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. Correcting Key Points in Muraresku, The Immortality Key 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 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 this is interesting. The question is, what will happen in the future. Now-- and I think that we can probably concede that. And so even within the New Testament you see little hints and clues that there was no such thing as only ordinary table wine. Which, again, what I see are small groups of people getting together to commune with the dead. 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. And the one thing that unites both of those worlds in this research called the pagan continuity hypothesis, the one thing we can bet on is the sacred language of Greek. The Immortality Key: Book Overview (Brian Muraresku) Maybe there's a spark of the divine within. 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. So I think this was a minority of early Christians. They are guaranteed an afterlife. 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. Maybe there's some residual fear that's been built up in me. An Exploration of Religion: An Interview with Brian Muraresku So my biggest question is, what kind of wine was it? Samuel Zuschlag - Durham University - Charlotte, North - LinkedIn What was discovered, as far as I can tell, from your treatment of it, is essentially an ancient pharmacy in this house. So I think it's really interesting details here worth following up on. 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? 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. That was the question for me. 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. We have other textual evidence. and he said, Brian, don't you dare. All episodes of The Tim Ferriss Show - Chartable But curiously, it's evidence for a eye ointment which is supposed to induce visions and was used as part of a liturgy in the cult of Mithras. Richard Evans Schultes and the Search for Ayahuasca 17 days ago Plants of the Gods: S3E10. The continuity between pagan and Christian cult nearby the archaeological area of Naquane in Capo di Ponte. You mentioned there were lots of dead ends, and there certainly were. Now, I've never done them myself, but I have talked to many, many people who've had experience with psychedelics. If you die before you die, you won't die when you die. 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. Yeah. CHARLES STANG: All right. And so how far should this investigation go? And so I can see psychedelics being some kind of extra sacramental ministry that potentially could ease people at the end of life. You become one with Christ by drinking that. BRIAN MURARESKU: Dr. Stang, an erudite introduction as ever. 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. What about all these early Christians themselves as essentially Jews? The Continuity Hypothesis was put forward by John Bowlby (1953) as a critical effect of attachments in his development of Attachment Theory. CHARLES STANG: Thank you, Brian. The continuity theory proposes that older adults maintain the same activities, behaviors, personalities, and relationships of the past. That's our next event, and will be at least two more events to follow. I did go straight to [INAUDIBLE] Papangelli in Eleusis, and I went to the museum. And so the big hunt for me was trying to find some of those psychedelic bits. So I want to propose that we stage this play in two acts. We're going to get there very soon. 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 . And so I cite a Pew poll, for example, that says something like 69% of American Catholics do not believe in transubstantiation, which is the defining dogma of the church, the idea that the bread and wine literally becomes the flesh and blood. 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. And I don't know if it's a genuine mystical experience or mystical mimetic or some kind of psychological breakthrough. So somewhere between 1% and 49%. Biblical Entheogens: a Speculative Hypothesis - ResearchGate And she talks about kind of being born again, another promise from John's gospel. 18.3C: Continuity Theory - Social Sci LibreTexts First, the continuity of the offices must be seen in light of the change of institutional charges; they had lost their religious connotations and had become secular. 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. Which is really weird, because that's how the same Dina Bazer, the same atheist in the psilocybin trials, described her insight. I mean, I asked lots of big questions in the book, and I fully acknowledge that. 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. That there is no hard archaeobotanical, archaeochemical data for spiked beer, spiked wine. 36:57 Drug-spiked wine . And for those of you who have found my line of questioning or just my general presence tedious, first of all, I fully appreciate that reaction. Maybe I'm afraid I'll take the psychedelic and I won't have what is reported in the literature from Hopkins and NYU. He's talking about kind of psychedelic wine. I wish that an ancient pharmacy had been preserved by Mount Vesuvius somewhere near Alexandria or even in upper Egypt or in Antioch or parts of Turkey. Thank you. And if there's historical precedent for it, all the more so. 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. Pagan Continuity and Christian Attitudes: When did Paganism End? Books about pagan continuity hypothesis? : r/AskHistorians - reddit We don't have to look very hard to find that. 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 Certainly these early churchmen used whatever they could against the forms of Christian practice they disapproved of, especially those they categorized as Gnostic. And I-- in my profession, we call this circumstantial, and I get it. Brian has been very busy taking his new book on the road, of course, all online, and we're very grateful to him for taking the time to join us this evening. Brought to you by GiveWell.org charity research and effective giving and 5-Bullet Friday, my very own email newsletter.Welcome to The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is usually my job to deconstruct world-class performers to tease out their routines, habits, et cetera that you can apply to your own life. And I write, at the very end of the book, I hope that they'd be proud of this investigation. And there were probably other Eleusises like that to the east. In May of last year, researchers published what they believe is the first archaeochemical data for the use of psychoactive drugs in some form of early Judaism. What's the wine? You won't find it in many places other than that. In fact, he found beer, wine, and mead all mixed together in a couple of different places. 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? And when I read psychedelic literature or I read the literature on near-death experiences, I see experiences similar to what I experienced as a young boy. Israel's Exodus In Transdisciplinary Perspective: Text - Vdoc.pub 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. Now, I've had experiences outside the Eucharist that resonate with me. Why don't we turn the tables and ask you what questions you think need to be posed? What does God mean? Nage ?] #646: Brian C. Muraresku with Dr. Mark Plotkin The Eleusinian 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 besides that, young Brian, let's keep the mysteries mysteries. What's significant about these features for our piecing together the ancient religion with no name? Plants of the Gods: Hallucinogens, Healing, Culture and Conservation We still have almost 700 with us. So even from the very beginning, it wasn't just barley and water. He calls it a drug against grief in Greek, [SPEAKING GREEK]. Mona Sobhani, PhD Retweeted. Although she's open to testing, there was nothing there. 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. Some number of people have asked about Egypt. Is this only Marcus? First, I will provide definitions for the terms "pagan", "Christian", 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? A lot of Christianity, as you rightly point out, I mean, it was an Eastern phenomenon, all over the eastern Mediterranean. That is about the future rather than the ancient history. You obviously think these are powerful substances with profound effects that track with reality. I just sense a great deal of structure and thoughtfulness going into this experience. let's take up your invitation and move from Dionysus to early Christianity. "The Tim Ferriss Show" 646: Brian C. Muraresku with Dr. Mark Plotkin And it was their claim that when the hymn to Demeter, one of these ancient records that records, in some form, the proto-recipe for this kykeon potion, which I call like a primitive beer, in the hymn to Demeter, they talk about ingredients like barley, water, and mint. And if it only occurs in John, the big question is why. When you start testing, you find things. And keep in mind that we'll drop down into any one of these points more deeply. 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? CHARLES STANG: OK, that is the big question. 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 But clearly, when you're thinking about ancient Egypt or elsewhere, there's definitely a funerary tradition. So the closer we get to the modern period, we're starting to find beer, wine mixed with interesting things. Research inside the Church of Saint Faustina and Liberata Fig 1. 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 we at least have, again, the indicia of evidence that something was happening there. Now, Mithras is another one of these mystery religions. He draws on the theory of "pagan continuity," which holds that early Christianity adopted . PDF The continuity between pagan and Christian cult - Scandinavia 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. OK-- maybe one of those ancient beers. I appreciate this. You may have already noticed one such question-- not too hard. And what we know about the wine of the time is that it was prized amongst other things not for its alcoholic content, but for its ability to induce madness. And according to Wasson, Hofmann, and Ruck, that barley was really a code word. And I think that's an important distinction to make. Now, you could draw the obvious conclusion. 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 as a lawyer, I know what is probative and what's circumstantial evidence, and I just-- I don't see it there. So the big question is, what kind of drug was this, if it was a drug? CHARLES STANG: OK. Now let's move into the Greek mystery. So frankly, what happens during the Neolithic, we don't know, at least from a scientific vantage. And yet I talked to an atheist who has one experience with psilocybin and is immediately bathed in God's love. Oh, I hope I haven't offended you, Brian. 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. You're not confident that the pope is suddenly going to issue an encyclical. So Dionysus is not the god of alcohol. Now I understand and I appreciate the pharmaceutical industry's ability to distribute this as medicine for those who are looking for alternatives, alternative treatments for depression and anxiety and PTSD and addiction and end of life distress. I have a deep interest in mysticism, and I've had mystical experiences, which I don't think are very relevant. I don't know why it's happening now, but we're finally taking a look. They followed Platonic (and other Greeks) philosophy. These sources suggest a much greater degree of continuity with pre-Christian values and practice than the writings of more . So why refrain? Who were the Saints? Brendon Benz presents an alternative hypothesis to recent scholarship which has hypothesized that Israel consisted of geographical, economic . 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. You can see that inscribed on a plaque in Saint Paul's monastery at Mount Athos in Greece. Read more about The Immortality Key by Brian Muraresku Making Sense by Sam Harris But I realized that in 1977, when he wrote that in German, this was the height of scholarship, at least going out on a limb to speculate about the prospect of psychedelics at the very heart of the Greek mysteries, which I refer to as something like the real religion of the ancient Greeks, by the way, in speaking about the Eleusinian mysteries. The Immortality Key - Book Review and Discussion - Were early - Reddit And even in the New Testament, you'll see wine spiked with myrrh, for example, that's served to Jesus at his crucifixion. But I don't hold-- I don't hang my hat on that claim. Continuity Hypothesis - Keith E Rice's Integrated SocioPsychology Blog Brian C. Muraresku with Dr. Mark Plotkin: The Eleusinian Mysteries What about Jesus as a Jew? For those who didn't have the time or the money or the temerity to travel all the way to Eleusis from Spain, here's your off-site campus, right? And you find terracotta heads that could or could not be representative of Demeter and Persephone, the two goddesses to whom the mysteries of Eleusis were dedicated. He decides to get people even more drunk. 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? And I'm happy to see we have over 800 people present for this conversation. They found a tiny chalice this big, dated to the second century BC. I might forward the proposition that I don't think the early church fathers were the best botanists. What does it mean to die before dying? That event is already up on our website and open for registration. These are famous figures to those of us who study early Christianity. And nor do I think that you can characterize southern Italy as ground zero for the spirit of Greek mysticism, or however you put it. I'd never thought before about how Christianity developed as an organized religion in the centuries after Jesus' murder. He was wronged by individuals, allegedly. Maybe for those facing the end of life. I was satisfied with I give Brian Muraresku an "A" for enthusiasm, but I gave his book 2 stars. It's arguably not the case in the third century. So why do you think psychedelics are so significant that they might usher in a new Reformation? 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? 13,000 years old. But it's not an ingested psychedelic. The actual key that I found time and again in looking at this literature and the data is what seems to be happening here is the cultivation of a near-death experience. That's only after Constantine. But Egypt seems to not really be hugely relevant to the research. 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 all along, I invite you all to pose questions to Brian in the Q&A function. CHARLES STANG: Brian, I wonder if you could end by reflecting on the meaning of dying before you die. The kind of mysticism I've always been attracted to, like the rule of Saint Benedict and the Trappist monks and the Cistercian monks. 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 And part of me really wants to put all these pieces together before I dive in. I would love to see these licensed, regulated, retreat centers be done in a way that is medically sound and scientifically rigorous. It was-- Eleusis was state-administered, a somewhat formal affair. I've no doubt that Brian has unearthed and collected a remarkable body of evidence, but evidence of what, exactly? CHARLES STANG: Yeah. 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. The long and short of it is, in 1978 there was no hard scientific data to prove this one way or the other. 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 And Hofmann famously discovers-- or synthesizes LSD from ergot in 1938. Thank you all for joining us, and I hope to see many of you later this month for our next event. They were relevant to me in going down this rabbit hole. 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. She joins me for most events and meetings. So let's start, then, the first act. So again, that's February 22. But it was not far from a well-known colony in [INAUDIBLE] that was founded by Phocians. And if it's one thing Catholicism does very, very well, it's contemplative mysticism. And there were moments when the sunlight would just break through. 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. 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 . Psychedelics Today: PTSF 35 (with Brian Muraresku) Griffithsfund.org 48:01 Brian's psychedelic experiences . Now, Carl Ruck from Boston University, much closer to home, however, took that invitation and tried to pursue this hypothesis. So what evidence can you provide for that claim? And that's what I get into in detail in the book. 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. What is its connection to Eleusis? 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. 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 . And we had a great chat, a very spirited chat about the mysteries and the psychedelic hypothesis. That's, just absurd. And the one thing that unites both of those worlds in this research called the pagan continuity hypothesis, the one thing we can bet on is the sacred language of Greek. At Cambridge University he worked in developmental biolo. Well, wonderful. So how does Dionysian revelries get into this picture? 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 . Material evidence of a very strange potion, a drug, or a [SPEAKING GREEK]. And I'm not even sure what that piece looks like or how big it is.
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