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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. These are famous figures to those of us who study early Christianity. 18.3C: Continuity Theory. Now, I have no idea where it goes from here, or if I'll take it myself. So the closer we get to the modern period, we're starting to find beer, wine mixed with interesting things. I'm not sure where it falls. So your presentation of early Christianity inclines heavily toward the Greek world. For me, that's a question, and it will yield more questions. 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. In this hypothesis, both widely accepted and widely criticized,11 'American' was synonymous with 'North American'. Maybe there's a spark of the divine within. Brought to you by Wealthfront high-yield savings account, Peloton Row premium rower for an efficient workout, and You Need A Budget cult-favorite money management app.. Rick Rubin is a nine-time GRAMMY-winning producer, one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in the world, and the most successful producer in any genre, according to Rolling Stone. But they charge Marcus specifically, not with a psychedelic Eucharist, but the use of a love potion. A rebirth into what? She had the strange sense that every moment was an eternity of its own. And maybe in these near-death experiences we begin to actually experience that at a visceral level. I would have been happy to find a spiked wine anywhere. And so how far should this investigation go? And very famous passages, by the way, that should be familiar to most New Testament readers. Find ratings and reviews for the newest movie and TV shows. Now that the pagan continuity hypothesis is defended, the next task is to show that the pagan and proto-Christian ritual sacraments were, in fact, psychedelicbrews. I see something that's happening to people. He decides to get people even more drunk. 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. And they found this site, along with others around the Mediterranean. 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. But with what were they mixed, and to what effect? "@BrianMuraresku with @DocMarkPlotkin The Eleusinian Mysteries, Discovering the Divine, The Immortality Key, The Pagan Continuity Hypothesis, Lessons from Scholar Karen Armstrong, and Much More" Please enjoy! And even Burkert, I think, calls it the most famous of the mystery rituals. 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. 25:15 Dionysus and the "pagan continuity hypothesis" 30:54 Gnosticism and Early Christianity . 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. So this is the tradition, I can say with a straight face, that saved my life. You're not confident that the pope is suddenly going to issue an encyclical. He co-writes that with Gordon Wasson and Albert Hofmann, who famously-- there it is, the three authors. 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. 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. This 'pagan continuity hypothesis' with a psychedelic twist is now backed up by biochemistry and agrochemistry and tons of historical research, exposing our forgotten history. Again, if you're attracted to psychedelics, it's kind of an extreme thing, right? 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? 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? It's some kind of wine-based concoction, some kind of something that is throwing these people into ecstasy. This two-part discussion between Muraresku and Dr. Plotkin examines the role psychedelics have played in the development of Western civilization. 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. 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. Read more about The Immortality Key by Brian Muraresku Making Sense by Sam Harris 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. So that, actually, is the key to the immortality key. We know that at the time of Jesus, before, during, and after, there were recipes floating around. I fully expect we will find it. BRIAN MURARESKU: Right. 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. So imagine how many artifacts are just sitting in museums right now, waiting to be tested. You may have already noticed one such question-- not too hard. There's no mistake in her mind that it was Greek. And Ruck, and you following Ruck, make much of this, suggesting maybe the Gnostics are pharmacologists of some kind. CHARLES STANG: All right. I am so fortunate to have been selected to present my thesis, "Mythology and Psychedelics: Taking the Pagan Continuity Hypothesis a Step Further" at. 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. The pagan continuity hypothesis theorizes that when Christianity arrived in Greece around AD 49, it didn't suddenly replace the existing religion. 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. 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. Brought to you by GiveWell.org charity research and effective giving and 5-Bullet Friday, my very own email newsletter.Welcome to The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is usually my job to deconstruct world-class performers to tease out their routines, habits, et cetera that you can apply to your own life. As much as we know about the mysteries of Eleusis. I don't know why it's happening now, but we're finally taking a look. They minimized or completely removed the Jewish debates found in the New Testament, and they took on a style that was more palatable to the wider pagan world. 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. Then I see the mysteries of Dionysus as kind of the Burning Man or the Woodstock of the ancient world. 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? I would love to see these licensed, regulated, retreat centers be done in a way that is medically sound and scientifically rigorous. Certainly these early churchmen used whatever they could against the forms of Christian practice they disapproved of, especially those they categorized as Gnostic. And the big question for me was what was that something else? 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? Copyright 2023 President and Fellows of Harvard College. And another: in defending the pagan continuity hypothesis, Muraresku presumes a somewhat non-Jewish, pagan-like Jesus, while ignoring the growing body of psychedelic literature, including works by . And I wonder whether the former narrative serves the interests of the latter. 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. Just imagine, I have to live with me. But we do know that something was happening. So this is interesting. Some number of people have asked about Egypt. 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, although, I mean, and that actually, I'd like to come back to that, the notion of the, that not just the pagan continuity hypothesis, but the mystery continuity hypothesis through the Vatican. CHARLES STANG: Right. A rebirth into a new conception of the self, the self's relationship to things that are hard to define, like God. She joins me for most events and meetings. Let's move to early Christian. 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." What about Jesus as a Jew? I'm skeptical, Dr. Stang. I just sense a great deal of structure and thoughtfulness going into this experience. 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. He's joining us from Uruguay, where he has wisely chosen to spend his pandemic isolation. Which is a very weird thing today. Thank you, sir. BRIAN MURARESKU: Right. And keep in mind that we'll drop down into any one of these points more deeply. Research inside the Church of Saint Faustina and Liberata Fig 1. 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 . Just from reading Dioscorides and reading all the different texts, the past 12 years have absolutely transformed the way I think about wine. 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. 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. 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]. The (Mistaken) Conspiracy Theory: In the Late Middle Ages, religious elites created a new, and mistaken, intellectual framework out of Christian heresy and theology concerning demons. The big question is, did any of these recipes, did any of this wine spiking actually make its way into some paleo-Christian ceremony. This limestone altar tested positive for cannabis and frankincense that was being burned, they think, in a very ritualistic way. CHARLES STANG: Thank you, Brian. But I do want to push back a little bit on the elevation of this particular real estate in southern Italy. Let me just pull up my notes here. 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. The phrasing used in the book and by others is "the pagan continuity hypothesis". But I don't hold-- I don't hang my hat on that claim. And please just call me Charlie. In fact, he found beer, wine, and mead all mixed together in a couple of different places. And I want to ask you about specifically the Eleusinian mysteries, centered around the goddesses Demeter and Persephone. 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. I mean, in the absence of the actual data, that's my biggest question. 32:57 Ancient languages and Brian's education . So, like, they're wonderstruck, or awestruck by their libations and their incense. 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? So it wasn't just a random place to find one of these spiked wines. Wonderful, well, thank you. 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. 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 I think oversight also comes in handy within organized religion. BRIAN MURARESKU: Right. And the quote you just read from Burkert, it's published by Harvard University Press in 1985 as Greek Religion. What Brian labels the religion with no name. 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. Lots of Greek artifacts, lots of Greek signifiers. 8 "The winds, the sea . If beer was there that long ago, what kind of beer was it? You won't find it in many places other than that. 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. And what do you believe happens to you when you do that? And if it's one thing Catholicism does very, very well, it's contemplative mysticism.