There's evidence of the mysteries of Dionysus before, during, and after the life of Jesus, it's worth pointing out. 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. Before the church banned their use, early Christians used - Substack Now, Carl Ruck from Boston University, much closer to home, however, took that invitation and tried to pursue this hypothesis. What was the real religion of the ancient Greeks? Now, I've never done them myself, but I have talked to many, many people who've had experience with psychedelics. And they found this site, along with others around the Mediterranean. I don't think we have found it. Klaus Schmidt, who was with the German Archaeological Institute, called this a sanctuary and called these T-shaped pillars representations of gods. In my previous posts on the continuity hypothesis . A profound knowledge of visionary plants, herbs, and fungi passed from one generation to the next, ever since the Stone Age? Then there's what were the earliest Christians doing with the Eucharist. There have been breakthroughs, too, which no doubt kept Brian going despite some skepticism from the academy, to say the least. The universality of frontiers, however, made the hypothesis readily extendable to other parts of the globe. CHARLES STANG: So it may be worth mentioning, for those who are attending who haven't read the book, that you asked, who I can't remember her name, the woman who is in charge of the Eleusis site, whether some of the ritual vessels could be tested, only to discover-- tested for the remains of whatever they held, only to learn that those vessels had been cleaned and that no more vessels were going to be unearthed. Brendon Benz presents an alternative hypothesis to recent scholarship which has hypothesized that Israel consisted of geographical, economic . It's not the case in the second century. And when I started to get closer into the historical period-- this is all prehistory. He's been featured in Forbes, the Daily Beast, Big Think, and Vice. We're going to get there very soon. 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 I'm happy to see we have over 800 people present for this conversation. The question is, what will happen in the future. #646: Brian C. Muraresku with Dr. Mark Plotkin The Eleusinian Show Plants of the Gods: Hallucinogens, Healing, Culture and Conservation podcast, Ep Plants of the Gods: S4E2. David Wakefield - President - Wakefield Enterprises, LLC | LinkedIn Research inside the Church of Saint Faustina and Liberata Fig 1. 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. Which is a very weird thing today. Not because it was brand new data. I'm not. "The Tim Ferriss Show" 646: Brian C. Muraresku with Dr. Mark Plotkin And I-- in my profession, we call this circumstantial, and I get it. That event is already up on our website and open for registration. Do the drugs, Dr. Stang? Administration and supervision endeavors and with strong knowledge in: Online teaching and learning methods, Methods for Teaching Mathematics and Technology Integration for K-12 and College . Leonardo Torres Pagan, PhD - Subject Matter Expert & Editor - LinkedIn A combination of psychoactive plants, including opium, cannabis, and nightshade, along with the remains of reptiles and amphibians all steeped in wine, like a real witch's brew, uncovered in this house outside of Pompeii. There's all kinds of reasons I haven't done it. 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? I am excited . 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 1,672. And I think there are lots of reasons to believe that. I'm happy to argue about that. So how exactly is this evidence of something relevant to Christianity in Rome or southern Italy more widely? Not because it's not there, because it hasn't been tested. And does it line up with the promise from John's gospel that anyone who drinks this becomes instantly immortal? Rather, Christian beliefs were gradually incorporated into the pagan customs that already existed there. Wonderful, well, thank you. But you go further still, suggesting that Jesus himself at the Last Supper might have administered psychedelic sacrament, that the original Eucharist was psychedelic. BRIAN MURARESKU: I'm asked this question, I would say, in pretty much every interview I've done since late September. And I'm trying to reconcile that. OK, Brian, I invite you to join us now. #646: Brian C. Muraresku with Dr. Mark Plotkin The - Chartable CHARLES STANG: We've really read Jesus through the lens of his Greek inheritors. 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. . This is going to be a question that's back to the ancient world. 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. Continuity Hypothesis - Keith E Rice's Integrated SocioPsychology Blog They linked the idea of witches to an imagined organized sect which was a danger to the Christian commonwealth. Maybe there's some residual fear that's been built up in me. I mean, this really goes to my deep skepticism. So frankly, what happens during the Neolithic, we don't know, at least from a scientific vantage. And so that's what motivated my search here. Because they talk about everything else that they take issue with. 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. 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 I'm not even sure what that piece looks like or how big it is. CHARLES STANG: All right. And I think there are so many sites and excavations and so many chalices that remain to be tested. Maybe part of me is skeptical, right? And I'll just list them out quickly. 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. This notion in John 15:1, the notion of the true vine, for example, only occurs in John. And then at some point they go inland. The same Rome that circumstantially shows up, and south of Rome, where Constantine would build his basilicas in Naples and Capua later on. 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 to be quite honest, I'd never studied the ancient Greeks in Spain. 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 the basic point being, as far as we can tell, beer and wine are routinely mixed with things that we don't do today. No one lived there. I just sense a great deal of structure and thoughtfulness going into this experience. BRIAN MURARESKU: OK. 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. Love potions, love charms, they're very common in the ancient. CHARLES STANG: OK. If you look at Dioscorides, for example, his Materia Medica, that's written in the first century AD around the same time that the Gospels themselves are being written. Now, here's-- let's tack away from hard, scientific, archaeobotanical evidence for a moment. I think the wine certainly does. Like in a retreat pilgrimage type center, or maybe within palliative care. I mean, so it was Greek. 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. Here's another one. You won't find it in many places other than that. The altar had been sitting in a museum in Israel since the 1960s and just hadn't been tested. 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'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. Here is how I propose we are to proceed. And so for me, this was a hunt through the catacombs and archives and libraries, doing my sweet-talking, and trying to figure out what was behind some of those locked doors. Where are the drugs? 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. If beer was there that long ago, what kind of beer was it? So let's start with one that is more contemporary. Others find it in different ways, but the common denominator seems to be one of these really well-curated near-death experiences. Brian C. Muraresku with Dr. Mark Plotkin: The Eleusinian Mysteries, Discovering the Divine, The Immortality Key, The Pagan Continuity Hypothesis, Psychedelics, and More | Tim Ferriss Show #646 The Tim Ferriss Show. It pushes back the archaeology on some of this material a full 12,000 years. And it seems to me that if any of this is right, that whatever was happening in ancient Greece was a transformative experience for which a lot of thought and preparation went into. BRIAN MURARESKU: Right. And you're right. Not in every single case, obviously. Now that doesn't mean, as Brian was saying, that then suggests that that's the norm Eucharist. What's significant about these features for our piecing together the ancient religion with no name? I wish the church fathers were better botanists and would rail against the specific pharmacopeia. This time, tonight I'll say that it's just not my time yet. All episodes of The Tim Ferriss Show - Chartable There's a moment in the book where you are excited about some hard evidence. 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. #646: Brian C. Muraresku with Dr. Mark Plotkin The Eleusinian #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 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. BRIAN MURARESKU: Great question. So thank you, all who have hung with us. We have an hour and a half together and I hope there will be time for Q&A and discussion. The Tim Ferriss Show Podcast | Free Listening on Podbean App BRIAN MURARESKU: It just happens to show up. If you are drawn to psychedelics, in my mind, it means you're probably drawn to contemplative mysticism. You obviously think these are powerful substances with profound effects that track with reality. The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name And Hofmann famously discovers-- or synthesizes LSD from ergot in 1938. 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. And this is at a time when we're still hunting and gathering. And the big question is, what is this thing doing there in the middle of nowhere? 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. So again, if there were an early psychedelic sacrament that was being suppressed, I'd expect that the suppressors would talk about it. 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. You can see that inscribed on a plaque in Saint Paul's monastery at Mount Athos in Greece. And this is what I present to the world. So those are all possibly different questions to ask and answer. What does God mean? BRIAN MURARESKU: Great question. All that will be announced through our mailing list. But I mentioned that we've become friends because it is the prerogative of friends to ask hard questions. No, I think you-- this is why we're friends, Charlie. They were relevant to me in going down this rabbit hole. I wish that an ancient pharmacy had been preserved by Mount Vesuvius somewhere near Alexandria or even in upper Egypt or in Antioch or parts of Turkey. Now, I don't put too much weight into that. Do you think that by calling the Eucharist a placebo that you're likely to persuade them? It's really quite simple, Charlie. That's how we get to Catalonia. So Brian, welcome. CHARLES STANG: I do, too. What the Greeks were actually saying there is that it was barley infected with ergot, which is this natural fungus that infects cereal crops. Now, it's just an early indication and there's more testing to be done. 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. Church of the Saints Faustina and Liberata, view from the outside with the entrance enclosure, at "Sante" place, Capo di Ponte (Italy). Here's the proof of concept. Thank you. But things that sound intensely powerful. I know that's another loaded phrase. The only reason I went to college was to study classics. In the same place in and around Pompeii, this is where Christianity is really finding its roots. But it was just a process of putting these pieces together that I eventually found this data from the site Mas Castellar des Pontos in Spain. Again, how did Christianity take hold in a world with such a rich mystical tradition? 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. That's the promise in John's gospel, in John 6:54-55, that I quote in the book. Hard archaeobotanical, archaeochemical data, I haven't seen it. 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. Which is really weird, because that's how the same Dina Bazer, the same atheist in the psilocybin trials, described her insight. 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]. You see an altar of Pentelic marble that could only have come from the Mount Pentelicus quarry in mainland Greece. And as a lawyer, I know what is probative and what's circumstantial evidence, and I just-- I don't see it there. And nor did we think that a sanctuary would be one of the first things that we construct. Tim Ferriss Show Podcast Notes Now, that date is obviously very suggestive because that's precisely the time the Christians were establishing a beachhead in Rome. 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. So this is the tradition, I can say with a straight face, that saved my life. 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 . Those of you who don't know his name, he's a professor at the University of Amsterdam, an expert in Western esotericism. CHARLES STANG: OK, great. And I did not dare. And I feel like I accomplished that in the afterword to my book. So can you reflect for us where you really are and how you chose to write this book? And I started reading the studies from Pat McGovern at the University of Pennsylvania. 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? That's, just absurd. 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. They found a tiny chalice this big, dated to the second century BC. So what have you learned about the Eleusinian mysteries in particular since Ruck took this up, and what has convinced you that Ruck's hypothesis holds water? You know, it's an atheist using theological language to describe what happened to her. And there were probably other Eleusises like that to the east. He's the god of wine. CHARLES STANG: OK. And there you also found mortars that were tested and also tested positive for evidence of brewing. There's John Marco Allegro claiming that there was no Jesus, and this was just one big amanita muscaria cult. let's take up your invitation and move from Dionysus to early Christianity. Brian C. Muraresku - Priory Of Sion So it wasn't just a random place to find one of these spiked wines. 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 what does this earliest history tell us about the earliest evidence for an ancient psychedelic religion? 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. The phrasing used in the book and by others is "the pagan continuity hypothesis". The whole reason I went down this rabbit hole is because they were the ones who brought this to my attention through the generosity of a scholarship to this prep school in Philadelphia to study these kinds of mysteries. That there is no hard archaeobotanical, archaeochemical data for spiked beer, spiked wine. 283. The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name This is all secret. And what about the alleged democratization with which you credit the mysteries of Dionysus, or the role of women in that movement? 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. The Continuity Hypothesis of Dreams: A More Balanced Account It's some kind of wine-based concoction, some kind of something that is throwing these people into ecstasy. Video: Psychedelics: The Ancient Religion with No Name? That's one narrative that I feel is a little sensational. And then was, in some sense, the norm, the original Eucharist, and that it was then suppressed by orthodox, institutional Christianity, who persecuted, especially the women who were the caretakers of this tradition. The Immortality Key has its shortcomings. I mean, in the absence of the actual data, that's my biggest question. 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 recurring overreach and historical distortion, failure to consider relevant research on shamanism and Christianity, and presentation of speculation as fact