WAS JESUS ACTUALLY A PSYCHOACTIVE MUSHROOM?
We know for certain that the modern version of Christianity, with its cherry-picked gospels, is an incomplete picture of the religion that formed in the first centuries AD.
How different was that religion? Could it be that the whole of the new testament is a metaphorical facade for something completely different? John Marco Allegro, the author of The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, argued that Christianity was actually an Amanita muscaria-consuming mushroom cult and that Jesus didn’t exist and his role in the story of the Bible is to act as a coded symbol for the mushroom. This wild idea didn’t come from the mind of an uninformed individual.
Allegro was a leading scholar of ancient languages and was part of the team that deciphered the dead sea scrolls. Allegro’s claims haven’t stood up well to scrutiny, however. It still seems far fetched that the figure of Jesus was actually just a symbol for a mushroom sacrament.
DID EARLY CHRISTIANS USE PSYCHOACTIVE MUSHROOMS?
We need not immediately dismiss all of Allegro’s claims, however. Just because Christianity might not be a cover story for a mushroom cult, it doesn’t mean that early Christians didn’t consume a mushroom sacrament.
In The Psychedelic Gospels, Jerry and Julie Brown set out to document images of what appear to be psychoactive mushrooms in medieval Christian art, arguing they provide evidence for such a sacrament. This brings us full circle to the tree in the Garden of Eden, arguably depicted as a psychoactive mushroom.
Given the lack of evidence for a mushroom sacrament in Christianity that was successfully hidden for over a thousand years up until the middle ages, the presence of psychoactive mushrooms in the art might be more readily explained by the artist having had some experience with them in their lifetime. The most convincing images are scenes of the tree of knowledge of good and evil as a mushroom, indicating that the obvious connection between psychedelics and the forbidden fruit may have existed in medieval times.
WILL WE EVER KNOW THE TRUTH?
While the forbidden fruit may indeed be a reference to naturally occurring entheogens and the use of cannabis amongst ancient Hebrews seems to now be a certainty, the idea that the Hebrew Bible is the scripture of a religion that seriously employed psychedelic sacraments doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
The idea of Jesus as a medicine man who democratized entheogenic sacraments, however, is well within the realms of possibility. We’ll most likely never know the true extent of psychedelic use in ancient Judaism and Christianity, as any positional use is shrouded in the mists of time. We may want to ask why we’re looking for psychedelics in the Bible in the first place. If psychedelic are to play a role in the future of religion, citing a respectable tradition can go a long way in fighting the PR battle against the layers of cultural conditioning that have formed against plant medicine.
We don’t need to be so directly tied to the past. We might envision a truly forward-facing psychedelic religious reformation instead, one that doesn’t depend on whether or not Jesus was a mushroom.
