Michael Hoffman 10:20 Feb. 4, 2026
Contents:
links work on desktop Edge/Chrome:
- Moving Past Allegroism in Entheogen Scholarship
- Problem/ Obstacle: Ruck Loves Allegro
- Intro
- Popularity of the Irvin/Ruck Edition of The Sacred Mushroom & The Cross (Allegro, 1970/ 2009)
- Motivation for this Page
- See Also
Moving Past Allegroism in Entheogen Scholarship
Richard Ascough, citing my 2006 Plaincourault article, calls to retire and sideline Allegro.
This heading is a take-off on the article title
“Moving Past Mysticism in Psychedelic Science”
by Sanders & Zijlmans.
- 1st-generation entheogen scholarship (the Secret Amanita paradigm)
- Ditch Allegro, a ball-and-chain, boat anchor: academic anthropology abusing mushrooms to smear and defame the big bad Church.
- 2nd-generation entheogen scholarship (the Explicit Psilocybin paradigm)
Problem/ Obstacle: Ruck Loves Allegro
Intro
Titles of this article:
Official Declaration by Entheogen Scholarship: John Allegro Is Not an Entheogen Scholar; Entheogen Scholarship Is Permitted to Assert Mythicism and Centralize Psychedelics
Ascough’s article parrots my 2006 Plaincourault article’s conclusion: we must sideline and retire Allegro, to do 2nd-generation entheogen scholarship (the Explicit Psilocybin paradigm).
John Allegro and the Psychedelic Mysteries Hypothesis
Richard Ascough, 2025/08/08
School of Religion, Queen’s University at Kingston, Kingston, ON, Canada
https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/16/8/1029
John_Allegro_and_the_Psychedelic_Mysteries_Hypothe.pdf
https://egodeaththeory.org/2026/01/22/richard-ascough-on-psychedelics-in-western-religious-history/#John-Allegro-and-the-Psychedelic-Mysteries-Hypothesis
Popularity of the Irvin/Ruck Edition of The Sacred Mushroom & The Cross (Allegro, 1970/ 2009)
The pop’y of this book gives the impression that Allegro is an entheogen scholar.
Irvin and Ruck are leaders in entheogen scholarship.
https://www.amazon.com/Sacred-Mushroom-Cross-Christianity-fertility/dp/0982556292/
I tell ppl Irvin is the best and it’s mandatory you buy and read Irvin’s books, and read his articles.
But I haven’t bought this book, to see its handling of Plaincourault & to read Ruck’s article apx “Fungus Revivus”. 100 boxes of books, can’t justify.
There is a phrase like “Fungus Revivus” in Conjuring Eden: Art and the Entheogenic Vision of Paradise (Hoffman, Ruck & Staples, Entheos 1, 2001), https://entheomedia.net/Issue%20one.htm, https://egodeaththeory.org/2020/12/24/entheos-issues-1-4-mark-hoffman/#Entheos-Issue-1 or 2nd issue Datura “Daturas for the Virgin” 2001.
Motivation for this Page
Bad guys try to hobble harm and shackle entheogen scholarship by forcibly assigning Allegro to be the poster boy spokesman identical with entheogen scholarship.
This is total bullsh!t and a false, aggressive move.
We see what the Deniers are doing: striving to conflate Allegro with entheogen scholarship.
- You can’t assert psychedelics in Western religious history, because that’s the Allegro move.
- You can’t assert the ahistoricity of religious founder figures, because that’s the Allegro move.
- You can’t combine asserting “psychedelics in Western religious history” and “the ahistoricity of religious founder figures”, because that’s the Allegro move.
F*ck all those imposed constraints and restrictions on entheogen scholarship.
Entheogen scholarship OFFICIALLY rejects any and all such Allegro-leveraged restrictions.
You can’t assert psychedelics in Western religious history, because that’s the Allegro move.
Ppl like Browns have a problem with mythicism – too damn bad for them.
They routinely do a move of disavowing mythicism and associating it with Allegro.
Entheogen scholars will freely and boldly assert mythicism as much as possible, eg Timothy Freke & Peter Gandy’s book The Jesus Mysteries, 1999, https://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Mysteries-Was-Original-Pagan/dp/0609807986/
See Also
John Allegro and the Psychedelic Mysteries Hypothesis
Richard Ascough, 2025/08/08
School of Religion, Queen’s University at Kingston, Kingston, ON, Canada
https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/16/8/1029
John_Allegro_and_the_Psychedelic_Mysteries_Hypothe.pdf
https://egodeaththeory.org/2026/01/22/richard-ascough-on-psychedelics-in-western-religious-history/#John-Allegro-and-the-Psychedelic-Mysteries-Hypothesis
Cyberdisciple site > Site Map > Evaluating Psychedelic History Scholars
https://cyberdisciple.wordpress.com/site-map/#Evaluating-Psychedelic-History-Scholars —
- John Allegro
- Influence of early anthropological theorizing on ‘entheogen’ scholarship: John Allegro, The Sacred Mushroom
- Addendum to Allegro article; How to accurately assess Allegro; quotations from Allegro’s introduction about philology and against history – missing from site map
- Article: Hatsis, T. “Born of a Version”
- The Egodeath Theory Corroborates Carl Ruck’s Psychedelic Mysteries Paradigm
- Video: The Sweetest Taboo: Psychedelics and the Invention of Religious Experiences (Mosurinjohn, Sep. 2025)
- The replies article in the Journal of Psychedelic Studies replies to McPriest (McCarthy & Hunt Priest): mockingly dismisses Allegro/Ruck/Mura.
https://egodeaththeory.org/2023/04/09/journal-of-psychedelic-studies/#Psychedelic-Christianity-McPriest —
Psychedelic Christianity: From evangelical hippies and Roman Catholic intellectuals in the sixties to clergy in a Johns Hopkins clinical trial
Bryan McCarthy and Hunt Priest
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1556/2054.2024.00356
The Replies article:
Psychedelic Christianity: Commentary and reply; Commentaries on: McCarthy & Priest (2024). Psychedelic Christianity: From Evangelical hippies and Roman Catholic intellectuals in the sixties to clergy in a Johns Hopkins clinical trial
Replies from:
- Michael J. Winkelman, <—– entheogen scholar; the psychedelic origin of Christianity
- G. William Barnard,
- Marc G. Blainey,
- Jerry B. Brown, <—– entheogen scholar; the psychedelic origin of Christianity
- Thomas B. Roberts, <– og
- Joseph Lorenz,
- Jaime Clark-Soles,
- William A. Richards, <– og
- Harry T. Hunt,
- Timothy R. Gabrielli,
- David M. Odorisio,
- Tracy j. Trothen,
- Brad Stoddard, <—– dismissive of the psychedelic origin of Christianity
- Paul Jonathan Ungerland ii,
- George G. Lake,
- J. Kaleb Graves,
- Reply to replies: Bryan McCarthy, and Hunt Priest
Stoddard wrote:
“In “Psychedelic Christianity” the authors seek to forge a connection between psychedelics and Christianity.
“To their credit, they avoid the wildly speculative and inherently sensationalistic theories about allegedly ancient connections between psychedelics and Christianity (see Allegro, 1970; Muraresku, 2020).”
Stoddard tries to discredit Ruck & Muraresku by smearing them (shackling them) with association with Allegro – AS IF Allegro is an entheogen scholar.
The planets revolving around the sun instead of earth was so wildly speculative, it took 177 years from Copernicus circulating 1510 writing to colleagues, vs. Newton 1687 everyone finally switched over to the new paradigm.
Entheogen scholarship began in lets say 1915 with “def no psilocybin in Mexico”, mocked by Wassons 1957 book-pair. 2026-1915 = 111 years so far, the new paradigm has been in development.
1st-generation entheogen scholarship (the Secret Amanita paradigm)
2nd-generation entheogen scholarship (the Explicit Psilocybin paradigm) started 1997: The mushroom-tree of Plaincourault (Giorgio Samorini, 1997) https://www.samorini.it/doc1/sam/sam%20plaincourault.pdf
The Egodeath theory 