As a specialist in Semitic languages (Aramaic, Hebrew and Arabic) – NOT Sumerian – an honest scholar would rely on a specialist in Sumerian, to collaborate with. Allegro didn't bother – suspicious avoidance. Weston W. Fields (2009). The Dead Sea Scrolls, A Full History. Vol.1. Leiden: Brill. pp.212–213. ISBN 978-9004175815. J.M. Allegro (1962). "Further Light on the History of the Qumran Sect". Journal of Semitic Studies. 7: 304–308. doi: 10.1093/jss/7.2.304. I feel that Allegro gives a good explanation for the motivation of a group of people to value the mushroom's psychoactive effects as the hand of god. How else would someone try to explain such an experience without the slightest hint of how biochemistry really works? If someone honestly reads Allegro's text with this in mind, it's hard to see how he can be totally wrong. Aside from “The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross”, Allegro wrote several other books and articles on biblical studies, archaeology, and the history of religion. He was a controversial figure in his field, known for his unorthodox views and his willingness to challenge established beliefs.

a b c Philip R. Davies, "John Allegro and the Copper Scroll" in George J. Brooke; Philip R. Davies, eds. (2002). Copper Scroll Studies. Sheffield Academic Press. pp.26–27. ISBN 0826460550. Allegro, John M. (2009) The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, 40th anniversary edition, Gnostic Media, ISBN 978-0-9825562-7-6. a b c George J. Brooke, "Dead Sea Scrolls Scholarship in the United Kingdom", in Devorah Dimant, ed. (2012). The Dead Sea Scrolls in Scholarly Perspective: A History of Research. Leiden: Brill. p.458. ISBN 978-9004208063. The most important thing in life was life itself, and life is rain. The reasoning is simple. Rain begets vegetation on the earth as spermatozoa beget offspring in the womb. God, the Creator, the source of rain, must therefore be the sperm of creation and the heavenly penis from which it spills. The storm is the orgasm of God. The drops of rain are the ‘words’ of God. Earth is the womb of creation. Weston W. Fields (2009). The Dead Sea Scrolls, A Full History. Vol.1. Leiden: Brill. p.211. ISBN 978-9004175815.The book was the culmination of twenty years’ study of Semitic and proto-Semitic languages. Allegro hoped it would illuminate the origins of thought, language and religion. People should then be able to better understand where they came from, shed the trappings of religion, and take true responsibility for what they did to each other and their world. Years later, having gotten two degrees in religion and having read some of Allegro's other work, I returned to this book, hoping that I now knew enough to evaluate it.

The book relates the development of language to the development of myths, religions, and cultic practices in world cultures. Allegro argues, through etymology, that the roots of Christianity, and many other religions, lay in fertility cults, and that cult practices, such as ingesting visionary plants to perceive the mind of God, persisted into the early Christian era, and to some unspecified extent into the 13th century with reoccurrences in the 18th century and mid-20th century, as he interprets the fresco of the Plaincourault Chapel to be an accurate depiction of eucharistic ritual ingestion of Amanita muscaria. Allegro argued that Jesus never existed as a historical figure but was rather a mythological creation of early Christians under the influence of psychoactive mushroom extracts such as psilocybin. [1] As their differences deepened, Allegro came to resent and despise their tradition and belief system (Christianity) – on which opposition to his views stood.If you ever have a psychedelic experience and you are at all familiar with biblical myths, you get the vague feeling that this must be what they were talking about. Allegro shows you with the language that it is exactly what they were talking about. It makes more sense that our ancestors believed that having mushroom fueled orgies in the woods would transfer their powers of biological fertility to their crops than for them to have been scared of a bearded man in the sky. It also shines light on to the potential reasons the first Christians were persecuted so by the Romans. Allegro suggests that the use of these mushrooms was a common cultural practice in ancient civilizations and that the early Christian church tried to hide this knowledge. He also claims that the stories of the Bible, such as the story of the crucifixion of Jesus, were actually symbolic of the effects of the mushrooms. As with any art interpretation, it can be extremely difficult to take symbology out of its cultural context and this is perhaps the most challenging point of this project. Has Rush succeeded? Typically, yes and no. Yes, because Rush has demonstrated that the mushroom does play a particular role in Christian art, something hitherto ignored by religious scholars in the main. But no, because the groundwork for the reinterpretation of the symbology is based on an, as yet, still scantily evidenced theory, and the idea that knowledge of the mushroom has remained in secret with an elite priest class within the Church all this time, really needs more evidence than the art itself. In working on the scrolls with religious colleagues, Allegro came into sharp disagreement and strong conflict with them over dissemination of study findings and results. Solid state physics Quantum theory Chemical bonds SCIENCE Physics Condensed Matter Física do estado sólido Mecânica quântica

So you best be sure you don’t EVER read END OF A ROAD. Because that’s the one where Allegro pulls out all stops deploying ‘dirt bag druggies’ rhetoric to invoke the bad reputation of trippers in the contemporaneous public eye of his era (not their own, duh) – as a brush to tar the new testament and foundations of early Christianity with. Allegro studied at the University of Manchester, where he earned a degree in classical and Oriental studies. He later worked as a member of the team that deciphered the Dead Sea Scrolls and became known for his unconventional theories about their meaning. s/t: A Study of the Nature and Origins of Christianity within the Fertility Cults of the Ancient Near East As early as 1956 Allegro held controversial views regarding the content of the scrolls, stating in a letter to de Vaux, "It's a pity that you and your friends cannot conceive of anything written about Christianity without trying to grind some ecclesiastical or non-ecclesiastical axe." The bulk of his work on the Dead Sea Scrolls was done by 1960 and he was at odds with his scrolls colleagues. When a conflict broke out with H.H. Rowley concerning Allegro's interpretation of the scrolls, [22] Allegro, on the invitation of F. F. Bruce, moved from the Department of Near East Studies in the Faculty of Arts at Manchester to the Faculty of Theology. [18] It was during his stay in Theology that he wrote his controversial book, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, whose subtitle was "A Study of the Nature and Origins of Christianity within the Fertility Cults of the Ancient Near East". Apparently realising the impact this book would have, Allegro resigned his post at Manchester. [18] The Sacred Mushroom and Christian Myth [ edit ]George J. Brooke, "Dead Sea Scrolls Scholarship in the United Kingdom", in Devorah Dimant, ed. (2012). The Dead Sea Scrolls in Scholarly Perspective: A History of Research. Leiden: Brill. pp.453–454. ISBN 978-9004208063. The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross” is a book written by John M. Allegro, a biblical scholar. In the book, Allegro presents a different theory about the origins of Christianity. He argues that the early Christian religion was based on the use of hallucinogenic mushrooms and that the stories of the Bible were metaphors for their effects. In October 2008, Jan Irvin published The Holy Mushroom: Evidence of Mushrooms in Judeo-Christianity which was the first book to present texts which supported Allegro’s theory. For example, a 16 th century Christian text called The Epistle to the Renegade Bishops explicitly mentions and discusses “the holy mushroom”. Irvin provides dozens of Christian images to support Allegro’s ideas – images that weren’t available when The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross was originally published in 1970. The front cover of Irvin’s book includes one of these images – some mushrooms can be seen. Some say that in these kinds of images, it is not the Amanita mushroom that is shown, but psilocybin mushrooms, such as the ones shown below. After service in the Royal Navy during World War II, Allegro started to train for the Methodist ministry but transferred to a degree in Oriental Studies at the University of Manchester. In 1953 he was invited to become the first British representative on the international team working on the recently discovered Dead Sea Scrolls in Jordan. The following year he was appointed assistant lecturer in Comparative Semitic Philology at Manchester, and held a succession of lectureships there until he resigned in 1970 to become a full-time writer. In 1961 he was made Honorary Adviser on the Dead Sea Scrolls to the Jordanian government. Allegro asserts that it’s not such a controversial idea that religions could be based on the use of psychedelic plants. It’s been said that other ancient cultures might have used psychedelic plants as well in their religious rituals. In Book 9 of the classic Hindu text, the Rig Veda, a “pressed juice” called Soma is mentioned as something drunk by priests. Some sort of visionary state is reported: “Make me immortal in that realm where happiness and transports, where joys and felicities combine, and longing wishes are fulfilled.”

a b The Meaning of the Dead Sea Scrolls by Peter Flint and James VanderKam (Jul 10, 2005) ISBN 056708468X T&T Clark pp. 323-325The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross” was originally written in English and is widely available in this language. There are no official translations of the book into other languages. Book Editions Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2023-04-15 20:12:47 Autocrop_version 0.0.14_books-20220331-0.2 Boxid IA40409506 Camera Sony Alpha-A6300 (Control) Col_number COL-1272 Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier The ‘deliberate hoax’ idea seemed improbably complicated. And Allegro’s etymologies needed more substantiation – not enough was known at the time about the language of Sumer to verify many of his suggestions. But in the outrage The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross raised among Christian critics, scholars failed to follow up on the main ideas – a way of understanding the fertility concept at the root of religion, and the way language and religion grew up together: the origin of myth and philosophy. The idea of sacred mushrooms being intertwined with religious history is a fascinating concept. It raises questions about the origins of religious symbolism and the potential influence of psychoactive substances on ancient rituals and beliefs. Exploring the Content