by Jan Irvin
With the letter to the TLS, Wasson sent a cover note to the editor:
4) Wasson to Arthur Crook, Ed., TLS, 16 September 1970
I think Allegro must have got his idea of the fly-agaric from us, yet his book does not show any influence by us, apart from the fly-agaric.
~ R. Gordon Wasson
Commentary
The general reader and public at large miss Allegro’s point. Allegro rejected Wasson with his own words, publicly revealing Wasson’s contradictory position as feeble. So why then did Wasson write another self-contradictory letter to Crook, editor of the TLS? If not for purely strategic reasons, then what was the point of his writing this letter to the editor? Looking at the correspondences overall, we can logically surmise that Wasson was seeking to influence the opinion of the TLS on his behalf, even though Allegro had already technically debunked Wasson by using his own waffling words to Ramsbottom, “rightly or wrongly,” against him.
It is important to recognize Wasson’s statement to Crook as completely contradictory. Either Allegro was influenced by Wasson, or he wasn’t. Furthermore, we must question the very statement Wasson made to Crook. Is Wasson attempting to imply that Allegro took the idea from his Mushrooms, Russia and History, 1957, or from Soma, Divine Mushroom of Immortality, 1968? The reason this question is of utmost importance is because, as we know from popular press articles regarding Allegro, he went public with the idea of the drug origins of Christianity on or before Friday, October 13, 1967:
Scrolls Scholar Slaps At Biblical Cornerstones
By Godfrey Anderson
LONDON (AP) — A Hebrew language scholar unraveling the Dead Sea Scrolls suggested Friday that Christianity’s roots lay in a drug-taking cult and that the New Testament was “just a cover story” for it.
He said the Old Testament prophets, when they saw visions, were probably “taking a trip” on LSD or something like it.
John Marco Allegro, lecturer on Old Testament and intertestamental studies at Manchester University […]
~ The Fresno Bee, October 14, 1967
The story was also reported the same day in similar terms in several other newspapers, including:
Galveston Daily
Daily Oklahoman
The News
Times-Mirror and Observer
The Winnipeg Free Press.
This would make any contention by Wasson that Allegro took the theory from Soma, Divine Mushroom of Immortality, incredible.
It will become evident that the reason “…his book does not show any influence by us…” is simply because Wasson was not a major source for Allegro’s research.
5) Wasson to TLS, written 16 September, pub. 25 September 1970
The Sacred Mushroom
Sir,-Mr. Allegro (September 11) chooses to avoid the point of my letter: the Plaincourault fresco does not picture the fly-agaric. He admits, even insists, that he had been forewarned, but none the less for guidance on a question of medieval iconography he has stuck to a naive misinterpretation made by a band of eager mycologists, and only because he thinks this would serve his thesis. Some would have preferred the judgment of specialists in Romanesque art. Mr. Allegro’s uncritical choice of sources is again made manifest on page 123 of his book, where he takes up the chemistry of the fly-agaric. “Among the drugs so far isolated”, he says, “are Muscarine, Atropine, and Bufotenin.” He cites as his authority a book published in 1959 by a man, not a chemist, who was at the time exploring E.S.P. and talking with the dead, especially with an Egyptian priest belonging to the family of a 4th Dynasty Pharaoh. Muscarine is found consistently in the fly-agaric but in quantities so small that one would have to ingest upwards of six kilos to get a muscarine reaction, and moreover this would not be hallucinogenic. Atropine has been reported, but several careful studies in recent years have failed to find it in American and European specimens and its very presence is now considered doubtful. As for Bufotenin, there is none in the fly-agaric.
In the past ten years chemists have done much to clarify the intricate problems presented by the fly-agaric, notably the Bowden team in England, the Takemoto team of Sendai University, and most important the team headed by Professor Conrad Eugster in Zürich. Mr. Allegro seems ignorant to their writings. The active agents are ibotenic acid, muscimol, and muscazone, but the fascinating problem of the fly-agaric is not yet fully solved and there may be other agents yet to be discovered. A recapitulation of the work in this field will appear in the October issue of the Bulletin on Narcotics published in Geneva by the Division of Narcotic Drugs of the United Nations.
May I ask the hospitality of your columns to clarify the difference that separates Mr. Allegro and me? We both think the role of the fly-agaric was of major importance in Eurasian cultural history. In the 1920s my wife and I began to interest ourselves in the widely varying attitudes toward wild mushrooms of the European peoples. For more than two decades we gathered data – philological, folkloric, anthropological – on this theme, and these [caused] us, in the 1940s, to hazard a weak surmise: that a mushroom (we knew not which) had played a role in the religious life of our remote ancestors millennia ago, long before there was writing. Seeking light, we turned to the Asiatic cultures, and there we found two shrinking enclaves, in the remotest regions of the far north, where the shamans still made use of the fly-agaric as the hallucinogenic agent for communicating with the spirits of the dead. This seemed a gratifying confirmation of our surmise and we thought we had reached the end of our road. Our book, Mushrooms Russia & History, appeared in 1957.
In the 1960s I directed my attention to the Soma of the ancient Aryans, an hallucinogenic plant that saturates the Vedic hymns and that had never been identified. The descriptive terms of the poets, all of their varied tropes for the adored plant, tallied perfectly with the fly-agaric. No one had ever suggested a mushroom. The art and folklore of the Near and Middle East in the third and second millennium B.C. are saturated with a Marvellous Herb linked with a Tree of Life. They are, I contend, the fly-agaric and the tree with which it prefers to live in mycorrhizal relationship, the birch of the forest belt of Eurasia. Among the peoples of the Near and Middle East many hailed originally from the north and the brought down with them the tradition of the Tree and the Herb. The Semites absorbed the tradition at Mari and elsewhere. How much the peoples of the Near and Middle East knew of the plant, whether the memory of the potent herb was reinforced by supplies to esoteric circles coming from areas where the fly-agaric grows in quantity, I do not know.
I published my findings in 1969, without fanfare, in SOMA Divine Mushroom of Immortality. Warned by scholar-friends that my book might pass unnoticed as coming from without the fold of accredited scholars, I gave my theme a full-dress presentation aiming my book primarily at Vedic scholars, supplying the best illustrations well reproduced, printed on fine paper by Giovanni Mardersteig of Verona, in a fine binding – in short, dressed in apparel befitting the holy herb that was its subject. This unfortunately raised the cost. I arranged to have sent out as gifts, almost a third of the limited edition, chiefly to Indo-Iranian scholars [damaged text] [?some] to anthropologists, and a few to [?others] The book was quickly sold [?We heard…] that a Bern bookseller […?] is offering a f[ew c]opi[es …] in price. The … well received. You m… [?] commentary (April 30), drew attention to M. Lévi Strauss’s remarkable article devoted to it in L’Homme. In reviews and private communications, many have accepted or lean to my identification. I am to lead off in a discussion of the subject at the forthcoming International Congress of Orientalists in Canberra.
My book brings the role of the fly-agaric in the Near and Middle East down to 1000 B.C. Mr. Allegro’s performance brings it down from 1000 B.C. to the time of Christ. He does not disclose where he got the idea of the fly-agaric. I know no Sumerian, but I do remark that in an area of pioneering scholarship he tosses around Sumerian roots with an agility and a self-assurance not customary among philologists. When he occasionally touches on subjects with wh
ich I am familiar, as the Plaincourault fresco and the chemistry of the fly-agaric, he is, well, unimpressive.
The peoples of the Near and Middle East about whom Mr. Allegro is writing were among the most gifted and sophisticated that mankind has produced, and they have left us incomparable monuments of their culture. That they should have centred their religious life on a drug with the horrifying properties he describes on pages 163-164 of his book is unthinkable. Now that we are on the brink of learning the secrets of the great hallucinogen of history, the fly-agaric, it would be a reflection on our own intelligence were we to get off on the wrong foot. Mr. Allegro in this passage exhibits the complete syndrome of the invincible Anglo-Saxon mycophobe.
Commentary
Wasson lashes out at Allegro for supposedly ignoring his warning. He accuses Allegro of relying “none the less for guidance” and having “stuck to a naïve misinterpretation made by a band of eager mycologists…because he thinks this would serve his thesis”. However, it is Wasson who appears to intentionally ignore his own waffling words quoted in SMC ch. IX, footnote 20. He firmly states his position that the Plaincourault fresco, which does clearly portray a mushroom, “does not picture the fly-agaric”. I already touched on how Wasson failed to mention that his own contradictory position published in Soma is that the Plaincourault fresco indirectly represents a mushroom. But Wasson’s own stance can also be interpreted as naïve and held “only because he thinks this would serve his thesis”, which happens to be that mushroom usage was limited to circa 1000BCE and the book of Genesis—which is an inaccurate date, as Genesis was likely written around 586BCE (Rush, 2008). For Wasson to admit that the Plaincourault fresco directly represents mushrooms would mean that his own position against mushrooms in Christianity (below) is untenable.
As mentioned, Michael Hoffman and I have explored Wasson’s attack on Allegro with regard to the Plaincourault fresco in Wasson and Allegro on the Tree of Knowledge as Amanita (Hoffman et al, 2006). This article points out Wasson’s various contradictory positions on the use of entheogens in Christianity, as stated in his publications. It also shows Panofsky’s view of the Plaincourault fresco to be weak and illogical, and how Wasson has contrived a highly implausible argument in favour of this view. Wasson states: “Mr. Allegro’s uncritical choice of sources is again made manifest […] He cites as his authority a book published in 1959 by a man, not a chemist, who was at the time exploring E.S.P. and talking with the dead, especially with an Egyptian priest belonging to the family of a 4th Dynasty Pharaoh.” This statement is interesting simply because, as will be shown, Allegro took his idea of the mushroom almost entirely from the publications of scholars with whom Wasson himself had worked.
Wasson attacked Allegro for citing the work of Dr. Andrija Puharich, whom he simply calls “a man”. He doesn’t mention that Puharich was in fact a medical doctor who had worked with the US military and had left his post as Captain of the Army Chemical Center at Edgewood, Maryland in April 1955 (Levenda, 2005). It was only two months later in June 1955 that Wasson himself worked with Puharich, though they had already met in February of that same year (Puharich, 1959, below). It appears that Puharich was in charge of collecting psychoactive compounds for government research. There is strong evidence to suggest that Puharich was actually working with the MK-ULTRA program, US Army Intelligence and the CIA (Levenda, 2005). As if to simultaneously disparage and protect Puharich, Wasson avoided mentioning him by name, insulting him only indirectly. Wasson’s intentional selection of the words “a man” made Puharich seem less a professional and more an amateur, a lunatic amateur at that. In order to achieve maximum impact from his statement, and to leave the reader with the impression that Puharich, or rather “a man”, was a fringe lunatic, Wasson added the comment about Puharich’s exploring E.S.P. and talking with the dead – especially an Egyptian priest. But Wasson himself agreed to attempt E.S.P. mushroom experiments for Puharich while he was in Mexico from June 30 to July 4, 1955. In fact, Wasson even invited Puharich along for the trip (Puharich, 1959, pg. 83–86, 90, 96, 101). Wasson took a hypocritical stance to attack Allegro for things perfectly applicable to himself.
Allegro had read Puharich’s book and knew that Wasson agreed to partake in Puharich’s E.S.P. experiments. From reading Puharich, and Wasson’s invitation to him, it would appear that Wasson and Puharich were on good terms. Allegro said nothing regarding Wasson’s once again contradictory and mistakenly conflated position.
Wasson goes on to correctly state: “In the past ten years chemists have done much to clarify the intricate problems presented by the fly-agaric […] Mr Allegro seems ignorant to their writings.”
But this is only partially valid. Wasson is correct to say that chemists had done much to clarify the problems of the fly-agaric. However, as will be shown, each of the publications that were cited by Allegro, including Wasson’s, contradict one another. Allegro was most likely confused over the more recent Amanita chemistry research. On closer inspection of the publications regarding the fly-agaric’s chemistry (below), it becomes difficult to draw a final conclusion.
Wasson then asks: “May I ask the hospitality of your columns to clarify the difference that separates Mr. Allegro and me?”
This question sets the stage. Wasson is preparing to differentiate his position from Allegro’s by discussing his personal history and the elaborate publication of his book. He’s doing this in order to give himself clout. Then, seizing the sales pitch opportunity, Wasson launches into a seemingly conceited and wordy four-paragraph description of himself and his work, detailing its extravagant publication. He fails to consider that Allegro, too, could have gone into great detail on his own background in theology and philology and the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Christian origins, though Allegro does no such thing.
Wasson continues: “My book brings the role of the fly-agaric in the Near and Middle East down to 1000 B.C. Mr. Allegro’s performance brings it down from 1000 B.C. to the time of Christ.”
This comment is intended to lead the reader to the conclusion that, solely because of the Wasson-Panofsky interpretation of the Plaincourault fresco, “Allegro’s performance” is baseless. This is why Wasson refers to his own work as “my book,” but refers to Allegro’s as a “performance”. But to agree with Wasson would require an uncritical acceptance of the Wasson-Panofsky interpretation, and the assumption that no contrary evidence exists (see Hoffman et al, 2006; Ruck et al, 2007/2005/2001; Samorini, 1998). This tactic also seeks to place Wasson’s biblical mushrooms in the harmless era of 1000BCE, where they could pose no question, nor threat, to Christian orthodoxy. It sparks no interest in, nor investigation of, Christian origins. It only serves to highjack and nullify any inquiry that goes later than 1000BCE, and put down the inquirer—on the assumption that entheogens weren’t used in Judeo-Christian practice post 1000BCE.
These tactics are not the work of an unbiased, open-minded academic, but someone with ulterior, limiting motives; someone who seeks to gain status as the only authority. It is this unfounded stance by Wasson that has caused the schism. It is his assumptive, bull-headed dance of words that has enforced it in the eyes of other scholars to the present day.
Allegro, rather than side-step a direct investigation of modern religion as Wasson does, decides to take the issue head on and investigate mushroom usage into Christianity. Wasson is therefore correct in realizing the importance of mushroom usage in early religious practice, but illogical in applying the realization. He illogically, or mendaciously, considers Christianity out of bounds and attempts to constrain Allegro (and Ramsbottom, above) by presenting himself as the final authority.
Next Wasson states: “He does not disclose where he got the idea of the fly-agaric.”
This comment takes the reader off course: as if it really mattered where Allegro learned about the Amanita. Unless there is contention of plagiarism or unoriginality, what would be the point of Wasson’s statement? But Wasson has stated in his cover letter to the
editor of the TLS, “his book does not show any influence by us,” so the point, whatever it may be, is mooted. Regardless, Wasson was not the first to suggest the possibility of Amanita muscaria in religion. Allegro could have first learned about the Amanita from Ramsbottom or Robert Graves, both British, who in the 1950s both published works about the mushroom’s possible relationship to religion.
Next, Wasson enters into the famous Sumerian question: “I know no Sumerian, but I do remark that in an area of pioneering scholarship he tosses around Sumerian roots with an agility and a self-assurance not customary among philologists.”
Wasson is correct to be critical of the Sumerian issue, in that many of Allegro’s word connections were speculative. However, most Sumerian scholars have no understanding of fertility cults and entheogens, just as art historians don’t read mycology books. In Astrotheology & Shamanism (Irvin et al, 2006, pg. 55), we cite Sumerian expert Anna Partington, who states:
Most people come to the field of Sumerian studies with a background in several early Mideastern languages. Although John was of a previous generation, he was, in common with most Orientalists, perfectly well equipped to deal with cuneiform languages. He found comparative linguistic study especially interesting; but early in his career the finding of the scrolls by the Dead Sea led him to specialise in translation of these Hebrew and Aramaic documents.
Unfortunately, the comparative philological work presented in SMC [The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross] uses a number of hypothetical Sumerian words not attested in texts. These are marked with an asterisk following philological convention. This is akin to proposing there is a word in the English language ‘bellbat’ because the individual words ‘bell’ and ‘bat’ are known to exist separately. Then again words of different languages are gathered together without the type of argument which would be expected in order to demonstrate possible relationship.
