And so in some of these psychedelic trials, under the right conditions, I do see genuine religious experiences. Copyright 2023 President and Fellows of Harvard College. And the quote you just read from Burkert, it's published by Harvard University Press in 1985 as Greek Religion. So now it's true that these heresy hunters show an interest in this love potion. 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 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. I mean, I asked lots of big questions in the book, and I fully acknowledge that. So what have you learned about the Eleusinian mysteries in particular since Ruck took this up, and what has convinced you that Ruck's hypothesis holds water? Including, all the way back to Gobekli Tepe, which is why I mentioned that when we first started chatting. What's different about the Dionysian mysteries, and what evidence, direct or indirect, do we have about the wine of Dionysus being psychedelic? That was the question for me. I'm paraphrasing this one. 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. Material evidence of a very strange potion, a drug, or a [SPEAKING GREEK]. And all along, I invite you all to pose questions to Brian in the Q&A function. And I want to ask you about specifically the Eleusinian mysteries, centered around the goddesses Demeter and Persephone. 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. But even if they're telling the truth about this, even if it is accurate about Marcus that he used a love potion, a love potion isn't a Eucharist. And that's the mysteries of Dionysus. 40:15 Witches, drugs, and the Catholic Church . Up until that point I really had very little knowledge of psychedelics, personal or literary or otherwise. Which turns out, it may be they were. 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. No one lived there. So again, if there were an early psychedelic sacrament that was being suppressed, I'd expect that the suppressors would talk about it. And I think we're getting there. These mysteries had at their center a sacrament called kykeon, which offered a vision of the mysteries of life and death. 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. I think the only big question is what the exact relationship was from a place like that over to Eleusis. And even Burkert, I think, calls it the most famous of the mystery rituals. And it was the Jesuits who encouraged me to always, always ask questions and never take anything at face value. 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. 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. 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. 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 CHARLES STANG: All right. Let me start with the view-- the version of it that I think is less persuasive. They were mixed or fortified. Get personalized recommendations, and learn where to watch across hundreds of streaming providers. So the basic point being, as far as we can tell, beer and wine are routinely mixed with things that we don't do today. But with what were they mixed, and to what effect? Love potions, love charms, they're very common in the ancient. A combination of psychoactive plants, including opium, cannabis, and nightshade, along with the remains of reptiles and amphibians all steeped in wine, like a real witch's brew, uncovered in this house outside of Pompeii. 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. Now we're getting somewhere. I want to thank you for your candor. So why the silence from the heresiologists on a psychedelic sacrament? Many people see that as symbolic or allegorical or just a nice thing, which is not the case. BRIAN MURARESKU: Right. 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. Which is a very weird thing today. Those religions featured psychedelic beer and ceremonies lead by women . So that's something else to look into. But clearly, when you're thinking about ancient Egypt or elsewhere, there's definitely a funerary tradition. And I'm trying to reconcile that. Maybe I have that wrong. 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. I really tried. But we do know that the initiates made this pilgrimage from Athens to Eleusis, drunk the potion, the kykeon, had this very visionary event-- they all talk about seeing something-- and after which they become immortal. We have some inscriptions. So if Eleusis is the Fight Club of the ancient world, right, the first rule is you don't talk about it. 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. I mean, so it was Greek. I mean, this really goes to my deep skepticism. Thank you all for joining us, and I hope to see many of you later this month for our next event. He's talking about kind of psychedelic wine. And that is that there was a pervasive religion, ancient religion, that involved psychedelic sacraments, and that that pervasive religious culture filtered into the Greek mysteries and eventually into early Christianity. 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. But it survives. If we're being honest with ourselves, when you've drunk-- and I've drunk that wine-- I didn't necessarily feel that I'd become one with Jesus. She found the remains of dog sacrifice, which is super interesting. Like, what is this all about? And what does this earliest history tell us about the earliest evidence for an ancient psychedelic religion? I understand the appeal of that. And then at some point they go inland. Certainly these early churchmen used whatever they could against the forms of Christian practice they disapproved of, especially those they categorized as Gnostic. 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. It is my great pleasure to welcome Brian Muraresku to the Center. Now, I've never done them myself, but I have talked to many, many people who've had experience with psychedelics. And there are legitimate scholars out there who say, because John wanted to paint Jesus in the light of Dionysus, present him as the second coming of this pagan God. You mentioned, too, early churchmen, experts in heresies by the name of Irenaeus of Lyons and Hippolytus of Rome. There's all kinds of reasons I haven't done it. 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. 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? And I wonder and I question how we can keep that and retain that for today. And let's start with our earliest evidence from the Stone Age and the Bronze Age. BRIAN MURARESKU:: It's a simple formula, Charlie. So it's hard for me to write this and talk about this without acknowledging the Jesuits who put me here. BRIAN MURARESKU: OK. OK-- maybe one of those ancient beers. There's a moment in the book where you are excited about some hard evidence. . Thank you, sir. But what we do know is that their sacrament was wine and we know a bit more about the wine of antiquity, ancient Greek wine, than we can piece together from these nocturnal celebrations. I mean, something of symbolic significance, something monumental. 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. And I'm happy to see we have over 800 people present for this conversation. Psychedelics Today: PTSF 35 (with Brian Muraresku) Griffithsfund.org But they charge Marcus specifically, not with a psychedelic Eucharist, but the use of a love potion. Now, Brian managed to write this book while holding down a full time practice in international law based in Washington DC. We're going to get there very soon. You see an altar of Pentelic marble that could only have come from the Mount Pentelicus quarry in mainland Greece. And all we know-- I mean, we can't decipher sequence by sequence what was happening. OK, now, Brian, you've probably dealt with questions like this. So I spent 12 years looking for that data, eventually found it, of all places, in Catalonia in Spain in this 635-page monograph that was published in 2002 and for one reason or another-- probably because it was written in Catalan-- was not widely reported to the academic community and went largely ignored.