Making Sense with Sam Harris - #346 — The Best Kept Secret In History?

Episode Date: December 22, 2023

Sam Harris speaks with Brian Muraresku about ancient mystery religions and the possible psychedelic roots of Christianity. They discuss the Mysteries of Eleusis, the “pagan continuity hypothesis,” the cult of Dionysius, the Dead Sea scrolls and the Gnostic Gospels, Christianity as a cult of human sacrifice, the evidence for the use of psychedelics in ancient rites, the chemical analysis of ancient wine and beer, why Brian hasn’t tried psychedelics, the need for a modern Mysteries of Eleusis, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

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Today I'm speaking with Brian Murerescu. Brian holds a degree in Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit from Brown University, as well as a degree in law from Georgetown. He is a practicing lawyer and the author of a fascinating book titled The Immortality Key, The Secret History of the Religion with No Name. And that's the topic of our conversation today. We talk about the mystery religions of the ancient world and the possible psychedelic roots of Christianity. We discuss the mysteries of Eleusis, the pagan continuity hypothesis,

the cult of Dionysus, the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Gnostic Gospels, Christianity as a cult of human sacrifice, the evidence for the use of psychedelics and ancient rites, the chemical analysis of ancient wine and beer, why Brian hasn't tried psychedelics himself, the need for something like a modern mysteries of Eleusisives and other topics. Anyway, fascinating piece of history here that is rarely thought about. And now I bring you Brian Murarescu. I am here with Brian Murarescu. Brian, thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me, Sam. It's great to be here. Yes, you've written this fascinating book, which I hear rumors is going to be a fascinating documentary at some point.

This is The Immortality Key, The Secret History of the Religion with No Name. Am I right about that? Is there a film being made of this book? Yes. I'm not sure how much I can say about it, but there is an exceptional team that came together to put this on the screen. Nice. Nice. Well, that's exciting. Do you know the timeline for that? Probably a couple of years, although I'm sure I'm wrong about that. And are you going to be on camera for that? Or are you going to be the host of that? Yeah, for better or worse, I guess I'm a protagonist. So I'll be leading you down the blind alleyways of history.

Well, that will be different than writing the book, no doubt. Although this book, unlike most other books, really is a bit of a travelogue. I mean, you went all over the place to write this thing, and it's a literary or historical adventure. Give us a quick snapshot of your background, though. You have this interesting bio that doesn't immediately suggest plumbing the depths of psychedelic history. Where do you come from, and how did you get into this? Yeah, I guess I'll break the ice with the obvious, is that I've actually never experimented with psychedelics, which always surprises people. I'm a relatively boring guy. In my early 40s, I have two daughters. And I guess my journey began as a teenager learning Latin and Greek, of all things. I was forced to learn these dead languages

at the hands of the Jesuits when I was a teenager. I went to an all-boys prep school in Philadelphia where the last thing I thought I'd be good at was dead language, but turns out that came much easier than mathematics. And so from there, I was very fortunate to get a scholarship to Brown University where I doubled down on dead languages and studied Sanskrit and later classical Arabic. And after eight years of linguistic studies, did a 180 and went off to law school because I was tired of being broke. So I sold out to Wall Street and I worked in New York for a few years and then later moved down to D.C. where I continued practicing international law for the better part of 15 years until I figured there was a story here worth writing that had really consumed my imagination on nights and weekends because, well, I felt like I was losing my soul to the practice of law. And in my quiet moments, I'd always return to the classics and to the things I was studying as a younger boy. What is the significance of saying of these

languages that they are dead? It's that no one, they're not in current use as spoken languages by anyone, or is it actually impossible to know that one is speaking them correctly? active Latin speakers today. Sanskrit is sort of the same. It's been retained by the priestly class, but it's the Brahmins, but it's not an active oral language and it's really complicated grammatically. So Latin in twists and turns became what we know as Italian and then Sanskrit, more or less Hindi, although again, with lots of twists and turns. And then ancient Greek to modern Greek, maybe it's a bit more direct, but similar. But though a modern Greek speaker might have trouble declining ancient Greek verbs. Yeah. Yeah. Well, as you point out in the book, ancient Greek is really the key to so much of what we seek to know about this part of the past, in particular, the roots of

Christianity, which you go into in the book. So the thesis of the book, correct me if I'm wrong, is essentially your investigations into the role played by psychedelics both in classical antiquity and in early Christianity. Is that an adequate encapsulation of the book? Yeah, sure. Yeah, I was really taken by the idea of what Houston Smith, one of the great religious scholars of the 20th century, referred to as the best kept secret in history. That kind of stops you in your tracks. This idea that the ancient Greeks may have consumed something like a psychedelic potion in their holiest mysteries and their most sacred ceremonies, and that just perhaps this formula, this potion, made its way into paleo-Christianity in those early days after the life of Christ. And it's not my idea. This is an idea that goes back probably to the 1970s, if not before. There

was a bit of an incendiary book that was published in 1978 called The Road to Eleusis. And it was there that Gordon Wasson, the famed ethnomicologist who rediscovers psilocybin-containing mushrooms in the mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico in the 1950s, teams up with Albert Hoffman, Oaxaca, Mexico in the 1950s, teams up with Albert Hoffman, of all people, who famously synthesized LSD back in 1938, and then a fellow classicist, Professor Ruck, who's still alive. He's the only one of the trio still alive, now 88 years old, a tenured professor at Boston University. Together, they proffered the idea that the ancient Greeks were, in fact fact consuming something like an LSD-laced beer in the Mysteries of Eleusis, which was sort of like the Vatican of the ancient Greek world that survived for about 2,000 years. So as long as we've had Christianity today, the ancient pre-Christian, very pagan

Greeks, once a year, would show up on the doorstep of the sanctuary Eleusis, northwest of Athens, and indeed consume this potion whose ingredients and whose true character had remained elusive for so many centuries. Well, I want to talk about Eleusis. This is pretty much the starting point for your journey in the book, and it's certainly a natural starting point when talking about the role that the psychedelics may or may not have played in antiquity. I guess you also talk about the Soma cult, as attested in the Vedas, which I guess is equally ancient. Actually, what I had forgotten about, if I ever knew it, about the mysteries of Eleusis is just how long they persisted for. I mean, this is astonishing

history. There's nearly 2,000 years of a continuous rite that became central to the spiritual and intellectual life of the ancient Greeks and through the Hellenistic period and even into the Roman conquest of the area. And the people who we know or have good reason to believe participated are, you know, they're the leading lights of ancient Western thought there. I mean, Plato and Aristotle and Sophocles and Pindar and among the Romans, we have Cicero and Marcus Aurelius and others. And it's just astounding history to contemplate.

Marcus Aurelius and others. And it's just astounding history to contemplate. And also, it's yet another thing that early Christianity consciously destroyed in a Taliban-like erasure of the past. I mean, this is in the fourth century. Before we go to Eleusis itself, the book you just cited, The Road to Eleusis, was controversial. It was especially controversial for Ruck, right? I mean, the classicist who contributed to it. Why was this thesis so radioactive in classical circles? Because as we get into the details, I think it'll become obvious, certainly to anyone who has taken psychedelics, that it is all too plausible that psychedelics of some sort were involved here. Why was this just, I mean, this essentially led to the scholarly cancellation of Ruck, as you described. Yeah, correct. I think in 1978, it was just the wrong book at the wrong time. I think it was

quite a few decades ahead of its time. My book came out in 2020, and I don't think I've experienced an iota of the controversy that Karl Ruck once did in the late 1970s through the 1980s and 1990s. I mean, it wasn't very controversial, I think, even then in the 70s that indigenous or traditional societies, for example, had consumed psychedelic compounds of one kind or another for many millennia across the world, from the Americas to Africa and the Asia Pacific. But for some reason, the notion that the ancient Greeks, and Kralrock actually says this in The Road to Eleusis, it's one of my favorite lines. He says that the notion that the ancient Greeks, indeed, some of the most famous and intelligent among them, all those whom you named, by the way,

and not just Greeks, but Romans, and not just Romans, but emperors, Marcus Aurelius himself, the fact that they would enter so fully into such a rationality was anathema to the academy of the time. I mean, imagine the founding fathers of Western civilization getting high on drugs and inventing democracy. It's absurd. Well, so what is it that we know about the mysteries of Eleusis in terms of when they were conducted, how they were conducted, who attended, just the mechanics of it? And I think as we describe this, it'll seem increasingly likely that it had to be more than just a collective initiation unaided by pharmacology. a collective initiation unaided by pharmacology. I mean, given the life transformative effects alleged, for it to be reproducible and to bear that significance, it really would be hard to believe that it's just a matter of people having hiked a long time in the sun and gotten dehydrated and gotten inducted into some collective hysteria, again, unaided by something in that beer. Yeah, I think you nailed it. Professor Ruck refers to that experience,

atalusis, as the culminating experience of a lifetime. So what we do know is that it was absolutely transforming. We know bits and details, and we have clues that have been left in some of the literature, but it's important to point out that it was illegal to reveal what you saw at Eleusis and what you had experienced at Eleusis. And it typically only happened once in your life, typically later in life. So this is something that you, whether consciously or not, were preparing for for a very long time, right? For decades as part of your spiritual journey. So there was a certain maturity that attended these mysteries. Is there any reason to believe that a person could only attend the mysteries once, or are there records of people having done it more than once?

Yeah, as far as we know, for some reason it only happened once, or actually twice in the same sequence. So you would make this 13-mile march northwest of Athens. It would start in Athens. It's a nine-day affair, which included this ritual march and fasting and this procession, sacrifices along the way from Athens up to what's today called Elefsina. It's still there, the archaeological site. And so what happens along the way, we're not quite sure about, but on your first approach, it always happens in the fall, you become what's called a mystes, a mystic. It's where we get the word mystic, which literally means to close your eyes or to shut your

mouth. In other words, you are being initiated into the first level of this great pageant, this culminating experience of your life. And then only on your second approach, do you enter fully into the telesterion, the ancient sanctuary that was dedicated to the goddess Demeter. And only then, perhaps, do you drink this ritual potion that we mentioned before, which is called the koukion in ancient Greek. And only then did you become what's called an epoptes, which in Greek means something like the person who has seen it all. You've seen it everything. It was an eye-opening event. And that's very, very clear about the ancient mysteries. You saw something. And you mentioned Aristotle, for example, as a potential initiate. He was also

very clear that you did not go to Eleusis to learn anything. And he uses the Greek word mathēn, like mathematics. You went there to experience something. And he uses the word pathain, like pathos. You went there to actually suffer, to experience something. And we know to see something. Plato describes it as a blessed sight and vision that he experienced in sort of a state of ecstasy. And through time and time again, this is what the initiates are saying about the experience. You went there and you saw something that forever changed you and convinced you beyond all rationality that you were in fact an immortal, that you would never die. Yeah. And it's amazing to consider that these rites were practiced continuously for about a thousand

years prior to Plato and Aristotle. Correct. They're described in Homer, which is, what is that, 500 years or so before Plato and Aristotle? Correct. The rites could begin as far as we know, in some form or another, 1500 BC. So we're talking the Mycenaean period, which is extremely old as far as classics goes. Yeah. So the temple at Eleusis was the temple to Demeter and focused on essentially a cult around the Persephone story. Is that correct? Correct, yeah. Persephone, to remind those who haven't thought about her since their high school mythology class, she's the one who's abducted, better word is raped. a better word is raped. She's brought down to the underworld by the king of the dead himself,

Hades, and she's held captive there. And she's only released on the covenant that she has to return once again to hell, which has always been interpreted as a fertility cycle, as an explanation of how the seasons rotate one after the other. So she always has to spend one part of the year in hell, and then she can rejoin her mother Demeter for two-thirds of the year back on earth. But at its base, this is a ritual of death and rebirth, just like Persephone herself. So when the initiates go there, it is thought that they experience something like her death and resurrection. So again, the notion of resurrection centuries before the birth of Christianity. And there were other mystery cults in practice simultaneously,

right? And very likely with their own pharmacological enhancements. So there's the cult of Dionysus that you describe. And just give me a picture of the religious landscape at that point as we know it. How far did it spread geographically? We're talking about ancient Greece, but what does that mean on the map? And we're going to bring the birth of Christianity into the story here. How do you view the religious landscape during this period? So it's an interesting one. And I don't think it's too different from the landscape today, to be totally honest, which is part of the reason I was attracted to these mysteries, even as a teenager, because there's something about choice and movement and idiosyncrasy to

these mysteries. It's very personal. It's about your personal spiritual journey to the exclusion of what was largely a state cult practice where there were those Olympian gods and there were certain sacrifices that were made at certain times of the year to well-known divinities. And that was all well and good, but there was a bit of roteness to it. And so in these mysteries, again, they're defined best by this notion of death and rebirth. It's personalizing that spiritual journey in an approach to the true self. So there's this notion of dying to the false self and resurrecting to the notion of the true self, which comes in many, many forms. So it's not just in mainland Greece

itself. We're talking about the Eleusinian mysteries, which are headquartered there. The mysteries of Dionysus you can find all over the ancient Mediterranean, by the way, before, during, and after the life of Christ. And there's a number of parallels, I think, between those Dionysian mysteries, the mysteries of wine, and the later mysteries of Christianity, which actually they themselves were referred to and compared to mysteries by one and the later mysteries of Christianity, which actually they themselves were referred to and compared to mysteries by one of the church fathers, Tertullian. So, this is not just wild speculation. There's this notion of secrets and magical sacraments and hidden ceremonies that are unique to the mysteries and do show up in early Christianity.

But there were all kinds of mysteries around the ancient Mediterranean. And during the Hellenistic period that you mentioned, that's basically the period after Alexander the Great. So in the wake of Alexander in the fourth century BC and beyond, the Greek influence, the Greek language, Greek ritual, and some of these mysteries could be found anywhere from the West, so Iberia, what today we call Spain and Portugal, all the way to literally Afghanistan, Central Asia, and all across North Africa. So the reach of this culture and this idea of mystery was vast. And it precedes the Greeks, by the way. The Greeks likely adopted this notion of the mysteries from either the Egyptians or Mesopotamian civilizations, histories from either the Egyptians or Mesopotamian civilizations, or I make the comparison to the Vedic civilizations in South Asia, you know, millennia before classical Greece. So this is an

old tradition, which in all likelihood is probably prehistoric, actually. We're talking potentially tens of thousands of years. I want to read the quote you put in the book from Cicero, who's one of the more famous Roman statesmen and orators and writers that we recall. We don't know how much history has been lost to us, but he survives. But it's just impossible for me to imagine a statement like this about an ordinary ritual. So this is Cicero commenting upon the Eleusinian mysteries. For it appears to me that among the many exceptional and divine things your Athens has produced and contributed to human life, nothing is better than those mysteries. I mean, just think of a statement like that. I mean, given how beholden Roman civilization was to the Greek, I mean, they inherited, they copied everything,

the art, the architecture. They just took all the gods and just renamed them. I mean, it was just a reboot of the whole culture in so many ways. And so for Cicero to say that this is really the central jewel of Greek civilization is just an astounding statement. Okay, so back to Cicero. For by means of them we have been transformed from a rough and savage way of life to the state of humanity, and have been civilized, just as they are called initiations, so in actual fact we have learned from them the fundamentals of life, and have grasped the basis not only for

living with joy, but also for dying with a better hope. So there's this something about knowing that there's a kind of a, I think you start the book with this, the colophon, if you die before you die, you don't die when you die, or something close to that. What is the origin of that Greek phrase, if you die before you die, you won't die when you die. Yeah. So, interestingly, that comes from the Christian tradition, which is part of what I'm investigating in this book is that continuity from the pagan world, potentially the prehistoric world into Christianity. So, that phrase actually comes from a monastery. It comes from the St. Paul's Monastery on Mount Athos in Greece, which is one of the holiest sites in

Greek Orthodoxy, Eastern Orthodoxy, which I think is awfully peculiar because there's this notion of dying before dying. You find across the world's religions, by the way, they're enshrined in a monastery on Mount Athos, which again, I couldn't think of a better description of the ancient pagan mysteries themselves. Right. Yeah. Yeah. But just so when you imagine what experience someone like Cicero must have had to have said that about its significance in comparison with the rest of what Greek civilization had produced, it is hard to imagine that the unaided aspirant, just by force of his whatever concentration he's mustered over those nine days, that it would be an experience of a sort that could be honestly described in that way with the knowledge that it would be reproducible. And the thing that's so unique about psychedelics, and I will inevitably return to the fact that you haven't taken any at some point in this conversation, the thing that's so important and unique about them is that barring the tiniest number of neurological outliers,

basically they work for everybody, right? I mean, you take a thousand people and give them the requisite dose of whatever psychedelic, psilocybin or LSD or MDMA, not technically a psychedelic, but still effective in its own purview. A thousand out of a thousand people will have a very significant experience. Now, some may have a terrifying experience, some may witness some version of the beatific vision, but virtually no one, again, with the tiniest number of exceptions, will be bored and claim that nothing had happened, right? Now, that is not something you can say about yoga or prayer or meditation or anything else you can subject people to, even over the

course of nine days, where you can just say, all right, this is, you know, 100% of the people who cross this threshold are going to come out saying, that was astounding, right? That was the central moment of my life on earth. And with psychedelics, you really can reliably say that. Again, modulo all of the casualties, the people who feel ruined by the experience as opposed to improved, which will also happen. So that's what makes your thesis so plausible absent any of the other evidence we're going to talk about. I just can't get someone like Cicero saying such a thing or writing such a thing in the absence of some reproducible stimulus of that sort. Yeah, it had to be reproducible, which is not to say that the

Greeks weren't good at ritual and ceremony. But one of the prevailing hypotheses that preceded the psychedelic hypothesis was that it was something like a theatrical production. Well, that's a pretty damn good theatrical production. That is Taylor Swift on steroids. Or on psilocybin, as the case may be. No, that's probably a good show. Unfortunately, no theatrical structures have been found at the archaeological site. And we know the Greeks were good at drama and tragedy and comedy, right? And so there may have been a pageant of sorts.

There may have been a reenactment of that ritual abduction and descent to the underworld and the re-ascent to the life of mortals. But as far as we know, there was something internal happening to the initiates. And as far as we can tell, they were journeying with Persephone into the underworld. One of the scholars that I referenced throughout the book is Peter Kingsley. He's a favorite scholar of mine. And he has this great notion about going down to the underworld. He says, you know, when you go down to the underworld, when you're already dead, that's one thing, not particularly impressive, but to go there while you're alive, prepared and knowingly, and then to learn from that experience, that's another thing entirely. And I think that's what

Cicero is getting at when he calls the mysteries of Eleusis the most exceptional and divine thing that Athens ever produced, right? To the exclusion of democracy and the arts and sciences and mathematics and all the things we take for granted today, including the origins of free speech. There's something astounding happening at this site. And when I first stumbled on the psychedelic hypothesis and then began reading about the modern day experiences and some of these clinical trials over the past 20 years, you know, two and two started to come together for me. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So where does Christianity come into the picture here? And maybe one place to start is this notion of the pagan continuity hypothesis. What is that? And how should we view the first century of Christianity through the

lens of, or even centuries before it became the state religion of Rome, through the lens of these mystery religions? Right. So Christianity does not become the state religion until about 380 under Theodosius. So you have roughly 350 years after the death of Christ, while Christianity is in fits and starts, here persecuted, here tolerated, but altogether, I would say an underground religion. That changes into the fourth century after Constantine, obviously. But for a good couple hundred years, it's illegal. I think we often forget. And it looks very, very different from any Christianity you might be familiar with today.

And it's two and a half billion adherents. The biggest religion in the world starts off pretty strangely. It is an underground cult, in some cases, literally. So, in those early days after Christ, remember, there are no basilicas. There are no physical church buildings. There's no Bible. At least, there's no agreed dogma for the Bible. That also doesn't happen until the 4th century AD. Women are involved, at least some of the evidence suggests, from different catacombs and frescoes you can look at underground. So it's a very different religion than we have today. It's

local. I would say it's hyper-local. There isn't the central bureaucracy that we find today. And again, it has that air of choice and movement and idiosyncrasy that I mentioned about the ancient mysteries. It was about your connection to the eternal and to that immortal spark inside yourselves. And so people would get together and meet under the auspices of this mystery figure, Jesus, who in some senses does really resemble Dionysus. And I quote at length from this book, the Dionysian Gospel by MacDonald. And in there, you can see this interesting parallel in the ancient Greek from the Bacchae of Euripides, which debuts on stage there at the theater of Dionysus in 405 BC, and some of the peculiar Greek of John. And so, it's really impossible, I like to say, to understand the origins of Christianity in the absence of a working knowledge of Greek, because the earliest

Christians were Greek speakers. You know, Jesus is born in the Holy Land. His mission takes place there, as we know, but, you know, Christianity really thrives and is propagated across the Greek-speaking part of the Mediterranean in places like Greece, Turkey, North Africa, and Italy, including Rome and South Italy. The consumption of the magical wine of Dionysus, which was referred to as his blood by someone like Timotheus of Miletus 400 years before the birth of Jesus, was something that was taken almost for granted, that you would consume this blood in the form of wine in order to become one with the god Dionysus. That's where we get this notion of enthusiasm, being possessed in ecstasy by the god. this notion of enthusiasm, being possessed in ecstasy by the God. It's not only the birth of the theater, it's why ancient Greek becomes the language of the New Testament, because of this

experience that was happening in honor of the God Dionysus all the way back in Athens. Yeah, so you've sketched part of it, but I just want to, since I used the phrase, I just want to make sure we've actually described it, the pagan continuity hypothesis. How would you define that? Roman period. So, you know, things particularly from the classical period of Greece, so anywhere from 400 or 500 BC, which would include these kinds of mysteries and the kinds of beers that were being mixed and the kinds of wines that were being mixed, and they were both very different from the beers and wines of today. It's the notion that specifically those kinds of beverages, but that in general, these practices carried over into the early days after Jesus. And this is not a strange idea. Dr. Martin Luther King himself actually wrote an essay about this

in 1950. You can Google it. It's called The Influence of the Mystery Religions on Christianity. So this is widely known in academic circles. Where do the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Gnostic Gospels come in here? I mean, we have the Gospel of Thomas, which you describe in the book, which takes a very different, more mystical slant than much of what one gets in the New Testament. Maybe we could say something about the discovery of these texts, which were... I mean, it was astounding that something could be discovered in this way, and this late, I think it was 1945 that we discovered these texts, and it took about

30 years or so to translate them. What does this add to the picture of early Christianity? Well, see, this is why historians and classicists and archaeologists still have jobs, I think. We do discover things every now and again. And then in the 1940s, as you mentioned, there were these 52 additional texts that we didn't really know about, which have become known now as the Nag Hammadi Corpus. They were dug up there in Egypt, and they cast an entirely different light on the person of Jesus. The Gospel of Thomas, in particular, portrays Jesus as not somebody to be imitated and worshipped as the Son of God separate from us, but as sort of a mentor or a guide along the

path to personal salvation. And again, these Gnostic circles certainly have much more in common with those ancient Greek mysteries. I mentioned Tertullian before, one of these church fathers who writes in the second century, and he specifically makes the comparison between this Gnostic version of Christianity and these ancient pagan pre-Christian mystery rites. Whether or not that included the consumption of psychedelics is neither here nor there, but this notion that the Gnostics were after direct knowledge. And that's what Gnosticism means. It comes from the Greek gnosis, which means unmediated direct knowledge of the divine, which is to say the recognition that within you there is this divine spark,

that there is no heavenly father up in the clouds separate from us, from humanity, from life at large, but that you yourself carry a part of that light, a part of that divine spark. Yeah, that's essentially, at least as I read it in your description, the distinction that Aristotle was making with respect to the significance of what's happening at Eleusis. It's not about knowing more facts. It's about having an experience that delivers a participatory transformation of one's vision of the world and one's place in it. So Aristotle wouldn't have used, presumably he could have used the word gnosis, right? That's not the term he used? right um that's not the term he used conceivably yeah that that that shows up later this notion of of gnosis i don't think in the classical period they made those those distinctions they didn't

really have a word for god either which i think is really interesting at least the at least the abrahamic god i think that we're more familiar with with today and i'm a big fan of of platonism and neoplatonism now they often refer to the mystery of mysteries, I'll put it, as the good or the one, which I think is really interesting. And so there is this notion of monotheism that exists in parallel with the Abrahamic traditions, and it's referred to as philosophical monotheism. traditions, and it's referred to as philosophical monotheism. So, you certainly find it in Plato, and you especially find it in the Neoplatonists. And again, this is after the life of Christ and folks like Plotinus, who's this Neoplatonist of the third century AD. So, this notion of philosophical monotheism and the direct experience of the divine, it carries on before, during, and after the life of Christ. Christianity is brewing in this melting pot

of all these fairly esoteric ideas. Yeah, we're used to the iconography and story and symbolism of Christianity to a degree that I think we're inured to its fundamental strangeness, certainly in a modern context. I mean, there are elements here that are just weird, and I think we should find surprising, and yet we don't because this is just what the Christian story is. But the idea that what is essentially a cannibal ritual is the normal way of worshiping Jesus, right? How is it that no one is batting an eye at the prospect of eating his body and drinking his blood, right? And the idea that

he would be sacrificed for the sins of all humanity, that here we're endorsing an actual human sacrifice. Looked at from above, this does look like a cannibal an actual human sacrifice. Looked at from above, this does look like a cannibal cult of human sacrifice on some level. And one of the innovations in the Old Testament was to swap human sacrifice for animal sacrifice. But still there's this notion of sacrifice and the consumption of what has been sacrificed. And it's, you know, the idea that, you know, in a modern context, no one really does the arithmetic there. And to notice what is actually being suggested just seems strange to me, standing outside the tradition. What do we know about people's sense of the propriety of drinking human blood? Why would that be the thing that one would be symbolically inspired to do with wine or beer or anything else?

We began talking about it in those synergies between Dionysus and Jesus. So, to be clear, Dionysus is not the god of wine, at least not simply put. And he's certainly not the god of alcohol, because the Greeks had no word for alcohol. It's important to mention that that word comes from the Semitic, as it sounds, al-kul. It means that to paint or to stain. Kul was the powder that was used to ornament the eyes. So, you know, the Greeks had no notion of the inebriating effects of that fermentation process. At least they had no word for it. And so when you're talking about Dionysus as the god of theater or mystical rapture, you're really talking about delirium or frenzy or madness or insanity. So Dionysus, in communing with him and drinking his wine, which is his blood, you are entering into this pact.

wine, which is his blood, you are entering into this pact. And it's an uncertain pact. It's an ambiguous pact around madness. And does madness truly make you insane? Or does it on occasion bring enlightenment? But it's certainly uncertain, and there's a risk proposition there. And those are the parallels I love looking at with Jesus, because the Christian promise, I did grow up in the tradition, by the way, full disclosure. I went to 13 years of Catholic school. And so like, I was just told, so when I was five, just told, you know, to drink, I would eventually drink the blood and eat the flesh. And okay, I guess that's what you do, you know, but at the time, you know, don't forget how unabashedly cannibalistic and drastic that is to the ancient Jewish population, for example. And whenever I have this discussion, I always have to point out one line from the Gospels,

and I hope your listeners will Google it. It's the sixth chapter of John, verse 60. And, you know, John is talking about this notion of cannibalism because Jesus has just made the promise, the central promise of Christianity. If you munch my flesh and drink my blood, you are immortal. You have eternal life. Not that you will have it at some future undefined moment. You become eternal the moment you drink my blood and eat my flesh. Now, Jesus is not saying if you sit down in a cave or if you go off and meditate for 10 years or if you sit down in a cave, or if you go off and meditate for 10 years, or if you practice these breathing exercises, he's saying, if you consume me, if you consume my flesh and blood, if you enter into this process of theophagy, right, eating the God to become the God, which is ancient

and prehistoric, if you enter into this process, you too will become like me. And it was the same promise that was offered to the Dionysian initiates, again, for centuries and centuries before Christ. And it's a very strange idea today. I mentioned in the book, one of these polls that like something like 69% of American Catholics do not believe in transubstantiation, that the otherwise ordinary bread and wine become this miraculous flesh and blood. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes

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