Chicago St Patrick's Day 2022, Articles P

And how do we-- when the pharmaceutical industry and when these retreat centers begin to open and begin to proliferate, how do we make this sacred? The idea of the truth shall set you free, right, [SPEAKING GREEK], in 8:32. So Dionysus is not the god of alcohol. I want to thank you for putting up with me and my questions. I mean, I asked lots of big questions in the book, and I fully acknowledge that. But it's not an ingested psychedelic. CHARLES STANG: I do, too. And I think what the pharmaceutical industry can do is help to distribute this medicine. If we're being honest with ourselves, when you've drunk-- and I've drunk that wine-- I didn't necessarily feel that I'd become one with Jesus. I expect there will be. The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name I'm not sure where it falls. I want to thank you for your candor. By which I mean that the Gospel of John suggests that at the very least, the evangelist hoped to market Christianity to a pagan audience by suggesting that Jesus was somehow equivalent to Dionysus, and that the Eucharist, his sacrament of wine, was equivalent to Dionysus's 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. They linked the idea of witches to an imagined organized sect which was a danger to the Christian commonwealth. So the mysteries of Dionysus are a bit more of a free-for-all than the mysteries of Eleusis. So the closer we get to the modern period, we're starting to find beer, wine mixed with interesting things. So that, actually, is the key to the immortality key. Do you think that the Christians as a nascent cult adapted a highly effective psycho technology that was rattling . So after the whole first half of the book-- well, wait a minute, Dr. Stang. I mean, something of symbolic significance, something monumental. It was one of the early write-ups of the psilocybin studies coming out of Johns Hopkins. and he said, Brian, don't you dare. Research inside the Church of Saint Faustina and Liberata Fig 1. Things like fasting and sleep deprivation and tattooing and scarification and, et cetera, et cetera. It was-- Eleusis was state-administered, a somewhat formal affair. Brought to you by difficult to arrive at any conclusive hypothesis. That's staying within the field of time. 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. Did the potion at Eleusis change from generation to generation? Rather, Christian beliefs were gradually incorporated into the pagan customs that already existed there. Thank you. 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. I appreciate this. First, I will provide definitions for the terms "pagan", "Christian", I mean, I wish it were easier. Because at my heart, I still consider myself a good Catholic boy. Like in a retreat pilgrimage type center, or maybe within palliative care. Is this only Marcus? To become truly immortal, Campbell talks about entering into a sense of eternity, which is the infinite present here and now. I'll invite him to think about the future of religion in light of all this. From about 1500 BC to the fourth century AD, it calls to the best and brightest of not just Athens but also Rome. How does, in other words, how does religion sit with science? For me, that's a question, and it will yield more questions. There was an absence of continuity in the direction of the colony as Newport made his frequent voyages to and . "The Jews" are not after Ye. 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. These sources suggest a much greater degree of continuity with pre-Christian values and practice than the writings of more . OK, Brian, I invite you to join us now. Because ergot is just very common. 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 I point to that evidence as illustrative of the possibility that the Christians could, in fact, have gotten their hands on an actual wine. Here's your Western Eleusis. Continuity Hypothesis - Keith E Rice's Integrated SocioPsychology Blog That would require an entirely different kind of evidence. 8 "The winds, the sea . And there were moments when the sunlight would just break through. Perhaps more generally, you could just talk about other traditions around the Mediterranean, North African, or, let's even say Judaism. BRIAN MURARESKU: Right. OK-- maybe one of those ancient beers. The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name Just from reading Dioscorides and reading all the different texts, the past 12 years have absolutely transformed the way I think about wine. There's no mistake in her mind that it was Greek. What was the wine in the early Eucharist? At Cambridge University he worked in developmental biolo. But when it comes to that Sunday ritual, it just, whatever is happening today, it seems different from what may have motivated the earliest Christians, which leads me to very big questions. The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Brian C. Muraresku with Dr. Mark 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? So if you were a mystic and you were into Demeter and Persephone and Dionysus and you were into these strange Greek mystery cults, you'd be hard-pressed to find a better place to spend your time than [SPEAKING GREEK], southern Italy, which in some cases was more Greek than Greek. And I'm not even sure what that piece looks like or how big it is. It pushes back the archaeology on some of this material a full 12,000 years. You may have already noticed one such question-- not too hard. I've no doubt that Brian has unearthed and collected a remarkable body of evidence, but evidence of what, exactly? And then that's the word that Euripides uses, by the way. 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. I'm trying to get him to speak in the series about that. And I wonder and I question how we can keep that and retain that for today. #283: Managing Procrastination, Predicting the Future, and - Scribd So Pompeii and its environs at the time were called [SPEAKING GREEK], which means great Greece. I don't know why it's happening now, but we're finally taking a look. We have some inscriptions. These were Greek-- I've seen them referred to as Greek Vikings by Peter Kingsley, Vikings who came from Ionia. But I mentioned that we've become friends because it is the prerogative of friends to ask hard questions. So the big question is, what kind of drug was this, if it was a drug? 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. They were mixed or fortified. 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. 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. It's some kind of wine-based concoction, some kind of something that is throwing these people into ecstasy. And to be quite honest, I'd never studied the ancient Greeks in Spain. The answer seems to be connected to psychedelic drugs. When there's a clear tonal distinction, and an existing precedent for Christian modification to Pagan works, I don't see why you're resistant to the idea, and I'm curious . Now that doesn't mean, as Brian was saying, that then suggests that that's the norm Eucharist. You want to field questions in both those categories? And I got to say, there's not a heck of a lot of eye rolling, assuming people read my afterword and try to see how careful I am about delineating what is knowable and what is not and what this means for the future of religion. 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. 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? He has talked about the potential evidence for psychedelics in a Mithras liturgy. 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 paraphrasing this one. I would love to see these licensed, regulated, retreat centers be done in a way that is medically sound and scientifically rigorous. 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. You're not confident that the pope is suddenly going to issue an encyclical. Psychedelics Today: PTSF 35 (with Brian Muraresku) Griffithsfund.org It still leaves an even bigger if, Dr. Stang, is which one is psychedelic? 48:01 Brian's psychedelic experiences . The kind of mysticism I've always been attracted to, like the rule of Saint Benedict and the Trappist monks and the Cistercian monks. 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. You become one with Christ by drinking that. But unfortunately, it doesn't connect it to Christianity. Then what was the Gospel of John, how did it interpret the Eucharist and market it, and so on. BRIAN MURARESKU: Right. Now, here's-- let's tack away from hard, scientific, archaeobotanical evidence for a moment. #646: Brian C. Muraresku with Dr. Mark Plotkin The Eleusinian So at the very-- after the first half of the book is over, there's an epilogue, and I say, OK, here's the evidence. And there you also found mortars that were tested and also tested positive for evidence of brewing. But I think the broader question of what's the reception to this among explicitly religious folk and religious leaders? They're mixing potions. I try to be careful to always land on a lawyer's feet and be very honest with you and everybody else about where this goes from here. Tim Ferriss Show Podcast Notes 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. BRIAN MURARESKU: That's a good question. Like, what is this all about? 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. Was there any similarity from that potion to what was drunk at Eleusis? This event is entitled, Psychedelics, The Ancient Religion With No Name? So I have my concerns about what's about to happen in Oregon and the regulation of psilocybin for therapeutic purposes. And nor did we think that a sanctuary would be one of the first things that we construct. The Immortality Key Book Summary by Brian C. Muraresku And part of me really wants to put all these pieces together before I dive in. All right, so now, let's follow up with Dionysus, but let's see here. But maybe you could just say something about this community in Catalonia. They minimized or completely removed the Jewish debates found in the New Testament, and they took on a style that was more palatable to the wider pagan world. Mona Sobhani, PhD (@monasobhaniphd) / Twitter We look forward to hosting Chacruna's founder and executive director, Bia Labate, for a lecture on Monday, March 8. Certainly these early churchmen used whatever they could against the forms of Christian practice they disapproved of, especially those they categorized as Gnostic. I write it cognizant of the fact that the Eucharist doesn't work for many, many people. I see something that's happening to people. Plants of the Gods: Hallucinogens, Healing, Culture and Conservation 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. And my favorite line of the book is, "The lawyer in me won't sleep until that one chalice, that one container, that one vessel comes to light in an unquestionable Christian context.". And so even within the New Testament you see little hints and clues that there was no such thing as only ordinary table wine. 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? To sum up the most exciting parts of the book: the bloody wine of Dionysius became the bloody wine of Jesus - the pagan continuity hypothesis - the link between the Ancient Greeks of the final centuries BC and the paleo-Christians of the early centuries AD - in short, the default psychedelic of universal world history - the cult of . 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. 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. If they've been doing this, as you suggest, for 2,000 years, nearly, what makes you think that a few ancient historians are going to turn that aircraft carrier around? And I answer it differently every single time. So how does Dionysian revelries get into this picture? CHARLES STANG: OK. Now let's move into the Greek mystery. And the reason I find that a worthy avenue of pursuit is because when you take a step back and look at the Greek of the Gospels, especially the Greek of John, which is super weird, what I see based on Dennis MacDonald's scholarship that you mentioned-- and others-- when you do the exegesis of John's gospel, there's just lots of vocabulary and lots of imagery that doesn't appear elsewhere. But what we do know about the wine of the time is that it was routinely mixed with plants and herbs and potentially fungi. 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 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: Right. 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. 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. I mean, in the absence of the actual data, that's my biggest question. Please materialize. 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. Nage ?] Where are the drugs? And so in my afterword, I present this as a blip on the archaeochemical radar. What's significant about these features for our piecing together the ancient religion with no name? And shouldn't we all be asking that question? Or maybe in palliative care. Like in Israel. 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? 8th century BC from the Tel Arad shrine. So I got a copy of it from the Library of Congress, started reading through, and there, in fact, I was reading about this incredible discovery from the '90s. So let's talk about the future of religion, and specifically the future of Roman Catholicism. Continuity Questions - 36 Questions About Continuity - QuestionDB 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 only in John that Jesus is described as being born in the lap of the Father, the [SPEAKING GREEK] in 1:18, very similar to the way that Dionysus sprung miraculously from the thigh of Zeus, and on and on and on-- which I'm not going to bore you and the audience. 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. CHARLES STANG: OK. And that's a question equally for ancient historians and for contemporary seekers and/or good Catholics. And I think we're getting there. 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? We see lots of descriptions of this in the mystical literature with which you're very familiar. Phil's Picks | Phoenix Books I'm not sure many have. And her answer was that they'd all been cleaned or treated for conservation purposes. Now, I mentioned that Brian and I had become friends. 13,000 years old. And there were probably other Eleusises like that to the east. Material evidence of a very strange potion, a drug, or a [SPEAKING GREEK]. What about Jesus as a Jew? And you're right. Here's another one. Part 1 Brian C. Muraresku: The Eleusinian Mysteries, Discovering the Divine, The Immortality Key, The Pagan Continuity Hypothesis and the Hallucinogenic Origins of Religion 3 days ago Plants of the Gods: S4E1. 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. 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 The most influential religious historian of the twentieth century, Huston Smith, once referred to it as the "best-kept secret" in history. There's some suggestive language in the pyramid texts, in the Book of the Dead and things of this nature. The same Rome that circumstantially shows up, and south of Rome, where Constantine would build his basilicas in Naples and Capua later on. Who were the Saints? And I just happened to fall into that at the age of 14 thanks to the Jesuits, and just never left it behind. Because again, when I read the clinical literature, I'm reading things that look like mystical experiences, or that at least at least sound like them. And he found some beer and wine-- that was a bit surprising. Because they talk about everything else that they take issue with. So this is the tradition, I can say with a straight face, that saved my life. 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 please just call me Charlie. Klaus Schmidt, who was with the German Archaeological Institute, called this a sanctuary and called these T-shaped pillars representations of gods. And so that opened a question for me. I think the only big question is what the exact relationship was from a place like that over to Eleusis. Those of you who don't know his name, he's a professor at the University of Amsterdam, an expert in Western esotericism. 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. CHARLES STANG: Wonderful. And besides that, young Brian, let's keep the mysteries mysteries. So frankly, what happens during the Neolithic, we don't know, at least from a scientific vantage. I was satisfied with I give Brian Muraresku an "A" for enthusiasm, but I gave his book 2 stars. And that's not how it works today, and I don't think that's how it works in antiquity. The question is, what will happen in the future. I was not going to put a book out there that was sensationalist. 36:57 Drug-spiked wine . This an absolute masterclass on why you must know your identity and goals before forming a habit, what the best systems are for habit. So you were unable to test the vessels on site in Eleusis, which is what led you to, if I have this argument right, to Greek colonies around the Mediterranean. So first of all, please tell us how it is you came to pursue this research to write this book, and highlight briefly what you think are its principal conclusions and their significance for our present and future. 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. 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. And even in the New Testament, you'll see wine spiked with myrrh, for example, that's served to Jesus at his crucifixion. BRIAN MURARESKU: Right. Brian C. Muraresku - Priory Of Sion 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. 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 we had a great chat, a very spirited chat about the mysteries and the psychedelic hypothesis. The Psychedelic Gospels: The Secret History of Hallucinogens in I'm skeptical, Dr. Stang. But let me say at the outset that it is remarkably learned, full of great historical and philological detail.