The Sacred Mushroom and The Cross: A study of the nature and origins of Christianity within the fertility cults of the ancient Near East

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The angel plants had more access to god’s heavenly water than others, and consuming these hallucinogenic plants gave mortal men temporary access to god’s wisdom. The author has found dozens of instances where this new etymological context uncovers possible references to mushrooms.

Well, on a more somber note, the book’s author has some brilliant but gut wrenching insights in places. Maybe the truth is that Christianity existed for centuries before AD 70, under various names, as a mushroom-cult, forced underground by the Romans and the Jews. He was also pugnacious in his argument that the God of the Old Testament was “a mighty penis in the heavens who in a thunderous climax of the storm ejaculated semen upon the furrows of Mother Earth”. In November 2009 The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross was reprinted in a 40th anniversary edition with a 30-page addendum by Prof.It also highlights how easy it is to draw wildly different ideas from the inchoate mess that is the bible. So let me get this straight, the church picks a team of four experts to study the dead sea scrolls, and Allegro was one of them. But that link is still there, but, while it is very interesting, it is not the smoking gun of a grand conspiracy to expropriate secular power. As the 1960s wore on, his theories became increasingly distinctive, and his obsession with mushrooms grew. John Strugnell published a severe critique of the volume, "Notes en Marge du volume V des 'Discoveries in the Judean Desert of Jordan'" in Revue de Qumran.

During this period Allegro also published two popular books on the Dead Sea scrolls, The Dead Sea Scrolls (1956) and The People of the Dead Sea Scrolls (1958).It deals heavily with ancient languages, religions, and drugs, so if you're interested in any combination of those things, I totally recommend this book.

Although I'd picked up some Greek, I'd not even begun to study Hebrew, not to mention the other, older languages. While this book will be beyond most readers as it was for me, most of Allegro's other works are quite accessible. In the case of the sacred mushroom, there was no worthy equivalent sacrament, except the mushroom itself or a symbol of it - like a prostitute's urine?it has been my practice to offer no more than the basic essentials of photographs, transliteration, translation of non-biblical passages where this might serve some useful interpretative purpose, and the minimum of textual notes. As 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. It seems strange that this mushroom would be depicted in arguably the most famous story in the Bible. The book's basic argument is that the bible is a fossil or a play that got built up from older cults and stories and bad translations--a huge game of telephone--and that by studying its linguistic predecessors, we can understand the strange stories of the Judeo-Christian tradition.