pagan continuity hypothesis

I know that's another loaded phrase. So frankly, what happens during the Neolithic, we don't know, at least from a scientific vantage. That is, by giving, by even floating the possibility of this kind of-- at times, what seems like a Dan Brown sort of story, like, oh my god, there's a whole history of Christianity that's been suppressed-- draws attention, but the real point is actually that you're not really certain about the story, but you're certain is that we need to be more attentive to this evidence and to assess it soberly. So if you don't think that you are literally consuming divine blood, what is the point of religion? The Continuity Hypothesis was put forward by John Bowlby (1953) as a critical effect of attachments in his development of Attachment Theory. CHARLES STANG: OK. Now let's move into the Greek mystery. There have been breakthroughs, too, which no doubt kept Brian going despite some skepticism from the academy, to say the least. And I want to say that this question that we've been exploring the last half hour about what all this means for the present will be very much the topic of our next event on February 22, which is taking up the question of psychedelic chaplaincy. 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. BRIAN MURARESKU: Right. 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 . They did not. Psychedelics are a lens to investigate this stuff. 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. BRIAN MURARESKU:: It's a simple formula, Charlie. At Cambridge University he worked in developmental biolo. And so that opened a question for me. 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? You become one with Christ by drinking that. Now, Mithras is another one of these mystery religions. I do the same thing in the afterword at the very end of the book, where it's lots of, here's what we know. And to be quite honest, I'd never studied the ancient Greeks in Spain. I wish the church fathers were better botanists and would rail against the specific pharmacopeia. And I describe that as somehow finding that key to immortality. 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. He decides to get people even more drunk. Books about pagan continuity hypothesis? He's talking about kind of psychedelic wine. 101. The only reason I went to college was to study classics. Now you're a good sport, Brian. There he is. What about Jesus as a Jew? 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. Nage ?] Now I want to get to the questions, but one last question before we move to the discussion portion. #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 But maybe you could just say something about this community in Catalonia. That's because Brian and I have become friends these past several months, and I'll have more to say about that in a moment. So those are all possibly different questions to ask and answer. Get personalized recommendations, and learn where to watch across hundreds of streaming providers. Where does Western civilization come from? Research inside the Church of Saint Faustina and Liberata Fig 1. Although she's open to testing, there was nothing there. A rebirth into what? But things that sound intensely powerful. And maybe in these near-death experiences we begin to actually experience that at a visceral level. So don't feel like you have to go into great depth at this point. So, like, they're wonderstruck, or awestruck by their libations and their incense. And if it only occurs in John, the big question is why. So my biggest question is, what kind of wine was it? I was not going to put a book out there that was sensationalist. What is it about that formula that captures for you the wisdom, the insight that is on offer in this ancient ritual, psychedelic or otherwise? I fully expect we will find it. The most colorful theory of psychedelics in religion portrays the original Santa Claus as a shaman. So it is already happening. 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. And again, it survives, I think, because of that state support for the better part of 2,000 years. This is going to be a question that's back to the ancient world. 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? And I think we get hung up on the jargon. CHARLES STANG: So in some sense, you're feeling almost envy for the experiences on psychedelics, which is to say you've never experienced the indwelling of Christ or the immediate knowledge of your immortality in the sacrament. It pushes back the archaeology on some of this material a full 12,000 years. That's how we get to Catalonia. 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 that's all I present it as, is wonderfully attractive and maybe even sexy circumstantial evidence for the potential use of a psychedelic sacrament amongst the earliest Christians. BRIAN MURARESKU: That's a good question. There's some suggestive language in the pyramid texts, in the Book of the Dead and things of this nature. Not because it was brand new data. You won't find it in many places other than that. Let me just pull up my notes here. As much as we know about the mysteries of Eleusis. It's not to say that there isn't evidence from Alexandria or Antioch. Did the ancient Greeks use drugs to find God? Others find it in different ways, but the common denominator seems to be one of these really well-curated near-death experiences. 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. It was-- Eleusis was state-administered, a somewhat formal affair. And this is what I present to the world. There's John Marco Allegro claiming that there was no Jesus, and this was just one big amanita muscaria cult. Copyright 2023 The President and Fellows of Harvard College, The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name. What is its connection to Eleusis? Wise not least because it is summer there, as he reminds me every time we have a Zoom meeting, which has been quite often in these past several months. Because at my heart, I still consider myself a good Catholic boy. Many people see that as symbolic or allegorical or just a nice thing, which is not the case. What's different about the Dionysian mysteries, and what evidence, direct or indirect, do we have about the wine of Dionysus being psychedelic? And I offer psychedelics as one of those archaic techniques of ecstasy that seems to have been relevant and meaningful to our ancestors. The kind of mysticism I've always been attracted to, like the rule of Saint Benedict and the Trappist monks and the Cistercian monks. So this is the tradition, I can say with a straight face, that saved my life. 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. And in his book [? 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 I want to say to those who are still assembled here that I'm terribly sorry that we can't get to all your questions. 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. 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. Now, Carl Ruck from Boston University, much closer to home, however, took that invitation and tried to pursue this hypothesis. Because they talk about everything else that they take issue with. How does, in other words, how does religion sit with science? The continuity hypothesis of dreams suggests that the content of dreams are largely continuous with waking concepts and concerns of the dreamer. So can you reflect for us where you really are and how you chose to write this book? So Gobekli Tepe, for those who don't know, is this site in southern Turkey on the border with Syria. It draws attention to this material. You mentioned there were lots of dead ends, and there certainly were. CHARLES STANG: My name is Charles Stang, and I'm the director of the Center for the Study of World Religions here at Harvard Divinity School. Thank you. But I think the broader question of what's the reception to this among explicitly religious folk and religious leaders? I'm not. 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. The fact that the Vatican sits in Rome today is not an accident, I think, is the shortest way to answer that. CHARLES STANG: Thank you, Brian. Thank you, sir. It's funny to see that some of the first basilicas outside Rome are popping up here, and in and around Pompeii. Show Plants of the Gods: Hallucinogens, Healing, Culture and Conservation podcast, Ep Plants of the Gods: S4E2. Now, I don't put too much weight into that. So I'm trying to build the case-- and for some reason in my research, it kept coming back to Italy and Rome, which is why I focus on Hippolytus. Which is a very weird thing today. We see lots of descriptions of this in the mystical literature with which you're very familiar. CHARLES STANG: Well, Mr, Muraresku, you are hedging your bets here in a way that you do not necessarily hedge your bets in the book. For me, that's a question, and it will yield more questions. That would require an entirely different kind of evidence. But you will be consoled to know that someone else will be-- I will be there, but someone else will be leading that conversation. 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 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. 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? What was the wine in the early Eucharist? Those religions featured psychedelic beer and ceremonies lead by women . The book was published by Saint Martin's Press in September 2020 and has generated a whirlwind of attention. 36:57 Drug-spiked wine . And there you also found mortars that were tested and also tested positive for evidence of brewing. 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? CHARLES STANG: Right. And if there's historical precedent for it, all the more so. So Pompeii and its environs at the time were called [SPEAKING GREEK], which means great Greece. BRIAN MURARESKU: I'm asked this question, I would say, in pretty much every interview I've done since late September. 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. And they found this site, along with others around the Mediterranean. It's this 22-acre site of free-standing limestone, some rising 20 feet in the air, some weighing 50 tons. CHARLES STANG: We're often in this situation where we're trying to extrapolate from evidence from Egypt, to see is Egypt the norm or is it the exception? Now, Brian managed to write this book while holding down a full time practice in international law based in Washington DC. CHARLES STANG: OK. 474, ?] And for some reason, I mean, I'd read that two or three times as an undergrad and just glossed over that line. We have some inscriptions. Rupert Sheldrake, PhD, is a biologist and author best known for his hypothesis of morphic resonance. That's just everlasting. The altar had been sitting in a museum in Israel since the 1960s and just hadn't been tested. Now, here's-- let's tack away from hard, scientific, archaeobotanical evidence for a moment. So I have my concerns about what's about to happen in Oregon and the regulation of psilocybin for therapeutic purposes. CHARLES STANG: OK, that is the big question. Maybe there's a spark of the divine within. 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. 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. BRIAN MURARESKU: Right. 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 mean, I think the book makes it clear. We know that at the time of Jesus, before, during, and after, there were recipes floating around. OK-- maybe one of those ancient beers. What's the wine? I try to be careful to always land on a lawyer's feet and be very honest with you and everybody else about where this goes from here. What does God mean? And I'll just list them out quickly. And what, if any, was the relationship between those ancient Greeks and the real religion of the earliest Christians, who might call the paleo-Christians. 18.3C: Continuity Theory. The pagan continuity hypothesis theorizes that when Christianity arrived in Greece around AD 49, it didn't suddenly replace the existing religion. The continuity between pagan and Christian cult nearby the archaeological area of Naquane in Capo di Ponte. So that's from Burkert, a very sober scholar and the dean of all scholarship on Greek religion. You want to field questions in both those categories? So let's start, then, the first act. 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. 44:48 Psychedelics and ancient cave art . But I'm pressing you because that's my job. And I think what the pharmaceutical industry can do is help to distribute this medicine. 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? Not because they just found that altar. I'm sure he knows this well, by this point. These Native American church and the UDV, both some syncretic form of Christianity. So what evidence can you provide for that claim? 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. IMDb is the world's most popular and authoritative source for movie, TV and celebrity content. I mean, lots of great questions worthy of further investigation. Mona Sobhani, PhD Retweeted. 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? #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 really tried. But this clearly involved some kind of technical know-how and the ability to concoct these things that, in order to keep them safe and efficacious, would not have been very widespread, I don't think. So if we can test Eucharistic vessels, I wouldn't be surprised at all that we find one. BRIAN MURARESKU: It just happens to show up. This time, tonight I'll say that it's just not my time yet. And in the ancient world, wine was routinely referred to as a [SPEAKING GREEK], which is the Greek word for drug. Klaus Schmidt, who was with the German Archaeological Institute, called this a sanctuary and called these T-shaped pillars representations of gods. Brought to you by The big question is, did any of these recipes, did any of this wine spiking actually make its way into some paleo-Christian ceremony. Find ratings and reviews for the newest movie and TV shows. That was the question for me. And what it has to do with Eleusis or the Greek presence in general, I mean, again, just to say it briefly, is that this was a farmhouse of sorts that was inland, this sanctuary site. The mysteries of Dionysus, a bit weirder, a bit more off the grid. I mean, this is what I want to do with some of my remaining days on this planet, is take a look at all these different theories. Eusebius, third into the fourth century, is also talking about them-- it's a great Greek word, [SPEAKING GREEK]. And I just happened to fall into that at the age of 14 thanks to the Jesuits, and just never left it behind. And when I started to get closer into the historical period-- this is all prehistory. That event is already up on our website and open for registration. And Ruck, and you following Ruck, make much of this, suggesting maybe the Gnostics are pharmacologists of some kind. Joe Campbell puts it best that what we're after is an experience of being alive. And I'm happy to see we have over 800 people present for this conversation. And I answer it differently every single time. 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. But with what were they mixed, and to what effect? And I don't know if it's a genuine mystical experience or mystical mimetic or some kind of psychological breakthrough. And so I can see psychedelics being some kind of extra sacramental ministry that potentially could ease people at the end of life. Things like fasting and sleep deprivation and tattooing and scarification and, et cetera, et cetera. CHARLES STANG: OK. I am so fortunate to have been selected to present my thesis, "Mythology and Psychedelics: Taking the Pagan Continuity Hypothesis a Step Further" at. Now, I've never done them myself, but I have talked to many, many people who've had experience with psychedelics. The long and short of it is, in 1978 there was no hard scientific data to prove this one way or the other. Did the potion at Eleusis change from generation to generation? BRIAN MURARESKU: I look forward to it, Charlie. 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. Is there a smoking gun? Copyright 2023 President and Fellows of Harvard College. And it was the Jesuits who encouraged me to always, always ask questions and never take anything at face value. I include that line for a reason. And I guess my biggest question, not necessarily for you, but the psychedelic community, for what it's worth, or those who are interested in this stuff is how do we make this experience sacred? Yeah. But what we do know about the wine of the time is that it was routinely mixed with plants and herbs and potentially fungi. So here's a question for you. There's evidence of the mysteries of Dionysus before, during, and after the life of Jesus, it's worth pointing out. I was satisfied with I give Brian Muraresku an "A" for enthusiasm, but I gave his book 2 stars. 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 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. There's no mistake in her mind that it was Greek. Which, if you think about it, is a very elegant idea. And what does this earliest history tell us about the earliest evidence for an ancient psychedelic religion? I'm paraphrasing this one. And she talks about kind of being born again, another promise from John's gospel. So there's a whole slew of sites I want to test there.

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