Rev Left Radio - Early Christianity: Psychedelics, Ancient Greece, and the Emerging Church

Episode Date: March 13, 2021

In this episode, Brian C. Muraresku, who holds a degree from Brown University in Latin, Greek and Sanskrit,  joins Breht to discuss his fascinating book "The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name", a groundbreaking dive into the use of hallucinogens in ancient Greece, the Pagan Continuity Hypothesis, the role of the Eucharist in early Christianity, the relationship between mysticism and religion, the important role women played in this history, understanding Jesus as a mystic, and much more!  Learn more about Brian and find his book here: https://www.brianmuraresku.com/ ----- Support Rev Left Radio: https://www.patreon.com/RevLeftRadio or make a one time donation: PayPal.me/revleft LEARN MORE ABOUT REV LEFT RADIO: www.revolutionaryleftradio.com

Hello everybody and welcome back to Revolutionary Left Radio. I have a really special guest for you today. It is Brian C. Muraretscu, the author of The Immortality Key, The Secret History of the Religion with No Name. Brian's work is really fascinating. It's a deep dive into ancient history, and it makes these fascinating connections between early psychedelic use in ancient Greece, for example, and its connection to the rise of early Christianity.

So we talk about that history, the immense amount of research and scientific investigation that went into this book. We also use it as a jumping off board to talk about the sort of psychedelic renaissance happening in popular culture today, especially within science and medical departments at universities, the connection between formal institutional religion and mysticism. them. We discussed the view of Jesus as a possible mystic, which is something I've always been interested in and have wanted to talk about. So a whole smorgasbord of fascinating things are discussed in this episode. Brian is a really engaging, down-to-earth, human being, and is

really fun to talk to. So I really hope that you enjoy this episode. And if you do, definitely check out the book, The Immortality Key, because we can only scratch the surface of the depths that the book itself goes into. And as always, if you like what we do here at RevLeft Radio, you can support the show by becoming a member of our Patreon at patreon.com forward slash RevLeft Radio. And in exchange for your monthly donation, you do get access to bonus content.

So without further ado, let's jump into this episode with Brian Murawrescu on his wonderful work, The Immortality Key. Enjoy. Hello, everybody. This is Brian Murrescu. I'm the author of the recent book, The Immortality Key, the secret history of the religion with no name. It took me about 12 years to research, investigate, and write that book, which is essentially the hunt for two really big questions. Number one, did the ancient Greeks use drugs to find God? number two, did the earliest Christians also use drugs to find God? If the answer to either or both of those questions is a yes, then it raises profound questions about the origins of Western civilization.

This, in no uncertain terms, is the hunt for the Holy Grail. Beautiful. Yeah, and I love this book and this work because it intersects with so many of the interests that we have on this show with mysticism, psychedelics, deep history. and the scientific and scholarly research that really goes in to searching for the answers to these questions. So we're definitely honored to have you on this show. And maybe a good way to start is just to maybe talk a little bit about yourself, specifically how you identify religiously and sort of how you became interested in this topic. Sure. So I'm a good Catholic

boy, or at least I once was. I went to 13 years of Catholic school, the last four of which were spent at an all-boys prep school with the Jesuits, where I learned Latin and Greek, started at learning Latin and Greek. And then I continued that into undergrad at Brown University. I was actually recruited there specifically to do some more classics. And I think the expectation was that I'd get a Ph.D. and wind up teaching. And when I was 21, took a left turn into law school and started practicing law. I'm still practicing attorney. I'm now 40 years old. And so I've been doing that for 15 years. But over the course of all this research, I never really put down the ancient languages. This is the kind of stuff I'd turn to on nights and weekends to kind of keep life interesting and, you know,

following all these, all these mysteries around as deep as I could take them. And then, you know, a couple of years back, I kind of put my, my practice on hold and really dedicated myself for a couple of years to traveling over to Europe and writing this book. You know, it's a major passion project of mine. And in a weird way, it's only just beginning. You know, the immortality key is kind of proof of concept for, you know, a number of years to come where all these new disciplines that we're going to talk about are really weighing in on this question that goes to the heart of the real roots of where we come from. Yeah. And you mentioned, you know, 12 years of research, immense travel, you know, working on the weekends because it was a passion project. How have

you thought so far about the reception of the book? Have you been very pleasantly surprised with how just like the widespread interest that it's generated? Yeah, to be totally, yes. To be totally honest, yes. I didn't, I know it sounds corny, but I really didn't expect it. I mean, at its, at its base, it's a very esoteric question. I mean, and the things I get into, you know, with my classics background and kind of digging into these languages and mixing in archaeology and talking about things like neuropsychopharmacology and art history. And, you know, in a way, it's kind of like this Da Vinci Code inspired journalism and mixed with this Indiana Jones hunt. And to be totally honest, I wrote it for myself. And I know

that sounds corny too, but, you know, I talk openly in the book about my own identity crisis, you know, this raised Catholic, but, you know, questions about the faith and trying to figure out where my faith lies today and that mix of, you know, rationality and mysticism that is a part of like my every day is something that goes back 2,000 years, 3,000 years. The Greeks and the Romans and the early Christians were wrestling with all these same ideas, which I only got, you know, closer and closer to as I was investigating this book. So, yeah, for me, it's been a, a total psychedelic journey in the absence of psychedelics. Yeah, and that's one of the things that you mentioned quite often,

and it's interesting, is that you yourself have not yet, at least, doven into the use of psychedelics. Was that a conscious strategy, or is it just personally never become available for you? I'm sure with this book, opportunities arise and doors open, but can you talk about that decision? You wouldn't believe how many people try to offer me drugs. Yeah, it's including when I was with Professor Ruck, who we can talk about.

He's this 85-year-old professor at Boston University, and a lot of my book is really just following up on leads that he put down in 1978, which was not the best time to be writing a book on drugs, as you can imagine. In any event, so in the course of one of our travels, Professor Ruck and I found ourselves in Spain walking around at midnight on the streets of Barcelona, and some guy came up to us and tried to offer us LSD, and Carl Ruck was like, do you know who Albert Hoffman is? And the guy was like, yeah, yeah, of course. He invented LSD.

And then Ruck proceeded to tell the whole story about how he co-authored this book in 1978 with Albert Hoffman himself. And the guy was like, oh, man, you must have done all the drugs in the world. So it wasn't to be our night. But yeah, you'd be shocked at how often it happens. But as Graham Hancock, who wrote the forward to the book, has pointed out, it does give anybody that wants to be a detractor, less ammunition to use against you. this sort of strategic sense that you know you're not doing this from a perspective of somebody who

loves these psychedelics and wants to like you know post hoc make an argument in favor for them do you think that's helped with the sort of reception and credibility on some level especially in the scientific community i like how you put it on some level yes i mean um and i went into this to try and be as objective as possible this it's not a book about you know my trip reports and my subjective experiences i'm i'm interested in the experiences of others and i'm interested in the data and where the science is leading us. I'm very interested in, you know, this comparative analysis through the annals of history, teasing out all these clues. I mean, at the same time, you know, my friend Michael Pollan wrote a very influential book, How to Change Your Mind,

that came out a couple years ago that does document his personal experiences with these illegal compounds and it doesn't seem to have affected him all that much. So, I mean, I don't know. And in my own case, again, it's just, it's just where I landed. I mean, I made the conscious choice at some point to remain objective and stay a virgin. Um, you know, and then as time evolved, it just, it felt natural to me. Um, and kind of, you know, my whole quest behind psychedelics is seeing them as part of this universal spiritual toolkit, of which there are many tools to pick and choose from. Um, you know, so mystical experience is kind of the, the real driving force behind the book and the real key in the title of the immortality key,

which we can talk about. Absolutely. And in the second half of this conversation, I'm definitely going to dive into that and ask you about, um, your relationship to mysticism. But let's focus for now on the first half of just discussing the book, some of its main arguments, et cetera. So from a bird's eye view, like sort of what is the main argument of the book for those who aren't familiar with it? And what is, as the subtitle says, the religion with no name? Right. So again, I'm really picking up where this book, The Road to Illusis, left off. So it's released in 1978 by this trio of renegades, Gordon Wasson, Albert Hoffman, who discovered LSD, and this guy, Carl Ruck, who I was just referencing.

He's now 85 at the time he was in his early 40s, just a bit older than me. And their idea was that this place, Elusis, which is kind of like the Vatican of the ancient Greek world, it was their spiritual capital in many ways. And it called to initiates for 2,000 years, which as long as Christianity has been around. And their idea back in 1978 was that this potion that we know from the sources was involved in whatever was happening at this sanctuary, that this potion was spiked with mind-altering drugs that afforded this vision that's universally attested to almost by the initiates who went there and what little testimony survives, that it was this powerful life-transforming vision that convinced whoever went there that they

were immortal, that they would never die, that they were guaranteed of some kind of afterlife. So it had to be a very powerful vision, and the idea in 1978 was that, well, this potion must have been spiked with psychedelic, specifically ergot, which is this naturally occurring, fungus that's been around as long as grain and agriculture itself has been around, you know, so at least 12, 13,000 years. And Ergot is how Albert Hoffman himself was able to synthesize LSD back in the 1930s. So, you know, in principle, in the abstract, a very elegant theory for what may have happened at Alusus, but there was no, again, hard scientific data to kind of prove it. And that's how I spent the past 12 years, kind of looking for data.

Can you talk a little bit more about Alus, sort of what it's known for? or maybe even the historical period that we're talking about so people can orient themselves to that. And importantly, like some of the interesting and famous philosophers that went there. Sure. So when we're talking about Elusis, we're talking about this ritual sanctuary, 13 miles northwest of Athens. And we think it's in existence from about 1,500 BC to the 4th century AD when it's largely obliterated under the influence of the newly Christianized Roman Empire. So, you know, beginning to end, that's about 2,000 years. We don't really know what was going on in the early period, but by the time of the classical Greeks,

5th and 4th century BC, you know, 2,500 years ago, you have people like Plato, Pindar, Sophocles, a couple centuries later, Cicero, the Roman statesman, who calls Elusis the most exceptional and divine thing that Athens ever produced, right? So this was not a sideshow. This wasn't something you would just gloss over in the history of Greece. This is really, you know, part and parcel of the engine of the civilization

that gave birth to democracy, the arts and sciences, and all the rest of it. And then you have Marcus Aurelius himself. It was actually allowed inside the Holy of Holies a couple centuries after Cicero. So, you know, between both the Greeks and the Romans, this thing stood the test of time. And whatever happened there was a secret. This is why Houston Smith, the greatest religious scholar of the 20th century, calls it the best kept secret in history because we have this tiny little, you know, bits and clues and testimony that survives from people like Plato. who talks about his vision there, an ambiguous language, but we really don't know the details.

And so that's why it's always been open to speculation about what went on there. Yeah, absolutely fascinating. Can you talk about the pagan continuity hypothesis and what does it suggest about the connections between these practices of ancient Greece and then transitioning into the early Christian period? Right. So I was on site at the archaeological site of Elusis with one of the Greek excavators. And the best way to define the pagan continuity hypothesis is to quote something she said. You know, as we were going through the site, she was just kind of commenting on all the similarities

between whatever we think was happening in Elusis and what would become the Christian church. You know, and in this case, the Greek Orthodox Church, for example. So, you know, when you walk on site there, you see this big grain silo. And, you know, the first fruits, the crops were sent all from all around Greece to Elusis. is a sort of storage house for Demeter. Demeter was the Lady of the Grain, the Goddess of the Grain, much the same way that, for example, you know, the congregation might send in their tie,

there might send in donations to the local church. Everyone had to send some grain ins. There's that aspect. And then there's a giant church, to this day, a modern church dominating this precipice on site atalus. And what happens in the fall on this special church holiday every year is a bunch of pilgrims come in, and there's this bread blessing ceremony that takes place.

Again, this continuity of like the ancient grain dedicated to Demeter somehow being transitioned into the bread, right? That's associated with the Eucharist and with the Virgin Mary occupying the same site that's been in ritual use for, well, I mean, just about 3,500 years. So, I mean, there's lots of other details, but pagan continuity in and of itself is the idea that some of these ancient practices somehow made their way into Christianity, that whatever Christianity couldn't kill, it absorbed. Yeah, and that's certainly in line with Christian and other religious histories when conquering new territories or moving into new areas. There wasn't necessarily a wholesale obliteration of the local cultures and rituals, but to some extent as much as possible, sort of bringing in of some of them and turning

them in over time to just aspects of the dominant religion, right? That's right. And it pops up even more explicitly with the mysteries of Dionysus, which is another one of these, you know, pagan, ancient Greek traditions. So there was Elusis, and that was just one of, like, many mystery cults that were in existence for many, many centuries before Jesus in the Christian movement. And in the rights of Dionysus, it's funny. You see this, this God that we think of as the God of wine, right? Well, he was also the God of madness and ecstasy. And the Greeks didn't really associate with Dionysus with alcohol, per se, but like states of intoxication by any

means necessary in states of madness. And Dionysus in the ancient literature is described as the son of God. I mean, in the very first line of Euripides the Backeye, which debuted at the theater of Dionysus in 405 BC, 400 years before the putative birth of Jesus, you have this figure being called the son of God, right? Just like Jesus would be later. And you have this sacrament of wine that's also adopted by the Christians centuries later. And on and on, all these similarities that pop up between the two traditions. Yeah. When it comes to Elusis, was it like a retreat for the elites only? Was there any common people that could go?

What was the sort of class divide of that experience? Yeah, we don't really know. I get asked that question a lot. And I do think it was, you know, somewhat prohibitive, time and cost prohibitive. You had to take, you know, the time away from doing your duties. And, you know, at least nine days and nights were spent along this long procession and preparation to the culmination of this mystery, right? you had to do it twice. So it wasn't on your first visit, but your second visit to

Elus, that you were allowed to sip from that kukion potion, whatever it was, and have this magical vision. So, you know, there's a couple years of your life that are kind of dedicated to this thing, which not everybody can afford. And you're also paying your dues to the hereditary families who were running this thing. So it wasn't for everybody, but I wouldn't say it was necessarily elite or exclusive in that sense, but it was definitely something that you had to be able to afford to dedicate time to. I understand. I see. So with all this history in mind, can you discuss your research and your arguments regarding the Last Supper and the Eucharist specifically? Because I find this stuff incredibly fascinating.

I mean, that was the fun part for me, too. So in the first half of the book, I'm really focusing on the ancient Greeks. And I'm trying to sift out the actual hard evidence for this concept of what is essentially like an ergotized beer potion, right? If this was the idea from 1978, some kind of spiked beer was involved in elusis. What does that mean for the rest of Carl Ruck's career? I mean, he spent many, many years, decades writing about this kind of material and drugs and antiquity. So the long and short of it is I did find some hard scientific data in an ancient Greek sanctuary in what is today Spain, of all places, that does look like an ergotized beer, funnily enough, exactly as was hypothesized back in 1978. So if that's true,

if there were, you know, some of these potions splashing around the Mediterranean, how did it make its way into Christianity? I mean, if you just take a step back, the segue is pretty easy. I mean, Christianity is born into a very Greek world, right? The New Testament is written in Greek. Paul's letters, you know, virtually half of the books of the New Testament are written in Greek to Greek-speaking communities all over the place, including Corinth, for example. I mean, so Jesus is born and preaches the gospel in and around Galilee in the Holy Land, but, you know, the the church starts to take root in all these Greek-speaking communities, like Corinth, which is in Greece, and just a little bit west of Elusis, right?

The same spiritual capital that we've been talking about. So, like, what are the odds that one member or many members of this early Corinthian church didn't know anybody who'd been initiated into the mysteries of Elusis, or maybe were even initiated themselves? So we had to remember that the church grew up in a very Hellenized world, a very Greek world, where the concept of magic potions and mystery traditions and secrets would have been known to all these early churches. And so it only raises the question, is it possible that one of these magic potions spiked with just the right drugs made it into one of these early churches before, you know, the church really grew up and became a giant bureaucracy that it did after the 4th century AD.

There's a few centuries there where we don't have, you know, many details of what was going on. And that's sort of in line with how wine was used more broadly. we today think of wine as its own discrete beverage. Can you talk a little bit about how wine was historically used in these ancient times? Yeah, so the minute you start looking into ancient wine, you realize pretty quickly that it has nothing to do and resembles very little the kind of wine that we have today. So it was much more versatile in antiquity. If you go back to actually to the very first literature of Western civilization in Homer, in the Odyssey, you know, the prototypical witch, Circe is written about in Greek, mixing pharmacolugra evil drugs into a kukion potion.

Actually, Homer uses that word too, the kukion, the same kind of like mixed beverage that made its way into the Elucinian mysteries. You had this idea that goes all the way back to the 8th, 7th centuries, BC, and is being written about. And as time goes on, there's another word that's used for wine instead of the typical word, which is oinos. The other word used for wine at the time was pharmacon, which, as it sounds, is where we get the word pharmacy.

It means drug. And so, you know, it was common to refer to wine as a pharmacon because it was the thing in which you would, you know, dissolve drugs. It's how you got your medicine. You didn't go to CVS and, you know, get your prescription pills and down them with a glass of water. You would dissolve medicine into wine. Or you would dissolve poisons into wine if you wanted to hurt somebody. Or you would, you know, dissolve maybe something else into wine in order to create one of these mystical events of communion with your chosen gods. So it was very versatile.

On the Rogan episode that you did, I think you mentioned a little bit about Paul's dialogue with the Corinthians. I think it was in relation to wine as well. You want to say a little bit about that before we move on? Sure. That's a very controversial set of lines there. I picked up, again, just picking up where Carl Ruck leaves off, there's a really interesting line in the New Testament. And it's in the first letter to the Corinthians, Paul's first letter. in chapter 11, verse 30, you know, Paul is kind of chastising these Corinthians for not really

celebrating the Eucharist in the right way. He talks about them having access to a cup of demons and, you know, they're just, they're eating too much and they're getting drunk. And it's just not not what Jesus had in mind, apparently. You know, and so Paul's writing this to them in like in the 50s, in the 50s, in the 50s, AD. This is before the Gospels, by the way. So, you know, one of the first written testimonies we have of the Eucharist is this season. by the way. This precedes Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. So it goes back pretty deep. And what we see from the very beginning is that, you know, there were competing definitions of what this Eucharist was supposed to be and what this mass was supposed to be. The way the Corinthians had it, as I was

alluding to earlier, I mean, it looks like they were dipping into some Greek magic, according to Carl Ruck. So there's a line there. You know, Paul's saying, you know, if you guys keep doing this, you know, there's a reason that you're kind of missing the mark. And there's a reason that so many of you are weak and sick, and a number of you have fallen asleep. That's usually the way it reads in English, but the verb in Greek for fallen asleep is koi mao, or kimao, you would say in modern Greek. And what that means literally is to die. And it does pop up in other instances in the New Testament, like in the resurrection of Lazarus, for example, the same verb is used. You know, so Lazarth, what wasn't taking a nap, we know that there was something with this verb that did mean

to die. And so we have to ask ourselves, why is Paul saying, that people are literally dying from consuming the wrong kind of Eucharist. What was in that Eucharist? Was it a fatal potion? We don't know. So interesting, yeah. I think one of the other interesting elements of your book is the way that you highlight the role that women played in all of this history.

Can you discuss women's role in early Christianity surrounding the Eucharist and the reaction from the very patriarchal church and even how this related to some of the witch hunts? Yeah, it's a very important aspect of the early faith. faith. Women were integral to the birth and development of Christianity, and it should come as no surprise because they were integral to the Greek mystery rights as well. So Elusis, which we've been talking about, was originally a woman's right of initiation, reserved exclusively for them, only later are men allowed in. Same, if not more so, with the mysteries of Dionysus. These are

female-led minads, they're called, the followers of Dionysus, who fall into these fits of ecstasy and are mixing these wines. And I went to the Louvre Museum in Paris, specifically to see some ancient Greek vases, where it shows women in the act of mixing some kinds of plants and herbs into wine. You can see other examples of them potentially mixing mushrooms into wine. So we know that this was the province of women. And who's going to mix up the earliest Eucharist in the church before there's a priesthood or before there are brick and mortar basilicas, again, which don't occur until the 4th century AD. Until then, Christianity, an illegal cult, by the way, was being celebrated in

private dining rooms and in catacombs. And so it would have been women who were the leaders of many of these, you know, early house churches. And some of them were even mentioned by name in the New Testament, women like Lydia, for example. And all these women in Rome are mentioned by Paul, by name, like Mary and Trifaina and Trifosa. And this one woman, Junia, who specifically described as the foremost among the apostles, you know. So I didn't, you know, learn too much about this in Catholic school, but, you know, women were really integral to the birth this faith, and I would argue to the mixing of what seems to be the earliest sacraments of the church. Yeah. And then how does that relate to some of the, like, witch hunts and the church's

reaction? I mean, so you have to ask yourself what happens to this tradition. I mean, we know in the fourth century that as the church is becoming a bigger bureaucracy, and, you know, the patriarchal church is really just stepping into the shoes of the patriarchal Roman Empire, the all-male emperors, you know, give way to the all-male popes. And, you know, you know, cardinals, bishops, et cetera. So that's not so much of a surprise. And as women and potentially drugs and are excommunicated, if you want to say, and these Gnostic traditions go into hiding, what becomes of this? Well, I think this pharmacological knowledge obviously doesn't disappear. It goes underground. It goes into folk traditions. It goes into different healing modalities.

And I think it pops up with the witches. You know, what is a witch, if not someone who has mastery over plants and herbs and fungi and all these toxins. I mean, that's exactly how Circe, again, the prototypical witch, is described in the ancient Greek sources. And so now you have these women, as the Inquisition is approaching, suddenly having all this power and its power that could be perceived as in conflict with and may be very controversial to this patriarchal-led church that is trying to keep a grip on its Eucharist and on its sacraments and on the magic, the white magic that.

it alone is able to control, to, you know, to heal people and to keep the community in check. And so here are these witches out there mixing these crazy potions, some of which are described in very psychedelic terms, by the way, by the personal physician to the popes at the time. And it's at least part of the reason behind these witch hunts. It was their forbidden knowledge. And I think part of the forbidden pharmacology that they'd kept alive. You mentioned right there psychedelic descriptions. Do you have any, like, details on how these were described? Sure. I mean, we have at least a few. Well, I mean, I went into the archives in the Vatican myself to see if I could turn up anything in the manuscripts, which I think I did.

But even before that, we're talking like the 15th, 16th centuries. And so there's the physician I'm referencing is Andres Laguna. And, you know, he translates this older textbook on pharmacology from Diascorities, who writes in Greek in the first century AD. 1500 years later, here comes Andres Laguna, this physician to Pope Julius III. And so he translates like the original Greek from Diascorades, which has all kinds of crazy ingredients and mixed wines in the original manuscript. And then he adds all these notes and these anecdotes about what's happening in his time. And he talks about these witches ointments, these green ointments, he calls them.

And he lists out the ingredients like hemlock and black nightshade and henbane and mandrake, which, you know, if they're not familiar to you as classic, classical psychedelics like LSD or psilocybin or DMT, you know, these are very potent alkaloids. These are, they all contain the tropane alkaloids. These are all plants in the Solanasia family. Very, very witchy stuff, very, very dangerous stuff. And they're listed right there by the Pope's position.

Yeah, that's so interesting. I'm sort of thinking with regards to like the reaction from the church. And I think in a little bit we'll talk about mysticism versus formal religion. But, well, what has the church's response been more broadly to not? only your work, if there has been an explicit response, but to work like it in the past, like the book from the 70s that precedes yours. Has there been any sort of interaction there? Well, that's a good point.

And that's why I wrote the book that I did, which, you know, despite the fact that it asks very big questions and very much wonders, you know, how this technology could have been suppressed and how widespread it was in antiquity. At the end of the day, you know, I'm very clear at the end of my book to say, I don't know. I'm very honest with the reader, and I'll be honest with you now about how much we know and how much we don't. I mean, in the book, I present what I think is really compelling data about this ergotized beer from Spain, pointing to the Greek mysteries, and about one of these spiked wines from the first century AD, which we didn't mention, but is another wine that was spiked with things like cannabis and opium and henbane. I think it's some of the very first data that points to the physical existence of actual, like, botanical specimens of what you, might call a kind of psychedelic wine.

And so now it's there. It's in the record. And I think the question is, like, how much more is there to find? You know, former works, like John Allegro, for example, wrote a very controversial book, The Sacred Mushroom in the Cross. He wasn't interested in that kind of work. I mean, mainly because the science didn't exist. And so a lot of his work is philological, which is, you know, it's a different kind of

discipline. Some of his, you know, comparisons and some of his. exegesis of the texts are hard to swallow for some people. It's very, very complicated stuff. And as a result, the church was widely dismissive of it. So I wanted to be careful, you know, encroaching on this sacred territory to make sure that we stick to the facts and we stick to the science and just be honest about what's there and what's not. Absolutely. What has the response, if any, been from just like regular, you know, more orthodox Christians in general? Like, have you had any feedback from people who consider themselves Christians to this work?

Yes. So last month, I gave a nice talk at Harvard Divinity School with my friend, Dr. Charles Stang. He's actually doing a year-long program on psychedelics in the future of religion. We had a spirit at talk, which was a lot of fun and well-attended. And before and after that, I've been in touch with all kinds of religious professionals, priests, both in the Catholic and Orthodox faith, ministers, reverence, rabbis. Earlier this week, I did a Bible study with. a rabbi in California, Rabbi Zach Kamenetz. You know, so there are religious professionals who are interested in this material, as long as, you know, you go in with an open mind, I've had, I'm just having really wonderful conversations about the potential and, you know, for these compounds inside modern religion and what it all means for the future of Christianity. Yeah, that's wonderful that you've been met more or less with, with a broadly open-minded and embracing sort of response from folks. That's wonderful. Let's go ahead and move into the second half of this sort of conversation. And in the wonderful introduction to your book,

which I really did love, you discuss mysticism historically. And in other interviews that you've done, you've talked about the tensions between mysticism and religion. I was hoping that you can maybe opine a little bit on where you think the divisions are and what some of the history regarding the conflict between mysticism and more formal institutional religion have been over time. Yeah, I mean, so in the intro, I reference a spiritual luminary, brother David Steindel-Rash, and he says it better than I ever could. But he essentially says there's no other way to start religion than through some of these mystical experiences, which is not to say they were all drug-induced or a psychedelic facilitated.

But when you think about things like Moses in the Burning Bush or the Prophet Muhammad's interactions with the angel Gabriel or Paul on the road to Damascus, We're talking about, you know, weird things. We're talking about visionary encounters. We're talking about altered states of consciousness. And according to Brother David, you know, each of these religions, like the three I just mentioned, they do in fact have a mystical core, but the real challenge is to try and find access to that. And the real challenge is to try and keep that alive in this tension, you know, between the mystical and the religious establishment.

You know, part of the church just has to keep itself alive. Part of the church has to speak to people in a way that lots of, of people can understand and do things that lots of people can attend, like the Sunday Mass, for example. You know, psychedelics and mysticism more broadly, I've been saying recently, they're like the extra credit dimension of the faith. You know, it's not for everybody. You know, not everybody's going to go on pilgrimage to, you know, Santiago de Compostela, for example. There are lots of Catholics who do do that and who go to retreat centers, for example. When I was studying with the Jesuits, I'd go on retreat and I was investigating all this contemplative mysticism and silence.

and doing meditation, but that's not for everybody. And so I think the goal, and this is something the religious orders do particularly well in Christianity, is to try and keep that mystical core alive, because over time, it begins to disappear unless you're tending to it. And Brother David says that the pipes tend to get rusty and start to leak, or they get clogged up, and that the flow from that original mystical source will eventually slow down to a trickle. And that's not good for anybody. Richard Roar, the Franciscan, writes, beautiful.

beautifully about this, by the way, in the Universal Christ, one of his more recent books. And, you know, he like Brother David is talking about kind of resurrecting these old mystical traditions and keeping this alive for people in a way that actually makes sense. And if you think about it, you know, under the right circumstances, psychedelics could be one of the things that maybe taps into that mystical core. Yeah, I think that's really interesting and a really open-minded approach to not necessarily having to take one side or the other, but showing how both elements, sort of present themselves to people at different times

and there's a need for institutional religion as much as there is an important need for mysticism and one of the sort of, you know, ideas floating around generally in society is like, you know, what do all religions, well, all religions are getting sort of at the same thing. You know, what do all religions share? And in a very interesting way,

what they all do share are these sub-traditions of mysticism within them. You know, there's Sufism within Islam. Kabbalah within Judaism, plenty of Christian mysticism. One of the first Christian mystics I ever read was Thomas Merton, and I think he could definitely be considered a Christian mystic who engaged with things like Zen Buddhism. St. Francis is often considered to be a Christian mystic, etc. Before I move on to talk about Jesus and his relationship to this stuff, I was wondering, have you personally, I know you grew up Catholic, have you ever had any personal mystical experiences? That's the big question, isn't it? I mean, so I've never, I've never done drugs,

but I wasn't going to write a whole book about mystical experience without having, you know, my own brushes with the unfathomable mystery that we call God. I mean, I love how Joseph Campbell talks about it, this concept of like a condescension on the part of the infinite to the mind of man. This is what looks like God to us, but, you know, we don't have any real vocabulary for it. I do not think it's something you can read about, although, you know, the Jesuits gave me a strong foundation in the languages and the texts and the sources. But in my senior year of high school at St. Joe's prep in Philadelphia, I did go on retreat.

And what I discovered there was a whole different dimension of the faith. And, you know, I took the retreat seriously. And there were some moments there when, you know, I'd felt something and experienced something I hadn't quite seen before and wasn't sure how to put language to. And as I started reading some of this literature, psychedelic literature, the near-death literature, the mystical literature more broadly that I got into in college and thereafter, I started to realize that, well, I may have had something like a mystical experience and didn't know how to talk about it. And, you know, the hard part is learning how to capture that. I mean, how do you do that? How do you experience that in a way that's reliable and potent? And again, I kept turning back to psychedelics, despite never having tried them just because they seem to resolve.

in the kinds of things that the volunteers themselves at Hopkins, or NYU, for example, who conduct these clinical trials. These volunteers wind up describing their experiences in very mystical language, including among atheists in some cases. Yeah, absolutely. In fact, I think my first real big mystical opening was at a very young, as a teenager on, as I've talked about on the show before, a very high dose of psilocybin mushrooms and had a sort of subject object collapse with the night sky. And that opened me up to diving deeper. into these mystical traditions more broadly. And my main path has been like through Buddhist meditation.

And, you know, over time I've certainly had some organic, you know, what could be described as mystical experiences. And I totally agree with you about your inability to find the right language to describe these things. But there have been times also since then where I've revisited psychedelics with the sole intention of engaging with them on a spiritual way alone by myself with the proper set and setting and have had openings of something like universal love, you know, selfless compassion, et cetera. And it certainly is always sort of brief

and fleeting. And there's the, there's the feeling of like when you lose it, how do I get back to it? And I think that's a very protracted problem with anybody engaged in these mystical experiences at all. Once you have one of any sort, there's like this struggle, like how could you possibly get back to it? And psychedelics might offer a way there, but certainly I don't think they're the only answer by any means. No, and I think like any mystical experience, I mean, I would hope if we're talking about them in future religious use, I mean, as not the means to a superficial end, but I mean, genuinely, the beginning of a yearning, the beginning of a lifelong spiritual journey, which is what any true sacrament should be that, by the way. Again, I'm quoting Richard Roar, the Franciscan. He talks about, you know, the stun gun approach to sacraments. They're supposed to shock your system. This ontological shock. that tends to happen under psychedelics is kind of the thing that that sacraments were engineered for. You know, the turning mere ceremony into profound ritual. They're two very different things, you know.

Richard War talks about, you know, the difference between, you know, receiving a Valentine from your partner and actually having sex with your partner. The two very different things. And, you know, mystical experience can be a way into a much deeper relationship with ourselves and those around us. I think. Yeah, that's a really fascinating analogy for sure. And in the book, in the intro, specifically, you do talk a little bit about the Johns Hopkins experiments with some of these psychedelics. And I think we'll get to that in a second. But you did have an interview with a woman who was ostensibly an atheist who went through one of these, I believe, psilocybin experiences

as an end-of-life anxiety alleviation, if I remember correctly. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, Dina Baser. I'm still in touch with Dina Baser because I find her story just incredible. mainly because she still identifies as an atheist, which I think is fantastic. You know, we put too much jargon and language on this stuff. But when pressed, and to this day she hasn't changed her testimony in Iota, when you ask her what happened to her under her one and only dose of psilocybin when she was going through this trial for cancer patients at NYU, she says it felt as if she was being bathed in God's love.

And she says God as an atheist. She doesn't talk about the love of the cosmos or the love of the universe or mother nature, et cetera, energy, you know, she says, God. And whenever you ask her about that, she'll just say it seems like the most appropriate language to me. And then she talks even more insightfully about like what happened after that. And, you know, this line that I'd like to quote, she says, you know, she came to the realization that every moment is an eternity of its own. And again, this is from an atheist, but, you know, when you compare that against the mystical literature, it's almost identical to the way mystics and the early Gnostics talked about this concept of eternity, like not being a long time, but this concept that, you know, divinity

was present here and now and meaning was present here and now, not in some future amorphous afterlife, but that you could actually tap in to something really meaningful in this lifetime. Now, there's Dina Beezer, the atheist, talking about some pretty mystical stuff. Yeah, I found that incredibly interesting. And I think it was Dina who said the wonderful, quote, atheists and mystics both believe in nothing. mystics just capitalized the end? Was that her? Oh, that wasn't Dinah, but I think she'd appreciate that for sure. That's a great quote. Yeah, but they both essentially believe in nothing. It's just how you

capitalize it. I love that. So, you know, as like you, I grew up Catholic and I went through a hardcore new atheist, sad to say, phase in my early 20s. And for many years now, I have been profoundly interested in and practicing mysticism. And through this journey, you know, I initially loved Jesus as the literal son of God and then transition to dismissing him entirely as a fantasy in this, you know, hubristic and arrogant atheist way. And now I'm back to loving him again, but this time sort of from a more mystical perspective. And I think that reflects three pretty substantial views of Jesus, the sort of Orthodox Christian view of him as the literal son of God, the non-theist or non-Christian view, sometimes dismissing him, sometimes saying he was

a great teacher, but nothing more. And then the mystical view, which would even present Jesus as a mystic, having mystical experiences and trying to give words to those mystical experiences through the cultural and linguistic frameworks that he had, which was predominantly Judaism, I believe, at the time. So given your relationship to Christianity and the revelations of your research, how do you personally view Jesus? And does the view of him as fundamentally a mystic resonate with you whatsoever? It resonates completely. Yeah. And I mean, you know, your journey is just, It's the hero's journey of growing up and just being exposed to more ideas and having better vocabulary to talk about this stuff.

You know, I have two daughters, seven and five years old. I don't talk about God very eloquently to them. You know, so when you're growing up, it's just really difficult to teach these concepts to a five-year-old. I mean, I got my first communion when I was eight, eight years old. What the hell did I know about anything when I was eight? And there I am being initiated. it into the church in this very sacred ceremony is an eight-year-old.

And I mean, I'm sorry for my shock, but I have a daughter who's seven. I just, I can't imagine her understanding the depth of John 6.53, which, you know, it would come to me in my 20s and 30s. And so, I mean, I look at Jesus very differently now than I did when I was five because, well, I know the Greek, and I've been reading all these mystical reports. And, you know, what Jesus says in the sixth chapter of John there, which I read about in my book, is very mystical, profound stuff. It doesn't talk about Jesus as your Savior or someone you should pray to or worship. And this is, this was the Gnostic sensibility, this heretical sensibility of the early centuries.

But, you know, Jesus as someone to commune with in a very profound way, I mean, the promise, the formula in John's Gospel in 6.53 to 56 is that whoever eats him and drinks him becomes him. You know, you become Jesus, which is to say you become the logos at the very beginning of John's gospel, which is just to say, you become God. The formula is very, very simple. You can become God by eating God. That's hard to describe to a five-year-old. Yeah, absolutely. And there are always these quotations, which have radically changed meaning over time for me. Things like, you know, the kingdom of God is within yourself when he's talking to the Pharisees or the commandment or the command or the dictations.

to love your neighbor as yourself, which from a sort of conventional thought-based approach seems like an impossible task, particularly one that's filtered through and interpreted by the individual ego. But from a sort of mystical opening of selfless compassion, maybe portrayed through the sacred heart of Jesus, right, this radical opening to include everybody and to love everybody, it makes almost more sense as a sort of mystical reality to love your to love your neighbor as yourself. And so for all these different ways, I just, I come back around to really being fascinated by Jesus as a figure because of some of, some of these quotes and some of this stuff

of viewing him in this, in this way, you know? And I think it's profound and sophisticated what you're talking about. And I think that's what religion is. I mean, these are questions that obsess philosophers, and now they obsess psychotherapists and in an age before psychotherapists or therapists in general. general, there were religious professionals and there were philosophizers. I'm not sure if that was a paying job. But, you know, people, people have been thinking about this stuff for a long time. And these are deep mystical insights about loving your neighbor, for example. That's a profound,

that's a profound statement in the Gospels, but ultimately very mystical. You talked about, like, your own experience of ego dissolution or, you know, losing that, that subject, object, dichotomy that they talk about in philosophy, one of these unitive experiences, you know, beyond time and space, et cetera. I mean, what happens on the other side of that is that you begin to see yourself as kind of part of everything, or maybe everything is kind of part of you. This is what all the mystics write and talk about.

And what that means, taken to its radical extrapolation, is that when you look at someone else, you're looking at yourself and vice versa. And maybe there is a divine spark in everyone and everything around you. And it's a lot easier to love somebody when you're really just loving part of yourself.

I mean, so we do this for our children. We can feel, you know, their DNA rushing through their bodies that also exists in us. But on the mystical sensibility, you know, this cosmic DNA is present in all of us. And if you really approach life like that, I mean, really, if you go outside your door, look at every single person and say, there's my cosmic twin, it becomes a lot easier to love people. Yeah, beautifully, beautifully said, could not agree more. There seems, and this is the last question before I'll let you go, be respectful. of your time, that there seems to be a sort of psychedelic renaissance in science and culture today. And one you're contributing to, I think, importantly, with this work.

And your book reveals that the connection between humanity and psychedelics is nothing new and is, in fact, very ancient, but has had alternating periods of open celebration, as well as periods of more or less brutal repression. I mean, you can think of the war on drugs in our current paradigm and the scheduling of some of these drugs, even cannabis as a type one drug as a form of brutal repression. So what are your views on the revisiting of psychedelics in America today that's happening slowly? And what are your hopes regarding what psychedelics and the role they could play in the coming years? Well, I don't think we're going back to Woodstock, much as I would like that, because the music would be a lot better. And I'm, you know, I'm jealous that I was born a little too late for that.

But I think despite how fast everything is moving in the Renaissance, I also do sense it, kind of going painfully slow at the same time. Like, I don't think that we'll see FDA-approved psychedelic medication for things like anxiety and depression. Before 2025, it could happen sooner. You know, but that's a few years off before you see, like, proper FDA-approved centers. I mean, in the meantime, Oregon, as you probably know,

is currently regulating psilocybin for therapeutic purposes and will probably not be the last state to do that. And California, I think, has a bill going through to decriminalize psilocybin. And lots of different cities around the country at the municipal level have done the same thing. And so there's going to be a menu available to people in the coming years. And, you know, part of it will be for pure therapy. Part of it will be, you know, for wellness.

And there will always be the underground community, by the way. I mean, the same hippies who've been doing LSD or other drugs since the 1960s and 70s. Maybe in some cases haven't gone anywhere. And, you know, microdosing is becoming very popular. But aside from all that, You know, there's also the concept of psychedelics as a sacrament. And, you know, we're not speculating too much because, like, within the Native American church, the ritual use of peyote is authorized. And within, you know, certain other churches like the UDV, the Uniardo Vegetal, they use ayahuasca as their sacrament.

So here's the big question, you know, would something like psilocybin be allowed inside a Judeo-Christian context? And, you know, it's part of the question that I'm asking in the book, because, you know, here, in the West we have kind of this bias against psychedelics and maybe drugs in general as very like non-Western property, indigenous property, exotic property that has nothing to do with the people who, you know, derive all this benefit from these Greco-Roman values that inspired the founding fathers of the United States, for example. And yet, what if at the roots of the West, what if at the roots of all this were some drugs, sacred drugs, no less? What if they made their way from the Greek in Roman worlds into Christianity. Now, I know these are all very big ifs the same way I ask

him in the book, but, you know, with more funding and attention on the disciplines that can actually shed light on this stuff, it's going to raise a big question. Like, is there a new sacrament that could make its way into modern day Christianity in a very legal way that has nothing to do with the FDA and has everything to do with the First Amendment and the protection of sincere religious exercise? It's a very big question we're going to grapple with over the next few years. Yeah, I mean, I completely agree. And I think that's incredibly thoughtful and along with the freedom of expression and the freedom of speech to have some sort of amendment at some point of like the freedom to explore one's own consciousness you know

with certain responsibilities and regulations of course i think is a core human right um and it's a right that humans have exercised in all conditions and all cultures throughout time whether or not they were formally legal or not and i think a mature society um would would approach these things and engage with these things as sort of the important and sacramental as you would put it sort of you know technologies if you will that they are and and understanding them and even maybe you know thinking of a future possibility where there are institutions with with trained guides that you know bring you in and you do a psychological background test to make sure that you're you're okay to do this and they they walk you through it and you know help you if you have a bad trip

etc like that would be a very that would represent a healthier and much more mature approach to these things and one thing that i would actually not want to see necessarily and maybe i only have a half-cocked understanding of of how this actually plays out in the netherlands but like this just this like decriminalizing it and putting it out there is almost like a red light district thing where you go and you can get like these mushrooms and have a trip well that's certainly better than criminalizing them or anything but I think putting them into more respectful contexts like perhaps a Christian context, religious context, or at least culturally important, you know, ritualistic and ceremonial context is actually perhaps maybe even a better way to engage with these substances rather

than just making a smorgas board of things you can come and get to have a cool, crazy trip with because the respect that should go along with these things and the way that you approach using these substances, I think is half of the game, really. I agree. I agree. And, you know, professionals have a large role to play here, whether they're scientific professionals or medical professionals or religious professionals. You know, the more professionals who get involved in this, I think the smoother will be the transition into what this psychedelic renaissance becomes, which is not to say, again, that, you know, these compounds can't be available for the exploration of consciousness by otherwise,

you know, healthy, responsible consenting adults, right? So I worked on cannabis advocacy for a few years and I was part of this organization called Doctors for Cannabis Regulation. We were very clear about that word regulation in the name of our organization because it has a lot to do with education and it has a lot to do with how we look at these drugs and why we've demonized them and what it means to come out of that and how, you know, prohibition is not just this failed model, but, you know, it fails to protect the people you want to protect. like psychedelics aren't for everybody, the same way that drugs aren't for kids, and only by regulating them, I think, are you actually trying to educate people? You know, so you find far less

kids today who are smoking tobacco than you did a generation or two ago, not because, you know, we threw tobacco farmers into jail, but because we just got serious about the benefits and detriments of, you know, tobacco smoking. And, you know, when you're honest with people, I think they kind of get the point. I think it should be the same with cannabis. psychedelics and all manner of drugs. They absolutely don't belong in the criminal justice system. But much more than that, I think what we need is education. And I think all these professionals and these universities have a huge role to play in just spreading good information, which is what I'm doing here. Yeah, absolutely. And we are honored to have you on. And again, I'm a huge fan of this

book. I'm a fan of yours. And I really appreciate your insight and your thoughtfulness. and the way that you approach these topics and this profoundly fascinating history. The book, again, is The Immortality Key, the Secret History of the Religion with no name. Brian, before I let you go, can you please let listeners know where they can find you and your work online? Sure. So my last name is hard to find. But you can go to Brian Murrescu.com. Fortunately, you can also go to The Immortalitykey.com. And there, you can buy the book.

You can look at the things I'm working on. You can see links to my social media. I try and stay active on Twitter and Instagram. I'm getting better at that. So I always try to keep people informed of what I'm up to. Very cool. Hopefully we can send a few new followers your way. And I will link to those things in the show notes.

So anybody listening to this can easily find those and click on them. So thank you again, Brian. This has been a wonderful conversation. Keep up the amazing work. Thank you so much for having me. It was a fun chat.