The infamous English philologist and Biblical scholar John Marco Allegro is known today for two principal things: organizing the opening and translation of the Copper Scroll (from the Dead Sea Scrolls) and for arguing in his book 'The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross' that Jesus was a codeword for a hallucinogenic mushroom used by early Christians. The fallout from this latter thesis is what ultimately lead to Allegro's downfall in the scholarly world and - although Allegro has long been vilified - he was also well-ahead of his time in terms of considering the impact of the use hallucinogens on the formation of Christianity. (1)
It is indeed worth noting that while Allegro has long been vilified by some in the scholarly world (particularly those who are believing Christians): (2) to those scholars studying the use and impact of hallucinogenic substances however Allegro's work is regarded as something of a classic and to have moved in the right general direction towards a definition of religion that including an understanding of it as the partial result of experiments with then barely understood psychoactive substances. (3)
Ironically in spite of the furore around Allegro's work: it is difficult to understand what many of his detractors actually had against his hypothesis. Certainly one opponent focused on Allegro's Sumerian linguistic reconstructions (which is the basis of Allegro's case), but he was very much in a minority with most opponents and critics focusing on one of theses of the book: that Jesus Christ did not exist and that the term comes from a cultic description of a psychoactive mushroom. (4)
In doing so however Allegro's critics fundamentally ignored the fact that at least half of Allegro's text (circa 300 pages with a third of those being notes) was based on working out a sex-based symbolic origin of religion and the place of psychoactive mushrooms within that schema. Allegro didn't only comment on Christianity but spent about half the book talking about the use of these same substances by ancient and classical pagans (which was - and is - not controversial), pointed out that Mohammed's 'visitations' suggested a similar origin (5) and - appropriately for us - that jewish religious ideas derived from such substance (ab)use.
Now I should point out that I would agree with Allegro's critics that he did push his ideas rather too far and also his lack of consideration of counter-explanations is problematic in the extreme. However, Allegro's ideas are interesting in relation to the jews precisely because he was as unafraid of offending jews as he had been of offending Christians (Allegro had started out life as a convinced Methodist and had started to train for the priesthood). (6)
Allegro believed that many of the verses of the Bible (and in the Old Testament/Tanakh in particular) should be interpreted based on our understanding of the concept of punning among jews. (7) He suggested that the texts of the Old Testament/Tanakh had a dual purpose: they were both an inviolate religious text to the jewish masses, but to the jewish initiate into the 'higher mysteries' they were read like a codebook of - what Allegro calls - 'mushroom lore' or 'mushroom mythology'. (8)
Essentially what Allegro proposed was that the original jewish religious stories upon which the Old Testament/Tanakh are based were derived from the use of psychoactive mushrooms, which gave those who consumed them strange visions and dreams that they could not but understand in a religious intellectual framework.
In support of this Allegro makes very perceptive point about our understanding of the historical Israelites in that if they existed and whoever they originally were. They were - according to the Old Testament/Tanakh - essentially illiterate goat and sheep herding nomads who scraped a fairly miserable existence by tending their flocks, stealing from each other and attacking merchants and their neighbours. (9)
What they were not is what romantics - often with religious motivations - tend to picture them as: a great civilization straddling a major trading locale. (10) They were near major trading routes alright, but they did not have any civilization of note let alone a great one. The ‘civilization’ of the jews only really occurred with the advent of their contact with the Macedonian Greeks and it was not something they adopted readily, but rather was forced upon them by historical circumstance and the point of the sword.
This theme of the savagery and lack of civilization of the jews is something that runs through all of Allegro's writing and is at its most obvious in Allegro's book about the jews: 'The Chosen People'. (11) Yet Allegro was not anti-Semitic in any way that could be objectively recognised as such as his daughter and biographer Brown rightly stresses. (12)
For all that however if we use the wider 'definition' of anti-Semitism used today (i.e., anything critical of jews is anti-Semitic) then it becomes apparent that Allegro by today's rather loose definition was anti-Semitic. This is due less to Allegro's judging jews by the biological criteria that is definitive in terms of being anti-Semitic or not, but rather because the term 'anti-Semitic' has become an overused accusative canard that is indiscriminately applied to any belief or statement that a jew or an apologist for jews dislikes or considers injurious.
While Allegro cannot be considered anti-Semitic by any intellectually acceptable definition of the term: his ideas however fit within the rubric of the modern colloquial appellation of 'anti-Semite'.
This is because Allegro regarded the jews in their proper place and was often at pains to point out that the ideas inherent within Judaism - as exemplified by the interpretation of them by the Essenes, Zealots and others - were antithetical to good relations between jews and gentiles. Allegro emphasized the savage and illiterate aspect of the Israelites - both when they were nomads and when they had settled down onto a patch of land - because he (rightly) regarded this context to be essential to understand the origins of religious experience in general.
This Allegro associated with the concept of fertility and sometimes even the most sympathetic reader finds it difficult to read his work - particularly 'The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross' - as Allegro had an unfortunate tendency to simply repeat the same argument over and over without examining (or even mentioning) counter-theses. This concept of fertility Allegro connected to his Sumerian/Mesopotamian-centric conception of ancient history and the development of civilization: thus, Allegro proposed Sumerian etymologies and origins for Greek and Roman deities and heroes as well as Yahweh and Jesus.
However, unlike his suggestions in relation to the origins of Graeco-Roman religion: Allegro's comments on jews and Judaism are the centre of his thesis concerning the universal origin of religion in fertility cults. It is to Judaism not to other religions that Allegro's thesis fundamentally looks for its proof: the other religious systems that Allegro brings are up to buttress his argument in relation to the semi-universal nature of fertility cults being the origin of religion.
This then allowed Allegro to look at Judaism - and through it Christianity and Mesopotamian religion - as being the pivot of his thesis since it was the mirror through which he could understand the formation of religions past and present. This is what is often forgotten in appraisals of Allegro's work (13) in so far as they tend to focus on Allegro's suggestions in relation to Christianity not Allegro's actual intellectual position, which argued that since Christianity was directly derived from Judaism then if Judaism used psychoactive substances as its medium to commune with Yahweh, then it made sense if Christianity had carried on the practice. (14)
Allegro stipulated that this was not mass substance abuse as such, but rather that the medium through which one communed with Yahweh was kept as a closely guarded secret by the temple authorities. (15) When we note that psychoactive substances were frequently used in religions of the Near East then it becomes all the more likely that Judaism - as a sectarian split from Canaanite religious beliefs - would have maintained the religious practices used by the Canaanites. (16) The use of such substances would have been a closely guarded secret precisely because once it was known that through a specific substance one could commune with Yahweh then others would acquire the substance in question and thus break the monopoly of the jewish priesthood in regard to religious authority. (17)
This, of course, could not be allowed by the jewish priesthood since the breaking of their monopoly meant the loss of their privileged social and economic position as well as the waning of their political power. They simply could not tolerate anyone finding out about their secret ways of communing with Yahweh, because to do so endangered everything they had built up and indeed their very lives.
When we combine this understanding with the previously mentioned intellectual paradigm shift of viewing the Israelites as being in all essentials modern Bedouin. It becomes readily apparent that what Allegro is postulating - vis-a-vis the Sacred Mushroom - is that the illiterate sheep and goat herding jews (aka the Israelites) acquired experience in the use of naturally-occurring psychoactive substances and because they were illiterate and rather intellectually simple: they associated the experiences these substances produced with 'communing with Yahweh'.
These experiences (for example the Garden of Eden, God meeting Abraham in his tent, Moses communing with Yahweh in private on a mountain filled with caves where psychoactive substances were common, angels talking to Lot and his wife becoming a pillar of salt etc) then became folk stories passed down from father to son (much like the stories that make up the 'Arabian Nights') until they eventually came to be written down as the 'Word of Yahweh' in the (Written) Torah as a kind of definitive version. Much as we only know of the Trojan War through Homer: we never-the-less know that there were dozens of other heroic epics that dealt with the same material before Homer, but yet Homer remains our definitive version of the Trojan War.
If we follow Allegro's thesis then we can see that the (Written) Torah is simply just a polyglot of hallucinogen-induced experiences of illiterate sheep and goat herders, which had been stream-lined by connecting material through the facility of many generations of fireside story tellers. This renders the (Written) Torah onto the same level as something like the 'Arabian Nights' as simply a bunch of drug-induced stories that made their way down history as fireside yarns that the Israelites told each other and their children. (18)
Thus we can see why Allegro's views caused so much consternation and attracted so much ire at the time of their original publication as well as that these views were misapplied/misrepresented by Allegro's critics and friends in that they tended to focus on the result of his views in relationship to Christianity rather than understanding that what he was positing was a revolutionary understanding of Judaism and the Israelites based on removing the need to jazz up this (largely irrelevant) historical people into a major civilization.
In so doing Allegro lost his own faith (quite understandably) as well as his academic career (although this was partly his own fault) as his views were just too revolutionary for his day and indeed even today Allegro's position is avoided like the plague by modern Biblical scholars. This is not because it lacks evidence and is indeed an intuitive position to take if you agree with Allegro’s assumptions, but rather because in so doing one automatically renders religion as a natural experience rather than a supernatural experience, which rather takes the magic out of it for both laymen and scholars alike.
References
(1) See Stella Kramrisch, Jonathan Ott, Carl Ruck, R. Gordon Wasson (Eds.), 1988, 'Persephone's Quest: Ethneogens and the Origins of Religion', 1st Edition, Yale University Press: New Haven
(2) Allegro believed that Christians were trying to cover up evidence which would contradict (or throw into doubt) their religious beliefs. An argument that Allegro had earlier voiced in relation to the painfully slow rate of progress among the Christian scholars attached to the Dead Sea Scrolls project. Herschell Shanks, 1992, 'Is the Vatican suppressing the Dead Sea Scrolls?', pp. 283-287 in Herschell Shanks (Ed.), 1992, 'Understanding the Dead Sea Scrolls', 1st Edition, Random House: New York
(3) Cf. Kramrisch et al, Op. Cit.
(4) John Allegro, 1970, 'The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross', 1st Edition, Hodder and Stoughton: London
(5) Ibid., pp. 185-187; supported by John Rush, 2008, 'Failed God: Fractured Myth in a Fragile World', 1st Edition, North Atlantic: Berkeley
(6) Judith Anne Brown, 2005, 'John Marco Allegro: 'The Maverick of the Dead Sea Scrolls'', 1st Edition, Eerdmanns: Grand Rapids, pp. 10-18
(7) Allegro, 'The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross', Op. Cit., pp. 1-7
(8) Ibid., pp. 40; 80
(9) John Allegro, 1971, 'The Chosen People: A Study of Jewish History from the time of the Exile until the Revolt of Bar Kocheba', 1st Edition, Hodder and Stoughton: London, pp. 29; 59-60; 67; 106
(10) Ibid., pp. 29-35
(11) Ibid., particularly see his commentary on pp. 243-249
(12) Brown, Op. Cit., pp. 218-220
(13) Jan Irvin, Jack Herer, 2008, ''The Holy Mushroom': Evidence of Mushrooms in Judeo-Christianity', 1st Edition, Gnostic Media: United States
(14) Allegro, 'The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross', Op. Cit., pp. 20-22; 42-50; 128; 156
(15) Ibid., p. 172; John Allegro, 1970, 'The End of a Road', 1st Edition, Macgibbon & Kee: London, pp. 22-31; John Allegro, 1985, 'Physician, Heal Thyself...', 1st Edition, Prometheus: Buffalo, pp. 16-17
(16) John Allegro, 1977, 'Lost Gods', 1st Edition, Michael Joseph: London, p. 141
(17) Allegro, 'The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross', Op. Cit., p. 22
(18) Allegro, 'Lost Gods', Op. Cit., pp. 7-9