John Marco Allegro: The Maverick of the Dead Sea Scrolls
Judith Anne Brown
Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2005
ISBN 0-8028-2849-3
288 pages hardbound, $25.00
Review by Joe Szimhart, 2007
Of scrolls and mushrooms
Mushrooms fascinate me for a variety of reasons. My wife had a collection of mushroom objects when we met twenty-five years ago and we now have nearly a hundred made from a wide range of materials from wood to crystal to fossilized bone. I rendered my first mushroom paintings in 1970 and sold one or two out of a gallery called the Magic Mushroom. A major subplot in John Marco Allegro’s life concerned the influence of a remarkable mushroom called Amanita muscaria. John claimed he never ate an Amanita [as I did] but he was convinced that its psychedelic effects inspired the earliest myths of the human race. His 1970 book The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross: A Study of the Nature and Origins of Christianity within the Fertility Cults of the Ancient Near East was a tour de force in speculative philology and a grandiose attempt to identify the hidden source of religious inspiration from fertility cults disguised in the Gospels.
Prior to Sacred Mushroom, John Allegro was the popular spokesperson for the exciting revelations coming from the Dead Sea Scrolls recovered at Qumran, Jordan from 1947 though 1956 in eleven caves. As his daughter Judith Brown describes him, John [she calls him John throughout her biography] was a maverick if talented scholar who conflicted with his peers in academia. Scholars especially attacked and proved wrong his fascination with the sacred mushroom as an entheogen* or cult object masked by a code throughout the Gospel. John attempted to crack a code that essentially existed only in his imagination. The controversy ruined his academic career if not his popularity among non-traditional seekers who believed that the established Church was always either hiding or ignorant about the truth about Jesus.
John Marco Allegro (1923-1988) was born in London, served in the Royal Navy in World War II and afterwards pursued studies for the Methodist ministry. He changed direction to get a degree in Oriental Studies at Manchester University. In 1953 joined the first team to translate the Dead Sea Scrolls that were nearly two thousand years old. The following year he accepted a position as assistant lecturer in Comparative Semitic Philology at Manchester. He held a succession of lectureships there until he resigned in 1970 to become a full-time writer. Judith Brown maintains an even approach in her elegant biography despite writing about a father whose self-absorption and grandiose projects led him to abandon his wife and two children. Brown supports her narrative throughout with quotes from a cache of personal letters between John and his faithful, supportive wife Joan, his colleagues and media. The family destroyed boxes of intimate correspondence between John and his female love interests.
Allegro’s decision to recede from academia and pursue the popular media had as much to do with his personality as it did his eccentric approach to philology. Until I read Brown’s book my impression was that John Allegro was a victim of a wary Catholic and Protestant cabal that did not want certain revelations in the scrolls about the supposed “Essene” source of the Gospels to reach the public. The true story is far more complex. Speculation about Jesus and his mother belonging to or influenced by an Essene sect goes back long before the Dead Sea Scrolls discovery. Scholars never found strong evidence to support more than some shared traits already imbedded in Jewish culture. Those who wanted to believe that the real Jesus was truly an Essene derivative immediately accepted that notion in The Dead Sea Scrolls by John Allegro [first published in 1956]. Later, Allegro tempered his enthusiasm for an Essene-Christian identification in The Dead Sea Scrolls: A Reappraisal, 1964. However, in the mid-1950s, Allegro believed that his interpretation of the scrolls would undermine the “mythology” of the historical, dogma bound church. He felt his discovery was the vehicle for a revolution in religion that would humanize and rationalize the Christian faith. Brown writes on page 75 that John “…boasted lightly to Strugnell [a colleague], who was then looking for a more permanent job, “I wouldn’t worry about that theological job if I were you. By the time I’ve finished there won’t be any church left for you to join.” He not only overestimated his value as a revolutionary, John grossly underestimated the reactions to his books.
Brown paints a mildly critical but generally sympathetic picture of her father. In the end (282) she proclaims, “Scorning conformity and reckless of convention, John Allegro believed in original thought and had the courage to speak his belief.” Toward the end of his life Allegro concentrated on Sumerian language studies. He was convinced that Sumerian culture “held the key to the decipherment of names, myths, and legends; the myths show how the language works as the language feeds the myths…He felt he was reaching to where thought began” (277). John died of cardiac arrest from an aortic aneurism on his birthday February 17, 1988. He was sixty-five. Whether or not he would have finally established his theory we can never know. We do know that his pioneering if mistaken efforts in philology inspired others to understand better the limits of that science. With hindsight, Brown tells us, scholars now agree that “parallels” between the Teacher of Righteousness mentioned in the scrolls and Jesus “seems well-founded.” At that rate, at least one of John’s pet ideas retains partial merit.
Anyone interested in the history of the Dead Sea Scrolls will benefit from reading this book. Brown takes the reader through the human drama and intrigues both at the Qumran sites in Jordan and among the scholars and clergy involved with her father. She comments on the conflicts John had with the BBC over the documentary film based on his script for The Mystery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. After three years, the BBC shelved the project in 1983 saying it was not good enough. John believed that the BBC succumbed to Church pressure.
Beyond the history, I was more interested in how John Allegro participated in the revolutionary spirit of the Sixties. Allegro wanted to shake up the establishment and inspire us to take back power from dogmatic churches. He envisioned a more individualistic and experimental approach to religion in the coming New Age. Allegro wanted to bring religion out of the realms of anthropology and into modern times by showing that we create our religions and thus we can change them. He believed that religion was still necessary for society but that eventually rationality would prevail. He argued that we have to find a “more reasoned way” to avoid plundering the earth of natural resources. Our faiths would have to learn cooperation and sharing if we are to survive as a species. In 1977 in Lost Gods (pp.185-86) he wrote, “Historically the cult of the Earth-mother has probably come nearest to fulfilling this role, and, being sexually orientated, it has been especially concerned with this most disturbing and potentially disruptive element in Man’s biological constitution” (226). It is no wonder that Allegro’s greatest support came from New Age Movement devotees prone to accept as “truth” the speculations of The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross.
“Coming from John, who thought religion irrelevant, a mass return to faith in the Mother Earth sounds a somewhat questionable prescription. But it was meant as observation, and to provoke discussion, and to connect with what he saw as the free-and-easy youth culture of the 1970s.” (226)
Allegro may have appealed to the “free-and-easy” youth culture but his value seems to fall more into the skeptical community of Humanists. In the United States, it was Prometheus Books and Free Inquiry Magazine that took up John’s cause, published his books and offered him a voice. Brown writes, “…for a brief spell [in the mid 1980s] he felt himself come to life once more in the sunshine of popularity” (263). In 1986 he lectured to the convention of the American Atheists Indeed, a review by Tim Callahan in Skeptic Magazine (Vol.13 No.1, 2007) drew my attention to Brown’s book. I like Callahan’s synopsis but I had an issue with his conclusion after reading the book. “One wonders if, had Allegro not been isolated from his colleagues, he might have readily turned to them for feedback on his theories…The estrangement in this case seems to have been caused by a rather petty, and to a certain degree vicious, behavior on the part of the Scroll team. Perhaps higher-minded actions by people who, after all were mostly priests and for the most part religious, might have kept John Allegro within their fold where his genius at philology could have been a service to others rather than a snare for himself.” (Callahan in Skeptic, 77)
Callahan may be throwing a bone to his Humanist and anti-religion colleagues with this rather simplistic projection but Brown’s book conveys more caution among most of the Scroll team and clergy than viciousness. This was new territory for them fraught with sectarian politics. Allegro admitted that he was not the best of the translators. Brown writes on 116, “John insisted how pleased he was that responsibility for the official publication of the scroll was given to “my friend and colleague, Father Joseph Milik,” whom he calls “the most brilliant of our little team of scroll editors” and “certainly best fitted to carry the initial decipherment of the copper scroll a stage further.” Callahan does not mention a particularly vicious snub that ended Allegro’s dalliance with American Atheists. While entertaining a small group in London John failed to impress the atheist leader who Brown identifies merely as a woman “whose voice and girth were of operatic proportions” and who she calls “the matriarch.” The atheists commissioned John to lay out a tour of the Isles. During their final breakfast at the hotel, the American “matriarch” publicly proclaimed “the Awful Truth: that they were nowhere near Buckingham Palace, Stratford-upon-Avon, or Oxford Street; that the hotel was neither the Ritz nor the Savoy; that John’s aging Honda was not a limousine; and worst of all, “Allegro, you are POOR!” Sacked and immensely relieved, John left them where they stood and went home.” (263)
Passages like the one I just quoted make this book a pleasure to read on many levels. The writer creates a quiet drama throughout with the eye of an insider through the letters John left behind and her intimate knowledge of the times and places. She brought my curiosity about Allegro’s infamous Sacred Mushroom theory to a realization of what actually happened and what he tied to convey. It is not so much that he was so wrong about what inspired the ape-men to experience sacred deities and ancient priests to sustain the myths, as it was that his evidence for proving it was so flimsy. In the end, there was no one to blame but Allegro himself for squandering his talent. Perhaps he would have seen and done things differently had he been even more adventurous. I wonder if Allegro would have been as carried away by his imagination had he actually experienced for himself a trip or two on a sacred mushroom, for example. There are good reasons both psychological and medical why toxic substances eventually undermine the health of the very religions and myths they inspire.
*[For my experience with the Amanita, and why I conclude that the drug experience fails to sustain a sacred reality, go to http://home.dejazzd.com/jszimhart/bolondgomba.htm ]
jszimhart@dejazzd.com