The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross: A Study of the Nature and Origins of Christianity within the Fertility Cults of the Ancient Near East

John M. Allegro's The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, Hodder and Stoughton, 1970, is cited here as the flagship primary statement of the thesis this atlas records as rejected by mainstream scholarship, not as a reliable account of Christian origins. Its strength, such as it is, is that it is the actual source of the specific claim, useful for stating what the theory holds in its own author's words. Its limit is substantial: Allegro's philological arguments for a mushroom cult origin of Christianity were rejected by his own academic peers on publication and have not gained scholarly acceptance since; it is read here as the primary statement of a fringe position, not as evidence for it.