From Executive Producer Graham Hancock:
Written and Presented by David Thrussell
The Forbidden Book Club
Unearth the unexplained, the unknown and the unthinkable…
Scandalous, career-ending and out of print for almost 40 years, John M. Allegro’s ‘The Sacred Mushroom And The Cross’ might at first sound like the work of a fringe scribe or even madman. Allegro, however, was a widely respected scholar and one of the official team to first translate the Dead Sea Scrolls. The premise of the book ignited a firestorm upon original release in 1970: to wit, that the Christian bible was the coded lore of ancient middle eastern magic mushroom cults, who encrypted their beliefs, customs and rituals in the Gospels to protect it from hostile Roman authorities and preserve their knowledge at a time of tumult. Indeed, some have described Allegro’s thesis as reducing the Bible to little more than an ancient hallucinogenic ‘cookbook.’ What are we to make of Allegro’s assertions, what evidence did he produce and what can we learn from the controversy whether we choose to believe John M. Allegro or not…?
- The Forbidden Book Club EP02: ‘The Sacred Mushroom & The Cross’ by John M. Allegro
- The Forbidden Book Club EP01: ‘The Adam & Eve Story’ by Chan Thomas
Somebody has been eating too many mushrooms!
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Really enjoyed this but would have liked more detail on his theory
Really well done synopsis of the book. This book was influential to me in my early years and helped me to learn that not everything can be seen at face value. It also taught me that our ancestors learned to encode knowledge to prevent themselves from being persecuted. It’s too bad that John Allegro ended up revealing too much and suffering from the same persecution the early writers of the dead sea scrolls were trying to avoid.
Allegro was considered a kook and too far out?
By people who literally believe in a man conceived by virgin birth. Who died yet was resurrected. Walked on water. Turned water to wine. And healed people by touch.
Ok, I get it. Who is actually insane?
The first 17 verses of the Gospel of Matthew are a logical unit, or section, which deals with a single principal subject: the genealogy of Christ. It contains 72 Greek vocabulary words in these initial 17 verses.
The number of words which are nouns is exactly 56, or 7 x 8.
The Greek word “the” occurs most frequently in the passage: exactly 56 times, or 7 x 8. Also, the number of different forms in which the article “the” occurs is exactly 7.
There are two main sections in the passage: verse 1–11, and 12–17. In the first main section, the number of Greek vocabulary words used is 49, or 7 x 7.
Of these 49 words, the number of those beginning with a vowel is 28, or 7 x 4. The number of words beginning with a consonant is 21, or 7 x 3.
The total numbers of letters in these 49 words is 266, or 7 x 38. The number of vowels among these 266 letters is 140, or 7 x 20. The number of consonants is 126, or 7 x 18.
Of the 49 words, the number of words which occur more than once is 35, or 7 x 5. The number of words occurring only once is 14, or 7 x 2. The number of words which occur in only one form is exactly 42, or 7 x 6. The number of words appearing in more than one form is also 7.
The number of the 49 Greek vocabulary words which are nouns is 42, or 7 x 6. The number of words which are not nouns is 7. Of the nouns, 35 are proper names, or exactly 7 x 5. These 35 names are used 63 times, or 7 x 9. The number of male names is exactly 28, or 7 x 4. These male names occur 56 times or 7 x 8. The number which are not male names is 7.
Three women are mentioned — Tamar, Rahab, and Ruth. The number of Greek letters in these three names is 14, 7 x 2.
The number of compound nouns is 7. The number of Greek letters in these 7 nouns is 49, or 7 x 7.
Only one city is named in this passage, Babylon, which in Greek contains exactly 7 letters.
There are even more features in the numerical structure of the words themselves.
The 72 vocabulary words add up to a gametrical value of 42,364, or 7 x 6,052.
The 72 words appear in 90 forms — some appear in more than one form. The numeric value of the 90 forms is 54,075, or 7 x 7,725.
There are words in the passage just described that occur nowhere else in the New Testament. They occur 42 times (7 x 6) and have 126 letters (7 x 18).
If even one letter of the passage is changed, the entire pattern is destroyed. These numerical patterns are throughtout the bible, from one end to the other. Whatever the source of the bible, it is not human.