Home · Book Reports · 2017 · The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross

designates my notes. / designates important.

Thoughts

An interesting book, but I don’t think it can be fully understood by someone not familiar with the languages discussed. It seems to have been cited by Terrance McKenna, which gives me pause. If you assume McKenna is a disinformation agent, he is either building on disinformation or trying to muddy the waters of relevant information.

The book does, however indirectly, attack the idea that many of the religious figures of the past were simply literary tools to convey a particular message. Seeing the current level of debasement western civilization has fallen to with the rejection of religion it would not surprise me to find out that this is another rung on the ladder toward the narcissistic, dare I say Luciferian, world we have constructed.

It can also be seen as an early attempt to uncover (or promote) the use of the mushroom as a social control mechanism inside the mystery schools. This line of thinking can take you to the current day with psychedelics being more and more accepted as a treatment to mental illness (e.g. micro-dosing).

Again, if nothing else this is a wonderful book that is a feast for thought.

pdf page numbers

Table of Contents

• Chapter 0: INTRODUCTION
• Chapter 1: IN THE BEGINNING GOD CREATED...
• Chapter 2: SUMER AND THE BEGINNINGS OF HISTORY
• Chapter 3: THE NAMES OF THE GODS
• Chapter 4: PLANTS AND DRUGS
• Chapter 5: Plant Names and the Mysteries of the Fungus
• Chapter 6: THE KEY OF THE KINGDOM
• Chapter 7: THE MAN-CHILD BORN OF A VIRGIN
• Chapter 8: WOMAN’S PART IN THE CREATIVE PROCESS
• Chapter 9: THE SACRED PROSTITUTE
• Chapter 10: RELIGIOUS LAMENTATION
• Chapter 11: THE MUSHROOM “EGG” AND BIRDS OF MYTHOLOGY
• Chapter 12: THE HEAVENLY TWINS
• Chapter 13: STAR OF THE MORNING
• Chapter 14: COLOUR AND CONSISTENCY
• Chapter 15: MUSHROOM COSMOGRAPHY
• Chapter 16: DAVID, EGYPT, AND THE CENSUS
• Chapter 17: DEATH AND RESURRECTION
• Chapter 18: THE GARDEN OF ADONIS, EDEN AND DELIGHT; ZEALOTS AND MUSLIMS
• Chapter 19: THE BIBLE AS A BOOK OF MORALS

· Chapter 0: INTRODUCTION

page 5:

• If rain in the desert lands was the source of life, then the moisture from heaven must be only a more abundant kind of spermatozoa. If the male organ ejaculated this precious fluid and made life in the woman, then above the skies the source of nature’s semen must be a mighty penis, as the earth which bore its offspring was the womb. It followed therefore that to induce the heavenly phallus to complete its orgasm, man must stimulate it by sexual means, by singing, dancing, orgiastic displays and, above all, by the performance of the copulatory act itself

page 6:

• To hide their ways in times of upheaval, the mystery cult used a story, of Jesus, to propagate their knowledge. It was hidden so well that even the Romans should not be able to decipher it.

page 7:

• The mushroom has always been a thing of mystery. The ancients were puzzled by its manner of growth without seed, the speed with which it made its appearance after rain, and its as rapid disappearance. Born from a volva or “egg” it appears like a small penis, raising itself like the human organ sexually aroused, and when it spread wide its canopy the old botanists saw it as a phallus bearing the “burden” of a woman’s groin. Every aspect of the mushroom’s existence was fraught with sexual allusions, and in its phallic form the ancients saw a replica of the fertility god himself. It was the “son of God”, its drug was a purer form of the god’s own spermatozoa

page 9:

• For example, as we may now understand, “sin” for Jew and Christian had to do with the emission to waste of human sperm, a blasphemy against the god who was identified with the precious liquid.

page 12:

• Ours is a study of words, and through them of ideas. At the end we have to test the validity of our conclusions not against comparative history, least of all against the beliefs of the Church, past or present, but against the overall pattern of religious thought as it can now be traced through the ancient Near East from the earliest times. The question we have to ask is, does the Christianity as now revealed for the first time fit adequately into what went before the first century, not what came after in its name?

· Chapter 1: IN THE BEGINNING GOD CREATED…

page 14:

• For example, if we were to seek the root of a modern barbarism like “de-escalate”, we should immediately remove the “de—” and the verbal appendage “—ate”, slice off the initial “e—” as a recognizable prefix, and be left with “scal—” for further study. The Latin scala means “ladder” and we are clearly on the right track. But at this stage the etymologist will look out for possible vocalic changes occurring between dialects. One of the more common is between 1 and n, and we are not surprised to find that an early form of the root has n in place of I, so that Sanskrit, one of the earliest dialects of Indo-European, has a root skan- with the idea of “going up”. Sibilants can interchange, also, such as s and z, and short vowels can drop out in speech between consonants, like i between s and c. In fact, we can break down our Indo-European root scan-, “ascend”, still further into two Sumerian syllables, ZIG, “rise”, and AN, “up”. 1a

• Today, with faster and easier means of communication, it is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain control over the meanings of words, and this at a time when the need for understanding each other is most crucial.

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· Chapter 2: SUMER AND THE BEGINNINGS OF HISTORY

page 23:

• Summarizing: in the language and culture of the world’s most ancient civilization, Sumerian, it is now possible to find a bridge between the Indo-European and Semitic worlds. The first writing known is found on tablets from the Mesopotamian basin, dating some five thousand years ago, and consisting of crude pictures drawn with a stylus on to soft clay. Later the recognizable pictures became stylized into ideograms made up of nail- or wedge-shape impressions, so-called cuneiform signs, each representing syllables of consonants and vowels. These syllables made up “word-bricks” which resisted phonetic change within the language, and could be joined together to make connected phrases and sentences. To such word-bricks we can now trace Indo-European and Semitic verbal roots, and so begin to decipher for the first time the names of gods, heroes, plants, and animals appearing in cultic mythologies. We can also now start penetrating to the root-meanings of many religious and secular terms whose original significance has been obscure.

· Chapter 3: THE NAMES OF THE GODS

page 24:

• Thus the principal gods of the Greeks and Hebrews, Zeus and Yahweh (Jehovah), have names derived from Sumerian meaning “juice of fecundity”, spermatozoa, “seed of life”.’ The phrase is composed of two syllables, IA (ya, dialectally za), “juice”, literally “strong water”, and U, perhaps the most important phoneme in the whole of Near Eastern religion. It is found in the texts represented by a number of different cuneiform signs, but at the root of them all is the idea of “fertility”. Thus one U means “copulate” or “mount”, and “create”; another “rainstorm”, as source of the heavenly sperm; another “vegetation”, as the offspring of the god; whilst another U is the name of the storm-god himself.2 So, far from evincing a multiplicity of gods and conflicting theological notions, our earliest records lead us back to a single idea, even a single letter, “U”. Behind Judaism and Christianity, and indeed all the Near Eastern fertility religions and their more sophisticated developments, there lies this single phoneme “U”

• As saliva can be seen mixed with breath during forceful human speech, so the “speaking”6 of the divine penis is accompanied by a powerful blast of wind, the holy, creative spirit,7 bearing the “spittle” of semen.8 This “spittle” is the visible “speech” of God;

page 25:

• Within [the Earth] burns an eternal fire which every now and then demonstrates its presence dramatically, by bursting to the surface in a volcano, or by heating spring water to boiling point where the earth’s crust is thinnest. It was this uterine heat which made generation possible, and which later theologians identified with the place and means of eternal punishment.10

• Since common observation showed that dead and decaying matter melted back into the earth, it was thought that the imperishable part of man, his “soul” or spirit, the creative breath that gave him life in the womb, must either float off into the ether or return through the terrestrial vagina into the generative furnace. In either case he was more likely to have access to the fount of all wisdom than when his spirit was imprisoned in mortal flesh.

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• Perhaps the best known of the old Canaanite fertility gods, Baal, derives his name from a Sumerian verb AL, “bore”, which, combined with a preformative element BA, gave words for “drill” and “penis” and gave Latin and us our word “phallus”.26

page 28:

• The words for “curse” and “sin” have their roots in the idea of “seed running to waste”.41 This was the sin of Onan42 who shirked his duty of giving his dead brother’s wife more children by practising coitus interruptus, or, as the Bible says “spoiling it on the ground” (Gen 38 :1—10). This was the sin, too, of Sodom43 whose inhabitants preferred the attractions of two male visiting angels to Lot’s daughters (Gen 19).

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• Summarizing, then: we should not look for a multiplicity of gods in the ancient world, but rather many aspects of the one deity of fertility, the creative force that gives earth and its creatures life. The god was the seed, his name and functions finding verbal expression in the one Sumerian phoneme U; the whole fertility philosophy on which the various cults of the ancient Near East centred we may term simply a U-culture. The god expressed his seed from heaven as a mighty penis ejaculating sperm at orgasm. It entered the womb of mother earth through the labia, the furrows of the land, and formed a great reservoir of potency in the heart of the world. There gestation took place in the furnace of the terrestrial uterus. There, too, was thought to be the source of all knowledge, since the creative semen of the god was also the Word, acquisition of which by man gave him part of divine omniscience. It followed that those plants which were able to tap this power of knowledge to a greater degree than others, the sources of hallucinatory drugs, could impart to those who imbibed their juice “knowledge of the gods”.

· Chapter 4: PLANTS AND DRUGS

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• The fertility god Dionysus (Greek Dionusos) , whose cult emblem was the erect phallus, was also a god of healing, and his name, when broken down to its original parts, IA-U—NU—ShUSh, is almost identical with that ofJesus, having NU, “seed”, only in addition: “Semen, seed that saves”

· Chapter 5: Plant Names and the Mysteries of the Fungus

• “… The most disgraceful reason for this scanty knowledge [about herbs] is that even those who possess it refuse to teach it, just as though they would themselves lose what they have imparted to others.” -Pliny

page 36:

• it is not surprising that the mushroom should have become the centre of a mystery cult in the Near East which persisted for thousands of years. There seems good evidence that from there it swept into India in the cult of the Soma some 3,500 years ago; it certainly flourished in Siberia until quite recent times, and is found even today in certain parts of South America

· Chapter 6: THE KEY OF THE KINGDOM

· Chapter 7: THE MAN-CHILD BORN OF A VIRGIN

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• The phallic form of the mushroom matched precisely that of his [Jesus] father, whom the Sumerians called ISKUR, “Mighty Penis”, the Se— mites Adad, or Hadad, “Big—father”, the Greeks Patër- Zeus, and the Romans Jupiter, “Father-god”.7

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• That these ingredients formed only part of the sacred incense formula is well known. Josephus says there were thirteen elements,18 and the Talmud names eleven, plus salt, and a secret “herb” which was added to make the smoke rise in a vertical column before spreading outwards at the top.19 With the characteristic shape of the mushroom in mind, we can hazard a fair guess now at this secret ingredient.

page 48:

• The most common Hebrew word for “priest”, köhën, familiar as a well-known Jewish surname, comes from a Sumerian title, GU-EN-NA, literally, “guardian of semen”.27

page 49:

• Both the Semitic and the Greek words for “christ”, the “anointed, or smeared one”, came from Sumerian terms for semen or resinous saps, MASh and SKEM. Used as descriptive titles in that language, they appear as a “MASh—man”, exorcist, that is, the priest who drives away demons, and as a “ShEM-man” a compounder of perfumes, the equivalent of the Old Testament mixer of the holy anointing-oils.36

• SheM-man = shaman?

· Chapter 8: WOMAN’S PART IN THE CREATIVE PROCESS

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• Most prized of all was Tyrian purple, whose “highest glory”, according to Pliny, “consists in the colour of congealed blood, blackish at first glance but gleaming when held up to the light; this is the origin of Homer’s phrase, ‘blood of purple hue’ “8 Further dyeing of a scarlet fabric with Tyrian purple produced the rich colour called in Greek husginon, the Sumerian origin of which shows that it meant properly “blue blood”,9 another popular mark of the aristocracy. The same origin can be found for the “Hyacinth”, in Greek mythology the name of the youth accidentally slain by his friend Apollo, and from whose spilt blood there grew the flower of that name.10

• Doors - Hyacinth House = refer to slain youth?

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• Saturn is partly composed of a Sumerian word ShA-TUR, “womb”.

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· Chapter 9: THE SACRED PROSTITUTE

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• It comes as something of a shock to us in the Western world, after centuries of religiously inspired puritanism, to learn that the ancients attributed the greater inclinations towards sexual indulgence to women. It was said that the seer Teiresias was chosen by Zeus and Hera to decide on the question whether the male or the female derived most pleasure from sexual intercourse. He replied that “of the ten parts of coitus, a man enjoys one only; but a woman’s senses enjoy all ten to the flill”.26

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· Chapter 10: RELIGIOUS LAMENTATION

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• Presumably screaming was reckoned to have some erotic effect, and psychologically there may be some connection here with the extraordinary noise produced by teenage fans of pop-singers.

page 67:

• The same kind of distortion of facts in relation to secret fertility cults can be seen actually in operation in the Old Testament traditions. Towards the end of the seventh century BC the young King Josiah tried to purge Jerusalem 0f the old fertility worship. Among his acts of desecration was the defilement of Topheth “which is in the valley of the sons of Hinnom, that no one might bum his son or his daughter as an offering to Molech” (II Kgs 23 :10).

• Jeremiah also speaks of this Molech cult when he says of the wayward people of Jerusalem: “They built the high places of Baal in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to offer up their Sons and daughters to Molech. . .“(Jer 32:35). The commentators have drawn horrifying pictures for us of wicked men pushing little Solly and Rachel on to the funeral pyre outside Jerusalem’s south wall for the benefit of this pagan deity Molech. The clue to what was really intended, and indeed, what was probably written in the first editions of Kings and Jeremiah, is to be found in the corresponding passage in the Law. It appears in the context of regulations about sexual “perversions”, mainly concerning the degrees of family relationship within which the man may not have intercourse, mother, mother-in-law, sister, granddaughter, and soon. It goes on: You shall not give your seed to devote it to Molech. You shall not commit sodomy. You shall not commit buggery, and neither shall any woman have sexual relations with a beast; it is perversion (Lev i8 :21—23). The English versions fall into the same trap as did the early redactors of II Kings and Jeremiah. The Leviticus prohibition does not say “you shall not devote your children to Molech”, but, literally, “your seed”, that is, your spermatozoa. The word “seed” can of course be extended to mean offspring, but the context shows that the burden of the law is that you should not pollute the god-given semen, after which Yahweh was named, by misusing it either in the anus of another male or genitals of an animal, or, in some way, by using it in the worship of the Molech. The name Molech is philologically related to that group of mucilaginous herbs called “Mallow”, to the magic plant Moly, and the Greek Mukës, “mushroom”. The root of all lies in the idea of the erect penis, so we may reasonably infer that the practice here objected to involved the dedication in some way of human semen in a phallic rite probably connected with the sacred fungus.24

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· Chapter 11: THE MUSHROOM “EGG” AND BIRDS OF MYTHOLOGY

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• Those people of the ancient Near East who gave us our culture, would have viewed our concern with the Pill with incredulity. The barren womb was a plague from the god; a woman without a foetus in her belly was an insult to her sex and her man. In that house there could be no shãlöm, no “peace”

page 71:

• Philologically, also, the cherub-griffin is related to the fungus. The names in Indo-European and Semitic go back to another “pod-” or “womb-” word, *GtJIUB, similar in meaning to the source of the name of the well-known pod-plant, the Carob.’5 It was this Carob that supplied the horn- or uterus-shaped pods eaten by the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:16). Pliny described them as “not longer than a man’s finger, occasionally curved like a sickle, with the thickness of a man’s thumb”.’6 The name had another reference in the ancient world, however. The Accadian botanists use the same Semitic word for Carob to describe the Sumerian “Seed—of—life” plant, the mushroom.17

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· Chapter 12: THE HEAVENLY TWINS

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• This configuration of an upright supporting an apex or fork came to have a profound sexual significance. The upright was the strong arm or erect penis supporting the “burden” of the womb. The very word “burden” in Sumerian GUN, came down through Latin cunnus into our presently impolite designation of the female genitals, “cunt”.5 The “organ of burden”, AR-GUN, appears dialectaily in the name of Mount Hermon,36 the Canaanite version of Olympus,37 supporter of the heavenly arch.

• The Plane tree38 has had this significance from the beginning of recorded history. It was its shade that tempted the Sumerian goddess manna, wearied from her long travels, to sleep awhile. It stood in the garden of one Shukallituda, who found the lovely goddess sleeping and could not resist the temptation she offered. When she awoke to the discovery that she had not slept alone, she laid a terrible curse upon the land. The earth and wells were inundated with blood, like the land and river of Egypt when Pharaoh refused to let the Israelites leave (Exod 17: i7ff.). The woman, because of her vulva, what harm she did! manna because of her womb, what she did do! All the wells of the land she filled with blood. . .39

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• Similarly, it was in the shade of the Plane tree that Zeus made love to Europa, after he had carried her to Crete from the mainland in the guise of a magnificent white bull.40

• The Hebrew name for the Plane tree, ‘armön comes ultimately from the same Sumerian phrase AR-GUN as gave the name of the mountain Hermon.41 Our own word “harmony”, too, comes from the same source, for the word means properly “ajoining together” the matching of the bearer and the burden. One who does this in carpentry is a “harmonizer”.42 He makes the hole and fits the joint; like Phereclus, the ship—builder, he is a Harmonidës, “son of a carpenter”.43 So, too, is Jesus called in the New Testament (Matt 13:55; cp. Mark 6:3), for the mushroom was seen as both the “drill” and the effected “joint”.

• The Hebrew name for “rib”, sela’ is the Sumerian SILA, represented by the “V” shape,5° and what the Old Testament writer clearly had in mind was a rib extending on both sides of the spinal column, giving the arched form associated with the open groin and the mushroom top. From this “rib” the god fashioned the significant part of the woman, supplying the canopy for the erect stem, and “harmony” for the hitherto deprived Adam. The inverted “V” shape, the angular representation of the mushroom cap, was also the form of the old yoke that was laid across the shoulders of the servant or animal. Again, it is the Sumerian GUN, “burden”, that is at the base of our word “yoke” (through the Latin jugum, Greek zugon).

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· Chapter 13: STAR OF THE MORNING

page 85:

• In 2 stories, Johan and Jesus are sleeping on a boat. A storm starts and the crew wakes them up. They then stop the storm (Johan by being thrown in, Jesus from saying “peace!”.

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· Chapter 14: COLOUR AND CONSISTENCY

page 88:

• Esau’s name, as we may now recognizes from the Sumerian *E-ShU-A, “raised canopy”,9 a fitting epithet for one who represented in mythical form the cap of the Amanita muscaria, as his brother Jacob (Sumerian *IA..A_GTJB, “pillar”) was the mushroom stem.10 Jacob and Esau are in the story where Jacob’s mom puts goat skins (with hair) on him to make him feel to the blind father that Jacob is Esau.

• Of particular interest for our study is the Sumerian word GAN-NU, used of the red dye cochineal.14 This, also, derives very probably from the red top of the Amanita muscaria, since GAN also means a cone or hemispherical shape, such as the lid of a bowl,1 or a woman’s breast. It is from this latter use in the fuller Sumerian phrase AGAN, “breast”, that Greek obtained its name for the mushroom, Amanita, properly the “breast—shaped object”, referring to the cap.16

• From the Sumerian GAN-NU, denoting the red dye, came the Hebrew word khJnün for the red cap or daub put as a protection on the head of ewes in pasture.17

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• In the better known “John the Baptist”, the colour reference is also prominent. The myth_makers/have simply added to the name the Semitic epithet Tabbal, “the c’ipper” (baptizer), or “dyer”,19 derived ultimately from the same Sumerian *TAB_BA_R/LI, “mushroom”, that gave Accadian its tabarru, “red dye”, and Latin its tablion, “purple fringe”, just mentioned. The name and title of “John the Baptist” in the New Testament story then, means no more than the “red-topped mushroom”, but in giving him the added fungus name, *T_BA_LI, the story—tellers were able to assign him an important role in the story as the “baptizer” of Jesus and others.

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· Chapter 15: MUSHROOM COSMOGRAPHY

page 98:

• South of the Temple area lay the Jebusite stronghold of Zion proper, the mons veneris, as it were, of the city (fig. i.). On its south—western flank was the Pool of Siloam (“place of washing”) where Jesus sent the blind man to wash off the clay poultice he had laid on his eyes (John 9:7).24 The water of the Pool came from an underground conduit cut in the time of Hezekiali from the spring of Gihon on the other side of the hill. It was considered of such sanctity that the Temple cultus demanded that only Sioam water should be used in its special rites.25 Beneath the mons veneris was the junction of the two valleys circumventing the city on three sides (fig. 5). From the west, and sweeping round the south, was the valley of the “son(s) of Hinnom”, the site, as we saw earlier, of the Molech cult.28 The name of the valley in Hebrew is simply an attempt to put into recognizable Semitic a phrase whose original Sumerian meant “penis—sheath”, that is, “vagina” (*B&J_ERuM).2? Below Zion, the valley combined with another, the Kidron, which cut the city sharply off on the east and separated it from the Mount of Olives. The resultant depression ran down through the desert to the south and east into the Dead Sea basin, the bowels of the earth (fig. 6).

• This gorge was the original “valley of the shadow of death”, as its Hebrew designation salmaweth is wrongly translated in Psalm 23 4, and elsewhere. The real meaning of the original Sumerian *SILA_MUD means rather the opposite, “way of birth”, that is, “birth.canal”.28 Now the point of Molech having his “sperm-dedication” ceremonies here is clearly seen.

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• Here, again, is a field for much further research. If names like Jerusalem and Zion are primarily Sumerian and not Semitic, then we must seek a very early Sumerian influence in this area, which left later inhabitants not only designations of the city and valleys but a fertility cosmography in which Jerusalem played a central role.

page 102:

· Chapter 16: DAVID, EGYPT, AND THE CENSUS

• In the Old Testament, David, the “lover” or “beloved” as we may render his name,1 is the counterpart of the Semitic and classical Adonis, first among the fertility hero-gods of the ancient world. The name Adonis is related to the Semitic common noun ‘adön, “lord”. The root meaning of both we may now trace to the same Sumerian ANDUL, “heavenly shade”, as gave the name Atlas to the mighty man of mytho— logy who holds aloft the canopy of heaven.2

page 105:

• Children will remember a poem or song by heart without necessarily understanding every word. We all have doubtless wondered in our youth why a “green hill” should need a “city wall” anyway.

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· Chapter 17: DEATH AND RESURRECTION

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• the Amanita muscaria, gave them the delusion of a soul floating free over vast distances, separate from their bodies, as it still does to those foolish enough to seek out the experience.

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• It has seemed strange to scholars that Pluto, the god of the underworld, should elsewhere be reckoned as a god of fertility. It is true that much of our western classical and Semitic tradition has led us to think of Hades9 as a place of dull lifelessness, or even of retributive torture of the damned. More original, as we have seen,10 is the conception of the earth’s bowels as the seat of creation where all life is conceived and after death recreated.11 In the subterranean oven, the god’s seminal fluid is processed into living matter, and the Word made flesh. The name Pluto, Greek Plouton, is primarily a fertility word, now recognizable as coming from an original Sumerian *BURU_TUN, “deliverer of the womb”, of which the element BURU, “deliver, release”, is cognate with the Greek bruö, “teem with, be full, burst forth”.’2

• A story with a similar ending to that of Persephone’s myth is found related of Castor and Pollux. Following Castor’s death in battle at the hands of his cousins who had driven away some cattle, brother Pollux was cast into despair. At last, in answer to a prayer to Zeus that he too might die and leave this earth to rejoin his twin in Hades, Father Zeus agreed that he might spend one day with his peers the gods and the other in the earth with his brother. “Thus,” says Homer, “these two the earth, the giver of life, covers, albeit alive, and even in the world below they have honour from Zeus. One day they live in turn, and one day they are dead; and they have honour like unto that of the gods.”4

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• The luckless sons of the prophets who found “death in the pot”28 when Elisha came to dinner, picked their mushrooms29 from a “vine of the field” (II Kgs 4:38—41). This phrase has all the appearance of a folk- name for the fungus, as “vine of the earth” has been preserved in Syriac as a name of the Mandrake.3° The same expression is used in the book of Revelation for the harvest to which the angel with the sharp sickle is bidden: Put in your sickle, and gather the clusters of the vine of the earth, for its grapes are ripe (Rev 14:18).31 It is the same imagery of the “vine-mushroom” that described Jesus as “the true vine” (John i:i, s)’ and in Jewish—Christian literature as “the Vine of David”.32

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• The cultic cry of the Bacchantes was the “paean”, eleleu, eleleu.44 The elements of this invocation can now be traced back to the same Sumerian words that gave the Hebrews the name of their deity Elohim, translated “God” in our Bibles. It was a combination of Sumerian B-LA, “strong water,juice”, and IA—U/UIA,”juice of fecundity, spermatozoa”, in other words, the common Semitic name for god, “El”, combined with the tribal god name Yaliweh (“Jehovah”). In the invocation the original F-LA is doubled, and it is precisely this form that came down in the Bible in the chant of praise “Halleluia!“ The cry eleleu, eleleu was so marked a feature of the Bacchic rites that the Bacchantes became known as the Eleleides,46 and the chant itself the “Paean”, and associated with Apollo who had the same epithet, Paian, in Greek.47

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• In the Easter story of the New Testament the same incantatory expression is found, put into the mouth of the Jesus figure, splayed as the mushroom on the cross: At the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabach— thani!” which means, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” And some of the bystanders hearing it said, “Behold he is calling Elijah” (Mark 15 :34f., etc). The name “Elijah” is formed of the same elements as the divine name Elohini and the Bacchic cry “eleleu”,° and was doubtless intended to serve as a clue to the preceding cryptograph.

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• “My (our) father who art in heaven” is used frequently as a surrogate for God. The very fullness of the phrase has seemed curious where one might have expected a simple “God” or “Father” or the like. The explanation lies in the mushroom title *AB_BA_T_BA_PJ..GI, a rather fuller version of the one cited above and underlying “Abba, father”. The cryptographers have teased out the Sumerian into an Aramaic ‘abbi’ debareqi’a’, “0 my (our) father who art in heaven !“ Having now penetrated the disguise and laid bare the original Sumerian and the Aramaic phrase made from it, we can now recognize it as a phrase we have all known from our childhood story- books for a long time: “abracadabra”. Originally it had a far more serious intent, and is first found in the writings of one Q. Serenus Sammonicus of the second-third century A1, a physician of the sect we know as Gnostics. This author left precise instructions for the use of this cabbalistic phrase, which was believed to invoke beneficient spirits against disease and mis-. fortune. The magic word had to be stitched in the form of a cross and worn as an amulet in the bosom for nine days, and finally thrown backwards before sunrise into a stream running eastwards. The sect of Gnostics provides one of the major keys to unravelling the mystery of how the mushroom-worshipping Christians became the Church of later times. The Gnostics were groups of ascetics, scorning the lusts of the flesh entirely, and convinced that they possessed a secret and mysterious knowledge denied to lesser mortals, vouchsafed to them by revelation from God. They claimed to be connected to their Saviour-god and the earliest Christians by a secret tradition, and to possess certain mystic writings which only they could interpret. The ultimate object of their faith was an individual salvation, the assurance of a blessed destiny for each soul after death.

• They possessed many such formulae as “abracadabra”, and having pride of place above all their secret knowledge were the names of the demons. Only when each soul knew such names and could thus control their power, could repeat the holy formulae and display the right symbol, and were anointed (i.e. “christened”) with a holy oil, could he find his way to the seventh heaven, the kingdom of light. Thus, a principal feature of Gnosticism was the transmission to one another in strictest secrecy doctrines about the being, nature, names, and symbols of the Seven Demons or Angels who would otherwise bar their way to achieving the ultimate goal.

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• One is reminded of the Philistine god Baal-zebub, “Lord of the Flies”, whom Ahaziah sought to consult for a prognosis on his health after he had fallen through his bedroom window (II Kgs 12ff’.).

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• The whole of creation was divided into seven. The Bible allots seven days for the Creation cycle;82 there were seven lamps on the candlestick in the Temple, representing, so tradition had it, the seven planets.83 The Greeks believed that the whole body was renewed every seven years, and that certain of the seven-year cycles were of special importance, as the age of fourteen when a boy reaches puberty; at twenty-one he attains full sexual maturity; at forty-two a woman reaches her “grand cimacteric”, the menopause; at sixty-three men suffer a transitory sexual enfeeblement. The Bible allows mankind but “threescore years and ten” on normal reckoning.84

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• nekragogos, “leading forth the dead”,

• Rephaim were those “cast down from heaven”, identified with the fallen angels of DEATH AND RESURRECTION Genesis and Jewish mythology. According to the Bible, these “sons of God” were seduced by the beauty of mortal women and begot a race of supermen (Gen 6: if.). Later Jewish tradition has it that their seduction was at least partly their own fault since they had taught the girls the art of cosmetics, and so had begun the awful progress of mankind to degeneracy and sexual abandon. More important, “they taught them charms and enchantments, the cutting of roots, and made them acquainted with plants . . .“ (Enoch : iff).

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• When modem religious practice seems at times removed from reality, a Saturday or Sunday relaxation, even entertainment, rather than a concerted effort to influence the deity or be influenced by him, it is worth reminding ourselves that for the ancients it was a life—or— death matter. If the god did not respond to their pleas for rain or sunshine, they, their children, and their crops and animals died. When, before their eyes, the greenness of the ground vanished under the wilting heat of the summer sun, the dwellers of Near Eastern lands then, as now, viewed the future apprehensively. Everything depended on the god’s bounty in the Autumn and the following Spring. The enemy, in their mythological terms, had killed the fertility hero; would the New Year see his resurrection? In the little mushroom, men could see a prime example of the transience of nature’s gifts: in the morning it appeared, and by nightfall the worms had consumed it.

• The mushroom would also grow after the first rains after summer

· Chapter 18: THE GARDEN OF ADONIS, EDEN AND DELIGHT; ZEALOTS AND MUSLIMS

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• In short, the biblical Garden of Eden, the Qur’anic “gardens of delight”, the “Tammuz” whom the women bewailed at the Temple gate, and the Na’iman plants that Isaiah said would flee away in grief are all probably to be identified with the sacred mushroom.

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• There is one section of the speech, however, which if it is not a verbatim report of what Eleazar actually said, may be assumed to be a summary of Zealot ideas about the nature of the soul and its loose association with the body:

• “For from of old, from the first dawn of intelligence, we have been continually taught by those precepts, ancestral and divine — confirmed by the deeds and noble spirit of our forefathers — that life, not death, is man’s misfortune. For it is death which gives liberty to the soul and permits it to depart to its own pure abode, there to be free from all calamity. But so long as it is imprisoned in a mortal body and tainted with all its miseries, it is, in sober truth, dead, for association with what is mortal ill befits that which is divine.

• True, the soul possesses great capacity, even while incarcerated in the body; for it makes the latter its organ of perception, invisibly swaying it and directing it onward in its actions beyond the range of mortal nature. But it is not until, freed from the weight that drags it down to earth and clings about it, the soul is restored to its proper sphere, that it enjoys a blessed energy and a power untrammelled on every side, remaining, like God himself, invisible to human eyes Let sleep furnish you with a most convincing proof of what I say — sleep, in which the soul, undistracted by the body, while enjoying perfect independence the most delightful repose, holds converse with God by right of kinship, ranges the universe and foretells many things that are to come.”

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• This belief that the soul could roam at will, once the body was asleep, lies at the base of drug philosophy of the ancient world.

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• Muhammad’s faithful disciple Omar is said to have bitterly complained that the men of his tribe used to dominate their women but “when we came among the ‘Helpers’ (the Ansär ofMedina), they proved to be a people whose women dominated them, and our wives have come to copy the habits of the women of the Ansãr”.41a How far pre—Islamic Arabia was a matriarchal society is in ispute; perhaps the movement towards a patriarchal system was already in progress by the seventh century.4 lb Nevertheless, not all the women of the Faith accepted the veil so easily. The niece of’A’isha, the Prophet’s favourite wife, asserted her independence and persisted in going unveiled before all men despite her husband’s protests.41c

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• The demand made by Islam upon its adherents for “self-surrender” and submission to the will of Allah, was carried to its greatest extremes in the fanatical sect known as the Assassins. Theologically they were of the Shi’ite branch of Islam, but their external policies were marked, like the Jewish Zealots, by utter ruthlessness in removing from their path any person who disagreed with their ideas. This they achieved by raising within their group a band of young fanatics called the Fida’is, the “devoted ones”.42 They were known more generally as “Assassins” because their complete subservience to the will of their religious masters, without regard for personal danger, was the result of their taking a drug known as khashish, our “Hashish”.48

• The sect was formed as a secret society around 1090 when they won control, by stratagem, of the mountain fortress of Alainut in Persia. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries they and their successors spread terror throughout Persia and Syria, and were finally only put down after some 12,000 of them had been massacred. For some time small bodies of Assassins lingered on in the mountains of Syria, and some think the cult is not entirely dead even now.

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· Chapter 19: THE BIBLE AS A BOOK OF MORALS

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• Despite the dramatic episode of Elijah on Mount Carmel, the theme is not Yahweh versus Baal. Yahweh was Baal, as he was Zeus and Jupiter. The names, as we have seen, sound a common note of sexual import.

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• The improbable nature of the tale, quite apart from the “miracle” stories, the extraordinarily liberal attitude of the central figure towards the Jewish “quislings” of the time, his friendly disposition towards the most hated enemies of his people, his equivocation about paying taxes to the Roman government, the howling of Jewish citizens for the blood of one of their own people at the hands of the occupying power, features of the Gospel story which have never rung true, now can be understood for what they have always been: parts of a deliberate attempt to mislead the authorities into whose hands it was known the New Testament documents would fall. The New Testament was a “hoax”, but nevertheless a deadly serious and extremely dangerous attempt to transmit to the scattered faithful secrets which the Christians dare not permit to fall into unauthorized hands but to whose preservation they were irrevocably committed by sacred oaths.

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• The basis of social life and morality in these lands has always been the continuance of the family. A man’s sons are his Prudential life policy. If, when he is too old to work, or illness or other disaster overtakes him, he has no family to care for him, the man dies. If a woman can bear him no children, however good she may be at the cooking-pot or cows, she is failing in her prime mission in life. She has to go; or, at least, a more fertile substitute has to be found. If the man is rich enough he may be able to keep both women; but if not, the infertile woman must go back to her family. To forbid divorce in such circumstances makes nonsense of the whole basis for the moral and social stability of the ancient world.

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• Elsewhere Suetonius speaks of Christians as “a class of men given to a new and wicked superstition”,31 and there seem to have been reports circulating that they practised infanticide, cannibalism, and incest.32 One is reminded of the same things said about the Bacchantes, very probably for the same reason. Outside the societies of initiates, garbled reports about the sacred “Christ”—food, “crucified” and eaten in a common meal, would almost inevitably lead to the idea that the “Christians” were eating human flesh.