Volume 15, Number 11 · December 17, 1970
Worshipping the Red Mushroom
By W.H.C. Frend
The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross
by John M. Allegro
Doubleday, 376 pp., $7.95
The Encounter
by Malachi Martin
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 488 pp., $10.00
One of the most famous Upper Paleolithic paintings discovered in the great cave at Lascaux depicts a schematic figure of a bird-headed man, penis erect, holding his hands outstretched in the direction of a mortally wounded bison. The combination of imitative magic and fertility rite represented in that scene underlies much of what is known about the religion of early man in Europe. Yet few would assert that the legacy of Lascaux still influences the religious consciousness of Europeans today. In a slightly different form, however, this is what Dr. Allegro is stating in a remarkable study of the origins and nature of Christianity. 'If rain in the desert,' he writes, 'was the source of life, then moisture from heaven must only be a more abundant kind of spermatozoa. If the male organ ejaculated this precious fluid and made life in the woman, then above the skies the source of nature's semen must be a mighty penis, as the earth that bore its offspring was the womb. It followed therefore that to induce the heavenly phallus man must stimulate it by sexual means, by singing, dancing, orgiastic displays, and above all by performing the copulatory act itself.' Thus at the heart of all religions lies the phallic cult, and neither Judaism nor its offshoot, Christianity, was exceptional.
Review, 2514 words
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