Page 1 (number omitted)

"Religion is part of growing up. The reasoning that taught man that he was cleverer than the animals made him also aware of his own deficiencies. He could catch and kill beasts stronger and fleeter than himself because he could plan ahead, seek out their paths, and construct booby­traps. Later that same foresight led him to the art of farming and conserving his food supplies against the seasonal dearths. In the lands of marginal rainfall he learnt eventually the technique of digging and lin­ing cisterns, and civilization began. Nevertheless, vast areas of natural resources were outside man's control. If the animals did not breed there was no hunting. If the rain did not fall the furrowed earth remained barren. Clearly there was a power in the universe that was greater than man, a seemingly arbitrary control of Nature which could make a mockery of man's hunting and farming skills. His very existence de­pended upon maintaining a right relationship with that power, that is, on religion.
Interesting as it is to speculate on the precise forms prehistoric religious thought and ritual may have taken, we have in fact very little direct evidence. The cave drawings found in France, Spain, and Italy tell us little more than that man, some ten to twenty thousand years ago was a hunter, and that he may have enacted some kind of sympathetic ritual of slaughter to aid him in the hunt. This practical use of the gra­phic arts is paralleled today by Australian aborigines who accompany their symbolic portraiture with ritual mime, dancing, and recitation of traditional epics. Doubtless primitive man of the Palaeolithic periods did much the same, but the oral part of his rituals, which alone could adequately explain the drawings, is lost for ever. The relics of his plastic arts, relief carving, and clay modelling emphasize his interest in fecundity. The Gravettian culture, extending widely over South Russia and central Europe, and spreading to Italy, France, and Spain, abounds in / Page 2 / examples of the so-called" mother goddess" figurines. These clay models of women with pendulous breasts, huge buttocks, and distended bellies have obvious sexual and reproductive allusions, as do their male counter­parts.1
Doubtless all these had magical or religious purposes, but it is not until man has learnt the art of writing that he can communicate with a later age. Only then can we with any real assurance begin to read his mind and thoughts about God. Unfortunately, this only happened comparatively late in his development, in terms of evolutionary time, barely a minute or two ago. By then he was by no means "primitive". The first known attempts at connected writing were crude affairs, registering no more than lists of objects and numbers. But their very existence points to an advanced stage of economic administration, which is amply supported by archaeology. The wonder is that man had been able to progress so far without writing, the one facility we should have thought essential for social progress. How, we are inclined to ask in our ''jotting-pad'' age, was it possible to administer a region, farm out temple lands, collect revenues, fight wars, and maintain communications over long distances without easy means of documentation ? We are apt to forget that in those days they still had memories. The kind of superhuman results promised the modem subscriber to correspondence courses in memory-training must have been commonplace among intelligent people six thousand years ago. Even today it is not uncommon to fmd a Muslim who can recite the whole of the Qur'an (Koran), or a Jew who knows long sections of the Bible and Talmud by heart.
The first books, then, were the brain's memory cells, the first pen was the tongue. It was the ability of Homo sapiens to communicate with his fellows, to organize community life, and transmit hard-earned skills from father to son that raised man far above the animals. It was this same means of communication that brought him in touch with his god, to flatter, cajole, even threaten to obtain the means of life. Experience showed that, as in his human relationships, some words and actions were more effective than others, and there arose a body of uniform ritual and liturgy whose memorizing and enactment was the responsibility of the "holy men" of the community.
When, around 2500 BC, the first great religious poems and epics of the Near East came to be written down, they had behind them already a long history of oral transmission. The fundamental religious concep / Page 3 / tions they express go back thousands of years. Yet there were still another fifteen hundred years to go before the earliest text of the Old Testament was composed. It is not, therefore, sufficient to look for the origins of Christianity only within the previous thousand years of Old Testament writing, nor to start the history ofJudaism with a supposed dating of the patriarchs around 1750 BC. The origins of both cults go back into Near Eastern prehistory. The problem is how to relate specific details of these comparatively late religions with the earliest ideas about god.
Our way into the mind of ancient man can only be through his writings, and this is the province of philology, the science of words. We have to seek in the symbols by which he represented his spoken utter­ances clues to his thinking. The limitations of such study are obvious. The first is the insufficiency of the early writing to express abstract ideas. Even when the philologist has collected all the texts available, compiled his grammars and dictionaries, and is confident of his decipherment, there still rema,ins the inadequacy of any written word, even of the most advanced languages, to express thought. Even direct speech can fail to convey our meaning, and has to be accompanied with gesture and facial expression. A sign imprinted on wet clay, or even the flourish of the pen on paper, can leave much uncommunicated to the reader, as every poet and lover knows.
Nevertheless, the written word is a symbol of thought; behind it lies an attitude of mind, an emotion, a reasoned hypothesis, to which the reader can to some extent penetrate. It is with words and their meanings that this book is largely concerned. The study of the relationship be­tween words and the thoughts they express is called "etymology" since it seeks the "true" (Greek etumos) meaning of the word. The etymologist looks for the "root" of the word, that is the inner core which expresses its fundamental or "radical" concept.
For example, if we were to seek the root of a modern barbarism like "de-escalate", we should immediately remove the" de-" and the verbal appendage "-ate", slice off the initial "e-" as a recognizable prefix, and be left with "scal-" for further study. The Latin scala means "ladder" and we are clearly on the right track. But at this stage the etymologist will look out for possible vocalic changes occurring between dialects. One of the more common is between I and n, and we are not surprised to find that an early form of the root has n in place of I, so that Sanskrit, / Page 4 / one of the earliest dialects of Indo-European, has a root skan- with the idea of "going up". Sibilants can interchange, also, such as s and z, and short vowels can drop out in speech between consonants, like i between s and c. In fact, we can break down our Indo-European root scan-, "ascend", still further into two Sumerian syllables, ZIG, "rise", and AN , up.1a.
Or again, should we wish to track down the root of our word" rule" , meaning "control, guide, exercise influence over", etc., we should find that our etymological dictionaries will refer us through an adaptation of Old French back to the Latin regulo, "direct", connected with regno, "reign", rex, "king", and so on. The root here is plain reg- or the like, and its ultimate source we can now discover by taking our search back another three or four thousand years to the earliest known writing of all, that of ancient Sumer in the Mesopotamian basin. There we find a root RIG,2 meaning "shepherd", and, by breaking the word down even further, we can discover the idea behind "shepherd", that of ensuring the fecundity of the flocks in his charge. This explains the very common concept that the king was a "shepherd" to his people, since his task was primarily that of looking after the well-being and enrichment of the land and its people.
Here etymology has done more than discover the root-meaning of a particular word: it has opened a window on prehistoric philosophic thought. The idea of the shepherd-king's role in the community did not begin with the invention of writing. The written word merely expresses a long-held conception. If, then, in our search for the origins of religious cults and mythologies, we can trace their ideas back to the earliest known written texts we can use etymological methods to probe even further into the minds that gave them literary form.
Having arrived back at the primitive meaning of a root, the philo­logist has then to work his way forward again, tracing the way in which writers at different times use that root to express related concepts. For, of course, the meanings of words change; the more often they are used the wider becomes their reference. Today, with faster and easier means of communication, it is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain control over the meanings of words, and this at a time when the need for understanding each other is most crucial. In antiquity, people and ideas did not move quite so fast. Travel was not easy; remote areas would stay remote over generations and their languages would pre­ / Page 5 / serve old words and linguistic forms long lost in places more open to foreign influence.
Religious terminology, which is the special interest of this work, is least susceptible to change. Even though day-to-day words must develop their meanings to accord with social conditions and the invention of new crafts, communication with the god required a precise unchanging liturgy whose accurate transmission was the first responsibility of the priest­hood. In the study of ancient literatures the scholar has to bear in mind that the language of the hymns and epics may well differ considerably from the common tongue of the same period. One of the problems facing the student of Old Testament Hebrew is the probability that the classical tongue of the Bible does not accurately represent the spoken language of the ancient Israelites. Certainly the vocabulary of the Bible
is far too limited in extent to tell us much about the workaday world of ancient Canaan. When it comes to analysing the linguistic and phonetic structure of biblical Hebrew in terms of actual speech, the conviction grows that what we have is not the spoken dialect of anyone community living in a single place at one time, but a kind of mixed, artificiallan­guage, composed perhaps of a number of dialects and used specifically for religious purposes. The importance of a liturgical language from our immediate point of view is that it will have been essentially conservative. It is in such writing that we can expect to find words used in their most primitive sense.
If religious terminology in general tends to resist change, this is even more the case with proper names, particularly those of the gods and epic heroes. It now appears that in many cases these have survived un­altered over centuries, even millennia, of oral as well as written trans­mission. In this one category of words lies the greatest scope for present and future researches into the nature and meaning of the old mytholo­gies. To be able to decipher the name of the god will tell us his prime function and thus the meaning of the prayers and rituals by which he was worshipped.
The difficulty in this study has always been that the names are often very much older than the literature in which they occur, and are in­decipherable in that language. So often the commentator on some Greek myth, for example, has to confess that the hero's name is "pre-Hellenic", of uncertain origin and meaning. All that he can do in such cases is to gather together all the references he can find to that character and see / Page 6 / others, will know too well that the results are often at best tenuous, and the exercise, to say the least, frustrating. One problem is that the same god or hero is differently described in different places. Zeus merits distinc­tive epithets and worship in Athens and in Crete, for example. What you expect of your god depends on your physical and spiritual needs in the immediate situation, and the stories you make up about him will reflect the social and ethnic conditions of your own time and place. Clearly, the mythologist can best estimate these local and temporal factors in his material if he knows the god's original place in the order of nature, that is, if he knows the source and meaning of his name.
The dramatic step forward that is now possible in our researches into the origin of Near Eastern cults and mythologies arises from our ability to make these decipherments. We can now break down god-names like Zeus and Yahweh/Jehovah, and hero-names like Dionysus and Jesus, because it is possible to penetrate the linguistic barriers imposed by the different languages in which their respective literatures have reached us. We can reach back beyond the Greek of the classics and the New Testa­ment and the Hebrew of the Old Testament to a linguistic source common to all.
Furthermore, as might be expected in such a limited geographical area as the Near East, we fmd that not only have the names a common derivation but many of the religious ideas variously expressed by the different cultures stem from the same basic ideas. The forms of worship, as far as we can reconstruct them from our limited literary and archaeo­logical evidence, may appear quite unrelated, and the stories that circulated about the gods and heroes may reflect different social and ethnic backgrounds, but the underlying themes are turning out often to be the same. The worshippers of Dionysus headed their cultic pro­cessions with an erect penis, while those of Jesus symbolized their faith with a fish and a cross, but essentially all represent the common theme of fertility and the creative power of the god.
Even within the Bible, language has hitherto posed a major barrier to research into Christian origins. Jesus and his immediate followers are portrayed as Jews, living in Palestine and adopting Jewish customs and religious conventions. The religion propounded by the New Testament / Page 7 / is at root a form of Judaism, but the language in which it is expressed is Greek, a non-Semitic tongue. Words and names like "Christ", "Holy Ghost" "Jesus", "Joseph" , and Mary come through Hebrew channels
but have Greek forms or translations in the New Testament. The words of Jesus are quoted freely and often given the weight of incontrovertible authority, but in fact nobody knows for certain what he said, since what we have are translations of a supposedly Aramaic original of which all trace has otherwise been lost.
A large part of Christian scholarship has been devoted to trying to reconstruct the Semitic expressions underlying New Testament phrase­ology, with varying degrees of success but little absolute certainty. In the forms in which we know them, Greek and Hebrew are very differ­ent in vocabulary and grammatical structure. They belong to different language families, the one Indo-European, like Latin and English, the other Semitic, like Aramaic and Arabic. Translation from one into the other can be at times extremely difficult, since they express not only distinctive linguistic attitudes but underlying philosophies. One impedi­ment to mutual understanding between the Selnitic and non-Semitic world today is that mere mechanical translation of, say, Arabic words into English cannot express adequately the intention of the speaker and dangerous misunderstandings can too often arise as a result.
What we have now discovered is that by going far enough back in time it is possible to find a linguistic bridge between these ethnic and cultural groups. However far apart their respective languages and philosophies may have become, they stem from a common, recoverable source, and it is there that any realistic study of Christian and Jewish origins must begin. The root of Christianity in this sense lies not in the Old Testament, but, like that of Judaism itself, in a pre-Semitic, pre­Hellenic culture that existed in Mesopotamia some two or three thou­sand years before the earliest Old Testament composition. The Christian doctrine of the fatherhood of God stems not from the paternal relation­ship of Yahweh to his chosen people but from the naturalistic philosophy that saw the divine creator as a heavenly penis impregnating mother earth. The idea of divine love came not from the Israelite prophet's revelation of the forgiving nature of his god, but from a very much earlier understanding of the essential need for balance and reciprocation in nature, moral as well as physical."

THE END OF THE ROAD

John M. Allegro 1970

Chapter One

The One God

Page 21

RELIGION is the relationship between a man and his god. It is born out of his sense of weakness and frustration in the face of a largely hostile environment. The extent to which religion domin­ates a man's life depends therefore upon his self-confidence. Flushed with the success of his own efforts, man needs no master but himself. Dispirited by failure, or the blows of fortune, he looks to his god for comfort and hope of future restoration. Even when things went well, when his granaries were full, his cisterns flowing with water, his stockyards and rivers teeming with life, early man was beset with fears for the future, lest in the next year drought or plague strike his land. He plied his god with praise and bribes for the continuance of his good fortune, and tried to lure the deity into remaining with him for all time. He built fine houses for the god, and employed representatives to enact continual rites of appeasement and stimulation to promote his procreative activity.
For the god was life. The oldest god-names known from the Near East relate to his creative power. He was thought of as a mighty penis in the skies, ejaculating semen in the violence of the storm, and thereby fructifying the womb of mother Earth beneath. The Greek Zeus and the Hebrew Yahweh (Jehovah) derive from a common linguistic source, and both mean sperma­tozoa, 'seed of life'. Embedded within both names is an ancient Sumerian word, symbolized by the single letter 'U' meaning 'fertility', perhaps the most significant phoneme in the whole of / Page 22 / human speech 'U' was the name of the old Sumerian storm-god;
when he spoke, it was the shriek of the wind, the scream of ecstasy at the height of the divine orgasm. 'U' was the liquid that spurted from the lips of the swollen glans and bore divine life to earth. 'U' was the copulatory act itself, the bestriding of a woman by her mate, the mounting of beasts or, more remotely, the fecundation from above of the vaginal furrows of the earth by the god. 'U' meant 'to have mastery over', to be lord and hus­band. It signified the sensual, savage world of sexual domination and fructification. It lay at the heart of ancient religion.
The culture of ancient Sumer was not the first; man had been an intelligent being for hundreds of thousands of years before the people we call Sumerians first set foot in Mesopotamia. But for our Graeco-Semitic civilization their culture was the beginning; it is from their language, as now for the first time we can recognize, that our own ultimately derived. It is from their ideas about God that ours came, transmitted through the religious writings of the Jews and Greeks. Yahweh, Zeus and Allah are one: all mean 'the sperm of heaven' .
It was the Sumerian culture that, about 3500 BC, invented writing, and made communication of ideas and thus history possible. Before then, paintings daubed on walls, figurines crudely fashioned from clay, and the like offer modern enquirers our only ancient evidence for the religious questing of primitive man. With writing, first crudely incised picture diagrams on clay tablets, later stylized symbols and finally alphabets, man could transmit commands, accounts and then stories, songs and liturgies over distances of space and time. As early as 2000 BC Sumerian tablets were recording whole epics and cosmologies that had doubtless been transmitted by word of mouth for hundreds or thousands of years before that. The 'U' culture of Sumer was already old at the beginning of history.
If we want to to know how and where Christianity began, / Page 23 / where its roots lay and how its philosophies -were derived, we have to look not merely to the immediate hinterland of the Jewish Old Testameii't and the inter-testamentalliteratul'e of the Apocry­pha and the Dead Sea Scrolls, but raise our eyes to the very horizons of history. The 'Jesus' cult began long before that, but historically we first glimpse its essential features in the Sumerian 'V' culture, in the throbbing phallus of the Sumerian storm god. The name 'Jesus/Joshua' (the Greek and Hebrew forms) means 'the semen that heals' or 'fructifies', the god-juice that gives life. To be smeared with this powerful liquid, above all to absorb it into his body, was to bring. the worshipper of the 'Jesus' into living communion with God, indeed, to make him divine. Thus was religion perfected, God and man made one, and the power of all-knowledge transmitted from heaven to mortals. In the words of the New Testament writer, 'you have been anointed by the Holy One and know all things' (I John 220).
To the ancient, knowledge and fertility derived from the same source. The slimy juice that dribbled from a man's penis
at ejaculation was a kind of 'spittle' In the old vocabulary. The organ was 'speaking' at the moment of release. In the grosser and more violent imagery of ' the storm, the divine phallus spat its juice into the wind and men saw it beating down on to the open furrows of the ground and sinking away into the terrestial womb. They called it 'the Word of God'. To assimilate this Word into oneself was to have divine knowledge and thus power. The 'strong' man of a community, it was soon realized, was not the brawny fellow, much as he might boast of his prowess with an axe, a sword, a plough or his wife; it was the wise, the cunning man, full' of arts and crafts, the seducer of his fellow-men and women. It was he who became rich at the expense of the labourer; it was he who su~vived the long hot sum'mers of drought and watched lesser men gasp out their lives round dried up water­holes. He eked out his water ration from his cistern, hewn out of / Page 24 / the rock whilst the fool had watched the precious fluid stream away down the wadi beds. That kind of wisdom was as god-given as the rain itself; to achieve it was to become, like the eaters of Eden's fruit, 'like one of us', the gods. Above all, the wise man knew the divine secrets of the herbs and their powers. He was aware that some plants and trees contained more of the god's sperm in their sap than others. There were herbs that could kill, and others that could heal. There were a few very special herbs, like the Mandrake, which could do both. To use this 'Holy Plant' safely, it was not sufficient to know where to find it; one also had to know when it might be picked, the time of day, the state of the weather. One had to know its secret names and recite them at the moment of plucking and at its administering. One had to know its antidote and the precise amounts of each, given in accordance with the previously determined susceptibilities of the 'patient'.
The wisest men of the community, then, were the doctors and the priests, and their store of herbal knowledge was the most precious and closely guarded possession of the professions. Through it they wielded great power over their fellows. Even the king, the personal representative of the god in anyone city, depended on their information, guidance and good will for the continuance and effectiveness of his office.
The intimate relationship between the god and his priests found practical expression in the religious ritual of the temple, the god's house. There seems to have been a common pattern of architecture for the temple throughout the ancient Near East. The names applied to its various parts show that it was conceived of as a womb, in the innermost part of which, the 'uterus', the god dwelt and performed his acts of creation for the benefit of his people. It was the seat of the divine Word, and thus the source of oracular information imparted to the priest as mouthpiece of god.

Page 25

An essential part of the god-man relationship in times of uncertainty and crisis was to share in the divine knowledge of what was to come. Man must soon have realized that what separated him from animals and gave him a certain measure of control of his environment was the ability to reason and look ahead. Prognostication was the mark of human wisdom and to those especially favoured by the god, this ability to peer into the future raised them in esteem into a superhuman category. Of such were the doctors, priests and prophets of the ancient world, recipients of the divine Word. In the Holy of Holies, or 'Oracle' of the Hebrew temple, the high priest met Yahweh once a year and became, on behalf of his people, mystically endued with the god's holiness. He prepared himself by dressing up as the god, that is as the phallus, his headgear representing the glans penis and his body smeared with the saps and resins of those sacred plants deemed especially endowed with the god's semen. He became thus a 'christ' or 'anointed one', dripping with seminal fluid like the male organ in the vagina. His entry into the temple through the labial 'porch', past the hymenal 'veil' into the vaginal 'hall' and thus, on this special occasion, into the uterine 'Oracle' or 'Holy of Holies', symbolized the copulatory act of divine and animal creation. It was the hieratic equivalent of the imitative and stimulative act of the farmer copulating with his wife in the field, after harvest, urging the god to fructify the ground afresh as the man impregnated the woman's womb. In the Christian Church today, the priestly processional from porch to altar, preceded by the cross, symbol of the conjoined penis and vulva, culminating in the raising aloft of the Host, is but a traditional reflection of this age-old fertility ritual.
The prophet's relationship with the god was even more direct and intimate. By long preparation of his body and mind, by the subjection of his carnal desires, by fasting and abuse of his flesh, and particularly by the careful use of drugs, he could / Page 26 / induce within himself a hallucinatory state which he explained as direct communion with God. Day-to-day objects and people about him seemed larger and colours more intense. He saw strange visions and heard voices deriving, we would say, from his own subconscious, but for him and the credulous onlookers, from the seventh heaven of divine perception. It was at such fleeting moments that man was permitted to glimpse the throne of God and even to carry back to the human planes of existence the so-called 'knowledge of God'. At that one glorious moment of revelation, the prophet became a participant in the divine mysteries; suddenly he knew by no normal means of rationalization or deduction the secrets of the universe and the purpose of life. And if the words he babbled at the time seemed to those about him the ravings of a madman, for those who believed that their hero had seen God, their very incomprehensibility seemed added proof of divine origin.
From such oracular babbling the prophet himself, restored to rationality, or more usually his intimates who had assisted him through the mystic veil, derived by imaginative ingenuity the answers to problems needing an insight into the future for their solution: Shall we go to war? Where are my lost asses? Will my son recover? and so on. However satisfied or disappointed the customers of such prophetic trafficking when the enemy stood at the gates, the asses remained lost, and the only son died, for the visionary himself the revelation remained unimpeachable. His fellow men, even his disciples, may have failed to understand, but for him who had seen God face to face, the vision remained. For that one moment he had become as God himself, knowing all things, having power over all things, seeing all things as they really are. No one could ever take away that experience, and the prophet's only desire was to repeat the pro­cess again and again; if possible, to remain in that sublime state of perception and never return to the shackles of the / Page 27 / flesh, the cage from which he had found such blessed release.
The vision of the prophet in such moments of ecstasy was one of unity: one god, one purpose, one creative act and one stream of life. For morta1s at the receiving end of creation, this conception of oneness was not immediately evident. Inanimate objects were different from living beings: stones from trees, a rotting carcase from a breathing animal quivering with life. Even among living creatures there were fundamental differences, like male and female, small and great, weak and strong. There were the great opposites of nature: heat and cold, light and darkness, sweet and bitter, and the fundamental composites of matter: earth, air, water and fire. But for the prophet in his moment of revelation there was an essential unity about the whole of creation, an harmonic beauty which defied adequate verbal expression. The greatest passages of Hebrew poetry attempt to express this organic unity and harmony of the heavenly world, helped to some extent by the peculiar genius of the language, but too often lost in translation.
In less elevated spheres of perception, the underlying unity of nature was not entirely lost upon the prophet's fellow men, how­ever disparate in form and function natural phenomena appeared on the surface. The farmer recognized the need for a balance in his husbandry if the earth were to bear her fruit and his animals their young year after year. He knew as well as the modern agriculturist the need for leaving fields fallow after a time and the technique of crop rotation. Be over greedy and mother earth will take offence and deny her blessings. Deny fodder to your cows and they will refuse you milk. Overwork your ox and he
will die under the yoke. Giving and taking are essential parts of the same creative process. To make demands without restoration is tyranny, whether of land, animals or subject peoples. The result is imbalance, barrenness of land and livestock, and political rebellion.

Page 28

Perhaps only the religious mystic saw the unity of God sensually, but the ordinary man and the king knew its truth from practical experience. The social prophet translated this vision into no less tangible terms: if a man becomes rich at the expense of his neighbour and exercises his power over him at the expense of his human dignity, that underdog will turn on him. If a man denies another his natural rights, the god will restore the balance in this life or the next. If a man becomes prey to overweaning pride in his own efforts, the god will lay him low from his armoury of retribution against which man has no defence. The whole of what we call moral law was thus fundamentally an expression of the essential unity of the godhead and the associated balance of nature. In this sense, religion and ethics were inextricably related; sin was essentially an imbalance of the divine order. To commit sin was sacrilege.
F or example, since spermatozoa was divine, to spill it wastefully, that is, to ejaculate it in a way that denied its proper function of fructification, was a sin against God. The balance of nature had been upset. The cycle of events that began with the man's own conception, his growth to maturity, his sexual stimu­lation and orgasm, was interrupted if he committed sodomy or buggery, or if he withdrew his penis from the vagina before ejaculation and, in the words of the story of Onan in the Old Testament, 'spoiled the semen on the ground' (Gen. 389). As that miscreant was punished by a wrathful deity, so all who wasted the blessings of God, or in some way broke off the natural cycle by greed or laziness, laid themselves open to similar punishment.
It is this basic moral law which underlies the Catholic Church strictures on birth control. Hence so-called 'safe period' copula­tion is, properly speaking, as 'sinful' as placing a rubber sheathing between the glans and the uterine cervix. Both methods of contraception are strictly 'unnatural' and god-denying.
Christianity, like all other religious manifestations of the Near / Page 29 / East, was derived ultimately from a fertility cult first seen in the culture of ancient Sumer. To grasp the fundamental principles of this nature religion it is insufficient to study the rituals by which religious ideas were expressed, or even to analyse the liturgies and functions of the temple cults. One has to probe to the mean­ings of the divine and cultic titles, and to see how these ideas expressed there were reflected in every aspect of ancient life. If God were life, then it is reasonable to assume all man's mortal experience was god-centred. There was no such thing as a Sunday evening religion. Man's relationship with the deity per­meated everything he did: the food that he ate, the craft of his hands, the reasoning of his brain, his fears and hopes, his loves and hates. God was in everything, since he was the source of creation, and yet he remained apart and in control. He could give and he could withhold, bless and punish; his laws were immutable for man, but his actions could seem to mortal intelligence, at times quite arbitrary.
It was this uncertainty about God's will that kept man in perpetual subjection to his religious masters. Even when he obeyed all the rules he knew, preserved the balance of his taking and giving, made token reimbursements to the god of the first fruits of the harvest and the cattle-fold, yet disaster could in­explicably strike him or his household, and send him scurrying to the priest to know the nature of the sin he had unwittingly committed and the manner of its atonement.
If one could but have the knowledge of God, to eavesdrop on the councils of heaven, then man could better regulate his existence and avoid the pitfalls which beset him at every turn. If he knew there was to be a drought, he could store corn from the fruitful harvests. If he knew his land would be ravaged by an enemy, he might have moved away or harvested his crops and hid them before the onslaught. Above all, if he could learn the secrets of the herbs and taste the nectar of the god, the undiluted Word, / Page 30 / he would know all things and for a moment at least shed his mortality and free his naked soul for the flight to heaven. Then, at last, he would find certainty, and freedom from fear.
Thus the fertility religion led to the mystery drug cults of classical antiquity and to its Christian manifestation. The 'flesh' and 'blood' that the Bacchic and Christian participant of the mysteries chewed and drank, so innocuously represented today in the Church's communion meal, was the 'Dionysus' and the 'J esus Christ' by which he found salvation. The drug it contained offered spiritual release from the cloying sin that hindered the in­itiate's soul from complete absorption in the godhead. This was the ultimate mystery that the Church itself lost, consciously thrusting aside the essence of its potentially dangerous cult to achieve political accord with its temporal rulers.
Readers of The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross will know that the clues that led to the rediscovery of the particular drug source favoured by these mystery cults were primarily philological. The plant's identity was one of the most closely guarded secrets of the ancient world, so the pseudonyms by which it was comm­only designated proliferated while the mystic names were known only to the favoured few. The breakthrough came when we dis­covered that the names of gods and plants which came down into Greek and Latin, the languages used by the classical botanists and mythmakers, like those of the ancient Semitic records, could be traced to a common source in Sumerian, the first written language of the world. We had thus a bridge between the old Indo-European cultures and the Semitic world which gave us our Old Testament and the ethnic source of the New Testament and Christianity. By re-examining these god and plant names in the Greek and Latin writings and breaking them down into their original Sumerian verbal elements, we found it was possible to retrace our steps on the other side of the bridge, so to speak, and lay bare the meanings and derivation of Hebrew god-names, and / Page 31 / those of heroes like Moses and Joshua. So at last it has become possible to discover the real meanings behind the myths and legends of the Old Testament. Despite apparent differences in the language, background and details of the final forms of such myths, we can now begin to discern common themes in biblical and clas­sical legends. The false division erected by the academicians between the Indo-European and Semitic worlds has gone for ever. The classicist must now be also a Semiticist; the Semiticist must feel equally at home in the classics. We can look forward to a new era in the study of ancient history and perhaps find fresh impetus for rediscovering common ground between East and West.

THE END OF A ROAD

John M. Allegro 1970

Page 22

"The culture of ancient Sumer was not the first; man had been an intelligent being for hundreds of thousands of years before the people we call Sumerians first set foot in Mesopotamia. But for our Graeco-Semitic civilization their culture was the beginning; it is from their language, as now for the first time we can recognize, that our own ultimately derived. It is from their ideas about God that ours came, transmitted through the religious writings of the Jews and Greeks. Yahweh, Zeus and Allah are one: all mean 'the sperm of heaven' ."

THE SACRED MUSHROOM AND THE CROSS

John M, Allegro 1970

II

SUMER AND THE BEGINNINGS OF HISTORY

Page 8 ( Number omitted)" Civilization began in Sumer,l in the Land of the Two Rivers, Mesopotamia (figs. 1,2 omitted). No one knows where the Sumerians came from, but about 4000 BC they were already developing a culture which was to affect the whole world for over five thousand years.
The rich agricultural land of the alluvial plains meant there was always sufficient food for man and beast; fowl and fish were in abundance and the Bible did well to find here its Garden of Eden. Amid such plenty nomadic man needed no more to move from place to place as he ex­hausted the land's resources. His was now an urban culture. He could build cities like ancient Eridu accommodating several thousands of people. His simple buildings became classic examples of monumental architecture rising high above the surrounding plains. Arts and crafts became the specialist industries of the few.
The overbrimming wealth of Sumer could attract raw materials and services from less favoured lands round about, and a class of traders arose to channel imports through their warehouses and to travel abroad seeking more. Labour was organized and rigorously controlled for efficient production, and in every city management of the economy, religion, and culture was in the hands of the king and the priesthood.
For the land was the god's, without whose procreative power all life would cease. The king was his bailiff: a less, temporarily earthbound god whose function was also to ensure the productivity of the com­munity. The administrative centre of each district was the god's house, the temple, with its priestly officials whose control over the people was absolute. The temple was the seat of justice, land administration, scien tific learning, and theological speculation, as well as the theatre of religious ritual. It was the community's university and primary school, to which small boys would drag their unwilling steps each day to set the pattern of grammar school curricula for more than five millennia.

Page 9 (number omitted) 1 The Near East (illustration omitted)

It / Page 10 / was in such temple colleges that their tutors built, over the next two thousand years, some of the richest and most extensive libraries of the ancient world.
From the ruins of ancient Nippur on the lower Euphrates, a hundred miles or so from modern Baghdad, have come several thousand literary texts. A large number were written in the most prolific period of Sumerian culture, from about 2000 to 1500 BC. They evince a wide range of intellectual exploration in the fields of theology, botany, zoology, mineralogy, geography, mathematics, and philology, the results of centuries of creative thought.

2 Surner and Accad (illustration omitted)

Along with a continuing search for new knowledge went the systematic preservation of past results. The library of Nippur contained texts going back to around 2300 BC, as well as dictionaries, legal works, and myths reaching down nearly to the end of the second millennium.
Elsewhere, the library at Uruk held a range of literature stretching some 3,000 years, from the earliest times to a century or so before the / Page 11 / Christian era, when Sumerian was still being used as a special, esoteric language. For, although after 2360 BC Sumer had to share her hegemony of the region with her northern Semitic neighbours of Accad, and afterwards lost political control completely, she had set seal upon the cultural life of the Near East and the world for all time.
Yet, a century ago no one had ever heard of the Sumerians. Archaeologists who were at all interested in Mesopotamia were looking for the remains of the Assyrians and Babylonians, referred to often in biblical and classical sources. About the middle of the nineteenth century Sir Henry Rawlinson and other scholars were examining clay tablets found in the ruins of ancient Nineveh. They were inscribed with wedge­shaped ("cuneiform") signs already familiar as the writing of Semitic­speaking Accadians (Assyro-Babylonians). To this family of languages belong Hebrew and Aramaic, sister dialects used in the Old Testament, and Arabic, the language of Muhammad' s Qur'an and the modern Arab world. The initial decipherment of Accadian cuneiform had been made by Rawlinson in 1851, mainly on the basis of a trilingual inscription from Behistun' in Persia. However, some of the tablets now being studied had, besides the familiar Semitic dialect, another quite unknown tongue, interspersed between the lines. The script was the same so that the phonetic values of each sign could be transcribed even though the string of resultant syllables made no immediate sense. There were also discovered amongst the tablets word-lists in which Accadian words were set alongside equivalents in this strange tongue.
Some scholars refused to believe it was a real language at all. They spoke of a "secret script" used by the priests to overawe the laity and preserve their rituals and incantations from the uninitiated. The name by which it was known in the texts, "the tongue of Sum er" was incom­prehensible, and it was some years before the experts would take it seriously. However, when, later, monuments were discovered written only in this language and dating from a time before Semitic Accadian was being written in Mesopotamia, even the most sceptical had to admit that there must have existed in the area a pre-Semitic population from whom the Assyrians had borrowed the art of writing.
The cuneiform method of writing was well suited to the area. The alluvial soil of the plains provided an abundance of a particularly fine clay which could be moistened and shaped into a lozenge or pat in the palm of the hand. The earliest shape of "tablets" was roughly circular, / Page 12 / smoothly rounded on top and flat underneath. It was the shape of the flat loaf of the East even today, or of the biblical" cake of figs" or circular disk of a spinning whorl. It was, in fact, the shape of the top of a mush­room, and it was from the fungus that it received its name.2
Later the primitive "bun" tablet was regularized into a rectangular slab some two or three inches long and one and a half or two inches wide, and capable of being held in the scribe's hand. The soft clay was firm enough to take and preserve the impression made by the squared end of his stylus, but not so tacky as to stick to the scribe's hand as he worked.
As the texts required to be recorded grew longer, the tablets were made larger so that they could no longer be held in the hand. This meant that when the bigger tablets were introduced the attitude of the scribe's hand to the clay as it lay now on the table underwent a change, and with it the orientation of the symbols, which turned ninety degrees.
The 'Jotting-pad" kind of tablet, recording some passing transaction or the like, was simply hardened by being baked in the sun. But this method gave too impermanent a result for more important legal or religious texts, and offered too much scope to the forger, who had simply to remoisten the clay, smear over the impression and write in a new word. Important documents were baked hard in an oven, and the method is used even today by archaeologists finding sun-baked tablets which could too easily suffer damage during handling.
When the Semites took over the Sumerian technique of writing, it had already developed stylized forms far removed from the first, crude pictorial signs we find on the earliest tablets. The oldest text we know is probably a tally list of some kind and dates from about 3500 BC.3 It comes from Kish near ancient Babylon, and the signs at this stage are clearly recognizable representations of objects, like a head (Symbol omitted ), a leg (Symbol omitted ), an erect penis ejaculating sperm (Symbol omitted ), , and a hand (Symbol omitted ),
The signs had been made by drawing a pointed instrument through the clay like a pen. However, it was found that this method tended to push the clay into ridges before the stylus so that the signs became blurred and crossing over previous strokes obliterated them. So the scribes began simply pressing the end of the reed into the day forming a series of separate wedge-shaped marks, (Symbol omitted ), Inevitably, the flowing line of the original drawings was lost, stylized into formal representations which became further and further removed from the subject. To take the above examples, we see the following sequence of development:

Page 13

(Symbol diagram omitted ) The importance of such a primitive script for the etymologist is that he can illustrate the word with a picture, as a child is taught to read with bricks on which word and picture are printed side by side. Thus (Symbol omitted ), represents SAG, "head" (the Sumerian words are conventionally transcribed into capital letters, their Accadian equivalents into lower case type, italicized, in this instance, reshu). Identification of the object with a human head here, of course, poses no problem, but there are instances where to have the accompanying picture is to gain a valuable insight into the Sumerian mind. For example, where one is trying to discover the significance of fire in fertility mythology, it is useful to know that to represent the idea of "love" the Sumerian scribe drew a simple con­tainer with a burning torch inside, (Symbol omitted ), to indicate the fermenting heat of gestation in the womb. Or again, as a sidelight upon social customs, the word for "male slave" was an erect, ejaculating penis superimposed with three triangular impressions used to express "hill­country" or "foreign land": (Symbol omitted ), 4 and his feminine counterpart was the usual representation for "woman", the pubic triangle with the slit of the vulva, with a similar subscription: (Symbol omitted ),.5
The word for "male slave", ERI,6 leaves no doubt that his prime function was to procreate more slaves for his master, since a home-born slave was a better security risk than one dragged away from his native land as a spoil of war.
Unfortunately, this simple representative writing could not long survive the extension of the art to express more complex ideas than "laundry-lists". That same picture of the erect penis came also to be used, not unnaturally, to express" standing up straight", 7 or "length", 8 and so a number of verbs and nouns could ultimately be intended by the one picture. Furthermore, it could also represent the sound of the "penis" word, ush, and so could be used simply as a phonetic symbol where no reference to the meaning of the original was intended.

Page 14

Our alphabet is also, of course, composed of symbols, which were originally pictures. The letter A, for instance, is derived from the picture of a bull's head, seen in its earliest form as b, stylized in Phoenician as (Symbol omitted), and passing into early Greek as (Symbol omitted), and A , and so on into our western alphabet. Similarly, our letter B began as a picture of a house, or rather, the courtyard of a house, (Symbol omitted), which appears in Phoenician as (Symbol omitted), in Greek as (Symbol omitted), and (Symbol omitted).. Our D was a door, hieroglyphic (Symbol omitted), from which it developed the characteristic triangular shape of phoenician and Greek delta, (Symbol omitted),and (Symbol omitted). Our letter I came from a very much simplified version of a hieroglyphic hand, (Symbol omitted), through Phoenician (Symbol omitted), into Greek (Symbol omitted), and (Symbol omitted). And so on. But the idea of having symbols represent single sounds, consonants and vowels, was a major step forward and was not to be achieved for more than a thousand years after writing began in Sumer.
Just how great an advance this constituted can be appreciated by realizing that the cuneiform system required some three hundred different signs, and that each of these ideograms could represent a number of different sound-values. For instance, the sign for a road­ junction, SILA or SIL, (Symbol omitted), also meant TAR, "make a decision, judge", or KUD, "cut", Of KhASh, "break, grind up". All have this radical idea of "division" but its extension to similar motifs, physical and juridical, brings under the same ideogram a variety of different words. Similarly, the ideogram for" scrotum", simply a skin bag, (Symbol omitted), DUBUR, can also represent DUGGAN, "wallet",9 KALAM, "kidney", and even GIRISh, "butterfly", presumably from its origins in a chrysalis.
When Accadian took over the cuneiform system, the Semitic scribes added to the lists of values attaching to each ideogram those relating to their own equivalents of the Sumerian words. For example, Sumerian SAG, "head", was translated by Accadian reshu, so to the Sumerian values of the "head" ideogram, they added their own phonetic and etymological approximations, sak, sag, saq, shak, shag, shaq, resh, res, rish, ris. (Incidentally, it should be noted that Sumerian and Semitic had single consonants representing our sh sound, shown here as sh in Semitic and Sh in Sumerian.) Obviously learning to read and write would be very much easier if the student had only to memorize a couple of dozen signs representing individual sounds, consonants and vowels, and use these symbols to express the phonemes of which each sound­ / Page 15 / group or "word" was composed. He could then build up any word he wanted, like a Meccano model of standard-shaped pieces. Not surprisingly, until this radical step forward had been taken, proficiency in this highly complex cuneiform system was the privilege of a few, and, carrying with it power and prestige, tended to resist change and the wider dissemination of the craft.
Even when it did arrive, alphabetic writing was used to express only the "harder", consonantal sounds, whilst in reading the" softer" vowels had to be inserted according to the most likely meaning of the word in the context. This is still the case in many parts of the Semitic world, where vowelling words in Arabic newspaper printing, for example, is the exception rather than the rule. Indeed, full vowelling systems for most Semitic scripts were not introduced until the Christian era, and in the Bible considerable doubt can arise over the precise meaning of a passage because the text was only consonantally written and the context insufficiently clear to offer grounds for certain interpretation.
The advantage of the old, clumsy syllabic writing to the modern decipherer is that it shows the vowels as well as the consonants of the dead language. when one is trying to relate words from different language groups of widely varying dates, every scrap of information about their early pronunciation is of the utmost value. Because we have the vowels of Sumerian we can trace the developments ofits vocabulary into related dialects with more certainty than would have been possible had the alphabet been invented and widely used a thousand years earlier.
The Sumerian language is put together like a house of bricks. First, there are certain word-bricks expressing basic ideas, like KUR, "conquer", BA, "give". On to these the writer adds other word-bricks, like TA or NE, modifying the verb in some way or adding a possessive suffix, like "my", "his" or "their", to a noun. These added particles do not concern us so much in this study, since the words we are interested in are built mainly of the basic word-bricks. What is of vital importance for our researches is, however, that unlike many other languages, including our own, Sumerian tends to keep these basic idea-words unchanged. English often expresses tense in a verb by altering the sound within the root, as "he gives", but, ror the past tense, "he gave"; I run", but "I ran", and so on. Sumerian will keep the same radical element, merely adding a particle word-brick to modify the verb or its / Page 16 / relationship with other grammatical members of the sentence. Thus in our search for a Sumerian idea-word within Indo-European or Semitic names we can feel confident that, whatever phonetic changes it may have undergone through dialectal influences, the radical element we seek will originally have been a single, unchangeable word-brick. Once we can penetrate to that, we stand a good chance of deciphering the original meaning of the name.
Sometimes two or more radical elements can be combined to form a new word-brick like SILA, "road-junction",10 abbreviated sometimes to SIL. Clearly this word is a combination of SI, "fmger", and LA, "join together", the overall picture being that of Winston Churchill's "victory-V" sign. We should express that supposed original form of two separate but, as yet, uncombined elements as *SI-LA, with a preposited asterisk. This sign, here, and elsewhere, indicates a verbal group whose constituent parts are known to have existed in Sumerian but whose grouping or combination in that precise form does not actually appear in literature so far recovered.
At this point it must be emphasized that although we now have thousands of tablets from which to reconstruct a great deal of the vocabulary of Sumerian, they represent only a fraction of the original literature. Doubtless there is much more to be found beneath Mesopotamian soil, for archaeology has already demonstrated the very high level of Sumerian civilization and extent of its accumulated learning. It is now possible to propose combinations of known root elements with a fair degree of assurance; nevertheless the asterisk will appear frequently in the following pages and serve to remind us that such reconstructions, however probable, must find adequate cross-checking through the cognate languages if they are to be anything but speculative. Furthermore, they are only possible when the phonetic rules governing consonant and vowel changes from one language into another have been established.
We know that Sumerian was spoken in more than one dialect. These are referred to in the texts but there is not yet sufficient material to reconstruct them completely, or to know for certain their geographical and literary boundaries. What is now apparent, however, is that some of the most important phonetic changes evinced by these dialects are observable in the forms of Sumerian words as they appear in Indo­European and Semitic. Perhaps in the future it may be possible to draw / Page 17 / dialect boundaries which will show not only where the Sumerians originated but from what geographical points their language spread into the Indo-European and Semitic worlds. For the moment, to know the phonetic changes that may be expected in vocal transmission of Sumerian roots makes it possible to trace them in other language families.10a
For example, to our ears m and g could hardly be more different. In Sumerian, however, they are dialectally equivalent. The word AM, for instance, can appear as AG,l1 MAR as GAR,12 and so on. The same variation can be seen in dialectal Greek, as in the word magganon, "hunting-net", which appears rarely as gaggamon,13 and between Greek and Latin, as in amnos, "lamb", Latin agnus. Again, to us g is quite different from b, but they can fall together in Sumerian,14 and also parallel one another in Indo-European dialects. For example, the Greek balanos, "acorn", is the Latin (and English) glans.15
Some phonetic correspondences are more easily understood since the sounds are, in any case, not far apart, like b and p, with their "soft" sounds ph and f Latin pater is our "father". The sounds m and n are close enough to make their interchangeability easily comprehensible, as are the "liquid" letters r and 1. But not so immediately obvious is a common variant'in the Sumerian and Semitic worlds between l and n,16 and I and sh, and this has particularly to be looked for when Sumerian origins are sought for names in Semitic format.17
Specialists will note for themselves phonetic correspondences affecting their own fields of linguistic interest, but another variant which may seem strange at first sight to the non-specialist reader is that between the Sumerian Kh, a somewhat throatish rasping sound akin to the ch in the Scottish "loch", and hard g. This interchange occurs within Sumerian 18 and also externally. For example, MAKh, "great", appears in Greek as megas, Latin magnus.19 On the other hand, Sumerian Kh is found as its straightforward phonetic equivalent in the Greek chei (transliterated in these pages as kh for the sake of uniformity), in, for example, khalbane, a kind of gum, but as hard g in the Latin cognate galbanum.20
Vowels follow a fairly uniform and easily recognizable pattern. However, the sound i often disappears between consonants in the derived forms. For example the Sumerian BIL, "burn", appears in the Greek phlego and Latin flagro, "burn" (the source of our "flame"), but / Page 18 / the medial i has disappeared between the b and l. The full form of the Sumerian original was probably *BIL-AG.21 The Greek, it will be noted, has depressed the a of the last element to e, although Latin preserved the original sound. This "flattening" of the a sound is very common. Less expected is the frequent change of the Sumerian u, normally appearing in the cognates as u or o, to the Greek eta(Symbol omitted).22
Among other vowel-changes which might be mentioned here are those combined vowels we call diphthongs. Some are predictable enough when they occur through the conjunction of a and o, for example, becoming long o, or e and i becoming ei. But some diphthongs have arisen through the loss of an intervening consonant, particularly the letters l 23 and r.24 An interesting example of this occurs in the title of Apollo, Paian, and the Greek plant-name Paionia, our Paeony. Both go back to an original *BAR-IA-U-NA, which reappears with only the a and u combined in the New Testament Barionas, "Bar-Jona", Peter's surname.25
Summarizing: in the language and culture of the world's most ancient civilization, Sumerian, it is now possible to find a bridge between the Indo-European and Semitic worlds. The first writing known is found on tablets from the Mesopotamian basin, dating, some five thousand years ago, and consisting of crude pictures drawn with a stylus on to soft clay. Later the recognizable pictures became stylized into ideograms made up of nail- or wedge-shape impressions, so-called cuneiform signs, each representing syllables of consonants and vowels. These syllables made up "word-bricks" which resisted phonetic change within the language, and could be joined together to make connected phrases and sentences. To such word-bricks we can now trace Indo-European and Semitic verbal roots, and so begin to decipher for the first time the names of gods, heroes, plants, and animals appearing in cultic mytho­logies. We can also now start penetrating to the root-meanings of many religious and secular terms whose original significance has been obscure."

THE SACRED MUSHROOM AND THE CROSS

John M, Allegro 1970