The means of conveying the information were at hand, and had been for thousands of years. The folk-tales of the ancients had from the earliest times contained myths based on the personification of plants and trees. They were invested with human faculties and qualities and their names and physical characteristics were applied to the heroes and heroines of the stories. Some of these were just tales spun for entertainment, others were political parables like Jothan’s fable about the trees in the Old Testament, while others were means of remembering and transmitting therapeutic folk-lore. The names of the plants were spun out to make the basis of the stories whereby the creatures of fantasy were identified, dressed, and made to enact their parts. Here, then, was the literary device to spread occult knowledge to the faithful. To tell the story of a rabbi called Jesus, and invest him with the power and names of the magic drug. To have him live before the terrible events that had disrupted their lives, to preach a love between men, extending even to the hated Romans. Thus, reading such a tale, should it fall into Roman hands, even their mortal enemies might be deceived and not probe farther into the activities of the cells of the mystery cults within their territories.
Remember your history. The Romans are oppressing Christians and trying to stamp them out -- and they, or more precisely, the hundred or so bands of proto-Christianity that existed, many of them based on the folk wisdom and “magic” remedies that people believed at the time, are driven underground, trying to communicate and grow in secret. In this context, perhaps some gospels were written in a way that attempted to preserve this essential knowledge, but coding it in a way that would remain obscured if needed. But that leads to some interesting confusion -- as some people would come to take the stories literally.
In general, there are at least three levels of understanding involved in the New Testament writings. On the surface, there are the Greek words in their plain meanings. It is here that we have the story of Jesus and his adventures, the real-life backcloth against which they are set, and his homiletic teachings. How much reality there is at this level is a matter for further enquiry, but probably very little, apart from the social and historical background material.
It is this first level that Allegro more or less dismisses -- although it is what would become the orthodoxy or our modern times. He favors the second and third levels, which he goes on to describe like this:
Beneath the Greek there lies a Semitic level of understanding (not necessarily, or even probably, a Semitic form, that is, actual Semitic versions of the Greek texts). It is mainly in this level that the word-plays are made. For instance, the in the “stumbling-block” cycle of stories just mentioned, the puns are on the various meanings of the Aramaic word underlying the Greek ‘skandalon,’ that is ‘tiqla,’ “stumbling-block” -- “shekel, tax” -- “bolt-mushroom.”
Allegro will dedicate a lot of pages to these puns -- connections, real or imagined, between the Greek words appearing in the text to the translated Semitic words that would be there if he had manuscripts written in those languages, and their on-going allusions and references to the sacred mushroom -- Amanita muscaria -- that is supposed to be the core magical and medicinal plant at the bottom of everything. This comes through even more strongly in his third level of understanding.
Under that again there lie the basic conceptions of the mushroom cult. Here is the real stuff of the mystery-fertility philosophy. For example, to find their parables of the Kingdom, the writers make comparisons with objects and activities which, at the surface level of understanding, are often really absurd, besides being self-contradictory about the manner and form of the Kingdom’s coming. The passage that likens the Kingdom to a mustard seed, for example, and then speaks of birds nesting in the branches of the grown plant (Matt 13:31f., etc.), has driven the biblical naturalists to distraction looking for a mustard “tree” suitable as roosting places for the fowls of the air. They could have saved themselves the trouble since the reference, at the “lower” level, is simply a play on the Semitic ‘khardela,’ “mustard” and ‘ardila,’ “mushroom.” Furthermore, the whole discussion about the Kingdom stems from a play on the secret mushroom word TAB-BA-RI, read as the Semitic root ‘d-b-r,” “guide, manage, control,” the real meaning of this mystic “Kingdom” into which the initiate into the mysteries hoped to pass.
It is on this third level that Allergo’s most interesting and provocative comparisons and translations are made. For example, that Jesus’s virgin birth is code for a mushroom that seemingly reproduces without a seed.
One explanation for the creation of the mushroom without apparent seed was that the “womb” had been fertilized by thunder, since it was commonly observed that the fungi appeared after thunderstorms. Thus one name given them was Ceraunion, from the Greek ‘keraunios,’ “thunderbolt.” Another was the Greek ‘hudnon,’ probably derived from Sumerian *UD-NUN, “storm-seeded.”
It was thus uniquely begotten. The normal process of fructification had been by-passed. The seed had not fallen from some previous plant, to be nurtured by the earth until in turn it produced root and stalk. The god had “spoken” and his creative “word” had been carried to earth by the storm-wind, angelic messenger of heaven, and been implanted directly into the volva. The baby that resulted from this divine union was thus the “Son of God,” more truly representative of its heavenly father than any other form of plant or animal life. Here, in the tiny mushroom, was God manifest, the “Jesus” born of the Virgin, “the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation … in him all the fulness of God was pleased to dwell …” (Col 1:15ff.).
The phallic form of the mushroom matched precisely that of his father, whom the Sumerians called ISKUR, “Mighty Penis,” the Semites Adad, or Hadad, “Big-father,” the Greeks Pater-Zeus, and the Romans Jupiter, “Father-god.” To see the mushroom was to see the Father, as in Jesus the uncomprehending Philip was urged to look for God: “He who has seen me has seen the Father … Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father in me?” (John 14:9ff.). Even the demons recognized him as “the Holy One of God (Mark 1:24), and it was as “the Holy Plant” that the sacred fungus came to be known throughout the ancient world.
And even that the death and resurrection of Christ and the life everlasting that it offers is code for the astral projections made possible by the mushroom drug.
The way to this release of the soul was by asceticism and particularly by fasting, but these same effects could be achieved and more quickly by the use of drugs, like those Josephus says the Essenes sought out “which make for the welfare of the soul and body.” Above all, the sacred fungus, the Amanita muscaria, gave them the delusion of a soul floating free over vast distances, separate from their bodies, as it still does to those foolish enough to seek out the experience. The Christians put the matter thus: “If the Christ is in you, although your bodies are dead through sin, your spirits are alive through righteousness. If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit which dwells in you” (Rom 8:10, 11).
Not only could the drug contained under the skin of the sacred fungus give to the initiate at will this illusion of spiritual resurrection, of victory over death, but in the conception and growth of the mushroom he could see a microcosm of the whole natural order. Before his eyes the cycle of life and death was enacted in a matter of hours. The Amanita muscaria was the medium of spiritual regeneration and at the same time in itself the supreme example of the recreative process in the world of Nature. No wonder the fungus attracted so much awesome wonder among the ancients, or that it inspired some of literature’s greatest epics.
To the mystic, the little red-topped fungus must have seemed human in form and yet divine in its power to change men and give them an insight into the mysteries of the universe. It was in the world, but not of it. In the New Testament myth, the writers tried to express this idea of the duality of nature by portraying as its central character a man who appeared human enough on the surface but through whom there shone a god-like quality which manifested itself in miracle-working and a uniquely authoritative attitude to the Law. The extent to which they succeeded can be seen today in the mingled sympathy and awe with which Jesus is regarded in the Western world, even among people for whom the Christian religion offers no attractions.
This allegorical understanding of the miracles of Jesus as each representing one of the potent powers of the sacred mushroom is the deep and imaginative purpose of this book -- his ability of quieting storms, for example, representing the medicinal effects of the mushroom on a dyspeptic constitution -- but Allegro will, in my opinion, give far too much weight to his seemingly preferred second level of understanding, that of word similarity and puns.
“You shall not commit adultery.”
It is the New Testament elaboration on this theme which helps to identify the source of the word-play and the means of arriving at this terse command, expressed in a single Hebrew verb. At base is the mushroom name *LI-KUR-BALAG-ANTA, taken as “using a woman for adultery.” On this theme the New Testament expounds in words which perhaps have provoked more mental anguish and self-destruction than any other in the Christian writings:
“You have heard it said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart …” (Matt 5:27).
To this passage should be added:
“And the Pharisees came up and in order to test him, asked, ‘Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?’ He answered them, ‘What did Moses command you?’ They said, ‘Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce, and to put her away.’ But Jesus said to them, ‘For your hardness of heart he wrote you this commandment. But from the beginning of creation, “God made them male and female.” For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder.’
“And in the house the disciples asked him about this matter. And he said to them, ‘Whoever divorces his wife and marries another, commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery’” (Mark 10:2-12).
The extension of “adultery” to the mind reflects the age-old appreciation that in any moral situation the intention might be more important than the deed. Its statement and application here, however, come from adding TAB-BA-RI to the mushroom name quoted above, and thus reading, “an adulterous association with a woman (is) that which is in the mind.
The second passage quotes the statements in Genesis from the Creation story about the joining of the sexes in marriage because “Woman had been taken out of Man” (Gen 2:23f). This in itself is a word-play on the mushroom name *LI-MASh-BA(LA)G-ANTA-TAB-BA-RI-TI, from which the authors extracted “leaves those who begot him,” and “joined to his wife.” Using the same mushroom name, the New Testament writers go further, producing an Aramaic phrase meaning, “from the source of creation.” The whole “divorce” theme comes by word-play on the name, since the technical word for “sending away a wife” is in Semitic sh-b-q which they saw in *MASh-BA(LA)G … The same root means “leave” (as here, “parents,” or “home”). A very similar root, s-p-q, means “join together,” and so we have the “joining” of the husband and wife. From the central element in the name, -BAL-AG-, the authors extracted the Semitic root p-l-g, “divide,” and the phrase about not putting the married couple “asunder.”
The really crucial injunction for generations of Christians and others in the Western world is the addition attributed in the story to Jesus as a result of further enquiry from his followers:
“Whoever divorces his wife and marries another, commits adultery against her…”
This comes from the two related names of the mushroom, *MASh-BA(LA)G-ANTA and *LI-KUR-BALAG-ANTA, spelt out into Aramaic phrases as “he who divorces (his) wife” and “for adultery takes the woman (wife).”
At times, this focus on word-play becomes a little tedious for me. Okay. So the ancient words for the sacred mushroom can be found in many of the morality tales of the New Testament and its gospels. In fact, Allegro seems to go out of his way to highlight that these moral injunctions are nothing more than disguises for the secret information contained in the name of the mushroom. Why? To what end? Burying the knowledge -- indeed, just a word or two -- under narrative stories and character discussion seems in these cases to be too elaborate to make any practical sense. Is maybe Allegro reading too much meaning into his second layer of understanding?
Allegro, in fact, is wise enough to ask himself this very question.
It might be questioned if, in the social circumstances of the Near East in the first century, or indeed even now, this rule against divorce was either practicable or desirable. The basis of social life and morality in these lands has always been the continuance of the family. A man’s sons are his Prudential life policy. If, when he is too old to work, or illness or other disaster overtakes him, he has no family to care for him, the man dies. If a woman can bear him no children, however good she may be at the cooking-pot or cows, she is failing in her prime mission in life. She has to go; or at least, a more fertile substitute has to be found. If the man is rich enough he may be able to keep both women; but if not, the infertile woman must go back to her family. To forbid divorce in such circumstances makes nonsense of the whole basis for the moral and social stability of the ancient world.
Perhaps most clearly, indeed poignantly, this injunction about divorce and its Old Testament counterpart focuses our attention on the larger issues raised by these new discoveries. Were such “moral” teachings ever meant to be taken seriously? Certainly, there is nothing in the literary devices of word-play and biblical allusions which necessarily argues against it. A writer can express great thoughts and emotions by means of puns on important words or as supposed “fulfilments” of ancient laws, even if this method must tend to restrict his style and choice of words. The ideas of the New Testament teaching might still be valid despite the strangeness of the mushroom cult which gave them birth.
He seems to be saying that not only do modern readers miss the secrets of the mushroom cult hidden within these stories, but many, if not most, of the contemporary readers -- and maybe the actual writers -- missed them, too. At the bottom, the very syllables that make up their words and phrases may be so subservient to the ancient concepts of fertility and renewal that gave them rise, that even the people employing them for other reasons may not have intended them as conveyors of their secret wisdom. An idea that seems to undercut his entire thesis.
There is nothing being hidden here. The very language being used is simply built on the mushroom’s foundation.
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
