Book Review: The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross by John M. Allegro

“Like a Semitic philologist’s erotic nightmare.”

The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross by John M. Allegro. Narrated by Martyn Swain. Dreamscape Media, 2022. 11 hours (approx.).

The original 1970 cover.

In John M. Allegro’s interpretation of the Bible everything is a penis, and every penis is a mushroom. Of course, the apostle Peter is a penis, but so are the keys to heaven entrusted to him. The phrase “stumbling block” somehow also means penis, while God is a “mighty” penis in the sky whose ejaculate is the rain. When Jacob wrestles the angel, he suffers an injury to his hip. Why the hip? You guessed it! The ball-and-socket joint are a metaphorical penis in a vagina. 

Allegro (1923-1988) was a lecturer on the Old Testament for the University of Manchester and the first Briton to work on the Dead Sea Scrolls, according to a Time article. His infamous The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross is an attempt to prove the Bible is a hoax. 

To be specific, the Bible was written by a fertility cult who used hallucinogenic mushrooms to access the mind of God. When the cult became persecuted, they preserved their beliefs by writing them down. Allegro says:

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. 

But the rites couldn’t be stated explicitly, so the cult wrote in a code. The code can be deciphered via etymology. Allegro continues:

Through studying Sumerian cuneiform texts which go back to 3,500 B.C., we can trace the proper names and words used in the Bible back to their original meanings.

Allegro traces these “proper names and words” to their often-erotic origins. For example, Yahweh comes from the Sumerian for “juice of fecundity” (i.e., semen). “Christianity” means “smeared in semen.” So, all this time those porn stars were just practicing their religion. Who knew?

These erotic origins for words proffered by Allegro made one critic declare his book is “like a Semitic philologist’s erotic nightmare.”

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Allegro’s etymology is difficult to follow. It is a field of study this reviewer has only a passing knowledge of and no knowledge whatsoever in the specific areas of Semitic and proto-Semitic languages. The difficulty is compounded when listening to the audiobook. The Sumerian words are not spoken but spelled, and it matters if a letter is capital or lowercase. This results in a word whose printed form is “KhASh” to be read by the narrator, Martyn Swain, as capital-k-lowercase-h-capital-a-s-lowercase-h.

Critics have derided Allegro’s work as “word games” (Time). Indeed, Allegro himself said, “... such reconstructions, however probable, must find adequate cross-checking through the cognate languages if they are to be anything but speculative.” Even if we allow for all of Allegro's speculations, I don’t see this as anything more than an etymological Rorschach test.

I call this the ancient aliens problem. On the History Channel’s Ancient Aliens, it was argued that a figurine (pictured below) is proof of aliens because it looks like a spaceman. Indeed, it does. But it also looks like a deep-sea diver or a man in a ceremonial dress. It proves nothing.

The figurine in question.

Similarly, even if “Yahweh” is similar to a Sumerian word for “semen” that hardly proves the writers of the Bible were a near-east sex cult. According to Allegro, “Zeus” also comes from the same Sumerian origin as “Yahweh.” Were the entire Greek myths written by the same sex cult? At most I’d say The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross only proves that the progenitors of human language were perverts. 

Not to mention the book reeks of Bible code conspriacy, but I won’t get into that here.

To be fair, there are a number of contemporary researchers that support Allegro. In 2008, Jan Irvin published The Holy Mushroom which presented “a 16th century Christian text, The Epistle to the Renegade Bishops, that explicitly discusses ‘the holy mushroom’” (JohnAllegro.com).

There are some entertaining moments and weird tidbits throughout the book that alone make it worth reading. Did you know menstrual blood was thought to repel insects? And so, every month a farmer’s wife would walk through the fields with her skirt hiked up. Thank God for pesticides!

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Ancient Aliens’ Giorgio A. Tsoukalos.