#346 — The Best Kept Secret In History？
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Summary
In this episode of the Making Sense Podcast, I speak with Brian Murarescu, a practicing lawyer and the author of a fascinating book, The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion With No Name. In our conversation, we discuss the mysteries of Eleusis, the pagan continuity hypothesis, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Gnostic Gospels, as well as the evidence for the use of psychedelics in ancient rites, and why Brian hasn t tried psychedelics himself. We also discuss the need for something like a modern mysteries of Eglosis, and other topics that is rarely thought about in history. And now I bring you a fascinating piece of history: Brian's story of how he became interested in psychedelics, and how he ended up writing a book about it, and what it could mean for the future of the religion with no name. This episode is made possible by the support of our listeners, who are making possible by becoming a supporter of the podcast. Please consider becoming one of our sponsors, and help support what we're doing here. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore, therefore, we're made possible entirely through the support from our listeners. Thanks for being a supporter, and we're making possible all kinds of amazing things! Sam Harris and the team at The Making Sense Project. Make sure to subscribe to the podcast and become a patron of Making Sense by becoming one! . to get exclusive ad-free, fact checking and access to all the latest episodes of the making sense podcast. To find out there, go to Making Sense. and learn more about what we re doing here and more! to find out more about the things you can do to help support the podcast! and more like it. to become a supporter! - Sam Harris and to learn about the podcast and other awesome stuff like that in this episode: to help spread the word out there! Thanks, Sam Harris, making sense and much more. - making sense? by - and more on this episode, coming soon, coming out in the future, coming to you, coming back to you soon! by making sense, coming more of it with more of your own podcast, coming at you in the coming out more of that and so much more ... Thanks to you. --
Transcript
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Brian holds a degree in Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit from Brown University, as well as a degree
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He is a practicing lawyer and the author of a fascinating book titled The Immortality Key,
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The Secret History of the Religion with No Name.
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And that's the topic of our conversation today.
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We talk about the mystery religions of the ancient world and the possible psychedelic roots
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We discuss the mysteries of Eleusis, the pagan continuity hypothesis, the cult of Dionysus,
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the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Gnostic Gospels, Christianity as a cult of human sacrifice, the evidence for the
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use of psychedelics and ancient rites, the chemical analysis of ancient wine and beer, why Brian hasn't
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tried psychedelics himself, the need for something like a modern mysteries of Eleusis, and other
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Anyway, fascinating piece of history here that is rarely thought about.
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Yes, you've written this fascinating book, which I hear rumors is going to be a fascinating
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This is The Immortality Key, The Secret History of the Religion with No Name.
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I'm not sure how much I can say about it, but there is an exceptional team that came together
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Probably a couple of years, although I'm sure I'm wrong about that.
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Or do you know, are you going to be the host of that?
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For better or worse, I guess I'm a protagonist.
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I'll be leading you down the blind alleyways of history.
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Well, that will be different than writing the book, no doubt.
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Although this book, unlike most other books, really is a bit of a travelogue.
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I mean, you went all over the place to write this thing, and it's a literary or historical
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Give us a quick snapshot of your background, though.
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You have this interesting bio that doesn't immediately suggest plumbing the depths of
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Where do you come from, and how did you get into this?
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Yeah, I guess I'll break the ice with the obvious, is that I've actually never experimented
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with psychedelics, which always surprises people.
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And I guess my journey began as a teenager learning Latin and Greek, of all things.
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I was forced to learn these dead languages at the hands of the Jesuits when I was a teenager.
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I went to an all-boys prep school in Philadelphia, where the last thing I thought I'd be good
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But it turns out, that came much easier than mathematics.
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And so from there, I was very fortunate to get a scholarship to Brown University, where
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I doubled down on dead languages and studied Sanskrit and later classical Arabic.
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And after eight years of linguistic studies, did a 180 and went off to law school because
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So I sold out to Wall Street, and I worked in New York for a few years, and then later
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moved down to DC, where I continued practicing international law for the better part of 15
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years, until I figured there was a story here worth writing that had really consumed my
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Because, well, I felt like I was losing my soul to the practice of law.
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And in my quiet moments, I'd always return to the classics and to the things I was studying
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What is the significance of saying of these languages that they are dead?
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It's that no one, they're not in current use as spoken languages by anyone?
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Or is it actually impossible to know that one is speaking them correctly?
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So unless you hang in the right circles in the Vatican, there aren't many active Latin
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It's been retained by the priestly class, but it's, you know, the Brahmins.
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But it's not an active oral language, and it's really complicated grammatically.
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So Latin in twists and turns became what we know as Italian, and then Sanskrit more or less
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Hindi, although, again, with lots of twists and turns.
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And then ancient Greek to modern Greek, maybe it's a bit more direct, but similar.
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But though, you know, a modern Greek speaker might have trouble declining ancient Greek verbs.
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Well, as you point out in the book, ancient Greek is really the key to so much of what
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we seek to know about this part of the past, in particular, the roots of Christianity, which
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So the thesis of the book, correct me if I'm wrong, is essentially your investigations into
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the role played by psychedelics in both in classical antiquity and in early Christianity.
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Yeah, I was really taken by the idea of what Houston Smith, one of the great religious scholars
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of the 20th century, referred to as the best kept secret in history.
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This idea that the ancient Greeks may have consumed something like a psychedelic potion
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in their holiest mysteries and their most sacred ceremonies, and that just perhaps this formula,
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this potion, made its way into paleo-Christianity in those early days after the life of Christ.
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This is an idea that goes back probably to the 1970s, if not before.
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There was a bit of an incendiary book that was published in 1978 called The Road to Eleusis.
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And it was there that Gordon Wasson, the famed ethnomycologist who rediscovers psilocybin-containing
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mushrooms in the mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico in the 1950s, teams up with Albert Hoffman,
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of all people, who famously synthesized LSD back in 1938, and then a fellow classicist,
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He's the only one of the trio still alive, now 88 years old, a tenured professor at Boston
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University. Together, they proffered the idea that the ancient Greeks were, in fact, consuming
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something like an LSD-laced beer in the Mysteries of Eleusis, which was sort of like the Vatican
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of the ancient Greek world that survived for about 2,000 years. So as long as we've had
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Christianity today, the ancient pre-Christian, very pagan Greeks, once a year would show up
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on the doorstep of the sanctuary, Eleusis, northwest of Athens, and indeed consume this
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potion, whose ingredients and whose true character had remained elusive for so many centuries.
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Well, I want to talk about Eleusis. This is pretty much the starting point for your journey
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in the book, and it's certainly a natural starting point when talking about the role that the psychedelics
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may or may not have played in antiquity. I guess you also talk about the Soma cult,
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as attested in the Vedas, which I guess is equally ancient. Actually, what I had forgotten
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about, if I ever knew it, about the Mysteries of Eleusis is just how long they persisted for.
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I mean, this is astonishing history. There's nearly 2,000 years of a continuous rite that became
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central to the spiritual and intellectual life of the ancient Greeks and through the Hellenistic
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period and even into the Roman conquest of the area. And the people who we know or have good
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reason to believe participated, they're the leading lights of ancient Western thought there. I mean,
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Plato and Aristotle and Sophocles and Pindar and among the Romans, you have Cicero and Marcus Aurelius
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and others. And it's just astounding history to contemplate. And also, it's yet another thing that
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early Christianity consciously destroyed in a Taliban-like erasure of the past. I mean, this is
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in the 4th century. Before we go to Eleusis itself, the book you just cited, The Road to Eleusis,
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was controversial. It was especially controversial for Ruck, right? I mean, the classicist who contributed
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to it. Why was this thesis so radioactive in classical circles? Because as we get into the
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details, I think it'll become obvious, certainly to anyone who has taken psychedelics, that it is
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all too plausible that psychedelics of some sort were involved here. Why was this just, I mean,
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this essentially led to the scholarly cancellation of Ruck, as you described.
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Yeah, correct. I think in 1978, it was just the wrong book at the wrong time. I think it was
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quite a few decades ahead of its time. My book came out in 2020, and I don't think I've experienced
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an iota of the controversy that Karl Ruck once did in the late 1970s through the 1980s and 1990s. I mean,
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it wasn't very controversial. I think even then, in the 70s, that indigenous or traditional societies,
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for example, had consumed psychedelic compounds of one kind or another for many millennia across the
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world, from the Americas to Africa and the Asia Pacific. But for some reason, the notion that
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the ancient Greeks, and Karl Ruck actually says this in The Road to Eleusis, it's one of my favorite
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lines. He says that the notion that the ancient Greeks, indeed, some of the most famous and
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intelligent among them, all those whom you named, by the way, and not just Greeks, but Romans,
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and not just Romans, but emperors, Marcus Aurelius himself, the fact that they would enter so fully
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into such irrationality was anathema to the academy of the time. I mean, imagine the founding fathers of
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Western civilization getting high on drugs and venting democracy. It's absurd.
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Well, so what is it that we know about the mysteries of Eleusis in terms of when they were conducted,
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how they were conducted, who attended, just the mechanics of it? And I think as we describe this,
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it'll seem increasingly likely that it had to be more than just a collective initiation unaided by
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pharmacology. I mean, given the life transformative effects alleged, for it to be reproducible and to
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bear that significance, it really would be hard to believe that it's just a matter of people having
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hiked a long time in the sun and gotten dehydrated and gotten inducted into some, you know, collective
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hysteria, again, unaided by something in that beer.
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Yeah, I think you nailed it. Professor Ruck refers to that experience at Eleusis as the culminating
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experience of a lifetime. So what we do know is that it was absolutely transforming. We know bits
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and details, and we have clues that have been left in some of the literature, but it's important to
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point out that it was illegal to reveal what you saw at Eleusis and what you had experienced at
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Eleusis. And it typically only happened once in your life, typically later in life. So this is
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something that you, whether consciously or not, were preparing for, for a very long time, right?
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Right, right, right. For decades in your, as part of your spiritual journey. So there was a certain
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Is there any reason to believe that a person could only attend the mysteries once, or are there records of
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people having done it more than once? Yeah, as far as we know, for some reason, it only happened
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once, or actually twice in the same sequence. So you would make this, this 13-mile march northwest
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of Athens. It would start in Athens. It's a nine-day affair, which included this, this ritual march and
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fasting, and this procession, sacrifices along the way from Athens up to what's today called Elefcina.
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It's still there, the archaeological site. And so what happens along the way, we're not quite sure about,
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but on your first approach, it always happens, it always happens in the fall, you become what's
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called amistes, a mystic. It's where we get the word mystic, which literally means to close your
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eyes or to shut your mouth. In other words, you are being initiated into the first level
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of this, of this great pageant, this culminating experience of, of your life. And then only on your
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second approach, do you enter fully into the Telestereon, the, the ancient sanctuary that was
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dedicated to the goddess Demeter. And only then, perhaps, do you drink this ritual potion that we
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mentioned before, which is called the kukion in ancient Greek. And only then did you become what's
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called an epoptes, which in Greek means something like the person who has seen it all, you've seen
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it in everything. It was an eye-opening event. And that's very, very clear about the ancient mysteries.
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You saw something. And you mentioned Aristotle, for example, as a potential initiate. He was also very
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clear that you did not go to Eleusis to learn anything. And he uses the Greek word mathen,
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like mathematics. He went there to experience something. And he uses the word pathen, like
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pathos. He went there to actually suffer, to experience something. And we know to see something.
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Plato describes it as a blessed sight and vision that he experienced in sort of a state of ecstasy.
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And through time and time again, this is what the initiates are saying about the experience. You went
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there and you saw something that forever changed you and convinced you beyond all rationality that
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you were in fact an immortal, that you would never die. Yeah. And it's amazing to consider that these
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rites were practiced continuously for about a thousand years prior to Plato and Aristotle.
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Correct. They're described in Homer, which is, what is that, you know, 500 years or so before
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Plato and Aristotle? Correct. The rites could begin as far as we know, in some form or another,
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1500 BC. So we're talking the Mycenaean period, which is extremely old as far as classics goes.
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Yeah. So the temple at Eleusis was the temple to Demeter and focused on essentially a cult around
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the Persephone story. Is that correct? Correct. Yeah. Persephone, to remind those who haven't
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thought about her since their high school mythology class, she's the one who's abducted,
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a better word is raped. She's brought down to the underworld by the king of the dead himself,
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Hades, and she's held captive there. And she's only released on the covenant that she has to return
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once again to hell, which has always been interpreted as a fertility cycle, as an explanation of how the
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seasons rotate one after the other. So she always has to spend one part of the year in hell,
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and then she can rejoin her mother Demeter for two-thirds of the year back on Earth. But at its
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base, this is a ritual of death and rebirth, just like Persephone herself. So when the initiates go
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there, it is thought that they experience something like her death and resurrection. So again, the notion
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of resurrection centuries before the birth of Christianity.
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And there were other mystery cults in practice simultaneously, right? And very likely with their
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own pharmacological enhancements. So there's the cult of Dionysus that you describe. And just give
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me a picture of the religious landscape at that point as we know it. I mean, how far did it spread
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geographically? I mean, you know, we're talking about ancient Greece, but what does that mean on the map?
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And how, you know, we're going to bring the birth of Christianity into the story here. How do you view
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So it's an interesting one. And it's, I don't think it's too different from the landscape today,
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to be totally honest, which is part of the reason I was attracted to these mysteries,
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even as a teenager, because there's something about choice and movement and idiosyncrasy to these
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mysteries. It's very personal. It's about your personal spiritual journey to the exclusion of,
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you know, what was largely a state cult practice where, you know, there were those Olympian gods and
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there were certain sacrifices that were made at certain times of the year to well-known divinities.
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And that was all well and good, but there was a bit of roteness to it. And so in these mysteries,
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again, they're defined best by this notion of death and rebirth. It's personalizing
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that spiritual journey in an approach to the true self. So there's this notion of dying to the false
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self and resurrecting to the notion of the true self, which comes in many, many forms. So it's not
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just in mainland Greece itself. We're talking about the Eleusinian mysteries, which are headquartered there.
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The mysteries of Dionysus, you can find all over the ancient Mediterranean, by the way, before,
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during, and after the life of Christ. And there's a number of parallels, I think, between those
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Dionysian mysteries, the mysteries of wine, and the later mysteries of Christianity, which actually
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they themselves were referred to and compared to mysteries by one of the church fathers, Tertullian.
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So this is not just wild speculation. There's this notion of secrets and magical sacraments,
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and hidden ceremonies that are unique to the mysteries and do show up in early Christianity.
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But there were all kinds of mysteries around the ancient Mediterranean. And during the Hellenistic
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period that you mentioned, that's basically the period after Alexander the Great. So in the wake of
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Alexander in the fourth century BC and beyond, the Greek influence, the Greek language, Greek ritual,
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and some of these mysteries could be found anywhere from the West, so Iberia, what today we call
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Spain and Portugal, all the way to literally Afghanistan, Central Asia, and all across North
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Africa. So, you know, the reach of this culture and this idea of mystery was vast. And it precedes
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the Greeks, by the way. The Greeks likely adopted this notion of the mysteries from either the
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Egyptians or Mesopotamian civilizations, or I make the comparison to the Vedic civilizations in South
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Asia, you know, millennia before classical Greece. So this is an old tradition, which in all likelihood
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is probably prehistoric, actually. We're talking potentially tens of thousands of years.
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I want to read the quote you put in the book from Cicero, who is this, you know, one of the more
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famous Roman statesmen and orators and writers that we recall. We don't know how much history has
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been lost to us, but he survives. But it's just, it's impossible for me to imagine a statement like
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this about an ordinary ritual. I mean, so this is Cicero commenting upon the Elis and the mysteries.
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For it appears to me that among the many exceptional and divine things your Athens has produced and
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contributed to human life, nothing is better than those mysteries. I mean, just think of a statement
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like, I mean, given how beholden Roman civilization was to the Greek, I mean, they inherited, they
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copied everything, the art, the architecture, they just took all the gods and just renamed them. I mean,
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it's just, it was just a reboot of the whole culture in so many ways. And so for Cicero to say that this
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is really the central jewel of Greek civilization is just an astounding statement. Okay, so back to
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Cicero, for by means of them, we have been transformed from a rough and savage way of life
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to the state of humanity and have been civilized, just as they are called initiations. So in actual
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fact, we have learned from them the fundamentals of life and have grasped the basis, not only for
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living with joy, but also for dying with a better hope. Right? So there's just something about
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knowing that there's a kind of a, I think you start the book with this, the colophon, that if you die
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before you die, you don't die when you die, or something close to that. What is the origin of
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that Greek phrase? If you die before you die, you won't die when you die? Yeah. So interestingly,
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that comes from the Christian tradition, which is part of what I'm investigating in this book is that
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continuity from the pagan world, potentially the prehistoric world into Christianity. So that phrase
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actually comes from a monastery. It comes from the St. Paul's monastery on Mount Athos in Greece,
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which is one of the holiest sites in Greek Orthodoxy, Eastern Orthodoxy, which I think is
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awfully peculiar because there's this notion of dying before dying. You find across the world's
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religions, by the way, they're enshrined in a monastery on Mount Athos, which again, I couldn't
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think of a better description of the ancient pagan mysteries themselves. Right. Yeah. Yeah. But just so
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when you imagine what experience someone like Cicero must have had to have said that about its
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significance in comparison with the rest of what Greek civilization had produced, it is hard to
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imagine that the unaided aspirant, just by force of his whatever concentration he's mustered over those
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nine days, you know, that it would be an experience of a sort that could be honestly described in that way
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with the knowledge that it would be reproducible. And the thing that's so unique about psychedelics, and I will
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inevitably return to the fact that you haven't taken any at some point in this conversation, the thing that's so
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important and unique about them is that barring the tiniest number of neurological outliers, basically they work
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for everybody, right? I mean, you take a thousand people and give them the requisite dose of whatever
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psychedelic, psilocybin or LSD or, you know, MDMA, not technically a psychedelic, but still effective in its own
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purview. A thousand out of a thousand people will have a very significant experience. Now, some may have a
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terrifying experience, some may witness some version of the beatific vision, but virtually no one, again, with
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the tiniest number of exceptions, will be bored and claim that nothing had happened, right? Now, that is not
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something you can say about yoga or prayer or meditation or anything else you can subject people to,
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even over the course of nine days, where you can just say, all right, this is, you know, 100% of the
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people who cross this threshold are going to come out saying, that was astounding, right? That was the
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central moment of my life on earth. And with psychedelics, you really can reliably say that,
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again, you know, modulo all of the casualties, the people who feel, you know, ruined by the experience
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as opposed to improved, which will also happen. But so that's what makes your thesis so plausible,
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absent any of the other evidence we're going to talk about. It's just, I just can't get someone
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like Cicero saying such a thing or writing such a thing in the absence of some reproducible stimulus
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of that sort. Yeah, it had to be reproducible, which is not to say that the Greeks weren't good
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at ritual and ceremony. But, you know, one of the prevailing hypotheses that preceded the psychedelic
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hypothesis was that it was something like a theatrical production. Well, that's a pretty damn good
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theatrical production. That is Taylor Swift on steroids. Or on psilocybin, as the case may be.
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No, that's probably a good show. Unfortunately, no theatrical structures have been found at the
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archaeological site. And we know the Greeks were good at drama and tragedy and comedy, right? And so
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there may have been a pageant of sorts. There may have been a reenactment of that ritual abduction
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and descent to the underworld and the re-assent to the life of mortals. But, you know, as far as we
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know, there was something internal happening to the initiates. And as far as we can tell, they were
00:24:58.680
journeying with Persephone into the underworld. One of the scholars that I reference throughout the book
00:25:04.640
is Peter Kingsley. He's a favorite scholar of mine. And he has this great notion about going down
00:25:09.620
to the underworld. He says, you know, when you go down to the underworld, when you're already dead,
00:25:13.960
that's one thing. I'm not particularly impressive. But, you know, to go there while you're alive,
00:25:18.740
prepared and knowingly, and then to learn from that experience, that's another thing entirely.
00:25:24.460
And I think that's what Cicero is getting at. When he calls the mysteries of Eleusis,
00:25:28.720
the most exceptional and divine thing that Athens ever produced, right? To the exclusion of democracy
00:25:34.520
and the arts and sciences and mathematics and all the things we take for granted today,
00:25:38.500
including the origins of free speech. There's something astounding happening at this site.
00:25:45.020
And when I first stumbled on the psychedelic hypothesis and then began reading about the
00:25:50.340
modern day experiences and some of these clinical trials over the past 20 years, you know,
00:25:56.700
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So where does Christianity come into the picture here? And maybe one place to start is
00:26:03.480
this notion of the pagan continuity hypothesis. What is that? And how should we view the first,
00:26:11.660
you know, century of Christianity through the lens of, or even centuries before it became
00:26:17.300
the state religion of Rome, through the lens of these mystery religions?
00:26:23.140
Right. So Christianity does not become the state religion until about 380 under Theodosius. So you have,
00:26:30.000
you know, roughly 350 years after the death of Christ. Well, Christianity is in fits and starts,
00:26:37.420
you know, here persecuted, here tolerated. But, you know, altogether, I would say an underground
00:26:42.980
religion. That changes into the fourth century after Constantine, obviously. But for a good couple
00:26:48.320
hundred years, it's illegal. I think we often forget. And it looks very, very different from any
00:26:54.500
Christianity you might be familiar with today. And, you know, and it's two and a half billion
00:26:58.760
adherents. The biggest religion in the world starts off, you know, pretty strangely. It is an
00:27:04.340
underground cult, in some cases, literally. So in those early days after Christ, remember,
00:27:09.140
there are no basilicas. There are no physical church buildings. There's no Bible. At least there's
00:27:14.240
no agreed dogma for the Bible. That also doesn't happen until the fourth century AD. Women are involved,
00:27:22.140
at least some of the evidence suggests, from different catacombs and frescoes you can look
00:27:27.280
at underground. So it's a very different religion than we have today. It's local. I would say it's
00:27:33.080
hyper-local. There isn't, you know, the central bureaucracy that we find today. And again, it has
00:27:39.400
that air of choice and movement and idiosyncrasy that I mentioned about the ancient mysteries. It was
00:27:44.860
about your connection to the eternal and to that immortal spark inside yourselves. And so people
00:27:51.920
would get together and meet under the auspices of this mystery figure, Jesus, who in some senses
00:27:59.160
does really resemble Dionysus. And, you know, I quote at length from this book, The Dionysian Gospel
00:28:06.500
by MacDonald. And in there, you can see this interesting parallel in the ancient Greek from
00:28:11.800
the Bacchae of Euripides, which debuts on stage there at the Theater of Dionysus in 405 BC,
00:28:18.060
and some of the peculiar Greek of John. And so, you know, it's really impossible, I like to say,
00:28:24.320
to understand the origins of Christianity in the absence of a working knowledge of Greek,
00:28:29.180
because the earliest Christians were Greek speakers. You know, Jesus is born in the Holy
00:28:33.780
Land. His mission takes place there, as we know. But, you know, Christianity really thrives
00:28:38.820
and is propagated across the Greek-speaking part of the Mediterranean in places like Greece,
00:28:44.300
Turkey, North Africa, and Italy, including Rome and South Italy. And I think those kinds of people
00:28:50.820
were the Greek speakers who were very familiar with these ancient mystery traditions, both the
00:28:56.480
mysteries of Eleusis and those of Dionysus, where, lo and behold, the consumption of the magical wine of
00:29:02.200
Dionysus, which was referred to as his blood by someone like Timotheus of Miletus 400 years
00:29:08.080
before the birth of Jesus, was something that was taken almost for granted, that you would consume
00:29:14.120
this blood in the form of wine in order to become one with the god Dionysus. That's where
00:29:19.340
we get this notion of enthusiasm, being possessed in ecstasy by the god. It's not only the birth of the
00:29:26.380
theater, it's why ancient Greek becomes the language of the New Testament, because of this
00:29:31.980
experience that was happening in honor of the god Dionysus all the way back in Athens.
00:29:37.320
Yeah, so you've sketched part of it, but I just want to, since I used the phrase, I just want to
00:29:42.440
make sure we've actually described it, the pagan continuity hypothesis. How would you define that?
00:29:49.420
Right, so that's the notion that these pre-Christian rites, ceremonies, and practices carry over into the
00:29:57.480
Paleo-Christian era. So, you know, we're talking about the Greco-Roman period. So, you know,
00:30:01.580
things particularly from the classical period of Greece, so anywhere from 400 or 500 BC, which would
00:30:06.840
include these kinds of mysteries, and the kinds of beers that were being mixed, and the kinds of
00:30:12.120
wines that were being mixed, and they were both very different from the beers and wines of today.
00:30:17.080
It's a notion that specifically those kinds of beverages, but that in general, these practices
00:30:22.300
carried over into the early days after Jesus. And, you know, this is not a strange idea. Dr. Martin
00:30:28.800
Luther King himself actually wrote an essay about this in 1950. You can Google it. It's called The
00:30:34.480
Influence of the Mystery Religions on Christianity. So, this is widely known in academic circles.
00:30:40.060
Where do the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Gnostic Gospels come in here? I mean, we have, like, the Gospel of
00:30:46.960
Thomas, which you describe in the book, which it takes a very different, you know, more mystical
00:30:53.140
slant than much of what one gets in the New Testament. Maybe we could say something about
00:30:57.960
the discovery of these texts, which were, I mean, it's just, it was astounding that something could
00:31:04.600
be discovered in this way, and this late, I think it was 1945 that we discovered these texts, and it took
00:31:11.380
about 30 years or so to translate them. What does this add to the picture of early Christianity?
00:31:17.780
Well, see, this is why historians and classicists and archaeologists still have jobs, I think.
00:31:21.840
You know, we do discover things every now and again. And then in the 1940s, as you mentioned,
00:31:27.800
there were these 52 additional texts that we didn't really know about, which have become known
00:31:32.680
now as the Nag Hammadi Corpus. They were dug up there in Egypt, and they cast an entirely different
00:31:38.420
light on the person of Jesus. The Gospel of Thomas, in particular, you know, portrays Jesus as not
00:31:44.440
somebody to be imitated and worshiped as the Son of God separate from us, but as sort of a mentor
00:31:49.960
or a guide along the path to personal salvation. And again, these Gnostic circles certainly have
00:31:58.200
much more in common with those ancient Greek mysteries. I mentioned Tertullian before, one of
00:32:03.300
these church fathers who writes in the second century, and he specifically makes the comparison
00:32:08.000
between this Gnostic version of Christianity and these ancient pagan pre-Christian mystery rites.
00:32:16.200
You know, whether or not that included the consumption of psychedelics is neither here nor there,
00:32:19.480
but this notion that the Gnostics were after direct knowledge, and that's what Gnosticism means.
00:32:24.620
It comes from the Greek gnosis, which means unmediated direct knowledge of the divine, which is to say
00:32:32.060
the recognition that within you there is this divine spark, that there is no heavenly Father up in the
00:32:39.280
cloud separate from us, from humanity, from life at large, but that you yourself carry a part of that
00:32:45.640
light, a part of that divine spark. Yeah, that's essentially, at least as I read it in your description,
00:32:53.540
the distinction that Aristotle was making with respect to the significance of what's happening
00:32:58.100
at Eleusis. It's not about knowing more facts, it's about having a, an experience that delivers a
00:33:06.360
participatory transformation of one's, you know, vision of the world and one's place in it.
00:33:13.520
But so would, Aristotle wouldn't have used, presumably he could have used the word Gnosis, right?
00:33:22.940
Conceivably, yeah, that, that, that shows up later, this notion of, of Gnosis. I don't think
00:33:27.300
in the classical period, they made those, those distinctions. They didn't really have a word
00:33:33.020
for God either, which I think is really interesting, at least the, at least the Abrahamic God, I think
00:33:38.360
that we're more familiar with, with today. And I'm, I'm a big fan of, of Platonism and Neoplatonism.
00:33:43.740
Now, they often refer to the, the mystery of mysteries, I'll, I'll, I'll put it as, as the good or the one,
00:33:50.640
which I think is, is really interesting. And so, you know, there is this notion of monotheism
00:33:56.000
that exists, you know, in parallel with the Abrahamic traditions, and it's, it's referred
00:34:01.620
to as, as philosophical monotheism, you know. So it's, you certainly find it in, in Plato,
00:34:07.180
and you especially find it in the Neoplatonists. And again, this is after the life of Christ and
00:34:11.860
folks like Plotinus, who's this Neoplatonist of the third century AD. So this, this notion of
00:34:17.820
philosophical monotheism and, and the direct experience of the divine, you know, it carries
00:34:22.800
on before, during, and after the life of Christ. You know, Christianity is, is brewing in this melting
00:34:28.540
pot of all these, you know, fairly esoteric ideas. Yeah, there's something, we're, we're used to
00:34:34.820
the iconography and story and symbolism of Christianity to a degree that I think we're,
00:34:42.940
we're, we're inured to its, its fundamental strangeness, you know, certainly in a modern
00:34:47.720
context. I mean, there, there are elements here that are just weird, and I think we should find
00:34:51.780
surprising, and yet we don't, because they're just, this is just what the Christian story is. But
00:34:56.120
the, the idea that what is essentially a cannibal ritual is the, the normal way of worshiping Jesus,
00:35:06.500
right? Like, well, like, how is it that no one is batting an eye at the prospect of eating his body
00:35:12.900
and drinking his blood, right? And, and the idea that he would be sacrificed for the sins of all
00:35:19.320
humanity, that, that here, here we're, we're endorsing a, an actual human sacrifice. Looked at
00:35:26.140
from above, this does look like a cannibal cult of human sacrifice on some level. And one of the
00:35:32.100
innovations in the Old Testament was to, to swap human sacrifice for animal sacrifice, but still
00:35:37.240
there's this notion of sacrifice and the consumption of, of what has been sacrificed. And it's, you know,
00:35:43.120
the idea that, you know, in a modern context, no one really does the, the arithmetic there, and, and, and
00:35:51.960
to notice what is actually being suggested just seems strange to me, standing outside the
00:35:57.940
tradition. What, what do we know about people's sense of the propriety of drinking human blood? Why would
00:36:05.220
that be the thing that one would, would be, you know, symbolically inspired to do with wine or beer or
00:36:11.600
We, we began talking about it in, in those, those synergies between Dionysus and Jesus. So, you know,
00:36:17.460
to be clear, Dionysus is not the god of, of wine, at least not simply put. And he's certainly not the god of
00:36:22.920
alcohol because the Greeks had no word for alcohol. It's important to mention that, that, that word
00:36:27.880
comes from the Semitic, as it sounds, alcohol. It means that to paint or to stain, that coal was the,
00:36:33.460
the powder that was used to ornament the eyes. So, you know, the, the Greeks had no notion of
00:36:39.700
the inebriating effects of, of that fermentation process. At least they had no word for it. And so
00:36:45.300
when you're talking about Dionysus as the god of theater or, or mystical rapture, you're really
00:36:51.200
talking about delirium or frenzy or madness or insanity. So Dionysus, uh, you know, in, in
00:36:58.660
communing with him and drinking his wine, which is his blood, you are entering into this pact and
00:37:03.860
it's, it's an un, it's an uncertain pact. It's an ambiguous pact around madness. And, you know,
00:37:08.660
does madness, madness truly make you insane or, or does it, you know, on occasion bring enlightenment,
00:37:14.660
but it's certainly uncertain and there's a risk proposition there. And those are the parallels I
00:37:20.080
love looking at with, with Jesus because, you know, the, the Christian promise, I did grow up in
00:37:24.300
the tradition, by the way, full disclosure, I went to 13 years of Catholic school. And so like,
00:37:28.520
I was just told, so when I was five, just told, you know, to drink, I would eventually drink the
00:37:34.280
blood and eat the flesh. And okay, I guess that's what you do, you know, but at the time, you know,
00:37:38.900
don't, don't forget how unabashedly cannibalistic and drastic that is to the ancient Jewish population,
00:37:45.120
for example. And whenever I have this discussion, I always have to point out one line from
00:37:49.960
the gospels. And I hope your listeners will, will Google it. It's the sixth chapter of John
00:37:54.180
verse 60. And, you know, John is talking about this notion of cannibalism because Jesus has just
00:38:00.400
made the promise, the central promise of Christianity. If you munch my flesh and drink my
00:38:07.580
blood, you are immortal. You have eternal life. Not that you will have it at some future undefined
00:38:13.500
moment. You become eternal the moment you drink my blood and eat my flesh. Now, Jesus is not saying
00:38:19.440
if you sit down in a cave or if you go off and meditate for 10 years, or if you practice these
00:38:25.460
breathing exercises, he's saying, if you consume me, if you consume my flesh and blood, if you enter
00:38:30.940
into this process of theophagy, right, eating the God to become the God, which is ancient and
00:38:36.560
prehistoric. If you enter into this process, you too will become like me. And it was the same promise
00:38:42.520
that was offered to the Dionysian initiates, again, for centuries and centuries before Christ. And it's a
00:38:48.480
very strange idea today. I mentioned in the book, one of these polls, that like something like 69% of
00:38:53.560
American Catholics do not believe in transubstantiation, that the otherwise ordinary bread and wine
00:38:59.560
become this miraculous collection of black people have all the hard time.
00:39:03.480
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