The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross: A Study of the Nature and Origins of Christianity Within the Fertility Cults of the Ancient Near East¶
Metadata¶
| Syntax | Description |
|---|---|
| Title | The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross: A Study of the Nature and Origins of Christianity Within the Fertility Cults of the Ancient Near East |
| Author | John M. Allegro |
| Tags | #books #paperback |
Highlight¶
This book shows the power and persistence of this idea, and of the fertility cults and rituals by which people tried to attain divine vision and know the mind of their God. Central to such cults, over thousands of years and across continents, has been the use of entheogens (psychoactive substances derived from plants) to reach a higher consciousness, a sense of community with the gods. One of the chief sources was the sacred mushroom, Amanita muscaria—at once the symbol and embodiment of fertility, and the means to understand it.
- Page: ix
Note¶
Interesting history and theory.
Highlight¶
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.
- Page: xix
Note¶
Interesting thought about how the idea of life trickles down.
Highlight¶
The fungus recognized today as the Amanita muscaria, or Fly-Agaric, had been known from the beginning of history. Beneath the skin of its characteristic red and white-spotted cap, there is concealed 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.
- Page: xxii
Note¶
I wonder how the effects of ingesting Amanita muscaria were discovered.
Highlight¶
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 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 means of entering heaven; God had come down in the flesh to show the way to himself, by himself.
- Page: xxiii
Note¶
This section contains quite a description of Amanita muscaria physical characteristics. Was this documented by the ancients? Or is this just a theory?
Highlight¶
The first books, then, were the brain’s memory cells; the first pen was the tongue. It was the ability of Homo sapiens to communicate with his fellows, to organize community life, and transmit hard-earned skills from father to son that raised man far above the animals. It was this same means of communication that brought him in touch with his god, to flatter, cajole, even threaten to obtain the means of life. Experience showed that, as in his human relationships, some words and actions were more effective than others, and there arose a body of uniform ritual and liturgy whose memorizing and enactment was the responsibility of the “holy men” of the community.
- Page: 2
Note¶
Before written documentation existed, people relied on tacit knowledge sharing to survive and thrive.
Highlight¶
Our way into the mind of ancient man can only be through his writings, and this is the province of philology, the science of words. We have to seek in the symbols by which he represented his spoken utterances clues to his thinking.
- Page: 3
Note¶
This is my first time seeing the word "philology." Very interesting meaning and seems applicable in the field of knowledge management.
Highlight¶
Even when the 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.
- Page: 3
Note¶
This description does a good job of defining and giving examples of tacit knowledge.
Highlight¶
In the study of ancient literatures the scholar has to bear in mind that the language of the hymns and epics may well differ considerably from the common tongue of the same period. One of the problems facing the student of Old Testament Hebrew is the probability that the classical tongue of the Bible does not accurately represent the spoken language of the ancient Israelites. Certainly the vocabulary of the Bible is far too limited in extent to tell us much about the workaday world of ancient Canaan. When it comes to analyzing the linguistic and phonetic structure of biblical Hebrew in terms of actual speech, the conviction grows that what we have is not the spoken dialect of any one community living in a single place at one time, but a kind of mixed, artificial language, composed perhaps of a number of dialects and used specifically for religious purposes. The importance of a liturgical language from our immediate point of view is that it will have been essentially conservative. It is in such writing that we can expect to find words used in their most primitive sense.
- Page: 5
Note¶
Interesting theory about how the Bible contains a mix of languages, interpretations, and expressions throughout history. This mix of languages, interpretations, and expressions compromises the Bible as a single source of truth.
Highlight¶
This very ancient regard for the sanctity of semen, which lies at the core of the fertility idea, is the ultimate cultic justification of the Roman Catholic strictures on birth control. The real objections to contraception have little to do with family morals or, indeed, with morality at all as the modem world understands the term; it is simply that wasting seed is a religious “sin”; it is a blasphemy against the “word of god”, the “holy spirit”.
- Page: 26
Highlight¶
xxx
- Page: xxx