Was Jesus A Mushroom?

[CaledonianGonzo]

Or the entheogenic origins of religions as represented in books like John Allegro's 'The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross' and Clark Heinrich's 'Magic Mushrooms in Religion and Alchemy'.



Early man used psychoactive mushrooms, more specifically Amanita Muscaria/Fly Agaric, and mistakenly attributed the resulting psychedelic experience to a religious one. 

But is the same true of early (or even mid-period) Christians?  Iconography like the Plaincouralt fresco (pictured above) seems to suggest that the Eucharist was sometimes a bit more trippy than just wine and wafers.

In his book 'The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross', Allegro attempted to prove through etymology that the roots of Christianity, as of many other religions, lies in fertility cults - and that cultic practices (such as ingesting hallucinogenic drugs to perceive the mind of god) persisted into Christian times. 

Others like Heinrich go further and maintain that the Amanita mushroom was the deity itself, the Soma of the ancients mentioned in the Rig Veda.  That the mushroom symbols found in Hindu scriptures correspond with the symbols of ancient Judaism, Christianity, Grail myths and alchemy.  That the philosopher's stone, the burning bush and Ezekiel's wheel with its eyes around the rim were really, when it came down to it, just mad, mental toadstools.



A grail mushroom, yesterday.

I've got to admit, there's maybe an iota of something in it.  Given that every time your average shaman was communing with his deitieis he was off his gourd on special herbs and reindeer slash, it's not too much a of a stretch to think it was still going on centuries later.

So was the sacred mushroom the emblem and embodiment of divinity - or have those that see the correspondences (coincidences?) had a few too many sips of the old shroom tea?

[biggytitbo]

No he wasn't you daft cunt.

Jesus never existed as man or fungus.

[CaledonianGonzo]

Jesus never existed as man or fungus.

If Jesus wasn't a mushroom, then how come you never see them pictured together?








Except on the wall of St Mark's in Venice.

[massive bereavement]

Jesus ate glow in the dark mushrooms and that's how he pulled off that glow effect round his bonce.

[wheatgod]

Jesus was a monkey

lol

[CaledonianGonzo]

Jesus ate glow in the dark mushrooms and that's how he pulled off that glow effect round his bonce.

You won't be surprised to hear that those who subscribe to this theory wholesale do indeed interpret haloes as codified mushroom symbols.

[massive bereavement]

You won't be surprised to hear that those who subscribe to this theory wholesale do indeed interpret haloes as codified mushroom symbols.

No wonder he was single, who'd want to sleep next to somebody who lit up the bedroom all bloody night?

[CaledonianGonzo]

No wonder he was single, who'd want to sleep next to somebody who lit up the bedroom all bloody night?

But he could promise all his partners a second coming.


I'm here all week.  Try the psilocybin.

[biggytitbo]

But was Jesus a fun-gi to be with!! HAHAHA!!!

[chocky909]

Mushroom puns?

This old chestnut? What a load of shitake. Oyster out of these kind of discussions generally, always being full of people button in with their opinions and morel arguments. Anyway, I'm off to have my breakfast... magic!

[Backstage With Slowdive]

The Transmigration Of Timothy Archer....

[Steven]

I read Allegro's `The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross' a number of years ago, and it's quite a big book, but the amount of evidence he could amass was pretty meagre. Most of his hard evidence rested on the aforeseen frescos, the majority of the rest being various lingual puns between the Babylonian Semitic or Akkadian languages and Greek. I approached the book with an open mind but thought Allegro was just trying to make the material fit his hypothesis through any means necessary.

My personal opinion is that the frescos do reference pyschoactive mushrooms and the like, but these are merely an appropriation of Christianity by the Mystery Schools which have been going for thousands of years and seemingly adopt new stories and metaphors to fit their hierarchical structure of initiation around. The majority of Mystery Schools would use psychoactive drugs at some stage of initiation to inspire ecstacy or an orgiastic atmosphere for whatever means the cult would need for their particular religious leanings. Such as the common symbol of the white lotus featuring in Egyptian hieroglyphs which was only recently re-discovered to be a psychoactive when left to soak in wine (as shown in the carvings). Indeed the pyramids were never tombs but temples of initiation into these mysteries, the sarcophagous being the place where one experiences his symbolic death and rebirth.

So just as the Roman Caesar and pantheistic priesthood had to adopt Jesus in some way in order to 'move with the times' to protect their own organisation by forming the Pope and the Catholic church, so did these other priesthoods such as the Elusian Mysteries or the Mithraic cult. The basic operation is still the same but they dress it up with a different mask. And I'm not saying this is what Christianity is, but simply is one versions cult of Christianity, I imagine these frescos are from some kind of Gnostic cult. These existed before Jesus but just used his life as a framework for their already extant ideology. These groups survived well into the middle ages in versions such as the Cathars, Bogomils, Albegensians etc, which were persecuted and almost wiped entirely out by the Catholic church.

Allegro did go on to write further books on the Dead Sea Scrolls, which he was on the first translation team, he attested that the Jesus 'myth' was played out 100 years previously to 33 AD and was a power struggle between the Essenes and Temple Mount. Needless to say he was on shakey ground here too. I got the feeling he just really did not like Jesus, which was strange because he almost became a priest before deciding against it, obviously he took this crisis of faith with him into his professional work with gusto.

[Backstage With Slowdive]

I was in a 2nd hand bookshop and saw a tome by a Catholic priest debunking all this, which looked mildly interesting as I hadn't heard of the original stuff (I thought PKD made it all up).

[sirhenry]

The problem with that first image:

is that it's of the Tree of Knowledge that led to the Fall, therefore Not A Good Thing. "Eat this and suffer the wrath of God".

On the other hand, whacky shit like Deuteronomy make it very hard to argue against and there's a long history (not just PKD) of belief that St. John took various psacraments to improve his insights into the nature of God.

[Steven]

The problem with that first image:is that it's of the Tree of Knowledge that led to the Fall, therefore Not A Good Thing. "Eat this and suffer the wrath of God".

On the other hand, whacky shit like Deuteronomy make it very hard to argue against and there's a long history (not just PKD) of belief that St. John took various psacraments to improve his insights into the nature of God.

You're right there about the Tree of Knowledge. But the wrath was incurred by eating the 'fruit' of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and on that day ye shall surely die. You could also class a mushroom as a fruit of a tree I suppose since it grows from their roots. It would be a very modern wavy gravy Timothy Leary way to interpret the bible this way though. It is also pointed out they didn't die on the day of eating, but the bible interprets a year for God as 1000 for man, and I don't recall Adam or anyone else living past 900 or so. Enoch doesn't count. Everything is open to so much interpretation I can see how fights to the death ensue over dogma. People can argue about Adam and Eve getting off their tits on mushrooms until the cows come home, I think this part of the story is using some turns of phrase that mean other things, but the natural assumption is to take them literally.

[Steven]

I was in a 2nd hand bookshop and saw a tome by a Catholic priest debunking all this, which looked mildly interesting as I hadn't heard of the original stuff (I thought PKD made it all up).

I was not aware of `The Transmigration Of Timothy Archer', but I knew of the odd real life tale of James Pike which it seems heavily based on, a very strange story. I think the main problem is people are looking at various 'Christian' groups and classifying them as Christian simply because they have Jesus as a subject matter. I would class Christian as a follower of Christ's teachings, not of a Church or dogma constructed by later self-proclaimed 'authorities' on what is and is not Christian. The worst thing is nearly all the organisations who represent themselves as Christian do not follow his message at all, the Catholic church being probably the worst example. The trouble is people seem to associate these corrupt and deeply vindictive groups with the Christian teachings, when they are nothing of the sort. Couple this with all the other drug or sex cults which must have adopted Jesus after the fact, there's a lot of area there to discredit the Christian teachings but you're not actually using Jesus to do that, but organisations which took his name or image for their own cause, mixing it in with whatever else they use to dabble in.

There is also a deeply active smearing campaign that has been going on for years and has reached a kind of peak right now, with this Zeitgeist and 'waking up' bollocks floating around the net. They are full of lies and dis and misinformation, claiming that Jesus is the Sun God or an astrological metaphor or whatever crap. These are all just interpretations the Mystery Schools took on for their own initiate ideology, but are being explained to people as the 'real truth' on various documentaries now. Yes, the Catholic Church is full of Sun God worship but that's because it grew out of the Roman Pantheon and Mithras cult and merely adopted Jesus as a mascot when it was politically convenient to do so. These silly films claim stuff like Mithras was born on December 25th and so was Jesus. With even the most scant research it's apparent the celebration of Christmas or his birth was moved to this date to coincide with the Saturnalia feasts and orgies that the Romans already celebrated. I can't even confirm anywhere Mithras was born of a virgin like they seem to claim all these other gods were, and there is no specific date associating Mithras with December 25th either.

This silly cow Acharya S who is all over this stuff is claiming Horus was also born on December 25th, so Jesus is just another representation of the Osiris myth. When pressed with actual facts to back this up she had to admit that since Horus was the Sun God, he was in fact born EVERY DAY! But in their film they only mention that one day because it was convenient to do so. And don't even get me started on Jordan Maxwell, this guy uses idiotic similarities between languages which have no relation, and are not even contemporaneous. He strings stuff together like Ted Rogers giving clues on 3-2-1. There are many hawks around now peddling books or lecturing whilst trying to discredit any authenticity to the New Testament story, however seeing they need to lie or misrepresent to do that one must question what exactly their motives are.

One of the funniest ones I've researched was the `Secret Gospel of Mark', where a man called Morton Smith discovered by chance a fragment of correspondance between early Church leaders tucked away in the Monastary of Mar Saba in the 1950s. The fragment implies that Clement of Alexandria had unedited versions of the Gospels which contained 'inner-mysteries' that the laity were not worthy to be aware of. He quotes a fragment from Mark which illustrates Jesus 'initiating' a 'youth from Bethany' into the 'inner mysteries of the Kingdom of God', all played out with homosexual induction leanings. Obviously this has been leapt on by various groups and books written, but after a bit of research this Morton Smith character is not trustworthy at all. The original fragment has never been examined and was mysteriously lost, only a photograph of it was allowed to be looked at. The fragment seemed to cofirm an already existant view Morton held on Christ, so it is very strange he comes across this piece by happenstance. To cap it off, during the war there was a very popular adventure novel in which the Nazis attempt to win the war by faking a piece of Christian literature to discredit Jesus and ruin British ethics, the book was called 'The Mystery of Mar Saba' and the archaeologist finds the fragment in - you guessed it - the monastary of Mar Saba. The mind boggles. You can read more here: http://christiancadre.blogspot.com/2005/07/is-secret-gospel-of-mark-modern.html

[Jemble Fred]

JK Rowling would call these claims 'absurd'. Of course Jesus is a completely original character. Even if the movie 'Troll' (which of course contains a living mushroom) does contain some very glaring similarities.

[CaledonianGonzo]

can't even confirm anywhere Mithras was born of a virgin like they seem to claim all these other gods were

Interesting stuff, and will reply later in more detail, but wasn't Mithras hatched from an egg (or an egg-like rock)?  How you can work out whether the rock was fertilised or unfertilised is beyond me...

[Steven]

Interesting stuff, and will reply later in more detail, but wasn't Mithras hatched from an egg (or an egg-like rock)?  How you can work out whether the rock was fertilised or unfertilised is beyond me...

Ahhh, but wasn't this just a reinterpretation of the sacred Japanese Myth depicting their God being 'born from an egg on a mountain top' and in fact being 'the funkiest monkey that ever popped'?

[Treguard of Dunshelm]

Interesting stuff, and will reply later in more detail, but wasn't Mithras hatched from an egg (or an egg-like rock)?  How you can work out whether the rock was fertilised or unfertilised is beyond me...

Mithras sprang from a rock, attended by shepherds. On the 25th of December.

[The Plaque Goblin]

Jesus is our saviour.

Mushrooms are savoury.

[Steven]

Mithras sprang from a rock, attended by shepherds. On the 25th of December.

The Wiki page has this:

Mithras and the Virgin Birth

It is sometimes said that the birth of Mithras was a virgin birth, like that of Jesus. But no ancient source gives such a birth myth for Mithras. In Mithraic Studies it is stated that Mithras was born as an adult from solid rock, "wearing his Phrygian cap, issues forth from the rocky mass. As yet only his bare torso is visible. In each hand he raises aloft a lighted torch and, as an unusual detail, red flames shoot out all around him from the petra genetrix."[123]

David Ulansey speculates that this was a belief derived from the Perseus' myths which held he was born from an underground cavern.[124]
[edit] Mithras and 25th December

It is often stated that Mithras was thought to have been born on December 25. But Beck tells us that this is not so. In fact he calls this assertion 'that hoariest of "facts"'. He continues: "In truth, the only evidence for it is the celebration of the birthday of Invictus on that date in Calendar of Philocalus. 'Invictus' is of course Sol Invictus, Aurelian's sun god. It does not follow that a different, earlier, and unofficial sun god, Sol Invictus Mithras, was necessarily or even probably, born on that day too."[125]

Unusually amongst Roman mystery cults, the mysteries of Mithras had no 'public' face; worship of Mithras was confined to initiates, and they could only undertake such worship in the secrecy of the Mithraeum [126] Clauss states; "the Mithraic Mysteries had no public ceremonies of its own. The festival of natalis Invicti [Birth of the Unconquerable (Sun)], held on 25 December, was a general festival of the Sun, and by no means specific to the Mysteries of Mithras."[127]

Steven Hijmans has discussed in detail the question of whether the general "natalis Invicti" festival was related to Christmas but does not give Mithras as a possible source.

Though I wouldn't class this opinion as being the utmost authority on the subject. What really matters is what the actual Mystery Schools believed, and since these teachings were secret and only reached through initiation rights and never written down, it's much too difficult to discern their ideas. The only way to get some hint of it I feel is from reading works by writers who were indoctrinated into later groups which took some of their teachings from these various older schools, writers such as Madame Blavatsky or Manly Palmer Hall. The current trend for these modern books and films such as `Jesus: Last Of The Pharaohs' or `Zeitgeist' is to take their entire ideology from these theosophical writers who were merely retelling the Mystery School belief system as if it was historical fact.

[Backstage With Slowdive]

I think the main problem is people are looking at various 'Christian' groups and classifying them as Christian simply because they have Jesus as a subject matter. I would class Christian as a follower of Christ's teachings, not of a Church or dogma constructed by later self-proclaimed 'authorities' on what is and is not Christian.

Er... aren't you yourself making a ruling on what counts as "Christian"? And how to know "Christ's teachings" except through scriptures authenticated and officially translated by a specific sect? That's what the fuss about the KJV etc. was all about.

Here's my line: "Christianity" was a 1st century sect that believed in a prophecy that the world would end in their lifetimes, and they made this clear in the Gospels, which also refer to the destruction of Jerusalem as the prophecy being fulfilled. But it wasn't, and the sect's teachings were simply false. It carried on and became all its descendent churches (none of which have any legitimacy as "real Christianity") in the same way the 7th Day Adventists carried on existing in more recent times. Humans will just do things like that, they tend to behave irrationally.

As C.S.Lewis pointed out, you shouldn't call Jesus a "great moral teacher". Jesus' teachings are that he is the Son Of God and can forgive sins. If that wasn't true then his teachings (which are mainly about preparing for the end of the world) would be quite misguided. That's why hierarchies always build up around the "message", even in the "reformed" churches: someone has to fill in the detail, which means applying the stamp of religious authority to moral positions developed separately. Should christians be anarchists or reactionary conservatives? Both options have been explored thoroughly by people following their predispositions, and finding the right quotes endorsing them.

[Backstage With Slowdive]

To cap it off, during the war there was a very popular adventure novel in which the Nazis attempt to win the war by faking a piece of Christian literature to discredit Jesus and ruin British ethics,

That would have upset quite a lot of the Axis populations as well. I know it's hard for anti-Catholics to remember this, but RCs do actually regard themselves as "christian" as well.

[Steven]

As C.S.Lewis pointed out, you shouldn't call Jesus a "great moral teacher". Jesus' teachings are that he is the Son Of God and can forgive sins. If that wasn't true then his teachings (which are mainly about preparing for the end of the world) would be quite misguided. That's why hierarchies always build up around the "message", even in the "reformed" churches: someone has to fill in the detail, which means applying the stamp of religious authority to moral positions developed separately. Should christians be anarchists or reactionary conservatives? Both options have been explored thoroughly by people following their predispositions, and finding the right quotes endorsing them.

Well, I could gather that argument would come in somewhere. But I think I can honestly say of course you must only take Christianity from Christ's words, what else is there to take it from, fuckin' Paul? I don't believe there should be hierarchies to any religion which is the problem with the majority of them, which is a contention that is my own personal belief, I can't back that up with any particular bit of scripture. Can you actually quote me a piece of scripture where Jesus claims he is the Son of God or that he is preparing people for the end of the world? I am not being facetious, I genuinely would like to see it and deliberate about it, I was never brought up religious and was always an atheist really, just sort of fell into researching religious ethics and history so I do not have an encyclopedic knowledge of the New Testament at all.

[Steven]

That would have upset quite a lot of the Axis populations as well. I know it's hard for anti-Catholics to remember this, but RCs do actually regard themselves as "christian" as well.

I didn't write the novel, take it up with them! Though they are probably long dead now!

[Backstage With Slowdive]

But I think I can honestly say of course you must only take Christianity from Christ's words, what else is there to take it from, fuckin' Paul? I don't believe there should be hierarchies to any religion

But who authenticates the manuscripts and checks the translations? You don't accept the kind of waffle the Colin Wilson/theosophy crowd put out (well done) but that implies others have greater authority - who and why?

Can you actually quote me a piece of scripture where Jesus claims he is the Son of God or that he is preparing people for the end of the world?

For the end of the world, see Matthew 24, Mark 13 and Luke 21. If you can bring yourself to look at it, the online Catholic Encyclopedia does actually use many scriptural quotes in all its doctrinal expositions. But so do all the other sects.

[Jemble Fred]

you must only take Christianity from Christ's words

As Backstage pointed out, there is no Gospel of Jesus. And if there was, it would probably have been written by someone else.

[SetToStun]

As Backstage pointed out, there is no Gospel of Jesus. And if there was, it would probably have been written by someone else.

Holy ghost-written, as it were.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

'Wholly ghost-written, as it were' might have been better.

</Mr Picky Gets Around Like A Fat Slapper>