On John M. Allegro’s Suggestion That the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the 12th Century Plaincourault Chapel Depicts an Amanita muscaria Mushroom
Religions October 29, 2025 Ronald V. Huggins
John Marco Allegro's 1970 book The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross argued that a 12th-century fresco in Plaincourault Chapel, France, depicting the Fall of Adam and Eve, shows a mushroom-like Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, evidence of a clandestine psychedelic mushroom sect persisting in Christian Europe since New Testament times. A small group of writers, led by Carl A. P. Ruck, later sought to validate this theory by finding other examples of psychedelic mushrooms in early Christian and medieval art. This article examines these claims, focusing on the Plaincourault tree and similar images, and concludes that the arguments fail because they overpress similarities while ignoring differences.