Making Sense - Sam Harris - #346 — The Best Kept Secret In History？

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast.

00:00:08.820 This is Sam Harris.

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00:00:46.800 Today I'm speaking with Brian Murarescu.

00:00:50.200 Brian holds a degree in Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit from Brown University, as well as a degree

00:00:55.880 in law from Georgetown.

00:00:58.480 He is a practicing lawyer and the author of a fascinating book titled The Immortality Key,

00:01:04.380 The Secret History of the Religion with No Name.

00:01:07.140 And that's the topic of our conversation today.

00:01:09.540 We talk about the mystery religions of the ancient world and the possible psychedelic roots

00:01:15.500 of Christianity.

00:01:16.380 We discuss the mysteries of Eleusis, the pagan continuity hypothesis, the cult of Dionysus,

00:01:24.160 the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Gnostic Gospels, Christianity as a cult of human sacrifice, the evidence for the 1.00

00:01:30.720 use of psychedelics and ancient rites, the chemical analysis of ancient wine and beer, why Brian hasn't

00:01:37.220 tried psychedelics himself, the need for something like a modern mysteries of Eleusis, and other

00:01:42.980 topics.

00:01:43.380 Anyway, fascinating piece of history here that is rarely thought about.

00:01:48.800 And now I bring you Brian Murarescu.

00:01:57.440 I am here with Brian Murarescu.

00:01:59.980 Brian, thanks for joining me.

00:02:01.540 Thanks for having me, Sam.

00:02:02.340 It's great to be here.

00:02:03.760 Yes, you've written this fascinating book, which I hear rumors is going to be a fascinating

00:02:08.780 documentary at some point.

00:02:10.180 This is The Immortality Key, The Secret History of the Religion with No Name. 0.93

00:02:16.180 Am I right about that?

00:02:17.080 Is there a film being made of this book?

00:02:19.320 Yes.

00:02:19.580 I'm not sure how much I can say about it, but there is an exceptional team that came together

00:02:23.480 to put this on the screen.

00:02:25.860 Nice.

00:02:26.480 Nice.

00:02:26.860 Well, that's exciting.

00:02:27.920 Do you know the timeline for that?

00:02:29.020 Probably a couple of years, although I'm sure I'm wrong about that.

00:02:32.720 And are you going to be on camera for that?

00:02:35.160 Or do you know, are you going to be the host of that?

00:02:37.200 Yeah.

00:02:37.460 For better or worse, I guess I'm a protagonist.

00:02:40.600 So you'll be...

00:02:41.020 That's great.

00:02:41.200 That's great.

00:02:41.720 I'll be leading you down the blind alleyways of history.

00:02:44.860 Well, that will be different than writing the book, no doubt.

00:02:49.480 Although this book, unlike most other books, really is a bit of a travelogue.

00:02:55.120 I mean, you went all over the place to write this thing, and it's a literary or historical

00:03:02.300 adventure.

00:03:03.600 Give us a quick snapshot of your background, though.

00:03:07.200 You have this interesting bio that doesn't immediately suggest plumbing the depths of

00:03:13.040 psychedelic history.

00:03:14.580 Where do you come from, and how did you get into this?

00:03:17.100 Yeah, I guess I'll break the ice with the obvious, is that I've actually never experimented

00:03:22.800 with psychedelics, which always surprises people.

00:03:26.980 I'm a relatively boring guy.

00:03:28.760 In my early 40s, I have two daughters.

00:03:31.740 And I guess my journey began as a teenager learning Latin and Greek, of all things.

00:03:36.480 I was forced to learn these dead languages at the hands of the Jesuits when I was a teenager. 0.72

00:03:41.800 I went to an all-boys prep school in Philadelphia, where the last thing I thought I'd be good

00:03:45.800 at was dead language.

00:03:47.180 But it turns out, that came much easier than mathematics.

00:03:50.140 And so from there, I was very fortunate to get a scholarship to Brown University, where

00:03:54.000 I doubled down on dead languages and studied Sanskrit and later classical Arabic.

00:03:59.840 And after eight years of linguistic studies, did a 180 and went off to law school because

00:04:05.180 I was tired of being broke.

00:04:06.480 So I sold out to Wall Street, and I worked in New York for a few years, and then later

00:04:10.980 moved down to DC, where I continued practicing international law for the better part of 15

00:04:15.380 years, until I figured there was a story here worth writing that had really consumed my

00:04:21.640 imagination on nights and weekends.

00:04:24.660 Because, well, I felt like I was losing my soul to the practice of law.

00:04:28.660 And in my quiet moments, I'd always return to the classics and to the things I was studying

00:04:32.840 as a younger boy.

00:04:35.000 What is the significance of saying of these languages that they are dead?

00:04:40.320 It's that no one, they're not in current use as spoken languages by anyone?

00:04:45.460 Or is it actually impossible to know that one is speaking them correctly?

00:04:50.500 Maybe a mixture of both, actually.

00:04:53.340 You know, they've fallen into desuetude.

00:04:56.400 So unless you hang in the right circles in the Vatican, there aren't many active Latin

00:05:00.620 speakers today.

00:05:02.520 Sanskrit is sort of the same.

00:05:03.800 It's been retained by the priestly class, but it's, you know, the Brahmins. 0.87

00:05:09.460 But it's not an active oral language, and it's really complicated grammatically.

00:05:13.900 So Latin in twists and turns became what we know as Italian, and then Sanskrit more or less

00:05:21.200 Hindi, although, again, with lots of twists and turns.

00:05:24.240 And then ancient Greek to modern Greek, maybe it's a bit more direct, but similar.

00:05:29.160 But though, you know, a modern Greek speaker might have trouble declining ancient Greek verbs.

00:05:35.240 Yeah, yeah.

00:05:36.080 Well, as you point out in the book, ancient Greek is really the key to so much of what

00:05:42.140 we seek to know about this part of the past, in particular, the roots of Christianity, which

00:05:46.600 you go into in the book.

00:05:48.460 So the thesis of the book, correct me if I'm wrong, is essentially your investigations into

00:05:56.180 the role played by psychedelics in both in classical antiquity and in early Christianity.

00:06:02.460 Is that an adequate encapsulation of the book?

00:06:05.820 Yeah, sure.

00:06:07.000 Yeah, I was really taken by the idea of what Houston Smith, one of the great religious scholars

00:06:13.360 of the 20th century, referred to as the best kept secret in history.

00:06:17.700 That kind of stops you in your tracks.

00:06:19.800 This idea that the ancient Greeks may have consumed something like a psychedelic potion

00:06:24.800 in their holiest mysteries and their most sacred ceremonies, and that just perhaps this formula,

00:06:32.340 this potion, made its way into paleo-Christianity in those early days after the life of Christ.

00:06:39.920 And, you know, it's not my idea.

00:06:41.580 This is an idea that goes back probably to the 1970s, if not before.

00:06:44.940 There was a bit of an incendiary book that was published in 1978 called The Road to Eleusis.

00:06:49.860 And it was there that Gordon Wasson, the famed ethnomycologist who rediscovers psilocybin-containing

00:06:58.880 mushrooms in the mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico in the 1950s, teams up with Albert Hoffman,

00:07:03.800 of all people, who famously synthesized LSD back in 1938, and then a fellow classicist,

00:07:10.300 Professor Ruck, who's still alive.

00:07:11.740 He's the only one of the trio still alive, now 88 years old, a tenured professor at Boston

00:07:16.580 University. Together, they proffered the idea that the ancient Greeks were, in fact, consuming

00:07:22.160 something like an LSD-laced beer in the Mysteries of Eleusis, which was sort of like the Vatican

00:07:29.020 of the ancient Greek world that survived for about 2,000 years. So as long as we've had

00:07:34.160 Christianity today, the ancient pre-Christian, very pagan Greeks, once a year would show up 1.00

00:07:41.320 on the doorstep of the sanctuary, Eleusis, northwest of Athens, and indeed consume this

00:07:47.640 potion, whose ingredients and whose true character had remained elusive for so many centuries.

00:07:53.680 Well, I want to talk about Eleusis. This is pretty much the starting point for your journey

00:07:59.400 in the book, and it's certainly a natural starting point when talking about the role that the psychedelics

00:08:05.440 may or may not have played in antiquity. I guess you also talk about the Soma cult,

00:08:11.220 as attested in the Vedas, which I guess is equally ancient. Actually, what I had forgotten

00:08:17.760 about, if I ever knew it, about the Mysteries of Eleusis is just how long they persisted for.

00:08:24.540 I mean, this is astonishing history. There's nearly 2,000 years of a continuous rite that became

00:08:32.440 central to the spiritual and intellectual life of the ancient Greeks and through the Hellenistic

00:08:41.260 period and even into the Roman conquest of the area. And the people who we know or have good

00:08:48.960 reason to believe participated, they're the leading lights of ancient Western thought there. I mean,

00:08:54.720 Plato and Aristotle and Sophocles and Pindar and among the Romans, you have Cicero and Marcus Aurelius

00:09:00.960 and others. And it's just astounding history to contemplate. And also, it's yet another thing that

00:09:07.380 early Christianity consciously destroyed in a Taliban-like erasure of the past. I mean, this is 0.95

00:09:14.680 in the 4th century. Before we go to Eleusis itself, the book you just cited, The Road to Eleusis,

00:09:21.320 was controversial. It was especially controversial for Ruck, right? I mean, the classicist who contributed

00:09:28.340 to it. Why was this thesis so radioactive in classical circles? Because as we get into the

00:09:34.320 details, I think it'll become obvious, certainly to anyone who has taken psychedelics, that it is

00:09:39.040 all too plausible that psychedelics of some sort were involved here. Why was this just, I mean,

00:09:45.860 this essentially led to the scholarly cancellation of Ruck, as you described.

00:09:50.840 Yeah, correct. I think in 1978, it was just the wrong book at the wrong time. I think it was

00:09:55.320 quite a few decades ahead of its time. My book came out in 2020, and I don't think I've experienced

00:10:00.240 an iota of the controversy that Karl Ruck once did in the late 1970s through the 1980s and 1990s. I mean,

00:10:07.960 it wasn't very controversial. I think even then, in the 70s, that indigenous or traditional societies,

00:10:14.140 for example, had consumed psychedelic compounds of one kind or another for many millennia across the

00:10:21.840 world, from the Americas to Africa and the Asia Pacific. But for some reason, the notion that

00:10:27.160 the ancient Greeks, and Karl Ruck actually says this in The Road to Eleusis, it's one of my favorite

00:10:31.860 lines. He says that the notion that the ancient Greeks, indeed, some of the most famous and

00:10:36.960 intelligent among them, all those whom you named, by the way, and not just Greeks, but Romans,

00:10:41.400 and not just Romans, but emperors, Marcus Aurelius himself, the fact that they would enter so fully

00:10:46.760 into such irrationality was anathema to the academy of the time. I mean, imagine the founding fathers of

00:10:55.220 Western civilization getting high on drugs and venting democracy. It's absurd.

00:11:00.320 Well, so what is it that we know about the mysteries of Eleusis in terms of when they were conducted,

00:11:08.380 how they were conducted, who attended, just the mechanics of it? And I think as we describe this,

00:11:14.880 it'll seem increasingly likely that it had to be more than just a collective initiation unaided by

00:11:23.640 pharmacology. I mean, given the life transformative effects alleged, for it to be reproducible and to

00:11:31.040 bear that significance, it really would be hard to believe that it's just a matter of people having

00:11:35.300 hiked a long time in the sun and gotten dehydrated and gotten inducted into some, you know, collective

00:11:42.220 hysteria, again, unaided by something in that beer.

00:11:47.520 Yeah, I think you nailed it. Professor Ruck refers to that experience at Eleusis as the culminating

00:11:52.860 experience of a lifetime. So what we do know is that it was absolutely transforming. We know bits

00:11:59.240 and details, and we have clues that have been left in some of the literature, but it's important to

00:12:03.160 point out that it was illegal to reveal what you saw at Eleusis and what you had experienced at

00:12:09.160 Eleusis. And it typically only happened once in your life, typically later in life. So this is

00:12:14.160 something that you, whether consciously or not, were preparing for, for a very long time, right?

00:12:19.260 Right, right, right. For decades in your, as part of your spiritual journey. So there was a certain

00:12:24.240 maturity that attended these, these mysteries.

00:12:29.340 Is there any reason to believe that a person could only attend the mysteries once, or are there records of

00:12:37.160 people having done it more than once? Yeah, as far as we know, for some reason, it only happened

00:12:42.240 once, or actually twice in the same sequence. So you would make this, this 13-mile march northwest

00:12:48.000 of Athens. It would start in Athens. It's a nine-day affair, which included this, this ritual march and

00:12:53.360 fasting, and this procession, sacrifices along the way from Athens up to what's today called Elefcina.

00:12:59.700 It's still there, the archaeological site. And so what happens along the way, we're not quite sure about,

00:13:05.080 but on your first approach, it always happens, it always happens in the fall, you become what's

00:13:09.780 called amistes, a mystic. It's where we get the word mystic, which literally means to close your

00:13:13.900 eyes or to shut your mouth. In other words, you are being initiated into the first level

00:13:18.860 of this, of this great pageant, this culminating experience of, of your life. And then only on your

00:13:24.500 second approach, do you enter fully into the Telestereon, the, the ancient sanctuary that was

00:13:30.720 dedicated to the goddess Demeter. And only then, perhaps, do you drink this ritual potion that we

00:13:35.560 mentioned before, which is called the kukion in ancient Greek. And only then did you become what's

00:13:39.880 called an epoptes, which in Greek means something like the person who has seen it all, you've seen

00:13:45.020 it in everything. It was an eye-opening event. And that's very, very clear about the ancient mysteries.

00:13:49.880 You saw something. And you mentioned Aristotle, for example, as a potential initiate. He was also very

00:13:55.480 clear that you did not go to Eleusis to learn anything. And he uses the Greek word mathen,

00:14:00.480 like mathematics. He went there to experience something. And he uses the word pathen, like

00:14:05.900 pathos. He went there to actually suffer, to experience something. And we know to see something.

00:14:11.060 Plato describes it as a blessed sight and vision that he experienced in sort of a state of ecstasy.

00:14:17.660 And through time and time again, this is what the initiates are saying about the experience. You went

00:14:22.700 there and you saw something that forever changed you and convinced you beyond all rationality that

00:14:27.960 you were in fact an immortal, that you would never die. Yeah. And it's amazing to consider that these

00:14:33.540 rites were practiced continuously for about a thousand years prior to Plato and Aristotle.

00:14:42.240 Correct. They're described in Homer, which is, what is that, you know, 500 years or so before

00:14:47.520 Plato and Aristotle? Correct. The rites could begin as far as we know, in some form or another,

00:14:51.200 1500 BC. So we're talking the Mycenaean period, which is extremely old as far as classics goes.

00:14:58.340 Yeah. So the temple at Eleusis was the temple to Demeter and focused on essentially a cult around

00:15:08.000 the Persephone story. Is that correct? Correct. Yeah. Persephone, to remind those who haven't

00:15:14.580 thought about her since their high school mythology class, she's the one who's abducted, 0.88

00:15:19.480 a better word is raped. She's brought down to the underworld by the king of the dead himself,

00:15:24.960 Hades, and she's held captive there. And she's only released on the covenant that she has to return

00:15:32.440 once again to hell, which has always been interpreted as a fertility cycle, as an explanation of how the

00:15:40.360 seasons rotate one after the other. So she always has to spend one part of the year in hell, 1.00

00:15:45.480 and then she can rejoin her mother Demeter for two-thirds of the year back on Earth. But at its

00:15:51.940 base, this is a ritual of death and rebirth, just like Persephone herself. So when the initiates go

00:15:58.140 there, it is thought that they experience something like her death and resurrection. So again, the notion

00:16:04.100 of resurrection centuries before the birth of Christianity.

00:16:07.460 And there were other mystery cults in practice simultaneously, right? And very likely with their

00:16:14.980 own pharmacological enhancements. So there's the cult of Dionysus that you describe. And just give

00:16:22.460 me a picture of the religious landscape at that point as we know it. I mean, how far did it spread

00:16:29.780 geographically? I mean, you know, we're talking about ancient Greece, but what does that mean on the map?

00:16:36.680 And how, you know, we're going to bring the birth of Christianity into the story here. How do you view

00:16:43.420 the religious landscape during this period?

00:16:46.860 So it's an interesting one. And it's, I don't think it's too different from the landscape today,

00:16:50.920 to be totally honest, which is part of the reason I was attracted to these mysteries,

00:16:54.820 even as a teenager, because there's something about choice and movement and idiosyncrasy to these

00:17:02.360 mysteries. It's very personal. It's about your personal spiritual journey to the exclusion of,

00:17:08.720 you know, what was largely a state cult practice where, you know, there were those Olympian gods and

00:17:13.860 there were certain sacrifices that were made at certain times of the year to well-known divinities.

00:17:19.440 And that was all well and good, but there was a bit of roteness to it. And so in these mysteries,

00:17:24.100 again, they're defined best by this notion of death and rebirth. It's personalizing

00:17:30.240 that spiritual journey in an approach to the true self. So there's this notion of dying to the false

00:17:37.180 self and resurrecting to the notion of the true self, which comes in many, many forms. So it's not

00:17:43.000 just in mainland Greece itself. We're talking about the Eleusinian mysteries, which are headquartered there.

00:17:47.680 The mysteries of Dionysus, you can find all over the ancient Mediterranean, by the way, before,

00:17:53.040 during, and after the life of Christ. And there's a number of parallels, I think, between those

00:17:58.580 Dionysian mysteries, the mysteries of wine, and the later mysteries of Christianity, which actually

00:18:04.340 they themselves were referred to and compared to mysteries by one of the church fathers, Tertullian.

00:18:09.820 So this is not just wild speculation. There's this notion of secrets and magical sacraments,

00:18:16.260 and hidden ceremonies that are unique to the mysteries and do show up in early Christianity.

00:18:22.120 But there were all kinds of mysteries around the ancient Mediterranean. And during the Hellenistic

00:18:26.540 period that you mentioned, that's basically the period after Alexander the Great. So in the wake of

00:18:31.480 Alexander in the fourth century BC and beyond, the Greek influence, the Greek language, Greek ritual,

00:18:37.920 and some of these mysteries could be found anywhere from the West, so Iberia, what today we call

00:18:44.420 Spain and Portugal, all the way to literally Afghanistan, Central Asia, and all across North

00:18:50.000 Africa. So, you know, the reach of this culture and this idea of mystery was vast. And it precedes 0.64

00:18:56.160 the Greeks, by the way. The Greeks likely adopted this notion of the mysteries from either the

00:19:02.080 Egyptians or Mesopotamian civilizations, or I make the comparison to the Vedic civilizations in South

00:19:08.400 Asia, you know, millennia before classical Greece. So this is an old tradition, which in all likelihood

00:19:14.320 is probably prehistoric, actually. We're talking potentially tens of thousands of years.

00:19:19.440 I want to read the quote you put in the book from Cicero, who is this, you know, one of the more

00:19:25.300 famous Roman statesmen and orators and writers that we recall. We don't know how much history has

00:19:33.620 been lost to us, but he survives. But it's just, it's impossible for me to imagine a statement like

00:19:41.020 this about an ordinary ritual. I mean, so this is Cicero commenting upon the Elis and the mysteries.

00:19:50.380 For it appears to me that among the many exceptional and divine things your Athens has produced and

00:19:55.380 contributed to human life, nothing is better than those mysteries. I mean, just think of a statement

00:20:01.300 like, I mean, given how beholden Roman civilization was to the Greek, I mean, they inherited, they

00:20:07.240 copied everything, the art, the architecture, they just took all the gods and just renamed them. I mean,

00:20:12.860 it's just, it was just a reboot of the whole culture in so many ways. And so for Cicero to say that this

00:20:19.520 is really the central jewel of Greek civilization is just an astounding statement. Okay, so back to

00:20:26.540 Cicero, for by means of them, we have been transformed from a rough and savage way of life

00:20:32.400 to the state of humanity and have been civilized, just as they are called initiations. So in actual

00:20:38.400 fact, we have learned from them the fundamentals of life and have grasped the basis, not only for

00:20:44.400 living with joy, but also for dying with a better hope. Right? So there's just something about

00:20:49.540 knowing that there's a kind of a, I think you start the book with this, the colophon, that if you die

00:20:55.500 before you die, you don't die when you die, or something close to that. What is the origin of

00:21:00.100 that Greek phrase? If you die before you die, you won't die when you die? Yeah. So interestingly,

00:21:06.240 that comes from the Christian tradition, which is part of what I'm investigating in this book is that

00:21:11.880 continuity from the pagan world, potentially the prehistoric world into Christianity. So that phrase

00:21:18.520 actually comes from a monastery. It comes from the St. Paul's monastery on Mount Athos in Greece,

00:21:24.480 which is one of the holiest sites in Greek Orthodoxy, Eastern Orthodoxy, which I think is

00:21:29.580 awfully peculiar because there's this notion of dying before dying. You find across the world's

00:21:35.080 religions, by the way, they're enshrined in a monastery on Mount Athos, which again, I couldn't

00:21:40.260 think of a better description of the ancient pagan mysteries themselves. Right. Yeah. Yeah. But just so

00:21:47.280 when you imagine what experience someone like Cicero must have had to have said that about its

00:21:56.260 significance in comparison with the rest of what Greek civilization had produced, it is hard to 0.99

00:22:03.580 imagine that the unaided aspirant, just by force of his whatever concentration he's mustered over those

00:22:12.020 nine days, you know, that it would be an experience of a sort that could be honestly described in that way

00:22:18.760 with the knowledge that it would be reproducible. And the thing that's so unique about psychedelics, and I will

00:22:23.900 inevitably return to the fact that you haven't taken any at some point in this conversation, the thing that's so

00:22:29.940 important and unique about them is that barring the tiniest number of neurological outliers, basically they work

00:22:41.420 for everybody, right? I mean, you take a thousand people and give them the requisite dose of whatever

00:22:47.460 psychedelic, psilocybin or LSD or, you know, MDMA, not technically a psychedelic, but still effective in its own

00:22:55.520 purview. A thousand out of a thousand people will have a very significant experience. Now, some may have a

00:23:02.220 terrifying experience, some may witness some version of the beatific vision, but virtually no one, again, with

00:23:09.640 the tiniest number of exceptions, will be bored and claim that nothing had happened, right? Now, that is not

00:23:15.360 something you can say about yoga or prayer or meditation or anything else you can subject people to,

00:23:21.960 even over the course of nine days, where you can just say, all right, this is, you know, 100% of the

00:23:29.140 people who cross this threshold are going to come out saying, that was astounding, right? That was the

00:23:35.240 central moment of my life on earth. And with psychedelics, you really can reliably say that,

00:23:42.900 again, you know, modulo all of the casualties, the people who feel, you know, ruined by the experience

00:23:49.600 as opposed to improved, which will also happen. But so that's what makes your thesis so plausible,

00:23:55.800 absent any of the other evidence we're going to talk about. It's just, I just can't get someone

00:24:00.840 like Cicero saying such a thing or writing such a thing in the absence of some reproducible stimulus

00:24:07.980 of that sort. Yeah, it had to be reproducible, which is not to say that the Greeks weren't good

00:24:12.200 at ritual and ceremony. But, you know, one of the prevailing hypotheses that preceded the psychedelic

00:24:17.460 hypothesis was that it was something like a theatrical production. Well, that's a pretty damn good

00:24:22.200 theatrical production. That is Taylor Swift on steroids. Or on psilocybin, as the case may be.

00:24:30.820 No, that's probably a good show. Unfortunately, no theatrical structures have been found at the

00:24:37.660 archaeological site. And we know the Greeks were good at drama and tragedy and comedy, right? And so

00:24:42.440 there may have been a pageant of sorts. There may have been a reenactment of that ritual abduction

00:24:47.800 and descent to the underworld and the re-assent to the life of mortals. But, you know, as far as we

00:24:53.040 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,

00:25:54.600 two and two started to come together for me.

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, 0.82

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 1.00

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 0.89

00:27:14.240 no agreed dogma for the Bible. That also doesn't happen until the fourth century AD. Women are involved, 0.69

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, 0.99

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 1.00

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 0.81

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 0.96

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?

00:33:21.660 That's not the term he used?

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 0.62

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

00:36:10.680 anything else?

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 0.74

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, 1.00

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 0.99

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.

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - December 22, 2023

#346 — The Best Kept Secret In History？

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