The End of a Road

By John M. Allegro

In 1970, John M. Allegro published The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, arguing that the early Christians belonged to a drug cult, their sacrament consisting of hallucinogenic mushrooms. The book contained a large amount of linguistic data to support Allegro’s speculations. In his follow-up book, The End of a Road, Allegro considered the philosophical ramifications of having undermined Christianity and hence, for many people, religion altogether. He argued that abandoning religion is not tantamount to abandoning morality; rather, it should enable a more honest and straightforward approach to morality. This new edition includes a new foreword by Judith Anne Brown, author of John Marco Allegro: The Maverick of the Dead Sea Scrolls, as well as two new essays. These are an essay by Franco Fabbro discussing a mushroom mosaic in an early Christian church in Aquileia; and an essay by John Bolender discussing the vagueness of the concept of religion, which raises questions about the precise target of Allegro’s polemic and challenges attempts to defend religion as a biological adaptation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rousseau, etc.
• Release date: May 13, 2013
• ISBN: 9780615792095

John M. Allegro

John M. Allegro was an English archaeologist and scholar of the Dead Sea Scrolls. He served in the Royal Navy during World War II before studying Hebrew and Greek at Manchester University. In 1968, his translations of scripture commentary known as pesharim were published as Discoveries in the Judaean Desert of Jordan V: 4Q158-4Q186. He resigned his post at the Faculty of Theology at Manchester University shortly before the publication of The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross in 1970.

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1: The One God

Religion is the relationship between a man and his god. It is born out of his sense of weakness and frustration in the face of a largely hostile environment. The extent to which religion dominates a man’s life depends therefore upon his self-confidence. Flushed with the success of his own efforts, man needs no master but himself. Dispirited by failure, or the blows of fortune, he looks to his god for comfort and hope of future restoration. Even when things went well, when his granaries were full, his cisterns flowing with water, his stockyards and rivers teeming with life, early man was beset with fears for the future, lest in the next year drought or plague strike his land. He plied his god with praise and bribes for the continuance of his good fortune, and tried to lure the deity into remaining with him for all time. He built fine houses for the god, and employed representatives to enact continual rites of appeasement and stimulation to promote his procreative activity.

For the god was life. The oldest god-names known from the Near East relate to his creative power. He was thought of as a mighty penis in the skies, ejaculating semen in the violence of the storm, and thereby fructifying the womb of mother Earth beneath. The Greek Zeus and the Hebrew Yahweh (Jehovah) derive from a common linguistic source, and both mean spermatozoa, ‘seed of life’. Embedded within both names is an ancient Sumerian word, symbolized by the single letter ‘U’ meaning ‘fertility’, perhaps the most significant phoneme in the whole of human speech. ‘U’ was the name of the old Sumerian storm-god; when he spoke, it was the shriek of the wind, the scream of ecstasy at the height of the divine orgasm. ‘U’ was the liquid that spurted from the lips of the swollen glans and bore divine life to earth. ‘U’ was the copulatory act itself, the bestriding of a woman by her mate, the mounting of beasts or, more remotely, the fecundation from above of the vaginal furrows of the earth by the god. ‘U’ meant ‘to have mastery over’, to be lord and husband. It signified the sensual, savage world of sexual domination and fructification. It lay at the heart of ancient religion.

The culture of ancient Sumer was not the first; man had been an intelligent being for hundreds of thousands of years before the people we call Sumerians first set foot in Mesopotamia. But for our Graeco-Semitic civilization their culture was the beginning; it is from their language, as now for the first time we can recognize, that our own ultimately derived. It is from their ideas about God that ours came, transmitted through the religious writings of the Jews and Greeks. Yahweh, Zeus and Allah are one: all mean ‘the sperm of heaven’.

It was the Sumerian culture that, about 3500 BC, invented writing, and made communication of ideas and thus history possible. Before then, paintings daubed on walls, figurines crudely fashioned from clay, and the like offer modern enquirers our only ancient evidence for the religious questing of primitive man. With writing, first crudely incised picture diagrams on clay tablets, later stylized symbols and finally alphabets, man could transmit commands, accounts and then stories, songs and liturgies over distances of space and time. As early as 2000 BC Sumerian tablets were recording whole epics and cosmologies that had doubtless been transmitted by word of mouth for hundreds or thousands of years before that. The ‘U’ culture of Sumer was already old at the beginning of history.

If we want to know how and where Christianity began, where its roots lay and how its philosophies were derived, we have to look not merely to the immediate hinterland of the Jewish Old Testament and the inter-testamental literature of the Apocrypha and the Dead Sea Scrolls, but raise our eyes to the very horizons of history. The ‘Jesus’ cult began long before that, but historically we first glimpse its essential features in the Sumerian ‘U’ culture, in the throbbing phallus of the Sumerian storm god. The name ‘Jesus/Joshua’ (the Greek and Hebrew forms) means ‘the semen that heals’ or ‘fructifies’, the god-juice that gives life. To be smeared with this powerful liquid, above all to absorb it into his body, was to bring the worshipper of the ‘Jesus’ into living communion with God, indeed, to make him divine. Thus was religion perfected, God and man made one, and the power of all-knowledge transmitted from heaven to mortals. In the words of the New Testament writer, ‘you have been anointed by the Holy One and know all things’ (I John 2:20).

To the ancient, knowledge and fertility derived from the same source. The slimy juice that dribbled from a man’s penis at ejaculation was a kind of ‘spittle’ in the old vocabulary. The organ was ‘speaking’ at the moment of release. In the grosser and more violent imagery of the storm, the divine phallus spat its juice into the wind and men saw it beating down on to the open furrows of the ground and sinking away into the terrestial womb. They called it ‘the Word of God’. To assimilate this Word into oneself was to have divine knowledge and thus power. The ‘strong’ man of a community, it was soon realized, was not the brawny fellow, much as he might boast of his prowess with an axe, a sword, a plough or his wife; it was the wise, the cunning man, full of arts and crafts, the seducer of his fellow-men and women. It was he who became rich at the expense of the labourer; it was he who survived the long hot summers of drought and watched lesser men gasp out their lives round dried up water-holes. He eked out his water ration from his cistern, hewn out of the rock whilst the fool had watched the precious fluid stream away down the wadi beds. That kind of wisdom was as god-given as the rain itself; to achieve it was to become, like the eaters of Eden’s fruit, ‘like one of us’, the gods. Above all, the wise man knew the divine secrets of the herbs and their powers. He was aware that some plants and trees contained more of the god’s sperm in their sap than others. There were herbs that could kill, and others that could heal. There were a few very special herbs, like the Mandrake, which could do both. To use this ‘Holy Plant’ safely, it was not sufficient to know where to find it; one also had to know when it might be picked, the time of day, the state of the weather. One had to know its secret names and recite them at the moment of plucking and at its administering. One had to know its antidote and the precise amounts of each, given in accordance with the previously determined susceptibilities of the ‘patient’.

The wisest men of the community, then, were the doctors and the priests, and their store of herbal knowledge was the most precious and closely guarded possession of the professions. Through it they wielded great power over their fellows. Even the king, the personal representative of the god in any one city, depended on their information, guidance and good will for the continuance and effectiveness of his office.

The intimate relationship between the god and his priests found practical expression in the religious ritual of the temple, the god’s house. There seems to have been a common pattern of architecture for the temple throughout the ancient Near East. The names applied to its various parts show that it was conceived of as a womb, in the innermost part of which, the ‘uterus’, the god dwelt and performed his acts of creation for the benefit of his people. It was the seat of the divine Word, and thus the source of oracular information imparted to the priest as mouthpiece of the god.

An essential part of the god-man relationship in times of uncertainty and crisis was to share in the divine knowledge of what was to come. Man must soon have realized that what separated him from animals and gave him a certain measure of control of his environment was the ability to reason and look ahead. Prognostication was the mark of human wisdom and to those especially favoured by the god, this ability to peer into the future raised them in esteem into a superhuman category. Of such were the doctors, priests and prophets of the ancient world, recipients of the divine Word. In the Holy of Holies, or ‘Oracle’ of the Hebrew temple, the high priest met Yahweh once a year and became, on behalf of his people, mystically endued with the god’s holiness. He prepared himself by dressing up as the god, that is as the phallus, his headgear representing the glans penis and his body smeared with the saps and resins of those sacred plants deemed especially endowed with the god’s semen. He became thus a ‘christ’ or ‘anointed one’, dripping with seminal fluid like the male organ in the vagina. His entry into the temple through the labial ‘porch’, past the hymenal ‘veil’ into the vaginal ‘hall’ and thus, on this special occasion, into the uterine ‘Oracle’ or ‘Holy of Holies’, symbolized the copulatory act of divine and animal creation. It was the hieratic equivalent of the imitative and stimulative act of the farmer copulating with his wife in the field, after harvest, urging the god to fructify the ground afresh as the man impregnated the woman’s womb. In the Christian Church today, the priestly processional from porch to altar, preceded by the cross, symbol of the conjoined penis and vulva, culminating in the raising aloft of the Host, is but a traditional reflection of this age-old fertility