And yet I talked to an atheist who has one experience with psilocybin and is immediately bathed in God's love. You take a board corporate finance attorney, you add in lots of childhood hours watching Indiana Jones, lots of law school hours reading Dan Brown, you put it all together and out pops The Immortality Key. Frankly, if you ask the world's leading archaeobotanists and archaeochemists, where's the spiked beer and where's the spiked wine, which I've been doing since about 2007, 2008, the resounding answer you'll get back from everybody is a resounding no. So we not only didn't have the engineering know-how-- we used to think-- we didn't have even settled life to construct something like this. I mean, so Walter Burkert was part of the reason that kept me going on. And so how far should this investigation go? So I point to that evidence as illustrative of the possibility that the Christians could, in fact, have gotten their hands on an actual wine. A rebirth into what? And Brian, once again, thank you so much. I also sense another narrative in your book, and one you've flagged for us, maybe about 10 minutes ago, when you said that the book is a proof of concept. [2] I want to thank you for putting up with me and my questions. So don't feel like you have to go into great depth at this point. They were relevant to me in going down this rabbit hole. And I want to ask you about specifically the Eleusinian mysteries, centered around the goddesses Demeter and Persephone. BRIAN MURARESKU: I'm bringing more illumination. So I really follow the scholarship of Enriqueta Pons, who is the archaeologist on site there, at this Greek sanctuary that we're talking about in Catalonia, Mas Castellar des Pontos. But please do know that we will forward all these questions to Brian so he will know the sorts of questions his work prompts. So we're going down parallel paths here, and I feel we're caught between FDA-approved therapeutics and RFRA-protected sacraments, RFRA, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, or what becomes of these kinds of substances in any kind of legal format-- which they're not legal at the moment, some would argue. "@BrianMuraresku with @DocMarkPlotkin The Eleusinian Mysteries, Discovering the Divine, The Immortality Key, The Pagan Continuity Hypothesis, Lessons from Scholar Karen Armstrong, and Much More" Please enjoy! So first of all, please tell us how it is you came to pursue this research to write this book, and highlight briefly what you think are its principal conclusions and their significance for our present and future. So, I mean, my biggest question behind all of this is, as a good Catholic boy, is the Eucharist. 36:57 Drug-spiked wine . Brought to you by He dared to ask this very question before the hypothesis that this Eleusinian sacrament was indeed a psychedelic, and am I right that it was Ruck's hypothesis that set you down this path all those many years ago at Brown? So there's lots of interesting details here that filter through. We still have almost 700 with us. In the afterword, you champion the fact that we stand on the cusp of a new era of psychedelics precisely because they can be synthesized and administered safely in pill form, back to The Economist article "The God Pill". It is not psychedelics. In May of last year, researchers published what they believe is the first archaeochemical data for the use of psychoactive drugs in some form of early Judaism. And that's where oversight comes in handy. It was one of the early write-ups of the psilocybin studies coming out of Johns Hopkins. In this hypothesis, both widely accepted and widely criticized,11 'American' was synonymous with 'North American'. And she talks about the visions that transformed the way she thinks about herself. I wonder if you're familiar with Wouter Hanegraaff at the University of Amsterdam. Because what tends to happen in those experiences is a death and rebirth. And I think what the pharmaceutical industry can do is help to distribute this medicine. I mean, this really goes to my deep skepticism. So here's a question for you. Up until that point I really had very little knowledge of psychedelics, personal or literary or otherwise. And what we know about the wine of the time is that it was prized amongst other things not for its alcoholic content, but for its ability to induce madness. I'm going to stop asking my questions, although I have a million more, as you well know, and instead try to ventriloquist the questions that are coming through at quite a clip through the Q&A. But it was not far from a well-known colony in [INAUDIBLE] that was founded by Phocians. And if there's historical precedent for it, all the more so. Research inside the Church of Saint Faustina and Liberata Fig 1. And keep in mind that we'll drop down into any one of these points more deeply. Despite its popular appeal as a New York Times Bestseller, TIK fails to make a compelling case for its grand theory of the "pagan continuity hypothesis with a psychedelic twist" due to. There's a moment in the book where you are excited about some hard evidence. In this way, the two traditions coexisted in a syncretic form for some time before . But I don't hold-- I don't hang my hat on that claim. There have been breakthroughs, too, which no doubt kept Brian going despite some skepticism from the academy, to say the least. Wise not least because it is summer there, as he reminds me every time we have a Zoom meeting, which has been quite often in these past several months. He's joining us from Uruguay, where he has wisely chosen to spend his pandemic isolation. No, I think you-- this is why we're friends, Charlie. Maybe part of me is skeptical, right? To become truly immortal, Campbell talks about entering into a sense of eternity, which is the infinite present here and now. It still leaves an even bigger if, Dr. Stang, is which one is psychedelic? So it's hard for me to write this and talk about this without acknowledging the Jesuits who put me here. Which is really weird, because that's how the same Dina Bazer, the same atheist in the psilocybin trials, described her insight. And does it line up with the promise from John's gospel that anyone who drinks this becomes instantly immortal? And all along, I invite you all to pose questions to Brian in the Q&A function. But this clearly involved some kind of technical know-how and the ability to concoct these things that, in order to keep them safe and efficacious, would not have been very widespread, I don't think. I wish the church fathers were better botanists and would rail against the specific pharmacopeia. I was satisfied with I give Brian Muraresku an "A" for enthusiasm, but I gave his book 2 stars. Now, I've had experiences outside the Eucharist that resonate with me. IMDb is the world's most popular and authoritative source for movie, TV and celebrity content. The actual key that I found time and again in looking at this literature and the data is what seems to be happening here is the cultivation of a near-death experience. Well, let's get into it then. And the reason I find that a worthy avenue of pursuit is because when you take a step back and look at the Greek of the Gospels, especially the Greek of John, which is super weird, what I see based on Dennis MacDonald's scholarship that you mentioned-- and others-- when you do the exegesis of John's gospel, there's just lots of vocabulary and lots of imagery that doesn't appear elsewhere. So I see-- you're moving back and forth between these two. Like the wedding at Cana, which my synopsis of that event is a drunkard getting a bunch of drunk people even more drunk. The same Rome that circumstantially shows up, and south of Rome, where Constantine would build his basilicas in Naples and Capua later on. He draws on the theory of "pagan continuity," which holds that early Christianity adopted . From about 1500 BC to the fourth century AD, it calls to the best and brightest of not just Athens but also Rome. Brian launched the instant bestseller on the Joe Rogan Experience, and has now appeared on CNN, NPR, Sirius XM, Goop-- I don't even know what that is-- and The Weekly Dish with Andrew Sullivan. OK, Brian, I invite you to join us now. So the event happens, when all the wines run out, here comes Jesus, who's referred to in the Gospels as an [SPEAKING GREEK] in Greek, a drunkard. And so part of what it means to be a priest or a minister or a rabbi is to sit with the dying and the dead. And that the proof of concept idea is that we need to-- we, meaning historians of the ancient world, need to bring all the kinds of resources to bear on this to get better evidence and an interpretive frame for making sense of it. CHARLES STANG: Yeah. What was being thrown into it? But it was just a process of putting these pieces together that I eventually found this data from the site Mas Castellar des Pontos in Spain. And maybe therein we do since the intimation of immortality. Jerry Brown wrote a good review that should be read to put the book in its proper place. I mean, lots of great questions worthy of further investigation. If beer was there that long ago, what kind of beer was it? These-- that-- Christians are spread out throughout the eastern Mediterranean, and there are many, many pockets of people practicing what we might call, let's just call it Christian mysticism of some kind. Now, it's just an early indication and there's more testing to be done. Not because it's not there, because it hasn't been tested. The most influential religious historian of the twentieth century, Huston Smith, once referred to it as the "best-kept secret" in history. I might forward the proposition that I don't think the early church fathers were the best botanists. Now, that date is obviously very suggestive because that's precisely the time the Christians were establishing a beachhead in Rome. So to find dog sacrifice inside this Greek sanctuary alludes to this proto-witch, Hecate, the mother of Circe, who is mentioned in the same hymn to Demeter from the 8th, 7th century BC, as kind of the third of the goddesses to whom these mysteries were dedicated. . This event is entitled, Psychedelics, The Ancient Religion With No Name? And it was their claim that when the hymn to Demeter, one of these ancient records that records, in some form, the proto-recipe for this kykeon potion, which I call like a primitive beer, in the hymn to Demeter, they talk about ingredients like barley, water, and mint. And shouldn't we all be asking that question? I just sense a great deal of structure and thoughtfulness going into this experience. I took this to Greg [? I don't think we have found it. So imagine how many artifacts are just sitting in museums right now, waiting to be tested. And there were gaps as well. If the Dionysian one is psychedelic, does it really make its way into some kind of psychedelic Christianity? No one lived there. We know from the literature hundreds of years beforehand that in Elis, for example, in the Western Peloponnese, on the same Epiphany-type timeline, January 5, January 6, the priests would walk into the temple of Dionysus, leave three basins of water, the next morning they're miraculously transformed into wine. He's talking about kind of psychedelic wine. If your history is even remotely correct, that would have ushered in a very different church, if Valentinus's own student Marcus and the Marcosians were involved in psychedelic rituals, then that was an early road not taken, let's say. There's evidence of the mysteries of Dionysus before, during, and after the life of Jesus, it's worth pointing out. So. And I write, at the very end of the book, I hope that they'd be proud of this investigation. I'm currently reading The Immortality Key by Brian Muraresku and find this 2nd/3rd/4th century AD time period very interesting, particularly with regards to the adoptions of pagan rituals and practices by early Christianity. And this is at a time when we're still hunting and gathering. Even a little bit before Gobekli Tepe, there was another site unearthed relatively recently in Israel, at the Rakefet cave. But clearly, when you're thinking about ancient Egypt or elsewhere, there's definitely a funerary tradition.