The Holy Mushroom: Evidence of Mushrooms in Judeo-Christianity. A critical re-evaluation of the schism between John M. Allegro and R. Gordon Wasson over the theory on the entheogenic origins of Christianity presented in The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross. by J.R. Irvin (original) (raw)

Entheogens in Christian art: Wasson, Allegro, and the Psychedelic Gospels

Journal of Psychedelic Studies, 2019

In light of new historical evidence regarding ethnomycologist R. Gordon Wasson's correspondence with art historian Erwin Panofsky, this article provides an in-depth analysis of the presence of entheogenic mushroom images in Christian art within the context of the controversy between Wasson and philologist John Marco Allegro over the identification of a Garden of Eden fresco in the 12th century Chapel of Plaincourault in France. It reveals a compelling financial motive for Wasson's refusal to acknowledge that this fresco represents Amanita muscaria, as well as for Wasson's reluctance to pursue his hypothesis regarding the entheogenic origins of religion into Christian art and artifacts. While Wasson's view-that the presence of psychoactive mushrooms in the Near and Middle East ended around 1000 BCE-prevailed and stymied research on entheogens in Christianity for decades, a new generation of 21st century researchers has documented growing evidence of A. muscaria and psilocybin-containing mushrooms in Christian art, consistent with ethnobotanist Giorgio Samorini's typology of mushroom trees. This article presents original photographs, taken during fieldwork at churches and cathedrals throughout Europe and the Middle East, that confirm the presence of entheogenic mushrooms in Christian art: in frescoes, illuminated manuscripts, mosaics, sculptures, and stained glass windows. Based on this iconic evidence, the article proposes a psychedelic gospels theory and addresses critiques of this theory by art historians, ardent advocates, medieval historians, and conservative Catholics. It calls for the establishment of an Interdisciplinary Committee on the Psychedelic Gospels to independently evaluate the growing body of evidence of entheogenic mushrooms in Christian art in order to resolve a controversial question regarding the possible role of entheogens in the history and origins of Christianity.

THE SACRED MUSHROOM AND THE CROSS

In order to keep this information available to the public, this book has been pirated! IN MEMORIUM TO JOHN MARCO ALLEGRO By Adam Jay Kadmon John M. Allegro was born February 17, 1923 in London. He served in the Royal Navy then studied at the University of Manchester, where he obtained a first-class Honors Degree in Oriental studies in 1951. A year later, he was awarded a Masters degree for his work on the Balaam Oracles. His Oxford research on Hebrew dialects was interrupted when in 1953 he was called to join the first international team of scholars working on the newly discovered Dead Sea Scrolls in Jerusalem.

Mortal Knowledge, the Originary Event, and the Emergence of the Sacred

Anthropoetics, 2006

The question of origins continues to captivate human thought and sentiment, despite the postmodern insistence that knowledge of origins is impossible since it must lie beyond the boundaries of the origin of knowledge. Knowledge cannot seek causes that precede its own existence, it is said. Still, theoretical narratives continue to arise, accounting for such things as the origin of the universe, of our star and solar system, of Earth, of life on the planet, of the human species, of self-aware human cultures, and so on down into the origins of the local and particular. This should not be surprising; we sense that knowing our origins will tell us who we are. Postmodern prohibitions certainly have had no effect on the empirical findings of such objective fields as paleoanthropology or paleoarcheology. The trouble here is that although such objective fieldwork provides significant data, it is only in the interpretation of such data that an idea of early human experience can emerge. Interpretation inevitably brings in subjective factors and we necessarily find ourselves creating scenarios and looking inward into the contexts of the human heart to speculate on the prehistoric moment when imagination, conceptual thought, and abstract knowledge became possible. In other words, using the tools of our objective sciences, we create narratives of origin that attempt to exceed their own limitations by blending the objective with the subjective. Generative anthropology embraces such subjectivity and tends not to avail itself of such empirical data. It is instead an outstanding example of what might be seen as a more literary or even intuitional approach. The originary thinking demanded by generative anthropology is to some degree anathema to the harder sciences that ignore the human experience to seek progress in verifiable knowledge, centrifugally flying from origins even while explaining them away. The point of origin, however, remains the centripetal center of the present for the mythic mind, akin to the inspirations of poetry and the arts for us. However, when the mythic mind becomes the theoretic mind, according to the stages explained by Donald (1991), sacred awareness becomes self-isolated objectivity, much more efficient but entirely without a sense of revelation.

“Bodies and Things in the Forest of Symbols.” Religion 42 (4): 633-643

Taking Manuel Vásquez's book as its point of departure, this essay explores what a truly materialist history of materiality for the study of religion might look like, in contradistinction to idealist histories of materiality. It then mounts a defense of Clifford Geertz as a pioneering scholar of material and embodied religion, against the positions taken by Vásquez and, earlier, by Talal Asad, applying a critique that has by now become overly entrenched and unquestionable.

Myth and Mind: The Origin of Human Consciousness in the Discovery of the Sacred

Hollows of Memory: Featuring Gregory M Nixon's Work with Commentaries & Responses – Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research, 2010

By accepting that the formal structure of human language is the key to understanding the uniquity of human culture and consciousness and by further accepting the late appearance of such language amongst the Cro-Magnon, I am free to focus on the causes that led to such an unprecedented threshold crossing. In the complex of causes that led to human being, I look to scholarship in linguistics, mythology, anthropology, paleontology, and to creation myths themselves for an answer. I conclude that prehumans underwent an existential crisis, i.e., the realisation of certain mortality, that could be borne only by the discovery-creation of the larger realm of symbolic consciousness once experienced as the sacred (but today we know it as the world — as opposed to our immediate natural environment and that of other animals). Thus, although we, the human species, are but one species among innumerable others, we differ in kind, not degree. This quality is our symbolically enabled self-consciousness, the fortress of cultural identity that empowers but also imprisons awareness.

« Shamanism and proto-consciousness » (2015)

in René Lebrun, Julien De Vos et É. Van Quickelberghe (éds), Deus Unicus. Actes du colloque « Aux origines du monothéisme et du scepticisme religieux » organisé à Louvain-la-Neuve les 7 et 8 juin 2013 par le Centre d’histoire des Religions Cardinal Julien Ries [Cardinalis Julien Ries et Pierre Bordreuil in memoriam], Turnhout, Brepols, coll. Homo Religiosus série II, 14, 2015, pp. 247-260 The paper introduces to the stakes of the shamanic interpretation of the Paleolithic parietal art in five steps: first, it sketches the history of the discovery of Paleolithic cave paintings; second it briefly reviews the scientific vulgate on the matter; then the potentialities of ethnological comparativism are displayed and the overlapping existing between shamanism lato sensu and the homo religiosus ethos perused. In conclusion, we examine WILLIAM JAMES and A. N. WHITEHEAD respective import.