hercolano3.blogspot.com/2012/10/john-allegro-sacred-mushroom-and-cross...
Philologically, also, the cherub-griffin is related to the fungus. The names in Indo-European and Semitic go back to another “pod-” or “womb-” word, *GtJIUB, similar in meaning to the source of the name of the well-known pod-plant, the Carob.’5 It was this Carob that supplied the horn- or uterus-shaped pods eaten by the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:16).
Pliny described them as “not longer than a man’s finger, occasionally curved like a sickle, with the thickness of a man’s thumb”.16 The name had another reference in the ancient world, however. The Acadian botanists use the same Semitic word for Carob to describe the Sumerian “Seed—of—life” plant, the mushroom.17...
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There were, of course, edible locusts known in those times, but popular tradition fancied the Carob as the most likely reference of the text, and today the Ceratonia Siliqua is known as “St John’s Bread”.22 Unfortunately, this Carob is not a desert plant, so discussion on the identity of the “locust” has continued unabated. In fact it now seems much more likely that the source of the reference is another word—play between the Semitic gobay, guba’, “edible locust”, and gab’a, “mushroom”.
The similarity is not accidental: both come from a Sumerian root, GUG, “pod”, the locust reference being to the larva of the insect, the mushroom’s to the volva from which it develops.23 Even the popular designation of the Carob as “St John’s Bread” is not all that removed from the truth, since the Carob, as we have seen, shared at least in ancient Accadian the same name as the mushroom.24
No story in the New Testament has so gripped the imagination of authors, artists, opera librettists, and others than that of the death of John the Baptist at the instigation of a jealous woman:
But when Herod heard of it he said, “John, whom I beheaded, has been raised.” For Herod had sent and seized John, and bound him in prison for the sake of Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife; because he had married her. For John said to Herod, “It is not lawful for you to have your brother’s wife.” And Herodias had a grudge against him, and wanted to kill him.
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