I see something that's happening to people. BRIAN MURARESKU: That's a good question. That's, just absurd. So your presentation of early Christianity inclines heavily toward the Greek world. Like in a retreat pilgrimage type center, or maybe within palliative care. And he was actually going out and testing some of these ancient chalices. 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.
#646: Brian C. Muraresku with Dr. Mark Plotkin The Eleusinian 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. 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. Just from reading Dioscorides and reading all the different texts, the past 12 years have absolutely transformed the way I think about wine.
The Psychedelic Gospels: The Secret History of Hallucinogens in let's take up your invitation and move from Dionysus to early Christianity.
The Immortality Key - Book Review and Discussion - Were early - Reddit This book by Brian Muraresku, attempts to answer this question by delving into the history of ancient secret religions dating back thousands of years. . 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]. Not because they just found that altar. And did the earliest Christians inherit the same secret tradition? It's really quite simple, Charlie. And you suspect, therefore, that it might be a placebo, and you want the real thing. Or maybe in palliative care. What's the importance of your abstention from psychedelics, given what is obvious interest.
Phil's Picks | Phoenix Books But I mentioned that we've become friends because it is the prerogative of friends to ask hard questions. I mean, so it was Greek. This event is entitled, Psychedelics, The Ancient Religion With No Name? And in the ancient world, wine was routinely referred to as a [SPEAKING GREEK], which is the Greek word for drug. He's the god of wine. I know that that's a loaded phrase. he goes out on a limb and says that black nightshade actually causes [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH], which is not unpleasant visions, i.e. I go out of my way, in both parts of the book, which, it's divided into the history of beer and the history of wine, essentially. 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. And the second act, the same, but for what you call paleo-Christianity, the evidence for your suspicion that the Eucharist was originally a psychedelic sacrament. Where are the drugs? Well, wonderful. And now we have a working hypothesis and some data to suggest where we might be looking. 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 I mean, something of symbolic significance, something monumental. There's no mistake in her mind that it was Greek.
#646: Brian C. Muraresku with Dr. Mark Plotkin The Eleusinian CHARLES STANG: All right. BRIAN MURARESKU: I look forward to it, Charlie. 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? Brought to you by 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? 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. That to live on forever and ever, to live an everlasting life is not immortality. Let me start with the view-- the version of it that I think is less persuasive. It was it was barley, water, and something else. The long and short of it is, in 1978 there was no hard scientific data to prove this one way or the other. Material evidence of a very strange potion, a drug, or a [SPEAKING GREEK]. Nage ?] There have been really dramatic studies from Hopkins and NYU about the ability of psilocybin at the end of life to curb things like depression, anxiety, and end of life distress. Like the wedding at Cana, which my synopsis of that event is a drunkard getting a bunch of drunk people even more drunk. The only reason I went to college was to study classics. So it's hard for me to write this and talk about this without acknowledging the Jesuits who put me here. Because they talk about everything else that they take issue with. I expect we will find it. 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. And we had a great chat, a very spirited chat about the mysteries and the psychedelic hypothesis. So that, actually, is the key to the immortality key. Even a little bit before Gobekli Tepe, there was another site unearthed relatively recently in Israel, at the Rakefet cave. They followed Platonic (and other Greeks) philosophy. Thank you for that. So let's start, then, the first act. So let's start with one that is more contemporary. These mysteries had at their center a sacrament called kykeon, which offered a vision of the mysteries of life and death. Where you find the grain, you may have found ergot. And besides that, young Brian, let's keep the mysteries mysteries. And that's the mysteries of Dionysus. Read more about The Immortality Key by Brian Muraresku Making Sense by Sam Harris 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. And at some point in my narrative, I do include mention of Gobekli Tepe, for example, which is essentially twice the age of Stonehenge. The Immortality Key, The Secret History of the Religion With No Name. 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. So perhaps there's even more evidence. And not least because if I were to do it, I'd like to do so in a deeply sacred ritual. Thank you. 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. So Dionysus is not the god of alcohol. Maybe part of me is skeptical, right? You won't find it in many places other than that. I'm not. The question is, what will happen in the future.
The Tim Ferriss Show - #646: Brian C. Muraresku with Dr. Mark Plotkin To become truly immortal, Campbell talks about entering into a sense of eternity, which is the infinite present here and now. 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. All rights reserved. So there's a whole slew of sites I want to test there. Now, Brian managed to write this book while holding down a full time practice in international law based in Washington DC. I mean, I wish it were easier. It was a pilgrimage site. And this is what I present to the world. Not in every single case, obviously. But you will be consoled to know that someone else will be-- I will be there, but someone else will be leading that conversation. 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. Do you think that by calling the Eucharist a placebo that you're likely to persuade them? And I describe that as somehow finding that key to immortality. Eusebius, third into the fourth century, is also talking about them-- it's a great Greek word, [SPEAKING GREEK]. 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. I would expect we'd have ample evidence. Now-- and I think that we can probably concede that. I'm not sure where it falls. I know that's another loaded phrase. 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 please just call me Charlie. Now, that date is obviously very suggestive because that's precisely the time the Christians were establishing a beachhead in Rome. And there are legitimate scholars out there who say, because John wanted to paint Jesus in the light of Dionysus, present him as the second coming of this pagan God. BRIAN MURARESKU: Right. 36:57 Drug-spiked wine . This is all secret. The most colorful theory of psychedelics in religion portrays the original Santa Claus as a shaman. Not because it's not there, because it hasn't been tested.
18.3C: Continuity Theory - Social Sci LibreTexts So how to put this? It's funny to see that some of the first basilicas outside Rome are popping up here, and in and around Pompeii. So in my mind, it was the first real hard scientific data to support this hypothesis, which, as you alluded to at the beginning, only raises more questions. I want to thank you for putting up with me and my questions. Part 1 Brian C. Muraresku: The Eleusinian Mysteries, Discovering the Divine, The Immortality Key, The Pagan Continuity Hypothesis and the Hallucinogenic Origins of Religion - Feb 22, 2023 . So what evidence can you provide for that claim? So it is already happening. And let's start with our earliest evidence from the Stone Age and the Bronze Age. But they charge Marcus specifically, not with a psychedelic Eucharist, but the use of a love potion. Like, what is this all about? But it just happens to show up at the right place at the right time, when the earliest Christians could have availed themselves of this kind of sacrament. Oh, I hope I haven't offended you, Brian. If you are drawn to psychedelics, in my mind, it means you're probably drawn to contemplative mysticism. You see an altar of Pentelic marble that could only have come from the Mount Pentelicus quarry in mainland Greece. 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. What's the wine? How does, in other words, how does religion sit with science? But we do know that something was happening. And I think there are so many sites and excavations and so many chalices that remain to be tested. In my previous posts on the continuity hypothesis . I was not going to put a book out there that was sensationalist. She had the strange sense that every moment was an eternity of its own. They're mixing potions. I don't know why it's happening now, but we're finally taking a look. Here's the proof of concept. Now that doesn't mean, as Brian was saying, that then suggests that that's the norm Eucharist. You can see that inscribed on a plaque in Saint Paul's monastery at Mount Athos in Greece. Love potions, love charms, they're very common in the ancient. CHARLES STANG: Brian, I wonder if you could end by reflecting on the meaning of dying before you die.
Plants of the Gods: Hallucinogens, Healing, Culture and - Podchaser But with what were they mixed, and to what effect? 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. One, on mainland Greece from the Mycenaean period, 16th century BC, and the other about 800 years later in modern day Turkey, another ritual potion that seemed to have suggested some kind of concoction of beer, wine, and mead that was used to usher the king into the afterlife. And inside that beer was all kinds of vegetable matter, like wheat, oats, and sedge and lily and flax and various legumes. But in any case, Ruck had his career, well, savaged, in some sense, by the reaction to his daring to take this hypothesis seriously, this question seriously. 1,672. And does it line up with the promise from John's gospel that anyone who drinks this becomes instantly immortal? And I-- in my profession, we call this circumstantial, and I get it.
The Wanderer | Old English Poetry Project | Rutgers University 8th century BC from the Tel Arad shrine. Not just in Italy, but as kind of the headquarters for the Mediterranean. What's significant about these features for our piecing together the ancient religion with no name? So the Eastern Aegean. And Brian, it would be helpful for me to know whether you are more interested in questions that take up the ancient world or more that deal with this last issue, the sort of contemporary and the future. I understand the appeal of that. So if you don't think that you are literally consuming divine blood, what is the point of religion? CHARLES STANG: Yeah. But please do know that we will forward all these questions to Brian so he will know the sorts of questions his work prompts. But it's not an ingested psychedelic. So this is interesting. And very famous passages, by the way, that should be familiar to most New Testament readers. 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. So don't feel like you have to go into great depth at this point.
The Immortality Key - David Bookstaber 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.
David Wakefield - President - Wakefield Enterprises, LLC | LinkedIn Now, here's-- let's tack away from hard, scientific, archaeobotanical evidence for a moment. 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. If the Dionysian one is psychedelic, does it really make its way into some kind of psychedelic Christianity? 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? You might find it in a cemetery in Mexico. BRIAN MURARESKU: Good one. So the mysteries of Dionysus are a bit more of a free-for-all than the mysteries of Eleusis. But I think the broader question of what's the reception to this among explicitly religious folk and religious leaders? There have been breakthroughs, too, which no doubt kept Brian going despite some skepticism from the academy, to say the least. So there's a house preserved outside of Pompeii, preserved, like so much else, under the ash of Mount Vesuvius's eruption in the year 79 of the Common Era. Now, I have no idea where it goes from here, or if I'll take it myself. Now is there any evidence for psychedelic use in ancient Egypt, and if not, do you have any theory as to why that's silent? You obviously think these are powerful substances with profound effects that track with reality. 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 . There are others claiming that there's drugs everywhere. And I answer it differently every single time. And so that opened a question for me. And I wonder whether the former narrative serves the interests of the latter. 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. 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. And I want to ask you about specifically the Eleusinian mysteries, centered around the goddesses Demeter and Persephone. All right, so now, let's follow up with Dionysus, but let's see here. Psychedelics are a lens to investigate this stuff. From about 1500 BC to the fourth century AD, it calls to the best and brightest of not just Athens but also Rome. 25:15 Dionysus and the "pagan continuity hypothesis" 30:54 Gnosticism and Early Christianity . So somewhere between 1% and 49%. So I want to propose that we stage this play in two acts. Tim Ferriss is a self-experimenter and bestselling author, best known for The 4-Hour Workweek, which has been translated into 40+ languages. But I don't understand how that provides any significant link to paleo-Christian practice. Here's your Western Eleusis. He was wronged by individuals, allegedly. Yeah.
Books about pagan continuity hypothesis? : r/AskHistorians - reddit Little attempt has been made, however, to bridge the gap between \"pagan\" and \"Christian\" or to examine late antique, Christian attitudes toward sexuality and marriage from the viewpoint of the \"average\" Christian. 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 don't have to look very hard to find that. That's just everlasting. So here's a question for you. 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. 283. But if the original Eucharist were psychedelic, or even if there were significant numbers of early Christians using psychedelics like sacrament, I would expect the representatives of orthodox, institutional Christianity to rail against it.
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