In The Sacred Mushroom, Allegro departed from this expertise and turned to the original text of the New Testament. By poring over the roots of key words in a discipline known as philology, Allegro posited that the New Testament’s authors used encoded language to invoke a secret fertility cult hearkening back to ancient Mesopotamia. The group heavily used psychedelic substances, most notably the Amanita muscaria mushroom. This is the Christ-mushroom at the crux of his book.I'm going to have to actually read Allegro's book. But if his argument for the psychedelic rise of Christianity is based on Sumerian words, he has already lost me. And he would have to work hard to get me back.Allegro arrived at this conclusion by using Sumerian, the language of ancient Mesopotamia, as a key to understanding root words that signaled the civilization’s fertility cults. ...
Why? Sumerian was the language of Mesopotamia before the rise of the Babylonians and Assyrians. They spoke their own dialects of Akkadian and they used Akkadian as their official language. Even in the time of Hammurapi, Sumerian had the status of an elite, no-longer-spoken, scribal language, like Latin in the Middle Ages. By the time of the New Testament even Akkadian was largely forgotten, known mainly by a few Babylonian scribes. I can't see any way that there was direct influence of Sumerian on the Aramaic- and (largely) Greek-speaking world of the New Testament and early Christianity.
But I do agree with Qumran scholar Matthew Goff's assessment, quoted in this article:
But Allegro certainly wasn’t out of line questioning the role psychedelics may have played in Christianity’s formation. “It’s a legitimate academic question in terms of religions of the Near East of the time,” Goff says. “Were there rituals that were using some sort of substances? That’s not a bad academic question.”There is evidence for the use of psychoactive drugs in the religious world of and around ancient Israel. See here, here, here, here.
That said, such evidence is scarcer and less direct for Second Temple and Hellenistic/Roman-era Judaism. Ezra's eating of "flowers" before a vision in 4 Ezra 9:26 is perhaps one such place. But elsewhere in the book Ezra achieves his traces through ritual means, such as prayer and fasting.
I think there was ecstatic visionary activity in ancient Israel, Second Temple Judaism, and later Judaism, but this too involved ritual activity rather than the use of psychoactives. I have noted a couple of place where I have argued this at length here. See also here.
For more on John Allegro and his ideas, see here and here.
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