Well… it’s the 53rd anniversary of some people writing a letter to a newspaper. Which might not sound remarkable, but the writers were a group of academics, distressed that a colleague had set fire to his career by publishing a book that said Jesus was a mushroom hallucination.
John Marco Allegro had been a really quite eminent archaeologist and philologist (someone who studies texts), and wrote two respected books in the 1950s, The Dead Sea Scrolls and The People of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Then… things went slightly awry.
Some of Allegro’s points in the book can be put down to the difficulties of translating ancient Aramaic into modern English. Just what is a טיקלא (tiqla), for example? Mind you, even if it does mean ‘bolt’, does it necessarily follow that mushrooms are like cocks?
(Yes, Stormy Daniels’ description of Donald Trump is where my brain went, too, but I think it’s best not to dwell on such thoughts.)
Allegro’s idea that this early Christian fresco is… well, at least reminiscent of a mushroom isn’t wildly off.
…but there is the small problem that Amanita muscaria, the fly agaric, er… isn’t native to the Middle East.
On the face of it, the central idea — that Judaism and Christianity developed from earlier fertility cults sustained by “the sacred mushroom … the Amanita muscaria”, and that its hallucinogenic properties could resemble religious ecstasy — isn’t completely mad.
But when you’re spinning one idea out to book length, things can get a little… stretched, let’s say.
I haven’t read it in full, but I have flicked through, and it is a bit like being cornered by that guy in the pub/on the train, or reading one of those blogs/Twitter accounts.
(Still, at least this one’s normal #amirite?)
I have, though, read all of William Donaldson’s Brewer’s Rogues, Villains & Eccentrics, which tells me that Allegro thought the God of the Old Testament was
a mighty penis in the heavens who in a thunderous climax of the storm ejaculated semen upon the furrows of Mother Earth
…and I found the bit where Allegro says
Cain and Abel represent the ‘womb’ and the ‘penis’ respectively
because their first names come from the Sumerian ‘Gar-en’ (seed container) and ‘Bal’ (phallus).
We’re also told St Peter’s name is an “obvious play on the Semitic pitra (mushroom)”, and there’s a digression about
…and the chapter on the virgin birth quotes Pliny. Fungi are one of the “greatest marvels of nature”, apparently, because they “spring up spontaneously and cannot be grown from seed”. In other words: mushrooms; they’re a bit like Jesus, aren’t they?
And, basically, there’s just an awful lot of genitalia.
An awful lot.
Little wonder, then, that his fellow academics felt compelled to write to The Times on this day in 1970.
He replied to defend his “many years of intensive research” and suggest that
when these scholars have actually read and studied the book they will feel better able to offer the world a balanced judgement less clouded with emotion.
So, he can’t have been delighted when Cambridge University Press’s Church History journal published a considered review a year later — by someone who had read it, and thought it was fucking nonsense.
Still, he did make Time magazine:
…even if historian Dr Henry Chadwick did write to the Daily Telegraph to say there was
no particle of evidence for all this exciting conjecture. Allegro’s work reads like a Semitic philologist’s erotic nightmare after consuming a highly indigestible meal of hallucinogenic fungi.
According to William Donaldson,
Allegro denied that he had ever consumed this particular mushroom. “I wouldn’t be so bloody stupid,” he affirmed.
