This article is prompted by Chris Bennett’s recent article criticizing Jerry Brown and Julie Brown’s The Psychedelic Gospels. Here I will use Bennett’s article as a launching point to draw attention to certain dynamics in the field of historical psychedelics research (or “entheogen” scholarship) that are not discussed enough and are blocking progress in the field. In particular, I will discuss the problematic place in the field of John Marco Allegro’s The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross and the need to properly contextualize that book the field’s ensnarement in a literal understanding of “secrecy” or “mystery”; the need for a thoroughgoing reflection on the nature and meaning of “secrecy” and “mystery” the need to recognize pre-modern figural art, literary texts, myth, and ritual as complex, multi-valent media characterized by metaphoricity, allusion, punning, and double-entendre, rather than literalist, photorealistic representations of just one thing the need for generosity and charitability in intra-disciplinary criticism, though not at the expense of serious, no-nonsense critique; the need to keep the field focused on ideas, not personalities.