In 1970, one of the world's leading Dead Sea Scrolls scholars published a theory so outrageous it effectively destroyed his academic reputation. He suggested that Christianity began as a psychedelic mushroom cult.

John Marco Allegro's The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross argued that stories in the New Testament encoded secret fertility rituals involving Amanita muscaria. He went extraordinarily far, interpreting Jesus and key elements of Christianity itself through mushroom symbolism.

His fellow scholars largely demolished the linguistic argument. But more than half a century later, something interesting has happened.

The broader question Allegro was asking has become considerably harder to dismiss.

Not whether Jesus was secretly a mushroom — there's no convincing evidence for that — but whether psychoactive substances played an important role in the religious traditions from which Christianity emerged.

Archaeology increasingly shows that ancient people incorporated mind-altering substances into ritual life. Researchers have detected psychoactive compounds in human hair from Bronze Age Menorca and in an Egyptian ritual vessel dating to the Ptolemaic period.

And one of the biggest mysteries concerns the Eleusinian Mysteries. For almost 2,000 years, initiates travelled to Eleusis in ancient Greece to participate in secret ceremonies promising a transformative encounter with death and the divine. Participants included some of the most important figures of classical civilisation.

At the centre of the ritual was a mysterious drink called kykeon. In 1978, ethnomycologist R. Gordon Wasson, LSD discoverer Albert Hofmann and classicist Carl Ruck proposed something radical: perhaps kykeon contained psychoactive chemicals derived from ergot, the fungus that infects cereal grains and contains precursors related to LSD.

There was a major problem. Ergot can be dangerously toxic. Nobody had convincingly demonstrated how ancient people could have transformed it into a reliably psychoactive preparation using technologies available at the time.

Now researchers may have removed part of that objection.

A 2026 Scientific Reports study experimentally demonstrated that processing ergot under alkaline conditions can transform some of its alkaloids into lysergic acid amide (LSA) and related compounds.

That does not prove the Eleusinians did this. There is still no direct chemical evidence showing that the kykeon served at Eleusis contained ergot-derived psychedelics.

But it changes the question from:

“Could ancient people even have made such a preparation?”

to:

“Did they?”

Researchers are increasingly taking seriously the possibility that altered states — produced through psychoactive plants and fungi, fasting, chanting, dancing, meditation or other techniques — played important roles in ancient religious experience.

It doesn't vindicate Allegro's theory. His attempt to derive Christianity from an Amanita fertility cult remains extraordinarily speculative, and evidence that psychoactive substances existed in ancient religious cultures is not evidence that Christianity itself originated from them.

But the idea that psychoactive substances influenced ancient spirituality no longer sounds particularly outrageous.

And that leaves us with a fascinating possibility.

Long before humans built laboratories to investigate mystical experiences, our ancestors may already have discovered that certain molecules could reliably open the door to them.