American Alchemy with Jesse Michels - Did Jesus do Mushrooms? | Brian Muraresku

Episode Date: October 4, 2024

This week’s American Alchemist is Brian Muraresku: Brian is the New York Times bestselling author of the book, The Immortality Key. It documents the Ancient Greek mystery rituals that many said held civilization together and that the fathers of western civilization (Plato, Aristotle etc.) all underwent. Many of these great thinkers claimed the rituals helped them encounter “their immortal soul”. In The Immortality Key, Brian makes a strong case that the drink they consumed in the mystery rituals contained psychedelics and that these rituals had serious effects on the beginnings of Christianity. *** AMERICAN ALCHEMY is an original series hosted by Jesse Michels that explores the frontier of science and tech. Each week, we bring you exclusive interviews with some of the leading thinkers of our time. INSTAGRAM ➤ https://www.instagram.com/jessemichels TWITTER ➤ https://twitter.com/AlchemyAmerican EMAIL/BOOKINGS ➤ [e-mail] SUBSCRIBE TO OUR CHANNEL: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7eOJzNRWY4l2UTDvIquxYg?app=desktop original music: https://open.spotify.com/artist/6LlLRudDi60Uy4jcmOSEs1 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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played a foundational role in Western civilization and Christianity. Maybe you already know that Moses's burning bush actually could have been a DMT-rich acacia tree. Or John Allegro's theory that the Eucharist was actually an Aminita muskaria mushroom. But this week's American alchemist Brian Murrow Rescue takes this line of inquiry to the next level, with his New York Times best-selling book, The Immortality Key. Was Dionysus the God of Wine, or was Dionysus the God of psychedelics? The book focuses on Elusis, a little place 13 miles northwest of Athens. The most important Greeks at the time, Pythagoras, Ledo, Aristotle,

basically the founders of Western civilization would all go there on a pilgrimage and engage in a secret hermetically sealed ritual, possibly involving psychedelics and ritual sacrifice. People went to Elusis as human beings. They walked away, thinking they were embalmage, immortal. Give me time forever. Give me time forever. Spilling the secrets of what went on at Alusus was punishable by death. This is the fight club of the ancient world. There's even a lot of

evidence that early Christian cults practiced these ancient mystery rituals. And you've never had a psychedelic experience. I'm having one right now, Jesse. Brian also happens to be close friends with Leslie Kane, the New York Times journalist that has broken pretty much every major UFO story in the New York Times over the last four years. So we discuss a bit of of that too. Without further ado, please welcome this week's American alchemist in the truest sense of the word, Brian Murrescu. I'm here with my friend and the author of the Immortality Key, Brian Murrurescu. It's a fantastic book. It's a New York Times bestseller. It's a book that almost begets more questions than it does answers, although it has a lot of very interesting

answers and follow-ups to earlier work by people like Carl Ruck. Why don't we get into why we're here first, because a lot of the viewers might be wondering why we're in this very elegant setting. We're in the majestic Hagia Sophia, this Greek Orthodox cathedral, right beside the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. This in many ways is kind of the heart of the mystery of my book, trying to figure out the roots of Christianity and how we got to these beautiful cathedrals. It didn't start this way. Is it possible that some communities of early Greek-speaking Christians at some point in history, anywhere between 33 and 300 AD, may have availed themselves of what I think is the kind of technology

for which we can find evidence in the ancient sources. In other words, was Dionysus the god of wine or was Dionysus the god of psychedelics? It's a big question that Professor Ruck at Boston University asked 42 years ago, when he released the road to Elusis. And that was the book that even when I was an undergrad kind of sent me down the rabbit hole of trying to figure out like what was wine in the ancient world, right?

And could it have been spiked with mushrooms or other visionary plants, hallucinogenic herbs, toxins? I think that is a really interesting question, not only because there's data in the sources, but because for the first time, we're unearthing hard, scientific, organic data to actually support what was in those ancient chalises. Murrescu thinks that the Kekeon drink consumed at the Elyssinian mystery rituals

contained ergot, a fungus that grows on wheat and contains LSD. Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. wrote about the influence of the mystery religions on Christianity as far back as 1950. You can't ignore the similarities from the pagan world to the Christian world. And he attributes it to an unconscious process of ceremonies and rights from antiquity, making their way into Christianity. So a lot of this is centered around this specific spiritual capital. If Athens was sort of the political capital,

you had 13 miles northwest of Athens, the center called Elusis, where these mystery rituals went on. What exactly happened there? I wish I knew, Jesse. I've been trying to figure out for 25 years. Nobody knows. This is the Fight Club of the Ancient World.

Whatever happened there, no one talked about it, under penalty of death. So it was taken quite seriously, but what we're essentially talking about are very elaborate rights of death and rebirth. And not as some footnote, not as an afterthought. This was, in some senses, the spiritual epicenter of the ancient Mediterranean. It called to Plato and Sophocles and Pindar. It called to Cicero in the first century BC, who called Alusus the most divine and exceptional thing Athens ever produced. And a lot of this was somewhat pre-Socratic.

So you have a favorite author, Peter Kingsley. I do. And this famous quote, if you die before you die, you will not die, when you die, which kind of touches on what you were just talking about with Plato. So what is this element of simulating death? You know, what does it do to an individual person? Do you have any sort of sense? Well, that's the mystery.

Whatever it does to somebody is transformative. I mean, people went to elusis as human beings, and from what little testimony survived, again, because it's secret under penalty of death, they walked away thinking they were immortal. An pethanis, prine petanis, denta pethanis, otan petanis. If you die before you die, you won't die when you die.

And I do think it harkens back to this ancient tradition of confronting our mortality in order to achieve immortality. Something happens in that dissolving of the ego, right? of the ego, right? The self that we normally identify with, our passions, emotions, our experiences, our psyche, our psychology. Something happens when that is under threat and when it disappears. And so to Plato's point, the way that they saw these mysteries was not so much a learning process, although there were things to learn, there were rituals to perform. It was almost an unlearning

process of kind of shedding back, you know, peeling back the layers of the onion. So you start writing the book 12 years ago? Is that right? And what's the purpose of the, like, why do you think it's important that people realize this? What are the implications for today? Because we're suffering from an identity crisis. It's partly why we're sitting here. There's this narrative that, you know, the ancient Greeks essentially draft the blueprints for Western civilization and in comes Christianity to save our soul.

And there is the divide. There's the big divide between reason and faith, right? Or between science and religion. And it's still here today. And Huxley predicts that there might be a religion around psychedelics, possibly a new elusis, which Albert Hoffman talks about as well. Do you think that happens? And if so, what form does it take? Is it state sanctioned?

Is it outside of the state? I mean, that's a good question. I mean, over the next 10 years, I think you're going to see a bit of everything. So the state sanctioned, Elyucinian kind of ordered mysteries, I see the FDA. you know, like what's happening in Oregon, for example. It's crazy to think about like a regulated ecosystem for therapeutic psilocybin. I mean, that was unthinkable a few years ago. So there's the state intervening to produce, again, these set and settings where these irrational states of mind

seem to have incredible medicinal purpose, right? For everything from anxiety, depression, end of life distress, PTSD, etc. there is a place for that kind of sanctioned medicine. You're going to have the underground, the Diannesian wild kind of, you know, from Woodstock to Burning Man, it never really went anywhere. And Grateful Dead helped it along the way. So you're always going to have a part of that. And then just maybe in kind of a harmony between the two is the First Amendment, which, again,

there seems to be a compelling argument for the responsible, sincere, very sacred use of things like psychedelics within religious exercise, right? It's kind of guaranteed by the First Amendment before the right to free speech and assembly is that right to religion. What else is America known for? But for that. And so we don't have a clear path yet. I mean, there's some use of psychedelics in the Native American church, some Brazilian spawn churches. But I think the next 10 years, you're going to see things like psilocybin, maybe LSD, DMT, and others begin to float their way into either new churches. or maybe even organized religion.

What do you say to the person who reads Plato and says, well, that's just a guardian creating kind of a noble myth? And in fact, this is all just a lie to make me believe in the afterlife. And it's sort of, you know, as Nietzsche would say, some sort of slave morality to de-emphasize the material life, which is all there is. That's a great explanation. That could very well be the case.

Maybe we're just all inventing it so we can feel better as we pass on to death. I mean, there are folks who look at near-death literature like that. Why do we see the white light? Why would we be equipped for this experience as we're dying? Does it help us die? Does it help those around us experience our death better? I don't know why these near-death phenomena occur. Is there a biological evolutionary basis for it?

What would that be there for? Why would our death be facilitated in that way for purely physiological purposes? I don't know. And these myths in Plato, I have no idea. But I would say, again, about Plato, that his philosophy was the practicing of death and being dead. And I would invite someone who's interested in Plato to look to his guru, right? Like Parmenides or Empedocles or Pythagoras or the Presbyocratics. What were they doing?

What were these rights of incubation that they were practicing? Like going into underground temples, essentially, to meet a goddess, to go into altered states of consciousness, where they could barely feel the pulse, you know, treading somewhere between life and death, waking, and the dream state. I mean, this was part and parcel of ancient Greek civilization. And you've never had a psychedelic experience, is that right? I'm having one right now, Jesse. You've never had a psychedelic experience, but have you had any experiences,

any near-death experiences or any experiences that might be... Here we go. Right. I had a near-death experience when I was five, which I wasn't prepared for at five. My older brother, God bless his heart, accidentally hit me in the head with a golf club right here. I still have a hole in my head. I guess I was hit with like so much adrenaline that I didn't feel any pain. And I actually remember being in the car bleeding to death, my mother holding me, and asking her why she was crying.

Because I couldn't feel anything. And I thought everything was fine. And I felt bliss. I felt enormous bliss and comfort. And we get to the hospital. and I'm rushed into surgery and as the anesthesia kicks in, I feel like I leave my body. And what happens is what I describe it as a dream.

And maybe it was a dream. I don't know what the hell it was. But I remember waking up with this vivid imagery of meeting people and discussing things and being told things, and I wake up at five not knowing what to do with all that until like 10 years later or 20 years later, and I'm reading near-death literature, and I'm reading about mystical experiences.

And it seems to me that this whole dying before dying process is an actual thing that I wasn't looking for. But when I read the literature on psychedelics, I see like a technology, right? That's how Aldous Huxley described it. Like a technology, a biochemical discovery that under very controlled conditions seems to produce sometimes like a very vivid near-death experience, which is kind of worth exploring. I think so too. So you had your own mystery ritual. Maybe so. Maybe so. Maybe we don't know. And I'll let you leave the contents hermetically sealed for fear of punishment.

But yeah, I mean, the thing about Huxley, he was very interested in a fan of William James' transmission theory of consciousness. And if you think about what psilocybin does to the brain is it silences activity in the default mode network, which is the anterior and posterior singular of the brain, which is really where, if you were to have, how's the ego in any part of the brain, it would be there. All of your fears about the future, you know, worries about the past are in that sort of region. And so maybe if you quell or subdue that part of the brain, you are increasing your ability to like tether to elsewhere or something. You're receiving more kind of wisdom or information from elsewhere. It's the hard problem of consciousness that no one has solved.

and maybe we never will, but does the brain generate everything that we experience, or does it transceive, does it modulate consciousness? Does consciousness exist with or without us, right? With or without this physical body? I mean, it's hard to answer that phenomenologically, but again, these near-death states, whether at the end of physical life or through some traumatic event, or maybe in the purposeful induction of them,

I think these are great kind of like border areas. No one goes to Hank's for his spreadsheets. They go for a darn good pizza. Lately, though, the shop's been quiet. So Hank decides to bring back the $1 slice. He asks Copilot in Microsoft Excel to look at his sales and costs to help him see if he can afford it. Co-pilot shows Hank where the money's going

and which little extras make the dollar slice work. Now, Hanks has a line out the door. Hank makes the pizza. Co-Pilot handles the spreadsheets. Learn more at M365Copilot.com slash work. for research. It feels like the world is getting weirder in some sense.

So like if I'm again straw manning all this and I'm going to say apparently aliens exist now and that's the consensus. There's a whole fleet of a look on the ASA. Like what's happening

generally in the ethos? Why are things moving in this strange direction? The alien stuff. So we've been surrounded by aliens forever. Yeah. We used to call them the muses and outside the muses you have angels.

We're sitting under some pretty interesting seraphim right now in the dome of this cathedral. That's right. Yeah, stories of angels and demons and gins and silfs and fairies and boulder grinders and gnomes and elves. You're saying these are all the same thing? Well, I'm saying that they seem to inhabit this space, right?

And Terence McKenna puts it better than anybody. How do we deal with these things? Because they do pop up, even if it's just, you know, children's tales, even if it's just folklore. But they do make their way into the Bible and pagan literature. So what do we do with this stuff? And McKenna says that, you know, it's possible these are autonomous fragments of psychic energy temporarily escaped from the controlling power of the ego. Or do these things actually exist in some kind of like freestanding, autonomous reality

with which we occasionally have Congress? I don't have the answer. That's a great question. I think so. I think, you know, we're just widening the doors of perception to quote Huxley. You know, Diana Posulka, who's a religious studies professor at UNC Wilmington, she got access to the Vatican Archives, which I want to talk to you about as well. And then sort of came out with this theory that 1947 was essentially this dividing line.

And pre-47 and Roswell, people were seeing angels, demons, or whatever contemporary lore, you know, gin, leprechauns, you know, whatever. I forgot leprechauns. Yeah, leprechauns. And then now people kind of see aliens. That is the mythos of today. And so, yeah, do you agree with that or you don't know? I love her book, American Cosmic.

I love her work. The weirdest thing about all of that is even before the 40s, if you go back to the late 19th century, are you familiar with the airships? No. So people, it's kind of like the precursor to visitation events, alien visitation before Betty and Barney Hill before all this stuff. There were a bunch of sightings of what they were called airships, which kind of like, I'm not sure if it's a hot air balloon

or some strange configuration in the sky, but they'd be piloted by humanoid-looking beings. And they'd pop off their airships, sometimes on a ladder, sometimes otherwise, and kind of just settle down on a farm and have a conversation with somebody. And they'd fly off in the technology that was then cognizable at the time. These visitations, in a way, are kind of like a modern mystery event. People don't just walk away traumatize, in some cases they do,

but in other cases, I mean, transformed for the better. Again, not too different from some of the clinical literature on psychedelics and other breakthrough moments, very weird stuff. So, yeah, how do we make sense of this? Some people, you know, have radiation burns and are very scared and fearful, you know, after their experience.

Other people feel an overwhelming sense of love. It's almost like a Gnostic hierophony or revelation where they seem to come out transformed in a positive way. Is there any sort of explanation for this? I wish I knew. I mean, if there is some kind of ambassadorial program happening between this invisible world and our own, I can only say that, and that's giant speculation.

But this, I mean, this... This whole conversation, Well, wonderful. There's a great footnote to the whole thing. So I'm safe to speculate. Yes. It's been around forever, is all I can say. And, you know, it comes in different forms and guises at different periods in history. And you sort of imply that maybe the supper itself was a mystery ritual? Maybe the Kekeon is what Jesus actually drinks. Is that right? Is that a hypothetical possibility?

It's great fodder for speculation, and it's not my idea, so I'm happy to speculate. Right. when Jesus is asked why he talks in parables, right? Jesus isn't always a straight shooter. He tells stories about the mustard seed and the prodigal son and all the rest of it. And when he's asked why he speaks in parables, he says that it's a musterion. And he uses that word in Greek to his followers, which is defined by the Greek lexicon as a religious secret.

A religious secret to be confided only to the initiated and not to be communicated by them to ordinary mortals. That's in the actual Greek lexicon. So Jesus is saying that Christianity by definition is born with secrets, not necessarily drugs, but secrets and visions, absolutely. So putting Jesus almost through a neoplatonic lens, maybe he's one of a few people to have reached an amnesis. Jesus takes Judas aside and he sort of says something like, you know, I am you or you are me or something, something, you know, of that nature,

Is the implication here? Others can sort of reach that level? Well, I mean, that's the promise in John's gospel. And so I spend a lot of time in my book looking at the gospel of John. I cite, like, the key to the Christian mysteries, I call it, in the sixth chapter of John. And it's John's strange version of the Eucharist,

which is in beautiful Greek. Hotroga mutton-sarka, Kaipina-Mota-Heima, which means whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life. So not will have an afterlife, but has immortality. A few verses later, he says, and a moi mena, ga guanato.

That person, again, who eats my flesh and drinks my blood, remains in me and I in them. In other words, we become one. This is the whole point of communion. It's to become not just Christ-like, but one with Christ. And that's a motif

that you can trace directly back to the mystery rights of Dionysus, and other mystery initiations. And it's funny, as Eleusus was about to be destroyed in the 4th century AD, there was a notion. They were talking about this, you know? Like, what is this interplay of democracy and the survival of our species and the mysteries?

Are these all platitudes? Does this really mean anything in real life? Well, in 364, when the Roman Emperor Valentinian outlawed nocturnal rights and tried to shut down the mysteries, Prytextatus was this Roman hierophant, an initiate in the El Elyssinian. mysteries, and he tells Valentinian that to kill the mysteries of Elusis is to kill us, that the human species would be in peril if you shut down the mysteries, which means not just

democracy, but like life itself would become disastrous. Life would be abiotos in Greek, unlivable. In other words, keep Christianity around, but to kill the mystery that is somehow related to it is just possibly to put the human species in peril. Well, if that's the case, our mystery ritual is still going on now? Yes. Okay. They happen here every Sunday. Got it. So the sort of communion with the saints is maybe a modern mystery.

I think so. We talked about the creation of sacred spaces for the irrational to come into our life. This is prayer, right? And this is almsgiving, and this is basic service. Well, thank you, Brian. I really appreciate this. This was awesome. It was a very, as I expected,

wide-ranging discussion about all sorts of things. Amen. Thank you. Thank you, brother.