And nor do I think that you can characterize southern Italy as ground zero for the spirit of Greek mysticism, or however you put it. I'm happy to argue about that. Thank you. Tim Ferriss is a self-experimenter and bestselling author, best known for The 4-Hour Workweek, which has been translated into 40+ languages. There was an absence of continuity in the direction of the colony as Newport made his frequent voyages to and . Even a little bit before Gobekli Tepe, there was another site unearthed relatively recently in Israel, at the Rakefet cave. McGovern also finds wine from Egypt, for example, in 3150 BC, wine that is mixed with a number of interesting ingredients. President and CEO, First Southeast Financial Corp and First Federal Savings and Loan Director, Carolina First Bank and The South Financial Group If you are drawn to psychedelics, in my mind, it means you're probably drawn to contemplative mysticism. I'm not. First, I will provide definitions for the terms "pagan", "Christian", Thank you for that. This is true. Perhaps more generally, you could just talk about other traditions around the Mediterranean, North African, or, let's even say Judaism. Like the wedding at Cana, which my synopsis of that event is a drunkard getting a bunch of drunk people even more drunk. Brian has been very busy taking his new book on the road, of course, all online, and we're very grateful to him for taking the time to join us this evening. Tim Ferriss is a self-experimenter and bestselling author, best known for The 4-Hour Workweek, which has been translated into 40+ languages. Not just in Italy, but as kind of the headquarters for the Mediterranean. He's talking about kind of psychedelic wine. This notion in John 15:1, the notion of the true vine, for example, only occurs in John. Just imagine, I have to live with me. Was there any similarity from that potion to what was drunk at Eleusis? I'm not sure many have. Read more 37 people found this helpful Helpful Report abuse Tfsiebs So much research! But I don't understand how that provides any significant link to paleo-Christian practice. The most influential religious historian of the twentieth century, Huston Smith, once referred to it as the "best-kept secret" in history. And I think that that's the real question here. And Hofmann famously discovers-- or synthesizes LSD from ergot in 1938. It's funny to see that some of the first basilicas outside Rome are popping up here, and in and around Pompeii. And I describe that as somehow finding that key to immortality. They were mixed or fortified. And I don't know what that looks like. And she happened to find it on psilocybin. All that will be announced through our mailing list. I understand the appeal of that. But I do want to push back a little bit on the elevation of this particular real estate in southern Italy. 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. Please materialize. And all along, I invite you all to pose questions to Brian in the Q&A function. 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". And I just happened to fall into that at the age of 14 thanks to the Jesuits, and just never left it behind. I am excited . 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. To be a Catholic is to believe that you are literally consuming the blood of Christ to become Christ. So the Greek god of wine, intoxication. CHARLES STANG: Brian, I want to thank you for your time. And maybe therein we do since the intimation of immortality. Certainly these early churchmen used whatever they could against the forms of Christian practice they disapproved of, especially those they categorized as Gnostic. BRIAN MURARESKU: I look forward to it, Charlie. I don't know why it's happening now, but we're finally taking a look. And I think what the pharmaceutical industry can do is help to distribute this medicine. Find ratings and reviews for the newest movie and TV shows. There are others claiming that there's drugs everywhere. And if it's one thing Catholicism does very, very well, it's contemplative mysticism. So how does Dionysian revelries get into this picture? And I've listened to the volunteers who've gone through these experiences. 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. And the big question is, what is this thing doing there in the middle of nowhere? A rebirth into a new conception of the self, the self's relationship to things that are hard to define, like God. So Dionysus is not the god of alcohol. And I answer it differently every single time. Mona Sobhani, PhD Retweeted. And I think we get hung up on the jargon. 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'm paraphrasing this one. Here is how I propose we are to proceed. 36:57 Drug-spiked wine . Things like fasting and sleep deprivation and tattooing and scarification and, et cetera, et cetera. 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. In this hypothesis, both widely accepted and widely criticized,11 'American' was synonymous with 'North American'. Psychedelics are a lens to investigate this stuff. 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. What was being thrown into it? It was the Jesuits who taught me Latin and Greek. And we know from the record that [SPEAKING GREEK] is described as being so crowded with gods that they were easier to find than men. 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. 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. Copyright 2023 President and Fellows of Harvard College. 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. And nor did we think that a sanctuary would be one of the first things that we construct. But I think there's a decent scientific foothold to begin that work. Others find it in different ways, but the common denominator seems to be one of these really well-curated near-death experiences. But Egypt seems to not really be hugely relevant to the research. And all we know-- I mean, we can't decipher sequence by sequence what was happening. 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. 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. So your presentation of early Christianity inclines heavily toward the Greek world. You can see that inscribed on a plaque in Saint Paul's monastery at Mount Athos in Greece. So the mysteries of Dionysus are a bit more of a free-for-all than the mysteries of Eleusis. And they found this site, along with others around the Mediterranean. In the first half, we'll cover topics ranging from the Eleusinian Mysteries, early Christianity, and the pagan continuity hypothesis to the work of philosopher and psychologist William James. So the Eastern Aegean. And I want to-- just like you have this hard evidence from Catalonia, then the question is how to interpret it. The Continuity Hypothesis was put forward by John Bowlby (1953) as a critical effect of attachments in his development of Attachment Theory. The only reason I went to college was to study classics. And if it only occurs in John, the big question is why. I think the wine certainly does. 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. So, I mean, my biggest question behind all of this is, as a good Catholic boy, is the Eucharist. 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. Maybe I have that wrong. Here's the big question. It's some kind of wine-based concoction, some kind of something that is throwing these people into ecstasy. 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. It is my great pleasure to welcome Brian Muraresku to the Center. I mean, that's obviously the big question, and what that means for the future of medicine and religion and society at large. Books about pagan continuity hypothesis? He's been featured in Forbes, the Daily Beast, Big Think, and Vice. Now, Brian managed to write this book while holding down a full time practice in international law based in Washington DC. And that is that there was a pervasive religion, ancient religion, that involved psychedelic sacraments, and that that pervasive religious culture filtered into the Greek mysteries and eventually into early Christianity. In the afterword, you champion the fact that we stand on the cusp of a new era of psychedelics precisely because they can be synthesized and administered safely in pill form, back to The Economist article "The God Pill". An actual spiked wine. And I think there are so many sites and excavations and so many chalices that remain to be tested. BRIAN MURARESKU: Good one. Psychedelics Today: Mark Plotkin - Bio-Cultural Conservation of the Amazon. The kind of mysticism I've always been attracted to, like the rule of Saint Benedict and the Trappist monks and the Cistercian monks. But let me say at the outset that it is remarkably learned, full of great historical and philological detail. I mean, so Walter Burkert was part of the reason that kept me going on. And I don't know if there's other examples of such things. It seems entirely believable to me that we have a potion maker active near Pompeii. You know, it's an atheist using theological language to describe what happened to her. Not because it's not there, because it hasn't been tested. And why, if you're right that the church has succeeded in suppressing a psychedelic sacrament and has been peddling instead, what you call a placebo, and that it has exercised a monstrous campaign of persecution against plant medicine and the women who have kept its knowledge alive, why are you still attached to this tradition? So what evidence can you provide for that claim? And by the way, I'm not here trying to protect Christianity from the evidence of psychedelic use. And there were moments when the sunlight would just break through. So we not only didn't have the engineering know-how-- we used to think-- we didn't have even settled life to construct something like this. What about Jesus as a Jew? The pagan continuity hypothesis theorizes that when Christianity arrived in Greece around AD 49, it didn't suddenly replace the existing religion. There's John Marco Allegro claiming that there was no Jesus, and this was just one big amanita muscaria cult. And I'll just list them out quickly. When Irenaeus is talking about [SPEAKING GREEK], love potions, again, we have no idea what the hell he's talking about. I think the only big question is what the exact relationship was from a place like that over to Eleusis. Now, here's-- let's tack away from hard, scientific, archaeobotanical evidence for a moment. So what do we know about those rituals? I would expect we'd have ample evidence. Joe Campbell puts it best that what we're after is an experience of being alive. Like in Israel. But even if they're telling the truth about this, even if it is accurate about Marcus that he used a love potion, a love potion isn't a Eucharist. So I think it's really interesting details here worth following up on. Maybe for those facing the end of life. So why the silence from the heresiologists on a psychedelic sacrament? This time around, we have a very special edition featuring Dr. Mark Plotkin and Brian C . We have plays like the Bacchi from Euripides, where we can piece together some of this. And did the earliest Christians inherit the same secret tradition? Which, again, what I see are small groups of people getting together to commune with the dead. She found the remains of dog sacrifice, which is super interesting. They're mixing potions. Because for many, many years, you know, Ruck's career takes a bit of a nosedive. CHARLES STANG: OK, great. And I think sites like this have tended to be neglected in scholarship, or published in languages like Catalan, maybe Ukrainian, where it just doesn't filter through the academic community. And at the same time, when I see a thirst, especially in young people, for real experience, and I see so many Catholics who do not believe in transubstantiation, obviously, what comes to my mind is how, if at all, can psychedelics enhance faith or reinvent Christianity. You mentioned, too, early churchmen, experts in heresies by the name of Irenaeus of Lyons and Hippolytus of Rome. Show Plants of the Gods: Hallucinogens, Healing, Culture and Conservation podcast, Ep Plants of the Gods: S4E2. So don't feel like you have to go into great depth at this point. All rights reserved. These were Greek-- I've seen them referred to as Greek Vikings by Peter Kingsley, Vikings who came from Ionia. 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 I wonder and I question how we can keep that and retain that for today. I fully expect we will find it. 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. There's a good number of questions that are very curious why you are insisting on remaining a psychedelic virgin. 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. 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? BRIAN MURARESKU: Great question. What the Greeks were actually saying there is that it was barley infected with ergot, which is this natural fungus that infects cereal crops. 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. 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 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. 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. As much as we know about the mysteries of Eleusis. So whatever was happening there was important. And Dennis, amongst others, calls that a signature Dionysian miracle. CHARLES STANG: You know, Valentinus was almost elected bishop of Rome. He co-writes that with Gordon Wasson and Albert Hofmann, who famously-- there it is, the three authors. But it survives. The Tim Ferriss Show. This 'pagan continuity hypothesis' with a psychedelic twist is now backed up by biochemistry and agrochemistry and tons of historical research, exposing our forgotten history.
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