The Sacred Mushroom And The Cross

The book was the culmination of twenty years’ study of Semitic and proto-Semitic languages. Allegro hoped it would illuminate the origins of thought, language and religion. People should then be able to better understand where they came from, shed the trappings of religion, and take true responsibility for what they did to each other and their world.

None of this got past the initial shock-waves. The mushroom cloud spread more derision than enlightenment.

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:

The most important thing in life was life itself, and life is rain. The reasoning is simple. Rain begets vegetation on the earth as spermatozoa beget offspring in the womb. God, the Creator, the source of rain, must therefore be the sperm of creation and the heavenly penis from which it spills. The storm is the orgasm of God. The drops of rain are the ‘words’ of God. Earth is the womb of creation.

In The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, he ‘set out to trace the expression of this simple philosophy through the sacred literature of the ancient world’.

The clues lay in the development and spread of written language. They criss-cross different cultures and lead into many-layered webs of association. They led Allegro to believe that a fertility cult based on using the sacred mushroom, Amanita muscaria, as a gateway to divine understanding, was at the root of many religions, including early Christianity. The mushroom was seen as a symbol of God on earth. But because mushroom lore was secret, he reasoned that it had to be written down in the form of codes hidden in folk tales. “This is the basic origin of the stories of the New Testament. They were a literary device to spread the rites of mushroom worship to the faithful…The stories of the Gospels and Acts were a deliberate hoax. Through studying Sumerian cuneiform texts which go back to 3500 B.C., we can trace the proper names and words used in the Bible back to their original meanings.”

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.