Odd Conspiracies: John Allegro, Sacred Mushrooms, and the Dead Sea Scrolls

Abstract

This article examines the scholarship of John Allegro on the Dead Sea Scrolls and the role his status as a scholar has played in the reception of his The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross. While the Dead Sea Scrolls play no prominent role in the book, people promoting Sacred Mushroom and its unorthodox proposals stress that Allegro is a respected scholar with great philological acumen by appealing to status as an expert on the Dead Sea Scrolls. But Allegro’s contribution to the field is much more mixed than is often acknowledged by proponents of Sacred Mushroom. Allegro was also one of the first to promote the corrosive conspiracy theory that the rest of the editorial team was being controlled by the Vatican. Recognizing that Allegro’s scholarship is infused with a kind of conspiratorial ideation helps understand his method and approach in Sacred Mushroom—that the evidence that Christianity began as a sacred mushroom cult was intentionally obscured by New Testament authors. To agree with Allegro, one must grant that the evidence is hidden and below the surface. The renewed popularity for Allegro’s work, which is out of sync with his reputation among Qumran scholars, can be understood as one example of the broader phenomenon of the popularity of conspiratorial theories in contemporary culture

1. Introduction

I begin this article in a non-academic way: with a quotation from the right-wing internet celebrity Joe Rogan. He is well known for promoting conspiracy theories about COVID vaccines. He has also endorsed a less-known controversial topic: John Allegro’s The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, published in 1970. In one episode of his podcast, posted on YouTube as “The SECRET Meaning Behind ‘Christ’, in the John Marco Allegro Translations!,” he says:

Did you ever read any of that stuff, like the John Marco Allegro stuff? John Marco Allegro was a scholar … he started studying theology and he eventually became agnostic, but he was a language expert. And so he was hired to decipher the Dead Sea Scrolls. So they did it for fourteen years … they had to use DNA because they had to make sure that the fragments are from the same cow which would indicate that it is the same piece of skin, because it’s literally on animal skins. They found them in these ceramic vessels in Qumran, hidden in the fucking side of a mountain. Wild shit. So they take these down. They realize this is the oldest version of the Bible by far. I think it’s in Aramaic … And at the end of this translation, over fourteen years, John Marco Allegro writes a book called The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross. And he says the entire religion is a misunderstanding. And that what it was originally about was psychedelic mushrooms and fertility rituals. And that that’s what created this religion.

(Rogan 2022)

There is a lot one could unpack or correct here. I stress only the salient points. First and foremost, Rogen thinks Allegro got it right, while acknowledging that his thesis that Christianity began as a mushroom cult might sound crazy to most people. But we should take Allegro’s claims seriously because he is, as Rogan puts it, a “legit scholar” with “rock-solid credentials.” Allegro’s status as a scholar gives his unorthodox ideas about Christianity legitimacy. It is also important that Allegro was a scholar of the Dead Sea Scrolls because the Dead Sea Scrolls have unlocked the “secret meaning of Christ.”

Since promoters of Allegro’s The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross appeal to his status as a scholar of the Dead Sea Scrolls, it is reasonable to look at his contribution to Qumran scholarship. Over the years I recall him coming up less as a scholar who is cited and more as the subject of gossip at conferences because he committed “academic suicide” by publishing Sacred Mushroom. His scholarship was consistently controversial. The biography of Allegro written by his daughter proclaims him to be “The Maverick of the Dead Sea Scrolls” (Brown 2005). Less flatteringly, an obituary of Allegro in the Daily Telegraph described him as “the Liberace of Biblical Scholarship,” suggesting that he was a colorful figure whose eccentric ideas had value primarily as entertainment (John Allegro 1988). I do not think there is a single scholar of the Dead Sea Scrolls today who would unequivocally say that John Allegro was a “legit scholar” with “rock-solid credentials.”

Rogan’s endorsement of Allegro raises another pertinent issue—that The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, dismissed and lampooned by scholars when it was published, has a newfound popularity. This is also evident in the recent “40th Anniversary Edition” of the book published in 2009 (I use this edition throughout this essay). Its preface by the publisher (Jan Irvin) praises Allegro as “a man who was ahead of his time”, a perspective that purportedly justifies why the book should have a 40th anniversary edition (vi). Sacred Mushroom argues that Judaism and Christianity were cryptic efforts to continue a basic religious pattern expressed in older ancient Near Eastern religion, which centered on understanding the rain essential for life as semen from the penis of a sky god. People thought that this heavenly truth could be perceived through visions induced by the psychedelic mushroom amanita muscaria (fly-agaric). Major terms in both testaments of the Christian Bible, such as God, Jesus, Torah, and sin, have hidden phallic-mycological meaning, according to Allegro, which he deciphers by delineating their etymological origins, which he generally traces back to Sumerian.

My chief goal is not to deride the untenable claims of Sacred Mushroom or express moral outrage over them. I want to examine the book to better understand its appeal in contemporary culture. I suggest that Allegro’s unusual thesis can be understood as a kind of conspiracy theory or is at least a product of conspiratorial thinking. The massive rise in belief in conspiracy theories in contemporary culture explains why there is a new willingness in the broader public to entertain Allegro’s radical revisionism of the Bible and Christianity.

2. Crucifixion and Controversy: John Allegro on the Dead Sea Scrolls

The Dead Sea Scrolls were first discovered in late 1946 or early 1947 by Bedouins at Qumran in the Judean desert. The Jordanian Department of Antiquities, which had authority over the scrolls until Israel seized them in the 1967 war, arranged in the early 50s for a team of scholars to edit the fragments. John Allegro (1923–1988) was one of them. He was one of the first scholars to examine the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Allegro received undergraduate and master’s degrees in Oriental Studies in 1951 and 1952, respectively, at the University of Manchester (Fields 2009, pp. 209–14; Brooke 2012, pp. 453–58; Davies 2000, p. 18). Studying under Harold Rowley, he demonstrated an aptitude for Semitic philology. After beginning a doctoral program at Manchester, Allegro switched to Oxford to work with Godfrey Driver. Driver was asked to nominate people to join the Qumran editorial team, and he selected Allegro. The young scholar joined the group in 1953. While his scholarship on the scrolls established his academic credentials, he never returned to his doctoral studies or completed a Ph.D. program. He received an academic position at Manchester in 1954, becoming a Lecturer in Comparative Semitic Philology.

As a member of the Qumran editorial team, Allegro demonstrated that he had academic talent. He wrote several specialized publications on the Dead Sea Scrolls, several of which were the first studies of texts from the corpus (for a list of his scholarly publications, see Brown 2005, pp. 283–84). He was assigned to publish the editio princeps of several non-biblical texts in Oxford’s prestigious Discoveries of the Judean Desert, the official publication series of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Allegro also showed a penchant for writing for a popular audience. His 1956 volume, The Dead Sea Scrolls: A Reappraisal was a publishing success, particularly in England. It stands with The Scrolls from the Dead Sea (1955) by the literary critic Edmund Wilson or Dix ans de découvertes dans le désert de Juda (1957) by the Polish scholar Józef Milik, who was also on the Qumran editorial team, as among the first books that addressed a wide-spread public interest in the Dead Sea Scrolls in the 1950s (Allegro [1956] 1986; see also Hughes-Huff 2024). Allegro’s photographs, which document events such as the archaeological excavations at Qumran that took place in that decade, also comprise an important record for the initial phase of scholarship on the Dead Sea Scrolls (Brooke and Bond 1996).

But there was trouble in paradise. Allegro’s interpretations and public work caused controversies and problems. One of the most well-known instances involved a BBC interview he gave in 1956. From the scrolls available at the time, it was evident that they were written by an ancient Jewish sect which venerated a figure whom they refer to as the Teacher of Righteousness. The Habakkuk Pesher, a line-by-line exposition of the book of Habakkuk in the Hebrew Bible and one of the first Qumran scrolls to be published, repeatedly mentions this figure. Pesher is the Hebrew word for “interpretation” and denotes a genre of commentary literature found at Qumran. The pesher interprets Hab 2:15 as referring to the Wicked Priest (a derisive sectarian sobriquet for the high priest, the key figure of the Jerusalem temple) “who pursued the Teacher of Righteousness to consume him (לבלעו) with the heat of his anger” (1QpHab XI, 5–6). André Dupont-Sommer, a senior French biblical scholar, argued that this means the Wicked Priest killed the Teacher (Collins 2013, pp. 99–101). The Teacher of Righteousness, he concluded, provides historical confirmation that Jesus was a messiah who was persecuted and killed. Jesus follows a pattern established by the Teacher of Righteousness. Dupont-Sommer wrote that the Dead Sea Sect “heralds and prepares the way for the Christian New Covenant. The Galilean Master, as He is presented to us in the writings of the New Testament, appears in many respects as an astonishing reincarnation of the Teacher of Righteousness” (Dupont-Sommer 1952, p. 99).

Dupont-Sommer’s Christianizing conclusions about the Habakkuk Pesher found few adherents. But Allegro, showing a contrarian spirit, argued that Dupont-Sommer did not realize how right he was. One of the texts assigned to Allegro was a pesher on the book of the prophet Nahum (4Q169). This text cryptically refers to the “Lion of Wrath” and claims that he hangs men alive. This alludes to a horrific event that took place when the Dead Sea sect was active in the early first century BCE. The Hasmonean king Alexander Jannaeus harshly persecuted an uprising against him in Judah by crucifying en masse the men responsible. According to Josephus, the king crucified eight hundred men and made their wives and children watch, while he dined with his concubines (Ant. 13.380; cf. War 1.97). For this reason, most Qumran scholars understand the Lion of Wrath as a cipher for Jannaeus.

Allegro did not only interpret the Lion of Wrath as a reference to Jannaeus (Fields 2009, p. 303). He also equated him with the Wicked Priest known from the Habakkuk Pesher. Allegro concluded that Dupont-Sommer was correct that the Wicked Priest killed Teacher of Righteousness and went one step further: the Nahum Pesher indicates how he killed him—the Teacher was crucified! He, Allegro inferred, was one of the people crucified by the Lion of Wrath. As he explained in a BBC radio broadcast in January 1956: “the terrible Jannaeus, the Wicked Priest as they called him, stormed down to their new home (Qumran), dragged forth the Teacher, and as now seems probable, gave him into the hands of his Gentile troops to be crucified” (cited in Collins 2013, p. 105). Allegro did not stop there. After the Teacher of Righteousness died on the cross, members of the sect “took down the broken body of their Master to stand guard over it until Judgment Day,” out of the belief that their “Messiah would rise again and lead his faithful flock (the people of the new testament, as they called themselves) to a new and purified Jerusalem.”

Several members of the Qumran editorial team, including its chief Roland de Vaux, a Dominican priest and archaeologist, publicly disavowed Allegro’s conclusions in a letter published in the Times of London (16 March 1956): “It is our conviction that either he has misread the texts or he has built up a chain of conjectures which the materials do not support” (cited in Fields 2009, p. 323). De Vaux was unhappy that Allegro was making wild claims in public about unpublished texts. He wrote in a letter to Allegro in February 1956 that “These texts have never been published, they are in your hands, and perhaps the public at large would believe what you say, but scholars require verification. You have seriously failed to comply with the correct scientific method on which we wish to model our publication” (ibid., p. 305). Even Rowley, Allegro’s former mentor at Manchester, disavowed him. According to an article in Time Magazine (2 April 1956) about the uproar caused by Allegro’s BBC interview, Rowley “spanked him soundly” (Allegro Under Fire 1956). He is quoted as saying: “I deplore as unscholarly the presentation to the world of what scholars everywhere have supposed—as I supposed—to be specific statements in an unpublished text to which Mr. Allegro alone had access … Mr. Allegro was one of the most promising students I have ever had, and he is capable of doing fine work. I think it is a pity that he was entrusted with the editing of texts far from supervision … Important documents, for which scholars in all countries are eagerly waiting, should not be used to give immature scholars a spurious authority.”

If Allegro extended the Christianizing scholarship of Dupont-Sommer, he also inverted it. Whereas for Dupont-Sommer the Teacher of Righteousness as a slain messiah prepared the way for Jesus, learning about the Teacher gave Allegro an atheist epiphany. For him the Dead Sea Scrolls, as texts from antiquity, provide irrefutable materialist evidence for an ancient Jewish messianic movement, which is how he understood the Dead Sea sect. Many Qumran scholars today would not hold that the Teacher was revered as a messiah. But for Allegro, whereas the Teacher of Righteousness was regarded in ancient Judah as an actual messiah, people simply told stories about Jesus. The Dead Sea Scrolls so understood expose the myth of Christianity. He would argue that the stories in the New Testament about Jesus were not historical but were rather poor adaptations of the Teacher. Jesus in this reading is “fake news.” In the New Testament Jesus encourages all people to believe in him because, Allegro argued, the figure of the Teacher (a Jewish messiah) was changed to make a messiah that would appeal to Gentiles. This is why, in his view, Jesus is less anti-imperialist than the Teacher of Righteousness—this too being a position Qumran scholars would not in general hold today. Such adaptations of the Teacher figure for Allegro explain why Jesus is a pathetic figure in the New Testament, a milquetoast messiah who would not have lasted three minutes in Jerusalem, which was unstable and dangerous at the time, much less three years (Allegro [1979] 1992, pp. 226–27). Allegro’s Jesus in Sacred Mushroom is also a ruse, but a very different one (discussed below).

The academic disagreements that took place in the 1950s between Allegro and other members of the Qumran editorial team turned into more serious rifts. In addition to the controversial BBC interview, another major source of tension was the Copper Scroll (Fields 2009, pp. 268–74, 337–39; Collins 2013, pp. 24–25). This Qumran text is written on metal flattened into the shape of a scroll. It claims to divulge the locations of fantastically large sums of gold, totaling several tons. Allegro, working with the Engineering Department at the University of Manchester, devised a way to slice this scroll into sections, and they did so, allowing it to be read. Allegro took the Copper Scroll at face value as a treasure map. In 1960 he launched an Indiana Jones-like hunt for gold in the Judean desert, using the Copper Scroll as a guide (Allegro 1960; Brown 2005, pp. 118–33). Alas, he found no treasure. Other members of the team, particularly Milik, understood the Copper Scroll in less literalist terms, and these differences of opinion became increasingly acrimonious. (For a more contemporary scholarly assessment of the Copper Scroll, see Weitzman 2015.) Allegro was also very unhappy with his colleagues about delays regarding the acquisition of texts found in Cave 11 (Fields 2009, pp. 402–9). The Palestinian Archaeological Museum purchased them in 1956 from the Bedouin but arrangements for their publication rights, granted primarily to the Dutch Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences, were not worked out until the early 60s. Allegro during this time was under the false impression that other members of the editorial team had access to the Cave 11 texts. By 1956 he had become “completely estranged” from the rest of the group (ibid., p. 295).

For Allegro, his conflicts with other members of his team exposed an ugly, deeper truth. He promoted an insidious conspiracy theory—that the actions of his colleagues, several of whom were Catholic, were being covertly orchestrated by the Vatican (Lim 2005, pp. 12–13; Fields 2009, p. 411). He was one of the first scholars, if not the first, to make these vile claims. In a letter written on 24 December 1957, to the scholar James Muilenburg, Allegro accused the other members of the committee of secrecy regarding the purchasing and examination of scroll fragments, alleging that they have created a “Catholic monopoly on the Scrolls” (Brown 2005, p. 157). In January 1959 he said to Awni Dajani, who was at the time the Director of the Jordanian Department of Antiquities: “I am convinced that if something does turn up which affects the Roman Catholic dogma, the world will never see it” (ibid., p. 158).

Allegro understood himself as a victim of the Catholic conspiracy he discerned. In his letter to Dajani, written after the BBC had for the fifth time decided not to show a documentary on the Dead Sea Scrolls, Allegro suggested that the broadcast company was acting on orders from the Vatican: “There can be no reasonable doubt now that de Vaux’s cronies in London are using their influence to kill the programme, as he wished. I should not be at all surprised if the Vatican has not commanded its contacts in the BBC, where they are numerous and powerful, to keep it off the screens” (ibid., 159; cf. pp. 108–9). The implausibility of idea that the Vatican or de Vaux, a French priest based in Palestine, could have secret sway over BBC executives in London never allayed Allegro’s concern that powerful Catholic forces were trying to silence his scholarship. His conclusions reflect a conspiratorial mindset (a topic discussed in more detail below).

Over the following decades anti-Catholic conspiracy theories of the sort promoted by Allegro became mainstream. They became dominant in the public sphere in the 1980s, when scholars and the public were legitimately frustrated about the continued delay of the full publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Such anti-Catholic fears are expressed in The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception, which was published in 1991 (Baigent and Leigh 1991; images of the scrolls became accessible to the public before the US edition of the volume was published, undermining its core complaint about the inaccessibility of the scrolls). The delay in the publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls was not, I should not even have to say, because of a Catholic plot. The truth of the matter is less sensationalist. It was the regrettable consequence of lack of sufficient funding, not enough scholars assigned to the task and the large scale of the publications some of the Qumran scholars were working on (Collins 2013, pp. 213–22; VanderKam and Flint 2002, pp. 386–90). Also in the 1980s John Strugnell was the head of the editorial team, and his ability to lead the effort to publish the scrolls was hindered by his personal problems; he struggled with depression and alcoholism.

Allegro also promoted the view that the delay in publication was intentional because the principal scholars were more interested in maintaining their privileged access to the scrolls than addressing head-on how the texts can give us new insights into the origins of Christianity (Allegro [1979] 1992, p. 2). It is certainly true that Allegro worked faster than his colleagues. He was the only member of the original editorial team to finish the publication of the Qumran texts assigned to him. Allegro’s edition appeared in 1968, as volume 5 of Discoveries of the Judean Desert—the last volume in the series listed as Discoveries from the Judean Desert of Jordan (Brown 2005, pp. 170–71; Allegro 1968). The vast majority of the volumes in this series appeared in the 90s and 00s, edited by the following generation of Qumran scholars, under the auspices of the Israeli scholar Emanuel Tov.

Allegro justly deserves credit for his prompt publication of Qumran texts. Showing a laudable commitment to making them available to the public, he worked quickly. This, however, came at the expense of accuracy. Strugnell (1970) published an article in French that provides extensive corrections to Allegro’s readings and reconstructions of texts in his 1968 volume (Brooke 2012, p. 455). It is one of the lengthiest and most substantive critiques of any DJD volume. Early in my career it was recommended to me that any work on the texts that appear in Allegro’s DJD volume should be done in consultation with Strugnell’s article. Scholarship I carried out over the years led me to agree with that advice—that a scholar should not trust the Allegro edition on its own (e.g., Goff 2007, pp. 104–7).

Examining Allegro’s volume in relation to the others in the now complete DJD publication project (a total of forty volumes), its weaknesses as a scholarly edition are readily apparent. Allegro, unlike other scholars who published texts in this series, never wrote introductions to the texts he published nor provided paleographic assessments of their scripts, a crucial source of information for determining the date of Qumran fragments (VanderKam and Flint 2002, p. 387). Many texts whose reconstructions and transcriptions appear in DJD volumes have been questioned and revised by scholars. But Allegro’s volume is the only one of the forty volumes about which there has been serious interest in re-doing the entire edition. Scholars have collaborated on this revision, although it is not clear if that will ever happen (Brooke and Høgenhaven 2011).

To claim that, as Joe Rogan puts it, Allegro is a “legit scholar” of the Dead Sea Scrolls with “rock-solid credentials” ignores the fact that scholars consistently found his ideas and writings on the scrolls problematic and unpersuasive. One gets the impression that Allegro’s commitment to writing and speaking to a popular audience was shaped in part by his hostile reaction to criticism from fellow academics, which is part and parcel of the scholarly process. When his DJD volume was published in 1968, he had effectively become estranged from other Qumran scholars. It is not clear he had by that time much interest left in Dead Sea Scrolls. He did not make many of the final corrections and revisions to his DJD volume. They were done by Arnold Anderson (1924–2021), an Old Testament scholar and colleague of Allegro at Manchester, who receives some credit in the edition for its publication. While Allegro would after the publication of his DJD volume write on the Dead Sea Scrolls for a popular audience, he would never write anything for a specialized scholarly readership. He never published an article on the Dead Sea Scrolls in a refereed academic journal after 1964.

3. The Perennial Penis in the Skies: The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross

When The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross was published in 1970, scholars did not react to it favorably. Henry Chadwick (1920–2008), an important British scholar of early Christianity, wrote in a review in the Daily Telegraph that the book reads “like a Semitic philologist’s erotic nightmare after consuming a highly indigestible meal of hallucinogenic fungi” (Chadwick 1970, p. 6). The book’s publisher made a public apology (VanderKam and Flint 2002, pp. 324, 387). Even Judith Anne Brown in her sympathetic account of her father Allegro acknowledges that “The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross ruined John’s career” (Brown 2005, 185, pp. 202–10; Collins 2013, p. 108).

It is more accurate to say that Sacred Mushroom ruined Allegro’s academic reputation, or, better to say, what was left of it, since as we have seen it was in decline long before 1970 (Brown 2005, p. xv). Allegro ended his academic career, in the sense of being a member of the professoriate, before the publication of this book. He resigned voluntarily from the University of Manchester earlier that same year, no doubt because he understood how his new publication would be received (Brooke 2012, p. 458). It is not clear he wanted to be a part of academia anymore. The book’s thesis that Christianity began as a mushroom cult was not a position Allegro argued for as an academic. Rather, he presented it as a sort of “mic-drop” moment. By the time Sacred Mushroom came out, Allegro had already left the ivory tower.

Allegro’s estrangement from the world of Qumran scholarship is palpable throughout Sacred Mushroom. The Dead Sea Scrolls play no significant role in the book’s argumentation. They are rarely cited (e.g., Allegro [1970] 2009, pp. 296, 298). This is a loud silence. As Allegro himself advocated, the term “Essene” could derive from the Aramaic verb “to heal” (אסי). Josephus emphasizes that the Essenes had knowledge of “medicinal roots” used for healing (War 2.136). Allegro held that the sect’s proximity to the Dead Sea could itself be a sign of the group’s interest in healing, since that its unusual water has long been thought to have healing properties (e.g., Allegro [1970] 2009, pp. 66–67; Allegro [1979] 1992, pp. 66–67; cf. Taylor 2012, p. 305). Given that in Sacred Mushroom he discerns references to psychedelic mushrooms virtually everywhere in antiquity, it would have been easy for him to assert that the Dead Sea sect incorporated them into their healing practices. Allegro’s silence on the Dead Sea Scrolls becomes even louder upon realizing that he had by this point emphasized for years that they can change forever how we think about Jesus. Allegro’s expertise on the Dead Sea Scrolls, as a corpus that has the potential to unlock the “hidden meaning” of Christianity, has been marshalled by promoters of the book to legitimate its unorthodox views, as we saw with Joe Rogan above. Allegro’s lack of engagement with the Dead Sea Scrolls in Sacred Mushroom becomes understandable when realizing that by the late 60s he had lost interest in them.

If Allegro’s passion for the Dead Sea Scrolls is lacking in Sacred Mushroom, the same cannot be said for Semitic philology. He hits the reader with a pyrotechnic display of philology, constantly invoking terms from numerous Semitic languages and others as well, including Hebrew, Greek, Syriac, Sumerian, and even Sanskrit. Sumerian is particularly important for him. He consistently derives the etymology of terms from this ancient language. To take “Jesus” as an example, he says (as would most scholars) that the word (Greek Ἰησοῦς) derives from the Hebrew יהושע (Joshua). But Allegro goes further, contending that יהושע stems from the Sumerian *IA-U-Sh-U-A, which he says means “semen, which saves, restores, heals” (Allegro [1970] 2009, p. 35).

Throughout the book he argues that various terms in various languages have an esoteric meaning that can be unlocked by deciphering their Sumerian etymological origins. Sumerian becomes a sort of Rosetta stone that reveals Allegro’s iteration of ancient Near Eastern religion. He argues that the modern recovery of the language, which took place in the nineteenth century, offers a window into “the world’s most ancient civilization” making it now possible he argues “to find a bridge between the Indo-European and Semitic worlds” that allows us to “start penetrating to the root meaning of many religious and secular terms whose original significance has been obscured” (Allegro [1970] 2009, p. 18).

As Allegro’s “seminal” Jesus suggests, his Sumerian etymologies reveal that major biblical terms are much more sexual, and in particular phallic, than most readers of scripture could have ever fathomed. The phrase Lord of Hosts, or Yahweh Sabaoth, means “Yahweh’s penis” because Sabaoth derives from the Sumerian *SIPA-UD, “penis of the storm” (ibid., p. 24). The word Torah means “outpouring” and thus refers to the emission of “semen, grace, favour” (ibid., p. 23). “Sin” denotes wasting semen (ibid., pp. 25–26). For Allegro etymology is not simply about discovering the root-meaning of a particular word. It opens up “a window on prehistorical philosophic thought” that forces a radical rethinking of Christianity (ibid., p. 4; cf. 193). The mushroom cult Allegro discerns is not simply about mushrooms. It is very much about how early humans in the ancient Near East used sexuality and in particular the phallus to understand the world around them (ibid., xix). If rain fertilizes the land, according to their primordial rationalizing à la Allegro, it is sperm from above. There must be a powerful penis in the skies. How else could life-giving semen rain down upon us?

The Allegroian phallic myth penetrates deeper. Vegetation, the product of divine sperm, is imbued with esoteric potency. The elect were those who possessed this botanical wisdom. They were focused on the mushroom. They recognized its appearance as phallic. The mushroom was revered as an earthy representation of the heavenly fertility god and a product of his penis. This fungus was for them “‘the son of God’; its drug was a purer form of the god’s own spermatozoa than that discoverable in any other living matter” (ibid., p. xxiii). The psychedelic effects of the amanita muscaria provide a fleeting glimpse into the phallic nature of the divine. It offers a sort of unio mystica with the sky penis. The sacred mushroom is the “key to heaven” (ibid., p. xxii).

Judaism and Christianity are simply “logical developments from the older, cruder fertility cults” (ibid., p. xx). Understood within this larger system, Christianity existed long before the turn of the common era, continuing the core tenet evident in earlier fertility cults that sacred mushrooms provide access to the penis in the skies whose sperm is the key to life (ibid., pp. xxix, 193). The story of Jesus was simply a “literary device to spread occult knowledge to the faithful” (ibid., p. xxii). Allegro purports to reveal the esoteric truth of the mushroom cult, which the Bible describes in intentionally cryptic terms. When Christians were persecuted, the orthodox Christianity that emerged in its place is for Allegro the true heresy, a travesty of the earlier mushroom cult, the memory of which has long since faded away—but is now recovered through Allegro’s mycological philology.

A devout Christian might be offended by Allegro’s construal of Christianity. But a scholar of religious studies can be rightly perturbed by its perennialism. While Allegro seems to relish unveiling startling new religious truths, his overall approach is fully consistent with what were mainstream, even conservative approaches in religious studies at the time, which have long been abandoned. Allegro’s emphasis on ancient religion as the product of early man trying to make rational sense of the world around him is squarely in line with the work of two scholars who were influential in the academic study of religion for much of the twentieth century—E.B. Tylor and J.G. Frazer. Both stressed the origins of religion as the product of rational reflection by primitive cultures about the natural world. Tylor stresses for example that early humans concluded that there is some sort of spirit or life-force in people who are alive, and they then extended this animist logic to the broader world, that analogous spirits inhabit other forms of life, such as trees or mountains (Pals 1996, p. 25).

Frazer’s main book is The Golden Bough (1890–1915), for which he received much acclaim. This twelve-volume work was comprehensive in its scale, drawing extensively from ancient sources and ethnographic data from indigenous peoples around the world that was available to him as a professor in England when the British Empire had unparalleled global reach. Frazer’s encyclopedic tabulation of religious lore, he strove to show, reveals a grand evolutionary scheme. In his model the earliest stage is best described as magic, by which he denotes Tylorian efforts by early peoples to understand and manipulate the world around them. They needed crops to survive so they would have rituals designed to cause rain. But over time these early thinkers realized that magic is a sort of false science—the rain dances do not always result in rain. This developed further forms of rationalizing that led to religion. They developed conceptions of divine entities who had complex emotions and personalities, which provide ways to explain why the rain dances do not necessarily yield rain.

Frazer’s Golden Bough was immensely successful over the course of the twentieth century. It shaped how scholars approached the study of religion. The book promoted the perspective that the job of the scholar of religion is to marshal data from differing cultures to produce generalizing, comprehensive conceptions of religion. The Romanian scholar Mircea Eliade (1907–1986) dominated the field from the University of Chicago from the fifties to the eighties. Eliade’s scholarship is characterized by grand, universalizing claims about religion that incorporate material from throughout the world’s religious traditions, attesting the dominance of an Frazeresque encyclopedic approach up to the late twentieth century (Idel 2014; Smith 2004, pp. 61–100).

In the generation after Eliade, the field of religious studies rejected the Frazerian model. Jonathan Z. Smith demonstrated that Frazer misread stories at the center of Golden Bough regarding Roman tales regarding priests of the goddess Diana (the rex Nemorensis) and the figure of Balder in Old Norse mythology (Smith 1978, pp. 208–39; see also Da Col et al. 2018). Lincoln (2018, pp. 26–28) disavows “strong comparison,” that is, comparing material from different cultures in the service of overarching constructs, and champions instead “weak comparison,” or, comparing texts from different cultures to better understand them in their own cultural contexts, without appeal to grand schemes. The adaptation of local materials into universalizing theories flattens out the data, making it hard to appreciate their polyvalence and nuances (Pals 1996, p. 45). What used to be mainstream approaches in the field, it is now with hindsight easier to see, suffer from an inherent perennialist fallacy.

Set against this backdrop, Allegro’s perennialist “phallus-y” is easy to discern. He offers a phallic-inflected version of the universalizing mode of religious studies Frazer and others at the time were praised for doing. He forces a wide range of disparate data into a reductionist model. All religions of the ancient Near East are fertility cults and all fertility cults are essentially the same—veneration of the sky penis and its life-giving semen. The core problem with Allegro’s book, looking back at it fifty years after it appeared, from an academic standpoint is not that its main thesis is scandalous or shocking but that it is, in an important way, conservative. Its perennialist approach was in sync with mainstream approaches to the study of religion at the time.

Allegro’s perennialism in Sacred Mushroom, I suggest, is key to understanding the book’s philology. For him the monolithic, phallocentric nature of ancient Near Eastern religion from time immemorial can be discerned, as we have seen, by going back to Sumerian. Consistently lacking from his discussion is any sense of transmission, or how knowledge of Sumerian terminology could have been spread throughout the ancient Near East and the Mediterranean. The Dead Sea Scrolls illustrate, as has been the subject of much recent scholarship, that Mesopotamian lore was transmitted and utilized outside of Mesopotamia. According to the Qumran Book of Giants for example one of the giants is named Gilgamesh, the hero of Mesopotamian epic. In the Hellenistic period, the scrolls indicate, Mesopotamian lore spread not in Sumerian but in Aramaic, which was used extensively by Jews and others throughout the ancient Near East at the time (e.g., Goff 2023). Knowledge of Sumerian, preserved in cuneiform, was restricted to scribal elites in ancient Mesopotamia.

How Allegro could overlook such problems becomes easier to understand, if you understand him as offering a phallic brand of perennialism. By understanding all ancient Near Eastern religions as essentially the same, the oldest discernible language of the region, Sumerian, is underneath them all. The phallocentric nature of Allegro’s construal of ancient Near Eastern religion gives his thesis an almost Freudian quality. Veneration of the amanita muscaria as the semen of from the sky god’s penis is the “id” of ancient Near Eastern religion, coded in Sumerian, that lurks beneath the surface of the Bible and Christianity. Allegro’s sexualized approach to Sumerian etymology is a sort of “return of the repressed.”

Experts in the Bible were not the only academics who took serious issue with Allegro’s claims. The mycologist R. Gordon Wasson (1898–1986), who had argued that the amanita muscaria was important in ancient Vedic religion (equating it with soma), disagreed that veneration of this mushroom was as widespread as Allegro was asserting (Irvin 2008; Pharand 1996; Brown 2005, p. 206). Scholars with expertise in Sumerian upon the publication of Sacred Mushroom questioned Allegro’s use and even basic grasp of the language. Jacobsen (1971, p. 237), the leading expert in Sumerian at the time, in a review disparaged Allegro’s reliance on etymology, criticizing him for ignoring issues of grammatic structures and phonetic change. He reviewed numerous Sumerian words to which Allegro attributes a phallic or sexual meaning and said they have no such connotation. Jacobson called the book “a veritable recrudescence of the unbridled etymology of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries” (ibid., p. 236). He insultingly compared Allegro to the early modern Swedish scholar Olof Rudbeck, who in his Atlantica (or Atland eller Manheim, 1679–1702) used philology to argue that Sweden is the cradle of human civilization and that various ethnic groups, such as the Persians, the Phoenicians and the Scythians, are the descendants of ancient Swedes (ibid., pp. 236, 246; Burman and Boyes 2021). Another expert in Sumerian, J. S. Cooper (Johns Hopkins University), wrote a letter in 1971 to the editor of the New York Review of Books, emphasizing that a review of Sacred Mushroom by the scholar of early Christianity W.H.C. Frend did not sufficiently highlight Allegro’s misuse of Sumerian. Cooper wrote that Allegro “who is a Qumran (Dead Sea scrolls) specialist and not a Sumerologist, has seen fit to construct his theories upon a foundation of garbled, misinterpreted, or even nonexistent Sumerian words. While I am intrigued to see this obscure and difficult language, with which I do daily battle in the course of my researches, associated with items as exciting and modish as phallic worship and psilocybin, to say that Allegro should have known better would be an understatement” (Cooper 1971).

4. Conspiratorial Scholarship

Scholars were correct to observe that Allegro’s etymologies are often inaccurate. But there is a key aspect of his approach that one misses by simply making that point. He is not arguing that terminology in the Bible clearly points to the survival in Judaism and Christianity of an ancient phallic fertility cult. It is not self-evident. It is hidden but becomes discernable through Allegro’s Sumerian etymologies. In his model, the surface story of Jesus in the gospels is a kind of hoax, a “false flag” operation. Its phallic-mycological teachings were expressed in a hidden form that only initiates could discern (Allegro [1970] 2009, p. 194). The producers of New Testament texts are “cryptographers” who made the significance of their texts obscure (e.g., pp. xxvi, 42; cf. xxviii).

A good example of Allegro’s exegetical method regards a crux in Mark 3. In this chapter Jesus establishes his twelve disciples. In Mark, unlike the parallel passages in Matthew and Luke, Jesus renames both James son of Zebedee and his brother John as “Boanerges.” Mark 3:17 presumes that the term is obscure since it glosses it, explaining that it means “sons of thunder.” Scholars have struggled to understand how Boanerges could mean “sons of thunder” (Boring 2012, p. 103). “Boane-” is often understood as a loose transliteration of the Semitic “sons of” (בני). The portion “-rges” is more difficult. It may derive from the Semitic term רגז “tumult,” which is used in Job 37:1–2 in parallelism with “lightning,” which suggests the root can denote “thunder,” as the word is translated in the NRSV translation of Job 37 (Yarbro Collins 2007, pp. 219–20). It has also been connected to רגש, which can also denote “tumult” or rage, or רעש, which means “commotion” (Rook 1981). The term “Boanerges” remains an interpretive crux.

Not for Allegro, however (Allegro [1970] 2009, pp. 101–2). He dismisses out of hand any connection between “boane-” and “sons of.” “Boanerges,” has for him, unsurprisingly, a Sumerian etymology (GEŠPÚ + *AN-ÚR, “heavenly-roof”; ibid., p. 265). He asserts that “-rges” does not mean “thunder.” The phrase “sons of thunder” should be primarily understood not as glossing “Boanerges” but as a reference to the sacred mushroom. Mushrooms were called “sons of thunder,” he reasons, since early peoples concluded that fungi were “born of thunder” since they appeared after rainstorms. He supports this by bringing up the word κεραύνιον, which he translates as “thunder-fungus.”

The word κεραύνιον is generally understood as meaning “thunder.” It can also denote a kind of mushroom. It is implicit that for Allegro at issue in Mark 3:17 is his beloved amanita muscaria. It is not clear that this is the case. The term κεραύνιον for example occurs in Theophrastus’ Enquiry into Plants 1.6.5, describing a kind of mushroom but without any indication that it has psychedelic properties or provides visions of sky penises. The Loeb translation renders κεραύνιον there as “thunder-truffle” (Hort 1916, p. 43; cf. Ancient Medicine Blog 2021).

While a mycologist could critique Allegro’s understanding of what kind of mushroom the ancient Greeks denoted with “thunder” terminology, my key interest is what his take on Mark 3:17 reveals about Allegro’s philological method. Whereas most scholars are trying to find Semitic terminology underneath “Boanerges,” he is not. He’s not trying to answer why the verse explains that “Boanerges” means “sons of thunder.” He wants to show that the latter expression points to something which is not in the text at all—the sacred mushroom. We are observing “the craft of the Christian cryptographer” (Allegro [1970] 2009, p. 101). Allegro’s secretive author placed a cryptic allusion to “thunder-fungus” (κεραύνιον) in Mark 3:17, which does not attest this word, that would be discerned by readers of the text who were initiates of the amanita muscaria: “What appears on the surface is unreal and never expected to be taken seriously by those within the cult.” To emphasize the significance of his esoteric mycological exegesis, he stresses that if he’s correct “the historicity and validity of the New Testament story is in ruins.”

It is not my responsibility to save the New Testament from John Allegro. I am more interested in understanding his method. The above example from Mark 3:17 underscores an overarching methodological point—the lack of evidence for an argument is itself evidence for it. The meaning is not on the surface but hidden. It was intentionally hidden by the authors of the text. One question raised by our analysis is how to understand Allegro’s production of Sacred Mushroom in relation to his earlier work on the Dead Sea Scrolls, since the scrolls do not appear prominently in the book. It also does not fit well with what he argued about Jesus in the 50s. Is Jesus a cipher for semen from the sky penis and modeled after the crucified Teacher of Righteousness?

But Allegro’s earlier Qumran scholarship can, I think, help us understand the crypto-philology that characterizes his method in Sacred Mushroom. As discussed above, when he was a Qumran scholar he promoted anti-Catholic conspiracy theories. Sacred Mushroom has a similar conspiratorial quality. Allegro’s radical thesis about Christianity being a phallic mushroom cult can be understood as a kind of conspiracy theory, although this depends on how to define a conspiracy theory. At a minimum, the book is a product of conspiratorial thinking. The common thread between his work as a Qumran scholar and his unusual mycological claims in Sacred Mushroom is not so much the content of the scrolls but rather a common mindset—conspiratorial ideation.

While “conspiracy theory” can be understood in various ways, it is a kind of theory. As such, it offers a model for understanding something. A defining feature of conspiracy theories is that things do not happen by coincidence. Events, including seemingly unconnected ones, are related because they were orchestrated by a powerful group that works in secret (Barkun 2013, pp. 3–4; Butter and Knight 2020, p. 1). Popper ([1945] 1962, p. 2.94) in The Open Society and its Enemies defines a “conspiracy theory of society” as the view that “the explanation of a social phenomenon consists in the discovery of the men or groups who are interested in the occurrence of this phenomenon (sometimes it is a hidden interest which has first to be revealed), and who have planned and conspired to bring it out” (McKenzie-McHarg 2020, p. 25). Such conspiratorial thinking encourages its own kind of perennialism, in which differing kinds of data become evidence for the machinations of the same conspiratorial group, which leads to maximalizing, grand theories of history and causation.

The phrase “conspiracy theory” also often has a pejorative connotation, denoting ideas that are absurd, false, dangerous and/or racist (Butter and Knight 2020, p. 4; McKenzie-McHarg 2020, p. 17). Examples of conspiracy theories, which are legion, would be the belief that the fake Protocols of the Elders of Zion constitute evidence for a global Jewish conspiracy or the conviction among QAnon adherents that the US government is run by satanic pedophiles (Bloom and Moskalenko 2021). That the Vatican was covertly delaying the publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls is a kind of conspiracy theory, as they are conventionally understood.

Allegro’s grand thesis in Sacred Mushroom that Judaism, the Bible, and Christianity secretly continue an ancient Near Eastern mushroom cult is not a conspiracy theory in the sense described above. Conspiracy theories are often understood as focusing on current events, whereas Allegro is interested in antiquity. There is no ancient terminology—not even in Sumerian!—that corresponds to “conspiracy theory.” But events took place in antiquity that fit with what we call conspiracy theories. According to Tacitus for example there were widespread rumors that the fire which devasted Rome in 64 CE had been planned and believers of Christ were blamed for this covert deed, for which they were brutally persecuted (Annals 15.44.2–3; Pagán 2020). One can also discern conspiratorial theorizing in antiquity functioning as a kind of science. The mindset evident in the Nag Hammadi texts that the entire cosmos was created to keep humans in ignorance about their true, divine nature can be understood as a philosophical conspiracy theory.

Given its focus on antiquity, Allegro’s conspiratorial ideation in Sacred Mushroom does not uncover secret malignant forces that covertly orchestrate society, whereas conspiracy theories often do. But Allegro’s disclosures about antiquity very much do have contemporary ramifications. As he makes clear, if even one of his Sumerian etymologies of biblical terms is correct, the nature of Christianity must be rethought (Allegro [1970] 2009, p. 192). His revelations in Sacred Mushroom undermine the Catholic church he earlier perceived as working against him. His next book, The End of a Road, presumes that Sacred Mushroom undermined the legitimacy of Christianity and focuses on a follow-up question, how we can reimagine human society once we put the Christian religion behind us (Allegro 1970; Brown 2005, pp. 215–16).

If we understand conspiracy theory not simply as a term of derision but as denoting a mode of interpretive practice, it becomes easier to understand Sacred Mushroom as a product of conspiratorial thinking. We can call it conspiratorial theorizing. One epistemological feature of this mindset is that things are not what they appear to be. The forces that control and orchestrate events are by design unseen, or discernible only to an astute observer.

A conspiratorial way of thinking can function as a hermeneutical framework used to read texts. The textualization of conspiratorial thinking is evident in the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory, which peaked in 2016. The emails by Hilary Clinton and John Podesta leaked by WikiLeaks include discussions between people about ordering pizza. But when read with a QAnon mindset, the mundane details in those emails become coded references to forms of pedophilia, leading to the conclusion that Comet Ping Pong, a pizzeria in Washington DC, was the center of an underground child sex ring.

There is a similar hermeneutical mindset at work in Sacred Mushroom. The surface level text is read with the conviction that its true meaning is hidden, and that it is wildly different from its surface level meaning. Understanding Sacred Mushroom as a product of conspiratorial thinking, I suggest, helps explain its newfound popularity. Joe Rogan’s promotion of the book on his popular online platform is a major reason there is renewed interest in it. Rogan himself, as is well-known, promotes conspiracy theories. Understanding Sacred Mushroom as a product of conspiratorial thinking makes it appeal to someone with a penchant for conspiracy theories. Rogan’s online success is itself a broader symptom of the fact that a receptivity towards conspiracy theories has dramatically increased in recent years. A willingness to believe conspiracy theories rises after anxiety-producing social events, whereas trust in mainstream institutions erodes (Van Prooijen et al. 2020, p. 172; Bloom and Moskalenko 2021, p. 81). There have been many such events in recent years, including climate change related disasters, COVID, and white disaffection in the US towards demographic change. A conspiracy theory allows for a “reliable, certain, and stable” view of the world that has appeal when one has a self-perception of powerlessness in a dangerous world (Bowes et al. 2023, pp. 261, 275; cf. Douglas et al. 2017). Social media also allows such ideas to be disseminated on a scale otherwise impossible. Donald Trump gives conspiracy theories and misinformation a national platform that is unprecedented.

Among advocates such as Rogan, Allegro is not a difficult personality or flawed scholar, as he is typically understood in academia. He rather becomes, to use the language of David Frankfurter, an expert who gains prestige by unveiling hidden knowledge that calls into question mainstream perceptions of the Bible and Christianity (Frankfurter 2006, p. 69).

5. Conclusions

I suspect that if he was aware of it, Allegro would be pleased with the current situation. The field of Dead Sea Scrolls since he left it many years ago has blossomed. It is an established field of study in its own right. There is a vibrant Qumran “ivory tower” in which many scholars are doing good work. But by and large their high-quality publications go unnoticed by the broader public, while Sacred Mushroom, panned by scholars now long gone, enjoys new popularity in the public context that Allegro preferred to academia.

While Joe Rogan promotes Sacred Mushroom by appealing to Allegro’s “rock solid credentials” as a scholar of the Dead Sea Scrolls, experts in this field have consistently found his work problematic and unpersuasive. Allegro’s time as a Qumran scholar demonstrated his penchant for conspiracy theories, and his conspiratorial ideation informs Sacred Mushroom. Understanding the book in this way makes intelligible why conspiracy theorists like Joe Rogan promote the book, and why, amidst the broader rise of willingness to entertain conspiracy theories in contemporary culture, Sacred Mushroom has a popularity it never had when first published. When Jan Irvin praised Allegro in the 40th anniversary edition of Sacred Mushroom as “a man who was ahead of his time,” I do not think he realized how right he was.