So in the mountains and forests from Greece to Rome, including the Holy Land and Galilee. The long and short of it is, in 1978 there was no hard scientific data to prove this one way or the other. Copyright 2023 President and Fellows of Harvard College. I might forward the proposition that I don't think the early church fathers were the best botanists. So we move now into ancient history, but solidly into the historical record, however uneven that historical record is. I wish the church fathers were better botanists and would rail against the specific pharmacopeia. It was it was barley, water, and something else. BRIAN MURARESKU: It just happens to show up. So, although, I mean, and that actually, I'd like to come back to that, the notion of the, that not just the pagan continuity hypothesis, but the mystery continuity hypothesis through the Vatican. Maybe I have that wrong. Research inside the Church of Saint Faustina and Liberata Fig 1. And it was the Jesuits who encouraged me to always, always ask questions and never take anything at face value. Is this only Marcus? He's joining us from Uruguay, where he has wisely chosen to spend his pandemic isolation. I'd never thought before about how Christianity developed as an organized religion in the centuries after Jesus' murder. And when I read psychedelic literature or I read the literature on near-death experiences, I see experiences similar to what I experienced as a young boy. I do the same thing in the afterword at the very end of the book, where it's lots of, here's what we know. In this hypothesis, both widely accepted and widely criticized,11 'American' was synonymous with 'North American'. And I don't know if there's other examples of such things. It was the Jesuits who taught me Latin and Greek. So, I mean, my biggest question behind all of this is, as a good Catholic boy, is the Eucharist. And so that's what motivated my search here. Up until that point I really had very little knowledge of psychedelics, personal or literary or otherwise. After the first few chapters the author bogs down flogging the Pagan Continuity Hypothesis and exulting over his discovery of small scraps of evidence he found in a decade of research. He calls it a drug against grief in Greek, [SPEAKING GREEK]. Then I see the mysteries of Dionysus as kind of the Burning Man or the Woodstock of the ancient world. And I think we're getting there. So the big question is, what kind of drug was this, if it was a drug? I know that's another loaded phrase. Find ratings and reviews for the newest movie and TV shows. Here's the big question. Brendon Benz presents an alternative hypothesis to recent scholarship which has hypothesized that Israel consisted of geographical, economic . So how exactly is this evidence of something relevant to Christianity in Rome or southern Italy more widely? At Cambridge University he worked in developmental biolo. When there's a clear tonal distinction, and an existing precedent for Christian modification to Pagan works, I don't see why you're resistant to the idea, and I'm curious . Copyright 2023 The President and Fellows of Harvard College, The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name. And we had a great chat, a very spirited chat about the mysteries and the psychedelic hypothesis. You also find a Greek hearth inside this sanctuary. Hard archaeobotanical, archaeochemical data, I haven't seen it. I'm going to stop asking my questions, although I have a million more, as you well know, and instead try to ventriloquist the questions that are coming through at quite a clip through the Q&A. Are they rolling their eyes, or are you getting sort of secretive knowing nods of agreement? So thank you, all who have hung with us. Brought to you by BRIAN MURARESKU: I would say I've definitely experienced the power of the Christ and the Holy Spirit. So it's hard for me to write this and talk about this without acknowledging the Jesuits who put me here. It is my great pleasure to welcome Brian Muraresku to the Center. 40:15 Witches, drugs, and the Catholic Church . If your history is even remotely correct, that would have ushered in a very different church, if Valentinus's own student Marcus and the Marcosians were involved in psychedelic rituals, then that was an early road not taken, let's say. And if it's one thing Catholicism does very, very well, it's contemplative mysticism. These were Greek-- I've seen them referred to as Greek Vikings by Peter Kingsley, Vikings who came from Ionia. Something else I include at the end of my book is that I don't think that whatever this was, this big if about a psychedelic Eucharist, I don't think this was a majority of the paleo-Christians. What was being thrown into it? . So I point to that evidence as illustrative of the possibility that the Christians could, in fact, have gotten their hands on an actual wine. CHARLES STANG: All right. And there were moments when the sunlight would just break through. And that's what I get into in detail in the book. That is my dog Xena. We don't have to look very hard to find that. So I'm trying to build the case-- and for some reason in my research, it kept coming back to Italy and Rome, which is why I focus on Hippolytus. According to Muraresku, this work, which "presents the pagan continuity hypothesis with a psychedelic twist," addresses two fundamental questions: "Before the rise of Christianity, did the Ancient Greeks consume a secret psychedelic sacrament during their most famous and well-attended religious rituals? Now are there any other questions you wish to propose or push or-- I don't know, to push back against any of the criticisms or questions I've leveled? They followed Platonic (and other Greeks) philosophy. But in Pompeii, for example, there's the villa of the mysteries, one of these really breathtaking finds that also survived the ravage of Mount Vesuvius. I'm currently reading The Immortality Key by Brian Muraresku and find this 2nd/3rd/4th century AD time period very interesting, particularly with regards to the adoptions of pagan rituals and practices by early Christianity. So that, actually, is the key to the immortality key. Amongst all the mystery religions, Eleusis survives. McGovern also finds wine from Egypt, for example, in 3150 BC, wine that is mixed with a number of interesting ingredients. For me, that's a question, and it will yield more questions. Where you find the grain, you may have found ergot. I think it's important you have made a distinction between what was Jesus doing at the Last Supper, as if we could ever find out. #646: Brian C. Muraresku with Dr. Mark Plotkin The Eleusinian Mysteries, Discovering the Divine, The Immortality Key, The Pagan Continuity Hypothesis, Lessons from Scholar Karen Armstrong, and Much More from The Tim Ferriss Show on Podchaser, aired Wednesday, 28th December 2022. And I'll just list them out quickly. And what does this earliest history tell us about the earliest evidence for an ancient psychedelic religion? And I did not dare. So. When Irenaeus is talking about [SPEAKING GREEK], love potions, again, we have no idea what the hell he's talking about. So frankly, what happens during the Neolithic, we don't know, at least from a scientific vantage. But the point being, if the Dionysian wine was psychedelic-- which I know is a big if-- I think the more important thing to show here in this pagan continuity hypothesis is that it's at least plausible that the earliest Christians would have at the very least read the Gospel of John and interpreted that paleo-Christian Eucharistic wine, in some communities, as a kind of Dionysian wine. And that the proof of concept idea is that we need to-- we, meaning historians of the ancient world, need to bring all the kinds of resources to bear on this to get better evidence and an interpretive frame for making sense of it. I mean, this really goes to my deep skepticism. But if the original Eucharist were psychedelic, or even if there were significant numbers of early Christians using psychedelics like sacrament, I would expect the representatives of orthodox, institutional Christianity to rail against it. And so in some of these psychedelic trials, under the right conditions, I do see genuine religious experiences. President and CEO, First Southeast Financial Corp and First Federal Savings and Loan Director, Carolina First Bank and The South Financial Group And even in the New Testament, you'll see wine spiked with myrrh, for example, that's served to Jesus at his crucifixion. I'm trying to get him to speak in the series about that. I will ask Brian to describe how he came to write this remarkable book, and the years of sleuthing and studying that went into it. But by and large, no, we don't really know. The continuity between pagan and Christian cult nearby the archaeological area of Naquane in Capo di Ponte. CHARLES STANG: Brian, I wonder if you could end by reflecting on the meaning of dying before you die. And that's all I present it as, is wonderfully attractive and maybe even sexy circumstantial evidence for the potential use of a psychedelic sacrament amongst the earliest Christians. So psychedelics or not, I think it's the cultivation of that experience, which is the actual key. 7:30 The three pillars to the work: the Eucharist as a continuation of the pharmako and Dionysian mysteries; the Pagan continuity theory; and the idea that through the mysteries "We can die before we die so that when we die we do not die" 13:00 What does "blood of Christ" actually mean; the implied and literal cannibalism 32:57 Ancient languages and Brian's education . Part 1 Brian C. Muraresku: The Eleusinian Mysteries, Discovering the Divine, The Immortality Key, The Pagan Continuity Hypothesis and the Hallucinogenic Origins of Religion - Feb 22, 2023 If we're being honest with ourselves, when you've drunk-- and I've drunk that wine-- I didn't necessarily feel that I'd become one with Jesus. And another: in defending the pagan continuity hypothesis, Muraresku presumes a somewhat non-Jewish, pagan-like Jesus, while ignoring the growing body of psychedelic literature, including works by . Then what was the Gospel of John, how did it interpret the Eucharist and market it, and so on. Maybe I'm afraid I'll take the psychedelic and I won't have what is reported in the literature from Hopkins and NYU. It was one of the early write-ups of the psilocybin studies coming out of Johns Hopkins. Whether there's a psychedelic tradition-- I mean, there are some suggestive paintings. What Brian labels the religion with no name. So I think it's really interesting details here worth following up on. Now we're getting somewhere. These are famous figures to those of us who study early Christianity. He was wronged by individuals, allegedly. And not least because if I were to do it, I'd like to do so in a deeply sacred ritual. I imagine there are many more potion makers around than we typically recognize. Dogs, indicative of the Greek goddess Hecate, who, amongst other things was known as the [GREEK], the dog eater. Again, it's proof of concept for going back to Eleusis and going back to other sites around the Mediterranean and continuing to test, whether for ergotized beer or other things. There was an absence of continuity in the direction of the colony as Newport made his frequent voyages to and . Church of the Saints Faustina and Liberata, view from the outside with the entrance enclosure, at "Sante" place, Capo di Ponte (Italy). But what I see are potential and possibilities and things worthy of discussions like this. Others would argue that they are perfectly legal sacraments, at least in the Native American church with the use of peyote, or in the UDV or Santo Daime, I mean, ayahuasca does work in some syncretic Christian form, right? And I think there are so many sites and excavations and so many chalices that remain to be tested. CHARLES STANG: So that actually helps answer a question that's in the Q&A that was posed to me, which is why did I say I fully expect that we will find evidence for this? CHARLES STANG: All right. What I see is data that's been largely neglected, and I think what serves this as a discipline is just that. Again, if you're attracted to psychedelics, it's kind of an extreme thing, right? And maybe in these near-death experiences we begin to actually experience that at a visceral level. So there's a house preserved outside of Pompeii, preserved, like so much else, under the ash of Mount Vesuvius's eruption in the year 79 of the Common Era. Maybe there's a spark of the divine within. They did not. And I want to say that this question that we've been exploring the last half hour about what all this means for the present will be very much the topic of our next event on February 22, which is taking up the question of psychedelic chaplaincy. To sum up the most exciting parts of the book: the bloody wine of Dionysius became the bloody wine of Jesus - the pagan continuity hypothesis - the link between the Ancient Greeks of the final centuries BC and the paleo-Christians of the early centuries AD - in short, the default psychedelic of universal world history - the cult of . I wish that an ancient pharmacy had been preserved by Mount Vesuvius somewhere near Alexandria or even in upper Egypt or in Antioch or parts of Turkey. Little attempt has been made, however, to bridge the gap between \"pagan\" and \"Christian\" or to examine late antique, Christian attitudes toward sexuality and marriage from the viewpoint of the \"average\" Christian. We know from the literature hundreds of years beforehand that in Elis, for example, in the Western Peloponnese, on the same Epiphany-type timeline, January 5, January 6, the priests would walk into the temple of Dionysus, leave three basins of water, the next morning they're miraculously transformed into wine. This discussion on Febrary 1, 2021, between CSWR Director Charles Stang and Brian Muraresku about his new book, The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name,a groundbreaking dive into the role of psychedelics in the ancient Mediterranean world. So I think this was a minority of early Christians. Like in a retreat pilgrimage type center, or maybe within palliative care. Let's move to early Christian. It's not just Cana. And all we know-- I mean, we can't decipher sequence by sequence what was happening. There is evidence that has been either overlooked or perhaps intentionally suppressed. General Stanley McChrystal Mastering Risk: A User's Guide | Brought to you by Kettle & Fire high quality, tasty, and conveniently packaged bone broths; Eight Sleep. Throughout his five books he talks about wine being mixed with all kinds of stuff, like frankincense and myrrh, relatively innocuous stuff, but also less innocuous things like henbane and mandrake, these solanaceous plants which he specifically says is fatal. Thank you, sir. So there's a whole slew of sites I want to test there. And I hear-- I sense that narrative in your book. So welcome to the fourth event in our yearlong series on psychedelics and the future of religion, co-sponsored by the Esalen Institute, the Riverstyx Foundation, and the Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines. What about Jesus as a Jew? That also only occurs in John, another epithet of Dionysus. BRIAN MURARESKU: Right. The actual key that I found time and again in looking at this literature and the data is what seems to be happening here is the cultivation of a near-death experience. [1] According to this theory, older adults try to maintain this continuity of lifestyle by adapting strategies that are connected to their past experiences. Well, let's get into it then. So here's a question for you. Now, what's curious about this is we usually have-- Egypt plays a rather outsized role in our sense of early Christianity because-- and other adjacent or contemporary religious and philosophical movements, because everything in Egypt is preserved better than anywhere else in the Mediterranean. So, you know, I specifically wanted to avoid heavily relying on the 52 books of the [INAUDIBLE] corpus or heavily relying too much on the Gospel of Mary Magdalene and the evidence that's come from Egypt. I mean, something of symbolic significance, something monumental. What does ergotized beer in Catalonia have anything to do with the Greek mysteries at Eleusis? Reviewed in the United States on January 29, 2023 And there are legitimate scholars out there who say, because John wanted to paint Jesus in the light of Dionysus, present him as the second coming of this pagan God. Please materialize. I opened the speculation, Dr. Stang, that the Holy Grail itself could have been some kind of spiked concoction. And so for me, this was a hunt through the catacombs and archives and libraries, doing my sweet-talking, and trying to figure out what was behind some of those locked doors. You take a board corporate finance attorney, you add in lots of childhood hours watching Indiana Jones, lots of law school hours reading Dan Brown, you put it all together and out pops The Immortality Key. So let's talk about the future of religion, and specifically the future of Roman Catholicism. And let's start with our earliest evidence from the Stone Age and the Bronze Age. Which, again, what I see are small groups of people getting together to commune with the dead. And I'm happy to see we have over 800 people present for this conversation. If you die before you die, you won't die when you die. But please do know that we will forward all these questions to Brian so he will know the sorts of questions his work prompts. And I describe that as somehow finding that key to immortality. These-- that-- Christians are spread out throughout the eastern Mediterranean, and there are many, many pockets of people practicing what we might call, let's just call it Christian mysticism of some kind. So back in 2012, archaeologists and chemists were scraping some of these giant limestone troughs, and out pops calcium oxalate, which is one of these biomarkers for the fermentation of brewing. The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Brian C. Muraresku with Dr. Mark Plotkin The Eleusinian Mysteries, Discovering the Divine, The Immortality Key, The Pagan Continuity Hypothesis, Lessons from Scholar Karen Armstrong, and Much More (#646) - The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss 3 Annual "Best of" Apple Podcasts 900+ Million episodes downloaded But when it comes to that Sunday ritual, it just, whatever is happening today, it seems different from what may have motivated the earliest Christians, which leads me to very big questions. And by the way, I'm not here trying to protect Christianity from the evidence of psychedelic use. They're mixing potions. A lot of Christianity, as you rightly point out, I mean, it was an Eastern phenomenon, all over the eastern Mediterranean. But we do know that something was happening. Now the archaeologist of that site says-- I'm quoting from your book-- "For me, the Villa Vesuvio was a small farm that was specifically designed for the production of drugs." And part of me really wants to put all these pieces together before I dive in. The mysteries of Dionysus, a bit weirder, a bit more off the grid. I mean, the honest answer is not much. And then that's the word that Euripides uses, by the way. He co-writes that with Gordon Wasson and Albert Hofmann, who famously-- there it is, the three authors. We still have almost 700 with us. And if you're a good Christian or a good Catholic, and you're consuming that wine on any given Sunday, why are you doing that? It's something that goes from Homer all the way until the fall of the Roman Empire, over the course of well more than 1,000 years. So my biggest question is, what kind of wine was it? Wise not least because it is summer there, as he reminds me every time we have a Zoom meeting, which has been quite often in these past several months. She found the remains of dog sacrifice, which is super interesting. We have an hour and a half together and I hope there will be time for Q&A and discussion. And besides that, young Brian, let's keep the mysteries mysteries. But I do want to push back a little bit on the elevation of this particular real estate in southern Italy. They found a tiny chalice this big, dated to the second century BC. So, like, they're wonderstruck, or awestruck by their libations and their incense. It seems to me, though, that the intensity and the potency of the psychedelic experience is of an order of magnitude different than what I may have experienced through the Eucharist. What does it mean to die before dying? And so I cite a Pew poll, for example, that says something like 69% of American Catholics do not believe in transubstantiation, which is the defining dogma of the church, the idea that the bread and wine literally becomes the flesh and blood. But things that sound intensely powerful. And if there's historical precedent for it, all the more so. And when I started to get closer into the historical period-- this is all prehistory. And Brian, it would be helpful for me to know whether you are more interested in questions that take up the ancient world or more that deal with this last issue, the sort of contemporary and the future. I think psychedelics are just one piece of the puzzle. I mean, shouldn't everybody, shouldn't every Christian be wondering what kind of wine was on that table, or the tables of the earliest Christians? These sources suggest a much greater degree of continuity with pre-Christian values and practice than the writings of more . BRIAN MURARESKU: Right. So what I think we have here in this ergtotized beer drink from Catalonia, Spain, and in this weird witch's brew from 79 AD in Pompeii, I describe it, until I see evidence otherwise, as some of the very first heart scientific data for the actual existence of actual spiked wine in classical antiquity, which I think is a really big point. So what evidence can you provide for that claim? And there were gaps as well. But they charge Marcus specifically, not with a psychedelic Eucharist, but the use of a love potion. We call it ego dissolution, things of that nature. I think the wine certainly does. 18.3C: Continuity Theory. And so how far should this investigation go? So this whole water to wine thing was out there. But unfortunately, it doesn't connect it to Christianity. Mona Sobhani, PhD Retweeted. That's the promise in John's gospel, in John 6:54-55, that I quote in the book. But with what were they mixed, and to what effect? You want to field questions in both those categories? Not because they just found that altar. Thank you. And the reason I find that a worthy avenue of pursuit is because when you take a step back and look at the Greek of the Gospels, especially the Greek of John, which is super weird, what I see based on Dennis MacDonald's scholarship that you mentioned-- and others-- when you do the exegesis of John's gospel, there's just lots of vocabulary and lots of imagery that doesn't appear elsewhere. And I offer psychedelics as one of those archaic techniques of ecstasy that seems to have been relevant and meaningful to our ancestors. #646: Brian C. Muraresku with Dr. Mark Plotkin The Eleusinian Mysteries, Discovering the Divine, The Immortality Key, The Pagan Continuity Hypothesis, Lessons from Scholar Karen Armstrong, and Much More And I, for one, look forward to a time when I can see him in person for a beer, ergotized beer or not, if he ever leaves Uruguay. But I realized that in 1977, when he wrote that in German, this was the height of scholarship, at least going out on a limb to speculate about the prospect of psychedelics at the very heart of the Greek mysteries, which I refer to as something like the real religion of the ancient Greeks, by the way, in speaking about the Eleusinian mysteries. So at the very-- after the first half of the book is over, there's an epilogue, and I say, OK, here's the evidence. There's some suggestive language in the pyramid texts, in the Book of the Dead and things of this nature. So it is already happening. And in the ancient world, wine was routinely referred to as a [SPEAKING GREEK], which is the Greek word for drug. BRIAN MURARESKU: OK. Brian's thesis, that of the Pagan Continuity Hypothesis, was explored by Alexander Hislop in his "The Two Babylons", 1853, as a Protestant treatise in the spirit of Martin Luther as Alexander too interjects the Elusinian Mysteries. So this is the tradition, I can say with a straight face, that saved my life. And I-- in my profession, we call this circumstantial, and I get it. Yeah. Perhaps more generally, you could just talk about other traditions around the Mediterranean, North African, or, let's even say Judaism. In my previous posts on the continuity hypothesis . Mark and Brian cover the Eleusinian Mysteries, the pagan continuity hypothesis, early Christianity, lessons from famed religious scholar Karen Armstrong, overlooked aspects of influential philosopher William James's career, ancient wine and ancient beer, experiencing the divine within us, the importance of " tikkun olam "repairing and improving He dared to ask this very question before the hypothesis that this Eleusinian sacrament was indeed a psychedelic, and am I right that it was Ruck's hypothesis that set you down this path all those many years ago at Brown? would certainly appreciate. A rebirth into what? And I'm trying to reconcile that. So this is interesting. Maybe there's some residual fear that's been built up in me. But it just happens to show up at the right place at the right time, when the earliest Christians could have availed themselves of this kind of sacrament. BRIAN MURARESKU: We can dip from both pies, Dr. Stang. Even a little bit before Gobekli Tepe, there was another site unearthed relatively recently in Israel, at the Rakefet cave. As much as we know about the mysteries of Eleusis. But I mentioned that we've become friends because it is the prerogative of friends to ask hard questions. I don't think we have found it. But the next event in this series will happen sooner than that. Now, I think you answered that last part. Like, what is this all about? And that's not how it works today, and I don't think that's how it works in antiquity. . CHARLES STANG: Thank you, Brian. This is all secret. It pushes back the archaeology on some of this material a full 12,000 years.
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