Modern Wisdom - #276 - Brian Muraresku - The Psychedelic Origins Of Western Civilisation

Episode Date: January 30, 2021

Brian Muraresku is a lawyer and an author. The Mysteries of the ancient world are just getting stranger and stranger. Did Plato, Marcus Aurelius and thousands more attend a secret psychedelic ceremony which formed the basis for the Christian Sacrament? Expect to learn why an annual parade finished with a secret ceremony in ancient Greece, why the Christians may have wanted to keep this secret, what it was like to research in the Vatican secret archives, the implications if all this is true and much more... Sponsors: To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom  Extra Stuff: Buy The Immortality Key - https://amzn.to/2NhfbqP  Check out Brian's Website - https://www.brianmuraresku.com/ Follow Brian on Twitter - https://twitter.com/BrianMuraresku  Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back. My guest today is Brian Murerescu, lawyer and author, and we are talking about the psychedelic origins of Western civilization. The mysteries of the ancient world are just getting stranger and stranger. Did Plato and Marcus Aralius and thousands more attend a secret psychedelic ceremony which formed the basis for the Christian sacrament? So today, expect to learn why an annual parade finished with a secret ceremony in ancient Greece. Why the Christians may have wanted to keep this a secret. What it was like to research in the Vatican's secret archives, the implications if all this

is true and much more. This is like real life Dan Brownshire. That actually is. Secret societies, a crazy potion that lets you die before you die. Brian is, he's spent 12 years researching this. I first heard him on Joe Rogan and I just had to get him on. So yeah, I really hope that you enjoy this. It's just a fascinating, cool story. And if you enjoy it, the book is a good read as well. But now it's time for the wise and wonderful Brian Murerescu. You're a qualified lawyer. Why are you talking about the psychedelic origins of Western civilization? That's a great question. I feel like I'm still a barrister. Is that what you call a barristering?

Lawyering? Being a barrister. If anyone can tell us if the verb is too barrister. So I still do that, believe it or not. I'm still in good standing in New York state and Washington, DC for the moment. And I don't know. I just started reading about psychedelics and I couldn't stop. But weren't tempted to try them. You actually, sorry, decided not to try them. You remained psychedelically uninitiated throughout the writing of your book. My virginity was and remains intact. Is that going to change at any point soon? Soon in the coming years, I'm not sure exactly when, but as it becomes legal and as the facilities come online where you can have an experience that is responsible and scientifically rigorous and also for me authentically sacred and historical, I think that will be my moment.

It's going to be so fascinating to see what happens to you having spent over a decade thinking, reflecting, considering, and then also going into wondering what other people's experiences are, like the the meta experience, what did they think, what did they feel, and whatever it is that you end up going through is you're going to be shot into another universe. I can't wait. I'm always part of me is always thinking the great irony of all of this would be,

if absolutely nothing happened. Oh, this time, all this time. That was wrong. Fucking what a waste, it was all a big troll. Is there a movie coming out? Is there a movie coming out about the book? We hope so. At least a documentary series.

So we're busy pitching that to different networks and streamers here in the US. But obviously, it'll have a global audience. To the so cool. Yeah, man. That's been a big part of my job the past few weeks and months But negotiating what sort of a series it should be who should play you can we get Tom Hanks all that sort of stuff All of the above and where do you go and how do you get there and why are you doing in it and is this you know

Is this one episode is this a thousand, and how do we pair the mystery and suspense with the rigorous academic scholarship and make it a feast for the eyes and for the ears? It's got to be a killer soundtrack, right? Nice. So it's going to be bar history writing, producing, the triple threat. That's the big triple threat. That's my new business card, Chris. I love it. I love it. If you need an agent, speak to me.

So, right, laid on us. What's the story arc of history that you're following here? What are we talking about? Right. So, it's, you know, I call it the best kept secret in history, which is not my words. These are the words of Houston Smith, who, if you've never heard of him, he's one of the most influential scholars of the 20th century. And what he was referring to are essentially two questions. Number one, did the ancient Greek Jews drugs define God? And number two, did the earliest Christians inherit part of that tradition?

If the answer to both of those questions is yes, then it means that, you know, like Western civilization, as we know it, was somewhat founded on a visionary experience and Christianity, the world's biggest religion today, with 2.5 billion people, might be tapping into those same psychedelic waters. So these are big questions, obviously very controversial. And there's lots of literature out there in artifacts, you can go hunt down, but what I tried to do over the past 12 years

is sniff out the hard scientific data to really make heads or tails of this for the first time. Why does it matter or why is there a distinction between happening just for the Greeks and it happening for also the foundation of Christianity? So the first chapter of my book is called Identity Crisis, and it talks a lot about this. I mean, at some point, for a long time, there was no separation between church and state. And I feel like in the West, we're still grappling, at least in the United States. We're still growing. Well, in the UK as well, we're still grappling with this sense of the sacred and the profane.

I mean, so the old narrative is that the ancient Greeks birthed political life as we know it and gave us the arts and sciences and the concept of a university and you know we took their theaters and made it into Hollywood and we took their Olympic games and we made it into the sports industry and all this stuff that they gave us you know they were able to do all this but when it came to the meaning of life you know they got it all wrong it's the prevailing narrative and here comes Jesus and Christianity and the Christianized Roman Empire and they're the ones who go off and evangelize. And they're the ones who colonize the Americas, for example, in Africa and Asia. It was

this evangelization movement, you know. We live in 2021 on no-domany, the year of our Lord. I mean, so there's all these identity crises that i think we're still grappling with like sometimes we're greek and rational and sometimes we're very christian and and irashical faith based um... and with which which isn't how do we heal that divide um... so if you can answer both of those questions and weirdly a psychedelic is the thing that unites the ancient greeks and the christians when you know we're hard up trying to figure out anything that unites them. What a powerful story. Absolutely. So where do we begin? What's the, what, what even suggests? Why psychedelics?

So I mean, I spent my years asking myself the same question. It starts, for me, it started in 1955. I wasn't there. But in this guy Gordon Watson, who, like me, was working on Wall Street, he was working at JP Morgan, this former banker turned ethno-mycologist. He became obsessed with mushrooms. And went all around the world hunting them. We think he's the first to really document this ceremony in the mass text of Mexico, while still typing and containing mushrooms under the tutelage of Maria Sabina. He takes the mushrooms in a very ritual setting and he has a crazy you know visionary experience but what's weird about Gordon is that instead of saying just oh wow was it wasn't that some crazy geometry of crazy visuals or what

the hell was that? This guy because he's well read and lettered you know he says I think that I've tapped into the platonic archetypes. He says that these divine mushrooms must have been what was behind the ancient mysteries. Because what happened to me was so real, so vivid, and so clear, that I think I've tapped into the realest version of reality. And if I just did that here in 1955, maybe our ancient ancestors, 2500 years ago, were doing the same thing because psychedelics are a freaking, they're a mind-buster. And so when someone like that is doing psychedelics and thinking about the classics and history, without doing them, I was relying on his testimony to kind of fared out the same details.

I was reading these studies coming out of Hopkins, very similar kind of testimony. One and only Dosa Silasai have been crazy visuals, crazy mystical insights. And the first thing I think of is Gordon Wasim and his theory that maybe the Greeks were doing this. And I flashed to this book from 1978 where they were spouting this controversial theory that psychedelics are the roots of Western civilization and off I go. Why? Like that's a wonderful postulated theory from some guy that once did mushrooms, but that doesn't necessarily justify doing 12 years of a book on it. That's a good point. My wife mentioned something similar at some point. So that's my point. So where's the data? So in 1978, what they had was really interesting literary references around what was happening at a lucis. And so for those who

don't know a lucis is like the spiritual capital, the ancient world. It survives for about 2000 years. That is to say as long as Christianity over the past 2000. It called to everybody from Plato in classical Athens to Marcus Aurelius and the Roman Empire centuries later. And they all talk about this vision, they all talk about this life-transforming event. Like if you went to a Lucis, you confronted death and became an immortal. Only people who'd gone there and had this experience walked away from it, guaranteed of an afterlife. That's where you went to get your afterlife. And so it's this really central pivotal moment in Greek history, in the history of Western

civilization. And there's some testimony from Plato and others that they saw this thing. And there's old poetry like the hymn to Demeter from a couple centuries before that, which talks about this magic potion. And it lists out the ingredients of this potion, called the kookyon. And what we're told in the ancient literature, in the ancient sources, that survived, and not much survived, because this was all secret. But what we're left with is the idea of this magical beer that propelled this vision.

And it was water, mint, and barley, which again, is not something to stake 12 years of your life on, but according to Gordon Wasson and Albert Hoffman, who discovers LSD in 1938, they were kind of reading between the lines, and they said it's not water, you know, barley and mint, it's water-urgatized barley and mint. So barley that been infected by Urgot, Urgot is where we get LSD. And it's a really, really elegant theory because Ergot is totally natural. It pops up on all the serial crops. And it's interesting to think that that may have been there 25 hundred years ago or a lot, lot longer, by the way, which I explore in the book. But again,

no hard scientific data to support that. What would be the reason for someone in intellectual like Plato or an emperor like Marcus Aralius? What would be the reason for them to go to this bizarre place and have some odd ritual and change their state? I thought that there would be much more down to earth grounded humans. I think that's the thing that brought them down to earth. So Marcus Aurelius, classic textbook stoic, he didn't just go to Elyusus. And again, this place survives from the ancient Greek times to the ancient Roman times.

And Marcus Aurelius is the perfect example of why, because someone like him, we think he's one of the only lay people to go inside the Holy of Holies in the sanctuary, this temple at Elusius. It was almost destroyed in the second century AD, and he re-billed it to Roman standards. He wanted to keep this thing alive, this thing that had spoken to his ancestors and all of our ancestors in the West, going back to ancient Greek times. There was something very powerful and very special about this place. That's difficult to capture in words, but I think that at the center of Greek existence was this idea that you can't think your way into enlightenment or you can't read your way into enlightenment. If you read through Plato, what he says about philosophy, he says

true philosophy is nothing else but the practice of dying and being dead. And so, the concept that these Greeks were obsessed with investigating death, the same way they would investigate the other phenomenon in the natural world. I mean, to them, Elusius is more of a science than a religion. You went there to test the God hypothesis, to have this vision for yourself and peer back the veil on reality and see what's there. What is the die before you die? Can you say that in the original language for us?

Right, so that comes to us in Greek and it's inscribed on a plaque at St. Paul's monastery, Mount Athos in Greek, it's one of the holiest sites in Orthodox Christianity. But I think it does tap back because of this Greek lineage into ancient times. And it goes on Bethanis, Brin, Bethanis, Denta, Bethanis, Ota, Bethanis. If you die before you die, you won't die when you die. And I think this is the kind of thing that was practiced at a loses, this kind of near death experience, this pre-death experience that many walked away from saying was one of the most meaningful events of their lives.

And that ties in with what we're seeing at Johns Hopkins at the moment, right, that it's one of the top five most meaningful spiritual experiences that they've had. It's also being used as a tool to help avoid or deal with death anxiety for people who are perhaps terminally ill as well. Right, and that I mean, I didn't answer your question, but that's why I went down the rabbit hole. So there's lots of ancient literature, testimony, data for what it's worth, but in 2007 and eight, I was reading those studies, and since then this crazy statistic has remained stable. If you talk to Roland Griffiths at Johns Hopkins today, for example, he'll say that 75% of those volunteers over the past roughly 20 years,

75%, 3 and 4, will call their one and only dose among the most meaningful experiences of their lives, if not the most meaningful experience. So not having done psychedelics, I can still look at that kind of stat and think there's probably something there. Can you describe based on what you know and what the research has suggested, what elucists would look like? Let's say that we're a bird's eye view or in a drone and we can go around, what would be happening, who would be there, where is it, what's what's going on? Yeah, it's a pretty fun place, or I think I'm, you know, it attracted all kinds of different people.

I think it was probably less burning man and more fight club. You know, the psychedelic, cyclop. Yeah, I think it was the psychedelic fight club of the ancient world. There was definitely a party atmosphere or a rockess nature to it. I mean, so it's a nine day, nine night extravaganza. It starts in Athens and you make, you do this processional march. You make a ritual pilgrimage, 13 miles from Athens all the way to Ellusus. And along the way, there's all kinds of broadyi body behavior and women lifting skirts and telling dirty jokes and all kinds of fun stuff and then you get there and it's serious as a heart attack. You know you experience eventually the culmination of these nine days and nights is a night inside the temple.

This all night, this panuchia, this all night affair in this torch lit sanctuary that was dedicated to the goddess Demeter, and along with you, we think that the temple could accommodate about 3,000 people. There were kind of like stairs that line the perimeter of this sanctuary. At some point a gong is struck of light emits from the center of the temple. This is after a magic potion's been passed around. And if they appear as percepany, the goddess of the underworld, and sometimes she's described as holding a baby,

the baby dynisis or the baby yahuos. And it's this idea that from death springs life. And it's interpreted for a long time, it's just this very visceral initiation into the cycles of fertility and the seasonal cycles, but there was something very personal happening to these people. So they didn't just like see a stage act. It wasn't just stage crowned. There may have been some of that going on, but again, all the testimony with little survive tells us there was

something deeply personal about whatever they witnessed there. Hence the theory that part of who they were witnessing was in the mind's eye, you know, behind closed eyes, for example, something perhaps psychedelic. It seems juxtaposed to have something that's incredibly sacred where only one layperson got to go, Marcus Aurelius, and yet there's this raucous nature on the way there. What's going on? It's a great question. I think you know, so there's also a Mardi Gras element, right? There's Mardi Gras and Fight Club and Burning. It's a

mix of all this. It's definitely a public festival at some point, right? And I think it's breaking down boundaries. It's breaking down physical boundaries and mental boundaries. And it's like it's intentional mind benders, you know? Making just horrible jokes at you to kind of break down your ego before you even get there. And on your first visit, you're not deemed eligible

enough to see that magical vision. So you have to visit twice, which is why this whole initiation sequence lasts at least a year and a half. So you don't drink on the first time. No, you become a moustache. That was the title you got. On your first visit, you become a moustache, which is a mystic.

It's only on your second visit that you became an apoptase, which in Greek is kind of like, you know, somebody who sees it all. So it was a long, long process to get there. And, you know, part of it is intellectual instruction. And part of it is a really rigorous, you know, physical, exhausting march, where you show up thirsty and hungry and just kind of beaten down. And I think those are the conditions after all that priming,

or maybe just the right medicine would put you into the state of mind to actually experience some kind of death and rebirth. It would be invited. So technically, anybody could go under two conditions. You had to speak some ancient Greek and you can't have committed murder. So if you're not a murderer and knows some Greek, you're in. Okay. So I run I run nightclubs in the UK and it would be interesting if my door policy was based on that. Excuse me mate, do you speak do you speak ancient Greek and have you committed a murder? Is that

well I can I can whack some Greek out to you you committed a murder? Is that well, I can whack some Greek out to you but I'm afraid on the second card, you're going to have to go somewhere else. Yeah, it might be the only nightclub where I be welcome. Perhaps, perhaps indeed. What are the mysteries then? You talk about it throughout the book, what are the mysteries? Right, so, Ellusus is one example of the mysteries that existed in the ancient world. I talk about the mysteries of Dionysus. In ancient Greece, there are lots of other mysteries. At Samothrae's, the Egyptian mysteries of Isis and Osiris, the mysteries of Magda

Matar and different cults from the Near East. I mean, if you had to break it all down and say something very simple, I would say that these are ceremonial experiences of death and rebirth. So something is happening where you're shedding your identity and you're losing that identity and some kind of ego-desolving event and you're being reborn, re-awakened into a new identity and that identity is something that is in accord with the natural world and in accord with the cosmos. So clearly there's an experience happening there. That's why I always say an experience of death and rebirth, not just like a crazy theory or something you were listening to, but a real visceral

experience. Why was all of this? If it's such a transformative experience, 3,000 people going, is it annual? Was every year? It was, we think around the fall equinox once a year every year. Got you, and it was lasting for quite a long time, and there's multiple different of these mysteries. If that's the case, why is it seemingly kept hidden then? Like sacred religion is written and repeated everywhere. Why is this sacred ritual not?

I've been asking myself the same question for many years. I mean, so I'll tell you, I've been asked this question before, but I'm going to answer it differently this time. I'm going to say this. I think that, because the way I describe it, the ceremonial death and rebirth, my personal belief is that I think there was something to do with the anticipation. And I think that if you know what's about to happen to you, it takes away some of the magic.

And I think part of the reason this was kept secret is because you're not supposed to know what's happening to you. So imagine, if you will, like, initiation into a secret society, right? And you know, you come into the sacred chamber and you see a pool filled with alligators, hungry alligators. And, you know, your mates tell you, you got to hop into that pool and get out the other side and then you're one of us. And you say, holy shit, why would I do that?

You know, it's a death sentence. And so you hop in, you get through the whole thing and it's the most terrifying experience of your life and out you come reborn. Now, if you'd been told beforehand that those alligators were perfectly well-fed and didn't want anything to do with you, it would kind of take away from the experience. And so I think elucists is something similar. There was this priming going on, and this anticipation that was being built up, and this mythology that was transmitted from generation to generation. If you know exactly what's going to happen, if you know you're going to drink this potion

and it's not going to kill you, but it will mess with your senses for a while. If you're told every detail of that, I don't think it's as special. Why in that case? I understand why it might have been kept quiet from the people who were going, but in terms of noting things down in history, if you've got over a couple of hundred years, several thousands, tens of thousands of people, perhaps attending this, you would have thought that it would have been easier to find, the most transformative experience of 30,000 people's lives. Why are you scrabbling for little scraps of paper and having to go to the Vatican and run off to Greece and ask to do testing on the inside of pots and stuff like that?

It should be written everywhere. Well, I mean, I'd ask the same question about Jesus. I want to know what Jesus was all about in this religion of two and a half billion people. And the guy never wrote a goddamn word down. And so we're left with these four somewhat contradictory gospels that are written a generation after his death. We're left with the epistles of St. Paul, who never ever met the guy in the flesh.

He receives all his information in these visionary experiences. And yet it's the world's biggest religion, man. It's two and a half billion people. And we don't have a word from this guy. I mean, how is that possible? Very, very good point. So what happened?

Like, you've got this amazing transformative ceremony. Why is it still not happening today? So there's a lot of different answers to that. Part of the answer, I talk about this in the book. I mean, part of the answer is the Christianized Roman Empire. The Christian emperors weren't too happy with elusis and the other pagan traditions stalking around, messing up the show.

And so by the end of the fourth century AD, a number of decrees are issued in the second half of that century trying to do away with this stuff. They try to do away with nocturnal ceremonies, which would include elusis, and then it comes back. And a lot of the old libraries and statuary kind of disappear, not exclusively at the hands of the Christianized Roman Empire, but there's this generational loss of knowledge.

And to your point, if nothing's written down, there's no doctrine, there's no dogma, there's no records for this stuff. If anything's going to go up and smoke pretty quickly, it's something like these mysteries. Have you got any idea of what the last time it happened would be? Said it went away, came back. More or less.

I mean, so in the last decade of the fourth century AD, 392, more or less is the last time, I think we see this celebrated in a ritual way. And how's the banning of these rituals described? Like what went on? Was it burning down the temple? See, at some point, this is why I say you can't exclusively blame the Christians. I mean, at some point, the barbarians get their hands on Elusa. And the big question is, how do they just march in and take this place down? Well, they did it once in the second century. It happens again at the end of the fourth century, but part of me thinks that the Christian Emperor is kind of open the gates and just let the writers damn Peter. So why does this matter? Like what are the

implications, if it's true, the broader implications other than Plato and Marcus Aurelius and a bunch of other famous people that we know about had a great time? Because what if this is the real religion of the ancient Greeks? And what if this identity crisis that we have is a false one? What if the people who created the foundations for our life today were the same people who were very obsessed with finding out a meaning for life? What if it, in addition to our faith traditions, in addition to the Bible and the New Testament, what if in addition to all that, these ancient philosophers and mystics had ideas that weren't that distinct from Christian mystics and some of these heretical sects like the Nostics,

or some of the very mainstream followers of Jesus. I mean, the big question I ask in the book is, you know, is the ancient Greek of the pagan world and their rights and practices at all related to the ancient Greek of the New Testament and their rights and practices. And, you know, again, it's the Greek is the sacred language of Christianity. And so by looking into these mysteries, what I'm really studying is what's called the pagan continuity hypothesis. Was there something about Plato and the rest of them and his philosophy and these rights at Alusus? Is there some of that that actually made its way into Christianity? Into the earliest Christian communities that we know for 300 years were practicing secret, illegal mystery traditions inside private homes and and graveyards. I mean, there's a lot of crossover. It seems to me looking back at what I know about Greek philosophy and what I understand about Christianity, that they do

seem like two pieces of opposite puzzles or of the same puzzle perhaps, that you had this incredibly grounded, very virtuous knot to woo-woo that was limited, at least in my experience, to do with the Greeks. They had their gods, but it wasn't a sort of a personal transcendent type of philosophy with regards to that. Whereas with Christianity, almost everything was about the theology, it was about the paying tribute to the higher power, and a lot less to do with the personal sovereignty that seems to be based around the Greeks. And it does seem odd that you could go from society that we're now in 2020 that Ryan Holiday is making a living off in 2020. You could go from such a pragmatic society and philosophy into one that I think even to Christians now,

they're not superbly proud of a lot of the things that went on around that time. It was very militant the way that Christianity kind of came aboard with conversions and crusades and things like that. It really does feel like there is a missing piece there. And that's what I'm looking for. And part of the hard, you know, the hard investigation is that when you go looking for answers, you find this sacred territory split into two departments. So, you know, in most universities, most institutions, theology is very different from the classics. So, if you're interested in what all the pagans were up to, you're studying classics.

You're studying the ancient Greek works of Plato and others. If you're into the Jesus stuff, same language, by the way, you're suddenly in the theology department or divinity studies. And there's a quote I have in the book from an old scholar from like the early 20th century, who says that, the literature and civilization of a very extensive part of world history is

very much neglected by the very ones best able to investigate it, which is the classicists. I mean, these are the people who study all the powerful syntax and grammar and gorgeous language of the ancient Greek. And when you ask a classicist to read the New Testament, they read it a little bit differently, which is why I got obsessed with this theory from 1978. It wasn't just Gordon Was in the Albert Hoffman, and I mentioned it was Carl Ruck, this hard-gird Yale-trained classisist who reads the New Testament very differently from the way your average priest might read it, and he reads it with the lens of a pagan, and with the lens of someone who was initiated into these mystery schools. And I say, I say the lens of a pagan,

which is not fair, he's a good Catholic boy, just like me, just like me. What outside of the rhetoric and what was written down and the presence of Ergot in the Bali or in the wheat, what other convincing evidence have you found? I'm looking at everything, right? So part of me is looking for the hard scientific data. Is there actual, what we haven't talked about yet, but is there any, you know, archiopatannical data for one of these spiked beers, these ergotized beers or one of these spiked wines out there? I mean that's a whole separate question, but like

what's in the literature? You know, just from the literary perspective, and this is what classicists do, is they read the old texts and find out what was there. I mean, I didn't spend a lot of time reading Dyschorities when I was learning Latin and Greek, but afterwards, I started reading his Matéria Medica, and he writes this massive treatise in ancient Greek in the first century AD, the same time the gospels are being written. And in his magnum opus, he has all these formulas, these recipes, for spiking wine, with all kinds of funky herbs and plants and different things. And he says, even at one point, that one of these plants will cause not unpleasant visions. Fantasias Uaithaith. So he's talking about psychedelics at the same time that Matthew, Mark, and Luke are

writing their gospels. And later John, and it makes you wonder, you know, if the Greeks knew about all this stuff, if they knew about pharmacology, what are the odds that some of that pharmacology would make its way into the same ancient Greek-speaking communities who had inherited all this stuff from their ancestors. One place you would look at is Corinth, for example. No Paul's letter to the Corinthians. You hear it every wedding you go to.

Corinth's today is 45 minutes to the west of Ellusus, this ancient spiritual capital. Now what are the odds that an early Corinthian who heard about this son of god, born of a virgin, with this new magical gift of immortal wine, this magic potion. What are the odds that either they themselves or someone they knew was not initiated had elusis, where this magic potion had been splashing around for centuries and centuries. And so to me the gospels are playing off of this pagan continuity. What research has been done into the archaeobotony, or the archaeochemistry of it? So that's the fun part, that's the fun part.

The short answer is not a hell of a lot. So I had to try and find out the scholars were working on this stuff, and I eventually came across Andrew Koe, who's at MIT, I mean, I would say the world's leading archaeochemist. He's responsible amongst other things for unearthing the world's oldest wine seller in Galilee. The same Galilee where Jesus is born, except it dates well before Jesus to about 1700 BC from the cameon and night period. And it's, again, through gas chromatography and mass spectrometry, they're finding a spike with all kinds of funky stuff, like honey, storex, terribens, cypress cedar, etc.

Now, you might say, oh, it's just interesting, you know, aromatic flavor profile enhancing type stuff, and that's certainly true. But the big question I'm always asking Andrew is, were there other psychoactive additives, psychotropic additives? And theoretically his answer has always been yes, why not, let's go find the data. So based off some leads from him, I was pouring into these archaeobotney journals and eventually came across a couple different things. So one hit for Ancient Beer, one hit for ancient wine. Both discovered in the 1990s and largely ignored

by the academic community. And as best as I can tell, like never reported to the public, just archaeologists doing what they do, finding amazing things and there it sits in a journal. But in Spain, from the second century BC, I came across this study of an ancient Greek century. There were Greeks in Spain, just like there were Greeks in Greece and Italy. And from the second century BC, they found this tiny chalice about a couple inches high

and it went under analysis and they found the remains of beer and ergot. So there's your ergotized beer, this crazy idea from 1978. We now have actual scientific data to corroborate that, which is pretty crazy. I'm trying to think about what the reason would be, I understand that the Christian church was being pretty forthcoming at trying to convert everybody, they were, they were, they were, they were full were, they were, it was a big relationship with the Christians. But I'm trying to work out what the, the fear that they would have had as opposed to repurposing the existing ritual and just rebranding it, why they would get rid of it. And I think I've heard you talk about this before that it would,

taking a psychoactive substance gives you direct access to God in one form or another. You no longer actually need the medium that is the church or the priest or the religion at white. It's you and him speaking directly to him. Is that your sort of conception of it as well? I think that's, again, I think that's part of the answer. It's hard for me to figure out what was going on in the fourth century. And I think I'm on record saying something like I sympathize with the church fathers. And I'm not sure what I mean by that. But they were in the business of church building, which at the time is in the business of

nation building. they were in the business of church building, which at the time is in the business of nation-building. And how do you do that with this secret illegal cult where people are meeting in private with no standards, who the hell knows what's going on behind closed doors, are literally underground in family catacombs. This is where Christianity took root in private houses and catacombs for 300 years. There was no brick and mortar churches. There were no physical basilicas until Constantine in the fourth century AD.

So once it comes above ground, literally, and once Christians aren't being hunted down by lions, how do you get this faith off the ground? And I think that you need standards, and you need dogma, which is why all these church councils get together and they figure out which books go in and which don't. And yeah, there was a hack job going on. I mean, there was the the the noxic literature dogma, which is why all these church councils get together and they figure out which books go in and which don't.

And yeah, there was a hack job going on. I mean, there was, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the gnaxic literature disappears. All these texts from Nagamadi Egypt, for example, that were dug up in the middle of the 20th century, and this beautiful, beautiful testimonies that talk about a different Jesus like in the Gospel of Thomas, where the Gospel of Mary Nagolin, which is now I think over 125 years old. There were other versions of the faith out there, and slowly but surely they start to disappear in the fourth and fifth centuries. Now, again, part of that is the church trying to do what it does, which is build up your

ocracy, create something coherent, which they had never been able to do successfully. This is why we have the schism between the Catholic and Orthodox, and then we have the Brazans, and then we have the Evangelicals and everything else. I mean, it's hard to hold this thing together. What I sense in the early years was an attempt to cohere a religion that was very much in danger of disappearing. And along with that goes all these secrets and all these mysteries.

Talk us through your experience researching in the Vatican. Obviously this sounds pretty heretical. But why did they even let you near Rome? I don't know. That's a good question. I'm still trying to figure that out. So what do you do? Do you email the Pope?

Do you send him a DM on Twitter? What happens? Yeah, I was like, you know, Frank, it's Brian. You got some cool stuff. I'd love to see it. There it's not that, I mean, it is. It's very difficult to get your way into the Vatican secret archives and the catatechomes. I was very honest with folks. I talked to the archivist at the Secret Archives and the archive of the congregation for

the doctrine of the faith, which holds these inquisition records. I went underground with this Vatican archaeologist to look at the frescoes and these Catechomes. I would tell people, here's my crazy idea about this psychedelic eucharist. I think it's just as crazy as you do, because I don't know, I haven't seen the hard scientific data for it. I'm out there looking for it all over the Mediterranean. I'd like to know if there's any evidence here.

So part of it is just asking them if we could test different vessels and different chalices, which they're sitting on in the hundreds of thousands, in their own handwriting, from the 16th century, or the 15th thousands, you know, in their own handwriting from the 16th century or the 15th century, is there a mention of these magical potions? And the short answer is there is. They were hunting and targeting witches, at least partly because of their knowledge of these traditional healing mechanisms and sometimes visionary medicines. So it's all there preserved in the literature. What does it feel like being underneath the absolutely epicenter

for the Christian faith rooting through? I mean, you're in the necropolis, which is this bit below the system, not below the system, chapel below the Vatican, right? And there's multiple... The same Peter's. Yeah. Is it below St. Peter's, Basilica? Just multiple layers below that.

What did it feel like? It must have been, it's proper down-brown shit. It was, that's what I said, to the priest who was with me. This is, this is damn brown shit. And I felt like I'd never get out. Like there was a, you know, it would be the clank of a gate. And the last time I breathed fresh air, everyone, they're all cool, man. Everyone's very cool in the Vatican.

I might be one of the few people to say that, but everyone, they're all super cool to me. And the, oh, Fichou Scavi, the excavation office there. I was looking at, you know, what could be one of the first mosaics, one of the first representations of Christian art directly under St. Peter's Basilica. And one of these tombs, the tombs of the Yulee, and there you see these vines just curling all around this figure seated on a horse. And I'm not the first person art historians have said that there's a real mix up here of jesus and dynisus all these dynesian vines you know uh... rolling their way around this mosaic it's hard to know what to make of that and it's hard to know what was going on down there uh... because

from the records we have there was some pagan shit going on underneath the Vatican in the early days this is where they went like other catacombs to keep you know the dead they went there to meet st. Peter before there was a St. Peter's Basilica. They went there to camp out amongst these graves and host these parties, which the professor emeritus of history at Yale University calls chill-outs. They went to have chill-outs with the dead to drink their wine and have a feast every day in some cases. So, I mean, you know, Rome is a fun place to be. How does the mysteries at elusis relate to the Holy Sacrament?

I mean, well, there's a big question. And how I try to answer that in the book is by using the mysteries of Dionysus as the translator. So you have all these mysteries at a looses, right? And it's these pilgrims making this march, drinking this potion, having this vision. It's all administered by the state. So even though it's technically open to lots of different people, as we mentioned, it's a very formal event. At some point you have the mysteries of Dionysus and it takes the concept of a magical potion, takes it out of the sanctuary away from the temple. So where are the mysteries of Dionysus being celebrated? Outdoors.

Open-air churches in the forest and mountains. It's people getting smashed in these drunken orgies in the honor of the God of wine, right? And then here comes Jesus, not too long after that, and effect at the same time. I mean, in Galilee, ancient Israel, ancient Palestine, you will find images of Dionysus. All around Galilee. So, you know, his cult was there at the same time that the cult of Jesus was just gathering steam. And what is Jesus doing with this magic potion? He's saying, not only can you take it out of the temple, not only can you take it to the open air church, but take this magic potion that makes you immortal, nothing less than that,

and take it into your dining room. So I think by domesticating these mysteries, I think that for some early Christians, I think that's how they would have read the early accounts of Jesus. Here's this guy taking an immortality potion, that's his blood, the same way that the wanted dynisus was described by the way, the blood of dynisus.

And he's taking it inside the dynagrum and saying, you can celebrate this at home. It's okay to do this at home. Because at the time, that was a sacrilege in elusius. You were not allowed to celebrate that at home. We have accounts of people trying to do that and it was this massive scandal in Athens. And so here comes Jesus with a new model to preserve, in some cases, these mysteries. Well, you see the imagery of the Last Supper, and you've got... Everyone looks fairly cozy, you know?

They look pretty... They look pretty merry at that situation. I'm aware it's not a photograph. No, but we, I mean, we have the accounts, aside from Leonardo's imaginations of it. It's for, you know, the Eucharist, the Last Supper is recorded in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and in John, it's really, it's weird, and John, it's different. It's Jesus giving a sermon outside, but he's talking about the same thing. He's talking about his flesh and blood. And he uses really weird language, that by the way is not Jewish. So people think about the last stupper and this cozy affair amongst friends.

It's this Passover meal before his death, this morning of Jesus, before his death. I can't think of a single Jewish dinner where human flesh and blood is being served. And yet here comes Jesus saying, who ever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life. Not will have, not will go to heaven, right here tonight. If you drink in me, you are immortal. This is the same way these sacraments were described by the pagans and think about it Like munching on this flesh. It's a really a pocket of word that Jesus uses in Greek. They're drug on to munch on my flesh It's like this really graphic visceral event that's being described

So who the hell knows what was going on? Did did you totally lose your shit with how many questions you have to ask yourself? Because every situation that you come across, everything that you find out is that, oh, that's interesting. And now he has 3,000 questions that are implied by me knowing this one extra bit. You described the torturous process of me talking to my editor for a couple of years. But this chapter is so important, man. I'm going to love this chapter. It's really essential to the argument. One thing I was thinking about while reading the book was how our existing cultural

structures affect the way that we experience psychedelics. I know that this may not necessarily be your precise field of study, but it's an interesting question that I want to ask you anyway. So can you imagine what would be seen by a human who grows up in a lab with no cultural input? So what would they see? Like how much is the transcendent effect intrinsic to the drug and how much is enabled by the existing narrative frameworks that we have in our own minds? That's a great question, man. It's, you know, it doves to tell, it doves to tell us to my word, I mean, I do talk to

the clinical psychologists about this stuff and the psychopromicologists. What everyone agrees on is that set in setting our integral. I mean, it's not a wonder drug. And more importantly, psychedelics just are not for everybody, which is why they've been successful in their trials at Hopkins and NYU by screening certain people out. It takes a really heroic, emotional, psychological preparation to prepare for this stuff.

And just think about what the word psychedelic means in Greek. It means to manifest the contents of the psyche is how I translate it. Sika denos. And so when that happens, I mean, before you even begin thinking about that, why don't you try dusting off those contents for yourself? I mean, you dream about them every night. Have you addressed some of those traumas from your childhood? Have you addressed some of those pitfalls in your relationships? Some of that shadow work that plays out in your everyday

life. There's lots of work that you can do before psychedelics, and which is part of the reason I haven't done them. I mean, there's lots of stuff that you can do, including mindfulness and meditation and all the rest of it. So once you get to that point, when all this stuff is being laid bare, and I don't know what would happen to someone who was grown in a lab, that'd be an interesting experiment. It'd be hard to get FDA approval for that. But I think people are playing on memories and people are playing on the archetypal things that live inside the subconscious of all humans. Which is really powerful stuff. Is this thing? These images come out.

I mean, a Christian will have an image of an Indian deity. And some guy in the UK will have an image of a Mayan god. It's really hard to explain why that's the case. That's what fascinated me about it. I wonder, obviously, as you say, slightly unethical and perhaps unrealistic experiment to run, but it would be fascinating to see, because that would be the ultimate control. You would be able to control exclusively for cultural inputs, for all of the existing narratives. There's certain things. You get the visual distortion that almost everybody says in terms of geometric patterns, for instance.

So you perhaps always going to have that, no matter what you're looking at, no matter who you are, what you've grown up, what your thought patterns are like inside of your mind. But can you imagine if people reported these people who were grown up without these cultural inputs, cultural narratives and frameworks inside of their mind? And they reported similar manifestations, which would be, this is something universally held within us all. I don't know, I just thought that was a really interesting thought experiment. I like that. I mean, some of the researchers do write about this. Bill Richardson, who's

one of the researchers at Hopkins, does write about this about the encounter with the archetypes. I mean, there are people who haven't been trained in or to the best of their knowledge haven't been substantively exposed to some of these traditions that do pop up, I mean kind of spontaneously, like, you know, gauze and goddesses from different faith traditions that just don't belong in the contents of someone's psyche on the eastern coast of the United States, and yet in comes this stuff. Did you discuss with anybody about the potential dosage or an equivalent dosage that people may have been consuming? In the end, that's what's really hard, man.

So even though even though we found some of the archaeopatannical, archaeochemical evidence, to this day, to the best of my knowledge, this kookyon potion, or some of this spiked wine hasn't been really created to the standards of antiquity. So, I mean, that's something I very much want to do. Even with this find in Spain, we still want to retest that chalice and really figure out like, what was the formula here? What were the measurements? Because by all accounts, an ergotized beer is not the most pleasant trip. I mean, it's kind of terrifying. I mean, ergotism traditionally leads to all kinds of really

unfun things, like gangrene and convulsions and stuff like that. But what I've been thinking recently is that maybe it was a very low dose, and other folks have mentioned this to me who are more experienced than me. But maybe it was a low dose that, again, just kind of that re-jiggered the brain somehow that just said it, I mean, just to the left of normal, after all that fasting, maybe some sleep deprivation, the long march from Athens, for example, a low dose, a lower dose of Ergatized beer,

could have been the kind of thing, to have a really powerful vision, I don't know. It's just there's so many questions, man. Has anything come out since your book was published? Has there been a use continuing to research? Are you still, is there a sequel? Like what's your current? Oh, there is a sequel. Wow. It's all, it's all happening, man. As just one, one tiny example, National Geographic and others reported in November, I think it was, about this. You can Google it, the Pinwheel Cave, the Pinwheel Cave in California from the two-mash tribe. I think it was, about this. You can Google it, the pinwheel cave,

the pinwheel cave in California from the Chumash tribe. I think it's only a few hundred years old, so it's not going into deep antiquity. But about 400 or so years ago, they found this cave with a dattura flower painted on the ceiling of this cave. And inside crevices in the rock, they actually found the organic remains of

Duturic quids, which is a very hallucinogenic plant flower. It has contains all these tropeane acolytes, the same kind of acolytes that may have been present in these wine potions, I mentioned, that diascorities was writing about in the first century AD. So a very interesting find, and it was called the very first Archaeochemical Evidence for the coexistence of rock art and psychedelic drugs. And I mean, that happens in 2020 for no reason whatsoever. At the time that all this, you know, we're talking about all this stuff.

So, you know, every time I open the computer, there's another story out there. What's next for you? So we're still doing this documentary series and pushing forward on that. I am writing a second book that is very much related to but distinct from the first one without giving too much away. Lots more clues, lots of more ancient signals, and you know, the big question, what does this mean for the future of medicine, religion, society, all those kind of questions in the midst of a global pandemic, and economic turmoil, and civil unrest, and political discontent. I mean, I think it's a very interesting moment that we're living in, and people are looking for meaning. And isn't it interesting to think about this continuity, right, not just from the Greeks and the Christians, but maybe to us, and maybe we're living at this moment where some of this technology is being resurrected. It's a big question. Well, think about what people have turned to in this time of need.

Copies of Marcus Aurelius' meditations and paperback were sold out at the beginning of 2020. You think, well, why would someone go 1800 years back to a philosophy that was Aristotle or Plato that thought the brain only existed to get rid of heat out of the body? thought the brain only existed to get rid of heat out of the body. And you're like, on some stuff, they were so right. And on other stuff, so far off in germ theory, I hadn't gone through. When as a Marcus Aurelius is dying from the plague, as he's caught in the at the at nine plague, they're struggling to breathe because of the amount of incense that's burning in the room because they thought the incense would get rid of the plague.

It would help to get rid of the air particles in the air. And all that they were doing was forcing Marcus Arrethius to smell like someone's awful auntie's house. The spiritual auntie who's always burning incense, it was just like forcing him to do that. So on one side you have these people who are obviously incredibly detached from what we understand now. And yet the more universal elements, the things that they were able to observe more accurately, human nature, meaning, flourishing, what does it mean to be virtuous, to have temperance. Those things are what people in 2021 are going back to, they're relying more on the writings of Marcus Aralius than they are on anybody for the last 1800 years. And this present, this story arc that we're coming

back to psychedelics, precisely the same. If what you say is true, if what you've discovered is correct, is true. If what you've discovered is correct and it's taken us around about 2,000 years to start using therapeutically something which could have aided the last two millennia of human civilization, then we have a lot of catching up to do and it is just fascinating the way that these things are coming in full circle. I agree that's beautifully put, man. I couldn't say it better than that. You just you just wrote the back cover. That's perfect. Fine. That's that's I'll give you the rights. We can we can discuss deals off air. Man, I've I've loved today, Brian. It's so fascinating. Your dedication to this. You've been told it a million times, but your dedication to this project is

your dedication to this project is, it's psychopathic. In the good way, in the great way, not in the Brian Rose from London Real Way, where can people go? They want to keep up to date with, what is that you're doing? Where should they head? I'm not going to spell my Romanian name. So I'll say, the immortalitykey.com. If you go to the immortalitykey.com,

you'll see my homepage there and it links to all my social media. So I try and keep it updated and I'm usually terrible about it, but I'm better on Twitter and Instagram. So you can see some updates there. Everything will be linked in the show notes below, including a link to the immortality key wherever you can get a hold of it.

Man, I'm gonna have to get you back on. We're going to have to talk about the new book and the when Tom Hanks decides to accept the role and whatever new discoveries we've got, so round two will happen soon. I'm there, brother. I'm fed.