In May 1970, a respected British archaeologist named John Allegro published what might be the most controversial book in the history of religious scholarship. The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross argued, through meticulous, if deeply disputed, linguistic analysis, that Jesus Christ was not a man at all, but a coded reference to a psychedelic mushroom.
Every miracle, every divine vision, every epiphany in the New Testament, Allegro claimed, was really an allegory for a trip.
Academics demolished it. His publisher distanced themselves. His career never fully recovered.
However, fifty-five years later, people are reading it again, as profiled in a new article for Popular Mechanics from Elana Spivack.
The Theory, Explained
Allegro was no crackpot by reputation. Before the book, he was a celebrated Dead Sea Scrolls scholar, one of the few Western academics trusted to handle the ancient Semitic texts discovered in a Judean cave in 1947.
His leap from those scrolls to psychedelic mushrooms hinged on a linguistic discipline called philology: the study of root words across ancient languages.
By tracing New Testament Greek back through Hebrew, Aramaic, and ultimately to Sumerian, Allegro believed he could decode a hidden fertility cult embedded in early Christianity, one that used the Amanita muscaria mushroom as its central sacrament. Jesus, in this reading, was the mushroom.
The Sumerians were one of the world’s earliest known civilizations, flourishing in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq) around 4,500 BCE. They invented writing, built the first cities, and developed complex religious rituals centered on fertility, death, and rebirth. Many of these involving psychedelic mushrooms.
Where It Falls Apart
The problem, according to modern scholars, is the Sumerian. Allegro treated it as a linguistic skeleton key connecting the ancient Near East to early Christianity. Linguists didn’t buy it.
Where It Might Not
Allegro may have had the wrong method but landed somewhere worth exploring. Archaeobotanical research has quietly built a case for psychedelic use in the ancient Near East. A 2023 study in Scientific Reports found evidence of plant-based hallucinogens in human hair from a Spanish cave dating back 3,000 years. A 2024 follow-up in the same journal identified psychotropic substances in an Egyptian vase from the 2nd century BCE.
Neuroscience adds another layer. Researchers have found that meditative and spiritual practices appear to "shut down some of the cortical areas" in the brain, particularly the parietal lobe, which governs our sense of self and spatial orientation. Psychedelics, they note, can produce the same effect.
Why It's Back Now
The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross landed on Joe Rogan's podcast two years ago, circulating freely across conspiratorial corners of the internet alongside more serious academic interest.
Whether or not Jesus was a mushroom, the question of what early believers were actually experiencing, and why, turns out to be harder to dismiss than it once seemed.
For the full deep dive, including expert commentary from archaeologists, neuroscientists, and religious scholars, read Elana Spivack's original reporting over at Popular Mechanics.
