False spore
CHRISTOPHER BOOKER
The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross John M. Allegro (Hodder and Stoughton 633)
A few years ago, Mr Allegro, author of a best-selling paperback on the Dead Sea Scrolls and a lecturer in Old Testament studies at Manchester, gave it as his opinion to the world that Jesus of Nazareth never existed. Perhaps the fact that the world re- acted to this startling claim with little more than a couple of invitations to appear on the Frost Programme was chiefly due to Mr Allegro's oversight in failing to supply any evidence to support it.
This lack he now remedies, in a large and scholarly-seeming volume. The explanation, it appears, is that Jesus was in fact the pseu- donym of a psychedelic mushroom. The early Christians were actually secret worship- pers of the toadstool Amanita Muscaria (or Fly Agaric), and since this practice was frowned upon by the various authorities, the New Testament story had to be cooked up as a kind of elaborate cover story in code, to put persecutors off the scent. Unfortunately, after two or three hundred years, the secret of the mushroom cult somehow mysteriously perished, and all that remained was dull, old, straightforward, unpsychedelic Christianity as we have known it ever since.
The weapon which Mr Allegro mounts to support this story is what his publishers modestly describe as `a major breakthrough' in etymology. Backed by indexes in eleven separate languages, including Sumerian, Sanskrit and Accadian, and with over a hundred pages of detailed philological notes, he suggests that if we trace back all the key words and names in the Bible to their Sumerian and other roots, two facts emerge. First, that the Jewish religion was a fertility cult, almost entirely based on the image of the phallus and its female counterpart. Second, that the focus of the cult was the Fly Agaric—visually a representation of the per- fect coupling which will make the world fertile, and the flesh of which, eaten in small quantities, will (if it does not kill you) give You an LSD-style glimpse of God. If all this sounds like an interestingly suggestive extension of various previous theories—such as Mr Robert Graves's Plausible argument that Fly Agaric was the ambrosia consumed at Bacchic revels—it must nevertheless be confessed that, once Mr
Allegro has seen one mushroom in the Bible, he does see them everywhere. We are whirled through a dizzying display of philological demonstrations that not only are all the obvious things, such as the Tree of Know- ledge and manna, to be seen as mycological— but once he gets on to the New Testament, we are to be persuaded that almost every other word is a code name for the sacred fungus. Not only Jesus and Christ have their fungal derivations, but so does Iscariot. Peter, of course, is really `pitra', the Semitic for mushroom; Cephas is the same as the French cape; the cross is a mushroom symbol, as is the breaking of bread.
I am sure Mr Allegro is sincere about all this, and I am not in a position to question the soundness of his philology (although I would suggest that some of his readings do seem a little arbitrary—it would have been nice for instance to have at least a note of explanation as to why, in the book of Job, 'is there any taste in the white of an egg' should automatically be rendered as `is there any taste in the spittle of the mushroom'). Nevertheless, there are one or two large questions left unanswered. Above all, why, instead of a collection of coherent narratives, should the real meaning of the New Testa- ment be apparently nothing more than just 'mushroom, mushroom, mushroom, mush- room'? I know people who take pot and LSD are somewhat over-inclined to lard their con- versation with references to these things—but is it not rather odd that the fictitious code should seem to make so much more sense than the hidden, fungoid meaning?
Previous page
