pagan continuity hypothesis

The continuity theory proposes that older adults maintain the same activities, behaviors, personalities, and relationships of the past. It's some kind of wine-based concoction, some kind of something that is throwing these people into ecstasy. We have an hour and a half together and I hope there will be time for Q&A and discussion. Mona Sobhani, PhD (@monasobhaniphd) / Twitter She found the remains of dog sacrifice, which is super interesting. If beer was there that long ago, what kind of beer was it? I see a huge need and a demand for young religious clergy to begin taking a look at this stuff. So the Greek god of wine, intoxication. I also sense another narrative in your book, and one you've flagged for us, maybe about 10 minutes ago, when you said that the book is a proof of concept. Well, let's get into it then. I will ask Brian to describe how he came to write this remarkable book, and the years of sleuthing and studying that went into it. So the event happens, when all the wines run out, here comes Jesus, who's referred to in the Gospels as an [SPEAKING GREEK] in Greek, a drunkard. I mean, in the absence of the actual data, that's my biggest question. I took this to Greg [? The Tim Ferriss Show Podcast | Free Listening on Podbean App Mark and Brian cover the Eleusinian Mysteries, the pagan continuity hypothesis, early Christianity, lessons from famed religious scholar Karen Armstrong, overlooked aspects of influential philosopher William James's career, ancient wine and ancient beer, experiencing the divine within us, the importance of "tikkun olam"repairing and . So imagine how many artifacts are just sitting in museums right now, waiting to be tested. But I do want to push back a little bit on the elevation of this particular real estate in southern Italy. So. Now, that is part of your kind of interest in democratizing mysticism, but it also, curiously, cuts out the very people who have been preserving this tradition for centuries, namely, on your own account, this sort of invisible or barely visible lineage of women. Where does Western civilization come from? And I've listened to the volunteers who've gone through these experiences. So what have you learned about the Eleusinian mysteries in particular since Ruck took this up, and what has convinced you that Ruck's hypothesis holds water? So this whole water to wine thing was out there. And all we know-- I mean, we can't decipher sequence by sequence what was happening. Part 1 Brian C. Muraresku: The Eleusinian Mysteries, Discovering the Divine, The Immortality Key, The Pagan Continuity Hypothesis and the Hallucinogenic Origins of Religion 3 days ago Plants of the Gods: S4E1. And I describe that as somehow finding that key to immortality. It's a big question for me. 25:15 Dionysus and the "pagan continuity hypothesis" 30:54 Gnosticism and Early Christianity . 40:15 Witches, drugs, and the Catholic Church . So Brian, welcome. BRIAN MURARESKU: Great question. And so for me, this was a hunt through the catacombs and archives and libraries, doing my sweet-talking, and trying to figure out what was behind some of those locked doors. #646: Brian C. Muraresku with Dr. Mark Plotkin The Eleusinian Mysteries, Discovering the Divine, The Immortality Key, The Pagan Continuity Hypothesis, Lessons from Scholar Karen Armstrong, and Much More by The Tim Ferriss Show Now I understand and I appreciate the pharmaceutical industry's ability to distribute this as medicine for those who are looking for alternatives, alternative treatments for depression and anxiety and PTSD and addiction and end of life distress. These are famous figures to those of us who study early Christianity. Now, you could draw the obvious conclusion. . And according to Wasson, Hofmann, and Ruck, that barley was really a code word. So it is already happening. Brian C. Muraresku with Dr. Mark Plotkin: The Eleusinian Mysteries, Discovering the Divine, The Immortality Key, The Pagan Continuity Hypothesis, Psychedelics, and More | Tim Ferriss Show #646 We know that at the time of Jesus, before, during, and after, there were recipes floating around. What the Greeks were actually saying there is that it was barley infected with ergot, which is this natural fungus that infects cereal crops. There were formula. Its proponents maintain that the affable, plump old fellow associated with Christmas derives from the character of Arctic medical practitioners. So I think it's really interesting details here worth following up on. And nor do I think that you can characterize southern Italy as ground zero for the spirit of Greek mysticism, or however you put it. McGovern also finds wine from Egypt, for example, in 3150 BC, wine that is mixed with a number of interesting ingredients. The Tim Ferriss Show - #646: Brian C. Muraresku with Dr. Mark Plotkin Mark and Brian cover the Eleusinian Mysteries, the pagan continuity hypothesis, early Christianity, lessons from famed religious scholar Karen Armstrong, overlooked aspects of influential philosopher William James's career, ancient wine and ancient beer, experiencing the divine within us, the importance of "tikkun olam"repairing and . And if you're a good Christian or a good Catholic, and you're consuming that wine on any given Sunday, why are you doing that? So I want to propose that we stage this play in two acts. And that is that there was a pervasive religion, ancient religion, that involved psychedelic sacraments, and that that pervasive religious culture filtered into the Greek mysteries and eventually into early Christianity. Thank you for that. CHARLES STANG: My name is Charles Stang, and I'm the director of the Center for the Study of World Religions here at Harvard Divinity School. But I think the broader question of what's the reception to this among explicitly religious folk and religious leaders? Mark and Brian cover the Eleusinian Mysteries, the pagan continuity hypothesis, early Christianity, lessons from famed religious scholar Karen Armstrong, overlooked aspects of influential philosopher William James's career, ancient wine and ancient beer, experiencing the divine within us, the importance of " tikkun olam "repairing and improving Because they talk about everything else that they take issue with. Phil's Picks | Phoenix Books There's all kinds of reasons I haven't done it. Here's the big question. And so that's what motivated my search here. Like in a retreat pilgrimage type center, or maybe within palliative care. Some number of people have asked about Egypt. Do you think that by calling the Eucharist a placebo that you're likely to persuade them? CHARLES STANG: OK. And I started reading the studies from Pat McGovern at the University of Pennsylvania. #646: Brian C. Muraresku with Dr. Mark Plotkin The Eleusinian #283: Managing Procrastination, Predicting the Future, and - Scribd I think the only big question is what the exact relationship was from a place like that over to Eleusis. Correcting Key Points in Muraresku, The Immortality Key And I want to-- just like you have this hard evidence from Catalonia, then the question is how to interpret it. I mean, this is what I want to do with some of my remaining days on this planet, is take a look at all these different theories. First, the continuity of the offices must be seen in light of the change of institutional charges; they had lost their religious connotations and had become secular. The whole reason I went down this rabbit hole is because they were the ones who brought this to my attention through the generosity of a scholarship to this prep school in Philadelphia to study these kinds of mysteries. 7:30 The three pillars to the work: the Eucharist as a continuation of the pharmako and Dionysian mysteries; the Pagan continuity theory; and the idea that through the mysteries "We can die before we die so that when we die we do not die" 13:00 What does "blood of Christ" actually mean; the implied and literal cannibalism Let's move to early Christian. And there were probably other Eleusises like that to the east. So when Hippolytus is calling out the Marcosians, and specifically women, consecrating this alternative Eucharist in their alternative proto-mass, he uses the Greek word-- and we've talked about this before-- but he uses the Greek word [SPEAKING GREEK] seven times in a row, by the way, without specifying which drugs he's referring to. The Immortality Key - Book Review and Discussion - Were early - Reddit And apparently, the book is on order, so I can't speak to this directly, but the ancient Greek text that preserves this liturgy also preserves the formula, the ingredients of the eye ointment. And so the big hunt for me was trying to find some of those psychedelic bits. And I don't know what that looks like. Leonardo Torres Pagan, PhD - Subject Matter Expert & Editor - LinkedIn CHARLES STANG: OK, great. You obviously think these are powerful substances with profound effects that track with reality. So I point to that evidence as illustrative of the possibility that the Christians could, in fact, have gotten their hands on an actual wine. So Pompeii and its environs at the time were called [SPEAKING GREEK], which means great Greece. But I realized that in 1977, when he wrote that in German, this was the height of scholarship, at least going out on a limb to speculate about the prospect of psychedelics at the very heart of the Greek mysteries, which I refer to as something like the real religion of the ancient Greeks, by the way, in speaking about the Eleusinian mysteries. Nage ?] But we do know that something was happening. But I'm pressing you because that's my job. Then I see the mysteries of Dionysus as kind of the Burning Man or the Woodstock of the ancient world. It's not the case in the second century. Revolutionary Left Radio: Early Christianity: Psychedelics, Ancient But things that sound intensely powerful. The big question is, did any of these recipes, did any of this wine spiking actually make its way into some paleo-Christian ceremony. We know from the literature hundreds of years beforehand that in Elis, for example, in the Western Peloponnese, on the same Epiphany-type timeline, January 5, January 6, the priests would walk into the temple of Dionysus, leave three basins of water, the next morning they're miraculously transformed into wine. Thank you all for joining us, and I hope to see many of you later this month for our next event. Now I want to get to the questions, but one last question before we move to the discussion portion. So I see-- you're moving back and forth between these two. And it was their claim that when the hymn to Demeter, one of these ancient records that records, in some form, the proto-recipe for this kykeon potion, which I call like a primitive beer, in the hymn to Demeter, they talk about ingredients like barley, water, and mint. And for those of you who have found my line of questioning or just my general presence tedious, first of all, I fully appreciate that reaction. And that's where oversight comes in handy. The divine personage in whom this cult centered was the Magna Mater Deum who was conceived as the source of all life as well as the personification of all the powers of nature.\[Footnote:] Willoughby, Pagan Regeneration, p. 114.\ 7 She was the "Great Mother" not only "of all the gods," but of all men" as well. Brian launched the instant bestseller on the Joe Rogan Experience, and has now appeared on CNN, NPR, Sirius XM, Goop-- I don't even know what that is-- and The Weekly Dish with Andrew Sullivan. And I did not dare. Lots of Greek artifacts, lots of Greek signifiers. So I think this was a minority of early Christians. You're not confident that the pope is suddenly going to issue an encyclical. To assess this hypothesis and, perhaps, to push it further, has required years of dogged and, at times, discouraging works in archives and archaeology. A profound knowledge of visionary plants, herbs, and fungi passed from one generation to the next, ever since the Stone Age? But what I hear from people, including atheists, like Dina Bazer, who participated in these Hopkins NYU trials is that she felt like on her one and only dose of psilocybin that she was bathed in God's love. CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF WORLD RELIGIONS, Harvard Divinity School42 Francis Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138 617.495.4495, my.hds |Harvard Divinity School |Harvard University |Privacy |Accessibility |Digital Accessibility | Trademark Notice |Reporting Copyright Infringements. Nazanin Boniadi I wonder if you're familiar with Wouter Hanegraaff at the University of Amsterdam. That's staying within the field of time. And yet I talked to an atheist who has one experience with psilocybin and is immediately bathed in God's love. BRIAN MURARESKU: I look forward to it, Charlie. Because again, when I read the clinical literature, I'm reading things that look like mystical experiences, or that at least at least sound like them. #646: Brian C. Muraresku with Dr. Mark Plotkin The Eleusinian CHARLES STANG: Thank you, Brian. But even if they're telling the truth about this, even if it is accurate about Marcus that he used a love potion, a love potion isn't a Eucharist. But if the original Eucharist were psychedelic, or even if there were significant numbers of early Christians using psychedelics like sacrament, I would expect the representatives of orthodox, institutional Christianity to rail against it. So I have my concerns about what's about to happen in Oregon and the regulation of psilocybin for therapeutic purposes. But in Pompeii, for example, there's the villa of the mysteries, one of these really breathtaking finds that also survived the ravage of Mount Vesuvius. Brian is the author of a remarkable new book that has garnered a lot of attention and has sold a great many copies. They did not. I appreciate this. It was the Jesuits who taught me Latin and Greek. CHARLES STANG: I have one more question about the pre-Christian story, and that has to do with that the other mystery religion you give such attention to. Was there any similarity from that potion to what was drunk at Eleusis? So thank you, all who have hung with us. BRIAN MURARESKU: We can dip from both pies, Dr. Stang. Where are the drugs? Now, I think you answered that last part. The kind of mysticism I've always been attracted to, like the rule of Saint Benedict and the Trappist monks and the Cistercian monks. I'm skeptical, Dr. Stang. The Wanderer | Old English Poetry Project | Rutgers University So you lean on the good work of Harvard's own Arthur Darby Nock, and more recently, the work of Dennis McDonald at Claremont School of Theology, to suggest that the author of the Gospel of John deliberately paints Jesus and his Eucharist in the colors of Dionysus. Nage ?] The Continuity Hypothesis was put forward by John Bowlby (1953) as a critical effect of attachments in his development of Attachment Theory. Biblical Entheogens: a Speculative Hypothesis - ResearchGate The continuity hypothesis of dreams suggests that the content of dreams are largely continuous with waking concepts and concerns of the dreamer. Now, here's-- let's tack away from hard, scientific, archaeobotanical evidence for a moment. The universality of frontiers, however, made the hypothesis readily extendable to other parts of the globe. I think it's important you have made a distinction between what was Jesus doing at the Last Supper, as if we could ever find out. Well, the reason I mention Hippolytus and Marcus and focus on that in my evidence is because there's evidence of the Valentinians, who influenced Marcus, in and around Rome. So we move now into ancient history, but solidly into the historical record, however uneven that historical record is. One, on mainland Greece from the Mycenaean period, 16th century BC, and the other about 800 years later in modern day Turkey, another ritual potion that seemed to have suggested some kind of concoction of beer, wine, and mead that was used to usher the king into the afterlife. 101. And I think that we would behoove ourselves to incorporate, resuscitate, maybe, some of those techniques that seem to have been employed by the Greeks at Eleusis or by the Dionysians or some of these earliest Christians. And I think it does hearken back to a genuinely ancient Greek principle, which is that only by fully experiencing some kind of death, a death that feels real, where you, or at least the you you used to identify with, actually slips away, dissolves. 44:48 Psychedelics and ancient cave art . I want to thank you for putting up with me and my questions. I don't think we have found it. Here's what we don't. Did the potion at Eleusis change from generation to generation? The same Rome that circumstantially shows up, and south of Rome, where Constantine would build his basilicas in Naples and Capua later on. Books about pagan continuity hypothesis? : r/AskHistorians - reddit When you start testing, you find things. These two accuse one Gnostic teacher named Marcus-- who is himself a student of the famous theologian Valentinus-- they accuse him of dabbling in pharmacological devilry. The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Brian C. Muraresku with Dr. Mark Mark and Brian cover the Eleusinian Mysteries, the pagan continuity hypothesis, early Christianity, lessons from famed religious scholar Karen Armstrong, overlooked aspects of influential philosopher William James's career, ancient wine and ancient beer, experiencing the divine within us, the importance of " tikkun olam "repairing and improving What's different about the Dionysian mysteries, and what evidence, direct or indirect, do we have about the wine of Dionysus being psychedelic? That also only occurs in John, another epithet of Dionysus. Show Plants of the Gods: Hallucinogens, Healing, Culture and Conservation podcast, Ep Plants of the Gods: S4E2. Why don't we turn the tables and ask you what questions you think need to be posed? Church of the Saints Faustina and Liberata, view from the outside with the entrance enclosure, at "Sante" place, Capo di Ponte (Italy). CHARLES STANG: So that actually helps answer a question that's in the Q&A that was posed to me, which is why did I say I fully expect that we will find evidence for this? In this way, the two traditions coexisted in a syncretic form for some time before . So let's start with one that is more contemporary. The Immortality Key - David Bookstaber Up until that point I really had very little knowledge of psychedelics, personal or literary or otherwise. According to Muraresku, this work, BOOK REVIEW which "presents the pagan continuity hypothesis with a psychedelic twist," addresses two fundamental questions: "Before the rise of Christianity, did the Ancient Greeks consume a secret psychedelic sacrament during their most famous and well-attended religious rituals?