I know that's another loaded phrase. But it survives. The pagan continuity hypothesis theorizes that when Christianity arrived in Greece around AD 49, it didn't suddenly replace the existing religion. Maybe part of me is skeptical, right? CHARLES STANG: Right. Brian C. Muraresku with Dr. Mark Plotkin: The Eleusinian Mysteries, Discovering the Divine, The Immortality Key, The Pagan Continuity Hypothesis, Psychedelics, and More | Tim Ferriss Show #646 And she talks about the visions that transformed the way she thinks about herself. . There he is. Love potions, love charms, they're very common in the ancient. So whatever was happening there was important. Not because they just found that altar. Copyright 2023 The President and Fellows of Harvard College, The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name. Now-- and I think that we can probably concede that. Maybe there's some residual fear that's been built up in me. Here is how I propose we are to proceed. The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name Books about pagan continuity hypothesis? : r/AskHistorians - reddit Nage ?] BRIAN MURARESKU: We can dip from both pies, Dr. Stang. It was the Jesuits who taught me Latin and Greek. And Dennis, amongst others, calls that a signature Dionysian miracle. And there were probably other Eleusises like that to the east. 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 Tim Ferriss Show. So how exactly is this evidence of something relevant to Christianity in Rome or southern Italy more widely? "The Jews" are not after Ye. And part of me really wants to put all these pieces together before I dive in. Before I set forth the outline of this thesis, three topics must be discussed in order to establish a basic understanding of the religious terminology, Constantine's reign, and the contemporary sources. I expect we will find it. 44:48 Psychedelics and ancient cave art . 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. CHARLES STANG: All right. Thank you. So that, actually, is the key to the immortality key. And at some point in my narrative, I do include mention of Gobekli Tepe, for example, which is essentially twice the age of Stonehenge. CHARLES STANG: Brian, I wonder if you could end by reflecting on the meaning of dying before you die. First, the continuity of the offices must be seen in light of the change of institutional charges; they had lost their religious connotations and had become secular. 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. 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. 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 it's hard for me to write this and talk about this without acknowledging the Jesuits who put me here. And very famous passages, by the way, that should be familiar to most New Testament readers. CHARLES STANG: 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? 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. 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. 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. To sum up the most exciting parts of the book: the bloody wine of Dionysius became the bloody wine of Jesus - the pagan continuity hypothesis - the link between the Ancient Greeks of the final centuries BC and the paleo-Christians of the early centuries AD - in short, the default psychedelic of universal world history - the cult of . Nazanin Boniadi After the first few chapters the author bogs down flogging the Pagan Continuity Hypothesis and exulting over his discovery of small scraps of evidence he found in a decade of research. 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? They are guaranteed an afterlife. I opened the speculation, Dr. Stang, that the Holy Grail itself could have been some kind of spiked concoction. But I think the broader question of what's the reception to this among explicitly religious folk and religious leaders? It's really quite simple, Charlie. And what does this earliest history tell us about the earliest evidence for an ancient psychedelic religion? #646: Brian C. Muraresku with Dr. Mark Plotkin The Eleusinian 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. It still leaves an even bigger if, Dr. Stang, is which one is psychedelic? 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. #646: Brian C. Muraresku with Dr. Mark Plotkin The Eleusinian Mysteries, Discovering the Divine, The Immortality Key, The Pagan Continuity Hypothesis, Lessons from Scholar Karen Armstrong, and Much More And I think what the pharmaceutical industry can do is help to distribute this medicine. I really tried. Despite its popular appeal as a New York Times Bestseller, TIK fails to make a compelling case for its grand theory of the "pagan continuity hypothesis with a psychedelic twist" due to recurring overreach and historical distortion, failure to consider relevant research on shamanism and Christianity, and presentation of speculation as fact." 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? But things that sound intensely powerful. The altar had been sitting in a museum in Israel since the 1960s and just hadn't been tested. The Tim Ferriss Show - #535: General Stanley McChrystal Mast Ep #1 Show Notes | Brian Muraresku: Psychedelics, Civilization So this is interesting. I see a huge need and a demand for young religious clergy to begin taking a look at this stuff. Which is a very weird thing today. He's talking about kind of psychedelic wine. And so I don't think that psychedelics are coming to replace the Sunday Eucharist. And if the latter, do you think there's a good chance that religions will adopt psychedelics back into their rituals?". I wish the church fathers were better botanists and would rail against the specific pharmacopeia. And does it line up with the promise from John's gospel that anyone who drinks this becomes instantly immortal? Because every time I think about ancient wine, I am now immediately thinking about wine that is spiked. Read more about The Immortality Key by Brian Muraresku Making Sense by Sam Harris 101. 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 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. Why don't we turn the tables and ask you what questions you think need to be posed? Before the church banned their use, early Christians used - Substack The most colorful theory of psychedelics in religion portrays the original Santa Claus as a shaman. 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. So again, that's February 22. So if you don't think that you are literally consuming divine blood, what is the point of religion? So how to put this? These mysteries had at their center a sacrament called kykeon, which offered a vision of the mysteries of life and death. And she happened to find it on psilocybin. I have a deep interest in mysticism, and I've had mystical experiences, which I don't think are very relevant. Brian C. Muraresku - Priory Of Sion We have plays like the Bacchi from Euripides, where we can piece together some of this. Despite its popular appeal as a New York Times Bestseller, TIK fails to make a compelling case for its grand theory of the "pagan continuity hypothesis with a psychedelic twist" due to. In the first half, we'll cover topics ranging from the Eleusinian Mysteries, early Christianity, and the pagan continuity hypothesis to the work of philosopher and psychologist William James. Plants of the Gods: Hallucinogens, Healing, Culture and Conservation Here's your Western Eleusis. So can you reflect for us where you really are and how you chose to write this book? And I'm trying to reconcile that. 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. Maybe there's a spark of the divine within. And so in some of these psychedelic trials, under the right conditions, I do see genuine religious experiences. What's significant about these features for our piecing together the ancient religion with no name? The continuity between pagan and Christian cult nearby the archaeological area of Naquane in Capo di Ponte. And there were gaps as well. And then that's the word that Euripides uses, by the way. The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name 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.