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. Not because it was brand new data. Like the wedding at Cana, which my synopsis of that event is a drunkard getting a bunch of drunk people even more drunk. Brought to you by Wealthfront high-yield savings account, Peloton Row premium rower for an efficient workout, and You Need A Budget cult-favorite money management app.. Rick Rubin is a nine-time GRAMMY-winning producer, one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in the world, and the most successful producer in any genre, according to Rolling Stone. And I did not dare. Now are there any other questions you wish to propose or push or-- I don't know, to push back against any of the criticisms or questions I've leveled? But what we do know about the wine of the time is that it was routinely mixed with plants and herbs and potentially fungi. And then that's the word that Euripides uses, by the way. And what we find at this farmhouse is a sanctuary that Enriqueta Pons herself, the archaeologist who's been on site since 1990, she calls it some kind of sanctuary dedicated to the goddesses of the mysteries. What was discovered, as far as I can tell, from your treatment of it, is essentially an ancient pharmacy in this house. Which, again, what I see are small groups of people getting together to commune with the dead. You also find a Greek hearth inside this sanctuary. CHARLES STANG: OK, that is the big question. And you suspect, therefore, that it might be a placebo, and you want the real thing. So if you were a mystic and you were into Demeter and Persephone and Dionysus and you were into these strange Greek mystery cults, you'd be hard-pressed to find a better place to spend your time than [SPEAKING GREEK], southern Italy, which in some cases was more Greek than Greek. And it was the Jesuits who encouraged me to always, always ask questions and never take anything at face value. I mean, that's obviously the big question, and what that means for the future of medicine and religion and society at large. So back in 2012, archaeologists and chemists were scraping some of these giant limestone troughs, and out pops calcium oxalate, which is one of these biomarkers for the fermentation of brewing. 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. But clearly, when you're thinking about ancient Egypt or elsewhere, there's definitely a funerary tradition. But Egypt seems to not really be hugely relevant to the research. So I present this as proof of concept, and I heavily rely on the Gospel of John and the data from Italy because that's what was there. But it survives. 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 if we can test Eucharistic vessels, I wouldn't be surprised at all that we find one. 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 . That's the promise in John's gospel, in John 6:54-55, that I quote in the book. But it's not an ingested psychedelic. 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. The Gnostics did have continuity with paganism. And anyone who drinks this, [SPEAKING GREEK], Jesus says in Greek, you remain in me and I in you. And very famous passages, by the way, that should be familiar to most New Testament readers. That also only occurs in John, another epithet of Dionysus. And you're right. And so the big hunt for me was trying to find some of those psychedelic bits. 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. 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. If beer was there that long ago, what kind of beer was it? The most influential religious historian of the twentieth century, Huston Smith, once referred to it as the "best-kept secret" in history. The pagan continuity hypothesis theorizes that when Christianity arrived in Greece around AD 49, it didn't suddenly replace the existing religion. And we had a great chat, a very spirited chat about the mysteries and the psychedelic hypothesis. So if Eleusis is the Fight Club of the ancient world, right, the first rule is you don't talk about it. 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. The pagan continuity hypothesis at the heart of this book made sense to me. Here is how I propose we are to proceed. 101. That's all just fancy wordplay. 18.3C: Continuity Theory. I would have been happy to find a spiked wine anywhere. But the point being, the religion of brewing seems to pop up at the very beginning of civilization itself, or the very beginning of monumental engineering at this world's first sanctuary. I'm not. I wonder if you're familiar with Wouter Hanegraaff at the University of Amsterdam. And her answer was that they'd all been cleaned or treated for conservation purposes. So what do we know about those rituals? Others find it in different ways, but the common denominator seems to be one of these really well-curated near-death experiences. Why don't we turn the tables and ask you what questions you think need to be posed? I wish the church fathers were better botanists and would rail against the specific pharmacopeia. 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. 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? BRIAN MURARESKU: Right. 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. And at the same time, when I see a thirst, especially in young people, for real experience, and I see so many Catholics who do not believe in transubstantiation, obviously, what comes to my mind is how, if at all, can psychedelics enhance faith or reinvent Christianity. 283. 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. But the point being, if the Dionysian wine was psychedelic-- which I know is a big if-- I think the more important thing to show here in this pagan continuity hypothesis is that it's at least plausible that the earliest Christians would have at the very least read the Gospel of John and interpreted that paleo-Christian Eucharistic wine, in some communities, as a kind of Dionysian wine. 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. Again, how did Christianity take hold in a world with such a rich mystical tradition? These sources suggest a much greater degree of continuity with pre-Christian values and practice than the writings of more . I think it's important you have made a distinction between what was Jesus doing at the Last Supper, as if we could ever find out. Like in Israel. I would expect we'd have ample evidence. And I think that we would behoove ourselves to incorporate, resuscitate, maybe, some of those techniques that seem to have been employed by the Greeks at Eleusis or by the Dionysians or some of these earliest Christians. And I think we get hung up on the jargon. They're mixing potions. So when you take a step back, as you well know, there was a Hellenic presence all over the ancient Mediterranean. He was wronged by individuals, allegedly. 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. So I think this was a minority of early Christians. And I just happened to fall into that at the age of 14 thanks to the Jesuits, and just never left it behind. 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. Maybe part of me is skeptical, right? Pagan polemicists reversed the Biblical story of the Israelites' liberation from Egyptian bondage, portraying a negative image of Israelite origins and picturing them as misanthropes and atheists. And there were probably other Eleusises like that to the east. Now, Mithras is another one of these mystery religions. 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. One attendee has asked, "How have religious leaders reacted so far to your book? To become truly immortal, Campbell talks about entering into a sense of eternity, which is the infinite present here and now. And again, it survives, I think, because of that state support for the better part of 2,000 years. IMDb is the world's most popular and authoritative source for movie, TV and celebrity content. So Pompeii and its environs at the time were called [SPEAKING GREEK], which means great Greece. The Immortality Key has its shortcomings. Get personalized recommendations, and learn where to watch across hundreds of streaming providers. 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. What was the wine in the early Eucharist? 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. That was the question for me. #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 Brought to you by GiveWell.org charity research and effective giving and 5-Bullet Friday, my very own email newsletter. I see it as-- well, OK, I'd see it as within a minority. CHARLES STANG: We've really read Jesus through the lens of his Greek inheritors. So first of all, please tell us how it is you came to pursue this research to write this book, and highlight briefly what you think are its principal conclusions and their significance for our present and future. They did not. He decides to get people even more drunk. Who were the Saints? No, I think you-- this is why we're friends, Charlie. So let's start, then, the first act. There's John Marco Allegro claiming that there was no Jesus, and this was just one big amanita muscaria cult. Now, Brian managed to write this book while holding down a full time practice in international law based in Washington DC. 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. 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. To assess this hypothesis and, perhaps, to push it further, has required years of dogged and, at times, discouraging works in archives and archaeology. 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. And keep in mind that we'll drop down into any one of these points more deeply. But maybe you could just say something about this community in Catalonia. They linked the idea of witches to an imagined organized sect which was a danger to the Christian commonwealth. 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".
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