About Those "Fertility Cults"

I don't know about you, but over the years I've ran across mention from time to time of ancient "fertility cults" that were common in what is now the Middle East, the cradle of Western civilization. I've never had any good idea as to what that term really meant or referred to. Now I'm getting a picture.

This latest book I'm reading is The Sacred Mushroom & The Cross, by John M. Allegro. I'm going to have a lot more to say about this book as I read through it but for now let's just touch on a couple things. In the beginning of the book--which is as far as I am--the author talks about the fertility cults and describes them. This answers the question of what they were:

No 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 how to ensure his own survival. He has always been acutely conscious of his insufficiency. . . . Out of this sense of dependency and frustration, religion was born.

Somehow man had to establish communications with the source of the world's fertility, and thereafter maintain a right relationship with it. . . . If rain in the desert was the source of life, then the mositure from heaven must be only 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 which bore its offspring was the womb. It followed therefore that to induce the heavenly phallus to complete its orgasm, man must stimulate it by sexual means, by singing, dancing, orgiastic displays and, above all, by the performance of the copulatory act itself.

It all makes sense, doesn't it? If your very life depends on reproduction--of crops, animals, other humans--you have very worshipful feelings towards whatever keeps those things coming. Ergo: fertility cults, the earliest religions.

So anyway, as far as I've gotten he's still laying the groundwork for his thesis. That thesis, as far as I can tell, is that the worship of Jesus is a trick that backfired. Hallucinogenic plants, such as the amanita muscaria mushroom, were the secret to getting close to the great phallus in the sky, but to throw off all but the uninitiated, the shamans and other wise men referred to such plants as people. Only in the case of Christianity, the hoax ultimately superseded the secret.

Yes, this is a serious book. Stay tuned as I see how convincing an argument he makes.