Cannibalistic Christianity: former Rockford, IL scholar serves up psychedelic food for thought.

Cover of Earl Lee's pamphlet

After publishing the first article on former Rockford native freethinker, Earl Lee, a pamphlet he authored entitled “Among the Cannibal Christians,” from See Sharp Press in Tuscon, AZ, 1999, arrived in the mail. The 32-page essay details a series of astonishing theories:

• Religions featuring the resurrection motif often share common features, possibly derived from the use of a similar “sacred plant.”
• Ritual cannibalism forms the formative heart of these religious types, including Christianity.
• The true origins of Christianity were suppressed, and symbolic substitutions made to its central rituals, i.e., wine and the Eucharist.
• Corpses were placed in tombs, boxes, etc., to form part of the growth medium of the sacred plant, the belief being that memories and sacred experiences of the deceased could be consumed and likewise passed on and experienced by the devotees, through ingesting the plant in solid and liquid forms.

In a pamphlet-sized tome, such assertions can only be briefly “fleshed” out, and Earl wrote via email that a comprehensive account is due, hopefully, by November of 2009. The new book, a product of “about twenty years” of research will be available via Earl’s amazon.com page, so far entitled Cannibal Christians: The Origins of Religion in Human Sacrifice and Ritual Cannibalism.

Possible candidate for a "sacred mushroom" stock photo

Now, as the author himself points out, the theory of religious origins derived from psychedelic experiences is not new, and he points out a few himself: notably the now infamous Dead Sea Scrolls scholar John Allegro’s book The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross (1970), perhaps ironically noting that Allegro had his career basically “destroyed” by doing so. What is new from Earl Lee’s perspective hinges on whether or not there is a scientific basis for the claims that somehow the actual memories of the deceased are mediated by the psychotropes and find their way into the brain of the initiate just by eating the plant. So far, research has not turned up vegetables or fungi that are specific to growth upon human bodies, or any that are inherently psychotropic.

John Allego's famous book.

Most Higher Critics would point out that all apparent religious cannibalism is very far removed from the days of actual consumption of human flesh, despite the apparent correspondences, a point Earl Lee concedes, but his own twist is that there was a suppressed stage in the process, and the conspirators were the early orthodox Christians in the case under examination. The awful secret that must be entombed forever beneath actions of deliberate destruction and “spin” placed upon the early writings of the Church Fathers is that before everything became symbolic, real chemically-induced “spiritual” trips were the catalysts that propelled Christianity to speedy acceptance within the Roman world.