Ancient World Review

The Sacred Mushroom And The Cross

The Dead Sea Scrolls scholar, John Allegro, is probably best known for his controversial book, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross:

"The book relates the development of language to the development of myths, religions, and cultic practices in world cultures. Allegro argues, through etymology, that the roots of Christianity, and many other religions, lay in fertility cults, and that cult practices, such as ingesting visionary plants to perceive the mind of God, persisted into the early Christian era, and to some unspecified extent into the 13th century with reoccurrences in the 18th century and mid-20th century, as he interprets the fresco of the Plaincourault Chapel to be an accurate depiction of the ritual ingestion of Amanita muscaria as the Eucharist. Allegro argued that Jesus never existed as a historical figure and was a mythological creation of early Christians under the influence of psychoactive mushroom extracts such as psilocybin." (Wikipedia)

Fresco showing mushrooms in Plaincourault Chapel, France.

I've made several attempts to read The Sacred Mushroom and The Cross, but it's a difficult book for a layman to understand because it focuses almost exclusively on the etymology of words in ancient languages:

"As a philologist, Allegro analysed the derivations of language. He traced biblical words and phrases back to their roots in Sumerian, and showed how Sumerian phonemes recur in varying but related contexts in many Semitic, classical and other Indo-European languages. Although meanings changed to some extent, Allegro found some basic religious ideas passing on through the genealogy of words. His book The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross relates the development of language on our continent to the development of myths, religions and cultic practices in many cultures. Allegro believed he could prove through etymology that the roots of Christianity, as of many other religions, lay in fertility cults; and that cultic practices, such as ingesting hallucinogenic drugs to perceive the mind of god, persisted into Christian times." Source: JohnAllegro.org.

Often referred to as a maverick, Allegro was actually a diligent scholar whose book The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth is a brilliant piece of work on the beliefs of the Essenes and the possible origins of the early Christian communities which seemed to appear so suddenly in the ancient Mediterranean world. Highly recommended. I don't claim to be able to follow his linguistic arguments in The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, but the idea that the origins of Christianity and Judaism can be traced back to prehistoric fertility cults doesn't seem all that outlandish to me. In fact, it seems pretty likely.

Allegro sometimes said, in interviews, that Jesus was a mushroom and that Christianity was originally a cover for a secret mushroom cult. He apparently meant that literally, but I think the real message of his book is that Christianity evolved via Judaism from much more ancient shamanistic practices and that the mushroom symbolism of these old cults still survives in church artwork and theology to a certain extent. The basic idea is that the fundamental beliefs of Christianity and other religions originated in ancient fertility cults which used psychedelic mushrooms to make contact with God.

There's nothing inherently unreasonable about any of this. Religions, like ancient cultures, don't just appear fully formed; they all have deep roots in the prehistoric world. The same thing can be said for a lot of our modern holidays. Halloween and Christmas, for example, were originally pagan festivals and their ancient roots can still be seen in things like the Christmas tree and trick-or-treating. Many Christian symbols, beliefs and rituals have also been traced back to the pagan world and it seems to me that all John Allegro was doing was tracing them back even farther, perhaps to the very beginning.

Fertility religions go all the way back to the rise of agriculture during the Neolithic Revolution. They could be even older than that and traces of these ancient beliefs can still be seen today:

"Many ancient fertility rites have persisted in modified forms into modern times," according to Infoplease. For instance, "The Maypole dance derives from spring rituals glorifying the phallus." The Easter bunny and eggs are another example of this kind of survival from a pre-Christian past still found in the Christian church. The Easter egg in particular is a fertility symbol. So is the Ichthys, the Christian fish symbol. And it's quite possible that modern religions still contain elements that can be traced back to really ancient shamanistic rites that involved the use of psychotropic plants.

Mushrooms in Christian art. Unfortunately the artworks themselves aren't identified in this video.

The presence of mushrooms on very old church walls and stained-glass windows is undeniable. Perhaps they're a kind of vestigial symbolism, traces left behind by a primordial religion that had already faded into the unconscious minds of the artists who created them. That could be. If Christianity did evolve from an ancient mushroom cult, the question of whether the cult was still in existence when the church first came into being is a different matter altogether. Allegro's idea that the church was created as a cover for a secret and still active fertility cult is what I like to call a Jesus Cult Conspiracy Theory. If he meant that literally it's no wonder that his reputation went into decline after his book appeared. I'm not saying he was wrong; after all, how would I know? It's an entertaining idea, but I'd have to see a lot more evidence before I'll believe it's true.

Homeric Epics Written Around 762 BC?

Note: the image of Homer as a blind bard is now considered to be legendary.

"One of literature's oldest mysteries is a step closer to being solved. A new study dates Homer's The Iliad to 762 BCE and adds a quantitative means of testing ideas about history by analyzing the evolution of language." Source: Science Daily (2013).

Note: The researchers in this study "compared the Greek vocabulary in Homer's Iliad to modern Greek, relying on a 200-word lexicon found in every language and contrasting the distantly related Hittite as an indicator of divergence.

"Their methods date Homer's language to 762 BCE. The statistical model [according to one of the researchers] 'is completely ignorant to history -- it doesn't know who Homer is and doesn't know Greek.' Accordingly, the potential date ranges from the improbable extremes of 376 BCE to 1157 BCE. But the estimate attaches a robust likelihood to the date, and it ties nicely to Nestor's Cup, a vase dated to 723 BCE that is thought to carry an inscription from The Iliad."

Comment: I have no idea how reliable this study was, but the date the researchers came up with seems to fit (roughly) with the scanty evidence available. For instance, Herodotus, thought to have lived during the late fifth century BC, said that Homer lived 400 years before his time, i.e. sometime during the ninth or eighth centuries BC.  And Nestor's Cup, a wine cup discovered on the island of modern Ischia, has been dated to the eighth century BC. If the inscription on the vase is actually from the Iliad, then the epic must have been written before or around the same period when the vase was manufactured.

Who Built The Megalithic Stone Walls Of Peru? (Updated)

"Lying on the northern outskirts of the city of Cusco in Peru, lies the walled complex of Saksaywaman (Sacsayhuaman). The site is famed for its remarkable large dry stone walls with boulders carefully cut to fit together tightly without mortar ...  This precision, combined with the rounded corners of the blocks, the variety of their interlocking shapes, and the way the walls lean inward have puzzled scientists for decades." Source: Ancient Origins (2014).

Note: According to Wikipedia, Saksaywaman was built by the Incas in the 15th century. This seems to be the mainstream consensus.

Saksaywaman is a masterpiece of ancient engineering. According to Wikipedia, "The stones used in the construction of these terraces are among the largest used in any building in pre-Hispanic America. They display a precision of cutting and fitting that is unmatched in the Americas. The stones are so closely spaced that a single piece of paper will not fit between many of the stones." The Ancient Origins article quoted above goes into some detail about how the complex's walls could have been built and how their massive stones might have been transported. The next video describes one theory about how the walls were engineered.

Did the Inca build the intricately fitted stone walls of Sacsayhuaman or were they the work of some earlier "lost civilization?" Both possibilities might be true. The walls show clear signs that they were constructed in different stages over the years, perhaps by different cultures building on top of each other. And there is some reason to believe that the complex was already in existence, at least in some form, when the Incas took over the site. According to Megalith Builders, for instance, sections of the walls were first built by the Killke culture (900 -1200 AD) which lived in the area before the arrival of the Incas in the 13th century.

According to Wikipedia, "Killke culture flourished in highland Peru in the Late Intermediate Period around what is now Cusco. They built the massive fortress, Saksaywaman, during the 12th century [next video]. Later, the fortress was used by the Inca, following their occupation of the region."

Note: the Wikipedia article on the Killke culture contradicts its article on Sacsayhuaman, which says that the complex was built by the Incas. There's a lot of confusion about who the builders actually were in the sources I've seen.

This whole subject is very confusing. For example, Sacsayhuaman was first occupied around 900 AD, according to History Things, four centuries before the Incas conquered the area. The Killke culture, according to Wikipedia, existed between 900 and 1200 AD. If these dates are reliable, they seem to imply that the complex was already in existence in some form when the Killke culture appeared. If that's believable, then it's possible that a civilization even older than the Killke built the first walls. This is pure conjecture, naturally, but it's not completely implausible:

"Sacsayhuamán may still be hundreds or even thousands of years older than the Killke culture. There seems to be no reason why building in the Cuzco and Sacsayhuamán area would have only begun in 1100 AD when megalithic building had begun much earlier in other areas…" -- D.H. Childress, quoted in Ancient Pages.

Childress isn't the most reliable source, however. According to Wikipedia, his works "primarily concentrate on pseudoarchaeological and pseudoscientific topics such as Atlantis and Lemuria, pole shifts, the hollow earth, pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact, suppressed technology, Nikola Tesla, free energy, UFOs and ancient astronauts, anti-gravity, vimana aircraft, secret societies and other conspiracy theories. More recently, he has written on time travel and cryptozoology phenomena such as the yeti and sasquatch."

I like rogue archaeologists like Childress -- they're entertaining, if nothing else -- but after sifting through all these various sources of unknown reliability, I'm guessing that the megalithic walls of Peru were probably built in stages by the Killke culture and the Incas. Like the Mayans and Aztecs, they were master stone-workers and perfectly capable of constructing these spectacular sites. How they did it, though, remains a mystery.

The Mystery Of Egypt's Screaming Mummy

Video from 2008.

"'The gruesome mummy of Unknown Man E, also known as the ‘Screaming Mummy’, has long puzzled scholars,' renowned Egyptologist Zahi Hawass told Al-Ahram Weekly, adding that this particular mummy is surrounded in mystery. Although he was re-buried in the royal mummy cache of Deir Al-Bahari, he was not wrapped in the usual fine linen bandages like the rest of the mummies. Instead, he was wrapped in sheepskin, which was considered impure by the ancient Egyptians. His hands and feet were tied with leather thongs. He was not even mummified, but was merely left to dry in natron and then had some resin poured into his open mouth." Source: Archaeology News Network (2018).

Note: There has been speculation that this is the mummy of a 20th Dynasty Egyptian prince known as Pentawar who was "involved in the so-called 'harem conspiracy', a plot to kill his father [Ramesses III] and place Pentawer on the throne," according to Wikipedia. "He either killed himself or was executed following the assassination attempt."

It's possible, I guess, that this man wasn't actually screaming at the time of his death. The drying out process may have caused his mouth to open.

Maya Collapse Wasn't Caused By Drought?

Video from 2018. The theory that Maya civilization collapsed due to drought-related causes is widespread, but if this new research is correct the collapse may not have occurred for that reason after all.

"A new study casts doubt on drought as the driver of ancient Mayan civilization collapse. There is no dispute that a series of droughts occurred in the Yucatan Peninsula of southeastern Mexico and northern Central America at the end of the ninth century, when Maya cities mysteriously began to be depopulated. Believing the Maya were mostly dependent on drought-sensitive corn, beans, and squash, some scholars assume the droughts resulted in starvation." Source: Archaeology News Network.

"However, a new analysis by UC Riverside archaeologist Scott Fedick and plant physiologist Louis Santiago shows the Maya had nearly 500 edible plants available to them, many of which are highly drought resistant. The results of this analysis have now been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

"'Even in the most extreme drought situation — and we have no clear evidence the most extreme situation ever occurred — 59 species of edible plants would still have persisted,' Santiago said."

Roman Legionaries In China? (UPDATED)

Comment: This theory is speculative, but the idea that Roman soldiers ended up in China isn't totally implausible. The general scenario of how it could have happened goes like this:

In 53 BC, the Roman politician and general Marcus Crassus (115-53 BC) was killed at the Battle of Carrhae when he led his army into a trap during his ill-advised invasion of Parthia, an empire which bordered on China:

"At its height, the Parthian Empire stretched from the northern reaches of the Euphrates, in what is now central-eastern Turkey, to eastern Iran. The empire, located on the Silk Road trade route between the Roman Empire in the Mediterranean Basin and the Han dynasty of China, became a center of trade and commerce." (Wikipedia)

This map shows the location of Parthia when it was part of the Median Empire around 600 BC. Parthia is in the upper part of the yellow region just to the right of the Caspian Sea.

Crassus' invasion of Parthia was a complete disaster:

"In a slaughter known as the battle of Carrhae the Romans lost nearly their entire army and Crassus was killed. [The story is that the Parthians captured Crassus, the richest man in Rome, and executed him by pouring molten gold down his throat.] The remaining 10,000 or so Roman legionaries were captured." Source: War History Online.

The Parthians apparently used their Roman prisoners as border guards along the eastern frontiers:

"The Parthians had a standard practice of employing captured soldiers as border guards. By transferring the 10,000 legionaries to the eastern borders they prevented any realistic chance of escape for the Romans who likely would have simply accepted their new lot in life. Record of the soldiers vanish for about 17 years when the battle of Zhizhi was fought as a Chinese army under Chen Tang assaulted a border town known today as Taraz, located in Kazakhstan near the border of Kyrgyzstan." (War History Online)

According to the story, some of these former Roman soldiers and Parthian border guards fought as mercenaries at the battle of Zhizhi. They were either captured or defected to the Chinese, who were impressed by their fighting abilities and -- like the Parthians -- stationed them in a border town to guard the frontier:

"Anywhere from 100 to 1,000 or more soldiers established themselves in this town that was known by the Chinese as Liqian/Li-Jien, which is pronounced as 'legion'." (War History Online) "...It seems these Romans lived peacefully in Liqian, and 2,000 years later we have DNA evidence that over 50% of the villagers in modern day Liqian have Caucasian ancestry including green and blue eyes, increased average height and other distinguishing characteristics such as distinctly Roman noses."

If this story is true, then these Roman soldiers who fought under Crassus at Carrhae (and their descendants) had an extremely wild and strange destiny, to say the least. But is the story true?

First of all, there's no doubt that the inhabitants of the region of Liqian, China, have some kind of European ancestry. According to Wikipedia, "The area of the former Liqian city is known for the distinctive physical appearance of its inhabitants. The population has higher frequencies of traits prevalent in Europe, such as aquiline noses, blonde or light-colored hair, blue or green eyes, and relatively fair skin tones."

Who were these Europeans and where did they come from? The idea that they were Roman soldiers or their descendants isn't all that farfetched, but it's still controversial:

"A hypothesis by the sinologist Homer H. Dubs, according to which Roman legionaries clashed with Han troops during the battle and were resettled afterwards in a Chinese village named Liqian, has been rejected by modern historians and geneticists on the grounds of a critical appraisal of the ancient sources and recent DNA testings of the village people. However, this hypothesis has been supported by prominent scholars like Lev Gumilev."

It's possible that the people of Liqian are descended from Caucasoid Indo-Europeans who were living in the region long before the Romans went to war with Parthia:

"People with normatively Caucasoid traits and/or who spoke Indo-European languages lived in areas that are now part of Gansu and Xinjiang centuries before the Romans, including the Yuezhi, Wusun, Basmyls, Tocharians, and some prehistoric Siberian populations." (Wikipedia)

You can always trust the experts to mess up a good story, but I've got to admit that some of these Chinese do look like they have Roman ancestry. The people in Liqian are trying to use their supposed relationship with the Romans to boost their tourism industry and who can blame them? Whether the story is true or not is a different matter altogether.

Why Did Humans Lose Their Fur?

"Millions of modern humans ask themselves the same question every morning while looking in the mirror: Why am I so hairy? As a society, we spend millions of dollars per year on lip waxing, eyebrow threading, laser hair removal, and face and leg shaving, not to mention the cash we hand over to Supercuts or the neighborhood salon. But it turns out we are asking the wrong question—at least according to scientists who study human genetics and evolution. For them, the big mystery is why we are so hairless." Source: Smithsonian Magazine.

Nobody has the slightest idea why humans lost their fur. Of course this question is only a mystery if you assume that humans were actually covered with fur in the first place. Nevertheless, if we did evolve (like the modern apes) from some "fruit-eating, slow-climbing primate that resembled a baby gibbon," then presumably at one time Homo Sapiens or one of its hominin ancestors was just as furry as the gibbons of today.

I don't buy any of the explanations given in the top video. According to the new research described in the Smithsonian article, we may have lost our fur because of a genetic mutation which could also be responsible for baldness:

"A researcher studying the plantar region of rabbits noticed that an inhibitor protein, called Dickkopf 2 or Dkk2, was not present in high levels, giving the team the fist clue that Dkk2 may be fundamental to hair growth. When the team looked at the hairless plantar region of mice, they found that there were high levels of Dkk2, suggesting the protein might keep bits of skin hairless by blocking a signaling pathway called WNT, which is known to control hair growth."

According to this still speculative theory, something happened early in human evolution which led to an increase in Dkk2, which in turn inhibited the growth of hair. It's still unclear, at least to me, why a genetic mutation like this could effect an entire species, but some of these mutations can apparently spread very quickly.

The Secrets Of Silbury Hill - The Tallest Manmade Prehistoric Mound In Europe

Video from 2018.

"Silbury Hill is a prehistoric artificial chalk mound near Avebury in the English county of Wiltshire. It is part of the Stonehenge, Avebury and Associated Sites UNESCO World Heritage Site. At 39.3 metres (129 ft) high, it is the tallest prehistoric man-made mound in Europe and one of the largest in the world; similar in size to some of the smaller Egyptian pyramids of the Giza Necropolis." (Wikipedia)

"Few prehistoric artefacts have ever been found on Silbury Hill: at its core there is only clay, flints, turf, moss, topsoil, gravel, freshwater shells, mistletoe, oak, hazel, sarsen stones, ox bones, and antler tines. Roman and medieval items have been found on and around the site since the nineteenth century and it seems that the hill was reoccupied by later peoples."

A brief tour of some of the lesser known sites in the Avesbury landscape, including Silbury Hill.

Nobody knows why the Silbury Hill mound was built. According to the legends, it was the burial place of a mysterious King Sil or a pile of soil left behind by the Devil who was going to drop it on Marlborough before he was stopped by the priests of nearby Avebury. One modern researcher suggests that the mound could have been part of a network of monuments "designed with a system of inter-related sightlines, focusing on the step several metres below the summit."

The most interesting theory, I think, is that the mound was built for rituals which could have been observed from a considerable distance:

"John C. Barret asserts that although we no longer know what was at the top of Silbury Hill and cannot suggest what specific rituals or beliefs were associated with it, we can tease out basic spatial concepts. He notes that any ritual at Silbury Hill would have involved physically raising a few individuals far above the level of everyone else. These few individuals in a privileged position would have been visible for miles around and at several other monuments in the area. This would possibly indicate an elite group, perhaps a priesthood, powerfully displaying their authority."

Silbury Hill was the site of a supposed alien encounter back in 2009. According to UPI (2009), "British UFO experts said they were contacted by a police officer who told them he saw three extraterrestrials examining a crop circle" near the mound. These aliens were blonde and wore white coveralls, and they ran away "faster than any man he had ever seen" when he approached them.

Video from 2019.

Merlin's Mound, Silbury Hill's "Little Sister"

"Marlborough Mound [aka Merlin's Mound] is a Neolithic monument in the town of Marlborough in the English county of Wiltshire. Standing 19 metres tall [app 62 ft], it is second only to the nearby Silbury Hill in terms of height for such a monument. Modern study situates the construction date around 2400BC." (Wikipedia)

It's unclear why the mound was originally built. According to local legend, it is the burial place of Merlin, the famous wizard from the legend of King Arthur.

"...Since construction, the mound has functioned as the motte for a Norman Castle, a garden feature for a stately home, and a coaching inn as well as the site for a water tower within Marlborough College. In recent years there has been renewed interest in the site pertaining to its restoration and preservation as a culturally and historically significant site in Wiltshire. Additionally, its relation to the nearby Silbury Hill has generated scholarly interest in how the mound constitutes part of a larger archaeological complex in Wiltshire. In its present condition only the earthworks remain as well as a shell grotto and a concrete slab at the summit."

Jesus Cult Conspiracy Theories (Updated)

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.

Very little is known about the original Jesus cult during the first few centuries of its existence. No one really knows when the "official" canonical gospels were written, but the general consensus is that they appeared sometime after the middle to late first century, at least thirty or forty years after Jesus's death. Matthew and Luke are thought to have been written from an earlier account commonly referred to as the "Q document," which as far as I know has never been discovered. Its existence is assumed based on similarities in the manuscripts.

As for Jesus himself, the only independent documentary evidence (from the first few centuries AD) that he even existed consists of  a handful of references in Josephus, Tacitus, Suetonius, Pliny the Younger, and a few others. Most of these references, however, are about the Christians as a group, so they don't really support the existence of a historical Jesus. As far as I can tell, the only direct references to Jesus are found in Jewish Antiquities by Josephus and the Annals of Tacitus, but their authenticity has been challenged and Tacitus refers to a Christus (or Chrestus in some translations) rather than a Jesus. They could be insertions made by later Christian writers -- when it comes to ancient sources, you can't take anything for granted. Classical writers weren't very reliable to begin with and the church wasn't above forging references, gospels, apocalypses, epistles and martyr stories in order to market their new religion. For an interesting and extremely detailed description of the "Christian Forgery Mill," see "Forgery In Christianity: A Documented Record Of The Foundations Of The Christian Religion," by Joseph Wheless. Highly recommended.

Video from 2015. I can also recommend Ehrman's book Forged. Very interesting stuff.

Christian origins get even more complicated when you consider all the parallels that exist between Christian doctrine and various Near Eastern fertility cults, Zoroastrianism, astrology, Roman and Egyptian mystery religions and Jewish ascetic, messianic and apocalyptic groups in existence at the time. These parallels aren't very surprising because all of these different movements appeared in the same general landscape, but they provide fertile ground for alternate histories.

Almost everything we know about the rise of Christianity comes from texts and there are a lot of missing sources and "secret doctrines" so popular with conspiracy theorists. Besides the books in the "official" New Testament, there's a huge body of apocryphal literature which reflects the existence of dozens of "heretical" groups like the Gnostics which were gradually suppressed, often by violent means, as the Roman Catholic Church consolidated its control and standardized Christian dogma. More recent discoveries like the Dead Sea Scrolls fill in some of the historical context, but the general picture is still hazy and confused. "Suppressed gospels" and alternate histories have inspired books like Holy Blood, Holy Grail, the inspiration for the bestselling Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown.

The rest of this 2010 interview can be found here.

If Jesus was a real person, he lived during an extremely turbulent period of history.  Rome conquered Judea in the first century BC, allying itself with the Maccabees and later using the Herodians as client kings. The Jews revolted in 66 AD and Jerusalem was eventually destroyed around 70 AD by the future emperor Titus, son of Vespasian. Titus took over the suppression of the Jewish revolt, a bloody conflict documented by Josephus in his classic history "The Jewish War," after Vespasian returned to Rome to stake his claim to the throne during the Year Of The Four Emperors in 69 AD.

It was a chaotic time of civil wars and bloody revolutions. The Jewish population in Jerusalem was either massacred, enslaved or scattered around the world (the Diaspora) and the temple was destroyed. The Jews (some of them, anyway) were in almost constant rebellion against the Romans and their puppet rulers in Judea during Jesus' lifetime and the desert was crawling with self-proclaimed messiahs. The idea that a religion like Christianity, preaching peace, forgiveness and universal brotherhood, would appear in this context is surprising, to say the least. "Render unto Caesar" could be seen as treason and collaboration to a population living under a brutal occupation. The Jews were waiting for a military messiah, a descendant of King David who would lead them out of bondage, not some hippy claiming to be the Son of God, which they would have considered blasphemy.

This secular background has inspired a series of books arguing that the real Jesus was actually a military messiah, a guerrilla fighting the Roman occupation. I read several of these books years ago, but I can't remember their titles. The best summation of the argument can probably be found in two chapters written by the anthropologist Marvin Harris in his book "Cows, Pigs, Wars And Witches". Both chapters ("Messiahs" and "The Secret Of The Prince Of Peace") fill in the historical context and argue that Jesus was a revolutionary transformed into a peaceful messiah by later writers in order to protect their underground resistance movement from the Romans. This is plausible enough as far as it goes, but the theory discounts the actual message of the gospels. If there's a hidden message in the New Testament, there's also a surface message which can't simply be dismissed as a kind of cover story designed to conceal an ancient conspiracy.

Speaking of conspiracies, Joseph Atwill's book "Caesar's Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy To Invent Jesus" argues that Christianity was actually the invention of the Flavian Emperors -- Vespasian, Titus and Domitian -- the same Romans who crushed the Jewish rebellion. Faced with the problem of Jewish resistance in the province and elsewhere, the Flavian court (which included the turncoat Josephus) invented the story of a "peaceful messiah" as a form of counter-propaganda to the more militant religious doctrines causing so much trouble in Judea. According to Atwill, the gospels also include a coded message which reveals that the figure of Jesus in the New Testament is actually Titus -- a kind of Roman inside joke. This hidden message can supposedly be unraveled by reading the gospels together with Josephus' account of the war and deciphering the parallels. Atwill's book makes an interesting read and I particularly like his idea that the gospels were a form of early propaganda designed to pacify a rebellious population. Unfortunately, his argument depends on the numerous parallels which are supposed to exist between the gospels and Josephus and these are obscure, to say the least.

"Jesus Was Caesar" by Franceso Carotta also uses parallels to make its argument that Jesus Christ is actually "the historical manifestation of Divus Julius," i.e., the Divine Julius Caesar. The basic idea is that the Christian religion is a modified version of the cult of the Divine Caesar and that the gospels are a mythologized biography of Caesar from the time of the Roman Civil War to his assassination. In other words, the gospels are seen once again as a kind of code which can only be interpreted by reading them in conjunction with other books. Caesar was made an Imperial God after his death, but his cult disappeared around the time that Christianity emerged. "On the one hand, an actual historical figure missing his cult, on the other, a cult missing its actual historical figure: intriguing mirror images." Intriguing, yes, but is it actually true? Who knows? Like Atwill's book, whether you accept it or not depends on how strong these "mirror images" actually are.

"The Sacred Mushroom And The Cross" by John Allegro takes a different approach. This is a fascinating, scholarly and difficult book. Allegro believes that Christianity originated in a very ancient Near Eastern fertility cult centered around the use of the hallucinogenic mushroom amanita muscaria. If I understand Allegro's argument correctly (and I'm not sure I do), Christianity evolved as a kind of "false front" to protect the truth about the cult and its practices from the Romans, and its sacred texts are supposed to be full of references to the magic mushroom. Once again, Christianity is seen as a code to be deciphered, an esoteric, multi-layered conspiracy. This is an excellent book, but Allegro bases his theory almost entirely on linguistic arguments, "deciphering the names of gods, mythological characters...and plant names..." by tracing them back to their Sumerian roots, and the average reader will have a hard time verifying or even following his arguments. Still, if there's nothing to this, how do you explain the mushrooms in Christian iconography? For example, a fresco in the Chapel of Plaincouralt, France, shows Adam and Eve standing next to what definitely appears to be a giant mushroom. That's kind of peculiar, to say the least.

Hidden Christian history covers a huge amount of territory. I've only summarized three books, but there are literally hundreds of them available and I've only scratched the surface. For example, "The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold" by Acharya S argues that Christianity was "created by members of various secret societies, mystery schools and religions in order to unify the Roman Empire under one state religion." Her book "Suns of God: Krishna, Buddha and Christ Unveiled" explores the use of solar symbolism in world religions, arguing that Jesus is actually a sun deity. Whether you buy any of these various theories is irrelevant. The whole period is so interesting that they're worth reading just for their wealth of background information.

Trying to separate truth from fiction in these theories is an almost impossible task unless you want to spend the rest of your life tracking down sources and doing your own research. The problem comes when you step back and look at all the books that are out there -- all the different theories. One book, taken by itself, can be very convincing, but when you take them all together, it's obvious that they contradict each other in hundreds of different ways and the net effect is literary white noise -- a flood of information, speculation, questionable evidence and mutually exclusive conclusions. In this sense, the hidden history of Christianity is like the JFK assassination: an intractable mystery. The record's too sketchy and complex to come to any solid conclusions, but it doesn't really matter. Most people, as usual, will end up believing exactly what they want to believe and what they were raised to believe.

The most basic question about Jesus is whether he actually existed. Most of these theories about "who he really was" simply melt away if he's just another mythical character like all the other gods of the ancient world.