The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1543 - Brian Muraresku & Graham Hancock

00:00:12.000 Joining us by Skype is the great and powerful Graham Hancock, my friend.

00:00:16.000 How are you, sir?

00:00:18.000 Hi, Joe.

00:00:19.000 It's really good to be back with you.

00:00:21.000 I wish I could be there in person.

00:00:23.000 It feels very strange to be on this technology, but these are the times we live in.

00:00:29.000 Yeah, well, I'm just happy we could talk at all in this day and age.

00:00:32.000 Me too.

00:00:33.000 It's the little things, like little victories.

00:00:36.000 And Brian, I'm going to try it.

00:00:37.000 I'm going to try it.

00:00:39.000 Murarescu.

00:00:39.000 You nailed it, bro.

00:00:41.000 Thank you.

00:00:43.000 This is the first time we've ever done one of these as well in the studio where one, maybe ever, visual.

00:00:49.000 We've never done one.

00:00:50.000 We did one with you guys.

00:00:52.000 Remember we did Randall Carlson?

00:00:54.000 Yeah, and Mark Defant came in by telephone, I think.

00:00:58.000 Yes.

00:01:18.000 Now, this is, obviously, when I found out the subject matter, Graham, this is right up your alley, and it made total, complete sense why you and Brian worked together on this.

00:01:27.000 So, who wants to start and explain?

00:01:31.000 Graham, why don't we have you start, since you're over there in the UK? Yeah, absolutely.

00:01:37.000 Well, I mean, for me, in fact, Joe, I think you and I originally got in touch because of my interest in psychedelics in human culture and a book that I published in 2006 called Supernatural, which looks at the huge role that psychedelics have played in cultures and in religions all around the world.

00:01:59.000 And I touched in that book on the role of psychedelics in the origins of Christianity.

00:02:06.000 Which of course is a dynamite subject.

00:02:09.000 And what Brian has done in the Immortality Key has been to present hard and fast evidence that the first Christians were using psychedelics and that their religious experiences were mediated by psychedelic experiences.

00:02:24.000 And Brian, how did you get involved in this?

00:02:26.000 It's a long story. 0.98

00:02:27.000 You look like a stoner, by the way. 0.97

00:02:28.000 I'll just tell you right now. 0.96

00:02:29.000 You look like a guy who's done a few mushrooms in his day.

00:02:32.000 Oddly enough, I don't do drugs, and I've never done psychedelics.

00:02:35.000 Wow!

00:02:36.000 Yeah.

00:02:36.000 That's crazy.

00:02:37.000 Yeah.

00:02:37.000 You want to start?

00:02:39.000 Today?

00:02:39.000 Well, I wish we were in LA. I could hook you up.

00:02:43.000 But in Texas, the laws are sketchier here.

00:02:48.000 What led you to this, then?

00:02:50.000 I was fascinated by Graham's work, which I only came across about 12 years ago.

00:02:55.000 I was a Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit undergrad major.

00:03:00.000 And instead of getting the PhD or becoming a priest, which are the two options when you study Latin and Greek, I went to law school instead.

00:03:07.000 For no reason whatsoever.

00:03:09.000 And then wound up at a law firm and a couple years into it started reading about these psilocybin studies coming out of Hopkins and NYU. And that amazing statistic that two-thirds of the participants were describing it as one of the most amazing experiences of their lives.

00:03:23.000 And it hit me that there was something there because the testimony coming out of Hopkins and NYU in a very clinical setting immediately reminded me of what I heard about Eleusis.

00:03:34.000 And for those who don't know what Eleusis is, it's essentially the spiritual capital of the ancient world.

00:03:39.000 It was where the best and brightest of Athens and Rome went to essentially meet a goddess in the flesh and have this mind-blowing visionary experience.

00:03:49.000 So before Jerusalem, before Rome, before Mecca, there was Eleusis, and for some reason we're not taught about this in our high school mythology or Western Civ classes, but it was there that Plato Cicero, Marcus Aurelius all went to drink a magical potion and,

00:04:04.000 in their words, have this vision, what Plato calls a blessed sight and vision, the holiest of mysteries, in which they claim to have a direct encounter with the goddess and completely eradicate their fear of death.

00:04:15.000 It was very similar to what the volunteers are saying with their single experience of psilocybin.

00:04:21.000 Now, with Eleusis, how much history do we have?

00:04:24.000 How much recorded history that documents these rituals?

00:04:28.000 And is there any that describes the actual contents of this mixture?

00:04:32.000 No, there isn't much.

00:04:33.000 I mean, I say Eleusis is like the fight club of the ancient world.

00:04:37.000 The first rule about Eleusis is you don't talk about Eleusis.

00:04:40.000 You know, all we have is this fragmentary testimony, again, from Plato, Pindar, Sophocles, and others.

00:04:45.000 They do talk about a vision that's almost universal, and they almost universally talk about this once-in-a-lifetime transformative event where they become initiates, and only they properly have life after death.

00:04:57.000 Because at the time, the Greeks didn't really look forward to the afterlife.

00:05:01.000 In fact, there was no afterlife.

00:05:02.000 You just disappear into Hades to do God knows what.

00:05:05.000 But people walk away from Eleusis I think?

00:05:25.000 To actually look into it.

00:05:27.000 And so in 1978, this trio of renegades, Gordon Wasson, Albert Hoffman, who discovered LSD, and Karl Ruck, who was then the chair of the classics department at Boston University, they put out this book, The Road to Eleusis, claiming they'd found the secret after 2,000 years.

00:05:43.000 And what they claimed is that this potion was actually spiked with ergot.

00:05:47.000 Which is that naturally occurring fungus from which you can synthesize LSD. And in fact, it's where Albert, it's how he synthesized LSD by accident in 1938 with cultures of ergot.

00:05:57.000 We've talked about ergot before in this podcast, connecting it to the Salem witch trials, which is very speculative, but they think there's real evidence that shows that there was a late frost during the time of the Salem witch trials that probably led to mold growth on their wheat, which probably led to ergot infestation of their food.

00:06:16.000 And so these poor people were, you know, unintentionally eating acid.

00:06:22.000 Unintentionally.

00:06:23.000 It happened a lot.

00:06:24.000 There were ergot outbreaks across time, especially in the Middle Ages.

00:06:29.000 They would call it St. Anthony's Fire, the Ignis Saker, because it's so, so common. 0.56

00:06:34.000 In fact, if you talk to any brewer today, at least the brewers that I was talking to, I went to...

00:06:38.000 See this beer scientist in Munich, Germany, Martin Zarnkow.

00:06:41.000 And he says, you can't avoid it.

00:06:43.000 Now, it's more common on things like rye, but it also pops up on barley and wheat, too.

00:06:48.000 And again, it's unavoidable, and it's highly, highly toxic.

00:06:51.000 The question is, does it really produce the kind of vision, the visionary experiences that people have on psilocybin, LSD, mescaline, and others?

00:06:59.000 According to Albert Hoffman, absolutely.

00:07:01.000 So as a matter of fact, I went into the Harvard archives, where Wasson's papers are kept to this day in the botany libraries.

00:07:08.000 And I found a letter that Albert wrote Gordon, his co-author, in 1976, saying that Albert had self-experimented with Ergonavine, which is one of these alkaloids in ergot.

00:07:19.000 And he claimed, in 1976, it was five to ten times more potent than psilocybin.

00:07:26.000 It's fascinating to me that these cultures seem to have hid some of these rituals, and this goes back to really as far back as we have recorded psychedelic use, like Soma.

00:07:40.000 We still to this day don't know what that is, and it's described in these incredible ways in ancient Hindu texts, but we don't know what it is.

00:07:51.000 We have an idea.

00:07:52.000 I actually brought some Sanskrit to show you.

00:07:54.000 You want to see some Sanskrit?

00:07:55.000 Hell yeah.

00:07:56.000 Can you put it up on the screen?

00:07:57.000 It's under the Soma tab.

00:07:59.000 Oh, look at how beautiful that is.

00:08:00.000 There it is.

00:08:01.000 Their language, writing it in Sanskrit, God, it's so pretty.

00:08:05.000 Do you want me to read it for you?

00:08:05.000 Please, you can read that?

00:08:07.000 Yeah.

00:08:07.000 So this was my major in college.

00:08:09.000 So in the very middle there, you can see...

00:08:17.000 And what he's saying there is this is from the Rig Veda, right?

00:08:21.000 And it's the oldest literature in Western civilization.

00:08:25.000 We think it's among the Indo-European languages, it's the oldest recorded literature that we have.

00:08:30.000 It could be 1500 BC, 1700, perhaps much earlier, like the Iliad and the Odyssey in Greek.

00:08:36.000 This is the mother tongue of all the Indo-European languages.

00:08:40.000 And what they write about a lot is Soma, which is both a god and the juice that is pressed from this god.

00:08:46.000 And what they're talking about there is making this ritual potion, very much like the kukion that we find among the ancient Greeks.

00:08:53.000 And here, Soma is described as a mixed potion.

00:08:57.000 Yavashira means mixed with barley.

00:08:59.000 Gavashira, from Sanskrit go, gava is milk, mixed with milk.

00:09:03.000 And so I've read all the theories that you have about what Soma was, whether it was the Amanita muscaria mushroom or some psilocybin-containing species or DMT. The way that they describe Soma here is always a mixed potion.

00:09:18.000 So in this case, mixed with barley and milk.

00:09:21.000 So that would be an ergot, some sort of... 1.00

00:09:24.000 Already they're mentioned, I mean, and so that's what Rock Hoffman and Wasson were saying in 1978. We have literature from the 7th century BC, it's called the hymn to Demeter, where they record these ingredients of what the kukion was.

00:09:40.000 You ask, like, where's the actual evidence?

00:09:42.000 So in the 70s, we didn't have much.

00:09:44.000 It starts with the literature, which is what classicists do.

00:09:46.000 And so there's this hymn to Demeter that was discovered in 1777, a year after we declare our independence from Graham's people.

00:10:00.000 We're in Texas, man.

00:10:02.000 Absolutely.

00:10:03.000 Well done.

00:10:03.000 I'm all for independence.

00:10:09.000 I'd like to be independent of my own country, if possible, as well.

00:10:14.000 Well, Texas is taking refugees at the moment, is it not? 1.00

00:10:16.000 Well, that's what's happening here.

00:10:17.000 That's why we're here.

00:10:18.000 We're refugees from the country of California.

00:10:21.000 Exactly.

00:10:21.000 The nation-state of California.

00:10:24.000 So, why do we know why they combined it with milk?

00:10:28.000 Was it just so that it was easier to consume?

00:10:31.000 That's what we don't know.

00:10:32.000 We don't know why the kukion was this mixed thing either. 0.98

00:10:35.000 But so in the hymn to Demeter, they record these ingredients.

00:10:38.000 It's alfi, which is barley, hudor, which is water, and blechon, which means mint.

00:10:43.000 And that's all we had.

00:10:45.000 So it doesn't say milk?

00:10:46.000 You didn't say milk?

00:10:47.000 That was in soma.

00:10:49.000 In soma.

00:10:49.000 Yeah.

00:10:49.000 Oh, I'm sorry.

00:10:50.000 Which they mix with all kinds of things.

00:10:52.000 And not just barley and milk, but also honey.

00:10:54.000 As a matter of fact, soma is often identified with madhu, which is honey in Sanskrit.

00:10:59.000 McKenna speculated that there was a transfer in culture of psychedelic-based culture to an alcohol-based culture.

00:11:10.000 Based on climate change and also based on preserving things in honey, and that honey would create mead, and mead, which if people don't know, is an alcohol beverage that's actually made with honey.

00:11:22.000 Do you think that this was the case with the use of honey as well, that it's used as a preservative, or was it used to make it taste better, more palatable?

00:11:35.000 We don't know.

00:11:37.000 That's the problem.

00:11:38.000 When we're talking about ancient plants and fungi, plants especially, we don't know what plants they're talking about.

00:11:43.000 So the ancient literature records all kinds of plants across the language.

00:11:47.000 If I could jump in, Joe, you're absolutely right.

00:11:50.000 There was secrecy that surrounded the use of these potions in the ancient world.

00:11:55.000 There's a case from Athens of the potion from Eleusis being used for recreational purposes, and this is roundly condemned.

00:12:04.000 By all concerned, that it should only be used for the sacred and spiritual purposes of which it was intended.

00:12:10.000 So there was a great deal of secrecy that surrounded the use of these potions, and the potions were a doorway or a gateway into another level of reality.

00:12:21.000 And what's fascinating from Eleusis and many other ancient accounts is the way that people come back having lost their fear of death, that they don't regard death as the end anymore.

00:12:32.000 It's just another stage on the journey, just the beginning of the next great adventure.

00:12:39.000 And Brian is absolutely right to draw attention to the modern work with psilocybin.

00:12:44.000 And again, we find people who are terminal cases, who are imminently facing death, losing their fear of death as a result of using psilocybin.

00:12:53.000 So we can begin to see connections between what we understand about these extraordinary substances in the modern world and how the ancient world used them.

00:13:02.000 That does seem to be a universal theme, this theme of alleviating the fear of death.

00:13:08.000 And this comes up constantly with people that I know personally that have had these psychedelic experiences.

00:13:15.000 They say, well, I feel like I went to heaven, or I feel like now I understand why people believe there's this perfect afterlife, that I've actually experienced it.

00:13:25.000 A lot of the critics will say that it's some kind of natural human tendency that we don't want to die and that we're afraid of death and that religions provide us with some sort of solace, some sort of feeling of security.

00:13:41.000 But I don't think that washes at all.

00:13:44.000 I think what's striking about the psychedelic It's a direct experience that the person has.

00:13:50.000 They have an experience.

00:13:52.000 It's not a teaching.

00:13:53.000 It's not something that they're told about.

00:13:55.000 It's not a scripture that they read.

00:13:56.000 It's an experience that they have.

00:13:58.000 And that experience eliminates the fear of death.

00:14:01.000 I think Brian, by the way, having written The Immortality Key, for which I've only provided the foreword, I think Brian is absolutely right to be a psychedelic virgin.

00:14:12.000 In my case, because I have used psychedelics and many other substances, a lot of my critics just try to write off all my work, whether it's on lost civilizations or on psychedelics, they try to write it all off as the rantings of a sort of drug-fueled maniac.

00:14:29.000 And I think it's very smart of Brian not to put himself in that situation.

00:14:34.000 I hope he will work with psychedelics in the future, but I think he was right not to work with psychedelics before writing this book and to concentrate on the evidence.

00:14:42.000 Well, Michael Pollan, who later in life experienced psychedelics and wrote pretty brilliantly about them, for me, he's one of the more interesting people to discuss it because Michael's an investigative journalist.

00:14:59.000 He takes deep dives into these subjects and his deep dive into psychedelics was incredibly illuminating.

00:15:08.000 And so for him, I really enjoyed talking to him about it and I really enjoyed his book as well.

00:15:12.000 His perceptions of it were really unique because you're talking about a guy who lived his whole life without them, you know, and then really dove head first for his book.

00:15:23.000 It's kind of what happened to me when I wrote Supernatural.

00:15:28.000 Apart from one experience with LSD in 1974, I hadn't used any psychedelics until I began to research Supernatural back in the early 2000s.

00:15:38.000 And because I'm a kind of boots on the ground researcher, I felt it was essential that I have these experiences.

00:15:43.000 What I couldn't guess was the way that the experiences would utterly change and transform my life.

00:15:49.000 And I can understand from a level of personal experience why psychedelics do lie at the root, I think, of all the world's religions.

00:15:58.000 And those religions are now busily at work trying to deny that connection.

00:16:03.000 Well, they're not just trying to do it.

00:16:05.000 There's many people in science that are trying to deny these connections, too.

00:16:09.000 And it's so unfortunate that the people that are trying to deny these connections or the significance of these experiences haven't had them.

00:16:16.000 I don't think anybody who has a dimethyltryptamine experience can just dismiss it as being no big deal.

00:16:23.000 It's too crazy.

00:16:26.000 You need to do it, sir.

00:16:28.000 Yeah.

00:16:29.000 This guy.

00:16:30.000 Just the fact that it's one of those things where everyone who does it comes out of it saying, I can't believe that's real.

00:16:38.000 I can't believe you can just get there that quickly.

00:16:42.000 Three puffs and all of a sudden you're in Narnia.

00:16:46.000 We're way more intense than Narnia.

00:16:49.000 You're in Narnia and you're in a place where entities are actually communicating with you and speaking to you and teaching to you.

00:16:56.000 This is another aspect of psychedelics is the moral aspect of psychedelics.

00:17:01.000 Critics and enemies of psychedelics want to associate them with some kind of immorality, but actually anybody who's worked extensively with psychedelics will know that they contain moral teachings.

00:17:11.000 Whether it's the mushrooms or whether it's LSD, they cause us to examine our own behavior, our own impact upon others, to question our unkindness to others, and to give us at least the push To begin to be better people and more nurturing and more caring people for others.

00:17:28.000 So this strong moral element in psychedelics again is totally ignored by the critics who just want to demonize these substances for reasons that I think are rather sinister actually.

00:17:39.000 I think our current culture lacks a map of the territory and if we had like some sort of legitimate psychedelic counseling where we could go somewhere and experts both in pharmacology and in medical science can talk people through these experiences And help them,

00:17:59.000 achieve them, and get people to realize that, you know, much like the ancients, these experiences are not, it's not wise to use them recreationally.

00:18:08.000 I mean, you can if you want.

00:18:11.000 I mean, many people have and then inadvertently benefited from them greatly.

00:18:17.000 But I think they're very profound.

00:18:19.000 And I think they should be treated like, almost like you've got a Willy Wonka golden ticket to go meet God.

00:18:25.000 Because that's what it seems like.

00:18:27.000 It's It seems like it's happening.

00:18:29.000 It was for the ancients. 0.96

00:18:30.000 It should be treated with respect.

00:18:32.000 Yeah.

00:18:32.000 It should be treated with respect and with reverence because of this sense that we're passing through a doorway into a seamlessly convincing parallel reality and the possibility that that isn't just a concoction of our brains, that the brains are simply acting as an interface or a transceiver between us and that other I think

00:19:08.000 it should be obligatory.

00:19:10.000 That they have at least a dozen sessions with a powerful psychedelic.

00:19:14.000 It can be DMT, it can be ayahuasca, it can be LSD. But they've got to go through those dozen sessions.

00:19:19.000 They should be guided by experienced practitioners.

00:19:22.000 And at the end of those dozen sessions, I very much doubt if those individuals would be the same individuals who went into the application for the job in the first place.

00:19:30.000 No, I don't think you could be the same.

00:19:33.000 When you write about all this, how curious are you personally of the experience and do you plan on having it?

00:19:40.000 I do, under the conditions that you set.

00:19:43.000 I mean, I think that we're in a period now where everything is about to change.

00:19:46.000 Mm-hmm.

00:20:09.000 And what I look forward to is maybe in 10 years' time or less, these retreat centers, which are licensed and regulated with professional staff and medical supervised staff who essentially guide people through what would be a novel initiation experience,

00:20:25.000 not unlike what may have happened 2,700 years ago.

00:20:29.000 I'm hoping they're going to be backdoored in as therapy for people with pre-existing conditions that we have right now, like opioid addiction, Iboga, like Ibogaine being introduced, and MDMA for people with post-traumatic stress disorder, for soldiers,

00:20:44.000 because there's been so much real solid evidence that it's incredibly beneficial to these people.

00:20:50.000 Particularly the opioid crisis.

00:20:52.000 I mean, we have a real problem in this country with people being addicted to these pills and then wind up dying from them.

00:20:59.000 That can be nipped in the bud like really effectively with Ibogaine.

00:21:04.000 And the fact that you have to leave the country to have these Ibogaine experiences is really, it's a terrible statement on the rational thinking of our culture today.

00:21:15.000 Because it's not like these are unknown things.

00:21:17.000 We're talking about it right now on a podcast that millions of people are listening to.

00:21:20.000 And we've talked about it dozens of times in the past.

00:21:23.000 And it's something that scientists are aware of, researchers are aware of, and particularly people who have come back from there and have had these experiences and have been cured of their addictions.

00:21:35.000 It literally rewires the way the brain interfaces with these opioids.

00:21:40.000 And the fact that it's not available to people and they have to go through traditional counseling and benefit from their willpower and somehow or another try not to relapse, it's terrible.

00:21:52.000 Or even just mitigating some of that, even cannabis, for example, which can mitigate.

00:21:57.000 Some of those addictive potentials.

00:22:27.000 He's not the first one, right?

00:22:30.000 Jamie, you're a football fan.

00:22:32.000 Who's the other famous football player who couldn't kick the weed?

00:22:35.000 Ricky Williams.

00:22:36.000 That's right, Ricky Williams.

00:22:37.000 He never sought a TUE, though.

00:22:39.000 It was unthinkable to get a TUE at the time.

00:22:41.000 But it's amazing that the NFL would have a problem with marijuana when so many of those guys are on pills.

00:22:47.000 I mean, some of those guys are so severely injured.

00:22:50.000 I mean, it is one of the most brutal, if not the most brutal sport in the world.

00:22:55.000 And the fact that these guys can't seek marijuana for relief when they allow them to take opioids is just bananas.

00:23:03.000 It doesn't make any sense.

00:23:05.000 Because we live in an insane society which has got all its priorities upside down and is completely screwing up this beautiful world that human beings have been gifted by the universe.

00:23:18.000 And I think it boils down to a relatively few people.

00:23:23.000 We just have incredibly bad governments, lousy leaders, totally irresponsible, lacking any initiative or imagination in it entirely for themselves.

00:23:33.000 It's a messed up world and it's a kind of litmus test for how messed up that world is, that sovereign adults cannot take the responsible decision to use psychedelics without risking jail.

00:23:48.000 It's very, very insane that that should be the case, and yet alcohol is glorified in our society.

00:23:54.000 As you say, the opioids are prescribed hand over fist by Big Pharma.

00:23:59.000 We're very mixed up, and I have a feeling that the sooner we get our politicians onto major psychedelics, the better things are going to be.

00:24:07.000 Well, I think we've got to get the whole world involved as well.

00:24:10.000 We don't want to be the only ones that are tripping.

00:24:14.000 No problem, though.

00:24:15.000 If the Chinese and the Russians are not tripping and we are, we're like, everything's going to be fine, man.

00:24:21.000 Yeah.

00:24:22.000 And also, the other...

00:24:23.000 The other point to make, again, the critics try to trivialize this, but actually working with psychedelics, it can be really hard work.

00:24:32.000 It can be really grueling.

00:24:34.000 It can be really demanding.

00:24:35.000 It can put you through the psychological ringer as you confront your own dark side and learn how to deal with it.

00:24:41.000 Yes, there is a recreational role for these substances, and I honor the right of sovereign adults to use them for recreational purposes if they wish to do so.

00:24:50.000 But it's the deep work that these psychedelics require us to do, which is really fascinating and which is not easy.

00:24:57.000 It's very, very, very difficult.

00:24:59.000 I personally find it difficult.

00:25:00.000 I don't rush to my next psychedelic adventure.

00:25:03.000 I prepare myself very, very carefully and with some experiences.

00:25:11.000 And those are experiences, whether they're real or not, they're experiences that impact you as an experience does.

00:25:19.000 Yeah, you were breaking up a little bit there, but yeah, I completely agree with you about that.

00:25:24.000 I mean, I get terrified when I take an edible.

00:25:26.000 A marijuana edible is the introspective nature of those things and the way it breaks down your thoughts and your behavior and finds the skeletons in your closet.

00:25:36.000 You're in there for six hours!

00:25:37.000 Yeah!

00:25:39.000 Searching around with a flashlight.

00:25:41.000 I tell people, though, but that's one of the things that I like about it.

00:25:44.000 I learn things.

00:25:45.000 I know it's scary.

00:25:46.000 I know I feel terrifying while it's happening.

00:25:49.000 But when I come out of it on the other end, I genuinely feel like I'm a better person.

00:25:53.000 At that moment, I will be nicer to you.

00:25:59.000 I'm better at being me.

00:26:01.000 You know, it's very effective.

00:26:03.000 It really works.

00:26:03.000 There's something to it.

00:26:04.000 And it's available.

00:26:07.000 It's not something that you have to, you know, go to counseling for years and years.

00:26:13.000 No, it's right there.

00:26:14.000 You can get it real quick.

00:26:16.000 This was the whole point of the mysteries, by the way, in the ancient world.

00:26:19.000 I mean, so there was a whole apparatus dedicated to curating these experiences for people.

00:26:24.000 And sometimes it was once in a lifetime, like Atalusis, at some later point in your life, And then you have the Dionysian mysteries, which are a bit weirder and a bit crazier, but they were also curated by professionals, by technicians, women in this case, who were thought to be spiking wine with all kinds of magical plants,

00:26:41.000 herbs, and fungi.

00:26:42.000 But the mysteries existed to create this experience of death and rebirth, and they're supposed to be terrifying.

00:26:49.000 You were supposed to enter the underworld to meet the goddess.

00:26:52.000 It doesn't happen in the daylight.

00:26:54.000 It doesn't happen prancing around.

00:26:55.000 And the Greeks are known for lots of great things that we've inherited, like democracy and the arts and the sciences.

00:27:01.000 And what we're doing right now, this tria logos, through these microfonos, these are all Greek things and Greek technology that we've accepted as part and parcel of Western civilization.

00:27:11.000 But there was another part to them.

00:27:13.000 And it's a part, again, that is not taught in high school mythology or Western Civ.

00:27:17.000 And there's this deeply mystical aspect in the mysteries, for example, which the Greeks really looked to as something that wasn't just like a special part of civilization, but the central part of it.

00:27:30.000 So there is this, I'll tell you a story about this, this 4th century historian Zosimus.

00:27:34.000 He records the testimony of a Roman guy named Praetekstatus who was initiated at Eleusis.

00:27:40.000 Because remember, it wasn't just people from Greece.

00:27:42.000 It was around the Greek Empire, including at that time were people who'd been influenced by the Greeks.

00:27:47.000 And Eleusis has survived up until the 4th century AD, at which point it is, it's destroyed.

00:27:53.000 It's eliminated by the Christianized... 1.00

00:27:56.000 By Christians, yeah.

00:27:57.000 By the Christianized Roman Empire in the late 4th century.

00:28:01.000 And so there were different attempts to wipe it off the map.

00:28:05.000 And in 364, the Emperor Valentinian, he essentially outlaws all nocturnal celebrations because these things are always at night.

00:28:12.000 Eleusis was at night, which speaks to part of the experience.

00:28:16.000 And this guy, Pratextatus, is recorded as saying, Valentinian, please don't shut this down.

00:28:21.000 I'm an initiate.

00:28:22.000 I've been to Eleusis.

00:28:23.000 I've drunk the potion.

00:28:24.000 I've seen the goddess.

00:28:25.000 Please do not eliminate this.

00:28:28.000 Eleusis is the one thing that holds the entire human race together, he said.

00:28:32.000 He said, if you get rid of Eleusis, life for us will become a-biotos, which in Greek means unlivable.

00:28:39.000 It wasn't just about Greek existence, it was about human existence.

00:28:43.000 There was something happening at Eleusis with that potion, with this beatific vision that literally held civilization together like glue for the ancient Greeks.

00:28:52.000 And democracy, the arts, the sciences, everything else It was an offshoot of that experience.

00:28:57.000 Eleusis was the foundation.

00:28:59.000 One of the things you talked about was that there was this transference, like the Eucharist eventually became a placebo.

00:29:08.000 What do you think it was initially?

00:29:11.000 Do you think it was a psychedelic mushroom?

00:29:15.000 Allegro certainly thought that, right?

00:29:16.000 Right.

00:29:18.000 John Marco Allegro, author of The Sacred Mushroom and the Scroll.

00:29:22.000 So he releases that book in 1970, and he claims that Christianity is the guise for a Near Eastern fertility cult.

00:29:29.000 And it's, I mean, I think it's very interesting, but there aren't many linguists who support the proposition.

00:29:36.000 Right.

00:29:36.000 There's a lot of people that disagree with him pretty heavily, right?

00:29:39.000 I mean, from a purely linguistic perspective, to explain it briefly, so he says that...

00:29:44.000 Did you read The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross?

00:29:46.000 Did you read it?

00:29:47.000 Several times.

00:29:48.000 Did you read the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth as well?

00:29:51.000 From Allegro.

00:29:52.000 Yeah, that's the one that was...

00:29:54.000 So the Catholic Church bought out the original one, right?

00:29:56.000 And it was very difficult to get a hold of for the longest time.

00:29:59.000 You had to buy copies of it.

00:30:01.000 I've heard rumors to that effect, yes.

00:30:03.000 So he comes out with the second book, The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth.

00:30:10.000 Knowing as much as you know about language, did you feel like he made leaps?

00:30:15.000 Did you feel like he made these connections that maybe were based on speculation?

00:30:21.000 So he writes, it's pure philology, right?

00:30:23.000 So it's word games and things that only linguists, I mean, I think it's incredible that people who aren't linguists can actually read that.

00:30:30.000 It's really, really difficult to read Sacred Mushroom on the Cross.

00:30:33.000 But the basic premise is that the New Testament, written in Greek, has this Semitic substratum.

00:30:39.000 So underneath the Greek, the gospel writers and Paul are actually referring to different terms in Hebrew or Aramaic.

00:30:47.000 And that these terms have, in turn, come from the Sumerian, which any linguist would say is a language isolate, that there is no real relationship between Sumerian and the Indo-European languages, like Greek, and the Semitic.

00:31:01.000 So the premise of the argument is something that most linguists don't accept.

00:31:05.000 However, and Karl Ruck has written the afterword to one of the editions you probably have of Sacred Mushroom and the Cross.

00:31:12.000 And he gets into some complex theories about psycholinguistics and this interesting idea that just because they aren't related, there are certain words, certain names, certain vocabulary, like plant definitions, which would carry across the different languages.

00:31:25.000 And I find that somewhat interesting.

00:31:27.000 But when you dig into the words that Allegro was recreating, he places an asterisk, actually, next to these words, because they can't be corroborated by the ancient texts.

00:31:38.000 Yeah.

00:31:55.000 For example, like in 1 Corinthians 22, there's this interesting line where he says about that we preach Christ crucified is a skandalon for the Jews and a folly for the Greeks. 0.74

00:32:06.000 And skandalon in Greek means like a bolt or a snare, like a trap.

00:32:11.000 And Allegro ties it to like a tikla in Aramaic, which is like what he calls the bolt mushroom.

00:32:18.000 And in Sumerian, ukustigila.

00:32:20.000 And so he's saying that Paul's actually telling the Jews that, you know, the Christ crucified is a mushroom instead of a skandalon.

00:32:28.000 It's like a code word, like the skandalon is a mushroom.

00:32:31.000 And then for the Greeks, he says it's a fali, which is moira in Greek, which actually means mandrake, which is another psychedelic plant.

00:32:39.000 So there's all this different wordplay going on, but it's really hard to tease out any physical forensic evidence for this stuff, which was what I went after.

00:32:48.000 Was Allegro's position, if I recall correctly, that the sacred mushroom was Amanita muscaria?

00:32:56.000 Yeah, that was even the cover of his book.

00:32:58.000 It was a photo of Amanita Muscaria.

00:33:01.000 And that's where I have a...

00:33:02.000 I think Allegro did amazing work, but that's one area where I have a problem with Amanita Muscaria as the As the psychedelic of choice in early Christianity, because in shamanic cultures where Amanita muscaria is used,

00:33:19.000 it's recognized that the mushroom is much more effective after it's been passed through a human body, or indeed through the body of a reindeer, and emerged in urine.

00:33:31.000 And so those shamanistic Cultures of Siberia use Amanita Muscaria by drinking it in the urine of a shaman who has previously consumed the mushroom. 0.52

00:33:43.000 And I don't see a lot of evidence for that in early Christianity, and it's why I like the work that Brian has done looking at the really hard evidence for psychedelics in early Christianity, which are not in this case Amanita Muscaria, if I'm correct, Brian.

00:33:59.000 Isn't the speculation about Amanita Muscaria that it's seasonal, it's also genetically variable, like there's different species, much like different fruits taste differently, there's different versions of the Amanita Muscaria that have more psychedelic compounds in them,

00:34:17.000 and that there's all sorts of ways of preparing them that we've completely lost.

00:34:21.000 Am I getting this wrong?

00:34:23.000 I've only had one Amanita Muscaria experience and it wasn't very convincing.

00:34:28.000 Yeah, and this is often the case, but I'm told, I've not had the experience myself, but I'm told that if you can bear the idea of drinking the shaman's urine after he or she has consumed the Amanita Muscaria, you will have a really powerful journey.

00:34:43.000 Yeah, but you don't want a shaman just laughing hysterically after you drink his urine.

00:34:47.000 Absolutely. 1.00

00:34:48.000 The joke's on you, stupid. 1.00

00:34:50.000 There's also so many correlations between the Amanita Muscaria and Santa Claus, and Santa Claus to shamans. 1.00

00:34:57.000 The colors, the red and white, yeah.

00:34:59.000 Yeah, also the bag, the toys, the fact that they would dry them on these coniferous trees, the fact that these mushrooms have this mycorrhizal relationship with coniferous trees where they tend to grow under pine trees,

00:35:15.000 which is the tree that we use for Christmas trees.

00:35:17.000 The fact that they're bright red like a toy that is in a package waiting for a child to open it up.

00:35:24.000 There's so many of these weird connections.

00:35:26.000 The colors, the fact that reindeer are with Santa Claus, the fact that these reindeer fly.

00:35:32.000 They fly through the heavens.

00:35:34.000 Yeah, I mean, that caribou are notoriously attracted to Amanita muscaria mushrooms.

00:35:41.000 In fact, people that have had psychedelic rituals and gone outside to urinate have talked about caribou knocking them over to try to get to their urine.

00:35:50.000 And caribou are reindeer.

00:35:52.000 And they have been observed eating these things.

00:35:54.000 So they have this weird relationship.

00:35:57.000 All those things are together, connected in some sort of a strange way.

00:36:00.000 And there's also a history of shamanic rituals being outlawed in Siberia.

00:36:06.000 And the way they got around it was they would come through the chimney, which is just crazy.

00:36:11.000 They would climb onto people's roofs and slide down the chimney to deliver the mushrooms.

00:36:17.000 It's just another example of the way that our culture takes an ancient historical truth and completely castrates it and turns it into Santa Claus, you know, whereas what we're actually dealing with are profound experiences in deeply altered states of consciousness.

00:36:34.000 Well, it's also this information seems to have been lost fairly recently because if you go back to the early 1950s and 40s and look at Christmas cards, the Christmas cards and depictions of Christmas almost always contained elves and Amanita muscaria mushrooms.

00:36:52.000 The Amanita muscaria mushroom was synonymous with Christmas for some strange reason.

00:36:57.000 Have you seen those old?

00:36:58.000 Yeah.

00:36:58.000 Yeah, it's crazy, right?

00:36:59.000 Like, what is that?

00:37:01.000 It's all over the fairy tale books, too.

00:37:03.000 You can't avoid the Amanita everywhere you look, which is why I think Allegro was also interested, writing in 1970 and studying it in the 50s and 60s.

00:37:11.000 I think that's why he glommed on to the Amanita.

00:37:13.000 But it's such an unconvincing mushroom.

00:37:15.000 The people that I know that have experienced it in terms of a psychedelic ritual, I don't know anybody who's really blown their brains out with it.

00:37:23.000 And Gordon Watson also thought it was the ingredient behind Soma as well.

00:37:28.000 He writes a book about this in 1968, Soma, Divine Mushroom of Immortality.

00:37:32.000 That was his guess too for Soma. 0.85

00:37:35.000 But Wasson was experienced with psilocybin, which is so universally regarded as being effective.

00:37:42.000 That's why it's so confusing.

00:37:44.000 I always found that strange too, to be honest.

00:37:46.000 So Wasson, I mean, to explain where this comes from, Wasson has this incredible experience with Maria Sabina in 1955 in Oaxaca, Mexico.

00:37:55.000 And when he consumes the, we think, psilocybin mexicana.

00:37:59.000 And he is catapulted to the heavens and he has this vision that he describes as the realest thing he's ever experienced under the influence of the psilocybin.

00:38:09.000 And the thought occurs to him, he writes later in 1957 in Life magazine, he says that could it be the case that the divine mushrooms are in fact the answer behind the ancient mysteries?

00:38:20.000 Which is why he then went and started looking at the Amanita, perhaps, or eventually Ergot, which is where I pick up the scent.

00:38:27.000 At some point in his correspondence with Albert Hoffmann, they together began focusing on Ergot, like we said, because it's so common and so natural, but so highly toxic, too.

00:38:39.000 And Albert claimed to have this experience with it, and so for years and years, after teaming up with Karl Ruck, they were convinced that Ergot had to somehow be involved.

00:38:49.000 So, what is the speculation of what the Eucharist originally was?

00:38:53.000 According to the early Gnostics?

00:38:57.000 Yeah, I mean, is there any text that explains what the initial food was?

00:39:03.000 Well, I mean, we have the canonical explanation from the Gospels, and we have St. Paul's letter.

00:39:09.000 I mean, the honest answer, and I think any priest would say this too, is the honest answer is we don't know.

00:39:13.000 You know, the Gospels are written anytime between 65 and 100 A.D. Paul's letters are some of the earliest writings that we have, like the letter to the Corinthians, for example.

00:39:25.000 He writes that in about 53 A.D., And the way he describes what's happening there is very, very interesting.

00:39:32.000 Maybe we can pull it up, actually.

00:39:34.000 I brought some of the Greek from the New Corinthians.

00:39:38.000 It's under Christian Pharmacon and the 4 Corinthians 11.30.

00:39:45.000 So, at some point, I was looking for what that original Eucharist was, and where it was taken.

00:39:52.000 So you have to think about the Greek world at this time.

00:39:55.000 You know, Jesus is born in the Holy Land, but Christianity really takes root in the Greek-speaking parts of the Empire, which is why Paul's letters are written to Greek-speaking people, right?

00:40:05.000 And why it's interesting to follow this theory, because you have the ancient Greek-speaking Greek in the pagan world, But you also have ancient Greeks speaking Greek in this Christianizing world.

00:40:14.000 And so the people in Corinth is this church not far from Eleusis, by the way.

00:40:18.000 In fact, today it's only an hour west of Eleusis.

00:40:21.000 And one of the earliest churches is there.

00:40:23.000 And Paul is addressing this early church in Greek.

00:40:26.000 And at the bottom, you can read the English, but he's essentially yelling at them for consuming the wrong kind of Eucharist.

00:40:34.000 Mmm.

00:40:35.000 And earlier in this chapter, he calls it a cup of demons.

00:40:39.000 And at the end, he says, that's why so many of you are weak and sick, and a number of you have fallen asleep.

00:40:45.000 And I highlighted the word koimontai there.

00:40:48.000 So koimao in Greek, I can tell you for certain, does not mean to fall asleep.

00:40:54.000 Koima'o means to die because it's the exact word that John's Gospel uses about Lazarus.

00:41:00.000 Remember the famous miracle where Lazarus dies and he's resurrected?

00:41:03.000 That'd be a pretty shitty miracle if Lazarus was just taking a nap and Jesus went to wake him up from a nap.

00:41:11.000 And he uses the same verb there.

00:41:13.000 What Paul is saying here is that he's concerned that so many Corinthians are drinking a wine that is causing them to die.

00:41:20.000 Why would wine cause you to die in a Greek world that had no distilled liquor?

00:41:25.000 There was no hard alcohol in ancient Greece.

00:41:27.000 Distilled liquor doesn't enter Europe until much, much later, 8th, 9th, 10th centuries AD, right?

00:41:33.000 At this time, there's no word for alcohol either.

00:41:35.000 Alcohol is Arabic.

00:41:37.000 If you listen to the word, like alchemy or algebra or alcove, all these A-L words all come from the Arabic. 0.99

00:41:43.000 A-L is like the article in Arabic, like El in Spanish or Il in Italian.

00:41:48.000 So at this point, wine is not known For its alcoholic content.

00:41:54.000 Wine is a potion that is routinely mixed with all kinds of stuff.

00:41:58.000 Toxins, spices, perfumes, and plants, herbs, and fungi.

00:42:02.000 And here, we don't know what to make of it, but the Corinthians are drinking something that's causing them to die.

00:42:08.000 But the word is die.

00:42:11.000 Koimao absolutely means to die because it's the word that, in fact, you can go to the next slide, Jamie.

00:42:19.000 If you look it up right there, it means, just like we would say, the sleep of death, but it means death.

00:42:26.000 And elsewhere in the Gospels, it's the exact word used for what happened to Lazarus before his miraculous resurrection.

00:42:32.000 It's the whole point of the miracle.

00:42:34.000 He is koimao.

00:42:35.000 He has fallen asleep to the death of sleep.

00:42:39.000 So the speculation is that there's some sort of a psychedelic or a fungi or something that's in the wine that's causing them to die and they're using it recreationally and they're trying to discourage this.

00:42:55.000 That's how I read it.

00:42:56.000 And it's not just based on a random read of this one line in Corinthians.

00:43:01.000 It's based on an understanding of what Greek wine actually was, how far back it goes, which is centuries and centuries before this.

00:43:09.000 How it was mixed, what it was mixed with.

00:43:12.000 Even in the first century, there's a guy called Dioscorides, a Greek pharmacologist.

00:43:19.000 In fact, he's called the father of drugs.

00:43:21.000 And at the same time that these Gospels and Paul's letters are being written, he writes something called the Materia Medica.

00:43:27.000 It's these five books in Greek, and every drug prescription you've ever had in your life exists because Dioscorides wrote that manuscript.

00:43:35.000 And in that manuscript, in Book 5, he lists out, in Book 5 alone, 56 different recipes for spiked wine.

00:43:42.000 And in the Greek, he shows you how to spike wine with everything from salvia to hellebore to henbane, which he says is good for swollen genitals.

00:43:53.000 So if you have swollen genitals, you dissolve henbane into wine.

00:43:57.000 He says if you drink mandrake wine, like Allegro was talking about mandrake, it'll kill you in one cup full. 0.80

00:44:03.000 And then he says this about black nightshade in book 474. He says if you dissolve nightshade into wine, it will produce fantasias ou aedais, which in Greek means not unpleasant visions.

00:44:17.000 So just from the literature, we can tell that the Greeks absolutely knew how to spike wine with very powerful substances.

00:44:24.000 Graham, I gotta tell you, your microphone is really sensitive.

00:44:28.000 So anytime you do anything, any movement or breathing, it bangs around for whatever reason.

00:44:34.000 I'm sorry.

00:44:35.000 I just have to make you aware of it.

00:44:37.000 So I have to say...

00:44:39.000 Be still.

00:44:40.000 No, everything's fine, but anytime you bat, it overpowers everything, unfortunately. 0.84

00:44:45.000 Oh dear.

00:44:46.000 Sorry.

00:44:46.000 Can I be turned down at the switchboard or something?

00:44:49.000 I don't know.

00:44:50.000 I don't think that's what it is.

00:44:51.000 I'll clean it up in the recording.

00:44:53.000 Jamie will clean it up.

00:44:55.000 I'm writing them down.

00:44:55.000 Okay, he's writing down all the noises.

00:44:58.000 That's how good Jamie is.

00:44:59.000 I wanted to bring up sage to you because one of the things that you talked about was salvia.

00:45:04.000 Salvia is sage, right?

00:45:07.000 They are basically in the same species at least.

00:45:10.000 When those priests would be walking down the aisle and they would be blowing sage, they're burning sage, was that for some sort of a psychedelic effect?

00:45:20.000 Is that the reason why they were doing that?

00:45:23.000 So when it comes to incense, we actually have an answer now.

00:45:26.000 I'm not sure if you know this, but earlier this year in May, there were some researchers in Israel who released one of the first archaeochemical studies of ancient incense.

00:45:35.000 Have you heard about this?

00:45:36.000 No.

00:45:37.000 So just in May, at a place called Tel Arad in Israel, south of Jerusalem, west of the Dead Sea, There was the organic remains of some kind of incense that was burned on these two altars that is described by the researchers as kind of a scaled-down version of Solomon's temple.

00:45:55.000 It's dated to the 8th century BC, so in the Judahite period.

00:45:59.000 So we could feasibly say the beginnings of the Judeo-Christian period.

00:46:04.000 Oh yeah, there it is.

00:46:06.000 Frankincense.

00:46:06.000 I love that word.

00:46:07.000 So under archaeochemical analysis, and this sample had actually been excavated years ago in the 1960s and was deposited in the museum.

00:46:16.000 But the thing with this science, which is amazing, is that they can resurrect this stuff no matter when it was excavated.

00:46:22.000 So fortunately, it wasn't contaminated.

00:46:24.000 And after analysis, they found it contained THC, CBD, and CBN. So tetrahydrocannabinol, cannabidiol, And cannabinol.

00:46:34.000 And so they say it's the first example of psychoactive drug use in the ancient Holy Land, essentially.

00:46:42.000 So when they were walking down the aisle, would they use only—we know that was cannabis, but sage was used as well, right?

00:46:51.000 And sage is salvia divinorum, which is a more potent psychedelic than cannabis.

00:46:56.000 Yeah, but I think that's a new world plant, though.

00:46:58.000 Is it?

00:46:59.000 If I'm not mistaken.

00:47:00.000 Oh, okay.

00:47:01.000 I mean, at least the one you're thinking of.

00:47:03.000 So when you say New World, are you talking about European world?

00:47:06.000 In the Americas.

00:47:07.000 Oh, Americas, really? 0.94

00:47:08.000 So sage use when they would have it in that...

00:47:11.000 What is that...

00:47:11.000 Graham, you would know this.

00:47:12.000 What is that thing that they walk down the aisle with when they blow the smoke?

00:47:16.000 A sensor.

00:47:17.000 A sensor?

00:47:18.000 That's really what it's called?

00:47:19.000 A sensor?

00:47:19.000 C-E-N-S-O-R, yeah.

00:47:22.000 Yeah, a sensor.

00:47:24.000 It's an interesting double entendre there.

00:47:26.000 Yeah.

00:47:27.000 Sensorship, yeah.

00:47:29.000 So they were most certainly using cannabis or something else that they were burning, and they were getting everybody high.

00:47:34.000 And frankincense.

00:47:35.000 Yeah, and what is frankincense?

00:47:37.000 It's an aromatic spice.

00:47:39.000 Ah, so it just smells nice.

00:47:41.000 We don't think it's psychoactive, but maybe at the right dose it could be.

00:47:44.000 But the cannabis certainly was.

00:47:45.000 So they would give everybody marijuana smoke.

00:47:49.000 Just walk down the aisle and blow marijuana smoke on everybody.

00:47:52.000 If I may add, whether or not the smoke is...

00:47:55.000 is psychedelic.

00:47:57.000 It is adding to the experience.

00:47:58.000 It's adding to the setting.

00:48:01.000 And again, anybody who's worked with psychedelics will know that the setting is at least as important as the substance itself.

00:48:07.000 So they're masters of creating this mysterious and powerful and energizing setting in which the psychedelic experience can then unfold.

00:48:18.000 It's such a bummer that we know so little about what exactly was going on, but so nice that someone like you has done these deep dives into it, where at least we could pull out whatever we can.

00:48:31.000 And it just makes me think, where would we be if people like you weren't doing this?

00:48:37.000 It's so rare.

00:48:38.000 This is why I'm not doing DMT, man.

00:48:40.000 I would...

00:48:41.000 Because you wouldn't be doing it.

00:48:42.000 I don't know.

00:48:43.000 You might be doing it with more feverish need.

00:48:47.000 I mean, you might be really obsessed with it.

00:48:50.000 It's just, it's so strange.

00:48:53.000 And Graham, I always go back to your statement, which I think is such a great quote, that we're a species with amnesia in regard to our archaeology, our history, but also in regard to our use of psychedelics.

00:49:08.000 Yeah, well we've just not been given the straight scoop about our past.

00:49:14.000 Sometimes it's just purely the way that scholars work.

00:49:18.000 That academics work and sometimes I think in the case of Christianity it is actually a kind of conspiracy.

00:49:24.000 I think there was a deliberate effort to cover up the role of psychedelics and you could see why priests in the developing Roman Catholic faith who've already pulled on the jackboot of the Roman Empire, you could see why they wouldn't like Their congregations using psychedelics because when you use psychedelics you have a direct experience of the divine and hey you don't need that priest anymore.

00:49:47.000 The priest as an intermediary between you and the divine becomes redundant and I think that there was a concerted effort to cover up the role of psychedelics in early Christianity and to present a different narrative which it was purely was the bread and the wine,

00:50:04.000 the blood and the And the body of Christ in a symbolic sense and not in an actual sense of a substance that connects us to the divine.

00:50:14.000 So the literature that connects the banning of these psychedelic rituals in the 4th century, you're saying, how does it describe it and what was the reaction by the people?

00:50:29.000 I mean, at the time, so you have to remember that the Greek mysteries existed for a long, long time.

00:50:35.000 We don't know exactly how long, but the excavators, and this began in Eleusis, for example, in 1887. They date it back to at least 1500 BC. So if it survives until the 4th century AD, you're talking almost 2,000 years,

00:50:52.000 as long as Christianity itself has been around.

00:50:55.000 And the mysteries themselves...

00:50:57.000 And there are serious scholars who came along in the 70s to say this, could have prehistoric roots, which is how I started the investigation, by asking how this actually got to the Greeks.

00:51:09.000 Because what's interesting about this kukion potion, for example, is that it's not wine-based.

00:51:14.000 In that hymn to Demeter that came down to us, she's actually offered wine in this mythical story that takes place.

00:51:20.000 She's out looking for her daughter Persephone, who's been abducted and kidnapped to the underworld, and she looks for her for nine days and nights and can't find her, and she...

00:51:31.000 We're good to go.

00:51:52.000 is very, very weird.

00:51:54.000 For them to have a secret mystery religion that's not written down, remember, the civilization that birthed literature and the concept of the university as we know it, is also very weird.

00:52:03.000 So it's like they are retaining this very prehistoric ritual and this very prehistoric beverage, which is beer.

00:52:12.000 And as I trace it back further and further, you can see clues of beer being used in funerary and mortuary rituals As far back as 13,000 years.

00:52:23.000 And there are some who think that beer actually precedes bread at that moment we call the Agricultural Revolution, where the Upper Petolithic becomes the Neolithic.

00:52:33.000 And Graham writes a lot about this, and very beautifully, at Gobekli Tepe, for example.

00:52:37.000 So I was able to trace back the potential brewing of religious beer all the way back to Gobekli Tepe.

00:52:44.000 And the speculation is that this religious beer had some ergot in it.

00:52:50.000 Possibly.

00:52:50.000 It's possible.

00:52:52.000 It's possible.

00:52:52.000 We haven't done much testing for ergot that far back.

00:52:57.000 That's why I wanted to write this book, is because the science is relatively new.

00:53:02.000 Archaeochemistry, for example, is relatively new.

00:53:04.000 Some of the better findings have been coming out over the past 20 years, which is like a baby in the sciences.

00:53:11.000 In fact, Pat McGovern at the University of Pennsylvania, who I interviewed for the book, described archaeochemistry at the time, in the late 90s, when he was Producing some incredible finds as like an infant, which would make it like a toddler today.

00:53:25.000 And so we're just beginning to put these pieces together.

00:53:28.000 So we can't say there was psychedelic beer 13,000 years ago.

00:53:31.000 The question right now is was there beer at all?

00:53:35.000 And there's very early indications at Gobekli Tepe itself that they were brewing beer.

00:53:40.000 And at another site to the southwest in Israel, at Mount Carmel outside Haifa, there's this really interesting place called the Rockefet Cave.

00:53:48.000 And it was a burial site with about 30 individuals.

00:53:51.000 This is between 11,700 BC and 9,700 BC. A team from Stanford went in there, and they found these boulder mortars.

00:54:01.000 In which they found traces of the malting and mashing of grains which they think was for beer.

00:54:07.000 This is 13,000 years ago.

00:54:10.000 Which brings us to the Upper Paleolithic, and then we have the whole mystery of rock and cave art all around the world.

00:54:20.000 So Brian is right, we haven't got the analysis that proves that a psychedelic was in that 13,000-year-old beer.

00:54:28.000 But what we do have 13,000 years ago, and going back much further, 27, 40, 50,000 years ago, is art.

00:54:37.000 And that art really only makes sense as psychedelic art.

00:54:41.000 I mean, where else but in a visionary state do you see an entity that is part human and part animal in form, that is part a lion and part a human being?

00:54:52.000 It's not something you see every day.

00:54:54.000 It's not something that you see when you're out hunting game.

00:54:56.000 But seeing these therianthropes, as they're called, is a very common experience in deeply altered states of consciousness.

00:55:03.000 So the art itself speaks to us of artists Who had powerful experiences in deeply altered states.

00:55:11.000 What is the conventional speculation about those images, the half-man, half-animal images?

00:55:18.000 Increasingly, it is that they document psychedelic states.

00:55:23.000 There's a professor at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa, David Lewis Williams, written a book called The Mind in the Cave, who's documented this in great detail, that the only possible Another explanation for this art, which is found all over the world, is not just found in one region or one place,

00:55:41.000 is that the artists were shamans, that they were experiencing altered states of consciousness, and when they returned to a normal everyday state of consciousness, they remembered their visions and painted them on cave walls.

00:55:53.000 And those visions might well be a lion man or a bison man And that entity had communicated with them just in the way that entities communicate with us today under the influence of DMT or psilocybin.

00:56:06.000 Did you have a sense of urgency while you were writing this?

00:56:10.000 Did you understand that this is something that very few people who are legitimate scholars are going to really tackle?

00:56:18.000 Well, it hadn't been done, and I don't know why nobody was doing this and combining the humanities and the linguistics with the sciences.

00:56:27.000 I've been waiting for this book to come along, and no one wrote it.

00:56:31.000 So you had to write it yourself.

00:56:32.000 Since I wasn't doing DMT, I had plenty of free time.

00:56:35.000 How long did it take?

00:56:36.000 12 years.

00:56:37.000 Wow. 0.99

00:56:39.000 Was there any point in time where you were like, what the fuck am I doing? 0.98

00:56:43.000 If you ask my wife, yeah, especially. 1.00

00:56:47.000 You're supposed to be a lawyer, man.

00:56:50.000 No one's paying you for this.

00:56:52.000 You went to the Vatican?

00:56:54.000 Was there a real issue?

00:56:56.000 Yeah, absolutely.

00:56:58.000 It's a good point.

00:57:01.000 This is really, really hard, and it brings up something.

00:57:04.000 I've been talking with the researchers about this, too.

00:57:06.000 So when I talk about archaeochemistry, I mentioned Pat McGovern at UPenn.

00:57:09.000 There's another guy, Andrew Coe at MIT. And every time I have a question, these guys are there to answer it.

00:57:14.000 Andrew's awesome.

00:57:15.000 He's a younger guy in his mid-40s.

00:57:17.000 He's been doing this stuff his whole life.

00:57:23.000 We're good to go.

00:57:41.000 No one's out there studying for it.

00:57:43.000 It just doesn't exist.

00:57:44.000 And those who do study it find it very, very hard to get gainful employment.

00:57:49.000 You can't get paid to do this stuff.

00:57:50.000 And so a little bit later we'll talk about two archaeochemists I've been in touch with who have remarkable findings.

00:57:57.000 That I want to share here.

00:57:58.000 But they've each since left the discipline.

00:58:00.000 So they were doing incredible work 20 years ago, in the late 90s and early 2000s, were finding incredible things.

00:58:07.000 But, I mean, life being what it is, they had to leave the profession.

00:58:10.000 Well, let's get to that now.

00:58:11.000 Who are they and what are they?

00:58:13.000 So there's a couple different guys.

00:58:15.000 So there are two finds that I really went out of my way to put into this book.

00:58:20.000 One is trying to find hard evidence of this ergotized beer, and the other is trying to find actual hard evidence of wine that's been spiked.

00:58:30.000 And ideally, that would be spiked wine in the context of some kind of Christian ceremony.

00:58:35.000 Or some syncretic Greek Christian ceremony in the first century AD. And so I spent years and years trying to get in contact with these folks and reading through the archaeobotany journals.

00:58:46.000 And I'll start with the ergot first, since I was really kind of fascinated with ergot.

00:58:52.000 And this hypothesis from 1978, because it sits there for now 40 years, and there's no hard data to come by.

00:58:59.000 And people often argue about ergot the same way we argue about Amanita and the other candidates, because it doesn't make sense.

00:59:07.000 We know it's there, we know it's common, but it doesn't make the most sense as the thing that would have spiked this beer.

00:59:12.000 So I spent a long time looking for ergotized beer or any beer that was spiked.

00:59:18.000 Now if you go to the top archaeochemists or archaeobotanists in the US, the UK, or Europe, and I did for many years, and I asked them the very simple question, is there any botanical or chemical data of beer having been spiked with psychedelics?

00:59:32.000 And the universal answer that would always come back is no.

00:59:36.000 And so I'd ask them again, and the answer would be no.

00:59:39.000 And so I started to think about the ancient world and what that meant and what ancient Greece meant.

00:59:43.000 And so first I went to the site Atalusis to ask the archaeologist there if we could test her vessels.

00:59:49.000 And I couldn't believe that nobody had ever asked her if they could submit the vessels to chemical testing.

00:59:56.000 And so I flew there, and I talked to her about it, and she said, unfortunately, they've all been treated for conservation purposes.

01:00:02.000 You know, they put them in museums.

01:00:04.000 And they exhibit them to the public.

01:00:06.000 And when you do that, you contaminate the artifact and it's no longer testable.

01:00:11.000 So that was my dead end.

01:00:13.000 And that's where things stopped for a while.

01:00:16.000 And that's where my wife starts asking, you know... 1.00

01:00:19.000 Brian!

01:00:21.000 You flew to Greece by yourself and left your two daughters at home for no reason.

01:00:26.000 So you could ask a lady if you could test her chalices.

01:00:29.000 And she told you no.

01:00:30.000 And now what are you going to do?

01:00:32.000 And so I said, well, I'm going to get creative, man.

01:00:34.000 And so I thought about the ancient Greek world.

01:00:36.000 Here's the thing about the ancient Greek world.

01:00:38.000 In the wake of Alexander the Great, who was called the Great for a reason, the Greek influence after the fourth, third centuries BC stretched all the way from Iberia, Spain and Portugal to Afghanistan in the East.

01:00:52.000 I'm not sure if many folks realize that, but the Greek speaking or the Greek influence part of the world was enormous.

01:00:59.000 And so if you're looking for evidence of this kukion, why would you restrict yourself to Athens and Eleusis? 1.00

01:01:06.000 So I took a step back and I started thinking, where else would there be a Greek presence?

01:01:10.000 And I didn't expect to find one, but I landed on Iberia eventually because I started researching Urgot in different languages.

01:01:19.000 That was my first clue.

01:01:22.000 You know, in English we have this one weird word for it, ergot.

01:01:26.000 And actually in German there's lots of words for it, bizarrely enough.

01:01:29.000 Maybe it's because of the history of brewing.

01:01:30.000 But in German there's aftakorn, mutakorn, tolkorn, which means crazy corn, crazy grain.

01:01:36.000 Or totenkorn, which means death corn.

01:01:39.000 And so it's weird that, you know, as you look elsewhere, it seems to be more common to the German mind.

01:01:45.000 And then in Spanish I just started...

01:01:47.000 Random Googling for what that is.

01:01:50.000 It's called Cornezuela de Centeno in Spanish.

01:01:52.000 And a couple things started popping up.

01:01:55.000 And these notions of spiked beer started popping up, where they weren't supposed to.

01:02:00.000 I never expected to find them.

01:02:02.000 So the first hit that came in was from an archaeological site kind of in the middle, Midwest of Spain, called the Vallo Dolid.

01:02:09.000 And there, in 2003, they found a Greek vessel, a Greek chalice, called a Kernos.

01:02:16.000 And it's the same kind of vessel that's used in the Eleusinian Mysteries.

01:02:20.000 It's like this little cup with a tiny cup on the outside.

01:02:24.000 I brought a picture for you if you want to see it.

01:02:26.000 Sure.

01:02:27.000 Jamie, in Mas Castellar, if you scroll to the bottom, and copy of P29. So, this came from a site called the Necropolis of Las Ruedas.

01:02:45.000 And the Necropolis of Las Ruedas is this archaeological site that was dated to about the 2nd century BC. Now, these aren't Greek people. 0.99

01:02:53.000 This is a pre-Roman population called the vacai, or the Vaxians.

01:02:57.000 But for some reason, in this carnos, it tested positive for beer spiked with hyoscyamine.

01:03:04.000 If you go to the next tab, Jamie, you'll see that they wrote it up.

01:03:08.000 It's in Spanish.

01:03:10.000 But there you'll see that at the numbers 76 and 77, when they tested the kernos, which is a very Greek word, by the way, when they tested the kernos, it tested positive for traces of hyouskyamine.

01:03:24.000 And hyouskyamine can only occur...

01:03:26.000 In these solanaceous plants, these nightshade plants.

01:03:30.000 So it's the family of plants that includes very boring things like the tomato or the potato or tobacco, but it has these nightshades like mandrake, again, or henbane.

01:03:42.000 And so it's one of those tropane alkaloids that could have been in henbane, for example.

01:03:46.000 So here you're talking about a henbane beer, which is really weird.

01:03:50.000 The even weirder part is that this is found in a funeral complex.

01:03:55.000 Just like you'd find at Gobekli Tepe or the Rockefet Cave in Israel 13,000 years ago, here, after thousands and thousands of years, you're seeing this pre-Roman population using beer spiked with henbane in a death cult. 0.94

01:04:10.000 And where the researchers say that it was used to either facilitate the deceased's travel to the other world, or maybe the people who were there ushering the deceased into the other world.

01:04:21.000 They actually use that phrase. 0.99

01:04:22.000 Holy shit. 0.99

01:04:23.000 Go back to that image of the cup again, please. 0.99

01:04:26.000 So why does it have the cup on the outside of it again?

01:04:32.000 There's the large vessel and there's a small vessel to the side of it?

01:04:36.000 We don't know.

01:04:36.000 That's just what a kernos is.

01:04:38.000 It could have possibly been portion control?

01:04:42.000 Exactly.

01:04:42.000 If you scroll to the top, Jamie, you'll see two other kernoi on the top right there.

01:04:49.000 And so this is the next part of the clue.

01:04:53.000 So these came from a colony on the east coast of Iberia called Emporion.

01:05:00.000 Which was a bustling Greek colony.

01:05:03.000 And these are other Kernos vessels, just like you would see at Eleusis.

01:05:08.000 These are the kinds of things that they think the initiates were drinking from.

01:05:12.000 Now, they don't make for very good drinking vessels, but maybe they make for good mixing vessels, like for dosage control.

01:05:18.000 Something is going on there.

01:05:19.000 That's what they thought the Kernos was at Eleusis, for example, and that's what I wanted to test.

01:05:24.000 With the archaeologist there who said no.

01:05:26.000 And so now we're finding these vessels in Spain where they're not supposed to be.

01:05:30.000 And I can say, as a classicist or a one-time wannabe classicist, that the first thing you think of when you think about the ancient Greeks is not Spain.

01:05:38.000 And all of a sudden, I'm coming across this idea of spiked beer in Spain.

01:05:43.000 And it's just not supposed to be there.

01:05:45.000 That's so fascinating.

01:05:48.000 Can you go back to that original image, Jamie?

01:05:51.000 Yeah, of the cup with the small cup next to it.

01:05:55.000 What's the conventional description of what this is and why it's shaped this way?

01:06:01.000 I mean, the Spanish archaeologists, they also call this a kernos.

01:06:05.000 I mean, it's the extent of the Greek influence at that particular site.

01:06:09.000 This is the Pintia archaeological site.

01:06:11.000 The extent of the relationship and the network is a little unclear, at least to me.

01:06:16.000 It's unclear how strong the Greek presence was there.

01:06:19.000 But at the time, by the second century BC, Because the Greeks were already in these other port cities basically, it's not inconceivable that some kind of trade was happening and these vessels would have made their way inland.

01:06:32.000 Do they have a description as to why there's a small cup connected to the larger cup though?

01:06:37.000 It would be the same as any Greek archaeologist has, too.

01:06:41.000 We don't know why this was associated with the mysteries.

01:06:44.000 No one knows why.

01:06:46.000 It really does logically make sense that it would be some sort of a portion, because it's very small. 0.99

01:06:51.000 Obviously, you don't want to have too much of that shit. 0.90

01:06:54.000 It really does make complete sense, actually, that that's what it is, that you take one portion of this and mix it with ten portions of that, and then you're going to have an interesting journey. 0.98

01:07:04.000 I can't think of another explanation off the top of my head.

01:07:07.000 Obviously, I'm not qualified to speculate, but when I'm looking at this, I'm thinking, oh, that completely fits.

01:07:13.000 But you're on the right track, because that's where it led me to, was portion control.

01:07:18.000 And that's what I found next.

01:07:20.000 What'd you find next?

01:07:21.000 I found...

01:07:25.000 I found some things, man.

01:07:26.000 What'd you find, man?

01:07:31.000 So, Cernos, right?

01:07:33.000 I'm thinking Cernos vessels.

01:07:35.000 And so the vessel doesn't just show up in the middle of Spain there.

01:07:39.000 It shows up on the coast.

01:07:40.000 And so this town's called Emporion.

01:07:42.000 And today it's called Ampurias.

01:07:44.000 And it's in Catalonia, in northeast Spain, close to the border of With France.

01:07:49.000 And to be totally honest, I'd never heard of Emporion, and I'm not sure if many classicists have, but it was a bustling import-export business of the ancient Greeks, founded by the Phocaeans, who came from Ionia, which is today modern-day Turkey.

01:08:02.000 And they found this place in 575...

01:08:07.000 And we think that the religion comes with them, or some kind of religion.

01:08:11.000 Jamie, if you go back to Mas Castellar, you can see just an exterior shot of what this colonial town looks like.

01:08:19.000 And when you look at it, again, there, I mean, that could be southern Greece.

01:08:23.000 That could be an island in Greece.

01:08:25.000 That's on the northeast coast of Spain.

01:08:27.000 That's a statue of Asclepius, the Greek god of healing, standing in a courtyard in Spain.

01:08:33.000 And the statue dates to?

01:08:35.000 At least 5th century BC. Wow.

01:08:49.000 Wow.

01:09:06.000 And then it gets more interesting.

01:09:07.000 How?

01:09:12.000 So these people don't stick to the coast.

01:09:14.000 They go inland at some point.

01:09:16.000 And they go inland for a reason.

01:09:18.000 And there's a site that they found called Mas Castellar de Pontos.

01:09:23.000 It's a tiny town called Pontos.

01:09:24.000 And there's this farm that the archaeologists describe as a Greek farm a bit further inland.

01:09:30.000 Jamie, if we go back to the same file there, we can just click through a bunch of the images and the kinds of things that they found there.

01:09:53.000 Wow.

01:09:54.000 Wow.

01:10:04.000 So obviously there's some intense influence.

01:10:08.000 These are Greco-Italian amphorae, also dated to the 3rd century BC. And the next one, that's also some kind of Demeter Persephone.

01:10:17.000 That's an incense burner, by the way.

01:10:18.000 You stick incense in the top of it, light it up, depending on what your incense is, and it's used in cult rituals.

01:10:25.000 That's 3rd century BC. And then it gets weirder.

01:10:29.000 They find this, 5th century BC, that belongs in a dining room in Athens, not on a farm in Spain.

01:10:36.000 That's the origin of comedy right there, believe it or not.

01:10:40.000 That's called a komos. 0.59

01:10:42.000 Komos in ancient Greek is one of these drunken parades in honor of the god Dionysus.

01:10:48.000 These are the first paid regulars at the comedy store. 0.99

01:10:51.000 And he's got his dick out like Ari Shaffir. 1.00

01:10:55.000 There you go. 1.00

01:10:56.000 Wow.

01:10:58.000 That's crazy.

01:10:59.000 So then it gets weirder.

01:11:01.000 Just south of the site, they find this.

01:11:04.000 And this is Tryptolomus.

01:11:06.000 Tryptolomus is kind of the missionary of the mysteries.

01:11:09.000 So after Demeter establishes her temple in Eleusis, they send this guy to go scouring the earth to carry the knowledge of the grain and farming across Europe.

01:11:24.000 And if you go to the next one, Jamie...

01:11:37.000 Wow.

01:11:52.000 So if Tryptolemus tells you anything, it tells you that the mysteries went west, when they're not supposed to, by the way.

01:11:58.000 Graham alluded earlier to this incident that happened in Athens in 414 BC. To celebrate the mysteries outside of Eleusis is a sacrilege, a total sacrilege.

01:12:08.000 It was called the profanation of the mysteries.

01:12:11.000 And one of Socrates' star disciples, this guy Alcibiades, was caught indulging in the mystery ceremony at home instead of at the temple, and he became the Ed Snowden of the ancient world.

01:12:22.000 He was ostracized.

01:12:23.000 They would have killed him if he didn't run from Athens.

01:12:25.000 So this was serious stuff and sacred stuff.

01:12:28.000 So for them to be celebrating the mysteries, Think about it, it kind of makes sense because no one's looking over their shoulder in Spain.

01:12:35.000 If it's going to happen anywhere, maybe it'd be in the hinterlands of the empire.

01:12:40.000 So this is people that realized that they wanted to continue these rituals and couldn't do it in Greece anymore.

01:12:47.000 They had to get out.

01:12:49.000 Right.

01:12:49.000 Or these were folks who either couldn't afford or didn't want to go all the way to Eleusis.

01:12:54.000 I mean, you're in Spain.

01:12:55.000 Imagine getting to...

01:12:56.000 You can't get to Eleusis today.

01:12:57.000 Imagine getting to Eleusis 2,000 years ago, 2,500 years ago.

01:13:01.000 It's really, really difficult.

01:13:03.000 If I may give a parallel, it's rather like somebody...

01:13:07.000 Yeah.

01:13:22.000 Yeah, and that's pretty recently, right?

01:13:25.000 Like, within the last couple of decades, it's available all over the world.

01:13:28.000 Spread rapidly within the last couple of decades, and I think Brian is suggesting that a similar sort of thing was happening in the ancient world with a different substance.

01:13:36.000 The guy's name's so right on the nose, too.

01:13:40.000 Triptolemus.

01:13:41.000 I never thought about that until right now.

01:13:43.000 How could you not think of that?

01:13:44.000 Because I don't do DMT. But, I mean, Tripp...

01:13:46.000 People tripping.

01:13:47.000 I mean, it's just ridiculous that his name is Trip.

01:13:49.000 It's interesting.

01:13:50.000 I mean, look at him.

01:13:50.000 He's riding a dragon.

01:13:52.000 His name is Triptolemus.

01:13:53.000 And on the next one, too, Jamie, you'll see there's another Triptolemus from Capua.

01:13:56.000 This is in Italy.

01:13:58.000 So he did go west.

01:13:59.000 Wow.

01:14:00.000 We know he went to Italy.

01:14:01.000 And if he went to Italy, why wouldn't he go to Spain?

01:14:03.000 And look at the style of art.

01:14:05.000 It's completely Greek.

01:14:08.000 Wow.

01:14:09.000 Wow.

01:14:10.000 Pretty psychedelic at the same time.

01:14:11.000 Yeah.

01:14:12.000 Flying on that dragon.

01:14:13.000 Yes, it is.

01:14:15.000 But it's so uniform that in the three different locations you have the same imagery.

01:14:23.000 Wow.

01:14:24.000 And so the question that Wasson, Hoffman, and Ruck would immediately ask is, what is Triptalamus doing there?

01:14:30.000 Was he really sent as a missionary to teach people how to farm?

01:14:35.000 That's a traditional signal.

01:14:36.000 Isn't that wheat in his hands?

01:14:37.000 That's exactly right.

01:14:39.000 Okay, so Urgot.

01:14:40.000 He was dispatched to teach people how to grow cereals.

01:14:44.000 However, across the Neolithic period, people know how to farm.

01:14:49.000 People are already farming.

01:14:50.000 So it starts in the breadbasket at Gobekli Tepe in Anatolia.

01:14:54.000 We have farming across Europe.

01:14:56.000 In Greece, as early as 6500 BC, it's by 4000 or so BC. It's all over...

01:15:03.000 Europe.

01:15:03.000 Why would Tryptolemus need to be sent on a mission to teach people to do something they already knew how to do, which is farm?

01:15:10.000 And so what they would say is, he was teaching not about growing the grain, but about what grows on the grain, which is ergo.

01:15:18.000 Of course.

01:15:19.000 And look, someone's pouring something, too.

01:15:23.000 Yeah, that's one of those ritual ablutions.

01:15:27.000 Wow.

01:15:29.000 So then it gets more interesting.

01:15:35.000 Okay.

01:15:36.000 We're waiting, Jamie.

01:15:40.000 We're waiting, Brian.

01:15:41.000 In addition to Triptolemus and the heads of Demeter and Persephone, Enrique Tapons finds this gem, which is a 250-square-foot ritual sanctuary that she calls, in Spanish, a capilla domestica, which is a household shrine.

01:15:58.000 And she believes it's a household shrine that is specifically dedicated to reenacting the mysteries of Demeter and Persephone, Wow.

01:16:16.000 Wow.

01:16:36.000 And it's sitting in Spain.

01:16:38.000 And what they're doing on that, aside from burning incense all around, is they're sacrificing dogs.

01:16:43.000 They found the remains of three female dogs.

01:16:46.000 There's only one goddess in Greece associated with that, and that's Hecate, who is the mother of the witch Circe and the patroness of all witches.

01:16:54.000 And they're sacrificing dogs to her because she's known as the kunos fages in Greek, which is the dog eater. 0.96

01:17:03.000 What?

01:17:08.000 God.

01:17:09.000 The other things you find in that room, aside from the Greek altar and the Greek goddess to whom dogs are being sacrificed in an underworld journey where the living and dead are communing, is a Greek hearth.

01:17:20.000 And Enriqueta uses the Greek word eschara for that.

01:17:23.000 You can go to the next one, Jamie.

01:17:24.000 So in addition to the Greek altar and the Greek hearth, she finds these, which are very Greek-shaped cups.

01:17:31.000 These are called Kantharos. 1.00

01:17:33.000 The Kantharos is the ritual vessel that was only used by the god Dionysus to drink his magic potion.

01:17:40.000 She finds about 10 of these in and around the area.

01:17:42.000 And when I heard all this, after the Greek influences swimming on this place, I called up Karl Ruck, who at the time was 84 years old.

01:17:52.000 He's now 85 years old.

01:17:54.000 And his career was severely impacted after the release of the 1978 book The Road to Eleusis.

01:18:01.000 His career essentially tanks.

01:18:03.000 It was the classic case of the wrong book at the wrong time.

01:18:07.000 He was not supposed to write this because he did.

01:18:11.000 He was deposed as the chair of the classics department.

01:18:14.000 He was cut off from grad students.

01:18:17.000 He was discouraged from interdisciplinary scholarship with his colleagues.

01:18:22.000 He became the drug guy.

01:18:24.000 You know, classicists don't write about drugs, but the book really, really impacted his life.

01:18:28.000 And he became kind of the black sheep of the classics estate.

01:18:31.000 And there's no evidence to prove that this ergotized beer actually exists.

01:18:34.000 And so, you know, his career kind of went into a nosedive.

01:18:38.000 And so I've been keeping him up to speed on all this work.

01:18:41.000 And so I called him up and invited him to come see...

01:18:46.000 I'm going to go.

01:18:50.000 I'm going to go.

01:19:04.000 And so, in the mid-1990s, after it was excavated, this woman, Enriqueta, the archaeologist, for some reason, we don't know why, she got in touch with a young archaeobotanist, who I mentioned before, Jordi.

01:19:15.000 And they subjected this chalice to analysis.

01:19:19.000 And what they found was beer.

01:19:23.000 Wow.

01:19:34.000 Mm-hmm.

01:19:40.000 And it is the first and most compelling data to support this scorned hypothesis from 1978 that's ever emerged.

01:19:48.000 What was that like for him to experience that?

01:19:51.000 I mean, it had to be just completely mind-blowing, but also frustrating that he was right all along.

01:19:59.000 And I expected that too.

01:20:01.000 And I asked him, I have a video of me talking to him at the chapel.

01:20:05.000 I asked him what this all means.

01:20:07.000 And he's not salty about it.

01:20:10.000 42 years later?

01:20:11.000 42 years, yeah.

01:20:13.000 Not at all?

01:20:13.000 No.

01:20:14.000 LAUGHTER He's got a good life.

01:20:18.000 He's happy.

01:20:20.000 I think he feels vindicated.

01:20:24.000 Yes.

01:20:25.000 And I know he's excited to talk about this in public.

01:20:29.000 And this is the first time we're talking about it in public.

01:20:32.000 And I know he wants to dive deep on this.

01:20:34.000 But this is something he's dedicated his entire professional life to.

01:20:39.000 And you said he's 83 now?

01:20:42.000 He's 85 now.

01:20:44.000 How is he holding up physically?

01:20:48.000 He's okay now.

01:20:49.000 He's in quarantine.

01:20:50.000 He lives in this beautiful pre-revolutionary war home that I went to visit a couple years ago.

01:20:55.000 I describe it as something like the British Museum having been ransacked.

01:21:11.000 So from 78 on, he was just balls deep in this stuff.

01:21:15.000 He dove head in.

01:21:16.000 Instead of turning around after he was yelled at for being the drug guy, if you look him up and his CV, it's all he does is write about the potential use of drugs in the ancient world.

01:21:28.000 Did he have personal experiences?

01:21:29.000 Many.

01:21:30.000 Yeah, so that's probably why he started writing about it.

01:21:32.000 As a matter of...

01:21:33.000 There's really no reason to not...

01:21:38.000 As a matter of fact, when I mentioned that letter from Albert Hoffman to Gordon Wasson in 1976, when he self-dosed on the Ergonavine, he sent some, in the letter it says, he sent some in the mail to Gordon Wasson, who politely declined and made Ruck do it instead.

01:21:54.000 LAUGHTER Wow.

01:21:57.000 So for Ruck, what was it like for you to be able to show this to Ruck, to give him hard evidence, to show him these cups, to tell him about the tests that were done, the fact that they discovered ergot, the fact that they know these vessels were holding beer.

01:22:13.000 I mean, this vindication to be there physically while this vindication emerges.

01:22:19.000 Psychedelic, man.

01:22:20.000 It had to be.

01:22:21.000 It was really emotional.

01:22:22.000 I mean, it's still emotional for me.

01:22:25.000 And I mean, to be clear, there's more testing and more analysis that needs to be done.

01:22:29.000 This was 20 years ago.

01:22:31.000 And the breaking news is that that original sample may be stashed away somewhere at the University of Barcelona.

01:22:38.000 And Jordi was going to go look for it.

01:22:40.000 COVID intervened.

01:22:41.000 So we very much want to retest this stuff.

01:22:43.000 Andrew Koh at MIT very much wants to get a chemical sample.

01:22:46.000 So I want to be a little careful.

01:22:48.000 But the way it exists...

01:22:49.000 Today is extraordinarily compelling, and odds are there's probably even more evidence, some of which hasn't even been excavated.

01:22:57.000 And for Ruck, or for the field in general, I think it's extraordinary.

01:23:05.000 Well, the dots all connect themselves.

01:23:07.000 I mean, that's what's really amazing about it.

01:23:09.000 If you look at...

01:23:11.000 What you've discovered and if you look at the history of these people getting together and having these rituals and what we know about psychedelics in particular, LSD, and what Albert Hoffman has shown and any people who've experienced LSD know.

01:23:25.000 I mean, it all fits right in.

01:23:27.000 It all makes sense.

01:23:28.000 It's crazy.

01:23:30.000 And where would we be if you didn't write this book?

01:23:33.000 That's what's really interesting.

01:23:35.000 You know, there's seven plus billion people on this planet, and it just takes one person to not listen to their wife. 1.00

01:23:44.000 The next thing you know...

01:23:45.000 Do you hear that, PJ? Do you hear that?

01:23:47.000 PJ, he was right.

01:23:50.000 Thank God.

01:23:51.000 Is she cool?

01:23:52.000 I think you just saved my marriage.

01:23:53.000 I swear to Christ.

01:23:56.000 I think you just saved my marriage.

01:23:57.000 Is she cool with it now?

01:23:58.000 No.

01:23:59.000 Still no?

01:23:59.000 No, she wants to see how this goes and then she'll be cool.

01:24:02.000 Oh, it'll go great, man.

01:24:03.000 This book's going to sell like crazy.

01:24:05.000 Are you going to do an audio version of it?

01:24:08.000 I read it myself.

01:24:09.000 Oh, nice.

01:24:10.000 When is that going to be out?

01:24:11.000 It's out.

01:24:11.000 Is it out right now?

01:24:12.000 Or today or tomorrow, yeah.

01:24:13.000 Oh, okay, because I tried to look for it yesterday on Amazon.

01:24:16.000 Really?

01:24:16.000 Or on, no, Apple.

01:24:18.000 It wasn't available.

01:24:19.000 Okay, the 29th, I think.

01:24:20.000 Oh, okay.

01:24:21.000 The publication date is the 29th of September, and that's also the same publication date as the paperback of my lost civilization book, America Before.

01:24:30.000 I want to be clear that...

01:24:31.000 The Immortality Key is Brian's book.

01:24:34.000 Yes, you wrote the foreword.

01:24:35.000 My contribution to it is the foreword, and I'm grateful to Brian for asking me to do that.

01:24:42.000 I think Brian has done really important work, and I think the next step now is to demystify this field and get more science at work on this subject instead of just closing our eyes and closing our minds to these extraordinary possibilities that we've been radically misled about our own past.

01:24:59.000 Yeah, and I think thanks to the great work of Rick Doblin and Dr. Rick Strassman and yourself and so many other people that have contributed to this, it's now something that people are allowed to speculate about.

01:25:13.000 It's now something that people are allowed to...

01:25:15.000 Well, it's a test.

01:25:16.000 Yes.

01:25:16.000 People are having real legitimate conversations about these things now.

01:25:20.000 Yeah.

01:25:21.000 Yeah, this was the attempt to use 21st century science to test an ancient hypothesis.

01:25:29.000 And part of the issue is the ancient Greeks, and the other part is the Christians.

01:25:33.000 I mean, all we had for a long time was Allegro.

01:25:35.000 So I spent some time...

01:25:37.000 If Ruck was right about this, was Ruck right about what he writes about the Christians? 0.97

01:25:41.000 And he does write about psychedelic sacraments and the Christians. 0.83

01:25:44.000 And what was his speculation about the psychedelic sacraments and the Christians?

01:25:47.000 He also likes the Amanita Muscaria.

01:25:49.000 Really?

01:25:50.000 Yeah.

01:25:51.000 Why does everybody like that one?

01:25:53.000 Do you think it...

01:25:55.000 Well, this is also...

01:25:56.000 I'm asking you as a person who hasn't experienced psychedelics.

01:25:59.000 I do not know very many people that have had successful experiences with it.

01:26:04.000 It's very confusing.

01:26:06.000 But I do recognize that it's entirely...

01:26:09.000 McKenna speculated very much that we've lost our ability to understand how to prepare it, when to prepare it, when to pick it, and that it's seasonal.

01:26:20.000 There's so many variables.

01:26:22.000 Yeah.

01:26:24.000 We're ignorant about how to use these things. 0.69

01:26:26.000 Our society, I speak of a species with amnesia.

01:26:29.000 We've forgotten the old techniques and the old ways of doing things.

01:26:34.000 There's been a concerted effort in the modern world to demonize these substances and to cut them out of our lives and to associate them with irrational behavior and craziness and so on and so forth.

01:26:45.000 And to move forward in this field I hate to use the word, but it needs to be made more respectable because it's the key to understanding so much about ourselves that has been obscure and mysterious until now.

01:26:59.000 It's just, for a person who's experienced it, it's so strange, the contrast between the experience itself and the public's perception of it.

01:27:07.000 Particularly the average person who has not experienced psychedelics, who looks at it like this frivolous, ridiculous thing.

01:27:15.000 Like, why would you engage in such a thing? 0.79

01:27:18.000 Why would you?

01:27:18.000 I mean, I remember I had a conversation with Michio Kaku about it once, talking to him about psychedelic mushrooms.

01:27:23.000 And he was basically telling me, like, scientists want to strengthen their mind.

01:27:28.000 They don't want to ruin their mind, in that sense.

01:27:30.000 Like, you don't want to waste your mind on drugs.

01:27:33.000 And I was like, oh, there's a guy who needs to do some drugs.

01:27:36.000 Yeah, exactly.

01:27:38.000 People make these kind of statements as though they're facts.

01:27:42.000 Yet those people have had no experiences of the substance's concern.

01:27:48.000 For his own career, you almost have to say things like that.

01:27:53.000 Or at least then.

01:27:53.000 We're talking when I had this conversation with him more than a decade ago, probably 15 years ago.

01:27:58.000 So when you have these experiences and you run into the conventional perception of these, you understand that these people, almost like what happened with Ruck and what happened with many other scholars,

01:28:14.000 that...

01:28:28.000 Because there has been a hugely well organized and well funded propaganda war.

01:28:35.000 Against these substances.

01:28:37.000 Our society prides itself on the alert problem-solving state of consciousness.

01:28:43.000 And the alert problem-solving state of consciousness does have an important role to play.

01:28:47.000 But part of the madness of our society, why it's become so suicidally dangerous, is because the alert problem-solving state of We're good to go.

01:29:09.000 I think we're good to go.

01:29:19.000 They don't want people thinking for themselves.

01:29:21.000 They don't want the propaganda to be unpicked by a mushroom.

01:29:25.000 And that's why we face this propaganda war.

01:29:28.000 And what we're dealing with is the legacy of that propaganda war.

01:29:31.000 And the majority of people, unfortunately, don't realize that they've been subjected to 50 or 60 years of lying propaganda.

01:29:39.000 They think it's actually all facts.

01:29:41.000 And this is what needs to be unpicked.

01:29:43.000 We're in the middle of a crisis in this country in regards to police violence and police brutality, and a big part of that is the war on drugs.

01:29:52.000 It's a giant part of it.

01:29:53.000 It's responsible for the Breonna Taylor murder, which is being discussed right now, and people are protesting.

01:30:00.000 That was a war on drugs.

01:30:03.000 Absolutely.

01:30:04.000 No-knock raid.

01:30:05.000 I mean, that's what that's about.

01:30:07.000 And most of these...

01:30:09.000 It's not a war on drugs at all.

01:30:11.000 This is the thing.

01:30:12.000 It's a completely maniacal idea because ultimately it's not a war on drugs.

01:30:17.000 And I've used this phrase before.

01:30:18.000 It's a war on consciousness.

01:30:19.000 Our society does not want certain kinds of consciousness to be experienced.

01:30:25.000 It wants to shut them down.

01:30:27.000 And it treats us like children.

01:30:30.000 We're good to go.

01:30:53.000 I agree with you, but I think this battleship is slowly turning.

01:30:57.000 It is.

01:30:58.000 These kind of conversations that we're having right now, it's responsible in a big way for shifting the way people perceive these things.

01:31:07.000 For the longest time, the only way we've been explained to, the only way these subjects have been explained to us has been In demeaning terms.

01:31:16.000 And that these are bad experiences and you're going to wreck your life.

01:31:20.000 You're going to ruin your life.

01:31:21.000 And when we're here saying, well, maybe it'll make you a better person.

01:31:25.000 These are revolutionary thoughts in the 21st century.

01:31:29.000 And the fact that there's so many people that are echoing these statements.

01:31:33.000 And so many really intelligent, well-educated people who haven't ruined their lives.

01:31:39.000 Who have families and jobs.

01:31:40.000 And they're saying, no, this is actually good for you.

01:31:46.000 I think it needs to be recast in the issue of individual freedom and individual sovereignty.

01:31:52.000 Of course there must be limits on individual freedom.

01:31:54.000 We must not do harm to others.

01:31:56.000 In exercising our freedom.

01:31:59.000 But really, taking a psychedelic is the least harmful thing it's possible to do to anybody.

01:32:05.000 It's an entirely inward experience.

01:32:08.000 And it should not be controlled by the state and by government.

01:32:12.000 What's happening here is that we're literally being treated like children as adults.

01:32:16.000 And it's a most unfortunate aspect of our society.

01:32:19.000 And the way I I see government seeking to use the current crisis to add to its power, to dominate people's lives, to even enter into their homes, to encourage neighbors to snoop on one another.

01:32:29.000 It's a very insidious trend that we're in, and the war on drugs has been a big part of that trend for a long time.

01:32:34.000 But you're right, Joe, the battleship is turning around, and it's turning around.

01:32:47.000 Hear, hear.

01:32:48.000 And the thing about the psychedelic argument, too, it falls apart, the idea of criminalizing it, because it lacks all of the rationalizations that you can get with crystal meth and cocaine and death and We're good to go.

01:33:19.000 And they harm somebody else.

01:33:39.000 Now, when you talk to Ruck about Christianity and about the use of the Amanita muscaria mushroom, does he echo the statements of John Marco Allegro?

01:33:50.000 Does he buy into that, or does he have a parallel perspective on it?

01:33:56.000 It's kind of a hybrid.

01:33:58.000 In some of his writings, he's a fan of the Amanita.

01:34:01.000 In others, he takes a broader approach.

01:34:04.000 And I think that was my approach looking at this too, because the one thing that pops out at you from the ancient Christian world is wine.

01:34:11.000 And the one thing that pops out at you from the ancient Greek world is this spiked wine.

01:34:15.000 And Ruck does write quite a bit about that in The Road to Eleusis.

01:34:19.000 The same book in 1978 where he talks about this ergotized beer.

01:34:22.000 He is also talking about spiked wine.

01:34:24.000 But again, there wasn't much data to go on for the longest time.

01:34:28.000 So same as I was kind of scouring...

01:34:30.000 The ancient world for evidence of this ergotized beer.

01:34:34.000 I took it upon myself to put his other crazy thesis to the test.

01:34:38.000 And I started looking at wine in the ancient world.

01:34:40.000 Not just for the Amanita.

01:34:41.000 And I did look for it, by the way.

01:34:43.000 I looked for evidence.

01:34:43.000 I didn't find any.

01:34:44.000 But I found other evidence.

01:34:46.000 And it starts at the Louvre.

01:34:48.000 If I can show you a couple pictures.

01:34:51.000 Jamie, can you go to the Louvre?

01:34:53.000 That's the first time anybody's ever said that to you, Jamie.

01:34:56.000 Jamie, can you go to the Louvre?

01:35:03.000 So, in an obscure footnote from 1978, Ruck talks about a Greek priestess's spiking wine.

01:35:11.000 And he makes a reference to an old book from the early 20th century by a German scholar called Friedkenhaus.

01:35:17.000 And Friedkenhaus talked about this vase that was apparently in the Louvre that nobody had ever seen.

01:35:23.000 And I took it upon myself to try and find that vase.

01:35:26.000 And so at the very top, Jamie, if you click on the drawing...

01:35:30.000 This is a line drawing by Frickenhaus himself of what he apparently saw in the Louvre at some point in the early 20th century and not many people have seen since.

01:35:41.000 So this is his illustration of what he recalls being on the...

01:35:44.000 Exactly.

01:35:45.000 Exactly.

01:35:45.000 And if you take a look at it or zoom into the woman on the right, you can see her preparing additives for the wine.

01:35:54.000 And we can't really make out what they are.

01:35:59.000 But the way Frickenhaus drew it, it kind of looks like a mushroom in her left hand.

01:36:03.000 You can't really tell.

01:36:04.000 Ruck says the other one is a sprig of some herb.

01:36:07.000 And again, you can't really tell.

01:36:09.000 So I sent an email to the curator at the Louvre, Alexandra Cartiano, and I said, I'd like to take a look at this and I'd like to bring my friend along.

01:36:18.000 And my friend is Father Francis Tissot, Roman Catholic priest, who happens to be an expert botanist and herbalist.

01:36:26.000 So I called up Father Francis from his laboratory in the rustic parts of Italy, and I said, Father Francis, since you're trained at Columbia and Cornell and Harvard Divinity School, and you know everything about plants, will you come help identify this for me?

01:36:40.000 And so he said, sure.

01:36:41.000 So we met at the Louvre, and we meet Alexandra, and Alexandra says, you know, this vase, I can find it for you, but it's not on exhibition.

01:36:49.000 This is not in the public catalog.

01:36:52.000 This is in our storage room.

01:36:54.000 And if you want, I can take you to the storage room and show you this vase you've been looking for.

01:37:00.000 And I said, great.

01:37:01.000 And she takes us up to the second floor, past the statue of the Winged Victory of Samothrace, and she ushers us into this completely empty stock room filled with thousands and thousands of Greek wine vessels.

01:37:16.000 And there, sitting on a table, on the next picture, Jamie, are what she calls G408 and G409, And I believe this is one of the first color photographs taken of them.

01:37:27.000 There it is.

01:37:29.000 And so we don't know what's happening here, but we've moved from those mysteries of Eleusis to the mysteries of Dionysus.

01:37:38.000 And there's Father Francis with the magnifying glass trying to figure out what they're adding to the wine.

01:37:44.000 And again, it's just a painting, right?

01:37:46.000 We don't know if this is recording an actual event, but we're speculating that maybe the artist tried to record something for posterity.

01:37:54.000 And this vase is from?

01:37:57.000 5th century BC. It's called Red Figure Pottery.

01:38:01.000 So pretty old.

01:38:04.000 And we take a look, and as we lean in further, I have a mini heart attack because the pottery's been chipped.

01:38:10.000 Just where she's holding the other ingredient.

01:38:14.000 Oh no.

01:38:15.000 We have no idea what's in the right hand, but I'll let you try and guess what you think is in the left hand on the next close-up.

01:38:26.000 So that's completely missing there, and this is all we have left.

01:38:31.000 Boy, what is that?

01:38:33.000 It certainly could be a mushroom.

01:38:36.000 But it could be a lot of things, right?

01:38:38.000 It could be a lot of things.

01:38:40.000 So it was a little disappointing.

01:38:42.000 Yeah.

01:38:45.000 Wow, so when he originally saw it, it hadn't been chipped, so it happened...

01:38:51.000 So maybe, I mean, this is how this stuff goes missing.

01:38:54.000 This is how this stuff stays secret.

01:38:55.000 We don't know how or why it was chipped.

01:38:57.000 Maybe he saw it chipped.

01:38:59.000 It was probably chipped at some point in its long 2,500-year history, and he just invented something to put there.

01:39:06.000 Could be.

01:39:06.000 What I was hoping to find was what you'll see in the next few slides.

01:39:11.000 And this is from a separate Hudrya, 5th century BC, at a museum in Turkey.

01:39:16.000 And this is something Ruck has turned up over recent years.

01:39:19.000 These are women, very similar Dionysian tradition, adding plants and herbs to their wine. 0.99

01:39:27.000 Ruck identifies that as ivy.

01:39:29.000 If you lean in, if you go to the next one, Jamie.

01:39:34.000 Ivy is often associated with Dionysus.

01:39:38.000 Some of the ancient writers refer to wine spiked with ivy as drunkenness.

01:39:44.000 Look at their eyes. 0.99

01:39:45.000 Those ladies are tripping balls. 1.00

01:39:48.000 Look at their eyes. 1.00

01:39:49.000 They're like, woo!

01:39:51.000 Don't you think?

01:39:52.000 Look at their eyes.

01:39:53.000 That's not normal.

01:39:54.000 Yeah.

01:39:55.000 They are wide-eyed.

01:39:58.000 The next ingredient's more interesting.

01:40:02.000 So there's the second ingredient, and the next slide.

01:40:07.000 Mmm.

01:40:08.000 Yeah, very much the same mushroom.

01:40:10.000 Very mushroom, yeah.

01:40:12.000 I mean, that would be hard to describe that as anything else.

01:40:15.000 Mm-hmm.

01:40:17.000 Yeah.

01:40:19.000 Wow.

01:40:22.000 So this is where the pottery takes us, which is not very far.

01:40:25.000 I mean, maybe the artist meant to leave a clue.

01:40:29.000 Maybe it represents an actual ritual.

01:40:31.000 Maybe it doesn't.

01:40:32.000 We do know that the ancient authors are talking about this stuff a lot.

01:40:36.000 You can go to the next slide, Jamie.

01:40:37.000 And after that...

01:40:39.000 Whatever the wine was doing to people, this is what it was doing.

01:40:42.000 So when you drank the wine of Dionysus, this is like that Comos I showed you, that vase from Spain.

01:40:48.000 This is not quite a Comos, but it's another kind of ritual parade.

01:40:52.000 This is also in the Louvre.

01:40:53.000 If you head downstairs to the Sal de Cajiatid, you'll see the Borghese vase from 40 BC. And before that, this is...

01:41:04.000 This is typically how an initiate of the Dionysian Mysteries would be pictured.

01:41:09.000 And the next one, Jamie.

01:41:11.000 Right.

01:41:13.000 Before that.

01:41:15.000 So when they drank the wine of Dionysus, it wasn't to get drunk.

01:41:20.000 Which one are you?

01:41:22.000 Number 15. Borghese, yeah.

01:41:28.000 So, I've never seen anyone walk up the middle aisle in a Catholic Mass and walk away looking like that.

01:41:34.000 Yeah, that dude looks smashed, though.

01:41:36.000 It doesn't look like he's on mushrooms.

01:41:38.000 He looks drunk.

01:41:39.000 What is that thing above his shoulder, though?

01:41:42.000 That looks like a mushroom.

01:41:43.000 So that's called a thersos, and the top part's called the narthex, cognate with narcotics.

01:41:50.000 And Ruck thinks it's where they stuffed all the additives.

01:41:53.000 It's where they stuffed all the toxins for the wine.

01:41:56.000 And you often see the initiates of Dionysus carrying these, and you often see them over the head of the initiate.

01:42:04.000 They didn't go anywhere without their thyrsos wands.

01:42:07.000 And this wand, what was the top of it made out of?

01:42:11.000 Like bundled leaves.

01:42:14.000 It was a hollow stalk with bundled leaves in there, ruckba leaves, that they would put their stash in.

01:42:21.000 Wow.

01:42:22.000 So their whole thing was just adding things to alcohol, adding things to wine, adding things to beer.

01:42:29.000 In fact, it would be abnormal not to add something to wine.

01:42:35.000 So wine is routinely described in the ancient Greek as unusually intoxicating, seriously mind-altering, occasionally hallucinogenic, and potentially lethal.

01:42:45.000 And for that reason...

01:42:54.000 Mm-hmm.

01:43:06.000 Now, was this just when they were having these rituals?

01:43:09.000 But when they were eating, they would just drink wine normally, right?

01:43:12.000 There was everyday table wine, like we have today.

01:43:15.000 Right.

01:43:15.000 But it was more, you know, they wouldn't take two pills with a glass of water.

01:43:19.000 They would dissolve their medicine into wine.

01:43:22.000 Wine is described by Pat McGovern at UPenn, for example, as the universal palliative.

01:43:28.000 That's how you would self-administer medicine.

01:43:31.000 It's why Dioschorides, when I mentioned in the Materia Medica from the first century AD, it's why he has all these recipes.

01:43:37.000 A lot of them are just medicinal.

01:43:39.000 You know, not all of them resulted in these fantastic visions.

01:43:42.000 When he talked about your swollen genitals, it's because he was trying to offer a recipe for that. 0.85

01:43:46.000 And that goes back hundreds and hundreds of years into the Greek tradition.

01:43:50.000 But the interesting part of it is that if you go all the way back to Homer, 8th, 7th century BC, you do find this other kind of wine being mixed.

01:44:00.000 Wine for a ritualistic purpose, like Circe, the famous witch, the daughter of Hecate, who we found in Spain.

01:44:07.000 So Circe is routinely, again, mixing, Homer calls it farmaca lugra, evil drugs, into the wine.

01:44:15.000 You could also mix healing drugs into the wine, but there was essentially a whole pharmacopoeia available to them.

01:44:23.000 Wow.

01:44:25.000 Thank God you wrote this book, man!

01:44:28.000 PJ! There's more.

01:44:34.000 Keep going, man.

01:44:35.000 There's more, PJ. Okay, so for a long, long time, it's been the literature.

01:44:42.000 It's been vase and pottery.

01:44:44.000 It's been statuary like the Borghese vase.

01:44:47.000 The whole point I wrote this book is, again, to apply 21st century science to it.

01:44:51.000 So in my conversations with Pat McGovern and Andrew Coe at MIT, I started to find the initial clues for actual wine that was actually spiked, not just in the abstract.

01:45:05.000 So Jamie, if you open this up real quick to graveyard wine, which is how I refer to it.

01:45:13.000 So if you look at graveyard wine, go to the number scorpion wine right there.

01:45:20.000 So I was looking for evidence of wine actually being spiked in antiquity.

01:45:23.000 This comes from Egypt.

01:45:25.000 This is at Abydos, 3150 BC. It's so old, it's pre-dynastic. 0.99

01:45:31.000 This is Scorpion I. They found 700 wine jars that were subjected to chemical analysis.

01:45:38.000 Pat McGovern did the testing.

01:45:39.000 And they found it to be spiked with savory, wormwood, blue tansy, balm, senna, coriander, germander, mint, sage, and thyme.

01:45:50.000 Whoa.

01:45:52.000 And you can find that he published that in 2009, I believe, Ancient Egyptian Herbal Wines.

01:45:57.000 And Wyrmwood is some type of psychedelic, right?

01:46:00.000 I thought that too.

01:46:01.000 It's not?

01:46:02.000 It is.

01:46:02.000 Artemisia absinthium is psychoactive.

01:46:06.000 McGovern thinks this was Artemisia seberi, which is a slightly different species.

01:46:11.000 But when you look at it from afar, there's something more than just table wine there.

01:46:17.000 These were intentionally spiking the wine for a reason.

01:46:22.000 And they're deposited as grave goods for a reason.

01:46:25.000 And the reason would seem to be for ushering the pre-Pharaoh into the afterlife. 0.90

01:46:32.000 They were there with him to aid the journey, and we're not going to talk about the underworld journey in Egypt with Graham Hancock without asking Graham Hancock what he thinks about ancient Egyptian funerary practice.

01:46:43.000 Well, there's no doubt that the ancient Egyptians were very focused on death, not in a negative way.

01:46:51.000 They saw this life as our opportunity to prepare For the adventure and the challenge of death, that we had whatever years we got, 70, 90, 20, however many years we got, that was our opportunity to prepare for that great challenge of the journey that follows death.

01:47:12.000 And there's no doubt in my mind that the ancient Egyptians did make use of psychedelic substances.

01:47:20.000 The blue water lily from ancient Egypt being an example, jars of that Again, diluted in wine were found in the tomb of Tutankhamun.

01:47:33.000 This is a psychedelic brew.

01:47:36.000 And when you look at ancient Egyptian art, the entities which are very often part animal, part human in form, and which are teachers of mankind, you find yourself again in that same realm that People using psychedelics today find themselves in,

01:47:55.000 DMT in particular, encountering entities that speak to us, that teach us, and that often take the form of part animal, part human, berianthropes.

01:48:06.000 It's so interesting to see the actual evidence of this use.

01:48:11.000 Do Egyptologists dismiss this?

01:48:14.000 Do they embrace this?

01:48:15.000 Is this something that is not controversial?

01:48:19.000 I think Egyptologists will say that the ancient Egyptians were neurotically focused on death.

01:48:24.000 I would say the opposite.

01:48:26.000 I would say they had a very balanced approach to death.

01:48:29.000 I mean, one thing is clear.

01:48:32.000 We're all gonna die.

01:48:34.000 Nobody doubts that.

01:48:36.000 Sooner or later, that moment in our life is gonna come where life ends.

01:48:40.000 And to me, that is an incredibly important moment.

01:48:44.000 And the ancient Egyptians, by devoting their culture to figuring out how we live best in order to cross that bridge, to transit into that other realm, were being very practical and very profound in their inquiries.

01:49:00.000 It wasn't that they were afraid of death.

01:49:02.000 They wanted to ready themselves for the journey that follows death and they made it very clear that everything we do in this life, everything counts.

01:49:10.000 Nothing is We're not separated away.

01:49:14.000 There's nothing that we can deny.

01:49:16.000 There's complete clarity in the afterlife realm.

01:49:18.000 Nothing can be hidden.

01:49:20.000 We're confronted with absolute truth.

01:49:23.000 And in a way, psychedelics are a preparation for that because psychedelics also confront us with absolute truth.

01:49:29.000 And that's why psychedelics can often be very uncomfortable because we see the truth about ourselves, but we're being given an opportunity To change ourselves for the better and to be more nurturing and more positive and more useful people.

01:49:41.000 And as a result, the ancient Egyptians would say to confront a better death.

01:49:46.000 What I was getting at was what is their reaction to the psychedelically spiked wine?

01:49:52.000 Because I know you in particular… Egyptologists don't want anything to do with psychedelics.

01:49:57.000 They don't want anything to do with psychedelics.

01:50:00.000 They would prefer not to go there.

01:50:04.000 And just as there are many other aspects of ancient Egyptian culture that the Egyptologists don't want to go into, it often seems to me that they're in the process of trying to carve or shape ancient Egypt to fit into modern ideology.

01:50:17.000 And that's a great pity.

01:50:18.000 Well, it's also a great pity that, I mean, particularly with your work and the work that you've done with Dr. Robert Schock, describing some indications on some of the ancient structures that there was heavy erosion that was due to rainfall,

01:50:36.000 thousands of years of rainfall, which would have predated The conventional idea of when these things are constructed, the way that they resisted that, instead of looking at it like this fascinating new evidence that will illuminate this field and now we have some new perspective on this,

01:50:52.000 they rejected it so horrifically and they were mocking.

01:50:57.000 I remember that.

01:50:58.000 Who was that one Egyptologist that openly mocked the concept of it?

01:51:05.000 But not just one.

01:51:08.000 There's a film in the one that there was the documentary.

01:51:12.000 Yes, the Charlton Heston narrated the documentary.

01:51:17.000 Yes, I think you may be speaking about Ken Fetter, but really I could cite a dozen Egyptologists who feel this way.

01:51:24.000 The notion that the Great Sphinx is 12,500 years old, which is a notion based on the erosion patterns on the body of the Sphinx, is utterly unacceptable to Egyptologists.

01:51:35.000 They just don't want to go there.

01:51:36.000 They don't want to consider that possibility because they feel that they've got ancient Egyptian history taped.

01:51:43.000 That it begins about 5,000 years ago.

01:51:46.000 There's a bit of a precursor in the pre-dynastic period, a thousand or so years building up to ancient Egypt.

01:51:51.000 And then you have ancient Egyptian civilization and gradually it merges with the Greeks and with other cultures and spreads out around the world.

01:51:58.000 The notion that there is a background to ancient Egyptian civilization that goes back into the Ice Age is a notion that no Egyptologist is I think we're good to go.

01:52:29.000 Whether it comes from astronomy, whether it comes from geometry, whether it comes from geology, whether it comes from the statements of the ancient Egyptians themselves about their origins and their past, we shouldn't be ignoring this.

01:52:42.000 We should consider it.

01:52:43.000 And you're right.

01:52:44.000 Rather than reacting with fury to the notion of a much more ancient Sphinx, it would have been nice to have seen the Egyptological profession react with interest to it and begin to explore it and consider what it might mean because the geology is irrefutable.

01:52:59.000 But largely ignored.

01:53:01.000 The erosion, was it on the body of the Sphinx or was it on the walls of the temple where the Sphinx was carved out of?

01:53:07.000 Well, where you can see it today is...

01:53:09.000 So the Sphinx is carved out of solid bedrock.

01:53:12.000 It's carved out of the bedrock of the Giza Plateau.

01:53:15.000 And in order to do that, an enormous trench was created around the body of the Sphinx.

01:53:20.000 And in fact, the blocks that were excavated from that trench were then moved over and used to build what are called the Valley Temple and the Sphinx Temple, where in some cases you find blocks of limestone that weigh close to 200 tons.

01:53:37.000 And what has happened since then is that the body of the Sphinx has been subjected We're good to go.

01:53:59.000 And there are restoration blocks on the body of the Sphinx that date back four and a half thousand years.

01:54:06.000 And that process of restoring and renovating the Sphinx has gone on down the ages.

01:54:12.000 It's still happening today.

01:54:14.000 The pores of the Sphinx as we see them today are covered entirely with modern restoration blocks.

01:54:20.000 We don't see the bedrock underneath it, but where we do see the original bedrock is in the walls of that trench that was carved out to create the The body of the Sphinx in the first place, because nobody's been restoring those.

01:54:31.000 And it's in those that you see this characteristic undulating pattern that speaks of exposure to a very long period of heavy, heavy rainfall.

01:54:40.000 And the last time you have that heavy rainfall in Egypt is the period that geologists call the Younger Dryas, roughly between 12,800 and 11,600 years ago.

01:54:51.000 So the body of the Sphinx The trench out of which it is carved is saying, I am 12,000 years old.

01:54:57.000 And the only argument against that really is the head of the Sphinx being the typical head of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh with the Nemes headdress.

01:55:06.000 But of course, the head of the Sphinx was originally a lion, just as the body of the Sphinx is a lion.

01:55:12.000 And the head of the Sphinx was re-carved in dynastic times to give it this human form.

01:55:18.000 The reaction to that notion and this hard geological data that Robert Schock provided was just the most disturbing part of it.

01:55:27.000 Let's pay tribute to John Anthony West.

01:55:29.000 Because it was John Anthony West who originally had that brilliant insight.

01:55:35.000 That what we're looking at in the case of the Sphinx is water weathering.

01:55:41.000 And he rightly pays tributes to Schwaller de Lubix, an earlier scholar who was the first to notice this.

01:55:47.000 And John then brought Robert Schock to Egypt as a professional geologist.

01:55:52.000 Robert is professor of geology at the University of Boston and brought him there.

01:55:57.000 And Robert Schock indeed concluded that we are looking at water weathering on the body of the Sphinx.

01:56:02.000 And gradually, Robert...

01:56:07.000 7,000 or 8,000 years old, but much more recently he's also settled on the date of roughly 12,000 years old as the last time that you would get that sort of heavy rainfall in Egypt that could have created that characteristic weathering.

01:56:20.000 And I would encourage anybody who's interested in this to please check out John Anthony West's Magical Egypt series because it's amazing.

01:56:28.000 I've probably seen it 15 times.

01:56:30.000 I'm so glad that you had John on your show.

01:56:36.000 I know it's very rare that you do things by Skype.

01:56:39.000 We did it in person as well.

01:56:41.000 I had him on twice.

01:56:42.000 I had him on in person before he died and I had him on Skype before that.

01:56:47.000 What an amazing man he was.

01:56:49.000 Such a radical, such an incendiary...

01:56:52.000 You know, just planting intellectual bombs in the accepted wisdom of the modern world and making us all think again.

01:57:00.000 So I think when it comes to the age of the Sphinx, it's really important to realize the role that John Anthony West played, and I'm so glad that you had him on your show.

01:57:09.000 Yeah, I am as well.

01:57:10.000 It was a real honor.

01:57:11.000 He was a dear friend of mine, and I was with him just a month before his death, and he went into that journey of death with enormous courage and absolute certainty.

01:57:21.000 Now, when these vessels were tested and these psychedelic compounds were detected, what was the reaction?

01:57:31.000 Was there resistance to this?

01:57:33.000 How was it received?

01:57:35.000 We don't think they're properly psychedelic just yet.

01:57:38.000 I mean, all the ingredients that that...

01:57:40.000 Psychoactive?

01:57:40.000 Psychoactive, medicinal for sure.

01:57:44.000 It gets...

01:57:45.000 There wasn't much backlash that I know of after McGovern's study.

01:57:49.000 It was a gold standard study.

01:57:50.000 And then it continued, by the way.

01:57:52.000 So after those 700 jars at Abydos, after further analysis, they determined that the plants and herbs actually originated in the Holy Land.

01:58:02.000 In the Southern Levin, they weren't native to Egypt.

01:58:04.000 They had been brought there or they were shipped there by the folks in the Holy Land, which gets more interesting because the next big find was the world's oldest wine cellar, which was published in 2014. It came from Tel Cabri, which is also in Galilee.

01:58:18.000 Remember, this is going to be the same Galilee that Jesus comes on the scene and Christianity bursts across the planet. 0.95

01:58:23.000 So at Tel Cabri in 2014, they found another stash of wine Hmm.

01:58:48.000 Hmm.

01:58:51.000 Doesn't sound very psychedelic, though.

01:58:52.000 No.

01:58:53.000 No.

01:58:53.000 Not at all.

01:58:54.000 So they just were into spiking wine.

01:58:58.000 They love spiking wine.

01:58:59.000 But what Andrew Koh says about it is interesting, though.

01:59:02.000 And that's why I reached out to him originally.

01:59:04.000 Because he says that spiking wine with this many ingredients is indicative of a very sophisticated understanding.

01:59:12.000 I think?

01:59:37.000 Who knows?

01:59:39.000 We don't know which juniper it was, but there is juniper used in other psychoactive ceremonies.

01:59:45.000 There's a species of juniper, Juniperus recurva, which occurs near the Himalayas, actually.

01:59:52.000 And I've seen videos, really cool videos, if you want to pull it up, Jamie.

01:59:57.000 You can look up, if you Google, anybody can do this, GB shaman.

02:00:02.000 If you look up GB space shaman, you'll see a ritual of someone inhaling the juniper, the incense from juniper, and going into trance.

02:00:20.000 How much is written about wine and the additives and all the different things they put to wine?

02:00:27.000 Well, let's watch this first.

02:00:29.000 There's not much written about it.

02:00:30.000 You might have to skip forward, but this is them essentially preparing...

02:00:37.000 What are we looking at here?

02:00:38.000 So that's what they call the betayo.

02:00:41.000 The betayo are the traditional healer prophets and shamans of this tribe in the Hindu Kush.

02:00:50.000 And what they do is they inhale the incense from burning juniper and then suck the blood from a goat head. 1.00

02:00:58.000 Wow.

02:01:00.000 Jesus Christ.

02:01:01.000 The things people get up to.

02:01:03.000 That's what happens when you outlaw psychedelics.

02:01:06.000 People try anything.

02:01:08.000 Can I get mushrooms? 0.99

02:01:09.000 Yeah, suck a goat head. 1.00

02:01:11.000 Wow. 1.00

02:01:13.000 This is the Hunza people, and it says it puts him into a trance whereby he's able to communicate with the fairies. 1.00

02:01:21.000 Look at that guy, skeptical.

02:01:24.000 He's like, I'm not buying it.

02:01:26.000 This guy's always been annoying.

02:01:29.000 It's like, oh, he just wants to put on a robe and dance.

02:01:32.000 And he kind of looks like a guy who would do that, too.

02:01:35.000 And there's the headless goat.

02:01:37.000 The headless goat, exactly.

02:01:38.000 Oh, boy.

02:01:39.000 Hey, boy.

02:01:41.000 And what, is there a, do they explain?

02:01:44.000 Oh, here he goes. 0.97

02:01:45.000 He's sucking on the goat head. 0.99

02:01:46.000 Okay, this guy's annoying. 0.95

02:01:48.000 Look at him.

02:01:49.000 Look at how he's dancing.

02:01:50.000 And he's putting on a show.

02:01:51.000 Everybody's like, look at him.

02:01:53.000 And he's like, look at me. 0.94

02:01:55.000 I'm sucking on a goat head. 1.00

02:01:56.000 I'm so crazy. 0.99

02:01:57.000 I bet the goat head doesn't really do anything. 0.99

02:01:59.000 I bet the goat head is just so he gets extra attention. 1.00

02:02:01.000 Look at the kids. 0.99

02:02:02.000 Like, wow, this guy's crazy. 0.98

02:02:04.000 Look at him. 0.97

02:02:07.000 Yeah, a little bit of Borat in there, too.

02:02:11.000 Wow.

02:02:12.000 Okay.

02:02:13.000 Now, is it usually more than one person?

02:02:17.000 This is what's odd, is that this one guy is tripping balls, and then he collapses, and then everybody else is just going, oh, it's Marty.

02:02:24.000 Look at Marty. 0.97

02:02:25.000 Marty's getting crazy.

02:02:28.000 And then he's going to rinse his hands off.

02:02:31.000 Hmm.

02:02:32.000 And is this something that other people...

02:02:35.000 This is what's weird about this video.

02:02:37.000 It seems like one person is having a psychedelic ritual and the rest of them are just watching this guy.

02:02:42.000 He was the spiritual technician, the way you find in other traditional societies.

02:02:46.000 He was the one who trained to navigate that other world and learn the fairy language, apparently.

02:02:53.000 Fairy language?

02:02:54.000 The fairy language.

02:02:55.000 Hmm.

02:02:56.000 Yeah, it is weird that those fairies and elves and all these different things exist in so many different cultures.

02:03:01.000 And they are what you do see if you do take enough psychedelics or the right kind in the right setting.

02:03:07.000 Is that true?

02:03:08.000 Yeah.

02:03:09.000 I've met gestures.

02:03:10.000 It's true.

02:03:10.000 My take on this when I wrote Supernatural is that we have three supposedly different domains of experience.

02:03:19.000 We have the spirits who shamans encounter in altered states of consciousness.

02:03:25.000 We have fairies and elves from the Middle Ages.

02:03:30.000 Very often in illustrations you'll see that the mushrooms are present in the illustrations.

02:03:36.000 And then today we have aliens.

02:03:39.000 And at the level of phenomena, there are extremely close similarities between the entities that we call aliens today.

02:03:49.000 The entities that were called fairies or elves in the Middle Ages, and the entities that shamans refer to as spirits.

02:03:55.000 And I would say actually what we're dealing with is the same experience in all three cases, but viewed through different cultural lenses and construed in different ways.

02:04:07.000 And the only thing that really explains these kinds of experiences, where any one of us can actually share that experience and have that experience, It's psychedelics.

02:04:17.000 Powerful psychedelics like DMT will plunge us into that realm of experience and we will meet entities and many people today do construe those entities as aliens because that's how our culture is dealing with the other today.

02:04:29.000 Have you ever experienced anything that looked like what the classic iconic alien is?

02:04:35.000 Yeah, I have.

02:04:37.000 You have?

02:04:38.000 Really?

02:04:38.000 Absolutely.

02:04:39.000 In one of my early ayahuasca experiences in the Amazon, I saw flying, my eyes were closed, but I saw flying saucers.

02:04:51.000 And then I saw this classic sort of quote-unquote grey with that high domed forehead and narrow pointed chin and these really grim eyes looking down on me.

02:05:03.000 I think I may have mentioned this on your show before, but what I really regret doing, I felt I was going to be taken.

02:05:11.000 I felt I was going to be abducted.

02:05:13.000 And I opened my eyes and I shouted, no!

02:05:18.000 Of course!

02:05:19.000 Of course!

02:05:20.000 I should have kept my eyes closed and said, yes!

02:05:24.000 Take me!

02:05:25.000 But I didn't do that and I've never encountered them in that quite alien form again.

02:05:31.000 That's a bummer.

02:05:33.000 Yes, it is a bummer.

02:05:36.000 And we have to consider the possibility that these are not simply concoctions of our brains, that the brain is a much more complicated mechanism than we think it is, and that In certain circumstances, when brain chemistry is altered in the right way,

02:05:51.000 we gain access to other levels of reality that are normally closed off to our senses.

02:05:57.000 That is personally my view that what's happening with psychedelics.

02:06:01.000 I can't prove that that's the case.

02:06:03.000 But the sense that we are entering a seamlessly convincing parallel world, that it is inhabited by intelligent beings, and that they have things to say to us.

02:06:12.000 First of all, this is universal.

02:06:14.000 People who've worked with psychedelics all around the world have had those experiences.

02:06:18.000 And secondly, I just don't see this.

02:06:20.000 I don't see why we've all got a brain module for this.

02:06:23.000 I think we are actually peering through the doorway into another level of reality.

02:06:28.000 But it's going to take a whole lot more research to prove that.

02:06:30.000 That's just my own personal opinion.

02:06:33.000 My personal opinion mirrors yours.

02:06:35.000 My feelings have always been when I do psychedelics that I've tuned into a frequency that's unavailable to me during regular states of consciousness.

02:06:42.000 It doesn't seem like a hallucination.

02:06:44.000 It seems like I entered into a doorway and I'm in a new place and there's an urgency to it because I know that I'm not going to be able to stay here for very long.

02:06:53.000 And they seem to know that and they seem to communicate with you in a very urgent way.

02:07:01.000 And one of the things that I've talked about, I've talked about this experience before, one of the most profound ones, I met jesters who were giving me the finger.

02:07:10.000 And they seem to be explaining to me that I take myself too seriously.

02:07:15.000 It felt like, and then when I went, oh, okay, they went, yes.

02:07:21.000 Yeah, you got it.

02:07:22.000 You got it.

02:07:23.000 I was like, oh, yeah, you're right.

02:07:25.000 Yeah.

02:07:25.000 It was a feeling like, oh yeah, okay.

02:07:29.000 You think of yourself too highly.

02:07:31.000 That's why the subtitle of my book, Supernatural, back in 2006 was Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind.

02:07:38.000 And I think that's what's going on here.

02:07:40.000 I think that the psychedelics allow us to enter a realm where we encounter teachers who can help us to be better people and perhaps to be a better civilization.

02:07:50.000 Well, that was one of the more interesting things about, I believe it was University of Jerusalem, their take on what Moses in the burning bush was, that very likely the burning bush was the acacia tree, which is very rich in dimethyltryptamine.

02:08:08.000 DMT. Yeah.

02:08:42.000 Yeah, in what other state of consciousness do you meet intelligent plants that communicate with you?

02:08:49.000 It's very hard to imagine any other state of consciousness apart from the psychedelic state.

02:08:54.000 And what you're citing is the work of Benny Shannon, who is a professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and he has drunk ayahuasca himself at least 700 times.

02:09:04.000 Well, he's suspect then.

02:09:06.000 I don't know if we should listen to him anymore.

02:09:10.000 Exactly.

02:09:11.000 Any scholar who goes into this area and really does it properly faces skepticism and being shoved off to the side by his or her colleagues.

02:09:21.000 It takes courage to do this work.

02:09:24.000 But what we need is more scientists doing this work.

02:09:35.000 It all falls into place if you look at it under that description, and I'm glad he has the courage to step up and actually put this description out there.

02:09:43.000 I remember someone sent it to me in an email, and I was like, aha!

02:09:48.000 Like, there it is.

02:09:50.000 Of course.

02:09:50.000 Benny Shannon's book is called Ayahuasca, the Antipodes of the Mind.

02:09:56.000 It's a really important piece of work, but not widely enough read in my view.

02:10:02.000 Is there a cultural version of ayahuasca where there is an MAO inhibitor and a plant with dimethyltryptamine outside of the Amazon?

02:10:12.000 Is there an equivalent?

02:10:14.000 Sure.

02:10:15.000 Well, sure.

02:10:15.000 That was also part of Benny Shannon's argument in ancient Israel, that you have mimosas, certain mimosas, which contain the DMT,

02:10:30.000 and then you have harmoline in other plants that contain the monoamine oxidase inhibitors.

02:10:39.000 So you can have these What are called ayahuasca analogues, which are doing essentially the same thing.

02:10:47.000 I've consumed ayahuasca analogues myself, and they are very like ayahuasca, but not quite.

02:10:54.000 There is a difference.

02:10:56.000 Again, I'm going to sound very mystical and kind of woo-woo here, but there is a spirit in ayahuasca.

02:11:02.000 It's a female spirit. 1.00

02:11:03.000 It's a goddess, and I've not encountered her Yes, very much so.

02:11:35.000 I mean, sometimes she appears in, and I can hear my critics out there laughing at me now.

02:11:40.000 Hancock has completely lost it.

02:11:42.000 But sometimes she appears in the form of a human woman, sometimes in the form of a serpent.

02:11:49.000 And then, you know, we get into the whole issue of the Garden of Eden and the story of the Garden of Eden and the role that the serpent plays in that story.

02:11:56.000 And the role that the serpent plays in that story is pointing out to Adam and Eve that God has basically lied to them.

02:12:04.000 And he offers Adam and Eve the forbidden fruit.

02:12:08.000 Alex Gray, my friend, the visionary artist Alex Gray, calls it the first psychedelic slapdown.

02:12:13.000 That's what the Garden of Eden is.

02:12:16.000 So, you know, there are these intriguing experiences that are unleashed with these substances.

02:12:22.000 But to my mind, there is something very special about ayahuasca.

02:12:27.000 It's a living ancient technology.

02:12:29.000 You can trace it back thousands of years in the Amazon world.

02:12:33.000 And it's now coming out of the Amazon and finding its way around the world.

02:12:37.000 And that ancient fresco that shows Adam and Eve standing by mushrooms is very bizarre as well, right?

02:12:44.000 Yeah, absolutely.

02:12:46.000 Again, our psychedelic heritage has been hidden from us.

02:12:50.000 And that is why I value Brian's book, The Immortality Key, so much because it's done the solid scientific groundwork to begin to give academic scientists permission To investigate this field.

02:13:04.000 And that's what we need.

02:13:05.000 We need much more work done in this field than has been done already.

02:13:12.000 Man, how good does it feel to have put this down to paper and just set it?

02:13:18.000 Or do you feel like now that it's out there, you have a lot of explaining to do?

02:13:24.000 I think there's lots of explaining to do.

02:13:26.000 It's funny though, and we haven't gotten into too much of the Christian material yet, but I went through the Vatican quite a bit when I was writing this, with different departments at the Vatican.

02:13:36.000 The Vatican Secret Archives and the Archive of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Vatican Museums and all the catacombs in Rome.

02:13:45.000 And I went through there spelunking with Father Francis.

02:13:48.000 And to be totally honest, the Vatican couldn't have been nicer or more accommodating to me.

02:13:53.000 And while some of this is controversial, they've been very supportive to date.

02:13:58.000 And I say that as someone who went to 13 years of Catholic school.

02:14:02.000 I think that's true.

02:14:23.000 As pagans and wake up in 34 AD as Christians. 0.95

02:14:26.000 It was a process, an intercultural process, that took hundreds of years, which I call Paleo-Christianity, which I think for anyone interested in the faith is kind of the most interesting part.

02:14:36.000 These are the earliest and most authentic Christians, but they were living in a world where the blood of goats and all this spiked wine was the norm. 1.00

02:14:45.000 And as a matter of fact, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote about this, of all people.

02:14:50.000 Yeah, this is called the Pagan Continuity Hypothesis. 0.99

02:14:53.000 The idea that Christianity wasn't born in a vacuum.

02:14:56.000 In 1950, Dr. King wrote a paper called The Influence of the Mystery Religions on Christianity.

02:15:02.000 You can Google it.

02:15:03.000 You can Google it and you can Google it and you can read it.

02:15:06.000 This was not controversial woo-woo stuff, at least in 1950. When I went to the Vatican, I was really fortunate.

02:15:12.000 We hired a professional guide who was a professor.

02:15:15.000 There it is.

02:15:15.000 The Influence of the Mystery of Religions and Christianity.

02:15:18.000 Dr. Martin Luther King.

02:15:20.000 Wow.

02:15:20.000 It's impressive.

02:15:21.000 It's amazing.

02:15:23.000 We got really fortunate.

02:15:24.000 We have this amazing guide and we were in the middle of this one area of the Vatican and there was a giant pine cone.

02:15:34.000 Oh, yeah.

02:15:34.000 The Cortile della Pina.

02:15:36.000 Yeah, and so he brought it up.

02:15:38.000 Like, what do you think that stands for?

02:15:40.000 And I said, probably the pineal gland.

02:15:42.000 And his eyes lit up and we had this conversation.

02:15:45.000 And then we started talking about drugs.

02:15:47.000 You know too much, Joe Rogan.

02:15:49.000 And so he just loved the fact that I knew that and that I was into this.

02:15:53.000 And then we had a fantastic time.

02:15:55.000 But there's a lot of...

02:15:58.000 Mushroom imagery and iconic mushroom shapes and this connection between mushrooms and Christianity, you can find it.

02:16:08.000 There's a lot of...

02:16:10.000 One of the weirder ones, when Jack Harrow was alive, he was working on...

02:16:14.000 Jack Harrow was a guy who was a Goldwater Republican and became a cannabis advocate when he...

02:16:21.000 He got divorced and met a girlfriend, and he thought pot was for losers, but he just wanted to get high with this cute girl, and smoked a little pot.

02:16:30.000 He's like, where has this been all my life? 1.00

02:16:31.000 Holy shit! 0.99

02:16:32.000 And then he became a cannabis advocate, and I was very fortunate to meet him before he died, and he was showing me some stuff that he was working on. 0.99

02:16:38.000 But one of the things that he was working on after he wrote that book, The Emperor Wears No Clothes, but...

02:16:43.000 Then he was writing a book about mushrooms in Christianity and there was these ancient images of these naked people dancing in ecstasy and they were surrounded by this translucent mushroom image.

02:16:58.000 It was really fascinating and there was a lot of these images and images that were the shape of doors that were carved out in the form of a mushroom.

02:17:08.000 It only makes sense if you know what psychedelic mushrooms do when you take them.

02:17:15.000 You have these incredible experiences, and the idea that a religion would emerge out of these experiences is not unusual at all.

02:17:24.000 Mm-hmm.

02:17:41.000 I think?

02:18:05.000 And it goes across all the Greek-influenced areas, including Magna Graecia, which is Great Greece, which is Southern Italy, which happens to be the same place where the Catholic Church put down its roots 2,000 years ago.

02:18:18.000 The reason for that was because the early church was all Greek, and these were people who were steeped in the traditions of their ancestors.

02:18:25.000 I mean, imagine abandoning the religion of your grandparents for this new wine god from one day to the next.

02:18:31.000 It doesn't make that much sense.

02:18:33.000 The thesis of the book is that the Eucharist for some communities, at some point in time, at some area in this Greek-speaking part of the world, would have availed themselves of the kind of sacraments that were available to the Greeks for generations and generations.

02:18:49.000 And so we're still looking for the smoking gun of that ancient Greek spiked wine.

02:18:54.000 It's not there.

02:18:55.000 We talked about the Abydos wine in Egypt.

02:18:57.000 The herbal wine from Tel Kabri in Galilee.

02:19:01.000 So we've been looking in Greece and Turkey and Italy and elsewhere for that, you know, Greek spiked wine and haven't quite found it yet.

02:19:08.000 But Andrew Ko is very interested in continuing to test and find more things.

02:19:12.000 But in the meantime, we did find spiked wine.

02:19:15.000 Yeah, so you have evidence of spiked wine.

02:19:18.000 Now it's just finding it in Greece.

02:19:20.000 I think you want to find it in Greece to tie it to Dionysus.

02:19:23.000 You want to find it in Italy to tie it to the Christians, because that's really the area where the church, again, puts down roots and begins to grow up in that period of paleo-Christianity.

02:19:32.000 And so, just like I was looking for that ergotized beer, I was looking for evidence of where you could properly call it psychedelic wine may have popped up.

02:19:42.000 And there is one article in one archaeobotany journal from 20 years ago that talks about spiked wine.

02:19:48.000 Which was news to me, too, because every single time I go to the Pat McGoverns and Andrew Coes and all the top archaeobotanists in Europe, the answer you get back, just like the answer to the question, where is the spiked beer?

02:20:00.000 The answer is, there isn't any.

02:20:02.000 And it's another case of this evidence just either being ignored or underreported.

02:20:09.000 But there was a young, at the time, archaeobotanist, Marina Ceraldi, Who's from Naples and got her PhD in archaeology in the UK and she's on site in Pompeii testing these vessels.

02:20:21.000 We have a lot of evidence from Pompeii, by the way.

02:20:23.000 In fact, a lot of what we know about the ancient world comes from Pompeii and Herculaneum because of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. It explodes and destroys everything, but it also preserves everything.

02:20:35.000 Under like 17 feet of volcanic ash we have all these clues about the Dionysian mysteries and in addition to that there was this farmhouse in Scafati just to the east of Pompeii where there were seven dolia which is like a giant storage vessel And these dolia are found in a chela vinaria,

02:20:55.000 like a wine cellar, in a farm that also came complete with a torcularium, like a wine press, and a threshing floor.

02:21:03.000 So something about wine was happening in this place.

02:21:06.000 We don't know what.

02:21:07.000 The sample was extraordinarily well-preserved.

02:21:11.000 When Marina went in there, it wasn't a chemical analysis.

02:21:13.000 That's obviously more finely graded.

02:21:17.000 The sample was in such good shape because it had been waterlogged.

02:21:20.000 So the botanical samples were in pristine condition, and she could tell by the seeds and stems and other plant material what was there.

02:21:28.000 And there were over 50 species of plants and herbs and trees in this one sample, which is really weird.

02:21:34.000 Even more than we found at Abydos or Telkavri.

02:21:37.000 It was, you know, like just a melange of plant material that shouldn't be there.

02:21:43.000 And what she found, in addition to many other medicinal plants, was opium, cannabis, henbane, and black nightshade.

02:21:52.000 What is henbane?

02:21:53.000 Henbane is Hyoscyumus.

02:21:56.000 Hyoscyumine is one of those tropane alkaloids, that nightshade plant, that very witchy kind of plant that we found in the Cernos in Spain.

02:22:03.000 It was beer potentially spiked with henbane.

02:22:06.000 So we're finding wine spiked potentially with henbane.

02:22:10.000 We find four seeds at least.

02:22:11.000 There were two seeds of opium, nine seeds of cannabis, four seeds of henbane, and then two seeds of this black nightshade.

02:22:18.000 And in the article that describes it, Marina herself, the archaeobotanist, says this is some kind of spiced wine.

02:22:26.000 In fact, she calls it a Mithridatium.

02:22:28.000 Now, to understand that, there was this guy Mithridates.

02:22:31.000 Mithridates VI was the ruler of the Pontus region, in between the Black and Caspian Seas.

02:22:37.000 His father was poisoned to death.

02:22:39.000 And so, to prevent that, he would microdose his whole life.

02:22:43.000 He was poisoning himself.

02:22:45.000 Day in and day out.

02:22:46.000 And so this potion of many different toxic herbs and plants becomes known eventually in the Roman Empire as a Mithridatium, after Mithridates.

02:22:55.000 Now, when the Romans finally get to him and try and kill him, he tries to poison himself, and it doesn't work because he's immune.

02:23:02.000 So one of his soldiers has to stab him to death.

02:23:08.000 So he's micro dosing himself in preparation for someone else poisoning him.

02:23:13.000 Exactly.

02:23:13.000 But then when he tries to commit suicide, he's unable to.

02:23:15.000 Exactly.

02:23:16.000 Oh my God.

02:23:18.000 How strange.

02:23:19.000 And so outside of Pompeii, was there any other evidence and how would you go about finding it?

02:23:26.000 Like, say if you want to continue the search, where would you look?

02:23:30.000 I mean, it opens up a whole world of possibilities now that people...

02:23:34.000 I mean, I wrote this as kind of...

02:23:35.000 I call them the initial archaeobotanical blips on the radar.

02:23:38.000 So between this ergotized beer and this potentially psychedelic wine, there's lots of different places to look.

02:23:44.000 If you're trying to prove this psychedelic hypothesis within paleo-Christianity...

02:23:50.000 You're looking for a place where the Dionysian mysteries bumped up against the Christian mysteries. 0.80

02:23:55.000 And that's all over the place.

02:23:56.000 So back in Galilee, for example, Dionysus, there's a whole myth around Dionysus and his birth.

02:24:03.000 And different authors place his birth in different places.

02:24:05.000 One of the places they place his birth is a city called Schythopolis.

02:24:09.000 Scythopolis was like the capital of the Decaiopolis, this 10-city part of the eastern Mediterranean.

02:24:16.000 From Nazareth to Scythopolis today is 40 minutes door-to-door, Nazareth where Jesus grows up. 0.81

02:24:23.000 So Scythopolis has this northern cemetery where you do find artifacts.

02:24:28.000 That relate both to the pagan Dionysian mysteries and some Christian artifacts.

02:24:32.000 So a place like that would be ripe for further investigation.

02:24:36.000 Or in Ephesus, you have like the Grotto of the Seven Sleepers.

02:24:38.000 Another place where the pagan mysteries bumped up against the Christian mysteries.

02:24:43.000 One of the best places is Rome.

02:24:46.000 And the catacombs, which is why I spent so much time going through the catacombs looking for evidence of these essentially funerary rituals where people were celebrating with the dead using the sacramental wine in the very earliest versions of the Mass.

02:25:01.000 And is there any scripture, any texts that are describing what they were doing when they were going through these rituals, these funeral rituals?

02:25:09.000 I mean, there's a few things.

02:25:12.000 For the Christians, it's called the refrigerium.

02:25:15.000 The refrigerium in Latin means like a chill-out.

02:25:19.000 And there's a very respectable scholar, Ramsey McMullen.

02:25:22.000 He's considered one of the premier authorities of the ancient Roman world.

02:25:26.000 He describes the refrigerium as a place where the dead themselves participate.

02:25:32.000 And it's where the dead basically come back to life.

02:25:36.000 In the Roman world, you would never leave the dead alone. 0.99

02:25:39.000 Think of it like a funerary ritual in Mexico, for example, when the family goes to visit the graves of the ancestors.

02:25:46.000 There was a very similar principle in the ancient Roman world that carried over And so we know the refrigerium existed.

02:25:54.000 The big question is if the wine drunk at the refrigerium was similar to the wine of the early Christian Eucharist.

02:26:01.000 And when you look through these catacombs, you find really crazy stuff to suggest that, in fact, the two could coexist.

02:26:08.000 Wow, here we go.

02:26:09.000 Look at these images.

02:26:11.000 Now, the book's out.

02:26:13.000 The book's done.

02:26:14.000 Your thing now is obviously promoting this and getting the word out.

02:26:18.000 But do you have in your mind of following up on this research?

02:26:23.000 Now that the door's opened and now that people are aware of this, it seems like, first of all, I believe you're going to get help.

02:26:29.000 People are going to be interested in continuing this research and contributing to this research.

02:26:34.000 Where do you go from here?

02:26:36.000 I want to dedicate my life to this for the next 10 years.

02:26:39.000 Really?

02:26:39.000 Yes.

02:26:40.000 Wow.

02:26:41.000 How's PJ feel about that?

02:26:44.000 I don't think PJ's too happy.

02:26:47.000 No?

02:26:48.000 What if this sounds like gangbusters?

02:26:51.000 I think we need to take you down to the Amazon, Brian.

02:26:54.000 And you need to have an encounter with Mother Ayahuasca.

02:26:57.000 Or you could just go to Santa Cruz.

02:27:01.000 There's something about that rainforest, though.

02:27:05.000 Yeah, I'm sure.

02:27:05.000 It really is a special setting for this experience.

02:27:10.000 But I think it would be interesting, Brian.

02:27:12.000 Having written this as a scientific and an academic and a research exercise to then go on to see what your personal experience is and how that resonates with what you've learned as a scientific investigator.

02:27:25.000 Yeah, I mean, even if you wanted to do it in a clinical setting, like Rick Strassman did when he had these FDA-approved studies for DMT, the spirit molecule, just anything.

02:27:36.000 Just anything where you could tap into that world, because I guarantee you, you're going to come back eyes wide like those ladies in that drawing. 1.00

02:27:44.000 And you're going to be like, oh, okay.

02:27:46.000 It's fascinating to me when you talk to someone who is a psychedelic virgin, because you almost feel jealous.

02:27:53.000 Like, I almost...

02:27:55.000 Do you feel the same way, Graham?

02:27:57.000 Yeah, absolutely.

02:27:58.000 It would be nice to know that that experience lay ahead of us.

02:28:04.000 And we haven't had it yet.

02:28:06.000 But at the same time, you can learn to work with these substances.

02:28:12.000 They can be overwhelming at first.

02:28:14.000 And with more...

02:28:23.000 So when you say you want to do this and dedicate your life for the next 10 years, do you have multiple books in mind?

02:28:31.000 What is your thought?

02:28:32.000 So with this, my dream is to see this on the screen.

02:28:36.000 I think there's so many visual elements here.

02:28:39.000 What's up, Jamie?

02:28:41.000 Oh, sorry.

02:28:42.000 Sorry.

02:28:44.000 My dream is to see this on the screen.

02:28:49.000 I've been talking to a couple of development teams, a couple of production companies.

02:28:54.000 One is Anonymous Content in LA and Six West Media in New York.

02:28:58.000 Together we're developing a documentary series.

02:29:01.000 That adapts this, everything we've talked about for like a first season, but there's really multiple seasons here because there's so much evidence that's never been looked at.

02:29:10.000 And so it's taking the very best of the archaeochemistry and the very best of the on-in-the-field archaeology, combining all the linguistic evidence and the symbology and iconography and putting it together to find, once and for all, the smoking gun for the use of a psychedelic Eucharist in antiquity.

02:29:26.000 So do you have a place where you're bringing this?

02:29:29.000 We are just about to pitch this, as a matter of fact.

02:29:32.000 Oh, Netflix.

02:29:33.000 Where you at?

02:29:34.000 Yeah.

02:29:35.000 Listen, I would watch that all day long.

02:29:37.000 I'm really excited.

02:29:39.000 I'm really excited about the whole thing, the whole prospect of it.

02:29:42.000 And I think that it's...

02:29:43.000 I'm just so happy that you became obsessed with it and ignored all the people telling you to not.

02:29:51.000 Yeah.

02:29:52.000 Me too, man.

02:29:53.000 I mean, it's been a long road.

02:29:55.000 I never thought about psychedelics until I read Supernatural.

02:29:59.000 A lot of weird stuff was happening in my life in 2007, 2008. After I read those initial studies that came out of Hopkins and NYU, of course I wanted to try psilocybin.

02:30:10.000 And then the mystery just got deeper and deeper, and I realized there was...

02:30:15.000 We're good to go.

02:30:32.000 To try and put all these pieces together.

02:30:35.000 And I will say that, you know, it covers a lot of ground, but you don't need to know anything about history or archaeology, let alone archaeobotany or archaeochemistry or psychopharmacology or biblical studies or paleoanthropology to appreciate this,

02:30:50.000 because I kind of take it one step at a time from the very beginning and show you every piece of evidence that, I mean, as a virgin, did convince me that this is at least worth a sober look from the scientific community.

02:31:02.000 Well, I hope two things.

02:31:03.000 Next time I talk to you, we're promoting this television show, and you can tell me about your psychedelic experience that you had with Graham.

02:31:12.000 Did I agree to this already?

02:31:13.000 Yes, you agreed to it.

02:31:14.000 You agreed to it.

02:31:15.000 You signed up.

02:31:16.000 You signed up, bro.

02:31:17.000 And Graham, hopefully next time we communicate, it'll actually be in the flesh when somebody works out this COVID nonsense.

02:31:24.000 I hope so.

02:31:26.000 Can I just mention, we've not talked about my book, but this is the hardback of America Before, which we talked about the last time I was on your show.

02:31:37.000 And America Before has been in hardback for the past 18 months, but it's coming out in paperback 29th of September 2020 at a much reduced price.

02:31:48.000 And I hope that people who've not been able to access the hardback will be able to have a look at it in the... 0.62

02:31:53.000 In the paperback.

02:31:55.000 I mean, we had an amazing conversation the last time I was on your show.

02:31:59.000 And before that, we had the drama with Michael Shermer.

02:32:03.000 Yes.

02:32:05.000 And Randall Carson was present and that guy, Mark Defant, came in by telephone.

02:32:11.000 And I want to pay tribute to Michael Shermer.

02:32:13.000 You may have noticed this, Joe, that Michael put out a tweet saying that he was going to have to reconsider his – essentially, I'm paraphrasing – he was going to have to reconsider his prior attitude to my work in the light of new evidence about the Younger Dryas impact catastrophe that,

02:32:31.000 in my view, 12,000 years ago or so lost us a whole civilization.

02:32:37.000 It takes a lot to admit that one may have been wrong and I'm glad that Michael had the courage to put that tweet out there.

02:32:45.000 Yeah, I am as well.

02:32:46.000 Kudos to him and kudos to you and to Randall Carlson as well because those two conversations that we had about that are absolutely some of my favorite conversations of all time.

02:32:57.000 It's obvious that something happened and all the pieces much like this in this conversation about spiked wine and drugs.

02:33:07.000 It all makes sense.

02:33:08.000 It all fits into place.

02:33:10.000 And that we are a species with amnesia and that we need to rediscover our past.

02:33:16.000 And there's a curious resonance with the way that things are in the modern world, just as I have come to mistrust history, to mistrust the history that is taught to us in schools and universities, no longer to accept at face value the opinions of so-called We're good to go.

02:33:52.000 Regaining sovereignty over ourselves in a modern world that is struggling very hard to turn us all into children and rest all responsibility in government.

02:34:02.000 A huge mistake.

02:34:03.000 Governments are there to serve us.

02:34:05.000 They are not there to rule us.

02:34:07.000 They are not there to tell us what to do.

02:34:09.000 And I'm glad that people are waking up to this.

02:34:12.000 Hear, hear!

02:34:12.000 That's an excellent way to end this.

02:34:14.000 Thank you, Graham.

02:34:15.000 I love you.

02:34:16.000 I appreciate you very much.

02:34:17.000 I wish you were here right now.

02:34:18.000 I'd give you a big hug.

02:34:19.000 And thank you, Brian.

02:34:20.000 I'd give you a hug back.

02:34:21.000 Thank you.

02:34:22.000 Alright, thank you guys and thank you everybody listening.

02:34:24.000 Bye-bye.

02:34:25.000 Thank you.

The Joe Rogan Experience - September 30, 2020

Joe Rogan Experience #1543 - Brian Muraresku & Graham Hancock

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