And it was the Jesuits who encouraged me to always, always ask questions and never take anything at face value. Joe Campbell puts it best that what we're after is an experience of being alive. 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. We see lots of descriptions of this in the mystical literature with which you're very familiar. The pagan continuity hypothesis at the heart of this book made sense to me. So psychedelics or not, I think it's the cultivation of that experience, which is the actual key. And I'll just list them out quickly. 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 Like savory, wormwood, blue tansy, balm, senna, coriander, germander, mint, sage, and thyme. And that's not how it works today, and I don't think that's how it works in antiquity. And so with a revised ancient history, in place Brian tacks back to the title of our series, Psychedelics and the Future of Religion. 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. 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? The Tim Ferriss Show. Books about pagan continuity hypothesis? Even a little bit before Gobekli Tepe, there was another site unearthed relatively recently in Israel, at the Rakefet cave. And so even within the New Testament you see little hints and clues that there was no such thing as only ordinary table wine. 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. Psychedelics are a lens to investigate this stuff. Whether there's a psychedelic tradition-- I mean, there are some suggestive paintings. #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 Brought to you by GiveWell.org charity research and effective giving and 5-Bullet Friday, my very own email newsletter. A rebirth into a new conception of the self, the self's relationship to things that are hard to define, like God. 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. And we know the mysteries were there. [texts-excerpt] penalty for cutting mangroves in floridaFREE EstimateFREE Estimate But what I see are potential and possibilities and things worthy of discussions like this. 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. This time around, we have a very special edition featuring Dr. Mark Plotkin and Brian C . You become one with Christ by drinking that. Do the drugs, Dr. Stang? 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. And that's where oversight comes in handy. They followed Platonic (and other Greeks) philosophy. So whatever these [SPEAKING GREEK] libations incense were, the church fathers don't get into great detail about what may have been spiking them. You obviously think these are powerful substances with profound effects that track with reality. 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. What does ergotized beer in Catalonia have anything to do with the Greek mysteries at Eleusis? Now, let's get started, Brian. There he is. And I don't know if there's other examples of such things. OK-- maybe one of those ancient beers. 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. And the truth is that this is a project that goes well beyond ancient history, because Brian is convinced that what he has uncovered has profound implications for the future of religion, and specifically, the future of his own religion, Roman Catholicism. 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. Show Plants of the Gods: Hallucinogens, Healing, Culture and Conservation podcast, Ep Plants of the Gods: S4E2. This event is entitled, Psychedelics, The Ancient Religion With No Name? The altar had been sitting in a museum in Israel since the 1960s and just hadn't been tested. So throughout the book, you make the point that ancient beer and wine are not like our beer and wine. This notion in John 15:1, the notion of the true vine, for example, only occurs in John. He's the god of wine. Brian is the author of a remarkable new book that has garnered a lot of attention and has sold a great many copies. Many people see that as symbolic or allegorical or just a nice thing, which is not the case. Thank you all for joining us, and I hope to see many of you later this month for our next event. And I'm not even sure what that piece looks like or how big it is. So Pompeii and its environs at the time were called [SPEAKING GREEK], which means great Greece. Like the wedding at Cana, which my synopsis of that event is a drunkard getting a bunch of drunk people even more drunk. 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. BRIAN MURARESKU: Right. President and CEO, First Southeast Financial Corp and First Federal Savings and Loan Director, Carolina First Bank and The South Financial Group 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. CHARLES STANG: Wonderful. I wonder if you're familiar with Wouter Hanegraaff at the University of Amsterdam. Not because it's not there, because it hasn't been tested. CHARLES STANG: I do, too. Klaus Schmidt, who was with the German Archaeological Institute, called this a sanctuary and called these T-shaped pillars representations of gods. So let's start, then, the first act. Brought to you by BRIAN MURARESKU: I'm bringing more illumination. Copyright 2023 President and Fellows of Harvard College. 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. I'm going to come back to that idea of proof of concept. I was not going to put a book out there that was sensationalist. 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. Before I set forth the outline of this thesis, three topics must be discussed in order to establish a basic understanding of the religious terminology, Constantine's reign, and the contemporary sources. But I think there's a decent scientific foothold to begin that work. She had the strange sense that every moment was an eternity of its own. 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 really quite simple, Charlie. Now, Mithras is another one of these mystery religions. Rather, Christian beliefs were gradually incorporated into the pagan customs that already existed there. 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. The long and short of it is, in 1978 there was no hard scientific data to prove this one way or the other. Now, I've never done them myself, but I have talked to many, many people who've had experience with psychedelics. And as a lawyer, I know what is probative and what's circumstantial evidence, and I just-- I don't see it there. What about all these early Christians themselves as essentially Jews? This two-part discussion between Muraresku and Dr. Plotkin examines the role psychedelics have played in the development of Western civilization. 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? I'm trying to get him to speak in the series about that. Hard archaeobotanical, archaeochemical data, I haven't seen it. IMDb is the world's most popular and authoritative source for movie, TV and celebrity content. "The Jews" are not after Ye. The (Mistaken) Conspiracy Theory: In the Late Middle Ages, religious elites created a new, and mistaken, intellectual framework out of Christian heresy and theology concerning demons. And if it's one thing Catholicism does very, very well, it's contemplative mysticism. And again, it survives, I think, because of that state support for the better part of 2,000 years. It's funny to see that some of the first basilicas outside Rome are popping up here, and in and around Pompeii. 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. [2] Where you find the grain, you may have found ergot. All rights reserved. Here's another one. And if there's historical precedent for it, all the more so. 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. In fact, he found beer, wine, and mead all mixed together in a couple of different places. He co-writes that with Gordon Wasson and Albert Hofmann, who famously-- there it is, the three authors. So I'll speak in language that you and our good colleague Greg [? So somewhere between 1% and 49%. So to find dog sacrifice inside this Greek sanctuary alludes to this proto-witch, Hecate, the mother of Circe, who is mentioned in the same hymn to Demeter from the 8th, 7th century BC, as kind of the third of the goddesses to whom these mysteries were dedicated. 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. Some number of people have asked about Egypt. They were relevant to me in going down this rabbit hole. 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. You see an altar of Pentelic marble that could only have come from the Mount Pentelicus quarry in mainland Greece. Copyright 2023 The President and Fellows of Harvard College, The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name. And what does this earliest history tell us about the earliest evidence for an ancient psychedelic religion? 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. 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. Thank you. So this is the tradition, I can say with a straight face, that saved my life. And that that's how I-- and by not speculating more than we can about the mystical supper, if we follow the hypothesis that this is a big if for some early communities of Greek speakers, this is how I'm finding common ground with priests both Catholic and Orthodox and Protestants. CHARLES STANG: OK, that is the big question. 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. Richard Evans Schultes and the Search for Ayahuasca 17 days ago Plants of the Gods: S3E10. So again, that's February 22. And she happened to find it on psilocybin. CHARLES STANG: All right. So that's from Burkert, a very sober scholar and the dean of all scholarship on Greek religion. You may have already noticed one such question-- not too hard. And so in some of these psychedelic trials, under the right conditions, I do see genuine religious experiences. A rebirth into what? We have plays like the Bacchi from Euripides, where we can piece together some of this.
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