R.G. Wasson On The Allegory of The Fall

R.G Wasson, the founder of ethnomycology, and his wife Valentina.

There is, however, still another interpretation of the Allegory of The Fall which, lying somewhere between the fundamentalist and irreligious positions, has received very little attention from mainstream scholars, theologians or members of the lay public. Nevertheless, this interpretation is considered the most reasonable one by a growing number of scholars, scientists and laymen who implicitly or explicitly follow the teachings of the late Robert G. Wasson.

13th century French fresco depicting Adam and Eve next to a so-called Pilzbaum, or mushroom tree.

Although R.G. Wasson is by no means a household name, it was Wasson’s detailed study of the religious uses of psychotropic fungi by various ancient and modern cultures that fostered the relatively new science of ethnomycology. And it was those studies that led Wasson to believe that the Fall was a recorded version of a once orally transmitted, Hebrew taboo against eating a psychotropic mushroom — known technically as the A. muscaria and commonly as the fly-agaric —  that was ingested in antiquity, as it still is, to commune with God. It appears, however, that Wasson was not the first to suspect that the Allegory of the Fall was a prohibition on A. muscaria ingestion, because a twelfth century French fresco depicts Adam and Eve next to a so-called Pilzbaum, or mushroom tree, bearing red mushrooms that look remarkably like A. muscariae, and a little red, apple-like object next to Eve’s right elbow.

Entheogenic A. muscaria cap

It may be difficult for some readers to accept the notion that a mushroom could have been anciently used, as it still is, to induce religious communion. However, in his book Strange Fruit, Clark Heinrich reported having had the following experience after he ate a quantity of A. muscariae:

Before another thought could arise in my mind, in the midst of a great darkness and a great silence, the heavens opened above my head. In an instant I was flooded with light from above, light of the utmost whiteness and splendour, that quickly dissolved everything in its glory. The bliss I had experienced prior to this new revelation now paled to insignificance in an immensity of light that was also the purest love. As the truth of the situation dawned on me the word Father resounded in this heaven of light and I was taken up and absorbed by the unspeakable Godhead. No longer separate, there was neither an enjoyer nor a thing enjoyed; there was union.³

As explained in my article "Entheogen Induced Ego Death as a Form Of Religious Conversion, the phenomenon Heinrich experienced typically occurs as part of a broader phenomenon, known in the drug-vernacular as ego death and spiritual rebirth, following the ingestion of A. muscariae, mescaline, psilocybin, LSD, or a number of other substances. During this phenomenon, some sort of perceptual veil — for lack of a better term — seems to be rent, causing a person to typically feel as if he had died and been spiritually reborn as a brand new person in a brand new world that glows with bright colors and exudes an unconditional love. The person tends to examine the good and evil in past, present and future acts in this new light. And he often comes to believe that God’s spirit is and always has been within him and everyone else.

In addition, a person who has undergone ego death and spiritual rebirth typically comes to believe that he is immortal, and that he and everyone else is in some way an incarnation of God, or even God himself. Hence Wasson and several other ethnomycologists derived the now popular word entheogen for the A. muscaria and all similarly acting plants and chemicals by affixing the Greek root gen-, for making, to entheo-, the combining form of the Greek word for filled with God, entheos.

In Wasson’s mind, the A. muscaria was the prime candidate for the forbidden fruit for several reasons. First, ego death is very appropriately metaphorized as having one’s eyes opened to the very nature of good and evil, and to the recognition or illusion — depending, of course, on one’s viewpoint — that people are incarnations of God’s spirit, Gods Children, or even demigods. So when the serpent says to Adam and Eve in Genesis 3:5, "For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil," it seems probable that he was crediting the forbidden fruit with entheogenic characteristics.

Second, people have traditionally believed that eating even a single A. muscariae can cause death, despite the fact that deaths from A. muscaria ingestion are extremely rare. So, an ancient Hebrew taboo specifying that death would ensue after eating an A. muscaria is just as understandable as Adam’s and Eve’s failure to die after eating the forbidden fruit.

Third, A. muscariae are rhizophilic, in that they grow on or intimately associated with the roots of several tree species. In fact, inchoate in the very old, Ojibway Indian word miskwedo for the A. muscaria is the notion of a "tree mushroom."⁴ Accordingly, it would not have been all that strange if J, or the Allegory of The Fall’s prehistoric author, considered the A. muscaria a fruit.

Indeed, though Wasson failed to note it, the Biblical Hebrew word for the forbidden fruit, pere, referred broadly to products of the ground, as well as more narrowly to things we now consider fruits. So, pere could certainly have been used as a word for the A. muscaria in the Allegory of the Fall, in the allegory’s orally transmitted Hebrew prototype, or in both — especially since taboos have often been designed to obscure the nature of the tabooed item, rather than call attention to it.

If the A. muscaria was in fact the forbidden fruit, it would not be all that surprising that the Hebrew priests, who were the people responsible for coining, recording, protecting and disseminating the Allegory of the Fall, would have banned A. muscaria ingestion for several reasons. First, such priests would not have wanted the laity to ingest A. muscariae, because entheogen ingestion can be psychologically problematic — especially for the uninitiated — as we saw in the sixties and seventies when people were "freaking out" on entheogens.

Second, such priests would not have wanted the laity to ingest A. muscariae, because entheogen ingestion typically causes people to believe — rightly or wrongly — that they are communing directly with God, and that they do not need priests to mediate that communion. Obviously, these beliefs  would have been particularly threatening to Hebrew priests.

Third, people who ingest entheogens typically tend to question and often reject many of societies, customs, standards, religions and underlying principles, as we also saw in the sixties and seventies. So, the ingestion of entheogens by ancient Hebrews would have actually threatened the very fabric of their society.

It is even very possible that the Allegory of the Fall was coined by the herbalistic, shamanic ancestors of later Hebrew priests, who were themselves ingesting A. muscariae for religious reasons. In fact, the Scandinavian anthropologist Kai Donner reported at the turn-of-the century that among the Ostyak-Samoyed Eskimos, who were routinely ingesting A. muscaria for such reasons, "Those who are not, or are not going to be, shamans die from eating these mushrooms,"⁵ in a taboo that sounds remarkably like a variant of the one in Genesis 3. Similarly, the Finnish anthropologist Lehitslo reported that only those Samoyed shamans are familiar with the A. muscaria's origins can eat the mushrooms with "fortunate results" ..........................................