BRIAN MURARESKU: I'm bringing more illumination. No one lived there. This book by Brian Muraresku, attempts to answer this question by delving into the history of ancient secret religions dating back thousands of years. And so how far should this investigation go? And what about the alleged democratization with which you credit the mysteries of Dionysus, or the role of women in that movement? Now we're getting somewhere. I mean, I asked lots of big questions in the book, and I fully acknowledge that. We don't have to look very hard to find that. Like in a retreat pilgrimage type center, or maybe within palliative care. So don't feel like you have to go into great depth at this point. 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. So Brian, welcome. There aren't any churches or basilicas, right, in the first three centuries, in this era we're calling paleo-Christianity. 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. 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 "@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! 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 performers from eclectic areas (investing, chess, pro sports, etc . This time, tonight I'll say that it's just not my time yet. And she happened to find it on psilocybin. CHARLES STANG: Brian, I want to thank you for your time. So perhaps there's even more evidence. So what evidence can you provide for that claim? And again, it survives, I think, because of that state support for the better part of 2,000 years. and he said, Brian, don't you dare. So it wasn't just a random place to find one of these spiked wines. 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. 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? So let's start, then, the first act. In the same place in and around Pompeii, this is where Christianity is really finding its roots. To assess this hypothesis and, perhaps, to push it further, has required years of dogged and, at times, discouraging works in archives and archaeology. Now that doesn't mean, as Brian was saying, that then suggests that that's the norm Eucharist. 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 how to put this? I'm not sure where it falls. These were Greek-- I've seen them referred to as Greek Vikings by Peter Kingsley, Vikings who came from Ionia. Yeah. Is taking all these disciplines, whether it's your discipline or archaeochemistry or hard core botany, biology, even psychopharmacology, putting it all together and taking a look at this mystery, this puzzle, using the lens of psychedelics as a lens, really, to investigate not just the past but the future and the mystery of human consciousness. 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. I wonder if you're familiar with Wouter Hanegraaff at the University of Amsterdam. BRIAN MURARESKU:: It's a simple formula, Charlie. And I'm trying to reconcile that. 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 expect there will be. Copyright 2023 The President and Fellows of Harvard College, The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name. 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. Here's your Western Eleusis. And I don't know if it's a genuine mystical experience or mystical mimetic or some kind of psychological breakthrough. If the Dionysian one is psychedelic, does it really make its way into some kind of psychedelic Christianity? So Brian, I wonder, maybe we should give the floor to you and ask you to speak about, what are the questions you think both ancient historians such as myself should be asking that we're not, and maybe what are the sorts of questions that people who aren't ancient historians but who are drawn to this evidence, to your narrative, and to the present and the future of religion, what sort of questions should they be asking regarding psychedelics? Now I want to get to the questions, but one last question before we move to the discussion portion. 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. That's our next event, and will be at least two more events to follow. Here's the big question. Now, here's-- let's tack away from hard, scientific, archaeobotanical evidence for a moment. What about all these early Christians themselves as essentially Jews? 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. And there were gaps as well. Not because it was brand new data. We look forward to hosting Chacruna's founder and executive director, Bia Labate, for a lecture on Monday, March 8. So after the whole first half of the book-- well, wait a minute, Dr. Stang. The divine personage in whom this cult centered was the Magna Mater Deum who was conceived as the source of all life as well as the personification of all the powers of nature.\[Footnote:] Willoughby, Pagan Regeneration, p. 114.\ 7 She was the "Great Mother" not only "of all the gods," but of all men" as well. Hard archaeobotanical, archaeochemical data, I haven't seen it. In my previous posts on the continuity hypothesis . And I started reading the studies from Pat McGovern at the University of Pennsylvania. Now-- and I think that we can probably concede that. Brought to you by Wealthfront high-yield savings account, Peloton Row premium rower for an efficient workout, and You Need A Budget cult-favorite money management app.. Rick Rubin is a nine-time GRAMMY-winning producer, one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in the world, and the most successful producer in any genre, according to Rolling Stone. That's, just absurd. And I want to-- just like you have this hard evidence from Catalonia, then the question is how to interpret it. 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. 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. But let me say at the outset that it is remarkably learned, full of great historical and philological detail. Now, I don't put too much weight into that. 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 been featured in Forbes, the Daily Beast, Big Think, and Vice. This an absolute masterclass on why you must know your identity and goals before forming a habit, what the best systems are for habit. I also sense another narrative in your book, and one you've flagged for us, maybe about 10 minutes ago, when you said that the book is a proof of concept. 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. [1] According to this theory, older adults try to maintain this continuity of lifestyle by adapting strategies that are connected to their past experiences. Rather, Christian beliefs were gradually incorporated into the pagan customs that already existed there. BRIAN MURARESKU: Good one. And what the FDA can do is make sure that they're doing it in a way that it's absolutely safe and efficacious. CHARLES STANG: All right. Now, I've had experiences outside the Eucharist that resonate with me. Mona Sobhani, PhD Retweeted. But I don't understand how that provides any significant link to paleo-Christian practice. It was a pilgrimage site. Copyright 2023 President and Fellows of Harvard College. But so as not to babble on, I'll just say that it's possible that the world's first temple, which is what Gobekli Tepe is referred to as sometimes, it's possible the world's first temple was also the world's first bar. And for some reason, I mean, I'd read that two or three times as an undergrad and just glossed over that line. It tested positive for the microscopic remains of beer and also ergot, exactly the hypothesis that had been put forward in 1978 by the disgraced professor across town from you, Carl Ruck, who's now 85 years old, by the way. Research inside the Church of Saint Faustina and Liberata Fig 1. Are they rolling their eyes, or are you getting sort of secretive knowing nods of agreement? Dogs, indicative of the Greek goddess Hecate, who, amongst other things was known as the [GREEK], the dog eater. But it's not an ingested psychedelic. And that's what I get into in detail in the book. 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. I was not going to put a book out there that was sensationalist. A profound knowledge of visionary plants, herbs, and fungi passed from one generation to the next, ever since the Stone Age? And I asked her openly if we could test some of the many, many containers that they have, some on display, and many more in repository there. This event is entitled, Psychedelics, The Ancient Religion With No Name? It's really quite simple, Charlie. I imagine there are many more potion makers around than we typically recognize. To become truly immortal, Campbell talks about entering into a sense of eternity, which is the infinite present here and now. But I think the broader question of what's the reception to this among explicitly religious folk and religious leaders? We see lots of descriptions of this in the mystical literature with which you're very familiar. 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. 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 . So psychedelics or not, I think it's the cultivation of that experience, which is the actual key. But you will be consoled to know that someone else will be-- I will be there, but someone else will be leading that conversation. And let's start with our earliest evidence from the Stone Age and the Bronze Age. And so with a revised ancient history, in place Brian tacks back to the title of our series, Psychedelics and the Future of Religion. 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. And I don't know what that looks like. What about Jesus as a Jew? McGovern also finds wine from Egypt, for example, in 3150 BC, wine that is mixed with a number of interesting ingredients. OK, now, Brian, you've probably dealt with questions like this. 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. An actual spiked wine. The pagan continuity hypothesis at the heart of this book made sense to me. And I think it does hearken back to a genuinely ancient Greek principle, which is that only by fully experiencing some kind of death, a death that feels real, where you, or at least the you you used to identify with, actually slips away, dissolves. 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. Thank you for that. How does, in other words, how does religion sit with science? Read more about The Immortality Key by Brian Muraresku Making Sense by Sam Harris They're mixing potions. And I did not dare. But curiously, it's evidence for a eye ointment which is supposed to induce visions and was used as part of a liturgy in the cult of Mithras. 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. OK, Brian, I invite you to join us now. No, I think you-- this is why we're friends, Charlie. And I offer psychedelics as one of those archaic techniques of ecstasy that seems to have been relevant and meaningful to our ancestors. I mean, lots of great questions worthy of further investigation. It's arguably not the case in the third century. Certainly these early churchmen used whatever they could against the forms of Christian practice they disapproved of, especially those they categorized as Gnostic. 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. Now, it doesn't have to be the Holy Grail that was there at the Last Supper, but when you think about the sacrament of wine that is at the center of the world's biggest religion of 2.5 billion people, the thing that Pope Francis says is essential for salvation, I mean, how can we orient our lives around something for which there is little to no physical data? You're not confident that the pope is suddenly going to issue an encyclical. Maybe part of me is skeptical, right? And shouldn't we all be asking that question? You mentioned, too, early churchmen, experts in heresies by the name of Irenaeus of Lyons and Hippolytus of Rome. Now, Mithras is another one of these mystery religions. 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. Psychedelics Today: PTSF 35 (with Brian Muraresku) Griffithsfund.org For me, that's a question, and it will yield more questions. 32:57 Ancient languages and Brian's education . So whatever these [SPEAKING GREEK] libations incense were, the church fathers don't get into great detail about what may have been spiking them. 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. Now, that date is obviously very suggestive because that's precisely the time the Christians were establishing a beachhead in Rome. Did the potion at Eleusis change from generation to generation? Thank you, sir. CHARLES STANG: OK. Love potions, love charms, they're very common in the ancient. So those are all possibly different questions to ask and answer. That was the question for me. Who were the Saints? As a matter of fact, I think it's much more promising and much more fertile for scholarship to suggest that some of the earliest Christians may have availed themselves of a psychedelic sacrament and may have interpreted the Last Supper as some kind of invitation to open psychedelia, that mystical supper as the orthodox call it, [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]. I think the wine certainly does. 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 . 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. 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. 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? 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. CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF WORLD RELIGIONS, Harvard Divinity School42 Francis Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138 617.495.4495, my.hds |Harvard Divinity School |Harvard University |Privacy |Accessibility |Digital Accessibility | Trademark Notice |Reporting Copyright Infringements. And I've listened to the volunteers who've gone through these experiences. So even from the very beginning, it wasn't just barley and water. The Tim Ferriss Show. IMDb is the world's most popular and authoritative source for movie, TV and celebrity content. So this is the tradition, I can say with a straight face, that saved my life. Others find it in different ways, but the common denominator seems to be one of these really well-curated near-death experiences. And so in the epilogue, I say we simply do not know the relationship between this site in Spain and Eleusis, nor do we know what was happening at-- it doesn't automatically mean that Eleusis was a psychedelic rite. It's not to say that there isn't evidence from Alexandria or Antioch. 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. 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? That would require an entirely different kind of evidence. CHARLES STANG: Wonderful. This is all secret. And very famous passages, by the way, that should be familiar to most New Testament readers. CHARLES STANG: OK. The fact that the Vatican sits in Rome today is not an accident, I think, is the shortest way to answer that. In this episode, Brian C. Muraresku, who holds a degree from Brown University in Latin, Greek and Sanskrit,  joins Breht to discuss his fascinating book "The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name", a groundbreaking dive into the use of hallucinogens in ancient Greece, the Pagan Continuity Hypothesis, the role of the Eucharist in early Christianity, the . And that's where oversight comes in handy. But unfortunately, it doesn't connect it to Christianity. When Irenaeus is talking about [SPEAKING GREEK], love potions, again, we have no idea what the hell he's talking about. They followed Platonic (and other Greeks) philosophy. Klaus Schmidt, who was with the German Archaeological Institute, called this a sanctuary and called these T-shaped pillars representations of gods. These Native American church and the UDV, both some syncretic form of Christianity. A rebirth into what? So let's start with one that is more contemporary. Maybe there's some residual fear that's been built up in me. 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. That's staying within the field of time. 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 Now, the great scholar of Greek religion, Walter Burkert, you quote him as musing, once-- and I'm going to quote him-- he says, "it may rather be asked, even without the prospect of a certain answer, whether the basis of the mysteries, they were prehistoric drug rituals, some festival imp of immortality which, through the expansion of consciousness, seemed to guarantee some psychedelic beyond." Because at my heart, I still consider myself a good Catholic boy. That's all just fancy wordplay. You can see that inscribed on a plaque in Saint Paul's monastery at Mount Athos in Greece. 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 when I started to get closer into the historical period-- this is all prehistory. . What does it mean to die before dying? So there's lots of interesting details here that filter through. And her answer was that they'd all been cleaned or treated for conservation purposes. So I want to propose that we stage this play in two acts. And then that's the word that Euripides uses, by the way. So, I mean, my biggest question behind all of this is, as a good Catholic boy, is the Eucharist. I mean, so it was Greek. There are others claiming that there's drugs everywhere. So whatever was happening there was important. Books about pagan continuity hypothesis? And, as always the best way to keep abreast of this series and everything else we do here at the Center is to join our mailing list. The altar had been sitting in a museum in Israel since the 1960s and just hadn't been tested. 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. #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 CHARLES STANG: We've really read Jesus through the lens of his Greek inheritors. CHARLES STANG: Well, Mr, Muraresku, you are hedging your bets here in a way that you do not necessarily hedge your bets in the book. We're going to get there very soon. 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. A lot of Christianity, as you rightly point out, I mean, it was an Eastern phenomenon, all over the eastern Mediterranean. But it survives. Although she's open to testing, there was nothing there. So let's talk about the future of religion, and specifically the future of Roman Catholicism. It is my great pleasure to welcome Brian Muraresku to the Center. They linked the idea of witches to an imagined organized sect which was a danger to the Christian commonwealth. So here's a question for you. And what do you believe happens to you when you do that? And I feel like I accomplished that in the afterword to my book. 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. At Cambridge University he worked in developmental biolo. CHARLES STANG: I do, too. 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? And much of the evidence that you've collected is kind of the northern half of the Mediterranean world. I see something that's happening to people. And there were moments when the sunlight would just break through. The Immortality Key, The Secret History of the Religion With No Name. I understand the appeal of that. So I present this as proof of concept, and I heavily rely on the Gospel of John and the data from Italy because that's what was there. It's not the case in the second century. But it was not far from a well-known colony in [INAUDIBLE] that was founded by Phocians. What is it about that formula that captures for you the wisdom, the insight that is on offer in this ancient ritual, psychedelic or otherwise?
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