Ancient World Review

The Sacred Mushroom And The Cross

Nice promotional video by Gnostic Media for the 40th anniversary edition of John Allegro's The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, which argues that Christianity has its roots in a very ancient Near Eastern fertility cult which worshipped the hallucinogenic amanita muscaria mushroom. (See the article Jesus Cult Conspiracy Theories on this site for an overview of alternate theories about the origins of Christianity, including a brief review of the book). Allegro is a little hard to understand in this video, but he says, among other things, that Jesus, if he existed, had nothing to do with the Christos cult, which had been around for a very long time and had been forced to go underground, eventually finding its subterranean expression in the Christian religion. Allegro's theory is controversial, to say the least, but you have to wonder what all those mushrooms are doing in Christian art.

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Pre-Neolithic Mushroom Cults Of The Sahara

"Abstract--The idea that the use of hallucinogens should be a source of inspiration for some forms of prehistoric rock art is not a new one. After a brief examination of instances of such art, this article intends to focus its attention on a group of rock paintings in the Sahara Desert, the works of pre-neolithic Early Gatherers, in which mushroom effigies are represented repeatedly. The polychromic scenes of harvest, adoration and the offering of mushrooms, and large masked ‘gods’ covered with mushrooms, not to mention other significant details, lead us to suppose we are dealing with an ancient hallucinogenic mushroom cult. What is remarkable about these ethnomycological works, produced 7,000 – 9,000 years ago, is that they could indeed reflect the most ancient human culture as yet documented in which the ritual use of hallucinogenic mushrooms is explicitly represented.(As the fathers of modern ethno-mycology and in particular R. Gordon Wasson) imagined, this Saharian testimony shows that the use of hallucinogens goes back to the Paleolithic Period and that their use always takes place within contexts and rituals of a mysticoreligious nature." Source: Artepreistorica. The article originally appeared in Integration: Journal of Mind-Moving Plants and Cultures.

2700-year-old Pot Stash Found In China

"The Yanghai Tombs near Turpan, Xinjiang-Uighur Autonomous Region, China have recently been excavated to reveal the 2700-year-old grave of a Caucasoid shaman whose accoutrements included a large cache of cannabis, superbly preserved by climatic and burial conditions," according to the Journal of Experimental Botany. The "light-haired, blue-eyed Caucasian man" is being described as a "shaman of the Gushi culture, near Turpan in northwestern China" (Toronto Sun). Modern Turpan was apparently called Gushi back then, but I can't find anything about the "Gushi culture." In any case, this discovery provides more evidence of ancient Caucasoid migrations all over the planet, not to mention the widespread shamanistic use of psychoactive plants.

Jesus Cult Conspiracy Theories

The obscure origins of the Christian religion make it a natural subject for "hidden history" conspiracy theories. Dozens, if not hundreds of books have been written over the years, arguing, among other things, that Jesus was a magic mushroom, a solar deity, an Essene or a guerilla fighter sanitized to make him more palatable to the Romans. Some authors claim that Jesus was actually the deified Julius Caesar or that the gospels were propaganda written by the Flavian emperors to help pacify a rebellious province. Whatever the argument, the scarcity of original sources and the ambiguous nature of the evidence leave a lot of room for entertaining speculation.

The Burning Bush Hallucination

Moses was tripping when he saw the burning bush and received the Ten Commandments, according to Benny Shanon, a professor of cognitive psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. (Source: Haaretz)

According to Shanon, the patriarch was high on a concoction "based on bark of the acacia tree, that is frequently mentioned in the Bible." There are over a thousand different species of acacia found in southern Asia, Africa and the Americas, and many of them contain psychotropic alkaloids like DMT, a powerful hallucinogen which also occurs naturally in the human brain.