What the Greeks were actually saying there is that it was barley infected with ergot, which is this natural fungus that infects cereal crops. 40:15 Witches, drugs, and the Catholic Church . 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. So you lean on the good work of Harvard's own Arthur Darby Nock, and more recently, the work of Dennis McDonald at Claremont School of Theology, to suggest that the author of the Gospel of John deliberately paints Jesus and his Eucharist in the colors of Dionysus. One, on mainland Greece from the Mycenaean period, 16th century BC, and the other about 800 years later in modern day Turkey, another ritual potion that seemed to have suggested some kind of concoction of beer, wine, and mead that was used to usher the king into the afterlife. 32:57 Ancient languages and Brian's education . There's evidence of the mysteries of Dionysus before, during, and after the life of Jesus, it's worth pointing out. Nage ?] Brian launched the instant bestseller on the Joe Rogan Experience, and has now appeared on CNN, NPR, Sirius XM, Goop-- I don't even know what that is-- and The Weekly Dish with Andrew Sullivan. And how can you reasonably expect the church to recognize a psychedelic Eucharist? And so part of what it means to be a priest or a minister or a rabbi is to sit with the dying and the dead. I think the wine certainly does. I am so fortunate to have been selected to present my thesis, "Mythology and Psychedelics: Taking the Pagan Continuity Hypothesis a Step Further" at. So let's start, then, the first act. And if it's one thing Catholicism does very, very well, it's contemplative mysticism. Do you think that by calling the Eucharist a placebo that you're likely to persuade them? 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. In May of last year, researchers published what they believe is the first archaeochemical data for the use of psychoactive drugs in some form of early Judaism. 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 In my previous posts on the continuity hypothesis . And this is at a time when we're still hunting and gathering. The universality of frontiers, however, made the hypothesis readily extendable to other parts of the globe. There have been really dramatic studies from Hopkins and NYU about the ability of psilocybin at the end of life to curb things like depression, anxiety, and end of life distress. Brought to you by Newsweek calls him "the world's best human guinea pig," and The New York Times calls him "a cross between Jack Welch and a Buddhist monk." In this show, he deconstructs world-class . Its proponents maintain that the affable, plump old fellow associated with Christmas derives from the character of Arctic medical practitioners. And maybe in these near-death experiences we begin to actually experience that at a visceral level. CHARLES STANG: We're often in this situation where we're trying to extrapolate from evidence from Egypt, to see is Egypt the norm or is it the exception? 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. The pagan continuity hypothesis at the heart of this book made sense to me. The kind of mysticism I've always been attracted to, like the rule of Saint Benedict and the Trappist monks and the Cistercian monks. You may have already noticed one such question-- not too hard. Now, I don't put too much weight into that. "@BrianMuraresku with @DocMarkPlotkin The Eleusinian Mysteries, Discovering the Divine, The Immortality Key, The Pagan Continuity Hypothesis, Lessons from Scholar Karen Armstrong, and Much More" Please enjoy! And her answer was that they'd all been cleaned or treated for conservation purposes. These are famous figures to those of us who study early Christianity. Now, Mithras is another one of these mystery religions. And does it line up with the promise from John's gospel that anyone who drinks this becomes instantly immortal? 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. So perhaps there's even more evidence. Here's your Western Eleusis. 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". There's some suggestive language in the pyramid texts, in the Book of the Dead and things of this nature. And nor did we think that a sanctuary would be one of the first things that we construct. So let's start with one that is more contemporary. So if you don't think that you are literally consuming divine blood, what is the point of religion? The altar had been sitting in a museum in Israel since the 1960s and just hadn't been tested. They minimized or completely removed the Jewish debates found in the New Testament, and they took on a style that was more palatable to the wider pagan world. Read more about The Immortality Key by Brian Muraresku Making Sense by Sam Harris So again, that's February 22. I mean, in the absence of the actual data, that's my biggest question. So my biggest question is, what kind of wine was it? CHARLES STANG: I do, too. 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. And the second act, the same, but for what you call paleo-Christianity, the evidence for your suspicion that the Eucharist was originally a psychedelic sacrament. #646: Brian C. Muraresku with Dr. Mark Plotkin The Eleusinian let's take up your invitation and move from Dionysus to early Christianity. 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. Let's move to early Christian. 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. The Immortality Key, The Secret History of the Religion With No Name. These Native American church and the UDV, both some syncretic form of Christianity. And very famous passages, by the way, that should be familiar to most New Testament readers. 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 what we know about the wine of the time is that it was prized amongst other things not for its alcoholic content, but for its ability to induce madness. Not in every single case, obviously. 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. So when Hippolytus is calling out the Marcosians, and specifically women, consecrating this alternative Eucharist in their alternative proto-mass, he uses the Greek word-- and we've talked about this before-- but he uses the Greek word [SPEAKING GREEK] seven times in a row, by the way, without specifying which drugs he's referring to. CHARLES STANG: OK, great. The Immortality Key - Book Review and Discussion - Were early - Reddit And when you speak in that way, what I hear you saying is there is something going on. This is going to be a question that's back to the ancient world. Was Moses high? Studies linking religion and drugs gain traction 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. BRIAN MURARESKU:: It's a simple formula, Charlie. Maybe I'm afraid I'll take the psychedelic and I won't have what is reported in the literature from Hopkins and NYU. I am excited . This time, tonight I'll say that it's just not my time yet. Now that doesn't mean, as Brian was saying, that then suggests that that's the norm Eucharist. Love potions, love charms, they're very common in the ancient. So if we can test Eucharistic vessels, I wouldn't be surprised at all that we find one. So, I mean, my biggest question behind all of this is, as a good Catholic boy, is the Eucharist. I try to be careful to always land on a lawyer's feet and be very honest with you and everybody else about where this goes from here. I really tried. And by the way, I'm not here trying to protect Christianity from the evidence of psychedelic use. There's John Marco Allegro claiming that there was no Jesus, and this was just one big amanita muscaria cult. So there's lots of interesting details here that filter through. Now, here's-- let's tack away from hard, scientific, archaeobotanical evidence for a moment. So I'm not convinced that-- I think you're absolutely right that what this establishes is that Christians in southern Italy could have-- could have had access to the kinds of things that have been recovered from that drug farm, let's call it. #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. So the event happens, when all the wines run out, here comes Jesus, who's referred to in the Gospels as an [SPEAKING GREEK] in Greek, a drunkard. Who were the Saints? So it is already happening. 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. The Immortality Key - David Bookstaber 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. I want to thank you for putting up with me and my questions. Well, let's get into it then. Amongst all the mystery religions, Eleusis survives. And it was their claim that when the hymn to Demeter, one of these ancient records that records, in some form, the proto-recipe for this kykeon potion, which I call like a primitive beer, in the hymn to Demeter, they talk about ingredients like barley, water, and mint. #646: Brian C. Muraresku with Dr. Mark Plotkin The Eleusinian The Continuity Hypothesis was put forward by John Bowlby (1953) as a critical effect of attachments in his development of Attachment Theory. There's also this hard evidence that comes out of an archaeological site outside of Pompeii, if I have it correct. One attendee has asked, "How have religious leaders reacted so far to your book? And I don't know what that looks like. BRIAN MURARESKU: It just happens to show up. Brian C. Muraresku with Dr. Mark Plotkin: The Eleusinian Mysteries I'm skeptical, Dr. Stang. He draws on the theory of "pagan continuity," which holds that early Christianity adopted . These were Greek-- I've seen them referred to as Greek Vikings by Peter Kingsley, Vikings who came from Ionia. So those are all possibly different questions to ask and answer. 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? OK. Now let's pan back because, we have-- I want to wrap up my interrogation of you, which I've been pressing you, but I feel as if perhaps people joining me think I'm hostile to this hypothesis. So that, actually, is the key to the immortality key. You want to field questions in both those categories? When you start testing, you find things. What does that have to do with Christianity? 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. . 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. He's joining us from Uruguay, where he has wisely chosen to spend his pandemic isolation. That's the big question. And so with a revised ancient history, in place Brian tacks back to the title of our series, Psychedelics and the Future of Religion. And Hofmann famously discovers-- or synthesizes LSD from ergot in 1938. There's a moment in the book where you are excited about some hard evidence. The Religion has a Name: "Shamanism" - AKJournals If you die before you die, you won't die when you die. He's been featured in Forbes, the Daily Beast, Big Think, and Vice. The only reason I went to college was to study classics. I'm going to come back to that idea of proof of concept. In this way, the two traditions coexisted in a syncretic form for some time before . What I see is data that's been largely neglected, and I think what serves this as a discipline is just that. So don't feel like you have to go into great depth at this point. So the closer we get to the modern period, we're starting to find beer, wine mixed with interesting things. PDF The continuity between pagan and Christian cult - Scandinavia You can see that inscribed on a plaque in Saint Paul's monastery at Mount Athos in Greece. 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.