In the last post I mentioned that Creative Reading has a post up on the biblical scholar John M. Allegro, who committed academic suicide in 1970 when he published a book arguing that Christianity had been a fertility cult with the ingestion of psilocybin hallucinogenic mushrooms (fly agaric) as its central rite – the true “body of Christ”, as it were. That post has now been updated with a link to an interview with Allegro, conducted by two Dutch comedians for their satirical show, “Het Simplistisch Verbond” (the Simplistic Alliance), in 1976.
As Wouter points out in his blog post, the intention with the interview was no doubt to poke fun at what to any regular viewer comes across as a hilariously insane theory. Allegro swallows the bait whole and swims away with it. The interview is an intriguing insight into the scale of Allegro’s theory of religion in general: religion has its origin in solar-phallic worship and entheogenic practices. An educational video for one of the theories of religion that is generally not taught in religious studies programmes. Perhaps for good reason. Watch it and find out why Jesus was a mushroom.
Heterodoxology 