The Joe Rogan Experience - #1543 - Brian Muraresku & Graham Hancock

Episode Date: September 30, 2020

Attorney and scholar Brian C. Muraresku is the author of The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name. Featuring an introduction by Graham Hancock, The Immortality Key is a look into the psychedelic origins of the world's great spiritual practices and what those might mean for how we view ourselves and the world around us. Hancock's most recent book is America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization, now available in Paperback.

the joe rogan experience train by day joe rogan podcast by night all day joining us by skype is the great and powerful graham hancock my friend how are you sir hi joe it's really good to be back with you i wish i could be there in person uh it feels very strange to be on this this technology but these are the times we live in yeah well i'm just happy we could talk at all in this day and age it's the little things like little victories and uh brian i'm gonna try it i'm gonna try it more rescue you nailed it bro thank you and uh your but this is the first time we've ever done one of these as well in the studio where one per maybe ever visual we've never done what we did one with you guys remember we did randall carlson and yeah and mark mark defant came in by telephone i guess

which was very strange it was like a sound coming from nowhere at least i could see you but we've never done one of these like this but But this book, tell me, this is the immortality key, the secret history of religion, of the religion with no name. I'll say it again. The secret history of the religion with no name. Now, this is obviously when I found out the subject matter, Graham, this is right up your alley. And it made total complete sense why you and Brian worked together on this.

So who wants to start and explain? Graham, why don't we have you start since you're over there in the UK? Yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean, for me, in fact, Joe, I think you and I originally got in touch because of my interest in psychedelics in human culture and a book that I published in 2006 called Supernatural, which looks at the huge role that psychedelics have played in cultures and in religions all around the world. And I touched in that book on the role of psychedelics in the origins of Christianity, which of course is a dynamite subject. And what Brian has done in The Immortality Key has been to present hard

and fast evidence that the first Christians were using psychedelics and that their religious experiences were mediated by psychedelic experiences. And Brian, how did you get involved in this? It's a long story. You look like a stoner, by the way. I'll just tell you right now. You look like a guy who's done a few mushrooms in his day. Oddly enough, I don't do drugs. At all?

And I've never done psychedelics. Wow. Yeah. That's crazy. Yeah. You want to start? Today? Well, I wish we were in LA.

I could hook you up. In Texas, the laws are sketchier here. What led you to this then? I was fascinated by Graham's work, which I only came across about 12 years ago. I was a Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit undergrad major. And instead of getting the PhD or becoming a priest, which are the two options when you study Latin and Greek, I went to law school instead for no reason whatsoever. And then wound up at a law firm. And a couple years into it, started reading about these psilocybin studies coming out of Hopkins and NYU. And that amazing statistic that two-thirds of the participants were describing it as one of the most amazing experiences of their lives. And it hit me that there was something there,

because the testimony coming out of Hopkins and NYU, in a very clinical setting, immediately reminded me of what I heard about Eleusis. And for those who don't know what Eleusis is, it's essentially the spiritual capital of the ancient world. It was where the best and brightest of Athens and Rome went to essentially meet a goddess in the flesh and have this mind-blowing visionary experience.

So before Jerusalem, before Rome, before Mecca, there was a Lucis. And for some reason, we're not taught about this in our high school mythology or Western civ classes. But it was there that Plato, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius all went to drink a magical potion and, in their words words have this vision, what Plato calls a blessed sight and vision, the holiest of mysteries, in which they claim to have a direct encounter with the goddess and completely eradicate their fear of death. It was very similar to what the volunteers are saying with their single experience of psilocybin. Now with Eleusis, how much history do we have? How much recorded history that documents

these rituals? And is there any that describes the actual contents of this mixture? No, there isn't much. I mean, I say Eleusis is like the fight club of the ancient world. The first rule about Eleusis is you don't talk about Eleusis. You know, all we have is this fragmentary testimony, again, from Plato, Pindar, Sophocles, and others. They do talk about a vision that's almost universal, and they almost universally talk about this once-in-a-lifetime transformative event where they become initiates. And only they properly have life after death, because at the time, the Greeks didn't really look forward to the afterlife. In fact, there was no afterlife. You just disappear into Hades to do God knows what.

But people walk away from Eleusis saying that they'd found salvation. And we don't know why or how. We know this potion is involved. We know they make this pilgrimage 13 miles from Athens to Eleusis to drink this potion. We know they prepare for months, if not years, before it, and they're forever changed afterwards. But we have very little hard data to actually look into it. And so in 1978, this trio of renegades, Gordon Wasson, Albert Hoffman, who discovered LSD, and Carl Ruck, who was then the chair of the classics department at Boston University, they put out this book, The Road to Eleusis, claiming they'd found the secret after 2,000 years of what they claimed is that this potion was actually spiked with ergot, which is that

naturally occurring fungus from which you can synthesize LSD. And in fact, it's where Albert, it's how he synthesized LSD by accident in 1938 with cultures of ergot. We've talked about ergot before in this podcast, connecting it to the Salem witch trials, which is very speculative, but they think there's real evidence that shows that there was a late frost during the time of the Salem witch trials that probably led to mold growth on their wheat, which probably led to ergot infestation of their food. And so these poor people were, you know, unintentionally eating acid. Unintentionally. It happened a lot. There were ergot outbreaks across time,

especially in the Middle Ages. They would call it St. Anthony's Fire, the Igne Sacher, because it's so, so common. In fact, if you talk to any brewer today, at least the brewers that I was talking to, I went to see this beer scientist in Munich, Germany, Martin Zarnkow,

and he says you can't avoid it. Now, it's more common on things like rye, but it also pops up on barley and wheat too. And again, it's unavoidable and it's highly, highly toxic. The question is, does it really produce the kind of vision, the visionary experiences that people have on psilocybin, LSD, mescaline, and others? According to Albert Hoffman, absolutely. So as a matter of fact, I went into the Harvard archives, where Wasson's papers are kept to this day in the botany libraries. And I found a letter that Albert wrote Gordon, his co-author in 1976, saying that Albert had self-experimented with Ergonavine, which is one of these alkaloids in ergot. And he claimed in 1976, it was five to ten times more potent than psilocybin.

It's fascinating to me that these cultures seem to have hid some of these rituals. And this goes back to really as far back as we have recorded psychedelic use, like Soma. We still to this day don't know what that is and it's described in these incredible ways in ancient Hindu Texts, but we don't know what it is. We have an idea I actually brought some some Sanskrit to show you you want to see some Sanskrit? Hell yeah, can you put it up on the screen? It's under the the Soma tab. Oh look at how beautiful that is There it is. Their language writing it in Sanskrit, God, it's so pretty. Do you want me to read it for you? Please, you can read that? Yeah. So this was my major in college.

So in the very middle there, you can see, And what he's saying there is, this is from the Rig Veda, right? And it's the oldest literature in Western civilization. We think it's among the Indo-European languages. It's the oldest recorded literature that we have. It could be 1500 BC, 1700, perhaps much earlier, like the Iliad and the Odyssey in Greek. This is the mother tongue of all the Indo-European languages. And what they write about a lot is Soma,

which is both a god and the juice that is pressed from this god. And what they're talking about there is making this ritual potion, very much like the koukion that we find among the ancient Greeks. And here, Soma is described as a mixed potion. Yavashira means mixed with barley. Govashira from Sanskrit go, gova is milk, mixed with milk. And so I've read all the theories that you have about what soma was, whether it was the Amanita muscaria mushroom or some psilocybin-containing species or DMT. The way that they describe soma here is always a mixed potion, which, so in this case, mixed with barley and milk. So that would be an ergot, some sort of... Already they're mentioned. I mean, and so that's what Rock Hoffman and Wasson were saying in 1978.

We have literature from the 7th century BC. It's called the Hymn to Demeter, where they record these ingredients of what the koukion was. You ask, where's the actual evidence? So in the 70s, we didn't have much. It starts with the literature, which is what classicists do. And so there's this hymn to Demeter that was discovered in 1777, a year after we declare our independence from Graham's people. And what they found in there in line... Sorry, Graham. We're in Texas, man.

Absolutely. Well done. i'm all for independence i'd like to be independent of my own country if possible as well well texas is taking refugees at the moment is it not well that's what's happening here that's why we're here we're refugees from the country of california exactly The nation state of California. So, why do we know why they combined it with milk? Was it just so that it was easier to consume? That's what we don't know. We don't know why the koukion was

this mixed thing either, but so in the hymned to Demeter, they record these ingredients. It's alfi, which is barley, houdor, which is water, and blechon, which means mint. And that's all we had. So it doesn't say milk? You didn't say milk? That was in Soma.

In Soma? Oh, I'm sorry. Which they mix with all kinds of things, and not just barley and milk, but also honey. As a matter of fact, Soma is often identified with madhu, which is honey in Sanskrit. McKenna speculated that there was a transfer in culture of a psychedelic-based culture to an alcohol-based culture based on climate change and also based on preserving things in honey. And that honey would create mead, and mead, which if people don't know, is an alcohol beverage that's actually made with honey. beverage that's actually made with honey. Do you think that this was the case with the use of honey as well, that it's used as a preservative, or was it used to make it taste better, more palatable? We don't know. That's the problem when we're talking about ancient plants and fungi, plants especially. We don't know what plants they're talking about. So the ancient literature records all kinds of plants across the language. If I could jump in, Joe, you're absolutely right. There was secrecy that surrounded the use of these potions in the ancient world. There's a case from

Athens of the potion from Eleusis being used for recreational purposes, and this is roundly condemned by all concerned that it should only be used for the purposes. And this is roundly condemned by all concerned that it should only be used for the sacred and spiritual purposes of which it was intended. So there was a great deal of secrecy that surrounded the use of these potions. And the potions were a doorway or a gateway into another level of reality.

And what's fascinating from Eleusis and many other ancient accounts is the way that people come back having lost their fear of reality. And what's fascinating from Eleusis and many other ancient accounts is the way that people come back having lost their fear of death, that they don't regard death as the end anymore. It's just another stage on the journey, just the beginning of the next great adventure. And Brian is absolutely right to draw attention to the modern work with psilocybin. And again, we find people who are terminal cases who are imminently facing death, losing their fear of death as a result of using psilocybin. So we can begin to see connections between what we understand about these extraordinary

substances in the modern world and how the ancient world used them. That does seem to be a universal theme, this theme of alleviating the fear of death. And this comes up constantly with people that I know personally that have had it, had these psychedelic experiences. They say, well, I feel like I went to heaven, or I feel like now I understand why people believe there's this perfect afterlife that I've actually experienced it. A lot of the critics will say that it's some kind of natural human tendency that we don't want to die and that we're afraid of death and that religions provide us with some sort of solace, some sort of feeling of security. But I don't think that washes at all. I think what's striking

about the psychedelics is it's a direct experience that the person has. They have an experience. It's not a teaching. It's not something that they're told about. It's not a scripture that they read. It's an experience that they have. And that experience eliminates the fear of death. I think Brian, by the way, having written The Immortality Key, for which I've only provided the foreword, I think Brian is absolutely right to be a psychedelic virgin. In my case, because I have used psychedelics and many other substances, a lot of my critics just try to write off all my work, whether it's on lost civilizations or on psychedelics, they try to write it all off as the rantings of a sort of drug-fueled maniac. And I think it's very smart of Brian, very smart of

Brian not to put himself in that situation. I hope he will work with psychedelics in the future, but I think he was right not to work with psychedelics before writing this book and to concentrate on the evidence. Well, Michael Pollan, who later in life experienced psychedelics and wrote pretty brilliantly about them, for me, he's one of the more interesting people to discuss it because Michael's an investigative journalist. He takes deep dives into these subjects, and his deep dive into psychedelics was incredibly illuminating and so for him i really enjoyed talking to him about it and i really enjoyed his book as well his his perceptions of it were really unique because you're talking about a guy who lived

his whole life without them you know and then really dove head first for his book and kind of what happened kind of what happened to me when I wrote Supernatural. I had, apart from one experience with LSD in 1974, I hadn't used any psychedelics until I began to research Supernatural back in the early 2000s. And because I'm a kind of boots-on-the-ground researcher, I felt it was essential that I have these experiences. What I couldn't guess was the way that the experiences would utterly change and transform my life. And I

can understand from a level of personal experience why psychedelics do lie at the root, I think, of all the world's religions. And those religions are now busily at work trying to deny that connection. Well, they're not just trying to do it. There's many people in science that are trying to deny these connections too. And it's so unfortunate that the people that are trying to deny these connections or the significance of these experiences haven't had them. I don't think anybody who has a dimethyltryptamine experience can just dismiss it as being no big deal it's it's too crazy the fact and i you need to do it sir this guy i mean just the fact that it's it's one of those things where

everyone who does it comes out of it saying i can't believe that's real yeah i can't i can't believe you can just get there that quickly that three puffs and all of a sudden you're in Narnia. I just – I can't – we're not way more intense than Narnia. You're in Narnia and you're in a place where entities are actually communicating with you and speaking to you and teaching to you. I mean this is another aspect of psychedelics is the moral aspect of psychedelics. Critics and enemies of psychedelics want to associate them with some kind of immorality. But actually, anybody who's worked extensively with psychedelics will know that they contain moral teachings. Whether it's the mushrooms or whether it's LSD, they cause us to examine our own behavior, our own impact upon others, to question our unkindness to others, and to give us at least the push to begin to be better people and more nurturing and more caring people for others. So this strong moral element in psychedelics, again, is totally ignored by the critics who just want to demonize these substances for reasons that I think are rather sinister, actually. current culture lacks a map of the territory and if we had like some sort of legitimate

psychedelic counseling where we could go somewhere and experts both in pharmacology and in medical science can talk people through these experiences and help them achieve them and and get people to realize that you know much like the ancients experiences are not, it's not wise to use them recreationally. I mean, you can if you want. I mean, many people have and then inadvertently benefited from them greatly. But I think they're very profound, and I think they should be treated like, almost like you've got a Willy Wonka golden ticket to go meet God because that's what it seems like. It's what it seems like has happened.

It was for the ancients. Should be treated with respect. Should be treated with respect and with reverence because of this sense that we're passing through a doorway into a seamlessly convincing parallel reality. And the possibility that that isn't just a concoction of our brains, that the brains are simply acting as an interface or a transceiver between us and that other level of reality. And again, you can see the connection with psychedelics and religion here. My view is, and I've said this before on your show, Joe, if I were running the world, anybody who wanted to be a president, a prime

minister, a head of state of any kind, I think it should be obligatory that they have at least a dozen sessions with a powerful psychedelic. It can be DMT, it can be ayahuasca, it can be LSD, but they got to go through those dozen sessions. They should be guided by experienced practitioners. And at the end of those dozen sessions, I very much doubt if those individuals would be the same individuals who went into the application for the job in the first place. No, I don't think you could be the same. When you write about all this, how curious are you personally of the experience? And do you plan on having it? I do, under the conditions that you set. I mean, I think that we're in a period now

where everything is about to change. The clinical research is advancing. Rick Doblin is moving to phase three. You have researchers at Hopkins, NYU, now UCLA, looking at psilocybin for a host of different conditions, from depression, anxiety, end of life distress, which is really fascinating. And I think that sometime over the next five years, the FDA is going to get involved, and these will become available, at least for specified conditions. And what I look forward to is maybe in 10 years' time or less, these retreat centers, which are licensed and regulated with professional staff and medical supervised staff who essentially guide people through what would be a novel initiation experience, not unlike what may have happened 2,700 years ago.

I'm hoping they're going to be backdoored in as therapy for people with pre-existing conditions that we have right now, like opioid addiction, iboga, like ibogaine being introduced, and MDMA for people with post-traumatic stress disorder, for soldiers, because there's been so much real solid evidence that it's incredibly beneficial to these people, particularly the opioid crisis. I mean, we have a real problem in this country with people being addicted to these pills and then wind up dying from them. That can be nipped in the bud like really effectively with Ibogaine.

And the fact that you have to leave the country to have these ibogaine experiences is really it's it's a terrible statement on the the rational thinking of our culture today because it's not like these are unknown things we're talking about it right now on a podcast that millions of people are listening to and we've talked about it dozens of times in the past. And it's something that scientists are aware of, researchers are aware of, and particularly people who have come back from there and have had these experiences and have been cured of their addictions. It literally rewires the way the brain interfaces with these opioids. And the fact that it's not available to people and they have to go through traditional counseling and benefit from their willpower

and somehow or another try not to relapse. It's terrible. We've been just mitigating some of that. Even cannabis, for example, which can mitigate some of those addictive potentials. I worked with athletes, for example, which might interest you. So I represented a guy named Mike James

who was an NFL player who we believe is the first professional athlete in the US to seek a therapeutic use exemption from the NFL to get off his opioids and use cannabis instead. And we were there at 51st and Park Avenue at NFL headquarters, arbitrating with the NFL to try and get him a cannabis supply. And he lost. And he was fined six figures in the process, and he left the league because of it. He's not the first one, right? Who's the other, Jamie, you're a football fan. Who's the other famous football player who couldn't kick the weed? Ricky Williams.

That's right, Ricky Williams. He never sought a TUE, though. It was unthinkable to get a TUE at the time. But it's amazing that the NFL would have a problem with marijuana when so many of those guys are on pills. I mean, some of those guys are so severely injured. I mean, it is one of the most brutal, if not the most brutal sport in the world.

And the fact that these guys can't seek marijuana for relief when they allow them to take opioids, it's just bananas. It doesn't make any sense. Because we live in an insane society, which has got all its priorities upside down, and is completely screwing up this beautiful world that human beings have been gifted by the universe. And I think it boils down to a relatively few people. We just have incredibly bad governments, lousy leaders, totally irresponsible,

lacking any initiative or imagination in it entirely for themselves. It's a messed up world and it's a kind of litmus test for how messed up that world is that sovereign adults cannot take the responsible decision to use psychedelics without risking jail.

It's very, very insane that that should be the case. And yet alcohol is glorified in our society. As you say, the opioids are prescribed hand over fist by big pharma. We're very mixed up. And I have a feeling that the sooner we get our politicians onto major psychedelics the better things are going to be well i think we got to get the whole world involved as well we don't want to be the only ones that are tripping no problem if the chinese and the russians are not tripping and we are we're like everything's

gonna be fine man yeah and and also the other the other point to to make again the critics try to trip try to trivialize this but actually working with psychedelics is it can be really hard work it can be really grueling it can be really demanding it can put you through the psychological ringer as you confront your own dark side and learn how to deal with it yes there is a there is a recreational role for these substances, and I honor the right of sovereign adults to use them for recreational purposes if they wish to do so. But it's the deep work that these psychedelics require us to do,

which is really fascinating and which is not easy. It's very, very, very difficult. I personally find it difficult. I don't rush to my next psychedelic adventure. I prepare myself very, very carefully and with some experience. And those are experiences, whether they're real or not, they're experiences that impact you as an experience does. You were breaking up a little bit there, but yeah, I completely agree with you about that. I mean, I get terrified when I take an edible. A marijuana edible is the introspective nature of those things and the way it breaks down your thoughts and your behavior and finds the skeletons in your closet.

You're in there for six hours. Searching around with a flashlight. I tell people, though, but that's one of the things that I like about it. I learn things. I know it's scary. I know I feel terrifying while with a flashlight. I tell people, though, but that's one of the things that I like about it. I learn things. I know it's scary. I know I feel terrifying while it's happening. But when I come out of it on the other end, I genuinely feel like I'm a better person. Like I've gone – at that moment, I will be nicer to you.

I'm better at being me. It's very effective. It really works. There's something to it. And it's available. It's not something that you have to, you know, go to counseling for years and years. No, it's right there. You can get it real quick. This was the whole point of the mysteries, by the way, in the ancient world. I mean, so there was a whole apparatus dedicated to curating these experiences for people. And sometimes it was

once in a lifetime, like at a lusus at some later point in your life. And then you have the Dionysian mysteries, which are a bit weirder and a bit crazier. But they were also curated by professionals, by technicians, women in this case, who were thought to be spiking wine with all kinds of magical plants, herbs, and fungi. but the mysteries existed to create this experience of death and rebirth. And they're supposed to be terrifying. You were supposed to enter the underworld to meet the goddess. It doesn't happen in the daylight. It doesn't happen prancing around. And the Greeks are known for lots of great things that we've inherited, like democracy and the arts and the sciences and what we're doing right now, this, this trialogos through these microfonos. These are all Greek things and Greek technology that we've accepted as part and parcel

of Western civilization, but there was another part to them. And it's a part, again, that is not taught in high school mythology or Western civ. And there's this deeply mystical aspect in the mysteries, for example, which, which the Greeks really looked to as something that wasn't just like a special part of civilization, but the central part of it. So there is this, I'll tell you a story about this, this fourth century historian Zosimus. He records the testimony of a Roman guy named Praetextatus, who was initiated at Eleusis. Because remember, it wasn't just people from Greece. It was around the Greek empire, including at that time were people who'd been influenced by the Greeks. And Eleusis has survived up until the fourth century AD, at which point it's destroyed. It's eliminated by the

Christianized Roman empire in the late fourth century. And so there were different attempts to wipe it off the map. And in 364, the Emperor Valentinian, he essentially outlaws all nocturnal celebrations because these things are always at night. Eleusis was at night, which speaks to part of the experience. And this guy, Pratextatus, is recorded as saying, Valentinian, please don't shut this down. I'm an initiate.

I've been to Eleusis. I've drunk the potion. I've seen the goddess. Please do not eliminate this. Eleusis is the one thing that holds the entire human race together, he said. He said, if you get rid of Eleusis, life for us will become abiotos, which in Greek means unlivable. It wasn't just about Greek existence. It was about human existence. There was something happening at Eleusis with that potion, with this beatific vision that literally held civilization together like glue for the ancient Greeks. And democracy, the arts, the sciences, everything else was an offshoot of that experience. Eleusis was the foundation. One of the things you talked about

was that there was this transference, like the Eucharist eventually became a placebo. Do you think that that—what do you think it was initially? Do you think it was a psychedelic mushroom? So that's—Allegro certainly thought that, right? Right. John Mark Allegro, author of The Sacred Mushroom and the Scroll. So he releases that book in 1970, and he claims that Christianity is the guise for a Near Eastern fertility cult.

And I mean, I think it's very interesting, but there aren't many linguists who support the proposition. Right. There's a lot of people that disagree with him pretty heavily, right? I mean, from like a purely linguistic perspective, it's, I mean, to explain it briefly,

so he says that... Did you read the Sacred Mushroom and the he says that... Did you read this? Yeah. Sacred Mushroom and the Cross. Yeah. Did you read it? Several times. Did you read the Dead Sea Scrolls

and the Christian Myth as well? From Allegro. Yeah. Yeah. That's the one that was... So the Catholic Church bought out the original one, right? And it was very difficult to get a hold of for the longest time.

You had to buy copies of it. I've heard rumors to that effect, yes. Yeah. And then he... So he comes out with the second book, The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth. What, what did you, knowing as much as you know about language, what did you, did you feel like he made leaps? Did you feel like he made these connections that maybe were based on speculation? It's, so he writes, it's pure

philology, right? So it's, it's word games and things that only linguists I mean, I think it's incredible that people who aren't linguists can actually read that It's really, really difficult to read Sacred Mushroom and the Cross But the basic premise is that the New Testament, written in Greek Has this Semitic substratum So underneath the Greek, the gospel writers and Paul Are actually referring to different terms in Hebrew or Aramaic, and that these terms have in turn come from the Sumerian, which any linguist would say

is a language isolate, that there is no real relationship between Sumerian and the Indo-European languages like Greek and the Semitic. So the premise of the argument is something that most linguists don't accept. However, and Karl Ruck has written the afterword to one of the editions you probably have of Sacred Mushroom and the Cross. And he gets into some complex theories about psycholinguistics and this interesting idea that just because they aren't related, there are certain words, certain names, certain vocabulary, like plant definitions, which would carry across the different languages. And I find that somewhat interesting. But when you dig into the words that Allegro was recreating, he places an asterisk, actually, next to these words,

because they can't be corroborated by the ancient texts. So some of these Sumerian words, he straight up hypothesizes as existing, but they can't really be found in the existing tablets. So it's hard to correlate some of those meanings he draws down from the Sumerian. But that said, he makes very interesting claims. For example, like in 1 Corinthians 22, there's this interesting line where he says about that, we preach Christ crucified, is a skandalon for the Jews and a folly for the Greeks. And skandalon in Greek means like a bolt or a snare, like a trap. And Allegro ties it to like a tikla in Aramaic,

which is like what he calls the bolt mushroom. And in Sumerian, ukustigila. And so he's saying that Paul's actually telling the Jews that the Christ crucified is a mushroom instead of a skandalon. It's like a code word, like the skandalon is a mushroom. And then for the Greeks, he says it's a phali, which is moira in Greek, which actually means mandrake, which is another psychedelic plant. So there's all this different wordplay going on, but it's really hard to tease out any physical forensic evidence for this stuff, which was what I went after.

Was Allegro's position, if I recall correctly, that the sacred mushroom was Amanita muscaria? Yeah, that was even the cover of his book, was a photo of Amanita muscaria. And that's where I have a... I think Allegro did amazing work, but that's one area where I have a problem with Amanita muscaria as the psychedelic of choice in early Christianity. recognized that the mushroom is much more effective after it's been passed through a human body, or indeed through the body of a reindeer, and emerged in urine. And so those shamanistic cultures of Siberia use Amanita muscaria by drinking it in the urine of a shaman who has previously consumed the mushroom. And I don't see a lot of evidence for that in early Christianity.

And it's why I like the work that Brian has done, looking at the really hard evidence for psychedelics in early Christianity, which are not, in this case, Amanita muscaria, if I'm correct, Brian. Isn't the speculation about Amanita muscaria that it's seasonable? It's seasonal. it's also genetically variable, like there's different species, much like different fruits taste differently,

there's different versions of the Amanita muscaria that have more psychedelic compounds in them, and that there's all sorts of ways of preparing them that we've completely lost. Am I getting this wrong? I've only had one Amanita muscaria experience and it wasn't very convincing. Am I getting this wrong? I've only had one Amanita Muscaria experience and it wasn't very convincing.

Yeah, and this is often the case, but I'm told, I've not had the experience myself, but I'm told that if you can bear the idea of drinking the shaman's urine after he or she has consumed the Amanita Muscaria, you will have a really powerful journey. Yeah, but you don't want a shaman just laughing hysterically after you drink his urine. Absolutely.

The joke's on you, stupid. Yeah. There's also so many correlations between the Amanita muscaria and Santa Claus and Santa Claus to shamans. There's so many. The colors, the red and white. Yeah, there's also the bag, the toys, the fact that they would dry them on these coniferous trees, the fact that these mushrooms have this mycorrhizal relationship with coniferous trees

where they tend to grow under pine trees, which is the tree that we use for Christmas trees. The fact that they're bright red like a toy that is in a package waiting for a child to open it up. There's so many of these weird connections. The colors, the fact that reindeer are with Santa Claus, the fact these reindeer fly. Fly through the heavens. Yeah, I mean, caribou are notoriously attracted to Amanita muscaria mushrooms. In fact, people that have had psychedelic rituals and gone outside to urinate

have talked about caribou knocking them over to try to get to their urine. Caribou are reindeer. And they have been observed eating these things. So they have this weird relationship. All those things are together, connected in some sort of a strange way. And there's also a history of shamanic rituals

being outlawed in Siberia. And the way they got around it was they would come through the chimney, which is just crazy. They would climb onto people's roofs and slide down the chimney to deliver the mushrooms. Well, it's just another example of the way that our culture takes an ancient historical truth and completely castrates it and turns it into Santa Claus, you know, whereas what we're actually dealing with are profound experiences in deeply altered states of consciousness. Well, it's also this information seems to have been lost fairly recently, because if you go back to the early 1950s and 40s and look at birthday or christmas cards the christmas

cards and depictions of christmas almost always contained elves and amanita muscaria mushrooms the amanita muscaria mushroom was synonymous with christmas for some strange reason have you seen those old yeah yeah it's crazy right yeah like what is that like it's all over the the fairy tale books too you can't you can't avoid the Amanita everywhere you look, which is why I think Allegro was also interested, writing in 1970 and studying it in the 50s and 60s. I think that's why he glommed on to the Amanita. But it's such an unconvincing mushroom.

Like, the people that I know that have experienced it in terms of a psychedelic ritual, it's just, I don't know anybody who's really blown their brains out with it. No, and Gordon Wasson also thought it was the ingredient behind Soma as well. He writes a book about this in 1968, Soma, Divine Mushroom of Immortality. That was his guess too for Soma. But Wasson was experienced with psilocybin, which is so universally regarded as being effective.

That's why it's so confusing. I always found that strange too, to be honest. So, so, so Wasson, I mean, to explain where this, where this comes from, Wasson has this incredible experience with Maria Sabina in 1955 in Oaxaca, Mexico. And when he consumes the, we think psilocybe Mexicana, and he is catapulted to the heavens and he has this vision that, that he describes as the realest thing he's ever experienced under the influence of the psilocybin. And the thought occurs to him, he writes later in 1957 in Life magazine. He says that could it be the case that the divine mushrooms are in fact the answer behind the ancient mysteries? Which is why he then went and started looking at the Amanita, perhaps, or eventually Ergot,

which is where I pick up the scent. At some point in his correspondence with Albert Hoffman, they together began focusing on Ergot, like we said, because it's so common and so natural, but so highly toxic too. And Albert claimed to have this experience with it. And so for years and years after teaming up with Karl Ruck, they were convinced that ergot had to somehow be involved. So, what is the speculation of what the Eucharist originally was? According to the early Gnostics? Yeah, I mean, is there any text that explains what the initial food was?

Well, I mean, we have the canonical explanation from the Gospels, and we have St. Paul's letter. I mean, the honest answer, and I think any priest would say this too, is the honest answer is we don't know. You know, the Gospels are written anytime between 65 and 100 AD. Paul's letters are some of the earliest writings that we have, like the letter to the Corinthians, for example. He writes that in about 53 AD. And the way he describes what's happening there is very, very interesting. Maybe we can pull it up, actually. I brought some of the Greek from the New Corinthians. It's under Christian Pharmacon and the 4 Corinthians 1130. on? And the 4 Corinthians 1130. So, at some point, I was looking for what that original Eucharist was and where it was taken. So, you have to think about the Greek role at this time.

You know, Jesus is born in the Holy Land, but Christianity really takes root in the Greek speaking parts of the empire, which is why Paul's letters are written to Greek speaking people, right? And why it's interesting to follow this theory, because you have the ancient Greek-speaking Greek in the pagan world, but you also have ancient Greek- speaking Greek in this Christianizing world. And so the people in Corinth is this church, not far from Eleusis, by the way. In fact, today it's only an hour west of Eleusis, and one of the earliest churches is there, and Paul is addressing this early church in Greek. And at the bottom, you can read the English, but he's essentially yelling at them

for consuming the wrong kind of Eucharist. And earlier in this chapter, he calls it a cup of demons, and at the end, he says, that's why so many of you are weak and sick, and a number of you have fallen asleep. And I highlighted the word koimontai there. So koimao in Greek, I can tell you for certain, does not mean to fall asleep. Koimao means to die, because it's the exact word that John's gospel uses about Lazarus. Remember the famous miracle where Lazarus dies and he's resurrected? That'd be a pretty shitty miracle if Lazarus was just taking a nap and Jesus went to wake him up from a nap. And he uses the same verb there. What Paul is saying here is that he's concerned that so many Corinthians are drinking a wine that is causing them to die.

Why would wine cause you to die in a Greek world that had no distilled liquor? There was no hard alcohol in ancient Greece. Distilled liquor doesn't enter Europe until much, much later, 8th, 9th, 10th centuries AD, right? At this time, there's no word for alcohol either. Alcohol is Arabic. If you listen to the word, like alchemy or algebra or alcove, all these AL words all come from the Arabic. AL is like the article in Arabic, like el in Spanish or il in Italian. So at this point, wine is not known for its alcoholic content. Wine is a potion that is routinely mixed with all kinds of stuff, toxins, spices, perfumes, and plants, herbs, and fungi.

And here, we don't know what to make of it, but the Corinthians are drinking something that's causing them to die. But the word is die. Koimao absolutely means to die, because it's the word that, in fact, you can go to the next slide, Jamie. If you look it up right there, it means, just like we would say the sleep of death, if you look it up right there, it means, just like we would say the sleep of death, but it means death. And elsewhere in the Gospels, it's the exact word used for what happened to Lazarus before his miraculous resurrection. It's the whole point of the miracle. He is komao. He has fallen asleep to the death of sleep. Whoa. So the speculation is that there's some sort of a psychedelic or a fungi or something that's in the wine that's causing them to die,

and they're using it recreationally, and they're trying to discourage this. That's how I read it. And it's not just based on a random read of this one line in Corinthians. It's based on an understanding of what Greek wine actually was, how far back it goes, which is centuries and centuries before this, how it was mixed, what it was mixed with. Even in the first century, there's a guy called Dioscorides, a Greek pharmacologist. In fact, he's called the father of drugs. And at the same time that these gospels and Paul's letters are being written,

he writes something called the Materia Medica. It's these five books in Greek, and every drug prescription you've ever had in your life exists because Dioscorides wrote that manuscript. And in that manuscript, in book five, he lists out, in book five alone, 56 different recipes for spiked wine. And in the Greek, he shows you how to spike wine with everything from salvia to hellebore to henbane, which he says is good for swollen genitals. So if you have swollen genitals, you dissolve henbane into wine. He says if you drink mandrake wine, like Allegro was talking about mandrake, it'll kill you in one cupful. And then he says this about black nightshade

in book 474. He says, if you dissolve nightshade into wine, it will produce fantasias ou aedais, which in Greek means not unpleasant visions. So just from the literature, we can tell that the Greeks absolutely knew how to spike wine with very powerful substances. Graham, I got to tell you, your microphone is really sensitive. So anytime you do anything, any movement or breathing, it bangs around for whatever reason. I'm sorry. I just have to make you aware of it. So I have to sit still.

No, everything's fine. But anytime you bang, it overpowers everything, unfortunately. Oh, dear. Sorry. Can I be turned down at the switchboard or something? I don't know. I don't think that's what it is. I'll clean it up in the recording.

Jamie will clean it up. I'm writing him down. Okay, he's writing down all the noises. That's how good Jamie is. I wanted to bring up Sage to you because one of the things that you talked about was Salvia. Salvia is sage, right? They are basically in the same species, at least. When those priests would be walking down the aisle, and they would be blowing sage, they're burning sage. Was that for some sort of a psychedelic effect? Is that the reason why they were doing that? So when it comes to incense, we actually

have an answer now. I'm not sure if you know this, but earlier this year in May, there were some researchers in Israel who released one of the first archaeochemical studies of ancient incense. Have you heard about this? No. Oh, so just in May at a place called Tel Arad in Israel, south of Jerusalem, west of the Dead Sea, there was the organic remains of some kind of incense that was burned on these two altars that is described by the researchers as kind of a scaled-down version of Solomon's Temple. It's dated to the 8th century BC, so in the Judahite period. So we could feasibly say the beginnings of the Judeo-Christian period. Oh yeah, there it is.

Frankincense. I love that word. So under archaeochemical analysis, and this sample had actually been excavated years ago in the 1960s and was deposited in the museum. But the thing with this science, which is amazing, is that they can resurrect this stuff no matter when it was excavated. So fortunately, it wasn't contaminated. And after analysis, they found it contained thc uh cbd and cbn so tetrahydrocannabinol

cannabidiol and cannabinol uh and so it's it's the first they say it's the first example of psychoactive drug use uh in in the ancient holy essentially. So when they were walking down the aisle, would they use only—we know that was cannabis. But sage was used as well, right? And sage is salvia divinorum, which is a more potent psychedelic than cannabis. Yeah, but I think that's a New World plant, though. Is it? If I'm not mistaken. Oh, okay.

I mean, at least the one you're thinking of. So when you say New World, are you talking about European world in the americas oh americas really so sage use when they would have it in that what is that graham you would know this what is that thing that they walk down the aisle with when they blow a sensor a sensor that's really what it's called a sensor c-e-n-s-o-r yeah oh, a sensor. It's an interesting double entendre there. Yeah. Sensorship, yeah. So they were most certainly using cannabis or something else that they were burning,

and they were getting everybody high. And frankincense. Yeah, and what is frankincense? It's an aromatic spice. So it just smells nice. We don't think it's psychoactive, but maybe at the right dose it could be. But the cannabis certainly was. So they would give everybody marijuana smoke just walk down the aisle and blow marijuana smoke on everybody if i may add whether or not the smoke

is psychedelic it is adding to the experience it's adding to the to the setting and again anybody who's worked with psychedelics will know that the setting is at least as important as the substance itself. So they're masters of creating this mysterious and powerful and energizing setting in which the psychedelic experience can then unfold. It's such a bummer that we know so little about what exactly was going on, but so nice that someone like you has done these deep dives into it where at least we could pull out whatever we can. And it just makes me think, where would we be if people like you weren't doing this?

It's so rare. This is why I'm not doing DMT, man. Because you wouldn't be doing it? I don't know. You might be doing it with more feverish need. mean you might be really obsessed with it um it's just uh it's it's so strange and graham i always go back to your uh your statement which i think is such a great quote that we're a species with amnesia yeah in regard to our archaeology our history butia in regard to our archaeology, our history, but also in regard to our use of psychedelics. Yeah, well, we've just not been given the straight scoop about our past. Sometimes

it's just purely the way that scholars work, that academics work. And sometimes I think in the case of Christianity, it is actually a kind of conspiracy. I think there was a deliberate effort to cover up the role of psychedelics. And you could see why priests in the developing Roman Catholic faith, who've already pulled on the jackboot of the Roman Empire, you could see why they wouldn't like their congregations using psychedelics. Because when you use psychedelics, you have a direct experience of the divine and hey you don't need that priest anymore the priest as an intermediary between you and the divine becomes becomes redundant uh and and i think that there was a concerted effort to cover up the role of psychedelics in early christianity and to present a different narrative

which it was purely was the the bread the wine, the blood and the body of Christ, in a symbolic sense, and not in an actual sense of a substance that connects us to the divine. So the literature that connects the banning of these psychedelic rituals in 4th century, you're saying, how does it describe it, and what was the reaction by the people? I mean, at the time, so you have to remember that the Greek mysteries existed for a long, long time. We don't know exactly how long, but the excavators, and this began in Eleusis, for example, in 1887. They date it back to at least 1500 BC. So if it survives

until the 4th century AD, you're talking almost 2000 years, as long as Christianity itself has been around. And the mysteries themselves, and there are serious scholars who came along in the 70s to say this, could have prehistoric roots, which is how I started the investigation, to say this, could have prehistoric roots, which is how I started the investigation, by asking how this actually got to the Greeks. Because what's interesting about this koukion potion, for example, is that it's not wine-based. In that hymn to Demeter that came down to us, she's actually offered wine in this mythical story that takes place. She's out looking for her daughter Persephone, who's been abducted and kidnapped to the underworld. And she looks for her for nine days and nights and can't find her. And she rests her bones exhausted at Eleusis, and they try to offer her wine, and she says no. She wants that

water, barley, and mint. And again, Hoffman, Wasson, and Ruck thought it was kind of like a primitive version of beer, if you think about it. It reads like a very simple beer recipe. Now for the Greeks all the way through the classical period through Plato and afterwards, for them to be drinking beer instead of wine is very very weird. For them to have a secret mystery religion that's not written down remember the civilization that birthed literature and the concept of the university as we know it is also very weird. So it's like they are retaining this very prehistoric ritual and this very prehistoric beverage, which is beer. And as I trace it back further and further, you can see clues of beer being used in funerary and mortuary rituals as far back as 13,000 years. rituals as far back as 13,000 years.

And there are some who think that that beer actually precedes bread at that moment we call the agricultural revolution, where the upper Pedeolithic becomes the Neolithic. And Graham writes a lot about this and very beautifully at Gobekli Tepe, for example. So I was able to trace back the potential brewing of religious beer all the way back to Gobekli Tepe. And the speculation is that this religious beer had some ergot in it. Possibly.

It's possible. It's possible. We haven't done much testing for ergot that far back. I mean, that's why I wanted to write this book, is because the science is relatively new. Archaeochemistry, for example, is relatively new. Some of the better findings have been coming out over the past 20 years, which is like a baby in the sciences. In fact, Pat McGovern at the University of Pennsylvania, who I interviewed for the book, described archaeochemistry at the time, in the late 90s, when he was producing some incredible finds, as like an infant, which would make it like a toddler today. And so we're just beginning to put these pieces together. So we can't say there was psychedelic beer

13,000 years ago. The question right now is kind of, was there beer at all? And there's very early indications at Gobekli Tepe itself that they were brewing beer. And at another site to the southwest in Israel at Mount Carmel outside Haifa, there's this really interesting place called the Rockefet Cave. And it was a burial site with about 30 individuals. This is between 11,700 BC and 9,700 BC. A team from Stanford went in there and they found these boulder mortars in which they found traces of the malting and mashing of greens, which they think was for beer. This is 13,000 years ago. Graham, which brings us to the Upper Paleolithic, and then we have the whole mystery of rock and

cave art all around the world. So Brian is right. We haven't got the analysis that proves that a psychedelic was in that 13,000-year-old beer. But what we do have 13,000 years ago and going back much further, 27, 40, 50,000 years ago, is art. And that art really only makes sense as psychedelic art. I mean, where else, but in a visionary state, do you see an entity that is part human and part animal in form, that is part a lion and part a human being? It's not something you see every day. It's not something that you see when you're out hunting game. But seeing these therianthropes, as they are called, is a very common experience in deeply altered states of consciousness. So the art itself speaks to us of artists who had powerful experiences in deeply altered states. What is the conventional speculation about those images, the half-man, half-animal images? Increasingly, it is that they document psychedelic states. There's a professor at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa, David Lewis Williams,

written a book called The Mind in the Cave, who's documented this in great detail, that the only possible explanation for this art, which is found all over the world, is not just found in one region or one place, is that the artists were shamans, that they were experiencing altered states of consciousness. And when they returned to a normal everyday state of consciousness,

they remembered their visions and painted them on cave walls. And those visions might well be a lion man or a bison man. And that entity had communicated with them just in the way that entities communicate with us today under the influence of DMT or psilocybin. Did you have a sense of urgency while you were writing this? Did you understand that this is something that very few people who are legitimate scholars are going to really tackle? Well, it hadn't been done.

And I don't know why nobody was doing this and combining the humanities and the linguistics with with with the sciences um i've been waiting for this book to come along and and no one wrote it so you had to write it yourself i wasn't doing dmt i had plenty of free time how long did it take 12 years wow was there any point in time where you were like what the fuck am i doing uh if you ask my wife, yeah, especially. You're supposed to be a lawyer, man. No one's paying you for this. You went to the Vatican?

Was there a real issue? Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Really? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's, you know what, it's a good point. This is really, really hard, and it brings up something. I've been talking with the researchers about this, too. So when I talk about archaeochemistry, I mentioned Pat McGovern at UPenn. There's another guy, Andrew Ko at MIT. And every time I have a question, these guys are there to answer it. Andrew's awesome. He's a younger guy in his mid-40s. He's been doing this stuff his whole life. He has a background in classics like I do. And so he's the only person I've talked to who sees like the legitimacy of this kind of pursuit because he's one of those guys

who can think about the humanities and the sciences at the same time. But it's tough. There is no discipline for this. You can't get a PhD in the hunt for ancient intoxicants. No one's out there studying for it. It just doesn't exist. And those who do study it find it very, very hard to get gainful employment. for ancient intoxicants. No one's out there studying for it. It just doesn't exist. And

those who do study it find it very, very hard to get gainful employment. You can't get paid to do this stuff. And so a little bit later, we'll talk about two archaeochemists I've been in touch with who have remarkable findings that I want to share here, but they've each since left the discipline. So they were doing incredible work 20 years ago in the late 90s and early 2000s. We're finding incredible things, but I mean, life being what it is, they had to leave the profession. Well, let's get to that now. Who are they and what are they? So there's a couple of different guys. So there are two finds that I really went out of my way to put into this book. One is trying to find hard evidence of this ergotized beer, and the other is trying to

find actual hard evidence of wine that's been spiked. And ideally, that would be spiked wine in the context of some kind of Christian ceremony, or some syncretic Greek Christian ceremony in the first century AD. And so I spent years and years trying to get in contact with these folks and reading through the archaeobotany journals. And I'll start with Ergot first, since I was really kind of fascinated with Ergot and this hypothesis from 1978, because it sits there for now 40 years, and there's no hard data to come by. And people often argue about Ergot the same way we argue about Amanita and the other candidates, because it doesn't make sense. We know it's there, we know it's common, but it doesn't make the most sense as the thing that would have spiked this beer.

So I spent a long time looking for ergotized beer or any beer that was spiked. Now, if you go to the top archaeochemists or archaeobotanists in the US, the UK, or Europe, and I did for many years. And I asked them the very simple question, is there any botanical or chemical data of beer having been spiked with psychedelics? And the universal answer that would always come back is no. And so I'd ask them again, and the answer would be no. And so I started to think about the ancient world and what that meant and what ancient Greece meant. And so first I went to the site Atalusis to ask the archaeologist there if we could test her vessels. And I couldn't believe that nobody had ever asked her if they could submit the vessels to chemical

testing. And so I flew there and I talked to her about it. And she said, unfortunately, they've all been treated for conservation purposes. You know, they put them in museums and they exhibit them to the public. And when you do that, you contaminate the artifact and it's no longer testable. So that was my dead end. And that's where things stopped for a while. And that's where my wife starts asking, you know. Brian.

You flew to Greece by yourself and left your two daughters at home for no reason. So you could ask a lady if you could test her chalices. And she told you no. And now what are you going to do? And so I said, well, I'm going to get creative, man. And so I thought about the ancient Greek world. Here's the thing about the ancient Greek world.

In the wake of Alexander the Great, who was called the Great for a reason, the Greek influence after the fourth, third centuries BC stretched all the way from Iberia, Spain and Portugal, to Afghanistan in the east. I'm not sure if many folks realize that, but the Greek speaking or the Greek influence part of the world was enormous. And so if you're looking for evidence of this Koukion, why would you restrict yourself to Athens and Eleusis? So I took a step back and I started thinking, where else would there be a Greek presence? And I didn't expect to find one, but I landed on Iberia eventually because I started

researching ergot in different languages. That was my first clue. You know, in English, we have this one weird word for it, ergot. And actually, in German, there's lots of words for it, bizarrely enough. Maybe it's because of the history of brewing. But in German, there's Aftakorn, Mutakorn, Tollkorn, which means crazy corn, crazy grain, or Totenkorn, which means death corn. And so it's weird that, you know, as you look elsewhere, it seems to be more common to the German mind. And then in Spanish, I just started random Googling for what that is. It's called

Cornesuelo de Centeno in Spanish. And a couple of things started popping up. And these notions of spiked beer started popping up where they weren't supposed to. I never expected to find them. So the first hit that came in was from an archaeological site kind of in the middle, Midwest of Spain called the Valle Dolid. And there in 2003, they found a Greek vessel called a Greek chalice called a kernos. And it's the same kind of vessel that's used in the Eleusinian mysteries. It's like this little cup with a tiny cup on the outside I brought a picture for you if you want to see it sure Jamie in Mas Castellar

if you scroll to the bottom and copy of P29 so that's it so this came from a site called the Necropolis of Las Ruedas and the Necropolis of Las Ruedas. And the Necropolis of Las Ruedas is this archaeological site that was dated to about the 2nd century BC. Now, these aren't Greek people.

This is a pre-Roman population called the Vakai, or the Vaxians. But for some reason, in this kernos, it tested positive for beer spiked with hyoscyamine. If you go to the next tab, Jamie, you'll see that they wrote it up. It's in Spanish, but there you'll see that at numbers 76 and 77, when they tested the kernos, which is a very Greek word, by the way, when they tested the kernos, it tested positive for traces of hyoscyamine. And hyoscyamine can only occur in these solanaceous plants, these nightshade plants. So it's the family of plants that

includes very boring things like the tomato or the potato or tobacco, but it has these nightshades like mandrake, again, or henbane. And so it's one of those tropane alkaloids that could have been in henbane, for example. So here you're talking about a henbane beer, which is really weird. The even weirder part is that this is found in a funeral complex, just like you would find at Gobekli Tepe or the Rockefeller Cave in Israel 13,000 years ago. Here, after thousands and thousands of years, you're seeing this pre-Roman population using beer spiked with henbane in a death cult. And where the researchers say that it was used to either facilitate the deceased's travel to the other world, or maybe the people who were there

ushering the deceased into the other world. They actually use that phrase. Holy shit. Go back to that image of the cup again, please. So why does it have the cup on the outside of it again? There's the large vessel, and then there's a small vessel to the side of it? We don't know. That's just what a kernos is. Could it possibly have been portion control?

Exactly. If you scroll to the top, Jamie, you'll see two other kernoi on the top right there. And so this is the next part of the clue. So these came from a colony on the east coast of Iberia

called Emporion, which was a bustling Greek colony. And these are other kernos vessels, just like you would see at Eleusis. These are the kinds of things that they think the initiates were drinking from. Now, they don't make for very good drinking vessels,

but maybe they make for good mixing vessels, like for dosage control. Something is going on there. That's what they thought the Kernos was at Eleusis, for example. And that's what I wanted to test with the archaeologist there who said no. And so now we're finding these vessels in Spain where they're not supposed to be. And I can say as a classicist or a one-time wannabe classicist,

that the first thing you think of when you think about the ancient Greeks is not Spain. And all of a sudden, I'm coming across this idea of spiked beer in Spain. And it's just not supposed to be there. That's so fascinating. So this image, what is the, can you go back to that original image, Jamie? Of the cup with the small cup next to it. What is there, what's the conventional description of what this is and why it's shaped this way? I mean, the Spanish archaeologists, they also call this a kernos. I mean, it's the extent of the Greek influence at that particular site. This is the Pintia archaeological site. The extent of the relationship and the network is a little unclear, at least to me. It's unclear how strong

the Greek presence was there. But at the time, by the second century BC, because the Greeks were already in these other port cities, basically, it's not inconceivable that some kind of trade was happening and these vessels would have made their way inland. Do they have a description as to why there's a small cup connected to the larger cup though? It would be the same as any Greek archaeologist has too. We don't know why this was associated with the mysteries. No one knows why. It really does logically make sense that it would be some sort of a portion because it's very small. Obviously, you don't want to have too much of that shit.

Yeah. It really does make complete sense, actually, that that's what it is, that you take one portion of this and mix it with ten portions of that, and then you're going to have an interesting journey. I can't think of another explanation off the top of my head. Obviously I'm not qualified to speculate, but when I'm looking at this, I'm thinking,

Oh, that completely, that fits. But you're on, you're on the right track because that, that that's, that's where it led me to was portion control. Yeah.

And that's what I found next. What'd you find next? I found, I found some things, man. What'd you find next? I found... I found some things, man. What did you find, man? So, Cernos, right? I'm thinking Cernos vessels.

And so the vessel doesn't just show up in the middle of Spain there. It shows up on the coast at this... And so this town's called Empurion and today it's called Ampurias and it's in

Catalonia, in Northeast Spain, close to the border with France. And to be totally honest, I'd never heard of Emporion. And I'm not sure if many classicists have, but it was a bustling import-export business of the ancient Greeks, founded by the Phocaians, who came from Ionia, which is today modern-day Turkey. And they found this place in 575 BC, and we think that the religion comes with them, or some kind of religion. Jamie, if you go back to Mas Kastajar, you can see just an exterior shot of what this colonial town looks like. And when you look at it, again, there, I mean, it looks, that could be southern Greece, that could be an island in Greece. there, I mean, it looks, that could be southern Greece, that could be an island in Greece

that's on the northeast coast of Spain, that's a statue of Asclepius, the Greek god of healing standing in a courtyard in Spain and the statue dates to at least 5th century BC wow

and we don't know really what's going on but in the next slide, the Phocions who founded this place were devotees of, that's supposed to be Persephone on the left. The Greek goddess Persephone, the goddess of the underworld, the same goddess who the initiates would find when they made their pilgrimage to Eleusis and drank the potion. They went there to meet Persephone. And there she is on their coins. Wow. And then it gets more interesting how?

so these people don't stick to the coast they go inland at some point and they go inland for a reason and there's a site that they found called Mas Castellar de Pontos it's a tiny town called Pontos and there's this farm that the archaeologists describe as a Greek farm a bit further inland. Jamie, if we go back to the

same file there, we can just click through a bunch of the images and the kinds of things that they found there, which are indicative of the Greek mysteries. So starting with her, for example, that was unearthed at this archaeological site in Pontos. And the archaeologist responsible for this dig, who's been the same woman since 1990, her name is Enriqueta Pons, she found this and other objects. She calls this the head of Persephone. Wow. Or it could be the head of Demeter. But either way, she thinks it's a Greek goddess.

And this is 3rd century BC. So obviously there's some intense influence these are Greco-Italian amphorae also dated to the 3rd century BC and the next one that's also some kind of demeter that's an incense burner by the way

you stick incense in the top of it light it up depending on what your incense is and it's used in cult rituals. That's 3rd century BC, and then it gets weirder. They find this, 5th century BC, that belongs in a dining room in Athens, not on a farm in Spain. That's the origin of comedy right there,

believe it or not. That's called a komos. Komos, in ancient Greek, is one of these drunken parades in honor of the god Dionysus these are the first paid regulars at the comedy store and he's got his dick out like Ari Shaffir

there you go wow that's crazy so then it gets weirder just south of the site they find this and this is Tryptolemus. Tryptolemus is kind of the missionary of the mysteries. So after Demeter establishes her temple in Eleusis, they send this guy to go scouring the earth to carry the knowledge of the grain and farming

across Europe. And if you go to the next one, Jamie, you'll see that it's very similar to the kind of tryptolemus things that show up in Greece. This is from the Eleusis Museum on site in Eleusis. If you compare the two, you see a dude on a flying dragon cart in the left and a dude on a flying dragon cart in the right. They're both tryptolemus. The last place I ever expected to find tryptolemus was a farm in Spain. And there it is. Wow.

So if Tryptolemus tells you anything, it tells you that the mysteries went west, when they're not supposed to, by the way. Graham alluded earlier to this incident that happened in Athens in 414 BC. To celebrate the mysteries outside of Eleusis is a sacrilege, a total sacrilege. It was called the profanation of the mysteries. And one of Socrates' star disciples, this guy Alcibiades, was caught indulging in the mystery ceremony at home instead of at the temple. And he became the Ed Snowden of the ancient world. He was ostracized. They would have killed him if he didn't run from Athens. So this was serious stuff

and sacred stuff. So for them to be celebrating the mysteries, think about it, kind of makes sense because no one's looking over their shoulder in Spain. If it's going to happen anywhere, maybe it'd be in the hinterlands

of the empire. So this is people that realized that they wanted to continue these rituals and couldn't do it in Greece anymore. They had to get out. Right. Or these were folks who either couldn't afford or didn't want to go all the way to Eleusis. I mean, you're in Spain. Imagine getting to—you can't get to Eleusis today.

Imagine getting to Eleusis 2,000 years ago, 2,500 years ago. It's really, really difficult. ago, 2,500 years ago. It's really, really difficult. If I may give a parallel, it's rather like somebody seeking an ayahuasca experience today, and perhaps they can't afford to go all the way to the Amazon rainforest, or it just seems too big a journey. So they're going to look for somewhere nearer to home where they can have that experience. And indeed, ayahuasca is available all over the world now. Yeah, and that's pretty recently, right? Like within the last couple of decades, it's available all over the world. Spread rapidly within the last couple of decades.

And I think Brian is suggesting that a similar sort of thing was happening in the ancient world with a different substance. The guy's name is so right on the nose, too. Trip Ptolemas. I never thought about that until right now. Because I don't do DMT. But I mean, Trip. People tripping. I mean, it's just right now. Because I don't do DMT. But I mean, Trip. People tripping. I mean, it's just ridiculous that his name is Trip.

It's interesting. I mean, look at him. He's riding a dragon and his name is Triptolemus. And on the next one too, Jamie, you'll see there's another Triptolemus from Capua. This is in Italy. So he did go west. Wow. We know he went to Italy.

And if he went to Italy, why wouldn't he go to Spain? And look at the style of art. It's completely Greek. Wow. Pretty psychedelic at the same time. Yeah. Flying a panoramic. Yes, it is.

But it's so uniform that in the three different locations, you have the same imagery. Wow. In the three different locations, you have the same imagery. Wow. And so the question that Wasson, Hoffman, and Ruck would immediately ask is, what is Triptolemus doing there? Was he really sent as a missionary to teach people how to farm? That's a traditional signal. Isn't that wheat in his hands?

That's exactly right. Okay, so ergot. He was dispatched to teach people how to grow cereals. However, across the Neolithic period, people know how to farm. People are already farming. So it starts in the breadbasket at Gobekli Tepe in Anatolia. We have farming across Europe. In Greece, as early as 6500 BC, it's by 4000 or so BC, it's all over Europe. Why would Triptolemus need to be sent on a mission

to teach people to do something they already knew how to do, which is farm? And so what they would say is, he was teaching not about growing the grain, but about what grows on the grain, which is ergot. Of course. And look, someone's pouring something too. Yeah, that's one of those.

Just ritual ablutions. Wow. So then it gets more interesting. Okay. We're waiting, Jamie. We're waiting, Brian. In addition to Tryptolemus and the heads of Demeter and Persephone, Enrique Tapons finds this gem, which is a 250 square foot ritual sanctuary that she calls in Spanish a Capilla Domestica, which is a household shrine.

And she believes it's a household shrine that is specifically dedicated to reenacting the mysteries of Demeter and Persephone for people who wanted to get in touch with their Greek ancestors. And she calls this a ritual room for the living to interact with the dead. Wow. But you still need some Greek influence. So in the next slide, you'll see the altar where the activity was happening. Does that look Greek? Very.

So that's a column that was proven by petrographic analysis to have originated at the Mount Pantelicus quarry northeast of Athens. It came from Greece, and it's sitting in Spain. And what they're doing on that, aside from burning incense all around, is they're sacrificing dogs. They found the remains of three female dogs. There's only one goddess in Greece associated with that, and that's Hecate,

who is the mother of the witch Circe and the patroness of all witches. And they're sacrificing dogs to her because she's known as the kunosphages in Greek, which is the dog eater. What? God. The other things you find in that room, aside from the Greek altar and the Greek goddess

to whom dogs are being sacrificed in an underworld journey where the living and dead are communing, is a Greek hearth. And Enriqueta uses the Greek word eschara for that. You can go to the next one, Jamie. So in addition to the Greek altar and the Greek hearth, she finds these, which are very Greek-shaped cups. These are called kantharos. The kantharos is the ritual vessel

that was only used by the god Dionysus to drink his magic potion. She finds about 10 of these in and around the area. And when I heard all this, after the Greek influence is swimming on this place, I called up Karl Ruck, who at the time was 84 years old. He's now 85 years old. And his career was severely impacted

after the release of the 1978 book, The Road to Eleusis. His career essentially tanks. It was the classic case of the wrong book at the wrong time. He was not supposed to write this because he did. He was deposed as the chair of the classics department. He was cut off from grad students. He was discouraged from interdisciplinary scholarship with his colleagues. He became the drug guy. Classicists don't write about drugs, but the book really, really impacted his life. And he became kind of the black sheep of the classics estate. And there's no evidence to prove that this ergotized beer actually exists.

And so, you know, his career kind of went into a nosedive. And so I've been keeping him up to speed on all this work. And so I called him up and invited him to come see this ritual chapel with me. And so that's him getting his very first look at the incense burner and the cup. And he's in an ancient staring contest with Demeter looking at this cup. And I didn't take him all the way to Spain just so he could look at a cup. It's because of what was in the cup. the way to Spain just so he could look at a cup. It's because of what was in the cup. And so in the mid-1990s, after it was excavated, this woman Enriqueta, the archaeologist, for some reason, we don't know why, she got in touch with a young archaeobotanist who I mentioned before, Jordi,

and they subjected this chalice to analysis. And what they found was beer. Wow. So this thing was filled at some point with some kind of ritual beer that was used in some kind of ceremony dedicated to Demeter and Persephone. But that's not all they found. They also found the remains of Ergot.

And it is the first and most compelling data to support this scorned hypothesis from 1978 that's ever emerged. What was that like for him to experience that? It had to be just completely mind-blowing, but also frustrating that he was right all along. And I expected that, too. And I asked him. I have a video of me talking to him at the chapel. I asked him what this all means.

And he's not salty about it. 42 years later? 42 years, yeah. Not at all? No. He's got a good life. He's happy. I think he feels vindicated.

Yes. And I know he's excited to talk about this in public. And this is the first time we're talking about it in public. Uh, and I know he wants to dive deep on this. Uh, but this is something he's dedicated his entire professional life to. And he is, you said he's 83? He's 85 now. 85. Yeah.

Um, how, how is he holding up physically? 83? He's 85 now. 85. Yeah. How is he holding up physically? He's okay now. He's in quarantine. He lives in this beautiful pre-revolutionary war home that I went to visit a couple years ago. I describe it as something like the British Museum having been ransacked by a group of mischievous elves. He's surrounded by mushrooms and busts of Demeter and he's got some artifacts that belong to Gordon Wasson

who was his mentor in many ways. Father figure. So from 78 on, he was just balls deep in this stuff. He dove head in. Instead of turning around after he was yelled at for being the drug guy,

if you look him up and his CV, it's all he does is write about the potential use of drugs in the ancient world. Did he have personal experiences? Many. Yeah, so that's probably why he started writing about it. As a matter of fact...

There's really no reason to not. As a matter of fact, when I mentioned that letter from Albert Hoffman to Gordon Wasson in 1976, when he self-dosed on the Ergonavine. He sent some, in the letter it says, he sent some in the mail to Gordon Wasson who politely declined and made Ruck do it instead. Wow. So for Ruck, what was it like for you to be able to show this to Ruck, to give him hard evidence, to show him these cups, to tell him about the tests that were done, the fact that they discovered ergot, the fact that they know these vessels were holding beer. I mean, this vindication to be there physically while this

vindication emerges. Psychedelic, man. It was really emotional. I mean, it's still emotional for me. And I mean, to be clear, there's more testing and more analysis that needs to be done. This was 20 years ago. And the breaking news is that that original sample may be stashed away somewhere at the University of Barcelona, and Jordi was going to go look for it. COVID intervened. So we very much want to retest this stuff. Andrew Coe at MIT very much wants to get a chemical sample. So I want to be a little careful, but the way it exists today is extraordinarily compelling. And odds are, there's probably even more evidence, some of which hasn't even been

excavated. And for, for Ruck, it's, or for the field in general, I think it's, it's, it's really, and I think it's extraordinary. Well, the dots all connect themselves. I mean, that's what's really amazing about it. If you look at what you've discovered, and if you look at the history of these people getting together and having these rituals, and what we know about psychedelics, in particular LSD, and what Albert Hoffman has shown,

and any people who've experienced LSD know. I mean, it all fits right in. It all makes sense. It's crazy. It's just, and what, where would we be if you didn't write this book? That's what's really interesting. You know, there's seven plus billion people on this planet and it just takes one person to not listen to their wife.

And next thing you know. Do you hear that, PJ? Do you hear that? PJ, he was right. Thank God. Is she cool? I think you just saved my marriage. I swear to Christ.

I think you just saved my marriage. Is she cool with it now? No. Still not? No, she wants to see how this goes, and then she'll be cool. Oh, it'll go great, man. This book's going to sell like crazy. Are you going to do an audio version, and then she'll be cool. Oh, it'll go great, man. This book's going to sell like crazy.

Are you going to do an audio version of it? I read it myself. Oh, nice. When is that going to be out? It's out. Is it out right now? It should be, or today or tomorrow, yeah. Oh, okay, because I tried to look for it yesterday on Amazon.

It wasn't, or on, no, Apple. It wasn't available. Okay, the 29th, I think. Oh, okay. The publication date is the 29th of September, and that's also the same publication date as the paperback of my lost civilization book, America Before. I want to be clear that the immortality key is Brian's book.

Yes, you wrote the foreword. My contribution to it is the foreword, and I'm grateful to Brian for asking me to do that. I think Brian has done really important work, and I think the next step now is to demystify this field and get more science at work on this subject instead of just closing our eyes and closing our minds to these extraordinary possibilities that we've been radically misled about our own past. Yeah. And I think thanks to the great work of Rick Doblin and Dr. Rick Strassman and yourself and so many other people that have contributed to this, it's now something that people are allowed to speculate about.

It's now something that people are allowed to have. Yes. People are having real legitimate conversations about these things now. Yeah. Yeah. This was the attempt to use 21st century science to test an ancient hypothesis. And part of the issue is the ancient Greeks, and the other part's the Christians. I mean, all we had for a long time was Allegro. So I spent some time, if Ruck was right about this,

was Ruck right about what he writes about the Christians? And he does write about psychedelic sacraments and the Christians. And what was his speculation about the psychedelic sacraments and the Christians? He also likes the Amanita Muscaria. Really? Yeah. Why is everybody like that one? Do you think it—well, this is also—I'm asking you as a person who hasn't experienced psychedelics.

I do not know very many people that have had successful experiences with it. It's very confusing. But I do recognize that it's – McKenna speculated very much that we've lost our ability to understand how to prepare it and when to prepare it, when to pick it, and that it's seasonal. And there's so many variables. I think – Yeah, we're ignorant about how to use these things. Our society, I speak of a species with amnesia. We've forgotten the old techniques

and the old ways of doing things. There's been a concerted effort in the modern world to demonize these substances and to cut them out of our lives and to associate them with irrational behavior and craziness and so on and so forth. And to move forward in this field, I hate to use the word, but it needs to be made more respectable because it's the key to understanding so much about ourselves that has been obscure and mysterious until now.

It's just, for a person who's experienced it, it's so strange the contrast between the experience itself and the public's perception of it particularly the the average person who has not experienced psychedelics who looks at it like this frivolous ridiculous thing like why would you engage in such a thing why would you i mean i remember had a conversation with michio kaku about it once talking to him about uh psychedelic mushrooms and he was basically telling me scientists want to strengthen their mind they don't want to ruin their mind in that sense, like you don't want to waste your mind

on drugs and I was like, oh there's a guy who needs to do some drugs yeah exactly people make these kind of statements as though they're facts yet those people have had no experiences of the substances concerned but actually think for his own career though for his own career you you almost have to say things like that or at least then we're talking

when i had this conversation with him more than a decade ago probably 15 years ago so when when you have these experiences and you you know you run into the conventional perception of these you understand that these people almost like like what happened with ruck and what happened with many other scholars that took chances and discussed these things you wound up being this crazy person you wound up being this easily dismissed person and it's very very – in many ways it's discouraged in a very powerful way. Because there has been a hugely well-organized and well-funded propaganda war against these substances. Our society prides itself on the alert, problem-solving state of consciousness, and the alert, problem-solving state of consciousness. And the alert problem-solving state of consciousness does have an important role to play.

But part of the madness of our society, why it's become so suicidally dangerous, is because the alert problem-solving state of consciousness has been given a monopoly position. And what psychedelics do is they undermine the dominance of the alert problem-solving state of consciousness, and they show us the much wider range of consciousness that is available. And therefore, they are insidious to the powers that be.

Those powers that run and control our world today don't want people thinking for themselves. They don't want the propaganda to be unpicked by a mushroom. And that's why we've faced this propaganda war. And what we're dealing with is the legacy of that propaganda war. And the majority of people, unfortunately, don't realize that they've been subjected to 50 or 60 years of lying propaganda. They think it's actually all facts. And this is what needs to be unpicked. And we're in the middle of a crisis in this country in regards to police violence and police brutality. And a big part of that is the war on drugs. It's a giant part of it.

It's responsible for the Breonna Taylor murder, which is being discussed right now and people are protesting. That was a war on drugs. Absolutely. No knock rate. I mean, that's what that's about and most of these war on drugs at all this is the this is the thing it's a completely maniacal idea because ultimately it's not war on drugs and i've used this phrase before it's a war on consciousness yes our society does not want certain kinds of consciousness to be experienced. It wants to shut them down.

And it treats us like children. If adults are not free to make sovereign decisions about their own health, their own consciousness, and their own bodies while doing no harm to others, then freedom is a meaningless word. Yeah. And unfortunately, freedom is a meaningless word in the societies we live in today. We do live in a heavily mind-controlled society where facts are, where propaganda is disguised as fact. I agree with you, but I think this battleship is slowly turning. And I think that these kind of conversations that we're having right now, it's responsible in a big way for shifting the way people perceive these things.

For the longest time, the only way we've been explained to, the only way these subjects have been explained to us has been in demeaning terms, and that these are bad experiences, and you're going to wreck your life, you're going to ruin your life. And when we're here saying, well, maybe it'll make you a better person. These are revolutionary thoughts in the 21st century. And the fact that there's so many people that are echoing these statements, and so many really intelligent, well-educated people who haven't ruined their lives, who have families and jobs, and they're saying, no, this is actually good for you. and jobs and they're saying, no, this is actually good for you.

Yeah. And, you know, if it comes down, I think it needs to be recast in the issue of individual freedom and individual sovereignty. Of course, there must be limits on individual freedom. We must not do harm to others in exercising our freedom. But really, taking a psychedelic is the least harmful thing it's possible to do to anybody. It's an entirely inward experience. And it should not be controlled by the state and by government. What's happening here is that we're literally being treated like children as adults. And it's most unfortunate aspect of our society. And the way I see government seeking to use the current

crisis to add to its power, to dominate people's lives, to even enter into their homes, to encourage neighbors to snoop on one another. It's a very insidious trend that we're in. And the war on drugs has been a big part of that trend for a long time. But you're right, Joe, the battleship is turning around and it's turning around because people are waking up and they're saying, we're just not going to put up with this shit any longer. We're not going to be told what to do. We're not going to be treated as infants by our government. Hear, hear. And the thing about the psychedelic argument too,

it falls apart, the idea of criminalizing it, because it lacks all of the rationalizations that you can get with crystal meth and cocaine and death, overdose, addiction. Mushrooms are not addicting. These things are not addicting unless – And even so, we already have laws that deal with negative behavior towards others. So if somebody is on a particular substance and they harm somebody else, we have a law governing that harm that they've done to somebody else.

We don't need to have a law that that harm that they've done to somebody else. We don't need to have a law that enters the sanctum of the individual's consciousness and tells that person what he or she may think and what he or she may experience. It's a really Huxley-esque or Orwell-esque world that we're messing with here. Now, when you talk to Ruck about Christianity and about the use of the Amanita Muscaria mushroom, does he echo the statements of John Marco Allegro? Does he buy into that or does he have a parallel perspective on it? It's kind of a hybrid. In some of his writings, he's a fan of the Amanita. In others, he takes a broader approach.

He's a fan of the Amanita. In others, he takes a broader approach. And I think that was my approach looking at this too, because the one thing that pops out at you from the ancient Christian world is wine. And the one thing that pops out at you from the ancient Greek world is this spiked wine. And Ruck does write quite a bit about that in The Road to Eleusis, the same book in 1978,

where he talks about this ergotized beer. He is also talking about spiked wine. But again, there wasn't much data to go on for the longest time. So same as I was kind of scouring the ancient world for evidence of this ergotized beer, I took it upon myself to put his other crazy thesis to the test. And I started looking at wine in the ancient world, not just for the Amanita.

And I did look for it, by the way. I looked for evidence. I didn't find any, but I found other evidence. And it starts at the Lou world. Not just for the Amanita. I did look for it, by the way. I looked for evidence. I didn't find any, but I found other evidence. And it starts at the Louvre. If I can show you a couple pictures. Jamie, can you go to the Louvre? That's the first time anybody's ever said that to you, Jamie.

Jamie, can you go to the Louvre? Jamie? So, in an obscure footnote from 1978 ruck talks about a greek priestess's spiking wine and he makes a reference to an old book from the early 20th century by a german scholar called freaking house and freaking house talked about this vase that was apparently in the louvre that nobody had ever seen and And I took it upon myself to try and find that vase. And so at the very top, Jamie, if you click on the drawing, this is a line drawing by Frickenhaus himself of what he apparently saw in the Louvre at some point

in the early 20th century and not many people have seen since. So this is his illustration of what he recalls being on the... Exactly. Exactly. And if you take a look at it or zoom into the woman on the right you can see her preparing preparing additives for for the wine and we can't really make out what they are um but the way freaking house drew it it kind of looks like a mushroom in her left hand you can't really tell ruck says the other one is a sprig of some herb. And again, you can't really tell. So I sent an email to the curator at the Louvre, Alexandra Cartianu, and I said, I'd like to take a look at this and I'd like to bring my friend along. And my friend is Father Francis Tissot, Roman

Catholic priest, who happens to be an expert botanist and herbalist. So I called up Father Francis from his laboratory in the rustic parts of Italy, and I said, Father Francis, since you're trained at Columbia and Cornell and Harvard Divinity School, and you know everything about plants, will you come help identify this for me? And so he said, sure. So we met at the Louvre, and we meet Alexandra, and Alexandra says, you know, this vase, I can find it for you, but it's not on exhibition. This is not in the public catalog. This is in our storage room. And if you want, I can take floor past the statue of the winged victory of Samothrace, and she ushers us into this completely empty stockroom filled with thousands and thousands of Greek wine vessels. And there sitting on a table on the next picture, Jamie,

are what she calls G408 and G409. And I believe this is one of the first color photographs taken of them. Wow. There it is. And so we don't know what's happening here, but we've moved from those mysteries of Eleusis to the mysteries of Dionysus. And there's Father Francis with the magnifying glass

trying to figure out what they're adding to the wine. And again, it's just a painting, right? We don't know if this is recording an actual event, but we're speculating that that may be the artist tried to record something for posterity. And this vase is from... 5th century BC. It's called red figure pottery.

So pretty old. And we take a look, and as we lean in further, I have a mini heart attack because the pottery's been chipped. Just where she's holding the other ingredient. Oh, no. So we have no idea what's in the right hand. Oh, no. But I'll let you try and guess what you think is in the left hand

on the next close-up. So that's completely missing there, and this is all we have left what is that it certainly could be a mushroom but it could be a lot of things right it could be a lot of things so it was a little disappointing. Yeah. Wow. So when he originally saw it, it hadn't been chipped. So it happened. So maybe, I mean, this is how this stuff goes missing.

This is how this stuff stays secret. We don't know how or why it was chipped. Maybe he saw it chipped. It was probably chipped at some point in its long 2,500-year history. And he just invented something to put there. Could be. What I was hoping to find was what you'll see in the next few slides. And this is from a separate hudria, 5th century BC, at a museum in Turkey. And this is something Ruck has turned up over recent years.

These are women, very similar Dionysian tradition, adding plants and herbs to their wine. Ruck identifies that as ivy. If you lean in, if you go to the next one, Jamie. Ivy is often associated with Dionysus. Some of the ancient writers refer to wine spiked with ivy as drunkenness. Look at their eyes. Those ladies are drunkenness. Look at their eyes. Those ladies are tripping balls. Look at their eyes.

They're like, woo! Don't you think? Look at their eyes. That's not normal. Yeah. They are wide-eyed. The next ingredient's more interesting. So there's a second ingredient ingredient and in the next slide

yeah very much mushroom very mushroom yeah i mean that it would be hard to describe that as anything else yeah wow so this is where the pottery takes us which is which is not very far i mean maybe the artist meant to leave a clue uh maybe it represents an actual ritual maybe it doesn't we we do know that the ancient authors are are talking about this stuff a lot you can go to the next the next slide jamie and after that whatever whatever the wine was doing to people this is what it was doing so when you drank the wine of dionysus this is like it was doing. So when you drank the wine of Dionysus, this is like that comos.

I showed you that vase from Spain. This is not quite a comos, but it's another kind of ritual parade. This is also in the Louvre. If you head downstairs to the Salle de Cahillatide, you'll see the Borghese vase from 40 BC. And before that, this is

typically how an initiate of the Dionysian 40 BC, and before that, this is typically how an initiate of the Dionysian Mysteries would be pictured. And the next one, Jamie. Right. Before that. So when they drank the wine of Dionysus, it wasn't to get drunk. Which one are you...

Number 15. Borghese, yeah. So, I've never seen anyone walk up the middle aisle in a Catholic mass and walk away looking like that. Yeah, that dude looks smashed, though. It doesn't look like he's on mushrooms. He looks drunk.

What is that thing above his shoulder, though? That looks like a mushroom. So, that's called a thersos, and the top part's called the narthex uh cognate with narcotics and ruck thinks it's where they stuffed all the additives it's where they stuffed all the toxins for the for the wine and you often see uh the initiates of dionysus carrying these and you often see them over the head of the initiate they didn't go anywhere anywhere without their Thersos wands. And this wand, what was the top of it made out of? Like bundled leaves. It was a hollow stalk with bundled leaves in there,

ruckba leaves that they would put their stash. Wow. So their whole thing was just adding things to alcohol, adding things to wine, adding things to beer. It's in fact, it was, it was, it would be abnormal not to add something to wine. So wine is routinely described in the ancient Greek as unusually intoxicating, seriously mind altering, occasionally hallucinogenic and potentially lethal and for that reason one of the words used to describe wine for like a thousand years from Homer to the fall of the Roman Empire was pharmakon which is drug pharmacy that's the word they used ritually formulaic Lee to describe wine because it was routinely spiked with toxins and

herbs and plants. Now, was this just when they were having these rituals? But when they were eating, they would just drink wine normally, right? There was everyday table wine like we have today, but it was more, you know, they wouldn't take two pills with a glass of water. They would dissolve their medicine into wine. Wine is described by Pat McGovern at UPenn, for example, as the universal palliative. That's how you would self-administer medicine. It's why Diascorides, when I mentioned in the Materia Medica from the first century AD, it's why he has all these

recipes. A lot of them are just medicinal. You know, not all of them resulted in these fantastic visions. When he talked about your swollen genitals, it's because he was trying to offer a recipe for that. And that goes back hundreds and hundreds of years into the Greek tradition. But the interesting part of it is that if you go all the way back to Homer, 8th, 7th century BC, you do find this other kind of wine being mixed. Wine for a ritualistic purpose, like Circe, the famous witch, the daughter of Hecate, who we found in Spain.

Circe is routinely, again, mixing Homer calls it pharmaca lugra, evil drugs, into the wine. You could also mix healing drugs into the wine, but there was essentially a whole pharmacopeia available to them. Whew.

Wow. Thank God you wrote this book, man. There's more. There's more. Keep going, man. There's more, PJ. Okay, so when, we're not just looking, okay, so for a long, long time, it's been the literature. It's been, you know, vase and pottery, and it's been

statuary like the Borghese vase. I was interested, the whole point I wrote this book is, again, to apply 21st century science to it. So in my conversations with Pat McGovern and Andrew Coe at MIT, I started to find the initial clues for actual wine that was actually spiked, okay? Not just in the abstract. So, Jamie, if you open this up real quick to graveyard wine, which is how I refer to it. So, if you look at graveyard wine, go to the number scorpion wine right there. So, I was looking for evidence of wine actually being spiked in antiquity. This comes from Egypt. This is at Abydos, 3150 BC. It's so old, it's pre-dynastic.

This is Scorpion I. They found 700 wine jars that were subjected to chemical analysis. Pat McGovern did the testing. And they found it to be spiked with savory, wormwood, blue tansy, balm, senna, coriander, germander, mint, sage, and thyme. Whoa. And you can find that he published that in 2009, I believe, Ancient Egyptian Herbal Wines. And wormwood is some type of psychedelic, right? I thought that too. It's not?

It is. Artemisia absinthium is psychoactive. McGovern thinks this was Artemisia seberi, which is a slightly different species. But when you look at it from afar, there's something more than just table wine there. These were intentionally spiking the wine for a reason. And they're deposited as grave goods for a reason. And the reason would seem to be for ushering the pre-Pharaoh into the afterlife. They were there with him to aid the journey.

And we're not going to talk about the underworld journey in Egypt with Graham Hancock without asking Graham Hancock what he thinks about ancient Egyptian funerary practice. Well, there's no doubt that the ancient Egyptians were very focused on death, not in a negative way. They saw this life as our opportunity to prepare for the adventure and the challenge of death that we had whatever years we got, 70, 90, 20, however many years we got, that was our opportunity to prepare

for that great challenge of the journey that follows that follows death and there's no doubt in my mind that the ancient egyptians did make use of of psychedelic substances um the the blue water lily from ancient Egypt being an example. Jars of that, again, diluted in wine, were found in the tomb of Tutankhamun. This is a psychedelic brew. And when you look at ancient Egyptian art, the entities, which are very often part animal, part human in form, and which are teachers of mankind, you find yourself again in that same realm that people using psychedelics today find themselves in, DMT in particular, encountering entities that speak to us, that teach us,

and that often take the form of part animal, part human, baryanthropes. that often take the form of part animal, part human, baryanthropes. It's so interesting to see the actual evidence of this use. And do Egyptologists dismiss this? Do they embrace this? Is this something that is not controversial? I think Egyptologists will say that the ancient Egyptians were neurotically focused on death. I would say the opposite.

I would say they had a very balanced approach to death. I mean, one thing is clear. We're all going to die. Nobody doubts that. Sooner or later, that moment in our life is going to come where life ends. And to me, that is an incredibly important moment. And the ancient Egyptians, by devoting their culture to figuring out how we live best in order to cross that bridge to transit into that other realm were being very practical and very profound in their inquiries it wasn't that

they were afraid of death they wanted to ready themselves for the journey that follows death. And they made it very clear that everything we do in this life, everything counts. Nothing is separated away. There's nothing that we can deny. There's complete clarity in the afterlife realm. Nothing can be hidden. We're confronted with absolute truth. And in a way, psychedelics are a preparation for that because psychedelics also confront us with absolute truth. And that's why psychedelics can often be very uncomfortable because we see the truth about ourselves, but we're being given an opportunity to change ourselves for the better and to be more nurturing and more positive and

more useful people. And as a result, the ancient Egyptians would say to confront a better death. What I was getting at was what is their reaction to the psychedelically spiked wine? Because I know you particularly, Graham. Egyptologists don't want anything to do with psychedelics. That's what I want to know. They don't want anything to do with psychedelics. They would prefer not to go there.

And just as there are many other aspects of ancient Egyptian culture that the Egyptologists don't want to go into, it often seems to me that they're in the process of trying to carve or shape ancient Egypt to fit into modern ideology. And that's a great pity. Well, it's also a great pity that, I mean, particularly with your work and the work that you've done with Dr. Robert Schock, describing some indications on some of the ancient structures that there was heavy erosion that was due to rainfall, thousands of years of rainfall, which would have predated the conventional idea of when these things are constructed, the way that they resisted that, instead of looking at it like this, the way that they resisted that, instead of looking at it like this fascinating new evidence that will illuminate this field, and now we have some

new perspective on this, they rejected it so horrifically. And they were mocking, I remember that. Who was that one Egyptologist that openly mocked the concept of it? But not just one many many egyptologists about there's a film in the one that there was a the documentary maybe yes the charlton heston uh narrated the documentary yes um i think you may be you may be speaking about canfetta but really i could i could cite a dozen eologists who feel this way. The notion that the Great Sphinx is 12,500 years old, which is a notion based on the erosion patterns on the body of the Sphinx, is utterly unacceptable to Egyptologists. They just don't want to go there.

They don't want to consider that possibility because they feel that they've got ancient Egyptian history taped, that it begins about 5,000 years ago. There's a bit of a precursor in the pre-dynastic period, a thousand or so years building up to ancient Egypt. And then you have ancient Egyptian civilization and gradually it merges with the Greeks and with other cultures and spreads out around the world. The notion that there is a background to ancient Egyptian civilization that goes back into the Ice Age is a notion that no Egyptologist is prepared to accept. The moment they start accepting that notion, they cease to be Egyptologists in the view of their colleagues.

It's a very dangerous idea to contemplate. And that's why I spent the last quarter of a century trying to argue the case for a lost civilization. That, you know, maybe I'm not right about everything, but we shouldn't neglect the hints and the clues, whether it comes from astronomy, whether it comes from geometry, whether it comes from geology, whether it comes from the statements of the ancient Egyptians themselves about their origins and their past. We shouldn't be ignoring this.

We should consider it. And you're right, rather than reacting with fury to the notion of a much more ancient Sphinx, it would have been nice to have seen the Egyptological profession react with interest to it and begin to explore it and consider what it might mean, because the geology is irrefutable, but largely ignored. The erosion, was it on the body of the Sphinx or was it on the walls of the temple where the Sphinx was carved out of? Well, where you can see it today is, so the Sphinx is carved out of solid bedrock. It's carved out of the bedrock of the Giza Plateau. And in order to do that, an enormous trench was created around the body of the Sphinx. And in fact, the blocks that

were excavated from that trench were then moved over and used to build what are called the Bali Temple and the Sphinx Temple, where in some cases you find blocks of limestone that weigh close to 200 tons. And what has happened since then is that the body of the Sphinx has been subjected to multiple restorations. In fact, one of the arguments that Egyptologists just ignore is that already in the Old Kingdom, at the time when the Sphinx is supposed to have been made, according to conventional Egyptology, already in the Old Kingdom they were restoring it. And there are restoration blocks on the body of the Sphinx that date back four and a half thousand years.

And that process of restoring and renovating the Sphinx has gone on down the ages. It's still happening today. The pores of the Sphinx as we see them today are covered entirely with modern restoration blocks. We don't see the bedrock underneath it. But where we do see the original bedrock is in the walls of that trench that was carved out to create the body of the Sphinx in the first place, because nobody's been restoring those.

And it's in those that you see this characteristic undulating pattern that speaks of exposure to a very long period of heavy, heavy rainfall. And the last time you have that heavy rainfall in Egypt is the period that geologists call the Younger Dryas, roughly between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago. So the body of the Sphinx, the trench out of which it is carved, is saying, I am 12,000 years old.

And the only argument against that really is the head of the Sphinx being the typical head of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh with the nemesis headdress. But of course, the head of the Sphinx being the typical head of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh with the nemesis headdress. But of course, the head of the Sphinx was originally a lion, just as the body of the Sphinx is a lion. And the head of the Sphinx was re-carved in dynastic times to give it this human form.

The reaction to that notion and this hard geological data that Robert Shock provided was just the most disturbing part of it. Let's pay tribute to John Anthony West. Yes, sure. Because it was John Anthony West who originally had that brilliant insight that what we're looking at in the case of the Sphinx is water weathering. And he rightly pays tribute to Schwaller de Lubick, an earlier scholar, who was the first to notice this. And John then brought Robert Schock to Egypt as a professional geologist. Robert is professor of geology at the University of Boston, and brought him there. And Robert Schock indeed concluded that we are looking at water weathering on the body of the Sphinx. And gradually, Robert initially was very cautious. He was saying, well, the Sphinx. And gradually, Robert initially was very cautious. He was saying, well, the Sphinx must be 7,000 or 8,000 years old.

But much more recently, he's also settled on the date of roughly 12,000 years old as the last time that you would get that sort of heavy rainfall in Egypt that could have created that characteristic weathering. And I would encourage anybody who's interested in this to please check out John Anthony West's magical egypt series because it's amazing it's it's i've probably seen it 15 times it's so i'm so glad that you had that you had john on your show joe because you did also very i know it's very rare that you do things by skype and you did it in person as well but i had him twice yeah i had him on in person before he died, and I had him

on Skype before that. What an amazing man he was. Such a radical, such an incendiary, you know, just planting intellectual bombs in the accepted wisdom of the modern world and making us all think again. So I think when it comes to the age of the Sphinx, it's really important to realize the role that John Anthony West played. And I'm so glad that you had him on your show. Yeah, I am as well. It was a real honor. He was a dear friend of mine, and I was with him just a month before his death. And he went into that journey of death with enormous courage and absolute certainty. Now, when these vessels were tested and these psychedelic compounds were detected, what was the reaction? Was there resistance to this? How was it received?

We don't think they're properly psychedelic just yet. I mean, all the ingredients that- Psychoactive? Psychoactive, medicinal for sure. There wasn't much backlash that I know of after McGovern's study. It was a gold standard study. And then it continued, by the way. So after those 700 jars at Abydos, after further analysis, they determined that the plants and herbs actually originated in the Holy Land, in the southern Levin.

They weren't native to Egypt. They had been brought there or they were shipped there by the folks in the Holy Land, in the Southern Levant. They weren't native to Egypt. They had been brought there, or they were shipped there by the folks in the Holy Land, which gets more interesting, because the next big find was the world's oldest wine cellar, which was published in 2014. It came from Tel Kabri, which is also in Galilee. Remember, this is going to be the same Galilee that Jesus comes on the scene, and Christianity bursts across the planet. So at Tel Kabri in 2014, they found another stash of wine dubbed the world's oldest wine cellar. Also subjected to archaeochemical analysis

and what Andrew Koh and the team there found was wine spiked with honey, storax, terebinth, cypress, cedar, juniper, mint,

myrtle, and cinnamon, or at least cinnamaldehyde. Another very strange mixture. Doesn't sound very psychedelic, though. No. No. No, not at all. So they just were into spiking wine.

They just, they love spiking wine. But what Andrew Koh says about it is interesting, though. And that's why I reached out to him originally, because he says that spiking wine with this many ingredients is indicative of a very sophisticated understanding of the botanical landscape. And he says, quote, it demonstrates the pharmacopeic skills necessary to balance preservation, palatability, and psychoactivity. He uses that word.

Preservation, like in the terebinth for example you know resonating the wine so it doesn't spoil to to vinegar and then palatability if there is cinnamon or honey uh that you mentioned before too it would improve the flavor profile but then psychoactivity who knows uh we don't know which juniper it was but there there is juniper used in other psychoactive ceremonies. There's a species of juniper, Juniperus recurva, which occurs near the Himalayas, actually. And there's, I've seen videos, really cool videos, if you want to pull it up, Jamie. You can look up, if you Google, anybody can do this, GB shaman. If you look up GB space shaman, you'll see a ritual of

someone inhaling the juniper, the incense from juniper, and going into trance. How much is written about wine and the additives and all the different things they put to wine? Well, let's watch this first. There's not much written about it.

You might have to skip forward, but this is them essentially preparing... What are we looking at here? So that's what they call the batayo the batayo are their traditional uh healer prophets and and and shamans of this tribe in the hindu kush and what they do is they inhale the incense from burning juniper and then suck the blood from a goat head wow jesus christ and it says the things people get up to that's what happens when you outlaw psychedelics. People try anything. Can't get mushrooms?

Yeah, suck a goat head. Wow. And so... This is the Hunza people. And it says it puts him into a trance whereby he's able to communicate with the fairies. Ooh. Look at that guy, skeptical. He's like, I'm not buying buying it this guy's always been annoying

look at him it's like oh he just wants to put on a robe and dance and he kind of looks like a guy who would do that too and there's the there's the headless goat headless goat exactly oh boy hey boy and what is there a do they explain oh here he goes he's sucking on the goat head okay this guy's annoying look at him look at how he's dancing and he's he's putting on a show everybody's like look at him and he's like look at me i'm sucking on the goat head i'm so crazy i bet the goat head doesn't really do anything i bet the goat head is just so he gets extra attention look at the kids like wow this guy's crazy. Look at him. Yeah, a little bit of Borat in there, too.

Wow. Okay. Now, is it usually more than one person? This is what's odd, is that this one guy is tripping balls, and then he collapses, and then everybody else is just going, oh, it's Marty. Look at Marty. Marty's getting crazy. balls and then he collapses and then everybody else is just going oh it's marty look at marty marty's getting crazy and then he's gonna rinse his hands off

and is this something that other people this is what's weird about this video it seems like one person is having a psychedelic ritual and the rest of them are just watching this guy he was the spiritual technician the way you find in other traditional societies he was the one uh who trained to navigate that that other world and learn the fairy language apparently fairy language the fairy language yeah it is weird that those fairies and elves and all these different things exist in so many different cultures and they are what you do see if you do take enough psychedelics or the right kind in the right setting is that true yeah i've met gestures it's true my my take on this when when i wrote uh supernatural is that we're you know we we have three supposedly different

domains of experience we have the spirits who shamans encounter in altered states of consciousness. We have fairies and elves from the Middle Ages. Very often in illustrations, you'll see that the mushrooms are present in the illustrations. And then today we have aliens. And at the level of phenomena, there are extremely close similarities between the entities that we call aliens today, the entities that were called fairies or elves in the Middle Ages, and the entities that shamans refer to as spirits. And I would say, actually, what we're dealing with is the same experience in all three cases, but viewed through different cultural lenses and construed in different ways.

And the only thing that really explains these kind of experiences, where any one of us can actually share that experience and have that experience, is psychedelics. Powerful psychedelics like DMT will plunge us into that realm of experience and we will meet entities. And many people today do construe those entities as aliens because that's how our culture is dealing with the other today have you ever experienced anything that looked like what the the classic iconic alien is yeah i have you have really absolutely in one of my in one of my early ayahuasca experiences in the Amazon, I saw flying, my eyes were closed,

but I saw flying saucers. And then I saw this classic sort of quote unquote gray with that high domed forehead and narrow pointed chin and these really grim eyes looking down on me. I think I may have mentioned this on your show before, but what I really regret doing, I felt I was going to be taken. I felt I was going to be abducted. And I opened my eyes and I shouted, no.

Of course, of course, I should have kept my eyes closed and said, yes, take me. But I didn't do that. And I've never encountered them in that quite alien form again. That's a bummer. Yes, it is a bummer. And we have to consider the possibility that these are not simply concoctions of our brains, that the brain is a much more complicated mechanism than we think it is, and that in certain circumstances, when brain chemistry is altered in the right way,

we gain access to other levels of reality that are normally closed off to our senses. That is personally my view, that what's happening with psychedelics. I can't prove that that's the case, but the sense that we are entering a seamlessly convincing parallel world, that it is inhabited by intelligent beings and that they have things to say to us. First of all, this is universal. People who've worked with psychedelics

all around the world have had those experiences. And secondly, I just don't see this. I don't see why we've all got a brain module for this. I think we are actually peering through the doorway into another level of reality, but it's going to take a whole lot more research to prove that. That's just my own personal opinion. to me during regular states of consciousness. It doesn't seem like a hallucination. It seems like I entered into a doorway and I'm in a new place and there's an urgency to it because I know that I'm not going to be able to stay here for very long. And they seem to know that and they seem to communicate with you in a very urgent way. And one of the things that I've talked about, I've talked about this experience before, one of the most profound ones i met jesters who were giving me who were giving me the finger

and uh they seem they seem to be explaining to me that i take myself too seriously like it felt like and and then when i went oh okay they went yes yeah you Yeah, you got it. You got it. I was like, oh, yeah, you're right. It was a feeling like, oh, yeah, okay. You think of yourself too highly. That's why the subtitle of my book, Supernatural, back in 2006 was Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind. And I think that's what's going on here. I think that the psychedelics allow us to enter a realm where we encounter teachers

who can help us to be better people and perhaps to be a better civilization. Well, that was one of the more interesting things about, I believe it was University of Jerusalem, their take on what Moses and the burning bush was. That very likely the burning bush was the acacia tree, which is very rich in dimethyltryptamine. DMT. Yeah, and that this was what... When you say it that way, you're like, oh, of course, Moses, the burning bush, was God talking to him.

And you think about the translation between ancient Hebrew and then to Latin and to Greek and all these... And then the English eventually, like, of course, latin and to greek and all these and then the english eventually like of course there's going to be a lot lost in the translation but if you just looked at it that way you'd be like oh so that's a psychedelic drug of course you've done that oh if you do you kind of do meet something that seems like you would describe as god and it's very moral yeah you meet you meet in what other state of consciousness do you meet intelligent plants that communicate with you right you know that's the the it's very

hard to imagine any other state of consciousness apart from the psychedelic state and what you're citing is the work of benny shannon uh who is a professor at the hebrew university in jerusalem and he has drunk ayahuasca himself at least 700 times. I mean, he's got his boosted speed. Well, he's suspect then. I don't know if we should listen to him anymore. But he's a really serious, exactly. Any scholar who goes into this area and really does it properly faces skepticism and being shoved off to the side by his or her colleagues.

It takes courage to do this work. But what we need is more scientists doing this work, girding up their courage and getting on with it, because we need to learn about this aspect of ourselves. We've just got such an incomplete picture at the moment. But it all falls into place if you look at it under that description. And I'm glad he has the courage to step up and actually put this description out there. I remember someone sent it to me in an email, and I was like, aha! Like, there it is.

Of course. Benny Chanon's book is called Ayahuasca, the Antipodes of the Mind. It's a really important piece of work, but not widely enough read in my view. Not widely enough read, in my view. Is there a cultural version of ayahuasca where there is an MAO inhibitor and a plant with dimethyltryptamine outside of the Amazon? Is there an equivalent? Well, sure. in ancient Israel that you have mimosa, certain mimosas, which contain the DMT. And then you have harmaline in other plants that contain the monoamine oxidase inhibitors. So you can have these, what are called ayahuasca analogs which are which are doing essentially the same

the same thing i've i've consumed ayahuasca analogs myself and and they are very like ayahuasca but not quite there is a there is a there is a difference again i'm going to sound very mystical and kind of woo here but there is a spirit in ayahuasca. It's a female spirit. It's a goddess. And I've not encountered her with the analogs, only with ayahuasca from the Amazon. And what have the analogs been like? The experience is still psychedelic? Yes, very much so. The visions, the encounters with entities, the amazing geometric patterns and the self-reflection. What the fuck have I been doing with my life up till now? Why did I make that mistake?

Why did I hurt that person in that way? But that feeling of a direct, intimate encounter with a, I call her a goddess. I mean, sometimes she appears in, and I can hear my critics out there laughing at me now. Hancock has completely lost it. But sometimes she appears in the form of a human woman, sometimes in the form of a serpent. And then, you know, we get into the whole issue of the

Garden of Eden and the story of the Garden of Eden and the role that the serpent plays in that story. And the role that the serpent plays in that story is pointing out to Adam and Eve that God has basically lied to them. And he offers them, he offers Adam and Eve that God has basically lied to them. And he offers Adam and Eve the forbidden fruit. Alex Gray, my friend, the visionary artist Alex Gray, calls it the first psychedelic slapdown. That's what the Garden of Eden is. So there are these intriguing experiences that are unleashed with these substances. But to my mind, there is something very special about ayahuasca. It's a living ancient technology. You can trace it back thousands of years in the Amazon, and it's now coming out of the Amazon and finding its way around the world.

And that ancient fresco that shows Adam and Eve standing by mushrooms is very bizarre as well, of standing by mushrooms is very bizarre as well, right? Yeah, absolutely. Again, our psychedelic heritage has been hidden from us. And that is why I value Brian's book, The Immortality Key, so much, because it's done the solid scientific groundwork to begin to give academic scientists permission to investigate this field.

And that's what we need. We need much more work done in this field than has been done already. Man, how good does it feel to have put this down to paper and just set it? Or do you feel like now that it's out there, you have a lot of explaining to do? I think there's lots of explaining to do. It's funny though, and we haven't gotten into too much of the Christian material yet, but I went through the Vatican quite a bit when I was writing this, with different departments at the Vatican. The Vatican secret archives, and the archive of the Congregation for the

Doctrine of the Faith, and the Vatican museums, and all the catacombs in Rome. And I went through there spelunking with Father Francis. And to be totally honest, the Vatican couldn't have been nicer or more accommodating to me. And while some of this is controversial, they've been very supportive to date. And I say that as someone who went to 13 years of Catholic school, including four years with the Jesuits, they always encouraged me to ask questions about the origins of the faith, and there's lots and lots of questions there. There's a reason that today you can look around and find 33,000 denominations of Christianity. I think that was the case from the very beginning.

There was never one monolithic form of the faith, and people didn't go to bed in 33 AD as pagans and wake up in 34 AD as Christians. It was a process, an intercultural process that took hundreds of years, which I call paleo-Christianity, which I think for anyone interested in the faith is kind of the most interesting part. These are the earliest and most authentic Christians, but they were living in a world where the blood of goats and all this spiked wine was the norm. And as a matter of fact, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote about this, of all people. Really?

Yeah, this is called the pagan continuity hypothesis. The idea that Christianity wasn't born in a vacuum. In 1950, Dr. King wrote a paper called The Influence of the Mystery Religions on Christianity. You can Google it. You can Google it and you can Google it and you can read it. Wow. This was not controversial woo-woo stuff, at least in 1950. When I went to the Vatican, I was really fortunate.

We hired a professional guide who was a professor. There it is. The Influence of the Mystery of Religions in Christianity, Dr. Martin Luther King. Wow. It's impressive. It's amazing. We got really fortunate.

We had this amazing guide. And we were in the middle of this one area of the Vatican. And there was a giant pine cone. Oh, yeah. The Cortile della Pina. Yeah. And so he brought it up. Like, what do you think that stands for?

And I said, probably the pineal gland. And his eyes lit up. And we had this conversation. And then we started talking about drugs. You know too much, Joe Rogan. And so he just loved the fact that I knew that and that I was into this. And then we had a fantastic time. But there's a lot of mushroom imagery and iconic mushroom shapes and this connection between mushrooms and Christianity,

you can find it. There's a lot of—one of the weirder ones, when Jack Herrer was alive, he was working on—Jack Herrer was a guy who was a Goldwater Republican and became a cannabis advocate. He got divorced and met a girlfriend. He thought pot was for losers, but he just wanted to get high with this cute girl and smoked a little pot. He's like, where has this been all my life? Holy shit. And then he became a cannabis advocate. And I was

very fortunate to meet him before he died. And he was showing me some stuff that he was working on. But one of the things that he was working on after he wrote that book, The Emperor Wears No Clothes, working on after, you know, he wrote that book, The Emperor Wears No Clothes, but then he wrote, he was writing a book about mushrooms in Christianity. And there was these ancient images of these naked people dancing in ecstasy, and they were surrounded by this translucent mushroom image. And it was really fascinating. And there was a lot of these images, and images that were the shape of doors that were carved out in the form of a mushroom. And it only makes sense if you know what psychedelic mushrooms do when you take them. You have these incredible experiences, and the idea that a religion would emerge out of these experiences is not unusual at all.

No, especially if it was common in ancient Greece. That's why I try to focus on that continuity from the ancient Greeks to the Christians, because again, these are the same people. The earliest Christians were all Greek-speaking. When Paul is writing his letters, which is the majority of the New Testament, the 21 of the 27 books of the New Testament, he's writing in Greek to Greek people. He's writing to the Corinthians who speak Greek, the Thessalonians in Thessaloniki, now the second largest city in Greece, the Philippians, and then in modern day Turkey,

to the Ephesians and Colossians and Galatians. You know, Christianity is born in Galilee, or at least grows up in Galilee, but it doesn't take root there. It goes to the Greek speakers, and it goes across all the Greek-influenced areas, including Magna Graecia, which is Great Greece, which is southern Italy, which happens to be the same place where the Catholic Church put down its roots 2,000 years ago. The reason for that was because the early church was all Greek, and these were people who were steeped in the traditions of their ancestors. I mean, imagine abandoning the religion of your grandparents for this new wine god from one day to the next. It doesn't make that much sense. And so the thesis of the book is that the Eucharist for some communities at some point in time, at some area in this Greek-speaking

part of the world would have availed themselves of the kind of sacraments that were available to the Greeks for generations and generations. And so we're still looking for the smoking gun of that ancient Greek spiked wine. It's not there. We talked about the Abidos wine in Egypt, the herbal wine from Tel Kabri in Galilee. So we've been looking in Greece and Turkey and Italy and elsewhere for that Greek spiked wine and haven't quite found it yet. But Andrew Koh is very interested in continuing to test and find more things. But in the meantime, we did find spiked wine. Yeah, so you have evidence of spiked wine, now it's just finding it in Greece.

I think you want to find it in Greece to tie it to Dionysus. You want to find it in Italy to tie it to the Christians, because that's really the area where the church, again, puts down roots and begins to grow up in that period of paleo-Christianity. And so just like I was looking for that ergotized beer, I was looking for evidence of where you could properly call it psychedelic wine may have popped up, and there is one article in one archaeobotany journal from 20 years ago that talks about spiked wine, which was news to me too, because every single time

I go to the Pat McGoverns and Andrew Coase and all the top archaeobotanists in Europe, the answer you get back, just like the answer to the question, where is the spiked beer? The answer is there isn't any. And it's another case of this evidence just either being ignored or underreported but there was a a young at the time archaeobotanist marina cheraldi who was from naples and got her phd in archaeology in the uk and she's on site in pompeii testing these vessels we have a lot of evidence from pompe, by the way. In fact, a lot of what we know about the ancient world comes from Pompeii and Herculaneum because of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. It explodes and destroys everything, but it also preserves everything. Under like 17 feet of volcanic ash, we have all these clues about the Dionysian mysteries. And in addition to that,

there was this farmhouse in Scafati, just to the east of Pompeii, where there were seven dolia, which is like a giant storage vessel. And these dolia are found in a cella vinaria, like a wine cellar, in a farm that also came complete with a torcularium, like a wine press, and a threshing floor. So something about wine was happening in this place. We don't know what. The sample was extraordinarily well preserved. When Marina went

in there, it wasn't a chemical analysis. That's obviously more finely graded. The sample was in such good shape because it had been waterlogged. So the botanical samples were in pristine condition, and she could tell by the seeds and stems and other plant material what was there. And there were over 50 species of plants and herbs and trees in this one sample, which is really weird, even more than we found at Abaidos or Telcabri. It was, you know, like just a melange of plant material that shouldn't be there. And what she found, in addition to many other medicinal plants, was opium, cannabis, henbane, and black nightshade. What is henbane? Henbane is hyosciumus.

Hyosciamine is one of those tropane alkaloids, that nightshade plant, that very witchy kind of plant that we found in the Cernos in Spain. It was beer potentially spiked with henbane. So we're finding wine spiked potentially with henbane. We find four seeds at least. There were two seeds of opium, nine seeds of cannabis, four seeds of henbane, and then two seeds of this black nightshade. And in the article that describes it, Marina herself, the archaeobotanist, says this is some kind of spiced wine. In fact, she calls it a mithridatium.

Now, to understand that, there was this guy Mithridates. Mithridates VI was the ruler of the Pontus region in between the Black and Caspian Seas. His father was poisoned to death. And so to prevent that, he would microdose his whole life. He was poisoning himself day in and day out.

And so this potion of many different toxic herbs and plants becomes known eventually in the Roman Empire as a mithridatium, after mithridates. Now, when the Romans finally get to him and try and kill him, he tries to poison himself, and it doesn't work because he's immune. So one of his soldiers has to stab him to death. And it doesn't work because he's immune. So one of his soldiers has to stab him to death. So he's microdosing himself in preparation for someone else poisoning him. Exactly.

But then when he tries to commit suicide, he's unable to. Exactly. Oh, my God. How strange. And so outside of Pompeii, was there any other evidence? And how would you go about finding it? Like, say if you want to continue the search, where would you look? I mean, it opens up a whole world of possibilities now that people...

I mean, I wrote this as kind of... I call them the initial archaeobotanical blips on the radar. So between this ergotized beer and this potentially psychedelic wine, there's lots of different places to look. If you're trying to prove this psychedelic hypothesis within paleo-Christianity, you're looking for a place where the Dionysian mysteries bumped up against the Christian mysteries. And that's all over the place. So back in Galilee, for example, Dionysus, there's a whole myth around Dionysus and his birth, and different authors place his birth

in different places. One of the places authors place his birth in different places. One of the places they place his birth is a city called Scythopolis. Scythopolis was like the capital of the Deciopolis, this ten-city part of the eastern Mediterranean. From Nazareth to Scythopolis today is 40 minutes, door to door, Nazareth where Jesus grows up. minutes, door to door, Nazareth where Jesus grows up. So, Scythopolis has this northern cemetery where you do find artifacts that relate both to the pagan Dionysian mysteries and some Christian artifacts. So, a place like that would be ripe for further investigation. Or in Ephesus, you have like the Grotto of the Seven Sleepers, another place where the pagan mysteries bumped up against the Christian mysteries. One of the best places is Rome and the catacombs,

which is why I spent so much time going through the catacombs looking for evidence of these essentially funerary rituals where people were celebrating with the dead using the sacramental wine in the very earliest versions of the Mass. And is there any scripture, any texts that are describing what they were doing when they were going through these rituals, these funeral rituals? I mean, there's a few things. We have, so the funeral, for the Christians, it's called the refrigerium. The refrigerium in Latin means like a chill out. And there's a very respectable

scholar, Ramsey McMullen. He's considered one of the premier authorities of the ancient Roman world. He describes the refrigerium as a place where the dead themselves participate. And it's where the dead basically come back to life. In the Roman world, you would never leave the dead alone. Think of it like a funerary ritual in Mexico, for example, when the family goes to visit the graves of the ancestors. There was a very similar principle in the ancient Roman world that carried over into Christianity. And so we know the refrigerium existed.

The big question is if the wine drunk at the refrigerium was similar to the wine of the early Christian Eucharist. And when you look through these catacombs, you find really crazy stuff to suggest that, in fact, the two could coexist. Wow, here we go. Look at these images. Now, the book's out, the book's done. Your thing now is obviously promoting this and getting the word out. But do you have in your mind of following up on this research? Now that the that the doors opened and now that people are aware of this it seems like you're first of all i believe you're going to get help people

are going to be interested in continuing this research and and contributing to this research where do you go from here uh i want to dedicate my life to this for the next 10 years really yes wow so uh pj feel i don't think i don't think pj is too happy no what if this sells i think well really like we need to take you down to the amazon brian and uh you need to have an encounter with mother ayahuasca or you just go to santa cruz like you don't really have to go there's something about that rainforest, though. Yeah, I'm sure. It really is a special setting for this experience.

But I think it would be interesting, Brian, having written this as a scientific and an academic and a research exercise, to then go on to see what your personal experience is and how that resonates with what you've learned as a scientific investigator. Yeah. I mean, even if you wanted to do it in a clinical setting, like Rick Strassman did when he had these FDA approved studies for DMT, the spirit molecule, just anything, just anything where you could tap into that world, because I guarantee you, you're going to come back eyes wide like those ladies in that drawing. And You're going to be like, oh, okay. It's fascinating to me when you talk to someone who is a psychedelic virgin because you almost feel jealous. Like I almost – like, you know, do you feel the same way, Graham? Yeah, absolutely.

It would be nice to know that that experience lay ahead of us. Yeah. nice to know that that experience lay ahead of us. And we haven't had it yet. But at the same time, you can learn to work with these substances. They can be overwhelming at first. And with more careful use of these substances, you begin to manage them better. Not always, but usually. So when you say you want to do this and dedicate your life for the next 10 years, do you have multiple books in mind? What is your thought? So with this, I mean, my dream is to see this on the screen. I think there's so many visual elements here. I think that... What's up, Jamie? Oh, sorry, sorry. Okay, sorry.

am i oh sorry sorry okay sorry so the i think the the best way that i mean my dream is to see this on the screen so i've been talking to a couple of uh development teams a couple of production companies one is an anonymous content in la and six west media in new york together we're developing a documentary series that adapts this everything we've talked about for like a first season but there's really multiple seasons here because there's so much evidence that's never been documentary series that adapts this, everything we've talked about for like a first season, but there's really multiple seasons here because there's so much evidence that's never been looked at. And so it's taking the very best of the archeochemistry and the very best of the on, in the field archeology, combining all the linguistic evidence and the symbology and iconography and putting it together to find once and for all the smoking gun for the use of a psychedelic Eucharist in antiquity.

So do you have a place where you're bringing this? We are just about to pitch this, as a matter of fact. Oh, Netflix, where you at? Yeah, listen, I would watch that all day long. I'm really excited. I'm really excited about the whole thing, the whole prospect of it. And I think that it's, I'm just so happy that you became obsessed with it and ignored all the people telling you to not. Me too, man. I mean, it's been a long road. I never thought about psychedelics until I read

Supernatural. A lot of weird stuff was happening in my life in 2007, 2008. After I read those initial studies that came out of Hopkins and NYU, 2008. After I read those initial studies that came out of Hopkins and NYU, of course, I wanted to try psilocybin. And then the mystery just got deeper and deeper. And I realized there was a story to be told here that hadn't been told before. And I think it needed a serious and sober look at this stuff. So I really did spend nights and weekends doing nothing else but this kind of stuff and reading hundreds of books and thousands of journal articles and 12 years of Googling to try and put all these pieces together. And I will say that, you know, it covers a lot of

ground, but you don't need to know anything about history or archaeology, let alone archaeobotany or archaeochemistry or psychopharmacology or biblical studies or paleoanthropology to appreciate this, because I kind of take it one step at a time from the very beginning and show you every piece of evidence that, I mean, as a virgin, did convince me that this is at least worth a sober look from the scientific community. Well, I hope two things. Next time I talk to you, we're promoting this television show,

and you can tell me about your psychedelic experience that you had with Graham. Did I agree to this already? Yes, you agreed to it. You signed up. You signed up, bro. And Graham, hopefully next time we communicate, it will actually be in the flesh when somebody works out this COVID nonsense. I hope so. Can I just mention mention we've not talked about my book but this is the

hardback of america before which we which we talked about the last time i was on your show and uh america before has been in hardback for the past 18 months but it's coming out in in paperback 29 29th of september 2020 of September 2020 at a much reduced price. And I hope that people who've not been able to access the hardback will be able to have a look at it in the paperback. I mean, we had an amazing conversation the last time I was on your show. And before that, we had the drama with Michael Shermer. Yes. We had the drama with Michael Shermer.

Yes. And Randall Carson was present, and that guy, Mark DeFant, came in by telephone. And I want to pay tribute to Michael Shermer. You may have noticed this, Joe, that Michael put out a tweet saying that he was going to have to reconsider his, essentially, I'm paraphrasing, he was going to have to reconsider his prior attitude to my work in the light of new evidence about the Younger Dryas impact catastrophe that, in my view, 12,000 years ago or so, lost us a whole civilization.

It takes a lot to admit that one may have been wrong, and I'm glad that Michael had the courage to put that tweet out there. Yeah, I am as well. Kudos to him and kudos to you and to Randall Carlson as well because those two conversations that we had about that are absolutely some of my favorite conversations of all time. It's obvious that something happened and all the pieces, much like this, in this conversation about spiked wine and drugs, it all makes sense. It all fits into place. And that we are a species with amnesia and that we need to rediscover our past. And there's a curious resonance with the history that is taught to us in

schools and universities, no longer to accept at face value the opinions of so-called experts in the field. So in the modern world today, many people are learning to mistrust institutions that have long gone unquestioned, whether it's government or whether it's science. People are beginning to think for themselves. And I think there's an intriguing resonance between recovering our lost past and regaining sovereignty over ourselves in a modern world that is struggling very hard to turn us all into children and rest all responsibility in government. A huge mistake. Governments are there to serve us. They are not there to rule us. They are not there to tell us what to do.

And I'm glad that people are waking up to this. Hear, hear. That's an excellent way to end this. Thank you, Graham. I love you. I appreciate you very much. I wish you were here right now. I'd give you a big hug.

And thank you, Brian. Give me a hug back. Thanks. Thank you. All right. Thank you, guys. And thank you, everybody listening. Goodbye. Thank you. thank you Brian give me a hug back thanks thank you alright thank you guys and thank you everybody listening goodbye thank you