So the mysteries of Dionysus are a bit more of a free-for-all than the mysteries of Eleusis. Because every time I think about ancient wine, I am now immediately thinking about wine that is spiked. You see an altar of Pentelic marble that could only have come from the Mount Pentelicus quarry in mainland Greece. The only reason I went to college was to study classics. It's a big question for me. So why do you think psychedelics are so significant that they might usher in a new Reformation? So the closer we get to the modern period, we're starting to find beer, wine mixed with interesting things. If the Dionysian one is psychedelic, does it really make its way into some kind of psychedelic Christianity? Rather, Christian beliefs were gradually incorporated into the pagan customs that already existed there. 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. And how can you reasonably expect the church to recognize a psychedelic Eucharist? He's joining us from Uruguay, where he has wisely chosen to spend his pandemic isolation. At Cambridge University he worked in developmental biolo. But the point being, the religion of brewing seems to pop up at the very beginning of civilization itself, or the very beginning of monumental engineering at this world's first sanctuary. 36:57 Drug-spiked wine . Because ergot is just very common. 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. Tim Ferriss is a self-experimenter and bestselling author, best known for The 4-Hour Workweek, which has been translated into 40+ languages. In the Classics world, there's a pagan continuity hypothesis with the very origin of Christianity, and many overt references to Greek plays in the Gospel of John. BRIAN MURARESKU: Right. He calls it a drug against grief in Greek, [SPEAKING GREEK].
The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Brian C. Muraresku with Dr. Mark So there's a whole slew of sites I want to test there. For those who didn't have the time or the money or the temerity to travel all the way to Eleusis from Spain, here's your off-site campus, right? It seems entirely believable to me that we have a potion maker active near Pompeii. Now, you could draw the obvious conclusion. Like the wedding at Cana, which my synopsis of that event is a drunkard getting a bunch of drunk people even more drunk. Pagan polemicists reversed the Biblical story of the Israelites' liberation from Egyptian bondage, portraying a negative image of Israelite origins and picturing them as misanthropes and atheists. 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. The phrasing used in the book and by others is "the pagan continuity hypothesis". 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? 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. 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.
"The Influence of the Mystery Religions on Christianity" Here is how I propose we are to proceed. And she happened to find it on psilocybin. This notion in John 15:1, the notion of the true vine, for example, only occurs in John. First, the continuity of the offices must be seen in light of the change of institutional charges; they had lost their religious connotations and had become secular. 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. What Brian labels the religion with no name. 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. BRIAN MURARESKU: Right. I think psychedelics are just one piece of the puzzle. 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 think it's very important to be very honest with the reader and the audience about what we know and what we don't. 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 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. I expect we will find it. So let's talk about the future of religion, and specifically the future of Roman Catholicism. And does it line up with the promise from John's gospel that anyone who drinks this becomes instantly immortal? BRIAN MURARESKU: We can dip from both pies, Dr. Stang. I think the wine certainly does. These sources suggest a much greater degree of continuity with pre-Christian values and practice than the writings of more . And that's not how it works today, and I don't think that's how it works in antiquity. 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. So I don't write this to antagonize them or the church, the people who, again, ushered me into this discipline and into these questions. Reviewed in the United States on January 29, 2023 These are famous figures to those of us who study early Christianity. 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 . The kind of mysticism I've always been attracted to, like the rule of Saint Benedict and the Trappist monks and the Cistercian monks. In the same place in and around Pompeii, this is where Christianity is really finding its roots. It draws attention to this material. McGovern also finds wine from Egypt, for example, in 3150 BC, wine that is mixed with a number of interesting ingredients. That's how we get to Catalonia. Including, all the way back to Gobekli Tepe, which is why I mentioned that when we first started chatting. So I see-- you're moving back and forth between these two. 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 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. Now-- and I think that we can probably concede that. It still leaves an even bigger if, Dr. Stang, is which one is psychedelic?
Psychedelics Weekly - Prince Harry and Psychedelics, Proposed And Hofmann famously discovers-- or synthesizes LSD from ergot in 1938. You're not confident that the pope is suddenly going to issue an encyclical.
Plants of the Gods: Hallucinogens, Healing, Culture and - Podchaser #646: Brian C. Muraresku with Dr. Mark Plotkin The Eleusinian Do you think that by calling the Eucharist a placebo that you're likely to persuade them? 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. I'm going to come back to that idea of proof of concept.
Brian C. Muraresku with Dr. Mark Plotkin: The Eleusinian Mysteries I'm not sure many have. That's the big question. This is going to be a question that's back to the ancient world. 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. That is, by giving, by even floating the possibility of this kind of-- at times, what seems like a Dan Brown sort of story, like, oh my god, there's a whole history of Christianity that's been suppressed-- draws attention, but the real point is actually that you're not really certain about the story, but you're certain is that we need to be more attentive to this evidence and to assess it soberly. I see something that's happening to people. 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. 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. Brought to you by So when you take a step back, as you well know, there was a Hellenic presence all over the ancient Mediterranean. 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. Some number of people have asked about Egypt. I'm happy to be proven wrong. I see it as-- well, OK, I'd see it as within a minority. 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. 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. So whatever was happening there was important. BRIAN MURARESKU: Right. Whether there's a psychedelic tradition-- I mean, there are some suggestive paintings. And if it only occurs in John, the big question is why. 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. Did the potion at Eleusis change from generation to generation? This is true. An actual spiked wine. And I don't know what that looks like. What is its connection to Eleusis? I took this to Greg [? 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. Is this only Marcus? And that's where oversight comes in handy. And I started reading the studies from Pat McGovern at the University of Pennsylvania. I understand more papers are about to be published on this. But it was not far from a well-known colony in [INAUDIBLE] that was founded by Phocians. 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. Because what tends to happen in those experiences is a death and rebirth. I mean, this really goes to my deep skepticism. 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. So your presentation of early Christianity inclines heavily toward the Greek world. I really tried. The Gnostics did have continuity with paganism. The fact that the Vatican sits in Rome today is not an accident, I think, is the shortest way to answer that. According to Muraresku, this work, BOOK REVIEW 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? So again, that's February 22.
Tim Ferriss Show Podcast Notes Psychedelics Today: Mark Plotkin - Bio-Cultural Conservation of the Amazon. Now, Mithras is another one of these mystery religions. I'm sure he knows this well, by this point. And you suspect, therefore, that it might be a placebo, and you want the real thing. In this hypothesis, both widely accepted and widely criticized,11 'American' was synonymous with 'North American'. Not in every single case, obviously. 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. And the big question is, what is this thing doing there in the middle of nowhere? What, if any, was the relationship between this Greek sanctuary-- a very Greek sanctuary, by the way-- in Catalonia, to the mysteries of Eleusis? 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? They were mixed or fortified. So that, actually, is the key to the immortality key. 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. Psychedelics are a lens to investigate this stuff. So this is interesting. I fully expect we will find it. 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 might forward the proposition that I don't think the early church fathers were the best botanists. And so in my afterword, I present this as a blip on the archaeochemical radar. And her best guess is that it was like this open access sanctuary. So again, if there were an early psychedelic sacrament that was being suppressed, I'd expect that the suppressors would talk about it.
Brian C. Muraresku with Dr. Mark Plotkin The Eleusinian Mysteries And besides that, young Brian, let's keep the mysteries mysteries. Do you think that the Christians as a nascent cult adapted a highly effective psycho technology that was rattling . BRIAN MURARESKU:: It's a simple formula, Charlie. And I want to say to those who are still assembled here that I'm terribly sorry that we can't get to all your questions. And there you also found mortars that were tested and also tested positive for evidence of brewing. Get personalized recommendations, and learn where to watch across hundreds of streaming providers.
The Tim Ferriss Show | iHeart Not because they just found that altar.
#646: Brian C. Muraresku with Dr. Mark Plotkin The Eleusinian CHARLES STANG: Yeah. These mysteries had at their center a sacrament called kykeon, which offered a vision of the mysteries of life and death. There are others claiming that there's drugs everywhere. BRIAN MURARESKU: But you're spot on. And I'm trying to reconcile that. It is my great pleasure to welcome Brian Muraresku to the Center. And so I do see an avenue, like I kind of obliquely mentioned, but I do think there's an avenue within organized religion and for people who dedicate their lives as religious professionals to ministry to perhaps take a look at this in places where it might work. 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: My name is Charles Stang, and I'm the director of the Center for the Study of World Religions here at Harvard Divinity School. What's different about the Dionysian mysteries, and what evidence, direct or indirect, do we have about the wine of Dionysus being psychedelic? And I think oversight also comes in handy within organized religion. 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. Because very briefly, I think Brian and others have made a very strong case that these things-- this was a biotechnology that was available in the ancient world. And we know the mysteries were there. 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. This limestone altar tested positive for cannabis and frankincense that was being burned, they think, in a very ritualistic way. So if we can test Eucharistic vessels, I wouldn't be surprised at all that we find one. Those of you who don't know his name, he's a professor at the University of Amsterdam, an expert in Western esotericism. What's the importance of your abstention from psychedelics, given what is obvious interest. Here's the big question. 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. 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. Now, that date is obviously very suggestive because that's precisely the time the Christians were establishing a beachhead in Rome. 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. Even a little bit before Gobekli Tepe, there was another site unearthed relatively recently in Israel, at the Rakefet cave. 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. Not just in Italy, but as kind of the headquarters for the Mediterranean. That's all just fancy wordplay.
Biblical Entheogens: a Speculative Hypothesis - ResearchGate I'm trying to get him to speak in the series about that. Now that doesn't mean, as Brian was saying, that then suggests that that's the norm Eucharist. But maybe you could just say something about this community in Catalonia. So, I mean, my biggest question behind all of this is, as a good Catholic boy, is the Eucharist. 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 It's interesting that Saint Ignatius of Antioch, in the beginning of the second century AD, refers to the wine of the Eucharist as the [SPEAKING GREEK], the drug of immortality. And there were moments when the sunlight would just break through. So in the mountains and forests from Greece to Rome, including the Holy Land and Galilee. 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. So this is the tradition, I can say with a straight face, that saved my life. Things like fasting and sleep deprivation and tattooing and scarification and, et cetera, et cetera.
#646: Brian C. Muraresku with Dr. Mark Plotkin The - Chartable Those religions featured psychedelic beer and ceremonies lead by women . The idea of the truth shall set you free, right, [SPEAKING GREEK], in 8:32. So the Eastern Aegean. he goes out on a limb and says that black nightshade actually causes [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH], which is not unpleasant visions, i.e. Church of the Saints Faustina and Liberata, view from the outside with the entrance enclosure, at "Sante" place, Capo di Ponte (Italy). And let's start with our earliest evidence from the Stone Age and the Bronze Age. The most colorful theory of psychedelics in religion portrays the original Santa Claus as a shaman. This event is entitled, Psychedelics, The Ancient Religion With No Name? 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. [2] All right, so now, let's follow up with Dionysus, but let's see here. So the big question is, what kind of drug was this, if it was a drug? Who were the Saints? 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 . 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." 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. 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. 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. 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. Examine the pros and cons of the continuity theory of aging, specifically in terms of how it neglects to consider social institutions or chronically ill adults. So what do we know about those rituals? The continuity between pagan and Christian cult nearby the archaeological area of Naquane in Capo di Ponte. It's arguably not the case in the third century. So imagine how many artifacts are just sitting in museums right now, waiting to be tested. 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. 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. Thank you. CHARLES STANG: OK. And that's a question equally for ancient historians and for contemporary seekers and/or good Catholics. It's not just Cana. What was discovered, as far as I can tell, from your treatment of it, is essentially an ancient pharmacy in this house.
Continuity theory - Wikipedia The Tim Ferriss Show Podcast | Free Listening on Podbean App Israel's Exodus In Transdisciplinary Perspective: Text - Vdoc.pub I mean, in the absence of the actual data, that's my biggest question. So let's start with one that is more contemporary. 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. So I spent 12 years looking for that data, eventually found it, of all places, in Catalonia in Spain in this 635-page monograph that was published in 2002 and for one reason or another-- probably because it was written in Catalan-- was not widely reported to the academic community and went largely ignored. Read more 37 people found this helpful Helpful Report abuse Tfsiebs So much research! And please just call me Charlie. You mentioned there were lots of dead ends, and there certainly were. Listen to #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, an episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, easily on Podbay - the best podcast player on the web. But the next event in this series will happen sooner than that.
Brian C. Muraresku - Priory Of Sion Klaus Schmidt, who was with the German Archaeological Institute, called this a sanctuary and called these T-shaped pillars representations of gods.
#649: Rick Rubin, Legendary Music Producer The Creative Act 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 did not dare. I imagine there are many more potion makers around than we typically recognize. But what I hear from people, including atheists, like Dina Bazer, who participated in these Hopkins NYU trials is that she felt like on her one and only dose of psilocybin that she was bathed in God's love. 44:48 Psychedelics and ancient cave art . And according to Wasson, Hofmann, and Ruck, that barley was really a code word. It's some kind of wine-based concoction, some kind of something that is throwing these people into ecstasy. let's take up your invitation and move from Dionysus to early Christianity. 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. 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. Because my biggest question is, and the obvious question of the book is, if this was happening in antiquity, what does that mean for today? Maybe there's a spark of the divine within.