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2024-08-05 15:08:15 UTC

Kitchen Priestess (She/Her) on Nostr: Does This Medieval Fresco Show A Hallucinogenic Mushroom in the Garden of Eden? - ...

Does This Medieval Fresco Show A Hallucinogenic Mushroom in the Garden of Eden? - Controversy over what’s depicted in the image, and what it may say about early Christians, has raged for decades, by Emma Betuel August 5, 2021

"...The question of what was painted...goes back at least to 1911, when a member of the French Mycological Society suggested the thing...was a “bizarre” & “arborescent” mushroom. The idea that the Tree of Life was actually A. muscaria pops up in the 1925 book The Romance of the Fungus World, which presents a “curious myth” about the...fresco depicting the hallucinogenic...

The idea persisted, however, and was loudly revived in 1970 by John Marco Allegro...In his book The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, Allegro argued that Christianity itself had derived from a fertility cult whose members ingested hallucinogens. He called the Garden of Eden story “mushroom-based mythology.”

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/muscaria-hallucinogenic-mushroom-fresco

#Mythology #History #Frescoes #Art #Religion #Bookstodon #Mycology