by Alex Letcher
Reading Allegro now, some thirty-five years after the furore, it is hard to see why the book was ever taken seriously enough to merit such a vonsidered, high-level rebuttal. Certainly, the grotesque and pornographic image of Christianity painted by the book would still be offensive to many hardly a page goes by without some reference to giant or erect penises, ejaculation and torrents of fertilising semen raining down onto the soft and vulvic earth but the book reads now, not as a cogent academic thesis, but as the outpourings of a troubled mind.
And so it would have been seen then, had not the sensation caused by its serialisation meant that it became an instant best-seller. By luck or judgement, and like Wasson's SOMA beforehand, it precisely captured the Zeitgeist, the post-sixties preoccupation with sex and drugs, and the growing distrust of scientific and religious orthodoxy. The Church worried, rightly perhaps, that the book would presage an irreversible decline in church attendance, Christian morals, and Christian membership. Wrongly, though, they focussed on the most lurid symptom of that decline and not its cause, which was the Anglican Church's struggle to maintain its relevance amidst rapidly changing social attitudes. As King noted, 'to a large extent ... we orthodox Christians
have onlv ourselves to blame for making a fertility religion seem desirable'.^
Then, as now, the book was taken at face value, as an attempt to reveal the true origins of Christianity; but on reading the book and its far-fetched conclusions, the idea that Allegro actually believed what he was writing seems more and more implausible. Here was no hippy apologist looking to justify a private penchant for LSD, but a respected and serious-minded academic. Earlier, he had been singled out as exceptionally talented when he was elected to be the sole British member of the team sent to examine the newly discovered Dead Sea Scrolls (found in 1947). One repeatedly wonders what possessed him to write it.
It has been suggested that his motivation was financial, and that the book was a cynical attempt to cash in on Wasson's SOMA, published two years earlier.'6 It is certainly true that Allegro made a lot of money out of the book and was apparently paid £30,000 in total for the serialisation rights,17 but the few references to Wasson in the book make it probable that Allegro was broadly ignorant of the man and his work. If he was trying to piggyback on anyone's publishing success, it was surely Erich von Daniken's. I think there is another, more convincing, explanation, however.
It was while working on the Scrolls that Allegro first crossed swords with the Church. Impatient at the slow pace of work, he urged his colleagues to make their findings available to an ever more curious public. The Church, however, urged caution as they were worried that the Scrolls believed at the time to be a 'missing link' between Judaism and Christianity would undermine the Christian message. For if Christianity had merely evolved out of Judaism, that weakened its whole philosophical foundation, namely that Christ was the incarnation of God, bringing with him the New Covenant that caused a sudden and decisive rupture with the Old.
These worries eventually proved unfounded the Scrolls did not form a missing link as such but the Church's demurral prompted Allegro to publish his own book The Dead Sea Scrolls (1956) on the discoveries made. This became a best-seller in its own right, selling some 250,000 copies. It was the one book that the average lay person read on the subject, and it too triggered a flurry of outraged letters to The Times. Increasingly seen as a loose cannon, Allegro was steadily marginalised within the academy until eventually he was barred from working on the Scrolls altogether.
At the same time, it seems that he suffered a profound and person ally catastrophic loss of faith. Not only was he unable to square the
supposed inviolate truth of the Bible with the newly emerging textual and archaeological findings, but he also found the Church's resistance to those same findings unbearable they denied him an easy way of reconciling his own inner conflict. Something in him snapped, and he developed an almost pathological hatred of Christianity.'8 'It is difficult,' he wrote of the Clergy, 'not to feel contempt for people who have thus brought unnecessary suffering upon millions of simple folk who trusted their spiritual mentors too well."9 Here then was a man who, having lost both the means and the reason to pursue his work, ended up embittered and resentful.
The companion volume to The Sacred Mushroom, published almost unnoticed in the same year and named appropriately The End of a Road, gives further clues to Allegro's intentions. Throughout he refers to himself as a dispassionate scholar 'owing no allegiance to any religion',10 concerned only with the truth. But this is not how the book reads. It reads as a sustained and vitriolic attack on a once-treasured relationship, now irreparably sundered. It reads as an anguished jeremiad by a man who feels utterly betrayed. And it reads as a call for vengeance. Allegro wanted nothing less than to demolish Christianity and eiase it utterly from modern life. 'Throw it out,' he cried, 'with the rest of the discredited cult of the sacred mushroom.'1' He saw himself as a Samson-like figure, bringing down the edifice to which he had devoted his life. He chose to do this by using all his masterful scholastic skills to fabricate a lie so convincing that people would abandon Christianity, and religion more generally, in droves. And of the whole sorry mushroom-cult story, the only part he actually believed was that Christianity was a sham.
It need hardly be said that the years of resentment had, at the very least, clouded his judgement, for his plan backfired spectacularly. To his horror, one imagines, the public found the idea of his supposed sex and drug mushroom cult titillating and rather appealing, and while his own reputation lay in tatters, the integrity of the Church was actually strengthened by the scandal. Sidelined even further, he quietly stepped down from his position at Manchester University. Quite what it was about the man, his make-up and his biography that caused such a calamitous breakdown remains a mystery, but the whole episode still has an air of tragedy about it, ending as it did with his academic career in ruins.
While The Sacred Mushroom sold in huge numbers, its dense and uncompromising style meant that it was left by and large unread. The one idea it popularised, however, was that an unusual Romanesque fresco, tucked away in the centre of France in the Abbaye de Plaincourault, depicts Eve being tempted by a mushroom, not an apple: the serpent of the Garden of Eden appears, at first sight, to be coiled round a fly-agaric mushroom. A colour photo of the fresco was included in the book, and a stylised graphic rendition of it was eyecatchingly placed on the inside cover. For the general public, this was the only piece of evidence they needed to persuade them to accept Allegro's theory, for surely here was the incontrovertible proof?
Wasson had, rather regretfully one presumes, already discarded this notion when art historians convinced him that the fresco depicted nothing more exotic than a common, if bizarre, Romanesque stylisation of a tree." Allegro dropped the fresco from the abridged paperback version of the book, printed in 1973, so one assumes that he too was eventually brought round, but the myth lingers on in popular consciousness, resurfacing in field guides and coffee-table mushroom books. Interestingly, Wasson had actually presaged Allegro by contending that the stories of the temptation and of the tree of knowledge were a memory of fly-agaric-based spirituality. But by playing down the suggestion, and by placing it at the very end of his SOMA book, he managed to avoid the fuss that Allegro wittingly or unwittingly caused.
Allegro's book, its radical ideas and the moral panic it triggered have been largely forgotten, but every so often new books are issued that reiterate the conspiracy. Using the same 'creative' methodology outlined above, the American James Arthur 'Ethnomycologist, Author, Lecturer, Theological Researcher, Shaman, Teacher Soul Healer' suggests that the fly-agaric 'can be found at the roots of most of the religious writings our planet has to offer'.15 Clark Heinrich, who reconstitutes Allegro with the addition of his own exegetical insights, writes of the bread (white) and wine (red) consumed ritually at the Last Supper that 'if this quite specific and literal-sounding exhortation is not abou
t the fly-agaric mushroom then it is one of the most bizarre passages in the history of religion'.14 But beyond feeding the appetites of conspiracy-hungry mushroom enthusiasts, these sorts of unfounded speculations have made no religious or cultural impact, consigned as they are to the lunatic fringe.
To each of the fly-agaric conspiracies specific and convincing objections may be raised, but a fundamental problem common to all is that the documented psychopharmacological effects of the mushroom do not seem to match the rhapsodic ecstasies that the theorists insist it produces:45 it is hard to imagine anyone founding a religion on the basis of such a giddy, unpredictable and often unpleasant experience.
To be fair, the effects, as we have seen, can include feelings of overall stimulation, excitement and euphoria, with a perceived increase in strength or stamina; but they are typically accompanied by nausea, muscle twitches, general loss of coordination and stupor. Visions or hallucinations, of the sort recorded by the Polish brigadier Joseph Kopec, are rare, but visual distortion and macropsia the alteration of perception of scale and proportion, seized upon so profitably by Charles Kingsley and Lewis Carroll are common. A period of intense agitation lasting several hours in which subjects may behave strangely or ridiculously, but rarely as self-destructively as the Russian officers witnessed by Stephan Krasheninnikov is usually followed by a comalike sleep accompanied by strange but lucid dreams. Then again, as Wasson found to his chagrin, the mushroom may do nothing at all beyond making one violently sick. 'I am at a loss,' he wrote, after his unsuccessful attempt to replicate his psilocybin ecstasies, 'to explain the... failure of my own experiments with the fly-agaric.'16 Unlike the comparatively dependable action of psilocybin, there is simply no way of knowing which way the fly-agaric experience will go.
This is due to the mushroom's spectacularly complex biochemistry. The long-held idea that muscarine was the principal psychoactive agent of the fly-agaric proved to be misplaced (muscarine was isolated in 186917). The symptoms of muscarine poisoning, the excessive and uncontrollable production of sweat, saliva and tears, are rarely observed in fly-agaric intoxication, unsurprisingly given that we now know muscarine to occur in such low concentrations (0.0003 per cent) as to have a negligible effect.
In the mid 1960s, nearly a hundred years after muscarine was first discovered, two new alkaloids were identified almost simultaneously hy three teams of scientists operating independently in Japan, England and Switzerland/8 After some negotiation, it was agreed that the new chemicals should be labelled ibotenic acid (a-amino-3-hydroxy-5^xazoleacetic acid) and muscimol (5-(aminomethyI)-3-hydroxyisox^le), and various tests, including self-experimentation by some of the scientists, demonstrated that these were indeed the chemical culprits.29
These two closely related substances belong to a class of chemicals known as the isoxazoles, but even though they may occur in roughly similar concentrations within any given mushroom (0.03-1 per cent for muscimol, and 0.03-0.05 per cent for ibotenic acid10), muscimol is about five to ten times more potent and seems largely responsible for the species' pleasurable psychoactive effects. Like psilocybin, muscimol works by mimicking the action of a neurotransmitter, but unlike the former, which binds to serotonin receptor sites in the brain, muscimol interferes with another transmitter, gamma-aminobutyric acid or GABA, which works lower down in the central nervous system (CNS). Ibotenic acid mimics glutamate, a slightly different neurotransmitter, but both are excitatory amino acids involved with the control of neuronal activity within the CNS. Quite why stimulation of these receptor sites produces the observed effects remains unclear.
Interestingly, ibotenic acid readily transforms itself into muscimol through a process known as decarboxylation.M Drying, cooking or even the digestion process itself will, to varying degrees, facilitate this process. The Siberian practice of drying the mushroom to lessen its toxic effects turns out, therefore, to have a sound biochemical basis, for it maximises the concentration of the more desirable muscimol within any particular mushroom. Nevertheless, unmetabolised ibotenic acid has been found to be excreted in large quantities via the urine, which explains why the Siberians were able to recycle the mushroom's properties so effectively.31
Experimental evidence has shown that the proportions of these two related ingredients vary according to the age of a mushroom, and anecdotal evidence suggests that there may be seasonal variations as well, with mushrooms picked later in the year proving more toxic.' Greater concentrations of isoxazoles are found in the peelable skin and the cap than in the stem.'4 Other psychoactive ingredients may also be present, but scientists have been unable to agree upon exactly which chemicals and in what concentrations. Up to twenty further alkaloids are suspected with ever more arcane names but the presence and significance of muscazone, muscaridin, choline, uracile, hercynin and p-D-n-butylglycopyranoside, to name a few, remains hotly debated. To confuse the picture further, the mushroom also contains a dizzying mix of pigments and amino acids, and even heavy metals that it readily absorbs from the soil. None of these have any psychoactive effect, but might contribute to its toxicity."
As yet, no systematic bioassay has been undertaken to determine how these constituents vary according to the substrate upon which the mushrooms grow, the host-tree species, the variety or sub-species of mushroom, the country of origin and so on; no two specimens picked in different parts of the world will have exactly the same chemical constitution. In New Zealand, for example, fly-agaric mushrooms are largely avoided by mushroom aficionados, because they induce a violent sickness with no pleasurable effects whatsoever.,6 Presumably, Siberian fly-agaric mushrooms have a more favourable constitution. Compared to say the Liberty Cap, in which psilocybin content averages at a steady i per cent wherever it is found in the world, the flyagaric is like a chemical cocktail shaker into which a blindfolded bartender has poured whatever ingredients come to hand vodka, juice or carpet cleaner. It is this huge variability in its relative chemical composition that makes the fly-agaric so capriciously psychoactive, so unpredictable in its effects and so shaky, and hence unlikely, a foundation upon which to build a religion.
There is, of course, one other overarching objection to all the fly-agaric conspiracies, which is that if the effects of the mushroom are so desirable, so inspiring, and so religiously elevating, why haven't we seen the emergence of modern fly-agaric sects? Why hasn't the habit become more than a little widespread or acceptable? In the three hundred years that we have known about its properties, it is a struggle to find anyone in the West who has ever intentionally sought the mushroom out. There are a few, but compared to psilocybin mushrooms, which have gone global in a mere fifty years, the fly-agaric is consistently seen as a poor way to get high. Dutch smart shops have recently put dried fly-agaric on the market, riding on the back of the psilocybin mushroom trade, but sales are poor, and the market has by and large decided against this substitute.
Of course, human inquisitiveness is such that there have been a few notable outbreaks of intentional fly-agaric consumption throughout the last three hundred years, but always on a small scale, and always localised.57 The knowledge either came from serendipitous discovery or slipped out from the academy, for a few scientists experimented with the mushroom if only to see what all the fuss was about. We have already encountered the pioneer of American mycology, Captain Charles McIIvaine, who at the beginning of the twentieth century tested the toxicity of hundreds of mushrooms by eating them.*1 The flyagaric, he discovered, did little more than give him a headache, and almost regretfully he concluded that intemperance, in whatever form, was always accompanied by similar penalties. But his experiments were not the first.
The earliest recorded Western encounter with the mushroom took place in London, towards the end of the eighteenth century, not long before Everard Brande was called out to administer to the poor family poisoned by Liberty Caps. William Curtis (1746-1799) was one of the early pioneers of botany, the director of London's Chelsea Physic
Garden from 1773 to 1777, who helped popularise the techniques of ornamental flower cultivation through his Botanical Magazine. It was while working on his magnum opus, the Flora Londinensis a guide to all the plants and fungi growing within ten miles of the capital, which took him eleven years to complete that he encountered the stories about the mushroom emanating from Kamchatka. The realisation that the resplendent fly-agaric was either inebriating, 'making some joyous, others melancholy', or that it drove you 'raving mad', merely piqued his curiosity and encouraged him to try some himself. On chewing the mushroom, though, he found that it produced a terrible burning sensation in his mouth and stomach. Just to be sure that he hadn't been mistaken, he prevailed upon his reluctant and, one presumes, long-suffering gardener to repeat the experiment. The poor man gingerly broke off a piece, placed it in his mouth, and immediately complained of similar symptoms. They both concluded that the mushroom was very probably poisonous, and that they were lucky to have escaped unharmed.
In truth, they probably ate such small amounts that their symptoms were psychosomatic. The same cannot be said for Dr B. Grassi,4 a young doctor from the small village of Rovellasca, in the north of Italy, not far from Milan, who in 1880 published an enthusiastic paper on the effects of the fly-agaric/' Grassi had been inspired to investigate the matter after treating a peasant who had wittingly or unwittingly " we cannot be certain eaten a meal of the red-and-white mushrooms, and had had a rather splendid time of it. During this period, European vineyards were being threatened by a particularly virulent parasitK insect accidentally imported from America, and the price of wine was rising accordingly. Worried about the effect this would have on the peasant population, who after all needed a glass of wine as much as the next man, Grassi started to wonder whether the fly-agaric might not prove a useful substitute for alcohol during the lean months ahead. He set about investigating the matter with all the enthusiasm of youth.