The answer seems to be connected to psychedelic drugs. There's a moment in the book where you are excited about some hard evidence. And I think oversight also comes in handy within organized religion. 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? The Immortality Key has its shortcomings. Here is how I propose we are to proceed. And I write, at the very end of the book, I hope that they'd be proud of this investigation. So this whole water to wine thing was out there. If you die before you die, you won't die when you die. I think psychedelics are just one piece of the puzzle. That's the promise in John's gospel, in John 6:54-55, that I quote in the book. I might forward the proposition that I don't think the early church fathers were the best botanists. 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 by the way, I'm not here trying to protect Christianity from the evidence of psychedelic use. 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. 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. 13,000 years old. I mean, this really goes to my deep skepticism. Those of you who don't know his name, he's a professor at the University of Amsterdam, an expert in Western esotericism. We still have almost 700 with us. This two-part discussion between Muraresku and Dr. Plotkin examines the role psychedelics have played in the development of Western civilization. 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. And this is what I present to the world. 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. Like, what is this all about? You mentioned, too, early churchmen, experts in heresies by the name of Irenaeus of Lyons and Hippolytus of Rome. If you are drawn to psychedelics, in my mind, it means you're probably drawn to contemplative mysticism. The idea of the truth shall set you free, right, [SPEAKING GREEK], in 8:32. And yet I talked to an atheist who has one experience with psilocybin and is immediately bathed in God's love. All rights reserved. Maybe I'm afraid I'll take the psychedelic and I won't have what is reported in the literature from Hopkins and NYU. This time around, we have a very special edition featuring Dr. Mark Plotkin and Brian C . He's talking about kind of psychedelic wine. Lots of Greek artifacts, lots of Greek signifiers. Because for many, many years, you know, Ruck's career takes a bit of a nosedive. And does it line up with the promise from John's gospel that anyone who drinks this becomes instantly immortal? 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 CHARLES STANG: Wonderful. Now, that date is obviously very suggestive because that's precisely the time the Christians were establishing a beachhead in Rome. 36:57 Drug-spiked wine . 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. To assess this hypothesis and, perhaps, to push it further, has required years of dogged and, at times, discouraging works in archives and archaeology. I include that line for a reason. And what the FDA can do is make sure that they're doing it in a way that it's absolutely safe and efficacious. 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. 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 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. BRIAN MURARESKU: I would say I've definitely experienced the power of the Christ and the Holy Spirit. What I see is data that's been largely neglected, and I think what serves this as a discipline is just that. I mean, so it was Greek. So I see-- you're moving back and forth between these two. We know that at the time of Jesus, before, during, and after, there were recipes floating around. You might find it in a cemetery in Mexico. I think the only big question is what the exact relationship was from a place like that over to Eleusis. 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. When Irenaeus is talking about [SPEAKING GREEK], love potions, again, we have no idea what the hell he's talking about. So Plato, Pindar, Sophocles, all the way into Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, it's an important thing. Like savory, wormwood, blue tansy, balm, senna, coriander, germander, mint, sage, and thyme. And so even within the New Testament you see little hints and clues that there was no such thing as only ordinary table wine. And I think we get hung up on the jargon. The big question is, did any of these recipes, did any of this wine spiking actually make its way into some paleo-Christian ceremony. let's take up your invitation and move from Dionysus to early Christianity. And so I don't think that psychedelics are coming to replace the Sunday Eucharist. So whatever these [SPEAKING GREEK] libations incense were, the church fathers don't get into great detail about what may have been spiking them. That's staying within the field of time. I don't think we have found it. Well, wonderful. And I'm happy to see we have over 800 people present for this conversation. 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. It's not to say that there isn't evidence from Alexandria or Antioch. Now, Brian managed to write this book while holding down a full time practice in international law based in Washington DC. 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. And anyone who drinks this, [SPEAKING GREEK], Jesus says in Greek, you remain in me and I in you. McGovern also finds wine from Egypt, for example, in 3150 BC, wine that is mixed with a number of interesting ingredients. This time, tonight I'll say that it's just not my time yet. And I look forward to talking about this event with you after the fact eventually over a beer. Things like fasting and sleep deprivation and tattooing and scarification and, et cetera, et cetera. And you suspect, therefore, that it might be a placebo, and you want the real thing. But maybe you could just say something about this community in Catalonia. And in the ancient world, wine was routinely referred to as a [SPEAKING GREEK], which is the Greek word for drug. That would require an entirely different kind of evidence. Church of the Saints Faustina and Liberata, view from the outside with the entrance enclosure, at "Sante" place, Capo di Ponte (Italy). So we not only didn't have the engineering know-how-- we used to think-- we didn't have even settled life to construct something like this. And when I started to get closer into the historical period-- this is all prehistory. 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. I took this to Greg [? Not much. Many people see that as symbolic or allegorical or just a nice thing, which is not the case. Now, Carl Ruck from Boston University, much closer to home, however, took that invitation and tried to pursue this hypothesis. He was greatly influenced by Sigmund Freud (1940) who viewed an infant's first relationship - usually with the mother - as "the prototype of all later love-relations". We call it ego dissolution, things of that nature. I've no doubt that Brian has unearthed and collected a remarkable body of evidence, but evidence of what, exactly? They were mixed or fortified. OK, now, Brian, you've probably dealt with questions like this. 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. So I think it's really interesting details here worth following up on. These-- that-- Christians are spread out throughout the eastern Mediterranean, and there are many, many pockets of people practicing what we might call, let's just call it Christian mysticism of some kind. 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. BRIAN MURARESKU: I'm bringing more illumination. I would love to see these licensed, regulated, retreat centers be done in a way that is medically sound and scientifically rigorous. This is true. To some degree, I think you're looking back to southern Italy from the perspective of the supremacy of Rome, which is not the case in the first century. In this hypothesis, both widely accepted and widely criticized,11 'American' was synonymous with 'North American'. And I want to ask you about specifically the Eleusinian mysteries, centered around the goddesses Demeter and Persephone. And nor did we think that a sanctuary would be one of the first things that we construct. The Continuity Hypothesis was put forward by John Bowlby (1953) as a critical effect of attachments in his development of Attachment Theory. And that's the mysteries of Dionysus. 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. And all we know-- I mean, we can't decipher sequence by sequence what was happening. But I don't understand how that provides any significant link to paleo-Christian practice. One attendee has asked, "How have religious leaders reacted so far to your book? Is this only Marcus? CHARLES STANG: OK. Now let's move into the Greek mystery. That event is already up on our website and open for registration. 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. Then what was the Gospel of John, how did it interpret the Eucharist and market it, and so on. And to be quite honest, I'd never studied the ancient Greeks in Spain. 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? Now, I don't put too much weight into that. Because at my heart, I still consider myself a good Catholic boy. I mean, that's obviously the big question, and what that means for the future of medicine and religion and society at large. BRIAN MURARESKU: That's a good question. 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 He decides to get people even more drunk. Again, if you're attracted to psychedelics, it's kind of an extreme thing, right? 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. Love potions, love charms, they're very common in the ancient. 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. BRIAN MURARESKU: Now we're cooking with grease, Dr. Stang. This notion in John 15:1, the notion of the true vine, for example, only occurs in John. Read more 37 people found this helpful Helpful Report abuse Tfsiebs So much research! So again, that's February 22. That they were what you call extreme beverages. So that's something else to look into. And what you're referring to is-- and how I begin the book is this beautiful Greek phrase, [SPEAKING GREEK]. Show Plants of the Gods: Hallucinogens, Healing, Culture and Conservation podcast, Ep Plants of the Gods: S4E2. 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. So if you don't think that you are literally consuming divine blood, what is the point of religion? 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.

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