On the Origins of Western Psychedelia: Exploring Allegro’s The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross

Dear Colleagues,

The articles that constitute this Special Issue are dedicated to analyzing the enigmatic career of the Dead Sea Scrolls scholar John M. Allegro (1923–1988) and the history of the reception of his book, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross (1970).

A philologist with expertise in comparative Semitic languages, Allegro made a name for himself as a translator and popularizer of the Dead Sea Scrolls; however, his academic reputation was ruined with the publication of The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross: A Study of the Nature and Origins of Christianity within the Fertility Cults of the Ancient Near East.

The book was shunned by his peers in the academy, repudiated by the Church of England, and ridiculed by the international press. Allegro’s book was based on a deep understanding of Aramaic, Hebrew, Accadian, Syriac, Greek, Latin, and Sumerian, and since so few people possess the requisite understanding of comparative linguistics in the ancient world, the arguments presented in The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross were never directly refuted. This fact did not escape his small but dedicated group of followers, who have continued to direct attention to Allegro’s work in the decades since his provocative text was published (and republished in subsequent softcover editions). The book jumped into the cultural mainstream, after being a “cult classic” within the drug underground, on account of the Psychedelic Renaissance in scientific research starting in 2006. It was frequently promoted on the podcast The Joe Rogan Show (recently rated among the most popular podcasts in the world), and its notoriety was also bolstered by the unexpected success of Brian Muraresku’s The Immortality Key (2020), which covered similar ground to Allegro’s work.

What is at stake in the resurgence of interest in The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross? As the hype surrounding research into psychedelic medicine continues, Allegro’s conclusions gain more ground as a plausible explanation for the origins of monotheism, which is all the more distressing considering specialists’ indifference to his ideas. Accordingly, psychedelic-enthused celebrities and psychedelic scientists alike draw upon The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross as a resource for narratives concerning the psychedelic origins of Western religion, which are historically inaccurate, philologically suspect, and philosophically confused. The authors of this Special Issue have decided to afford this matter the care that it deserves. To be sure, contributors are not invested in merely underscoring the problems that marred Allegro’s research. Rather, this Special issue contextualizes the motivations behind his provocative theories, the scholarly and social milieux that rejected them as absurdities, as well as the perpetual appeal of The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross for the general public and academics who do not specialize in the ancient Near East. The articles will, at turns, appreciate the bold inventiveness of Allegro’s theories and disparage his purposefully misleading etymologies, tracing both his considerable intellectual virtuosity and scholarly malfeasance back to his turbulent tenure working on the earliest translation of the Dead Sea Scrolls. As the new era of Western psychedelia struggles with its own sense of historicity, setting the record straight with regards to Allegro will place the transdisciplinary field of psychedelic studies on a more solid foundation.

Bringing together scholars from across disciplines, this Special Issue explores three major vectors in the Allegro effect on psychedelic research and culture today: (1) the nature of Allegro's evidence and methods for his argument that the original Christian community was a fertility cult based on the sacramental use of the psychedelic mushroom Amanita muscaria; (2) the controversy and professional backlash generated by his thesis; and (3) the ongoing influence of his provocative thesis among academics, believers, and authors of popular fiction.

To address these research directions, this Special Issue seeks contributors who possess the ancient language skills that many of Allegro’s readers do not have: Biblical Hebrew, Greek (Attic and Koine), Latin, Aramaic (biblical, Qumran, Targumic), Syriac, Coptic, Middle Egyptian, and Ge‘ez.

Contributors may explore Allegro’s isolated ways of translating and working outside the corrective influence of the academic community, as well as the problematic implications of assuming that psychedelics lead to the same mystical states found in the Dead Sea Scrolls. They may also situate Allegro’s hypothesis in the context of other debates about the nature of psychedelic sacraments, such as the Vedic Soma portrayed in R. Gordon Wasson’s 1968 Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality, a book that has long been discredited in academic circles but continues to have a significant influence on the popular and scientific understanding of yoga and altered states.

Other contributors may address the following questions: What economic, social, and other gains and losses do writers of this “ancient psychedelic cults” genre experience by making the claim? How do their experiences differ if they endorse psychedelics and religions as things that matter (Muraresku) versus disparage psychedelics and religions as illusions to be broken (Allegro)? What are readers using this work to potentiate in the various spaces—underground, clinical, legal, ritual, scientific, popular—of psychedelic culture now?

We hope that both ancient historians and scholars of the contemporary period will move beyond speculative botany and invocation of vague mystical experiences to explore how the substances that are documented shaped the rituals themselves, and centering what is real phenomenologically and ontologically for the people carrying out the rituals—namely, their own divinity and the agency of the gods, spirits, and plant or fungal teachers.

The scholarly contributions in this Special Issues will be timely in the context of the burgeoning psychedelic conversation—in fact, they will add an important element to this conversation shortly in advance of what is sure to be the 50th anniversary reprint of Road to Eleusis’, the pro-psychedelic book that appeared in the same decade (1978) as Sacred Mushroom and has had a parallel scholarly non/reception. This Special Issue draws attention to the fact that people’s treatment of psychoactive use in ancient religious contexts has significant implications for our understanding of the past and for contemporary cultural and legal discussions about the use of drugs. Such treatments often overlook the complex cultural and religious context of the ancient world, projecting modern preoccupations with psychedelics onto it.

J. Christian Greer and Sharday Mosurinjohn will offer a closing Editorial to this Special Issue exploring the history of the reception of Allegro’s work, focusing on misconceptions by detractors and admirers alike. While his thesis that Jesus was a mushroom is well known among religious studies scholars focusing on psychedelics, few have noticed the actual motivation behind Allegro’s provocative thesis. Contrary to public perception, Allegro had no interest in placing psychedelics on the agenda for scholars of the ancient Near East, let alone arguing that psychedelic mushrooms have the potential to generate mystical experiences. Driven by the belief that psychoactive drugs only induce madness and delusion, Allegro associated Jesus with the red-capped Amanita muscaria mushroom as a means of discrediting Christianity at its source. His negative attitude towards drugs and insistence that Christianity originated as a perversely orgiastic mushroom cult represent a red thread that runs through his later work, beginning with The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross (1970), and which is especially pronounced in his follow-up book, The End of the Road (1970). In their closing essay, Greer and Mosurinjohn will explore what the failure of apprehending Allegro’s agenda reveals about his admirers and detractors, asking what motivates people to promote or refute narratives that center drugs as the “secret” behind Christianity’s origin. It is clear that the antagonism goes beyond the evaluation of evidence, modes of interpretation, or mere methodological differences but rather strikes at scholars’ more fundamental attitude towards the psychedelic class of drugs and their relationship to religious experience.

Dr. J. Christian Greer
Dr. Sharday C. Mosurinjohn
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Religions is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• psychedelia
• John M. Allegro
• The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross