CHARLES STANG: My name is Charles Stang, and I'm the director of the Center for the Study of World Religions here at Harvard Divinity School. You see an altar of Pentelic marble that could only have come from the Mount Pentelicus quarry in mainland Greece. Thank you. It is my great pleasure to welcome Brian Muraresku to the Center. So, although, I mean, and that actually, I'd like to come back to that, the notion of the, that not just the pagan continuity hypothesis, but the mystery continuity hypothesis through the Vatican. And part of me really wants to put all these pieces together before I dive in. Is there a smoking gun? 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. 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. He decides to get people even more drunk. Brought to you by And I feel like I accomplished that in the afterword to my book. First I'll give the floor to Brian to walk us into this remarkable book of his and the years of hard work that went into it, what drove him to do this. And even in the New Testament, you'll see wine spiked with myrrh, for example, that's served to Jesus at his crucifixion. And there were gaps as well. OK, now, Brian, you've probably dealt with questions like this. You can see that inscribed on a plaque in Saint Paul's monastery at Mount Athos in Greece. 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. You might find it in a cemetery in Mexico. And when we know so much about ancient wine and how very different it was from the wine of today, I mean, what can we say about the Eucharist if we're only looking at the texts? What does that have to do with Christianity? And we had a great chat, a very spirited chat about the mysteries and the psychedelic hypothesis. An actual spiked wine. So at the very-- after the first half of the book is over, there's an epilogue, and I say, OK, here's the evidence. The continuity theory proposes that older adults maintain the same activities, behaviors, personalities, and relationships of the past. And I think we get hung up on the jargon. So I spent 12 years looking for that data, eventually found it, of all places, in Catalonia in Spain in this 635-page monograph that was published in 2002 and for one reason or another-- probably because it was written in Catalan-- was not widely reported to the academic community and went largely ignored. 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 improving So I'll speak in language that you and our good colleague Greg [? Because for many, many years, you know, Ruck's career takes a bit of a nosedive. It was the Jesuits who taught me Latin and Greek. And considering the common background of modern religions (the Pagan Continuity hypothesis), any religious group who thinks they are chosen or correct are promoting a simplistic and ignorant view of our past. He has talked about the potential evidence for psychedelics in a Mithras liturgy. But maybe you could just say something about this community in Catalonia. And it was the Jesuits who encouraged me to always, always ask questions and never take anything at face value. 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]. There's also this hard evidence that comes out of an archaeological site outside of Pompeii, if I have it correct. Now, I think you answered that last part. So somewhere between 1% and 49%. Even a little bit before Gobekli Tepe, there was another site unearthed relatively recently in Israel, at the Rakefet cave. But in Pompeii, for example, there's the villa of the mysteries, one of these really breathtaking finds that also survived the ravage of Mount Vesuvius. That is my dog Xena. So how exactly is this evidence of something relevant to Christianity in Rome or southern Italy more widely? 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 why the silence from the heresiologists on a psychedelic sacrament? I am excited . The mysteries of Dionysus, a bit weirder, a bit more off the grid. That's staying within the field of time. Now, it's just an early indication and there's more testing to be done. So don't feel like you have to go into great depth at this point. BRIAN MURARESKU: OK. Others find it in different ways, but the common denominator seems to be one of these really well-curated near-death experiences. Or maybe in palliative care. 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. Now we're getting somewhere. From about 1500 BC to the fourth century AD, it calls to the best and brightest of not just Athens but also Rome. These sources suggest a much greater degree of continuity with pre-Christian values and practice than the writings of more . Whether there's a psychedelic tradition-- I mean, there are some suggestive paintings. And Dennis, amongst others, calls that a signature Dionysian miracle. 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 . . 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. So even from the very beginning, it wasn't just barley and water. I'd never thought before about how Christianity developed as an organized religion in the centuries after Jesus' murder. And by the way, I'm not here trying to protect Christianity from the evidence of psychedelic use. Then what was the Gospel of John, how did it interpret the Eucharist and market it, and so on. So if you were a mystic and you were into Demeter and Persephone and Dionysus and you were into these strange Greek mystery cults, you'd be hard-pressed to find a better place to spend your time than [SPEAKING GREEK], southern Italy, which in some cases was more Greek than Greek. I'm not sure many have. Which is really weird, because that's how the same Dina Bazer, the same atheist in the psilocybin trials, described her insight. Then I'll ask a series of questions that follow the course of his book, focusing on the different ancient religious traditions, the evidence for their psychedelic sacraments, and most importantly, whether and how the assembled evidence yields a coherent picture of the past. When you start testing, you find things. Little attempt has been made, however, to bridge the gap between \"pagan\" and \"Christian\" or to examine late antique, Christian attitudes toward sexuality and marriage from the viewpoint of the \"average\" Christian. All right, so now, let's follow up with Dionysus, but let's see here. So the big question is, what kind of drug was this, if it was a drug? Now is there any evidence for psychedelic use in ancient Egypt, and if not, do you have any theory as to why that's silent? Now, I have no idea where it goes from here, or if I'll take it myself. So there's a whole slew of sites I want to test there. I'm trying to get him to speak in the series about that. And I think we're getting there. And does it line up with the promise from John's gospel that anyone who drinks this becomes instantly immortal? Are they rolling their eyes, or are you getting sort of secretive knowing nods of agreement? What's the wine? And I got to say, there's not a heck of a lot of eye rolling, assuming people read my afterword and try to see how careful I am about delineating what is knowable and what is not and what this means for the future of religion. It draws attention to this material. Not because it's not there, because it hasn't been tested. CHARLES STANG: Brian, I wonder if you could end by reflecting on the meaning of dying before you die. It would have parts of Greek mysticism in it, the same Greek mysteries I've spent all these years investigating, and it would have some elements of what I see in paleo-Christianity. Others would argue that they are perfectly legal sacraments, at least in the Native American church with the use of peyote, or in the UDV or Santo Daime, I mean, ayahuasca does work in some syncretic Christian form, right? 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. Administration and supervision endeavors and with strong knowledge in: Online teaching and learning methods, Methods for Teaching Mathematics and Technology Integration for K-12 and College . And so I don't know what a really authentic, a really historic-looking ritual that is equal parts sacred, but also, again, medically sound, scientifically rigorous, would look like. And now we have a working hypothesis and some data to suggest where we might be looking. Thank you, sir. Let me start with the view-- the version of it that I think is less persuasive. Because again, when I read the clinical literature, I'm reading things that look like mystical experiences, or that at least at least sound like them. It seems entirely believable to me that we have a potion maker active near Pompeii. 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 . Then there's what were the earliest Christians doing with the Eucharist. In this hypothesis, both widely accepted and widely criticized,11 'American' was synonymous with 'North American'. I think the only big question is what the exact relationship was from a place like that over to Eleusis. So there's lots of interesting details here that filter through. It pushes back the archaeology on some of this material a full 12,000 years. Please materialize. 1,672. [2] 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. We look forward to hosting Chacruna's founder and executive director, Bia Labate, for a lecture on Monday, March 8. And that is that there was a pervasive religion, ancient religion, that involved psychedelic sacraments, and that that pervasive religious culture filtered into the Greek mysteries and eventually into early Christianity. Like the wedding at Cana, which my synopsis of that event is a drunkard getting a bunch of drunk people even more drunk. I mean, in the absence of the actual data, that's my biggest question. So what evidence can you provide for that claim? It's this 22-acre site of free-standing limestone, some rising 20 feet in the air, some weighing 50 tons. I think psychedelics are just one piece of the puzzle. Where does Western civilization come from? Copyright 2023 President and Fellows of Harvard College. So again, if there were an early psychedelic sacrament that was being suppressed, I'd expect that the suppressors would talk about it.
pagan continuity hypothesis