A study of the nature and origins of Christianitywithin the fertility cults of the ancient Near East
语言:
英文
格式:
pdf
作者:
John M.Allegro
目录:
CONTENTS1 In the Beginning God Created .. . .2 Sumer and the Beginnings of History3 The Names of the Gods4 Plants and Drugs5 Plant Names and the Mysteries of the Fungus6 The Key of the Kingdom7 The Man-child Born of a Virgin8 Woman\\\\\\\’s part in the Creative Process9 The Sacred Prostitute10 Religious Lamentation1 1 The Mushroom "Egg·\\\\\\\’ and Birds of Mythology12 The Heavenly Twins13 Star of the Morning14 Colour and Consistency15 Mushroom Cosmography16 David, Egypt, and the Census17 Death and Resurrection18 The Garden of Adonis, Eden and Delight;Zealots and Muslims19 The Bible as a Book of Morals
INTRODUCTIONNo one religion in the ancient Near East can be studied in isolation.All stem from man’s first questioning about the origin of life and howto ensure his own survival. He has always been acutely conscious ofhis insufficiency. However much he progressed technically, makingclothes, shelter, conserving food and water supplies, and so on. theforces of nature were always greater than he. The winds would blowaway his shelter, the sun parch his crops, wild beasts prey on hisanimals: he was always on the defensive in a losing battle. Out of thissense of dependency and frustratio� religion was born.Somehow man had to establish communications with the source ofthe world’s fertility, and thereafter maintain a right relationship withit. Over the course of time he built up a body of experiential knowledge of rituals that he or his representatives could perform, or wordsto recite, which were reckoned to have the greatest influence on thisfertility deity. At first they were largely imitative. If rain in the desertlands was the source of Jife, then the moisture from heaven must beonly a more abundant kind of spermatozoa. If the male organ ejaculated tills precious fluid and made life in the woman, then above theskies the source of nature’s semen must be a mighty penis, as the earthwhich bore its offspring was the womb. It followed therefore that toinduce the heavenly phallus to complete its orgasm, man must stimu·late it by sexual means, by singing. dancing, orgiastic displays and,above all, by the performance of the copulatory act itself.However far man progressed in his control of the world about himthere remained a large gap between what he wanted at any one timeand what he could achieve on his own account. There was alwayssome unscalable mountain, some branch of knowledge which remained unpenetrable, some disease with no known cure. It seemed tohim that if he had managed painstakingly to grope his way to a knowledge and dexterity so far above the animals, then in some mysteriousway his thinkers and artisans must have been tapping a source ofwisdom no less real than the rain that fructified the ground. Theheavenly penis, then, was not only the source of life-giving semen, it1 1was the origin of knowledge. The seed of God was the Word of God.The dream of man is to become God. Then be would be omnipotent; no longer fearful of the snows in winter or the sun in summer.or the drought that killed his cattle and made his children’s belllesswell grotesquely. The penis in the skies would rise and spurt its vitaljuice when man commanded, and the earth below would open itsvulva and gestate its young as man required. Above all, man wouldlearn the secrets of the universe not piecemeal, painfully by trial andfatal error, but by a sudden. wonderful illumination from within.But God is jealous of his power and his knowledge. He brooks norivals in heavenly places. If, in his mercy, he will allow just a very fewof his chosen mortals t o share his divinity. it is but for a fleetingmoment. Under very special circumstances he will permit men to riseto the throne of heaven and glimpse the beauty and the glory ofomniscience and omnipotence. For those who are so privileged therehas seemed no greater or more worthwhile experience. The coloursare brighter, the sounds more penetrating. every sensation is magnified, every natural force exaggeratedFor such a glimpse of heaven men have died. In the pursuit of thisgoal great religions have been born, shone as a beacon to men struggling still in their unequal battle with nature, and then too have died,stifled by their own attempts to perpetuate, codify. and evangelize themystic vision.Our present concern is to show that Judaism and Christianity aresuch cultic expressions of this endless pursuit by man to discoverinstant power and knowledge. Granted the first proposition that thevital forces of nature are controlled by an extra-terrestrial intelligence, these religions are logical developments from the older, cruderfertility cults. With the advance of technical proficiency the aims ofreligious ritual became less to influence the weather and the cropsthan to attain wisdom and the knowledge of the future. The Wordthat seeped through the labia of the earth’s womb became to themystic of less importance than the Logos which he believed his religion enabled him to apprehend and enthuse him with divineomniscience. But the source was the same vital power of the universeand the cultic practice differed little.To raise the crops the farmer copulated with his wife in the fields.To seek the drug that would send his soul winging to the seventh12heaven and back, the initiates into the religious mysteries had theirpriestesses seduce the god and draw him into their grasp as a womanfascinates her partner’s penis to erection.For the way to God and the fleeting view of heaven was throughplants more plentifully endued with the sperm of God than any other.These were the drug-herbs, the science of whose cultivation and usehad been accumulated over centuries of observation and dangerousexperiment. Those who had this secret wisdom of the plants were thechosen of their god; to them alone had he vouchsafed the privilege ofaccess to the heavenly throne. And if he was jealous of his power. noless were those who served him in the cultic mysteries. Theirs was nogospel to be shouted from the rooftops: Paradise was for none but thefavoured few. The incantations and rites by which they conjuredforth their drug plants, and the details of the bodily and mental pre-parations undergone before they could ingest their god. were thesecrets of the cult to which none but the initiate. bound by fearfuloaths, had access.Very rarely, and then only for urgent practical purposes, werethose secrets ever committed to writing. Normally they would bepassed from the priest to the initiate by word of mouth; dependentfor their accurate transmission on the trained memories of men dedicated to the learning and recitation of their "scriptures". But if. forsome drastic reason like the disruption of their cultic centres by waror persecution, it became necessary to write down the preciousnames of the herbs and the manner of their use and accompanyingincantations, it would be in some esoteric form comprehensible onlyto those within their dispersed communities.Such an occasion, we believe, was the Jewish Revolt of A.D. 66.Instigated probably by members of the cult, swayed by their druginduced madness to believe God had called them to master the worldin his name, they provoked the mighty power of Rome to swift andterrible action. Jerusalem was ravaged, her temple destroyed. Judaism was disrupted, and her people driven to seek refuge with communities already established around the Mediterranean coastlands.The mystery cults found themselves without their central fount ofauthority, with many of their priests killed in the abortive rebellionor driven into the desert. The secrets, if they were not to be lostfor ever, had to be committed to writing, and yet, if found, the13documents must give nothing away or betray those who still dareddefy the Roman authorities and continue their religious practices.The means of conveying the information were at hand, and hadbeen for thousands of years. The folk-tales of the ancients had fromthe earliest times contained myths based upon the personification ofplants and trees. They were invested with human faculties and qualities and their names and physical characteristics were applied to theheroes and heroines of the stories. Some of these were just tales spunfor entertainment, others were political parables like Jotham’s fableabout the trees in the Old Testament, while others were means ofremembering and transmitting therapeutic folk-lore. The names ofthe plants were spun out to make the basis of the stories, whereby thecreatures of fantasy were identified, dressed, and made to enact theirparts. Here, then. was the literary device to spread occult knowledgeto the faithfuL To tell the story of a rabbi called Jesus, and investhim with the power and names of the magic drug. To have hjm livebefore the terrible events that bad disrupted their lives, to preach alove between men, extending even to the hated Romans. Thus, reading such a tale, should it fall into Roman bands, even their mortalenemies might be deceived and not probe farther into the activities ofthe cells of the mystery cults within their territories.The ruse failed. Christians, bated and despised, were hauled forthand slain in their thousands. The cult well nigh perished. Whateventually took its place was a travesty of the real thing, a mockeryof the power that could raise men to heaven and give them theglimpse of God for which they gladly died. The story of the rabbicrucified at the instigation of the Jews became an historical peg uponwhich the new culfs authority was founded. What began as a hoax,became a trap even to those who believed themselves to be thespiritual heirs of the mystery religion and took to themselves thename of "Christian". Above all they forgot, or purged from the cultand their memories, the one supreme secret on which their wholereligious and ecstatic experience depended: the names and identityof the source of the drug, the key to heaven-the sacred mushroom.The fungus recognized today as the Amanita muscaria. or FlyAgaric, had been known from the beginning of history. Beneath theskin of its characteristic red- and white-spotted cap, there is con-14cealed a powerful hallucinatory poison. Its religious use among certain Siberian peoples and others has been the subject of study inrecent years, and its exhilarating and depressive effects have beenclinically examined. These include the stimulation of the perceptivefaculties so that the subject sees objects much greater or muchsmaller than they really are, colours and sounds are much enhanced,and there is a general sense of power, both physical and mental, quiteoutside the normal range of human experience.The mushroom has always been a thing of mystery. The ancientswere puzzled by its manner of growth without seed, the speed withwhich it made its appearance after rain, and its equally rapid disappearance. Born from a volva or "egg" it appears like a small penis,raising itself like the human organ sexually aroused, and when itspread wide its canopy the old botanists saw it as a phallus bearingthe "burden" of a woman’s groin. Every aspect of the mushroom’sexistence was fraught with sexual allusions, and i n its phallic formthe ancients saw a replica of the fertility god himself. It was the "sonof God", its drug was a purer form of the god’s own spermatozoathan that discoverable in any other form of living matter. It was, infact, God himself, manifest on earth. To the mystic it was the divinelygiven n1eans of entering heaven; God had come down in the flesh toshow the way to himself, by himself.To pluck such a precious herb was attended at every point withperil. The time-before sunrise, the words to be uttered-the nameof the guardian angel, were vital to the operation, but more wasneeded. Some form of substitution was necessary, to make an atonement to the earth robbed of her offspring. Yet such was the divinenature of the Holy Plant, as it was called, only the god could makethe necessary sacrifice. To redeem the Son, the Father had to supplyeven the "price of redemption". These are all phrases used of thesacred mushroom, as they are of the Jesus of Christian theology.Our present study bas much to do with names and titles. Onlywhen we can discover the nomenclature of the sacred fungus withinand without the cult, can we begin to understand its function andtheology. The main factor that has n1ade these new discoveries possible has been the realization that many of the most secret names ofthe mushroom go back to ancient Sumerian, the oldest writtenlanguage known to us, witnessed by cuneiform texts dating from the15fourth millennium B.C. Furthermore, it now appears that this ancienttongue provides a bridge between the Indo-European languages(which include Greek, Latin, and our own tongue) and the Semiticgroup, which includes the languages of the Old Testament, I..Jcbrewand Aramaic. For the first Lin1e, it becomes possible to decipher thenames of gods, mythological characters, classical and biblical, andplant names. Thus their place in the cultic systems and their functions in the old fertility religions can be determined.The great barriers that have hitherto seemed to divide the ancientworld. classical and biblical, have at last been crossed and at a moresignificant level than has previously been possible by merely comparing their respective mythologies. Stories and characters whichseem quite different in the way they are presented in various locations and at widely separated points in history can now be shownoften to have the same central theme. Even gods as different as Zeusand Yahweh embody the same fundamental conception of the fertility deity, for their names in origin are precisely the same. Acommon tongue overrides physical and racial boundaries. Evenlanguages so apparently different as Greek and Hebrew. when theycan be shown to derive from a common fount, point to an identityof culture at some early stage, Comparisons can therefore be madeon a scientific, philological level which might have appeared unthinkable before now. Sudden1y, aln1ost overnight, the ancient worldhas shrunk. All roads in the Near East lead back to the Mesopotamian basin, to ancient Sumer. Similarly, the most important ofthe religions and mythologies of that area, and probably far beyond,are reaching back to the mushroom cult of Sumer and her successors.In biblical studies. the old divisions between Old and New Testament areas of research, never very meaningful except to theChristian theologian, become even less valid. As far as the origins ofChristianity are concerned, we must look not just to intertestamentalliterature. the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, and the newly discovered writings from the Dead Sea, nor even merely to the 01dTestament and other Semitic works, but we have to bring into consideration Sumerian religious and mythological texts and the classicalwritings of Asia Minor. Greece, and Rome. The Christian Easter isas firmly linked to the Baechle Anthesteria as the Jewish Passover.16Above all, it is the pbiJogian who must be the spearhead of the newenquiry. It is primarily a study in words.A written word is more than a symbol: it is an expression of anidea. To penetrate to its inner meaning is to look into the mind of theman who wrote it. Later generations may give different meanings tothat symbol. extending its range of reference far beyond the originalintention. but if we can trace the original significance then it shouldbe possible to follow the trail by which it developed. In doing so, it issometimes possible even to outline the progress of man’s mental,technical or religious developmentThe earliest writing was by means of pictures, crudely inciseddiagrams on stone and clay. However lacking such symbols may bein grammatical or syntactical refinement, they do convey. in an instant, the one feature which seemed to the ancient scribe the mostsignificant aspect of the object or action he was trying to represent."Love" he shows as a flaming torch in a womb, a "foreign country"as a hill (because he lived on a plain). and so on. As the art of writingdeveloped further, we can begin to recognize the first statements ofideas which came later to have tremendous philosophical importance,"Life". "god". "priest". "temple’\ "grace", "sin", and so on. Toseek their later meanings in religious literature like the Bible we mustfirst discover their basic meaning and follow their developmentthrough as far as extant writings will allow.For example, as we may now understand, "sin" for Jew and Christian had to do with the emission to waste of human sperm. a blasphemy against the god who was indentified with the precious liquid.If to discover this understanding of "sin" seems today of only limitedacademic interest, it is worth recalling that it is this same principlethat lies at the root of modern Catholic strictures against the use ofthe "Pill".As far as the main burden of our present enquiry is concerned. ournew-found ability to penetrate to the beginnings of language meansthat we can set the 1ater mystery cults. as those of Judaism. of theDionysiac religion and Christjanity, into their much wider context. todiscover the first principles from which they developed, probe themysteries of their cultic names and invocations, and, in the case ofChristianity at least. appreciate something of the opposition they encountered among governing authorities and the measures taken to17transmit their secrets under cover of ancient mythologies in modemdress.Our study. then, begins at the beginning. with an appreciation ofreligion in terms of a stimulation of the god to procreation and theprovision of life. Armed with our new understanding of the languagerelationships of the ancient Near East, we can tackle the major problems involved in botanical nomenclature and discover those featuresof the more god-endued plants which attracted the attention of theold medicine men and prophets. The isolation of the names andepithets of the sacred mushroom opens the door into the secre.tchambers of the mystery cults which depended for their mystic halJuncinatory experiences on the drugs found in the fungus. At long lastidentification of the main characters of many of the old classical andbiblical mythologies is possible, since we can now decipher theirnames. Above all, those mushroqm epithets and holy invocationsthat the Christian cryptographers wove into their stories of the manJesus and hls companions can now be recognized, and the main features of the Christian cult laid bare.The isolation of the mu shroom cult and the real. hidden meaningof the New Testament writings drives a wedge between the moralteachings of the Gospels and their quite amoral religious setting. Thenew discoveries must thus raise more acutely the question of thevalidity of Christian "ethics" for the present time. If the Jewish rabbito whom they have hitherto been attributed turns out to have beenno more substantial than the mushroom, the authority of his homilies must stand or fall on the assent they can command on their ownmerit.What follows in this book is, as has been said, primarily a studyin words. To a reader brought u p to believe in the essential historicity of the Bible narratives some of the attitudes displayed in ourapproach to the texts may seem at first strange. We appear to bemore interested with the words than with the events they seem torecord; more concerned, say, with the meaning of Moses’ name thanhis supposed role as Israers first great political leader. Similarly. acentury or so ago, it must have seemed strange to the average Biblestudent to understand the approach of a "modernist" of the day whowas more interested in the ideas underlying the Creation story ofGenes is and their sources, than to date, locate, and identify the real18Garden of Eden� and_ to solve the problem of whence came Cain’swife. Then, it took a revolution in man�s appreciation of his development fron1 lower forms of life and a clearer understanding of the ageof this planet to force the theologian to abandon the historicity ofGenesis. Andyanrt，如果您要查看本帖隐藏内容请回复
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摘要：《The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross》是作者矿灵对于神圣蘑菇和十字架之间关系的探究。本文将从四个方面对《The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross》进行详细阐述。
1、《The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross》的背景和意义
《The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross》是矿灵对于神圣蘑菇和基督教起源之间的联系进行研究的著作。他详细探讨了古代文明中蘑菇的宗教和神秘象征意义，以及蘑菇在基督教起源中的可能角色。通过对宗教文化的分析和历史文献的研究，矿灵提出了大胆的观点，引起了广泛的争议。
《The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross》通过对神圣蘑菇和基督教起源之间关系的研究，引发了人们对宗教象征意义和意识改变的深入思考。矿灵的研究方法和证据为宗教研究和文化研究提供了新的思考方式和视角。虽然该书存在一些局限性，但它对于推动宗教和科学之间的对话和交流有着重要的影响。
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