/author/John%20M.%20Allegro

13 quotes by John M. Allegro

Author:

Publisher: Paperjacks (1971)

188-189

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.' They were known 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 khasish, our 'Hashish.' \r\n\r\nThe sect was formed as a secret society around 1090 when they won control, by stratagem, of the mountain fortress of Alamut 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. \r\n\r\nThe herb which gave them their name, khashish, 'Hashish', means in Arabic no more than 'dried herbage.' If used of a particular drug, it properly requires some qualification, like 'Red Hashish', meaning Belladonna, Deadly Nightshade. The word Hashish alone has become attached to one particular form Cannabis sativa, or Hemp, and the enervating drug made from its resin. But it is difficult to believe that the 'pot'-smokers of today, the weary dotards who wander listlessly round our cities and universities, are the spiritual successors of those drug-crazed enthusiasts who, regardless of their safety, stormed castles and stole as assassins into the strongholds of their enemies. If their 'Hashish' correctly interprets Cannabis then the latter must represent some more potent drug. \r\n\r\nThe Greek word Kannabis may now be traced to the Sumerian element GAN, 'mushroom top', followed by the word which we saw earlier was part of the name of the New Testament Barnabas, and mean 'red, speckled with white', denoting, in other words, the colour of the Amanita muscaria. As well as the transfer of its name to the less powerful 'Hashish', it underwent a jumbling of its form to produce the Greek Panakes, a mysterious plant also called Asclepion (elsewhere used of the mushroom), which required atonement to the earth of various cereals when pulled up. It seems therefore probable that the original Cannabis was the sacred fungus, and that the drug which stimulated the medieval Assassins to self-immolation was the same that brought the Zealots to their awful end on Masada a millennium earlier. Indeed, we may now seriously consider the possibility that the Assassin movement was but a resurgence of a cultic practice that was part of Islam from the beginning, and had its real origin thousands of years before that. It seems to be a pattern of religious movements based on the sacred fungus that long periods of relative calm and stagnation are interspersed with flashes of violent extremism which die away again after persecution, only to re-emerge in much later generations. In this, history is reflecting the action of the drug itself on its partakers. After hectic bouts of uncontrolled activity, the fungus-eater will collapse in a stupor from which only a resurgence of the stimulatory poison in his brain will arouse him.

172-173

In raising the sacred fungus, the participants of the Anthesteria festival were calling up the dead. It is expressly stated by the ancient writers that the Anthesteria was devoted to tending the souls of the departed, and that during the festival the dead were supposed to rise to the upper world. The cult of the sacred mushroom, then, was a manifestation of necromancy, 'divination by the dead.

162-164

Few parts of the Lord's Prayer have given more trouble to the praying Christian and more scope for the exegete than the verse: \r\n\r\n>And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil (Matt 6:13) \r\n\r\nThe Greek word for 'temptation', peirasmos, came in for special attention at the time of the decipherment of the Dead Sea Scrolls. It was realized correctly by scholars that behind this New Testament phrase lay the Semitic word for a place for 'testing' metals, that is, the refiner's crucible. The Essenes in the Scrolls talk of the 'time of testing that is coming' using the technical word. So, here, in the Prayer, the word-jugglers have taken its Aramaic equivalent, kur bukhana', 'crucible of testing', out of LI-KUR-BA (LA)G-ANTA, the mushroom name. The resultant phrase is particularly interesting because it is almost exactly the Aramaic name of the fungus as it has come down in literature, khurbakhna' or khurbekhana' (Arabic kharbaq), attached, like so many mushroom words, to the plant Hellebore. \r\n\r\nTaking the sacred fungus, or, in New Testament parlance, 'eating the body' of the Christ, must have been a very real peirasmos, 'trial', of the body and spirit. It would have seemed no accident to the cultic celebrant that the name of the mushroom and the phrase for 'fiery furnace of testing' appeared the same. The customary translations of the powerful concept as 'temptation' is almost ridiculous, recalling youthful experiences in the jam-cupboard or behind the woodshed with the girl next door. Well might the writer of Corinthians issue the warning: \r\n\r\n>Whoever, therefore, eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord unworthily will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord. Let a man examine himself, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup. For anyone who eats and drinks without critically treating his body, eats and drinks a 'crisis' upon himself. That is why many of you are weak and ill, and some have died... (1 Cor 11:27-30). \r\n\r\nThe Amanita muscaria is, after all, a poisonous fungus. Whist not the most dangerous, its drugs have a serious affect on the nervous system, and taken regularly over a long period would in the end kill the addict. Among its drugs so far isolated are Muscarine, Atropine, and Bufotenin. The first causes vomiting and diarrhoea, and stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system so that the partaker is capable of great feats of muscular exertion and endurance. The stories which came down of the fantastic strength exhibited by cultic heroes, however mythical the events described, have probably that element of real fact. So, too, the idea that the Maenads in their wild raving through the conifer forests were capable of tearing animals limb from limb, was not entirely devoid of truth. \r\n\r\nAtropine first stimulates the nervous system and then paralyzes it. It is this poison that is primarily responsible for the hallucinatory effects of the sacred fungus, but also for the muscular convulsions that must have seemed to bystanders like the demons within, wresting with the newly imbibed power of the god. \r\n\r\nBufotenin, a secretion otherwise found in the sweat glands of the African toad, lowers the pulse rate and temperature. As a result, the mushroom eater has the strange sensation of feeling his skin hot and cold simultaneously: hot in some places, cold in others. He finds himself hypersensitive to touch, light, and sound. The day following his 'trip' he will find all smells seem foul and a bad taste persists in his mouth. He feels an urgent need to urinate but is unable to do so.

160-161

The invocation of the 'Father' reminds us of the opening words of the Lord's Prayer, repeated millions of times a day all over the Christian world. In the mouth of Jesus, the opening words, '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-TAB-BA-RI-GI, a rather fuller version of the one cited above and underlying 'Abba, father.' The cryptographers have teased out the Sumerian into an Aramaic 'abba' debareqi'a', 'O my (our) father who art in heaven!' \r\n \r\nHaving now penetrated the disguise and laid bare the original Sumerian and 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 AD, 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 beneficent spirits against disease and misfortune. 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.

A great deal of the mythology of the ancient Near East hinges on the theme of the dying and rising god. It is usually, and correctly, seen as symbolism in story form of the processes of nature whereby in the heat of summer the earth's greenness disappears in death, to reappear the following spring in new birth. But, as we shall see, in the life cycle of the mushroom this natural cycle was quickened to a matter of days or even hours. The fungus was a microcosm of the whole fertility process, the essence of god compressed into the womb and penis of the hermaphrodite mushroom.

54-55

To Pliny the fungus had to be reckoned as one of the 'greatest of the marvels of nature', since it 'belonged to a class of things that spring up spontaneously and cannot be grown from seed.' It was surely 'among the most wonderful of all things' in that it could 'spring up and live without a root.' Until the invention of the microscope the function of the spore, produced by each fungus in its millions, could not be appreciated. The mushroom has, indeed, no seed in the accepted sense, germinating and giving out a root and later a stem apex with or without seed leaves. The walls of each minute spore extrude to form thread-like tubes which branch further until all mass together to form the spongy flesh of the fungus. The result is neither animal nor vegetable, and the mystery of its proper classification persisted until relatively modern times. Thus a sixteenth-century naturalist wrote: 'They are a sort of intermediate existence between plants and inanimate nature. In this respect fungi resemble zoophytes, which are intermediate between plants and animals.' \r\n\r\nOne explanation for the creation of the mushroom without apparent seed was that the 'womb' had been fertilized by thunder, since it was commonly observed that the fungi appeared after thunderstorms. Thus one name given them was Ceraunion, from the Greek keraunios, 'thunderbolt.' Another was the Greek hudnon, probably derived from Sumerian UD-NUN, 'storm-seeded.' \r\n\r\nIt was thus uniquely-begotten. The normal process of fructifacation had been by-passed. The seed had not fallen from some previous plant, to be nurtured by the earth until in turn it produced a root and stalk. The god had 'spoken' and his creative 'word' had been carried to earth by the storm-wind, angelic messenger of heaven, and been implanted directly into the volva. The baby that resulted from this divine union was thus the 'Son of God', more truly representative of its heavenly father than any other form of plant or animal life. Here, in the tiny mushroom, was God manifest, the 'Jesus' born of the Virgin 'the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation...in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell...' (Col 1:15).

36-37

An added difficulty in botany', wrote Pliny some nineteen hundred years ago, 'is the variety of names given to the same plant in different districts.' The more 'strange' the herb, the more noteworthy its characteristics, the greater the number of folk-names. Dioscorides, for instance, gives some two-score names to the Mandrake, that famous aphrodisiac with which Leah purchased a night of connubial bliss with Jacob (Gen 30:14ff), and whose narcotic properties could not suffice to give poor Othello 'that sweet sleep which thou owedst yesterday'. \r\nUntil comparatively recently, botanists lacked adequate methods of classification, so that plants tended to be grouped together on the basis of what we nowadays would consider secondary characteristics. Thus speaking of the Ground-pine, Pliny records that 'a third variety has the same smell and therefore the same name.' Even now, the inexactitude of local plant names is the despair of field botanists. Pliny felt as sorely frustrated: 'The reason why more herbs are not familiar,' he writes, 'is because experience of them is confined to illiterate country-folk, who form the only class of people living among them. Moreover, when crowds of medical men are to be met everywhere, nobody wants to look for them. Many simples, also, lack names, though their properties are known...The most disgraceful reason for this scanty knowledge is that even those who possess it refuse to teach it, just as though they would themselves lose what they have imparted to others.

Identifying the drug-producing plants, then, was not the only factor in early pharmaceutical and medical practice. It was one thing to be able to recognize a drug plant, even to know it's popular name; it was another to know how to extract and purify the active ingredient, and, above all, to know the right dosage. There were other complications. Some drugs were so powerful that they could only be safely administered on certain days, or after lengthy preparation of the body and mind. It was also well known that over-powerful drugs had to be countered with another having the opposite effect, as in the case of the purge Hellebore, and with some narcotics which had to be offset with stimulants. To know the correct dosages in these cases required an appreciation of the susceptibility of the patient to the drug's effects, perhaps the most difficult calculation of all. Much depended on the recipient's 'fate' allotted him at his birth, the factor that determined his individuality, his physical stature, the colour of his eyes, and so on. Only the astrologer could tell this, so that the art of medicine was itself dependent for success on astrology and the considerable astronomical knowledge this presupposed.

20-22

Quite simply, the reasoning of the early theologians seems to have been as follows: since rain makes the crops grow it must contain within it the seed of life. In human beings this is spermatozoa that is ejected from the penis at orgasm. Therefore it followed that rain is simply heavenly semen, the all-powerful creator, God. \r\nThe most forceful spurting of this 'seed' is accompanied by thunder and the shrieking wind. This is the 'voice' of God. Somewhere above the sky a mighty penis reaches an orgasm that shakes the heavens. The 'lips' of the penis-tip, the glans, open and the divine seed shoots forth and is borne by the wind to the earth. As saliva can be seen mixed with breath during forceful human speech, so the 'speaking' of the divine penis is accompanied by a powerful blast of wind, the holy, creative spirit, bearing the 'spittle' of semen. \r\nThis 'spittle' is the visible 'speech' of God; it is his 'Son' in New Testament terms, the 'Word' which 'was with God, and was God, and was in the beginning with God; through whom all things were made, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life ...' (John 1:1-4). In the words of the Psalmists: 'By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and all their host by the breath of his mouth' (Ps 33:6); or, 'when you send forth your breath they are created, and the face of the earth is restored' (Ps 104:30). \r\nThis idea of the creative Word of God came to have a profound philosophical and religious importance and was, and still is, the subject of much metaphysical debate. But originally it was not an abstract notion; you could see the 'Word of God', feel it as rain on your face, see it seeping into the furrows of mother earth, the 'labia' of the womb of creation. Within 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. \r\nAlso beneath the earth's surface, lay a great ocean whose waters, like those of the seas around and above the firmament (Gen 1:7) were the primeval reservoirs of the god's spermatozoa, the Word. They were therefore 'seas of knowledge' as the Sumerians called them, and could be tapped by seekers of truth, whether they looked 'to the heavens or to the earth beneath' (Isa 51:6), that is, by means of astrology or necromancy, 'divination from the dead'. This notion that mortals could discover the secrets of the past, present, and future by somehow projecting themselves to the 'seventh heaven' or down into the underworld gave rise to much mythology and some curious magical practices. 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. \r\nSince it was given to few men to be able to visit heaven or hell and return to tell what they had seen and heard, there arose the ideas of 'messengers', or angels, those 'workers of miracles' as their name in Greek and Hebrew means. These demigods, or heroes, had access to both worlds and play an important part in ancient mythology. They could come from above in various guises or be conjured up from the ground, like the ghost of Samuel drawn to the surface by the witch of Endor for consultation by King Saul (I Sam 28). One important aspect of this idea of heavenly and subterranean founds of knowledge is that since plants and trees had their roots beneath the soil and derived their nourishment from the water above and beneath the earth, it was thought possible that some varieties of vegetation could give their mortal consumers access to this wisdom. Herein lies the philosophical justification for believing that hallucinatory drugs distilled from such plants imparted divine secrets, or 'prophecies'. \r\nSuch very special kinds of vegetation were, then, 'angels' and to know their names was to have power over them. A large part of magical folk-lore was devoted to maintaining this vital knowledge of the names of the angels. It was not sufficient simply to know what drug could be expected to have certain effects; it was important to be able to call upon its name at the very moment of plucking and eating it. Not only was its rape from the womb of mother earth thus safely accomplished, but its powers could be secured by the prophet for his 'revelations' without incurring the heavy penalties so often suffered by those misusing the drug plants.

3-4

The study of the relationship between words and the thoughts they express is called 'etymology' since it seeks the 'true' (Greek etumos) meaning of the word. The etymologist looks for the 'root' of the word, that is the inner core which expresses its fundamental or 'radical' concept. \r\nFor 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 l and n, and we are not surprised to find that an early form of the root has n in place of l, 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. \r\nOr again, should we wish to track down the root of our word 'rule', meaning 'control, guide, exercise influence over', etc., we should find that our etymological dictionaries will refer us through an adaptation of Old French back to the Latin regulo, 'direct', connected with *regno, 'reign', rex, 'king', and so on. The root here is plain reg- or the like, and its ultimate source we can now discover by taking our search back another three or four thousand years to the earliest known writing of all, that of ancient Sumer in the Mesopotamian basin. There we find a root RIG, meaning 'shepherd', and, by breaking the word down even further, we can discover the idea behind 'shepherd', that of ensuring the fecundity of the flocks in his charge. This explains the very common concept that the king was a 'shepherd' to his people, since his task was primarily that of looking after the well-being and enrichment of the land and its people. \r\nHere etymology has done more than discover the root-meaning of a particular word: it has opened a window on prehistoric philosophic thought. The idea of the shepherd-king's role in the community did not begin with the invention of writing. The written word merely expresses a long-held conception.

Even when the modern philologist has collected all the texts available, compiled his grammars and dictionaries, and is confident of his decipherment, there still remains the inadequacy of any written word, even of the most advanced languages, to express thought. Even direct speech can fail to convey our meaning, and has to be accompanied with gesture and facial expression. A sign imprinted on wet clay, or even the flourish of the pen on paper, can leave much uncommunicated to the reader, as every poet and lover knows.

xvi

In any study of the sources and development of a particular religion, ideas are the vital factor. History takes second place. Event time is relatively unimportant. This is not to underestimate the importance of political and sociological influences in the fashioning of a cult and its ideology; but the prime materials of the philosophy stem from a fundamental conception of the universe and the source of life.

xii - xiii

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 means 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 train by which it developed. In doing so, it is sometimes possible even to outline the progress of man's mental, technical or religious development.