Table Of ContentCABACim
The
r
Sacred
Mushroom
and the
Cross
John M. Allegro
About the author
John Allegro was bom in London in 1923. When he left the Royal
Navy in 1946 he trained as a Methodist minister at the Hartley
Victoria Ministerial Training College. After two terms he left to
study at Manchester University, where he graduated in 1951 with
a first class degree in Semitic Studies. Obtaining his M.A., based
on philological study of the Balaam Oracles, he carried out further
research at Oxford on dialects of Biblical Hebrew. In 1952 he
became one of two British representatives on an international team
in Jerusalem which began the work of piecing together, deciphering
and publishing the Dead Sea Scroll fragments from Cave 4 at
Qumran. Returning to England, he became Assistant Lecturer on
Comparative Semitic Philology at Manchester University. Following
publication of Treasure of the Copper Scroll, Allegro joined a British
expedition to Jordan and in 1961 was appointed Honorary Adviser
on the Scrolls by the Jordanian Government. In 1966 he was co
writer of a play called The Lively Oracles which examined the pos
sible effects of the discovery in the Scrolls of some aspects of early
Jewish Christianity which might upset ecclesiastical dogma. He
then started research based on an unpublished scrap of the Scrolls
which seemed to him to cast an entirely different light on the story
of the New Testament. The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross is the
fruit of this research.
By the same author
Dead Sea Scrolls (Pelican)
People of the Dead Sea Scrolls (Doubleday, N.Y.)
Treasure of the Copper Scroll (Routledge & Kegan Paul)
Search in the Desert (Doubleday, N.Y.)
The Shapira Affair (Doubleday, N.Y.)
Discoveries in the Judean Desert of Jordan:
Qumran Cave 4 (Clarendon Press, Oxford)
End of a Road (MacGibbon & Kee)
John M. Allegro
THE SACRED MUSHROOM
AND THE CROSS
A study of the nature and origins of Christianity
within the fertility cults of the ancient Near East
Revised Abacus edition published 1973
by Sphere Books Ltd
30/32 Gray’s Inn Road, London WC1X 8JL
Reprinted 1974
First published in Great Britain by
Hodder and Stoughton Ltd 1970
Reprinted 1970 (three times)
Copyright © John M. Allegro 1970
This edition has been slightly revised by the author.
Notes and appendices published in the original
edition have been omitted and a new Preface
provided.
ISBN 0 349 10065 9
This book is sold subject to the condition that it
shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re
sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the
publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or
cover other than that in which it is published and
without a similar condition including this condition
being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Set in Linotype Times
Printed in Great Britain by Cox & Wyman Ltd,
London, Reading and Fakenham
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Quotations from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copy
righted 1952 and 1956, are used by permission.
Quotations from the Homeric Hymns, Pliny’s Natural History, and
Josephus’ Jewish Wars and Antiquities are used by permission of the
Loeb Classical Library.
CONTENTS
Preface 9
Introduction 11
1 In the Beginning God Created ... 23
2 Sumer and the Beginnings of History 31
3 The Names of the Gods 43
4 Plants and Drugs 53
5 Plant Names and the Mysteries of the Fungus 61
6 The Key of the Kingdom 69
7 The Man-child Born of a Virgin 79
8 Woman’s part in the Creative Process 88
9 The Sacred Prostitute 101
10 Religious Lamentation 108
11 The Mushroom “Egg*’and Birds of Mythology 116
12 The Heavenly Twins 123
13 Star of the Morning 136
14 Colour and Consistency 146
15 Mushroom Cosmography 163
16 David, Egypt, and the Census 171
17 Death and Resurrection 182
18 The Garden of Adonis, Eden and Delight;
Zealots and Muslims 210
19 The Bible as a Book of Morals 225
Index 241
PREFACE
The appearance three years ago of The Sacred Mushroom and the
Cross in its original, hard-cover edition, was the occasion for much
hostile criticism, most of it ill-informed and emotional. Less re
ligiously committed readers must have been somewhat taken aback
by the violence of the reaction, particularly when it stemmed from
supposedly disinterested academic quarters. For example, within
weeks of publication, fifteen university dons, apparently intent on
allaying outraged piety, signed a joint letter to The Times affirming
that in their opinion “this work is an essay in fantasy rather than
philology”. Since then none of the signatories, even the four or five
of their number competent to assess that aspect of the work, have felt
willing or able to substantiate this cursory dismissal of many years’
patient study. We must sadly conclude that in this country at least we
shall have to await the succession of a new generation of specialists
in Near Eastern and classical studies to exploit the considerable ad
vances offered by this work.
For the majority of interested and intelligent laymen, however,
less careful for the preservation of outmoded doctrinal concepts and
the rigid boundaries of academic disciplines, the book has proved a
stimulating challenge and hope for the future. For the first time we
can now see scientifically adduced grounds for believing that the
cultures and languages of East and West stemmed from a common
source, preserved at its earliest historical manifestation in the records
of ancient Sumer. It may not be too much to hope, therefore, that a
much-needed bridge between some of the oldest divisions of
mankind may yet be achieved by reference to this unity of
origin.
Not everyone is primarily interested in the sources of Christianity
or the unhistorical nature of much of the Gospel tradition. May I,
therefore, commend to the attention of my readers those aspects of
The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross that have so often been lost
sight of amid the howls of protests from antagonized defenders of
the Faith? I have adduced much new material for the understanding
9
and decipherment of many of the old plant names and myths pre
served by the ancient botanists, historians and physicians. There is a
wealth of new evidence here to be tapped and developed by re
searchers and enquiring laymen.
Another topic touched upon in these pages is the old philosophical
concept of the balance of nature. Present-day discussions on ecology
have placed renewed emphasis upon the anciently discovered truth
that what is snatched from Mother Earth must somehow be re
placed. The old fertility religions knew this well and made it central
to their faith and practice. I have developed the theme in some
greater detail in my later work, The End of a Road.
This latest paper-back edition of The Sacred Mushroom and the
Cross presents an opportunity for a larger number of readers to
explore the paths of enquiry opened by these new researches into the
sources of our cultures and religions. There can be no finality in such
explorative work, no dogmaticism, no bigoted obscurantism. The
book covers far too wide a field for any claim that the subjects in
volved have been treated exhaustively. In the sphere of comparative
philology, particularly, deeper studies from the point of view of each
family of tongues and dialects are needed to determine the full pos
sibilities of the discoveries made. Even the notes offered at the end of
the first, hard-cover edition could, in the space available, make only
fleeting references to radical sources and verbal parallels. In all cases,
however, sufficient was given for specialists to follow them through
and develop their possibilities.
In this smaller edition, the notes have been dropped for purposes
of economy. Readers wishing to pursue particular topics in more
detail are referred to the notes in the hard-cover version.
J. M. ALLEGRO
Ballasalla, Isle of Man
10
INTRODUCTION
No one religion in the ancient Near East can be studied in isolation.
All stem from man’s first questioning about the origin of life and how
to ensure his own survival. He has always been acutely conscious of
his insufficiency. However much he progressed technically, making
clothes, shelter, conserving food and water supplies, and so on, the
forces of nature were always greater than he. The winds would blow
away his shelter, the sun parch his crops, wild beasts prey on his
animals: he was always on the defensive in a losing battle. Out of this
sense of dependency and frustration, religion was born.
Somehow man had to establish communications with the source of
the world’s fertility, and thereafter maintain a right relationship with
it. Over the course of time he built up a body of experiential know
ledge of rituals that he or his representatives could perform, or words
to recite, which were reckoned to have the greatest influence on this
fertility deity. At first they were largely imitative. If rain in the desert
lands was the source of life, then the moisture from heaven must be
only a more abundant kind of spermatozoa. If the male organ ejacu
lated this precious fluid and made life in the woman, then above the
skies the source of nature’s semen must be a mighty penis, as the earth
which bore its offspring was the womb. It followed therefore that to
induce the heavenly phallus to complete its orgasm, man must stimu
late it by sexual means, by singing, dancing, orgiastic displays and,
above all, by the performance of the copulatory act itself.
However far man progressed in his control of the world about him
there remained a large gap between what he wanted at any one time
and what he could achieve on his own account. There was always
some unscalable mountain, some branch of knowledge which re
mained unpenetrable, some disease with no known cure. It seemed to
him that if he had managed painstakingly to grope his way to a know
ledge and dexterity so far above the animals, then in some mysterious
way his thinkers and artisans must have been tapping a source of
wisdom no less real than the rain that fructified the ground. The
heavenly penis, then, was not only the source of life-giving semen, it
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