pagan continuity hypothesis pagan continuity hypothesis

And this is at a time when we're still hunting and gathering. I think psychedelics are just one piece of the puzzle. Now, I don't put too much weight into that. 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." "@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! A rebirth into a new conception of the self, the self's relationship to things that are hard to define, like God. He decides to get people even more drunk. In the Classics world, there's a pagan continuity hypothesis with the very origin of Christianity, and many overt references to Greek plays in the Gospel of John. 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 the Eastern Aegean. I mean, I asked lots of big questions in the book, and I fully acknowledge that. In the same place in and around Pompeii, this is where Christianity is really finding its roots. 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. It is not psychedelics. 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 all we know-- I mean, we can't decipher sequence by sequence what was happening. There is evidence that has been either overlooked or perhaps intentionally suppressed. Now, I mentioned that Brian and I had become friends. The phrasing used in the book and by others is "the pagan continuity hypothesis". Just from reading Dioscorides and reading all the different texts, the past 12 years have absolutely transformed the way I think about wine. President and CEO, First Southeast Financial Corp and First Federal Savings and Loan Director, Carolina First Bank and The South Financial Group So there's a whole slew of sites I want to test there. Like the wedding at Cana, which my synopsis of that event is a drunkard getting a bunch of drunk people even more drunk. And I write, at the very end of the book, I hope that they'd be proud of this investigation. Here's the proof of concept. And I'll just list them out quickly. And I'm happy to see we have over 800 people present for this conversation. Brian is the author of a remarkable new book that has garnered a lot of attention and has sold a great many copies. Its proponents maintain that the affable, plump old fellow associated with Christmas derives from the character of Arctic medical practitioners. 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. BRIAN MURARESKU: Now we're cooking with grease, Dr. Stang. First act is your evidence for psychedelics among the so-called pagan religions in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East. But it survives. 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. So the big question is, what kind of drug was this, if it was a drug? 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." Interesting. You're not confident that the pope is suddenly going to issue an encyclical. Not because they just found that altar. We see lots of descriptions of this in the mystical literature with which you're very familiar. 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 don't know if there's other examples of such things. I took this to Greg [? Oh, I hope I haven't offended you, Brian. And I'm not even sure what that piece looks like or how big it is. I did go straight to [INAUDIBLE] Papangelli in Eleusis, and I went to the museum. 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 the Greek god of wine, intoxication. 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 Brian, once again, thank you so much. And by the way, I'm not here trying to protect Christianity from the evidence of psychedelic use. In my previous posts on the continuity hypothesis . They're mixing potions. 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. He co-writes that with Gordon Wasson and Albert Hofmann, who famously-- there it is, the three authors. So it's hard for me to write this and talk about this without acknowledging the Jesuits who put me here. Now, here's-- let's tack away from hard, scientific, archaeobotanical evidence for a moment. That would require an entirely different kind of evidence. And we had a great chat, a very spirited chat about the mysteries and the psychedelic hypothesis. Part 1 Brian C. Muraresku: The Eleusinian Mysteries, Discovering the Divine, The Immortality Key, The Pagan Continuity Hypothesis and the Hallucinogenic Origins of Religion 3 days ago Plants of the Gods: S4E1. All rights reserved. I mean, this really goes to my deep skepticism. I'm going to come back to that idea of proof of concept. In this way, the two traditions coexisted in a syncretic form for some time before . She had the strange sense that every moment was an eternity of its own. That they were what you call extreme beverages. 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? But clearly, when you're thinking about ancient Egypt or elsewhere, there's definitely a funerary tradition. Several theories address the issue of the origin of the Romanians.The Romanian language descends from the Vulgar Latin dialects spoken in the Roman provinces north of the "Jireek Line" (a proposed notional line separating the predominantly Latin-speaking territories from the Greek-speaking lands in Southeastern Europe) in Late Antiquity.The theory of Daco-Roman continuity argues that the . Thank you. "The Jews" are not after Ye. So can you reflect for us where you really are and how you chose to write this book? 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." There aren't any churches or basilicas, right, in the first three centuries, in this era we're calling paleo-Christianity. 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? To be a Catholic is to believe that you are literally consuming the blood of Christ to become Christ. Certainly these early churchmen used whatever they could against the forms of Christian practice they disapproved of, especially those they categorized as Gnostic. It's really quite simple, Charlie. He calls it a drug against grief in Greek, [SPEAKING GREEK]. What's the wine? Hard archaeobotanical, archaeochemical data, I haven't seen it. 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 . I mean, about 25 years ago, actually. 40:15 Witches, drugs, and the Catholic Church . And we know the mysteries were there. 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. 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 book was published by Saint Martin's Press in September 2020 and has generated a whirlwind of attention. 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. Here's your Western Eleusis. Which, again, what I see are small groups of people getting together to commune with the dead. BRIAN MURARESKU: But you're spot on. 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. And that's what I get into in detail in the book. It's this 22-acre site of free-standing limestone, some rising 20 feet in the air, some weighing 50 tons. According to Muraresku, this work, BOOK REVIEW which "presents the pagan continuity hypothesis with a psychedelic twist," addresses two fundamental questions: "Before the rise of Christianity, did the Ancient Greeks consume a secret psychedelic sacrament during their most famous and well-attended religious rituals? That is my dog Xena. Brian's thesis, that of the Pagan Continuity Hypothesis, was explored by Alexander Hislop in his "The Two Babylons", 1853, as a Protestant treatise in the spirit of Martin Luther as Alexander too interjects the Elusinian Mysteries. And considering the common background of modern religions (the Pagan Continuity hypothesis), any religious group who thinks they are chosen or correct are promoting a simplistic and ignorant view of our past. Maybe part of me is skeptical, right? And I-- in my profession, we call this circumstantial, and I get it. And then at some point they go inland. In fact, he found beer, wine, and mead all mixed together in a couple of different places. But by and large, no, we don't really know. That's just everlasting. So it wasn't just a random place to find one of these spiked wines. I've no doubt that Brian has unearthed and collected a remarkable body of evidence, but evidence of what, exactly? Psychedelics are a lens to investigate this stuff. CHARLES STANG: Brian, I wonder if you could end by reflecting on the meaning of dying before you die. Many people see that as symbolic or allegorical or just a nice thing, which is not the case. But what we do know about the wine of the time is that it was routinely mixed with plants and herbs and potentially fungi. 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. There have been breakthroughs, too, which no doubt kept Brian going despite some skepticism from the academy, to say the least. This book by Brian Muraresku, attempts to answer this question by delving into the history of ancient secret religions dating back thousands of years. 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. And shouldn't we all be asking that question? McGovern also finds wine from Egypt, for example, in 3150 BC, wine that is mixed with a number of interesting ingredients. On Monday, February 22, we will be hosting a panel discussion taking up the question what is psychedelic chaplaincy. So here's a question for you. And that's the mysteries of Dionysus. To become truly immortal, Campbell talks about entering into a sense of eternity, which is the infinite present here and now. The mysteries of Dionysus, a bit weirder, a bit more off the grid. You mentioned, too, early churchmen, experts in heresies by the name of Irenaeus of Lyons and Hippolytus of Rome. She joins me for most events and meetings. So Plato, Pindar, Sophocles, all the way into Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, it's an important thing. Examine the pros and cons of the continuity theory of aging, specifically in terms of how it neglects to consider social institutions or chronically ill adults. Mark and Brian cover the Eleusinian Mysteries, the pagan continuity hypothesis, early Christianity, lessons from famed religious scholar Karen Armstrong, overlooked aspects of influential philosopher William James's career, ancient wine and ancient beer, experiencing the divine within us, the importance of "tikkun olam"repairing and . 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. 8 "The winds, the sea . So there's lots of interesting details here that filter through. I opened the speculation, Dr. Stang, that the Holy Grail itself could have been some kind of spiked concoction. So how to put this? 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. Richard Evans Schultes and the Search for Ayahuasca 17 days ago Plants of the Gods: S3E10. And I think that that's the real question here. Listen to #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, an episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, easily on Podbay - the best podcast player on the web. Then there's what were the earliest Christians doing with the Eucharist. Now, that date is obviously very suggestive because that's precisely the time the Christians were establishing a beachhead in Rome. There's all kinds of reasons I haven't done it. 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 why do you think psychedelics are so significant that they might usher in a new Reformation? So that's from Burkert, a very sober scholar and the dean of all scholarship on Greek religion. So throughout the book, you make the point that ancient beer and wine are not like our beer and wine. What does that have to do with Christianity? BRIAN MURARESKU:: It's a simple formula, Charlie. CHARLES STANG: Right. 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? I mean, I wish it were easier. That also only occurs in John, another epithet of Dionysus. And what do you believe happens to you when you do that? [2] It was it was barley, water, and something else. 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. #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 Brought to you by GiveWell.org charity research and effective giving and 5-Bullet Friday, my very own email newsletter. 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 appreciate this. 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. Just imagine, I have to live with me. So I think this was a minority of early Christians. Where you find the grain, you may have found ergot. The continuity between pagan and Christian cult nearby the archaeological area of Naquane in Capo di Ponte. Copyright 2023 The President and Fellows of Harvard College, The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name. This time, tonight I'll say that it's just not my time yet. 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. And her best guess is that it was like this open access sanctuary. Here is how I propose we are to proceed. BRIAN MURARESKU: Right. So what evidence can you provide for that claim? I want to thank you for putting up with me and my questions. And he found some beer and wine-- that was a bit surprising. They were relevant to me in going down this rabbit hole. 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. 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. I mean, something of symbolic significance, something monumental. So even from the very beginning, it wasn't just barley and water. They are guaranteed an afterlife. I think the wine certainly does. And I think we're getting there. He was greatly influenced by Sigmund Freud (1940) who viewed an infant's first relationship - usually with the mother - as "the prototype of all later love-relations". Here's the big question. But unfortunately, it doesn't connect it to Christianity. Is there a smoking gun? And so in my afterword, I present this as a blip on the archaeochemical radar. I don't know why it's happening now, but we're finally taking a look. 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 I think what the pharmaceutical industry can do is help to distribute this medicine. BRIAN MURARESKU: I look forward to it, Charlie. The divine personage in whom this cult centered was the Magna Mater Deum who was conceived as the source of all life as well as the personification of all the powers of nature.\[Footnote:] Willoughby, Pagan Regeneration, p. 114.\ 7 She was the "Great Mother" not only "of all the gods," but of all men" as well. The continuity theory proposes that older adults maintain the same activities, behaviors, personalities, and relationships of the past. 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 I think there are so many sites and excavations and so many chalices that remain to be tested. You can see that inscribed on a plaque in Saint Paul's monastery at Mount Athos in Greece. BRIAN MURARESKU: Right. Including, all the way back to Gobekli Tepe, which is why I mentioned that when we first started chatting. We don't have to look very hard to find that. For me, that's a question, and it will yield more questions. And so the big question is what was happening there? 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 what about the alleged democratization with which you credit the mysteries of Dionysus, or the role of women in that movement? I think the only big question is what the exact relationship was from a place like that over to Eleusis. 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. CHARLES STANG: OK. Now you're a good sport, Brian. 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. We have other textual evidence. 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 yet I talked to an atheist who has one experience with psilocybin and is immediately bathed in God's love. The continuity theory of normal aging states that older adults will usually maintain the same activities, behaviors, relationships as they did in their earlier years of life. Now, Brian managed to write this book while holding down a full time practice in international law based in Washington DC. Maybe I'm afraid I'll take the psychedelic and I won't have what is reported in the literature from Hopkins and NYU. Get personalized recommendations, and learn where to watch across hundreds of streaming providers. Copyright 2023 President and Fellows of Harvard College. 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. You may have already noticed one such question-- not too hard. 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? [texts-excerpt] penalty for cutting mangroves in floridaFREE EstimateFREE Estimate I expect we will find it. I mean, the honest answer is not much. The altar had been sitting in a museum in Israel since the 1960s and just hadn't been tested. Yeah. It was-- Eleusis was state-administered, a somewhat formal affair. Now, I have no idea where it goes from here, or if I'll take it myself. 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? That is about the future rather than the ancient history. Because they talk about everything else that they take issue with. 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. And I describe that as somehow finding that key to immortality. Why don't we turn the tables and ask you what questions you think need to be posed? 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. And I offer psychedelics as one of those archaic techniques of ecstasy that seems to have been relevant and meaningful to our ancestors. That's all just fancy wordplay. 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. And let's start with our earliest evidence from the Stone Age and the Bronze Age. Again, how did Christianity take hold in a world with such a rich mystical tradition? 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? Maybe there's some residual fear that's been built up in me. OK-- maybe one of those ancient beers. And not least because if I were to do it, I'd like to do so in a deeply sacred ritual. CHARLES STANG: OK. And that's a question equally for ancient historians and for contemporary seekers and/or good Catholics. Where are the drugs? There's no mistake in her mind that it was Greek. So how does Dionysian revelries get into this picture? Dogs, indicative of the Greek goddess Hecate, who, amongst other things was known as the [GREEK], the dog eater. CHARLES STANG: OK. An actual spiked wine. CHARLES STANG: 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? Not because it's not there, because it hasn't been tested. Because at my heart, I still consider myself a good Catholic boy. 18.3C: Continuity Theory. We're going to get there very soon. CHARLES STANG: 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.