Upon the book's release, Allegro was effectively blacklisted from academia. Fourteen of his colleagues signed a letter to The Times denouncing his theories. The backlash was so severe that it overshadowed his legitimate work on the Dead Sea Scrolls for decades. 2. The Birth of Ethnomycology
Despite its academic dismissal, the book has experienced a resurgence in popular and "entheogenic" (psychedelic medicine) circles:
The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross , published in 1970 by philologist John Marco Allegro
: Allegro claims Jesus was not a historical person but a code name for the sacred fungus.