But they charge Marcus specifically, not with a psychedelic Eucharist, but the use of a love potion. They're mixing potions. And I guess my biggest question, not necessarily for you, but the psychedelic community, for what it's worth, or those who are interested in this stuff is how do we make this experience sacred? They linked the idea of witches to an imagined organized sect which was a danger to the Christian commonwealth. The pagan continuity hypothesis theorizes that when Christianity arrived in Greece around AD 49, it didn't suddenly replace the existing religion. I don't think we have found it. Hard archaeobotanical, archaeochemical data, I haven't seen it. So whatever these [SPEAKING GREEK] libations incense were, the church fathers don't get into great detail about what may have been spiking them. And now we have a working hypothesis and some data to suggest where we might be looking. So your presentation of early Christianity inclines heavily toward the Greek world. And so in some of these psychedelic trials, under the right conditions, I do see genuine religious experiences. McGovern also finds wine from Egypt, for example, in 3150 BC, wine that is mixed with a number of interesting ingredients. I mean, this really goes to my deep skepticism. And I just happened to fall into that at the age of 14 thanks to the Jesuits, and just never left it behind. I mean, this is what I want to do with some of my remaining days on this planet, is take a look at all these different theories. And it was the Jesuits who encouraged me to always, always ask questions and never take anything at face value. Yeah. To assess this hypothesis and, perhaps, to push it further, has required years of dogged and, at times, discouraging works in archives and archaeology. And that's where oversight comes in handy. BRIAN MURARESKU: I would say I've definitely experienced the power of the Christ and the Holy Spirit. Because ergot is just very common. So this is interesting. By which I mean that the Gospel of John suggests that at the very least, the evangelist hoped to market Christianity to a pagan audience by suggesting that Jesus was somehow equivalent to Dionysus, and that the Eucharist, his sacrament of wine, was equivalent to Dionysus's wine. And I think what the pharmaceutical industry can do is help to distribute this medicine. No one lived there. And what you're referring to is-- and how I begin the book is this beautiful Greek phrase, [SPEAKING GREEK]. Including, all the way back to Gobekli Tepe, which is why I mentioned that when we first started chatting. Do the drugs, Dr. Stang? You're not confident that the pope is suddenly going to issue an encyclical. But I think there's a decent scientific foothold to begin that work. And the one thing that unites both of those worlds in this research called the pagan continuity hypothesis, the one thing we can bet on is the sacred language of Greek. Books about pagan continuity hypothesis? So in my mind, it was the first real hard scientific data to support this hypothesis, which, as you alluded to at the beginning, only raises more questions. And we had a great chat, a very spirited chat about the mysteries and the psychedelic hypothesis. The question is, what will happen in the future. So whatever was happening there was important. And I want to ask you about specifically the Eleusinian mysteries, centered around the goddesses Demeter and Persephone. Rupert Sheldrake, PhD, is a biologist and author best known for his hypothesis of morphic resonance. Jerry Brown wrote a good review that should be read to put the book in its proper place. So the basic point being, as far as we can tell, beer and wine are routinely mixed with things that we don't do today. So even from the very beginning, it wasn't just barley and water. And she happened to find it on psilocybin. There's evidence of the mysteries of Dionysus before, during, and after the life of Jesus, it's worth pointing out. And did the earliest Christians inherit the same secret tradition? 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. I see a huge need and a demand for young religious clergy to begin taking a look at this stuff. Now, here's-- let's tack away from hard, scientific, archaeobotanical evidence for a moment. Whether there's a psychedelic tradition-- I mean, there are some suggestive paintings. Then I'll ask a series of questions that follow the course of his book, focusing on the different ancient religious traditions, the evidence for their psychedelic sacraments, and most importantly, whether and how the assembled evidence yields a coherent picture of the past. We call it ego dissolution, things of that nature. 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. 8th century BC from the Tel Arad shrine. And I think there are lots of reasons to believe that. Church of the Saints Faustina and Liberata, view from the outside with the entrance enclosure, at "Sante" place, Capo di Ponte (Italy). First I'll give the floor to Brian to walk us into this remarkable book of his and the years of hard work that went into it, what drove him to do this. The book proposes a history of religious ritualistic psychedelic use at least as old as the ancient Greek mystery religions, especially those starting in Eleusis and dating to roughly 2,000 BC. Now, that date is obviously very suggestive because that's precisely the time the Christians were establishing a beachhead in Rome. What's significant about these features for our piecing together the ancient religion with no name? I'm skeptical, Dr. Stang. Despite its popular appeal as a New York Times Bestseller, TIK fails to make a compelling case for its grand theory of the "pagan continuity hypothesis with a psychedelic twist" due to. 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 . And what we find at this farmhouse is a sanctuary that Enriqueta Pons herself, the archaeologist who's been on site since 1990, she calls it some kind of sanctuary dedicated to the goddesses of the mysteries. And much of the evidence that you've collected is kind of the northern half of the Mediterranean world. Amongst all the mystery religions, Eleusis survives. This an absolute masterclass on why you must know your identity and goals before forming a habit, what the best systems are for habit. So I see-- you're moving back and forth between these two. Reviewed in the United States on January 29, 2023 And in the ancient world, wine was routinely referred to as a [SPEAKING GREEK], which is the Greek word for drug. 474, ?] CHARLES STANG: OK, that is the big question. I'm happy to argue about that. So throughout the book, you make the point that ancient beer and wine are not like our beer and wine. And considering the common background of modern religions (the Pagan Continuity hypothesis), any religious group who thinks they are chosen or correct are promoting a simplistic and ignorant view of our past. 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. So I have my concerns about what's about to happen in Oregon and the regulation of psilocybin for therapeutic purposes. Thank you. 283. I expect there will be. It's not the case in the second century. If beer was there that long ago, what kind of beer was it? 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. So why refrain? Tim Ferriss Show #646: Brian C. Muraresku with Dr. Mark Plotkin: The Eleusinian Mysteries, Discovering the Divine, The Immortality Key, The Pagan Continuity Hypothesis, Psychedelics, and More. So to find dog sacrifice inside this Greek sanctuary alludes to this proto-witch, Hecate, the mother of Circe, who is mentioned in the same hymn to Demeter from the 8th, 7th century BC, as kind of the third of the goddesses to whom these mysteries were dedicated. And I write, at the very end of the book, I hope that they'd be proud of this investigation. Material evidence of a very strange potion, a drug, or a [SPEAKING GREEK]. And how can you reasonably expect the church to recognize a psychedelic Eucharist? And nor did we think that a sanctuary would be one of the first things that we construct. So how exactly is this evidence of something relevant to Christianity in Rome or southern Italy more widely? And apparently, the book is on order, so I can't speak to this directly, but the ancient Greek text that preserves this liturgy also preserves the formula, the ingredients of the eye ointment. And I just happened to fall into that at the age of 14 thanks to the Jesuits, and just never left it behind. The Gnostics did have continuity with paganism. And all we know-- I mean, we can't decipher sequence by sequence what was happening. First act is your evidence for psychedelics among the so-called pagan religions in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East. Now, I think you answered that last part. So that's something else to look into. 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. CHARLES STANG: Right. Thank you for that. And what it has to do with Eleusis or the Greek presence in general, I mean, again, just to say it briefly, is that this was a farmhouse of sorts that was inland, this sanctuary site. So Dionysus is not the god of alcohol. Thank you all for joining us, and I hope to see many of you later this month for our next event. What does ergotized beer in Catalonia have anything to do with the Greek mysteries at Eleusis? OK-- maybe one of those ancient beers. It is my great pleasure to welcome Brian Muraresku to the Center. 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. I mean, if Burkert was happy to speculate about psychedelics, I'm not sure why Ruck got the reception that he did in 1978 with their book The Road to Eleusis. Let me just pull up my notes here. 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. And her best guess is that it was like this open access sanctuary. I mean, something of symbolic significance, something monumental. And he was actually going out and testing some of these ancient chalices. There was an absence of continuity in the direction of the colony as Newport made his frequent voyages to and . We have some inscriptions. So my biggest question is, what kind of wine was it? IMDb is the world's most popular and authoritative source for movie, TV and celebrity content. And that kind of invisible religion with no name, although brutally suppressed, managed to survive in Europe for many centuries and could potentially be revived today. And if it's one thing Catholicism does very, very well, it's contemplative mysticism. It was the Jesuits who taught me Latin and Greek. But I want to ask you to reflect on the broader narrative that you're painting, because I've heard you speak in two ways about the significance of this work. And I got to say, there's not a heck of a lot of eye rolling, assuming people read my afterword and try to see how careful I am about delineating what is knowable and what is not and what this means for the future of religion. We have other textual evidence. CHARLES STANG: OK. Show Plants of the Gods: Hallucinogens, Healing, Culture and Conservation podcast, Ep Plants of the Gods: S4E2. Joe Campbell puts it best that what we're after is an experience of being alive. Frankly, if you ask the world's leading archaeobotanists and archaeochemists, where's the spiked beer and where's the spiked wine, which I've been doing since about 2007, 2008, the resounding answer you'll get back from everybody is a resounding no. But Egypt seems to not really be hugely relevant to the research. [1] According to this theory, older adults try to maintain this continuity of lifestyle by adapting strategies that are connected to their past experiences. 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. 18.3C: Continuity Theory. 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. But this clearly involved some kind of technical know-how and the ability to concoct these things that, in order to keep them safe and efficacious, would not have been very widespread, I don't think. And I think that that's the real question here. CHARLES STANG: OK. Because at my heart, I still consider myself a good Catholic boy. What does God mean? Now, let's get started, Brian. That's our next event, and will be at least two more events to follow. And please just call me Charlie. So Plato, Pindar, Sophocles, all the way into Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, it's an important thing. Here's the big question. So can you reflect on the-- standing on the threshold of pharmaceutical companies taking control of this, how is that to be commended when the very people who have kept this alive would be pushed to the side in that move? She joins me for most events and meetings. 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. I would have been happy to find a spiked wine anywhere. First, I will provide definitions for the terms "pagan", "Christian", And then that's the word that Euripides uses, by the way. But maybe you could just say something about this community in Catalonia. Well, wonderful. #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 CHARLES STANG: So in some sense, you're feeling almost envy for the experiences on psychedelics, which is to say you've never experienced the indwelling of Christ or the immediate knowledge of your immortality in the sacrament. I am so fortunate to have been selected to present my thesis, "Mythology and Psychedelics: Taking the Pagan Continuity Hypothesis a Step Further" at. That's just everlasting. I took this to Greg [? And part of me really wants to put all these pieces together before I dive in. A rebirth into a new conception of the self, the self's relationship to things that are hard to define, like God. #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 by The Tim Ferriss Show That's the promise in John's gospel, in John 6:54-55, that I quote in the book. 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. And to be quite honest, I'd never studied the ancient Greeks in Spain. CHARLES STANG: I do, too. Which, if you think about it, is a very elegant idea. This time, tonight I'll say that it's just not my time yet. What was being thrown into it? 48:01 Brian's psychedelic experiences . And does it line up with the promise from John's gospel that anyone who drinks this becomes instantly immortal? And there you also found mortars that were tested and also tested positive for evidence of brewing. Or maybe in palliative care. Because again, when I read the clinical literature, I'm reading things that look like mystical experiences, or that at least at least sound like them. It's this 22-acre site of free-standing limestone, some rising 20 feet in the air, some weighing 50 tons. And very famous passages, by the way, that should be familiar to most New Testament readers. He comes to this research with a full suite of scholarly skills, including a deep knowledge of Greek and Latin as well as facility in a number of European languages, which became crucial for uncovering some rather obscure research in Catalan, and also for sweet-talking the gatekeepers of archives and archaeological sites. Nage ?] The universality of frontiers, however, made the hypothesis readily extendable to other parts of the globe. That they were what you call extreme beverages. The continuity hypothesis of dreams suggests that the content of dreams are largely continuous with waking concepts and concerns of the dreamer. In this way, the two traditions coexisted in a syncretic form for some time before . And when Houston says something like that, it grabs the attention of a young undergrad a bit to your south in Providence, Rhode Island, who was digging into Latin and Greek and wondering what the heck this was all about. Its proponents maintain that the affable, plump old fellow associated with Christmas derives from the character of Arctic medical practitioners. The pagan continuity hypothesis at the heart of this book made sense to me. I mean, what-- my big question is, what can we say about the Eucharist-- and maybe it's just my weird lens, but what can we say about it definitively in the absence of the archaeochemstry or the archaeobotany? So if Eleusis is the Fight Club of the ancient world, right, the first rule is you don't talk about it. Like the wedding at Cana, which my synopsis of that event is a drunkard getting a bunch of drunk people even more drunk. In fact, something I'm following up on now is the prospect of similar sites in the Crimea around the Black Sea, because there was also a Greek presence there. 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. And what, if any, was the relationship between those ancient Greeks and the real religion of the earliest Christians, who might call the paleo-Christians. 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. Richard Evans Schultes and the Search for Ayahuasca 17 days ago Plants of the Gods: S3E10. Maybe I'm afraid I'll take the psychedelic and I won't have what is reported in the literature from Hopkins and NYU. Here's the proof of concept. Psychedelics Today: Mark Plotkin - Bio-Cultural Conservation of the Amazon. So the big question is, what kind of drug was this, if it was a drug? But what we do know about the wine of the time is that it was routinely mixed with plants and herbs and potentially fungi. Let's move to early Christian. So you were unable to test the vessels on site in Eleusis, which is what led you to, if I have this argument right, to Greek colonies around the Mediterranean. I have a deep interest in mysticism, and I've had mystical experiences, which I don't think are very relevant. BRIAN MURARESKU: Right. 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. All right, so now, let's follow up with Dionysus, but let's see here. Now that the pagan continuity hypothesis is defended, the next task is to show that the pagan and proto-Christian ritual sacraments were, in fact, psychedelicbrews. And for those of you who have found my line of questioning or just my general presence tedious, first of all, I fully appreciate that reaction. And not least because if I were to do it, I'd like to do so in a deeply sacred ritual. In this hypothesis, both widely accepted and widely criticized,11 'American' was synonymous with 'North American'. Nage ?] 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. But we do know that something was happening. I think psychedelics are just one piece of the puzzle. That's how we get to Catalonia. We don't have to look very hard to find that. But I'm pressing you because that's my job. But by and large, no, we don't really know. CHARLES STANG: My name is Charles Stang, and I'm the director of the Center for the Study of World Religions here at Harvard Divinity School. 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. I think the wine certainly does. His aim when he set out on this journey 12 years ago was to assess the validity of a rather old, but largely discredited hypothesis, namely, that some of the religions of the ancient Mediterranean, perhaps including Christianity, used a psychedelic sacrament to induce mystical experiences at the border of life and death, and that these psychedelic rituals were just the tip of the iceberg, signs of an even more ancient and pervasive religious practice going back many thousands of years. In 1950, Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote " The Influence of the Mystery Religions on Christianity " which describes the continuity from the Pagan, pre-Christian world to what would become early Christianity in the decades and centuries before Jesus Religion & Mystical Experiences, Wine Before I set forth the outline of this thesis, three topics must be discussed in order to establish a basic understanding of the religious terminology, Constantine's reign, and the contemporary sources. And that's what I get into in detail in the book. And you're right. So I want to propose that we stage this play in two acts. CHARLES STANG: I have one more question about the pre-Christian story, and that has to do with that the other mystery religion you give such attention to. But it's not an ingested psychedelic. So how to put this? BRIAN MURARESKU: Good one. Those of you who don't know his name, he's a professor at the University of Amsterdam, an expert in Western esotericism. So we're going down parallel paths here, and I feel we're caught between FDA-approved therapeutics and RFRA-protected sacraments, RFRA, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, or what becomes of these kinds of substances in any kind of legal format-- which they're not legal at the moment, some would argue. Where does Western civilization come from? He's talking about kind of psychedelic wine. Are they rolling their eyes, or are you getting sort of secretive knowing nods of agreement? And what about the alleged democratization with which you credit the mysteries of Dionysus, or the role of women in that movement? That's the big question. The continuity theory proposes that older adults maintain the same activities, behaviors, personalities, and relationships of the past. To this day I remain a psychedelic virgin quite proudly, and I spent the past 12 years, ever since that moment in 2007, researching what Houston Smith, perhaps one of the most influential religious historians of the 20th century, would call the best kept secret in history. Now we're getting somewhere. I mean, I asked lots of big questions in the book, and I fully acknowledge that. Now, Carl Ruck from Boston University, much closer to home, however, took that invitation and tried to pursue this hypothesis. And when we know so much about ancient wine and how very different it was from the wine of today, I mean, what can we say about the Eucharist if we're only looking at the texts? I see it as-- well, OK, I'd see it as within a minority. So those are all possibly different questions to ask and answer. The altar had been sitting in a museum in Israel since the 1960s and just hadn't been tested. Psychedelics Today: PTSF 35 (with Brian Muraresku) Griffithsfund.org So listening right now, there's at least one orthodox priest, there's at least one Catholic priest, an Episcopalian, an Anglican, and several others with whom I've been talking in recent months. So it's hard for me to write this and talk about this without acknowledging the Jesuits who put me here. Which turns out, it may be they were. And we know the mysteries were there. So. 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? And I think it's proof of concept-- just proof of concept-- for investing serious funding, and attention into the actual search for these kinds of potions. You may have already noticed one such question-- not too hard. So why do you think psychedelics are so significant that they might usher in a new Reformation? BRIAN MURARESKU: We can dip from both pies, Dr. Stang. 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 the big question is, what is this thing doing there in the middle of nowhere? [2] That also only occurs in John, another epithet of Dionysus. All he says is that these women and Marcus are adding drugs seven times in a row into whatever potion this is they're mixing up. BRIAN MURARESKU:: It's a simple formula, Charlie. And I'm not even sure what that piece looks like or how big it is. That there is no hard archaeobotanical, archaeochemical data for spiked beer, spiked wine. Now I understand and I appreciate the pharmaceutical industry's ability to distribute this as medicine for those who are looking for alternatives, alternative treatments for depression and anxiety and PTSD and addiction and end of life distress. There he is. So again, if there were an early psychedelic sacrament that was being suppressed, I'd expect that the suppressors would talk about it. I opened the speculation, Dr. Stang, that the Holy Grail itself could have been some kind of spiked concoction. And if it only occurs in John, the big question is why. But I don't understand how that provides any significant link to paleo-Christian practice. She had the strange sense that every moment was an eternity of its own. These sources suggest a much greater degree of continuity with pre-Christian values and practice than the writings of more . It's only in John that Jesus is described as being born in the lap of the Father, the [SPEAKING GREEK] in 1:18, very similar to the way that Dionysus sprung miraculously from the thigh of Zeus, and on and on and on-- which I'm not going to bore you and the audience. He was greatly influenced by Sigmund Freud (1940) who viewed an infant's first relationship - usually with the mother - as "the prototype of all later love-relations". I'm not sure where it falls. I mean, so Walter Burkert was part of the reason that kept me going on. So what do we know about those rituals? 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. Now that doesn't mean, as Brian was saying, that then suggests that that's the norm Eucharist. Was there any similarity from that potion to what was drunk at Eleusis? So when you take a step back, as you well know, there was a Hellenic presence all over the ancient Mediterranean. We see lots of descriptions of this in the mystical literature with which you're very familiar. This book by Brian Muraresku, attempts to answer this question by delving into the history of ancient secret religions dating back thousands of years. The big question is, did any of these recipes, did any of this wine spiking actually make its way into some paleo-Christian ceremony. So if we can test Eucharistic vessels, I wouldn't be surprised at all that we find one. And I think it's very important to be very honest with the reader and the audience about what we know and what we don't. And that that's how I-- and by not speculating more than we can about the mystical supper, if we follow the hypothesis that this is a big if for some early communities of Greek speakers, this is how I'm finding common ground with priests both Catholic and Orthodox and Protestants. Brought to you by GiveWell.org charity research and effective giving and 5-Bullet Friday, my very own email newsletter.Welcome to The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is usually my job to deconstruct world-class performers to tease out their routines, habits, et cetera that you can apply to your own life. In fact, he found beer, wine, and mead all mixed together in a couple of different places. That seems very believable, but there's nothing to suggest that the pharmacy or drug farm was serving Christians, or even that the potions produced were for ritual use. And keep in mind that we'll drop down into any one of these points more deeply. So what evidence can you provide for that claim? Now, that is part of your kind of interest in democratizing mysticism, but it also, curiously, cuts out the very people who have been preserving this tradition for centuries, namely, on your own account, this sort of invisible or barely visible lineage of women.
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