The Snake & The sacred Mushroom Pt.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
in their heads a fiery poison which the ancients believed could pass from one to the other.
The prime example of the relation between the serpent and the mushroom is, of course, in the Garden of Eden story of the Old Testament.
The cunning reptile prevails upon Eve and her husband to eat of the tree whose fruit “made them as gods, knowing good and evil” (Gen 3.4).
The whole Eden story is mushroom-based mythology-not least in the identity of the “tree” as the sacred fungus.
Even as late as the 13th century some recollection of the old tradition was known among Christians, to judge from a fresco painted on the wall of a ruined church in Plaincourault in France.
There the Amanita Muscaria is gloriously portrayed entwined with a serpent, while Eve stands by, her hands on her belly.
As we saw, women had an important part to play in the mushroom cult.
Another of their activities lay in that curious phenomenon – religious lamentation. This sympathetic identification of the worshipper with a suffering god seems to be a necessary part of most religions.
To see Catholic women, particularly in Mediterranean countries, racked with real grief at Eastertide as they contemplate the Crucifix and the wounds of their Lord, can leave little doubt that they are suffering real mental anguish.
There is apparently in human beings, and in women particularly, a capacity for sympathetic grief – which demands dramatic expression – however historically improbable the tragic events and persons they re-enact in their imaginations.
Ritual lamentation has a sexual significance as can now be demonstrated by its terminology.
Whatever inward emotional satisfaction the practice of lamenting the dead god may have achieved, its basic intention was to bring him back to life.
In the case of agricultural communities, the dead god is a personifica-
tion of the fertility of the soil deemed to have perished during the hot summer months, but capable of being revivified under the influence of the autumn and spring rains—the fertilization of the father-god in heaven.
Thus the lamentation ceremonies were intended to rejuvenate the dormant phallus of the fertility deity.
The common word in the Hebrew Old Testament for “lamentation” we now recognise as having come from a Sumerian term meaning “erect”.
It is related to other words in Hebrew and Greek for a musical instrument, kinnor and kinura (“penis erector”) respectively. This is the harlot’s “harp” of Isaiah 23.16, the “lyre” of David, whose playing relived the maniacal fits of Saul (I Samuel 16.16, etc.).
The priestesses whose task it was to make ritual lamentation for the dead god—or the dormant mushroom—by screeching and wailing had their classical counterpart in the female votaries of the god Bacchus/Dionysus – the so-called Bacchantes, “raisers of the phallic mushroom,” as we now understand the term.
They were noted for their drug-induced frenzy, at one moment whirling in a mad dance, tossing their heads, and driving one another on with screaming and wild clamour of musical instruments. At another, they were sunk in the deepest lethargy.
The Bacchantes both possessed the god and were possessed by him; theirs was a religious “enthusiasm” in the proper sense of that term—that is, “god-filled.”
NEXT SUNDAY: What John Allegro says the Lord’s Prayer really means.
Sunday Mirror
April 26, 1970 Pg. 28
ABRACADABRA –the magic phrase hidden in the Lord’s Prayer
THE SACRED MUSHROOM AND THE CROSS
JOHN ALLEGRO’s startling theory that challenges all Christian belief.
THERE always have been extreme difficulties in understanding the story of Jesus.
There are in the New Testament problems posed on historical, geographical, topographical, social and religious grounds which have never been resolved.
But to the Christian scholar they have always seemed of less relevance than the apparently incontrovertible fact of the existence of one, semi-divine man who set the whole Christian movement in motion, and without whose existence the inauguration of the Church would seem inexplicable.
But if it now transpires that Christianity was only a latter-day manifestation of a religious movement that had existed for thousands of years—what then?
Let it be emphasized: if only one of the mushroom references of the cryptic phrases of the New Testament text were correct, then a new element has to be reckoned with in the nature and origin of Christianity.
If the stories of Jesus are no more historically real than those of Adam and Eve, Jacob and Esau and even of Moses, what of the Bible’s moral teachings?
How far can our new appreciation of the origins and nature of Judaism and Christianity allow us to accord its teaching universal authority?
This, perhaps, is the most crucial issue raised by the present discoveries.
And in my mind there is no doubt that thanks to these discoveries about the origin of the languages of the Bible—Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, and their related tongues – the stories of the New Testament have indeed been exposed as myths.
Just as years ago Bible commentators realized that when the writer of the New Testament Book of Revelation wrote “Babylon” in his political diatribe he meant the enemy Rome, so we know now that when the Gospel writers speak of Jesus, Peter, James and John, and so on, they are really personifying the sacred mushroom – the Amanita Muscaria. They are spinning stories from its cult-names.
But what of the crucifixion of Jesus?
Well, for a start, one of the names for the mushroom which has come down in Aramaic, with a somewhat different reference, was “The Little Cross.” To understand the significance of this folk-name, we have to appreciate the nature of the ancient instrument of death.
The Roman crux, or “cross” itself, was a straight or forked piece of wood which the criminal carried across his shoulders like a yoke to the place of execution.
There his wrists were tied to the extremities of the “yoke” and this stretcher was then hoisted to the top of a pole set in the ground (the Greek stauros).
This gave the well known form of the cross of Christian symbolism.
Sometimes, some of the weight was taken off the wrists or hands by providing the upright with a projection peg to support the wretched man’s crutch. It was called a “saddle” (Latin sedile).
In all this, the ancient worshipper of the sacred mushroom saw a striking, if gruesome, similarity with the adored object of his religion.
The cross piece was the mushroom cap and the upright support was the stem of the fungus.
Every aspect of the phallic mushroom was replete with sexual allusions, and the sign of the cross was primarily a sexual fertility symbol.
It is with this significance that the cross became the sign of the phallic god Hermes, erected throughout the ancient world at cross-roads, and thought to bring good luck to travelers, as the Crucifix is commonly displayed by the roadside in Catholic countries today.
In the case of the Hermes symbol, not only have we the upright and two “arms but half-way up the vertical post was fixed a replica phallus, to remind the passer-by of the god’s fertility powers.
This phallus—“saddle”—is possibly preserved symbolically today in the double cross-piece of the characteristic crucifix of the eastern churches.
The Semitic verb for “crucify” as used in the Old Testament means stretch out, disjoint. So the “crucifixion” of the “Christ” fungus in these terms meant the stretching out of the mushroom at its fullest extent.
Thereafter the fungus speedily wilts and rots away. The ancient saw in its fast “growth,” and speedy death, a microcosm of nature.
For they believed the fungus no less miraculously came to life again, and after a day or two its red tip could be seen pushing its way through the pine needles of its natural habitat.
The god had been resurrected.
THE Easter story of the New Testament simply puts into human story terms the “crucifixion” of the sacred mushroom.
This is followed by its return to the mother earth that gave it birth and its resurrection to life after thirty-six hours.
And what of the words supposedly spoken by Jesus at the time of this crucifixion?
“At the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?’” which means “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Mark 15.34).
Unfortunately, it doesn’t. “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani” is an ingenious approximation to ancient incantation to the mushroom.
The whole name will have meant “the cone of the erect mushroom.” That is the cap, or “glans” of the fungus.
It has, of course, nothing at all to do with a Semitic phrase about “forsaking” anyone.
The invocation was meant to be made when the devotee was on the point of pulling up the sacred mushroom—that is, after it had been “crucified” or stretched out to its full.
It reminds us of another invocation to God. When Jesus speaks of the deity he is often made to say “My father who art in heaven,” and the Lord’s Prayer starts off similarly: “Our father who art in heaven…”
“My/our father who art in heaven” conceals at a Semitic level of understanding another secret name of the sacred fungus.
The original, which meant “sky-stretched canopy of the cone,” was cleverly teased into an Aramaic phrase “abba debaregi’u,” “O my (our) father who art in heaven!”
Having now penetrated the disguise and laid bare the original Sumerian from which the name must have been derived, we can recognise it in a somewhat jumbled form in a phrase we have all known from our childhood story-books—“abracadabra.”
Originally it had a far more serious intent, and is first found in the writings of a second-century physician of a heretical “Christian” sect, the Gnostics.
This author left precise instructions for the use of “abracadabra,” which by that time had come to be used simply as a magical phrase to ward off evil.
Having broken the code of the “Lord’s Prayer” to this extent, we can go on and solve a number of perplexing problems in the text which have engaged scholars’ attention for centuries.
The Ten Commandments form part of a mushroom myth in the Old Testament story of Moses and Mount Sinai.
Even the two slabs of stone on which the “Ten Words” were inscribed by the finger of God originated from the “bun” shape of the primitive writing tablet, resembling the top of a mushroom. Indeed, it is from one of the names of the fungus that, through Greek and Latin, we derive our word “tablet.”
The Old Testament Story of Moses and the Ten Commandments
was a myth disguising mushroom worship, Allegro Claims.
Illustration from the Mansell Collection.
THE name of the sacred mountain, Sinai, comes, as we can now see, from a Sumerian word meaning “brazier.”
This accounts for its description as “wrapped in smoke…like the smoke of a kiln” (Exodus 19.18)
The fiery-topped Amanita Muscaria seemed to the ancients like a brazier.
When Moses, the serpent-mushroom character, meets Jehovah there and receives the “tablets of testimony,” he finds after the interview that his face is glowing so much that people are afraid to approach him (Exodus 34.30).
The substance of the Ten Commandments, hover well rooted some of them may have been in ancient tribal laws, owe their form and position in the story to word-play on ancient mushroom names.
The ancient Israelite religion of Jehovah worship was based largely on the mushroom cult. Many other of the old myths about the patriarchs—stories like Jacob and Esau, representing the stem and red cap of the sacred fungus respectively—now reveal for the first time their mushroom connections.
The earlier legends are not cryptic writings, like those of Jesus and his friends. They are merely mushroom folk-lore, illustrating in entertaining story form, aspects of the mysterious fungus.
Later the cult came under pressure from a new “orthodoxy” in Judaism which tried to root out all traces of the fertility religion that gave it birth.
The sacred mushroom cult then went underground, to reappear with even more disastrous results in the first and second centuries AD, when the drug-crazed “Zealots” (another pun on a mushroom name) and their successors again challenged the might of Rome.
A “reformed” Christianity then drove its drug-takers into the desert as “heretics,” and eventually so conformed to the will of the State that in the fourth century it became an integral part of the ruling establishment.
By then its priests had forgotten the codes and the true meaning of Christ’s name—and were taking the words of the hoax literally—trying to convince their followers that the Host had miraculously become the flesh and juice of the god.
But, as I said at the beginning, what matters is the moral teaching of the Bible.
Can it be argued that the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount embody a store of moral idealism that will serve mankind for a long time –irrespective of their origins?
If some aspect of the Christian ethic still seem worth while today, does it add or detract from their validity that they were promulgated two thousand years ago by worshippers of the Amanita Muscaria?
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Meneame
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