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.