Biblical Literature. 75 (3): 174–187. doi: 10.2307/3261919. JSTOR 3261919. George J. Brooke, "Dead Sea Scrolls Scholarship in the United Kingdom", in Devorah Dimant, ed. (2012). The Dead Sea Scrolls in Scholarly Perspective: A History of Research. Leiden: Brill. pp.453–454. ISBN 978-9004208063.

Underpinning The Sacred Mushroom is the idea that fertility was of fundamental importance to primitive religion, as it is to life. Allegro set out this concept in a preliminary plan of the book, sent to the publishers Hodder and Stoughton Ltd., on October 23, 1968:That can best be summarized as, “This stuff is in the New Testament because a bunch of ancient, sex-crazed Sumerians ate psychedelic mushrooms and somehow had a unified enough experience while high to draw the same conclusions about the divine, and so did everybody else who was a part of the sex-crazed mushroom cult for thousands of years, including the sex-averse Essenes, who were super influential on the authors of the New Testament, even though they’re never mentioned in the New Testament, and that’s how the mushroom religion was passed down for millennia until a bunch of early Christians took things literally, and that’s when all this stuff was lost, but then I rediscovered the truth that it was all about psychedelic mushrooms, and I discovered that truth ever so conveniently at the time when hippies were really getting into that stuff.” His work is very well researched. Half of the book is bibliography. That being said, the work is incomplete. He lays some very solid groundwork for what could be an entire new field of study. There are a lot of asterisks. The sheer number of references and the obvious intentional obfuscation is compelling. Allegro discovered that Christianity had its origins “in an orgiastic fertility cult that made use of a hallucinogenic mushroom containing the drug psilocybin. Moreover, Jesus never actually existed, but was invented by early Christians under the influence of those drugs” who used his story to pass down coded messages from Sumerian times, encouraging those with the secret knowledge to continue pursuing divine communion through psychedelic mushrooms. However, a bunch of idiots then took these New Testament stories literally, concluded that Jesus was an historical person, and — voila! — Christianity was born. As early as 1956 Allegro held controversial views regarding the content of the scrolls, stating in a letter to de Vaux, "It's a pity that you and your friends cannot conceive of anything written about Christianity without trying to grind some ecclesiastical or non-ecclesiastical axe." The bulk of his work on the Dead Sea Scrolls was done by 1960 and he was at odds with his scrolls colleagues. When a conflict broke out with H.H. Rowley concerning Allegro's interpretation of the scrolls, [22] Allegro, on the invitation of F. F. Bruce, moved from the Department of Near East Studies in the Faculty of Arts at Manchester to the Faculty of Theology. [18] It was during his stay in Theology that he wrote his controversial book, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, whose subtitle was "A Study of the Nature and Origins of Christianity within the Fertility Cults of the Ancient Near East". Apparently realising the impact this book would have, Allegro resigned his post at Manchester. [18] The Sacred Mushroom and Christian Myth [ edit ] The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross: A Study of the Nature and Origins of Christianity Within the Fertility Cults of the Ancient Near East

That Savior was found in Jesus Christ, the Son of God who was crucified outside Jerusalem and rose again that all who believe in Him might have eternal life. This Jesus Christ, first promised to the mother and father of all humanity, has won salvation for all humankind. Very compelling hypothesis about Mushrooms in Sumer supported by linguistic evidences, but to me it felt like too much at some point. There are so many linguistic references and at the end most of them are either a Penis, a Vulva or something related to them or fertility. Likewise, in the same way that Dionysus appealed to ancient Greek inebriates who wanted to justify their love of drunkenness, thanks to podcaster Joe Rogan, today’s drug enthusiasts have a new conspiracy theory that will confirm all their preexisting biases concerning hallucinogenic drugs — a conspiracy that could best be summed up as, “Actually, Jesus was a psychedelic mushroom.” The Joe Rogan Psychedelic Mushroom TheoryAs with any art interpretation, it can be extremely difficult to take symbology out of its cultural context and this is perhaps the most challenging point of this project. Has Rush succeeded? Typically, yes and no. Yes, because Rush has demonstrated that the mushroom does play a particular role in Christian art, something hitherto ignored by religious scholars in the main. But no, because the groundwork for the reinterpretation of the symbology is based on an, as yet, still scantily evidenced theory, and the idea that knowledge of the mushroom has remained in secret with an elite priest class within the Church all this time, really needs more evidence than the art itself. Throughout the centuries, God added more details to this promise. This Savior would be the son of Abraham, the heir of David who would rule from David’s throne forever. He would be pierced for our iniquities, die, and rise again on the third day. The ‘deliberate hoax’ idea seemed improbably complicated. And Allegro’s etymologies needed more substantiation – not enough was known at the time about the language of Sumer to verify many of his suggestions. But in the outrage The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross raised among Christian critics, scholars failed to follow up on the main ideas – a way of understanding the fertility concept at the root of religion, and the way language and religion grew up together: the origin of myth and philosophy. Allegro argued that Jesus in the Gospels was in fact a code for a type of hallucinogen, the Amanita muscaria, and that Christianity was the product of an ancient "sex-and-mushroom" cult. [29] [30] Critical reaction was swift and harsh: fourteen British scholars (including Allegro's mentor at Oxford, Godfrey Driver) denounced it. [29] Sidnie White Crawford wrote of the publication of Sacred Mushroom, "Rightly or wrongly, Allegro would never be taken seriously as a scholar again." [31]