In this episode, we re joined by the great and powerful Graham Hancock to talk about his new book, The Immortality Key, and how psychedelics may have played a role in the creation of Christianity. We re also joined by a special guest, Dr. Brian Murarescu, an expert in the field of psychedelics and the founder of the Immortals Research Institute, to discuss the use of psychedelic drugs by the ancient Greek goddess Athena at Eleusis, and why it s so important to understand the history of the worship of the Goddess Athena in ancient Greece and Rome, and the role that psychedelics played in the founding of Christianity in the first century CE. This is an [Expert] level episode, which means some parts of the discussion may not make sense unless you ve had a psychedelic experience. If you ve ever had an experience with psychedelics, you ll want to know if it s possible that the first Christians were using psychedelics to have a direct encounter with Athena, or if it was merely a hallucination. And if so, what kind of experience did they have? And what role did it have in their lives? And why is it so important? We ll find out on this episode of Mythology and Mythology, hosted by Joe Rogan and Brian Kogan. The Mythology Guys! Subscribe to Mythology today to get immediate access to all the newest episodes and get access to our most up-to-date episodes, including our most popular episodes and special releases. Subscribe today using our newsletter! Mythology! Subscribe, Like, Share, and subscribe to our podcast, and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts! Thanks for listening and share the podcast on your thoughts, stories, reviews, and thoughts on your favorite podcast! we re listening to this podcast! :) and we re sharing it on all social media platforms! v=aUoUoQQYQYVQYUYUQ&t=3q&referenced Thank you so much love and support us on Insta: & v=AQQQIQIYQ&q&q=3SQQ&ref=a&qid=3QQR&qA&qb&qtr=3s&qlist=3&qref=8&qw&qq&s=3
00:01:18.000Now, this is, obviously, when I found out the subject matter, Graham, this is right up your alley, and it made total, complete sense why you and Brian worked together on this.
00:01:31.000Graham, why don't we have you start, since you're over there in the UK? Yeah, absolutely.
00:01:37.000Well, I mean, for me, in fact, Joe, I think you and I originally got in touch because of my interest in psychedelics in human culture and a book that I published in 2006 called Supernatural, which looks at the huge role that psychedelics have played in cultures and in religions all around the world.
00:01:59.000And I touched in that book on the role of psychedelics in the origins of Christianity.
00:02:06.000Which of course is a dynamite subject.
00:02:09.000And what Brian has done in the Immortality Key has been to present hard and fast evidence that the first Christians were using psychedelics and that their religious experiences were mediated by psychedelic experiences.
00:02:24.000And Brian, how did you get involved in this?
00:02:50.000I was fascinated by Graham's work, which I only came across about 12 years ago.
00:02:55.000I was a Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit undergrad major.
00:03:00.000And instead of getting the PhD or becoming a priest, which are the two options when you study Latin and Greek, I went to law school instead.
00:03:09.000And then wound up at a law firm and a couple years into it started reading about these psilocybin studies coming out of Hopkins and NYU. And that amazing statistic that two-thirds of the participants were describing it as one of the most amazing experiences of their lives.
00:03:23.000And it hit me that there was something there because the testimony coming out of Hopkins and NYU in a very clinical setting immediately reminded me of what I heard about Eleusis.
00:03:34.000And for those who don't know what Eleusis is, it's essentially the spiritual capital of the ancient world.
00:03:39.000It was where the best and brightest of Athens and Rome went to essentially meet a goddess in the flesh and have this mind-blowing visionary experience.
00:03:49.000So before Jerusalem, before Rome, before Mecca, there was Eleusis, and for some reason we're not taught about this in our high school mythology or Western Civ classes, but it was there that Plato Cicero, Marcus Aurelius all went to drink a magical potion and,
00:04:04.000in their words, have this vision, what Plato calls a blessed sight and vision, the holiest of mysteries, in which they claim to have a direct encounter with the goddess and completely eradicate their fear of death.
00:04:15.000It was very similar to what the volunteers are saying with their single experience of psilocybin.
00:04:21.000Now, with Eleusis, how much history do we have?
00:04:24.000How much recorded history that documents these rituals?
00:04:28.000And is there any that describes the actual contents of this mixture?
00:04:33.000I mean, I say Eleusis is like the fight club of the ancient world.
00:04:37.000The first rule about Eleusis is you don't talk about Eleusis.
00:04:40.000You know, all we have is this fragmentary testimony, again, from Plato, Pindar, Sophocles, and others.
00:04:45.000They do talk about a vision that's almost universal, and they almost universally talk about this once-in-a-lifetime transformative event where they become initiates, and only they properly have life after death.
00:04:57.000Because at the time, the Greeks didn't really look forward to the afterlife.
00:05:27.000And so in 1978, this trio of renegades, Gordon Wasson, Albert Hoffman, who discovered LSD, and Karl Ruck, who was then the chair of the classics department at Boston University, they put out this book, The Road to Eleusis, claiming they'd found the secret after 2,000 years.
00:05:43.000And what they claimed is that this potion was actually spiked with ergot.
00:05:47.000Which is that naturally occurring fungus from which you can synthesize LSD. And in fact, it's where Albert, it's how he synthesized LSD by accident in 1938 with cultures of ergot.
00:05:57.000We've talked about ergot before in this podcast, connecting it to the Salem witch trials, which is very speculative, but they think there's real evidence that shows that there was a late frost during the time of the Salem witch trials that probably led to mold growth on their wheat, which probably led to ergot infestation of their food.
00:06:16.000And so these poor people were, you know, unintentionally eating acid.
00:06:43.000Now, it's more common on things like rye, but it also pops up on barley and wheat, too.
00:06:48.000And again, it's unavoidable, and it's highly, highly toxic.
00:06:51.000The question is, does it really produce the kind of vision, the visionary experiences that people have on psilocybin, LSD, mescaline, and others?
00:06:59.000According to Albert Hoffman, absolutely.
00:07:01.000So as a matter of fact, I went into the Harvard archives, where Wasson's papers are kept to this day in the botany libraries.
00:07:08.000And I found a letter that Albert wrote Gordon, his co-author, in 1976, saying that Albert had self-experimented with Ergonavine, which is one of these alkaloids in ergot.
00:07:19.000And he claimed, in 1976, it was five to ten times more potent than psilocybin.
00:07:26.000It's fascinating to me that these cultures seem to have hid some of these rituals, and this goes back to really as far back as we have recorded psychedelic use, like Soma.
00:07:40.000We still to this day don't know what that is, and it's described in these incredible ways in ancient Hindu texts, but we don't know what it is.
00:08:59.000Gavashira, from Sanskrit go, gava is milk, mixed with milk.
00:09:03.000And so I've read all the theories that you have about what Soma was, whether it was the Amanita muscaria mushroom or some psilocybin-containing species or DMT. The way that they describe Soma here is always a mixed potion.
00:09:18.000So in this case, mixed with barley and milk.
00:09:21.000So that would be an ergot, some sort of...
00:09:24.000Already they're mentioned, I mean, and so that's what Rock Hoffman and Wasson were saying in 1978. We have literature from the 7th century BC, it's called the hymn to Demeter, where they record these ingredients of what the kukion was.
00:09:40.000You ask, like, where's the actual evidence?
00:10:50.000Which they mix with all kinds of things.
00:10:52.000And not just barley and milk, but also honey.
00:10:54.000As a matter of fact, soma is often identified with madhu, which is honey in Sanskrit.
00:10:59.000McKenna speculated that there was a transfer in culture of psychedelic-based culture to an alcohol-based culture.
00:11:10.000Based on climate change and also based on preserving things in honey, and that honey would create mead, and mead, which if people don't know, is an alcohol beverage that's actually made with honey.
00:11:22.000Do you think that this was the case with the use of honey as well, that it's used as a preservative, or was it used to make it taste better, more palatable?
00:11:38.000When we're talking about ancient plants and fungi, plants especially, we don't know what plants they're talking about.
00:11:43.000So the ancient literature records all kinds of plants across the language.
00:11:47.000If I could jump in, Joe, you're absolutely right.
00:11:50.000There was secrecy that surrounded the use of these potions in the ancient world.
00:11:55.000There's a case from Athens of the potion from Eleusis being used for recreational purposes, and this is roundly condemned.
00:12:04.000By all concerned, that it should only be used for the sacred and spiritual purposes of which it was intended.
00:12:10.000So there was a great deal of secrecy that surrounded the use of these potions, and the potions were a doorway or a gateway into another level of reality.
00:12:21.000And what's fascinating from Eleusis and many other ancient accounts is the way that people come back having lost their fear of death, that they don't regard death as the end anymore.
00:12:32.000It's just another stage on the journey, just the beginning of the next great adventure.
00:12:39.000And Brian is absolutely right to draw attention to the modern work with psilocybin.
00:12:44.000And again, we find people who are terminal cases, who are imminently facing death, losing their fear of death as a result of using psilocybin.
00:12:53.000So we can begin to see connections between what we understand about these extraordinary substances in the modern world and how the ancient world used them.
00:13:02.000That does seem to be a universal theme, this theme of alleviating the fear of death.
00:13:08.000And this comes up constantly with people that I know personally that have had these psychedelic experiences.
00:13:15.000They say, well, I feel like I went to heaven, or I feel like now I understand why people believe there's this perfect afterlife, that I've actually experienced it.
00:13:25.000A lot of the critics will say that it's some kind of natural human tendency that we don't want to die and that we're afraid of death and that religions provide us with some sort of solace, some sort of feeling of security.
00:13:58.000And that experience eliminates the fear of death.
00:14:01.000I think Brian, by the way, having written The Immortality Key, for which I've only provided the foreword, I think Brian is absolutely right to be a psychedelic virgin.
00:14:12.000In my case, because I have used psychedelics and many other substances, a lot of my critics just try to write off all my work, whether it's on lost civilizations or on psychedelics, they try to write it all off as the rantings of a sort of drug-fueled maniac.
00:14:29.000And I think it's very smart of Brian not to put himself in that situation.
00:14:34.000I hope he will work with psychedelics in the future, but I think he was right not to work with psychedelics before writing this book and to concentrate on the evidence.
00:14:42.000Well, Michael Pollan, who later in life experienced psychedelics and wrote pretty brilliantly about them, for me, he's one of the more interesting people to discuss it because Michael's an investigative journalist.
00:14:59.000He takes deep dives into these subjects and his deep dive into psychedelics was incredibly illuminating.
00:15:08.000And so for him, I really enjoyed talking to him about it and I really enjoyed his book as well.
00:15:12.000His perceptions of it were really unique because you're talking about a guy who lived his whole life without them, you know, and then really dove head first for his book.
00:15:23.000It's kind of what happened to me when I wrote Supernatural.
00:15:28.000Apart from one experience with LSD in 1974, I hadn't used any psychedelics until I began to research Supernatural back in the early 2000s.
00:15:38.000And because I'm a kind of boots on the ground researcher, I felt it was essential that I have these experiences.
00:15:43.000What I couldn't guess was the way that the experiences would utterly change and transform my life.
00:15:49.000And I can understand from a level of personal experience why psychedelics do lie at the root, I think, of all the world's religions.
00:15:58.000And those religions are now busily at work trying to deny that connection.
00:16:03.000Well, they're not just trying to do it.
00:16:05.000There's many people in science that are trying to deny these connections, too.
00:16:09.000And it's so unfortunate that the people that are trying to deny these connections or the significance of these experiences haven't had them.
00:16:16.000I don't think anybody who has a dimethyltryptamine experience can just dismiss it as being no big deal.
00:16:49.000You're in Narnia and you're in a place where entities are actually communicating with you and speaking to you and teaching to you.
00:16:56.000This is another aspect of psychedelics is the moral aspect of psychedelics.
00:17:01.000Critics and enemies of psychedelics want to associate them with some kind of immorality, but actually anybody who's worked extensively with psychedelics will know that they contain moral teachings.
00:17:11.000Whether it's the mushrooms or whether it's LSD, they cause us to examine our own behavior, our own impact upon others, to question our unkindness to others, and to give us at least the push To begin to be better people and more nurturing and more caring people for others.
00:17:28.000So this strong moral element in psychedelics again is totally ignored by the critics who just want to demonize these substances for reasons that I think are rather sinister actually.
00:17:39.000I think our current culture lacks a map of the territory and if we had like some sort of legitimate psychedelic counseling where we could go somewhere and experts both in pharmacology and in medical science can talk people through these experiences And help them,
00:17:59.000achieve them, and get people to realize that, you know, much like the ancients, these experiences are not, it's not wise to use them recreationally.
00:18:32.000It should be treated with respect and with reverence because of this sense that we're passing through a doorway into a seamlessly convincing parallel reality and the possibility that that isn't just a concoction of our brains, that the brains are simply acting as an interface or a transceiver between us and that other I think
00:19:10.000That they have at least a dozen sessions with a powerful psychedelic.
00:19:14.000It can be DMT, it can be ayahuasca, it can be LSD. But they've got to go through those dozen sessions.
00:19:19.000They should be guided by experienced practitioners.
00:19:22.000And at the end of those dozen sessions, I very much doubt if those individuals would be the same individuals who went into the application for the job in the first place.
00:19:30.000No, I don't think you could be the same.
00:19:33.000When you write about all this, how curious are you personally of the experience and do you plan on having it?
00:19:40.000I do, under the conditions that you set.
00:19:43.000I mean, I think that we're in a period now where everything is about to change.
00:20:09.000And what I look forward to is maybe in 10 years' time or less, these retreat centers, which are licensed and regulated with professional staff and medical supervised staff who essentially guide people through what would be a novel initiation experience,
00:20:25.000not unlike what may have happened 2,700 years ago.
00:20:29.000I'm hoping they're going to be backdoored in as therapy for people with pre-existing conditions that we have right now, like opioid addiction, Iboga, like Ibogaine being introduced, and MDMA for people with post-traumatic stress disorder, for soldiers,
00:20:44.000because there's been so much real solid evidence that it's incredibly beneficial to these people.
00:20:52.000I mean, we have a real problem in this country with people being addicted to these pills and then wind up dying from them.
00:20:59.000That can be nipped in the bud like really effectively with Ibogaine.
00:21:04.000And the fact that you have to leave the country to have these Ibogaine experiences is really, it's a terrible statement on the rational thinking of our culture today.
00:21:15.000Because it's not like these are unknown things.
00:21:17.000We're talking about it right now on a podcast that millions of people are listening to.
00:21:20.000And we've talked about it dozens of times in the past.
00:21:23.000And it's something that scientists are aware of, researchers are aware of, and particularly people who have come back from there and have had these experiences and have been cured of their addictions.
00:21:35.000It literally rewires the way the brain interfaces with these opioids.
00:21:40.000And the fact that it's not available to people and they have to go through traditional counseling and benefit from their willpower and somehow or another try not to relapse, it's terrible.
00:21:52.000Or even just mitigating some of that, even cannabis, for example, which can mitigate.
00:23:05.000Because we live in an insane society which has got all its priorities upside down and is completely screwing up this beautiful world that human beings have been gifted by the universe.
00:23:18.000And I think it boils down to a relatively few people.
00:23:23.000We just have incredibly bad governments, lousy leaders, totally irresponsible, lacking any initiative or imagination in it entirely for themselves.
00:23:33.000It's a messed up world and it's a kind of litmus test for how messed up that world is, that sovereign adults cannot take the responsible decision to use psychedelics without risking jail.
00:23:48.000It's very, very insane that that should be the case, and yet alcohol is glorified in our society.
00:23:54.000As you say, the opioids are prescribed hand over fist by Big Pharma.
00:23:59.000We're very mixed up, and I have a feeling that the sooner we get our politicians onto major psychedelics, the better things are going to be.
00:24:07.000Well, I think we've got to get the whole world involved as well.
00:24:10.000We don't want to be the only ones that are tripping.
00:24:35.000It can put you through the psychological ringer as you confront your own dark side and learn how to deal with it.
00:24:41.000Yes, there is a recreational role for these substances, and I honor the right of sovereign adults to use them for recreational purposes if they wish to do so.
00:24:50.000But it's the deep work that these psychedelics require us to do, which is really fascinating and which is not easy.
00:25:00.000I don't rush to my next psychedelic adventure.
00:25:03.000I prepare myself very, very carefully and with some experiences.
00:25:11.000And those are experiences, whether they're real or not, they're experiences that impact you as an experience does.
00:25:19.000Yeah, you were breaking up a little bit there, but yeah, I completely agree with you about that.
00:25:24.000I mean, I get terrified when I take an edible.
00:25:26.000A marijuana edible is the introspective nature of those things and the way it breaks down your thoughts and your behavior and finds the skeletons in your closet.
00:26:16.000This was the whole point of the mysteries, by the way, in the ancient world.
00:26:19.000I mean, so there was a whole apparatus dedicated to curating these experiences for people.
00:26:24.000And sometimes it was once in a lifetime, like Atalusis, at some later point in your life, And then you have the Dionysian mysteries, which are a bit weirder and a bit crazier, but they were also curated by professionals, by technicians, women in this case, who were thought to be spiking wine with all kinds of magical plants,
00:26:55.000And the Greeks are known for lots of great things that we've inherited, like democracy and the arts and the sciences.
00:27:01.000And what we're doing right now, this tria logos, through these microfonos, these are all Greek things and Greek technology that we've accepted as part and parcel of Western civilization.
00:27:13.000And it's a part, again, that is not taught in high school mythology or Western Civ.
00:27:17.000And there's this deeply mystical aspect in the mysteries, for example, which the Greeks really looked to as something that wasn't just like a special part of civilization, but the central part of it.
00:27:30.000So there is this, I'll tell you a story about this, this 4th century historian Zosimus.
00:27:34.000He records the testimony of a Roman guy named Praetekstatus who was initiated at Eleusis.
00:27:40.000Because remember, it wasn't just people from Greece.
00:27:42.000It was around the Greek Empire, including at that time were people who'd been influenced by the Greeks.
00:27:47.000And Eleusis has survived up until the 4th century AD, at which point it is, it's destroyed.
00:27:53.000It's eliminated by the Christianized...
00:28:28.000Eleusis is the one thing that holds the entire human race together, he said.
00:28:32.000He said, if you get rid of Eleusis, life for us will become a-biotos, which in Greek means unlivable.
00:28:39.000It wasn't just about Greek existence, it was about human existence.
00:28:43.000There was something happening at Eleusis with that potion, with this beatific vision that literally held civilization together like glue for the ancient Greeks.
00:28:52.000And democracy, the arts, the sciences, everything else It was an offshoot of that experience.
00:30:01.000I've heard rumors to that effect, yes.
00:30:03.000So he comes out with the second book, The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth.
00:30:10.000Knowing as much as you know about language, did you feel like he made leaps?
00:30:15.000Did you feel like he made these connections that maybe were based on speculation?
00:30:21.000So he writes, it's pure philology, right?
00:30:23.000So it's word games and things that only linguists, I mean, I think it's incredible that people who aren't linguists can actually read that.
00:30:30.000It's really, really difficult to read Sacred Mushroom on the Cross.
00:30:33.000But the basic premise is that the New Testament, written in Greek, has this Semitic substratum.
00:30:39.000So underneath the Greek, the gospel writers and Paul are actually referring to different terms in Hebrew or Aramaic.
00:30:47.000And that these terms have, in turn, come from the Sumerian, which any linguist would say is a language isolate, that there is no real relationship between Sumerian and the Indo-European languages, like Greek, and the Semitic.
00:31:01.000So the premise of the argument is something that most linguists don't accept.
00:31:05.000However, and Karl Ruck has written the afterword to one of the editions you probably have of Sacred Mushroom and the Cross.
00:31:12.000And he gets into some complex theories about psycholinguistics and this interesting idea that just because they aren't related, there are certain words, certain names, certain vocabulary, like plant definitions, which would carry across the different languages.
00:31:27.000But when you dig into the words that Allegro was recreating, he places an asterisk, actually, next to these words, because they can't be corroborated by the ancient texts.
00:31:55.000For example, like in 1 Corinthians 22, there's this interesting line where he says about that we preach Christ crucified is a skandalon for the Jews and a folly for the Greeks.
00:32:06.000And skandalon in Greek means like a bolt or a snare, like a trap.
00:32:11.000And Allegro ties it to like a tikla in Aramaic, which is like what he calls the bolt mushroom.
00:32:20.000And so he's saying that Paul's actually telling the Jews that, you know, the Christ crucified is a mushroom instead of a skandalon.
00:32:28.000It's like a code word, like the skandalon is a mushroom.
00:32:31.000And then for the Greeks, he says it's a fali, which is moira in Greek, which actually means mandrake, which is another psychedelic plant.
00:32:39.000So there's all this different wordplay going on, but it's really hard to tease out any physical forensic evidence for this stuff, which was what I went after.
00:32:48.000Was Allegro's position, if I recall correctly, that the sacred mushroom was Amanita muscaria?
00:32:56.000Yeah, that was even the cover of his book.
00:33:02.000I think Allegro did amazing work, but that's one area where I have a problem with Amanita Muscaria as the As the psychedelic of choice in early Christianity, because in shamanic cultures where Amanita muscaria is used,
00:33:19.000it's recognized that the mushroom is much more effective after it's been passed through a human body, or indeed through the body of a reindeer, and emerged in urine.
00:33:31.000And so those shamanistic Cultures of Siberia use Amanita Muscaria by drinking it in the urine of a shaman who has previously consumed the mushroom.
00:33:43.000And I don't see a lot of evidence for that in early Christianity, and it's why I like the work that Brian has done looking at the really hard evidence for psychedelics in early Christianity, which are not in this case Amanita Muscaria, if I'm correct, Brian.
00:33:59.000Isn't the speculation about Amanita Muscaria that it's seasonal, it's also genetically variable, like there's different species, much like different fruits taste differently, there's different versions of the Amanita Muscaria that have more psychedelic compounds in them,
00:34:17.000and that there's all sorts of ways of preparing them that we've completely lost.
00:34:23.000I've only had one Amanita Muscaria experience and it wasn't very convincing.
00:34:28.000Yeah, and this is often the case, but I'm told, I've not had the experience myself, but I'm told that if you can bear the idea of drinking the shaman's urine after he or she has consumed the Amanita Muscaria, you will have a really powerful journey.
00:34:43.000Yeah, but you don't want a shaman just laughing hysterically after you drink his urine.
00:34:59.000Yeah, also the bag, the toys, the fact that they would dry them on these coniferous trees, the fact that these mushrooms have this mycorrhizal relationship with coniferous trees where they tend to grow under pine trees,
00:35:15.000which is the tree that we use for Christmas trees.
00:35:17.000The fact that they're bright red like a toy that is in a package waiting for a child to open it up.
00:35:24.000There's so many of these weird connections.
00:35:26.000The colors, the fact that reindeer are with Santa Claus, the fact that these reindeer fly.
00:35:34.000Yeah, I mean, that caribou are notoriously attracted to Amanita muscaria mushrooms.
00:35:41.000In fact, people that have had psychedelic rituals and gone outside to urinate have talked about caribou knocking them over to try to get to their urine.
00:35:57.000All those things are together, connected in some sort of a strange way.
00:36:00.000And there's also a history of shamanic rituals being outlawed in Siberia.
00:36:06.000And the way they got around it was they would come through the chimney, which is just crazy.
00:36:11.000They would climb onto people's roofs and slide down the chimney to deliver the mushrooms.
00:36:17.000It's just another example of the way that our culture takes an ancient historical truth and completely castrates it and turns it into Santa Claus, you know, whereas what we're actually dealing with are profound experiences in deeply altered states of consciousness.
00:36:34.000Well, it's also this information seems to have been lost fairly recently because if you go back to the early 1950s and 40s and look at Christmas cards, the Christmas cards and depictions of Christmas almost always contained elves and Amanita muscaria mushrooms.
00:36:52.000The Amanita muscaria mushroom was synonymous with Christmas for some strange reason.
00:37:01.000It's all over the fairy tale books, too.
00:37:03.000You can't avoid the Amanita everywhere you look, which is why I think Allegro was also interested, writing in 1970 and studying it in the 50s and 60s.
00:37:11.000I think that's why he glommed on to the Amanita.
00:37:13.000But it's such an unconvincing mushroom.
00:37:15.000The people that I know that have experienced it in terms of a psychedelic ritual, I don't know anybody who's really blown their brains out with it.
00:37:23.000And Gordon Watson also thought it was the ingredient behind Soma as well.
00:37:28.000He writes a book about this in 1968, Soma, Divine Mushroom of Immortality.
00:37:44.000I always found that strange too, to be honest.
00:37:46.000So Wasson, I mean, to explain where this comes from, Wasson has this incredible experience with Maria Sabina in 1955 in Oaxaca, Mexico.
00:37:55.000And when he consumes the, we think, psilocybin mexicana.
00:37:59.000And he is catapulted to the heavens and he has this vision that he describes as the realest thing he's ever experienced under the influence of the psilocybin.
00:38:09.000And the thought occurs to him, he writes later in 1957 in Life magazine, he says that could it be the case that the divine mushrooms are in fact the answer behind the ancient mysteries?
00:38:20.000Which is why he then went and started looking at the Amanita, perhaps, or eventually Ergot, which is where I pick up the scent.
00:38:27.000At some point in his correspondence with Albert Hoffmann, they together began focusing on Ergot, like we said, because it's so common and so natural, but so highly toxic, too.
00:38:39.000And Albert claimed to have this experience with it, and so for years and years, after teaming up with Karl Ruck, they were convinced that Ergot had to somehow be involved.
00:38:49.000So, what is the speculation of what the Eucharist originally was?
00:38:57.000Yeah, I mean, is there any text that explains what the initial food was?
00:39:03.000Well, I mean, we have the canonical explanation from the Gospels, and we have St. Paul's letter.
00:39:09.000I mean, the honest answer, and I think any priest would say this too, is the honest answer is we don't know.
00:39:13.000You know, the Gospels are written anytime between 65 and 100 A.D. Paul's letters are some of the earliest writings that we have, like the letter to the Corinthians, for example.
00:39:25.000He writes that in about 53 A.D., And the way he describes what's happening there is very, very interesting.
00:39:34.000I brought some of the Greek from the New Corinthians.
00:39:38.000It's under Christian Pharmacon and the 4 Corinthians 11.30.
00:39:45.000So, at some point, I was looking for what that original Eucharist was, and where it was taken.
00:39:52.000So you have to think about the Greek world at this time.
00:39:55.000You know, Jesus is born in the Holy Land, but Christianity really takes root in the Greek-speaking parts of the Empire, which is why Paul's letters are written to Greek-speaking people, right?
00:40:05.000And why it's interesting to follow this theory, because you have the ancient Greek-speaking Greek in the pagan world, But you also have ancient Greeks speaking Greek in this Christianizing world.
00:40:14.000And so the people in Corinth is this church not far from Eleusis, by the way.
00:40:18.000In fact, today it's only an hour west of Eleusis.
00:40:21.000And one of the earliest churches is there.
00:40:23.000And Paul is addressing this early church in Greek.
00:40:26.000And at the bottom, you can read the English, but he's essentially yelling at them for consuming the wrong kind of Eucharist.
00:42:35.000He has fallen asleep to the death of sleep.
00:42:39.000So the speculation is that there's some sort of a psychedelic or a fungi or something that's in the wine that's causing them to die and they're using it recreationally and they're trying to discourage this.
00:42:56.000And it's not just based on a random read of this one line in Corinthians.
00:43:01.000It's based on an understanding of what Greek wine actually was, how far back it goes, which is centuries and centuries before this.
00:43:09.000How it was mixed, what it was mixed with.
00:43:12.000Even in the first century, there's a guy called Dioscorides, a Greek pharmacologist.
00:43:19.000In fact, he's called the father of drugs.
00:43:21.000And at the same time that these Gospels and Paul's letters are being written, he writes something called the Materia Medica.
00:43:27.000It's these five books in Greek, and every drug prescription you've ever had in your life exists because Dioscorides wrote that manuscript.
00:43:35.000And in that manuscript, in Book 5, he lists out, in Book 5 alone, 56 different recipes for spiked wine.
00:43:42.000And in the Greek, he shows you how to spike wine with everything from salvia to hellebore to henbane, which he says is good for swollen genitals.
00:43:53.000So if you have swollen genitals, you dissolve henbane into wine.
00:43:57.000He says if you drink mandrake wine, like Allegro was talking about mandrake, it'll kill you in one cup full.
00:44:03.000And then he says this about black nightshade in book 474. He says if you dissolve nightshade into wine, it will produce fantasias ou aedais, which in Greek means not unpleasant visions.
00:44:17.000So just from the literature, we can tell that the Greeks absolutely knew how to spike wine with very powerful substances.
00:44:24.000Graham, I gotta tell you, your microphone is really sensitive.
00:44:28.000So anytime you do anything, any movement or breathing, it bangs around for whatever reason.
00:45:07.000They are basically in the same species at least.
00:45:10.000When those priests would be walking down the aisle and they would be blowing sage, they're burning sage, was that for some sort of a psychedelic effect?
00:45:20.000Is that the reason why they were doing that?
00:45:23.000So when it comes to incense, we actually have an answer now.
00:45:26.000I'm not sure if you know this, but earlier this year in May, there were some researchers in Israel who released one of the first archaeochemical studies of ancient incense.
00:45:37.000So just in May, at a place called Tel Arad in Israel, south of Jerusalem, west of the Dead Sea, There was the organic remains of some kind of incense that was burned on these two altars that is described by the researchers as kind of a scaled-down version of Solomon's temple.
00:45:55.000It's dated to the 8th century BC, so in the Judahite period.
00:45:59.000So we could feasibly say the beginnings of the Judeo-Christian period.
00:48:01.000And again, anybody who's worked with psychedelics will know that the setting is at least as important as the substance itself.
00:48:07.000So they're masters of creating this mysterious and powerful and energizing setting in which the psychedelic experience can then unfold.
00:48:18.000It's such a bummer that we know so little about what exactly was going on, but so nice that someone like you has done these deep dives into it, where at least we could pull out whatever we can.
00:48:31.000And it just makes me think, where would we be if people like you weren't doing this?
00:48:53.000And Graham, I always go back to your statement, which I think is such a great quote, that we're a species with amnesia in regard to our archaeology, our history, but also in regard to our use of psychedelics.
00:49:08.000Yeah, well we've just not been given the straight scoop about our past.
00:49:14.000Sometimes it's just purely the way that scholars work.
00:49:18.000That academics work and sometimes I think in the case of Christianity it is actually a kind of conspiracy.
00:49:24.000I think there was a deliberate effort to cover up the role of psychedelics and you could see why priests in the developing Roman Catholic faith who've already pulled on the jackboot of the Roman Empire, you could see why they wouldn't like Their congregations using psychedelics because when you use psychedelics you have a direct experience of the divine and hey you don't need that priest anymore.
00:49:47.000The priest as an intermediary between you and the divine becomes redundant and I think that there was a concerted effort to cover up the role of psychedelics in early Christianity and to present a different narrative which it was purely was the bread and the wine,
00:50:04.000the blood and the And the body of Christ in a symbolic sense and not in an actual sense of a substance that connects us to the divine.
00:50:14.000So the literature that connects the banning of these psychedelic rituals in the 4th century, you're saying, how does it describe it and what was the reaction by the people?
00:50:29.000I mean, at the time, so you have to remember that the Greek mysteries existed for a long, long time.
00:50:35.000We don't know exactly how long, but the excavators, and this began in Eleusis, for example, in 1887. They date it back to at least 1500 BC. So if it survives until the 4th century AD, you're talking almost 2,000 years,
00:50:52.000as long as Christianity itself has been around.
00:50:57.000And there are serious scholars who came along in the 70s to say this, could have prehistoric roots, which is how I started the investigation, by asking how this actually got to the Greeks.
00:51:09.000Because what's interesting about this kukion potion, for example, is that it's not wine-based.
00:51:14.000In that hymn to Demeter that came down to us, she's actually offered wine in this mythical story that takes place.
00:51:20.000She's out looking for her daughter Persephone, who's been abducted and kidnapped to the underworld, and she looks for her for nine days and nights and can't find her, and she...
00:51:54.000For them to have a secret mystery religion that's not written down, remember, the civilization that birthed literature and the concept of the university as we know it, is also very weird.
00:52:03.000So it's like they are retaining this very prehistoric ritual and this very prehistoric beverage, which is beer.
00:52:12.000And as I trace it back further and further, you can see clues of beer being used in funerary and mortuary rituals As far back as 13,000 years.
00:52:23.000And there are some who think that beer actually precedes bread at that moment we call the Agricultural Revolution, where the Upper Petolithic becomes the Neolithic.
00:52:33.000And Graham writes a lot about this, and very beautifully, at Gobekli Tepe, for example.
00:52:37.000So I was able to trace back the potential brewing of religious beer all the way back to Gobekli Tepe.
00:52:44.000And the speculation is that this religious beer had some ergot in it.
00:52:52.000We haven't done much testing for ergot that far back.
00:52:57.000That's why I wanted to write this book, is because the science is relatively new.
00:53:02.000Archaeochemistry, for example, is relatively new.
00:53:04.000Some of the better findings have been coming out over the past 20 years, which is like a baby in the sciences.
00:53:11.000In fact, Pat McGovern at the University of Pennsylvania, who I interviewed for the book, described archaeochemistry at the time, in the late 90s, when he was Producing some incredible finds as like an infant, which would make it like a toddler today.
00:53:25.000And so we're just beginning to put these pieces together.
00:53:28.000So we can't say there was psychedelic beer 13,000 years ago.
00:53:31.000The question right now is was there beer at all?
00:53:35.000And there's very early indications at Gobekli Tepe itself that they were brewing beer.
00:53:40.000And at another site to the southwest in Israel, at Mount Carmel outside Haifa, there's this really interesting place called the Rockefet Cave.
00:53:48.000And it was a burial site with about 30 individuals.
00:53:51.000This is between 11,700 BC and 9,700 BC. A team from Stanford went in there, and they found these boulder mortars.
00:54:01.000In which they found traces of the malting and mashing of grains which they think was for beer.
00:54:10.000Which brings us to the Upper Paleolithic, and then we have the whole mystery of rock and cave art all around the world.
00:54:20.000So Brian is right, we haven't got the analysis that proves that a psychedelic was in that 13,000-year-old beer.
00:54:28.000But what we do have 13,000 years ago, and going back much further, 27, 40, 50,000 years ago, is art.
00:54:37.000And that art really only makes sense as psychedelic art.
00:54:41.000I mean, where else but in a visionary state do you see an entity that is part human and part animal in form, that is part a lion and part a human being?
00:54:54.000It's not something that you see when you're out hunting game.
00:54:56.000But seeing these therianthropes, as they're called, is a very common experience in deeply altered states of consciousness.
00:55:03.000So the art itself speaks to us of artists Who had powerful experiences in deeply altered states.
00:55:11.000What is the conventional speculation about those images, the half-man, half-animal images?
00:55:18.000Increasingly, it is that they document psychedelic states.
00:55:23.000There's a professor at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa, David Lewis Williams, written a book called The Mind in the Cave, who's documented this in great detail, that the only possible Another explanation for this art, which is found all over the world, is not just found in one region or one place,
00:55:41.000is that the artists were shamans, that they were experiencing altered states of consciousness, and when they returned to a normal everyday state of consciousness, they remembered their visions and painted them on cave walls.
00:55:53.000And those visions might well be a lion man or a bison man And that entity had communicated with them just in the way that entities communicate with us today under the influence of DMT or psilocybin.
00:56:06.000Did you have a sense of urgency while you were writing this?
00:56:10.000Did you understand that this is something that very few people who are legitimate scholars are going to really tackle?
00:56:18.000Well, it hadn't been done, and I don't know why nobody was doing this and combining the humanities and the linguistics with the sciences.
00:56:27.000I've been waiting for this book to come along, and no one wrote it.
00:58:15.000So there are two finds that I really went out of my way to put into this book.
00:58:20.000One is trying to find hard evidence of this ergotized beer, and the other is trying to find actual hard evidence of wine that's been spiked.
00:58:30.000And ideally, that would be spiked wine in the context of some kind of Christian ceremony.
00:58:35.000Or some syncretic Greek Christian ceremony in the first century AD. And so I spent years and years trying to get in contact with these folks and reading through the archaeobotany journals.
00:58:46.000And I'll start with the ergot first, since I was really kind of fascinated with ergot.
00:58:52.000And this hypothesis from 1978, because it sits there for now 40 years, and there's no hard data to come by.
00:58:59.000And people often argue about ergot the same way we argue about Amanita and the other candidates, because it doesn't make sense.
00:59:07.000We know it's there, we know it's common, but it doesn't make the most sense as the thing that would have spiked this beer.
00:59:12.000So I spent a long time looking for ergotized beer or any beer that was spiked.
00:59:18.000Now if you go to the top archaeochemists or archaeobotanists in the US, the UK, or Europe, and I did for many years, and I asked them the very simple question, is there any botanical or chemical data of beer having been spiked with psychedelics?
00:59:32.000And the universal answer that would always come back is no.
00:59:36.000And so I'd ask them again, and the answer would be no.
00:59:39.000And so I started to think about the ancient world and what that meant and what ancient Greece meant.
00:59:43.000And so first I went to the site Atalusis to ask the archaeologist there if we could test her vessels.
00:59:49.000And I couldn't believe that nobody had ever asked her if they could submit the vessels to chemical testing.
00:59:56.000And so I flew there, and I talked to her about it, and she said, unfortunately, they've all been treated for conservation purposes.
01:00:32.000And so I said, well, I'm going to get creative, man.
01:00:34.000And so I thought about the ancient Greek world.
01:00:36.000Here's the thing about the ancient Greek world.
01:00:38.000In the wake of Alexander the Great, who was called the Great for a reason, the Greek influence after the fourth, third centuries BC stretched all the way from Iberia, Spain and Portugal to Afghanistan in the East.
01:00:52.000I'm not sure if many folks realize that, but the Greek speaking or the Greek influence part of the world was enormous.
01:00:59.000And so if you're looking for evidence of this kukion, why would you restrict yourself to Athens and Eleusis?
01:01:06.000So I took a step back and I started thinking, where else would there be a Greek presence?
01:01:10.000And I didn't expect to find one, but I landed on Iberia eventually because I started researching Urgot in different languages.
01:03:10.000But there you'll see that at the numbers 76 and 77, when they tested the kernos, which is a very Greek word, by the way, when they tested the kernos, it tested positive for traces of hyouskyamine.
01:03:26.000In these solanaceous plants, these nightshade plants.
01:03:30.000So it's the family of plants that includes very boring things like the tomato or the potato or tobacco, but it has these nightshades like mandrake, again, or henbane.
01:03:42.000And so it's one of those tropane alkaloids that could have been in henbane, for example.
01:03:46.000So here you're talking about a henbane beer, which is really weird.
01:03:50.000The even weirder part is that this is found in a funeral complex.
01:03:55.000Just like you'd find at Gobekli Tepe or the Rockefet Cave in Israel 13,000 years ago, here, after thousands and thousands of years, you're seeing this pre-Roman population using beer spiked with henbane in a death cult.
01:04:10.000And where the researchers say that it was used to either facilitate the deceased's travel to the other world, or maybe the people who were there ushering the deceased into the other world.
01:05:19.000That's what they thought the Kernos was at Eleusis, for example, and that's what I wanted to test.
01:05:24.000With the archaeologist there who said no.
01:05:26.000And so now we're finding these vessels in Spain where they're not supposed to be.
01:05:30.000And I can say, as a classicist or a one-time wannabe classicist, that the first thing you think of when you think about the ancient Greeks is not Spain.
01:05:38.000And all of a sudden, I'm coming across this idea of spiked beer in Spain.
01:05:43.000And it's just not supposed to be there.
01:05:48.000Can you go back to that original image, Jamie?
01:05:51.000Yeah, of the cup with the small cup next to it.
01:05:55.000What's the conventional description of what this is and why it's shaped this way?
01:06:01.000I mean, the Spanish archaeologists, they also call this a kernos.
01:06:05.000I mean, it's the extent of the Greek influence at that particular site.
01:06:09.000This is the Pintia archaeological site.
01:06:11.000The extent of the relationship and the network is a little unclear, at least to me.
01:06:16.000It's unclear how strong the Greek presence was there.
01:06:19.000But at the time, by the second century BC, Because the Greeks were already in these other port cities basically, it's not inconceivable that some kind of trade was happening and these vessels would have made their way inland.
01:06:32.000Do they have a description as to why there's a small cup connected to the larger cup though?
01:06:37.000It would be the same as any Greek archaeologist has, too.
01:06:41.000We don't know why this was associated with the mysteries.
01:06:46.000It really does logically make sense that it would be some sort of a portion, because it's very small.
01:06:51.000Obviously, you don't want to have too much of that shit.
01:06:54.000It really does make complete sense, actually, that that's what it is, that you take one portion of this and mix it with ten portions of that, and then you're going to have an interesting journey.
01:07:04.000I can't think of another explanation off the top of my head.
01:07:07.000Obviously, I'm not qualified to speculate, but when I'm looking at this, I'm thinking, oh, that completely fits.
01:07:13.000But you're on the right track, because that's where it led me to, was portion control.
01:07:44.000And it's in Catalonia, in northeast Spain, close to the border of With France.
01:07:49.000And to be totally honest, I'd never heard of Emporion, and I'm not sure if many classicists have, but it was a bustling import-export business of the ancient Greeks, founded by the Phocaeans, who came from Ionia, which is today modern-day Turkey.
01:09:24.000And there's this farm that the archaeologists describe as a Greek farm a bit further inland.
01:09:30.000Jamie, if we go back to the same file there, we can just click through a bunch of the images and the kinds of things that they found there.
01:11:06.000Tryptolomus is kind of the missionary of the mysteries.
01:11:09.000So after Demeter establishes her temple in Eleusis, they send this guy to go scouring the earth to carry the knowledge of the grain and farming across Europe.
01:11:24.000And if you go to the next one, Jamie...
01:11:52.000So if Tryptolemus tells you anything, it tells you that the mysteries went west, when they're not supposed to, by the way.
01:11:58.000Graham alluded earlier to this incident that happened in Athens in 414 BC. To celebrate the mysteries outside of Eleusis is a sacrilege, a total sacrilege.
01:12:08.000It was called the profanation of the mysteries.
01:12:11.000And one of Socrates' star disciples, this guy Alcibiades, was caught indulging in the mystery ceremony at home instead of at the temple, and he became the Ed Snowden of the ancient world.
01:13:22.000Yeah, and that's pretty recently, right?
01:13:25.000Like, within the last couple of decades, it's available all over the world.
01:13:28.000Spread rapidly within the last couple of decades, and I think Brian is suggesting that a similar sort of thing was happening in the ancient world with a different substance.
01:13:36.000The guy's name's so right on the nose, too.
01:15:41.000In addition to Triptolemus and the heads of Demeter and Persephone, Enrique Tapons finds this gem, which is a 250-square-foot ritual sanctuary that she calls, in Spanish, a capilla domestica, which is a household shrine.
01:15:58.000And she believes it's a household shrine that is specifically dedicated to reenacting the mysteries of Demeter and Persephone, Wow.
01:16:38.000And what they're doing on that, aside from burning incense all around, is they're sacrificing dogs.
01:16:43.000They found the remains of three female dogs.
01:16:46.000There's only one goddess in Greece associated with that, and that's Hecate, who is the mother of the witch Circe and the patroness of all witches.
01:16:54.000And they're sacrificing dogs to her because she's known as the kunos fages in Greek, which is the dog eater.
01:17:09.000The other things you find in that room, aside from the Greek altar and the Greek goddess to whom dogs are being sacrificed in an underworld journey where the living and dead are communing, is a Greek hearth.
01:17:20.000And Enriqueta uses the Greek word eschara for that.
01:19:04.000And so, in the mid-1990s, after it was excavated, this woman, Enriqueta, the archaeologist, for some reason, we don't know why, she got in touch with a young archaeobotanist, who I mentioned before, Jordi.
01:19:15.000And they subjected this chalice to analysis.
01:21:16.000Instead of turning around after he was yelled at for being the drug guy, if you look him up and his CV, it's all he does is write about the potential use of drugs in the ancient world.
01:21:38.000As a matter of fact, when I mentioned that letter from Albert Hoffman to Gordon Wasson in 1976, when he self-dosed on the Ergonavine, he sent some, in the letter it says, he sent some in the mail to Gordon Wasson, who politely declined and made Ruck do it instead.
01:21:57.000So for Ruck, what was it like for you to be able to show this to Ruck, to give him hard evidence, to show him these cups, to tell him about the tests that were done, the fact that they discovered ergot, the fact that they know these vessels were holding beer.
01:22:13.000I mean, this vindication to be there physically while this vindication emerges.
01:23:11.000What you've discovered and if you look at the history of these people getting together and having these rituals and what we know about psychedelics in particular, LSD, and what Albert Hoffman has shown and any people who've experienced LSD know.
01:24:21.000The publication date is the 29th of September, and that's also the same publication date as the paperback of my lost civilization book, America Before.
01:24:35.000My contribution to it is the foreword, and I'm grateful to Brian for asking me to do that.
01:24:42.000I think Brian has done really important work, and I think the next step now is to demystify this field and get more science at work on this subject instead of just closing our eyes and closing our minds to these extraordinary possibilities that we've been radically misled about our own past.
01:24:59.000Yeah, and I think thanks to the great work of Rick Doblin and Dr. Rick Strassman and yourself and so many other people that have contributed to this, it's now something that people are allowed to speculate about.
01:25:13.000It's now something that people are allowed to...
01:26:06.000But I do recognize that it's entirely...
01:26:09.000McKenna speculated very much that we've lost our ability to understand how to prepare it, when to prepare it, when to pick it, and that it's seasonal.
01:26:24.000We're ignorant about how to use these things.
01:26:26.000Our society, I speak of a species with amnesia.
01:26:29.000We've forgotten the old techniques and the old ways of doing things.
01:26:34.000There's been a concerted effort in the modern world to demonize these substances and to cut them out of our lives and to associate them with irrational behavior and craziness and so on and so forth.
01:26:45.000And to move forward in this field I hate to use the word, but it needs to be made more respectable because it's the key to understanding so much about ourselves that has been obscure and mysterious until now.
01:26:59.000It's just, for a person who's experienced it, it's so strange, the contrast between the experience itself and the public's perception of it.
01:27:07.000Particularly the average person who has not experienced psychedelics, who looks at it like this frivolous, ridiculous thing.
01:27:15.000Like, why would you engage in such a thing?
01:27:53.000We're talking when I had this conversation with him more than a decade ago, probably 15 years ago.
01:27:58.000So when you have these experiences and you run into the conventional perception of these, you understand that these people, almost like what happened with Ruck and what happened with many other scholars,
01:28:37.000Our society prides itself on the alert problem-solving state of consciousness.
01:28:43.000And the alert problem-solving state of consciousness does have an important role to play.
01:28:47.000But part of the madness of our society, why it's become so suicidally dangerous, is because the alert problem-solving state of We're good to go.
01:29:41.000And this is what needs to be unpicked.
01:29:43.000We're in the middle of a crisis in this country in regards to police violence and police brutality, and a big part of that is the war on drugs.
01:30:58.000These kind of conversations that we're having right now, it's responsible in a big way for shifting the way people perceive these things.
01:31:07.000For the longest time, the only way we've been explained to, the only way these subjects have been explained to us has been In demeaning terms.
01:31:16.000And that these are bad experiences and you're going to wreck your life.
01:32:08.000And it should not be controlled by the state and by government.
01:32:12.000What's happening here is that we're literally being treated like children as adults.
01:32:16.000And it's a most unfortunate aspect of our society.
01:32:19.000And the way I I see government seeking to use the current crisis to add to its power, to dominate people's lives, to even enter into their homes, to encourage neighbors to snoop on one another.
01:32:29.000It's a very insidious trend that we're in, and the war on drugs has been a big part of that trend for a long time.
01:32:34.000But you're right, Joe, the battleship is turning around, and it's turning around.
01:32:48.000And the thing about the psychedelic argument, too, it falls apart, the idea of criminalizing it, because it lacks all of the rationalizations that you can get with crystal meth and cocaine and death and We're good to go.
01:33:39.000Now, when you talk to Ruck about Christianity and about the use of the Amanita muscaria mushroom, does he echo the statements of John Marco Allegro?
01:33:50.000Does he buy into that, or does he have a parallel perspective on it?
01:35:03.000So, in an obscure footnote from 1978, Ruck talks about a Greek priestess's spiking wine.
01:35:11.000And he makes a reference to an old book from the early 20th century by a German scholar called Friedkenhaus.
01:35:17.000And Friedkenhaus talked about this vase that was apparently in the Louvre that nobody had ever seen.
01:35:23.000And I took it upon myself to try and find that vase.
01:35:26.000And so at the very top, Jamie, if you click on the drawing...
01:35:30.000This is a line drawing by Frickenhaus himself of what he apparently saw in the Louvre at some point in the early 20th century and not many people have seen since.
01:35:41.000So this is his illustration of what he recalls being on the...
01:36:09.000So I sent an email to the curator at the Louvre, Alexandra Cartiano, and I said, I'd like to take a look at this and I'd like to bring my friend along.
01:36:18.000And my friend is Father Francis Tissot, Roman Catholic priest, who happens to be an expert botanist and herbalist.
01:36:26.000So I called up Father Francis from his laboratory in the rustic parts of Italy, and I said, Father Francis, since you're trained at Columbia and Cornell and Harvard Divinity School, and you know everything about plants, will you come help identify this for me?
01:36:41.000So we met at the Louvre, and we meet Alexandra, and Alexandra says, you know, this vase, I can find it for you, but it's not on exhibition.
01:37:01.000And she takes us up to the second floor, past the statue of the Winged Victory of Samothrace, and she ushers us into this completely empty stock room filled with thousands and thousands of Greek wine vessels.
01:37:16.000And there, sitting on a table, on the next picture, Jamie, are what she calls G408 and G409, And I believe this is one of the first color photographs taken of them.
01:42:22.000So their whole thing was just adding things to alcohol, adding things to wine, adding things to beer.
01:42:29.000In fact, it would be abnormal not to add something to wine.
01:42:35.000So wine is routinely described in the ancient Greek as unusually intoxicating, seriously mind-altering, occasionally hallucinogenic, and potentially lethal.
01:43:39.000You know, not all of them resulted in these fantastic visions.
01:43:42.000When he talked about your swollen genitals, it's because he was trying to offer a recipe for that.
01:43:46.000And that goes back hundreds and hundreds of years into the Greek tradition.
01:43:50.000But the interesting part of it is that if you go all the way back to Homer, 8th, 7th century BC, you do find this other kind of wine being mixed.
01:44:00.000Wine for a ritualistic purpose, like Circe, the famous witch, the daughter of Hecate, who we found in Spain.
01:44:07.000So Circe is routinely, again, mixing, Homer calls it farmaca lugra, evil drugs, into the wine.
01:44:15.000You could also mix healing drugs into the wine, but there was essentially a whole pharmacopoeia available to them.
01:44:44.000It's been statuary like the Borghese vase.
01:44:47.000The whole point I wrote this book is, again, to apply 21st century science to it.
01:44:51.000So in my conversations with Pat McGovern and Andrew Coe at MIT, I started to find the initial clues for actual wine that was actually spiked, not just in the abstract.
01:45:05.000So Jamie, if you open this up real quick to graveyard wine, which is how I refer to it.
01:45:13.000So if you look at graveyard wine, go to the number scorpion wine right there.
01:45:20.000So I was looking for evidence of wine actually being spiked in antiquity.
01:46:06.000McGovern thinks this was Artemisia seberi, which is a slightly different species.
01:46:11.000But when you look at it from afar, there's something more than just table wine there.
01:46:17.000These were intentionally spiking the wine for a reason.
01:46:22.000And they're deposited as grave goods for a reason.
01:46:25.000And the reason would seem to be for ushering the pre-Pharaoh into the afterlife.
01:46:32.000They were there with him to aid the journey, and we're not going to talk about the underworld journey in Egypt with Graham Hancock without asking Graham Hancock what he thinks about ancient Egyptian funerary practice.
01:46:43.000Well, there's no doubt that the ancient Egyptians were very focused on death, not in a negative way.
01:46:51.000They saw this life as our opportunity to prepare For the adventure and the challenge of death, that we had whatever years we got, 70, 90, 20, however many years we got, that was our opportunity to prepare for that great challenge of the journey that follows death.
01:47:12.000And there's no doubt in my mind that the ancient Egyptians did make use of psychedelic substances.
01:47:20.000The blue water lily from ancient Egypt being an example, jars of that Again, diluted in wine were found in the tomb of Tutankhamun.
01:47:36.000And when you look at ancient Egyptian art, the entities which are very often part animal, part human in form, and which are teachers of mankind, you find yourself again in that same realm that People using psychedelics today find themselves in,
01:47:55.000DMT in particular, encountering entities that speak to us, that teach us, and that often take the form of part animal, part human, berianthropes.
01:48:06.000It's so interesting to see the actual evidence of this use.
01:48:36.000Sooner or later, that moment in our life is gonna come where life ends.
01:48:40.000And to me, that is an incredibly important moment.
01:48:44.000And the ancient Egyptians, by devoting their culture to figuring out how we live best in order to cross that bridge, to transit into that other realm, were being very practical and very profound in their inquiries.
01:49:00.000It wasn't that they were afraid of death.
01:49:02.000They wanted to ready themselves for the journey that follows death and they made it very clear that everything we do in this life, everything counts.
01:49:23.000And in a way, psychedelics are a preparation for that because psychedelics also confront us with absolute truth.
01:49:29.000And that's why psychedelics can often be very uncomfortable because we see the truth about ourselves, but we're being given an opportunity To change ourselves for the better and to be more nurturing and more positive and more useful people.
01:49:41.000And as a result, the ancient Egyptians would say to confront a better death.
01:49:46.000What I was getting at was what is their reaction to the psychedelically spiked wine?
01:49:52.000Because I know you in particular… Egyptologists don't want anything to do with psychedelics.
01:49:57.000They don't want anything to do with psychedelics.
01:50:04.000And just as there are many other aspects of ancient Egyptian culture that the Egyptologists don't want to go into, it often seems to me that they're in the process of trying to carve or shape ancient Egypt to fit into modern ideology.
01:50:18.000Well, it's also a great pity that, I mean, particularly with your work and the work that you've done with Dr. Robert Schock, describing some indications on some of the ancient structures that there was heavy erosion that was due to rainfall,
01:50:36.000thousands of years of rainfall, which would have predated The conventional idea of when these things are constructed, the way that they resisted that, instead of looking at it like this fascinating new evidence that will illuminate this field and now we have some new perspective on this,
01:50:52.000they rejected it so horrifically and they were mocking.
01:51:08.000There's a film in the one that there was the documentary.
01:51:12.000Yes, the Charlton Heston narrated the documentary.
01:51:17.000Yes, I think you may be speaking about Ken Fetter, but really I could cite a dozen Egyptologists who feel this way.
01:51:24.000The notion that the Great Sphinx is 12,500 years old, which is a notion based on the erosion patterns on the body of the Sphinx, is utterly unacceptable to Egyptologists.
01:51:46.000There's a bit of a precursor in the pre-dynastic period, a thousand or so years building up to ancient Egypt.
01:51:51.000And then you have ancient Egyptian civilization and gradually it merges with the Greeks and with other cultures and spreads out around the world.
01:51:58.000The notion that there is a background to ancient Egyptian civilization that goes back into the Ice Age is a notion that no Egyptologist is I think we're good to go.
01:52:29.000Whether it comes from astronomy, whether it comes from geometry, whether it comes from geology, whether it comes from the statements of the ancient Egyptians themselves about their origins and their past, we shouldn't be ignoring this.
01:52:44.000Rather than reacting with fury to the notion of a much more ancient Sphinx, it would have been nice to have seen the Egyptological profession react with interest to it and begin to explore it and consider what it might mean because the geology is irrefutable.
01:53:01.000The erosion, was it on the body of the Sphinx or was it on the walls of the temple where the Sphinx was carved out of?
01:53:07.000Well, where you can see it today is...
01:53:09.000So the Sphinx is carved out of solid bedrock.
01:53:12.000It's carved out of the bedrock of the Giza Plateau.
01:53:15.000And in order to do that, an enormous trench was created around the body of the Sphinx.
01:53:20.000And in fact, the blocks that were excavated from that trench were then moved over and used to build what are called the Valley Temple and the Sphinx Temple, where in some cases you find blocks of limestone that weigh close to 200 tons.
01:53:37.000And what has happened since then is that the body of the Sphinx has been subjected We're good to go.
01:53:59.000And there are restoration blocks on the body of the Sphinx that date back four and a half thousand years.
01:54:06.000And that process of restoring and renovating the Sphinx has gone on down the ages.
01:54:14.000The pores of the Sphinx as we see them today are covered entirely with modern restoration blocks.
01:54:20.000We don't see the bedrock underneath it, but where we do see the original bedrock is in the walls of that trench that was carved out to create the The body of the Sphinx in the first place, because nobody's been restoring those.
01:54:31.000And it's in those that you see this characteristic undulating pattern that speaks of exposure to a very long period of heavy, heavy rainfall.
01:54:40.000And the last time you have that heavy rainfall in Egypt is the period that geologists call the Younger Dryas, roughly between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago.
01:54:51.000So the body of the Sphinx The trench out of which it is carved is saying, I am 12,000 years old.
01:54:57.000And the only argument against that really is the head of the Sphinx being the typical head of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh with the Nemes headdress.
01:55:06.000But of course, the head of the Sphinx was originally a lion, just as the body of the Sphinx is a lion.
01:55:12.000And the head of the Sphinx was re-carved in dynastic times to give it this human form.
01:55:18.000The reaction to that notion and this hard geological data that Robert Schock provided was just the most disturbing part of it.
01:55:27.000Let's pay tribute to John Anthony West.
01:55:29.000Because it was John Anthony West who originally had that brilliant insight.
01:55:35.000That what we're looking at in the case of the Sphinx is water weathering.
01:55:41.000And he rightly pays tributes to Schwaller de Lubix, an earlier scholar who was the first to notice this.
01:55:47.000And John then brought Robert Schock to Egypt as a professional geologist.
01:55:52.000Robert is professor of geology at the University of Boston and brought him there.
01:55:57.000And Robert Schock indeed concluded that we are looking at water weathering on the body of the Sphinx.
01:56:07.0007,000 or 8,000 years old, but much more recently he's also settled on the date of roughly 12,000 years old as the last time that you would get that sort of heavy rainfall in Egypt that could have created that characteristic weathering.
01:56:20.000And I would encourage anybody who's interested in this to please check out John Anthony West's Magical Egypt series because it's amazing.
01:56:52.000You know, just planting intellectual bombs in the accepted wisdom of the modern world and making us all think again.
01:57:00.000So I think when it comes to the age of the Sphinx, it's really important to realize the role that John Anthony West played, and I'm so glad that you had him on your show.
01:57:11.000He was a dear friend of mine, and I was with him just a month before his death, and he went into that journey of death with enormous courage and absolute certainty.
01:57:21.000Now, when these vessels were tested and these psychedelic compounds were detected, what was the reaction?
01:57:52.000So after those 700 jars at Abydos, after further analysis, they determined that the plants and herbs actually originated in the Holy Land.
01:58:02.000In the Southern Levin, they weren't native to Egypt.
01:58:04.000They had been brought there or they were shipped there by the folks in the Holy Land, which gets more interesting because the next big find was the world's oldest wine cellar, which was published in 2014. It came from Tel Cabri, which is also in Galilee.
01:58:18.000Remember, this is going to be the same Galilee that Jesus comes on the scene and Christianity bursts across the planet.
01:58:23.000So at Tel Cabri in 2014, they found another stash of wine Hmm.
02:03:39.000And at the level of phenomena, there are extremely close similarities between the entities that we call aliens today.
02:03:49.000The entities that were called fairies or elves in the Middle Ages, and the entities that shamans refer to as spirits.
02:03:55.000And I would say actually what we're dealing with is the same experience in all three cases, but viewed through different cultural lenses and construed in different ways.
02:04:07.000And the only thing that really explains these kinds of experiences, where any one of us can actually share that experience and have that experience, It's psychedelics.
02:04:17.000Powerful psychedelics like DMT will plunge us into that realm of experience and we will meet entities and many people today do construe those entities as aliens because that's how our culture is dealing with the other today.
02:04:29.000Have you ever experienced anything that looked like what the classic iconic alien is?
02:04:39.000In one of my early ayahuasca experiences in the Amazon, I saw flying, my eyes were closed, but I saw flying saucers.
02:04:51.000And then I saw this classic sort of quote-unquote grey with that high domed forehead and narrow pointed chin and these really grim eyes looking down on me.
02:05:03.000I think I may have mentioned this on your show before, but what I really regret doing, I felt I was going to be taken.
02:05:36.000And we have to consider the possibility that these are not simply concoctions of our brains, that the brain is a much more complicated mechanism than we think it is, and that In certain circumstances, when brain chemistry is altered in the right way,
02:05:51.000we gain access to other levels of reality that are normally closed off to our senses.
02:05:57.000That is personally my view that what's happening with psychedelics.
02:06:03.000But the sense that we are entering a seamlessly convincing parallel world, that it is inhabited by intelligent beings, and that they have things to say to us.
02:06:35.000My feelings have always been when I do psychedelics that I've tuned into a frequency that's unavailable to me during regular states of consciousness.
02:06:44.000It seems like I entered into a doorway and I'm in a new place and there's an urgency to it because I know that I'm not going to be able to stay here for very long.
02:06:53.000And they seem to know that and they seem to communicate with you in a very urgent way.
02:07:01.000And one of the things that I've talked about, I've talked about this experience before, one of the most profound ones, I met jesters who were giving me the finger.
02:07:10.000And they seem to be explaining to me that I take myself too seriously.
02:07:15.000It felt like, and then when I went, oh, okay, they went, yes.
02:07:31.000That's why the subtitle of my book, Supernatural, back in 2006 was Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind.
02:07:38.000And I think that's what's going on here.
02:07:40.000I think that the psychedelics allow us to enter a realm where we encounter teachers who can help us to be better people and perhaps to be a better civilization.
02:07:50.000Well, that was one of the more interesting things about, I believe it was University of Jerusalem, their take on what Moses in the burning bush was, that very likely the burning bush was the acacia tree, which is very rich in dimethyltryptamine.
02:08:42.000Yeah, in what other state of consciousness do you meet intelligent plants that communicate with you?
02:08:49.000It's very hard to imagine any other state of consciousness apart from the psychedelic state.
02:08:54.000And what you're citing is the work of Benny Shannon, who is a professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and he has drunk ayahuasca himself at least 700 times.
02:09:11.000Any scholar who goes into this area and really does it properly faces skepticism and being shoved off to the side by his or her colleagues.
02:09:24.000But what we need is more scientists doing this work.
02:09:35.000It all falls into place if you look at it under that description, and I'm glad he has the courage to step up and actually put this description out there.
02:09:43.000I remember someone sent it to me in an email, and I was like, aha!
02:11:42.000But sometimes she appears in the form of a human woman, sometimes in the form of a serpent.
02:11:49.000And then, you know, we get into the whole issue of the Garden of Eden and the story of the Garden of Eden and the role that the serpent plays in that story.
02:11:56.000And the role that the serpent plays in that story is pointing out to Adam and Eve that God has basically lied to them.
02:12:04.000And he offers Adam and Eve the forbidden fruit.
02:12:08.000Alex Gray, my friend, the visionary artist Alex Gray, calls it the first psychedelic slapdown.
02:12:46.000Again, our psychedelic heritage has been hidden from us.
02:12:50.000And that is why I value Brian's book, The Immortality Key, so much because it's done the solid scientific groundwork to begin to give academic scientists permission To investigate this field.
02:13:05.000We need much more work done in this field than has been done already.
02:13:12.000Man, how good does it feel to have put this down to paper and just set it?
02:13:18.000Or do you feel like now that it's out there, you have a lot of explaining to do?
02:13:24.000I think there's lots of explaining to do.
02:13:26.000It's funny though, and we haven't gotten into too much of the Christian material yet, but I went through the Vatican quite a bit when I was writing this, with different departments at the Vatican.
02:13:36.000The Vatican Secret Archives and the Archive of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Vatican Museums and all the catacombs in Rome.
02:13:45.000And I went through there spelunking with Father Francis.
02:13:48.000And to be totally honest, the Vatican couldn't have been nicer or more accommodating to me.
02:13:53.000And while some of this is controversial, they've been very supportive to date.
02:13:58.000And I say that as someone who went to 13 years of Catholic school.
02:14:23.000As pagans and wake up in 34 AD as Christians.
02:14:26.000It was a process, an intercultural process, that took hundreds of years, which I call Paleo-Christianity, which I think for anyone interested in the faith is kind of the most interesting part.
02:14:36.000These are the earliest and most authentic Christians, but they were living in a world where the blood of goats and all this spiked wine was the norm.
02:14:45.000And as a matter of fact, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote about this, of all people.
02:14:50.000Yeah, this is called the Pagan Continuity Hypothesis.
02:14:53.000The idea that Christianity wasn't born in a vacuum.
02:14:56.000In 1950, Dr. King wrote a paper called The Influence of the Mystery Religions on Christianity.
02:16:10.000One of the weirder ones, when Jack Harrow was alive, he was working on...
02:16:14.000Jack Harrow was a guy who was a Goldwater Republican and became a cannabis advocate when he...
02:16:21.000He got divorced and met a girlfriend, and he thought pot was for losers, but he just wanted to get high with this cute girl, and smoked a little pot.
02:16:30.000He's like, where has this been all my life?
02:16:32.000And then he became a cannabis advocate, and I was very fortunate to meet him before he died, and he was showing me some stuff that he was working on.
02:16:38.000But one of the things that he was working on after he wrote that book, The Emperor Wears No Clothes, but...
02:16:43.000Then he was writing a book about mushrooms in Christianity and there was these ancient images of these naked people dancing in ecstasy and they were surrounded by this translucent mushroom image.
02:16:58.000It was really fascinating and there was a lot of these images and images that were the shape of doors that were carved out in the form of a mushroom.
02:17:08.000It only makes sense if you know what psychedelic mushrooms do when you take them.
02:17:15.000You have these incredible experiences, and the idea that a religion would emerge out of these experiences is not unusual at all.
02:18:05.000And it goes across all the Greek-influenced areas, including Magna Graecia, which is Great Greece, which is Southern Italy, which happens to be the same place where the Catholic Church put down its roots 2,000 years ago.
02:18:18.000The reason for that was because the early church was all Greek, and these were people who were steeped in the traditions of their ancestors.
02:18:25.000I mean, imagine abandoning the religion of your grandparents for this new wine god from one day to the next.
02:18:33.000The thesis of the book is that the Eucharist for some communities, at some point in time, at some area in this Greek-speaking part of the world, would have availed themselves of the kind of sacraments that were available to the Greeks for generations and generations.
02:18:49.000And so we're still looking for the smoking gun of that ancient Greek spiked wine.
02:19:20.000I think you want to find it in Greece to tie it to Dionysus.
02:19:23.000You want to find it in Italy to tie it to the Christians, because that's really the area where the church, again, puts down roots and begins to grow up in that period of paleo-Christianity.
02:19:32.000And so, just like I was looking for that ergotized beer, I was looking for evidence of where you could properly call it psychedelic wine may have popped up.
02:19:42.000And there is one article in one archaeobotany journal from 20 years ago that talks about spiked wine.
02:19:48.000Which was news to me, too, because every single time I go to the Pat McGoverns and Andrew Coes and all the top archaeobotanists in Europe, the answer you get back, just like the answer to the question, where is the spiked beer?
02:20:02.000And it's another case of this evidence just either being ignored or underreported.
02:20:09.000But there was a young, at the time, archaeobotanist, Marina Ceraldi, Who's from Naples and got her PhD in archaeology in the UK and she's on site in Pompeii testing these vessels.
02:20:21.000We have a lot of evidence from Pompeii, by the way.
02:20:23.000In fact, a lot of what we know about the ancient world comes from Pompeii and Herculaneum because of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. It explodes and destroys everything, but it also preserves everything.
02:20:35.000Under like 17 feet of volcanic ash we have all these clues about the Dionysian mysteries and in addition to that there was this farmhouse in Scafati just to the east of Pompeii where there were seven dolia which is like a giant storage vessel And these dolia are found in a chela vinaria,
02:20:55.000like a wine cellar, in a farm that also came complete with a torcularium, like a wine press, and a threshing floor.
02:21:03.000So something about wine was happening in this place.
02:22:46.000And so this potion of many different toxic herbs and plants becomes known eventually in the Roman Empire as a Mithridatium, after Mithridates.
02:22:55.000Now, when the Romans finally get to him and try and kill him, he tries to poison himself, and it doesn't work because he's immune.
02:23:02.000So one of his soldiers has to stab him to death.
02:23:08.000So he's micro dosing himself in preparation for someone else poisoning him.
02:24:46.000And the catacombs, which is why I spent so much time going through the catacombs looking for evidence of these essentially funerary rituals where people were celebrating with the dead using the sacramental wine in the very earliest versions of the Mass.
02:25:01.000And is there any scripture, any texts that are describing what they were doing when they were going through these rituals, these funeral rituals?
02:27:05.000It really is a special setting for this experience.
02:27:10.000But I think it would be interesting, Brian.
02:27:12.000Having written this as a scientific and an academic and a research exercise to then go on to see what your personal experience is and how that resonates with what you've learned as a scientific investigator.
02:27:25.000Yeah, I mean, even if you wanted to do it in a clinical setting, like Rick Strassman did when he had these FDA-approved studies for DMT, the spirit molecule, just anything.
02:27:36.000Just anything where you could tap into that world, because I guarantee you, you're going to come back eyes wide like those ladies in that drawing.
02:27:44.000And you're going to be like, oh, okay.
02:27:46.000It's fascinating to me when you talk to someone who is a psychedelic virgin, because you almost feel jealous.
02:28:44.000My dream is to see this on the screen.
02:28:49.000I've been talking to a couple of development teams, a couple of production companies.
02:28:54.000One is Anonymous Content in LA and Six West Media in New York.
02:28:58.000Together we're developing a documentary series.
02:29:01.000That adapts this, everything we've talked about for like a first season, but there's really multiple seasons here because there's so much evidence that's never been looked at.
02:29:10.000And so it's taking the very best of the archaeochemistry and the very best of the on-in-the-field archaeology, combining all the linguistic evidence and the symbology and iconography and putting it together to find, once and for all, the smoking gun for the use of a psychedelic Eucharist in antiquity.
02:29:26.000So do you have a place where you're bringing this?
02:29:29.000We are just about to pitch this, as a matter of fact.
02:29:55.000I never thought about psychedelics until I read Supernatural.
02:29:59.000A lot of weird stuff was happening in my life in 2007, 2008. After I read those initial studies that came out of Hopkins and NYU, of course I wanted to try psilocybin.
02:30:10.000And then the mystery just got deeper and deeper, and I realized there was...
02:30:32.000To try and put all these pieces together.
02:30:35.000And I will say that, you know, it covers a lot of ground, but you don't need to know anything about history or archaeology, let alone archaeobotany or archaeochemistry or psychopharmacology or biblical studies or paleoanthropology to appreciate this,
02:30:50.000because I kind of take it one step at a time from the very beginning and show you every piece of evidence that, I mean, as a virgin, did convince me that this is at least worth a sober look from the scientific community.
02:31:03.000Next time I talk to you, we're promoting this television show, and you can tell me about your psychedelic experience that you had with Graham.
02:31:26.000Can I just mention, we've not talked about my book, but this is the hardback of America Before, which we talked about the last time I was on your show.
02:31:37.000And America Before has been in hardback for the past 18 months, but it's coming out in paperback 29th of September 2020 at a much reduced price.
02:31:48.000And I hope that people who've not been able to access the hardback will be able to have a look at it in the...
02:32:05.000And Randall Carson was present and that guy, Mark Defant, came in by telephone.
02:32:11.000And I want to pay tribute to Michael Shermer.
02:32:13.000You may have noticed this, Joe, that Michael put out a tweet saying that he was going to have to reconsider his – essentially, I'm paraphrasing – he was going to have to reconsider his prior attitude to my work in the light of new evidence about the Younger Dryas impact catastrophe that,
02:32:31.000in my view, 12,000 years ago or so lost us a whole civilization.
02:32:37.000It takes a lot to admit that one may have been wrong and I'm glad that Michael had the courage to put that tweet out there.
02:32:46.000Kudos to him and kudos to you and to Randall Carlson as well because those two conversations that we had about that are absolutely some of my favorite conversations of all time.
02:32:57.000It's obvious that something happened and all the pieces much like this in this conversation about spiked wine and drugs.
02:33:10.000And that we are a species with amnesia and that we need to rediscover our past.
02:33:16.000And there's a curious resonance with the way that things are in the modern world, just as I have come to mistrust history, to mistrust the history that is taught to us in schools and universities, no longer to accept at face value the opinions of so-called We're good to go.
02:33:52.000Regaining sovereignty over ourselves in a modern world that is struggling very hard to turn us all into children and rest all responsibility in government.