Halos Were Inspired By Magic Mushrooms - Joe Rogan

Spirituality is a weird word. What does that mean? It's a very taboo word. It's a very abused word. It's abused, for sure. I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual. You know, that kind of shit. Yeah, yeah. That's where it gets weird. Yeah, I don't like that at all. You know, when I speak about spirituality, I'm speaking about something that really can't be put in the words. It's unfathomable. You know, our language isn't designed to talk about this stuff. Mm-hmm. You know, when we look at Orwell and Newspeak, there's certain words that don't exist for this stuff. You'd have to use an ancient language, and even an ancient language, you try to translate to English, it's like, we don't have a word for this. You ever had to... You don't see anything like that. Like ancient Hebrew, when they try to translate things. Right. Ancient Hebrew, all the numbers were actually... All the letters were actually numbers as well. Correct, correct. Yeah. Do you know when you talk about halos, that the original halo was a mushroom cap? A what? Yeah. A mushroom cap. Oh, you're talking about... Okay, I got you. The original halo was... Well, there's a book called The Sacred Mushroom in the Cross. It's by John Marco Allegro, and he was a biblical scholar that was one of the guys that was assigned to decipher the Dead Sea Scrolls, which is the oldest version of the Bible. Yes. The only one I think that they've ever found, it's written in Aramaic, and it was found in Qumran and these clay jars, that's all written on animal skins to decipher it. They actually had to run DNA tests on the animal skins to figure out which skins belong to which animals, so they could put all the stuff together to figure out all these pieces were a part of this one scroll. Yeah. Well, this guy John Marco Allegro studied it for 14 years, and it was his conclusion after he was done that the entire Christian religion was a giant misunderstanding. And what it was originally about was the consumption of psychedelic mushrooms and fertility rituals. And they started doing all of these, like these different scholars who studied ancient art and ancient religious art, they started finding this mushroom iconography and all this ancient artwork. And one of the things they noticed is that the bottom of a mushroom, we could take particularly the Amanita Muscaria mushroom, which is the one that they connect to the Christian religion. Look at the bottom of it and see what it looks like with all those lines. Now look at that. That was the original halo. Okay. If you see that picture with Jesus, with the halo around his head, the halo was essentially the bottom of a mushroom cap. And the idea, they believe, was that these people were the ones that were consuming the psychedelic mushrooms, so they had this great wisdom and this connection to God. That's what they thought manna was, that they thought these psychedelic mushrooms were the flesh of God. I liked that. Yeah. And so that when you have these ancient religions that were possibly based on the consumption of these psychedelic mushrooms, all that stuff has kind of been lost in the translation over years and years and years, and then even the visualization of the halos changed. Yeah. And there's also some really crazy ones of naked people dancing in ecstasy, surrounded by this translucent mushroom image. So the idea that they were in these mushroom-induced, euphoric states, and that they were dancing around, all these religious depictions. Yeah. Very interesting. Because if you think about ancient religions, right, no science, they had no idea what shape the world was, they didn't know anything. But they did know if you found these mushrooms and you took them, you'd trip your fucking balls off, and you would have this incredible experience. And they thought that was God, that was their connection to God. You know, so there's... That's interesting. Yeah. It's a great book, and the Catholic Church actually bought it out, and they got rid of it. And then you could only buy used copies of it, but then it was republished recently over the last few years, someone got the rights to it. Mm. Yeah. That's interesting. It's intense stuff. Yeah, I like that conversation. Yeah. That's sexy. Yeah. You know, anything that goes away from the norm, I think is real sexy. I need to be talked about.