Kind: captions
Language: en
the following is a conversation with
brian muirescu author of the immortality
key the secret history of the religion
with no name a book that reconstructs
the forgotten history of psychedelics in
the development of western civilization
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this is the lex friedman podcast and
here's my conversation
with brian murescu
who or what do you think
god is
how is our conception maybe put another
way of god changed throughout history
we're starting with an easy one lex yep
[Laughter]
so what is god well god
is a thought
god is an idea
but it's its reference is to that which
is beyond thinking beyond our ability to
even conceive
um beyond the categories of being and
non-being so how do we talk about that
to talk about it is almost to get it
wrong
right so uh joe campbell famously said
that you know any god that is not
transparent to transcendence is like an
idolatry because it's just a mental
construct
and it can't possibly speak to the
incomprehensible so we use poetic
language we say
the being of beings the um
the infinite
life energy of the universe the the
mystery of transcendence boundless life
unqualified is-ness but it doesn't quite
get to the point i think that if there's
any great insight from mysticism it's
that you and i participate with god
in a very real way lex friedman here in
austin texas that in the here and now to
touch that eternal principle another way
to refer to god to touch that eternal
principle within ourselves
is to participate with with divinity in
some way um so not an external force but
that divine sense within so there's some
aspect in which god is a part of us so
one it's the thing we can't describe
this represents all of the mystery
around us
it's outside our
ability to comprehend and at the same
time it's somehow the thing that's
inside of us
also the ultimate paradox mcfield of
magdeburg 13th century german mystic
maybe the first german mystic um
says that the the day of her spiritual
awakening was the day that she saw and
knew that she saw god in all things and
all things in god and so we can say this
by the way without apology or
lightweight theology or
vapit speculation or even heresy you
know we can we can talk about this
including within the abrahamic faiths
the mystical core of these faiths all
talk about the encounter of divinity
within that's what i explore in the
immortality key that this notion of
techniques
archaic techniques in some cases of
ecstasy that allow that experience of
the eternal principle to actually rise
up in our consciousness
when we're still here as flesh and blood
beings
there's some sense in which our
conception of god though
is conjured up by our own mind
and so
aren't we
creating god
like aren't we the gods
that are creating the idea of god
like if if we are
like when we talk about
god
aren't we playing with ideas that are
created by our
our mind and thereby
we are the creator not god
this is a very kind of
cyclical question but in some sense i
mean
that uh
if god is the thing that represents
the mystery all around us
contrast that with our conception of god
the way we talk about him is more a
creation of our minds it's not the
mystery it's our
uh struggle to comprehend the mystery
and therefore we're creating the god in
terms of the god that we we're talking
about in this conversation or in general
if that makes any sense it makes no
sense whatsoever
but this is this is uh this is the
eternal mystery um
this is why it's so difficult to talk
about and yet it could be the very
center of our beings
you know the upanishads
speak about us as the creators about us
as gods it's a very different creation
myth but the god of the upanishads
in this great verse talks about
pouring themselves
pouring themselves into creation indeed
i have become this creation says god and
there's a great line verily he or she
who knows this becomes in this creation
a creator
so
yeah i mean just our ability to engage
in mentation our ability to to think
about this stuff is partly our divine
nature this is what the humanists were
talking about and in the renaissance by
the way um and that it's not so much
learning putting dots together having
arguments with each other over learned
books it's it's a process of unlearning
is what some of the mystical traditions
talk about
unlearning all these thoughts emotions
traumas and experiences that have gone
into the false construction of our false
self that behind all these layers like
peeling back the onion
is a part of us
that once you can identify that
um begins to look a little bit different
in other words it's one thing to
foster a relationship with god it's a
very different thing to identify as god
and and i mean that quite literally
without being heretical you can you can
find this in the mystery traditions
can you expand on this you mean a human
being can
can embody god
that is um textbook incarnational
theology that you can find in any any
christian mystic um but you can find it
in the mystical tradition of islam and
and judaism as well so rumi for example
the great uh the great sufi mystic talks
about um if you could
get rid of yourself just get rid of
yourself just once the secret of secrets
would open to you that the face of the
unknown would appear on the perception
of your consciousness
rabbi lawrence kushner a modern-day
contemporary mystic
talks about uh because this stuff does
continue there's a continuity the poetry
here is incredible so well listen listen
to rabbi kushner he says that the
emptying of selfhood
allows the soul to attach to true
reality and in kabulism the true reality
is what's called the divine nothingness
i yin and so i like the adage that um
and mystics both essentially believe in
nothing
except that the mystics spell it with a
capital n
the divine nothing yeah and then i'll
give you meister eckhart
another medieval christian mystic he
says that
if you could not yourself right the same
concept if you could not yourself for
just an instant indeed i say less than
an instant you would possess all so
again you're seeing the same thing in
sufism
kabbalism christian mysticism the way to
identify with the divine is to peel back
these layers and attempt to discover
pure awareness
if we look at the universe from a
physics perspective or you know i'm a
computer science person so if the
universe is a
is a computer
there's some sense that
god
the creator of the universe or just the
computer itself
doesn't know what the heck is going to
happen
it just kind of creates some basic rules
and runs the thing
so there is some element in which
you can conceive of humans or conscious
beings or intelligent beings
as uh
as a tool
that the creator uses to understand
itself himself
do you uh do you think that's
a perspective that uh we could or is
useful to take on god that
is basically
the universe created humans to
understand itself
he doesn't actually know the full thing
he needs the human brains to figure out
the puzzle so that's in contrasting to
the unlearning to getting out of the way
that we've talked about it's more like
no we need the humans to figure out this
puzzle well we have no answers to this
which is why philosophers still have
jobs if they have jobs at all but i mean
they're so the physicists take a look at
this um have you seen the article that
came out i think it was this month in
the journal of cosmology and
astroparticle physics um uh robert lanza
the biocentrism theory the idea that the
universe comes into being through our
observation right the whole the god
equation so not just in quantum
mechanics but in general relativity the
idea that that we make the universe
moment by moment which is kind of
mind-blowing gets into ideas of
simulation
okay so that's how the physicists at
least some of them might look at it you
could also look back to the medieval
christian mystics
meister eckhart once again says that the
i with which i see god is the same eye
that sees me right so one sight
one knowledge
one love um
another mind-blowing concept but this is
this is why the arts and poetry and
music are so important because although
i love astroparticle physics
it's another to kind of hear this
the same message um across time
yeah the simulation thing
i was actually looking this morning at
video games just the statistics on video
games and i saw that the two top video
games in terms of hours played
is fortnite and world of warcraft and i
saw that it's 140 billion hours
billion hours have been played at those
games
that's a lot of video games
yeah but that that's very sophisticated
worlds being created especially in the
world of warcraft it's a massive online
role-playing game so you have these
characters that are together sort of
creating a world but they in themselves
they're also developing they have all
these items and they're growing like
they're little humans like there's
complicated societies that are formed
they have goals they're striving and so
on
and it's we're creating a universe
within our universe and for now it's a
kind of um
it's a basic sort of constrained version
of our more richer earth like
civilization but it's conceivable that
you know that
we are this thing on earth is a kind of
video game that somebody else is playing
it's like you could see sort of video
games upon video games being created
that uh and this is something i think a
lot about not from a philosophical
perspective but practically how fun does
this video game have to be
for us to let go of the
silly pursuits in this meet space that
we live in and fully
just stay in wow stay in world of
warcraft stay in the video game for full
time so i think about that from an
engineering perspective like is there
going to be a time when this video game
is actual real life for us and then the
creatures inside the video game
they'll be just borrowing our
consciousness
for sort of to ground themselves will
refer to us as the gods
right like won't we become the gods
this conversation is not going how i
expected but i think about this a lot
from you know because i love video games
and i wonder
more and more of us especially in covet
times of living in the digital world you
could think about twitter and all those
kinds of things you could think about
clubhouse people using just voices to
communicate with little icons sort of in
the digital space you can see more and
more will be moving in the digital space
and let go of this physical space
and then the the remnants
of the the ancients that created the
video games that nobody
centuries from now will even remember
those will be the gods and then there'll
be gods upon gods being created
this is the kind of stuff i think about
but is that any at all useful to you
to this thought experiment of a
simulation basically the fabric of our
reality how did it come to be what is
running this thing is that useful or is
it ultimately
the project of understanding god
of understanding myth
is the project that centers on the human
on the human mind for you
we seem to be at the center of this
divine dance which which sounds awfully
anthropocentric
but
the ancients thought about this too i
mean the concept and sanskrit of lila
that the point behind the existence is
this play right it's ultimately playful
this divine dance
it gets awfully complicated in the
gnostic and neoplatonic schools these
chains of being from godhead down to us
right
some invisible right
and we're going to get into terence
mckenna territory later on but we can
start now by talking about discarnate
entities and archons and aliens and
archetypes i mean there is a a world
where terrence mckenna does meet plato
and gnosticism um quite kindly and that
that's in the um this invisible college
right the um
the invisible world uh with which we
seem to have some kind of symbiosis
um that has a higher intent maybe even a
purpose or a plan in mind for us so i
mean these ideas come across when you've
had a heroic dose of mushrooms um they
also pop up in the ancient philosophical
literature this idea of archons who you
know
the puppet masters controlling us flesh
and blood beings
it's all uh it's all a cosmic dance and
there are no answers to this first who
are the archons the second what is this
world where transformative means
play-doh do you mean in the space of
ideas
or are we talking about some kind of
world that connects all of consciousness
throughout human history i think through
different techniques it is you know i
think a lot about i think gordon wassen
is the meeting point of the two so so
gordon watson who i do talk about in the
book uh was this um jp morgan banker
turned ethnomycologist and he's largely
credited with the rediscovery
of psilocybin containing mushrooms
which kind of gave rise to the pop
psychedelic revolution of the 1960s
he visited maria sabina down in mexico
in his wake when bob dylan led zeppelin
the stones and everybody else
and the way he describes his psilocybin
experience
is a bit strange because he thinks of
plato right
and he says that you know whereas our
ordinary reality is kind of this
imperfect view of things
gordon watson felt that on mushrooms he
was spying the archetypes and he talks
about plato and he writes about the
archetypes in this famous article that's
released in 1957 in life magazine and so
a well-read
individual from the mid-20th century has
his
premier psychedelic experience and
outcomes plato because what he was
witnessing was so sharp so brilliant so
detailed
in some sense more real than real this
noetic sense that william james talks
about that when you confront something
more real than real these discarnate
entities these images
this uh these visionary motifs you're
tempted
to believe that you've tapped into the
truest nature and the underlying
structure of the cosmos and that's
difficult to escape from whether you're
plato or terence mckenna or gordon
watson caught in between
so we talk about this
being in touch with something that is
more real than real
and let's just go straight there to
mckenna before we return to the bigger
picture so he's talked about the uh what
is it self-healing machina self
self-transforming self-transforming
machine i was during his uh
dmt
travels
and uh i just talked to rick doblin who
also had different travels through this
hyperspace
but they're all seem to be traveling on
the same spaceships just to different
locations and there is a sense in which
they seem to be traveling
through whatever i don't know if it's
through space time or something else to
meet
something that is more real than real uh
what can you say about this dmt
experience about terence mckenna about
the poetry he used but maybe more
specifically about this place that they
seem to all travel to
so the big question is is it real is it
really more real than real the ancient
philosophers were asking the same
question and their means of attempting
to answer that was by dying
so if you ask plato the definition of
philosophy he will say that
to practice it in the right way
is to practice dying and being dead and
many people describe the psychedelic
experience in sort of near-death
experience terms
um and the encountering of all this
visual imagery tends to be something
that is often described as more real
than real so how does terence talk about
this so i was just listening to the
trial logs which folks should look up um
somewhere between 1989 and 1990 terence
sits down
with his friends ralph abraham and
rupert sheldrake at esalen and they're
they're trying to figure out the meaning
of these discarnate entities and these
non-human intelligences
and terence develops a taxonomy for how
to analyze this and he says that number
one
they're either
um semi-physical
but kind of elusive so think of the
bigfoot or the yeti or things like this
um beings that exist somewhere between
mythology and zoology
which is isn't really appropriate here
so so uh option number two
he says is the mental i'm sorry
you're dropping so many good lines it's
so good okay i apologize
[Laughter]
somewhere between nostalgia and zouave
this is all terence mckenna okay all
right i take no credit for this uh so
but you're combining you're like uh jimi
hendrix only used the blues scale but
he's still uh he still created something
new in the music you played anyway go
ahead well we're going into mixolydian
right now okay so um
uh so uh option number two and this is
this what this is what uh terence calls
sort of the mentalist reductionist
approach
um and this is this is pure mechanical
poetry he says that these beings could
be autonomous fragments of psychic
energy that have temporarily escaped the
controlling power of the ego
um so in jungian senses these would just
be pure projections um the projections
of schizophrenics in some cases so
they're essentially unreal and the third
option the most tantalizing
is that they're both non-physical but
autonomous in other words they actually
exist
in some kind of real place
in some kind of real space and that we
can have congress with them there is
communication he talks about um the
whisperings of the demon artificers and
that it's just possible
that our meetings with these beings have
coaxed the human species
into self-expression in a very real way
that at different times in history our
relationships with these
semi-autonomous beings may actually
guide the species now this is
high speculation and uh terence and
ralph and rupert wind up talking about
the early modern period and the
scientific enlightenment and that even
someone like descartes reports a dream
in which he came face to face with an
angel who said that the conquest of
nature
is to be achieved
uh through measure and number so so even
the hard-minded materialist like like
descartes is confronting these
discarnate entities john d in the 16th
century the high magician of the
elizabethan court
he reports decades worth of what we
would say is extraterrestrial
communication or interdimensional
communication
um and you can find instances of this
throughout history including among the
pre-socratics um and peter kingsley
writes quite a bit about this but i'll
save that until your next question well
first of all we don't seem to understand
from where intelligence came from we
don't understand
from where life came from on earth
but that we can kind of into it because
that's the space of chemistry and
biology you have good theories about the
origins of life on earth but the origins
of intelligent life
that is is a giant mystery and
there's some sense in which
i mean i don't know if you know the
movie 2001 space odyssey
but
it does seem that there is like
important
throughout human history throughout life
on earth there's important phase shifts
of
it feels like something happened
where there's big leaps
it could be something coincidental like
fire and learning how to cook meat and
all those kinds of things
but it feels like there could be other
things and i think that's at the core of
your work is exploring what those things
could be
is there is it
possible talked about joe rogan offline
is it
it's entirely possible is it possible
that psychedelics have in fact
contributed
of being an important uh source of those
phase shifts throughout human history of
the intel basically steering the
intellectual development and growth of
human civilization
it's a hypothesis worth investigating
how about that beautiful and
and maybe not psychedelics in and of
themselves but i think our whole
conversation is kind of wrapped up in
these
non-ordinary states of awareness we
start by talking about god which is
something
unordinary and expansive and i think
that as you
as you trace the intervention of
divinity if that's the case
throughout human history you have to
bump up against the irrational um
mercedes the great scholar
of religions and fellow romanian said
that the history of religions
essentially constitutes the point of
intersection between metaphysics and
biology
right so that we are biological beings
who do interact with our planet with the
with the natural kingdom
and you would think that as you know
early archaic ecologists we would have
figured out what plants work which fungi
don't
and developed maybe language around that
and so this is this is another one of
mckenna's
speculative but very interesting
hypotheses the stoned ape theory
is it is it possible that psychedelics
were involved in one of the several
leaps forward you mentioned the word
leap
jared diamond talks about the great leap
forward 60 000 years ago
the species had been around for a couple
hundred thousand years all of a sudden
the cave painting appears
all of a sudden there's a phase shift
did something like that happen millions
of years ago and i love the way paul
stamets talks about this it would be the
ingestion
of perhaps psilocybin containing fungi
millions and millions of times
over millions and millions of years so
it's not just a one-time event that
cascades but it's this it's the
accumulation of psychedelic experience
that it's really difficult to test that
hypothesis
but i've been talking with a
paleoanthropologist in south africa my
friend lee berger
about ways that we might test for this
and so lee amongst many things is this
national geographic explorer
he's the paleoanthropologist
paleoanthropologist at the university of
waterstrength
he's famous amongst other things for the
discovery of previously undiscovered
hominids like homo naledi
and there's an interesting point
um so naledi
is
this archaic hominid morphologically
archaic but it dates to about 300 000
years ago
which is very strange um what's even
more strange about homo naledi at the
rising star cave system there in south
africa is that lee believes he's
discovered the first bipedal ape
deliberately disposing of its dead
um so there is a recognition of
self-mortality
and the practicing of rituals around
death we're talking about burials and if
you have burials says lee in an archaic
hominid 300 000 years ago maybe you have
language and i mentioned that because
terence mckenna was obsessed with
language in the stone dape theory that
the ingestion of psilocybin in addition
to enhancing visual acuity perhaps
facilitating sexual arousal
leads to proto-language
now isn't it interesting this could be
entirely a coincidence
that the largest sound inventory of any
language is the koi-san
of botswana and namibia
they have something like 164 consonants
and 44 vowels english by comparison has
about 45. so i don't know what to make
of this but what you find in that part
of the world is very
very complex language
language that could be an inheritance
language that could be incredibly
archaic together with this recognition
of self-mortality and when i talk to lee
berger we say when you're looking at
universals like that language around all
human populations the recognition of
self-mortality the contemplation of
death just maybe you have pharmacology
and so maybe we can go out and test for
this
using gas chromatography mass
spectrometry proteomics technology that
doesn't even exist but maybe we can
actually test the stone tape theory to
figure out once and for all if there's
any merit there can you just linger a
little bit on the pharmacology tools
like how how would you how would it be
possible to say something about what was
being ingested so so so long ago that's
what i asked dr berger
so lee
has discovered um in the dental calculus
nice of archaic hominids dental calculus
i like that
evidence of their diet and
you might not believe how old this was
but in in sediba australopithecus sediba
they found evidence of sadiba's diet
going back 2 million years
so through things like phytoliths which
are essentially
fossilized plant tissue they found
evidence that sediba was eating bark and
leaves and grasses and fruits and palm
so no psychedelics to speak of but it
just goes to show that through things
like dental microwave analysis and other
techniques that we're still developing
we can actually figure out what the diet
was at the time i'll fast forward to 50
000 years ago
there was another study out of el cidron
cave in 2012 which found that
neanderthals again preceding our species
50 000 years ago
were ingesting yarrow and chamomile
which had been identified as medicinal
so again not psychedelic or psychoactive
but we kind of have the beginnings of
the technology and this that was nine
years ago to begin figuring out the
ancestral diet of these hominids
presumably there could be a way to
figure out it's not just diet but which
are have psychoactive elements to them
so whether you're chewing it whether
you're smoking it whether i mean i don't
know what licking it i don't know if
there's any kind of ways through the
dental calculus to figure out
which exact substances were being
consumed
is it possible to figure out whether
psychedelic substances are being
consumed by looking at human behavior
like you said organized burials
or cave paintings
no but so that's a little bit of a
stretch to say like where did the sleep
come from but it's not it's not so so so
just last fall as a matter of fact so
that that notion has been out there for
a while the idea that hallucinogens and
the ritual consumption of hallucinogens
were somehow related to the great leap
forward or somehow related to the
initial cape pain and graham hancock
wrote a beautiful book about this called
supernatural which in many ways like
sent me down this rabbit hole back in
2007. and so but even at the time when
he was writing that in the year
subsequent
it was still kind of seen as a kooky
idea
last fall
interestingly enough
the first archaeochemical data for the
ritual consumption
of psychedelics associated with cave art
was finally published it's it's not that
ancient it's only about four or five
hundred years ago but it came from the
pinwheel cave a chumash site in in
california and what they found were
datura quids like these chewed up you
mentioned how did they ingest it these
chewed up quids like these these bunches
of datura which contain these very
powerful tropane alkaloids and what was
believed to be some kind of chumash
initiation site so we can say that there
is initial
you know archaeochemical data for the
consumption of psychedelics and cave art
and so where else might we find this
are there a lot of archaeochemists in
the world
like because this is fascinating it's
through chemistry
through biology through physics whatever
like all the disciplines we perhaps one
day computer science
we um
apply those tools to study not the data
of today but the data of the past
are we talking about dozens here
like how hard is this problem relative
to how many people are taking it on just
as a side a little tangent we're
probably talking
more dozens than hundreds um i
spent many years trying to track down an
archaeochemist who would talk to me
there were a couple um pat mcgovern at
the university of pennsylvania yeah and
then my friend andrew ko at mit which
you might know something about um andrew
really you know on his own time on his
own dime
has been gathering the data
for this organic residue analysis um he
has what's called the open r chem
project which is this online open source
repository for this data but there's
never been a center for this no
university has stood up a dedicated
center a team really which is what you
need
of archaeochemists looking at this stuff
but i mean even despite that there have
been some remarkable discoveries
over the past 10 20 years it's still a
discipline very much in its infancy
maybe it's becoming a toddler but as the
technology gets better and cheaper um i
hope uh you'll see more and more
archaeochemists
joining the fight yeah and andrew is
fascinating his work is fascinating but
uh also i just because of because of
your work i came across an exchange a
few emails with patrick mcgovern
who's basically what would you call him
so he has a center i guess that's
does biomolecular archaeology at upenn
and
he's the author of a bunch of books one
of which is ancient bruise
so he's a scholar of beer and wine
and like ancient alcohol which is
fascinating they influence even just
alcohol but he has like
alcohol with um
hallucinogenic properties as well but
it's fascinating the influ as a russian
it's fascinating to uh
to think about the influence of alcohol
on the development
of human civilization throughout its
history is this is there something you
can comment on
alcohol or in general
patrick's work that was informative to
you inspiring or kind of
added to your conception of of human
history his work was some of the first
hard scientific data that i saw for the
ritual consumption of these intoxicants
um i don't think he's ever found
the hard and fast data for for
psychedelics but what he turned me on to
was this idea
that alcohol or beer and wine
specifically
could have been used as vehicles for the
administration of psychedelics that's
where it all started for me um just just
the notion that ancient beer and ancient
wine is very very different from what we
drink today that typically they were
cocktails they were often fortified and
mixed with different fruits berries
herbs plants maybe even fungi over time
because this was all in the absence of
distilled liquor right there is no hard
alcohol even in russia
before
maybe the 12th century it was in europe
maybe a bit earlier but the the concept
of distillation just didn't exist and so
you know to pack a punch um
you know rather than just drink a kind
of watered-down budweiser these people
were interested in fortifying these
beverages with whatever they could find
in nature and and pat to his credit
found some of the initial data for these
um you could say spiked wines and spiked
beers not with anything overtly
psychedelic but just the fact that in
the 16th century bc at grave circle a in
my senai there's this minoan ritual
cocktail of beer mixed with wine mixed
with mead is very interesting it's even
more interesting that you find that
across the aegean um in gordium at king
midas tomb right the same kind of ritual
cocktail which pat and sam at the
dogfish head brewery uh resurrected as
the midas touch so i mean the notion
that we can go back find this data
resurrect it in some cases 2 800 years
later i found pretty exciting 10 years
ago
yeah bringing back for research
but that's that's fascinating that
people were playing with these ideas and
we'll return to
we'll return to ideas of psychedelic
confused wine which is pretty
fascinating but can we step back and
just kind of look at your work with the
the book immortality key
what is the story that you tell in this
book i knew we'd get there eventually
lex
it's a non-linear path
somehow we were talking about simulation
and the universe is a computer that's
creating video games and wow and uh
fortnite but
we got there and we'll return
always to insane philosophical but uh
your book can mortality what what's the
story that you tell in this book
what do you which part of human history
are you studying
right so that's that's the way to phrase
it so it's you know it's my 12-year
search
for the hard scientific data
for the ritual use of psychedelics and
classical antiquity so we're talking
about amongst the ancient greeks and
romans
and the paleo christians
so the generations that would give birth
to the largest religion the world's ever
known christianity today was two and a
half billion people the big question for
me is you know were psychedelics
actually involved there was a lot
written about this in the 60s john marco
allegro
the book that i follow was published in
1978 before i was born the road to
ellucis
by gordon watson who we talked about
already albert hofmann who famously
discovers lsd or synthesizes it from
ergot and karl ruck
who is still a professor of classics at
boston university the only surviving
member of that renegade trio and now 85
years old so this this all predates us
um but what was lacking in the 60s 70s
80s 90s i think was some of this
technology
and and the hard scientific data now for
years and years i went out to the
archaeobotanists and the archaeochemists
around the world and i asked a very
basic question is there any evidence
for psychedelics and classical antiquity
and the answer would almost invariably
come back no i'm talking to in addition
to pat he put me in touch with hans
peter stika in germany tania valamotti
in greece
florenzano in italy i went all over the
place asking one question and getting
the same answer back time and again and
so the book is essentially my my search
for that data and the eventual
uncovering of two what i think are key
pieces of data one data
one data point
shows the ritual use of a psychedelic
beer
in classical antiquity in iberia with
today's spain and the other shows what
looks like a kind of psychedelic wine
just outside pompeii from the first
century a.d at the right place at the
right time when the earliest christians
were showing up in italy
again these are early steps in the
search for evidence in the space but uh
speaking of early christians
what role do you think
psychedelic infused wine could have
played
in the life of
the
i i won't be clever in the life of jesus
christ
i've been saying recently that and i
hope this doesn't sound
obscurantist but
i think it's impossible
to understand jesus
and the birth of christianity in the
absence of ancient greek
and i'll give you a very specific
example of why i think that's the case
you can read the entire new testament
in ancient greek and not once will you
ever find a reference to alcohol
because there was no word in ancient
greek for alcohol the way the word
sounds alcohol it comes it's semitic it
comes from the arabic
khala means to enliven a refresh it
probably comes from coal kohl sort of
these powdered metallics that were used
in alchemical experiments and cosmetics
so again that's much later in time
when we're using alchemy distillation
etc in the first century ad
the power of wine wasn't necessarily
tied to alcohol right fermented grapes
the way we think about wine today so pat
mcgovern found some of that early
organic data for wine being mixed
with uh
with beer and with mead but if you look
at the literature from the first century
a.d diocerities for example he writes
this this massive treatise at the exact
same time the gospels are being written
and diascorides
in just one of his books talks about 56
detailed recipes
for spiking wine with all kinds of
things like salvia and hellebore and
frankincense and myrrh these spiced
perfumes but also more dangerous things
like henbane and mandrake which he says
in greek can be fatal with just one
cupful and in book 474 of his materia
medica
he talks about black nightshade
producing fantasias
none not unpleasant visions
what today we would say is psychedelic
so just looking at the literature and
the kind of literature that even most
classicists i didn't really learn it in
undergrad i came across diasporities
later um
just a basic look at the literature
supports what mcgovern has been testing
which is the fact that wine was
routinely mixed with different compounds
it's fascinating by the way that
language affects our
conception
of the tools we use to understand the
world so like
like it you can see wine
you can see psychedelics
if they're not
called drugs
you can uh
you can maybe reframe
how you see them in terms of their role
in on us thinking about the world
understanding the world that's really
interesting that language has that power
but what language was used to understand
wine at the time so we're talking about
a greek speaking world right so you know
jesus
uh is born and does his public ministry
in the holy land but think about the
early church think about where the
church takes root you know paul the
greatest evangelist of the time writes
basically half the new testament he's
writing letters in greek to greek
speakers in places like corinth
in greece
or philippi a defunct city just north of
the island of thaus or he's writing to
folks in what today is is turkey uh the
colossians the galatians he writes
letters to the romans um these are greek
speakers in these pockets these hellenic
pockets all around the ancient
mediterranean and for them again
ignore discordies ignore pat mcgovern's
work to them to think about wine was to
think about a mixed a mixed potion and
so the word oinos in ancient greek does
show up in the new testament but there
was another word to describe wine and it
exists for like a thousand years before
during and after the life of jesus the
word used for wine is farmacon which
obviously gives us the word pharmacy it
means drug
so in greek a greek speaker would
actually use the word drug
to refer to wine uh ruth skodal the
classicist talks about this as a as a
ritualistic formula um they understood
wine
as this compound beverage a drug against
grief um a medicinal elixir
that could either harm or heal or just
maybe a sacrament to put you in touch
with wine gods old and new
clearly
religion
and myth but
religion very much so has
sort of uh
much like dreams has like an imagery
component like
you're kind of going outside
the
visual constraints of physical space
where you kind of have
very specific conceptions of what things
look like and you kind of use your
imagination to
stretch beyond the world as we know it
things that are
try to get in touch with things that are
more real than real
what role do these tools
do these
uh farmicons
have in trying to stimulate the imagery
of religion like
do you have a sense that they have a
critical role here or is this just a
bunch of different factors
that are utilized a bunch of different
tools that are utilized to construct
this imagery or is this not even or is
imagery the wrong terminology is it more
like space of ideas that's core to to
religion no i think the wine is
absolutely essential and so if it's
impossible to understand paleo
christianity in the absence of ancient
greek i think it's equally difficult in
the absence of
the sacred pharmacopoeia or wine itself
right just think about wine
at the time um i i think that the
ancient greek audience would have heard
that in a very different way um from us
and so they're referring to it maybe as
a pharmacon but the followers of
dionysus which precedes jesus and in
some cases
the story of jesus is kind of a
recapitulation of the mysteries of
dionysus but when you think about
dionysus
maybe from your high school mythology
you think about him as the god of
theater or the god of wine which is
typically what it is or the god of
ecstasy
you know again dionysus is not the god
of alcohol there's no there's no concept
of of fermented grapes the power of
dionysus and the ability to commune with
dionysus through his blood
and before christianity the blood
of dionysus is equated to his wine the
sacramental drinking of the wine was
interpreted and classicist write about
this including walter berkert
it was interpreted as consuming the god
himself in order to become one with the
god this is where we get the idea of
enthusiasm because the language matters
enthusiasm to be filled with the spirit
of the god so that you became identified
with dionysus and acquired his divine
powers now how does that happen
again he's not the god of alcohol he is
the god of wine but he's really the god
of madness and delirium
and frenzy and his principal followers
are women they're called the mine ads
and the way they get in touch with him
is through the consumption of the
sacramental wine
even at the theater of dionysus
separate from his outdoor churches there
was a wine served there called drima
and this is the wine that gives birth to
hollywood i mean the ancient hollywood
was there at the theater of dionysus
this is where comedy and tragedy and
poetry and music come from
but rather than a hot dog and a beer
what they drink at the theater of
dionysus was this wine called trima
which means pounded or rubbed and
professor ruck talks about maybe it was
the drugs that were rubbed into this
theatrical beverage
to help
uh the play come alive so madness is
seen as a positive thing is it like a
creative journey
it's not it's not uh
it's it's the what is it the unlearning
getting out of the way kind of thing
is is that how it seen or is it more
like um
entertaining
escape
from life that is suffering
okay i gotta i gotta inject a little
modern dostoevsky into the old
despair um maybe it's maybe it's a bit
of that
we we can't say that there wasn't
recreational drinking happening um the
greeks also have the symposium right um
and they also were just getting hammered
in some cases yeah but when it comes to
the rights of dionysus yeah what you see
there is um
the creation
of these states of awareness in which
again you identify with the god to
become the god there's there's theophagy
there's the consumption of divinity in
order to become divinity right back to
how we started the conversation right so
if we stop conceiving of god as
something exterior to us but that the
mystery
of being itself is the mystery of your
being and the mystery of my being that
the way to encounter that is through the
sacramental theology that you drink
the actual blood of this greek god to
become
that god and there was a place for this
in ancient greek society so drinking the
wine and drinking the blood of dionysus
do you think jesus
is
an actual physical person that existed
in history or is he an idea
that
came to to life through the consumption
of wine and those kinds of rituals so
this is where i faced my ex
communication depending how i answer
this
[Laughter]
i mean you're you're playing with fire
and wine
[Laughter]
that's a good combination by the way
yeah
uh so
i i shy away from that controversy in
the book i'm perfectly willing to accept
jesus as a historical personage um you
know we have the multiplicity of sources
although it's a generation after his
death um but we have the eucharist being
described in the four gospels we have it
being described by paul
in first corinthians
but when you read john it does read a
bit differently than the other gospels
and in my book i rely a lot on the
scholarship of dennis mcdonald who
writes a fabulous book called the
dionysian gospel
and this is again why the greek matters
because once you start to analyze the
greek of john's gospel
it seems to be a presentation of jesus
very much in the guise of dionysus the
most obvious example is the wedding at
cana right
that only occurs in john's gospel the
famous transformation of water into wine
now again to any greek speaker of the
first century they would have known
about the greek district of ellis on the
peloponnese
and in ellis around the epiphany every
january the priests of dionysus would
deposit these water basins empty basins
in the temple of dionysus they'd return
the next morning
and find them magically filled with wine
now on the island of andros it's even
more interesting around the same
epiphany date the gods gift day
dies theodosia the wine would emanate
from the temple and run like a river
for a week and you can google the
baccanal of the andreans a wonderful
painting by titian which hangs in the
prado and you'll see a river of wine
behind these people having a great time
this exists for centuries and centuries
before the wedding at cana and before
jesus begins his public ministry with
what these scholars call the signature
miracle of dionysus it would not have
been lost on the greek audience that
that something very specific is being
communicated here what's being
communicated
that you just might find in early
christianity
what you hold strong to in these
mysteries of dionysus that you may have
inherited from your parents your
grandparents your great grandparents for
centuries there was a perfectly good
religion there were perfectly good
mystery cults in the ancient greek and
roman worlds and here comes this new
untested illegal cult
illegal of a dozen or so illiterate day
laborers that go on to convert the
empire in a few hundred years
the answer to that
extraordinary growth is not psychedelics
but i do think it's visionary
experiences and i do think it's this
continuity from the pagan world into
early christianity so what part you
mentioned this idea that's really
interesting though i i think you said
paul stamets
of
i guess millions of people over millions
of years
kind of uh consuming
really practicing a ritual or a habit of
some sort this idea of rituals is kind
of interesting
again you mentioned cult
what's the role of ritual consumption of
some of these substances or just ritual
practice of anything in um the
intellectual growth of
particular groups of people or societies
so again i would say it is the the
centerpiece of ancient life not just the
mysteries of dionysus
uh which we've only talked a bit about
but the mysteries of ellucis were
probably the most famous
and longest lasting of these greek
mystery rites and i mean just to put it
in simple terms the best definition for
a mystery religion um as the name
implies is something secret
all right muo from the greek means to
shut the eyes or or to shut the mouth up
to keep quiet about this stuff um you
know we're always teasing details
from the archaeological and the literary
record and we're kind of just
grabbing at these at these secrets but
ellucis which survives for like 2000
years into the christian period from
about 1500 bc to the 4th century a.d
it's kind of this this centerpiece of
greek life cicero the great roman
statesman calls what was happening at a
lucius
the most exceptional and divine thing
that athens ever produced so not
democracy the arts and sciences or
philosophy but the vision
that was encountered atalusis perhaps
through the ritual consumption of a
potent psychedelic over hundreds and
hundreds of years thousands and
thousands if not millions of initiates
pilgrims who would walk from athens to
ellucis to encounter this vision
it seems to have been
not just an important part of greek life
but the thing that made life livable
such that as these mysteries are about
to be exterminated by the newly
christianized roman empire there's this
passage in the ancient literature that
talks about these you know in the
absence of these mysteries life becomes
unlivable abigail
is there ways you can i mean you write
about the mysteries of ulysses and is
there ways you can convert that into
words
why those are so important
to them
more important than any other invention
to them why is it such a source of
meaning to life
so from what we can reconstruct
they would make that pilgrimage 13 miles
northwest of athens to confront their
mortality remember we were talking about
homo naledi and in south africa this
recognition of self-mortality
the deliberate disposal of the dead um
plato talks about the the real practice
of philosophy being the the death and
dying process so
in in some senses you went to elusive to
die
and to experience a a death before your
death we talked about this with with
terence mckenna as well and this the how
the psychedelic state
seems to share something in common with
the near-death or out-of-body
experiences or these ecstatic
experiences whether through wine or beer
or otherwise you went to ellucis to die
um and it was said that only those who
had witnessed this vision whatever
vision was to be witnessed and endemic
or sanctuary
it essentially vouch safe to uh the
afterlife that only those who went there
became immortal um and cicero says that
um you know at that point you
essentially live
with more joy and die with a better hope
can i ask you a question about this uh
human contention with death this uh
confrontation of death
that seems to be at the core of things i
i don't know how deep to the core
but um
it seems to be a central element of the
human condition what do you think about
ernest becker
and those guys that put
put death at the what is it the warm at
the core
which uh
as the main thing
the the main create like this
confrontation of our own mortality first
of all being understand that we're
mortal and then confronting the terror
of it the the fear of it
as the creator like trying to escape the
fear of death as the creative force
of human society it's like the reason we
do anything is because we're just
running away from our death
scared
uh do you find
some of that to be true first of all as
a
somebody who looks in the mirror looks
at yourself and your own as a human
being two just looking at society today
and three at this whole big s spread of
human history and all the cool stuff
we've created including the mysteries of
elusive
i wonder what life would look like in
the absence of the fear of our mortality
i wonder
how we'd interact with one another
if there was relatively little or no
fear of death i really do when it comes
to becker's work and others um if the
ancients were known for anything it was
running to death
it was the opposite in fact dying before
dying which is the immortality key by
the way it's not psychedelic's point
when i when i refer to this key i'm
referring to this notion that's
preserved in greek
if you die before you die
you won't die when you die
for some reason
the ancients prized
that experience and we talked about the
mystics of of sufism and kabbalism and
christian mysticism
where you have this the same self
nodding this death before death the
divine nothingness right for some reason
the mystic saints visionaries and
ancient philosophers they ran to death
and the one message i wanted to try and
communicate with this book is how they
viewed life
that it can only be fully experienced
fully embodied
in the wake
of a really intense
perhaps terrifying
but utterly transformational encounter
with death
so running to death not running away
from death you talk about aldous huxley
and mind changers
so if we look at the history
where
the ancients were running to death and
maybe using some uh
uh performance enhancing perma