[MUSIC PLAYING] SPEAKER 1: My name
is Charles Stang, and I'm the director
of the Center for the Study of
World Religions here at Harvard Divinity School. That is my dog Xena. She joins me for most
events and meetings. So welcome to the fourth
event in our yearlong series on psychedelics and the future
of religion, co-sponsored by the Esalen
Institute, the Riverstyx Foundation, and the Chacruna
Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines. We look forward to
hosting Chacruna's founder and executive
director, Bia Labate, for a lecture on
Monday, March 8. But the next event
in this series will happen sooner than that. On Monday, February 22, we will
be hosting a panel discussion taking up the question what
is psychedelic chaplaincy. That event is already
up on our website and open for registration. And, as always the best way
to keep abreast of this series and everything else we
do here at the Center is to join our mailing list. We have an hour
and a half together and I hope there will be
time for Q&A and discussion. I expect there will be. It is my great
pleasure to welcome Brian Muraresku to the Center. Brian is the author of a
remarkable new book that has garnered a lot
of attention and has sold a great many copies. The Immortality Key,
The Secret History of the Religion With No Name. Brian has been very
busy taking his new book on the road, of
course, all online, and we're very grateful
to him for taking the time to join us this evening. He's joining us
from Uruguay, where he has wisely chosen to
spend his pandemic isolation. Wise not least because
it is summer there, as he reminds me every time
we have a Zoom meeting, which has been quite often
in these past several months. That's because Brian and
I have become friends these past several
months, and I'll have more to say about that in a moment. I will ask Brian
to describe how he came to write this
remarkable book, and the years of sleuthing and
studying that went into it. But let me say at
the outset that it is remarkably
learned, full of great historical and
philological detail. His aim when he set
out on this journey 12 years ago was to
assess the validity of a rather old, but largely
discredited hypothesis, namely, that some of the religions
of the ancient Mediterranean, perhaps including Christianity,
used a psychedelic sacrament to induce mystical experiences
at the border of life and death, and that these
psychedelic rituals were just the tip of the iceberg,
signs of an even more ancient and pervasive
religious practice going back many thousands of years. What Brian labels the
religion with no name. To assess this hypothesis and,
perhaps, to push it further, has required years of
dogged and, at times, discouraging works in
archives and archaeology. There have been
breakthroughs, too, which no doubt kept Brian
going despite some skepticism from the academy,
to say the least. And the truth is that this
is a project that goes well beyond ancient history,
because Brian is convinced that what he has uncovered
has profound implications for the future of
religion, and specifically, the future of his own
religion, Roman Catholicism. And so with a revised
ancient history, in place Brian tacks back to the title
of our series, Psychedelics and the Future of Religion. Now, Brian managed to write
this book while holding down a full time practice
in international law based in Washington DC. He comes to this research with a
full suite of scholarly skills, including a deep knowledge
of Greek and Latin as well as facility in a
number of European languages, which became crucial for
uncovering some rather obscure research in
Catalan, and also for sweet-talking the
gatekeepers of archives and archaeological sites. The book was published by Saint
Martin's Press in September 2020 and has generated a
whirlwind of attention. Brian launched the instant
bestseller on the Joe Rogan Experience, and has now appeared
on CNN, NPR, Sirius XM, Goop-- I don't even know what that is-- and The Weekly Dish
with Andrew Sullivan. He's been featured in Forbes,
the Daily Beast, Big Think, and Vice. Now, I mentioned that Brian
and I had become friends. This is true. And I, for one, look
forward to a time when I can see him in person for
a beer, ergotized beer or not, if he ever leaves Uruguay. But I mentioned that
we've become friends because it is the prerogative of
friends to ask hard questions. You may have already noticed one
such question-- not too hard. This event is
entitled, Psychedelics, The Ancient Religion
With No Name? For me, that's a question, and
it will yield more questions. I've no doubt that Brian
has unearthed and collected a remarkable body of evidence,
but evidence of what, exactly? Here is how I propose
we are to proceed. First I'll give
the floor to Brian to walk us into this
remarkable book of his and the years of hard
work that went into it, what drove him to do this. Then I'll ask a
series of questions that follow the
course of his book, focusing on the different
ancient religious traditions, the evidence for their
psychedelic sacraments, and most importantly,
whether and how the assembled evidence yields
a coherent picture of the past. I'll invite him to think
about the future of religion in light of all this. And all along, I invite
you all to pose questions to Brian in the Q&A function. OK, Brian, I invite
you to join us now. Please materialize. There he is. And I'm happy to see
we have over 800 people present for this conversation. So Brian, welcome. SPEAKER 2: Dr. Stang, an
erudite introduction as ever. Thank you, sir. SPEAKER 1: Thank you, Brian. And please just call me Charlie. Now, let's get started, Brian. So first of all,
please tell us how it is you came to pursue this
research to write this book, and highlight briefly
what you think are its principal conclusions
and their significance for our present and future. And keep in mind
that we'll drop down into any one of these
points more deeply. So don't feel like you
have to go into great depth at this point. SPEAKER 2: It's a
simple formula, Charlie. You take a board corporate
finance attorney, you add in lots
of childhood hours watching Indiana Jones, lots
of law school hours reading Dan Brown, you put it all together
and out pops The Immortality Key. It's really quite
simple, Charlie. So I was obsessed
with this stuff from the moment I picked up an
article in The Economist called the God Pill back in 2007. It was one of the
early write-ups of the psilocybin studies
coming out of Johns Hopkins. Up until that point I really
had very little knowledge of psychedelics, personal
or literary or otherwise. To this day I remain a
psychedelic virgin quite proudly, and I spent
the past 12 years, ever since that moment
in 2007, researching what Houston Smith, perhaps
one of the most influential religious historians
of the 20th century, would call the best
kept secret in history. And when Houston says
something like that, it grabs the attention of
a young undergrad a bit to your south in Providence,
Rhode Island, who was digging into Latin and
Greek and wondering what the heck this was all about. Like, what is this all about? Where does Western
civilization come from? What was the real religion
of the ancient Greeks? And what, if any,
was the relationship between those ancient
Greeks and the real religion of the earliest
Christians, who might call the paleo-Christians. And the one thing
that unites both of those worlds in this research
called the pagan continuity hypothesis, the one
thing we can bet on is the sacred language of Greek. And I just happened to fall into
that at the age of 14 thanks to the Jesuits, and just
never left it behind. And so for me, this was a
hunt through the catacombs and archives and libraries,
doing my sweet-talking, and trying to figure
out what was behind some of those locked doors. And this is what I
present to the world. SPEAKER 1: Wonderful. Thank you for that. Well, let's get into it then. So I want to propose that we
stage this play in two acts. First act is your
evidence for psychedelics among the so-called pagan
religions in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East. And the second act,
the same, but for what you call paleo-Christianity,
the evidence for your suspicion that the Eucharist
was originally a psychedelic sacrament. So let's start,
then, the first act. And let's start with
our earliest evidence from the Stone Age
and the Bronze Age. So throughout the book,
you make the point that ancient beer and wine are
not like our beer and wine. That they were what you
call extreme beverages. They were mixed or fortified. But with what were they
mixed, and to what effect? And what does this
earliest history tell us about the
earliest evidence for an ancient
psychedelic religion? SPEAKER 2: Great question. So I went fully down
the rabbit hole. And at some point
in my narrative, I do include mention
of Gobekli Tepe, for example, which
is essentially twice the age of Stonehenge. It pushes back the archaeology
on some of this material a full 12,000 years. So Gobekli Tepe, for
those who don't know, is this site in southern Turkey
on the border with Syria. It's this 22-acre site of
free-standing limestone, some rising 20 feet in the
air, some weighing 50 tons. And the big question is, what
is this thing doing there in the middle of nowhere? It was a pilgrimage site. No one lived there. And this is at a time when we're
still hunting and gathering. So we not only didn't have
the engineering know-how-- we used to think-- we didn't have even settled
life to construct something like this. And nor did we think
that a sanctuary would be one of the first
things that we construct. I mean, something of symbolic
significance, something monumental. Klaus Schmidt, who was with
the German Archaeological Institute, called
this a sanctuary and called these T-shaped
pillars representations of gods. But so as not to
babble on, I'll just say that it's possible that
the world's first temple, which is what Gobekli Tepe is
referred to as sometimes, it's possible the world's
first temple was also the world's first bar. So back in 2012,
archaeologists and chemists were scraping some of these
giant limestone troughs, and out pops calcium
oxalate, which is one of these biomarkers for
the fermentation of brewing. Now, it's just an
early indication and there's more
testing to be done. I understand more papers are
about to be published on this. But the point being,
the religion of brewing seems to pop up at the very
beginning of civilization itself, or the very beginning
of monumental engineering at this world's first sanctuary. And so that opened
a question for me. If beer was there that long
ago, what kind of beer was it? What was being thrown into it? Even a little bit
before Gobekli Tepe, there was another site unearthed
relatively recently in Israel, at the Rakefet cave. 13,000 years old. And there you also found
mortars that were tested and also tested positive
for evidence of brewing. And inside that beer was all
kinds of vegetable matter, like wheat, oats, and
sedge and lily and flax and various legumes. So even from the
very beginning, it wasn't just barley and water. It was it was barley,
water, and something else. And the big question for me was
what was that something else? And when I started to get closer
into the historical period-- this is all prehistory. So frankly, what happens
during the Neolithic, we don't know, at least
from a scientific vantage. And I started
reading the studies from Pat McGovern at the
University of Pennsylvania. And he was actually
going out and testing some of these ancient chalices. And he found some
beer and wine-- that was a bit surprising. In fact, he found beer,
wine, and mead all mixed together in a couple
of different places. One, on mainland Greece from the
Mycenaean period, 16th century BC, and the other about 800
years later in modern day Turkey, another
ritual potion that seemed to have suggested some
kind of concoction of beer, wine, and mead that
was used to usher the king into the afterlife. So the closer we get
to the modern period, we're starting to
find beer, wine mixed with interesting things. McGovern also finds wine
from Egypt, for example, in 3150 BC, wine that
is mixed with a number of interesting ingredients. And I'll just list
them out quickly. Like savory,
wormwood, blue tansy, balm, senna, coriander,
germander, mint, sage, and thyme. So the basic point being,
as far as we can tell, beer and wine are
routinely mixed with things that we don't do today. And so the big hunt
for me was trying to find some of those
psychedelic bits. And that's what I get into
in detail in the book. SPEAKER 1: OK. Now let's move into
the Greek mystery. So we move now into
ancient history, but solidly into the
historical record, however uneven that
historical record is. And I want to ask you about
specifically the Eleusinian mysteries, centered around
the goddesses Demeter and Persephone. These mysteries
had at their center a sacrament called
kykeon, which offered a vision of the mysteries
of life and death. Now, the great scholar of
Greek religion, Walter Burkert, you quote him as musing, once-- and I'm going to quote him--
he says, "it may rather be asked, even without the
prospect of a certain answer, whether the basis of
the mysteries, they were prehistoric drug
rituals, some festival imp of immortality which,
through the expansion of consciousness,
seemed to guarantee some psychedelic beyond." So that's from Burkert,
a very sober scholar and the dean of all
scholarship on Greek religion. Now, Carl Ruck from
Boston University, much closer to home,
however, took that invitation and tried to pursue
this hypothesis. He dared to ask this very
question before the hypothesis that this Eleusinian sacrament
was indeed a psychedelic, and am I right that it
was Ruck's hypothesis that set you down this path all
those many years ago at Brown? Maybe I have that wrong. But in any case, Ruck
had his career, well, savaged, in some sense, by
the reaction to his daring to take this
hypothesis seriously, this question seriously. So what have you learned
about the Eleusinian mysteries in particular since
Ruck took this up, and what has convinced you that
Ruck's hypothesis holds water? SPEAKER 2: Great question. I mean, so Walter Burkert
was part of the reason that kept me going on. You mentioned there
were lots of dead ends, and there certainly were. And there were gaps as well. And there were moments when
the sunlight would just break through. And the quote you just
read from Burkert, it's published by Harvard
University Press in 1985 as Greek Religion. And for some reason,
I mean, I'd read that two or three times
as an undergrad and just glossed over that line. But I realized
that in 1977, when he wrote that in German, this
was the height of scholarship, at least going out on
a limb to speculate about the prospect
of psychedelics at the very heart of the
Greek mysteries, which I refer to as something like the real
religion of the ancient Greeks, by the way, in speaking about
the Eleusinian mysteries. I know that that's
a loaded phrase. I'm happy to argue about that. But it survives. Amongst all the mystery
religions, Eleusis survives. From about 1500 BC to
the fourth century AD, it calls to the
best and brightest of not just Athens
but also Rome. So Plato, Pindar,
Sophocles, all the way into Cicero, Marcus Aurelius,
it's an important thing. And even Burkert, I think,
calls it the most famous of the mystery rituals. So whatever was happening
there was important. And all we know-- I mean, we can't
decipher sequence by sequence what was happening. But we do know that the
initiates made this pilgrimage from Athens to Eleusis,
drunk the potion, the kykeon, had this very visionary
event-- they all talk about seeing
something-- and after which they become immortal. They are guaranteed
an afterlife. And so the big question is
what was happening there? I mean, if Burkert was happy to
speculate about psychedelics, I'm not sure why Ruck
got the reception that he did in 1978 with their
book The Road to Eleusis. He co-writes that with Gordon
Wasson and Albert Hofmann, who famously-- there it
is, the three authors. And Hofmann famously
discovers-- or synthesizes LSD from ergot in 1938. And it was their claim
that when the hymn to Demeter, one of
these ancient records that records, in some form, the
proto-recipe for this kykeon potion, which I call like a
primitive beer, in the hymn to Demeter, they talk about
ingredients like barley, water, and mint. And according to Wasson,
Hofmann, and Ruck, that barley was
really a code word. What the Greeks
were actually saying there is that it
was barley infected with ergot, which is
this natural fungus that infects cereal crops. Which, if you think about
it, is a very elegant idea. Because ergot is
just very common. Where you find the grain,
you may have found ergot. Including, all the way
back to Gobekli Tepe, which is why I mentioned that
when we first started chatting. Because even though it's
a very long time ago, Gobekli Tepe, interestingly,
has some things in common with Eleusis, like
the worship of the grain, the possibility of brewing,
the notion of a pilgrimage, and interaction with the dead. So there's lots of interesting
details here that filter through. The long and short
of it is, in 1978 there was no hard
scientific data to prove this one
way or the other. So I spent 12 years looking for
that data, eventually found it, of all places, in Catalonia
in Spain in this 635-page monograph that was published
in 2002 and for one reason or another-- probably because
it was written in Catalan-- was not widely reported to the
academic community and went largely ignored. So I got a copy of it from the
Library of Congress, started reading through, and
there, in fact, I was reading about this
incredible discovery from the '90s. I mean, about 25
years ago, actually. They found a tiny
chalice this big, dated to the second century BC. It tested positive for the
microscopic remains of beer and also ergot, exactly
the hypothesis that had been put forward in 1978
by the disgraced professor across town from you, Carl
Ruck, who's now 85 years old, by the way. So in my mind, it was the
first real hard scientific data to support this
hypothesis, which, as you alluded to
at the beginning, only raises more questions. What, if any, was the
relationship between this Greek sanctuary-- a very Greek
sanctuary, by the way-- in Catalonia, to the
mysteries of Eleusis? Was there any similarity
from that potion to what was drunk at Eleusis? Did the potion at Eleusis change
from generation to generation? I mean, lots of great
questions worthy of further investigation. But I think there's a
decent scientific foothold to begin that work. SPEAKER 1: So it may
be worth mentioning, for those who are attending who
haven't read the book, that you asked, who I can't remember
her name, the woman who is in charge of
the Eleusis site, whether some of the ritual
vessels could be tested, only to discover-- tested for the remains
of whatever they held, only to learn that
those vessels had been cleaned and that no more vessels
were going to be unearthed. So you were unable
to test the vessels on site in Eleusis,
which is what led you to, if I have this argument
right, to Greek colonies around the Mediterranean. That's how we get to Catalonia. But maybe you could
just say something about this community
in Catalonia. What is its
connection to Eleusis? What does ergotized
beer in Catalonia have anything to do with the
Greek mysteries at Eleusis? SPEAKER 2: That's
a good question. So I really follow
the scholarship of Enriqueta Pons, who is
the archaeologist on site there, at this Greek
sanctuary that we're talking about in Catalonia,
Mas Castellar des Pontos. And you're right. I mean, I wish it were easier. I did go straight to [INAUDIBLE]
Papangelli in Eleusis, and I went to the museum. And we had a great chat,
a very spirited chat about the mysteries and
the psychedelic hypothesis. And I asked her
openly if we could test some of the many, many
containers that they have, some on display, and many
more in repository there. And her answer was that they'd
all been cleaned or treated for conservation purposes. And besides that,
young Brian, let's keep the mysteries mysteries. Although she's open to testing,
there was nothing there. So when you take a step
back, as you well know, there was a Hellenic
presence all over the ancient Mediterranean. And to be quite
honest, I'd never studied the ancient
Greeks in Spain. I'm not sure many have. But it was just a process of
putting these pieces together that I eventually found
this data from the site Mas Castellar des Pontos in Spain. And what it has to do with
Eleusis or the Greek presence in general, I mean, again,
just to say it briefly, is that this was a farmhouse
of sorts that was inland, this sanctuary site. But it was not far from
a well-known colony in [INAUDIBLE] that was
founded by Phocians. These were Greek-- I've seen them referred to
as Greek Vikings by Peter Kingsley, Vikings
who came from Ionia. So the Eastern Aegean. And they found this
site, along with others around the Mediterranean. And then at some
point they go inland. And what we find
at this farmhouse is a sanctuary that
Enriqueta Pons herself, the archaeologist who's
been on site since 1990, she calls it some
kind of sanctuary dedicated to the goddesses
of the mysteries. And you find terracotta
heads that could or could not be representative of
Demeter and Persephone, the two goddesses to whom
the mysteries of Eleusis were dedicated. She found the remains
of dog sacrifice, which is super interesting. Dogs, indicative of
the Greek goddess Hecate, who, amongst
other things was known as the [GREEK], the dog eater. So to find dog sacrifice inside
this Greek sanctuary alludes to this proto-witch,
Hecate, the mother of Circe, who is mentioned in the
same hymn to Demeter from the 8th, 7th
century BC, as kind of the third of the goddesses
to whom these mysteries were dedicated. You also find a Greek hearth
inside this sanctuary. You see an altar
of Pentelic marble that could only have come
from the Mount Pentelicus quarry in mainland Greece. I mean, so it was Greek. Lots of Greek artifacts,
lots of Greek signifiers. There's no mistake in her
mind that it was Greek. I think the only big question is
what the exact relationship was from a place like
that over to Eleusis. And her best guess is that
it was like this open access sanctuary. For those who didn't have
the time or the money or the temerity to travel all
the way to Eleusis from Spain, here's your off-site
campus, right? Here's your Western Eleusis. And there were probably
other Eleusises like that to the east. In fact, something I'm
following up on now is the prospect of similar sites
in the Crimea around the Black Sea, because there was also
a Greek presence there. And I think sites
like this have tended to be neglected in scholarship,
or published in languages like Catalan, maybe Ukrainian,
where it just doesn't filter through the academic community. So I think it's really
interesting details here worth following up on. SPEAKER 1: I have
one more question about the pre-Christian
story, and that has to do with that the
other mystery religion you give such attention to. And that's the
mysteries of Dionysus. So the Greek god of
wine, intoxication. So how does Dionysian revelries
get into this picture? What's different about the
Dionysian mysteries, and what evidence, direct
or indirect, do we have about the wine of
Dionysus being psychedelic? And what about the alleged
democratization with which you credit the mysteries
of Dionysus, or the role of women
in that movement? What's significant about
these features for our piecing together the ancient
religion with no name? SPEAKER 2: Right. So the mysteries of
Dionysus are a bit more of a free-for-all than
the mysteries of Eleusis. So if Eleusis is the Fight
Club of the ancient world, right, the first rule is
you don't talk about it. This is all secret. Then I see the
mysteries of Dionysus as kind of the Burning
Man or the Woodstock of the ancient world. It was-- Eleusis was
state-administered, a somewhat formal affair. And again, it survives, I think,
because of that state support for the better part
of 2,000 years. The mysteries of Dionysus,
a bit weirder, a bit more off the grid. So in the mountains and
forests from Greece to Rome, including the Holy
Land and Galilee. There's evidence of the
mysteries of Dionysus before, during, and
after the life of Jesus, it's worth pointing out. So what do we know
about those rituals? Not much. I mean, the honest
answer is not much. As much as we know about
the mysteries of Eleusis. We have plays like the Bacchi
from Euripides, where we can piece together some of this. We have some inscriptions. We have other textual evidence. But by and large, no,
we don't really know. But what we do know is that
their sacrament was wine and we know a bit
more about the wine of antiquity,
ancient Greek wine, than we can piece together from
these nocturnal celebrations. And what we know about
the wine of the time is that it was prized
amongst other things not for its alcoholic
content, but for its ability to induce madness. So Dionysus is not
the god of alcohol. He's the god of wine. And in the ancient world, wine
was routinely referred to as a [SPEAKING GREEK],, which is
the Greek word for drug. It's something that goes
from Homer all the way until the fall of
the Roman Empire, over the course of well
more than 1,000 years. So the big question is,
what kind of drug was this, if it was a drug? And then that's the word that
Euripides uses, by the way. He calls it a drug against grief
in Greek, [SPEAKING GREEK].. It's interesting that
Saint Ignatius of Antioch, in the beginning of
the second century AD, refers to the wine
of the Eucharist as the [SPEAKING GREEK],,
the drug of immortality. Now, I don't put too
much weight into that. That's all just fancy wordplay. But what we do know about
the wine of the time is that it was routinely
mixed with plants and herbs and potentially fungi. We don't have to look
very hard to find that. If you look at
Dioscorides, for example, his Materia Medica, that's
written in the first century AD around the same time
that the Gospels themselves are being written. Throughout his
five books he talks about wine being mixed
with all kinds of stuff, like frankincense and myrrh,
relatively innocuous stuff, but also less innocuous things
like henbane and mandrake, these solanaceous plants which
he specifically says is fatal. And in his book [? 474, ?] he
goes out on a limb and says that black nightshade actually
causes [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH],, which is not unpleasant
visions, i.e. He's talking about kind
of psychedelic wine. So We know that at the time
of Jesus, before, during, and after, there were
recipes floating around. There were formula. The big question is, did
any of these recipes, did any of this wine
spiking actually make its way into some
paleo-Christian ceremony. That's the big question. SPEAKER 1: OK, that
is the big question. [LAUGHTER] We're going to get
there very soon. All right, so now, let's
follow up with Dionysus, but let's see here. Let's move to early Christian. let's take up your invitation
and move from Dionysus to early Christianity. So you lean on the good work
of Harvard's own Arthur Darby Nock, and more recently,
the work of Dennis McDonald at Claremont School of
Theology, to suggest that the author of
the Gospel of John deliberately paints
Jesus and his Eucharist in the colors of Dionysus. By which I mean that
the Gospel of John suggests that at the very
least, the evangelist hoped to market Christianity
to a pagan audience by suggesting that Jesus was
somehow equivalent to Dionysus, and that the Eucharist,
his sacrament of wine, was equivalent to
Dionysus's wine. But you go further
still, suggesting that Jesus himself
at the Last Supper might have administered
psychedelic sacrament, that the original
Eucharist was psychedelic. So what evidence can you
provide for that claim? SPEAKER 2: I don't-- I don't claim too heavily. I opened the
speculation, Dr. Stang, that the Holy Grail
itself could have been some kind of spiked concoction. But I don't hold-- I don't hang my
hat on that claim. As a matter of fact, I think
it's much more promising and much more fertile for
scholarship to suggest that some of the earliest Christians
may have availed themselves of a psychedelic sacrament and
may have interpreted the Last Supper as some kind of
invitation to open psychedelia, that mystical supper as
the orthodox call it, [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]. And the reason I find that
a worthy avenue of pursuit is because when you take
a step back and look at the Greek of the Gospels,
especially the Greek of John, which is super weird,
what I see based on Dennis MacDonald's
scholarship that you mentioned-- and others-- when you do the
exegesis of John's gospel, there's just lots of
vocabulary and lots of imagery that doesn't
appear elsewhere. And very famous
passages, by the way, that should be familiar to
most New Testament readers. Like the wedding at Cana,
which my synopsis of that event is a drunkard getting a bunch
of drunk people even more drunk. So the event happens, when
all the wines run out, here comes Jesus, who's
referred to in the Gospels as an [SPEAKING GREEK]
in Greek, a drunkard. He decides to get
people even more drunk. And Dennis, amongst others,
calls that a signature Dionysian miracle. We know from the literature
hundreds of years beforehand that in
Elis, for example, in the Western Peloponnese,
on the same Epiphany-type timeline, January 5,
January 6, the priests would walk into the
temple of Dionysus, leave three basins of
water, the next morning they're miraculously
transformed into wine. So this whole water to
wine thing was out there. And if it only occurs in
John, the big question is why. And there are legitimate
scholars out there who say, because John
wanted to paint Jesus in the light of
Dionysus, present him as the second coming
of this pagan God. It's not just Cana. This notion in John 15:1,
the notion of the true vine, for example, only
occurs in John. The idea of the truth
shall set you free, right, [SPEAKING GREEK], in 8:32. That also only occurs in John,
another epithet of Dionysus. It's only in John that
Jesus is described as being born in the lap of the
Father, the [SPEAKING GREEK] in 1:18, very similar to
the way that Dionysus sprung miraculously from
the thigh of Zeus, and on and on and on--
which I'm not going to bore you and the audience. But the point being,
if the Dionysian wine was psychedelic-- which I know is a big if-- I think the more important
thing to show here in this pagan continuity
hypothesis is that it's at least plausible that the
earliest Christians would have at the very least read
the Gospel of John and interpreted that
paleo-Christian Eucharistic wine, in some communities,
as a kind of Dionysian wine. And I think there are lots
of reasons to believe that. It still leaves an even
bigger if, Dr. Stang, is which one is psychedelic? If the Dionysian
one is psychedelic, does it really make
its way into some kind of psychedelic Christianity? I think the wine certainly does. Do the drugs, Dr. Stang? Where are the drugs? SPEAKER 1: Well, Mr, Muraresku,
you are hedging your bets here in a way that you
do not necessarily hedge your bets in the book. So this is interesting. I think it's important you have
made a distinction between what was Jesus doing at
the Last Supper, as if we could ever find out. Then there's what were the
earliest Christians doing with the Eucharist. Then what was the
Gospel of John, how did it interpret
the Eucharist and market it, and so on. So those are all possibly
different questions to ask and answer. There's a moment in the
book where you are excited about some hard evidence. And I want to-- just like
you have this hard evidence from Catalonia,
then the question is how to interpret it. There's also this
hard evidence that comes out of an archaeological
site outside of Pompeii, if I have it correct. Let me just pull
up my notes here. So there's a house preserved
outside of Pompeii, preserved, like so much
else, under the ash of Mount Vesuvius's eruption in the
year 79 of the Common Era. Now, that date is
obviously very suggestive because that's
precisely the time the Christians were establishing
a beachhead in Rome. What was discovered,
as far as I can tell, from your treatment
of it, is essentially an ancient pharmacy
in this house. Material evidence of a very
strange potion, a drug, or a [SPEAKING GREEK]. A combination of
psychoactive plants, including opium,
cannabis, and nightshade, along with the remains of
reptiles and amphibians all steeped in wine, like
a real witch's brew, uncovered in this house
outside of Pompeii. Now the archaeologist
of that site says-- I'm quoting from your book-- "For me, the Villa
Vesuvio was a small farm that was specifically designed
for the production of drugs." That seems very
believable, but there's nothing to suggest that the
pharmacy or drug farm was serving Christians, or even
that the potions produced were for ritual use. So how exactly is this
evidence of something relevant to Christianity in Rome
or southern Italy more widely? It seems entirely
believable to me that we have a potion
maker active near Pompeii. I imagine there are many more
potion makers around than we typically recognize. But I don't understand how that
provides any significant link to paleo-Christian practice. SPEAKER 2: Now we're cooking
with grease, Dr. Stang. Now we're getting somewhere. So I point to that evidence as
illustrative of the possibility that the Christians could,
in fact, have gotten their hands on an actual wine. That was the question for me. An actual spiked wine. Because for many,
many years, you know, Ruck's career takes
a bit of a nosedive. There's John Marco
Allegro claiming that there was no
Jesus, and this was just one big
amanita muscaria cult. There are others claiming
that there's drugs everywhere. Frankly, if you ask the world's
leading archaeobotanists and archaeochemists,
where's the spiked beer and where's the spiked
wine, which I've been doing since
about 2007, 2008, the resounding answer you'll
get back from everybody is a resounding no. That there is no hard
archaeobotanical, archaeochemical data for
spiked beer, spiked wine. So what I think we have
here in this ergtotized beer drink from Catalonia, Spain,
and in this weird witch's brew from 79 AD in
Pompeii, I describe it, until I see evidence
otherwise, as some of the very first
heart scientific data for the actual existence
of actual spiked wine in classical antiquity, which
I think is a really big point. Now-- and I think that we
can probably concede that. What does that have to
do with Christianity? The fact that the Vatican
sits in Rome today is not an accident, I
think, is the shortest way to answer that. So Pompeii and its
environs at the time were called [SPEAKING GREEK],,
which means great Greece. So if you were a mystic
and you were into Demeter and Persephone and
Dionysus and you were into these strange
Greek mystery cults, you'd be hard-pressed
to find a better place to spend your time
than [SPEAKING GREEK],, southern Italy,
which in some cases was more Greek than Greek. I know that's another
loaded phrase. But in Pompeii, for
example, there's the villa of the mysteries,
one of these really breathtaking finds
that also survived the ravage of Mount Vesuvius. And we know the
mysteries were there. And we know from the record
that [SPEAKING GREEK] is described as being so crowded
with gods that they were easier to find than men. In the same place in
and around Pompeii, this is where Christianity
is really finding its roots. Not just in Italy, but as
kind of the headquarters for the Mediterranean. There aren't any churches
or basilicas, right, in the first three
centuries, in this era we're calling paleo-Christianity. That's only after Constantine. It's funny to see that
some of the first basilicas outside Rome are
popping up here, and in and around Pompeii. So it wasn't just a
random place to find one of these spiked wines. I would have been happy to
find a spiked wine anywhere. SPEAKER 1: Sure. SPEAKER 2: It just
happens to show up. And I-- in my profession,
we call this circumstantial, and I get it. But it just happens to
show up at the right place at the right time, when the
earliest Christians could have availed themselves
of this kind of sacrament. And so in my
afterword, I present this as a blip on the
archaeochemical radar. And I think it's
proof of concept-- just proof of concept-- for investing serious
funding, and attention into the actual search for
these kinds of potions. And that's all I present it
as, is wonderfully attractive and maybe even sexy
circumstantial evidence for the potential use of
a psychedelic sacrament amongst the earliest Christians. SPEAKER 1: All right. I'm going to come back to
that idea of proof of concept. But I do want to push
back a little bit on the elevation of this
particular real estate in southern Italy. To some degree, I think you're
looking back to southern Italy from the perspective of
the supremacy of Rome, which is not the case
in the first century. It's not the case in
the second century. It's arguably not the
case in the third century. And nor do I think that you
can characterize southern Italy as ground zero for the
spirit of Greek mysticism, or however you put it. These-- that-- Christians are spread out
throughout the eastern Mediterranean, and there are
many, many pockets of people practicing what we
might call, let's just call it Christian
mysticism of some kind. So I'm not convinced that-- I think you're absolutely right
that what this establishes is that Christians in
southern Italy could have-- could have had access
to the kinds of things that have been recovered from
that drug farm, let's call it. But unfortunately, it doesn't
connect it to Christianity. And by the way,
I'm not here trying to protect Christianity from
the evidence of psychedelic use. I expect we will find it. I fully expect we will find it. [LAUGHS] I don't think we have found it. And I think that's an
important distinction to make. Now, here's-- let's tack
away from hard, scientific, archaeobotanical
evidence for a moment. I understand the appeal of that. But if the original
Eucharist were psychedelic, or even if there were
significant numbers of early Christians using
psychedelics like sacrament, I would expect the
representatives of orthodox,
institutional Christianity to rail against it. I would expect we'd
have ample evidence. Certainly these
early churchmen used whatever they could against
the forms of Christian practice they disapproved
of, especially those they categorized as Gnostic. You mentioned, too, early
churchmen, experts in heresies by the name of Irenaeus of
Lyons and Hippolytus of Rome. These are famous
figures to those of us who study early Christianity. These two accuse one Gnostic
teacher named Marcus-- who is himself a student of the
famous theologian Valentinus-- they accuse him of dabbling
in pharmacological devilry. And Ruck, and you following
Ruck, make much of this, suggesting maybe
the Gnostics are pharmacologists of some kind. They're mixing potions. Which turns out, it
may be they were. But they charge
Marcus specifically, not with a
psychedelic Eucharist, but the use of a love potion. So now it's true that these
heresy hunters show an interest in this love potion. But even if they're telling
the truth about this, even if it is
accurate about Marcus that he used a love potion, a
love potion isn't a Eucharist. Love potions, love
charms, they're very common in the ancient So again, if there were an
early psychedelic sacrament that was being suppressed, I'd
expect that the suppressors would talk about it. Because they talk about
everything else that they take issue with. So why the silence from the
heresiologists on a psychedelic sacrament? SPEAKER 2: I wish I could
answer that question. I might forward the
proposition that I don't think the early
church fathers were the best botanists. So when Hippolytus is
calling out the Marcosians, and specifically women,
consecrating this alternative Eucharist in their
alternative proto-mass, he uses the Greek word-- and we've talked
about this before-- but he uses the Greek
word [SPEAKING GREEK] seven times in a
row, by the way, without specifying which
drugs he's referring to. All he says is that these women
and Marcus are adding drugs seven times in a row into
whatever potion this is they're mixing up. Now, you could draw
the obvious conclusion. Is this only Marcus? Well, the reason I mention
Hippolytus and Marcus and focus on that
in my evidence is because there's evidence of the
Valentinians, who influenced Marcus, in and around Rome. The same Rome that
circumstantially shows up, and south of Rome,
where Constantine would build his basilicas in
Naples and Capua later on. So I'm trying to
build the case-- and for some reason
in my research, it kept coming back to
Italy and Rome, which is why I focus on Hippolytus. When Irenaeus is talking about
[SPEAKING GREEK],, love potions, again, we have no idea what
the hell he's talking about. It's some kind of
wine-based concoction, some kind of something
that is throwing these people into ecstasy. Eusebius, third into
the fourth century, is also talking about them-- it's a great Greek
word, [SPEAKING GREEK].. So, like, they're wonderstruck,
or awestruck by their libations and their incense. So whatever these
[SPEAKING GREEK] libations incense were, the church fathers
don't get into great detail about what may have
been spiking them. But we at least have, again,
the indicia of evidence that something was
happening there. I wish the church fathers
were better botanists and would rail against
the specific pharmacopeia. They did not. But we do know that
something was happening. SPEAKER 1: You know,
Valentinus was almost elected bishop of Rome. If your history is
even remotely correct, that would have ushered in
a very different church, if Valentinus's own student
Marcus and the Marcosians were involved in psychedelic
rituals, then that was an early road
not taken, let's say. OK. Now let's pan back
because, we have-- I want to wrap up my
interrogation of you, which I've been pressing
you, but I feel as if perhaps people
joining me think I'm hostile to this hypothesis. I'm not. But I'm pressing you
because that's my job. But I want to ask you to
reflect on the broader narrative that you're painting,
because I've heard you speak in two
ways about the significance of this work. Let me start with the view-- the version of it that I
think is less persuasive. And that is that there
was a pervasive religion, ancient religion, that involved
psychedelic sacraments, and that that pervasive
religious culture filtered into the
Greek mysteries and eventually into
early Christianity. And then was, in some sense, the
norm, the original Eucharist, and that it was then suppressed
by orthodox, institutional Christianity, who persecuted,
especially the women who were the caretakers
of this tradition. And that kind of invisible
religion with no name, although brutally
suppressed, managed to survive in Europe
for many centuries and could potentially
be revived today. That's one narrative that I
feel is a little sensational. It draws attention
to this material. And I hear-- I sense that narrative
in your book. I also sense another
narrative in your book, and one you've flagged for us,
maybe about 10 minutes ago, when you said that the
book is a proof of concept. And when you speak in that
way, what I hear you saying is there is something going on. There is evidence that has been
either overlooked or perhaps intentionally suppressed. Oh, I hope I haven't
offended you, Brian. SPEAKER 2: I'm bringing
more illumination. SPEAKER 1: OK, great. And that the proof of concept
idea is that we need to-- we, meaning historians
of the ancient world, need to bring all the
kinds of resources to bear on this to
get better evidence and an interpretive frame
for making sense of it. So I see-- you're moving back
and forth between these two. And I wonder whether the
former narrative serves the interests of the latter. That is, by giving, by even
floating the possibility of this kind of-- at times, what seems like
a Dan Brown sort of story, like, oh my god, there's a whole
history of Christianity that's been suppressed-- draws attention, but the
real point is actually that you're not really
certain about the story, but you're certain
is that we need to be more attentive
to this evidence and to assess it soberly. So can you reflect for
us where you really are and how you chose
to write this book? SPEAKER 2: Good one. I mean, I think the
book makes it clear. I really tried. So I'll speak in language that
you and our good colleague Greg [? Nage ?] would
certainly appreciate. I was not going to
put a book out there that was sensationalist. So after the whole
first half of the book-- well, wait a minute, Dr. Stang. I go out of my
way, in both parts of the book, which, it's
divided into the history of beer and the history of
wine, essentially. So at the very-- after the first half of the book
is over, there's an epilogue, and I say, OK,
here's the evidence. Here's the big question. I took this to Greg [? Nage ?]
and he said, Brian, don't you dare. And I did not dare. And so in the epilogue,
I say we simply do not know the relationship between
this site in Spain and Eleusis, nor do we know what
was happening at-- it doesn't automatically
mean that Eleusis was a psychedelic rite. Again, it's proof of concept
for going back to Eleusis and going back to other sites
around the Mediterranean and continuing to test,
whether for ergotized beer or other things. I do the same thing
in the afterword at the very end of the
book, where it's lots of, here's what we know. Here's what we don't. Here's the proof of concept. Is there a smoking gun? And my favorite line of the
book is, "The lawyer in me won't sleep until that one
chalice, that one container, that one vessel comes to light
in an unquestionable Christian context." I include that
line for a reason. I'm skeptical, Dr. Stang. And as a lawyer, I
know what is probative and what's circumstantial
evidence, and I just-- I don't see it there. What I see is data that's
been largely neglected, and I think what serves this
as a discipline is just that. Is taking all these
disciplines, whether it's your discipline or
archaeochemistry or hard core botany, biology, even
psychopharmacology, putting it all together and taking a look
at this mystery, this puzzle, using the lens of
psychedelics as a lens, really, to investigate not
just the past but the future and the mystery of
human consciousness. And I think that that's
the real question here. Psychedelics are a lens
to investigate this stuff. And I think it's very important
to be very honest with the reader and the audience
about what we know and what we don't. And I feel like I accomplished
that in the afterword to my book. SPEAKER 1: All right. Now you're a good sport, Brian. I appreciate this. Now I want to get
to the questions, but one last question before we
move to the discussion portion. That is about the future rather
than the ancient history. So how to put this? So let's talk about
the future of religion, and specifically the future
of Roman Catholicism. So why do you think
psychedelics are so significant that they might
usher in a new Reformation? And why, if you're right
that the church has succeeded in suppressing a
psychedelic sacrament and has been peddling instead,
what you call a placebo, and that it has exercised
a monstrous campaign of persecution
against plant medicine and the women who have
kept its knowledge alive, why are you still attached
to this tradition? And how can you
reasonably expect the church to recognize
a psychedelic Eucharist? Do you think that by calling the
Eucharist a placebo that you're likely to persuade them? [LAUGHS] If they've been doing this, as
you suggest, for 2,000 years, nearly, what makes you think
that a few ancient historians are going to turn that
aircraft carrier around? SPEAKER 2: Right. So this is the tradition, I
can say with a straight face, that saved my life. It was the Jesuits who
taught me Latin and Greek. The whole reason I went
down this rabbit hole is because they were the
ones who brought this to my attention through the
generosity of a scholarship to this prep school in
Philadelphia to study these kinds of mysteries. And it was the
Jesuits who encouraged me to always, always
ask questions and never take anything at face value. And I write, at the
very end of the book, I hope that they'd be proud
of this investigation. Because at my heart, I
still consider myself a good Catholic boy. The only reason I went to
college was to study classics. So it's hard for me to write
this and talk about this without acknowledging the
Jesuits who put me here. So I don't write this to
antagonize them or the church, the people who, again, ushered
me into this discipline and into these questions. I write it cognizant of the
fact that the Eucharist doesn't work for many, many people. And so I cite a Pew
poll, for example, that says something like
69% of American Catholics do not believe in
transubstantiation, which is the defining dogma
of the church, the idea that the bread
and wine literally becomes the flesh and blood. Many people see that as
symbolic or allegorical or just a nice thing,
which is not the case. To be a Catholic is to
believe that you are literally consuming the blood of
Christ to become Christ. That's the promise in John's
gospel, in John 6:54-55, that I quote in the book. So if you don't think
that you are literally consuming divine blood, what
is the point of religion? Now, I've never
done them myself, but I have talked to many, many
people who've had experience with psychedelics. And I've listened to
the volunteers who've gone through these experiences. And I don't know if it's a
genuine mystical experience or mystical mimetic or some kind
of psychological breakthrough. And I think we get
hung up on the jargon. But what I hear from
people, including atheists, like Dina Bazer, who
participated in these Hopkins NYU trials is that she
felt like on her one and only dose of psilocybin that
she was bathed in God's love. You know, it's an atheist
using theological language to describe what
happened to her. And she talks about kind
of being born again, another promise
from John's gospel. And she talks about
the visions that transformed the way she
thinks about herself. And so in some of these
psychedelic trials, under the right
conditions, I do see genuine religious experiences. I see something that's
happening to people. And at the same time, when
I see a thirst, especially in young people,
for real experience, and I see so many
Catholics who do not believe in
transubstantiation, obviously, what comes to my mind
is how, if at all, can psychedelics enhance faith
or reinvent Christianity. And so I don't think
that psychedelics are coming to replace
the Sunday Eucharist. That's, just absurd. If you are drawn to
psychedelics, in my mind, it means you're probably drawn
to contemplative mysticism. And if it's one thing
Catholicism does very, very well, it's
contemplative mysticism. The kind of mysticism I've
always been attracted to, like the rule of Saint
Benedict and the Trappist monks and the Cistercian monks. And so if there is a
place for psychedelics, I would think it would be in
one of those sacred containers within monastic
life, or pilgrims who visit one of these
monastic centers, for example. Or maybe in palliative care. Maybe for those facing
the end of life. There have been really dramatic
studies from Hopkins and NYU about the ability of
psilocybin at the end of life to curb things like
depression, anxiety, and end of life distress. And so part of
what it means to be a priest or a
minister or a rabbi is to sit with the
dying and the dead. And so I can see
psychedelics being some kind of extra
sacramental ministry that potentially could ease
people at the end of life. Now, I have no idea
where it goes from here, or if I'll take it myself. But what I see are potential
and possibilities and things worthy of discussions like this. SPEAKER 1: Yeah. Wonderful, well, thank you. I'm going to stop
asking my questions, although I have a million
more, as you well know, and instead try to ventriloquist
the questions that are coming through at quite a clip
through the Q&A. And Brian, it would be helpful
for me to know whether you are more interested
in questions that take up the ancient world
or more that deal with this last issue, the sort
of contemporary and the future. You want to field questions
in both those categories? SPEAKER 2: We can dip
from both pies, Dr. Stang. Yeah. SPEAKER 1: OK. So let's start with one
that is more contemporary. One attendee has asked,
"How have religious leaders reacted so far to your book? Are they rolling
their eyes, or are you getting sort of secretive
knowing nods of agreement? And if the latter,
do you think there's a good chance that religions
will adopt psychedelics back into their rituals?" Now, I think you
answered that last part. You're not confident
that the pope is suddenly going to issue an encyclical. But I think the broader
question of what's the reception to this among
explicitly religious folk and religious leaders? SPEAKER 2: Right. So listening right now, there's
at least one orthodox priest, there's at least
one Catholic priest, an Episcopalian, an
Anglican, and several others with whom I've been
talking in recent months. And I got to say, there's
not a heck of a lot of eye rolling, assuming
people read my afterword and try to see how careful
I am about delineating what is knowable and what
is not and what this means for the future of religion. Something else I include
at the end of my book is that I don't think
that whatever this was, this big if about a psychedelic
Eucharist, I don't think this was a majority of
the paleo-Christians. And that's not how
it works today, and I don't think that's
how it works in antiquity. Again, if you're
attracted to psychedelics, it's kind of an
extreme thing, right? I see it as-- well, OK, I'd
see it as within a minority. So somewhere between 1% and 49%. I'm not sure where it falls. But this clearly
involved some kind of technical know-how
and the ability to concoct these
things that, in order to keep them safe
and efficacious, would not have been very
widespread, I don't think. I'm happy to be proven wrong. So I think this was a
minority of early Christians. And that that's how I-- and by
not speculating more than we can about the mystical
supper, if we follow the hypothesis
that this is a big if for some early communities
of Greek speakers, this is how I'm finding
common ground with priests both Catholic and
Orthodox and Protestants. SPEAKER 1: All right. Here's another one. I'm paraphrasing this one. In the afterword,
you champion the fact that we stand on the cusp
of a new era of psychedelics precisely because they can be
synthesized and administered safely in pill form, back to
The Economist article "The God Pill". Now, that is part of your kind
of interest in democratizing mysticism, but it
also, curiously, cuts out the very people
who have been preserving this tradition for centuries,
namely, on your own account, this sort of invisible or
barely visible lineage of women. So can you reflect on the-- standing on the threshold
of pharmaceutical companies taking control of
this, how is that to be commended when the very
people who have kept this alive would be pushed to
the side in that move? SPEAKER 2: Right. Interesting. So we're going down
parallel paths here, and I feel we're caught between
FDA-approved therapeutics and RFRA-protected sacraments,
RFRA, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, or what becomes
of these kinds of substances in any kind of legal
format-- which they're not legal at the moment,
some would argue. Others would argue that they
are perfectly legal sacraments, at least in the Native American
church with the use of peyote, or in the UDV or
Santo Daime, I mean, ayahuasca does work in some
syncretic Christian form, right? These Native American
church and the UDV, both some syncretic
form of Christianity. So it is already happening. The question is, what
will happen in the future. Now I understand
and I appreciate the pharmaceutical
industry's ability to distribute this
as medicine for those who are looking
for alternatives, alternative treatments for
depression and anxiety and PTSD and addiction and
end of life distress. And I think what the
pharmaceutical industry can do is help to
distribute this medicine. And what the FDA can do
is make sure that they're doing it in a way
that it's absolutely safe and efficacious. So I have my
concerns about what's about to happen in Oregon and
the regulation of psilocybin for therapeutic purposes. I would love to see these
licensed, regulated, retreat centers be done in a way
that is medically sound and scientifically rigorous. And that's where
oversight comes in handy. And I think oversight
also comes in handy within organized religion. And so I do see an avenue, like
I kind of obliquely mentioned, but I do think there's an
avenue within organized religion and for people who
dedicate their lives as religious
professionals to ministry to perhaps take a look at this
in places where it might work. Like in a retreat pilgrimage
type center, or maybe within palliative care. I see a huge need and a demand
for young religious clergy to begin taking a
look at this stuff. And if there's historical
precedent for it, all the more so. SPEAKER 1: OK. This is going to be
a question that's back to the ancient world. So your presentation
of early Christianity inclines heavily
toward the Greek world. And much of the evidence
that you've collected is kind of the northern half
of the Mediterranean world. Some number of people
have asked about Egypt. Now, what's curious about
this is we usually have-- Egypt plays a
rather outsized role in our sense of early
Christianity because-- and other adjacent or
contemporary religious and philosophical movements,
because everything in Egypt is preserved better
than anywhere else in the Mediterranean. SPEAKER 2: That's right. SPEAKER 1: We're often
in this situation where we're trying
to extrapolate from evidence from Egypt, to
see is Egypt the norm or is it the exception? But Egypt seems to
not really be hugely relevant to the research. Now is there any evidence
for psychedelic use in ancient Egypt,
and if not, do you have any theory as
to why that's silent? Perhaps more generally,
you could just talk about other traditions
around the Mediterranean, North African, or, let's
even say Judaism. SPEAKER 2: Yeah. SPEAKER 1: We've
really read Jesus through the lens of
his Greek inheritors. What about Jesus as a Jew? What about all these
early Christians themselves as essentially Jews? SPEAKER 2: I mean, this is-- SPEAKER 1: Or-- sorry. SPEAKER 2: But you're spot on. I mean, this is what I want to
do with some of my remaining days on this planet,
is take a look at all these different theories. So I present this
as proof of concept, and I heavily rely on the Gospel
of John and the data from Italy because that's what was there. It's not to say that
there isn't evidence from Alexandria or Antioch. I wish that an
ancient pharmacy had been preserved by Mount Vesuvius
somewhere near Alexandria or even in upper Egypt or in
Antioch or parts of Turkey. A lot of Christianity,
as you rightly point out, I mean, it was an
Eastern phenomenon, all over the eastern
Mediterranean. And I think there are so many
sites and excavations and so many chalices that
remain to be tested. And now we have a working
hypothesis and some data to suggest where we
might be looking. So, you know, I
specifically wanted to avoid heavily relying on
the 52 books of the [INAUDIBLE] corpus or heavily
relying too much on the Gospel of Mary Magdalene
and the evidence that's come from Egypt. But clearly, when you're
thinking about ancient Egypt or elsewhere, there's
definitely a funerary tradition. Whether there's a
psychedelic tradition-- I mean, there are some
suggestive paintings. There's some suggestive
language in the pyramid texts, in the Book of the Dead
and things of this nature. Hard archaeobotanical,
archaeochemical data, I haven't seen it. Not because it's not there,
because it hasn't been tested. So there's a whole slew of
sites I want to test there. When you start testing,
you find things. Like in Israel. In May of last year, researchers
published what they believe is the first
archaeochemical data for the use of
psychoactive drugs in some form of early Judaism. 8th century BC from
the Tel Arad shrine. This limestone altar
tested positive for cannabis and
frankincense that was being burned, they think,
in a very ritualistic way. Not because they just
found that altar. Not because it was
brand new data. The altar had been sitting
in a museum in Israel since the 1960s and
just hadn't been tested. So imagine how many
artifacts are just sitting in museums right
now, waiting to be tested. I don't know why
it's happening now, but we're finally taking a look. SPEAKER 1: So that actually
helps answer a question that's in the Q&A that was
posed to me, which is why did I say I fully expect
that we will find evidence for this? Because very briefly, I
think Brian and others have made a very strong case
that these things-- this was a biotechnology that was
available in the ancient world. I can't imagine that there
were no Christians that availed themselves of
this biotechnology, and I can't imagine-- it's entirely plausible
to me that they would mix this biotechnology
with the Eucharist. So if we can test
Eucharistic vessels, I wouldn't be surprised
at all that we find one. Now that doesn't mean,
as Brian was saying, that then suggests that
that's the norm Eucharist. That would require an entirely
different kind of evidence. OK, now, Brian, you've probably
dealt with questions like this. There's a good
number of questions that are very curious why you
are insisting on remaining a psychedelic virgin. What's the importance of your
abstention from psychedelics, given what is obvious interest. You obviously think these
are powerful substances with profound effects
that track with reality. So why refrain? SPEAKER 2: I'm asked this
question, I would say, in pretty much every interview
I've done since late September. And I answer it differently
every single time. This time, tonight I'll say
that it's just not my time yet. I have a deep
interest in mysticism, and I've had mystical
experiences, which I don't think are very relevant. They were relevant to me in
going down this rabbit hole. And when I read
psychedelic literature or I read the literature
on near-death experiences, I see experiences
similar to what I experienced as a young boy. And so that's what
motivated my search here. Maybe part of me is
skeptical, right? I mean, this really goes
to my deep skepticism. Maybe I'm afraid I'll
take the psychedelic and I won't have what is
reported in the literature from Hopkins and NYU. Maybe there's some residual
fear that's been built up in me. There's all kinds of
reasons I haven't done it. And not least because
if I were to do it, I'd like to do so in a
deeply sacred ritual. And I don't know
what that looks like. It would have parts of
Greek mysticism in it, the same Greek
mysteries I've spent all these years
investigating, and it would have some elements of what
I see in paleo-Christianity. Which, again, what I
see are small groups of people getting together
to commune with the dead. Which is a very
weird thing today. You might find it in
a cemetery in Mexico. You won't find it in many
places other than that. And so I don't know what a
really authentic, a really historic-looking ritual that is
equal parts sacred, but also, again, medically sound,
scientifically rigorous, would look like. And part of me really wants to
put all these pieces together before I dive in. And I think we're getting there. SPEAKER 1: OK. I wonder if you're familiar
with Wouter Hanegraaff at the University of Amsterdam. Those of you who
don't know his name, he's a professor
at the University of Amsterdam, an expert
in Western esotericism. He has talked about
the potential evidence for psychedelics in
a Mithras liturgy. I'm trying to get him to speak
in the series about that. But curiously, it's
evidence for a eye ointment which is supposed
to induce visions and was used as part of a
liturgy in the cult of Mithras. Now, Mithras is another one
of these mystery religions. And apparently, the
book is on order, so I can't speak
to this directly, but the ancient Greek text
that preserves this liturgy also preserves the formula,
the ingredients of the eye ointment. So that's something
else to look into. So perhaps there's
even more evidence. But it's not an
ingested psychedelic. And I don't know if there's
other examples of such things. So Brian, I wonder, maybe we
should give the floor to you and ask you to speak about,
what are the questions you think both ancient historians
such as myself should be asking that
we're not, and maybe what are the sorts of
questions that people who aren't ancient
historians but who are drawn to this evidence,
to your narrative, and to the present and the
future of religion, what sort of questions should they be
asking regarding psychedelics? Why don't we turn the tables
and ask you what questions you think need to be posed? SPEAKER 2: OK. So, I mean, my biggest
question behind all of this is, as a good Catholic
boy, is the Eucharist. I mean, what-- my
big question is, what can we say
about the Eucharist-- and maybe it's
just my weird lens, but what can we say
about it definitively in the absence of
the archaeochemstry or the archaeobotany? Now, it doesn't have to be
the Holy Grail that was there at the Last Supper,
but when you think about the sacrament of wine that
is at the center of the world's biggest religion of 2.5
billion people, the thing that Pope Francis says is
essential for salvation, I mean, how can we
orient our lives around something for which there
is little to no physical data? How does, in other words, how
does religion sit with science? And when we know so
much about ancient wine and how very different it
was from the wine of today, I mean, what can we
say about the Eucharist if we're only
looking at the texts? And so how far should
this investigation go? I mean, shouldn't everybody,
shouldn't every Christian be wondering what
kind of wine was on that table, or the tables
of the earliest Christians? I mean, in the absence of
the actual data, that's my biggest question. Because every time I
think about ancient wine, I am now immediately thinking
about wine that is spiked. Just from reading
Dioscorides and reading all the different
texts, the past 12 years have absolutely transformed
the way I think about wine. And even in the New
Testament, you'll see wine spiked with myrrh,
for example, that's served to Jesus at his crucifixion. And so even within
the New Testament you see little hints and clues
that there was no such thing as only ordinary table wine. So my biggest question is,
what kind of wine was it? And shouldn't we all be
asking that question? SPEAKER 1: OK. And that's a question equally
for ancient historians and for contemporary seekers
and/or good Catholics. What's the wine? What was the wine in
the early Eucharist? SPEAKER 2: Right. And if you're a good
Christian or a good Catholic, and you're consuming that
wine on any given Sunday, why are you doing that? And what do you believe happens
to you when you do that? And does it line up with the
promise from John's gospel that anyone who drinks this
becomes instantly immortal? And anyone who drinks this,
[SPEAKING GREEK],, Jesus says in Greek, you remain
in me and I in you. You become one with
Christ by drinking that. If we're being honest with
ourselves, when you've drunk-- and I've drunk that wine-- I didn't necessarily feel that
I'd become one with Jesus. And yet I talked
to an atheist who has one experience
with psilocybin and is immediately
bathed in God's love. And I'm trying to
reconcile that. It's a big question for me. SPEAKER 1: So in
some sense, you're feeling almost envy
for the experiences on psychedelics, which is to
say you've never experienced the indwelling of Christ
or the immediate knowledge of your immortality
in the sacrament. And you suspect, therefore,
that it might be a placebo, and you want the real thing. SPEAKER 2: I would
say I've definitely experienced the power of the
Christ and the Holy Spirit. It seems to me, though, that
the intensity and the potency of the psychedelic experience
is of an order of magnitude different than what I
may have experienced through the Eucharist. Now, I've had experiences
outside the Eucharist that resonate with me. But when it comes to
that Sunday ritual, it just, whatever
is happening today, it seems different from what
may have motivated the earliest Christians, which leads
me to very big questions. SPEAKER 1: Right. Now are there any
other questions you wish to propose or push or-- I don't know, to push back
against any of the criticisms or questions I've leveled? SPEAKER 2: I think
you were great. [LAUGHS] No, I think you-- this is why we're
friends, Charlie. I mean, I asked lots of
big questions in the book, and I fully acknowledge that. I try to be careful to always
land on a lawyer's feet and be very honest with
you and everybody else about where this goes from here. Because my biggest question
is, and the obvious question of the book is, if this
was happening in antiquity, what does that mean for today? I mean, that's obviously
the big question, and what that means for the
future of medicine and religion and society at large. And I guess my biggest question,
not necessarily for you, but the psychedelic community,
for what it's worth, or those who are interested
in this stuff is how do we make this experience sacred? And how do we-- when the pharmaceutical industry
and when these retreat centers begin to open and
begin to proliferate, how do we make this sacred? Because again, when I read
the clinical literature, I'm reading things that look
like mystical experiences, or that at least at
least sound like them. Not in every single
case, obviously. But things that sound
intensely powerful. And it seems to me that
if any of this is right, that whatever was
happening in ancient Greece was a transformative experience
for which a lot of thought and preparation went into. And I think that we
would behoove ourselves to incorporate, resuscitate,
maybe, some of those techniques that seem to have been employed
by the Greeks at Eleusis or by the Dionysians or some
of these earliest Christians. I just sense a great deal of
structure and thoughtfulness going into this experience. And I wonder and I question
how we can keep that and retain that for today. SPEAKER 1: Brian,
I wonder if you could end by reflecting
on the meaning of dying before you die. What is it about
that formula that captures for you the
wisdom, the insight that is on offer in this
ancient ritual, psychedelic or otherwise? What does it mean
to die before dying? SPEAKER 2: Right. So that, actually, is the
key to the immortality key. It is not psychedelics. And I offer psychedelics as
one of those archaic techniques of ecstasy that seems to have
been relevant and meaningful to our ancestors. Things like fasting
and sleep deprivation and tattooing and scarification
and, et cetera, et cetera. I think psychedelics are
just one piece of the puzzle. And I'm not even sure
what that piece looks like or how big it is. The actual key that I
found time and again in looking at this
literature and the data is what seems to
be happening here is the cultivation of a
near-death experience. And what you're
referring to is-- and how I begin the book is
this beautiful Greek phrase, [SPEAKING GREEK]. If you die before you die,
you won't die when you die. You can see that inscribed
on a plaque in Saint Paul's monastery at Mount
Athos in Greece. And I think it does hearken
back to a genuinely ancient Greek principle, which is that
only by fully experiencing some kind of death, a death
that feels real, where you, or at least the you you
used to identify with, actually slips away, dissolves. We call it ego dissolution,
things of that nature. We see lots of descriptions of
this in the mystical literature with which you're very familiar. So psychedelics or
not, I think it's the cultivation of
that experience, which is the actual key. Because what tends to
happen in those experiences is a death and rebirth. A rebirth into what? A rebirth into a new
conception of the self, the self's relationship to
things that are hard to define, like God. What does God mean? Maybe there's a spark
of the divine within. And maybe in these
near-death experiences we begin to actually experience
that at a visceral level. And maybe therein we do since
the intimation of immortality. Joe Campbell puts it best
that what we're after is an experience of being alive. That to live on
forever and ever, to live an everlasting
life is not immortality. That's just everlasting. That's staying within
the field of time. To become truly
immortal, Campbell talks about entering
into a sense of eternity, which is the infinite
present here and now. Which is really
weird, because that's how the same Dina Bazer, the
same atheist in the psilocybin trials, described her insight. She had the strange
sense that every moment was an eternity of its own. And I describe that as
somehow finding that key to immortality. And she happened to
find it on psilocybin. Others find it in
different ways, but the common
denominator seems to be one of these really well-curated
near-death experiences. SPEAKER 1: Brian, I want
to thank you for your time. I want to thank you
for your candor. I want to thank you for putting
up with me and my questions. And I want to say to those
who are still assembled here that I'm terribly
sorry that we can't get to all your questions. But please do know that we will
forward all these questions to Brian so he will know
the sorts of questions his work prompts. I'm sure he knows this
well, by this point. And I want to say
that this question that we've been exploring
the last half hour about what all this means for the
present will be very much the topic of our
next event on February 22, which is taking up the question
of psychedelic chaplaincy. And for those of you who have
found my line of questioning or just my general presence
tedious, first of all, I fully appreciate
that reaction. Just imagine, I have
to live with me. But you will be consoled to
know that someone else will be-- I will be there,
but someone else will be leading
that conversation. Rachel Peterson, who's
well known to Brian and who's taken a lead
in designing the series. So again, that's February 22. That's our next event, and will
be at least two more events to follow. All that will be announced
through our mailing list. So thank you, all who
have hung with us. We still have
almost 700 with us. And Brian, once again,
thank you so much. And I look forward to talking
about this event with you after the fact
eventually over a beer. OK-- maybe one of
those ancient beers. SPEAKER 2: I look
forward to it, Charlie. SPEAKER 1: I do, too. Thank you. Thank you. Well, wonderful. Thank you all for joining us,
and I hope to see many of you later this month
for our next event. [MUSIC PLAYING]
