Dr. John Marco Allegro

'studying the copper scrolls of Qumran'

No people has received so much attention from historians, philosophers, and theologians as the Jews. For all that, their ethnic and cultural origins have remained shrouded in mystery, largely because the main source of information, the Bible, is self-contradictory in this regard. The hebrew and Arabaic writing that are contained within the biblical corpus come from a wide area of space and time, and the unity that has been impressed upon them derives largely from the wishful thinking of the Jewish theologian of a comparatively late date. In fact, as recent research is showing ever more clearly, the myths and tradition of the Bible were very, very old long before they were ever collected or even written down in their present form, and stem in large measure from pre-Semitica strata of Near Eastern culture. The task of sifting fact from fancy, history from pious hero-worship, becomes incresingly difficult as the hererogeneous nature of biblical traditions becomes more evident.

Nevertheless, it is plain that the Babylonian exile of the Jews in the sixth century B.C. played a decisive part in the formation of what we call Judaism, and that thereafter the distinctive features of the cult, particularly in its exclusiveness, became more and more emphasized even if they were not then actually created. the Israelite religion of the post-exilic years was a very different thing from that which had preceeded the catastrophe of 587 B.C., and it is to this crucial period, culminating in the even greater disasters of the first and second centuries A.D., that we should look for a better understanding of the Jewish problems of today.

Some new comprehension of the relentless forces at work within Judaism of this period has now been made possible through the discoveries outlined in my recent book, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross. We know, for instance, that the pious belief of later Judaism and Christianity that Yahweh/Jehovah was from the beginning a "pure" desert god, uttterly opposed to the popular fertility cults of contemporary Canaan, was quite false. He can now be philologically related to the Indo-European Zeus, and their common name interpreted from its Sumerian origin to mean "spermatozoa," the sacred juice of created life. Many of the other divine names of the ancient Near East were similarly sexually oriented, all bearing witness to the original fertility concepts of the religions of this homeland of man's earliest civilizations. Furthermore, the discovery of the ancient cult of the sacred fungus, whose hallucinatory drug gave priest and prophet the fancied belief that they could communicate with the divine source of life, has at least given the key by which ancien Israelite mythology can be positively related to the oldest strata of Near Eastern culture. Abraham and Moses are as Sumarian in origin as gilgamesh.

This lifting of cultural horizons means that we can now view the later, esoteric developments within Israel, such as Essenism, Zealotism, and Christianity, in a wider and very much more satisfactory perspective. Now, for the first time, we can begin to understand how these self-destructive religio-political movements stemmed from the most ancient features of Israelitism, and we can better sympathize with the Roman and more moderate Jewish authourities who saw their dangers and tried, too late, to root out the extremist elements before they could bring disaster upon themselves and all Jewry.

If this tragic saga of the Chosen People has any lesson for us today, it must be that religious emotionalism, however stimulating and for whatever motives, is an extremely dangerous and unpredictable force. Moral and patriotic idealism that springs from a racialist religion is a perilous philsophy that can soon burst through the bounds of rational control. Modern heralds of the New Era, from whatever gods they claim their authority and whatever they raise their prophetic voices--the Jerusalem Knesset, the Meccan kiblah or the platforms of Carnegie Hall or wembley Stadium--should appreciate the power of the spoken word to unleash the mighty forces of religious fanaticism. Modern facilities for mass communication and hypnosis make the stimulatory drugs used by Zealotism, earlier Christianity, and medieval Islam unnecessary. Their calls to a holy war against supposed moral, political, or racial enemies can be now more terrifyingly effective than ever before, and more fearful in their consequences. Let the reformer and the patriout seek the infinitly more difficult and painstaking way to the Promised Land through reason and rationality.

Allegro, John Marco, "The Chosen People--A Study of Jewish History from the Time of the Exile Until the Revold of Bar Kocheba. Sixth Century B.C. to Second Century A.D." 1971