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THE SACRED MUSHROOM AND THE CROSS

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Was made much of in mythology. Extended to gigantic proportions, this figure is reflected in such imagery as huge men like Atlas holding up the canopy of heaven, or of mountains like Olympus serving the dual function of supporting the sky and providing a connecting link between the gods and earth.

Above all, the mushroom provoked sexual imagery and terminology. The manner of its rapid growth from the volva, or “womb,” the rapid erection of its stem, and its glans-like head, all stimulated phallic names.

Of such, as we may now recognize, is the most common Semitic name for the mushroom—phutr (Arabic), pitra (Aramaic)—portrayed in the New Testament myth as “Peter,” an invented disciple of the non-existent Jesus.

The deciphering of plant and drug names not only allows us to share the imagery their shapes provoked in the minds of the ancient botanists, but to learn of the power they were supposed to wield. This is particularly important with regard to the mandrake – an old name for the Holy Plant.

It was with the mandrake that Leah bargained with Rachel for a night of connubial bliss with Jacob (Genesis 30.14-16). It appears frequently in folk-lore as the prime magic plant and aphrodisiac.

I can show that the Greek name, Mandragoras, comes from a Sumerian phrase meaning “Fateplant-of-the-field,” and is philologically related to the classical “Nectar,” the food of the gods.’ Both in fact, represented the sacred mushroom.

 

AT LAST we can understand some of the legends about this magic plant.

We can see why it was thought to resemble parts of the human body; why it shrieked when pulled from the ground.

The Christians believed that they were the true spiritual heirs to ancient Israel.

So it was an obvious device to convey to the scattered cells of the cult reminders of their most sacred doctrines and incantatory names and expression concealed within a story of a “second Moses,” another Law-giver, named after the patriarch’s successor in office Joshua (Greek Iesus, “Jesus”).

Thus was born the Gospel myth of the New Testament.

How far it succeeded in deceiving the authorities, Jewish and Roman, is doubtful.

I can now show that one or two of the sparse references to Jesus that the ecclesiastical censors have allowed to come on in Jewish written traditions demonstrate without doubt that, at least at the beginning, Jews knew full well what the “Jesus” was that the Christians worshipped. The references also show clearly that the Jews despised the whole business as much as did the Romans.

The Romans could not find words low enough to describe the Christians they hounded out from their secret meetings and tortured to death. And the Romans were famed for their religious tolerance!

Those most deceived appear to have been the sect who took over the name “Christian” (“semen-smeared”), and formed the basis of the modern church.

But by then the prime ingredient of their sacred meal had been lost—or suppressed – and its priests offered the initiates in its place a wafer and sweet wine, assuring them that before the Host touched their lips it would have changed into the flesh and blood of God.

Foremost among the literary devices used to encode secret names for the sacred mushroom was word-playing or punning. There are many examples of this in the Old Testament, and it was commonly used by Jewish teachers to discover supposed hidden meanings in Bible texts.

Here are examples of mushroom-name puns in a New Testament writer’s passage on the wisdom and foolishness of Christian teaching.

He ingeniously inserts the following phrase:

“For the Jews demand signs and the Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling – block to Jews and folly to Gentiles . . .” (I Corinthians 1.23).

The word “stumbling-block” (Greek skandalon, our “scandal”) is properly used of a “trap” or “snare.” It denotes a knobbed stick or bolt upon which the bait is placed, and which, if tripped by the prey, sets off the trap itself.

So metaphorically it is used for any impediment which hinders or traps an unwitting person.

The Greek word skandalon, we can now appreciate, originally meant “bolt.” Its Aramaic equivalent was tiqla, and the phallic mushroom was sometimes called a “bolt – plant” because the shape of the primitive key or bolt was, in essence, a short rod surmounted by a knob.

So we may decipher the first part: To the Jews (i.e., in the Jewish language), the “Christ crucified” (the semen-anointed, erect phallic mushroom) is a “bolt-plant” (tiqla – mushroom, “stumbling – block”). The second part neatly

 

 

Confirms the first: “and folly to the Gentiles” (that is, Greeks). The Greek work for “folly” is moria, and Morios was a Greek word for the mushroom! Now the pun is made clear.

The “stumbling-block” (tiqla, “boltmushroom”) pun appears quite frequently. We know it best in the text in Matthew 16 about Peter and the “keys” of heaven. In it, Peter—the mushroom—is given the “key,” or “bolt” of paradise (v. 19), and is called a “stumbling-block” (v. 23).

The other part of that text about Peter being the “rock” foundation of the Church-on which the Roman Catholics place so much emphasis—is a double wordplay.

Not only is there the long-recognised pun on Peter-Petros in Greek and petra (rock) and pitra (mushroom)—but there is also a pun on the Latin cepa, one of a number of “onion” words which were used of the similarly formed bulbed mushroom. (The French still call certain mushrooms “cepe” or “ceps”—after the Latin.)

Even calling the name “satan” (“Get thee behind me…v. 23) is in line with the depa pun, since Setanion is another Latin name which also means onion or mushroom.

One of our common vegetables is chicory, a variant form of whose name in Greek is Korkoron. This last occurs also as a mushroom name, and Pliny’s description of “chicor” shows that whatever plant he is describing it is not the culinary root we know so well:

“Those who have anointed themselves with the juice of the whole plant, mixed with oil, become more popular and obtain their wishes more easily…so great are its health-giving properties that some call it Chreston…”

 

SOME ancient confusion through similarity in words has taken place here.

The juice was to be “rubbed on” or “anointed” (christos), and its properties were so beneficial that it was called Chreston (Greek khrestos, “good honest, health-bestowing,” etc.).

One is reminded of the form of the name by which non-Christians spoke of the object of the sect’s adoration – Chrestus.

Suetonius speaks of the emperor Claudius having to expel Jews from Rome because they were making a disturbance “at the instigation of Chrestus.”

What Pliny is describing then is the “Jesus Christ” mushroom whose consumption brought upon the first-century Christians the vilification and contempt of the Roman historians.

 

NEXT SUNDAY

 

Sunday Mirror

April 19, 1970 Pg. 34

 

WORSHIP BY ORGY TURNED THESE WOMEN INTO WITCHES

A startling theory that Christianity is a hoax based on a sex-drug cult

By JOHN ALLEGRO

 

Illustration: Hermann Degkwitz

 

 

AS WE now know from our studies of ancient Sumerian writings dating back to 3,500 BC, God was originally thought of as a giant phallus in the sky.

His fertile seed—rain—fell to the womb called earth, causing it to “give birth” to crops and vegetation.

And we also know that this let to a special priesthood – men who could act as intermediaries with the heavenly phallus.

They achieved this by the use of the “Holy Plant”—a plant whose juices were a powerful hallucinatory drug that could indeed seem to transport its users to another world.

This plant was the mushroom known as Amanita muscaria.

And from my researches as a philologist—a student of languages and words—I know now that when the time came for the secrets of the mushroom cult to be written down to preserve them intact in a hostile world, it was done in a kind of code.

Within the story of a rabbi called Jesus were woven names and incantations used in the gathering and consuming of the sacred fungus.

 

The Church made the basis of its theology a legend revolving round a man Jesus, crucified and resurrected, who never, in fact, existed.

In the sense that the story of Jesus and his friends was intended to deceive 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 these first “Christians” (users of the “Christus,” the sacred mushroom) were.

It was a concentration of the powerful juice of the “Holy Plant” that the Magi—the magicians or Wise men (the great pedlars of the ancient world) – believed would give anyone anointed with it amazing power. They could “obtain every wish, banish fevers and cure all  diseases without exception.”

So the Christian, the “smeared or anointed one,” received “knowledge of all things” by his “anointing from the Holy One” (I John 2.20).

Thereafter he had need of no other teacher and remained for ever-

More endowed with all knowledge.

Whatever the full ingredients of the Christian unction may have been, they would certainly have included the aromatic gums and spices of the traditional Israelite anointing oil: myrrh, aromatic cane, cinnamon and cassia.

That these ingredients formed only part of the sacred formula is well known. Josephus, the Jewish historian of Roman times, says there were thirteen elements, and the Talmud names eleven, plus salt, and a secret herb which was added to make the smoke rise in a vertical column before spreading outwards at the top.

With the characteristic shape of a mushroom in mind we can now hazard a fair guess at the secret ingredient.

Knowledge and healing were two aspects of the same life-force. To be rubbed with the Holy Plant was to receive divine knowledge. It also cured every sickness.

Josephus suggests that anyone of the Christian community who was sick should call the elders to anoint him with oil in the name of Jesus (the Epistle of James 5.14)—in other words with the juice of the sacred mushroom.

 

Use of the name “Jesus” as an invocation for healing was appropriate enough.

Its Hebrew origin which we know as “Joshua” comes from a Sumerian phrase meaning “semen which saves” or “restores.”

The fertility god of the Greeks, Dionysus (otherwise known as Bacchus, the good of the wild women known as Bacchantes), whose symbol was the erect penis, has virtually the same name as Joshua (or Jesus), as we can now recognise from their mutual Sumerian source.

Their orgiastic rites were derived from the same maddening drug of the Amanita Muscaria.

The Twelve Apostles are sent out among their fellow-men casting out demons and anointing the sick with oil (Mark 6.13). Healing by unction persisted in the Church until the 12^th century, and the anointing of the dying—“extreme unction”—has persisted in the Roman Catholic Church.

The principle behind this practice remains the same: God’s “seed-of-life” imparts life to the ailing or the dead.

Things, as well as people, could be anointed so that they became “holy”—that is separated to the god’s service. The Semitic word for “holy” is fundamentally a fertility word.

The anointing into holiness of kings and priests is again largely imitative in character. The prime duty of the king was to ensure the fertility of the land and well-being of his subjects. Many of the Greek and Semitic words for “lord” and “lordship” convey this idea when seen in their Sumerian form.

The priest’s function was also to see that the god played his part in inseminating the land.

 

THE SACRED MUSHROOM AND THE CROSS

The most common Hebrew word for “priest” –kohen—familiar as well-known Jewish surname, comes from a Sumerian title meaning literally, “guardian of semen.”

Pouring the sacred juices over the heads of these dignitaries was intended to represent them as “gods”—replicas of the divine phallus.

So we anoint our Sovereign at the coronation ceremony.

In our churches the ritual processio0n through the nave to the alter, headed by the fertility symbol of the cross and the anointed Bishop, preserves the ancient idea of the fertility god entering his house.

In the phallic mushroom—the “man-child” born of the “virgin” womb – we have the reality behind the Christ figure of the New Testament story.

By imitating the mushroom by eating it and sucking its juice (or “blood”), the Christian was taking unto himself the panoply of his god, as were the priests in the sanctuary.

As the priests “served” the god in the temple—the symbolic womb of divine creation—so the Christians and their cultic associates worshipped their god and mystically involved themselves in the creative process.

In the language of the mystery cults they sought to be “born again,” when –purged afresh of past sin—they could apprehend the god in drug-induced ecstasy.

 

Women had their roles in the ancient cult. There were the sacred prostitutes—an office well known in the ancient world.

It is usually assumed that the woman dedicated herself to the service of the god as a sexual partner in some imitative ritual designed to stimulate the generative faculties of the fertility deity.

Doubtless, in many of the cults she did perform such a function, copulating before the alter with the priests or other male worshippers at certain festivals.

There are also indications that it was considered necessary to make some sort of booth or covering for the prostitute and the magic plant during the seduction.

Hosea specifies that the sacred prostitutes practised their art under the trees, where “the shade is good” (4.13).

Ezekiel speaks of some kind of full-length veil by which they “ensnared souls” (13.18).

The Holy Plant had not be uprooted under cover of darkness, “lest the act be seen by the woodpecker of Mars” (perhaps a folk-name for the red-topped Amanita Muscaria), or “the sun and moon.”

The sexual power of women was vital to the mystery cults and accounts in large measure for the attractiveness of cuts to women from the earliest times.

It also has much to do with the antagonism towards sexuality generally and the distrust of women displayed by the laser Church, and the readiness with which supposed witches were hounded by Christians until quite recent times.

The telepathic control over people’s minds exercised by such females, known the world over as “the evil eye,” came originally from this ability to arouse men’s passions.

The Latin fascinus, from which our “fascination” comes, as well as meaning “bewitching,” was also the proper name of a deity with a phallic emblem, and this as we can now appreciate, is the original source of this word and the Greek baskanos, “sorcerer.”

It was believed that the malign influences of “fascination,” which came to be extended to any form of mental dominance, could be averted by wearing on the person a model phallic symbol—rather as the Christian symbol of the Cross is currently displayed by those within and without the Church toward off evil.

A similar connection between sexual influence and sorcery appears in the derivation of our word “magic.” Its immediate source is the Latin magus, representing the Old Persian magush, the title of a religious official whose power of mind and body earned him a reputation for sorcery—and shoes name meant originally “big penis.”

Ezekiel, in describing the necromantic (divination from the dead) ritual of the witches, says they fastened on their wrists “magic bands,” as our English versions translate the Hebrew (13.18).

As we can now appreciate, the Sumerian original means “magical imprisonment,” and is portrayed in scenes of mystery rites of the Dionysiac cult as a basket from which a serpent’s head is emerging.

The symbolism here represents the matted vulva bursting open to reveal the emergent mushroom, anciently identified with the snake.

Here is the origin of the magic practice of serpent-charming, as well as of such mythologies as Moses (“emergent snake.” as his name means) in his basket in the bull-rushes (exodus 2-3).

 

The snake is an important feature of Dionysiac (Bacchic) imagery and cultic rites.

The Maenads are pictured with serpents entwined in their hair and round their limbs.

In the case of Ezekiel’s witches, their soul-catching “baskets” were brought along partly to offer some imitative encouragement to the dormant fungus to open and reveal itself.

It is not difficult to understand the reasoning behind the ancient identification of the mushroom and the serpent. Both emerged from holes in the ground, could erect themselves, and both bore