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Let's move to early Christian. Here's the proof of concept. 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? Now, let's get started, Brian. And when you speak in that way, what I hear you saying is there is something going on. So it is already happening. 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. Frankly, if you ask the world's leading archaeobotanists and archaeochemists, where's the spiked beer and where's the spiked wine, which I've been doing since about 2007, 2008, the resounding answer you'll get back from everybody is a resounding no. CHARLES STANG: I do, too. [texts-excerpt] penalty for cutting mangroves in floridaFREE EstimateFREE Estimate And by the way, I'm not here trying to protect Christianity from the evidence of psychedelic use. So why the silence from the heresiologists on a psychedelic sacrament? They found a tiny chalice this big, dated to the second century BC. So now it's true that these heresy hunters show an interest in this love potion. 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. 44:48 Psychedelics and ancient cave art . It's something that goes from Homer all the way until the fall of the Roman Empire, over the course of well more than 1,000 years. This time, tonight I'll say that it's just not my time yet. Which, if you think about it, is a very elegant idea. Books about pagan continuity hypothesis? Maybe I have that wrong. Rather, Christian beliefs were gradually incorporated into the pagan customs that already existed there. 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. It's arguably not the case in the third century. Reviewed in the United States on January 29, 2023 OK, now, Brian, you've probably dealt with questions like this. The Immortality Key, The Secret History of the Religion With No Name. 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. 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 . 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? The kind of mysticism I've always been attracted to, like the rule of Saint Benedict and the Trappist monks and the Cistercian monks. You mentioned, too, early churchmen, experts in heresies by the name of Irenaeus of Lyons and Hippolytus of Rome. Wonderful, well, thank you. 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. Maybe there's some residual fear that's been built up in me. Certainly these early churchmen used whatever they could against the forms of Christian practice they disapproved of, especially those they categorized as Gnostic. 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. That's the promise in John's gospel, in John 6:54-55, that I quote in the book. They're mixing potions. And Hofmann famously discovers-- or synthesizes LSD from ergot in 1938. I write it cognizant of the fact that the Eucharist doesn't work for many, many people. The pagan continuity hypothesis at the heart of this book made sense to me. And in the ancient world, wine was routinely referred to as a [SPEAKING GREEK], which is the Greek word for drug. There he is. 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. 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. I can't imagine that there were no Christians that availed themselves of this biotechnology, and I can't imagine-- it's entirely plausible to me that they would mix this biotechnology with the Eucharist. 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. I think the wine certainly does. What's different about the Dionysian mysteries, and what evidence, direct or indirect, do we have about the wine of Dionysus being psychedelic? I have a deep interest in mysticism, and I've had mystical experiences, which I don't think are very relevant. Again, how did Christianity take hold in a world with such a rich mystical tradition? 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? The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: 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 (#646) - The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss 3 Annual "Best of" Apple Podcasts 900+ Million episodes downloaded You're not confident that the pope is suddenly going to issue an encyclical. Now, Carl Ruck from Boston University, much closer to home, however, took that invitation and tried to pursue this hypothesis. 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. There have been breakthroughs, too, which no doubt kept Brian going despite some skepticism from the academy, to say the least. But what we do know is that their sacrament was wine and we know a bit more about the wine of antiquity, ancient Greek wine, than we can piece together from these nocturnal celebrations. We have an hour and a half together and I hope there will be time for Q&A and discussion. That was the question for me. And you suspect, therefore, that it might be a placebo, and you want the real thing. Now are there any other questions you wish to propose or push or-- I don't know, to push back against any of the criticisms or questions I've leveled? And if you're a good Christian or a good Catholic, and you're consuming that wine on any given Sunday, why are you doing that? Now, Brian managed to write this book while holding down a full time practice in international law based in Washington DC. You can see that inscribed on a plaque in Saint Paul's monastery at Mount Athos in Greece. So how to put this? I appreciate this. So, I mean, my biggest question behind all of this is, as a good Catholic boy, is the Eucharist. 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. Maybe for those facing the end of life. BRIAN MURARESKU:: It's a simple formula, Charlie. 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. 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. BRIAN MURARESKU: Now we're cooking with grease, Dr. Stang. So somewhere between 1% and 49%. Now that doesn't mean, as Brian was saying, that then suggests that that's the norm Eucharist. 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. And they found this site, along with others around the Mediterranean. 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? OK, Brian, I invite you to join us now. They were relevant to me in going down this rabbit hole. Lots of Greek artifacts, lots of Greek signifiers. To some degree, I think you're looking back to southern Italy from the perspective of the supremacy of Rome, which is not the case in the first century. To be a Catholic is to believe that you are literally consuming the blood of Christ to become Christ. And shouldn't we all be asking that question? These two accuse one Gnostic teacher named Marcus-- who is himself a student of the famous theologian Valentinus-- they accuse him of dabbling in pharmacological devilry. 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 expect we will find it. Now I want to get to the questions, but one last question before we move to the discussion portion. 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. 1,672. Not much. And not least because if I were to do it, I'd like to do so in a deeply sacred ritual. 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? Its proponents maintain that the affable, plump old fellow associated with Christmas derives from the character of Arctic medical practitioners. That to live on forever and ever, to live an everlasting life is not immortality. So if Eleusis is the Fight Club of the ancient world, right, the first rule is you don't talk about it. And as a lawyer, I know what is probative and what's circumstantial evidence, and I just-- I don't see it there. 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. 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 two-part discussion between Muraresku and Dr. Plotkin examines the role psychedelics have played in the development of Western civilization. But maybe you could just say something about this community in Catalonia. Brendon Benz presents an alternative hypothesis to recent scholarship which has hypothesized that Israel consisted of geographical, economic . 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. You might find it in a cemetery in Mexico. 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." What was the real religion of the ancient Greeks? All rights reserved. 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. That's just everlasting. The most influential religious historian of the twentieth century, Huston Smith, once referred to it as the "best-kept secret" in history. Brought to you by Thank you, sir. There's evidence of the mysteries of Dionysus before, during, and after the life of Jesus, it's worth pointing out. So Gobekli Tepe, for those who don't know, is this site in southern Turkey on the border with Syria. And does it line up with the promise from John's gospel that anyone who drinks this becomes instantly immortal? 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 . The Immortality Key has its shortcomings. He calls it a drug against grief in Greek, [SPEAKING GREEK]. 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. CHARLES STANG: All right. And I think there are so many sites and excavations and so many chalices that remain to be tested. These were Greek-- I've seen them referred to as Greek Vikings by Peter Kingsley, Vikings who came from Ionia. 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. would certainly appreciate. I'll invite him to think about the future of religion in light of all this. So, like, they're wonderstruck, or awestruck by their libations and their incense. 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. Why don't we turn the tables and ask you what questions you think need to be posed? 25:15 Dionysus and the "pagan continuity hypothesis" 30:54 Gnosticism and Early Christianity . Like, what is this all about? Because for many, many years, you know, Ruck's career takes a bit of a nosedive. Get personalized recommendations, and learn where to watch across hundreds of streaming providers. 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 was satisfied with I give Brian Muraresku an "A" for enthusiasm, but I gave his book 2 stars. But I want to ask you to reflect on the broader narrative that you're painting, because I've heard you speak in two ways about the significance of this work. And again, it survives, I think, because of that state support for the better part of 2,000 years. But we do know that the initiates made this pilgrimage from Athens to Eleusis, drunk the potion, the kykeon, had this very visionary event-- they all talk about seeing something-- and after which they become immortal. And I'm trying to reconcile that. Eusebius, third into the fourth century, is also talking about them-- it's a great Greek word, [SPEAKING GREEK]. What Brian labels the religion with no name. But in Pompeii, for example, there's the villa of the mysteries, one of these really breathtaking finds that also survived the ravage of Mount Vesuvius. 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? Thank you for that. BRIAN MURARESKU: Dr. Stang, an erudite introduction as ever. So the Greek god of wine, intoxication. Things like fasting and sleep deprivation and tattooing and scarification and, et cetera, et cetera. 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. And I don't know if it's a genuine mystical experience or mystical mimetic or some kind of psychological breakthrough. That's all just fancy wordplay. The big question is, did any of these recipes, did any of this wine spiking actually make its way into some paleo-Christian ceremony. Now, I have no idea where it goes from here, or if I'll take it myself. And so if there is a place for psychedelics, I would think it would be in one of those sacred containers within monastic life, or pilgrims who visit one of these monastic centers, for example. 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 I did go straight to [INAUDIBLE] Papangelli in Eleusis, and I went to the museum. CHARLES STANG: Yeah. And I've listened to the volunteers who've gone through these experiences. 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 I just happened to fall into that at the age of 14 thanks to the Jesuits, and just never left it behind. It's not the case in the second century. But what I see are potential and possibilities and things worthy of discussions like this.