The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross

The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross ruined John’s career.

The book was the culmination of twenty years’ study, for it grew out of everything he had learned about the development of Semitic and proto-Semitic languages. He meant it to launch his name upon history as a world thinker. He hoped it would illuminate the origins of thought and language, so that people could 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.

None of this got past the initial shock-waves. The mushroom cloud spread more derision than enlightenment.

Underpinning The Sacred Mushroom is the idea that fertility must be of fundamental importance to primitive religion, as it is to life. John set out this concept in a preliminary plan of the book, sent to the publishers Hodder and Stoughton, Ltd., on October 23, 1968:

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.

In The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, John set out to trace the expression of this simple philosophy through the sacred literature of the ancient world.

‘The source of this breakthrough has been the oft-attempted but hitherto inconclusive search for a common denominator to the language groups of Sumerian, Indo-European, and Semitic. It is now possible to decipher some important proper names in the old hymns and epics in all these literatures, and to check and cross-check our results with the other languages.’ John Allegro

John’s linguistic clues criss-cross different cultures and lead into many-layered webs of association. They led him to believe that a fertility cult based on using the sacred mushroom, amanita muscaria, as a gateway to divine understanding, was at the root of many religions, including Christianity. The mushroom was seen as a symbol of God on earth. But because mushroom lore was secret, he reasoned that it had to be written down in the form of codes hidden in folk tales. “This is the basic origin of the stories of the New Testament. They were a literary device to spread the rites of mushroom worship to the faithful…The stories of the Gospels and Acts were a deliberate hoax. Through studying Sumerian cuneiform texts which go back to 3500 B.C., we can trace the proper names and words used in the Bible back to their original meanings.”

There are problems with the ‘deliberate hoax’ idea. And John’s etymologies needed more substantiation – not enough was known at the time about the language of Sumer to verify many of his suggestions. However, 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.

In January 2006, Jan Irvin and Andrew Rutajit published Astrotheology & Shamanism: Unveiling the Law of Duality in Christianity and Other Religions. This book, which is dedicated to John, was the first to make a serious examination of John’s proposals. The book substantiates many of his claims via iconographic and symbolic evidence and brings together years of research and references, many of which have been released since the publication of The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross. After 36 years, John’s idea of a Grand Unifying Theory of Religion may be coming to fruition.

After the publication of The Sacred Mushroom, John was criticized for making up many of his religious concepts, not only of drug use, but of fertility worship. Below is an extensive bibliography of materials used by Irvin and Rutajit in their study, Astrotheology & Shamanism. Many of the references, such as Frazer, Wasson, Graves, Ramsbottom, Rolfe, and many others, were also used by John. Included are references to several excellent books on ancient fertility worship: Inman, Howard, Goldberg, etc. Both Inman and Howard discuss fertility worship in Christianity at length.