PTSF 35 (with Brian Muraresku)
Psychedelics Today
Psychedelics Today, LLC
4.6 • 598 Ratings
🗓️ 27 November 2020
⏱️ 92 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In today's Solidarity Fridays episode, the typical Solidarity Fridays format is switched up yet again, this time with Joe interviewing author of best-selling book, The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name, and recent Joe Rogan Experience guest, Brian Muraresku. Because where do you go after Joe Rogan? Psychedelics Today, of course.
Muraresku discusses how his fascination with Latin and Greek and the 1978 book, The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries (by R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, and Carl A. P. Ruck) and its proposal of a psychedelic sacrament of sorts being imbibed at the Rites of Eleusis led him to spend about 12 years searching for evidence to prove it. From the idea of "graveyard beer," to Alcibiades and the profanation of mysteries, to wine parties to interact with the dead called refrigeriums, Muraresku dives deep into his findings: that the wine they drank was, at the least, spiked with herbs and spices to create something very different and likely hallucinogenic, that participants were seeking immortality, a euphoric ecstasy, and communion with both God and the dead, that both the Dionysian Gospel and Christianity are heavily related to the Rites of Eleusis, and that these ceremonies don't appear to have been isolated to Eleusis- that people took what they learned and practiced elsewhere, in what Denise Demetriou refers to as "open-access sanctuaries."
Notable Quotes
"Some of the legacies of this civilization, from democracy and the arts and sciences to literature and philosophy and the very concept of a university- all these inheritances are the things that we associate with the very literate Greeks. And there stands Euelisis at the center of it all. ...And they [the Rites] were seen as so important, so central, so integral to life at the time, that even Cicero, a Roman in the first century B.C.- he referred to Euelisis as 'the most exceptional and divine thing that Athens ever produced.' So it wasn't democracy, the arts, sciences, etc. It was Eleusis."
"They saw something. The thinking for a long time was that maybe it was a theatrical performance- maybe there was something happening in this temple that has been lost to time. And then that book I mentioned in 1978, The Road to Eleusis, was saying as long as we're talking about a vision, why can't it be something that was produced internally? Why couldn't it be one of these great epiphanic psychedelic visions? And so, as a hypothesis, it makes sense just based on the way people talked about this experience. It was a once in a lifetime experience that essentially erased the fear of death and made these initiates immortals. And weirdly, which is why I picked this up in the first place, it's very, very similar to the testimony that comes from the volunteers in the Johns Hopkins experiments with psilocybin. It's again, a once in a lifetime single dose of psilocybin [that] seems to result in these profound, mystical transformations in people; including atheists, who will describe it as among the most meaningful experiences of their lives."
"I think that there was a historical Jesus, and I think that we have these relatively conflicting accounts of what he was and what the message was in the canonical gospels that have come down to us. But we have these other gospels and this Gnostic literature that didn't make it in The Bible, and the gospel of Mary Magdalene. And what comes across to me, time and again, are people trying to find ecstasy, people looking for communion with Jesus. And again, you don't have to look off into all this esoteric stuff just to focus on the very simple proposition that the Eucharist is an immortality potion, plain and simple."
Links
Wikipedia.org: Diagoras of Melos (additional Alcibiades/"profanation the mysteries" info
R. Gordon Wasson's 1957 Life magazine article
The Dionysian Gospel: The Fourth Gospel and Euripides, by Dennis R. MacDonald
Youtube: Joe Rogan Experience #1543 - Brian Muraresku & Graham Hancock
Youtube: His recent appearance on CNN
The Immortality Key on Audible
About Brian Muraresku
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, everybody. Welcome back to Psychedelics today. If you've been following our Solidarity Friday episodes, this is going to be a little bit different in one of our formal interviews. So today on the |
| 0:22.8 | show, we are very pleased and honored to have Brian Moore Rescue on the show. If you haven't heard of |
| 0:28.5 | Brian's work, he's the author of The Immortality Key, The Secret History of the Religion with No Name. |
| 0:34.5 | A little bit more about Brian. Brian graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Brown University |
| 0:39.5 | with a degree in Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit. As a member of the New York Bar, he has been |
| 0:45.2 | practicing law internationally for five years. In 2016, he became the founding executive director |
| 0:50.9 | of Doctors for Cannabis Regulation, whose work has been featured in CNN, ESPN, |
| 0:56.9 | Vice, and the Washington Post. In arbitration with the NFL, he represented the first professional |
| 1:02.0 | athlete in the United States to request a therapeutic use exemption for cannabis. Awesome. |
| 1:08.8 | And Brian lives outside of Washington, D.C. with his wife and two daughters. And again, |
| 1:13.8 | he's the author of the Immortality Key, the Secret History of the Religion with no name. |
| 1:19.9 | If you haven't stumbled across this book before or Brian's work, I'll read a little bit about the |
| 1:25.0 | book. But chances are, if you've been following us here at |
| 1:28.1 | Psychedelics today, I'm guessing there's a good chance you've probably already seen Brian's work |
| 1:32.9 | or, you know, found him elsewhere. I know he's been having a lot of press lately and it's really |
| 1:38.0 | great. So the immortality key. So the most influential religious scholar in the 20th century, Houston Smith, once referred to it as |
| 1:49.2 | the best kept secret in history. Did the ancient Greeks use drugs to find God? And did the earliest Christians |
| 1:56.3 | inherit the same secret tradition? Because of the origins of Western civilization and the future of the |
| 2:02.8 | world's biggest religion are at stake, controversy has swirled around these questions for generations. |
| 2:09.8 | A bitter and often vicious debate, only fueled by the lack of any hard scientific evidence to |
| 2:15.4 | prove the case until now. |
| 2:25.1 | So this book follows Brian's 12-year global investigation into the archaic roots of the religious experience. |
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