The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross
A study of the nature and origins of Christianity within the fertility cults of the ancient Near East
John M. Allegro, a philologist and scholar of the Dead Sea Scrolls, advanced one of the most radical hypotheses of the 20th century: that early Christianity emerged from a fertility cult centered around the ingestion of psychoactive mushrooms, primarily Amanita muscaria. Through linguistic and symbolic analysis, he proposed that the figure of Jesus represented a coded myth of sacred intoxication — a vehicle to preserve the esoteric knowledge of plant-based communion under the veil of religious narrative. The work was rejected by institutional academia, but later recognized as a pioneering exploration into the entheogenic origins of spirituality.
