The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 183. The Immortality Key; Psychedelics and the Ancient Age

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00:00:57.540 Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.

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00:01:47.220 Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

00:01:53.540 This is season four, episode 37.

00:01:56.280 In this episode, my dad is joined by Brian Muir Rescue and Carl Ruck.

00:02:00.960 Brian is the founding executive director of Doctors for Cannabis Regulation

00:02:05.600 and author of The Immortality Key, The Secret History of the Religion with No Name.

00:02:11.820 Carl Ruck is a professor and researcher best known for his work in mythology and religion

00:02:16.560 on the sacred role of psychoactive plants that induce an altered state of consciousness.

00:02:23.360 Together, they discuss psychedelics in religion, visionary and hallucinogenic experiences,

00:02:29.580 ties between Greek mythology and Christianity, and more.

00:02:33.200 I hope you enjoy this episode.

00:02:34.900 What about Jung? Do you think that he experimented with hallucinogens?

00:02:39.180 Who?

00:02:39.860 Carl Jung.

00:02:41.160 Because he knew things. He knows things that you just can't believe anybody could know.

00:02:44.760 We know he spent a year in Taos.

00:02:49.080 I have a house in Taos.

00:02:52.680 And that year is not documented, but he was experimenting with mind-altering substances.

00:03:01.420 Psilocybin?

00:03:03.080 Probably.

00:03:04.360 Was that before or after the Red Book? Do you know?

00:03:07.040 I think the Red Book came out of that.

00:03:08.740 I think the Red Book came out of that.

00:03:38.720 And then later in the discussion with Professor Carl A.P. Ruck,

00:03:43.980 Professor of Classical Studies at Boston University.

00:03:46.980 Mr. Murescu, the author, wrote the recent book,

00:03:50.300 The Immortality Key, The Secret History of the Religion with No Name,

00:03:54.280 which was published by St. Martin's Press in 2020.

00:03:58.400 That's the book here.

00:03:59.440 I read it from cover to cover last month.

00:04:02.020 It was as excitingly plotted as Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code,

00:04:09.360 which is really saying something, given that that was a best-selling novel.

00:04:12.440 And this is actually a work of adventure, non-fiction, inquiry, and scientific exploration,

00:04:17.740 all compacted into something that was extraordinarily readable.

00:04:21.160 Mr. Murescu graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Brown University with a degree in Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit,

00:04:27.060 which clearly prepared him for his later work.

00:04:29.080 As alumnus of Georgetown Law and a member of the New York Bar,

00:04:32.880 he's been practicing law internationally for 15 years.

00:04:36.120 About the book.

00:04:37.000 For 2,000 years prior to the birth of Christ,

00:04:40.620 the ancient Greeks found revelation in their own sacraments.

00:04:44.620 Sacred beverages were routinely consumed as part of the so-called ancient mysteries,

00:04:49.920 elaborate rites that led initiates to the brink of death and beyond at Aloysus.

00:04:54.840 Others drank the holy wine of Dionysius to become one with the God.

00:04:59.260 In the 1970s, scholars, including Dr. Karl Rock,

00:05:03.680 claimed that this beer and wine, the original sacraments of Western civilization,

00:05:09.060 were spiked with mind-altering drugs.

00:05:12.600 In recent years, vindication for the disgraced theory has been quietly mounting in the laboratory.

00:05:18.120 The constantly advancing fields of archaeobotany and archaeochemistry

00:05:22.520 have been hinting at the enduring use of hallucinogenic drinks in antiquity.

00:05:27.500 And with a single dose of psilocybin,

00:05:29.200 the psychopharmacologists at Johns Hopkins and NYU are now producing

00:05:33.840 powerful, revelatory, religious-slash-mystical experiences in the lab.

00:05:38.720 But the smoking gun remains elusive.

00:05:42.080 If these sacraments survived for thousands of years in our remote prehistory,

00:05:46.040 from the Stone Age to the ancient Greeks,

00:05:48.060 did they also survive into the age of Jesus?

00:05:50.540 Was the Eucharist of the earliest Christians, in fact, a psychedelic Eucharist?

00:05:54.620 The Immortality Key takes its readers on an adventurous 12-year global hunt for evidence.

00:06:01.740 Professor Karl Rock, who will join us for the latter part of the discussion,

00:06:04.900 is an authority on the ecstatic rituals of the god Dionysus.

00:06:08.660 With the ethnomycologist R. Gordon Wasson and Albert Hoffman, who discovered LSD,

00:06:14.580 he identified the secret psychoactive ingredient in the visionary potion

00:06:18.260 that was drunk by the initiates at the Eleusinian Mysteries.

00:06:21.340 In Persephone's quest in Theogens and the Origins of Religion,

00:06:26.080 he proclaimed the centrality of psychoactive sacraments at the very beginning of religion,

00:06:30.840 employing the neologism in Theogen to free the topic from the pejorative connotation

00:06:36.000 for words like drug or hallucinogen.

00:06:38.600 So we're very much looking forward to talking to Professor Rock as well.

00:06:42.580 So hello, Brian.

00:06:44.020 Thank you so much for agreeing to talk to me today about your book.

00:06:47.340 Thank you, Jordan.

00:06:48.040 It's an honor.

00:06:48.920 It's good to see you doing well.

00:06:50.020 Oh, thank you very much.

00:06:51.820 I'm very much looking forward to this discussion.

00:06:53.800 I did find the book of substantive intellectual interest, that's for sure.

00:06:59.040 For anyone who's interested in the history of religious experience,

00:07:02.400 it's quite the trip, let's say.

00:07:04.180 But it was remarkably well plotted as well.

00:07:06.840 It was a book that was very dense with information,

00:07:09.720 but almost impossible to put down.

00:07:11.700 And so that's quite the thing to pull off.

00:07:14.360 And why?

00:07:16.700 Why did you do this?

00:07:18.280 How did you do it?

00:07:19.420 I'm still trying to figure that out, Jordan, to be totally honest.

00:07:23.520 It was my avocation.

00:07:25.200 I mean, no one was writing checks for me to fly to the Mediterranean and look at ancient secrets.

00:07:31.000 It's not the thing that you do when you're supposed to be a practicing attorney raising children.

00:07:34.900 But this bug got into me, I guess, when I was a teenager.

00:07:39.000 I was studying Latin and Greek with the Jesuits at an all-boys school.

00:07:43.120 I got a scholarship to attend that school, otherwise would not have afforded to go.

00:07:47.840 And then was recruited by Brown, as you mentioned, to study Latin and Greek and piled on some Sanskrit,

00:07:53.080 some Arabic, and other things in between.

00:07:55.180 And along the way, you hear about this best-kept secret in history.

00:07:58.840 That's what Houston Smith, perhaps one of the greatest religious scholars of the 20th century,

00:08:03.680 that's how he referred to these mysteries, and particularly the sacrament within these ancient mysteries,

00:08:08.900 these sacramental potions that have since gone missing.

00:08:12.400 You know, for a couple thousand years, we've been trying to crack this mystery to no avail.

00:08:16.440 But there's Houston Smith saying it's a mystery worth investigating.

00:08:21.520 And so I don't really know what to do with that.

00:08:23.820 In the late 90s and early 2000s, there's not a lot of scholarship on ancient pharmacology.

00:08:28.560 And I read this crazy book, The Road to Eleusis, which comes out in 1978,

00:08:32.200 and I'm trying to figure out how the ancient Greeks could have consumed, you know, a beer,

00:08:37.420 otherwise spiked with LSD, but there's no hard scientific data to support it.

00:08:41.620 So I leave it to one side, until 2007.

00:08:44.920 And it was Roland Griffiths, who you recently talked to.

00:08:47.540 It was his early studies with psilocybin, the active compound in magic mushrooms.

00:08:52.460 That began in the early 2000s.

00:08:54.300 The initial results are released in 2006.

00:08:56.880 Doesn't come onto my radar until 2007.

00:08:58.880 But what I'm reading about are people today, modern-day volunteers,

00:09:03.780 having a transformative experience from one and only dose of psilocybin.

00:09:08.380 And Gordon Wasson is mentioned in the first line of this article, The God Pill.

00:09:13.300 And it immediately reminds me of The Road to Eleusis, and it reminds me of Eleusis itself,

00:09:18.880 2,500 years ago.

00:09:20.060 And this notion that it was a once-in-a-lifetime psychedelic encounter

00:09:25.040 that was very much part and parcel of the origins of Western civilization.

00:09:29.240 So from there, I was off.

00:09:30.900 Well, let's talk about the Hallucinian mysteries to begin with.

00:09:33.560 Clue everybody in about what they were and why you believe, and not just you, obviously,

00:09:40.160 but why they're of enduring significance, both to us now, but also you make the case in the book

00:09:47.900 that the very essence of Greek civilization, from which so much of our civilization is derived,

00:09:55.420 was rooted in these hallucinogenic mysteries, essentially, or at least in the Eleusinian mysteries.

00:10:01.320 And so please elaborate on the mysteries and their significance.

00:10:05.120 So we say the ancient mysteries.

00:10:06.700 There were lots of mysteries in the ancient world, the mysteries of Eleusis,

00:10:09.860 the mysteries of Dionysus, the mysteries of Isis and Osiris.

00:10:12.700 But Eleusis, which today is this relatively small town of only about 30,000 people,

00:10:18.220 13 miles northwest of Athens, for about 2,000 years,

00:10:22.340 it was kind of the epicenter of the Mediterranean spiritual universe.

00:10:27.040 It was not a sideshow.

00:10:28.920 I sometimes referred to it as the real religion of the ancient Greeks,

00:10:32.560 and the best and brightest among them.

00:10:34.240 It called to initiates like Plato, Pindar, Cicero,

00:10:38.560 who actually called it the most divine thing that Athens ever produced,

00:10:41.980 the most divine thing.

00:10:43.580 So not democracy, the arts and sciences, and philosophy, but Eleusis.

00:10:48.420 Marcus Aurelius famously rebuilt Eleusis when it was almost destroyed.

00:10:52.620 So it mattered to these people, both to the Greeks.

00:10:55.500 Your case in the book, you lay out your belief that the Eleusinian mysteries

00:11:03.280 were absolutely central to the animating spirit of Greek civilization.

00:11:06.820 So it wasn't rationality versus the mysteries of Dionysius, let's say.

00:11:10.620 It was rationality embedded in some more profound religious experience

00:11:15.720 that was integrally related with whatever was happening at Eleusis.

00:11:20.000 Absolutely integral.

00:11:21.340 And we can say that with a straight face and very confidently

00:11:24.000 because of the way its destruction is recorded in the 4th century AD

00:11:27.780 under the newly Christianized Roman Empire.

00:11:30.460 So at the time, in the 4th century,

00:11:32.440 the Roman Emperor Valentinian tries to get rid of Eleusis,

00:11:35.500 and we have the testimony of this high priest, Praetekstatus,

00:11:39.060 who says literally that life in the absence of Eleusis would be unlivable,

00:11:44.040 abiotos in Greek.

00:11:45.580 And so there's lots of ways to translate that or interpret that.

00:11:48.700 But even Karl Kerenyi, this famous classicist writing in the 1960s,

00:11:52.800 he looks at that language and says,

00:11:54.600 you know, the sharpness of this formulation,

00:11:57.200 that life is unlivable without the mysteries,

00:11:59.120 has no precedent in Greek literature.

00:12:02.220 Even Karl doesn't know what to make of this.

00:12:04.820 And he draws a distinction.

00:12:06.940 He worked with Jung, Karl Kerenyi, as well.

00:12:08.880 Exactly, exactly, exactly right.

00:12:10.480 Published with Bollingen, yeah, very impressive scholar.

00:12:13.300 And this impressive scholar didn't know what to make of this testimony

00:12:16.420 from Praetekstatus.

00:12:17.520 And he thinks that Praetekstatus is clearly drawing a distinction

00:12:21.340 between what was available in the pagan mysteries

00:12:24.140 versus what was available in the rise of Christianity at that time

00:12:28.060 in the 4th century.

00:12:29.180 So again, Eleusis is bound up not just with the notion of Greek existence,

00:12:33.480 but human existence and the survival of our species.

00:12:36.780 Okay, so back to you as a teenager.

00:12:38.780 Now, you got interested in this when you were relatively young.

00:12:42.300 What? Why?

00:12:43.380 What was calling to you, do you think?

00:12:45.840 Hum.

00:12:48.620 It's that perennial search for meaning.

00:12:51.000 I mean, I was raised Catholic.

00:12:53.080 Very particularized derivative of it, though.

00:12:55.640 So there's some story there.

00:12:57.400 There's something going on there.

00:12:58.880 Because it's, as you also pointed out in your introduction,

00:13:02.260 what you did is not, it's not within the realm of normative behavior.

00:13:06.660 You have your law degree.

00:13:07.760 You have your family.

00:13:08.660 You have your children.

00:13:09.720 You're a sensible, educated person.

00:13:11.320 And you took a 12-year hiatus to pursue something

00:13:14.400 that's very abstract, spiritual, historical.

00:13:18.600 There's something driving you, for sure.

00:13:20.400 And then you related it back to your teenage years,

00:13:23.080 what was gripping you?

00:13:25.180 Because part of that's the animating spirit of this book.

00:13:30.640 Okay, so I mean, if I'm being honest,

00:13:32.740 I was the first person in my family to go to college.

00:13:35.820 And the whole reason I went to college was because of Latin and Greek.

00:13:39.140 There's no doubt about it.

00:13:41.260 I may not have gone if it weren't for the classics,

00:13:43.820 or the Jesuits who were teaching me these classics.

00:13:46.440 And for me, this is a major identity crisis.

00:13:49.560 And I talk about our societal crisis.

00:13:51.820 You know, our loss of connection with that tradition.

00:13:55.540 Well, exactly.

00:13:56.300 And I wanted to know what that tradition was

00:13:58.040 and how my Catholicism, I went to Catholic school for 13 years,

00:14:01.580 how does my Catholicism and everything I've learned

00:14:03.960 about the Christian lineage, how does that square with Eleusis,

00:14:07.060 for example?

00:14:07.920 How does that square with...

00:14:08.440 Yes, and that's something I really want to talk to you about,

00:14:10.660 because there is some transformation.

00:14:13.740 Even if the Christians were using the hallucinogenic sacraments

00:14:17.140 that you characterize as being typically used

00:14:19.900 by a more archaic Greek society,

00:14:23.340 there's some reason for the Christian transformation.

00:14:28.460 And I don't understand the relationship between that

00:14:30.960 and the hallucinogenic story.

00:14:33.380 So I would definitely like to return to that.

00:14:35.460 But okay, so you're interested in Greek and Latin.

00:14:37.520 And you're the first person in your household to go to college.

00:14:40.300 How did you get interested in Greek and Latin?

00:14:43.020 It was forced upon me by the Jesuits.

00:14:45.820 Latin was mandatory at this school, St. Joe's Prep.

00:14:48.880 I otherwise wouldn't have taken a shine to it.

00:14:51.060 And then Greek was an elective, but I stuck with that.

00:14:53.780 And my professor, Dr. Henry V. Bender,

00:14:56.620 insisted that I stick with it,

00:14:58.280 actually helped me apply to college,

00:15:00.020 hopped me on a train to go up to Providence to Brown

00:15:02.840 to check it out.

00:15:03.600 And that's how it happened.

00:15:05.980 You know, I wasn't touring colleges with my family.

00:15:08.900 It was the Jesuits who got me thinking about this stuff.

00:15:12.860 And actually, to their credit,

00:15:14.540 very open-mindedly encouraged me

00:15:16.600 to ask very fundamental questions

00:15:18.760 about the origins of the faith

00:15:20.120 and this whole pagan continuity idea

00:15:22.220 that we can talk about,

00:15:23.160 this transference from the pagan world

00:15:25.400 to the Christian world and what it all means.

00:15:28.740 And the interest in the hallucinogenic element of it,

00:15:32.100 was that a consequence of your knowledge

00:15:35.100 that something was being used as a sacrament,

00:15:37.480 some substance was being used as a sacrament,

00:15:40.300 ateloysus in particular?

00:15:41.500 Or is there more to it than that?

00:15:42.940 So this is the great irony

00:15:44.600 is that I've never experimented with psychedelics.

00:15:48.340 That's the great irony of this book

00:15:50.260 and all this research,

00:15:51.240 because it really was Roland's work at Hopkins.

00:15:55.860 That just, it hit me like a punch in the face.

00:15:58.100 The idea of people experiencing psilocybin

00:16:02.600 and over the course of a few hours,

00:16:04.800 having their lives completely transformed.

00:16:07.400 You know, not just positive changes

00:16:09.780 in attitudes, behaviors, and belief,

00:16:11.760 but fundamental psychological change in an afternoon.

00:16:15.480 If I had to come up with a definition of a leucis,

00:16:17.820 that would be it, except it was an overnight.

00:16:19.560 I see, so you saw the connection.

00:16:21.300 But it wasn't a consequence of personal experience.

00:16:23.680 It was a consequence of intellectual realization.

00:16:25.720 That's what it was.

00:16:27.400 And those numbers have stayed consistent,

00:16:29.480 Roland will tell you.

00:16:30.160 When I asked him before publishing the book,

00:16:31.660 if this number still makes sense,

00:16:33.760 he will tell me that 75% of these volunteers

00:16:37.380 will report that their one and only dose of psilocybin

00:16:40.240 remains one of the most meaningful experiences

00:16:43.120 of their entire lives,

00:16:44.300 if not the most meaningful experience.

00:16:46.220 And this is data going back 20 years now.

00:16:49.160 Okay, okay.

00:16:50.140 So this provided you with some insight

00:16:53.680 into what might have been going on

00:16:55.740 with the ancient mysteries.

00:16:57.000 And of course, there's other scholars

00:16:58.740 who push towards that conclusion, let's say,

00:17:04.220 like Dr. Ruck, who we're going to talk to later.

00:17:06.500 Gordon Wasson, for example,

00:17:08.160 who's mentioned continually in your book,

00:17:10.720 made the claim that the Amanita muscaria mushroom

00:17:13.880 was the Soma of the ancient Hindus,

00:17:16.620 was the inspiration for the Rig Veda.

00:17:19.820 And Mircea Eliade, who worked with Karen Yee

00:17:24.040 and also with Jung, wrote a great book on shamanism.

00:17:27.060 I don't know if you know the book, you likely do,

00:17:29.920 but Eliade claimed that the use of hallucinogens

00:17:33.840 among the shamanic practitioners

00:17:37.080 was a deviation from the historical norm.

00:17:40.320 But I think the bulk of the evidence

00:17:42.900 that's been accrued since Eliade wrote his great book,

00:17:45.940 because it is a great book, shamanism,

00:17:47.800 it's a great book, I think he was wrong about that.

00:17:51.360 I think it's absolutely crystal clear

00:17:52.960 that throughout human history,

00:17:55.180 for at least 50,000 years, perhaps longer than that,

00:17:58.900 our spiritual guides, especially in the archaic world,

00:18:02.040 were using whatever hallucinogenic substances

00:18:04.220 they could get their hands on

00:18:05.380 with their vast knowledge of local biology

00:18:07.940 to produce these mystical experiences.

00:18:10.940 And we have no idea to what degree

00:18:12.980 that shaped us culturally or how that shaped

00:18:17.040 our religious structures, beliefs, presumptions,

00:18:21.500 all of that.

00:18:22.260 And so that would make Elusis a continuation

00:18:24.320 of the shamanic tradition.

00:18:25.640 And so I think it fits nicely

00:18:26.680 into the anthropological literature in that manner.

00:18:29.060 Okay, so on to your voyage.

00:18:31.420 You go to Brown and study Latin and Greek and so forth.

00:18:37.320 And then what happens?

00:18:39.400 And then I have a great time learning Latin and Greek.

00:18:41.620 And then I'm a senior.

00:18:42.660 And I hear all the grad students grumbling

00:18:44.680 about the job market,

00:18:45.760 because there is no livelihood

00:18:48.080 to become from classics.

00:18:49.880 I mean, it was either, for me,

00:18:50.940 it was either becoming a priest

00:18:52.460 or a classics professor.

00:18:54.080 And I still remain interested in both, oddly enough.

00:18:56.800 But I took a left turn into law school

00:18:59.500 and decided to enter the marketplace

00:19:01.820 and to acquire, you know, marketable skills.

00:19:04.220 Um, it was, it was largely an economic decision.

00:19:10.020 And despite going to law school,

00:19:11.560 you also went on this decade-long hiatus.

00:19:14.600 Well, because I couldn't put it down.

00:19:16.200 I mean, when I was, you know,

00:19:17.620 even when I was, when I was interviewing

00:19:19.160 for the law firm,

00:19:20.100 we wound up talking about Sanskrit,

00:19:21.460 because that's obviously on my resume.

00:19:23.120 And people wonder why the hell

00:19:24.760 I wrote a senior thesis

00:19:25.940 translating a 13th century giant poem from Sanskrit.

00:19:28.840 And it comes up in conversation.

00:19:30.700 People find it mildly interesting.

00:19:32.260 And so you go off from there.

00:19:34.260 The liberal arts have a way

00:19:35.800 of preparing you for all kinds of things.

00:19:38.240 And in my case, it was, you know,

00:19:39.960 I would still read Latin and Greek

00:19:41.200 on my, on my lunch breaks.

00:19:42.340 And that, that's what drove the imagination

00:19:44.420 until 2007,

00:19:45.560 when psychedelics came on my mental radar

00:19:48.560 and propelled me on this journey

00:19:50.680 for another 12 years.

00:19:52.100 All right.

00:19:52.720 Well, let's walk through the journey.

00:19:54.160 Tell, tell us what you did first.

00:19:56.340 Well, um, I used my law firm salary

00:19:58.720 to purchase every book

00:20:00.220 that Ruck himself had ever written,

00:20:01.860 um, and Wasson and Hoffman.

00:20:04.160 Then I started reading about Terence McKenna

00:20:05.860 quite a bit

00:20:06.460 and was reading his information,

00:20:08.020 um, and listening to his lectures.

00:20:10.140 And I spent most of the day

00:20:11.640 doing that for a couple of years.

00:20:13.400 Um, and then I started to realize

00:20:15.060 that some newer disciplines

00:20:16.480 like the archaeobotany

00:20:17.600 and archaeochemistry

00:20:18.460 that you mentioned earlier.

00:20:19.600 Um, and with the advance of technology,

00:20:22.120 new tools, new techniques,

00:20:23.480 um, we were suddenly able

00:20:25.040 to peer back into history

00:20:26.520 in a way that we never could before.

00:20:28.800 Um, in other words,

00:20:29.540 things like gas chromatography,

00:20:31.000 mass spectrometry,

00:20:31.860 and these wonderful, you know,

00:20:33.600 lab additions had allowed us

00:20:35.880 to look into,

00:20:36.660 to peer into these ancient containers,

00:20:38.900 these cups and these chalices

00:20:40.100 and these grails of sorts,

00:20:42.140 um, and tell us for certain,

00:20:44.440 relatively certain,

00:20:45.400 what our ancestors were consuming

00:20:46.980 and why?

00:20:47.620 And this is all relatively new.

00:20:48.740 This is not,

00:20:49.300 this did not exist in 1978.

00:20:51.040 And so that was a big break for me

00:20:52.520 in this, in this research,

00:20:53.980 trying to, you know,

00:20:54.800 attract the hard scientific data

00:20:56.460 to prove this one way or the other.

00:20:58.540 You spent a lot of time in the book

00:21:00.020 writing about beer, for example.

00:21:02.800 Mainly to make a case too

00:21:04.000 that one, one of the motivating factors

00:21:05.560 for the development of agriculture

00:21:06.860 was likely the easily,

00:21:08.220 easy transformation of barley

00:21:09.980 into alcoholic beverage,

00:21:11.620 which, or perhaps not just alcoholic.

00:21:13.960 But I thought that was also

00:21:14.900 a very interesting

00:21:15.680 speculation.

00:21:17.860 So maybe we can talk

00:21:19.380 about that a bit.

00:21:20.800 Um, it's mainly because

00:21:22.220 I like beer

00:21:22.900 and it was a great excuse

00:21:23.940 to go to Germany

00:21:24.720 to talk to a beer scientist

00:21:25.880 to talk about beer,

00:21:27.360 uh, which was a lot of fun.

00:21:28.680 And beer could go back

00:21:29.500 12,000 years.

00:21:30.500 As a matter of fact,

00:21:31.260 beer might be responsible

00:21:32.920 for the birth of civilization

00:21:34.420 as we know it.

00:21:35.860 Um, if you look to

00:21:36.540 Gobekli Tepe, for example,

00:21:38.300 uh, about 10 years ago,

00:21:39.380 there was some evidence

00:21:40.260 from this giant,

00:21:41.320 you know, um,

00:21:42.480 site of megalithic architecture,

00:21:43.960 uh, sometimes described

00:21:45.640 as, as the world's

00:21:46.580 first temple.

00:21:47.660 Um, turns out

00:21:48.860 the world's first temple

00:21:49.840 might be the world's

00:21:50.740 first bar

00:21:51.380 in this giant megalithic site.

00:21:53.200 This, by the way,

00:21:54.080 is 6,000 years

00:21:55.660 before Stonehenge,

00:21:56.880 7,000 years

00:21:57.820 before the high civilizations

00:21:58.980 of Egypt and Sumeria.

00:22:00.760 Um, but in this site,

00:22:02.180 they did find initial traces

00:22:03.900 of calcium oxalate,

00:22:05.080 which, which points

00:22:05.820 to beer fermentation.

00:22:07.500 Um, and, you know,

00:22:08.320 at the time

00:22:08.900 may, might be safer

00:22:10.180 to drink some beer

00:22:11.060 versus some, uh,

00:22:12.480 some, some water

00:22:13.200 in some cases.

00:22:13.860 And so, it, it could

00:22:14.800 very well be the case

00:22:15.680 that beer is bound up

00:22:16.920 with these ancient sites,

00:22:18.480 with ancient ritual,

00:22:19.860 um, these T-shaped pillars

00:22:21.100 meant to be the depictions

00:22:22.120 of early gods.

00:22:23.420 Um, it's possible

00:22:24.200 that there was some

00:22:24.920 intoxicating affair there.

00:22:26.180 We don't know for certain,

00:22:27.020 uh, but, you know,

00:22:28.060 beer could go back

00:22:28.740 an awfully long way.

00:22:30.180 Right.

00:22:30.640 Well, we do think

00:22:31.340 of beer as a spirit

00:22:32.400 and alcohol as a spirit,

00:22:33.560 and that's not accidental

00:22:34.820 because it's the ingestion

00:22:35.960 of a substance

00:22:36.500 that changes you psychologically.

00:22:37.940 And so, it's not

00:22:39.340 that great a leap

00:22:40.240 to posit that there's

00:22:41.620 some spirit

00:22:42.160 that inhabits the beverage,

00:22:44.000 and that's the spirit

00:22:45.000 of wine, that's the spirit

00:22:46.240 of drunkenness.

00:22:46.940 Dionysius, you talk

00:22:48.000 about ergot

00:22:48.700 and its relationship

00:22:49.900 to beer manufacture

00:22:50.860 as well, and ergot

00:22:52.400 is a, is a, uh, a fungus.

00:22:55.040 Uh, it's a fungus

00:22:55.840 that produces

00:22:56.400 an LSD-like substance.

00:22:58.360 Um, and so,

00:22:59.720 you speculate,

00:23:00.780 and, and some of that's

00:23:01.760 backed up by the,

00:23:02.560 the archaeobotany

00:23:03.900 that you described,

00:23:04.760 that perhaps beer

00:23:06.380 was accidentally

00:23:07.060 contaminated with ergot

00:23:08.140 to begin with,

00:23:08.860 but the consequences

00:23:09.820 of that were

00:23:10.480 non-trivial,

00:23:11.680 to say the least.

00:23:12.700 Mm-hmm.

00:23:13.720 Um, it could be,

00:23:14.760 and this,

00:23:15.120 this was the hypothesis

00:23:16.520 put forward in this book,

00:23:17.620 The Road to Eleusis.

00:23:18.500 So this, this was the idea

00:23:19.720 that Wasson, Hoffman,

00:23:21.600 and Ruck

00:23:22.180 had stumbled upon,

00:23:23.420 and I, I think,

00:23:24.320 I largely credit Albert,

00:23:25.600 who famously discovers

00:23:26.840 LSD from ergot, right?

00:23:29.020 So he synthesizes LSD

00:23:30.600 from this natural fungus,

00:23:32.400 which contains

00:23:33.060 lots of other alkaloids,

00:23:34.260 by the way.

00:23:35.040 Um, so things like LSA,

00:23:36.600 LSH, et cetera.

00:23:38.080 Um, to this day,

00:23:38.940 we don't know

00:23:39.680 which alkaloid

00:23:40.460 it may have been

00:23:41.240 that spiked this beer potion,

00:23:43.040 um, but could very well

00:23:44.640 have been something

00:23:45.220 like an ergotized potion

00:23:46.520 that was consumed

00:23:47.280 by these initiates

00:23:48.440 century after century

00:23:50.140 to, you know,

00:23:51.360 open the gates of death

00:23:52.760 and, and convince them

00:23:54.280 of their immortality.

00:23:55.520 Um, this was the idea

00:23:56.360 in 1978,

00:23:57.160 and so, um,

00:23:58.520 I ran with that hypothesis,

00:23:59.740 and I looked for ergot

00:24:00.860 anywhere I could.

00:24:02.340 In the, in Iliad's, um,

00:24:04.860 description of the

00:24:05.940 shamanic transformation,

00:24:09.020 he describes,

00:24:11.040 and this is analogous

00:24:12.220 to your description

00:24:13.300 of the Eleusinian

00:24:14.780 mysteries trip

00:24:16.020 and its association

00:24:17.520 with death.

00:24:18.280 Okay, so one of the things

00:24:19.120 we should point out

00:24:20.020 just to begin with

00:24:21.200 is that Roland Griffiths

00:24:23.700 gave psilocybin

00:24:25.180 to cancer patients

00:24:26.360 who were facing death,

00:24:27.620 and that transformed

00:24:29.660 their relationship

00:24:30.600 to death itself.

00:24:32.860 Now, when Eliad

00:24:35.180 details out

00:24:35.980 the shamanic experience,

00:24:37.120 he said that the shaman

00:24:38.540 who undertake

00:24:40.600 their ritual,

00:24:42.560 likely with the use

00:24:43.520 of hallucinogenic substances,

00:24:45.880 are typically reduced

00:24:48.480 to something resembling

00:24:50.840 a skeleton.

00:24:52.200 So they undergo a death,

00:24:54.320 uh, and the nature

00:24:55.580 of that experience

00:24:56.340 is not precisely clear.

00:24:57.620 Eliad never experienced it,

00:24:59.220 so these are accounts

00:25:00.240 that he derived

00:25:01.240 from the anthropological

00:25:02.620 literature,

00:25:03.220 and the shamanic culture

00:25:04.600 stretched perhaps

00:25:05.640 all the way around

00:25:06.260 the world

00:25:06.540 because there are, uh,

00:25:08.440 uh, analogs

00:25:09.400 between shamanic reports

00:25:10.940 in, from Siberia

00:25:12.420 and from the Amazon jungle,

00:25:13.480 so it's conceivable

00:25:14.380 that that was all

00:25:15.560 disseminated from a single

00:25:16.600 source, or maybe,

00:25:17.680 maybe it's a consequence

00:25:18.920 of the fact that

00:25:19.640 hallucinogenic substances

00:25:20.680 produce the same effects

00:25:21.860 worldwide,

00:25:22.580 or maybe both,

00:25:23.780 who knows,

00:25:24.520 but in any case,

00:25:25.640 the shaman die,

00:25:26.760 they commune

00:25:28.100 with their ancestors,

00:25:29.320 they commune

00:25:29.740 with their ancestral spirit,

00:25:30.920 they climb the ladder

00:25:32.940 or tree

00:25:33.900 or rope

00:25:34.760 or pole

00:25:35.860 that links

00:25:36.940 the, the domains

00:25:38.520 of existence

00:25:39.120 together,

00:25:39.720 so they climb up

00:25:40.940 this pole

00:25:41.520 into heaven

00:25:42.860 where they commune

00:25:43.680 with the gods,

00:25:44.380 and that's the classic

00:25:46.080 shamanic experience,

00:25:47.880 it's like Jack

00:25:48.660 and the beanstalk,

00:25:49.600 it's, and I believe

00:25:50.320 Jack and the beanstalk

00:25:51.060 is actually a very,

00:25:51.900 it's a, it's a,

00:25:52.820 it's a carryover

00:25:54.300 from, from shamanic tales,

00:25:55.760 I think,

00:25:56.360 it looks like it

00:25:57.320 if you, if you look

00:25:58.020 at the story carefully,

00:25:58.840 but in any case,

00:25:59.940 there's this,

00:26:00.900 there's a death

00:26:01.620 and then a rebirth

00:26:03.120 that's associated

00:26:03.880 with the experience,

00:26:04.660 there's a communion

00:26:05.260 with ancestral spirits,

00:26:07.040 the spirits

00:26:08.020 of the forefathers,

00:26:08.900 let's say,

00:26:09.240 there's the transformation

00:26:09.980 of that into something

00:26:11.080 resembling communion

00:26:12.000 with God

00:26:12.660 and then the transformation

00:26:13.860 of people's understanding

00:26:15.420 of death.

00:26:15.960 Now, I don't know

00:26:16.620 what happened

00:26:17.280 to Griffith's subjects

00:26:19.760 that re,

00:26:21.060 that transformed

00:26:22.000 their understanding

00:26:22.860 of death

00:26:23.320 in relationship

00:26:23.860 to their cancer

00:26:24.600 because the research

00:26:25.900 reports don't contain

00:26:27.060 much in terms

00:26:27.940 of description

00:26:28.540 of content

00:26:29.200 of experience,

00:26:30.160 right?

00:26:30.940 It's not like people

00:26:31.980 are magically transformed,

00:26:33.580 something happens

00:26:34.620 to them in,

00:26:35.960 in the,

00:26:36.780 as a consequence

00:26:37.380 of an extremely

00:26:38.320 packed and dense

00:26:39.580 experience that's

00:26:40.520 all condensed

00:26:41.040 into a very,

00:26:41.640 very short period

00:26:42.340 of time

00:26:42.760 and they come out

00:26:43.740 while neurologically

00:26:44.560 transformed,

00:26:45.160 they showed transformations

00:26:46.300 in personality

00:26:47.020 that were quite profound

00:26:47.860 even a year later.

00:26:49.180 Many of them quit smoking,

00:26:50.480 different studies,

00:26:51.260 which also indicates

00:26:52.280 a kind of transformation

00:26:53.240 even on a pharmacological level.

00:26:56.200 So, back to Aloysus,

00:26:57.640 there's something going on

00:26:59.520 that you talk about death

00:27:01.340 and facing death

00:27:02.300 in Aloysus.

00:27:03.720 Yeah.

00:27:05.000 It's the classic

00:27:05.920 shamanic journey.

00:27:06.720 I mean,

00:27:06.940 Roland's volunteers

00:27:08.080 will sometimes talk

00:27:09.600 about experiencing

00:27:10.540 their psilocybin journey

00:27:11.680 as a foreshadowing

00:27:12.620 of death.

00:27:13.860 And again,

00:27:14.420 we don't know

00:27:14.860 all the details,

00:27:15.520 all the content,

00:27:16.580 but it's something like

00:27:17.740 this is what death

00:27:18.620 will be like

00:27:19.400 is one of the

00:27:20.240 overarching conclusions.

00:27:21.540 And that was

00:27:22.340 the mysteries.

00:27:23.620 Again,

00:27:24.140 if I have to put it

00:27:25.180 in a few words,

00:27:25.940 it is essentially

00:27:26.660 a ceremony

00:27:27.700 of death

00:27:28.400 and rebirth.

00:27:29.720 Right,

00:27:30.020 well,

00:27:30.240 your words

00:27:31.440 at the beginning

00:27:31.980 of the book

00:27:32.540 are,

00:27:33.780 let me just get this here,

00:27:35.400 from the Greek.

00:27:37.560 If you die

00:27:38.600 before you die,

00:27:40.840 you won't die

00:27:41.960 when you die.

00:27:43.580 And that certainly

00:27:44.540 has Christian overtones

00:27:45.760 as well,

00:27:46.880 interestingly enough.

00:27:47.640 that comes directly

00:27:49.120 from a plaque

00:27:50.000 at the St. Paul's

00:27:51.180 Monastery

00:27:51.740 on Mount Athos

00:27:52.720 in Greece,

00:27:53.580 one of the holiest

00:27:54.180 sites of Orthodoxy.

00:27:55.540 Anpethanis,

00:27:56.160 primpethanis,

00:27:57.040 dentapathanis,

00:27:58.040 otanpethanis.

00:27:59.320 It's very Christian.

00:28:00.580 It's also very Greek.

00:28:01.860 Going back to that,

00:28:02.680 you know,

00:28:03.120 personality struggle

00:28:03.900 I was talking about.

00:28:04.680 Are we Greek

00:28:05.360 or are we Christian?

00:28:06.540 Like,

00:28:06.700 the old narrative

00:28:07.340 is that the Greeks

00:28:08.400 who invented

00:28:08.820 all this stuff,

00:28:09.780 democracy,

00:28:10.300 the arts,

00:28:10.600 and sciences,

00:28:11.260 et cetera,

00:28:11.920 these rational people

00:28:12.940 somehow,

00:28:13.940 you know,

00:28:14.300 birthed civilization

00:28:15.360 into existence,

00:28:16.320 but then Christianity

00:28:17.240 comes along

00:28:18.160 and saves our soul.

00:28:20.060 But here's,

00:28:21.060 Eleusis is the

00:28:22.020 contraindication.

00:28:23.060 Eleusis was the place

00:28:24.740 where these initiates

00:28:25.660 went to find meaning

00:28:26.900 by dying before they die

00:28:28.760 in some sense.

00:28:29.760 I mean,

00:28:29.960 experiencing the same

00:28:31.260 underworld journey

00:28:32.180 as the goddess Persephone.

00:28:33.700 They identified

00:28:34.420 with her,

00:28:35.100 not in any symbolic

00:28:36.300 or metaphorical way,

00:28:37.720 but something visceral

00:28:38.740 happened to them

00:28:39.820 in an experience.

00:28:40.700 Experientially.

00:28:41.360 Yeah,

00:28:41.560 well,

00:28:41.780 those myths,

00:28:42.720 those myths

00:28:43.280 look like they're reflections,

00:28:45.260 they're narratized reflections

00:28:47.780 of an experience

00:28:49.080 that people actually went through.

00:28:51.860 And that journey

00:28:52.840 to the underworld

00:28:53.580 is a journey

00:28:54.980 to the land beyond death.

00:28:56.300 I mean,

00:28:56.480 it's more than that

00:28:57.220 because it's a metaphor

00:28:58.180 as well as perhaps

00:28:59.280 the description

00:28:59.860 of some kind

00:29:00.460 of experiential reality

00:29:01.500 and we can't,

00:29:02.460 we certainly can't

00:29:03.640 probe it particularly deeply.

00:29:05.560 We don't understand

00:29:06.460 what these chemicals do.

00:29:07.580 We don't understand

00:29:08.220 the meaning

00:29:09.000 or the reality,

00:29:11.520 the significance

00:29:12.060 of mystical experience

00:29:13.580 of this sort.

00:29:14.480 But it is very interesting

00:29:15.580 to note that

00:29:16.260 the people who,

00:29:18.880 it's very interesting

00:29:20.440 to note that

00:29:21.020 the people

00:29:21.440 who gave birth

00:29:22.240 to our civilization,

00:29:23.360 so to speak,

00:29:23.900 or at least

00:29:24.200 certain aspects of it,

00:29:25.480 regarded this experience

00:29:26.700 with a tremendous

00:29:27.300 amount of respect.

00:29:28.660 They didn't feel

00:29:29.080 it was something

00:29:29.540 antithetical

00:29:30.340 to what they were doing.

00:29:31.300 They felt that

00:29:31.760 it was something

00:29:32.180 that was nourishing

00:29:32.920 what they were doing.

00:29:34.680 Right.

00:29:35.220 Plato calls it

00:29:35.860 the holiest of mysteries

00:29:37.100 in talking about Eleusis.

00:29:38.820 Aristotle says that

00:29:39.900 you go there

00:29:40.620 not to learn something.

00:29:42.020 He uses the Greek word

00:29:42.780 mathene,

00:29:43.440 like mathematics.

00:29:44.220 You don't go there

00:29:44.700 to learn something,

00:29:46.040 but to experience something.

00:29:48.280 And if you think

00:29:48.700 about philosophy

00:29:49.420 in its broadest sense,

00:29:50.800 Plato himself says that

00:29:51.800 those who engage

00:29:52.840 with philosophy

00:29:53.900 in the right way

00:29:55.220 practice nothing else

00:29:56.560 but dying

00:29:57.300 and being dead.

00:29:58.860 So again,

00:29:59.280 it's this constant

00:30:00.180 sense of death

00:30:01.060 and rebirth.

00:30:02.080 Something fundamentally

00:30:03.800 life-altering

00:30:04.900 happens at Eleusis

00:30:06.060 that convinces

00:30:06.940 these people,

00:30:07.860 right,

00:30:08.380 convinces these initiates

00:30:09.800 that they have

00:30:10.740 transcended their mortality

00:30:12.120 and they are guaranteed

00:30:13.420 an afterlife.

00:30:14.620 It was said

00:30:14.980 only those who go

00:30:15.740 to Eleusis,

00:30:16.420 only them,

00:30:17.320 will experience

00:30:18.000 the afterlife.

00:30:20.380 Well,

00:30:20.640 I suppose they experienced

00:30:21.980 it when they went

00:30:22.660 to Eleusis

00:30:23.260 and then perhaps

00:30:23.940 had it with them

00:30:24.580 for the rest of their life.

00:30:25.720 At least that's

00:30:26.540 the idea.

00:30:28.620 So take us

00:30:30.160 on some of your trips.

00:30:31.280 You went to talk

00:30:33.000 to the world's leading

00:30:34.020 beer scientists,

00:30:35.880 so to speak.

00:30:36.680 You went to Greece.

00:30:38.060 You went to Rome.

00:30:39.180 You went to the Vatican.

00:30:40.460 You went to the Vatican libraries.

00:30:42.000 What was that like?

00:30:43.100 And what did you find there?

00:30:44.640 And how were you received?

00:30:47.640 With relatively open arms.

00:30:49.920 I made decent friends

00:30:51.680 with the archivists

00:30:52.640 and the librarians,

00:30:53.720 largely over strong

00:30:54.740 Italian coffee.

00:30:55.600 So that's always a tip

00:30:57.120 for your future Vatican visit.

00:30:58.460 Well, it's so interesting

00:30:59.460 that you didn't meet

00:31:00.620 a lot of resistance

00:31:01.500 to what you were doing

00:31:02.420 because you'd think that,

00:31:03.840 now, is that because

00:31:04.720 people didn't understand

00:31:05.800 what you're doing

00:31:06.360 or did they understand

00:31:07.240 and let you anyways?

00:31:08.180 Because it's not that obvious

00:31:09.420 that the Vatican

00:31:10.180 would be that thrilled

00:31:11.060 with the proposition

00:31:11.840 that the original

00:31:13.060 sacraments of Christianity

00:31:14.180 were the most potent

00:31:16.240 hallucinogens

00:31:16.880 that we know.

00:31:18.380 And what sort of response

00:31:20.420 have you got

00:31:20.880 from classically religious people,

00:31:23.260 traditionally religious people,

00:31:24.500 Christian people,

00:31:25.240 most particularly,

00:31:26.840 as a consequence

00:31:27.660 of laying out the claims

00:31:29.080 that you've made?

00:31:30.420 It's been somewhat surprising

00:31:31.780 to be totally honest

00:31:32.680 in that there has been

00:31:35.020 generally good reception

00:31:36.300 amongst the Catholics

00:31:37.600 and the Orthodox

00:31:38.340 and the Protestants

00:31:39.360 with whom I talk.

00:31:40.720 And I think if you

00:31:41.820 take a step back

00:31:42.740 and just think about it,

00:31:44.240 you know,

00:31:44.500 I'm not impugning anybody today.

00:31:46.020 This is all ancient history.

00:31:47.120 A lot of it has been

00:31:48.740 gone over well before me.

00:31:50.240 I mean, just the notion

00:31:51.320 of other forms of Christianity,

00:31:53.560 Gnosticism, for example,

00:31:55.200 those 52 books

00:31:56.480 of the Nag Hammadi corpus

00:31:57.620 that were discovered in 1945.

00:31:59.100 We've been talking

00:32:00.440 and writing about them

00:32:01.220 for decades.

00:32:02.340 So, I mean, it's known

00:32:03.380 that there were other versions

00:32:04.600 of the faith out there.

00:32:06.440 You know, throwing

00:32:06.880 a psychedelic twist in there

00:32:08.100 is somewhat controversial,

00:32:09.880 but, you know,

00:32:10.660 that would presuppose

00:32:11.960 that Christianity

00:32:12.780 and psychedelics

00:32:15.020 are somehow

00:32:15.500 mutually exclusive.

00:32:16.600 And I'm not sure

00:32:17.780 that they are.

00:32:18.280 I mean, even today,

00:32:19.460 if you look at the native...

00:32:20.260 You wouldn't be so convinced

00:32:21.540 of that if you read

00:32:22.360 the book of Revelation,

00:32:23.620 which looks for all

00:32:24.800 intents and purposes

00:32:25.740 like the account

00:32:27.000 of a hallucinogenic experience.

00:32:29.840 And so does some

00:32:30.900 of the language

00:32:31.340 in the Gospel of John.

00:32:32.760 Or so does, you know,

00:32:34.240 the Mark, for example,

00:32:36.380 in 411,

00:32:37.340 might not be psychedelics,

00:32:38.600 but when Jesus is asked

00:32:39.820 why he speaks in parables,

00:32:41.420 you know,

00:32:41.640 why talk about

00:32:42.560 the mustard seed

00:32:43.320 and the prodigal son?

00:32:44.180 Why not speak

00:32:44.700 plainly to people?

00:32:45.480 Well, the response

00:32:46.500 from Jesus is that

00:32:47.420 he's trying to relay

00:32:48.560 a musterion,

00:32:50.340 and that's the Greek word

00:32:51.600 for mystery,

00:32:52.260 the very same mystery

00:32:53.400 as you would use

00:32:54.400 in the mysteries of Eleusis,

00:32:55.520 for example,

00:32:56.340 or the mysteries of Dionysus.

00:32:57.580 It's that word which,

00:32:59.180 if you look at

00:32:59.760 the Thayer Greek-English

00:33:01.940 lexicon of the New Testament

00:33:03.200 published in the 19th century,

00:33:05.160 they will define

00:33:05.980 that musterion

00:33:06.920 in Mark

00:33:07.800 as a religious secret,

00:33:09.220 you know,

00:33:09.400 confided only to the initiated,

00:33:11.240 not to be communicated

00:33:12.260 by them

00:33:12.980 to ordinary mortals.

00:33:14.640 I mean,

00:33:14.800 so the idea

00:33:15.380 that Christianity

00:33:16.480 is born with secrets,

00:33:18.720 right,

00:33:19.200 potentially secret rituals,

00:33:20.940 I think has been known

00:33:22.000 for some time.

00:33:23.400 I think that the big question

00:33:24.400 is whether or not

00:33:25.440 that included

00:33:26.100 some kind of

00:33:26.700 ancient pharmacology.

00:33:28.540 Yeah, well,

00:33:28.980 that's definitely

00:33:29.980 the big question,

00:33:30.940 and the other big question,

00:33:32.320 of course,

00:33:32.560 is what relevance

00:33:33.520 does that have

00:33:34.220 to a church

00:33:34.780 that increasingly

00:33:35.440 seems to be dying,

00:33:36.540 at least in the West?

00:33:38.040 I mean,

00:33:38.280 Rick Griffiths told me

00:33:39.480 that Harvard Divinity School

00:33:41.700 is thinking about

00:33:42.520 starting up

00:33:44.100 a psychedelic divinity program.

00:33:47.560 Yeah,

00:33:47.700 and I actually had

00:33:48.200 a great talk

00:33:48.720 with Charlie Stang

00:33:49.580 at Harvard Divinity.

00:33:51.080 He interviewed me

00:33:51.900 and grilled me

00:33:52.660 in a very respectable way,

00:33:55.000 but he's had

00:33:55.600 a year-long series

00:33:57.000 of wonderful presentations

00:33:58.300 on psychedelics

00:33:59.280 and the future of religion,

00:34:00.740 which I hope

00:34:01.960 will continue.

00:34:02.920 So,

00:34:03.480 of all places,

00:34:04.680 you know,

00:34:04.920 where the same campus

00:34:06.640 that spawned

00:34:07.400 Timothy Leary

00:34:07.940 and Dick Alpert

00:34:08.680 seems like

00:34:09.940 there's some interest

00:34:10.880 in this again

00:34:11.420 in a very sober way.

00:34:13.640 Yeah,

00:34:13.880 so to speak,

00:34:14.580 so to speak,

00:34:15.380 yeah.

00:34:15.920 Okay,

00:34:16.340 so let's go to

00:34:18.040 the Vatican.

00:34:18.760 What did you do there

00:34:19.700 in Rome

00:34:20.280 and what did you discover?

00:34:22.600 Well,

00:34:23.080 I discovered

00:34:23.540 a version of the faith

00:34:24.460 like we've been talking about

00:34:25.560 that I didn't hear about

00:34:27.320 in my 13 years

00:34:28.080 of Catholic school,

00:34:29.260 and I was investigating

00:34:30.800 this notion

00:34:31.640 of continuity,

00:34:32.740 pagan continuity,

00:34:33.740 the idea that

00:34:34.900 if there were

00:34:35.640 these psychedelic rituals

00:34:37.420 in antiquity,

00:34:38.080 in pagan antiquity,

00:34:39.460 did some of that

00:34:40.340 somehow make its way

00:34:41.640 into the Christian world?

00:34:43.320 And so I went,

00:34:44.820 I went spelunking.

00:34:45.800 I went literally

00:34:46.480 under the Vatican

00:34:47.360 into the necropolis

00:34:49.060 atop which it sits

00:34:50.640 and went to

00:34:51.740 Mausoleum M

00:34:52.700 inside the Vatican

00:34:53.640 and right there,

00:34:54.820 you know,

00:34:55.580 under the cathedral,

00:34:56.680 you will see

00:34:57.440 the vines of Dionysus

00:34:58.920 painted onto

00:34:59.800 this mosaic.

00:35:01.700 Could be one of the

00:35:02.220 earliest Christian mosaics

00:35:03.480 that we have,

00:35:04.040 as a matter of fact,

00:35:04.820 in this tomb.

00:35:05.740 And art historians

00:35:06.480 point out that

00:35:07.180 clearly these are

00:35:07.780 the vines of Dionysus

00:35:09.260 that have been co-opted

00:35:10.860 as the vines

00:35:11.880 of Christianity.

00:35:13.300 In John's gospel,

00:35:14.400 Jesus refers to himself

00:35:15.600 as the true vine.

00:35:17.140 I mean,

00:35:17.300 so it's a very kind of

00:35:18.440 just silly example

00:35:19.360 of how,

00:35:20.700 you know,

00:35:21.000 the edifice of the church

00:35:22.520 is,

00:35:23.020 in some sense,

00:35:23.680 is literally built

00:35:24.700 on top of these

00:35:25.740 pagan roots.

00:35:26.480 And if you go to,

00:35:27.540 you know,

00:35:27.760 other catacombs

00:35:28.880 around the city

00:35:29.780 under the streets

00:35:30.340 of Rome,

00:35:30.740 you will find frescoes

00:35:31.920 from the 3rd and 4th century.

00:35:33.420 And in these frescoes,

00:35:34.460 you will see women

00:35:35.260 consecrating what looks

00:35:37.020 like wine

00:35:37.720 in what looks like

00:35:38.980 some kind of version

00:35:40.080 of a proto-mass

00:35:41.040 or a proto-Eucharistic meal.

00:35:42.900 The Vatican itself

00:35:44.300 identifies these women

00:35:45.980 as,

00:35:46.960 you know,

00:35:47.480 participating

00:35:47.940 in a Eucharistic vigil,

00:35:49.660 not what you often

00:35:50.700 hear about.

00:35:51.860 Next to one of these

00:35:53.040 women consecrating wine,

00:35:54.180 you'll see the Greek

00:35:54.800 witch Circe,

00:35:56.040 who,

00:35:56.660 if anything,

00:35:57.500 is known for her

00:35:58.180 pharmacological expertise

00:35:59.500 going as far back

00:36:00.800 as Homer.

00:36:01.420 So it's difficult

00:36:02.060 to explain

00:36:02.860 these images,

00:36:04.280 these very Greek images

00:36:05.400 that somehow

00:36:06.560 reference pharmacology,

00:36:08.500 somehow reference

00:36:09.340 the role of women

00:36:10.360 in the birth

00:36:11.220 and development

00:36:11.700 of the church.

00:36:12.400 It's not a Christianity

00:36:13.480 that's often talked about.

00:36:15.440 So,

00:36:15.880 why do you think

00:36:17.060 if Christianity

00:36:18.460 or at least

00:36:19.140 some branches of Christ,

00:36:20.460 okay,

00:36:20.860 so first,

00:36:21.640 do you think

00:36:22.080 that Christianity

00:36:22.660 itself had its origins

00:36:24.340 in hallucinogenic use?

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00:42:02.800 Do you think

00:42:03.540 that Christianity

00:42:04.120 itself had its

00:42:05.340 origins in

00:42:06.180 hallucinogenic use?

00:42:08.060 I mean,

00:42:08.260 that's certainly

00:42:08.600 what John Allegro

00:42:09.400 claimed, right,

00:42:10.080 with the sacred

00:42:10.940 mushroom and the cross.

00:42:11.880 I read that

00:42:12.280 when I was

00:42:12.700 pretty young,

00:42:13.560 15,

00:42:14.060 and I had no idea

00:42:15.140 what to do

00:42:15.560 with that book.

00:42:16.260 I mean,

00:42:16.880 because there was

00:42:17.360 no way I could

00:42:17.920 criticize it.

00:42:18.500 He was a

00:42:19.020 philologist,

00:42:20.100 essentially,

00:42:20.580 right?

00:42:20.780 He derived

00:42:21.440 almost all of

00:42:21.980 his evidence

00:42:22.380 from the derivation

00:42:23.220 of words,

00:42:23.800 from the etymology

00:42:24.960 of words,

00:42:25.480 and I just

00:42:26.300 still don't have

00:42:27.640 enough expertise

00:42:28.300 in that field

00:42:28.880 to evaluate

00:42:30.300 his claims,

00:42:31.200 but I read

00:42:31.660 that.

00:42:31.960 I thought

00:42:32.200 Christianity

00:42:33.100 originated as

00:42:35.940 a hallucinogenic

00:42:37.300 mushroom cult.

00:42:38.260 Really?

00:42:38.740 That's actually

00:42:39.540 possible?

00:42:40.160 And he compiles a

00:42:41.160 tremendous amount

00:42:41.760 of evidence.

00:42:42.300 It's a very

00:42:42.820 scholarly book.

00:42:43.640 It destroyed

00:42:44.180 his career

00:42:44.760 because it was

00:42:46.120 published at the

00:42:46.720 height of the

00:42:47.120 hippie revolution,

00:42:47.840 which Timothy

00:42:48.680 Leary was

00:42:49.240 responsible for,

00:42:50.820 as a consequence,

00:42:52.380 I would say,

00:42:52.800 of his carelessness

00:42:53.480 more than

00:42:54.480 anything else.

00:42:55.740 Allegra was

00:42:56.280 very serious.

00:42:56.980 It's a very

00:42:57.380 serious book,

00:42:58.060 but it's not

00:42:58.440 one that's

00:42:58.880 easy to know

00:43:00.540 what to do

00:43:00.980 with that book.

00:43:01.980 And Allegra

00:43:03.500 was put aside

00:43:04.180 because of it,

00:43:04.780 and lots of

00:43:05.440 people paid

00:43:05.880 the price for

00:43:06.420 this,

00:43:06.780 and Ruck,

00:43:07.360 who we're

00:43:07.560 going to talk

00:43:07.920 to later,

00:43:08.340 was one of

00:43:09.100 them as well.

00:43:09.800 I mean,

00:43:10.140 the pathway

00:43:11.260 was laid for

00:43:11.960 you in some

00:43:12.540 sense because

00:43:13.080 all these

00:43:13.460 other people

00:43:13.900 had already

00:43:14.280 suffered for

00:43:14.940 putting forward

00:43:15.520 this hypothesis

00:43:16.240 earlier,

00:43:16.840 right?

00:43:17.020 I'm the

00:43:17.700 first.

00:43:18.360 I had it easy,

00:43:19.640 Jordan.

00:43:20.100 There was no

00:43:21.220 hard going here,

00:43:21.860 which is maybe

00:43:22.280 part of the

00:43:23.020 reason why I

00:43:24.120 was welcomed

00:43:24.700 into the

00:43:25.520 Vatican,

00:43:26.000 or why I've

00:43:26.440 had great

00:43:26.820 conversations

00:43:27.340 with people

00:43:27.820 at Harvard

00:43:28.200 and Yale

00:43:29.140 and elsewhere

00:43:29.940 because times

00:43:30.920 have changed,

00:43:31.560 I think largely

00:43:32.100 thanks to

00:43:32.700 Roland Griffith's

00:43:33.480 clinical work

00:43:34.120 and the

00:43:35.480 extraordinary

00:43:36.200 promise that

00:43:37.640 is being shown

00:43:38.540 on clinical

00:43:39.100 depression,

00:43:39.700 anxiety,

00:43:40.260 end-of-life

00:43:40.700 distress,

00:43:41.220 PTSD,

00:43:41.940 addiction,

00:43:42.300 you name it,

00:43:43.040 with these

00:43:43.560 compounds,

00:43:44.400 the study of

00:43:45.140 which was

00:43:45.900 interrupted for

00:43:46.580 decades.

00:43:47.020 And I think

00:43:47.460 people are

00:43:48.720 beginning to

00:43:49.300 realize that

00:43:50.160 there's something

00:43:50.620 here worth

00:43:51.080 looking at.

00:43:51.620 When the

00:43:51.860 front page of

00:43:52.400 the New York

00:43:52.740 Times earlier

00:43:53.500 this week is

00:43:54.120 talking about

00:43:54.640 the future

00:43:55.060 of psychiatry

00:43:56.020 being revolutionized

00:43:58.120 because of

00:43:59.020 psychedelics with

00:43:59.660 psilocybin and

00:44:00.320 MDMA.

00:44:00.720 Right, the same

00:44:00.740 sort of thing

00:44:01.260 occurred in the

00:44:01.960 early 1960s when

00:44:03.240 LSD and

00:44:04.480 mescaline and

00:44:06.100 all of the

00:44:06.760 powerful psychedelics

00:44:07.920 were being

00:44:08.480 utilized, partly

00:44:10.100 for the treatment

00:44:10.780 of alcoholism,

00:44:11.580 for example,

00:44:12.280 and there was

00:44:12.920 some evidence

00:44:13.380 that that was

00:44:13.900 successful,

00:44:14.740 but things got

00:44:15.300 out of hand

00:44:15.760 very, very

00:44:16.220 rapidly.

00:44:17.020 I mean, maybe

00:44:17.800 that's why

00:44:18.460 Christianity, as

00:44:20.380 it formalized,

00:44:21.520 put the

00:44:22.220 psychedelic sacraments

00:44:23.140 to rest.

00:44:23.740 I mean, when we

00:44:24.740 introduced them

00:44:25.580 back into our

00:44:26.180 civilization, speaking

00:44:27.260 as a, you know,

00:44:28.280 Westerner, so to

00:44:29.440 speak, I mean, that

00:44:30.740 was only in the

00:44:31.520 1950s.

00:44:32.460 When did, it was

00:44:33.360 Wasson who went

00:44:34.160 into Mexico and

00:44:35.540 discovered the

00:44:36.280 psilocybin mushrooms

00:44:37.060 and brought them

00:44:37.600 back.

00:44:38.260 He's quite the

00:44:38.860 character.

00:44:39.460 I'd recommend that

00:44:40.720 everyone who's

00:44:41.400 listening read about

00:44:42.620 Gordon Wasson,

00:44:43.460 because he was

00:44:43.900 quite the

00:44:44.700 person, pulled

00:44:46.080 these powerful

00:44:46.920 hallucinogens back

00:44:47.840 into our culture.

00:44:48.620 I mean, they

00:44:49.300 blew us into

00:44:49.860 pieces in the

00:44:50.500 1960s so badly.

00:44:52.340 We had to make

00:44:52.860 them all illegal

00:44:53.480 and scared the

00:44:54.300 hell out of

00:44:54.740 everyone.

00:44:55.460 Well, so to

00:44:55.960 speak, maybe it

00:44:56.700 didn't scare the

00:44:57.320 hell out of

00:44:57.800 everyone.

00:44:58.060 That would have

00:44:58.720 been the positive

00:44:59.340 outcome, but

00:44:59.980 our authorities

00:45:02.440 certainly regarded

00:45:04.160 them as radically

00:45:05.260 disruptive, and

00:45:06.240 that seems to me

00:45:07.160 to be not such an

00:45:08.240 unreasonable judgment,

00:45:09.280 even though there's

00:45:10.720 a very powerful

00:45:11.960 counter-argument to

00:45:12.720 be made.

00:45:13.600 It's something to

00:45:14.300 be very, very

00:45:14.800 cautious about.

00:45:16.080 Are you still a

00:45:17.220 practicing Christian?

00:45:19.460 And you don't have

00:45:20.340 to answer that.

00:45:21.060 I don't want to put

00:45:21.940 you on the spot.

00:45:22.980 I'd love to.

00:45:23.860 I very much still

00:45:25.200 consider myself a

00:45:26.360 Christian in the way

00:45:28.040 I learned about it

00:45:28.880 from the Jesuits,

00:45:29.640 which was largely

00:45:30.560 about social justice

00:45:32.140 and contemplative

00:45:33.780 mysticism and being

00:45:35.400 of service.

00:45:36.020 I was taught to be a

00:45:36.760 man for others, and

00:45:37.580 in that sense, I

00:45:38.540 still consider myself

00:45:39.420 a Christian, maybe

00:45:40.540 even more so after

00:45:41.660 discovering the pagan

00:45:44.020 roots of this faith.

00:45:45.140 And what I do think

00:45:46.360 is an interesting

00:45:47.980 way for Christianity

00:45:49.240 to sit with these

00:45:50.720 mystery traditions and

00:45:51.880 the possibility that in

00:45:53.240 these early centuries of

00:45:54.280 paleo-Christianity, there

00:45:55.480 was a type of

00:45:56.140 Christianity that

00:45:58.040 clearly attracted

00:45:58.980 people, and I think

00:45:59.920 it's the kind of

00:46:00.420 Christianity that

00:46:01.200 attracts me today,

00:46:02.720 2,000 years later.

00:46:03.680 This notion of

00:46:05.480 personal, direct

00:46:07.760 experience of the

00:46:09.280 divine.

00:46:09.820 Something was

00:46:10.340 happening in those

00:46:11.580 centuries to turn

00:46:12.960 this carpenter's son

00:46:14.080 into the most famous

00:46:15.400 human being who ever

00:46:16.300 lived.

00:46:16.980 Something was

00:46:17.500 happening for this

00:46:18.420 illegal cult of a

00:46:20.420 dozen or so illiterate

00:46:21.540 day-laborers to

00:46:22.740 convert the entire

00:46:23.660 Roman Empire in only a

00:46:25.200 couple centuries and

00:46:26.440 become the world's

00:46:27.060 biggest religion.

00:46:27.540 Well, that's also the

00:46:27.640 great mystery that's in

00:46:28.740 your book, too, because

00:46:29.740 the hallucinant mysteries

00:46:31.940 are going along for

00:46:32.800 2,000 years, let's say,

00:46:34.200 and then they're

00:46:35.180 disrupted, and

00:46:36.240 Christianity comes

00:46:37.020 along, and there's a

00:46:38.160 hallucinogenic end to

00:46:39.220 it.

00:46:39.420 So what was it about

00:46:40.980 what happened?

00:46:42.440 Something happened

00:46:43.300 that isn't merely a

00:46:45.340 continuation of the

00:46:46.880 psychedelic, the

00:46:47.580 shamanic psychedelic

00:46:48.540 tradition, or that's

00:46:49.420 what you have to think

00:46:50.580 if you're a Christian,

00:46:51.220 but that's also what

00:46:52.040 you have to think

00:46:52.580 historically, because

00:46:53.420 Christianity did do

00:46:54.840 exactly what you said

00:46:55.740 it did.

00:46:56.620 And so that's

00:46:57.060 something I can't,

00:46:58.320 I'm very interested in

00:46:59.740 this, I'm very

00:47:01.820 interested in Christian

00:47:03.080 ideas, I'm very

00:47:04.300 interested in the

00:47:05.620 continuity of

00:47:06.540 religious experience

00:47:07.320 across tens of

00:47:08.200 thousands of years,

00:47:08.920 and maybe more than

00:47:09.600 that, and I don't

00:47:11.100 understand at all what

00:47:12.820 constitutes the shift

00:47:14.100 that occurs from the

00:47:15.120 transformation from the

00:47:16.820 pagan structures, let's

00:47:18.980 say, predicated as

00:47:19.940 they might have been

00:47:20.460 on hallucinogenic

00:47:21.220 experience, extending

00:47:22.540 way back into the

00:47:24.080 shamanic depths of

00:47:25.320 time, God only knows

00:47:26.800 how long.

00:47:27.640 There's some

00:47:28.280 transformation, though,

00:47:29.340 that's specific to

00:47:30.080 Christianity that's

00:47:30.920 tangled up with the

00:47:31.740 hallucinogen use that I

00:47:32.800 don't understand at

00:47:33.840 all, and that has

00:47:34.560 something to do as

00:47:35.300 well with this idea of

00:47:36.300 the defeat of death and

00:47:37.820 the resurrection of the

00:47:39.840 body and all of this

00:47:40.880 mystical elements and

00:47:42.640 the hallucinogenic

00:47:44.640 elements of

00:47:45.300 Christianity that are

00:47:46.200 integrated into the

00:47:47.020 book of Revelation and

00:47:47.940 so on.

00:47:48.680 So there's a

00:47:49.280 pharmacological story,

00:47:50.620 but there's a story of

00:47:51.840 the transformation of

00:47:53.440 religious ideation that

00:47:54.580 also is a complete

00:47:55.440 mystery.

00:47:56.740 Why was Christ able to

00:47:58.440 displace Dionysius, let's

00:47:59.880 say?

00:48:00.480 And what does it

00:48:01.080 signify that that was

00:48:02.120 the case?

00:48:04.000 That's what I'm trying

00:48:05.360 to figure out.

00:48:05.940 I think Allegro kind

00:48:07.720 of sits on the more

00:48:08.700 extreme end of the

00:48:09.800 spectrum of the

00:48:10.560 psychedelic hypothesis.

00:48:11.720 So I don't think that

00:48:13.060 the religion begins as a

00:48:14.000 mushroom cult, for

00:48:14.640 example.

00:48:15.400 I'm not sure if there

00:48:16.080 were psychedelics at the

00:48:17.080 Last Supper.

00:48:17.960 I think the hypothesis

00:48:19.840 I'm pursuing is whether

00:48:21.560 or not there could have

00:48:22.880 been some communities of

00:48:24.940 early Greek-speaking

00:48:26.060 Christians who at some

00:48:27.540 place in the ancient

00:48:28.380 Mediterranean would have

00:48:30.380 availed themselves of some

00:48:31.920 kind of mind-altering

00:48:33.520 sacrament.

00:48:34.840 The prevalence of that

00:48:37.000 kind of tradition, we

00:48:37.740 simply don't know.

00:48:38.680 At the end of the book,

00:48:39.340 I say it's probably not a

00:48:40.820 majority.

00:48:41.760 There were other things

00:48:42.680 that led to the rise and

00:48:44.200 success of Christianity.

00:48:45.800 It's often distinguished

00:48:47.320 from its pagan

00:48:48.140 predecessors by this sense

00:48:50.160 of community and love and

00:48:51.560 charity that the ancient

00:48:53.200 sources talk about.

00:48:54.700 But clearly there was

00:48:55.880 something else that was

00:48:58.020 inspiring people to

00:48:59.620 abandon the faith of

00:49:01.200 their ancestors.

00:49:02.120 Perfectly good religion,

00:49:03.260 like Eleusis, by the way,

00:49:04.460 which survives all the way

00:49:05.660 through the early

00:49:06.180 Christian period.

00:49:07.340 The mysteries of Dionysus,

00:49:08.800 a perfectly good religion

00:49:09.840 to the Greek speakers of

00:49:11.260 Greece and elsewhere.

00:49:12.140 That survives before,

00:49:13.840 during, and after the life

00:49:14.940 of Jesus.

00:49:15.480 So I think for at least

00:49:17.040 some of these communities,

00:49:18.320 the way the gospel was

00:49:19.260 communicated to them in

00:49:20.640 the Greek language may

00:49:22.220 have reminded them of some

00:49:23.980 of these mystery rights,

00:49:25.040 some of these pagan

00:49:25.720 rituals.

00:49:26.200 Well, that is, relatively

00:49:28.440 speaking, a very moderate

00:49:29.760 hypothesis.

00:49:30.560 I guess the problem I have

00:49:32.020 with that hypothesis, insofar

00:49:33.660 as I have a problem with

00:49:34.680 it, because it could well

00:49:35.680 be accurate, is that, as

00:49:38.200 you have pointed out, the

00:49:39.380 hallucinogenic experience is

00:49:40.800 so unbelievably powerful that

00:49:42.560 it's hard to believe that it

00:49:43.700 would have had a tremendous

00:49:45.420 impact.

00:49:46.100 And you see also these odd

00:49:48.160 correspondences between the

00:49:51.440 development of Christian

00:49:52.420 ideas and the mysteries of

00:49:54.820 facing death that you

00:49:55.780 described that aren't

00:49:56.620 trivial.

00:49:57.160 So Christ is crucified, he

00:49:58.560 dies, three days later, so

00:50:01.200 he spends time in the

00:50:02.180 underworld, he spends time in

00:50:03.420 hell, he resurrects.

00:50:04.680 That's a dying, that's a

00:50:07.100 death and resurrection story

00:50:08.500 that's very much akin to a

00:50:10.080 shamanic death and rebirth.

00:50:13.540 And it's hard to believe that

00:50:15.680 those ideas aren't in some

00:50:17.060 manner integrally related,

00:50:19.060 especially given that that's

00:50:20.260 something that can be

00:50:20.980 experienced as a consequence

00:50:22.820 of chemical transformation.

00:50:24.340 And then the next question is,

00:50:25.780 what the hell does it mean

00:50:27.460 that that sort of thing can

00:50:29.360 be initiated in people

00:50:32.540 repeatedly and reliably as a

00:50:36.200 consequence of chemical

00:50:37.200 manipulation?

00:50:38.560 I mean, and you'd say, well,

00:50:40.160 it's an aberration, it's a

00:50:41.440 form of poisoning.

00:50:42.620 That's a reason, that's the

00:50:43.940 most reasonable hypothesis.

00:50:45.560 But then you'd expect that if

00:50:46.880 it was a consequence of

00:50:47.840 poisoning, that the downstream

00:50:49.060 effects would be negative, not

00:50:50.660 positive.

00:50:51.300 And I read a large-scale

00:50:52.760 study, hundreds of thousands

00:50:54.120 of people, it's retrospective

00:50:55.620 analysis, looking at the

00:50:57.240 comparative mental and

00:50:58.120 physical health of

00:50:58.960 hallucinogen users versus

00:51:00.740 non-users.

00:51:01.740 And on virtually every measure

00:51:03.440 of physical and mental

00:51:04.420 health, the hallucinogen users

00:51:05.840 were healthier.

00:51:07.520 That's not what you'd expect

00:51:08.600 if it's poison.

00:51:10.100 And so it's not poison, but

00:51:12.380 it's a chemical that produces

00:51:13.420 this incredibly powerful

00:51:14.640 spiritual experience.

00:51:15.740 What the hell are we supposed

00:51:16.680 to make of that?

00:51:17.440 And it's at the foundation of

00:51:20.040 our religious belief,

00:51:21.300 historically speaking, perhaps

00:51:22.800 at the foundation of Christian

00:51:24.140 ideas themselves.

00:51:25.500 It looks like it's integral to

00:51:27.100 the emergence of Greek

00:51:28.680 rationality in all of the

00:51:30.000 civilization that's flourished

00:51:31.220 in the Mediterranean.

00:51:32.300 It can't just be brushed away.

00:51:34.180 And then there's the clinical

00:51:35.100 evidence coming in from

00:51:36.200 Griffith's end, showing that

00:51:37.700 it does appear to be

00:51:38.560 positively transformative.

00:51:40.880 I mean, it just, it points to

00:51:43.160 something that we just don't

00:51:44.120 understand at all.

00:51:44.980 And then I've read a fair bit

00:51:46.560 about mushrooms and they're

00:51:47.620 very, very strange things.

00:51:49.520 Paul Stamets, he's, I imagine

00:51:51.580 you're familiar with his work.

00:51:52.600 He's quite the genius and a

00:51:53.940 very strange person.

00:51:54.980 I should really interview him.

00:51:56.660 He's, he's a remarkable person

00:51:58.280 and mushrooms are very, very

00:52:00.320 complicated things.

00:52:01.380 And it isn't obvious why

00:52:02.900 psilocybin mushrooms produce

00:52:04.280 psilocybin.

00:52:04.900 It doesn't seem to do much for

00:52:05.940 the mushroom.

00:52:06.800 And so there's a mystery there.

00:52:09.320 And well, and then there's all

00:52:12.460 of the speculation that McKenna,

00:52:15.560 I met his brother at a

00:52:16.900 conference on awe.

00:52:17.720 He came and spoke up at the

00:52:18.740 U of T.

00:52:19.160 So that was extremely

00:52:19.880 interesting.

00:52:21.060 But his stoned ape theory is

00:52:23.080 extremely interesting as well.

00:52:25.100 You know, I mean, it's

00:52:25.760 definitely on the fringe ends

00:52:27.100 of speculation, but, but it's

00:52:31.500 not like there's any shortage of

00:52:33.500 evidence that every human

00:52:34.740 culture that ever existed did

00:52:36.240 everything they possibly could to

00:52:37.760 identify every hallucinogenic

00:52:39.460 substance within reach and become

00:52:41.240 masters of them.

00:52:43.200 So, right.

00:52:44.000 Well, we, we co-evolve with

00:52:45.040 these things.

00:52:45.500 I love talking to Paul and to

00:52:46.860 Dennis, Dennis McKenna.

00:52:48.700 They're, they're, they're,

00:52:49.860 they're great stewards of this,

00:52:50.940 of this tradition.

00:52:52.200 And I, you know, I'm not a

00:52:54.300 mycologist or a scientist for

00:52:56.160 that matter.

00:52:56.880 But this, this is the kind of

00:52:58.120 stuff that, that asks deep

00:52:59.180 questions about our past.

00:53:00.340 I mean, so, and when we're

00:53:01.220 talking about pagan continuity,

00:53:02.460 maybe we should say

00:53:03.420 anthropological continuity.

00:53:05.520 This, this, this goes.

00:53:06.460 Right, because that's farther

00:53:07.260 back than pagan by tens of

00:53:09.060 thousands of years, right?

00:53:10.160 We had no idea how far back

00:53:11.700 this goes.

00:53:13.060 It could be tens of thousands

00:53:14.000 of years.

00:53:14.520 I cite one.

00:53:15.220 It's highly likely.

00:53:16.440 I cite one study in my book

00:53:17.800 about Neanderthals.

00:53:18.800 This is from a decade ago.

00:53:19.880 They found medicinal plants

00:53:21.460 like chamomile and yarrow in

00:53:23.700 the dental calculus of

00:53:25.100 Neanderthal bones in Spain.

00:53:27.160 That goes back 50,000 years.

00:53:28.860 There's some evidence that

00:53:29.900 chimps use medicinal plants and

00:53:31.540 cats eat grass when they're

00:53:32.900 ill.

00:53:33.400 Like, I mean, the relationship

00:53:35.120 between animals and plants is

00:53:36.660 extraordinarily complicated.

00:53:37.900 And, and, and, you know, the

00:53:39.920 thing is, too, the farther back

00:53:41.420 you go in history to identify

00:53:42.760 something and you see it there,

00:53:44.280 the farther back it's likely

00:53:46.060 that that occurred because the

00:53:47.520 farther back you go, the more

00:53:48.640 stable cultures are and the less

00:53:50.100 likely they are to have

00:53:50.960 radically transformed.

00:53:52.360 So if you go back 15,000 years

00:53:54.180 and something's there, well, you

00:53:55.280 can make a pretty good guess that

00:53:56.400 maybe it was there 80,000 years

00:53:57.840 ago because there just wasn't that

00:53:59.180 much change.

00:54:00.540 And lack of change is what's

00:54:03.240 typical rather than change, you

00:54:04.900 know, despite our current

00:54:05.900 culture.

00:54:07.240 So, yeah, so this stuff goes way

00:54:09.200 as back as far as we can

00:54:10.460 possibly imagine.

00:54:11.440 You said just moments ago that

00:54:14.500 we co-evolved with mushrooms.

00:54:17.100 And so what, can you elaborate on

00:54:18.980 that a bit?

00:54:19.580 What do you mean?

00:54:20.740 Well, they, they certainly

00:54:21.680 precede us.

00:54:23.660 Plants go back about 470 million

00:54:25.980 years.

00:54:26.820 If you talk to Paul Stamets, he

00:54:28.180 will say there's a fossilized

00:54:29.460 mushroom that's two and a half

00:54:31.360 billion years old.

00:54:32.960 So the mushroom actually far

00:54:34.320 precedes the plants that we know

00:54:35.540 of, 391,000 species, 80,000 of

00:54:39.620 which might be edible.

00:54:40.800 This is in orders of millions of

00:54:42.940 years before us.

00:54:45.480 And let's, I mean, let's just

00:54:46.220 think about it commonsensically.

00:54:48.940 You know, if we weren't made to

00:54:50.720 interact with our environment,

00:54:52.080 why would these plants have an

00:54:53.860 impact on us?

00:54:54.520 Why are we equipped with CB1,

00:54:56.100 CB2 receptors?

00:54:57.340 Why are we equipped with the 5-HT2A

00:54:59.160 receptor?

00:54:59.640 Why do these things have any

00:55:00.820 impact on us whatsoever?

00:55:02.560 Um, it seems, it seems that we've

00:55:05.240 co-evolved together with our

00:55:06.700 planet, um, and just maybe we're

00:55:08.680 not aliens to it, but together,

00:55:10.960 um, these things are, are more

00:55:13.200 allies than foes.

00:55:14.500 In some cases, poisons though they

00:55:16.020 may be.

00:55:17.420 Yeah, well, that's the question.

00:55:18.820 Are they allies or foes?

00:55:20.080 And if they're allies, what exactly

00:55:21.420 does that, what exactly is the

00:55:23.220 significance of that?

00:55:24.240 Hello, Dr. Rook, it's a pleasure to

00:55:32.440 meet you, and thank you very much

00:55:33.840 for agreeing to come and talk with

00:55:36.140 me.

00:55:36.640 We've been talking, obviously, about,

00:55:38.320 about Brian's book, and about

00:55:40.220 co-evolution with mushrooms, and

00:55:42.060 about the potential significance of

00:55:43.800 whatever the potential significance

00:55:45.960 is of the fact that our religious

00:55:48.260 ideas, which seem to sit at the

00:55:49.840 basis of our culture, may have been

00:55:51.560 profoundly influenced across thousands

00:55:53.500 of years by hallucinogenic use, and

00:55:55.340 what in the world are we supposed to

00:55:56.820 make of that?

00:55:57.540 And I won't read the intro, because

00:55:59.620 I've already done that, so we, that,

00:56:01.440 that people are already, um, um,

00:56:04.320 informed as to who you are.

00:56:06.440 I'm going to start by asking you

00:56:08.080 about, uh, the road to Aloysus.

00:56:09.920 So, you co-authored the, if that's

00:56:11.780 okay, can we start there?

00:56:12.820 Does that seem reasonable to you?

00:56:14.500 Why not jump right in, eh?

00:56:16.500 You co-authored the road to Aloysus

00:56:18.340 in 1978 with R. Gordon Wasson and

00:56:21.360 Albert Hoffman.

00:56:22.200 And Wasson was an amateur

00:56:24.080 mycologist.

00:56:24.800 I believe that his primary

00:56:25.900 occupation, I think he was a banker,

00:56:27.640 but he was a very accomplished, um,

00:56:29.980 thinker and, and explorer.

00:56:32.280 And had a profound...

00:56:33.500 He found banking very boring, he

00:56:35.060 told me.

00:56:35.940 Well, it's certainly compared to the

00:56:37.300 other things he did.

00:56:38.040 It was, it was very run-of-the-mill,

00:56:39.640 uh, occupation.

00:56:41.320 Um, and he wrote this famous book,

00:56:43.420 Soma, which, which, which is well

00:56:46.140 accepted now, I think, as an

00:56:47.760 authoritative, authoritative

00:56:49.040 hypothesis, at least, that the, um,

00:56:52.220 ancient Hindus, in particular, were

00:56:53.680 using Amanita muscaria, the fly

00:56:55.460 agaric, the red mushroom with

00:56:57.080 white dots, the fairy tale

00:56:58.340 mushroom, as an entheogen, in your

00:57:00.840 terminology.

00:57:02.040 Um, and Albert Hoffman, who

00:57:04.640 discovered LSD, and you co-authored

00:57:06.920 this book, the road to Aloysus, in

00:57:08.520 1978.

00:57:09.520 And so, first of all, like, what was

00:57:13.020 that like, and why did they pick

00:57:14.780 you?

00:57:15.240 And, and then we can get into what

00:57:16.940 the consequences of that were.

00:57:19.380 Well, actually, I had a sabbatical

00:57:21.740 year and decided that I would travel

00:57:24.460 across, uh, Europe.

00:57:26.300 So I bought a car in London and then,

00:57:29.220 uh, shipped it over to, uh, the

00:57:32.280 mainland and drove to Greece.

00:57:34.500 But while, while I was in London, I

00:57:37.420 thought I should buy books to have

00:57:40.380 to read while I was traveling.

00:57:43.640 And so I noticed a copy of John

00:57:46.160 Allegro's, uh, Sacred Mushroom of

00:57:48.120 the Cross in a bookstore window, and

00:57:50.520 I put it in the car.

00:57:52.520 And, uh, in that time that I was

00:57:54.560 traveling and staying in Greece, I

00:57:56.340 read it.

00:57:57.560 And I read it naively.

00:57:59.900 I was unaware of the fact that I

00:58:01.500 was not supposed to like it.

00:58:03.500 Uh, uh, and, uh, but I was, I

00:58:09.600 couldn't judge, um, where Allegro was

00:58:13.480 dealing with, uh, Hebrew or with a

00:58:17.040 Sumerian, but I certainly could judge

00:58:20.040 when he cited classical sources.

00:58:23.200 And I was amazed that he brought my

00:58:25.860 attention things that I had not been

00:58:29.200 taught.

00:58:30.120 So I'm going to interrupt you there

00:58:31.380 just for one second, if you don't

00:58:32.740 mind.

00:58:32.940 We were just talking about, uh, the

00:58:34.720 Sacred Mushroom and the Cross.

00:58:35.780 I read that when I was about 15 or

00:58:37.660 16, and it completely blew the top of

00:58:40.200 my head off.

00:58:40.840 And, of course, I was completely

00:58:41.960 incapable of assessing it, apart from

00:58:43.940 the fact that it looked to be a very

00:58:45.640 scholarly work and was hard to just

00:58:47.480 ignore.

00:58:48.600 But, but it's interesting to hear you

00:58:50.280 say that even when he moved out of his

00:58:52.520 area of specialty into your area of

00:58:55.000 specialty, you found him to be a

00:58:57.180 credible scholar who, who had actually

00:58:59.080 found things that you didn't know

00:59:00.280 about.

00:59:00.720 His citations were fantastic.

00:59:02.340 And I was, I was interested in Dionysus

00:59:05.480 and, uh, he was giving me information

00:59:08.480 about the nature of the mania induced by

00:59:12.420 possession by Dionysus.

00:59:15.340 And, uh, and so I, when I came back from

00:59:20.320 the, the trip, I, I wrote two scholarly

00:59:23.900 essays that were accepted in reputable

00:59:28.020 journals, uh, peer journals and, uh,

00:59:31.280 published, and then I, I became aware of

00:59:35.240 Gordon Wasson's work and read, uh, his

00:59:40.180 work on, uh, SOMA.

00:59:42.500 And a friend said, why don't you send your

00:59:44.420 essays to Gordon?

00:59:45.880 And so I did.

00:59:47.520 And so I present, uh, I didn't mean to,

00:59:50.420 but I presented myself to Wasson as an

00:59:52.940 authority already on this topic.

00:59:54.860 Um, so I always thought that he, he

00:59:58.260 over estimated my abilities, uh, but I

01:00:03.020 almost immediately got a phone call from

01:00:04.720 him.

01:00:04.960 He was coming to Boston and we had to

01:00:07.560 meet.

01:00:08.060 So we did.

01:00:09.080 And then the second time, very shortly

01:00:11.960 after he came to Boston and he said, we met in

01:00:16.620 Dick Schulte's, uh, office this time.

01:00:19.720 First time we had met, we met at a restaurant and, uh, he, he, uh, announced to, uh, Schulte's

01:00:28.620 without having told me that he and I were going to work on, uh,

01:00:34.880 Eleusis and had to do with the grain goddess.

01:00:37.680 And Schulte's being a, um, a botanist, he said, oh, grain, very interesting.

01:00:42.420 And, and, but that's the first I knew that, uh, we were going to work together.

01:00:48.420 And so, please go ahead.

01:00:51.120 We were going to drive to his, uh, his, uh, house in, uh, Western, uh, uh, Connecticut.

01:00:59.320 And, uh, so on the drive, he told me what the project was and he essentially dropped in my lap.

01:01:07.220 Uh, he had, he had the theory that it would be ergot and that it was, uh, a sensible theory

01:01:13.700 because it would have to be something connected with grain and the nature of the, the experience

01:01:20.020 of the most classicists would not have accepted it, uh, was visionary, which would mean, well,

01:01:26.900 in those days we would have called hallucination, but come to know better that we shouldn't call

01:01:31.300 it that, uh, it is a transcendent vision.

01:01:35.460 But it had to be something connected with grain and the most, uh, uh, obvious, uh, intoxicant

01:01:42.260 that, that would be a toxin if you wish connected with grain would be ergot, which was a fungus

01:01:48.420 that grows on, on a mushroom.

01:01:50.740 Now, Wassum was always interested only in mushrooms because of, uh, the, the experience which he,

01:01:58.660 which he describes many times, uh, of his, uh, honeymoon in the Catskills where he went for a

01:02:07.780 walk with his wife, new wife Valentina Pavlovna and she saw mushrooms growing everywhere and he saw

01:02:14.260 only toadstools.

01:02:15.460 And, uh, that's why they, they became interested in, in discovering that people had, uh, definite

01:02:23.140 attitudes about mushrooms and that they figure prominently, uh, in, in art and literature.

01:02:29.380 And so he was really only interested in mushrooms and was, uh, I remember, um, when we received, uh, a specimen

01:02:39.780 of ergot, uh, from Hoffman that had fruited, um, the sclerotia is just, it looks just like a kernel of

01:02:49.300 grain that's become, uh, clubby and, and, and purplish.

01:02:54.660 Um, the infected, the, the, the real mushroom is the root-like growth, which is called the sclerotia.

01:03:01.460 And it, it permeates its host, but under suitable conditions, it fruits.

01:03:06.980 And, uh, this is true of, of ergot.

01:03:10.260 And so that we had, uh, we didn't have the actual specimen.

01:03:13.540 We had a photograph from Hoffman of the fruiting, uh, kernel of grain.

01:03:18.260 And you could see that, uh, mushrooms were sprouting out of it.

01:03:21.380 So he was ecstatic.

01:03:22.340 It was indeed, we have, of course, fungus is a fungus, but, um, this wasn't a mold.

01:03:28.020 This was a, as he called it, a higher form of mushroom that produced the fruiting bodies.

01:03:33.140 So he was ecstatic, but he, it was my task.

01:03:37.380 And it seemed very plausible to, I really didn't know anything about the, uh, Eleusis and, and, and

01:03:44.180 mysteries, uh, it's, uh, it's peripheral to ordinary classical education.

01:03:49.380 It was my task to, to show that, uh, it, it fit the, uh, the mythological, uh, scenario.

01:03:58.020 And when you say, okay, I have three questions.

01:04:00.500 You, you distinguish between hallucinogen and visionary experience.

01:04:03.700 And then you also just made a case, yep, please.

01:04:07.300 Because hallucinogen means that you've lost your way and you're wandering.

01:04:12.660 And, uh, and it is pejorative.

01:04:16.900 You're only, you're hallucinating.

01:04:19.140 Uh, I mean, if I saw God and someone said, you're hallucinating, the person is saying,

01:04:23.540 you haven't seen God.

01:04:25.060 You've imagined something probably, uh, uh, devilish.

01:04:29.780 And so for that reason, uh, I was asked to come up with a new term and invented the term

01:04:34.980 entheogen, which is actually a Greek, Greek adjective, uh, describing the way the devotees

01:04:40.900 of Dionysus became when they were possessed by him.

01:04:43.860 It means you have the deity within you.

01:04:46.500 And I just coined it, uh, upon hallucinogen and added the, the genesis root.

01:04:52.500 It's quite a coinage because it is very different from hallucinogen or hallucination.

01:04:56.980 I mean, LSD and psilocybin have been given to people who are schizophrenic, who do have

01:05:02.420 hallucinations and the LSD and psilocybin do not exacerbate schizophrenic hallucinations.

01:05:09.220 They seem you, if you want to exacerbate schizophrenic hallucinations, you use amphetamines,

01:05:14.020 a different class of drugs entirely.

01:05:16.180 And so whatever it is, the visionary experiences that these, this alternative class of drugs is

01:05:20.820 producing does look pharmacologically distinct.

01:05:22.980 Um, entheogen obviously has, well, it's an interesting word because it actually caught

01:05:29.060 on.

01:05:29.300 People use it.

01:05:29.940 It's not that easy to coin a word.

01:05:31.460 There needs to be a space for it and a demand for it.

01:05:34.340 And it, it has to be poetically apt.

01:05:36.260 So you captured something, but entheogen obviously has a whole set of connotations

01:05:40.500 that are very much unlike hallucinogen.

01:05:43.060 And you mentioned the God within.

01:05:45.220 So you were thinking about all these things when you came up with the word.

01:05:48.340 So, so maybe you could tell me about that.

01:05:50.500 Well, about the, the connotations of, uh, of entheogen.

01:05:54.660 In fact, it does, uh, it does prejudice one to accept that the vision is in some way related

01:06:02.980 to religion.

01:06:04.020 And so I have worked with, uh, scientists who objected and I co-authored a paper with him.

01:06:10.580 Uh, and, uh, he wouldn't use the word entheogen, but, uh, we use the word neurotropic means it

01:06:18.980 just changes the way your brain works without judging whether what, what, what, what, what,

01:06:24.740 what the significance of that change is.

01:06:27.620 And so it definitely, it definitely is a term that is used by people who believe there is

01:06:33.620 something like a spiritual dimension to our existence.

01:06:36.740 And, well, let me ask you about that.

01:06:39.300 You've been thinking about this for an extraordinarily long time and, and it's cost you a fair bit

01:06:43.300 to think about it, although I imagine it's been an adventure as well.

01:06:46.580 Are you still pleased with the coinage?

01:06:49.620 Were you pleased with the coinage of entheogen to begin with the word?

01:06:52.980 And, and do you stand by that, that, that creation, so to speak?

01:06:57.220 Yes, yes, because of its roots, it goes into, uh, European languages.

01:07:01.940 And so you find it in French and German and, and, and so on, uh, slight adaptations to make

01:07:09.620 it fit their language, but it's the same word.

01:07:13.060 So what do you, what's your impression of the validity, significance, meaning, et cetera,

01:07:19.940 of the entheogenic experience?

01:07:21.700 What sense do you make out of it?

01:07:23.300 The fact that this chemically induced, uh, this, a chemical induction of a mystical experience,

01:07:29.700 what sense do you make of that?

01:07:31.220 What significance is there in that?

01:07:34.420 The, the, the, what, what I make of it is quite profound, but it's not something that

01:07:38.820 really one can share easily, but I can make, I can, I can put it very simply that as, as we

01:07:47.700 each sit in our present rooms, we have constructed what we consider to be the reality by the things

01:07:54.500 that we see, and we have not constructed that reality by the things that we don't see.

01:08:00.260 But it's quite obvious that what we see is only those things that our organs of perception allow us

01:08:06.260 to react to. Uh, and so anything that we are not capable of reacting to with our organs of sensation

01:08:15.460 isn't part of a reality. And you can train yourself to see the fringes of reality.

01:08:24.900 Well, uh, as a matter of fact, uh, this is a rather humorous event. I was at a conference with

01:08:30.980 Dick Schultes and, uh, and Albert Hoffman. And Dick Schultes is a botanist at Harvard,

01:08:37.300 who had participated in many shamanic experiences, had taken many drugs. The people in the audience

01:08:46.900 said, someone in the audience said, what has it meant for you to be taking all those drugs?

01:08:51.540 And Schultes, I'm sure he was lying, but he was a very common sense, uh, sane person. Um, he, he said,

01:09:01.060 it means nothing, means absolutely nothing. It means the next morning you get up and go to work.

01:09:06.980 And then they asked Albert and Albert said, well, it, I think it means that the, the, the, the,

01:09:16.420 the defining lines of reality are a bit fuzzy.

01:09:22.420 A bit fuzzy. Yeah.

01:09:24.180 So, I mean, uh, as I sit here, there are, I can imagine and, and it, and certain gifted times,

01:09:31.620 perhaps I even can respond to the fact there are a lot of other things going on in this,

01:09:37.220 in this chamber and where you are also.

01:09:41.380 So I talked to Brian, I talked a bit to Brian about the Eleusinian mysteries and the, and the

01:09:48.820 idea that he opened his book with that

01:09:54.100 to overcome death, you have to experience death. And Griffith's work with psilocybin has showed that

01:09:59.380 cancer patients who take psilocybin and have a mystical experience have a profoundly altered

01:10:05.700 relationship with death, a profoundly altered understanding of death. And this would be

01:10:10.340 associated with those chambers of mystery that you just described that can be opened under some

01:10:14.820 circumstances. Do you have anything to say about that transformation in attitude towards death,

01:10:20.820 which, you know, seems like a highly relevant issue, all things considered, since we all have to face death.

01:10:25.860 Yeah. I think, I think it's sad that one should be aware of that, um, totality of existence

01:10:35.620 only when you're about to leave it.

01:10:37.220 And what, what do you think, if anything, that the entheogenic experience can contribute to our,

01:10:45.380 what would you say, our ability to tolerate our mortality, our ability to understand it,

01:10:49.700 our ability to transcend it?

01:10:51.140 Well, we're, we're talking about something that's unknowable. And by definition, that means that

01:10:59.060 anything you say about it can't be it, because it's unknowable. We can only speak in paradigms and

01:11:06.740 and, and, and, and parallels and so forth. Uh, and, um, but, um, it is perhaps, um, an outrageous supposition to assume that we are mortal.

01:11:23.700 And why do you say that? Why do you think that's an outrageous supposition?

01:11:28.420 And believe me, I'm not trying to trap you here. I'm genuinely curious about this.

01:11:32.180 The whole, the whole mystery of being and, and, and procreation is

01:11:38.740 inexplicable.

01:11:40.500 Yeah, well, it certainly seems to be that consciousness itself is inexplicable. We don't

01:11:44.340 have a good causal theory for consciousness. We have no way, we have no understanding whatsoever

01:11:49.220 of the relationship between consciousness and neurological functioning, as far as I've been able to tell.

01:11:53.620 I've read a lot of books on consciousness and neurology, and most of them aren't particularly

01:11:57.860 credible. Some of them are good, but there's, there's also a mystery about the fact

01:12:01.940 of existence. It's experiential existence itself, which is obviously dependent on consciousness. And

01:12:07.140 what we do know, don't know about consciousness could fill many, many volumes. And so that speaks

01:12:11.540 to your many chambered, uh, experiential realm argument. What happened? Okay, let's talk about

01:12:18.340 Hoffman, because you wrote the book, you wrote, wrote two voices with Hoffman as well. So you talked

01:12:22.420 about Wesson. How did you meet Hoffman?

01:12:24.180 I only met him at that conference with Schultes. And then again, I met him on his 100th birthday

01:12:39.300 at a conference in Basel. And I hadn't seen him for 30 years. I mean, well, I'd seen him,

01:12:47.620 I guess in the eighties. I hadn't seen him for a couple of decades. And, um, he didn't recognize

01:12:54.980 me. When I got up to speak, I was announced and, and he said, Oh, Carl, is that you?

01:13:00.100 Well, that's a long time. Yes. I just saw one of my colleagues a week ago or so, a couple of weeks

01:13:08.100 ago. I had seen him for 20 years and I wouldn't have recognized him 25 years. I wouldn't have

01:13:11.700 recognized him if I would have passed him on the street. I don't know if he would have recognized

01:13:15.220 me either. So that's a long, that's a long time. So can you, can you briefly outline the thesis of

01:13:22.340 the road to Aloysius? The thesis is very simple. It was one of many what were termed mystery initiations

01:13:39.780 in antiquity. But in the case of this mystery initiation, it was, first of all, a Panhellenic

01:13:47.940 right. So many people, uh, not just from a village or a tribal group of Greece, uh, or you didn't even

01:14:00.100 have to be Greek. Anyone who had the means to do it, uh, would do it. It was considered the experience

01:14:06.340 of a lifetime. And so it was a kind of universal experience, but it was only one of many of these

01:14:12.980 things which were formed locally. And it was institutionalized, which is very interesting. So

01:14:17.700 because Brian and I were talking about the reintroduction of psychedelics into the West

01:14:23.060 in the 1960s, of course, that caused tremendous cultural disruption and then clamped down on the

01:14:28.100 use of psychedelics in general. But the Greeks had figured out how to institutionalize their use and

01:14:32.820 to, uh, well, maybe the Greeks hadn't, maybe the precursors to the Greeks had, because God only knows

01:14:38.660 how old the tradition was, but they seem to be able to keep the genie in the bottle, so to speak.

01:14:43.060 And do you have any sense of how they managed that?

01:14:45.140 Yeah, Athens was, was becoming an imperial power and, and it annexed Eleusis and then took over the,

01:14:53.060 the, uh, the religion. And so Athens wasn't rich as, as, as the religion, as the right became, uh, more

01:15:01.940 popular, uh, of course people knew about it, but there was no reason. Eleusis was a separate town,

01:15:08.500 a separate state. There was no reason why, uh, it would be identified with Athens other than the

01:15:14.340 fact that Athens annexed Eleusis and then took over the administration of, of the, uh, of the rights.

01:15:22.260 And in fact, um, uh, had a preliminary right, which was performed in Athens a half year before the,

01:15:31.140 the right at the village. And this is about 14 miles outside of Athens to the, to the west.

01:15:37.540 So, uh, but in the case of, but in the case of Eleusis, which makes it so, uh, interesting,

01:15:43.860 not only was it this important, uh, classical mystery of religion, um, but there are others

01:15:50.900 which were equally important. In this case, we have in Homeric, uh, uh, uh, him to the goddess, uh,

01:16:00.100 uh, uh, uh, Demeter. Uh, these are poems in the style of Homer, but not by Homer,

01:16:06.500 in Homeric type of poetry. We have the precise, uh, uh, ingredients for a potion that was drunk as part of

01:16:15.620 it, of the, of the mystery. And of course you could just disregard it as classes as have,

01:16:22.420 as meaning nothing, or you could think that it was responsible for the fact that people,

01:16:27.700 uh, we, we know what happened, uh, although it can't be believed what happened. And as I said,

01:16:33.780 it's unknowable. So what I'm saying isn't what happened, but they, um, they all saw something

01:16:40.020 at exactly the same time in a chamber after they've been prepared for, by long indoctrination as to what

01:16:48.020 they were supposed to see and so forth. Um, but on cue, they saw something and you can't.

01:16:54.500 Do you see that as a continuation of the shamanic tradition?

01:16:57.700 Yes, of course. There's no, there's no, there's no way you can, you can make a group of people,

01:17:03.540 several thousand people see something all at the same time by drumming or fasting or anything of

01:17:10.660 that kind. It's going to be haphazard. Some people may, um, have a, have a transcendent experience and,

01:17:17.620 and others won't. But on cue every year, a large group of people, uh, had a vision after they,

01:17:27.300 drank a, a, a, a, a potion whose ingredients are known. So that's what makes it interesting.

01:17:35.140 Do you have some sense of the, of the contents of the vision?

01:17:38.980 Yeah.

01:17:39.300 Can, can, can you outline that?

01:17:43.220 I can quote, because of course, to, to say what it was openly was prohibited under the pain of death.

01:17:52.660 But, um, uh, in, in, in a play of Euripides, the Ion, um, the, uh, chorale says that when you pass through

01:18:04.900 the gates of the Hall of Initiation, you will see the stars dance and with them dance the moon.

01:18:14.740 But I have to remind you that the Hall of Initiation has a solid roof. You cannot see the sky.

01:18:23.300 The only way you can see the stars dance and with them dance the moon is if you have transcended the

01:18:29.780 physical past to the edge of the cosmos, which is what is described in ancient poems of the shamanic

01:18:36.660 journey to the, to the edge of the cosmos and are there dancing amongst the celestial, uh, uh, bodies,

01:18:46.020 planets, and the stars.

01:18:48.340 Okay. Let, let me ask you a side question.

01:18:49.940 Of course, that's impossible, isn't it?

01:18:51.380 Yeah. Well, yeah. Who knows what's impossible precisely?

01:18:55.620 So it's, it's what's described over and over again, though. It's what

01:18:59.060 Plato describes in the Phaedrus. It's what Parmenides describes in his poem.

01:19:03.940 In the, in the shamanic tradition, at least according to Iliad and to other sources that

01:19:09.460 I've read, the, the shaman who, although Iliad didn't accept this part of the hypothesis because

01:19:14.820 he didn't accept the hallucinogenic, the centrality of hallucinogenic substances in the shamanic

01:19:19.300 experience. But we talked about that earlier in the podcast, but the, the, the shamanic initiate,

01:19:25.140 the shamanic practitioner would die, would be reduced to a skeleton. That's one way of think,

01:19:31.140 thinking about one, one part of the experience and, and sometimes have his bodily organs replaced,

01:19:36.980 or sometimes have them replaced by something that represented a crystalline structure that

01:19:40.980 was more pure, but would die anyways, would reliably commune with the ancestors,

01:19:46.740 would then leave the cosmos as we know it, traveling up and down something like the layers of,

01:19:53.620 like a structure that represented the different layers of experience, which seemed to me something

01:19:57.540 like, imagine the standard three, three dimensions of reality plus time. So we've got width and height

01:20:04.180 and depth and, and time. But there's, there's another dimension of sorts, which is the dimension

01:20:10.820 that we experience when we go down into the micro realm of being, and that we experience when we go up

01:20:15.860 into the macro realm of being. So from the subatomic to the cosmological level, that seems to me to be

01:20:21.860 portrayed by the idea of the world tree. You can see that in Scandinavian mythology, because the

01:20:28.260 world tree is associated with the cosmos as such, and then the ability to move up and down that tree

01:20:33.780 seems to be associated with the ability to move between the earthly realm and the heavenly realm.

01:20:38.500 And to move into the heavenly realm is to move outside of the normal cosmos, which is reminiscent to me

01:20:43.380 of the idea that God, the Christian idea that God exists in a place and that, and time that's outside of

01:20:49.780 our universe. So it's, it's, which is quite a remarkable and non-obvious idea. Um,

01:20:59.700 this, so why am I, I'm wondering to what degree that idea, that cosmological idea of the world tree is

01:21:08.020 associated with this idea of the journey through the cosmos and the, and the experience of divinity

01:21:13.140 in the Eleusinian mysteries? Is that a variant of the shamanic story?

01:21:17.540 Everything that you've been saying, um, is documentable also in, in classical mythology.

01:21:24.820 These are themes which are waiting for scholars to recognize, but, and they are now, but, uh, when I

01:21:32.340 embarked in the study of classics, uh, there were very few classicists who even knew that, uh, these

01:21:38.980 things were being spoken of. Okay. Which things are you referring to more specifically?

01:21:43.860 Like the, like the body being, uh, being attacked by, uh, demons and spirits and, and, uh, the, uh, internal

01:21:52.020 organs being rearranged and, uh, uh, a police, uh, page, uh, a, a, a part of the body replaced with

01:21:59.140 some badge of immortality, uh, all of the descendants of Pelops.

01:22:04.980 You see, you see that here, something flashed into my mind. I'm an admirer of the Disney film,

01:22:09.860 Pinocchio. Yeah. Now Pinocchio goes down to the depths, right? He's an initiate. He goes down to the

01:22:15.700 depths. He goes down to the bottom of the ocean, like Gilgamesh. Yes. He finds his father. That's

01:22:20.340 the ancestral spirits in the body of a dragon. It's a whale, but that whale breathes fire. It's a dragon

01:22:25.860 for all intents and purposes. And when he's transformed into a genuine person, right?

01:22:31.700 And so that's his rebirth and transformation. He comes back from the dead. His conscience,

01:22:35.780 Jiminy Cricket, is given a gold badge. And that's an echo of that shamanic idea of the replacement of

01:22:41.300 something, the soul-like. It reflects the stars, actually. That's how the movie closes. This badge

01:22:46.740 reflects the stars. So you see these unbelievably deep classical mythological slash shamanic ideas

01:22:54.820 popping up in places that you'd never expect them to pop up, continually and constantly.

01:23:00.500 I mean, what you're talking about is subject for another series of your investigations. It's

01:23:09.780 what the Disney artists knew about entheogenic or do now know about entheogenic experience

01:23:16.820 because they fit the pattern perfectly.

01:23:18.980 Yeah. And so do you have any specific knowledge of that? I mean, that movie was made in the 1930s.

01:23:25.140 Yes.

01:23:25.620 I mean, it's a work of absolute genius. That movie is so deep. It just stuns me every

01:23:31.540 time I watch it because there's always something more to discover in it.

01:23:34.420 In Fantasia, isn't there an episode of Dancing Mushrooms?

01:23:41.540 Yes. I believe there is.

01:23:43.300 Well, that's incredible, though. I mean, it must have been crazy. No one would know what that meant.

01:23:49.540 Yeah, yeah.

01:23:50.100 There always has been an inner core of people that know very well what it all means.

01:23:54.820 So what happened to you after this book was published? First of all, what did you expect

01:24:01.460 would happen when you published this book? That's the first question. And then what actually happened?

01:24:06.740 I expected that other classicists would take the idea and work with it in fields of expertise

01:24:14.820 that I did not master. I expected that they would take the ball and run with it.

01:24:25.460 But like you did with Allegro's book.

01:24:28.420 Yeah, but it didn't happen. And in particular, my situation at Boston University was that at the

01:24:38.900 time I was acting chairman and President Silver was a great supporter of classics, but he had his own

01:24:48.980 idea of what classics were. And I worked with him, in fact, in starting the buildup of the department,

01:24:56.100 which has become quite a respected department. But he had his own idea

01:25:03.060 idea about what he would have thought drugs and his idea of Greek rationality. He was a philosopher.

01:25:13.700 And so he certainly was not willing, even though Dodds had written a book on Greeks and the irrational,

01:25:22.020 which greatly influenced me. He was not one of those people that was interested in Greek irrationality.

01:25:28.180 And so I was at a chairman's meeting in his office, and he was talking to us about—we had to

01:25:38.820 stress the fact that publications were necessary for advancement.

01:25:43.460 And then he looked at me and he said, unless it's a publication by the Vanity Press.

01:25:49.220 And I had nothing to do with the publication. And Harcourt Brace is not a Vanity Press.

01:25:54.580 And Watson didn't pay for the publication. So that would be what the definition of Vanity Press is.

01:26:03.060 And Harcourt Brace is certainly not a Vanity Press. I mean, there's no doubt about that.

01:26:07.140 And Helen Wolfe, her son, I was very interested in the work. He's a classicist. And she was our particular editor.

01:26:16.900 But I was labeled as publishing with Vanity Press. And he disliked me from that point on.

01:26:28.900 And do you believe it was because—why? Because of his belief in the rationality in particular,

01:26:35.380 the rationality of the Greek, not the Dionysian element, it's the Apollonian element.

01:26:39.300 Yes, absolutely. And he was a very divisive figure. And so it became a way for people who

01:26:49.940 wanted to advance themselves to denigrate me. So I had colleagues in my department who

01:26:58.020 turned against me because that way they could climb upon my corpse and promote themselves.

01:27:04.180 It's all changed now. I mean, the people who were involved are no longer there, except for a few

01:27:11.940 people who are my friends. And they're not hostile to me at all now. But it was a very divisive period

01:27:18.900 at Boston University. And to put Carl's experience in context, maybe, this is in the late 1970s. One of

01:27:26.580 Carl's colleagues at the time was Howard Zinn, who famously wrote A People's History of the United States,

01:27:31.780 published in 1980. John Silber, who was the president of BU at the time, this sort of no-nonsense Texan of

01:27:39.940 conservative Presbyterian roots, he didn't have the best relationship with Howard Zinn either. He would

01:27:46.500 deny the Marxist, as he called him, sabbaticals, promotions, and pay raises. And Silber was no fan of

01:27:54.420 the anti-war movement or revolutionaries. And the idea of aligning the psychedelic gospels of

01:28:00.340 enlightenment from Tim Leary and others with this anti-war movement was not welcome on campus in the

01:28:06.260 late 70s. Or to suspect that a faculty member was going to introduce students to drugs, which was,

01:28:13.540 of course, not anywhere in the realm of possibility. Right. But I guess there's the,

01:28:20.660 the, what would you say, the uncertain consequence of taking this sort of hypothesis seriously,

01:28:28.740 right, which is an uncertain, there are uncertain consequences.

01:28:32.980 It's a very dangerous proposition, because it opens up the possibility that religious experience

01:28:40.660 or spiritual realities are a part of our basic nature as, as humans.

01:28:47.140 Well, but it's worse than that.

01:28:49.300 That calls into question the validity of all the religions.

01:28:53.300 It's, it's so...

01:28:54.580 Well, I think it's worse. I think it calls, it, it, it opens up the possibility that they're correct.

01:29:01.300 They're correct. They had just defined it in their own manner.

01:29:04.740 Well, yes, yes, that, yes. But I think, I think the idea, this might be my own personal peccadillo,

01:29:12.100 but I think the idea that there's something in the central religious doctrine that's fundamentally

01:29:16.980 correct is much more terrifying than the idea that there isn't.

01:29:21.460 That's how it looks to me. I mean, if, if there's something divine and immortal about human beings,

01:29:27.220 and it's our ultimate ethical responsibility to let that shine into the world, and that's part of

01:29:34.580 reality itself, then, you know, heaven help us when we don't manage that. That's how it looks to me.

01:29:41.380 Yes, absolutely.

01:29:42.340 You know, I've heard Freudian criticisms of, of religious belief, for example,

01:29:47.140 know that, that the belief in life after death is nothing but a myth that's designed to,

01:29:52.820 what would you say, keep us in childhood denial of the terrible realities of our experience, of

01:29:59.460 existence. But, you know, that doesn't really account for the prevailing stories of hell, let's

01:30:05.300 say, because if you're going to invent a religion that does nothing but satisfy your childish delusions,

01:30:09.940 why would you bother with hell? And there's this element to the religious, yes, go ahead.

01:30:15.060 I could challenge you to prove that you're alive. You're just hallucinating. My God, you really are

01:30:22.260 off the wall.

01:30:22.900 Well, there's no doubt about that, but, but I get your point. Well, so, so I'm not sure what, I don't,

01:30:30.340 I'm not exactly sure what the more revolutionary idea is, you know, is that, and there's another part

01:30:36.100 of this that's extraordinarily problematic, too, from a philosophical perspective, which is that

01:30:40.180 that if the entheogens are pointing towards something that resembles a genuine religious

01:30:46.180 experience, and if that religious experience is profound and valid and constitutes part of the

01:30:52.420 base from which our culture, both Greek and Christian, was derived, let's say, rather than

01:30:56.980 being antithetical to it in this Dionysius versus Apollo way, if it's actually at the core of it, which is

01:31:02.740 the case Brian makes, for example, in his book, then this is all something that we need to take

01:31:07.460 extraordinarily seriously, and that's really revolutionary, as far as I'm concerned, and now

01:31:13.540 we have a chemical, you know, because part of the problem for Western people has always been,

01:31:18.660 well, we've got the material realm and science, and look at how powerful it is, we have the spiritual

01:31:22.980 realm, and it's separate, but all of a sudden now you have something that bridges the gap, right, which

01:31:27.620 is these strange psychedelic chemicals, which are material in the utmost, but have this intense spiritual,

01:31:35.140 what would you say, nature, or at least are capable of eliciting that in us, and so then that calls into

01:31:43.220 question the entire relationship between the material structure of existence and the spiritual realm,

01:31:47.780 and that's revolutionary. I was talking to a physicist last week,

01:31:55.060 unfortunately his name momentarily escapes my mind, but he's a famous atheist, and I mentioned

01:32:00.660 Griffith's work to him, you know, it's like, well, he's one of the people who originated the idea that the entire

01:32:06.820 universe could spring into being from nothing, and as elementary particles do, and he sees no materialist

01:32:13.940 evidence whatsoever for a spiritual realm, but then I said, well, what do you do with Griffith's work?

01:32:18.580 What do you do with the entire corpus of psychedelic experience? What do you make of that?

01:32:22.580 Because ignoring it isn't going to help, there's the shamanic tradition, there's the continuation of

01:32:28.100 that into Greece and the hallucinian mysteries, there's the development of that throughout

01:32:31.460 Christianity, that can't just be easily set aside, especially if we're a rescue is right,

01:32:37.860 for example, and there was some influence of these sacramental potions on the development

01:32:44.500 of early Christian ideas, and those ideas are central to our culture.

01:32:48.180 Sure. Yes.

01:32:49.140 So, we've got a big problem here, conceptually, and I would say it's actually a testament to the

01:32:55.140 integrity of the universities that something as revolutionary as what you did didn't completely

01:33:00.180 destroy your career.

01:33:02.900 It's true, yeah. At the time, I had several students who were writing a dissertation, so I'm not imagining that

01:33:14.740 that this event happened. They were told that they could not, they would never get their degree unless

01:33:24.260 they dropped me as their advisor. And they remained my friends, and that's the story they told me.

01:33:31.860 And their work was then finished by other people, and in some cases, they've been quite successful.

01:33:43.060 They've been published and so forth, but it was the work they did with me, and was stolen by somebody else.

01:33:49.620 Because, and this was not that Silver who did it, it was someone in the department

01:33:55.860 who was definitely trying to get credits for what he was doing, who stole the students away from me.

01:34:04.660 Well, it's heartening to me that you were able to maintain your career as an academic,

01:34:12.740 despite wandering into this most incendiary territory, and I'm not sure that that would be the case today,

01:34:20.420 at least under some circumstances. So, I'm going to blame all these questions on Brian, by the way,

01:34:26.660 because he sent them to me. So, but they're good questions, so I'm going to go ahead with them.

01:34:30.580 You apparently tested the Kukion potion yourself in the 1970s. Albert Hoffman sent you and Wasson some

01:34:37.940 ergot in the mail. Could you share that story?

01:34:41.060 Yeah, it was just rather humorous, because we did do it. It was at the very beginning, in fact,

01:34:48.420 because Wasson was very direct. If we were going to write about this, we should know what the experience

01:34:54.180 was like. And so, it was one of the times that I visited him. About once a month I went to spend the

01:35:00.420 weekend at his house in Connecticut. And as we were driving there, he said,

01:35:08.980 we're going to take the potion tonight. And so, I said, oh really? And we had dinner. His old nanny

01:35:19.460 was there, an elderly black woman, and he announced, we're going to take the potion tonight.

01:35:28.100 This is awfully open, because, you know, I believe this is illegal to be taking drugs.

01:35:32.660 And so, he said, the custom is to fast before you do this. And so, we can't eat anything. So,

01:35:42.420 we sat there while the other people ate. And then, when dinner was over, we got up to go down to the

01:35:50.340 barn. He stayed in his studio, which was converted in the barn, not in the main house.

01:35:58.580 And as we got up to go, the other people said, well, have fun. Now, this is rather flippant, too.

01:36:06.420 So, when we got there, he put on some music, and he said, the custom is to observe silence. So,

01:36:13.940 I knew that I wasn't supposed to talk. I didn't know at the time, but we were listening to the

01:36:18.580 chanting of Maria Sabina, the Mazatec Shaman. So, it was very moving, and we sat wrapped up in

01:36:25.380 blankets by the fireplace. His daughter, who was a PhD in nursing, sat in the corner as the monitor in

01:36:37.460 case anything went wrong. And so, no one spoke. And the chanting went on about midnight.

01:36:44.100 I finally said, Gordon, I don't think anything has happened. And he said, yes, yes, it's been most

01:36:48.900 disappointing. But we were hungry. So, we went up to the house and raided the pantry to have something

01:36:54.980 to eat. And the next morning, we took out Albert's letter, in which he gave a very detailed

01:37:01.940 account of what he had experienced with this potion. So, we just decided, well, apparently it

01:37:09.220 works. It just didn't work for us. We didn't take enough of it. And so, we went ahead with it on the

01:37:16.660 basis of Albert's experience, not our own. Gordon said, Albert's a very small man. He didn't send

01:37:26.340 enough for people our size. And was the potion an LSD derivative? Was it purified LSD?

01:37:33.940 No, it was Ergonavine, which was one of the chemicals in ergot. And at the time,

01:37:42.660 we had settled upon that because ergot has some 300 toxins. It's a very complicated chemical

01:37:52.260 complex. But only one of them is water-soluble, and that's Ergonavine. And so, by simple extraction

01:38:02.180 in water, which is what's required for the recipe in the Homer Kim, we could get Ergonavine. But

01:38:10.900 other people have tried it since, and Ergonavine doesn't seem to be that active. But I've worked with

01:38:18.580 Peter Webster in France, who's a chemist. And we have decided to discover that ergotamine, which is what's

01:38:30.740 marketed for migraines, it dilates the blood vessels in the brain, and treats migraines. Ergotamine

01:38:41.060 Ergonavine in itself is not psychoactive. But in an aqueous solution, which is alkaline,

01:38:52.340 and the achieving of making it alkaline is simple. You just add some bone ash to it, and that would fit

01:38:59.140 also the scenario and significance of the mythological paradigm of the Elucidian mystery.

01:39:07.060 So it has to be something simple like that. Some bone ash in it produces an alkaline solution.

01:39:13.780 And then Ergonavine goes into a... It's not a solution, but it's called hydrolysis,

01:39:24.020 which is a combination with water. Something like what happens when you chew on starches in your mouth.

01:39:30.660 And it is an unstable chemical of itself in its mirror image, going back and forth between the two

01:39:41.860 constantly. And that apparently is psychoactive.

01:39:46.660 So the potion that you took with Wausau wasn't effective. What about other experiences that you've

01:39:57.940 had, if you want to talk about them, and you're certainly not obligated to?

01:40:02.580 Yes, of course, anything that was done, and in those days, narco tourism was not the vogue. And

01:40:09.540 anyone can do this now legally by traveling to South America or to Mexico. There's quite a tourist trade

01:40:20.340 in that sort of thing. But in those days, it was illegal to have access to these substances. And so

01:40:29.460 whatever experience I had was given by friends who had gotten them, unfortunately, from the illegal

01:40:36.180 drug trade. But I did have experience with LSD and with psilocybin.

01:40:44.580 And did you have a classic shamanic experience with those substances?

01:40:49.540 Yes, very intense.

01:40:52.260 And did it involve dying?

01:40:55.780 It involved... I mean, it's very hard to talk about this, because if I talk about it,

01:41:00.980 some people will think I'm a religious leader, and I'll have a following, and they want me to

01:41:05.460 establish a church, and all that sort of thing.

01:41:08.340 Well, that's what... Have you ever read Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious by Carl Jung,

01:41:13.460 just out of curiosity?

01:41:15.140 I have, yes. I've read Variations by Jung.

01:41:18.180 Okay, okay. Because he provides some psychological hygiene tips in precisely that regard. Although,

01:41:25.860 for him, I don't know if it was a consequence of

01:41:28.340 knowing anything about hallucinogenic use, but...

01:41:30.660 The reason I got into classics, I was originally going to be a psychiatrist, and I did pre-med.

01:41:40.260 But I had a philosophy course

01:41:41.940 at Yale, and the philosophy teacher was one of those charismatic young guys.

01:41:51.140 He said, you're studying psychology, psychiatry, because you're interested in the soul,

01:42:00.500 and you think that psychiatry will give you access to the soul. But psychiatry is a doctoring, a medicine

01:42:13.140 profession. It deals with six souls. And it's true, I was really interested in

01:42:20.100 psychiatry, because I was fascinated by the delusional realities that were reported in case histories.

01:42:26.660 And I very much wondered what they meant, and was dying to experience safely that kind of

01:42:33.700 delusional reality. But he said, if you want to study the soul, you have to study the humanities.

01:42:40.340 And so I took seriously what he said, and thought that classics was the most basic of the of the

01:42:48.660 humanities. So I switched into classics. But I was interested in the soul to begin with.

01:42:54.020 Now, so you're a trained classicist who experimented with psychedelic substances. So my presupposition

01:43:01.300 is that your training as a classicist likely influenced and expanded your experiences with

01:43:07.780 psychedelic substances. It provided structure and content.

01:43:11.540 It gave me... I mean, I became a mythologist. Mythology gives me a framework for understanding

01:43:17.620 a way of structuring imaginary reality. Let's call it that.

01:43:24.100 Okay. So can you tell me a little bit about how you've structured your understanding of that

01:43:29.380 imaginary... Did you say imaginary reality? Did you say mythological reality?

01:43:32.980 Well, if I look at it from my sane vantage point, I would call it imaginary reality. But

01:43:40.100 I very much wanted to enter into the world of myth.

01:43:43.540 Right. But that's a strange kind of imagination, isn't it?

01:43:46.900 I could enter it. Yes.

01:43:48.900 Well, because there's this transpersonal element to it. This is the thing that I can't quite understand,

01:43:54.180 is that you could describe the landscape of the imagination as purely subjective. But the

01:43:59.300 problem with that is that the features of the landscape are transpersonal. That's what's expressed

01:44:04.500 in mythology. And if they weren't, we couldn't talk about it. And so even though it's subjective,

01:44:08.740 it has a transpersonal or impersonal element that seems to be grounded in... You can't say objective

01:44:15.060 reality precisely because you experience it subjectively. But it's not only like idiosyncratic

01:44:21.220 imagination. It has this death, underworld element, this rebirth element that... Yes.

01:44:26.260 So, okay. So I'm going to push you again, if you don't mind. I would be more interested in

01:44:32.580 your take on this. You've had these experiences. You're a trained classicist.

01:44:36.340 What is this reality that's being laid out in these experiences? And how do you understand it?

01:44:45.700 I think of it as a journey to discover who you are. And when you go on this journey, it gets dangerous.

01:44:57.060 And you feel that maybe you should turn back. But just up ahead, it looks as though it might be even

01:45:03.940 more interesting up there. So you go further and further and further. And when you get to the

01:45:09.140 end of the journey, what you find is yourself looking back.

01:45:19.780 There... I mean, I said I'm not going to found a church, but there is no God. You're so stupid. Don't you

01:45:27.940 realize that you are God?

01:45:32.100 And so what...

01:45:35.620 I guess what I wonder about is what happens if you...

01:45:42.100 What are the implications of that kind of realization for how you conduct your life?

01:45:46.100 Like, look what happens with Griffith's subjects. They quit smoking.

01:45:50.980 Okay, so now it's easy to think about that as a pharmacological effect.

01:45:54.980 Purely, right? That their brains undergo a chemical transformation.

01:45:58.020 They're no longer addicted to nicotine. I don't believe that's what happens.

01:46:02.900 I believe what happens is that they undergo a mystical experience that alerts them to who they

01:46:08.260 should and could be. And that doesn't involve poisoning themselves with a deadly substance. So

01:46:14.100 in light of the new information they've received about their potential, and maybe the actuality of

01:46:19.780 their being, they decide to desist in that... they desist in that self-destructive pattern of

01:46:25.700 behavior. I think the same thing happens to alcoholics that are cured, so to speak, as a

01:46:29.940 consequence of psychedelic experience. Does that seem reasonable to you?

01:46:34.980 It does seem reasonable, yes.

01:46:37.860 But I have to... I mean, we're talking about a very dangerous subject because

01:46:43.780 many of these substances are addictive and are causing tremendous hardship for people who get

01:46:53.620 hooked on them. And even alcohol, which is legal, is extremely dangerous, and there are many people who

01:47:04.820 are addicted to it.

01:47:05.940 It's clearly the most dangerous of drugs.

01:47:07.940 I know people who have died.

01:47:09.540 Yes. Alcohol is an absolute catastrophe. I mean, there'd be virtually no violence,

01:47:15.140 domestic violence, for example, if there's no alcohol. Alcohol is a catastrophe in 50 different

01:47:19.140 ways. That doesn't necessarily mean it should be illegal, but it's definitely a catastrophe.

01:47:22.660 Well, yeah, that's just it. I mean, there has to be an etiquette of use.

01:47:30.020 And these addictive substances you described, the hallucinogens don't technically fall into that

01:47:34.660 category. Oddly enough, right? Because people tend not to abuse them.

01:47:38.980 In the case of LSD, you build up an immediate immunity to it. So if you take it the second day,

01:47:45.860 nothing happens at all.

01:47:46.900 Yes. And something similar has been reported with psilocybin and with DMT. So these seem to be

01:47:52.820 self-limiting substances, at least to some degree, as opposed to drugs like cocaine,

01:47:56.900 which is classic psychomotor stimulants, or the benzodiazepine class,

01:48:02.740 or the opiates, for that matter, which all have that addictive tendency.

01:48:09.700 So here's a question. Let's move away from the personal experience end a bit,

01:48:14.980 although I'm so tempted to push it deeper, but I won't. I'll leave it be for the time being.

01:48:22.020 This is something I did discuss with Brian.

01:48:23.940 And his book, and he's obviously profoundly influenced by you. His book, I believe, is

01:48:31.060 predicated on the assumption that the great Greek rationality, everything that we admire

01:48:37.700 and understand about Greek culture was embedded inside this mystical tradition. It wasn't antithetical

01:48:43.140 to it. It was embedded inside it. Yes.

01:48:45.060 Like our thought is embedded inside a dream, if you think about it from a Jungian perspective.

01:48:50.020 And I think that's an accurate way of looking at the world. Rationality embedded in a dream,

01:48:54.580 embedded in a body, something like that. What do you think was the value of non-ordinary

01:49:00.500 states of consciousness in classical antiquity?

01:49:02.900 The value for us is that we would not have the great works of sculpture and literature

01:49:16.260 and painting if that society did not have access to this awareness of spiritual entities.

01:49:27.540 They call it the muses, but they're not imaginary. They're actually possessing spirits.

01:49:41.060 People testify over and over again that in the act of creation, and I find that myself,

01:49:48.260 you know, I'm just writing an essay. In the act of creation, you don't know what you're doing.

01:49:52.900 Someone is working through you. Something is working through you.

01:49:56.020 Or if I don't want to go that far, it allows me to reconfigure the functioning of my brain in a way

01:50:06.420 that, ordinarily, I would not have access to.

01:50:13.780 This idea of the communion with the ancestors seems to me to be analogous on the shamanic front to the

01:50:20.580 idea of being possessed by the creative spirit that drives mankind, essentially.

01:50:25.700 The experience that's induced by the psychedelics that puts the users in touch with their ancestors,

01:50:35.780 puts them in touch, that's exactly the right way to think about it, I think, with the central animating

01:50:40.260 spirit of mankind. And that's part of that spirit that drives that continual conversation that we're all

01:50:48.100 supposed to be involved in, for example, as humanities practitioners, right? The golden chain that exists

01:50:54.100 down the centuries that stretches all the way back to the shamanic rituals. That's all part of this.

01:50:58.660 And that's the spirit that animates you when you're creative. And animates means to be possessed by

01:51:04.500 a spirit because it's related to anima, right? And so you are possessed by a benevolent spirit that

01:51:10.180 produces and utters truth if you're engaged in the creative activity properly. And that mystical experience seems to be

01:51:20.260 associated with the ability to move away the blinders that would stop you from being able to perceive the

01:51:27.620 existence of that spirit. Yes, that's reasonable. It isn't reasonable at all. Of course, none of this

01:51:34.500 is the least bit reasonable. Albert had synthesized LSD five years before he was aware of its visionary

01:51:43.620 potential. But at the time, it didn't seem to have any use. And so he put it aside on a shelf in his

01:51:53.380 laboratory. And five years later, as he was passing the shelf, he sensed that the vial said,

01:52:02.100 take me. And so he took it off the shelf and took the smallest amount, assuming that it would be too

01:52:11.460 small to be deadly poisonous or to have any effect. And he would work his way up to see what its effect

01:52:18.180 might be. And so the smallest conceivable dosage produced the first LSD documented trip in our era.

01:52:25.940 Well, is it still the case, when I was studying pharmacology to the degree that I studied it,

01:52:31.780 that the claim was made that LSD is the most potent pharmacological substance ever discovered,

01:52:36.500 that 100 million molecules or some tiny trivial amount is sufficient to induce a mystical state.

01:52:42.420 It's unbelievably potent. And now maybe there have been pharmacological agents discovered.

01:52:46.500 Yes, I know. I'm unaware. There may be some new things. But yeah, that's what I understand,

01:52:50.580 too. It's extraordinary.

01:52:57.540 Here's a question Brian came up with as well. If the ancient Greeks used drugs to find God,

01:53:02.340 so what? Why should anybody care about this today? What are you really looking for in this research?

01:53:07.220 Well, I guess that's a reasonable set of questions. What about Jung? What about Jung? Do you think that he

01:53:16.260 do you think that he experimented with hallucinogens? Who? Carl Jung. Because he knew things. He knows

01:53:22.180 things that you just can't believe anybody could know. We know he spent a year in Taos. I have a house in Taos.

01:53:31.140 And that year is not documented, but he was experimenting with the mind-altering substances.

01:53:40.980 Psilocybin? Probably. Was that before or after the Red Book? Do you know? I think the Red Book came out of that.

01:53:53.220 How sure are you that that happened? Well, I can't be sure. Yeah, I know. I know. I know. Because I wasn't there.

01:54:02.100 And one could try to find if there are any people who knew him at the time.

01:54:09.940 But he had a strange family background. There were lots of visionaries in his family. So he might have

01:54:14.020 been one of those spontaneously visionary types. Like what about William Blake?

01:54:20.420 That's one of the things that we're very interested in tracking down. The use of

01:54:26.500 entheogens amongst people, reputable, great monuments of our cultural tradition.

01:54:34.660 Did they have access to altered consciousness? And I'm quite sure that Blake did.

01:54:39.140 Milton?

01:54:42.580 Well, each one of these is a whole study.

01:54:44.740 I know. Yes, yes.

01:54:47.300 So I don't know. I can't come up with a passage in Milton, but it certainly would be a fertile thing

01:54:54.100 to do. It's one of the things on the agenda for Brian, me and my other associates.

01:55:03.540 Brian, you said when we were talking that you hadn't tried anything that was psychedelic,

01:55:08.340 despite your intense interest. And so I'm going to be nosy and rude and ask you, what's stopped you?

01:55:18.660 Maybe I've been influenced by Carl's story too much.

01:55:20.980 But you must be dying of curiosity, given that you are so curious.

01:55:27.460 His testimony is all the more valuable because he hasn't done it. So people can not say that he's

01:55:35.300 ruined his mind on drugs. So that if he ever does do it, he should keep it secret.

01:55:42.740 Well, that's part of it. I would take a lie detector today. I still have not done it. I'm dying of

01:55:49.940 curiosity. I wanted to approach this book in as objective a manner as possible. I do think that's

01:55:56.340 important, but it's not off the table for the future. What I've said in the past is,

01:56:00.820 and I mentioned this earlier, Jordan, I don't think that psychedelics are mutually exclusive of

01:56:05.380 organized faith or traditional faith. And Carl and I were both raised Catholic, as a matter of fact.

01:56:12.740 Um, and you know, there's, there's a version, there's a way of doing this, that, that is both,

01:56:18.740 I think, um, honest and respectful of the ancient mysteries, the pagan mysteries,

01:56:23.700 and paleo-Christianity. I keep coming back to those first few centuries after Jesus

01:56:28.340 as this ancient cultural internet.

01:56:30.020 Well, if we can't, if we can't integrate Christianity, let's say with,

01:56:32.820 with its precursors, how the hell are we going to integrate Christianity with the rest of the world?

01:56:36.660 And this might be a way as, as odd as that sounds, or, you know, mysticism writ large,

01:56:42.180 and you see this all over the Catholic religious orders from the Franciscans to the Jesuits and

01:56:47.060 Carthusians. I mean, there, there's a periphery to Christianity where mysticism lives and breathes

01:56:53.700 the, the same mysticism I would argue as, as the ancient mysteries, psychedelic or otherwise. And so if,

01:56:59.540 if there was a vehicle, um, a container for this, it would, it would be in that periphery,

01:57:04.340 uh, the, the Meister Eckhart periphery, you know, where to, if you could not yourself for an instant,

01:57:09.860 um, you know, you would possess all.

01:57:11.700 Well, and the dogma, the dogma, generally speaking, has to be the container for the

01:57:15.700 mystical experience, too. You know, I mean, people who have a spiritual bent,

01:57:19.300 who are on the openness and personality-wise, let's say, of the religious continuum,

01:57:24.580 they tend to be antithetical to dogma, but dogma contains the tradition that constrains,

01:57:29.860 and I suppose in some sense delimits the insanity of the psychedelic mystical experience.

01:57:35.140 Those two things have to be brought together.

01:57:37.540 And I think it has a way of interpreting the experience, too. I, I, I've asked, I've,

01:57:40.740 I've asked Carl in the past, what should I be doing to prepare for my first psychedelic trip?

01:57:45.300 And he's told me, you've done it. It's in the study of classics, as we were talking about before.

01:57:50.420 Um, I'm not sure if that's true or not, uh, but, you know, the, when it comes to psychedelics-

01:57:54.580 It gives you a framework.

01:57:55.220 It's a framework for, you know, disentangling and-

01:57:58.180 Well, there's an ethical idea, too, you know. I mean, before the, before the ancient Hebrews

01:58:02.500 encountered the God of the Ark of the Covenant, they purified themselves ethically.

01:58:07.940 That's something to be cognizant of. You know, if you, if the layers of reality are peeled back and

01:58:13.540 the distinction between good and evil is drawn for you, you want to be sure you're as far away from

01:58:17.620 the malevolence in your own spirit as you can possibly be. And that's no joke. I mean,

01:58:22.820 that's part of the reason that the, that set is so important because these experiences can become

01:58:28.420 hellish in no time flat. And I suspect that's likely more to be the case to the degree to which

01:58:34.340 there's a certain amount of hellishness in your psyche. So that's a warning of, of, of sorts.

01:58:40.180 I have another question for you, Dr. Rock. I asked Brian this, and

01:58:47.140 if the Dionysian, first of all, how do you view the relationship between, this is a terribly

01:58:53.300 complicated question, Dionysius and Christ, and why was it necessary, so to speak, for Dionysius to

01:58:58.820 transform into Christ? I mean, I mean, just make simple observation that, that Christ is a Hellenized

01:59:12.660 Jewish tradition. Christ is a Greek deity. The Christian story is a Greek myth.

01:59:23.220 So you, so it's the, it's the con, it's the consequence of Judaism and Greece coming together.

01:59:31.860 This does not mean to say that it is an inauthentic religion. I understand. Okay,

01:59:35.620 so let me, let me ask you a question. So I studied, to the degree that I'm capable,

01:59:40.900 the emergence of the, of the god Marduk in Mesopotamian culture. And one of the things that I stumbled

01:59:47.620 across was the fact that Marduk was, for example, known by at least 50 different names, and they were all

01:59:52.980 attributes. And I thought, well, each of those names was likely at some point in history, the

01:59:59.300 signifier of a tribal deity and the tribal deity. So imagine this, imagine that we abstract up what

02:00:05.380 we admire into something resembling the deity that guides our, our tribe. And we, we, we attribute to

02:00:12.740 that a personality and, and we try to enter into a relationship with it because it's the personality

02:00:17.300 that represents the ideal, just like the personality that animates you when you're creative

02:00:21.540 represents the creative spirit that permeates mankind. Each tribe has its own idealized

02:00:28.100 representation. And, but when tribes come together, those ideals fight, that's the battle between

02:00:33.380 gods in heaven that Eliade writes about. So, so prolifically. So you imagine that as tribes come

02:00:39.700 together, their gods fight in psychological space and arrange themselves into something resembling a

02:00:45.300 hierarchy and a higher god emerges as a consequence of the conflict, something that's more sophisticated.

02:00:51.540 And so, and so as we aggregate as human beings, as we aggregate across tribes, we develop a more

02:00:58.100 sophisticated and universal conception of the highest ideal. So you have Greece and, and, and, and, and, and, and

02:01:05.700 Judaism combined. And out of that emerges the figure of Christ's transformation of Dionysius. And as you said,

02:01:13.140 it's not something that it doesn't invalidate the revelation. You'd expect some revelation to occur as the

02:01:20.900 consequence of the, of the interaction between two cultures that had been separated because they had their own

02:01:26.820 profound developmental history. Of course, it would be cataclysmic. Something has to come out of that. And I, what I don't

02:01:33.540 understand is the role that the hallucinogens played in that. Of course, there's many things I don't

02:01:38.580 understand, but that's certainly one of them.

02:01:40.100 Yeah. I mean, the, the fact that religions fight with each other, the tribes have their, their own

02:01:47.940 contingent of deities and, and they fight with each other and so on. That's, that's the whole tragedy of this.

02:01:55.940 Because once you define it, uh, you try to own it. And, um, then you have people with their

02:02:04.580 set of belongings and, uh, opposing people with another set of belongings. Whereas the basic nature

02:02:11.380 of this experience is that that's all immaterial. There's only one reality. It, it can't be defined that

02:02:19.700 way. Uh, I mean, you don't have to see, you don't have to explain these other entities that are in this

02:02:27.060 room, these rooms with us, uh, as, as, uh, animals or as animate, uh, human hybrids or as humans and so forth.

02:02:39.620 Uh, equally in this ancient mystery tradition, what could be seen would be the perfect

02:02:49.220 relationships of mathematics and geometry. And, and, uh, we know that, uh, Pythagoras, uh,

02:02:59.700 was, was, uh, uh, he, he, he, he didn't figure out with pencil and paper, uh, the relationship of

02:03:10.900 geometric forms and so forth. Uh, he saw it, uh, and he saw it while he was in a cave.

02:03:19.700 And the way he did this is that in, from the cave, as in the Ellicinian Chamber of Initiation,

02:03:26.500 he transcended in the spirit out of the cave to the edges of the universe and saw those things. Of course,

02:03:32.980 that's impossible. He couldn't have done that, but that's what he did. Well, he was Pythagoras after all.

02:03:39.620 Yeah, I know. But anyway, but, but, but I mean, so we don't have to define them as, as this god or

02:03:45.540 so that, uh, that god and so forth. Uh, we already have, uh, uh, working out a, a, a, a, a really great

02:03:52.980 system of, of, uh, definitions, which we call science.

02:03:57.060 Right. I mean, even Carl, even scholars who don't support the psychedelic hypothesis necessarily,

02:04:03.860 and I'm thinking of maybe Peter Kingsley, who's also a great inspiration, will, will nonetheless

02:04:09.220 talk about the wisdom in the dark places of wisdom or his book reality. He gets into Kingsley goes into

02:04:15.380 great detail about these cave techniques and these incubatory techniques practiced, um, by Pythagoras in

02:04:20.900 his basement that he built for these techniques in Italy, entering into these, these, these states of

02:04:25.780 trance, these cataleptic states of trance, you know, beyond time, beyond space, this, this kind of

02:04:32.420 apparently near death state. Um, you know, this, this, this was practiced by the likes of Pythagoras,

02:04:37.940 Parmenides, and Pedocles. The, these pre-Socratics with or without drugs, um, would enter into these

02:04:44.180 states to commune with the goddess and bring back the things that we would call at least part of

02:04:49.060 Western civilization. So, I mean, these, the, these states of non-irrationality, um, uh, you know,

02:04:54.820 I think this is relatively accepted by classicists, Carl. This goes back to ER, ER, ER Dodds, the

02:05:00.100 Greeks and the, and the irrational a couple of generations ago. So I think psychedelics are just

02:05:04.180 one twist on this.

02:05:06.980 Gilgamesh goes down to the bottom of the ocean like Pinocchio does, and he brings back the herb

02:05:12.660 of immortality, but it's stolen. It's, I believe by a snake on the way back. Is that, that's the case?

02:05:17.780 Is that, that's the story? Is that a shamanic story as well? Yes.

02:05:22.980 And so we go out to the edge of the world to gather wisdom, but on the way back, we lose it,

02:05:27.300 and we can't bring it back. Or we can only bring back fragments of it. We're not capable of bringing

02:05:31.860 back at all.

02:05:34.980 Once you wake up, it's hard to remember the dream.

02:05:37.060 That's a good place to stop.

02:05:45.620 But we could add one thing.

02:05:46.900 Yes, definitely.

02:05:48.020 One, a very important technique is to enter the dream world, and when you're dreaming,

02:05:54.900 don't decide you want to wake up, but carry consciousness into the dream,

02:06:00.100 in which case you've entered this world. You're in the spirit world. You're in control of everything.

02:06:05.460 Have you been able to lucid dream?

02:06:07.780 Yes.

02:06:09.140 Are you an avid practitioner?

02:06:12.180 I used to practice it more than I do now, because I came to realize that what I was trying to do was die.

02:06:20.820 There's no sense in hurrying, hurrying the process.

02:06:23.220 I mean, once you do that, once you disassociate your spirit from your body,

02:06:30.500 you might decide you don't want to go back in again, and that's what happens when you die.

02:06:42.660 But the moment when you do that, when you bring consciousness into your unconscious

02:06:49.300 reality is an extremely orgasmic, pleasant feeling.

02:06:59.060 Thank you very much, Brian.

02:07:01.620 Thank you, Jordan.

02:07:02.340 Much appreciated.

02:07:03.140 Thank you.

02:07:03.620 Enjoyed talking to you both.

02:07:04.820 I appreciate your candor, to say the least.

02:07:09.380 And your work, for that matter.

02:07:11.700 You know, you're participating in something that's of staggering significance.

02:07:17.380 Thank you, Jordan.

02:07:20.180 Thank you.

02:07:21.380 Thank you, Jordan.

02:07:22.900 Thank you.

02:07:34.580 And I'll make you a little bit more 감사합니다.

02:07:38.580 Thank you, Jordan.

02:07:39.460 Thank you, Jordan.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - July 19, 2021

183. The Immortality Key; Psychedelics and the Ancient Age ｜ Brian Muraresku & Prof. Carl Ruck

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