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He was wronged by individuals, allegedly. So if you don't think that you are literally consuming divine blood, what is the point of religion? This limestone altar tested positive for cannabis and frankincense that was being burned, they think, in a very ritualistic way. But I want to ask you to reflect on the broader narrative that you're painting, because I've heard you speak in two ways about the significance of this work. Now, Brian managed to write this book while holding down a full time practice in international law based in Washington DC. So, I mean, my biggest question behind all of this is, as a good Catholic boy, is the Eucharist. To become truly immortal, Campbell talks about entering into a sense of eternity, which is the infinite present here and now. . And what you're referring to is-- and how I begin the book is this beautiful Greek phrase, [SPEAKING GREEK]. And she talks about kind of being born again, another promise from John's gospel. Now, I have no idea where it goes from here, or if I'll take it myself. Psychedelics Today: Mark Plotkin - Bio-Cultural Conservation of the Amazon. So. And yet I talked to an atheist who has one experience with psilocybin and is immediately bathed in God's love. It tested positive for the microscopic remains of beer and also ergot, exactly the hypothesis that had been put forward in 1978 by the disgraced professor across town from you, Carl Ruck, who's now 85 years old, by the way. I see something that's happening to people. But what I see are potential and possibilities and things worthy of discussions like this. OK, Brian, I invite you to join us now. Now that doesn't mean, as Brian was saying, that then suggests that that's the norm Eucharist. 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. 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. Like savory, wormwood, blue tansy, balm, senna, coriander, germander, mint, sage, and thyme. 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 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. 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. CHARLES STANG: OK. What about Jesus as a Jew? And the quote you just read from Burkert, it's published by Harvard University Press in 1985 as Greek Religion. let's take up your invitation and move from Dionysus to early Christianity. I wish the church fathers were better botanists and would rail against the specific pharmacopeia. Some number of people have asked about Egypt. Like the wedding at Cana, which my synopsis of that event is a drunkard getting a bunch of drunk people even more drunk. In the Classics world, there's a pagan continuity hypothesis with the very origin of Christianity, and many overt references to Greek plays in the Gospel of John. Not because it was brand new data. But I don't hold-- I don't hang my hat on that claim. I mean, so it was Greek. 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. And when I started to get closer into the historical period-- this is all prehistory. Not just in Italy, but as kind of the headquarters for the Mediterranean. 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. It was the Jesuits who taught me Latin and Greek. So how to put this? Books about pagan continuity hypothesis? I see it as-- well, OK, I'd see it as within a minority. But you will be consoled to know that someone else will be-- I will be there, but someone else will be leading that conversation. So I'll speak in language that you and our good colleague Greg [? 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. To be a Catholic is to believe that you are literally consuming the blood of Christ to become Christ. And I write, at the very end of the book, I hope that they'd be proud of this investigation. And nor did we think that a sanctuary would be one of the first things that we construct. What the Greeks were actually saying there is that it was barley infected with ergot, which is this natural fungus that infects cereal crops. 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. and he said, Brian, don't you dare. Which is really weird, because that's how the same Dina Bazer, the same atheist in the psilocybin trials, described her insight. Throughout his five books he talks about wine being mixed with all kinds of stuff, like frankincense and myrrh, relatively innocuous stuff, but also less innocuous things like henbane and mandrake, these solanaceous plants which he specifically says is fatal. 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. Certainly these early churchmen used whatever they could against the forms of Christian practice they disapproved of, especially those they categorized as Gnostic. 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. To this day I remain a psychedelic virgin quite proudly, and I spent the past 12 years, ever since that moment in 2007, researching what Houston Smith, perhaps one of the most influential religious historians of the 20th century, would call the best kept secret in history. He's the god of wine. And if you're a good Christian or a good Catholic, and you're consuming that wine on any given Sunday, why are you doing that? It's a big question for me. CHARLES STANG: OK, great. So it wasn't just a random place to find one of these spiked wines. So I have my concerns about what's about to happen in Oregon and the regulation of psilocybin for therapeutic purposes. 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. CHARLES STANG: Wonderful. All he says is that these women and Marcus are adding drugs seven times in a row into whatever potion this is they're mixing up. There's no mistake in her mind that it was Greek. McGovern also finds wine from Egypt, for example, in 3150 BC, wine that is mixed with a number of interesting ingredients. Maybe part of me is skeptical, right? But I'm pressing you because that's my job. 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. 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. I know that that's a loaded phrase. BRIAN MURARESKU: But you're spot on. And we had a great chat, a very spirited chat about the mysteries and the psychedelic hypothesis. 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. Here's what we don't. And when we know so much about ancient wine and how very different it was from the wine of today, I mean, what can we say about the Eucharist if we're only looking at the texts? "The Jews" are not after Ye. Now you're a good sport, Brian. Although she's open to testing, there was nothing there. So again, if there were an early psychedelic sacrament that was being suppressed, I'd expect that the suppressors would talk about it. 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 universality of frontiers, however, made the hypothesis readily extendable to other parts of the globe. Including, all the way back to Gobekli Tepe, which is why I mentioned that when we first started chatting. 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. So this whole water to wine thing was out there. So there's a whole slew of sites I want to test there. And I answer it differently every single time. That event is already up on our website and open for registration. What was the wine in the early Eucharist? But unfortunately, it doesn't connect it to Christianity. The mysteries of Dionysus, a bit weirder, a bit more off the grid. So the big question is, what kind of drug was this, if it was a drug? 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. So those are all possibly different questions to ask and answer. And he found some beer and wine-- that was a bit surprising. OK-- maybe one of those ancient beers. It was it was barley, water, and something else. And I don't know if it's a genuine mystical experience or mystical mimetic or some kind of psychological breakthrough. So the Greek god of wine, intoxication. So when Hippolytus is calling out the Marcosians, and specifically women, consecrating this alternative Eucharist in their alternative proto-mass, he uses the Greek word-- and we've talked about this before-- but he uses the Greek word [SPEAKING GREEK] seven times in a row, by the way, without specifying which drugs he's referring to. So Gobekli Tepe, for those who don't know, is this site in southern Turkey on the border with Syria. The continuity hypothesis of dreams suggests that the content of dreams are largely continuous with waking concepts and concerns of the dreamer. And I wonder and I question how we can keep that and retain that for today. I expect we will find it. Now I want to get to the questions, but one last question before we move to the discussion portion. I write it cognizant of the fact that the Eucharist doesn't work for many, many people. So I was obsessed with this stuff from the moment I picked up an article in The Economist called the God Pill back in 2007. 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. It's arguably not the case in the third century. No, I think you-- this is why we're friends, Charlie. It would have parts of Greek mysticism in it, the same Greek mysteries I've spent all these years investigating, and it would have some elements of what I see in paleo-Christianity. It's not just Cana. There he is. We have some inscriptions. And he was actually going out and testing some of these ancient chalices. So again, that's February 22. It's not the case in the second century. But let me say at the outset that it is remarkably learned, full of great historical and philological detail. So how does Dionysian revelries get into this picture? Now, Carl Ruck from Boston University, much closer to home, however, took that invitation and tried to pursue this hypothesis. These sources suggest a much greater degree of continuity with pre-Christian values and practice than the writings of more . And how do we-- when the pharmaceutical industry and when these retreat centers begin to open and begin to proliferate, how do we make this sacred? Tim Ferriss is a self-experimenter and bestselling author, best known for The 4-Hour Workweek, which has been translated into 40+ languages. They linked the idea of witches to an imagined organized sect which was a danger to the Christian commonwealth. And if it only occurs in John, the big question is why. BRIAN MURARESKU: I wish I could answer that question. You mentioned, too, early churchmen, experts in heresies by the name of Irenaeus of Lyons and Hippolytus of Rome. And that's the mysteries of Dionysus. All right, so now, let's follow up with Dionysus, but let's see here. So psychedelics or not, I think it's the cultivation of that experience, which is the actual key. 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. I'd never thought before about how Christianity developed as an organized religion in the centuries after Jesus' murder. Things like fasting and sleep deprivation and tattooing and scarification and, et cetera, et cetera. It's some kind of wine-based concoction, some kind of something that is throwing these people into ecstasy. And she talks about the visions that transformed the way she thinks about herself. I'm going to come back to that idea of proof of concept. BRIAN MURARESKU: Right. CHARLES STANG: OK. And that's a question equally for ancient historians and for contemporary seekers and/or good Catholics. Is there a smoking gun? I mean, I wish it were easier. That's our next event, and will be at least two more events to follow. I might forward the proposition that I don't think the early church fathers were the best botanists. So throughout the book, you make the point that ancient beer and wine are not like our beer and wine. And this is at a time when we're still hunting and gathering. So don't feel like you have to go into great depth at this point. But by and large, no, we don't really know. And when you speak in that way, what I hear you saying is there is something going on. 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.