pagan continuity hypothesis

After the first few chapters the author bogs down flogging the Pagan Continuity Hypothesis and exulting over his discovery of small scraps of evidence he found in a decade of research. I mean, in the absence of the actual data, that's my biggest question. But I don't hold-- I don't hang my hat on that claim. But in any case, Ruck had his career, well, savaged, in some sense, by the reaction to his daring to take this hypothesis seriously, this question seriously. 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. So welcome to the fourth event in our yearlong series on psychedelics and the future of religion, co-sponsored by the Esalen Institute, the Riverstyx Foundation, and the Chacruna Institute for Psychedelic Plant Medicines. And I'm not even sure what that piece looks like or how big it is. This is going to be a question that's back to the ancient world. Whether there's a psychedelic tradition-- I mean, there are some suggestive paintings. The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name It's this 22-acre site of free-standing limestone, some rising 20 feet in the air, some weighing 50 tons. And we know from the record that [SPEAKING GREEK] is described as being so crowded with gods that they were easier to find than men. So Brian, I wonder, maybe we should give the floor to you and ask you to speak about, what are the questions you think both ancient historians such as myself should be asking that we're not, and maybe what are the sorts of questions that people who aren't ancient historians but who are drawn to this evidence, to your narrative, and to the present and the future of religion, what sort of questions should they be asking regarding psychedelics? So in my mind, it was the first real hard scientific data to support this hypothesis, which, as you alluded to at the beginning, only raises more questions. So it is already happening. So if we can test Eucharistic vessels, I wouldn't be surprised at all that we find one. And so in my afterword, I present this as a blip on the archaeochemical radar. BRIAN MURARESKU: We can dip from both pies, Dr. Stang. Books about pagan continuity hypothesis? Phil's Picks | Phoenix Books The pagan continuity hypothesis at the heart of this book made sense to me. Eusebius, third into the fourth century, is also talking about them-- it's a great Greek word, [SPEAKING GREEK]. The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Brian C. Muraresku with Dr. Mark Plotkin The Eleusinian Mysteries, Discovering the Divine, The Immortality Key, The Pagan Continuity Hypothesis, Lessons from Scholar Karen Armstrong, and Much More (#646) - The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss 3 Annual "Best of" Apple Podcasts 900+ Million episodes downloaded Show Plants of the Gods: Hallucinogens, Healing, Culture and Conservation podcast, Ep Plants of the Gods: S4E2. 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. And so in some of these psychedelic trials, under the right conditions, I do see genuine religious experiences. And I'll just list them out quickly. 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. What about all these early Christians themselves as essentially Jews? I took this to Greg [? And shouldn't we all be asking that question? And I hear-- I sense that narrative in your book. The fact that the Vatican sits in Rome today is not an accident, I think, is the shortest way to answer that. Now, I've never done them myself, but I have talked to many, many people who've had experience with psychedelics. I mean, so it was Greek. So I was obsessed with this stuff from the moment I picked up an article in The Economist called the God Pill back in 2007. So, you know, I specifically wanted to avoid heavily relying on the 52 books of the [INAUDIBLE] corpus or heavily relying too much on the Gospel of Mary Magdalene and the evidence that's come from Egypt. So there's a whole slew of sites I want to test there. I did go straight to [INAUDIBLE] Papangelli in Eleusis, and I went to the museum. That's how we get to Catalonia. 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. Here's your Western Eleusis. Church of the Saints Faustina and Liberata, view from the outside with the entrance enclosure, at "Sante" place, Capo di Ponte (Italy). 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. He's been featured in Forbes, the Daily Beast, Big Think, and Vice. It's not just Cana. So don't feel like you have to go into great depth at this point. 13,000 years old. I mean, lots of great questions worthy of further investigation. And I think there are lots of reasons to believe that. These sources suggest a much greater degree of continuity with pre-Christian values and practice than the writings of more . First act is your evidence for psychedelics among the so-called pagan religions in the ancient Mediterranean and Near East. They found a tiny chalice this big, dated to the second century BC. Then I see the mysteries of Dionysus as kind of the Burning Man or the Woodstock of the ancient world. 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. So you lean on the good work of Harvard's own Arthur Darby Nock, and more recently, the work of Dennis McDonald at Claremont School of Theology, to suggest that the author of the Gospel of John deliberately paints Jesus and his Eucharist in the colors of Dionysus. And this is what I present to the world. They were relevant to me in going down this rabbit hole. And he found some beer and wine-- that was a bit surprising. Brian C. Muraresku (@BrianMuraresku) / Twitter What does God mean? And the quote you just read from Burkert, it's published by Harvard University Press in 1985 as Greek Religion. So the big question is, what kind of drug was this, if it was a drug? CHARLES STANG: OK. The universality of frontiers, however, made the hypothesis readily extendable to other parts of the globe. The big question is, did any of these recipes, did any of this wine spiking actually make its way into some paleo-Christian ceremony. BRIAN MURARESKU: I look forward to it, Charlie. So perhaps there's even more evidence. Now, let's get started, Brian. It's a big question for me. In this way, the two traditions coexisted in a syncretic form for some time before . CHARLES STANG: We're often in this situation where we're trying to extrapolate from evidence from Egypt, to see is Egypt the norm or is it the exception? That would require an entirely different kind of evidence. 8 "The winds, the sea . But curiously, it's evidence for a eye ointment which is supposed to induce visions and was used as part of a liturgy in the cult of Mithras. These Native American church and the UDV, both some syncretic form of Christianity. But I don't understand how that provides any significant link to paleo-Christian practice. And it seems to me that if any of this is right, that whatever was happening in ancient Greece was a transformative experience for which a lot of thought and preparation went into. Mark and Brian cover the Eleusinian Mysteries, the pagan continuity hypothesis, early Christianity, lessons from famed religious scholar Karen Armstrong, overlooked aspects of influential philosopher William James's career, ancient wine and ancient beer, experiencing the divine within us, the importance of "tikkun olam"repairing and . Brian C. Muraresku with Dr. Mark Plotkin The Eleusinian Mysteries Then there's what were the earliest Christians doing with the Eucharist. I see something that's happening to people. This an absolute masterclass on why you must know your identity and goals before forming a habit, what the best systems are for habit. And to be quite honest, I'd never studied the ancient Greeks in Spain. Now, Mithras is another one of these mystery religions. And even in the New Testament, you'll see wine spiked with myrrh, for example, that's served to Jesus at his crucifixion. Where does Western civilization come from? 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. CHARLES STANG: All right. To some degree, I think you're looking back to southern Italy from the perspective of the supremacy of Rome, which is not the case in the first century. In the Classics world, there's a pagan continuity hypothesis with the very origin of Christianity, and many overt references to Greek plays in the Gospel of John. The Immortality Key has its shortcomings. I write it cognizant of the fact that the Eucharist doesn't work for many, many people. Let's move to early Christian. A profound knowledge of visionary plants, herbs, and fungi passed from one generation to the next, ever since the Stone Age? We have plays like the Bacchi from Euripides, where we can piece together some of this. Did the potion at Eleusis change from generation to generation? Now that doesn't mean, as Brian was saying, that then suggests that that's the norm Eucharist. And her answer was that they'd all been cleaned or treated for conservation purposes. All episodes of The Tim Ferriss Show - Chartable Before I set forth the outline of this thesis, three topics must be discussed in order to establish a basic understanding of the religious terminology, Constantine's reign, and the contemporary sources. But they charge Marcus specifically, not with a psychedelic Eucharist, but the use of a love potion. We have some inscriptions. The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Brian C. Muraresku with Dr. Mark To this day I remain a psychedelic virgin quite proudly, and I spent the past 12 years, ever since that moment in 2007, researching what Houston Smith, perhaps one of the most influential religious historians of the 20th century, would call the best kept secret in history. But it just happens to show up at the right place at the right time, when the earliest Christians could have availed themselves of this kind of sacrament. She joins me for most events and meetings. BRIAN MURARESKU: Great question. An Exploration of Religion: An Interview with Brian Muraresku And that's what I get into in detail in the book. Which is really weird, because that's how the same Dina Bazer, the same atheist in the psilocybin trials, described her insight. I understand the appeal of that. And I just happened to fall into that at the age of 14 thanks to the Jesuits, and just never left it behind. You mentioned there were lots of dead ends, and there certainly were. And nor do I think that you can characterize southern Italy as ground zero for the spirit of Greek mysticism, or however you put it. Like in a retreat pilgrimage type center, or maybe within palliative care. I know that that's a loaded phrase. . And so I do see an avenue, like I kind of obliquely mentioned, but I do think there's an avenue within organized religion and for people who dedicate their lives as religious professionals to ministry to perhaps take a look at this in places where it might work. So what I think we have here in this ergtotized beer drink from Catalonia, Spain, and in this weird witch's brew from 79 AD in Pompeii, I describe it, until I see evidence otherwise, as some of the very first heart scientific data for the actual existence of actual spiked wine in classical antiquity, which I think is a really big point. Maybe part of me is skeptical, right? Interesting. Continuity Hypothesis - Keith E Rice's Integrated SocioPsychology Blog Here's the proof of concept. All rights reserved. I wonder if you're familiar with Wouter Hanegraaff at the University of Amsterdam. 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. And Hofmann famously discovers-- or synthesizes LSD from ergot in 1938. That there is no hard archaeobotanical, archaeochemical data for spiked beer, spiked wine. Brian C. Muraresku with Dr. Mark Plotkin: The Eleusinian Mysteries, Discovering the Divine, The Immortality Key, The Pagan Continuity Hypothesis, Psychedelics, and More | Tim Ferriss Show #646 And there were gaps as well. "The Influence of the Mystery Religions on Christianity" And why, if you're right that the church has succeeded in suppressing a psychedelic sacrament and has been peddling instead, what you call a placebo, and that it has exercised a monstrous campaign of persecution against plant medicine and the women who have kept its knowledge alive, why are you still attached to this tradition? But Egypt seems to not really be hugely relevant to the research. That event is already up on our website and open for registration. But what I hear from people, including atheists, like Dina Bazer, who participated in these Hopkins NYU trials is that she felt like on her one and only dose of psilocybin that she was bathed in God's love. I wish that an ancient pharmacy had been preserved by Mount Vesuvius somewhere near Alexandria or even in upper Egypt or in Antioch or parts of Turkey. I've no doubt that Brian has unearthed and collected a remarkable body of evidence, but evidence of what, exactly? It was the Jesuits who taught me Latin and Greek. Brought to you by Wealthfront high-yield savings account, Peloton Row premium rower for an efficient workout, and You Need A Budget cult-favorite money management app.. Rick Rubin is a nine-time GRAMMY-winning producer, one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in the world, and the most successful producer in any genre, according to Rolling Stone. And for those of you who have found my line of questioning or just my general presence tedious, first of all, I fully appreciate that reaction. Maybe I have that wrong. We have an hour and a half together and I hope there will be time for Q&A and discussion. Plants of the Gods: Hallucinogens, Healing, Culture and - TopPodcast And so even within the New Testament you see little hints and clues that there was no such thing as only ordinary table wine. CHARLES STANG: So that actually helps answer a question that's in the Q&A that was posed to me, which is why did I say I fully expect that we will find evidence for this? Leonardo Torres Pagan, PhD - Subject Matter Expert & Editor - LinkedIn And inside that beer was all kinds of vegetable matter, like wheat, oats, and sedge and lily and flax and various legumes. Was Moses high? Studies linking religion and drugs gain traction Copyright 2023 The President and Fellows of Harvard College, The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name. BRIAN MURARESKU: OK. And there you also found mortars that were tested and also tested positive for evidence of brewing. 101. Certainly these early churchmen used whatever they could against the forms of Christian practice they disapproved of, especially those they categorized as Gnostic. And so the big question is what was happening there? But clearly, when you're thinking about ancient Egypt or elsewhere, there's definitely a funerary tradition. And Dennis, amongst others, calls that a signature Dionysian miracle. Up until that point I really had very little knowledge of psychedelics, personal or literary or otherwise. Now, it doesn't have to be the Holy Grail that was there at the Last Supper, but when you think about the sacrament of wine that is at the center of the world's biggest religion of 2.5 billion people, the thing that Pope Francis says is essential for salvation, I mean, how can we orient our lives around something for which there is little to no physical data? What about Jesus as a Jew? But what we do know is that their sacrament was wine and we know a bit more about the wine of antiquity, ancient Greek wine, than we can piece together from these nocturnal celebrations. What is its connection to Eleusis? An actual spiked wine. He draws on the theory of "pagan continuity," which holds that early Christianity adopted . But even if they're telling the truth about this, even if it is accurate about Marcus that he used a love potion, a love potion isn't a Eucharist. The kind of mysticism I've always been attracted to, like the rule of Saint Benedict and the Trappist monks and the Cistercian monks. The Immortality Key - David Bookstaber Please materialize. Oh, I hope I haven't offended you, Brian. CHARLES STANG: You know, Valentinus was almost elected bishop of Rome. So even from the very beginning, it wasn't just barley and water. The Immortality Key - Book Review and Discussion - Were early - Reddit So there's a house preserved outside of Pompeii, preserved, like so much else, under the ash of Mount Vesuvius's eruption in the year 79 of the Common Era. So we move now into ancient history, but solidly into the historical record, however uneven that historical record is. And I want to say that this question that we've been exploring the last half hour about what all this means for the present will be very much the topic of our next event on February 22, which is taking up the question of psychedelic chaplaincy. CHARLES STANG: Brian, I want to thank you for your time. I'm not sure many have. Because very briefly, I think Brian and others have made a very strong case that these things-- this was a biotechnology that was available in the ancient world. I think psychedelics are just one piece of the puzzle. BRIAN MURARESKU: Right. It draws attention to this material. Did the Early Church Use Psychedelics? - Substack So psychedelics or not, I think it's the cultivation of that experience, which is the actual key. Do the drugs, Dr. Stang? The Continuity Hypothesis was put forward by John Bowlby (1953) as a critical effect of attachments in his development of Attachment Theory. So I'm trying to build the case-- and for some reason in my research, it kept coming back to Italy and Rome, which is why I focus on Hippolytus. 44:48 Psychedelics and ancient cave art . And so I can see psychedelics being some kind of extra sacramental ministry that potentially could ease people at the end of life. It pushes back the archaeology on some of this material a full 12,000 years. And please just call me Charlie. BRIAN MURARESKU: Good one. Amongst all the mystery religions, Eleusis survives. In 1950, Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote " The Influence of the Mystery Religions on Christianity " which describes the continuity from the Pagan, pre-Christian world to what would become early Christianity in the decades and centuries before Jesus Religion & Mystical Experiences, Wine The continuity hypothesis of dreams suggests that the content of dreams are largely continuous with waking concepts and concerns of the dreamer. Now-- and I think that we can probably concede that. To assess this hypothesis and, perhaps, to push it further, has required years of dogged and, at times, discouraging works in archives and archaeology. Rather, Christian beliefs were gradually incorporated into the pagan customs that already existed there. That to live on forever and ever, to live an everlasting life is not immortality. And that's where oversight comes in handy. The Continuity Hypothesis of Dreams: A More Balanced Account A combination of psychoactive plants, including opium, cannabis, and nightshade, along with the remains of reptiles and amphibians all steeped in wine, like a real witch's brew, uncovered in this house outside of Pompeii. Reviewed in the United States on January 29, 2023 I'd never thought before about how Christianity developed as an organized religion in the centuries after Jesus' murder. Something else I include at the end of my book is that I don't think that whatever this was, this big if about a psychedelic Eucharist, I don't think this was a majority of the paleo-Christians. And in his book [? And I think that we would behoove ourselves to incorporate, resuscitate, maybe, some of those techniques that seem to have been employed by the Greeks at Eleusis or by the Dionysians or some of these earliest Christians. Brian C. Muraresku with Dr. Mark Plotkin: The Eleusinian Mysteries Rupert Sheldrake, PhD, is a biologist and author best known for his hypothesis of morphic resonance. #646: Brian C. Muraresku with Dr. Mark Plotkin The Eleusinian Mysteries, Discovering the Divine, The Immortality Key, The Pagan Continuity Hypothesis, Lessons from Scholar Karen Armstrong, and Much More by The Tim Ferriss Show They were mixed or fortified. Many people see that as symbolic or allegorical or just a nice thing, which is not the case. But it survives. And we know the mysteries were there. So your presentation of early Christianity inclines heavily toward the Greek world. So somewhere between 1% and 49%. This is all secret. #646: Brian C. Muraresku with Dr. Mark Plotkin The Eleusinian And if it only occurs in John, the big question is why. But the next event in this series will happen sooner than that. At Cambridge University he worked in developmental biolo. Part 1 Brian C. Muraresku: The Eleusinian Mysteries, Discovering the Divine, The Immortality Key, The Pagan Continuity Hypothesis and the Hallucinogenic Origins of Religion - Feb 22, 2023 The Tim Ferriss Show Podcast | Free Listening on Podbean App We don't have to look very hard to find that. But I want to ask you to reflect on the broader narrative that you're painting, because I've heard you speak in two ways about the significance of this work. You see an altar of Pentelic marble that could only have come from the Mount Pentelicus quarry in mainland Greece. So can you reflect on the-- standing on the threshold of pharmaceutical companies taking control of this, how is that to be commended when the very people who have kept this alive would be pushed to the side in that move? From about 1500 BC to the fourth century AD, it calls to the best and brightest of not just Athens but also Rome. Newsweek calls him 'the world's best human guinea pig,' and The New York Times calls him 'a cross between Jack Welch and a Buddhist monk.' In this show, he deconstructs world-class performers from eclectic areas (investing, chess, pro sports, etc . The (Mistaken) Conspiracy Theory: In the Late Middle Ages, religious elites created a new, and mistaken, intellectual framework out of Christian heresy and theology concerning demons. And at the same time, when I see a thirst, especially in young people, for real experience, and I see so many Catholics who do not believe in transubstantiation, obviously, what comes to my mind is how, if at all, can psychedelics enhance faith or reinvent Christianity. Because what tends to happen in those experiences is a death and rebirth. Who were the Saints? This notion in John 15:1, the notion of the true vine, for example, only occurs in John. So this is interesting. Continuity theory - Wikipedia You become one with Christ by drinking that. His aim when he set out on this journey 12 years ago was to assess the validity of a rather old, but largely discredited hypothesis, namely, that some of the religions of the ancient Mediterranean, perhaps including Christianity, used a psychedelic sacrament to induce mystical experiences at the border of life and death, and that these psychedelic rituals were just the tip of the iceberg, signs of an even more ancient and pervasive religious practice going back many thousands of years. CHARLES STANG: Thank you, Brian. As a matter of fact, I think it's much more promising and much more fertile for scholarship to suggest that some of the earliest Christians may have availed themselves of a psychedelic sacrament and may have interpreted the Last Supper as some kind of invitation to open psychedelia, that mystical supper as the orthodox call it, [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]. That they were what you call extreme beverages. No one lived there. Books about pagan continuity hypothesis? I'm happy to be proven wrong. There have been really dramatic studies from Hopkins and NYU about the ability of psilocybin at the end of life to curb things like depression, anxiety, and end of life distress. And as a lawyer, I know what is probative and what's circumstantial evidence, and I just-- I don't see it there. I include that line for a reason. There's no mistake in her mind that it was Greek. So Plato, Pindar, Sophocles, all the way into Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, it's an important thing. Now, that is part of your kind of interest in democratizing mysticism, but it also, curiously, cuts out the very people who have been preserving this tradition for centuries, namely, on your own account, this sort of invisible or barely visible lineage of women. So I present this as proof of concept, and I heavily rely on the Gospel of John and the data from Italy because that's what was there. 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. What I see is data that's been largely neglected, and I think what serves this as a discipline is just that. If you are drawn to psychedelics, in my mind, it means you're probably drawn to contemplative mysticism. #646: Brian C. Muraresku with Dr. Mark Plotkin The Eleusinian Mysteries, Discovering the Divine, The Immortality Key, The Pagan Continuity Hypothesis, Lessons from Scholar Karen Armstrong, and Much More from The Tim Ferriss Show on Podchaser, aired Wednesday, 28th December 2022. "The Tim Ferriss Show" 646: Brian C. Muraresku with Dr. Mark Plotkin And the one thing that unites both of those worlds in this research called the pagan continuity hypothesis, the one thing we can bet on is the sacred language of Greek. There aren't any churches or basilicas, right, in the first three centuries, in this era we're calling paleo-Christianity. The Immortality Key, The Secret History of the Religion With No Name. What was the real religion of the ancient Greeks? You can see that inscribed on a plaque in Saint Paul's monastery at Mount Athos in Greece. According to Muraresku, this work, which "presents the pagan continuity hypothesis with a psychedelic twist," addresses two fundamental questions: "Before the rise of Christianity, did the Ancient Greeks consume a secret psychedelic sacrament during their most famous and well-attended religious rituals?

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