The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 183. The Immortality Key; Psychedelics and the Ancient Age | Brian Muraresku & Prof. Carl Ruck

Episode Date: July 20, 2021

This podcast was recorded on May 14th, 2021.In today’s episode, Dr. Jordan Peterson is accompanied by author Brian Muraresku and Professor Carl Ruck to unravel the secrets of ancient Greek culture and religion. They embark upon the sinuous journey of discussing psychedelics in Ancient Greek religion, and how both Brian and Professor Ruck became deeply invested in understanding the subject.Today we meet with Brian Muraresku, who tells us why and how he was drawn to research the role of psychedelics within Western civilization. Muraresku is also the author of The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion With No Name.Carl Ruck is an American professor who’s known for his extensive research on mythology and religion regarding the sacred role of entheogens; a selection of psychoactive plants that are known for inducing altered states of reality or consciousness. Ruck co-authored the book The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries, and is currently teaching mythology classes supporting this theory at Boston University.

Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast. This is season 4, episode 37. In this episode, my dad is joined by Brian, Mirra Rescue, and Carl Rock. Brian is the founding executive director of Doctors for Cannabis Regulation, an author of the Immortality Key, the secret history of the religion with no name. Carl Rock is a professor and researcher best known for his work in mythology and religion on the sacred role of psychoactive plants that induce an altered state of consciousness. Together, they discuss psychedelics in religion,

visionary and hallucinogenic experiences ties between Greek mythology and Christianity and more. I hope you enjoy this episode. What about Jung? Do you think that he experimented with hallucinogens? Who? Carl Jung. Because he knew things. He knows things that you just can't believe anybody could know. We know he spends a year in TOS. I have a house in TOS and that year is not documented, but he was experimenting with the mind-altering substances. Silicide?

Probably. Was that before or after the red book, do you know? I think the red book came out of that. Hello everyone. I'm pleased to talk with two people today, first with author Brian C. Murrerscu and then later in the discussion with Professor Carl A. P. Ruck, Professor of Classical Studies at Boston University. Mr. Murrerscu, the author, wrote the recent book The Immortality Key, the secret history of the religion with no name, which was published by St. Martin's Press in 2020. That's the book here.

I read it from cover to cover last month. It was as excitingly plotted as Dan Brown's Da Vinci code, which is really saying something given that that was a best selling novel. And this is actually a work of adventure, nonfiction, inquiry and scientific exploration all compacted into something that was extraordinarily readable. Mr. Rurescu graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Brown University with a degree in Latin, Greek and Sanskrit which clearly prepared him for his later work as the alumnus of

Georgetown Law and a member of the New York Bar has been practicing law internationally for 15 years. About the book. For 2000 years prior to the birth of Christ, the ancient Greeks found revelation in their own sacraments, sacred beverages were routinely consumed as part of the so-called ancient mysteries, elaborate rights that led initiates to the brink of death

and beyond at alloysus. Others drank the holy wine of Dionysius to become one with the god. In 1970s, in the 1970s, scholars, including Dr. Carl Rock, claimed that this beer and wine, the original sacraments of Western civilization, were spiked with mind-altering drugs. In recent years, vindication for the disgraced theory has been quietly mounting in the laboratory, the constantly advancing fields of archaeobotany and archaeochemistry have been hinting

at the endearing use of hallucinogenic drinks and antiquity. And with a single dose of psilocybin, the psychopharmacologists said, Johns Hopkins and NYU are now producing powerful, revelatory, religious, slash mystical experiences in the lab. But the smoking gun remains elusive. If these sacraments survived for thousands of years in our remote prehistory, from the

stone age to the ancient Greeks, did they also survive into the age of Jesus? Was the Eucharist of the earliest Christians, in fact, a psychedelic Eucharist. The immortality key takes its readers on an adventurous 12-year global hunt for evidence. Professor Carl Rock, who will join us for the latter part of the discussion, is an authority on the ecstatic rituals of the God Dionysus. With the ethno-micologist Ar Gordon-Wasson and Albert Hoffman, who discovered LSD, he identified the secret psychoactive ingredient in the visionary potion that was drunk by the initiates

at the Illusinian mysteries. In Persephone's quest in Theogens and the origins of religion, he proclaimed the centrality of psychoactive sacraments at the very beginning of religion, employing the neologism in Theogen to free the topic from the pejorative contation for words like drug or hallucinogen. So we're very much looking forward to talking to Professor Rock as well. So hello, Brian. Thank you for so much for agreeing to talk

to me today about your book. Thank you, Jordan. It's an honor. It's good to see you doing well. Oh, thank you very much. I'm very much looking forward to this discussion. I did find the book Well, it was a substantive intellectual interest. That's for sure for anyone who's interested in the history of religious experience It's it's quite the trip, let's say, but it was remarkably well plotted as well It was a book that was very dense with information, but almost impossible to put down and so that's that's a that's quite the thing to pull off so and Why why did you do this? How did you do it? I'm still trying to figure that out, Jordan,

to be totally honest. It was my avocation. I mean, I wasn't, no one was writing checks for me to fly to the Mediterranean and look at ancient secrets. It's not the thing that you do when you're supposed to be a practicing attorney raising children. But this bug got into me. I guess when I was a teenager, I was studying Latin in Greek with the Jesuits at an all-boys school. I got a scholarship to attend that school otherwise would not have afforded to go. And then was recruited by Brown, as you

mentioned, to study Latin in Greek and piled on some Sanskrit, some Arabic, and other things in between. And along the way, you hear about this best kept secret in history. That's what Houston Smith, perhaps one of the greatest religious scholars of the 20th century, that's how he referred to these mysteries, and particularly the sacrament within these ancient mysteries, these sacramental potions that have since gone missing. You know, for a couple thousand years, we've been trying to crack this mystery to no avail. But there's Houston Smith saying it's a mystery worth investigating.

And so I don't really know what to do with that. In the late 90s and early 2000s, there's not a lot of scholarship on ancient pharmacology. And I read this crazy book The Road to Illusus, which comes out in 1978. And I'm trying to figure out how the ancient Greeks could have consumed a beer, otherwise spiked with LSD, but there's no hard scientific data to support it, so I leave it to one side until 2007, and it was Rolling Griffiths, who you recently talked to.

It was his early studies with Silasibin, the act of compound and magic mushrooms. That began in the early 2000s. The initial results are released in 2006. Doesn't come onto my radar into 2007, but what I'm reading about are people today, modern-day volunteers, having a transformative experience from one and only dose of psilocybin. And Gordon Wasson, as mentioned in the first line of this article, The Godpill, and it immediately reminds me of the road to Ellusus, and it reminds me of Ellusus itself, 2500 years ago. And this notion that it was a once-in-a-lifetime psychedelic

encounter that was very much part and parcel of the origins of Western civilization. So from there, I was off. Let's start, let's talk about the Ellusinian mysteries to begin with. Clue everybody in about what they were and why you believe and what not just you obviously, but why they're of enduring significance,

both to us now, but also you make the case in the book that the very essence of Greek civilization from which so much of our civilization is derived, was rooted in these hallucinogenic mysteries, essentially, or at least in the hallucinian mysteries. And so please elaborate on the mysteries and their significance. So, we say the ancient mysteries. There were lots of mysteries in the ancient world. The mysteries of elusis, the mysteries of dynisis, the mysteries of isis and osyras, but

elusis, which today is this relatively small town of only about 30, the mysteries of Isis and Osiris, but Ellusus, which today is this relatively small town of only about 30,000 people, 13 miles northwest of Athens. For about 2000 years, it was kind of the epicenter of the Mediterranean spiritual universe. It was not a side show. I sometimes refer to it as the real religion of the ancient Greeks, and the best and brightest among them. It called to initiates like Plato, Pindar, a Cicero, who actually called it the most divine thing that Athens ever produced, the most divine thing.

So not democracy, the arts and sciences and philosophy, but elusis, Marcus Aurelius famously rebuilt elusis when it was almost destroyed. So it mattered to these people, both to the Greek. If you're case in the book, you lay out your belief that the Illusinean mysteries were absolutely central to the animating spirit of Greek civilization. So it wasn't rationality versus the mysteries of Dionysius,

let's say. It was rationality embedded in some more profound, religious experience that was integrally related with whatever was happening in the loisers. Absolutely integral and we can say that with a straight face and very confidently because of the way its destruction is recorded in the fourth century AD, under the newly Christianized Roman Empire. So at the time in the fourth century the Roman Emperor Valentinian tries to get rid of elusis, and we have the testimony of this high priest, Prytek Status, who says, literally, that life in the absence of elusis would be unlivable, abiotos in Greek.

And so there's lots of ways to translate that, or interpret that, but even Karl Kerenje, this famous classist writing in the 1960s, he looks at that language and says, you know, the sharpness of this formulation, that life and says, you know, the sharpness of this formulation that life is unlivable without the mysteries has no precedent in Greek literature. Even Carl doesn't know what to make of this. And he draws a distinction between... You worked with Jung Carl, Karen, you as well. Exactly, exactly. He's published with Bollinger, yeah, very impressive scholar. And this impressive scholar didn't know what to make of this testimony from Praetik's

Datoos. And he thinks that Praetik's Datoos is clearly drawing a distinction between what was available in the pagan mysteries versus what was available in the rise of Christianity at that time in the fourth century. So again, Elusus is bound up not just with the notion of Greek existence, but human existence and the survival of our species. Okay, so back to you as a teenager. Now, you got interested in this when you were very relative to a young.

What? Why? How, what was calling to you, do you think? Um. It's, it's that perennial search for meaning. I mean, um, this is a very particularized derivative of it though. So there's some story there. There's something going on there that because it's you as you also

pointed out in your introduction, what you did is not it's not within the realm of normative behavior. You have your law degree, you have your family, you have your children, you're a sensible educated person and you took a 12 year hiatus to pursue something that's very abstract, spiritual, historical. There's something driving you for sure and then you related it back to your teenage years. What was gripping you and because there's part of that's the animation spirit, animating spirit of this book. Okay, so I mean if I'm being honest, you know, I was the first person in my family to go to college and the whole reason I went to college was because of Latin and Greek.

There's no doubt about it. I may not have gone if it weren't for the classics or the Jesuits who were teaching me these classics. And for me, this is a major identity crisis and I talk about our societal crisis. Are we lost of connection with that tradition? Well, exactly. And I wanted to know what that tradition was, and how my Catholicism, I went to Catholic school for 13 years, how does my Catholicism and everything I've learned about the Christian lineage, how does that square with eluses, for example?

How does that square with? Yes, and that's something I really want to talk to you about, because there is some transformation. Even if the Christians were using the hallucinogenic sacraments that you characterize as being typically used by archaic, or more archaic Greek Saras Society, which I think there's some reason for the Christian transformation, and I don't understand the relationship between that and the hallucinogenic story, so I would definitely like to return to that.

But okay, so you're interested in Greek and Latin. And how, you're the first person in your household to go to college. How did you get interested in Greek and Latin? It was forced upon me by the judge. It's Latin was mandatory at this school, St. Joe's Prep. My otherwise wouldn't have taken a shine to it. And then Greek was an elective, but I stuck with that.

And my professor, Dr. Henry V. Bender, insisted that I stick with it actually helped me apply to it. And then Greek was an elective, but I stuck with that. And my professor, Dr. Henry V. Bender, insisted that I stick with it, actually helped me apply to college, hot me on a train to go up to Providence to Brown to check it out. And that's how it happened. I wasn't touring colleges with my family. It was the Jesuits who got me thinking about this stuff. And actually, to their credit, very open mindedly

encouraged me to ask very fundamental questions about the origins of the faith and this whole pagan continuity idea that we can talk about, this transference from the pagan world to the Christian world and what it all means. And the interest in the hallucinogenic element of it, was that a consequence of your knowledge that something was being used as a sacrament, some substance was being used as a sacrament, in the hallucinogenic element of it. Was that a consequence of your knowledge that something was being used as a sacrament,

some substance was being used as a sacrament? Adalysis in particular, or there's more to it than that. So this is the great irony is that I've never experimented with psychedelics. That's the great irony of this book and all this research because it really was Roland's work at Hopkins. That just hit me like a punch in the face. The idea of people experiencing psilocybin and over the course of a few hours, having

their lives completely transformed. You know, not just positive changes in attitudes, behaviors, and belief, but fundamental psychological change in an afternoon. If I had to come up with a definition of a lususis, that would be belief, but fundamental psychological change in an afternoon. If I had to come up with a definition of elusive, that would be it, except it was over and over. You saw the connection, but it wasn't a consequence of personal experience. It was a consequence of intellectual realization. That's what it was.

And those numbers have said consistent role, and we'll tell you. When I asked him before publishing the book, if this number still makes sense, he will tell me that 75% of these volunteers were report that they're one and only dose of silocybin remains one of the most meaningful experiences of their entire lives, if not the most meaningful experience. And this is data going back 20 years now. Okay, okay. So, this provided you with some insight into what might have been going on with the ancient

mysteries. And of course, there's other scholars who push towards that conclusion, let's say, like Dr. Rock, who we're going to talk to later, Gordon Wasso, for example, who's mentioned continually in your book, made the claim that the Ammonita-Mascaria mushroom was the soma of the ancient Hindus, and was the inspiration for the Rigveda. And Merchè Eliada, who worked with Caranhean, also with Jung, wrote a great book on shamanism. I don't know if you know the book you likely do, but Eliada claimed that the use of hallucinogens among shaman, the shamanic practitioners, was a deviation from the historical norm.

But I think the bulk of the evidence that's been accrued since Aliyahd wrote his great book, because it is a great book, shamanism, it's a great book. I think he was wrong about that. I think it's absolutely crystal clear that throughout human history, for at least 50,000 years, perhaps longer than that, our spiritual guides, especially in the archaic world, were using whatever hallucinogenic substances they could get their hands on with their vast knowledge

of local biology to produce these mystical experiences. And we have no idea to what degree that shaped us culturally or how that shaped our religious structures, beliefs, presumptions, all of that. And so that would make elusive a continuation of the shamanic tradition. And so I think it fits nicely into the anthropological literature in that manner. Okay. So on to your voyage, you go to Brown and to study Latin and Greek and so forth and then what happened? And then I have a great time learning Latin and Greek and then I'm a senior and I hear all the

grad students grumbling about the job market because there is no livelihood to become from classics. I mean it was either for me it was either you becoming a priest or a classics professor and I still remain interested in both oddly enough. But I took a left turn into law school and decided to enter the marketplace and to acquire marketable skills. It was largely an economic decision. And despite going to law school, you also went on this decade long hiatus. Well, because I couldn't put it down. I mean, when I was, you know, even when I was,

when I was interviewing for the law firm, we wound up talking about Sanskrit because that's obviously on my resume. And people wonder why the hell I wrote a senior thesis, translating a 13th century giant poem from Sanskrit. And it comes up in conversation. People find it mildly interesting. And so you go off from there. The liberal arts have a way of preparing you for all kinds of things. And in my case, it was, you know, I would still read Latin and Greek on my lunch breaks. And that's what drove the imagination until 2007 when psychedelics came on my mental radar and propelled me on this journey for another 12 years.

All right, well, let's walk through the journey to help tell us what you did first. Well, I used my law firm salary to purchase every book that Ruck himself had ever written and Wasen and Hoffman. Then I started reading about Terrence McKenna quite a bit and was reading his information and listening to his lectures. And I spent most of the day doing that for a couple years. And then I started to realize that some newer disciplines like the Archaeobotany and Archaeochemistry that you mentioned earlier, and with the advance of technology, new tools, new techniques,

we were suddenly able to peer back into history in a way that we never could before. In other words, things like gas chromatography, mass spectrometry and these wonderful, you know, lab additions had allowed us to look into, to peer into these ancient containers, these cups and these chalices and these grails of sorts, and tell us, for certain, relatively certain, what our ancestors were consuming and why, and this is all relatively new. This is not, this did not exist in 1978. And so that was a

big break for me in this, in this research, trying to attract the hard scientific data to prove this one way or the other. You spent a lot of time in the book writing about beer, for example. And they've been making a case too that one of the motivating factors for the development of agriculture was likely the easy transformation of barley into alcoholic beverage, which, or perhaps not just alcoholic. But I thought that was also a very interesting speculation. So maybe we can talk about that a bit. It's mainly because I like beer,

and it was a great excuse to go to Germany to talk to a beer scientist, to talk about beer, which was a lot of fun. And beer could go back 12,000 years. As a matter of fact, beer might be responsible for the birth of civilization as we know it. If you look to Gobekli Tepe, for example, about 10 years ago, there was some evidence from this giant site of megalithic architecture sometimes described as the world's first temple.

Turns out the world's first temple might be the world's first bar. In this giant megalithic site, this, by the way, is 6,000 years before Stonehenge, 7,000 years before the high civilizations of Egypt and Sumeria. But in this site, they did find initial traces of calcium oxalate, which points to beer fermentation. And, you know, at the time, it might be safer to drink some beer versus some water, in some cases. And so it could very well be the case that beer is bound up with these ancient sites, with ancient ritual, these T-shaped pillars meant to be the depictions

of early gods. It's possible that there was some intoxicating affair there. We don't know for certain, but beer could go back an awfully long way. Right, well, we do think of beer as a spirit, an alcohol as a spirit, and that's not accidental, because it's the ingestion of a substance that changes you psychologically. And so, it's not that great a leap to posit that there's some spirit that inhabits the beverage,

and that's the spirit of wine, that's the spirit of drunkenness, dinesias. You talk about ergot and its relationship to beer manufacture as well. Andght is a fungus. It's a fungus that produces an LSD like substance. And so you speculate, and some of that's backed up by the archaeo-bit botany that you described that perhaps beer was accidentally contaminated with Irght to begin with, but the consequences of that were non-trivial to say the least.

It could be, and this was the hypothesis put forward in this book, The Road to Illusus. So this was the idea that Was in Hoffmann and Ruck had stumbled upon, and I think I largely credit Albert, who famously discovers LSD from Urgot, so he synthesizes LSD from this natural fungus, which contains lots of other alkaloids, by the way. So things like LSA, LSA, etc. To this day, we don't know which alkaloid it may have been, that's spiked this beer potion, but could very well have been something like an ergotized potion that was consumed by these initiates, century after century, to open the gates of death and convince them

of their immortality. This was the idea in 1978, and so I ran with that hypothesis, and I looked for Ergot anywhere I could. In the Iliad's description of the shamanic transformation, he describes, and this is analogous to your description of the Illusinian mysteries trip and its association with death. Okay, so one of the things we should point out just to begin with is that Roland Griffiths gave Silicide and two cancer patients who

were facing death and that transformed their relationship to death itself. Now, when Eliad details out the shamanic experience, he said that the shaman who undertake their ritual, likely with the use of hallucinogenic substances, are typically reduced to something resembling a skeleton. So they undergo a death. And the nature of that experience is not precisely clear, Ilya had never experienced it, so these are accounts that he derived from

the anthropological literature, and the shamanic culture stretched perhaps all the way around the world, because there are analogues between shamanic reports from Siberia and from the Amazon jungle, so it's conceivable that that was all disseminated from a single source, or maybe it's a consequence of the fact that hallucinogenic substances produce the same effects worldwide, or maybe both, who knows. But in any case, the shaman die. They commune with their ancestors. They commune with their ancestral spirit. they climb the ladder or tree or rope or pole that links the domains of existence together, so they climb up this pole into heaven where they commune with the gods.

And that's the classic shamanic experience. It's like Jack in the Beanstalk. And I believe Jack in the Beanstalk is actually a variant. It's a carryover from shamanic tales, I think. It looks like it if you look at the story carefully. But in any case, there's a death and then a rebirth that's associated with the experience. There's a communion with ancestral spirits.

The spirits of the forefathers, let's say, there's the transformation of that into something resembling communion with God. And then the transformation of people's understanding of death. Now, I don't know what happened to Griffiths subjects that transformed their understanding of death in relationship to their cancer because the research reports don't contain much in terms of description of content of experience, right? It's not like people are magically transformed. Something happens to them in, as a consequence of an extremely packed and dense experience that's all condensed into a very, very short period of time.

And they come out, well, neurologically transformed. They showed transformations in personality. They were quite profound even a year later. Many of them quit smoking, different studies, which also indicates a kind of transformation, even on a pharmacological level. So, back to the loisus, there's something going on that you talk about death and facing death in a loisus. And yeah, it's the classic shamanic journey. I mean, Roland's volunteers will sometimes talk about experiencing their psilocybin journey as a foreshadowing of death. And again, we don't know all the details, all the content,

but it's something like, this is what death will be like, is one of the overarching conclusions. And that was the mysteries. Again, if I have to put it in a few words, it is essentially a ceremony of death and rebirth. Even if you're your words at the beginning of the book, are, let me just get this here from the Greek. If you die before you die, you won't die when you die.

And that certainly has Christian overtones as well. Interestingly enough. That comes directly from a plaque at the St. Paul's monastery on Mount Athos in Greece, one of the holiest sites of Orthodoxy, on Bethanis, Prin-Bethanis, Denthapathanis, Ohtan-Bethanis. It's very Christian, it's also very Greek.

Going back to that personality struggle I was talking about, are we Greek or are we Christian? Like the old narrative is that the Greeks who invented all this stuff, democracy, the arts and sciences, et cetera, these rational people somehow, birthed civilization into existence, but then Christianity comes along and sciences, etc. These rational people somehow, you know, birthed civilization into existence, but then Christianity comes along and saves our soul. But here's Alusus is the

contraindication. Alusus was the place where these initiates went to find meaning by dying before they die. In some sense, I mean, experiencing the same underworld journey as the goddess Persephone. They identified with her, not in any symbolic or metaphorical way, but something visceral happened to them in an experience. Right, experientially. Yeah, well, those myths, those myths look like their reflections, their narrow-tized reflections of an experience that people actually went through, and that journey to the underworld is a journey to the land beyond death.

I mean, it's more than that, because it's a metaphor, as well as perhaps the description of some kind of experiential reality. And we certainly can't probe it particularly deeply. We don't understand what these chemicals do. We don't understand the meaning or the reality, the significance of mystical experience of this sort. But it is very interesting to note that the people who, it's very interesting to note that the people

who gave birth to our civilization, so to speak, or at least certain aspects of it, regarded this experience with a tremendous amount of respect. They didn't feel it was something antithetical to what they were doing. They felt that it was something that was nourishing what they were doing. Right. Plato calls it the hol was nourishing what they were doing. Right. Plato calls it the holiest of mysteries and talking about elusis. Aristotle says that you go there not to learn something. He uses the Greek word methane like mathematics. You don't go there to learn something, but to experience something.

And if you think about philosophy and its broadest sense, Plato himself says that, you know, those who engage with philosophy in the right way, practice nothing else but dying and being dead. So again, it's this constant sense of death and rebirth, something fundamentally life altering happens at a leusus that convinces these people, right? Convinces these initiates that they have transcended their mortality and they are guaranteed an afterlife. It was said, only those who go to a loses, only them will experience the afterlife. You know, I suppose they experienced it

when they went to a loisice and then perhaps had it with them for the rest of their life. At least that's the idea. So take us on some of your trips. You went to talk to the world's leading beer scientists, so to speak. You went to Greece, you went to Rome, you went to the Vatican, you went to the Vatican libraries, what was that like? And what did you find there?

And how were you received? With relatively open arms. I made decent friends with the archivists and the librarians largely over strong Italian coffee, so that that's always a tip for your future Vaticanism. Yeah, well, it's so interesting that you didn't meet a lot of resistance to what you were doing because you'd think that now is that because people didn't understand what you're doing or did they understand and let you anyways? Because it's not that obvious that the Vatican would be that thrilled with the proposition

that the original sacraments of Christianity were the most potent hallucinogens that we know. And what sort of response have you got from classically religious people, traditionally religious people, Christian people, more most particularly, as a consequence of laying out the claims that you've made? It's been somewhat surprising to be totally honest in that there has been a generally good reception amongst the Catholics and the Orthodox and the Protestants with whom I talk. And I think if you take a step back and just think about it, you know, I'm not impugning anybody today. This is all ancient history. A lot of it has been gone over well before me. I mean, just the notion of other forms of Christianity, nosticism, for example, those 52 books of the Nagamadi Corpus that were discovered in 1945.

We've been talking and writing about them for decades. So, I mean, it's known that there were other versions of the faith out there, throwing a psychedelic twist in there is somewhat controversial, but that would presuppose that Christianity and psychedelics are somehow mutually exclusive. And I'm not sure that they are. I mean, even today, if you look at it... You would be so convinced of that if you read the book for ev'lation, which looks for all intents and purposes like the account of a hallucinogenic experience.

And so does some of the language in the Gospel of John, or so does the mark, for example, in 411, might not be psychedelics when, but when Jesus is asked why he speaks in parables, why talk about the mustard seed and the prodigal son? Why not speak plainly to people? The response from Jesus is that he's trying to relay a moustadion. And that's the Greek word for mystery, the very same mystery as you would use in the mysteries of a luces, for example, or the mysteries of Dionysus. It's that word which, if you look at the the the Thayer Greek English lexicon of the New Testament, published in the 19th century, they will

define that Moustadion in Mark as a religious secret, you know, confide it only to the initiate it, not to be communicated by them to ordinary mortals. I mean, so the idea that Christianity is born with secrets, right, potentially secret rituals, I think has been known for some time. I think that the big question is whether or not that include it, some kind of ancient pharmacology. Yeah, well, that's definitely the big question. And the other big question, of course, is what relevance does that have to a church that increasingly seems to be dying dying at least in the West? I mean, Griffiths told me that

Harvard Divinity School is thinking about starting up a psychedelic divinity program. Yeah, and I actually had a great talk with Charlie Stang at Harvard Divinity. He interviewed me and grilled me in a very respectable way, but he's had a year-long series of wonderful presentations on psychedelics in the future of religion, which I hope will continue. So of all places, where the same campus that that spawned Timothy Leary and Dick Albert, seems like there's some interest in this again in a very sober way.

Yeah, so to speak. So to speak. Yeah. OK, so let's go to the Vatican. What did you do there in Rome and what did you discover? Well, I discovered a version of the faith, like we've been talking about, that I didn't hear about in my 13 years of Catholic school, and I was investigating this notion of continuity, pagan continuity, the idea that if there were these psychedelic rituals and antiquity, and pagan antiquity, did some of that somehow make its way

into the Christian world. And so I went, I went spolunking, I went literally under the Vatican into the Necropolis, a top which it sits, and went to Mausoleum M inside the Vatican. And right there, it sits and went to Mausoleum M inside the Vatican. And right there, under the cathedral, you will see the vines of Dionysus painted onto this mosaic. Could be one of the earliest Christian mosaics that we have as a matter of fact. In this tomb, and art historians point out that clearly these are the vines of Dionysus

that have been co-opted as the vines of Christianity. I mean, John's Gospel, Jesus, refers to himself as the true vine. I mean, so it's a very kind of desilient example of how the edifice of the Church is, in some sense, is literally built on top of these pagan roots. And if you go to other catacombs around the city under the streets of Rome, you will find frescoes from the third and fourth century. And in these frescoes, you will see women consec from the third and fourth century. And in these frescos, you will see women concentrating what looks like wine

in what looks like some kind of version of a proto-mass or proto-eucharistic meal. The Vatican itself identifies these women as, you know, participating in a eucharistic vigil, not what you often hear about. Next to one of these women concentrating wine, you'll see the Greek witch Cersei, who, if anything, is known for her pharmacological expertise going as far back as Homer. So it's difficult to explain these images, these very Greek images that somehow reference pharmacology, somehow reference the role of women and the birth development of the church. It's not a Christianity that's often talked about. So, why do you think if Christianity or at least some branches of Christ, okay, so first, do you think that Christianity itself has its origins in hallucinogenic use?

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That's headspace.com slash JBP for a free one month trial with access to headspace's full library of meditations for every situation. This is the best deal offer right now. Head to headspace.com slash JBP today. Do you think that Christianity itself had its origins in hallucinogenic use? I mean, that's certainly what John Allegro claimed, right? With the super mushroom in the cross. I read that when I was pretty young, 15,

and I had no idea what to do with that book. I mean, because there was no way I could criticize it. He was a philologist, essentially, right? He derived almost all of his evidence from the derivation of words, from the etymology of words. And I just still don't have enough expertise in that field to evaluate his claims, but I read that.

I thought Christianity originated as a hallucinogenic mushroom cult, really? That's actually possible. And he compiles a tremendous amount of evidence. It's a very scholarly book. I destroyed his career because it was published at the height of the hippie revolution, which Timothy Leary was responsible for, and has a consequence, I would say, of his carelessness, more than anything else. But Allegro was very serious. It's a very serious book, but it's not one that's easy to, it's not easy to know what to do with that book. And Elieger was put aside because of it and lots of people paid the price for this and

Rock who we're going to talk to later was one of them as well. I mean, the pathway was laid for you in some sense because all these other people had already suffered for putting forward this hypothesis earlier, right? And so by the way, I had it, I had it easy, Jordan. There was no hard going here, which is at is maybe part of the reason why I was welcomed into the Vatican or why I've had great conversations with people at Harvard and Yale and elsewhere because times have changed. I think largely thanks to Roland Griffith's clinical work and the extraordinary promise

that is being shown on clinical depression, anxiety, end of life distress, PTSD, addiction, you name it, with these compounds, the study of which was interrupted for decades. And I think people are beginning to realize that there's something here worth looking at. When the front page of the New York Times, earlier this week, is talking about the future of psychiatry

being revolutionized because of psychedelics with psilocybin and DNA. And the same sort of thing occurred in the early 1960s when LSD and Mescal and all of the powerful psychedelics were being utilized partly for the treatment of alcoholism, for example, and there was some evidence that that was successful. But things got out of hand very, very rapidly. I mean, maybe that's why Christianity, as it formalized,

put the psychedelic sacraments to rest. I mean, when we introduced them back into our civilization, speaking as a, you know, westerner, so to speak, I mean, that was only in the 1950s. When did, it was Wasson who went into Mexico and discovered the psilocybin mushrooms and brought them back. He was quite the character.

I'd recommend that everyone who's listening read about Gordon Wasson, because he was quite the character. I'd recommend that everyone who's listening read about Gordon Wason, because he was quite the person, pulled these powerful hues and engines back into our culture. I mean, they blew us into pieces in the 1960s. So badly, we had to make them all illegal and scared the hell out of everyone, well, so to speak, maybe it didn't scare the hell out of everyone, that would have been the positive outcome.

But our authorities certainly regarded them as radically disrupt event. That seems to me to be not such an unreasonable judgment, even though there's a counter-argument, very powerful counter-argument to be made. It's something to be very, very cautious about. Are you still a practicing Christian? And you don't have to answer that. I want to put you in the spot. I'd love to. I very

much still consider myself a Christian in the way I learned about it from the Jesuits, was largely about social justice and contemplative mysticism and being of service. I was taught to be a man for others. And in that sense, yeah, I still consider myself a Christian, maybe even more so after discovering the pagan roots of this faith. And what I do think is an interesting way for Christianity to sit with these mystery traditions and the possibility that in these early centuries of paleo Christianity, there was a type of Christianity that clearly attracted people. And I think it's the kind of Christianity that attracts me today,

2000 years later. This notion of personal direct experience of the divine, something was happening in those centuries to turn this Carpenter's son into the most famous human being who ever lived. Something was happening for this illegal cult of a dozen or so illiterate day laborers to convert the entire Roman Empire in only a couple centuries and become the world's biggest religion. Well, that's also the great mystery that's in your bark, too, because the Illusinean mysteries are going along for 2000 years, let's say, and then they're disrupted.

And Christianity comes along, and there's a hallucinogenic end to it. So what was it about what happened? Something happened that isn't merely a continuation of the shamanic psychedelic tradition, or that's what you have to think if you're a Christian, but that's also what you have to think historically, because Christianity did do exactly what you said it did. And so that's something I can't. I'm very interested in this Kant, I'm very interested in Christian ideas. I'm very interested in this Kant, I'm very interested in Christian ideas. I'm very interested in the continuity of religious experience across tens of thousands of years, and maybe more than that. And I don't understand at all what constitutes the shift that occurs from the transformation, from the pagan structures, let's say, predicated as they might have been on hallucinogenic experience, extending way back into the shamanic depths of time, God only knows how long. There's

some transformation, though, that's specific to Christianity, that's tangled up with hallucinogenic use, that I don't understand at all, and that has something to do as well with this idea of the defeat of death and the resurrection of the body, and all of this mystical elements, and the hallucinogenic elements of Christianity that are integrated into the book of Revelation and so on. So there's a pharmacological story, but there's a story of the transformation

of religious ideation that also is a complete mystery. I just, why was Christ able to displace Dinesias, let's say? And what does it signify that that was the case? That's the, I mean, that's what I'm trying to figure out. I mean, I think, I think Allegro kind of sits on the more extreme end of the spectrum of the psychedelic hypothesis. So I, I mean, I don't think that the religion begins as a mushroom cult, for example. I'm not sure if there were psychedelics at the last supper. I think the, the, the hypothesis I'm pursuing is whether or not there could have been, you know, some communities of early Greek-speaking Christians who at some place in the ancient Mediterranean would have availed themselves of some kind of mind-altering sacrament.

You know, the prevalence of that kind of tradition we simply don't know. At the end of the book, I say it's probably not a majority. There were other things that led to the rise and success of Christianity. It's often distinguished from its pagan predecessors by this sense of community and love and charity that the ancient sources talk about, but there was something else that was inspiring people to abandon the faith of their ancestors, perfectly good religion, like a Lucis by the way, which survives all the way through the early Christian period. The mysteries of Dionysus, a perfectly good religion to the Greek speakers of Greece and elsewhere,

that survives before, during, and after the life of Jesus. So I think for at least some of these communities, the way the gospel was communicated to them in the Greek language may have reminded them of some of these mystery rights, some of these pagan rituals. Well, that is that is a relatively speaking, a very moderate hypothesis. I guess the problem I have with that hypothesis in so far as I have a problem with it because it could well be accurate is that as you have pointed out, the hallucinogenic experience is so unbelievably powerful that it's hard to believe that it would have had a

like a tremendous impact. And you see also these odd correspondences between the development of Christian ideas and the mysteries of facing death that you describe. They don't trivial. So Christ is crucified. He dies. Three days later, so he spends time in the underworld. He spends time in hell. He resurrects. That's a dying, that's a death in resurrection story that's very much akin to a shamanic death and rebirth. And it's hard to believe that those ideas aren't in some manner, intagrally related, especially given that that's something that can be experienced as a consequence

of chemical transformation. And then the next question is, what the hell does it mean that that sort of thing can be initiated in people repeatedly and reliably as a consequence of chemical manipulation? I mean, and you'd say, well, it's a aberration, it's a form of poisoning, that's a reason, that's the most reasonable hypothesis. But then you'd say, well, it's a now, it's a form of poisoning. That's the most reasonable hypothesis. But then you'd expect that if it was a consequence of poisoning, that the downstream effects would be negative, not positive.

And I read a large-scale study. Hundreds of thousands of people, its retrospective analysis, looking at the comparative mental and physical health of hallucinogen users versus non-users. And on virtually every measure of physical and mental health, the hallucinogen users were healthier. It's not what you'd expect if it's poison. And so it's not poison, but it's a chemical that produces this incredibly powerful spiritual

experience. What the hell are we supposed to make of that? And it's at the foundation of our religious belief, historically speaking, perhaps at the foundation of Christian ideas themselves. It looks like it's integral to the emergence of Greek rationality in all of the civilization that's flourished in the Mediterranean. It can't just be brushed away.

And then there's the clinical evidence coming in from Griffithsend showing that does appear to be positively transformative. I mean, it points to something that we just don't understand at all. And then I've read a fair bit about mushrooms, and they're very, very strange things. Paul Stammitz, I imagine you're familiar with his work, he's quite the genius, and a very strange person. I should really interview him. He's a remarkable person. And mushrooms are very, very complicated things. And it isn't obvious why

Silaside and Mushrooms produce Silaside. It doesn't seem to do much for the mushroom. And so there's a mystery there. And well, and then there's all of the speculation that, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, he came and spoke up at the U of T. So that was extremely interesting. But his stoned ape theory is extremely interesting as well. I mean, it's definitely on the fringe ends of speculation. But it's not like there's any shortage of evidence that every human culture that ever existed did everything they possibly could to identify every hallucinogenic substance within reach and become masters of them. So we co-evolve with these things. I love talking to Paul and to Dennis, Dennis McKenna.

They're great stewards of this tradition. And I'm not a mycologist or a scientist for that matter. But this is the kind of stuff that that asks deep questions about our past. And when we're talking about pagan continuity, maybe we should say anthropological continuity. This case. Right, because that's farther back than pagan by tens of thousands of years. Right.

We had no idea how far back this goes. It could be tens of thousands of years. Yes, likely. It's highly likely. I cite one study in my book about Neanderthals. This is from a decade ago. They found medicinal plants like chamomile and yaro in the dental calculus of Neanderthal bones in Spain.

That goes back 50,000 years. There's some evidence that chimps use medicinal plants and cats eat grass when they're ill. Like, I mean, the relationship between animals and plants is extraordinarily complicated. And, and you know, the thing is too, the farther back you go in history to identify something, and you see it there, the farther back, it's likely that that occurred, because the farther

back you go, the more stable cultures are, and the less likely they are to have radically transformed. So if you go back 15,000 years and something's there, well, you can make a pretty good guess that maybe it was there 80,000 years ago, because there just wasn't that much change. And lack of change is what's typical rather than change, you know, despite our current culture. So, yeah, so this stuff goes way as back as far as we can possibly imagine. You said just a moment ago that we co-evolved with mushrooms. And so what can you elaborate on that a bit? What do you mean? Well, they certainly precede us.

Plants go back about 470 million years. If you talk to Paul Stammitz, he will say there's a fossilized mushroom that's two and a half billion years old. So the mushroom actually far precedes the plants that we know of. 391,000 species, 80,000 of which might be edible. This is in orders of millions of years before us. And let's just think about it common sensically. If we weren't made to interact with our environment,

why would these plants have an impact on us? Why are we equipped with CB1, CB2 receptors? Why are we equipped with the five HT2A receptor? Why do these things have any impact on us whatsoever? It seems that we've co- evolved together with our planet, and just maybe we're not aliens to it, but together these things are more allies than foes. In some cases, poisons though they may be.

Yeah, well, that's the question. Are they allies or foes? And if they're allies, what exactly does that, what exactly is the significance of that? [♪ Music playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background, playing in background obviously about Brian's book and about co-evolution with mushrooms and about the potential significance of whatever the potential significance is of the fact that our religious ideas, which seem to sit at the basis of our culture, may have been profoundly influenced across thousands of years by hallucinogenic use and what in the world are we supposed to make of that. And I won't read the intro because I've already done that.

So that people are already informed as to who you are. I'm going to start by asking you about the road to alloys. So you co-authored, if that's OK, can we start there? Does that seem reasonable to you? Why not jump right in? You co-authored the road to alloys in 1978 with our Gordon Wasson and Albert Hoffman. Wasson was an amateur, my call, just I believe that his primary occupation, I think he was a banker, but he was a very accomplished thinker and explorer.

Yes, he found Bank. He found Banking very boring, he told me. Well, certainly compared to the other things he did, it was very run of the mill occupation. And he wrote this famous book, Soma, which is well accepted now, I think, as an authoritative hypothesis at least, that the ancient Hindus in particular were using emanita mascaria, the flyagarrach, the red mushroom with white dots, the fairy tale mushroom, as an entheogen in your terminology. And Albert Hoffman, who discovered LSD, and you co-authored this book, The Roed to a Loisus in 1978. And so first of all, like, what was that like? And why did they pick you? And then we can get into what the consequences of

that were. Well, actually, I had a sabbatical year and decided that I would travel across Europe. So I bought a car and a London and then shipped it over to the mainland and drove to Greece. But while I was in London, I thought I should buy books to have to read while I was traveling. And so I noticed the copy of John Lable was a sick of mushroom across in a bookstore, window, and I put it in the car. And in that time that I was traveling and staying in Greece, I read it.

And I read it naively, I was unaware of the fact that I was not supposed to like it. But I was, I couldn't judge where Legrou was dealing with a kebrew or with a Samarian. But I certainly could judge when he cited classical sources. But I certainly could judge when he cited classical sources. And I was amazed that he brought my attention, things that I had not been taught. So I'm going to interrupt you there just for one second, if you don't mind. We were just talking about the sacred mushroom in the cross.

I read that when I was about 15 or 16, and it completely blew the top of my head off. And of course, I was completely incapable of assessing it, apart from the fact that it looked to be a very scholarly work and was hard to just ignore. But it's interesting to hear you say that even when he moved out of his area of specialty into your area of specialty, you found him to be a credible scholar who had actually found things that you didn't know about. His citations were fantastic. And I was interested in Dionysus, and he was giving me information about the nature of

the mania induced by possession by Dionysus. And so when I came back from the trip, I wrote two scholarly essays that were accepted in reputable journals, peer journals, and published. And then I became aware of Gordon Washington's work and read his work on Soma. And the friend said, why don't you send your essays to Gordon? And so I did. And so I didn't mean to, but I presented myself to Watson as an authority already on this topic.

So I always thought that he overestimated my abilities. But I almost immediately got a phone call from him. He was coming to Boston and we had to meet. So we did. And then the second time, very shortly after, he came to Boston and he said, we met in Dick Shulte's office this time. First time we met at a restaurant and he announced to Shulti is without having told me that he and I were going to work on Lucis and had to do with the grain goddess and Shulti is being a botanist. He said, oh grain, very interesting. But that's the first I knew that we were going to work together. And so, please go ahead.

We were going to drive to his house in Western Connecticut. And so on the drive he told me what the project was and he essentially dropped him my lap. He had the theory that it would be Eregat and it was a sensible theory because it would have to be something connected with grain and the nature of the experience of the most classes it would not have accepted it was visionary, which would mean in those days we would have called hallucination but come to know better that we shouldn't call it that. It is a transcendent vision, but it had to be something connected with grain and the most obvious intoxicant that would be toxin, if you wish, connected with grain would be airgut, which was a fungus that grows on mushroom. Wasim was always interested only in mushrooms because of the experience which he describes many times of his honeymoon in the Catskills, where he went

for a walk with his wife, new wife Elantina Pavlovna, and she saw mushrooms growing everywhere, and he saw on me toadstools, and that's why they began interested in discovering that people had why they began interested in discovering that people had definite attitudes about mushrooms and that they figure prominently in art and literature. And so he was really only interested in mushrooms. And I remember when we received a specimen of aragot from Hoffman that had fruited the scarosha. It's just, it looks just like a kernel of grain that's become clubby and and purplish. The infected, the real mushroom is the root-like growth, which is called the scarosha, and it permeates its hosts, but under suitable conditions,

it fruits, and this is true of air got. And so that we had, we didn't have the actual specimen, we had a photograph from Hoffman of the fruiting kernel of grain, and you could see that mushrooms were sprouting out of it. So he was ecstatic. It was indeed, we are, of course, fungus is a fungus, but this wasn't a mold. This was a, as he called a higher form of mushroom that produced the fruiting bodies. So he was ecstatic, but he, it was my task, and it seemed very plausible to, I really didn't know anything about the seen very plausible to, I really didn't know anything about the elusive and mysteries,

it's peripheral to ordinary classical education. It was my task to show that it fit the mythological scenario. And when you say, okay, I have three questions, you distinguish between hallucinogenic and visionary experience and then you also just Well, because, yeah, please because hallucinogenic means that you've lost your way in your wandering and And it is pejorative. You're only you're hallucinating I mean if I saw God and someone said you're're hallucinating, the person is saying, you haven't seen God, you've imagined something probably devilish. And so for that reason, I was asked to come up with a new term and invented the term anti-agent, which is actually a Greek adjective describing the way the devotees of Dionysus became when they were possessed by

him. It means that the deity within you, and I just coined it upon Lusigen and added the genus-like group. It's quite a coinage because it is very different from Hallucinogen or Hallucination. I mean, the LSD and Silasibon have been given to people who are schizophrenia who do have hallucinations. And the LSD and psilocybin do not exacerbate schizophrenia hallucinations. They seem, if you want to exacerbate schizophrenia hallucinations, you use themphetamines, different class of drugs entirely. And so whatever it is, the visionary experiences that these alternative class of drugs is producing does look pharmacologically distinct.

In Theogen obviously has, well, it's an interesting word because it actually caught on. People use it. It's not that easy to coin a word. There needs to be a space for it and a demand for it. And it has to be poetically apt. So you captured something. But in Theogen obviously has a whole set of connotations

that are very much unlike hallucinogen. And you mentioned the God within. So you were thinking about all these things when you came up with the word. So maybe you could tell me about that. Well, I'm about the connotations of anti-agent. In fact, it does, it does prejudice one to accept that the vision is in some way related to religion. So I have worked with a scientist who objected in a core author of paper with him, and he wouldn't use the word enthio gen, but we use the word neurotropic, means it just changes the way your brain works without judging whether what the significance of that change is. And so it definitely is a term that is used by people who believe there is something like a spiritual dimension to our existence. And well let me ask you about that. You've been thinking about this for an extraordinary long time. And it's cost you a fair bit to think about it.

Oh, I imagine it's been an adventure as well. Are you still pleased with the coinage? Were you pleased with the coinage of Enthiogen to begin with the word? And do you stand by that creation? So to speak? Yes, yes, because of its roots, it goes into European languages.

And so you find it in French and German and so on, a slight adaptation to make it fit their language, but the same word. So what do you, what's your impression of the validity, significance, meaning, etc. of the in theogenic experience? What sense do you make out of it, the fact that this chemically induced, a chemical induction of a mystical experience? What sense do you make of that? What significance is there in that? Oh, the, the, the, what, what I make of it is quite profound, but it's not something

that really one can share easily. But I can make, I can put it very simply that as we each sit in our present room, we have constructed what we consider to be the reality by the things that we see. And we have not constructed that reality by the things that we don't see. But it's quite obvious that what we see is only those things that our organs of perception allow us to react to. And so anything that we are not capable of reacting to with our organs of sensation isn't part of a reality. And you can train yourself to see the fringes of reality.

Well, as a matter of fact, the rather humorous event, I was at a conference with Dixielties and Albert Hoffman, and Dixielties, the botanist at Harvard, who had participated in many shamanic experiences had taken many drugs. People in the audience said, someone in the audience said, what has it meant for you to be taking all those drugs? In short, I'm sure he was lying, but he was a very common sense sane person. He said, means nothing.

Means absolutely nothing. means the next morning you get up and go to work and then they asked Albert. Albert said, well I think it means that the defining lines of reality are a bit fuzzy. A bit fuzzy, yeah. So, as I sit here, I can imagine, and it, and certain gifted times, perhaps I can respond to the fact, there are a lot of other things going on in this chamber, and where you are also. So, I talked a bit to Brian about the Elisinian mysteries and the idea that he opened his book with that to overcome death you have to experience death. And Griffiths work with Silasiven has shown that cancer patients who take Silasayb and have a mystical

experience, have a profoundly altered relationship with death, a profoundly altered understanding of death. And this would be associated with those chambers of mystery that you just described that can be opened under some circumstances. Do you have anything to say about that transformation and attitude towards death, which seems like a highly relevant issue, all things considered, since we all have to face death. Yeah.

I think it's sad that one should be aware of that totality of existence, only when you're about to leave it. And what do you think, if anything, that the end theogenic experience can contribute to our, what would you say, our ability to tolerate our mortality, our ability to understand it, our ability to transcend it? Well, we're talking about something that's unknowable, and by definition that means that anything you say about it can't be it because it's unknowable, both on these speaking paradigms and parallels and so forth.

But it is perhaps an outrageous supposition to assume that we are mortal. And why do you say that? Why do you think that's an outrageous supposition? And believe me, I'm not trying to trap you, that I'm genuinely curious about you. The whole mystery of being and procreation is inexplicable. Yeah, well, certainly seems to be that consciousness itself is inexplicable. We don't have a good causal theory for consciousness. We have no way, we have no understanding whatsoever of the relationship between consciousness and neurological functioning as far as I've been able to tell. I've read a lot of books on consciousness and neurology and most of them aren't particularly

credible. Some of them are good, but there's also a mystery about the fact of existence, its experiential existence itself, which is obviously dependent on consciousness. And what we don't know about consciousness could fill many, many volumes. And so that speaks to your many chambered experiential realm argument.

What happened? Okay, let's talk about Hoffman, because you wrote the book, you wrote two loisers with Hoffman as well. So you talked about Wesson, how did you meet Hoffman? I only met him at that conference with Shulties. And then again, I met him on his hundreds birthday in Edacomphorance in Basel.

And I hadn't seen him for 30 years. I mean, well, I'd seen him, I guess in the 80s, I hadn't seen him for a couple of decades and he didn't recognize me. When I got up to speak, I was announced and he said, oh, Carl, is that you? Well, that's a long time. Yes.

I just saw one of my colleagues a week ago or so, a couple of weeks ago, I'd seen him for 20 years, and I wouldn't have recognized him 25 years. I wouldn't have recognized him if I would have passed him on the street. I don't know if he would have recognized me either. So that's a long, that's a long time. So can you, can you briefly outline the thesis of the road to a loisus? The thesis is very simple. It was one of many what returned

mystery initiations in antiquity. But in the case of this mystery initiation, it was first of all a pan-holinic right. So many people, not just from a village or a tribal group of Greece, or do you even have to be Greek? Anyone who had the means to do it would do it, as considered the experience of a lifetime. And so it was a kind of universal experience,

but it was only one of many of these things which were formed locally. And it was institutionalized, which is very interesting. So because Brian and I were talking about the reintroduction of psychedelics into the West in the 1960s, of course that caused tremendous cultural disruption and then clamped down on the use of psychedelics in general. But the Greeks had figured out how to institutionalize their use

and to, well, maybe the Greeks had, maybe the precursors to the Greeks had because God only knows how old the tradition was, but they seemed to be able to keep the genie in the bottle, so to speak. And do you have any sense of how they managed that? Athens was becoming an imperial power and it annexed the leases and then took over the religion.

And so Athens was as the religion, as the right became more popular. Of course, people knew about it, but there was no reason. Eluses was a separate town, a separate state. There was no reason why it would be attempted by with Athens other than the fact that Athens annexed Eluses and then took over the administration

of the of the rights. And in fact, had a preliminary right, which was performed in Athens a half year before the right at that village, and this is about 14 miles outside of Athens to the west. So in the case of, but in the case of loses, which makes it so interesting, I don't know, it was this

important classical mystery religion, but there are others who were equally important. In this case, we have in Homeric hymn, which is the goddess D a demeter. These are poems in the style of Homer, but not by Homer, in the Homeric type of poetry. We have the precise ingredients for a potion that was drunk as part of the mystery. And of course, you could just just regard it as classes as I have, as meaning nothing, or you could think that it was responsible for the fact that people, we know what happened, although it can't be believed what happened. And as I said, it's unknowable so what I'm saying isn't what happened. But they all saw something at exactly the same time in a chamber after they had been prepared for long indoctrination, is what they were supposed to see, and so forth.

But on you, they saw something. Do you see that as a continuation of the shamanic tradition? Yes, of course. There's no way you can make a group of people, several thousand people, see something all at the same time by drumming or fasting or anything of that kind. It's going to be haphazard. Some people may have a transcendent experience and others won't. But on cue, every year, and others won't. On cue, every year, a large group of people had a vision after they drank a potion whose ingredients

are known. And that's what makes it interesting. Do you have some sense of the contents of the vision? Yeah. Can you outline that? I can quote because of course to say what it was, openly was prohibited under the pain of death, but in a play of euripidies, the Ion, The Coral says that when you pass through the gates of the Hall of Initiation, you will see the stars dance and with them dance the moon. But I have to remind you that the Hall of Initiation has a solid roof.

You cannot see the sky. The only way you can see the stars dance, and with them dance the moon, is if you have transcended the physical past to the edge of the cosmos, which is what is described in ancient poems of the Shamanic journey, to the edge of the cosmos, and they're dancing amongst the celestial bodies, planets, and the stars. Okay, let me ask you a side. Of course, that's impossible, isn't it? Yeah, well, yeah. Who knows what's impossible precisely?

Yes, it's what's described over and over again, though it's what Plato describes in the Fiedras. It's what Parman in the Fiedras. It's what Parmina he describes in his poem. In the Shamanic tradition, at least according to Iliad and to other sources that I've read, the Shaman who, although Iliad didn't accept this part of the hypothesis because he didn't accept the hallucinogenic, the centrality of hallucinogenic substances in the Shamanic experience. But we talked about that earlier in the podcast, But the shamanic initiate, a shamanic practitioner,

would die, would be reduced to a skeleton. That's one way of thinking about one part of the experience. And sometimes have his bodily organs replaced, or sometimes have them replaced by something that represented a crystalline structure that was more pure, but would die anyways. Would reliably commune with the ancestors, would then leave the cosmos as we know it, traveling up and down, something like a structure that represented the different layers of experience, which seemed to me something like, imagine the standard three dimensions of reality plus time. So we've got width and height and depth and time.

But there's another dimension of sorts, which is the dimension that we experience when we go down into the micro realm of being. And that we experience when we go up into the macro realm of being. So from the subatomic to the cosmological level, that seems to me to be portrayed by the idea of the world tree. You can see that in Scandinavian mythology because the world tree is associated with the cosmos as such and then

the ability to move up and down that tree seems to be associated with the ability to move between the earthly realm and the heavenly realm and to move into the heavenly realm is to move outside the normal cosmos, which is reminiscent to me of the idea that the Christian idea that God exists in a place and time that's outside of our universe. So it's quite a remarkable and non-obvious idea. So, why am I, I'm wondering to what degree that idea, that cosmological idea of the world tree is associated with this idea of the journey through the cosmos and the, and the experience of divinity and the Illusinean mysteries, is that a variant of the shamanic story? Everything that you've been saying is documented also in classical mythology. These are themes which are waiting for scholars to recognize, but they are now. But when I embarked in the study of classics, there were very few classes that

so we even knew that these were being spoken of in the book. Which things are you referring to specifically? Like the body being attacked by demons and spirits and the internal organs being rearranged and a part of the body replaced with some badge of immortality, all of the descendants of Peelups. You see that here? Something flashed into my mind. I'm an admirer of the Disney film,

Pinocchio. Yeah. Now Pinocchio goes down to the depths, right? He's an initiate. He goes down to the depths. He goes down to the bottom of the ocean, like Gilgamesh. Yes. He finds his father. That's the ancestral spirits in the body of a dragon. It's a whale, but that whale breathes fire. It's a dragon for all intents and purposes. And when he's transformed into a genuine person, right? So that's his rebirth and transformation. He comes back from the dead. His conscience, Jiminy Cricket, is given a gold badge. And that's an echo of that shamanic idea of the replacement of something the soul like it reflects the stars actually that's how the movie closes this badge reflects the stars so you see these unbelievably deep classical mythological slash shamanic ideas popping up in places that you never expect them to pop

up continually and constantly. Yeah, that, I mean, was your time, is it subject for another series of your investigations? It's what the Disney artists knew about Antiogenic or do now know about Antiogenic experience because they fit the pattern perfectly. Yeah, so do you have any specific knowledge of that? I mean, that movie was made in the 1930s. Yes. Number, I mean, it's a work of absolute genius. That that that movie is so deep, it just stuns me every time I watch it because there's always something more to discover in it. But in Fantasia, isn't there an episode of dancing at mushrooms? Yes.

I believe there is. Well, that's incredible. I mean, most of them are crazy. No one would know what that meant. Yeah, yeah. There always has been an inner core of people who know very well what it all means. So what happened to you after this book was published?

First of all, what did you expect would happen when you published this book? That's the first question. And then what actually happened? I expected other classes would take the idea and work with it in fields of expertise that I did not master. I expected that they would take the ball and run with it. Like you did with a leg rose book.

Yeah, but it didn't happen. In particular, my situation at Boston University was that at the time I was acting chairman and President Silver was a great supporter of classics, but he had his own idea of what classics were. And I worked with him, in fact, in starting the buildup of the department, which has become quite a respected department. But he had his own idea about what he would have thought drugs and his

idea of Greek rationality. He was a philosopher. And so he certainly was not willing, even the Dodds had written a book on Greeks and the irrational, which greatly influenced me, he was not one of those people that was interested in Greek irrationality. And so I was at a chairman's meeting in his office, and he was talking to us about, we had to stress the fact that publications were necessary for advancement. And then he looked at me and he said, unless it's a publication by the Vanity Press. And I had nothing to do with the publication. And Harcourt Brace was not a Vanity Press and Watson didn't pay for the publication. So that would be with the definition of Vanity Presses.

On Harcourt Braze, it's certainly not a Vanity Press. I mean, there's no doubt about that. Helen Wolfe, her son, I was very interested in the work, he's a classist, and she was our particular editor. But I was labeled as Pub with vanity and press and he disliked me from that point on. Well, and you believe it was because why because of his his belief well, he was a very rationality, particular rationality of the great, not the Dionysian element. Yeah, he was a very he element.

Yes, absolutely. And he was a very divisive figure. And so it became a way for people who wanted to advance themselves to denigrate me. So I had colleagues in my department who turned against me because that way they could climb up on my corpse and promote themselves. It's all changed now.

I mean, the people who were involved are no longer there, except for a few people who are my friends, and they're not hostile to me at all now. But it was a very divisive period at Boston University. And to put Carl's experiencing context, maybe, this is in the late 1970s, one of Carl's colleagues at the time was Howard Zinn, who famously wrote a People's History of the United States,

published in 1980. John Silver, who was the president of BU at the time, is sort of no nonsense, no nonsense, Texan of conservative Presbyterian roots. He didn't have the best relationship with Howard Zinn, either. He would deny the Marxist, as he called him, sabbaticals, promotions, and pay raises. And, you know, Silber was no fan of the anti-war movement or revolutionaries, and the idea of, you know, aligning the psychedelic gospels of enlightenment from Tim Leary and others with this anti-war movement

was not welcome on campus in the late 70s. Or to suspect that a faculty member was going to introduce students to drugs, which was questioned out anywhere in the realm of possibility. Right, but there, I guess there's the, the, what would you say the uncertain consequence of taking this sort of hypothesis seriously, right, which is an uncertain, there are uncertain consequences. It's a very dangerous proposition because it opens up to the possibility that religious experience or spiritual realities are a part

of our basic nature as humans. Well, that's what it's called. That calls into question the validity of all the religions. It's so... Well, I think it's worse. I think it calls... It opens up the possibility that they're correct. They're correct.

They had just defined it in their own... Well, yes, yes, yes. But I think the idea, this might be my own personal peccadillo, but I think the idea that there's something in the central religious doctrine that's fundamentally correct is much more terrifying than the idea that there isn't. That's how it looks to me. I mean, if there's something divine and immortal about human beings, and it's our ultimate ethical

responsibility to let that shine into the world, and that's part of reality itself, then heaven help us when we don't manage that. That's how it looks to me. Yes, absolutely. You know, I've heard Freudian criticisms of religious belief, for example, that belief in life after death is nothing but a myth that's designed to, what would you say, keep us in childhood denial of the terrible realities of our existence.

But that doesn't really account for the prevailing stories of hell, let's say, because if you're going to invent a religion that does nothing but satisfy your childish delusions, why would you bother with hell? And there's this element to the religious, yes, go ahead. I could challenge you to prove that you're alive. You're just hallucinating. My God, you really are off the wall. Well, there's no doubt about that, but I get your point. Well, so I'm not sure what I'm not exactly sure what the more revolutionary idea is, you know, is that and there's another part of this that's extraordinarily problematic too from a philosophical perspective, which is that if the anthogens are pointing towards something

that resembles a genuine religious experience, and if that religious experience is profound and valid and constitutes part of the base from which our culture, both Greek and Christian was derived, let's say, rather than being antithetical to it in this Dionysius first-us-apal-away, if it's actually the core of it, which is the case Brian makes, for example, in his book,ius first is a Paul away. If it's actually the core of it, which is the case Brian

makes, for example, in his book, then this is all something that we need to take extraordinarily seriously. And that's really revolutionary as far as I'm concerned. And now we have a chemical, because part of the problem for Western people has always been, well, we've got the material realm in science and look at how powerful it is. We have the spiritual realm and it's separate, but all of a sudden now you have something

that bridges the gap, right, which is these strange psychedelic chemicals, which are material in the utmost, but have this intense spiritual, what would you say, nature, or at least are capable of eliciting that in us. And so then that calls into question the entire relationship between the material structure of existence and the spiritual realm. And that's revolutionary. I was talking to a physicist last week. Unfortunately, his name momentarily escapes my mind, but he's a famous atheist. And I mentioned Griffiths work to him. It's like, well, he's one of the people

who originated the idea that the entire universe could spring into being from nothing. And as elementary particles do, and he sees no materialist evidence whatsoever for a spiritual realm. But then I said, well, what do you do with Griffiths work? What do you do with the entire corpus of psychedelic experience? What do you make of that? Because ignoring it isn't you do with the entire corpus of psychedelic experience? What do you make of that?

Because ignoring it isn't going to help. There's the shamanic tradition. There's the continuation of that in to Greece and the Illusinean mysteries. There's the development of that throughout Christianity that can't just be easily set aside, especially if Mararske was right, for example, and there was some influence of these sacramental potions on the development

of early Christian ideas. And those ideas are central to our culture. Yes. So we've got a big problem here conceptually. And it's no what I would say, it's actually a testament to the integrity of the universities that something is revolutionary as what you did didn't completely destroy your career. It's true. Yeah.

At the time, I had several students who were writing a dissertation. So I'm not imagining that this event happened. They were told that they could not, they would never get the degree unless they dropped me as their advisor. And they remained my friends and that's the story they told me. And their work was then done finished by other people. And in some cases it had been quite successful. They've been published and so forth, but it was the work they did with me and was still in by somebody else because and this and this was not the silver we did it was someone in the department who was definitely trying to get credits for what he was doing who still the students away from me.

Well, it's it's it's heartening to me that you were able to maintain your career as an academic, despite wandering into this most incendiary territory. And I'm not sure that that would be the case today, at least under some circumstances. So I'm going to blame all these questions on Brian, by the way, because he's seven of me, but they're good questions. So I'm going to go ahead with them. You apparently tested the Kukio on potion yourself in the 1970s. Albert Hoffman sent you and was on some Urgot in the mail. Could you share that story? Yeah, just rather humorous because we did do it.

It was at the very beginning in fact, because Washington was very direct. If we were going to write about this, we should know what the experience was like. And so one of the times that I visited about once a month, I went to spend the weekend at his house in Connecticut and as we were driving there he said we're going to take the potion tonight and so I thought oh really and we had dinner his old nanny was there a lovely black woman and he announced we're going to take a potion tonight. This is awfully open because you know I believe this is illegal to be taken drugs and it's so he said the customer is too fast before you do this and

so we can't eat anything. So we sat there while the other people ate and then when dinner was over we got up to go down to the barn and the studio he stayed in the studio which was converted in the barn not in the main house and as we got to go, you know, people said, well, have fun. This is rather flippant too. So when we got there, he put on some music, and he said, the customers deserve silence. So I knew that I wasn't supposed to talk. I didn't know at the time, but we were listening to the chanting of Maria Sabina, the Mazatek Shaman. So it was very moving, and we sat wrapped up in blankets by the fireplace, his daughter who was a PhD in nursing sat in the

corner as the monitor in case anything went wrong. And so no one spoke and the chanting went on but midnight. I find it said Gordon I don't think anything has happened. And he said yes, yes it's been most disappointing. But we were hungry. It went up to the house and rated the pantry. It has like me to eat. In the next morning we took out Elbrus letter in which he gave a very detailed account of what he had experienced with this potion. So we just decided, well, apparently it works it just in work for us, we didn't take enough of it. And so we went ahead with it on the basis of Alvers' experience, not our own. Gordon said Alvers a very small man. He didn't send enough for people our size.

And was the potion an LSD derivative? Was it purified LSD? No, it was Ergonovian, which was one of the chemicals in Ergot. And at the time, we have settled up on that because Ergott has some 300 toxins. It's very complicated. Chemical. Complex.

But only one of them is water soluble, and that's Ergonevine. And so by simple extraction in water, which is what's required for the recipe in the Homeric Kim, we could get Ergonovine. But other people have tried it since, and Ergonovine doesn't seem to be that active. But I've worked with Peter Webster in France, who's a chemist, and we have decided to discover that agotamine, which is what's marketed for migraines. It dilates the blood vessels in the brain,

treat migraines agotamine in itself is not a psychoactive, but in an aqua solution, which is alkaline, and the achieving of making it alkaline is simply you just add some bone ash to it, and that would fit also the scenario of the significance of the mythological paradigm of the Elisirian mystery. So it has to be something simple like that. Some bone ash in it, produces an alkaline solution. And then, Ergonovian goes into a,

it's not a solution, but it's called hydrolysis, which is a combination with water, something like what happens when you chew on starches in your mouth. And it is an unstable chemical of itself in a smear image going back and forth between the two constantly, and that a parent is psychoactive. So the the this the potion that you took with was on wasn't effective. What about other experiences that you've had if you want to talk about them and you're certainly not obligated to. Yes, of course, anything that was done, and in those days, Narcotourism was not the vote, and anyone can do this now legally by traveling

to South America or to Mexico, and there's quite a tourist trade in that sort of thing. But in those days, it was illegal to have access to these substances. And so whatever experience I had was given by friends, who had gotten them, unfortunately, from the illegal drug trade. So I did have experience with LSD with the civil society. And did you have a classic shamanic experience with those substances? Yes, very intense.

And did it involve dying? It involved, I mean, it's very hard to shop at this because if I talk about it, some people will think I'm a religious leader and I'll have a following and they want me to stop us a church and well, all that sort of thing. Well, that's what I think. Do you have you ever read relations between the ego and the unconscious by Carl Jung just out of curiosity? I have, yes. I've read the very answers to Carl Jung.

Okay, because he provides some psychological hygiene tips and precisely that regard, although for him I don't know if it was a consequence of knowing anything about hallucinogenic use, but the reason I got into classics, I was originally going to be a psychiatrist and I did pre-med, And I did premed, but I had a philosophy course at Yale. And the philosophy teacher was one of those charismatic young guys. And he said, you're studying psychology, psychiatry, because you're interested in the soul. And you think that psychiatry will give access to the soul, but the psychiatry is a doctor, a medicine profession. It deals with six souls. And it's true, I was really interested

in psychiatry because I was fascinated by the delusional realities that were reported in cases, and I was very much wondered what they meant, and was dying to experience safely that kind of delusional reality. But he said, if you want to study the soul, you have to study the humanities. And so I took seriously what he said and thought that

classics was the most basic of the humanities. So I switched into classics, but I was interested in the soul to begin with. Now, so you're a trained classist who experimented with psychedelics substances. So my presupposition is that you're training as a classist, likely, influenced and expanded your experiences with psychedelic substances. It would provide its structure and content. It gave me a May came in pathologist. Mythology gives me a framework for understanding

a way of structuring imaginary reality. Let's call that. Okay, so can you tell me a little bit about how you've structured your understanding of that? Imaginary, did you say imaginary reality? Did you say mythological reality? Well, if I look at it from my sane vantage point, I would call it imaginary reality,

but I very much wanted to enter into the world of myth. Right, but that's a strange kind of imagination, isn't it? I could enter it, yes. Well, because there's this trans-personal element to it. This is the thing that I can't quite understand, is that you could describe the landscape of the imagination as purely subjective, but the problem with that is that the features of the landscape are

transpersonal. That's what's expressed in mythology. And if they weren't, we couldn't talk about it. And so, even though it's subjective, it has a transpersonal or impersonal element that seems to be grounded in, you can't say objective reality precisely because you experience it subjectively, but it's not only like idiosyncratic imagination. It has this death underworld element, this rebirth element. So, okay, so I'm gonna push you again if you don't mind. I would be more interested in your take on this. You've had these experiences, you're a train classist. What is this reality that's being laid out in these experiences?

And how do you understand it? I think of it as a journey to discover who you are. And when you go on this journey, it gets dangerous and you feel that maybe you should turn back, but just at the head it looks as though it might be even more interesting up there. So you go further and further and further. When you get to the end of the journey, which you find is yourself looking back. I said I'm not going to found a church, but there is no God. You're so stupid, don't you realize you are God?

And so, what I guess what I wonder about is what happens if you, what are the implications of that kind of realization for how you conduct your life? Like, look what happens with Griffith's subjects. They quit smoking. Okay, so now it's easy to think about that as a pharmacological effect. Purely, right, that their brains undergo a chemical transformation, they're no longer addicted to nicotine.

I don't believe that's what happens. I believe what happens is that they undergo a mystical experience that alerts them to who they should and could be, and that doesn't involve poisoning themselves with a deadly substance. So, in light of the new information, they've received about their potential, and maybe the actuality of their being, they decide to desist in that, they desist in that self-destructive pattern of behavior. I think the same thing happens to alcoholics that are cured, so to speak, as a consequence of psychedelic

experience. Does that seem reasonable to you? It does seem reasonable, yes, but I have to, me, we're talking about very dangerous subject because many of these substances are addictive and causing tremendous hardship for people who get get hooked on them and even alcohol which

is legal is extremely dangerous and there are many people who are addicted to it. It's clearly the most dangerous of drugs. And the people have died. Yes. Alcohol is an absolute catastrophe. I mean, there'd be virtually no violence, domestic violence, for example. There's no alcohol.

Alcohol is a catastrophe in 50 different ways. That doesn't necessarily mean it should be illegal, but it's definitely a catastrophe. I mean, there has to be an etiquette of use. And these addictive substances you describe, the hallucinogens don't technically fall into that category oddly enough, right? Because people tend not to abuse them. In the case of LSD, you build up an immediate immunity to it, so if you take

it the second day, nothing happens at all. Yes, and something similar has been reported with psilocybin and with DMT. So, these seem to be self-limiting substances, at least to some degree, as opposed to drugs like cocaine, with the classics, like a motor stimulants or the benzodiazepine class or the opiates for that matter, which all have that addictive tendency. So, here's a question, let's move away from the personal experience and a bit, although I'm so attempted to push a speaker,

but I won't, I'll leave it be for the time being. What was the, this is something I did discuss with Brian. His book, and he's obviously profoundly influenced by you, his book, I believe, is predicated on the assumption that the Greek, the great Greek rationality, everything that we admire and understand about Greek culture, was embedded inside this mystical tradition. It wasn't antithetical to it. It was embedded inside it. Yes.

Like our thought is embedded inside a dream, if you think about it from a young and perspective, which, and I think that's an accurate way of looking at the world, rationality embedded in a dream, embedded in a body, it's something like that. What do you think was the value of non-ordinary states of consciousness in classical antiquity? The value for us is that we would not have the great works of sculpture and literature and painting. If that society did not have access to this awareness of spiritual entities. Okay, so they call it the muses, but they're not imaginary. They're actually possessing spirits. The people testify over and over again that in the act of creation, and I find that my side of you know I'm just writing an essay. In the act of creation, you don't know what you're doing. Someone is working through you. Something is working through you.

Or if I don't want to go that far. It allows me to reconfigure the functioning of my brain in a way that ordinary would not have access to. There is this idea of the communion with the ancestors seems to me to be analogous on the shamanic front to the idea of being possessed by the creative spirit that drives mankind essentially, is that the experience that's induced by the psychedelics that puts the users in, with the central animating spirit of mankind. And that's part of that spirit that drives that continual conversation that we're all supposed to be involved in, for example, as humanity's practitioners, right? The golden chain that exists down the centuries that stretches all the way back to the shamanic rituals. That's all part of this.

And that's the spirit that animates you when you're creative. And animates means to be possessed by a spirit because it's related to anima. And so you are possessed by a benevolent spirit that produces and utters truth if you're engaged in the creative activity properly. And those psychedelic, that mystical experience seems to be associated with the ability to move away the blinders that would stop you from being able to perceive the existence of that spirit. That's, yes, that's reasonable.

Yes. It is reasonable at all. And of course, none of this is the least bit reasonable. I would have had synthesized LST five years before he was aware of its visionary potential. But at the time, it didn't seem to have any use. So he put it aside on a shelf in his laboratory. And five years later, as he was passing the shelf, he sensed that the vials said, take me. And so he took it off the shelf

and took the smallest amount, assuming that it would be too small to be deadly poisonous, or to have any effect, and he would work as well up to see what it's effect might be. And so the smallest conceivable, those produced the first LSD documentary trip in our area. Well, is it still the case when I was studying

pharmacology to the degree that I studied it, that the claim was made that LSD is the most potent pharmacological substance ever discovered, that 100 million molecules or some tiny trivial amount is sufficient to induce a mystical state. It's unbelievably potent. And now maybe there have been pharmacological agents discussing this. Yes, I know.

I'm going to unwear that maybe some of you have things, but yeah, that's what I understand to. It's extraordinary. Here's a question, Brian, came up with as well. If the ancient Greeks used drugs to find God, so what, why should anybody care about this today? What are you really looking for in this research? Well, I guess that's a reasonable set of questions. What about Jung?

What about Jung? Do you think that he experimented with hallucinogens? Who? Carl Jung, because he knew things. He knows things that you just can't believe anybody could know. We know he spends a year in Toss. I have a house in Toss. And that year is not documented,

but he was experimenting with the mind-altering substances. Silicide bin? Probably. Was that before or after the red book, do you know? I think the red book came out of that. How sure are you that that happened? Well, I can't be sure. Yeah, I know, I know. Because I wasn't there.

And I wanted to try to find if there are any people who knew him at the time. But he had a strange family background. There were lots of visionaries in his family. So he might have been one of those spontaneously visionary types. Like, what about William Blake? I, that's one of the things that're very interested in tracking down the use of anti-agents amongst people, reputable, great monuments of our cultural tradition. Did they have access to altered consciousness? And I'm quite sure that Blake did.

Milton? I'm quite sure that like did Milton Well, each one of these is a whole study. I know I might. Yes. Yes. I don't know I can't come up with a passage in Milton But it certainly it would be a fertile thing to go to do it's It's it's one of the things on the agenda for Brian me and my other associates things on the agenda for Brian, me and my other associates. Brian, you said when we were talking that you hadn't tried anything that was psychedelic despite your intense interest. And so I'm going to be nosy and rude and ask you what's stopped you? Hmm.

Maybe I've been influenced by Carl's story too much. Uh, it's, um, you must be dying of curiosity. I've been influenced by Carl's story too much. It's... You must be dying of curiosity. I've actually said that it's so curious. His testimony is all the more valuable because he hasn't done it. So people cannot say that he's ruined his mind and drugs. Right. So that the paper does do it, he should keep it secret.

Well, that's part of... I, he should keep it secret. Well, that's part of, I mean, you know, I would take a lie detector today, I still have not done it. I'm dying of curiosity. I wanted to approach this book in as objective a matter as possible. I do think that's important, but it's not off the table for the future. What I've said in the past is,

and I mentioned this earlier, Jordan, I don't think that psychedelics are mutually exclusive of organized faith or traditional faith. And Carl and I were both raised Catholic as a matter of fact. And there's a version, there's a way of doing this that is both, I think, honest and respectful of the ancient mysteries, the pagan mysteries, and paleo Christianity. I keep coming back to those first few centuries after Jesus as this ancient cultural

internet. If we can't integrate Christianity, let's say with its precursors, how the hell are we going to integrate Christianity with the rest of the world? And this might be a way. As odd as that sounds, or mysticism writ large, and you see this all over the Catholic religious orders from the Franciscans to the Jesuits and Carthusions, I mean, there's a periphery to Christianity where mysticism lives in briefs. The same mysticism I would argue as the ancient mysteries psychedelic or otherwise. And so if there was a vehicle, a container for this, it would be in that periphery. The Meister Eckhart periphery, you know, where if you could not yourself for an instant, you would possess all.

Well, the dogma, generally speaking, has to be the container for the mystical experience, too. You know, I mean, people who have a spiritual bent, who are on the openness and personality-wise, let's say, of the religious continuum, they tend to be antithetical to dogma, but dogma contains the tradition that constrains, and I suppose in some sense, delimits the insanity of the psychedelic mystical experience. Those two things have to be brought together. And I think it has a way of interpreting the experience, too. I've asked Carl in the past, what should I be doing to prepare for my first psychedelic trip? And he's told me you've done it.

It's in this study of classics, as we were talking about before. I'm not sure if that's true or not, but when it comes to psychedelics. It gives you a framework. It's a framework for disentangling and doing the... Well, there's an ethical idea too, you know, I mean, before the ancient Hebrews encountered the God of the Ark of the Covenant, they purified themselves ethically. That's something to be cognizant of.

You know, if the layers of reality are peeled back and the distinction between good and evil is drawn for you, you want to be sure you're as far away from the malevolence in your own spirit as you can possibly be. And that's no joke. I mean, that's part of the reason that the sat is so important because these experiences can become hellish and no time flat. And I suspect that's likely more to be the case

to the degree to which there's a certain amount of hellishness in your psyche. So that's a warning of sorts. I have another question for you, Dr. Rock. I will ask Brian this. And if the Dionysian, first of all, how do you view the relationship between, this is a terribly complicated question,

Dionysian Christ. And why was it necessary, so to speak, for Dionysius to transform into Christ? speak for Dionysius to transform into Christ. I mean, just make simple observation that Christ is a Hellenized Jewish tradition. Christ is a Greek Theody. The Christian story is a Greek myth. So it's the consequence of Judaism and the Hungry coming together?

This does not mean to say that it is an authentic religion. I understand. Let me ask you a question. I studied to the degree that I'm capable. The emergence of the God Marduk and misobtami and culture, and one of the things that I stumbled across was the fact that Marduk was, for example, known by at least 50 different names, and they were all attributes, and I thought, well, each of those names was likely, at some point in history, the signifier of a tribal deity, and the tribal deity. So imagine this, imagine

that we abstract up what we admire into something resembling the deity that guides our tribe. And we attribute to that a personality. And we try to enter into a relationship with it because it's the personality that represents the ideal, just like the personality that animates you when your creative represents the creative spirit that permeates mankind. Each tribe has its own idealized representation. But when tribes come together, those ideals fight. That's the battle between gods in heaven

that Iliatti writes about so prolifically. So you imagine that as tribes come together, their gods fight in psychological space and arrange themselves into something resembling a hierarchy and a higher-god emerges as a consequence of the conflict, something that's more sophisticated. And so as we aggregate as human beings, as we aggregate across tribes, we develop a more sophisticated and universal conception of the highest ideal. So you have Greece and and Judaism combined and out of that emerges the figure of crisis, transformation of Dinesias. And as you said, it's not something that it doesn't invalidate the the revelation. You'd expect some revelation to occur as the consequence of the

of the interaction between two cultures that had been separated because they had their own profound developmental history. Of course, it would be cataclysmic. Something has to come out of that. And what I don't understand is the role that the hallucinogens played in that. Of course, there's many things I don't understand. But that's certainly one of them. Yeah. There's many things I don't understand. I've certainly wanted them. Yeah, I mean, the fact that religions fight with each other,

the tribes had their own contingent of deities and their fight with each other. And that's the whole tragedy of this. Because once you define it, you try to own it. And then you have people with their set of belongings and opposing people with another set of belongings. Whereas the basic nature of this experience is that that's all the material. There's only one reality. It can't be defined that way. I mean, you don't have to see, you don't have to explain these other entities that are in this room, these rooms with us, as animals or as animate human hybrids or as humans and so forth. Equally in this ancient mystery tradition, what could be seen would be the perfect relationships of forms and so forth.

He saw it and he saw it while he was in a cave. And the way he did that this is that from the cave, as in the Elisynian Chamber of Indication, he transcended in the spirit out of the cave to the edges of the universe and saw those things. And of course, that's impossible. He couldn't have done that. But that's what he did.

Well, he was spectacular, I said. He was integral. Yeah, I know, but anyway, but I mean, so we don't have to define them as as this God is that that God and so forth We already have a working out a really great system of definitions which we call science Right, I mean even Carl and even scholars who don't support the psychedelic hypothesis necessarily, and I'm thinking of maybe Peter Kingsley, who's also a great inspiration. Well, nonetheless,

talk about the wisdom in the dark places of wisdom, or his book Reality. He gets into Kingsley goes into great detail about these cave techniques and these incubatory techniques practiced by Pythagoras and his basement that he built for these techniques. In Italy, entering into these states of trance, these cataleptics states of trance, you know, beyond time, beyond space, this kind of apparently near-death state. You know, this was practiced by the likes of Pythagoras, parmenides, and pedicolies. These pre-secretics, with or or without drugs would enter into these states to commune with the goddess and bring back the things that we would call at least part of Western

civilization. So, I mean, these states of non-arachnality, I think this is relatively accepted by classes as Carl. This goes back to ER- Duds, the Greeks and the irrational a couple generations ago. So I think psychedelics are just one twist on this. Gilgamesh goes down to the bottom of the ocean like Pinocchio does and he brings back the herb of immortality but it's stolen, I believe, by a snake on the way back. That's the case. That's the story. There's that a shamanic story as well. And so we go out to the edge of the world together wisdom, but on the way back we lose it,

and we can't bring it back, or we can only bring back fragments of it. We're not capable of bringing back at all. Once you wake up, it's hard to remember the dream. That's a good place to stop. But we could add one thing. Yes, definitely. A very important technique is to enter the dream world and when you dream and don't decide

you want to wake up but carry consciousness into the dream. In which case you've entered this world, you're in the spirit world, you're in control of everything. Have you been able to lose a dream? Yes. Are you an avid practitioner? I used to practice it more than I do now because I came to realize that what I was trying to do was die. It does sense in hurry, in the process. I mean, once you do that, once you dissociate your spirit from your body, you might decide

you don't want to go back in again, and that's what happens when you do that, when you bring consciousness into your unconscious reality, is extreme or a gazmic pleasant feeling. Thank you very much, Brian. Thank you, Jordan. Much appreciated. Thank you, Jordan. Much appreciated. Thank you. Dr. Dr.

Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr.

Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr.

Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr.

Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Thank you, Jordy. you