pagan continuity hypothesis

We have an hour and a half together and I hope there will be time for Q&A and discussion. So why the silence from the heresiologists on a psychedelic sacrament? CHARLES STANG: OK. Now let's move into the Greek mystery. I am so fortunate to have been selected to present my thesis, "Mythology and Psychedelics: Taking the Pagan Continuity Hypothesis a Step Further" at. CHARLES STANG: Thank you, Brian. This is all secret. She found the remains of dog sacrifice, which is super interesting. The big question is, did any of these recipes, did any of this wine spiking actually make its way into some paleo-Christian ceremony. I'm not sure many have. So even from the very beginning, it wasn't just barley and water. 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. All right, so now, let's follow up with Dionysus, but let's see here. BRIAN MURARESKU: I'm asked this question, I would say, in pretty much every interview I've done since late September. And I wonder and I question how we can keep that and retain that for today. 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. This event is entitled, Psychedelics, The Ancient Religion With No Name? With more than 35 years of experience in the field of Education dedicated to help students, teachers and administrators in both public and private institutions at school, undergraduate and graduate level. 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. 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 . And shouldn't we all be asking that question? Just imagine, I have to live with me. I'm not. The most colorful theory of psychedelics in religion portrays the original Santa Claus as a shaman. And I, for one, look forward to a time when I can see him in person for a beer, ergotized beer or not, if he ever leaves Uruguay. Again, if you're attracted to psychedelics, it's kind of an extreme thing, right? 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. So Dionysus is not the god of alcohol. So that's something else to look into. If the Dionysian one is psychedelic, does it really make its way into some kind of psychedelic Christianity? And nor did we think that a sanctuary would be one of the first things that we construct. What I see is data that's been largely neglected, and I think what serves this as a discipline is just that. BRIAN MURARESKU: That's a good question. 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. So thank you, all who have hung with us. And he found some beer and wine-- that was a bit surprising. So the mysteries of Dionysus are a bit more of a free-for-all than the mysteries of Eleusis. That also only occurs in John, another epithet of Dionysus. Now-- and I think that we can probably concede that. 8 "The winds, the sea . Get personalized recommendations, and learn where to watch across hundreds of streaming providers. 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. 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. I fully expect we will find it. 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." So I don't write this to antagonize them or the church, the people who, again, ushered me into this discipline and into these questions. Nazanin Boniadi Others find it in different ways, but the common denominator seems to be one of these really well-curated near-death experiences. It's not just Cana. And what do you believe happens to you when you do that? 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? McGovern also finds wine from Egypt, for example, in 3150 BC, wine that is mixed with a number of interesting ingredients. And there you also found mortars that were tested and also tested positive for evidence of brewing. You also find a Greek hearth inside this sanctuary. First act is your evidence for psychedelics among the so-called pagan religions in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East. But I don't understand how that provides any significant link to paleo-Christian practice. That's, just absurd. 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. So if we can test Eucharistic vessels, I wouldn't be surprised at all that we find one. 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 Jews" are not after Ye. I want to thank you for putting up with me and my questions. These were Greek-- I've seen them referred to as Greek Vikings by Peter Kingsley, Vikings who came from Ionia. So don't feel like you have to go into great depth at this point. And maybe therein we do since the intimation of immortality. And again, it survives, I think, because of that state support for the better part of 2,000 years. Tim Ferriss is a self-experimenter and bestselling author, best known for The 4-Hour Workweek, which has been translated into 40+ languages. 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. 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 . OK, now, Brian, you've probably dealt with questions like this. 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. And I describe that as somehow finding that key to immortality. So Brian, welcome. Now, Brian managed to write this book while holding down a full time practice in international law based in Washington DC. 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. And much of the evidence that you've collected is kind of the northern half of the Mediterranean world. But clearly, when you're thinking about ancient Egypt or elsewhere, there's definitely a funerary tradition. The book proposes a history of religious ritualistic psychedelic use at least as old as the ancient Greek mystery religions, especially those starting in Eleusis and dating to roughly 2,000 BC. So Pompeii and its environs at the time were called [SPEAKING GREEK], which means great Greece. Here is how I propose we are to proceed. And there were gaps as well. Do you think that the Christians as a nascent cult adapted a highly effective psycho technology that was rattling . CHARLES STANG: Yeah. This is true. Up until that point I really had very little knowledge of psychedelics, personal or literary or otherwise. 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. Now, here's-- let's tack away from hard, scientific, archaeobotanical evidence for a moment. And Hofmann famously discovers-- or synthesizes LSD from ergot in 1938. So the closer we get to the modern period, we're starting to find beer, wine mixed with interesting things. 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. The universality of frontiers, however, made the hypothesis readily extendable to other parts of the globe. Because even though it's a very long time ago, Gobekli Tepe, interestingly, has some things in common with Eleusis, like the worship of the grain, the possibility of brewing, the notion of a pilgrimage, and interaction with the dead. 55 This is very likely as it seems that the process had already started in the 4th century. 283. 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. 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. I include that line for a reason. What does it mean to die before dying? And another: in defending the pagan continuity hypothesis, Muraresku presumes a somewhat non-Jewish, pagan-like Jesus, while ignoring the growing body of psychedelic literature, including works by . 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. CHARLES STANG: Wonderful. Which is a very weird thing today. 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 when I started to get closer into the historical period-- this is all prehistory. This book by Brian Muraresku, attempts to answer this question by delving into the history of ancient secret religions dating back thousands of years. So psychedelics or not, I think it's the cultivation of that experience, which is the actual key. he goes out on a limb and says that black nightshade actually causes [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH], which is not unpleasant visions, i.e. 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]. I also sense another narrative in your book, and one you've flagged for us, maybe about 10 minutes ago, when you said that the book is a proof of concept. It's some kind of wine-based concoction, some kind of something that is throwing these people into ecstasy. I expect we will find it. She had the strange sense that every moment was an eternity of its own. I am excited . I mean, in the absence of the actual data, that's my biggest question. Brian is the author of a remarkable new book that has garnered a lot of attention and has sold a great many copies. Where you find the grain, you may have found ergot. And the quote you just read from Burkert, it's published by Harvard University Press in 1985 as Greek Religion. And to be quite honest, I'd never studied the ancient Greeks in Spain. So again, that's February 22. Are they rolling their eyes, or are you getting sort of secretive knowing nods of agreement? Now, I don't put too much weight into that. I have a deep interest in mysticism, and I've had mystical experiences, which I don't think are very relevant. BRIAN MURARESKU: Right. So there's a whole slew of sites I want to test there. So. Perhaps more generally, you could just talk about other traditions around the Mediterranean, North African, or, let's even say Judaism. BRIAN MURARESKU: Right. 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 in the mountains and forests from Greece to Rome, including the Holy Land and Galilee. 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. And keep in mind that we'll drop down into any one of these points more deeply. And if it's one thing Catholicism does very, very well, it's contemplative mysticism. BRIAN MURARESKU: I look forward to it, Charlie. #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 There have been breakthroughs, too, which no doubt kept Brian going despite some skepticism from the academy, to say the least. 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. But I don't hold-- I don't hang my hat on that claim. But you go further still, suggesting that Jesus himself at the Last Supper might have administered psychedelic sacrament, that the original Eucharist was psychedelic. Because at my heart, I still consider myself a good Catholic boy. He co-writes that with Gordon Wasson and Albert Hofmann, who famously-- there it is, the three authors. And I'm happy to see we have over 800 people present for this conversation. I'll invite him to think about the future of religion in light of all this. Brought to you by And I just happened to fall into that at the age of 14 thanks to the Jesuits, and just never left it behind. 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. What does God mean? And I want to-- just like you have this hard evidence from Catalonia, then the question is how to interpret it. And so I can see psychedelics being some kind of extra sacramental ministry that potentially could ease people at the end of life. 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. And that's what I get into in detail in the book. After the first few chapters the author bogs down flogging the Pagan Continuity Hypothesis and exulting over his discovery of small scraps of evidence he found in a decade of research. 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. If your history is even remotely correct, that would have ushered in a very different church, if Valentinus's own student Marcus and the Marcosians were involved in psychedelic rituals, then that was an early road not taken, let's say. The fact that the Vatican sits in Rome today is not an accident, I think, is the shortest way to answer that. 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? That's how we get to Catalonia. That is about the future rather than the ancient history. Please materialize. I mean, so Walter Burkert was part of the reason that kept me going on. CHARLES STANG: All right. 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. It pushes back the archaeology on some of this material a full 12,000 years. It seems entirely believable to me that we have a potion maker active near Pompeii. Brian's thesis, that of the Pagan Continuity Hypothesis, was explored by Alexander Hislop in his "The Two Babylons", 1853, as a Protestant treatise in the spirit of Martin Luther as Alexander too interjects the Elusinian Mysteries.

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