Jesus and psychedelics in ancient times | Brian Muraresku and Lex Fridman

but uh your book can mortality what what's the story that you tell in this book what do you which part of human history are you studying right so that's that's the way to phrase it so it's you know it's my 12-year search for the hard scientific data for the ritual use of psychedelics and classical antiquity so we're talking about amongst the ancient greeks and romans and the paleo christians uh so the generations that would give birth to the largest religion the world's ever known christianity today was two and a half billion people the big question for me is you know were psychedelics actually involved there was a lot written about this in the 60s john marco allegro the book that i follow was published in 1978 before i was born the road to ellucis by gordon watson who we talked about already albert hofmann who famously discovers lsd or synthesizes it from ergot and karl ruck who is still a professor of classics at boston university the only surviving member of that renegade trio and now 85 years old so this this all predates us um but what was lacking in the 60s 70s 80s 90s i think was some of this technology and and the hard scientific data now for years and years i went out to the archaeobotanists and the archaeochemists around the world and i asked a very basic question is there any evidence for psychedelics and classical antiquity and the answer would almost invariably come back no i'm talking to in addition to pat he put me in touch with hans peter stika in germany tania valamotti in greece a sunta florenzano in italy i went all over the place asking one question and getting the same answer back time and again and so the book is essentially my my search for that data and the eventual uncovering of two what i think are key pieces of data one data one data point shows the ritual use of a psychedelic beer in classical antiquity in iberia with today's spain and the other shows what looks like a kind of psychedelic wine just outside pompeii from the 1st century a.d at the right place at the right time when the earliest christians were showing up in italy again these are early steps in the search for evidence in this space but uh speaking of early christians what role do you think psychedelic infused wine could have played in the life of the i i won't be clever in the life of jesus christ i've been saying recently that and i hope this doesn't sound obscurantist but i think it's impossible to understand jesus and the birth of christianity in the absence of ancient greek and i'll give you a very specific example of why i think that's the case you can read the entire new testament in ancient greek and not once will you ever find a reference to alcohol because there was no word in ancient greek for alcohol the way the word sounds alcohol it comes it's semitic it comes from the arabic khala means to enliven a refresh it probably comes from coal kohl sort of these powdered metallics that were used in alchemical experiments in cosmetics so again that's much later in time when we're using alchemy distillation etc in the first century ad the power of wine wasn't necessarily tied to alcohol right fermented grapes the way we think about wine today so pat mcgovern found some of that early organic data for wine being mixed with with beer and with mead but if you look at the literature from the first century a.d diocerities for example he writes this this massive treatise at the exact same time the gospels are being written and diascorides in just one of his books talks about 56 detailed recipes for spiking wine with all kinds of things like salvia and hellebore and frankincense and myrrh these spiced perfumes but also more dangerous things like henbane and mandrake which he says in greek can be fatal with just one cupful and in book 474 of his materia medica he talks about black nightshade producing fantasias not unpleasant visions what today we would say is psychedelic so just looking at the literature and the kind of literature that even most classicists i didn't really learn it in undergrad i came across diasporities later but just a basic look at the literature supports what mcgovern has been testing which is the fact that wine was routinely mixed with different compounds it's fascinating by the way that language affects our conception of the tools we use to understand the world so like like it you can see wine you can see psychedelics if they're not called drugs you you can uh you can maybe reframe how you see them in terms of their role in on us thinking about the world understanding the world that's really interesting that language has that power but what language was used to understand wine at the time so we're talking about a greek speaking world right so you know jesus uh is born and does his public ministry in the holy land but think about the early church think about where the church takes root you know paul the greatest evangelist of the time writes basically half the new testament he's writing letters in greek to greek speakers in places like corinth in greece or philippi a defunct city just north of the island of thassos or he's writing to folks in what today is is turkey the colossians the galatians he writes letters to the romans these are greek speakers in these pockets these hellenic pockets all around the ancient mediterranean and for them again ignore discordies ignore pat mcgovern's work to them to think about wine was to think about a mixed a mixed potion and so the word oinos in ancient greek does show up in the new testament but there was another word to describe wine and it exists for like a thousand years before during and after the life of jesus the word used for wine is farmacon which obviously gives us the word pharmacy it means drug so in greek a greek speaker would actually use the word drug to refer to wine ruth skodal the classicist talks about this as a as a ritualistic formula they understood wine as this compound beverage a drug against grief a medicinal elixir that could either harm or heal or just maybe a sacrament to put you in touch with wine gods old and new clearly religion and myth but religion very much so has sort of uh much like dreams has like an imagery component like you're kind of going outside the visual constraints of physical space where you kind of have very specific conceptions of what things look like and you kind of use your imagination to stretch beyond the world as we know it things that are try to get in touch with things that are more real than real what role do these tools do these uh farmicons have in trying to stimulate the imagery of religion like do you have a sense that they have a critical role here or is this just a bunch of different factors that are utilized a bunch of different tools that are utilized to construct this imagery or is this not even or is imagery the wrong terminology is it more like space of ideas that's core to to religion no i think the wine is absolutely essential and so if it's impossible to understand paleo christianity in the absence of ancient greek i think it's equally difficult in the absence of the sacred pharmacopoeia or wine itself right just just think about wine at the time um i i think that the ancient greek audience would have heard that in a very different way um from us and so they're referring to it maybe as a pharmacon but the followers of dionysus which precedes jesus and in some cases the story of jesus is kind of a recapitulation of the mysteries of dionysus but when you think about dionysus maybe from your high school mythology you think about him as the god of theater or the god of wine which is typically what it is or the god of ecstasy um you know again dionysus is not the god of alcohol there's no concept of of fermented grapes the power of dionysus and the ability to commune with dionysus through his blood and before christianity the blood of dionysus is equated to his wine the sacramental drinking of the wine was interpreted and classicist write about this including walter berkert it was interpreted as consuming the god himself in order to become one with the god this is where we get the idea of enthusiasm because the language matters enthusiasm to be filled with the spirit of the god so that you became identified with dionysus and acquired his divine powers now how does that happen again he's not the god of alcohol he is the god of wine but he's really the god of madness and delirium and frenzy and his principal followers are women they're called the mine ads and the way they get in touch with him is through the consumption of the sacramental wine even at the theater of dionysus separate from his outdoor churches there was a wine served there called drima and this is the wine that gives birth to hollywood i mean the ancient hollywood was there at the theater of dionysus this is where comedy and tragedy and poetry and music come from but rather than a hot dog and a beer what they drink at the theater of dionysus was this wine called trima which means pounded or rubbed and professor ruck talks about maybe it was the drugs that were rubbed into this theatrical beverage to help the uh play come alive so madness is seen as a positive thing is it like a creative journey it's not it's not uh it's it's the what is it the unlearning getting out of the way kind of thing is is that how it seemed or is it more like um entertaining escape from life that is suffering i gotta i gotta inject a little modern dostoevsky into the old existential despair um maybe it's maybe it's a bit of that we we can't say that there wasn't recreational drinking happening um the greeks also had the symposium right um and they also were just getting hammered in some cases yeah but when it comes to the rights of dionysus yeah what you see there is um the creation of these states of awareness in which again you identify with the god to become the god there's there's theophagy there's the consumption of divinity in order to become divinity right back to how we started the conversation right so if we stop conceiving of god as something exterior to us but that the mystery of being itself is the mystery of your being and the mystery of my being that the way to encounter that is through the sacramental theology that you drink the actual blood of this greek god to become that god and there was a place for this in ancient greek society so drinking the wine is drinking the blood of dionysus do you think jesus is an actual physical person that existed in history or is he an idea that came to to life through the consumption of wine and those kinds of rituals so this is where i faced my ex communication depending how i answer this [Laughter] i mean you're you're playing with fire and wine [Laughter] a good combination by the way yeah uh so i i shy away from that controversy in the book i'm perfectly willing to accept jesus as a historical personage um you know we have the multiplicity of sources although it's a generation after his death um but we have the eucharist being described in the four gospels we have it being described by paul in first corinthians but when you read john it does read a bit differently than the other gospels and in my book i rely a lot on the scholarship of dennis mcdonald who writes a fabulous book called the dionysian gospel and this is again why the greek matters because once you start to analyze the greek of john's gospel it seems to be a presentation of jesus very much in the guise of dionysus the most obvious example is the wedding at cana right that only occurs in john's gospel the famous transformation of water into wine now again to any greek speaker of the first century they would have known about the greek district of ellis on the peloponnese and in ellis around the epiphany every january the priests of dionysus would deposit these water basins empty basins in the temple of dionysus they'd return the next morning and find them magically filled with wine now on the island of andros it's even more interesting around the same epiphany date the gods gift day dies theodosia the wine would emanate from the temple and run like a river for a week and you can google the bachanal of the andreans a wonderful painting by titian which hangs in the prado and you'll see a river of wine behind these people having a great time this exists for centuries and centuries before the wedding at cana and before jesus begins his public ministry with what these scholars call the signature miracle of dionysus it would not have been lost on the greek audience that that something very specific is being communicated here what's being communicated that you just might find in early christianity what you hold strong to in these mysteries of dionysus that you may have inherited from your parents your grandparents your great-grandparents for centuries there was a perfectly good religion there were perfectly good mystery cults in the ancient greek and roman worlds and here comes this new untested illegal cult illegal of a dozen or so illiterate day laborers that go on to convert the empire in a few hundred years the answer to that extraordinary growth is not psychedelics but i do think it's visionary experiences and i do think it's this continuity from the pagan world into early christianity you

Channel: Lex Clips

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Keywords: ai, ai clips, ai podcast, ai podcast clips, artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence podcast, brian muraresku, computer science, consciousness, deep learning, einstein, elon musk, engineering, friedman, joe rogan, lex ai, lex clips, lex fridman, lex fridman podcast, lex friedman, lex mit, lex podcast, machine learning, math, math podcast, mathematics, mit ai, philosophy, physics, physics podcast, science, tech, tech podcast, technology, turing

Id: xOItnbkArxk

Length: 15min 16sec (916 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 17 2021