Moses with stone tabletsSo claims Israeli professor Benny Shanon, who could never understand the Old Testament account of Moses receiving the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai.  Then, suddenly, it all made sense.

"And all the people perceived the thunderings, and the lightnings, and the voice of the horn, and the mountain smoking." Thus the book of Exodus describes the impressive moment of the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai.

The "perceiving of the voices" has been interpreted endlessly since these words were first written. When Professor Benny Shanon, professor of cognitive psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, reads the verse, he recalls a powerful hallucinatory experience he had when he visited the Amazon and drank a potion made from a plant called ayahuasca. "One of the things that happens when you drink the potion is a visual experience created via sounds," he says.

Of course!  How could any rational person doubt such a compelling argument?

Shanon, former head of the Hebrew University psychology department, said his first experience with ayahuasca was in 1991 when he was invited to a religious ceremony in the northern Amazon in 1991 in Brazil. "I experienced visions that had spiritual-religious connotations," he says. Since that time, he has used it hundreds of times, and has published a book about the plant.

Do you suppose this guy is allowing his personal experiences to influence his reading of the Bible?  Nah!  A psychology professor would never do that.

Anyway, that is not exactly a novel idea.  Back in 1970, John Allegro hypothesised that the New Testament was written by aficionados of “the cult of the phallic mushroom” and that “Jesus” was a code name for the mushroom.  Prof Allegro also claimed that Moses (meaning “emergent snake”) was another myth having something to do with mushroom worship.

By comparison, Prof Shanon’s hypothesis seems almost sane sober down-to-earth, but I doubt it will prove any more persuasive.