Famous scholar challenges the faith of centuries
CHRIST AND THE SACRED MUSHROOM
By DAVID YORK

Lecturer John Allegro examines a dried specimen of the sacred mushroom.
‘Some will accuse me of blasphemy’
A DISTINGUISHED British scholar has written a sensational book that is certain to cause the greatest upheaval in orthodox Christian thinking since Charles Darwin said Man was descended from the ape.
For he not only argues the non-existence of Jesus Christ and the Apostles, but claims that Christianity itself – as well as Judaism and other religions of the near and Middle East—are no more than hangovers from an ancient fertility cult.
Expert
The author of this remarkable book is 47-year-old John M. Allegro, lecturer in Old Testament and Inter-Testamental Studies at Manchester University, and a philologist—a student of words and language.
He is also one of the world’s greatest experts on the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Mr. Allegro told the Sunday Mirror yesterday: “Thousands of years before Christianity, secret cults arose which worshipped the sacred mushroom—the Amanita Muscaria—which, for various reasons (including its shape and power as a drug) came to be regarded as a symbol of God on earth.
“When the secrets of the cult had to be written down, it was done in the form of codes hidden in folk tales.
“This is the basic origin of the stories in the New Testament. They are a literary device to spread the rites and rules of mushroom worship to the faithful.”
Challenge
Such a claim, such a challenge, to orthodox belief, coming as it does from one of the country’s leading experts in his field, is something of a religious H-bomb—threatening a shattering fall-out.
The controversy it will arouse must certainly lead to furious and acrimonious debates and schisms that will divide, not only Christians but Jews, Mohammedans and others whose religions have their origins in the areas covered by Mr. Allegro’s researches.
It is a fundamental challenge. To many it might suggest not only that there was no Christ or Moses,
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THE SACRED MUSHROOM
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Not only-to use Mr. Allegro’s own words – “that the stories in the Gospels and Acts were a deliberate hoax,” but also that there is no God.
Mr. Allegro bases his claims on his researches into the oldest written language known to us—Sumerian “Cuneiform” text dating back to 3500 BC. From this ancient tongue he believes came the language of the Bible.
And so, he says, we no longer have to take the New Testament story at its face value. We can trace the proper names and words used in it back to their true and original meanings.
“It is this,” says Mr. Allegro, “That reveal the cult of the phallic mushroom.”
Mr. Allegro’s book, which is to be published throughout the world, is bound to lead to fierce arguments. He says: “I’ll doubtless be accused by some of blasphemy. But these conclusions are the result of purely scientific dispassionate research.
Languages
“When I left the Royal Navy in 1947 I began to train for the Methodist Ministry as a theological student at Manchester University. This led me to a study of the ancient Semitic languages – including Old Testament Hebrew and Aramaic—and I became progressively more interested in the language and less in theology.
“Then came my appointment as the first British representative on the Dead Sea Scrolls editing team in Jerusalem.
From my work on these texts, the next step was a re-examination of New Testament names and titles, and to the realization that more lay behind them than was generally appreciated.
“And so I probed deeper—to the very beginnings of civilization. To Sumerian. And this book is the result.”
Mr. Allegro’s book, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, is to be published by Hodder and Stoughton in May.
Why are they handling it? Says their managing director, Mr. Robin Denniston: “John Allegro unquestionably raises fundamental and revolutionary religious questions.
“But even if he can be challenged on some of his interpretations, our feeling is that this is a serious and deeply important contribution to an area of knowledge which is of vital concern, not just to the Christian community, but to every literate person.”
ANOTHER GREAT SUNDAY MIRROR SERIES BEGINS TODAY
Sunday Mirror
April 5, 1970 Page 9
THE SACRED MUSHROOM AND THE CROSS
BEGINNING THE MOST CHALLENGING BOOK FOR YEARS
by JOHN ALLEGRO

FOR primitive man living in the sun-parched, often desert lands of the Near and Middle East, life was almost entirely dependent upon rain.
It came from the sky to make things grown, and in his simplicity he came to believe that somewhere up above him was a mighty phallus in the sky, and that rain was his semen that came down to fertilise the womb we call earth.
From this innocent reasoning all the religions of that area were born—the ancient cults of the Greeks and Persians, Judaism, Christianity, even Muhammadanism. All had their origins in this basic idea of a heavenly phallus.
Once man had worked out his theory about the divine rain, he thought he could help to stimulate rain in much the same way as he did orgasms on earth; by singing, dancing, orgiastic displays and, above all, by performing the sex act—particularly in the fields, where the sacred semen was most needed.
It was then a natural step to want to share the secrets of how to control the power and knowledge of the heavenly phallus.
But how?
Over the centuries there were those who experimented with herbs and drugs and, as I shall show, came upon one drug that really seemed to transport them out of this world into heaven.
But this knowledge was not to be shared indiscriminately. If god was jealous of his powers, so were those to whom he gave this glimpse of divinity. Paradise was for the favoured few.
And so there arose the priesthood with its secret preparations and ceremonies that had to be observed before the chosen ones could take the drug—rituals that gave them great
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powers over the rest of the community.
Rarely, and then only for urgent practical purposes, were those secrets ever committed to writing.
Normally they would be passed between the priest and the initiate by word of mouth: dependent for their accurate transmission on the trained memories of men dedicated to the learning and recitation of these “scriptures.”
But if, for some dramatic reason – persecution, or the disruption caused by war—it became necessary to write down the precious names of the drug, the manner of its use, and the secret incantations, it was written in a secret form. A code—hidden in a story containing puns or some other word play.
I believe that this is the basic truth about the stories in the New Testament.
The key which unlocked the secret is philology – the study of words and language. Recent discoveries about the origins of the language of the Old and New Testaments—Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek—have revealed to me that from very early times the original meanings of the words and stories were lost or misunderstood.
Christ, for instance, far from being a real person, is now shown to be merely another name for the drug plant.
One of the occasions when the secrets of the drug cult had to be written down was after the Jewish revolt of 66AD.
Swayed by the narcotic-induced madness to believe God had called them to master the world in his name, the cult’s members provoked the mighty power of Rome to swift and terrible action.
Jerusalem was ravaged, her temple destroyed. Judaism was disrupted and her people driven to seek refuge with communities already established around the Mediterranean coastlands.
The mystery cults found themselves without their central fount of authority, with many of their priests killed in the abortive rebellion or driven into the desert.
The secrets, if they were not to be lost for ever, had to be committed to writing—and yet if found, the documents must give nothing away or betray those who still dared defy the Roman authorities and continue their religious practices.
The means of conveying the information were at hand, and had been for thousands of years. From the earliest times the folk-tales of the ancients had contained myths based upon the personification of plants and trees.
They were invested with human faculties and qualities and their names and physical characteristics were applied to the heroes and heroines of the stories.
Some of these were just tales spun for entertainment, others were political parables like Jotham’s fable about the trees in the Old Testament, while others were means of remember and transmitting therapeutic folklore.
The names of the plants were spun out to make the basis of the stories, whereby the creatures of fantasy were indemnified dressed, and made to enact their parts.
Here, then, was the literary device to spread occult knowledge to the faithful…
To tell the story of a rabbi called Jesus, and invest him with the power and names of the magic drug. To have him live before the terrible events that had disrupted their lives, to preach a love between men, extending even to the hated Romans.
Thus, should the talk fall into Roman hands, even their mortal enemies might be deceived and not probe further into the activities of the mystery cults within their territories.
The ruse failed. Christians, hated and despised, where hauled forth and slain in their thousands. The cult well nigh perished. What eventually took its place was a travesty of the real thing, a mockery of the drug’s power to raise men to heaven and give them the longed-for glimpse of God.
The story of the rabbi crucified at the instigation of the Jews was accepted as fact—as an historical peg upon which the new cult’s authority was founded.
What began as a hoax became a trap even to those who believed themselves to be the spiritual heirs of the mystery religion and took to themselves the name “Christian.”
The Crucifixion story was a ruse to guard the Sacred Mushroom. But the hoax became a trap we call Christianity.

Author JOHN ALLEGRO
Above all the cult forgot, or purged from their memories, the one supreme secret on which their whole religious and ecstatic experience depended.
This secret was the names and identity of the source of the drug, the key to heaven.
The source of the drug? It was the Sacred Mushroom.
The fungus recognized today as the Amanita Muscaria, or Fly-Agaric, had been known from the beginning of history. Beneath the skin of its characteristic red and white-spotted cap, there is concealed a powerful hallucinatory poison.
Its religious use among certain Siberian peoples and others has been the subject of a study in recent years, and its exhilarating and depressive effects have been clinically examined.
These include the stimulation of the perceptive faculties so that the subject sees objects much greater or much smaller than they really are. Colours and sounds are much enhanced, and there is a general sense of power, both physical and mental, quite outside the normal range of human experience.
Although it grows only in certain climatic conditions, the Amanita Muscaria could be dried and transported long distances by cult members.
The mushroom has always been a thing of mystery. The ancients were puzzled by its manner of growth without seed, the speed with which it made its appearance after rain, and its rapid disappearance.
Born from a volva or “egg.” It appears like a small penis, raising itself like the human organ sexually aroused, and when it spread wide its canopy the old botanists saw it as a phallus bearing the “burden” of a woman’s groin.
Every aspect of the mushroom’s existence was fraught with sexual allusions, and in its phallic form the ancients saw a replica of the fertility god himself.
Its drug was a purer form of the heavenly spermatozoa than that discoverable in any other form of living matter.
The drug was God himself, manifest on earth. To the mystic it was the divinely given means of entering heaven: God had come down in the flesh to show the way to himself, by himself.
So far I have not backed these statements of mine with proof. Let me begin by explaining how I set about my researches.
The main factor that has made these new discoveries possible has been the recovery of the oldest written language known to us—Sumerian “cuneiform” texts, dating back at their earliest to about 3,500 BC.
It now appears that this ancient tongue provides a bridge between the Indo-European languages, which include Greek, Latin and English, and the Semitic group which includes Hebrew and Aramaic.
For the first time, it becomes possible to decipher the names of gods, mythological characters – classical and biblical – and plant names. Thus their place and functions in the old fertility religions can be determined.
Stories and characters which seem quite different in the way they are presented in various locations and at widely separated points in history can now be shown to have the same central theme.
Gods previously considered as widely different as the ancient Greek Zeus and Jehovah can be seen to embody the same fundamental conception of the fertility deity, for their names have precisely the same origin.
Suddenly almost overnight, the ancient world has shrunk. All religious roads in the Near and Middle East lead back to the Mesopotamian basin – to ancient Sumer.
In biblical studies, as far as the origins of Christianity are concerned we must look not just to inter-testamental literature, the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha and the newly discovered writings from the Dead Sea, nor even merely to the Old Testament and other Semitic works.
We have to bring into consideration Sumerian religious and mythological texts and the classical writings of Asia Minor, Greece and Rome.
Above all, it is the philologians—the students of language—who must be the spearhead of the new enquiry. It is primarily a study in words
The earliest writings was by means of pictures, diagrams crudely incised on
Adapted from The Sacred Mushroom and The Cross, by John M. Allegro, to be published in May by Hodder and Stoughton 63s © John M Allegro 1970.
Illustrations by ALLAN CRACKNELL
stone and clay. However lacking such symbols may be in grammar or syntax, they do convey in an instant the one feature which seemed to the ancient scribe the most significant aspect of the object or action he is trying to represent.
“Love” he shows as a flaming torch in a container, representing a womb; a “foreign country” as hills (because he lived in a plain).
As the art of writing developed further, we can begin to recognise the first statements of ideas which later had tremendous philosophical importance – “life,” “god,” “priest,” “temple,” “grace,” “sin,” and so on.
To seek their later meanings in religious literature like the Bible we must first discover their basic meaning.
For example, “sin” for Jew and Christian originally had to do with the wasteful emission of human sperm—a blasphemy against the god who was identified with the precious liquid.
To have discovered this is not just of limited academic interest—its original meaning lies at the root of modern Catholic strictures against the Pill.
So language is important. Because of it, identification of the main characters of many of the old classical and biblical mythologies is at long last possible.
To a reader brought up to believe in the essential historic truth of the Bible narratives some of the attitudes displayed in my approach to the texts may seem strange.
I appear to be more interested with the words than with the events they seem to record.
Similarly, a century or so ago, it must have seemed strange to the average Bible student to understand the approach of a “modernist” of the day who was more interested in the ideas underlying the Creation story of Genesis and their sources than in dating, locating and identifying the real Garden of Eden, and to solving the problem of whence came Cain’s wife.
Then, it took a revolution in man’s appreciation of his development from lower forms life, and a clearer understanding of the age of this planet, to force him to abandon the idea that Genesis was historically true – that the whole of the human race could trace its origin to two people living in the middle of Mesopotamia, and that the earth had come into existence in the year 4,004 BC.
The inquirer must begin with his only real source of knowledge – the written word. As for as Judaism and Christianity are concerned, this means the Bible.

There is precious little else than can give us details about what the Israelite believed about his god and the world about him, or about the real nature of Christianity.
The sparse references to one “Christus” or “Chrestus” in the works of contemporary non-Christian historians, tell us nothing about the nature of the man, and only dubiously—despite the claims often made for them—do they support his historic existence.
They simply bear witness to the fact (never in dispute) that the stories of the Gospels were in circulation soon after 70 AD—after the revolt of 66 AD.
If we want to know more about early Christianity we must look to our only real source, the written words of the New Testament.
The New Testament is full of problems. Among the most perplexing have always been the foreign, presumed Aramaic, “nicknames” given to characters like James and John—“Boanerges,” and Joseph, surnamed “Barnabus.”
The New Testament says these nicknames mean respectively “Sons of Thunder” and “Son of Encouragement” (or “Consolation”). Unfortunately, they don’t, and no amount of diddling with the text will make the “translations” fit the names.
Scholars usually assume that mistakes have crept into the writings through the unfamiliarity of later copyists with the language Jesus and his companions are presumed to have spoken—Aramaic. So they have tended to pass these “mistakes” by with a shrug.
But they are of crucial importance. They provide us with a clue to the nature of the original “Christianity.”
Concealed within the “nicknames” and their “translations” are names of the sacred mushroom, the sect’s “Christ.”
The deliberately deceptive nature of the mistranslations puts the lie to the whole of the “cover-story” of the man Jesus and his activities.
Once the ruse is penetrated, then research can go ahead fast with fitting the Christian phenomenon more firmly into the cultic patterns of the ancient Near East.
So our first task is to find out what these “nicknames” really meant, just as, in the Old Testament, we have to attach more importance to the names of its chief characters than the situation in which they are depicted.
Of course, history now and again forced itself on my attention during my researches. Did Abraham, Isaac and Jacob ever exist as real people?
Was there ever a sojourn in Egypt of the Chosen People, or a political leader called Moses? Was the Exodus historical fact?
These and many other questions are raised afresh by my studies, but it is my contention that they are not of prime importance. Far more urgent is the meaning underlying the myths in which these names are found.
In the case of Christianity, the historical questions are perhaps more acute. If the New Testament story is not what it seems, then when and how did the Christian Church come to take it at its face value, and make the worship of one man, Jesus—crucified and miraculously brought back to life—the central theme of its religious philosophy?
For Christianity under various names, had been thriving for centuries before the supposed birth of Jesus.
We are, then, dealing with ideas rather than people. We cannot name the chief characters of our story. Doubtless there were real leaders exercising considerable power over their fellows but in the mystery cults they were never named to the outsider.
We cannot, like the Christian pietist, conjure a picture of a young man working at his father’s carpentry bench, taking little children in his arms, or talking earnestly with a Mary while her sister did the housework.
In this respect, our study is not an easy one. There is no one simple answer to the problems of the New Testament discoverable by just reshuffling the Gospel narratives to produce yet another picture of the man Jesus.
The question we have now to ask is: does the Christianity revealed for the first time by my researches fit adequately into what went BEFORE the first century—not what came after in its name?
NEXT SUNDAY
The sex-drug cult of the Sacred Mushroom—and the deciphering of the Gospel stories of Christ.
Sunday Mirror
April 12, 1970 Pg. 10
JOHN ALLEGRO’s controversial theory that strikes at the very foundations of Christianity..
THE SACRED MUSHROOM AND THE CROSS
ALL THE religions of the Near and Middle East—Judaism, Christianity and Muhammadism, as well as many of the old Greek and Persian mythologies—had the same common origin:

EXPLAINED: THE MYTHS OF MOSES AND PETER
A simple, primitive belief that God was a phallus in the sky whose orgasmic rain fertilized the womb we call earth and so produced crops and vegetation.
Then priesthoods arose – men who said they were able to act as intermediaries with the divine phallus.
And it was believed that they were able to do this by the use of a powerful drug that did indeed seem to transport them from this world to some celestial paradise.
This drug was the mushroom, Amanita Muscaria, or Fly-Agaric.
At first the secrets of the mushroom cult – the procedures and incantations that had to accompany the gathering and use of the plant—were passed on only by word of mouth.
But when the time came for them to be written down, the instructions were given in the form of a code.
Old and secret names of the sacred fungus were woven into a story about a rabbi called Jesus. On the surface his sayings and actions seemed politically blameless, and religiously and morally praiseworthy.
Under the surface, however—concealed by word-play or punning, false “translations” and similar literary devices—were the real secrets of the cult.
In the sense that the story of Jesus and his friends was intended to deceive the enemies of the sect, Jews and Romans, it was a hoax, the greatest in history.
Unfortunately it misfired. The Jews and Romans were not taken in; but the immediate successors of the first “Christians” (users of the “Christus,” the sacred mushroom) were.
The Church made the basis of its theology a legend
Adapted from The Sacred Mushroom and The Cross, by John M. Allegro, to be published in May by Hodder and Stoughton, 63s. © John Allegro, 1970. Illustrations on this page are taken from The Children’s Bible in Colour, Paul Hamlyn, 30’s.
revolving around a man crucified and resurrected—who never, in fact, existed.
Why worship a mushroom in the first place?
For one thing the hallucinations caused were a known fact. And to the ancients its very appearance added to its magical quality. A plant that grew rapidly like the male sex organ when aroused, and when it spread wide its canopy it was seen as a phallus topped by the woman’s groin – a symbol of the supreme act of fertility.
TO the ancients the mushroom was a replica of the phallus in the sky.
To the Roman naturalist, Pliny, the fungus had to be reckoned as one of the “greatest of the marvels of nature,” since it “belonged to a class of things that spring up spontaneously and cannot be grown from seed.”
Until the invention of the microscope the function of the spore, produced by each fungus in its millions, could not be appreciated.
One explanation among the ancients for the creation of the mushroom without apparent seed was that the “womb” had been fertilized by thunder, since it was commonly observed that the fungi appeared after thunderstorms.
It was thus uniquely begotten. The normal process of procreation had been by-passed. The seed had not fallen from some previous plant, to be nurtured by the earth until it produced a root and stalk.
The god had “spoken” and his creative “word” had been carried to earth by the storm – wind – an angelic message of heaven.
To see the mushroom was to see the Father, and it was as “the Holy Plant” that the sacred fungus came to be known throughout the ancient world.
HOW can we come to these conclusions?
The answer is in the study of philology—the science of words and language—and the discovery of the true origins (and therefore meanings) of the names and stories told in the Bible.
The key is only about a hundred years old: the discovery by Sir Henry Rawlinson of clay writing tablets in the ruins of ancient Nineveh in Mesopotamia.
On them were written message in a hitherto unknown language called Sumerian. The “letters” consisted of wedge – shaped (“cuneiform”) signs impressed into soft clay which was then baked in the sun.
The wedge-shaped symbols developed from small pic-
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tures of common objects like a head, leg or other parts of the human body.
Each picture represented an idea, and such primitive “writing” can offer a better understanding of the thought behind the word than later, more stylized, methods of expressing letters and syllables.
The languages of the Bible, Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, all derive ultimately from this ancient Sumerian, so we can now trace basic religious ideas farther back than ever before.
Furthermore, since proper names, like those of the gods and biblical and classical legends, tend to resist change, we can now begin to decipher their original meanings.
For example, Esau means “canopy” – the mushroom cap (hence the idea of his red skin, like the red and white-spotted cap of the Amanita muscaria).
“Moses” means “emergent snake” – a reference to the mushroom seen as a snake emerging from its hole in the ground (hence the conjuring trick with the serpent and the rod: Exodus 4.2-4). And so on.
More important, we can now decipher the names of the Jewish and classical gods, especially Jehovah and Zeus. Both mean the same: “Juice of fecundity,” the source of life.
So, despite everything we had previously thought, Jehovah was a fertility deity, and not, as commonly supposed, a desert god implacably opposed to the nature gods of Canaan and their sex rites.
Now we can begin to understand such biblical descriptive names of Jehovah as Sebaoth—“of Hosts,” as it is usually translated. Actually “Sebaoth” comes from two Sumerian words meaning “penis of the storm.” The name “Joseph” is a shortened form of the same title.
Similar phallic designations are given, as we now see, to many Sumerian, Greek and Semitic gods, tribal ancestors and heroes. Hercules, that great “club – bearer,” was named after the grossness of his sex organ, as was the Hebrew tribal ancestor Issachar.
This is just one example of how we can now span the whole area of our study and bring together apparently quite disparate religious cults

simply through being able to decipher the names and epithets of their gods.
The ancients believed that under the earth’s crust lay a “sea of knowledge” formed by the heavenly rain. Thus the souls of the dead must necessarily know more of the mind of God.
It followed that, since plants had their roots under the earth, certain of them, the drug-plants, could also tap the reservoir of divine knowledge.
So, if man could but discover by experiment those more powerful plants, he, too, could be permitted to share the secrets of the dead—and of God. He could know the future, and also be endowed with a god-like, superhuman strength of mind and body.
Among devotees of the mushroom cult, it was the Amanita Muscaria which contained this divine juice more than any other drug-plant.
It is not surprising, therefore, that the cult should have become, in the Near East, a mystery religion which persisted for thousands of years.
There seems good evidence for believing that it swept from there into India in the worship of the Soma drug, subject of many hymns of the Sanskrit Rib Veda, some 3,500 years ago.
The cult certainly flourished in Siberia in more recent times, and a possibly related version in South American has been the subject of much recent inquiry.
Partly because of the religious use of the sacred mushroom, and the fearful respect with which country folk have always treated it, its more original names became taboo and folk-names and epithets proliferated at their expense.
It is as if, in our own language, the only name by which we knew the mushroom was the folk – name “toadstool,” and that some researcher of the future was faced with the problem of deciding what species of plant life served as the habitual perch of large frogs.
In seeking for the mushroom folk-names and epithets, one of our main sources obviously will be its distinctive shape of a slender stem supporting an arched canopy, like a sun-shade. This characteristic