《The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross》

Pearl0501

INTRODUCTION
No one religion in the ancient Near East can be studied in isolation.
All stem from man's first questioning about the origin of life and how
to ensure his own survival. He has always been acutely conscious of
his insufficiency. However much he progressed technically, making
clothes, shelter, conserving food and water supplies, and so on. the
forces of nature were always greater than he. The winds would blow
away his shelter, the sun parch his crops, wild beasts prey on his
animals: he was always on the defensive in a losing battle. Out of this
sense of dependency and frustratio� religion was born.
Somehow man had to establish communications with the source of
the world's fertility, and thereafter maintain a right relationship with
it. Over the course of time he built up a body of experiential knowledge of rituals that he or his representatives could perform, or words
to recite, which were reckoned to have the greatest influence on this
fertility deity. At first they were largely imitative. If rain in the desert
lands was the source of Jife, then the moisture from heaven must be
only a more abundant kind of spermatozoa. If the male organ ejaculated tills 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 stimu·
late it by sexual means, by singing. dancing, orgiastic displays and,
above all, by the performance of the copulatory act itself.
However far man progressed in his control of the world about him
there remained a large gap between what he wanted at any one time
and what he could achieve on his own account. There was always
some unscalable mountain, some branch of knowledge which remained unpenetrable, some disease with no known cure. It seemed to
him that if he had managed painstakingly to grope his way to a knowledge and dexterity so far above the animals, then in some mysterious
way his thinkers and artisans must have been tapping a source of
wisdom no less real than the rain that fructified the ground. The
heavenly penis, then, was not only the source of life-giving semen, it
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was the origin of knowledge. The seed of God was the Word of God.
The dream of man is to become God. Then be would be omnipotent; no longer fearful of the snows in winter or the sun in summer.
or the drought that killed his cattle and made his children's bellles
swell grotesquely. The penis in the skies would rise and spurt its vital
juice when man commanded, and the earth below would open its
vulva and gestate its young as man required. Above all, man would
learn the secrets of the universe not piecemeal, painfully by trial and
fatal error, but by a sudden. wonderful illumination from within.
But God is jealous of his power and his knowledge. He brooks no
rivals in heavenly places. If, in his mercy, he will allow just a very few
of his chosen mortals t o share his divinity. it is but for a fleeting
moment. Under very special circumstances he will permit men to rise
to the throne of heaven and glimpse the beauty and the glory of
omniscience and omnipotence. For those who are so privileged there
has seemed no greater or more worthwhile experience. The colours
are brighter, the sounds more penetrating. every sensation is magnified, every natural force exaggerated
For such a glimpse of heaven men have died. In the pursuit of this
goal great religions have been born, shone as a beacon to men struggling still in their unequal battle with nature, and then too have died,
stifled by their own attempts to perpetuate, codify. and evangelize the
mystic vision.
Our present concern is to show that Judaism and Christianity are
such cultic expressions of this endless pursuit by man to discover
instant power and knowledge. Granted the first proposition that the
vital forces of nature are controlled by an extra-terrestrial intelligence, these religions are logical developments from the older, cruder
fertility cults. With the advance of technical proficiency the aims of
religious ritual became less to influence the weather and the crops
than to attain wisdom and the knowledge of the future. The Word
that seeped through the labia of the earth's womb became to the
mystic of less importance than the Logos which he believed his religion enabled him to apprehend and enthuse him with divine
omniscience. But the source was the same vital power of the universe
and the cultic practice differed little.
To raise the crops the farmer copulated with his wife in the fields.
To seek the drug that would send his soul winging to the seventh
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heaven and back, the initiates into the religious mysteries had their
priestesses seduce the god and draw him into their grasp as a woman
fascinates her partner's penis to erection.
For the way to God and the fleeting view of heaven was through
plants more plentifully endued with the sperm of God than any other.
These were the drug-herbs, the science of whose cultivation and use
had been accumulated over centuries of observation and dangerous
experiment. Those who had this secret wisdom of the plants were the
chosen of their god; to them alone had he vouchsafed the privilege of
access to the heavenly throne. And if he was jealous of his power. no
less were those who served him in the cultic mysteries. Theirs was no
gospel to be shouted from the rooftops: Paradise was for none but the
favoured few. The incantations and rites by which they conjured
forth their drug plants, and the details of the bodily and mental pre-­
parations undergone before they could ingest their god. were the
secrets of the cult to which none but the initiate. bound by fearful
oaths, had access.
Very rarely, and then only for urgent practical purposes, were
those secrets ever committed to writing. Normally they would be
passed from the priest to the initiate by word of mouth; dependent
for their accurate transmission on the trained memories of men dedicated to the learning and recitation of their "scriptures". But if. for
some drastic reason like the disruption of their cultic centres by war
or persecution, it became necessary to write down the precious
names of the herbs and the manner of their use and accompanying
incantations, it would be in some esoteric form comprehensible only
to those within their dispersed communities.
Such an occasion, we believe, was the Jewish Revolt of A.D. 66.
Instigated probably by members of the cult, swayed by their druginduced madness to believe God had called them to master the world
in his name, they provoked the mighty power of Rome to swift and
terrible action. Jerusalem was ravaged, her temple destroyed. Judaism was disrupted, and her people driven to seek refuge with communities already established around the Mediterranean coastlands.
The mystery cults found themselves without their central fount of
authority, with many of their priests killed in the abortive rebellion
or driven into the desert. The secrets, if they were not to be lost
for ever, had to be committed to writing, and yet, if found, the
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documents must give nothing away or betray those who still dared
defy the Roman authorities and continue their religious practices.
The means of conveying the information were at hand, and had
been for thousands of years. The folk-tales of the ancients had from
the earliest times contained myths based upon the personification of
plants and trees. They were invested with human faculties and qualities and their names and physical characteristics were applied to the
heroes and heroines of the stories. Some of these were just tales spun
for entertainment, others were political parables like Jotham's fable
about the trees in the Old Testament, while others were means of
remembering and transmitting therapeutic folk-lore. The names of
the plants were spun out to make the basis of the stories, whereby the
creatures of fantasy were identified, dressed, and made to enact their
parts. Here, then. was the literary device to spread occult knowledge
to the faithfuL To tell the story of a rabbi called Jesus, and invest
him with the power and names of the magic drug. To have hjm live
before the terrible events that bad disrupted their lives, to preach a
love between men, extending even to the hated Romans. Thus, reading such a tale, should it fall into Roman bands, even their mortal
enemies might be deceived and not probe farther into the activities of
the cells of the mystery cults within their territories.
The ruse failed. Christians, bated and despised, were hauled forth
and slain in their thousands. The cult well nigh perished. What
eventually took its place was a travesty of the real thing, a mockery
of the power that could raise men to heaven and give them the
glimpse of God for which they gladly died. The story of the rabbi
crucified at the instigation of the Jews became an historical peg upon
which the new culfs authority was founded. What began as a hoax,
became a trap even to those who believed themselves to be the
spiritual heirs of the mystery religion and took to themselves the
name of "Christian". Above all they forgot, or purged from the cult
and their memories, the one supreme secret on which their whole
religious and ecstatic experience depended: the names and identity
of the source of the drug, the key to heaven-the sacred mushroom.
The fungus recognized today as the Amanita muscaria. or FlyAgaric, had been known from the beginning of history. Beneath the
skin of its characteristic red- and white-spotted cap, there is con-
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cealed a powerful hallucinatory poison. Its religious use among certain Siberian peoples and others has been the subject of study in
recent years, and its exhilarating and depressive effects have been
clinically examined. These include the stimulation of the perceptive
faculties so that the subject sees objects much greater or much
smaller than they really are, colours and sounds are much enhanced,
and there is a general sense of power, both physical and mental, quite
outside the normal range of human experience.
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 equally 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 i n 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
than that discoverable in any other form of living matter. It was, in
fact, God himself, manifest on earth. To the mystic it was the divinely
given n1eans of entering heaven; God had come down in the flesh to
show the way to himself, by himself.
To pluck such a precious herb was attended at every point with
peril. The time-before sunrise, the words to be uttered-the name
of the guardian angel, were vital to the operation, but more was
needed. Some form of substitution was necessary, to make an atonement to the earth robbed of her offspring. Yet such was the divine
nature of the Holy Plant, as it was called, only the god could make
the necessary sacrifice. To redeem the Son, the Father had to supply
even the "price of redemption". These are all phrases used of the
sacred mushroom, as they are of the Jesus of Christian theology.
Our present study bas much to do with names and titles. Only
when we can discover the nomenclature of the sacred fungus within
and without the cult, can we begin to understand its function and
theology. The main factor that has n1ade these new discoveries possible has been the realization that many of the most secret names of
the mushroom go back to ancient Sumerian, the oldest written
language known to us, witnessed by cuneiform texts dating from the
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fourth millennium B.C. Furthermore, it now appears that this ancient
tongue provides a bridge between the Indo-European languages
(which include Greek, Latin, and our own tongue) and the Semitic
group, which includes the languages of the Old Testament, I..Jcbrew
and Aramaic. For the first Lin1e, it becomes possible to decipher the
names of gods, mythological characters, classical and biblical, and
plant names. Thus their place in the cultic systems and their functions in the old fertility religions can be determined.
The great barriers that have hitherto seemed to divide the ancient
world. classical and biblical, have at last been crossed and at a more
significant level than has previously been possible by merely comparing their respective mythologies. Stories and characters which
seem quite different in the way they are presented in various locations and at widely separated points in history can now be shown
often to have the same central theme. Even gods as different as Zeus
and Yahweh embody the same fundamental conception of the fertility deity, for their names in origin are precisely the same. A
common tongue overrides physical and racial boundaries. Even
languages so apparently different as Greek and Hebrew. when they
can be shown to derive from a common fount, point to an identity
of culture at some early stage, Comparisons can therefore be made
on a scientific, philological level which might have appeared unthinkable before now. Sudden1y, aln1ost overnight, the ancient world
has shrunk. All roads in the Near East lead back to the Mesopotamian basin, to ancient Sumer. Similarly, the most important of
the religions and mythologies of that area, and probably far beyond,
are reaching back to the mushroom cult of Sumer and her successors.
In biblical studies. the old divisions between Old and New Testament areas of research, never very meaningful except to the
Christian theologian, become even less valid. As far as the origins of
Christianity are concerned, we must look not just to intertestamental
literature. the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, and the newly discovered writings from the Dead Sea, nor even merely to the 01d
Testament and other Semitic works, but we have to bring into consideration Sumerian religious and mythological texts and the classical
writings of Asia Minor. Greece, and Rome. The Christian Easter is
as firmly linked to the Baechle Anthesteria as the Jewish Passover.
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Above all, it is the pbiJogian who must be the spearhead of the new
enquiry. It is primarily a study in words.
A written word is more than a symbol: it is an expression of an
idea. To penetrate to its inner meaning is to look into the mind of the
man who wrote it. Later generations may give different meanings to
that symbol. extending its range of reference far beyond the original
intention. but if we can trace the original significance then it should
be possible to follow the trail by which it developed. In doing so, it is
sometimes possible even to outline the progress of man's mental,
technical or religious development
The earliest writing was by means of pictures, crudely incised
diagrams on stone and clay. However lacking such symbols may be
in grammatical or syntactical refinement, they do convey. in an instant, the one feature which seemed to the ancient scribe the most
significant aspect of the object or action he was trying to represent.
"Love" he shows as a flaming torch in a womb, a "foreign country"
as a hill (because he lived on a plain). and so on. As the art of writing
developed further, we can begin to recognize the first statements of
ideas which came later to have tremendous philosophical importance,
"Life". "god". "priest". "temple'\ "grace", "sin", and so on. To
seek their later meanings in religious literature like the Bible we must
first discover their basic meaning and follow their development
through as far as extant writings will allow.
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 indentified with the precious liquid.
If to discover this understanding of "sin" seems today of only limited
academic interest, it is worth recalling that it is this same principle
that lies at the root of modern Catholic strictures against the use of
the "Pill".
As far as the main burden of our present enquiry is concerned. our
new-found ability to penetrate to the beginnings of language means
that we can set the 1ater mystery cults. as those of Judaism. of the
Dionysiac religion and Christjanity, into their much wider context. to
discover the first principles from which they developed, probe the
mysteries of their cultic names and invocations, and, in the case of
Christianity at least. appreciate something of the opposition they encountered among governing authorities and the measures taken to
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transmit their secrets under cover of ancient mythologies in modem
dress.
Our study. then, begins at the beginning. with an appreciation of
religion in terms of a stimulation of the god to procreation and the
provision of life. Armed with our new understanding of the language
relationships of the ancient Near East, we can tackle the major problems involved in botanical nomenclature and discover those features
of the more god-endued plants which attracted the attention of the
old medicine men and prophets. The isolation of the names and
epithets of the sacred mushroom opens the door into the secre.t
chambers of the mystery cults which depended for their mystic halJuncinatory experiences on the drugs found in the fungus. At long last
identification of the main characters of many of the old classical and
biblical mythologies is possible, since we can now decipher their
names. Above all, those mushroqm epithets and holy invocations
that the Christian cryptographers wove into their stories of the man
Jesus and hls companions can now be recognized, and the main features of the Christian cult laid bare.
The isolation of the mu shroom cult and the real. hidden meaning
of the New Testament writings drives a wedge between the moral
teachings of the Gospels and their quite amoral religious setting. The
new discoveries must thus raise more acutely the question of the
validity of Christian "ethics" for the present time. If the Jewish rabbi
to whom they have hitherto been attributed turns out to have been
no more substantial than the mushroom, the authority of his homilies must stand or fall on the assent they can command on their own
merit.
What follows in this book is, as has been said, primarily a study
in words. To a reader brought u p to believe in the essential historicity of the Bible narratives some of the attitudes displayed in our
approach to the texts may seem at first strange. We appear to be
more interested with the words than with the events they seem to
record; more concerned, say, with the meaning of Moses' name than
his supposed role as Israers first great political leader. Similarly. a
century or so ago, it must have seemed strange to the average Bible
student to understand the approach of a "modernist" of the day who
was more interested in the ideas underlying the Creation story of
Genes is and their sources, than to date, locate, and identify the real
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Garden of Eden� and_ to solve the problem of whence came Cain's
wife. Then, it took a revolution in man�s appreciation of his development fron1 lower forms of life and a clearer understanding of the age
of this planet to force the theologian to abandon the historicity of
Genesis.

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