John Allegro Quotes

And looks commercing with the skies, Thy rapt soul sitting in thine eyes.

Where glowing embers through the room Teach light to counterfeit a gloom...

Or bid the soul of Orpheus sing Such notes as warbled to the string, Drew Iron tears down Pluto’s cheek, And made Hell grant what Love did seek.

Thousands of years before Christianity, secret cults arose which worshipped the sacred mushroom—the Amanita Muscaria—which, for various reasons (including its shape and power as a drug) came to be regarded as a symbol of God on earth. When the secrets of the cult had to be written down, it was done in the form of codes hidden in folk tales. This is the basic origin of the stories in the New Testament. They are a literary device to spread the rites and rules of mushroom worship to the faithful.

But it is difficult to believe that the "pot"-smokers of today, the weary dotards who wander listlessly round our cities and universities, are the spiritual successors of those drug-crazed enthusiasts who, regardless their safety, stormed castles and stole as assassins into the strongholds of their enemies.

the opium-eater cannot present himself in the character of l'Allegro: even then, he speaks and thinks as becomes Il Penseroso.

Valentine’s concept of introversion includes traits that contemporary psychology would classify as openness to experience (“thinker, dreamer”), conscientiousness (“idealist”), and neuroticism (“shy individual”). A long line of poets, scientists, and philosophers have also tended to group these traits together. All the way back in Genesis, the earliest book of the Bible, we had cerebral Jacob (a “quiet man dwelling in tents” who later becomes “Israel,” meaning one who wrestles inwardly with God) squaring off in sibling rivalry with his brother, the swashbuckling Esau (a “skillful hunter” and “man of the field”). In classical antiquity, the physicians Hippocrates and Galen famously proposed that our temperaments—and destinies—were a function of our bodily fluids, with extra blood and “yellow bile” making us sanguine or choleric (stable or neurotic extroversion), and an excess of phlegm and “black bile” making us calm or melancholic (stable or neurotic introversion). Aristotle noted that the melancholic temperament was associated with eminence in philosophy, poetry, and the arts (today we might classify this as opennessto experience). The seventeenth-century English poet John Milton wrote Il Penseroso (“The Thinker”) and L’Allegro (“The Merry One”), comparing “the happy person” who frolics in the countryside and revels in the city with “the thoughtful person” who walks meditatively through the nighttime woods and studies in a “lonely Towr.” (Again, today the description of Il Penseroso would apply not only to introversion but also to openness to experience and neuroticism.) The nineteenth-century German philosopher Schopenhauer contrasted “good-spirited” people (energetic, active, and easily bored) with his preferred type, “intelligent people” (sensitive, imaginative, and melancholic). “Mark this well, ye proud men of action!” declared his countryman Heinrich Heine. “Ye are, after all, nothing but unconscious instruments of the men of thought.” Because of this definitional complexity, I originally planned to invent my own terms for these constellations of traits. I decided against this, again for cultural reasons: the words introvert and extrovert have the advantage of being well known and highly evocative. Every time I uttered them at a dinner party or to a seatmate on an airplane, they elicited a torrent of confessions and reflections. For similar reasons, I’ve used the layperson’s spelling of extrovert rather than the extravert one finds throughout the research literature.

According to philologist John Allegro in his speculative The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, these links between eros and religion also link back to mind drugs – specifically, to the phallic-looking amanita muscaria mushroom, whose effects are similar to belladonna’s, and which is still used for magic purposes by Siberian shamans. Moreover, according to Allegro’s hypothesis, it was worshipped as a god throughout Europe and Asia in the late Stone Age.

A written word is more than a symbol: it is an expression of an idea. To penetrate to its inner meaning is to look into the mind of the man who wrote it.

And with thee is Wisdom, which knoweth thy works, and was present when thou wast making the world,

British car strikes reduce production of Austin Allegros and Morris Marinas. Rest of world copes.