Great book
This book is a heavy read. There is so much in formation, with notes for every page. You will see how the ancient religions started of, praising the sky father for ejaculating his spermatozoa of rain onto the womb of mother earth so as to impregnate it and give life to everything. These beliefs led to mystery school teachings and fertility cults to secretly teach the knowledge of god. Later this and other true meanings were lost in story telling and myth creation.
The notes are about 1/4 of the book. Don't expect to breeze through the book. To more fully grasp the understanding Allegro has, you will need to learn at least the alphabet of Greek, Hebrew. The notes also contain Persian, Arabic and Latin. I learned the Greek and Hebrew alphabet, but I could not bear to understand the stylistic Arabic, far too difficult for me to read.
What would give an even greater understanding would be to know the languages mentioned above. When you can read the letters you can see how certain words are related from one language to the other, and how they have a common root, but to understand the words in their native language would be very valuable to understand the book as a whole.
The only problem is with the non-existent words that Allegro compiles. Allegro only does this with Sumerian, which he uses as the backbone root for all languages, as Sumerian is the first recorded language with cuniform. The Sumerian tablets do not contain all vernacular of the language since they were mostly only business tablets and such. So he uses words that exist and compounds them together to form new words. This is a valid way of making new words, as all languages have words within words to make up a new meaning that can be based on the root of the old meaning. It is just that sometimes, since I don't know the definitions of Sumerian words, it is hard to follow how compounds can become a new meaning. This is my only problem with the book, the Sumerian compound words.
I would recommend this book for anyone interested at getting to the roots of the mythical Bible and how it was written. Very well written and informative. I read 'The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth' afterwards, but I would recommend that lighter reading before Sacred Mushroom to get a generally lighter overview of aspects of the dead sea scrolls, then follow it with the analysis of Sacred Mushroom. I also recommend books by Thomas L. Thompson.
