Joe Rogan Experience #1543 - Brian Muraresku & Graham Hancock

[Music] joining us by skype is the great and powerful graham hancock my friend how are you sir hi joe it's really good to be back with you i wish i could be there in person uh it feels very strange to be on this uh this technology but these are the times we live in yeah well i'm just happy we could talk at all in this day and age it's the little things like little victories and uh brian i'm going to try it i'm going to try it more rescue you nailed it bro thank you and uh your but this is the first time we've ever done one of these as well in the studio where one per maybe ever visual we've never done what we did one with you guys remember we did randall carlson and yeah and mark mark defant came in by telephone yes which is very strange it was like a sound coming from nowhere at least i could see you but we've never done one of these like this but this book tell me this is uh the immortality key the secret of the secret history of religion of the religion with no name i'll say it again the secret history of the religion with no name um now this is obviously when i found out the subject matter graham this is right up your alley and uh yeah it made total complete sense why you and brian work together on this so uh who wants to start and explain why graham why don't we have you start since you're you know you're over there in the uk yeah absolutely well i i mean for me in fact joe i think you and i originally got in touch because of my interest in psychedelics in human culture uh and a book that i published in 2006 called supernatural yes which which looks at the huge role that psychedelics have played in cultures and in religions all around the world and i touched in that book on the role of psychedelics in the origins of christianity which of course is a dynamite subject uh and what brian has done in the immortality key has been to present hard and fast evidence that the first christians were using psychedelics and that their religious experiences were mediated by psychedelic experiences and brian how did you get involved in this it's a long story you look like a stoner by the way i just tell you right now you look like a guy who's done a few mushrooms in his day uh oddly enough i don't do drugs and i've had i've never done psychedelics wow yeah that's crazy yeah you want to start today well i wish we were in la i could hook you up but in texas it's a little it's the laws are sketchier here um what what led you to this then i was fascinated by graham's work um which i only came across about 12 years ago i was a latin greek and sanskrit uh undergrad major and instead of getting the phd or becoming a priest which might the two options when you study latin in greek i went to law school instead for no reason whatsoever and then wound up at a law firm and a couple years into it started reading about these psilocybin studies coming out of hopkins and nyu and that amazing statistic that two-thirds of the participants were describing it as one of the most amazing experiences of their lives and it hit me that there was something there because the testimony coming out of hopkins and nyu in a very clinical setting immediately reminded me of what i heard about ellucis and for those who don't know what ellucis is it's essentially the spiritual capital of the ancient world it was where the best and brightest of athens and rome went to essentially meet a goddess in the flesh and have this mind-blowing visionary experience so before jerusalem before rome before mecca there was a lucis and for some reason we're not taught about this in our high school mythology or western civ classes but it was there that plato cicero marcus aurelius all went to drink a magical potion and in their words have this vision what plato calls a a blessed sight and vision the holiest of mysteries in which they claim to have a direct encounter with the goddess and completely eradicate their fear of death it was very similar to what the volunteers are saying with their single experience of psilocybin now with ellucis how much history do we have how much recorded history that documents these rituals and is there any that describes the actual contents of this mixture no there isn't much i mean elusive i say ellucis is like the fight club of the ancient world you know the first rule about ellucis is you don't talk about ellucis you know all we have is this fragmentary testimony again from from plato pindar sophocles and others they do talk about a vision that's almost universal and they almost universally talk about this once in a lifetime transformative event where they become initiates and only they properly have life after death because at the time the greeks didn't really look forward to the afterlife in fact there was no afterlife you just disappear into hades to do god knows what but people walk away from ellucis saying that they'd found salvation and we don't know why or how we know this potion is involved we know they make this pilgrimage uh 13 miles from athens to ellucis to drink this potion we know they they prepare for months if not years before it and they're forever changed afterwards but we have very little hard data uh to actually look into it and so in 1978 this this trio of renegades uh gordon watson albert hoffman who discovered lsd and carl ruck who was then the chair of the classics department at boston university they put out this book the road to ellucis claiming they'd found the secret after 2 000 years what they claimed is that this potion was actually spiked with ergot which is that naturally occurring fungus from which you can synthesize lsd and in fact it's where albert it's how he synthesized lsd by accident in 1938 with cultures of ergot we've talked about ergot before in this podcast connecting it to the salem witch trials which is uh very speculative but they think there's real evidence that shows that there was a late frost during the time of the salem witch trials that probably led to mold growth on their wheat which probably led to ergot infestation of their food and so these poor people were you know uh unintentionally eating acid unintentionally it happened a lot there were got outbreaks uh across time especially in the middle ages they would call it um saint anthony's fire the ignisaker because it's so so common uh in fact if you talk to any brewer today at least the brewers that i was talking to i went to see this beer scientist in munich germany martin zarnkow and he says you can't avoid it now it's more common on things like rye but it also pops up on barley and wheat too and again it's unavoidable and it's highly highly toxic the question is does it really produce the kind of vision the visionary experiences that people have on psilocybin lsd mescaline and others according to albert hoffman absolutely so as a matter of fact i went into the harvard archives where watson's papers are kept to this day in the botany libraries and i found a letter that albert wrote gordon his co-author in 1976 saying that albert had self-experimented with uh with ergonovine which is one of these alkaloids in ergot and he claimed in 1976 it was five to ten times more potent than psilocybin it's fascinating to me that these cultures seem to have hid some of these rituals and this goes back to really it as far back as we have recorded psychedelic use like soma we still to this day don't know what that is and it's described in these in incredible ways in ancient hindu texts but we don't know what it is we have an idea i actually brought some some sanskrit to show you yeah you want to see some sanskrit well yeah can you put it up on the screen it's under the the soma tab oh look at how beautiful that is there it is their language writing it in sanskrit god it's so pretty do you want me to read it for you please you can read that yeah so this was my major in college so at the in the very middle there you can see and what what he's saying there um is this is from the rig veda right and it's it's the oldest literature in western civilization uh we think it's among the indo-european languages it's the oldest recorded literature that we have it could be 1500 bc 1700 perhaps much earlier like the iliad and the odyssey in greek this is the mother tongue of of all the indo-european languages and what they write about a lot is soma which is both a god and the juice that is pressed from this god and what they're talking about there is is making this ritual potion very much like the kukion that we find among the ancient greeks and here soma is described as a mixed potion yavashira means mixed with barley gavashira from sanskrit go gaba is milk mixed with milk and so i've read all the theories that you have about what soma was whether it was the amanita muscaria mushroom or some psilocybin containing species or or dmt uh the way they that they describe soma here is always a mixed potion which so in this case mixed with barley and milk so that would be an ergot some sort of already they're mentioned i mean and so that's that's what rock hoffman and and watson were saying in 1978 um we have we have literature from the the 7th century bc it's called the hymn to demeter where they record these ingredients uh of what the cookie on was you ask like where's the actual evidence so in the 70s we didn't have much it starts with the literature which is what classes do and so there's this hymn to demeter that was discovered in 1777 a year after we declare our independence from graham's people and what they what they found in there in in line sorry we're in texas man absolutely well done i'm all for independence [Laughter] i'd like i'd like to be independent of my own country if possible as well well texas is taking refugees at the moment is it not well that's what's happening here that's why we're here we're refugees from the country of california exactly this this nation state of california um so why why do we know why they combined it with milk and it was it just so that it was easier to consume that that's what we don't know we don't know why the cookie on was it was this mixed thing either but so in the him to demeter they record these ingredients it's alfie which is barley hudor which is water and which means mint and that's all we have so there's it doesn't say milk you didn't say milk that was in soma and so yeah oh i'm sorry which they mix with all kinds of things and not just and not just barley and milk but also honey as a matter of fact soma is often identified with madu which is honey in sanskrit mckenna speculated that there was a there was a transfer in culture of a psychedelic based culture to an alcohol-based culture based on climate change and also based on preserving things in honey and that honey would create mead and mead which if people don't know is an alcohol beverage that's actually made with honey is do you think that this was the case with the use of honey as well that is used as a preservative or was it used to to make it taste better or more palatable we don't know we don't know that that's the problem when we're talking about ancient plants and fungi plants especially we don't know what plants they're talking about so the ancient literature records all kinds of plants across the world if i could if i could jump in joe you're you're absolutely right there was uh secrecy that surrounded the use of these potions in the ancient world there's a case from from athens of the potion from eleusis being used for recreational purposes and this is roundly condemned by all concerned that it should only be used for the for the sacred and spiritual purposes of which it was intended so there was a great deal of secrecy uh that surrounded the use of these potions and the potions were a doorway or a gateway into another level of reality and what's fascinating from eleusis and many other ancient accounts is the way that people come back having lost their fear of death that they don't regard death as the end anymore it's just another stage on the journey just the beginning of the next great adventure uh and and um it's brian is absolutely right to draw attention to the to the modern work with psilocybin and again we find people who are terminal cases who are imminently facing death losing their fear of death as a result of of using psilocybin so we can begin to see connections between what we understand about these extraordinary substances in the modern world and how the ancient world used them that that does seem to be a universal theme this uh this theme of alleviating the fear of death and this this this comes up constantly with people that i know personally that have had it had these psychedelic experiences they they say well i feel like i went to heaven i feel like now i understand why people believe there's this perfect afterlife that i've seen a lot of the critics will say that it's some kind of natural human tendency that we don't want to die and that we're afraid of death and that and that uh religions provide us with some sort of solace uh some some sort of feeling of security but i i don't think that washes at all i think it's i think what's striking about the psychedelics is it's a direct experience that the person has they have an experience it's not a teaching it's not something that they're told about it's not a scripture that they read it's an experience that they have and that experience eliminates the the fear of death i think brian by the way uh having written the immortality key for which i've only provided the forward uh i think brian is absolutely right to be a psychedelic virgin um in in my case because i have used psychedelics and many other substances a lot of my critics just try to write off all my work whether it's on lost civilizations uh or on psychedelics they try to write it all off as the rantings of a sort of drug-fueled maniac and i think it's very smart of brian very smart of brian not to put himself in that situation i hope he will work with psychedelics in the future but i think he was right not to work with psychedelics before writing this book and to concentrate on the evidence well uh michael pollan who uh later in life experienced psychedelics and uh wrote pretty brilliantly about them for me that is he's one of the more interesting uh people to discuss it because michael is an investigative journalist he he he dot takes deep dives into these subjects and his deep dive into psychedelics was incredibly illuminating and so for him i i really enjoyed talking to him about it and i really enjoyed his book as well his his perceptions of it were really unique because you're talking about a guy who lived his whole life without them you know and then really dove head first for his book and kind of what happened kind of what happened to me when i when i wrote supernatural i had i had apart from one experience with lsd in 1974 i hadn't used any psychedelics until i began to research uh supernatural back in the early 2000s and because i'm a kind of boots on the ground researcher i felt it was essential that i have these experiences what i couldn't guess was the way that the experiences would utterly change and transform my life and i i can understand from a level of personal experience why psychedelics do lie at the root i think of all the world's religions and those religions are now busily at work trying to deny that connection well they're not just trying to do it so there's many people in science that are trying to deny these connections too and it's it's so unfortunate that the people that are trying to deny these connections or the significance of these experiences haven't had them i i don't think anybody who has a dimethyltryptamine experience can just dismiss it as being no big deal it's it's too crazy you need to do it sir this guy just the fact that it's it's one of those things where everyone who does it comes out of it saying i can't believe that's real yeah i can't i can't believe you can just get there that quickly that three puffs and all of a sudden you're in narnia i just i can't and we're not way more intense than narnia what and you're in a place where entities are actually communicating with you and speaking to you and teaching to you i mean this is another aspect of psychedelics is the moral aspect of psychedelics critics and enemies of psychedelics want to associate them with some kind of immorality but actually anybody who's worked extensively with psychedelics will know that they contain moral teachings whether it's the mushrooms or whether it's lsd they cause us to examine our own behavior our own impact upon others to question our unkindness to others and to give us at least uh the push to to begin to be better people and more nurturing and more caring people for others so this strong moral element in psychedelics again is totally ignored uh by by the critics who just want to demonize these substances for for reasons that i think are rather sinister actually well i think our current culture lapse lacks a map of the territory and if we had like some sort of legitimate psychedelic counseling where we could go somewhere and experts both in pharmacology and in medical science can talk people through these experiences and help them achieve them and and get people to realize that you know much like the ancients these experiences are not it's not wise to use them recreationally i mean you can you can if you want i mean many people have and then inadvertently benefited from them greatly but i think they're they're very profound and i think they should be treated like almost like you've got a willy wonka golden ticket to go meet god because that's what it seems like it's what it seems like it's happening should be treated with respect should be treated with respect and with and with reverence because because of this sense that we're passing through a doorway into a seamlessly convincing parallel reality and the possibility that that isn't just a concoction of our brains that the brains are simply acting as a as an interface or a transceiver between us and that other level of reality and again you can see the connection with psychedelics and and religion here my view is and i've said this before on your show joe uh if i were running the world anybody who wanted to be a president uh a prime minister a head of state of any kind i think it should be obligatory that they have at least a dozen sessions with a powerful psychedelic it can be dmt it can be ayahuasca it can be lsd but they've got to go through those dozen sessions they should be guided by experienced practitioners and at the end of those dozen sessions i very much doubt if those individuals would be the same individuals who went into the application for the job in the first place no i don't think you could be the same um when when you write about all this how curious are you personally of the experience and do you plan on having it i do under the conditions that you set i mean i think that we're in a period now where everything is about to change the clinical research is advancing rick dolben is moving to phase three you have researchers at hopkins nyu now ucla looking at psilocybin for a host of different conditions from depression anxiety end-of-life distress which is really fascinating and i think that sometime over the next five years the fda is going to get involved and these will become available at least for specified conditions and what i look forward to is maybe in 10 years time or less these retreat centers which are licensed and regulated with you know professional staff and medical supervised uh staff who essentially guide people through what would be a novel initiation experience not not unlike what may have happened 2 700 years ago i'm hoping they're going to be backdoored in as therapy for people with pre-existing conditions that we have right now like opioid addiction iboga like ibogaine being introduced and mdma for people with post-traumatic stress disorder for soldiers because there's been so much real solid evidence that it's incredibly beneficial to these people particularly the opioid crisis i mean we have a real problem in this country with people being addicted to these pills and then wind up dying from them um that can be nipped in the bud like really effectively with ibogaine and the fact that you have to leave the country to have these ibogaine experiences is really it's it's a terrible statement on the the rational thinking of our culture today because it's not like these are unknown things we're talking about it right now in a podcast that millions of people are listening to and we've talked about it dozens of times in the past and it's something that scientists are aware of researchers aware of and particularly people who have come back from there and have had these experiences and have been cured of their their addictions it literally rewires the way the brain interfaces with these opioids and the fact that it's not available to people and they have to go through traditional counseling and just and and and benefit from their willpower and somehow another try not to to relapse it's it's it's terrifying or even just mitigating some of that i'm even cannabis for example which which can be which can which can mitigate some of those addictive potentials yes i worked i worked with athletes for example which which might interest you so i represented a guy named mike james who was an nfl player who we we believe is the first professional athlete in the us to seek a therapeutic use exemption from the nfl to get off his opioids and use cannabis instead and we were there at 51st and park avenue at nfl headquarters arbitrating with the nfl to try and get him a cannabis supply and and he lost and he was fined six figures in the process and he left the lead because of it he's not the first one right wasn't there was who's the other jamie you're a football fan who's the other famous uh football player who couldn't kick the weed ricky williams that's right ricky williams he never sought a tu e though it was it was unthinkable to get a tue at the time but it's amazing that the nfl would have a problem with marijuana when so many of those guys are on pills i mean some of these guys are so severely injured i mean it is one of the most brutal if not the most brutal sport in the world and the fact that these guys can't seek marijuana for relief when they allow them to take opioids it's just bananas it doesn't mean it doesn't make any sense because we live in an insane society which is uh got all its priorities upside down and is completely screwing up this beautiful world that human beings have been gifted by the by by the universe and i i think it boils down to relatively few relatively few people we just have incredibly bad governments lousy leaders totally irresponsible lacking any initiative or imagination in it entirely for themselves uh it's a it's it's a messed up world and it's a kind of litmus test for how messed up that world is that sovereign adults cannot take the responsible decision to use psychedelics without risking uh jail that's it's it's it's as simple as it's very very insane that that should be the case and yet alcohol is glorified in our society as you say the opioids are prescribed hand over fist by by big pharma we're very mixed up and and i have a feeling that uh the sooner we get our politicians onto major psychedelics the better things are going to be well i think we got to get the whole world involved as well we don't want to be the only ones that are tripping no problem if the chinese and the russians are not tripping and we are we're like everything's gonna be fine man yeah and and also the other the other point to to make again the critics tried to try to trivialize this but actually working with psychedelics is re it can be really hard work it can be really grueling it can be really demanding it can put you through the psychological ringer as you confront your own dark side and learn how to deal with it yes there is a there is a recreational role for these substances and i honor the right of sovereign adults to use them for recreational purposes if they wish to do so but it's the deep work that these psychedelics require us to do which is which is really fascinating and which is not easy it's very very very difficult i personally find it difficult i don't rush to my next psychedelic adventure uh i prepare myself very very carefully and with some um some experiences and those are experiences whether they're real or not experiences of fact you experience does yeah um you're breaking up a little bit there but yeah i i completely agree with you about that i mean i i i get terrified when i take an edible a marijuana edible is the the introspective nature of those things the way it breaks down your thoughts and your behavior and finds the skeletons in your closet but you're in that for six hours searching around with a flashlight i tell people though but that's one of the things that i like about it i i learn things i know it's scary i know i feel terrifying while it's happening but when i come out of it on the other end i genuinely feel like i'm a better person like i've gone i've ex at that moment i will i will be nicer to you i am better i i'm better at being me you know it's it's very effective it really works there's something to it and it's it's it's available it's not something that you have to you know go to counseling for years and years and and it's no it's right there you get it real quick this was the whole point of the mysteries by the way in the ancient world i mean so there was a whole apparatus dedicated to curating these experiences for people and sometimes it was once in a lifetime like atalusis at some later point in your life and then you have the dionysian mysteries which are a bit weirder and a bit crazier but they were also curated by professionals by technicians women in this case who were thought to be spiking wine with all kinds of magical plants herbs and fungi but the the mysteries existed to create this experience of death and rebirth and they're supposed to be terrifying you were supposed to enter the underworld to meet the goddess it doesn't happen in the daylight it doesn't happen prancing around and the greeks are known for lots of great things that we've inherited like democracy and the arts and the sciences and what we're doing right now this this trial logos through these micro fonos these are all greek things in greek technology that we've accepted as part and parcel of western civilization but there was another part to them and it's a part again that is not taught in high school mythology or western civ and there's this deeply mystical aspect in the mysteries for example which which the greeks really looked to as something that wasn't just like a special part of civilization but the the central part of it so there is this um i'll tell you a story about this this fourth century historian zosimus he records the testimony of a roman guy named pritek status who was initiated at a lucius because remember it wasn't just people from greece it was around the greek empire including at that time where people had been influenced by the greeks and ellucis has survived up until the fourth century a.d at which point it is uh it's destroyed it's eliminated by the christianity by christians yeah by the christianized roman empire um in uh in the late fourth century uh and so there were there were different attempts to wipe it off the map and in 364 uh the emperor valentinian he essentially outlaws all nocturnal celebrations because these things are always at night elusive was at night which speaks to part of the experience and this guy pratik status is recorded as saying valentinian please don't shut this down i'm an initiate i've been to elusive i've drunk the potion i've seen the goddess please do not eliminate this elusive is the one thing that holds the entire human race together he said he said if you get rid of ellucis life for us will become a biotos which in greek means unlivable it wasn't just about greek existence it was about human existence there was something happening atolus with that potion with this beatific vision that literally held civilization together like glue for the ancient greeks and democracy the arts the sciences everything else was an offshoot of that experience ellucis was the foundation one of the things you talked about was that there was this transference like the eucharist eventually became a placebo do you do you think that that what do you think it was initially do you think it was a psychedelic mushroom so that's uh allegro certainly thought that right right uh and so john marco allegro author of the sacred mushroom in the scroll so he releases that book in 1970 and he claims that uh christianity is the guys for a near eastern fertility cult and it's i mean i think it's very interesting but there aren't many linguists who who support the proposition right there's there's a lot of people that disagree with them pretty heavily right i mean from from like a purely linguistic perspective it's uh i mean to explain it briefly so he he says that did you read this yeah the sacred mushroom in the cross yeah do you read it several times did you read uh the dead sea scrolls in the christian myth as well from allegro yeah yeah that's the one that was so the catholic church bought out the original one right and they it was very difficult to get a hold of for the longest time you had to buy copies of it i've heard rumors to that effect yeah yeah and then he so he comes out the second book the dead sea scrolls in the christian myth what what did knowing as much as you know about language what did you did you feel like he made leaps did you feel like he made these connections that maybe were based on speculation it's so he writes it's pure philology right so it's it's word games and things that only linguists i mean i i think it's incredible that that people who aren't linguists can actually read that it's really really difficult to read sacred mushroom on the cross but the basic premise is that the new testament written in greek has this semitic substratum so underneath the greek the the author the gospel writers and and paul are actually referring to different terms in hebrew or aramaic and that these terms have in turn come from the sumerian which any linguist would say is a language isolate that there is no real relationship between sumerian and the indo-european languages like greek and the semitic so the the premise of the argument is something that most linguists don't accept however and and carl rock has written the afterword to uh one of the additions you probably have of sacred mushroom in the cross and he gets into some complex theories about psycholinguistics and this interesting idea that just because they they aren't related there are certain words certain names certain vocabulary like plant definitions which which would carry across the different languages and i find that somewhat interesting but when you when you dig into the the words that allegro was recreating he's he places an asterisk actually next to to these words because they can't be corroborated by the ancient texts so some of these sumerian words he he straight up hypothesizes as existing uh but they're they're not they can't really be found in the existing tablets uh so it's it's hard to correlate some of those meanings he draws down from the sumerian but that said he makes very interesting claims for example like in one corinthians 22 there's this interesting line where he says about the we we preach christ crucified is um is a scandalon for the jews and a folly for the greeks and scandalone in greek means like um a bolt or a snare like a trap and allegro ties it to like a atikla in in aramaic which is like the what he calls the the bolt mushroom and in sumerian and so he's saying that paul's actually telling the jews that you know the the christ crucified is a mushroom instead of a scandalon it's like like a code word like the scandalon is a mushroom and then for the greeks he says it's a folly which is moira in in greek which actually means mandrake which is another psychedelic plant so there's all this this different you know word play going on but it's really hard to tease out any physical forensic evidence for this stuff which was what i was was allegro's uh position if i recall correctly that the sacred mushroom was amanita muscaria yeah that was even the cover of his book it was a photo of emily and that and that's where i have a i think allegra did amazing work but that's that's one area where i where i have a problem with with amanita muscaria as the as the psychedelic of choice in in early christianity because in shamanic cultures where amanita muscaria is used it's recognized that the potion that the mushroom is much more effective after it's been passed through a human body or indeed through the body of a reindeer uh and emerged in urine and so so the those those uh shamanistic cultures of siberia use amanita muscaria by drinking it in the urine of a shaman who has previously consumed the mushroom and i don't see a lot of evidence for that in early christianity and it's why i like the work that brian has done looking at the really hard evidence for psychedelics in early christianity which are not which are not in this case i'ma need to muscaria if i'm correct brian isn't the speculation about amanita muscaria that it's seasonable it's it's it's seasonal it's also genetically variable like there's there's different species of like much like different fruits taste differently there's different versions of the amino miscarriage that have more psychedelic compounds in them and then there's all sorts of ways of preparing them that we've completely lost isn't it am i getting this wrong because i've only had one amanita mascara experience and it wasn't very convincing yeah and this is this is often often the case but but i i'm told i've not had the experience myself but i'm told that if you can bear the idea of drinking the shaman's urine after he or she has consumed the amanita muscaria you will have a really powerful journey yeah but you don't want a shaman just laughing hysterically after you drink his there's also so many correlations between uh the amanita muscaria and santa claus and santa claus to shamans there's so many colors the red white yes yeah there's also the the you know the bag the toys the the fact that they would dry them on on these uh coniferous trees the fact that these mushrooms have this mycorrhizal relationship with coniferous trees where they they tend to grow under pine trees which is the tree that we use for christmas trees though for the fact that they're bright red like a toy that is you know in a package waiting for a child to open it up it's there's so many of these weird connections the colors the fact that reindeer or with santa claus the fact these reindeer fly you know through the heavens yeah i mean it's in that caribou are notoriously attracted to uh amanita mysterio mushrooms in fact people that have had psychedelic rituals and gone outside to urinative have talked about caribou knocking them over to try to get to their urine and caribou our reindeer you know and they have been observed eating these things so they have this weird relationship all those things are together connected in some sort of a strange way and there's also a history of shamanic rituals being outlawed in siberia and the way they got around it was they would come through the chimney which is just crazy they would they would climb onto people's roofs and and and slide down the chimney to uh deliver the mushrooms it's just another another example of the way that our culture takes an ancient historical truth and completely castrates it and turns and turns it into santa claus you know whereas what we're what we're actually dealing with are profound experiences in deeply altered states of consciousness well it's also this information seems to have been lost fairly recently because if you go back to the early 1950s and 40s and look at birthday christmas cards the christmas cards and depictions of christmas almost always contained elves and amanita muscaria mushrooms the mysteria mushroom was synonymous with christmas for some strange reason have you ever seen those old yeah it's crazy right yeah like what is that like it's all over the the fairy tale books too you can't you can't avoid the the amanita yeah everywhere you look which is why i think allegro was also interested writing in 1970 and studying it in the 50s and 60s i think that's why he glommed on to the amanita but it's such an unconvincing mushroom like the people that i know that have experienced it in in terms of a psychedelic ritual it's just i don't know anybody who's really blown their brains out with it no and and gordon watson also thought it was the the ingredient behind soma as well he writes a book about this in 1968 soma divine mushroom of immortality that that was his guess too for for soma but wasan was experienced with psilocybin which is so universally regarded as being effective that's why it's so confusing i always found that strange too to be honest so so wasson i mean to explain where this where this comes from watson has this incredible experience with maria sabina in 1955 in oaxaca mexico and when he consumes the we think philosophy mexicana and uh he is catapulted to the heavens and he has this vision uh that that he describes as the realest thing he's ever experienced uh under the influence of the psilocybin and the thought occurs to him he writes later in 1957 in life magazine he says that the could it be the case that the divine mushrooms are in fact the answer behind the ancient mysteries which is why he then went and started looking at the amanita perhaps or eventually ergot which is where i pick up the scent uh at some point in his correspondence with albert huffman they they together began focusing on ergot like we said because it's so common and so natural but so highly toxic too uh and albert claimed to have this experience with it and so for for years and years after teaming up with carl ruck they were convinced that ergot had to somehow be involved so what is the speculation of what the eucharist originally was according to the early gnostics yeah i mean what is there any text that explains what the initial food was well i mean we have the canonical explanation from the gospels we have and we have st paul's letter um i mean the honest answer and i think and any priest would say this too is the honest answer is we don't know uh you know the gospels are written anytime between 65 and 100 a.d paul's letters are some of the earliest uh writings that we have uh like the the letter to the corinthians for example uh he's he writes that in about 53 a.d and the way he describes what's happening there is very very interesting maybe we can we can pull it up actually i brought uh some of the some of the greek from uh the new corinthians it's under uh christian farmicon and the four corinthians 11 30. so um at some point i was looking for i was looking for what that original eucharist was depend and where it was taken so you have to you have to think about the the greek role at this time you know jesus is born in the in the holy land but christianity really takes root in the greek speaking parts of the empire which is why paul's letters are written to greek speaking people right and and why it's interesting to follow this theory because you have the the ancient greeks speaking greek and the pagan world but you also have ancient greeks speaking greek in this christianizing world and so the people in corinth is this church not far from elusive by the way in fact today it's only an hour west of ellucis and one of the earliest churches is there and paul is addressing this early church in in greek and at the at the bottom you can read the english but he's essentially yelling at them for consuming the wrong kind of eucharist and earlier in this in this chapter he calls it a cup of demons and at the end he says that's why so many of you are weak and sick and a number of you have fallen asleep and i highlight the word koimontai there so koimato in greek i can tell you for certain does not mean to fall asleep means to die because it's the exact word that john's gospel uses about lazarus remember the famous miracle where lazarus dies and he's resurrected that'd be a pretty shitty miracle if lazarus was just taking a nap and jesus went to wake him up from a nap so right and he's the the same verb there what paul is saying here is that he's concerned that so many corinthians are drinking a wine that is causing them to die why would wine cause you to die in a greek world that had no distilled liquor there was no hard alcohol in ancient greece distilled liquor doesn't enter europe until much much later 8th 9th 10th centuries a.d right at this time there's no word for alcohol either alcohol is arabic if you listen to the word like alchemy or algebra or alcove all these a-l words all come from the arabic a-l is like the the article in arabic like l in spanish or ill and italian so at this point wine is not known for its alcoholic content wine is a potion that is routinely mixed with all kinds of stuff toxins spices perfumes and plants herbs and fungi and here we don't know what to make of it but the corinthians are drinking something that's causing them to die but the word is dye koimato absolutely means to die because it's the word that uh in fact you can go to the next slide jamie it's it's the if you look it up right there it means just like we would say the sleep of death but it means death and and elsewhere in the gospels it's the exact word used for what happened to lazarus before his miraculous resurrection it's the whole point of the miracle he is he has fallen asleep to the death of sleep well so the speculation is that there's some sort of a psychedelic or a fungi or something that's in the wine that's causing them to die and they're using it regularly recreationally and they're they're trying to discourage this that's that that's how i read it and it's it's and it's not just based on a random read of of this one line in corinthians it's based on an understanding of of of what greek wine actually was how far back it goes which is centuries and centuries before this how it was mixed what it was mixed with um even in the first century there's a guy called dioscoretes a a greek pharmacologist in fact he's called the father of drugs and at the same time that these gospels and paul's letters are being written he writes something called the materia medica it's these five books in greek and every drug prescription you've ever had in your life exists because diascoretes wrote that manuscript and in that manuscript in book five he lists out in book five alone 56 different recipes for spiked wine and in the greek he shows you how to spike wine with everything from salvia to hellebore to henbane which he says is good for swollen genitals so if you have swollen genitals you you you dissolve henbane into wine he says if you drink mandrake wine like allegro was talking about mandrake it'll kill you in one cup full and then he says this about black nightshade in book 474 he says if you dissolve nightshade into wine it will produce fantasias which in greek means not unpleasant visions so just from the literature we can tell that the greeks absolutely knew how to spike wine with very powerful substances uh graham i gotta tell you your your microphone is really sensitive so anytime you do anything it any movement or breathing it bangs around for whatever reason i'm sorry i just just have to make you aware of it um so i have to stay still no everything's fine but anytime you bet it's just really it overpowers everything unfortunately sorry can i be turned down at the switchboard or something i don't know it's i don't think that's what it is i think it's the type of in the recording that says jamie will clean it up writing him down it's okay he's writing down all the noises that's how good jamie is um i wanted to bring up sage to you because one of the things that you you you talked about with salvia salvia is sage right they are basically in the same species at least when those priests would be walking down the aisle and they would be blowing sage they're burning sage was that for some sort of a psychedelic effect is that the reason why they were doing that so when it when it comes to incense we actually have an answer now i'm not sure if you know this but earlier this year in in may there were some researchers in israel who released one of the first um archaeochemical studies of ancient incense have you heard about this no oh it's so just in may at a place called tel arad in israel south of jerusalem west of the dead sea there was the the organic remains of some kind of incense that was burned on these two altars that is described by the researchers as kind of a scaled down version of solomon's temple um it's it's dated to the 8th century bc so in the judahite period so we could feasibly say the beginnings of the judeo-christian period oh yeah there it is frankincense i love that word so under archaeochemical analysis and and this uh this sample had actually been excavated years ago in the 1960s and was deposited in the museum but the thing with with uh with this this science which is amazing is that they can resurrect this stuff no matter when it was excavated so fortunately it wasn't contaminated and after analysis they found it contained thc cbd and cbn so tetrahydrocannabinol cannabidiol and cannabinol uh and so it's it's it's the fir they say it's the first example of psychoactive drug use uh in in the ancient holy land essentially so when they were walking down the aisle um would they use only we know that was cannabis but sage was used as well right and sage is salvia divinorum which is a more potent psychedelic than cannabis yeah but i think that's a new world plant though is it if i'm not mistaken oh yeah they're i mean at least the one you're thinking of so when they use say when you say new world are you talking about european world in the americas oh america's really so sage use when they would have it in that what is that graham do you would know this what is that thing that they walk down the aisle with when they blow this a sensor a sensor that's really what it's called a sensor c-e-n-s-o-r yeah or yeah yeah so they were most certainly using cannabis or something else that they were burning and they were getting everybody high and frankincense yeah and what is frankincense it's it's an aromatic spice uh so it just smells smells nice we don't think it's psychoactive but maybe at the right dose it could be but the cannabis certainly was so they would give everybody marijuana smoke just walk down the aisle and blow marijuana smoke on everybody if i may add whether or not the smoke is psychedelic it is adding to the experience it's adding to the to the setting and again anybody who's worked with psychedelics will know that the setting is at least as important as the substance itself so they're they're masters of creating this this mysterious and powerful and energizing setting uh in which the psychedelic experience can then unfold it's such a bummer that we know so little about what exactly was going on but so nice that someone like you has done these deep dives into it where at least we could pull out whatever we can and it just it makes me think like what what where would we be if people like you weren't doing this it's so it's so rare this is why i'm not doing dmt man you wouldn't be doing it i don't know you might be doing it with more feverish need i mean you might be really obsessed with it um it's just it's it's so strange and graham i always go back to your uh your statement which i think is just such a great quote that we're a species with amnesia yeah in regard to our archaeology our history but also in regard to our use of psychedelics yeah well we've we've just not been given the straight scoop about about our past uh sometimes it's uh just purely the way that scholars work that academics work and and sometimes i think in the case of christianity it is actually a kind of conspiracy i think there was a deliberate effort to cover up the role of psychedelics and you could see why priests in the developing roman catholic faith who've already pulled on the jack boot of the roman empire you could see why they wouldn't like their congregations using psychedelics because when you use psychedelics you have a direct experience of the divine and hey you don't need that priest anymore the priest as an intermediary between you and the divine becomes becomes redundant and and i think that there was a concerted effort to cover up the role of psychedelics in early christianity and to present a different narrative which it was purely was the the bread and the wine the blood and the and the body of christ uh in a symbolic sense uh and not in an actual sense of a substance that connects us to the divine so the the literature that connects the um banning of these uh psychedelic rituals in fourth century you're saying how does it describe it and what what was the was the reaction by by the people i mean at the time so you have to remember that the the greek mysteries existed for a long long time yeah um we don't know exactly how long but the excavators and and this this began in in elusive for example in 1887 uh they they date it back to at least 1500 bc so if if it survives until the fourth century a.d you're talking almost 2 000 years as long as christianity itself has been around and the mysteries themselves and there are serious scholars who came along in the 70s to say this could have prehistoric roots which is how i started the investigation by by asking how how this actually got to the greeks because what's interesting about this cookie on potion for example is that it's not wine based in in that hymn to demeter that came down to us she's actually offered wine in this mythical story that takes place she's out looking for her daughter persephone who's been abducted and kidnapped to the underworld and she looks for her for nine days and nights and can't find her and she she uh rests her bones exhausted atalusis and they try to offer her wine and she says no she wants that water barley and mint and again hoffman watson and rock thought it was kind of like a primitive version of beer if you think about it it reads like a very simple beer recipe now for the greeks all the way through the classical period through platon afterwards for them to be drinking beer instead of wine is very very weird for them to have a secret mystery religion that's not written down remember the civilization that birthed literature and the concept of the university as we know it is also very weird so it's like they're they are retaining this very prehistoric uh ritual and this very prehistoric beverage which is beer and as i trace it back further and further you can see clues of beer being used in funerary and mortuary rituals as far back as 13 000 years and there are some who think that that beer actually precedes bread at that moment we call the agricultural revolution where the upper paleolithic becomes a neolithic and graham writes a lot about this and very beautifully at gobekli tepe for example so i was able to trace back uh the potential brewing of religious beer all the way back to gobekli tepe and the speculation is that this religious beer had some ergot in it possibly it's it's possible it's possible we we haven't done much testing for ergot that far back i mean we're that that's why i wanted to write this book is because the science is relatively new um archaeochemistry for example is relatively new it's it's some of the better findings have been coming out over the past 20 years which is which is like a baby in the sciences in fact pat mcgovern at the university of pennsylvania who i interviewed for the book described archaeochemistry at the time in the late 90s when he was producing some incredible finds as like an infant which would make it like a toddler today and so we're just beginning to put these pieces together so we can't say there was psychedelic beer 13 000 years ago the question right now is kind of was there beer at all and there are there's very early indications at gobekli tepe itself that they were brewing beer and at another site to the southwest in israel at mount carmel outside haifa there's this really interesting place called the rockefeller cave and it was a burial site with about 30 individuals this is between 11 700 bc and 9700 bc a team from stanford went in there and they found these bolder mortars in which they found traces of the malting and mashing of grains which they think was for beer this is 13 000 years ago which brings which brings us to the to the upper paleolithic and then we have the whole mystery of rock and cave art all around the world so brian is right we haven't got the analysis that proves that a psychedelic was in that 13 000 year old beer but what we do have 13 000 years ago and going back much further 27 40 50 000 years ago is art and that art really only makes sense as psychedelic art i mean what where else but in a visionary state do you see an entity that is part human and part animal in in form that is part a lion and part a human being it's not something you see every day it's not something you see when you're out hunting game but seeing these therianthropes as they're called is a very common experience in deeply altered states of consciousness so the art itself speaks to us of artists who had had powerful experiences in deeply altered states what is the conventional conventional speculation about those images the half man half animal images increasingly it is that uh that they document psychedelic states uh there's a professor at the university of witwatersrand in south africa david lewis williams written a book called the mind in the cave who's documented this in in great detail that the only possible explanation for this art which is found all over the world is not just found in in one region or one place is that the artists were shamans that they were experiencing altered states of consciousness and when they returned to a normal everyday state of consciousness they remembered their visions and painted them on cave walls and those visions would might well be a lion man or a bison man and that entity had communicated with them just in the way that entities communicate with us today under the influence of dmt or psilocybin did you have a sense of urgency while you were writing this like did you understand that this is something that very few people who are legitimate scholars are going to really tackle well it hadn't been done and i don't i don't know why nobody was was doing this and combining the humanities and the linguistics with with the sciences i've been waiting for this book to come along and and no one wrote it so you had to write it yourself since i wasn't doing dmt i had plenty of free time how long did it take 12 years wow did was there any point in time where you're like what the [ __ ] am i doing uh if you ask my wife yeah especially you're supposed to be a lawyer man no one's paying you for this you went to the vatican was it was there a real issue oh yeah yeah yeah absolutely yeah it's uh it's um you know what it's a good point this is this is really really hard and it brings up something uh i've been talking with the researchers about this too so when i talk about archaeochemistry i mentioned pat mcgovern at u pen there's another guy andrew co at mit and every time i have a question these guys are there to answer it andrew's awesome he's a younger guy in his mid 40s uh he's he's been doing this stuff his his whole life he has a background in classics like like i do and so he's the only person i've talked to who sees like the the legitimacy of this kind of pursuit because he's one of those guys who can think about the humanities and the sciences at the same time but it's it's tough this there there is no discipline for this you can't get a phd in the hunt for ancient intoxicants no one's out there studying for it it just doesn't exist and those who do study it find it very very hard to get gainful employment you can't get paid to do this stuff and so a little bit later we'll talk about two archaeochemists i've been in touch with who have remarkable findings uh that i want to share here but they've each since left the discipline so they were doing incredible work 20 years ago in the late 90s and early 2000s we're finding incredible things but i mean life being what it is they had to leave the profession well let's get to that now who who are they and what are they so there there's a couple different guys one uh there so there are two finds that i really went out of my way to put into this book one is trying to find hard evidence of this ergatized beer and the other is trying to find actual hard evidence of of wine that's been spiked and ideally that would that would be spiked wine in the context of some kind of christian ceremony or or some syncretic greek christian ceremony in the first century a.d and so i spent years and years trying to get in contact with these folks and reading through the archaeo-botany journals and i'll start with ergot first since i was really kind of fascinated with ergot and this hypothesis from 1978 because it sits there for now 40 years and there's no hard data to come by and people often argue about ergot the same way we argue about amanita and the other candidates because it's it doesn't make sense um we know it's there we know it's common but it doesn't make the most sense as the thing that would have spiked this beer uh so i spent a long time looking for ergatized beer or any beer that was spiked now if you go to the top archaeochemists or archaeobotanists in the u.s the uk or europe and i did for many years and i asked them the very simple question is there any botanical or chemical data of beer having been spiked with psychedelics and the universal answer that would always come back is no and so i'd ask them again and the answer would be no and so i started to think about the ancient world and what that meant and what ancient greece meant and so first i went to the site atalusis to ask the archaeologist there if we could test her vessels and i couldn't believe that nobody had ever asked her if they could submit the test the vessels to chemical testing and so i flew there and i talked to her about it and she said unfortunately they've all been treated for conservation purposes you know they put them in museums uh and they exhibit them to the public and when you do that you you contaminate the the artifact and it's no longer testable so that was my dead end and that's where things stopped for a while and that's where my wife starts asking you know brian you flew to greece by yourself and left your two daughters at home for no reason so you could ask a lady if you could test her her chalices and she told you no and now what are you gonna do and so i said well i'm gonna get creative man and so i thought about the ancient greek world uh here's the thing about the ancient greek world in in in the wake of alexander the great who was called the great for a reason the greek influence um after the fourth third centuries bc was stretched all the way from iberia spain and portugal to afghanistan in the east i'm not sure if many folks realized that but the the the greek speaking or the greek influence part of the world was enormous and so if you're looking for evidence of this cookie on why would you restrict yourself to athens and elusives so i took a step back and i started thinking where else would there be a greek presence and i didn't expect to find one but i i landed on iberia eventually because i started um researching ergot in different languages that was that was my first clue you know they're in in english we have this one weird word for it ergot and actually in german there's lots of words for it bizarrely enough maybe it's because of the history of brewing but in german there's aftakon mutacon tolcon which means crazy corn crazy green or totencorn which means death corn and so it's it's weird that you know as as you look elsewhere it's it seems to be more common to the german mind and then in spanish i just started random googling for what that is it's called cornezuelo incentive in spanish and a couple things started popping up um and this these notions of of spiked beer started popping up where they weren't supposed to i never expected to find them so the first hit that came in was from an archaeological site kind of in the in the middle midwest of spain called uh the vajo dolidh and there in 2003 they found a greek vessel called a greek chalice called the kernos and it's the same kind of vessel that's used in the elusive mysteries it's a it's like this little cup with a tiny cup on the outside i brought a picture for you if you want to see it sure um jamie in um in moscow if you scroll to the bottom and copy of p29 so this this this can that's it so this came from a site called the necropolis of las ruedas and the necropolis of las vegas is this archaeological site that was dated to about the second century bc now these aren't greek people uh this is a pre-roman population called the vodka or the vaccines but for some reason in this carnos it tests it positive for beer spiked with hyoscyamine if you go to the to the next tab jamie you'll see that they wrote up it's in spanish but there you'll see that the at the number 76 and 77 when they tested the the kernels which is a very greek word by the way when they tested the kernels it tested positive for traces of hyoscyamine and hyoscyamine can only occur in these solanaceous plants these nightshade plants you're talking so the it's the family of plants that includes very boring things like uh the tomato plants and or the potato or tobacco but it has these nightshades like mandrake again uh or or henbane and so it's one of those propane alkaloids that could have been in henbane for example so here you're talking about a henbane beer which is really weird the even weirder part is that this is found in a funeral complex just like just like you would find at gobekli tepe or the rockefellet cave in israel 13 000 years ago here after thousands and thousands of years you're seeing this pre-roman population using beer spiked with henbane in a death cult and where the researchers say that it was used to either facilitate the deceased's travel to the other world or maybe the people who were there ushering the deceased into the other world they actually use that phrase holy [ __ ] go back to that image of the uh cup again please so why does it have the cup on the outside of it again there's the the large vessel and there's a small vessel to the side of it we we don't know that that's just what that that's what a kernel says if you scroll could possibly have been uh portion control exactly if you scroll to the top jamie uh you'll see uh two other keranoi on the top right there yeah and so this is this is the next part of the of the clue so so these came from um a colony on the east coast of iberia called emporion which was a bustling uh greek colony and these are our are other kernels vessels just like you would see atalusis these are the kinds of things that they think the initiates were drinking from now they don't make for very good drinking vessels but maybe they they make for good mixing vessels like like for dosage control yeah something is going on there that's that's what they thought the cardinals was at a losses for example and that's what i wanted to test with the archaeologist there who said no and so now we're finding these vessels in spain where they're not supposed to be and i can say as a classicist or a one-time wannabe classicist that the first thing you think of when you think about the ancient greeks is not spain and all of a sudden i'm coming across this idea of spiked beer in spain it's just not supposed to be there that's so fascinating so this image what is the can you go back to that original image jamie of the yeah the cup with the small cup next to it what what is their what's the conventional description of what this is and why it's shaped this way i mean the the spanish archaeologist they also call this akernos i mean it's it's the the extent of the greek influence at that particular site this is the pintia archaeological site the extent of the relationship and the network is is a little unclear at least at least to me it's it's unclear how strong the greek presence was there but at the time by the second century bc um because the greeks were already in these other uh port cities basically it's it's not inconceivable that some kind of trade was happening and these vessels would have made their way inland do they have a description as to why there's a small cup connected to the larger cup though it would be the same as as any greek archaeologist has too we we don't know why this was this was associated with the mysteries no one knows why it really does logically make sense that it would be some sort of a portion because it's very small obviously you don't want to have too much of that [ __ ] yeah it really does it really does make complete sense actually that's what it is that you take one portion of this and mix it with ten portions of that yeah and then you're gonna have an interesting journey yeah i can't think of another explanation off the top of my head obviously i'm not qualified to speculate but when i'm looking at this i'm thinking oh that completely that fits but you're on you're on the right track because that that's that's where it led me to was portion control yeah and that's what i found next what'd you find next i found it i found some things man what'd you find man [Laughter] so uh kerenos right i'm thinking karanas vessels and so the vessel doesn't just show up in uh in the middle of spain there it shows up on the coast at this and so this this town is called emporion and today it's called ampurias and it's in in in catalonia in northeast spain close to the border with france and to be totally honest i'd never heard of emporion and i'm not sure if many classes have but it was a bustling import export business of the ancient greeks founded by the fochaians who came from ionia which is today modern-day turkey and they found this place in 575 bc and we we think that the religion comes with them or some kind of religion jamie if you go back to moscow you can see just an exterior shot of what this this colonial town looks like and when you look at it again there i mean it looks that could be southern greece that could be an island in greece that that's on the the northeast coast of spain that's a statue of asclepius the greek god of healing standing in a courtyard in spain and the statue dates to uh at least fifth century bc wow and we don't know really what's going on but in the next slide the focaians who founded this place uh were devotees of that's per that's supposed to be persephone on the left the greek goddess persephone the goddess of the underworld the same goddess who the initiates would find when they made their pilgrimage to elusive and drank the potion they went there to meet persephone yeah and there she is on their coins wow and then it gets more interesting wow [Laughter] so these people don't don't stick to the coast they go inland at some point and they go inland for a reason and there's a site that they that they found called mas castellar de pontos it's a tiny town called pontos and there's this farm that the archaeologists describe as a greek farm a bit further inland jamie if we go if we go back to the the same file there we can just click through a bunch of the images and the kinds of things that they found there which are indicative of of the greek mysteries so that so starting with her for example that was that was unearthed at this archaeological site in pontos and the archaeologist's responsible for this dig who's been the same woman over the past as since 1990 her name is enriqueta ponz she found this and other objects she calls this the head of persephone or it could be the head of demeter but she either way if she thinks it's a greek goddess and this is third century bc so obviously there's some intense influence these are greco-italian m4i also dated to the third century bc and the next one that's also some kind of demeter percep that's an incense burner by the way you you stick incense in the top of it light it up uh depending on what your incense is and it's used in cult rituals that's third century bc and then it gets weirder they find this 5th century bc that belongs in a dining room in athens not on a farm in spain that is the that's the origin of comedy right there believe it or not that that's called a comos comos in ancient greek is one of these drunken parades in honor of the god dionysus these are the first paid regulars at the comedy store and he's got his dick out like ari shafir there you go wow that's crazy so then it gets weirder just south of the site they find this and this is triptolemus tryptolemus is kind of the missionary of the mysteries so after demeter uh uh establishes her temple in elusis they they send this guy to go scouring the earth uh to carry the knowledge of the grain and farming across across europe and if you go to the next one jamie you'll see that it's it's very similar to the kind of triptolimus things that show up in greece this is from the uh the elusive museum on site in ellucis if you compare the two you see a dude on a flying dragon cart on the left and a dude on a flying dragon cart in the right they're both tryptolemus the last place i ever expected to find tryptolemus was a farm in spain and there it is wow so if if tryptolemus tells you anything it tells you that the mysteries went west when they're not supposed to by the way graham alluded earlier uh to this incident that happened in athens in 414 bc to celebrate the mysteries outside of ellucis is a sacrilege a total sacrilege it was called the profanation of the mysteries and one of socrates star disciples this guy al-qaeda's was caught indulging in the mystery ceremony at home instead of at the temple and he became the ed snowden of the ancient world he was ostracized they would have killed him if he didn't run from athens so this was serious stuff and and sacred stuff so for them to be celebrating the mysteries if you think about it kind of makes sense because no one's looking over their shoulder in spain if it's going to happen anywhere maybe it'd be on in the hinterlands of the empire so this is people that realized that they wanted to continue these rituals and couldn't do it in greece anymore they had to get out right or these were folks who either couldn't afford or didn't want to go all the way to a losses i mean you're in spain imagine getting to you can't get to ellucis today imagine getting to elusives 2000 years ago 2500 years ago it's it's really really difficult and this if i make it if i may give a parallel it's rather like somebody seeking an ayahuasca experience today and perhaps they can't afford to go all the way to the amazon rainforest or it just seems too big a journey so they're going to look for somewhere nearer to home where they can have that experience and indeed ayahuasca is available all over the world now yeah and that's pretty recently right like within the last couple of decades it's available all over the world rapidly within the last couple of decades and i think brian is suggesting that a similar sort of thing was happening in the ancient world with a different substance the guy's name is so right on the nose too you know i never thought about that until until right now because i don't do dmt but i mean trip people tripping i mean it's just ridiculous that his name is tripp it's interesting i mean look at him he's riding a dragon his name is tryptolemus and on the next one too jamie you'll see there's another trip columnist from from kapua this is in italy so he did go west we know he went to italy and if he went to italy why wouldn't he go to spain and look at the style of art it's completely greek wow pretty psychedelic at the same time yes yeah is it's it's it but it's so it's so uniform that in in the three different locations you have the same imagery wow and so the question that wasson hoffman and ruck would immediately immediately ask is what is tryptolemus doing there is he really was he really sent as a missionary to teach people how to farm that's that that's a traditional scene isn't that wheat in his hands that's exactly right he was dispatched he was dispatched to teach people how to grow cereals however across the neolithic period people know how to farm people are already farming so it starts in the bread basket at gobekli tepe in anatolia we have farming across europe and in greece as early as 6 500 bc it's by by 4 000 or so bc it's all over europe why would tryptolemus need to be sent on a mission to teach people to do something they already knew how to do which is farm and so what they would say is he was teaching not not about growing the grain but about what grows on the grain which is ergonomic of course and look someone's pouring something too yeah that's one of those just ritual ablutions wow so then it gets more interesting okay we're waiting jamie [Laughter] we're so waiting ryan in addition to triptolemus and the heads of demeter and persephone enrique the ponz finds this gem which is a 250 square foot ritual sanctuary that she calls in spanish a capisia domestica which is a household shrine and she believes it's a household shrine that is specifically dedicated to reenacting the mysteries of demeter and persephone for people who wanted to get in touch with their greek ancestors and she calls this a ritual room for the living to interact with the dead wow but you still need some greek influence so in the next slide you'll see the altar where the activity was happening does that look greek very so that's a column that was proven by petrographic analysis to have originated at the mount pentelicus quarry northeast of athens it came from greece and it's sitting in spain and what they're doing on that aside from burning incense all around is they're sacrificing dogs they found the remains of three female dogs there's only one goddess in greece associated with that and that's hecate who is the mother of the witch cersei and the patroness of all witches and they're sacrificing dogs to her because she's known as the kunos fagues in greek which is the dog eater what god the other things you find in that room aside from the greek altar and the greek goddess to whom dogs are being sacrificed in an underworld journey where the living and dead or communing is a greek hearth and enriqueta uses the greek word eschara for that you can go to the next one jamie so in addition to the greek altar and the greek hearth she finds these which are very greek shaped cups these are called kantharos the kantharos is the ritual vessel that was only used by the god dionysus to drink his magic potion she finds about 10 of these in and around the area and when i heard all this after the the greek influence is swimming on this place i called up carl ruck who at the time was 84 years old he's now 85 years old and his career was severely impacted after the release of 19 the 1978 book the road to ellucis his career essentially tanks it was the classic case of the wrong book at the wrong time he was not supposed to write this because he did he was deposed as the cl as the chair of the classics department he was cut off from grad students he was uh discouraged from interdisciplinary scholarship with his colleagues and he became the drug guy you know classicists don't write about drugs but the book really really impacted his life and he became kind of the black sheep of the classics estate and there's no evidence to prove that this ergotized beer actually exists and so you know his his career kind of went into a nosedive and so i've been keeping him up to speed on all this work and so i called him up and invited him to to come see uh this this ritual chapel with me and so that's him getting his very first look at the at the incense burner and and the cup and there he's an ancient staring contest with demeter looking at this cup and i didn't take him all the way to spain just so he could look at a cup it's because of what was in the cup and so in the mid 1990s after it was excavated this woman enriqueta the archaeologists for some reason we don't know why she got in touch with a young archaeobotanist who i mentioned before jordi and they subjected this this chalice to analysis and what they found was beer wow so this thing was filled at some point with some kind of ritual beer that was used in some kind of ceremony dedicated to demeter and persephone but that's not all they found they also found the remains of ergot [Music] and it is the the first and most compelling data to support this scorned hypothesis from 1978 that's ever emerged what was that like for him to to experience that he's it had to be just completely mind-blowing but also frustrating that he was right all along and i i expected that too when and i asked him i have a video of of me talking to him at the chapel i asked him what this all means and he was he's he's not salty about it he's 42 years later 42 years yeah not at all no he's got a good life he's he's happy um i think he i think he feels he i think he feels vindicated yes um and and and i know he's excited to talk about this in public and this is the first time we're talking about it in public and i know he wants to dive deep on this uh but this is something he's dedicated his entire professional life to and he is you said he's 83. he's 85 now 85. yeah um how is he holding up physically um he's okay now he's in quarantine he lives in this beautiful pre-revolutionary war home that i went to visit a couple years ago i describe it as something like the british museum having been ransacked by a group of mischievous elves he's surrounded by mushrooms and busts of of demeter and he's got some some artifacts that belong to gordon wassen who was his mentor in many ways you know father figure so from 78 on he was just balls deep in this stuff he dove head in instead of turning around after he was yelled at for being the drug guy he if you look him up and his cv this this is it's all he does is is right about the potential use of drugs in the in the ancient world did he have personal experiences uh many yeah so that's probably why you started writing about it as a matter there's really no reason or not as a matter of fact when i mentioned that letter from albert hoffman to gordon watson in 1976 when he when he self-dosed on the ergonovine he sent some in the letter it says he sent some in the mail to gordon watson who politely declined and made and made ruck do it instead wow so for rock like what was it like for you to be able to show this to rock to give him hard evidence to show him these cups to tell him about the tests that were done the fact that they discovered ergot the fact that they know these vessels were holding beer i mean this vindication to be there physically while this vindication emerges psychedelic man it had to be it was really emotional i mean it's it's still emotional for me and i mean to be clear there's more testing and more analysis that needs to be done this is this was this was 20 years ago and the breaking news is that that original sample may may be stashed away somewhere at the university of barcelona and jordi was going to go look for it kovit intervened so we very much want to re-test this stuff andrew code mit very much wants to get a chemical sample so i want to be a little careful but the way it exists today is extraordinarily compelling and odds are there's probably even more evidence some of which hasn't even been excavated and for for rock it's or for the field in general uh i think it's it's it's really and i think it's extraordinary well the dots all connect themselves i mean that's what's really amazing about it it's it's if you look at what you've discovered and if you look at the the history of these people getting together and having these rituals and what we know about psychedelics in particular lsd and what albert hoffman has shown and and any people who've experienced lsd know i mean it all fits right in it all makes sense it's crazy it's just and what what where would we be if you didn't write this book that's what's really interesting you know it's there's seven plus billion people on this planet and it just takes one person to not listen to their wife the next thing you know do you hear that pj did you hear that pj he was right thank god is she cool i think you just saved my marriage i swear i swear to christ i think you just saved my marriage is she cool with it now no i mean yeah no no she wants to see how this goes and then she'll be cool oh it'll go great man this book's gonna sell like crazy are you gonna do uh an audio version of it i read it myself oh nice when is that gonna be out it's out is it out right now it should or today or tomorrow yeah oh okay because i tried to look for it yesterday on amazon it wasn't or on um no uh apple that wasn't available okay the 29th i think okay the publication date is the 29th of september and that's also the same publication date as the paperback of my lost civilization book america before i want to be clear that the immortality key is brian's book yes my contribution to it is the uh is is the forward and i'm grateful to brian for asking me to to do that i think brian has done really important work and i think the next step now is to demystify this field and and get more science at work on this subject instead of just closing our eyes and closing our minds to these extraordinary possibilities that we've been radically misled about our own past yeah and i think thanks thanks to the great work of rick doblin and uh dr rick strassman and yourself and so many other people that have contributed to this it it's now something that people are allowed to speculate about it's now something that people allowed to it's a test yes people are having real legitimate conversations about these things now yeah yeah this this this was the the attempt to use 21st century science to test an ancient hypothesis and part of part of the the issue is the ancient greeks and the other parts the christians i mean all we had for a long time was allegro so i spent some time if ruck was right about this was ruck write about what he writes about the christians and he does write about psychedelic sacraments in the christians and what was his speculation about the psychedelic sacraments in the christians he also likes the amanita muscaria really yeah why is everybody like that one do you think it well this is also i'm asking you as a person who hasn't experienced psychedelics um i i do not know very many people that have had successful experiences with it it's very confusing but i do recognize that it's in time like mckenna speculated very much that we've lost our ability to understand like how to prepare it and where where when to prepare it when to pick it and then it's seasonal and there's there's so many variables you know i think we're ignorant about how to use these things our society i i speak of a species with amnesia we've forgotten the old techniques and the old ways of doing things we've there's been a concerted effort in the in the modern world to demonize these substances and to cut them out of our lives and to associate them with irrational behavior and craziness and so on and so forth and and to move to move forward in this field it i hate to use the word but it needs to be made more respectable because it's the key to understanding so much about ourselves that has been obscure and mysterious until now it's just for a person who's experienced it it's so strange the contrast between the experience itself and the public's perception of it particularly the the average person who has not experienced psychedelics who looks at it like this frivolous ridiculous thing like why would you engage in such a thing why would you i mean i remember had a conversation with michio kaku about it once talking to him about uh psychedelic mushrooms and and he was basically telling me like scientists want to strengthen their mind they don't want to ruin their mind in that sense like you don't want to waste your mind on drugs and i was like oh but there's a guy who needs to do some drugs yeah exactly people make these kind of statements as though they're facts yes uh yet those people have had no experiences of the of of the substances concerned but also i think for his own career though for his own career you almost have to say things like that or at least then we're talking when i had this conversation with him more than a decade ago probably 15 years ago so when when you have these experiences and you you know you run into the conventional perception of these you understand that these people almost like like what happened with ruck and what happened with many other scholars that took chances and discussed these things you wound up being this crazy person you wound up being this easily dismissed person and it's very uh it's it's in in many ways it's discouraged in a very powerful way and because there has there has been a hugely well organized and well-funded propaganda war against these substances our society prides itself on the alert problem-solving state of consciousness and the alert problem-solving state of consciousness does have an important role to play but part of the madness of our society why it's become so suicidally dangerous is because the alert problem-solving state of consciousness has been given a monopoly position and what psychedelics do is they undermine the dominance of the alert problem-solving state of consciousness and they show us the much wider range of consciousness that is uh that is available uh and and therefore they are um insidious to the powers that be those powers that run and control our world today don't want people thinking for themselves they don't want the propaganda to be unpicked by a mushroom uh and and that's why we've we've faced this propaganda war and what we're dealing with is the legacy of that propaganda war and and the majority the majority of people unfortunately don't realize that they've been subjected to 50 or 60 years of lying propaganda they think it's actually all facts yeah and this is what needs to be unpicked and we're in the middle of uh a crisis in this country in regards to police violence and police brutality and a big part of that is the war on drugs it's a giant part of it it's responsible for the brianna taylor uh murder which is uh being discussed right now and people are protesting that was a war on drugs uh absolutely no knock raid i mean that's that's that's what that's about and most of these were on drugs at all this is the this is the thing it's a completely maniacal i idea because ultimately it's not war on drugs and i've used this phrase before it's a war on consciousness yes our society does not want certain kinds of consciousness to be experienced it wants to shut them down and and it treats us like children if adults are not free to make sovereign decisions about their own health their own consciousness and their own bodies while doing no harm to others then freedom is a meaningless word yeah and unfortunately freedom is a meaningless word in the societies we live in today we do live in a heavily mind controlled society where facts are where propaganda is disguised as fact i i agree with you but i think this battleship is slowly turning and i think it is these kind of conversations that we're having right now it's irresponsible in a big way for shifting the way people perceive these things for the longest time the only way we've been explained to uh the only way these subjects have been explained to us has been in in demeaning terms and that that these are bad experiences and you're going to wreck your life you're going to ruin your life and and when we're here saying well maybe it'll make you a better person like that these are revolutionary thoughts in the 21st century that and the fact that there's so many people that are echoing these statements and so many really intelligent well-educated people who who haven't ruined their lives who have families and jobs yeah and they're saying no this is actually good for you yeah and and you know if it comes down i think it needs to be recast in the issue of of individual freedom and individual sovereignty of course there must be limits on individual freedom we must not do harm to others uh in exercising our freedom but really taking a psychedelic is the least harmful thing it's possible to do to anybody it's an entirely inward experience and and it should not be controlled by the state and by government what's happening here is that we're literally being treated like children as adults and it's a most unfortunate aspect of our society and the way i see government seeking to use the current crisis to add to its power to dominate people's lives to even enter into their homes to encourage neighbors to snoop on one another it's a very insidious trend that we're in and the war on drugs has been a big part of that trend for a long time but you're right joe the battleship is turning around and it's turning around because people are waking up and they're saying we're just not going to put up with this [ __ ] any longer we're not going to be told what to do we're not going to be treated as infants by our government here here and the thing about the psychedelic argument too it it falls apart the the idea of criminalizing it because it lacks all of the rationalizations that you can get with crystal meth and cocaine and all death overdose addiction like mushrooms are not addicting like these these things are they're not addicting in terms and even so we already have laws that deal with negative behavior towards others so if somebody is on a particular substance and they harm somebody else we have a law governing that harm that they've done to somebody else we don't need to have a law that enters the sanctum of the individual's consciousness and tells that person what he or she may think and what he or she may experience it's a really huxley-esque or orwell-esque world that we're that we're messing with here now when you talk to rock about christianity and about the use of the avenida muscaria mushroom does does he echo the statements of john marco allegro does he does he buy into that or does he have a parallel perspective on it like his it's it's interesting it's kind of a hybrid in some of his writings he's a fan of the amanita in others he takes a broader approach and i think that that was my approach looking at this too because the the one thing that pops out at you from the ancient christian world is is wine and the one thing that pops out at you from the ancient greek world is this is this spiked wine and rock does write quite quite a bit about that in the road to ellucis the same book in 1978 where he talks about this ergotized beer he is also talking about spiked wine but again there wasn't much data to go on for the longest time so same as i was kind of scouring the ancient world for evidence of this ergotized beer i took it upon myself to put his other crazy thesis to the test and i started looking at wine in the ancient world not just for the amanita and i did look for it by the way i looked for evidence i didn't find any but i found other evidence and it starts at the louvre if i can show you a couple couple pictures jamie can you go to the louvre that's the first time anybody's ever said that to you jamie jamie [Laughter] so in in an obscure footnote from 1978 ruck talks about a greek priestesses spiking wine and he makes a reference to an old book from the early 20th century by a german scholar called freaking house and fricken house talked about this vaz that was apparently in the louvre that nobody had ever seen and i took it upon myself to try and find that vas and so at the very top jamie if you click on the drawing this is this is a a line drawing by frickin house himself of what he apparently saw in the louvre at some point in the early 20th century and not many people have seen since so this is his illustration of what he recalls being on exactly exactly and if if you take a look at it or zoom into the woman on the right you can see her preparing preparing additives for for the wine and we can't really make out what they are um but the way fricken house drew it it kind of looks like a mushroom in her left hand you can't really tell ruck says the other one is a sprig of some herb and again you can't really tell so i sent an email to the curator at the louvre alexandra captiano and i said i'd like to take a look at this and i'd like to bring my friend along and my friend is father francis tiso roman catholic priest who happens to be an an expert botanist and herbalist uh so i called up father francis from his laboratory in uh in the rustic parts of italy and i said father francis since you're uh trained at columbia and cornell and harvard divinity school and you know everything about plants will you come help identify this for me and so he said sure so we met at the louvre and we meet alexandre and alexandra says uh you know these th this fast i can find it for you but it's not on exhibition uh this is this is not in the public catalog this is in our storage room and if you want i can i can i can take you to the storage room and show you this fuzz you've been looking for and i said great and she takes us up to the to the second floor past the the statue of the winged victory of samothrace and she ushers us into this completely empty stockroom filled with thousands and thousands of greek wine vessels and they're sitting on a table on the next picture jamie are what she calls g408 and g409 and i believe this is one of the first color photographs taken of them there it is and so we don't know what's happening here but we've moved from those mysteries of dying of uh elusive to the mysteries of dionysus and there's father francis with the with the magnifying glass trying to figure out what they're adding to the wine and again this is it's just a painting right we don't know if this is recording an actual event but we're speculating that maybe the artist tried to record something for for posterity and this vaz is from fifth century bc it's called red figure pottery so pretty old and we take a look and as we lean in further i have a mini heart attack because the pottery has been chipped just just where she's holding the other ingredient oh so no we have no idea what's in the right hand oh no but i'll let you try and guess what you think is in the left hand on the next uh the next close-up so that's completely missing there and this is all we have left what is that it certainly could be a mushroom but it could be a lot of things right it could be a lot of things so it was a little disappointing yeah wow so when he originally saw it it hadn't been chipped so it happened so maybe i mean this is how this stuff goes missing this is how this stuff stays secret uh we don't know how or why it was chipped maybe he saw it chipped it was probably chipped at some point in its long 2500 year history and he just invented something to put there what could it be what i was hoping to find was what you'll see in the next few slides and this is from a separate hudria 5th century bc at a museum in turkey and this is something ruck has turned up over recent years these are women very similar dionysian tradition adding plants and herbs to their wine ruck identifies that as ivy if you lean in uh if you go to the next one jamie ivy is often associated with dionysus some of the ancient writers refer to um wine spiked with ivy as drunkenness look at their eyes those ladies are tripping balls look at their eyes they're like whoo don't you think look at their eyes that's not normal yeah they are wide-eyed the next ingredient's more interesting so there's there's a second ingredient and in the next slide yeah very much looks like a mushroom very mushroom yeah yeah i mean that would be hard to describe that as anything else yeah wow so this is where the pottery takes us which is which is not very far i mean maybe the artist meant to leave a clue uh maybe it represents an actual ritual maybe it doesn't we we do know that the ancient authors are are talking about this stuff a lot you can go to the next slide jamie and after that whatever whatever the wine was doing to people this is what it was doing so when you drank the wine of dionysus this is like that that komos i i showed you that vaz from spain this is this is not quite a comas but it's it's another kind of ritual parade this is also in the louvre if you head uh downstairs to the sal de cajatid you'll see the borgese vaz from 40 bc and uh before that this is so this is typically how an initiate of the dianese and mysteries would be pictured and the next one jamie right before that so when they when they drank the wine of dionysus it wasn't to get drunk which one are you number number 15. orgazi yeah so i've never seen anyone walk up the middle aisle in a catholic mass and walk away looking like that yeah that dude looks smashed though it doesn't look like he's on mushrooms he looks drunk what is that thing on above his shoulder though that looks like a mushroom rock so that's called a thier sauce and the top part's called the narthex cognate with narcotics and ruck thinks it's where they stuffed all the additives it's where they stuffed all the toxins for the for the wine and you often see the initiates of dionysus carrying these and you often see them over the head of the initiate they didn't go anywhere without their their their sauce wands and this wand what was the the top of it made out of like um like bundled leaves it was a hollow stalk with bundled leaves and in there ruck believes that they would put their stash wow so their whole thing was just adding things to alcohol adding things to wine adding things to beer it's it in fact it was it was it would be abnormal not to add something to wine so wine is routinely described in the ancient greek as unusually intoxicating seriously mind-altering occasionally hallucinogenic and potentially lethal and for that reason one of the words used to describe wine for like a thousand years from homer to the fall of the roman empire was farmacon which is drug pharmacy that's the word they used ritually formulaically to describe wine because it was routinely spiked with toxins and herbs and plants now was this just when they were having these rituals but when they were eating they would just drink wine normally right there was everyday table wine like we have today right but it was more you know they wouldn't take two pills with a glass of water they would dissolve their medicine into wine wine is described by pat mcgovern at u-pen for example as the universal palliative that that that's how you would self-administer medicine it's why dice cortis when i mentioned in the materiaka from the first century a.d it's why he has all these recipes a lot of them are just medicinal you know not not all of them resulted in these fantastic visions when he talked about your swollen genitals it's because he was trying to offer a recipe for that and that goes back hundreds and hundreds of years into the greek tradition uh but the the interesting part of it is that if you go all the way back to homer 8th 7th century bc you do find this other kind of wine being mixed wine for a ritualistic purpose like circe the famous witch the daughter of hekate who we found in in spain so seriously is routinely again mixing uh homer uh calls it farmaca lugra evil drugs into the wine you could also mix healing drugs into the wine but there were there was essentially a whole pharmacopoeia available to them wow but thank god you wrote this book man there's aj there's more keep going there's more there's more pj okay so when we're not just looking okay so for for a long long time it's been the literature um it's been you know vaz and pottery and it's been statuary like the borges de vaz the whole point i wrote this book is again to apply 21st century science to it um so in my conversations with pat mcgovern and andrew co at mit i started to find the initial clues for actual wine that was actually spiked okay not just uh not just in the abstract so uh jamie if you open this up uh real quick to uh graveyard wine which is how i refer to it so if you look at graveyard wine go to the number scorpion wine right there so i was looking for evidence of wine actually being spiked in antiquity this comes from egypt this is at abaidos 3150 bc it's so old it's pre it's pre-dynastic this is scorpion the first they found 700 wine jars that were subjected to chemical analysis uh pat mcgovern did the testing and they found it to be spiked with savory wormwood blue tansy balm senna coriander germander mint sage and thyme whoa and you can find that he published that in 2009 i believe ancient egyptian herbal wines and wormwood is some type of psychedelic i thought that too it's it's not it's not it is artemisia absinthium is is psychoactive mcgovern thinks this was artemisia seberi which is a slightly different uh species but when you look at it from from afar there's something more than just table wine there these were intentionally uh spiking the wine for a reason and they're deposited as grave goods for a reason and the reason would seem to be for ushering the the the pre pharaoh into the afterlife they were there with him to aid the journey and we're not going to talk about the underworld journey in egypt with graham hancock without asking graham hancock what he thinks about uh ancient egyptian funerary practice well there's no doubt that the the ancient egyptians were very focused on death not in a negative way uh they saw this life as our opportunity to prepare for the adventure and the challenge of death that we had whatever years we got 70 90 or 20 however many years we got that was our opportunity to prepare for that great challenge of the journey that follows that follows death and there's no doubt in my mind that the ancient egyptians did make use of uh of of psychedelic substances um the the blue water lily from ancient egypt being being an example jars of that again diluted in wine were found in the the tomb of tutankhamun um this is a a psychedelic brew and and when you look at ancient egyptian art the the entities which are very often part animal part human in form uh and which are teachers of mankind uh you find yourself again in that same realm uh that people using psychedelics today find themselves in dmt in particular encountering entities that speak to us that teach us and that often take the form of part animal part human perianthropes it's it's so interesting to see the actual evidence of this use and when do egyptologists dismiss this do they embrace this is this something that is not controversial i think egypt egyptologists will say that the ancient egyptians were neurotically focused on death i i would say i would say the opposite i would say they had a very balanced approach to death i mean one thing is clear it we're all going to die this nobody nobody doubts that sooner or later that moment in our life is going to come where life ends uh and to me that is an incredibly important moment and the ancient egyptians by devoting their culture to figuring out how we live best in order to cross that bridge to transit into that other realm uh where were being very practical uh and and very profound in their inquiries it wasn't that they were afraid of death they wanted to ready themselves for the journey that follows death and they made it and they made it very clear that everything we do in this life everything counts nothing is separated away there's nothing that we can deny there's complete clarity in the afterlife realm nothing can be nothing can be hidden we're confronted with absolute truth and in a way psychedelics are a preparation for that because psychedelics also confront us with absolute truth and that's why psychedelics can often be very uncomfortable because we see the truth about ourselves but we're being given an opportunity to change ourselves for the better and to be more nurturing and more positive and more useful people and as a result the ancient egyptians would say uh to how to to confront a better death well what i was getting at was uh what is their reaction to the psychedelically spiked wine because i i know you particularly egyptologists don't want anything to do with psychedelics they don't want anything to do with psychedelics they would prefer not to not to go there uh and and just as there are many other aspects of ancient egyptian culture that the egyptologists don't want to go into it often seems to me that they're in the process of trying to carve or shape ancient egypt to fit into modern ideology and that's a great pity well it's also a great pity that i mean particularly with your work and the work that you've done with dr robert shock describing some indications on some of the ancient structures that there was heavy erosion that was due to rainfall thousands of years of rainfall which would have predated the the conventional idea of when these things are constructed the way that they resisted that instead of looking at it like this fascinating new evidence that will illuminate this field and now we have some new perspective on this they rejected it so horrifically and it was so they were mocking i remember that who was that that one egyptologist that uh openly mocked the the concept of it uh but not just one man many many egyptians there's a film in in the one that there was the the documentary maybe yes the charlton heston uh narrated the documentary yes um i think you may be you may be speaking about ken fetter but really i could i could cite a dozen egyptologists who feel this way the notion that the great sphinx is 12 and a half thousand years old which is a notion based on the erosion patterns on the body of the sphinx is utterly unacceptable to egyptologists they just don't want to go there they don't want to consider that possibility because they feel that they've got ancient egyptian history taped uh that it begins about five thousand years ago there's a bit of a precursor in the pre-dynastic period a thousand or so years building up to ancient egypt and then you have ancient egyptian civilization and gradually it merges with the greeks and with other cultures and spreads out around the world the notion that there is a background to ancient egyptian civilization that goes back into the ice age is a notion that no egyptologist is prepared to accept the moment they start accepting that notion they cease to be egyptologists in the view of their colleagues it's a very dangerous idea to to contemplate and that that's why i spent the last quarter of a century trying to argue the case for a lost civilization but uh you know maybe i'm not right about everything but we shouldn't neglect the hints and the clues whether it comes from astronomy whether it comes from geometry whether it comes from geology whether it comes from the statements of the ancient egyptians themselves about their origins and their past we shouldn't be ignoring this we should consider it and you're right rather than rather than reacting with fury to the notion of a much more ancient sphinx it would have been nice to have seen the egyptological profession react with interest to it and begin to explore it and consider what it might mean because the geology is irrefutable but largely ignored the the erosion was it on the body of the sphinx or was it on the walls of the temple where the sphinx was carved out of well where you can see it today is price so the the sphinx is carved out of solid bedrock it's carved out of the bedrock of the giza plateau and in order to do that an enormous trench was created around the body of the sphinx and in fact the the blocks that were excavated from that trench were then moved over and used to build what are called the valley temple and the sphinx temple where in some cases you find blocks of limestone that weigh close to 200 tons and and what has happened since then is that the body of the sphinx has been subjected to multiple restorations in fact one of the arguments that egyptologists just ignore is that he already in the old kingdom at the time when the sphinx is supposed to have been made according to conventional egyptology already in the old kingdom they were restoring it and there are restoration blocks on the body of the sphinx that date back four and a half thousand years and that process of of restoring and renovating the sphinx has gone on down the ages it's still happening today the pores of the sinks as we see them today are covered entirely with modern restoration blocks we don't see the bedrock underneath it but where we do see the original bedrock is in the walls of that trench that was carved out to create the body of the sphinx in the first place because nobody's been restoring those and it's in those that you see this characteristic undulating pattern that speaks of exposure to a very long period of heavy heavy rainfall and the last time you have that heavy rainfall in egypt is the period that geologists call the younger dry ass roughly between 12 800 and eleven thousand six hundred years ago so the body of the sphinx the trench out of which it is carved is saying i am twelve thousand years old and the only argument against that really is the head of the sphinx being the typical head of an ancient egyptian pharaoh with the nemesis headdress but of course the head of the sphinx was originally a lion just as the body of the sphinx is a lion and the head of the sphinx was recarved in dynastic times to give it this human form the the reaction to that notion and the this uh hard geological data that robert shock provided was just the most disturbing let's pay tribute to john anthony west yes sure because it was john anthony west who originally had that brilliant insight uh that that what we're looking at uh on the in the case of the sphinx is water weathering and and he rightly pays tributes to to schwaller de lubix an earlier scholar who was the first to notice this and john then brought robert shock to egypt as a professional geologist robert is professor of geology at the at the university of boston and um brought him there and robert shock indeed concluded that we are looking at water weathering on the body of the sphinx and gradually robert initially was very cautious he was saying well the sphinx must be seven or eight thousand years old but much more recently he's also settled on the date of roughly twelve 000 years old as the last time that you would get that sort of heavy rainfall in egypt that could have created that characteristic weathering and i would encourage anybody who's interested in this to please check out john anthony west's magical egypt series because it's amazing it's it's i've probably seen it 15 times it's i'm so glad that you had that you had john on your show uh joe because you did also very i know it's very rare that you do things by skype and you did in person as well i had about twice yeah i had him on in person and before he died and i had him on skype before that what an amazing man he was such a radical such an incendiary you know just planting planting intellectual bombs in in the accepted wisdom of the modern world and making us all think again so i i think when it comes to the age of the sphinx it's really important to realize the role that john anthony west played and i'm i'm so glad that you had him on your show yeah i am as well dear friend of mine and i was i was i was with him just a month before his before his death and he went into that journey of death with enormous courage and absolute certainty now when these vessels were tested and these psychedelic compounds were detected what was the reaction was was there resistance to this what how was it received we don't think they're properly psychedelic um just yet i mean all the ingredients that that psychoactive psychoactive medicinal for for sure it gets um there wasn't much backlash that i know of after after mcgovern study it was a gold standard study and then it continued by the way so after those 700 jars at abidos after further analysis they they determined that the the plants and herbs actually originated in the holy land in the southern levan they weren't native to egypt they had been brought there or they were shipped there by the folks in the holy land which gets more interesting because the next big find was the world's oldest wine cellar which was published in 2014 it came from talcabri which is also in galilee remember this is going to be the same galilee that jesus comes on the scene and christianity bursts across the planet so at telcabri in 2014 they found another a stash of wine dubbed the world's oldest wine cellar also subjected to archaeochemical analysis and what andrewco and the team there found was wine spiked with honey storax terabyth cypress cedar juniper mint myrtle and cinnamon or at least cinnamaldehyde hmm another very strange mixture it doesn't sound very psychedelic though no no no not at all so they just they just were into spiking wine they just they love spiking one but what andrew cohen says about it is interesting though and that's that's why i reached out to him originally because he says that spiking wine with this many ingredients is indicative of a very sophisticated understanding of the botanical landscape and he says he says quote uh it demonstrates the pharmacopoeic skills necessary to balance preservation palatability and psychoactivity he uses that word preservation like in the terebin for example you know resonating the wine so it doesn't spoil to to vinegar and then palatability if there is cinnamon or honey uh that you mentioned before too it would improve the flavor profile but then psychoactivity who knows uh we don't know which juniper it was but there is juniper used in other psychoactive ceremonies there's there's a species of juniper juniperous recurve which occurs in near the himalayas actually and there's i've seen videos really cool videos if you want to pull it up jamie you can look up if you google anybody can do this gb uh shaman if you look up gb space shaman you'll see a ritual of uh someone inhaling the the juniper the incense from juniper and going into trance [Laughter] how much is written about wine and the additives and all the different things they put to wine let's watch this first there's there's not much written about it you might have to to skip forward but this is them essentially preparing what are we looking at so that's uh that's uh that's a bit what they call the battalio the battalio are their traditional uh healer prophets and and and shamans of this tribe in the hindu kush and what they do is they inhale the incense from burning juniper and then suck the blood from a goat head wow jesus christ and it says the things people get up to that's what happens when you outlaw psychedelics people try anything yeah sucker goat head wow and so this is the hunza people and it says it puts him into a trance whereby he's able to communicate with the fairies look at that guy skeptical he's like i'm not buying it this guy's always been annoying look at him he's like oh he just wants to put on a robe and dance and he kind of looks like a guy would do that too and there's the there's headless ghost headless goat exactly oh boy hey boy and what is there do they explain oh here he goes he's sucking on the goat head okay this guy's annoying look at him look at how he's dancing and he's he's putting on a show everybody's like look at him and he's like look at me i'm sucking my goat head i'm so crazy i bet the goat head doesn't really do anything i bet the goat head is just so he gets extra attention look at the kids like wow this guy's crazy look at him yeah a little bit of borrowed in there too wow okay now um is it usually more than one person this is what's odd is that this one guy is tripping balls and then he collapses and then everybody else is just going oh it's marty look at marty marty's getting crazy and he's gonna rinse his hands off and is this something that other people this is what's weird about this video it seems like one person is having a psychedelic ritual and the rest of them are just watching this guy he was the spiritual technician the way you find in other traditional societies he was the one uh who trained to navigate that other world and learn the fairy language apparently very language the fairy language hmm yeah it is weird that those fairies and elves and all these different things exist in so many different cultures and they are what you do see if you do take enough psychedelics or the right kind in the right setting is that true yeah yeah i've mentioned absolutely it's true my take on this when when i wrote uh supernatural is that we're you know we we have three supposedly different domains of experience we have the spirits who shamans encounter in altered states of consciousness uh we have uh fairies and elves from the middle ages very often in illustrations you'll see that the mush mushrooms are present in the illustrations and then today we have aliens uh and at the level of phenomena the there are extremely close similarities between the entities that we call aliens today uh the entities that were called fairies or elves in the middle ages and the entities that shamans refer to as spirits and i would say actually what we're dealing with is the same experience in all three cases but viewed through different cultural lenses uh and and construed in in different ways and the only thing that really explains these kind of experiences where any one of us can actually share that experience and have that experience is psychedelics powerful psychedelics like dmt will plunge us into that realm of experience and we will meet entities and many people today do construe those entities as aliens because that's how our culture is dealing with the other uh today have you ever experienced anything that looked like what the the classic iconic alien is yeah i have you have really absolutely in one of my in one of my early ayahuasca experiences in the in in the amazon um i saw flying my eyes were closed but uh i saw flying saucers and then i saw this classic sort of quote-unquote gray with that high domed forehead and narrow pointed chin and these really grim eyes looking looking down on me i think i may have mentioned this on your show before but what i what i really regret doing i felt i was going to be taken i felt i was going to be abducted and i opened my eyes and i shouted no of course of course i should have kept my eyes closed and said yes take me but i didn't do that and i've never encountered them in that quite alien form again that's a bummer yes the it is a bummer and we have to we have to consider the possibility that these are not simply concoctions of our brains uh that that the brain is a much more complicated mechanism than we think it is and that in certain circumstances when brain chemistry is altered in the right way we gain access to other levels of reality that are normally closed off to our senses that is personally my view that what's happening with psychedelics i can't prove that that's the case but the the sense that we are entering a seamlessly convincing parallel world that it is inhabited by intelligent beings and that they have things to say to us first of all this is universal uh people have worked with psychedelics all around the world have had those experiences and secondly i just don't see this i don't see why we've all got a brain module for this i think we are actually peering through the doorway into another level of reality but it's going to take a whole lot more research to prove that that's just my own personal opinion my personal opinion mirror is yours my feelings have always been when i do psychedelics that i've tuned into a frequency that's unavailable to me during regular states of consciousness it doesn't seem like a hallucination it seems like i entered into a doorway and i'm in a new place and i there's an urgency to it because i know that i'm not going to be able to stay here for very long because i'm and they seem to know that and they seem to be they they seem to communicate with you in a very urgent way and uh i've one of the things that i've talked about i've talked about this experience before one of the most profound ones i met jesters who were giving me who were giving me the finger and uh they seem they seem to be explaining to me that i take myself too seriously yeah like it felt like and and then when i went oh okay they went yes yeah you got it you got it i was like oh yeah you're right it was it was it was a feeling like oh yeah yeah okay you think of yourself too highly that's why the the subtitle of my my book supernatural back in 2006 was meetings with the ancient teachers of mankind and i think that's what's going on here i think that the psychedelics allow us to enter a realm where we encounter teachers who can help us to be better people and perhaps to be a better civilization well that was one of the more interesting things about i believe it was university of jerusalem their their take on what moses in the burning bush was that very likely the burning bush was the acacia tree which is very rich in dimethyltryptamine dmt yeah and that this was what i mean it when you say it that way you're like oh of course moses the burning bush was god talking to him and you think about the translation between ancient hebrew and then to latin and the greek and all these and then the english eventually like of course there's going to be a lot lost in the translation but if you just looked at it that way you'd be like oh so that's a psychedelic drug of course have you done that oh if you do you kind of do meet something that seems like you would describe as god and it's very moral yeah you meet you me in what other state of consciousness do you meet intelligent plants that communicate with you right you know that's the the it's very hard to imagine any other state of consciousness apart from the psychedelic state and what you're citing is the work of benny shannon uh who is a professor at the hebrew university in jerusalem and he has drunk ayahuasca himself at least 700 times i mean he's got well he's suspect and i don't know if we should listen to him anymore but but he's a really serious exactly any any scholar who goes into this area and really does it properly faces skepticism and uh being shoved off to the side by his or her colleagues it takes courage uh to do this work but what we need is more scientists doing this work girding up their courage and getting on with it because we need to learn about this aspect of ourselves we've just got such an incomplete picture at the moment but it all falls into place if you look at it under that description and i'm glad he has the courage to step up and actually put this description out there um so i remember i remember someone sent it to me uh in an email and i was like aha like there it is of course and benny benny shannon's book is called ayahuasca the antipodes of the mind it's really important really important piece of work but uh not widely enough red in my view is there a uh a cultural version of ayahuasca where there is an mao inhibitor and a plant with dimethyltryptamine outside of the amazon is there an equivalent well sure that was that was also part of bernie shannon's uh argument uh in the in in ancient israel that uh that you have um uh you have mimosa certain mimosas which um which contain the uh the dmt uh and then you have um harmaline uh in um in in other plants that contain the monoamine oxidase inhibitor so so you can have these uh what are called ayahuasca analogs which are which are doing essentially the same the same thing i've i've consumed ayahuasca analogs myself and and they are very like ayahuasca but not quite there is a there is a there is a difference again i'm going to sound very mystical and kind of woo here but there is a spirit in ayahuasca it's a female spirit it's a goddess uh and and i've not encountered her uh with the analogs only with ayahuasca from the amazon and what have the analogs been like the the experience is still psychedelic yes very much so the the the the visions the encounters the encounters with entities the amazing geometric patterns and the self-reflection what the [ __ ] have i been doing with my life up till now but it does why did i make that mistake why did i hurt that person in that way but that that feeling of a direct intimate encounter with a i call her a goddess i mean sometimes she appears in and i can hear my critics out there laughing at me now hancock has completely lost it but sometimes she appears to it appears in the form of a human woman sometimes in the form of a of a serpent and then you know we get into the whole issue of the garden of eden and the story of the garden of eden and the role that the serpent plays in that story and the role that the serpent plays in that story is pointing out to adam and eve that god has basically lied to them and he offers them he he offers adam and eve the forbidden fruit uh alex gray my friend the visionary artist alex gray calls it the first psychedelic slap down that's what the garden of eden is um so you know that there are these intriguing experiences that are unleashed with these with these substances but to my mind there is something very special about ayahuasca and it's a living ancient technology you can trace it back thousands of years in the amazon and it's now coming out of the amazon and finding its way around the world and that ancient fresco that shows adam and eve standing by mushrooms is very bizarre as well right yeah absolutely absolutely again this our psychedelic heritage has been hidden from us and that is why i value brian's book the immortality key so much because it's done the solid scientific groundwork to begin to give academic scientists permission to investigate this field and that's what we need we need much more work done in this field than has been done already man how good does it feel to have put this down to paper and just said or do you feel like now that it's out there you have a lot of explaining to do i think there's lots of explaining to do but it's funny though when and we haven't gotten into the too much of the christian material yet but um i went through the vatican quite a bit when i when i was writing this uh with different departments at the vatican uh the vatican secret archives and the archive of the congregation for the doctrine of the faith and the vatican museums and all the catacombs in rome and i went through there spelunking with father francis and to be totally honest the vatican couldn't have been nicer or more accommodating to me and while some of this is controversial they've been very supportive uh to to date and i say that as someone who went to 13 years of catholic school uh including four years with the jesuits they always encouraged me to ask questions about the origins of the faith and there's lots and lots of questions there there's a reason that today you can look around and find 33 000 denominations of christianity i think that was the case from the very beginning there was never one monolithic form of the faith and people didn't go to bed in 33 a.d as pagans and wake up in 34 a.d as christians it was a process an intercultural process that took hundreds of years which i call paleo-christianity which i think for anyone interested in the faith is kind of the most interesting part these are the earliest and most authentic christians but they were living in a world where the blood of goats and all this spiked wine was the norm and as a matter of fact uh dr martin luther king jr wrote about this of all people really yeah this is called the pagan continuity hypothesis the idea that christianity wasn't born in a vacuum in 1950 dr king wrote a paper called the influence of the mystery religions on christianity you can google it you can google it and you can google it and you can read it wow this was this this was not controversial woo-woo stuff at least in 1950. when i went to the vatican i was really fortunate we hired a professional guide who was a professor there it is the influence of the mystery religions and christianity dr martin luther king wow it's impressive that's amazing um we got really fortunate we have this amazing guide and uh we were in the middle of this one area of the vatican and there was a a giant pine cone oh yeah and uh yeah and so he brought it up like what do you think that stands for and i said probably the pineal gland and his eyes lit up and we had this conversation and then we started talking about drugs you know too much joe rogan and so he just loved the fact that i knew that and that i was into this and then we had a fantastic time but there's a lot of mushroom imagery and iconic mushroom shapes and and and this connection between mushrooms and christianity you can find it there there's a a lot of one of the weirder ones when jack herrera was alive he was working on jack hiro was a guy who was a goldwater republican and became a cannabis advocate when he he got divorced and made it met a girlfriend and you know he thought pot was for losers but he just wanted to get high with this cute girl and uh smoked a little pot he was like where has this been on my life holy [ __ ] and then he became a cannabis advocate and i was very fortunate to meet him before he died and he was showing me some stuff that he was working on but one of the things that he was working on after you know he wrote that book the emperor wears no clothes but then he wrote he was writing a book about mushrooms and christianity and there was these ancient images of these naked people dancing in ecstasy and they were surrounded by this translucent mushroom image it was really fascinating and there was a lot of these images and images that were the shape of doors that were carved out in the form of a mushroom and that this it only makes sense if you know what psychedelic mushrooms do when you take them you you have these incredible experiences and the idea that a religion would emerge out of these experiences is not unusual at all no especially if it was common in ancient greece that that's that's why i try to focus on that continuity from the ancient greeks to the christians because again these are the same people the earliest christians were all greek speaking when when paul is writing his letters which is the majority of the new testament the 21 of the 27 books of the new testament he's writing in greek to greek people he's writing to the corinthians who speak greek the thessalonians and thessaloniki now the second largest city in greek in greece the philippians and then in modern-day turkey to the ephesians and colossians and galatians you know christianity is born in galilee or at least grows up in galilee but it doesn't take root there it goes it goes to the greek speakers and it goes across all the greek influenced areas including magna which is great greece which is southern italy which happens to be the same place where the catholic church put down its roots uh two thousand years ago there the reason for that was because the early church was all greek and these were people who were steeped in the traditions of their ancestors i mean imagine abandoning the religion of your grandparents for this new wine god from one day to the next it doesn't doesn't make that much sense and so the thesis of the book is that the eucharist for some communities at some point in time at some area in this greek speaking part of the world would have availed themselves of the kind of sacraments that were available to the greeks for generations and generations and so we're still looking for the smoking gun of that that ancient greek spiked wine it's not there we talked about the baidos wine in egypt the the the herbal wine from telcabri in galilee uh so we've been looking in greece and turkey and italy and elsewhere for that you know greek spiked wine and haven't quite found it yet but andrew co was very interested in continuing to test and find more things but in the meantime we did find spiked wine yeah so you have evidence of spiked wine now it's just finding it in greece i think we want you want to find it in greece to tie it to dionysus you want to find it in italy to tie it to the christians because that's really the area where where the the church again puts down roots and begins to grow up in that period of paleochristianity and so just like i was looking for that ergatized beer i was looking for evidence of where you could properly call it psychedelic wine may have popped up and there is one article in one archaeobotany journal from 20 years ago that talks about spiked wine which was news which was news to me too because every single time i go to the pat mcgoverns and andrew cose and all the top archaeobotanists in europe the answer you get back just like the answer to the question where is the spiked beer the answer is there isn't any and it's it's another case of this evidence just either being ignored or under-reported but there was a a young at the time archaeobotanist marina cheraldi who was from naples and got her phd in archaeology in the uk and she's on site in pompeii testing these vessels we have a lot of evidence from pompeii by the way in fact a lot of what we know about the ancient world comes from pompei and herculaneum because of mount vesuvius in 79 a.d it explodes and destroys everything but it also preserves everything under like 17 feet of volcanic ash we have all these clues about the dionysian mysteries and in addition to that there was this farmhouse in scafatti just to the east of pompeii where there were seven dolia which is like a giant storage vessel uh and these dolia are found in a in a chela vinaria like a wine cellar in a farm that also came complete with a torkularium like a wine press and a threshing floor so something about wine was happening in this place we don't know what the sample was extraordinarily well preserved when marina went in there it wasn't a chemical analysis that's obviously more more fine more finely grated the the sample was in such good shape because it had been waterlogged so the the botanical samples were in pristine condition and she could tell by the seeds and stems and other plant material what was there and there were over 50 species of plants and herbs and trees in this in this one sample which is really weird even more than we found at abidos or telcari it was uh you know like a uh just a melange of plant material that shouldn't be there and what she found in addition to many other medicinal plants was opium cannabis henbane and black nightshade what is henbane n-bane is the is he uh it's a hyoscyamine is one of those propane alkaloids the the that nightshade plant that very witchy kind of plant that we found in the kerenos in spain uh that it was beer potentially spiked with henbain so we're finding wine spiked potentially with hen bean we find four seeds at least there were two seeds of opium nine seeds of cannabis four seeds of henbane and then two seeds of this black nightshade and uh in the article that that describes it she marina herself the archaeobotanist says this is some kind of spiced wine in fact she calls it a mithra datyum now to understand that there was this guy mithradatis mithradatis vi was uh the ruler of the pontus region in between the black and caspian seas his father was poisoned to death and so to prevent that he would micro dose his whole life he was poisoning himself day in and day out and so this potion of many different toxic herbs and plants becomes known eventually in the roman empire as a mithradatyum after mithridates now when the romans finally get to him and try and kill him he tries to poison himself and it doesn't work because he's immune so one of his soldiers has to stab him to death [Music] so he's micro dosing himself in preparation for someone else poisoning exactly but then when he tries to commit suicide he's unable to exactly oh my god how strange and so outside of pompeii um was there any other evidence and how would you fi how go about finding it like where like say if you want to continue the search where where would you look that's i mean it opens up a whole world of possibilities now that people i mean i wrote this as kind of i call them the initial archaeo botanical blips on the radar so between this ergatized beer and this potentially psychedelic wine there's lots of different places to look um if you're trying to to prove that this psychedelic hypothesis within paleochristianity you're looking for a place where the dionysian mysteries bumped up against the christian mysteries and that's all over the place um so back in galilee for example dionysus there's a there's a whole myth around dionysus and his birth and different authors place his birth in different places one of the places they place his birth is is a city called skithopolis skithopolis was like the capital of the dechaiopolis this ten city part of the eastern mediterranean from nazareth to skeetopolis today is 40 minutes door-to-door nazareth where jesus grows up um so sketopoulos has this northern cemetery where you do find artifacts that relate both to the pagan dionysian mysteries and some christian artifacts so a place like that would be ripe for further investigation or an ephesus you have like the grotto of the seven sleepers another place where the pagan mysteries bumped up against the christian mysteries one of the best places is rome and the catacombs which is why i spent so much time going through the catacombs looking for evidence of these essentially funerary rituals where people were celebrating with the dead using the sacramental wine in the very earliest versions of the mass and is there any scripture any any texts that are describing what they were doing when they were going through these rituals these funeral rituals i mean there there's a few things we have so the the funeral for the christians it's called the refrigerium uh the refrigerium in latin means like a chill out and there's there's a very respectable scholar ramsey mcmullen he's considered one of the the premier authorities of the ancient roman world he describes the refugerium as a place where the dead themselves participate uh and it's where the the dead basically come back to life in the roman world you would all you would never leave the dead alone think think of it like um like a funerary ritual in in mexico for example when the family goes to visit the graves of the ancestors there was a very similar principle uh in the ancient roman world that carried over into christianity and so we know the refrigerium existed the big question is if the wine drunk at the refrigerium was similar to the wine of the early christian eucharist and when you look through these catacombs you find really crazy stuff to suggest that in fact the two could the two could coexist wow here we go look at these images now the the book's out the book's done your your thing now is obviously promoting this and getting the word out but do you have in your mind of following up on this research now that the doors opened and now that people are aware of this it seems like first of all i believe you're going to get help people are going to be interested in continuing this research and and contributing to this research where do you go from here uh i want to dedicate my life to this for the next 10 years really yes wow so how's pj feel but i don't think i don't think pj's too happy no what is this i think well really like i think we need to we need to take you down to the amazon brian and uh you need to have an encounter with mother ayahuasca or you can just go to santa cruz like you don't really have to there's something about that rainforest though yeah i'm sure it really is it really is a special setting for this uh for this experience but i think it would be interesting brian uh having having written this as a scientific and an academic and a research exercise to to then go on to see what your personal experience is and how that resonates with what you've learned as a as a scientific investigator yeah i mean even if you wanted to do it in a clinical setting like rick strassman did when he had these uh fda approved uh studies for uh dmt the spirit molecule just anything is anything where you could tap into that world because i guarantee you you're gonna come back eyes wide like those ladies in that drawing you're gonna be like oh okay it's it's fascinating to me when you talk to someone who is a psychedelic virgin because uh you almost feel jealous like i almost like you know do you feel the same way graham yeah absolutely absolutely it would be it would be nice to it would be nice to know that that experience lay ahead of us yeah uh and we haven't and we haven't had it yet but but you you know at the same time uh you can learn to work with these substances they can be overwhelming at first and and with with more careful use of these substances you begin to manage them better not always but usually so when you say you want to do this and dedicate your life for the next 10 years are you do you have multiple books in mind do you have what what is your thought so with this i mean my my dream is to see this on the screen i think there's there's so many visual elements here i think the what's up jamie oh sorry sorry okay sorry so the i think the the the best way that i i mean my dream is to see this on the screen so i've been talking to a couple of uh uh development teams couple production companies one is anonymous content in la and six west media in new york together we're developing a documentary series that adapts this everything we've talked about for like a first season but there's really multiple seasons here because there's so much evidence that's never been looked at and so it's taking the very best of the archaeochemistry and the very best of the on uh in the field archaeology combining all the linguistic evidence and the symbology and iconography and putting it together to find once and for all the smoking gun for the use of a psychedelic eucharist in antiquity so are you do you have a place where you're bringing this or we are just about to pitch this as a matter of fact oh netflix where you at yeah listen i i would watch that all day long i'm really excited um i'm really excited about the whole thing the whole prospect of it and and i think that it's i'm just so happy that you became obsessed with it and they ignored all the people telling you to not me too man i mean it's it's it's been a it's been a long road i never never thought about psychedelics until i read uh supernatural a lot of weird stuff was happening in my life in 2007 after i read those initial studies that came out of hopkins and nyu of course i wanted to to try psilocybin and then the mystery just got deeper and deeper and i realized there was there was a story to be told here that hadn't been told before and i think it needed a serious and and sober look at this stuff so i really did spend nights and weekends doing nothing else but this kind of stuff and reading hundreds of books and thousands of journal articles and 12 years of googling to try and put all these pieces together and i will say that you know it covers a lot of ground but you don't need to know anything about history or archaeology let alone archaeobotany or archaeochemistry or psychopharmacology or biblical studies or paleoanthropology to appreciate this because i kind of take it one step at a time from the very beginning and show you every piece of evidence that i mean as a virgin did convince me that this is at least worth a sober look from the scientific community well i hope two things next time i talk to you we're promoting this television show and you can tell me about your psychedelic experience that you had with graham did i agree to this all right yes you agreed to it you agreed you signed up you signed up bro and graham the hope hopefully next time we communicate it will actually be in the flesh when somebody works out this covid nonsense i hope i i hope so um can i can i just mention we've not talked about my book but this is the hardback of america before which we which we talked about the last time i was on your show and uh america before has been in hardback for the past 18 months but it's coming out in in paperback 29th 29th of september 2020 uh at a much reduced price and i hope that people have not been able to access the hardback will be able to have a look at it in the uh in in the paperback i mean we had we had an amazing conversation uh the last time i was on your show and before that we had the drama with uh michael schermer and randall carson was present and that guy mark defant uh came in by telephone and i i want to pay tribute to michael sherman uh you may have noticed this joe that that that michael put out a tweet saying that he was going to have to reconsider his essentially i'm i'm paraphrasing he was going to have to reconsider his prior attitude to my work in the light of new evidence about the younger dryas impact catastrophe that in my view 12 000 years ago or so uh lost us a whole civilization uh it takes a lot to admit that uh that one may have been wrong and i'm i'm i'm glad that michael had the had had the courage to put that tweet out there yeah i am as well kudos to him and uh kudos to you and to randall carlson as well because those two conversations that we had about that are absolutely some of my favorite conversations of all time those were it's it's it's obvious that something happened and and it all the pieces much like this in this conversation about uh spiked wine and drugs and it all makes sense it all fits into place and that we are a species with amnesia and that we need to we need to rediscover our past and there's a curious resonance with the way that things are in the in the modern world just as i have come to mistrust history to mistrust the history that is taught to us in schools and universities uh no longer to accept at face value the opinions of so-called experts in the field so in the modern world today many people are learning to mistrust institutions that have long gone unquestioned whether it's government or whether it's science people are beginning to think for themselves and i think there's an intriguing resonance between recovering our lost past and regaining sovereignty over ourselves in a modern world that is struggling very hard to turn us all into children and rest all responsibility in in government a huge mistake governments are there to serve us they are not there to rule us they are not there to tell us what to do and i'm glad that people are waking up to this here here that's an excellent way to end this thank you graeme i love you i appreciate you very much i wish you were here right now i'd give you a big hug and thank you brian i'll give you a head back thanks thank you all right thank you guys and thank you everybody listening [Music] goodbye [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: PowerfulJRE

Views: 3,422,924

Rating: 4.8360257 out of 5

Keywords: Joe Rogan Experience, JRE, Joe, Rogan, podcast, MMA, comedy, stand, up, funny, Freak, Party, Joe Rogan, JRE #1543, Brian Muraresku, Graham Hancock, comedian

Id: gzAQ7SklDxo

Length: 154min 41sec (9281 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 30 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Sealkyuubinaruto]

Brian Muraresku is really good at explaining his findings and is extremely prepared. Impressive!

[u/wxrx]

I feel like it’s been a long ass time since we’ve had a podcast like this. Even some of the more “intellectual” types like lex that comes on recently still ends up being a podcast on mainstream events and news. 10 minutes into this one and Im loving it, Joe is just letting him talk about this dudes life research and it’s great.

[u/amIwokeyet]

Well, looks like I'm taking a three hour lunch break today

[u/reborngoat]

Fuck yes. I will always tune in when Hancock is on.

[u/HitchhikingToNirvana]

Graham "about 11.000 years ago" Hancock...

Also where is Randall "Younger Dryas" Carlson?

[u/bpmartin]

New studio lighting tuned way better this time around. Learning process, guys

[u/Liverman102]

Finally one with no Current news events. Dope.

[u/Alfiedog100]

The best thing about this young guy is that he doesn't say

''...As I write about in the book...''

Before every damn sentence like so many other people publicising their books.

Really good pod, I take it all with a giant boulder of salt but it's fun to imagine.

[u/ThatGuysHair]

The Brian guy is super interesting!