pagan continuity hypothesis
It's not to say that there isn't evidence from Alexandria or Antioch. Not because it was brand new data. He co-writes that with Gordon Wasson and Albert Hofmann, who famously-- there it is, the three authors. BRIAN MURARESKU: I'm bringing more illumination. It was the Jesuits who taught me Latin and Greek. Well, let's get into it then. CHARLES STANG: Brian, I wonder if you could end by reflecting on the meaning of dying before you die. 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 Because my biggest question is, and the obvious question of the book is, if this was happening in antiquity, what does that mean for today? Kanye West (Ye) storms off Timcast IRL show after Tim Pool pushes back So, I mean, my biggest question behind all of this is, as a good Catholic boy, is the Eucharist. Books about pagan continuity hypothesis? : r/AskHistorians - reddit OK, now, Brian, you've probably dealt with questions like this. And did the earliest Christians inherit the same secret tradition? I think the only big question is what the exact relationship was from a place like that over to Eleusis. What the Greeks were actually saying there is that it was barley infected with ergot, which is this natural fungus that infects cereal crops. So I'm not convinced that-- I think you're absolutely right that what this establishes is that Christians in southern Italy could have-- could have had access to the kinds of things that have been recovered from that drug farm, let's call it. OK, Brian, I invite you to join us now. So listening right now, there's at least one orthodox priest, there's at least one Catholic priest, an Episcopalian, an Anglican, and several others with whom I've been talking in recent months. 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. The phrasing used in the book and by others is "the pagan continuity hypothesis". Part 1 Brian C. Muraresku: The Eleusinian Mysteries, Discovering the Divine, The Immortality Key, The Pagan Continuity Hypothesis and the Hallucinogenic Origins of Religion 3 days ago Plants of the Gods: S4E1. So your presentation of early Christianity inclines heavily toward the Greek world. What's the wine? There are others claiming that there's drugs everywhere. I mean, I asked lots of big questions in the book, and I fully acknowledge that. and he said, Brian, don't you dare. Was Moses high? Studies linking religion and drugs gain traction Did the Early Church Use Psychedelics? - Substack If we're being honest with ourselves, when you've drunk-- and I've drunk that wine-- I didn't necessarily feel that I'd become one with Jesus. Then I see the mysteries of Dionysus as kind of the Burning Man or the Woodstock of the ancient world. 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. 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]. 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. That's how we get to Catalonia. And I'm trying to reconcile that. But please do know that we will forward all these questions to Brian so he will know the sorts of questions his work prompts. Why don't we turn the tables and ask you what questions you think need to be posed? And I don't know if it's a genuine mystical experience or mystical mimetic or some kind of psychological breakthrough. We call it ego dissolution, things of that nature. Now we're getting somewhere. Material evidence of a very strange potion, a drug, or a [SPEAKING GREEK]. Maybe part of me is skeptical, right? Because ergot is just very common. You know, it's an atheist using theological language to describe what happened to her. But I realized that in 1977, when he wrote that in German, this was the height of scholarship, at least going out on a limb to speculate about the prospect of psychedelics at the very heart of the Greek mysteries, which I refer to as something like the real religion of the ancient Greeks, by the way, in speaking about the Eleusinian mysteries. This discussion on Febrary 1, 2021, between CSWR Director Charles Stang and Brian Muraresku about his new book, The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name,a groundbreaking dive into the role of psychedelics in the ancient Mediterranean world. 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 my favorite line of the book is, "The lawyer in me won't sleep until that one chalice, that one container, that one vessel comes to light in an unquestionable Christian context.". So when Hippolytus is calling out the Marcosians, and specifically women, consecrating this alternative Eucharist in their alternative proto-mass, he uses the Greek word-- and we've talked about this before-- but he uses the Greek word [SPEAKING GREEK] seven times in a row, by the way, without specifying which drugs he's referring to. I mean, lots of great questions worthy of further investigation. How does, in other words, how does religion sit with science? Interesting. Klaus Schmidt, who was with the German Archaeological Institute, called this a sanctuary and called these T-shaped pillars representations of gods. But the next event in this series will happen sooner than that. We have some inscriptions. So those are all possibly different questions to ask and answer. That there is no hard archaeobotanical, archaeochemical data for spiked beer, spiked wine. 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. Not much. And in the ancient world, wine was routinely referred to as a [SPEAKING GREEK], which is the Greek word for drug. Brought to you by 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. And that's where oversight comes in handy. In the first half, we'll cover topics ranging from the Eleusinian Mysteries, early Christianity, and the pagan continuity hypothesis to the work of philosopher and psychologist William James. And I think what the pharmaceutical industry can do is help to distribute this medicine. And I offer psychedelics as one of those archaic techniques of ecstasy that seems to have been relevant and meaningful to our ancestors. Plants of the Gods: Hallucinogens, Healing, Culture and - TopPodcast 18.3C: Continuity Theory - Social Sci LibreTexts And so I don't think that psychedelics are coming to replace the Sunday Eucharist. So whatever was happening there was important. It's a big question for me. Well, the reason I mention Hippolytus and Marcus and focus on that in my evidence is because there's evidence of the Valentinians, who influenced Marcus, in and around Rome. Let me just pull up my notes here. 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. 32:57 Ancient languages and Brian's education . In fact, something I'm following up on now is the prospect of similar sites in the Crimea around the Black Sea, because there was also a Greek presence there. There was an absence of continuity in the direction of the colony as Newport made his frequent voyages to and . But we do know that the initiates made this pilgrimage from Athens to Eleusis, drunk the potion, the kykeon, had this very visionary event-- they all talk about seeing something-- and after which they become immortal. So why do you think psychedelics are so significant that they might usher in a new Reformation? He comes to this research with a full suite of scholarly skills, including a deep knowledge of Greek and Latin as well as facility in a number of European languages, which became crucial for uncovering some rather obscure research in Catalan, and also for sweet-talking the gatekeepers of archives and archaeological sites. CHARLES STANG: All right. 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. But if the original Eucharist were psychedelic, or even if there were significant numbers of early Christians using psychedelics like sacrament, I would expect the representatives of orthodox, institutional Christianity to rail against it. If you look at Dioscorides, for example, his Materia Medica, that's written in the first century AD around the same time that the Gospels themselves are being written. 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 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. Before the church banned their use, early Christians used - Substack Please materialize. It tested positive for the microscopic remains of beer and also ergot, exactly the hypothesis that had been put forward in 1978 by the disgraced professor across town from you, Carl Ruck, who's now 85 years old, by the way. The Tim Ferriss Show - #535: General Stanley McChrystal Mast
