by Alex Boese
These were just a few of the hidden mushroom references that Allegro found in the New Testament. There were many more. But what should we make of them? They seemed far too numerous to chalk up to chance or coincidence. Allegro concluded that they were, instead, evidence that the authors of the holy book must have been members of some kind of mushroom cult.
Once clued into its existence, Allegro began to suspect that this cult had played a pivotal role in the history of Western religion – a role which had previously been undetected by scholars and was only stumbled upon by him because of his linguistic expertise. He became obsessed by the idea of uncovering this history. His daughter, Judith Anne Brown, later wrote that her main memory of him from this time, when she was a teenager and he was working on The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, was that he was forever in his office, barricaded behind trays of index cards and reams of notes, compiling evidence to support his theory.
The story, as he eventually pieced it together, was that, long ago in the Stone Age (he was vague about the exact date), a mushroom-worshiping fertility cult must have arisen among the people living in Mesopotamia. He imagined these people believing that rain was the sperm of the great sky god that fell on the womb of the Earth, giving birth to her children, the plants. Mushrooms, to them, would have been the most special plant of all, because the fungi possessed remarkable powers. They grew from the soil as if by magic, without a seed – a virgin birth – and their shape resembled a thrusting phallus, making them a symbol of the fecundity of the sky god manifested on Earth.
One mushroom in particular, Allegro theorized, would have captured the attention of these primitive people. This was the psychedelic species Amanita muscaria, more commonly known as fly agaric. It has a very distinctive appearance, featuring a bright red cap speckled with white dots. The really attention-grabbing aspect of this mushroom, however, wasn’t what it looked like, but rather what happened when it was ingested, because it then granted wondrous visions. The early Mesopotamians might have believed these were glimpses of the divine knowledge of the sky god himself.
Allegro concluded that a cult must have formed around the worship of this mushroom, with a priesthood dedicated to preserving the various rituals, incantations and preparations necessary for using it. As this was powerful knowledge that couldn’t be shared with the common people, the priests made sure it was kept secret, hidden behind an elaborate veil of cryptic codes and secret names, and never written down.
So far, so good. Allegro’s theory of an ancient Mesopotamian mushroom cult may have been seen as highly conjectural by other scholars, but few would have taken offense at it. His next move, however, proved far more controversial, because he skipped ahead in his alternative history of religion to the first century AD.
During the intervening centuries, he speculated, the mushroom cult had clashed repeatedly with the secular authorities of monarchs and their bureaucrats. The kind of visionary powers its priests invoked were far too volatile for the liking of political leaders. It had been forced to go underground, but pockets of it remained – small groups who continued to pass down the sacred knowledge of the mushroom from one generation to the next. One of these groups, he concluded, was to be found in the Roman province of Judea. It was a radical Jewish sect whose members called themselves Christians.
The term Christian, Allegro explained, derived from the Greek word Christos, meaning ‘rubbed on’ or ‘anointed’. That much is standard linguistics. Jesus Christ means ‘Jesus the anointed one’. The traditional explanation is that the term refers back to the ancient Jewish practice of anointing kings with oil. Allegro, however, hypothesized that the Christians might have acquired the name because they rubbed a mushroom-infused hallucinogenic oil into their skin as part of their rituals. And that was just the start of his reinterpretation of Christian symbolism. His other claims were even more sensational.
For example, Allegro claimed that the name ‘Jesus’ didn’t refer to a person at all. It was actually an ancient term for the fly agaric mushroom, deriving from the Hebrew name Joshua, which, in turn, came from a Sumerian phrase meaning ‘semen which saves’, referring to the mushroom as the phallic representation of the sky god.
Christians also frequently spoke of the death and resurrection of Jesus. Again, according to Allegro, this was part of mushroom lore, being a coded allusion to the life cycle of the mushroom: how it sprouted quickly, as if from a virgin birth, spread out its canopy, then died, but returned again in a few days. Similarly, he said, the cross that the Christians used as the symbol of their faith was fungal in origin. The Aramaic verb for ‘crucify’ meant ‘to stretch out’. So, the ‘crucifixion’ of Jesus referred to the stretching out of the mushroom to its fullest extent. The cross itself was simply a highly stylized representation of the mushroom with its canopy stretched out. ‘The little cross’, Allegro noted, was an Aramaic term for a mushroom.
All this might have remained hidden knowledge, according to Allegro, if the Romans hadn’t sent troops to Judea in 66 AD to put down the Jewish unrest there, sparking a brutal war that dragged on for seven years and culminated with the famous Siege of Masada. He speculated that the Romans must have cracked down particularly hard on the Christians who had been stirring up trouble by proclaiming that the end of times – and, by extension, the end of the Roman Empire – was near. This was a belief they had arrived at, he said, thanks to their mushroom-induced visions.
Forced to flee Jerusalem, Allegro speculated that the Christian priests had decided on the desperate gamble of writing down their sacred lore, lest it be lost entirely. They took elaborate measures to conceal their secrets, however, embedding them within a cover story about a friendly Jewish rabbi who preached universal love. This text was the New Testament, which brought Allegro’s alternative history of religion full circle, as it provided him with an explanation for the cryptic mushroom references which had been the puzzle that launched his scholarly journey of discovery in the first place.
There was one more act in Allegro’s alternative history, however. It was an ironic twist of fate, which occurred, he said, when knowledge of how to interpret the Christian texts properly was forgotten during the following centuries. This left the cover story as all that people understood, and it was on this misleading facade that modern Christianity arose.
Although, he said, one could still see echoes of the original mushroom cult in various Christian practices, such as the ritual of Holy Communion. Didn’t it seem odd, he asked, for Christians to participate in an apparently cannibalistic ritual involving the consumption of the body and blood of their god? Of course it was! The original ceremony, he assured readers, was far less grisly. It was merely the communal act of sharing and ingesting their god, the sacred mushroom.
The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross appeared in bookshops in May 1970. The British media heavily promoted it, unable to resist the spectacle of such heretical claims being argued by a well-known academic. On account of this publicity, it sold briskly, until readers discovered that, despite the book’s scandalous theme, it was no page turner. In fact, it was almost unreadable to anyone but a philologist. Allegro, believing he was writing a work of great intellectual significance, had earnestly tried to make it scholarly enough to satisfy his fellow academics, to the point of including 146 pages of endnotes analysing arcane points of linguistics.
He probably shouldn’t have bothered, because scholars savaged the book. A typical review came from the theologian Henry Chadwick, Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, who wrote that it read like ‘a Semitic philologist’s erotic nightmare’.
Critics zeroed in on Allegro’s philological argument, in which he claimed etymological links between Greek, Aramaic and Sumerian words. These presumed links seemed absurd to them. After all, just because words and phrases may sound vaguely alike – such as ‘lama sabachthani’ and ‘LI-MASh-BA(LA)G-ANTA’ – that doesn’t mean they’re related, as Allegro assumed. Peter Levi, reviewing the book for the Sunday Times, noted that it also
didn’t make sense to believe that a Jewish sect in the first century AD would have been proficient in Sumerian.
Even sympathetic reviewers, such as the poet Robert Graves, found it difficult to accept Allegro’s argument, questioning whether Amanita muscaria was even growing in Judea at that time in order to have been available to the cult members.
The hardest blow for Allegro, however, landed when The Times published a letter signed by fifteen of the leading linguistic professors in the United Kingdom, who declared that the book wasn’t based on any philological evidence they considered worthy of scholarly significance. Among the signatories was Sir Godfrey Driver, Allegro’s former professor at Oxford.
As Allegro’s daughter later noted in her biography of him, the book ruined his career, and, to a large degree, his life. His marriage fell apart. He lost his job and never held an academic position again. He continued writing books, though for an increasingly small audience, and, in 1988, at the age of sixty-five, he dropped dead of an aortic aneurysm.
A book that’s gained so much infamy may seem impossible to defend – but is it? Allegro’s philological argument is probably beyond salvage. Even his most loyal defenders in the twenty-first century, such as his daughter, concede that his linguistic speculations are unconvincing. But what about his more general claim that Christianity originated from a mushroom cult? As outlandish as the idea might seem, an argument could potentially be made for that – although, to do so, one has to be willing to accept a rather large premise: that Jesus never existed as a historical person.
As far as mainstream scholars are concerned, the debate ends right there. The firm consensus is that Jesus, putting aside the question of whether he had any supernatural attributes, was a real person. But, for over a century, a handful of scholars have been insisting there are compelling reasons to doubt the historicity of him. This is called the Christ-myth theory, and its advocates are known as mythicists.
They note that there’s no direct evidence of Jesus’s existence. All the information about his life comes from sources written decades after he supposedly lived. That alone isn’t particularly significant; the same is true of many people throughout history whose existence isn’t doubted. But the case of Jesus is more suspicious, they maintain, because there’s a remarkable similarity between his life story and the stories of various beings worshipped by pagan cults.
During the Greco-Roman era, cults had sprung up throughout the Mediterranean whose followers worshipped divinities such as Osiris, Romulus, Adonis and Mithra. There was a common pattern among these beings. They were all said to be of human form, though born of a divine parent, and they had all undergone some form of suffering through which they had obtained a victory over death, enabling them to offer personal salvation to their followers. Moreover, although these beings were divine, they were all said to have lived here on Earth, and stories were told about them set in human history.
By the first century AD, this pattern had become well established. So, the mythicists argue, isn’t it possible that the story of Jesus was simply an outgrowth of this broader pagan trend? Might not Jesus have originated as a mythic being similar to the other ones worshipped around the Mediterranean, and over time his story began to be presented as fact, embellished with real-world details?
But, if Jesus was a mythic being, mainstream scholars respond, why does the story of his life end with his crucifixion? That was a highly stigmatized way to die in the Roman Empire. Surely a cult would have chosen a more respectable death for their deity. The fact that they didn’t, most scholars believe, suggests that this detail was based on a real-life event. It indicates that there really was a preacher named Jesus, and this was how he died.
Despite this objection, the Christ-myth theory nevertheless endures with a robust, if fringe, following. And, for those willing to proceed down this path, the question then becomes, what type of mythic being was Jesus originally?
Most mythicists believe he had been a deity associated with the sky or sun. But this is where Allegro’s theory returns, because couldn’t Jesus just as well have been a mushroom deity? If the argument is over what type of mythic being he was, why is a mushroom god any less plausible than a sky god? It would, after all, explain why early Christians so frequently described having mystical visions. And there were indisputably ancient cults organized around the worship of drug gods. The most famous of these was the cult of Dionysus, the Greek god of wine. Like Jesus, Dionysus was believed to have undergone death and resurrection.
So, that’s one possible argument for taking Allegro’s theory seriously. Though, the fact remains that it does seem rather outrageous to transform the historical Jesus into a mushroom, and this actually highlights a central feature of Christianity: what a crucial role the apparent historicity of Jesus has played in its success. A god that seemed less flesh-and-blood and more mythical wouldn’t have had the same persuasive power. So, even if, for the sake of argument, one is willing to consider that Jesus may have originated as a mushroom, the more relevant observation would be how completely this knowledge was erased – because the reason Christianity became one of the dominant religions in the world was precisely because so many people were convinced that Jesus was entirely real.
Weird became true: ancient Troy
German-born businessman Heinrich Schliemann liked to tell the story of how he first heard about Troy. It was, he said, in 1829, when he was only seven, and his father gave him a copy of Ludwig Jerrer’s Illustrated History of the World for Christmas. In it, he found a picture of the ancient city of Troy in flames. Intrigued, he showed it to his father, who took him on his knee and told him about the legendary beauty of Helen and of how her love for the Trojan prince Paris led her to flee her husband, King Menelaus; how the Greeks had launched a thousand ships to reclaim her from Troy, and how the heroes Achilles and Hector fought on the dusty plains outside the city; and finally of how the Greeks used trickery to gain access to the walled citadel by hiding inside a wooden horse. Then they burned Troy to the ground.
Schliemann claimed that hearing this tale stirred something inside of him, making him decide, even at that young age, that one day he would find Troy. But, at the time, most historians didn’t believe that Troy existed. Throughout ancient history, its existence had been taken for granted, but with the rise of more sceptical attitudes towards historical analysis in the eighteenth century, doubts had crept into the minds of scholars. After all, there were no obvious remains of anything like a city where it should have been located, on the north-west corner of Turkey. This scepticism acquired orthodox status when the classical historian George Grote published his multi-volume History of Greece in the mid-nineteenth century. Grote argued that there was no more reality to the tale of the Trojan War, with its larger-than-life heroes, than there was to other ancient legends, such as the story of Jason and the Argonauts. Poetry, he declared authoritatively, was not history. There was simply no reason to believe the city was real.
Schliemann thought differently, but he was still a young man when Grote’s history came out, so he put his dream of finding Troy on a back burner – although he would later claim not a day passed when he didn’t think of it – and he devoted himself instead to business. He became a commodities trader, and he proved to be brilliant at it. He had a natural talent for languages, which facilitated his dealings in the world of international business. By the early 1860s, when he was still only in his forties, he had become so wealthy that he didn’t have to work another day in his life.
He set off to travel the world, and, in 1868, he found himself in the eastern Mediterranean. It was time, he decided, to finally pursue his dream of finding Troy once and for all. He had already taught himself ancient Greek some years ago, so, with a copy of Homer’s Iliad in his hand, he visited sites in north-west Turkey, comparing landmarks with Homer’s description of the landscape around Troy.
Homer had written that, from Troy, you could see the snow-capped peak of Mount Ida, that there were two ri
vers there, and that it was close enough to the coast so that the Greek warriors could easily walk from their camp on the beach to the city itself. By following these clues, Schliemann eventually decided that a site named Hisarlik, near the modern seaport of Çanakkale, had to be Troy.
Schliemann was so confident in his identification that, before he even began digging, he published his conclusion as a book called Ithaca, the Peloponnesus and Troy. Academics weren’t convinced. The French historian Ernest Renan declared him a fool. Others sneered that he was a mere businessman. What, they asked, could he possibly know?
Schliemann remained undeterred. Their scepticism simply made him more determined to prove his claim. In 1870, he hired a team of diggers and launched a full-scale excavation at Hissarlik. They dug a trench, forty-five feet deep, straight through the hill at the site, revealing that a powerful city definitely had once been located there. In fact, the excavation showed that the city had been built up and destroyed nine different times. These layers were stacked horizontally on top of each other.
Schliemann’s greatest achievement came in May 1873, when he discovered what he declared to be the ‘Treasure of Priam’ (in the Homeric epics, Priam was the King of Troy). It was a stunning collection of bronze, silver and gold artefacts that included jewellery, battle axes, swords, shields and vases. It certainly seemed like a treasure worthy of ancient Troy. The find made headlines around the world. Together with the other evidence from the dig, it seemed obvious, at least to the popular press, that Schliemann had proven the experts wrong. He had discovered ancient Troy.
Scholars still refused to believe his claim for years. Continuing excavations over the course of the twentieth century, however, led most of them to agree that Hisarlik probably is Troy. There’s no smoking gun, such as a throne with Priam’s name on it, but the site is in the right location, it was a wealthy city, and there’s evidence of armed conflicts there at the end of the Late Bronze Age, which is when historians believe the Trojan War would have occurred. So, the thinking goes, why wouldn’t it be Troy?