Ye Shall Know Them by Their Fruits

The Magical Rise of Christianity

Introduction

Early Christianity was nothing if not magical. That might surprise modern Christians who recall the Catholic Church heavily persecuting magical arts like witchcraft or alchemy. St. Augustine wrote, “demons are the authors and fabricators of magical arts”. But before Augustine, Christianity stood in magical opposition to the sober Roman authorities. Early Christians read from magic books, waved magic wands, and brewed magic potions; they presented a magical challenge to the sober Roman authorities.

Magic Books

One of the primary weapons used by early Christians in their spiritual conquest of the Roman Empire was the bound book. The book was invented around the same time as the inauguration of Augustus and the birth of Jesus.

Before the advent of bound books, writing was done on scrolls. The innovation of the book was slicing these scrolls into numbered pages and then adding a Table of Contents, allowing readers to skip directly to any section of the text without having to parse the entire scroll. The ability to instantly jump to any chapter and verse made scriptural references instantaneous, and having a reference text in common unified Christians scattered across an Empire.

That reference text was the Bible. This book is still often treated as a sacred object, even by perfectly secular people when they swear on it in court. Modern Christians, in liturgical practice, ritualistically elevate, kiss, and treat the Bible as a magical object imbued with power.

Magical books are also a traditional accessory of witches and wizards; some of the books in the Harry Potter universe are sentient enough to bite. Books are every bit as connected to modern conceptions of magic as they are to Christianity.

Magic Wands

The Hypogeum of the Aurelii is a 3rd-century underground burial chamber in Rome. Because this archaeological site was not discovered until modern times, some remarkable frescoes are well-preserved within.

One fresco depicts a man surrounded by 12 other individuals, dramatically holding a cup aloft over his head. Some experts believe this is the oldest depiction of the Last Supper. “Whenever twelve people belly up to a sacred dinner,” wrote Brian Murasesku in his 2020 book The Immortality Key, “ and start drinking sacramental wine in a tomb under the Vatican’s exclusive authority, what else are we supposed to think?”

Another fresco on the ceiling of the Hypogeum of the Aurelii serves as the title card for this essay. It depicts individuals holding long sticks that resemble the wands associated with our modern conception of magic. These wands are a holdover from the cult of Dionysus, who traditionally carried a thyrsus wand, tipped with a pinecone.

Early Christianity borrowed much symbology from the cult of Dionysus, which had unsuccessfully challenged Roman authority two hundred years before Christianity followed in its footsteps. Early Christians utilized existing symbols to make Christianity more comprehensible to potential new converts. Thanks, in no small part, to their bound books, the Christian challenge to power proved much more effective than its Dionysian predecessor.

Magic Potions

Magic wands were far from the only trapping of anti-authoritarian Dionysus worship adopted by early Christians. The pinecone on the end of Dionysus’ wand was supposed to have been used to mix up the psychedelic wine that was the focal point of that cult. Mixing ingredients to induce altered states of mind also evokes the potions we associate with magical lore. At the same time, non-spiked wine remains a focal point of the Christian communion to this day.

References to psychoactive ingredients abound in Christianity. Dr. Jerry B. Brown and his wife, Julie M. Brown, published their remarkable book The Psychedelic Gospels in 2016. They provide numerous photographs of Medieval Christian artwork in which Jesus is portrayed as a mushroom. The Browns suggest the Church’s psychedelic origins were not controversial until the time of the Inquisition.

“Roman authorities frequently accused Christians of practicing sorcery through the use of hallucinogens,” wrote the Browns. “In addition, Irenaeus (130–200), the bishop of Lyon, argued that only the heretical churches, including the Gnostic churches, made use of hallucinogens in their secret rites. However, with the coming of the Inquisition, we see a dramatic decline in entheogenic images in Christian art after the High Middle Ages (1000–1200).”

A detail from the aforementioned Hypogeum of the Aurelii depicts a figure holding a magic wand and standing on an unmistakable, mushroom-like pattern.

In 1970, Dead Sea Scrolls scholar John Marco Allegro published a controversial book entitled The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, in which he presented a careful linguistic argument that the story of the New Testament is a veiled allegory for a specific species of magic mushroom. He suggested that the authors of that document referred to mushrooms allegorically to prevent the Roman authorities from cracking down on them.

Allegro implied that Bible passages like Matthew 7:16, “Ye shall know them by their fruits”, refer to literal fruit in the form of a mushroom. That verse is a warning against following false prophets. A true prophet, in this sense, might mean a hallucinogenic mushroom as opposed to a conventional one.

Debt Forgiveness

The warning against false prophets is part of the renowned Sermon on the Mount, the most frequently quoted text in the New Testament. It spans chapters 5-7 of the Gospel of Matthew, and chapter 6 contains the Lord’s Prayer. Verse 12 is rendered in the King James Bible as, “And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.”

Psychedelic drug use promotes the idea that reality is an illusion. The wealthy want their employees to show up and generate revenue for them without asking too many questions. But people who believe their job is illusory tend not to make very reliable workers. Those substances present an economic inconvenience to the wealthy elite of any society.

Debt forgiveness, too, presents an economic inconvenience to the wealthy. Forgiving debts means a transfer of wealth from rich to poor, as the rich write off debts they previously expected to collect. Fortunately for Rome’s wealthy oligarchy, St. Augustine reinterpreted forgiveness to mean forgiveness for sexual misdeeds, rather than financial forgiveness.

Eventually, during the Middle Ages, the Church began charging people for the remission of sins with the infamous Sale of Indulgences. Early Christianity sought to redistribute wealth away from the rich with broad debt forgiveness. But after Christianity found itself in a position of authority, it switched sides and instead recommended that the poor donate what little money they had to the fabulously wealthy Church.

Conclusion

Christianity began as a magical challenge to the Roman economic hierarchy. But after it was adopted as the state religion of the Roman Empire, it became the very thing it had once rebelled against: the establishment. During the Middle Ages, the Church distanced itself from its magical origins and started persecuting magical challenges to its authority. Just as the Roman authorities threw Christians to the lions in the Colosseum, the medieval Christian authorities burned witches alive and tortured heretics in the dungeons of the Inquisition.

Further Materials

As the presence of psychoactive mushroom images in Aquileia indicates, we know that early Christians consumed hallucinogens. This is confirmed by historical documents as well. Roman authorities frequently accused Christians of practicing sorcery through the use of hallucinogens. In addition, Irenaeus (130–200), the bishop of Lyon, argued that only the heretical churches, including the Gnostic churches, made use of hallucinogens in their secret rites. However, with the coming of the Inquisition, we see a dramatic decline in entheogenic images in Christian art after the High Middle Ages (1000–1200). This is understandable, as the influence of the Inquisition expanded across Europe, receiving formal sanction for wider witch hunts in the fifteenth century when Pope Innocent VIII issued a papal bull (Summis desiderantes affectibus, 1484) authorizing the “correcting, imprisoning, punishing, and chastising” of devil worshippers. He did so at the urging of Inquisitors Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, who published the notorious Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches), which became highly influential in secular witchcraft trials.
Jerry B. Brown, Julie M. Brown, The Psychedelic Gospels: The Secret History of Hallucinogens in Christianity, 2016, page 179