My book review is at the end of these cliff notes. Anything in italics and between brackets [like this] is additional info from me, not from the book. There's also many typos and misspelled words.
Synopsis/Cliff Notes
* * * I N T R O D U C T I O N * * *
Ancient man had two needs:
- Avoid hunger for them and their children
- Have sex
And they knew two facts:
- When the sky made water, it made plant life.
- When the penis made water inside a woman, it made human life.
Therefor, there was a Giant Penis in the sky that makes life in the womb of the earth. Thus began the fertility cults.
The Giant Penis (the Father) lived in a land above Earth (the Mother), with all-knowing power and knowledge.
The Giant Penis in heaven favored some plants more than others - drug plants with powers to show them heaven. Those with all the knowledge about which ones they were, how to use them, how to prepare them, etc. were the favoured ones of the Heavenly Penis. They were the priests of the drug cults, an evolution of the fertility cults.
The initiates into the drug cults where sworn to secrecy (maybe to make the drug effect all the more powerful) and so there is not a lot of record of their existence.
In the Iron Age, there existed a drug cult in Jerusalem who’s sacred drug was Amanita Muscaria. They challenged the Roman empire, lost badly, and had to quickly write down the occult knowledge of the sacrament - but not in plain language, they must encode it in the ancient technique of story telling and fables. Thus they wrote The New Testament of The Bible.
[In fact, this drug cult - aka Christianity - may have learned of this mushroom from ancient Sumaria, the bronze age civilization that spawned everything. They would have passed this knowledge onto the Greeks, as well, and onto the tribes of the Indus Valley, where use of Amanita Muscaria was cannonized in the Rig Veta a thousand years later (Wassen, Hoffman, et al). ]
The main evidence for this theory is the study of words and new connections made possible by the discovery of Sumatria clay tablets. For example, the word “sin” is derived from the act of wasting semen, an affront to the god of procreation.
But what does this have to do with Amanita Muscaria? The sacred mushroom was at the center of the Israeli cult(s), it was their god-endowed plant that gave them temporary access to heaven and immortality.
And is the New Testiment total bull shit? We don’t know because The Church destroyed everything it considered heretical. Maybe the truth is that Christianity existed for centuries before AD 70, under various names, as a mushroom-cult, forced underground by the Romans and the Jews. And they rewrote their own history in a deliberately misleading and mistranslated "New Testament" that obscured the use of the sacred mushroom (the real heresy) yet gave them the secular power to become The Church of today.
The central inquiry to test this hypothesis is: does Christianity - as now revealed for the first time - fit adequately with what came *before* the first century, not *after*?
* * * C H A P T E R 1 * * *
Jesus and pals were Jews, in Palestine, speaking Hebrew. However the New Testament was written in Greek. Hebrew and Greek are extremely different languages coming from different language families: Semitic and Indo-European, respectively. So translation is not easy or certain. We can’t be certain about the meaning behind the Hebrew heros' names, such as Jesus.
There is a language that predates both Hebrew and Greek, and it could be the bridge between the two. It is ancient Sumerian. And we now have the philological tools to decipher the Sumerian clay tablets.
The words that changed the least throughout time were the names of the gods, heroes, etc., especially as written in religious texts. So those could be more easily broken down into their forgotten origin. Foreshadowing….!
Author doubles down on his claim that Christianity is just a fertility cult in disguise. [It is me, the reader’s, notion that the this whole book is a jab at The Church for not letting him study the Dead Sea Scrolls. More googling required. Edit: in 1953 he was invited to study the Dead Sea Scrolls for one year in Jerusalem. Was a very respected scholar back in the day.]
* * * C H A P T E R 2 * * *
Sumeria/Sumer was old as fuck and lasted for 2,000 fucking years! Very first civilization. Early bronze age, around 3000 to 2000 B.C.
Sumerian culture was the first in a series of successive cultures starting in Mesopotamia, spreading to Europe and India, and eventually conquering the world.
They started out with a shitty language with no real alphabet, and by the end of their civilization they had a real alphabet with consonants and vowels. And their words were built using “world blocks” kind of like English. This means that we can reliably find the root of words. Author then goes on to show a bunch of examples and mind numbing jargon.
Author now admits that there is a degree of SPECULATION to some of the Sumerian translations.
* * * C H A P T E R 3 * * *
The common wisdom of Biblical scholars has been that, as man evolved to a “higher intelligence”, so did man’s spirituality. We started with a primitive pantheon of multiple deities, some of them inanimate objects even, and then a dramatic revelation from on high convinced man that there was really only one almighty God. And this enlightenment made it possible for God to now communicate with man.
But of course that is not the case. The forgotten Sumerian origins of the words for the Hebrew and Greek gods translates to spermatozoa, or “seed of life” (evidence in the notes). This backs up the claim that early man believed that god was a heavenly penis that rained his seed onto the earth.
Not only was there a mighty, celestial penis in the clouds, but when the penis reached an orgasm it shook the heavens, it thundered, and that noise was the voice of god. And the rain was the “The Word” of god. The voice and his words did not come from a mouth, it came from the tip of a penis. God is a penis.
This liquid that comes down from the sky is his “Son”. Jesus is god’s semen, raining down, seeping into the labia of mother earth, the womb of creation. As the water, which contained god’s wisdom, collected in the terrestrial vagina, it became the water source that fed the roots of the plants. The angel plants had more access to god’s heavenly water than others, and consuming these hallucinogenic plants gave mortal men temporary access to god’s wisdom.
Lots of entomological evidence is given. The Sumerian word for shepherd (an endearing allegory for father/husband/priest/god) means penis, the biblical phrase Yahweh means penis of the storm, and Joseph in the Old Testament means Yahweh’s penis. Perhaps the most damning is the origin of the latin word “phallic” which is derived from the Sumerian word for “bore" and “drill", but it is also the ancestor for the most popular Canaanite fertility god, Baal.
The word “fecundity” is used a lot.
* * * C H A P T E R 4 * * *
In the ancient world, healing and medicinal plants (“angles”) were very important. Your pharmacist, doctor, and priest were the same person. Healer and priest were two inseparable roles. Drug plants became the study of priests, prophets, and witch-doctors. Their knowledge was well guarded and carefully used in rituals, such as the zodiac as described in the dead sea scrolls.
The Hebrew word for Jesus, yehoshua, Joshua, comes from Sumerian: IA-U-ShU-A (ShUsh)
The Greek fertility god Dionysus, is, in Sumerian, is: IA-U-NU-ShUsh
This is nearly identical, and not coincidence. The Sumerian word ShU, “save”, can be found in both. Jesus translates to “semen, which saves, restores, and heals” and Dionysus translates to “Semen, seed that saves” and is also comparable to the Greek word for “healer”, itself an epithet of Zeus.
* * * C H A P T E R 5 * * *
Ancient plant names are a real challenge because of lack of scientific knowledge, and drug plant names arFoe even worse because of all the folk names and mystery. For example, Poppies have the same ancient name (of many) as Paeans, because both are flowers that smell the same.
He uses the words “mandrake fungus” to relate “mandrake” to the word “nectar” as in nectar of the gods. Therefore mushrooms are the nectar of the gods. There is an asterisk present and even without it, its a bit of a stretch. The rest of his examples in this chapter are also stretching it. The Sumerian word for mushroom can be traced to the word for “key”, and the name Peter can be traced back to the Hebrew word for mushroom.
He’s now saying the sacred mushroom is a demomic plant because it gives access to the underworld, but before he was saying it is an angelic plant because it gives access to heaven.
We’re ready to break the code of the main hypothesis of this book - that the mystery cult of the sacred mushroom in ancient Israel codified their sacred knowledge and rituals into religious text before they were persecuted by the Romans. The group that found these texts, took them up, and built them into The New Testament didn’t understand that they were parables, allegories, and fables rife with hidden messages, word-plays, and covert meanings.
* * * C H A P T E R 6 * * *
A New Testament sentence in Corinthians literally translates to "Jesus Christ is a mushroom". The sentence is “…we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling-block to Jews and folly to Gentiles…” Apparently, "stumbling block" means mushroom in Aramaic because a stumbling block is a wooden trap box held up by a stick or a bolt - and a bolt is shaped like a mushroom. And folly means mushroom in Greek because the greek word for folly is “moria” and the Greek word for mushroom is “morios”. Additionally, the Greek word for stumbling block can translate to “scandal", which we can now appreciate. The “stumbling block” trap can also snare the unwitting, causing a scandal.
Many other (dubious) connections are made between strange biblical phrases to mushrooms and penises. Alternative names for words, incantations, variant translations, transliterations from other dialects, and re-constructed Sumerian originals, are all used to show that the plain Greek is actually word-plays and allusions to a hidden layer of Semitic understanding.
For example, the Kingdom of Heaven is likened in the bible to a mustard seed and plant, but the Semitic words for mustard is “khardela” and for mushroom is “ardila”. Therefore the Kingdom is a mushroom. Its so obvious!!
* * * C H A P T E R 7 * * *
We now compare Jesus to mushrooms.
Ancient man was perplexed by mushrooms because they seemingly produced fruit without being fertilized. The erect mushroom emerges out of the womb of the earth, sometimes from an egg-like sag (in the case of Amanita Muscaria) that can resemble a vulva. There are no seeds, and there are no stamens (male flower parts) for fertilization. It’s like the mushroom was born from a virgin.
One apparent explanation was that it was fertilized by thunder, due to the appearance of the mushroom after rain storms. A variant greek name for mushroom could be translated to a Sumerian word that means “storm-seeded”. And thunder, as we know, is the word of God. And thunder accompanies the life-giving rain from God’s mouth/penis tip. Thus, the mushroom is the Son of God, born of a virgin.
The mushroom resembles a penis, and the Amanita Muscaria with its wide, red cap would have been the mightiest of them all. That makes sense, given that the father was the mighty penis is the sky.
But wait, there’s more!
The “crown of thorns” thing is an illusion to fringe of shreds of prepuce remaining after an insufficient circumcision operation, which is exactly like the shred of pendent annulus on the stem of the sacred mushroom, a remnant of the veil. [This is actually THE identifying characteristic of the Amanita Muscaria mushroom when compared to other Amanitas.]
Many other examples are given to show that Christianity is derived from the mushroom cult, such as the fact that “anointed” ones are smeared with god’s oils aka his semen, and of course is an illusion to the slime on the amanita mushroom cap.
* * * C H A P T E R 8 * * *
Women who do not menstrase also do not bear children, therefor the mensural blood is the third key ingredient in fructification (first is creative spirit and second is semen).
Because of that, it was treated with power and respect, but overall it was feared. It was thought to be "harmful to worms, insects, and other vermin.” And of course it was also connected with the moon. The ancient Greeks believed that menstraul blood during a new moon, and especially during an eclipse, was extremely powerful, and deadly for any man trying to fuck her.
Easter, occurring at the same time as the roman new year, is, according to Allegro, connected to an ancient fire-cult that forced young virgin girls to maintain a sacred fire pit until they were of marriage age. If they lost their virginity before then, they were thrown in an underground tomb to die.
umm, something about sacred prostitutes and “menses like” sap dropping from pine trees being the seeds of life, which are *of course* the amanita mushrooms which only grow under conifers. TBH I’m skipping around a lot in this chapter.
The only photograph in the book, which is of a faded image of some mushrooms and a snake, is shown in this chapter. However, it is seemingly completely unrelated to the chapter itself. [Edit: it’s for the next chapter. why is it on the wrong page? the only photo in the whole book?]
_________________
My thoughts so far
================
Finding myself reading it in the same voice as the crazy-haired guy in “Ancient Aliens”.
There’s enough possible connections so far to say that “maybe it can’t all be coincidence” but, at the same time, there’s a lot of speculations, assumptions, asterisks, etc. CONJECTURE.
For example, Allegro will make a weak connection in an earlier chapters and then say “as we’ve proven, the biblical mandrake is the sacred mushroom, therefore...”
Maybe there is a general, ancient connection between Christianity and fertility cults, and between fertility cults and mushrooms. But there’s no smoking gun that proves that Jesus is a mushroom. Other than conjecture.
The phrase, “Bearing in mind the phallic form of the sacred mushroom...,” could basically be added before any sentence involving sex, rods, priests, medicine, serpents, anything colored red or purple, anything oily, anything having to do with rain or thunder storms… and could be used to link Christianity to the hypnotic drug.
While I have a new appreciation for “taking the bible literally” I also have a new appreciation of the word “conjecture”.
And we haven’t yet talked about Amanita Muscaria in depth. Or at all, really! Only a one-paragraph on the botany of Amanita mushrooms in general.
What about baptism?
What about the celibacy requirement for priests? why?
The garden of eden? whats that about?
Why circumcision? whats that about?
Is the cross a phallic symble or mushroom shape too?
Is the holy grail an amanita that is getting old and the edges have turned upright and concave? like a cup?
* * * C H A P T E R 9 * * *
Of the ancient mystery-cult religions there were many prostitutes who copulated with the priests and other male worshipers. Perhaps because of the power to - not only make a penis erect (a source of great wonder to the ancients) - but to seemingly make a mushroom emerge out of the ground (“erect”).
There were also male cultic-prostitutes, as well as female, but they were more likely to be sodomites than servicers of the female worshipers.
Apparently the female prostitutes could seduce and bring forth the phallic mushroom using their urine and menstral blood, especially during rituals. This gave them their power.
We now get to the allegory of the garden of Eden.
As they myth goes, Adam and Eve are tricked into eating the forbidden fruit by a serpent, resulting in their expulsion from the garden. To take fruits of the earth requires compensation or sacrifice to the god. The fruit and the tree is obviously the sacred mushroom. In the case of the sacred mushroom, there was no worthy equivalent sacrament, except the mushroom itself or a symbol of it - like a prostitute's urine??. And remember, of course, that the fruit made Adam and Eve “as gods, knowing good and evil.” (Genesis 3:4) - something a trippy mushroom could accomplish as well. iT aLL mAkeS sEnSe !!
Allegro reference the faded mural in the abandoned church in France, showing Adam and Even in Eden. [But the Amanita Muscaria does not grow this way as shown. It is just as likely a really dumb way to draw an apple tree as it is an amanita mushroom.]
* * * R E M A I N I N G C H A P T E R S * * *
I can't continue reading this any more. There's too many things wrong with it.
For example, Allegro keeps providing biblical quotes about mandrake and they all explicitly say it is the root of the plant that is vital. Mushrooms are not roots and don't even have roots! I looked up "mandrake" in wikipedia and while the ancient botanical word can apply to a few different plants, it says that, "A mandrake is the root of a plant, historically derived either from plants of the genus Mandragora found in the Mediterranean region."
Book Review
I really wanted to like this book, I wanted it to be true. I even wanted get the front-page illustration as a tattoo.
“Excessive use of imagination and conjecture” ... yes.
It was a fun read though! I also know a lot more now about language, bronze age cultures, new and old testament myths, etc.
I’m sure some of the stuff about ancient fertility cults are true. And I think we do have to consider the good possibility that the culture of ancient Sumer and the Sumerian language was influential upon later bronze age civilizations, which in turn would have been influential upon iron age civilizations. So on and so forth. And mysterious drug cults certainly did exist and persisted for over 1000 years of antiquity. However the proposed link between hypnotic mushrooms and Christianity is not yet proven.
Then again, some of the ideas in this book are very thought provoking. The virgin Mary, mother earth and the father in the sky and the son of god, the relationship between healers and priests, the relationship between “sin” and wasting semen, the close association between the Sumerian words for “Jesus” and “Dionysus”, etc.
Maybe the Hebrew and Greek words for “god” really does translate to the Sumerian word for “spermatozoa”. What would that mean? Does it mean that the prophets of Judaism codified a giant-penis-worshipping cult into their religion? Or does it just mean that, over the course of thousands of years the original meaning of the word was simply lost in time. But that link is still there, but, while it is very interesting, it is not the smoking gun of a grand conspiracy to expropriate secular power.
Perhaps this book is a reflection on our cultures obsession with sex and drugs. Or maybe it is evidence that ancient man was also obsessed with sex and drugs, and that evidence of this has been saved in the ancient and forgotten meaning in our words. I think that both can be true!