26: Return of the Repressed, Or The Drugs Paula White is Not On (w/Brian Muraresku)
Trump’s personal pastor Paula White seizes the podium to speak in tongues and prophesize that angels from Africa will certify her master’s electoral victory. Evangelical Kenneth Copeland laughs maniacally at the devilish proposition that Biden has won. They both yearn to squeeze some drop of ecstasy from the husk of conservative politics. How much of the emotional terrorism rolling through these times is the return of the repressed?
In our weekly reporting, Derek looks at Australian chef Pete Evans and his nostalgia for fascist mysticism, hidden beneath green shakes and doTerra downlines. Julian covers Dr. Northrup’s latest viral science fictions, as well as the bizarre Nazi comparisons trending on conspiritualist pages. Matthew looks at nested repressions returning with a vengeance: QAnon resurrecting the Satanic Panic, Bill Gates as the return of the vampire, and the strange new phenomenon of the Aggro-Spiritual Boss Babe Rage Witch, whose coin seems to be on the rise just as the Mark Walsh Spiritual Pick-Up Artist currency tanks. He also considers distinctions between canceling and punching sideways, picking up from last week’s episode.
Then, in a rich interview with author of The Immortality Key, Brian Muraresku, Derek explores the ancient psychedelia of Christianity, both forgotten and repressed, and hopes for its return, as it would probably make Paula White and Kenneth Copeland chill TF out.
Show Notes
Pete Evans says COVID-19 isn’t contagious
Pete Evans fined $25,000 by Therapeutic Goods Administration over coronavirus claims relating to BioCharger
Controversial celebrity chef Pete Evans canned by Seven Network
Healing hubs, a ‘sacred geometry hub’ and solar-powered cabins: Inside the new hippy commune promoted by Pete Evans where people pay to live off the grid in ‘earth ships’
Pete Evans, Truthseeker
Pete Evans shares the Nazi symbol, Black Sun
Christiane Northrup’s Nazi tweet
Northrup’s COVID vaccine interview
COVID-19 Vaccine To Alter DNA? 5 False Claims By Christiane Northrup
Nazi comparison
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Episode 26, Return of the Repressed, or The Drugs Paula White Is Not On, with Brian Mororescu. - Wow.
Trump's personal pastor, Paula White, say that three times fast, Trump's personal pastor, Paula White, seizes the podium to speak in tongues and prophesies that angels from Africa will certify her master's electoral victory.
Meanwhile, evangelical Kenneth Copeland laughs maniacally at the devilish proposition that Biden has won.
They both yearn, it seems, to squeeze some drop of ecstasy from the husk of conservative politics.
So, how much of the emotional terrorism rolling through these times might be a return of the repressed?
In our weekly reporting, Derek looks at Australian chef Pete Evans and his nostalgia for fascist mysticism hidden beneath green shakes and doTERRA downlines.
I'm looking at returning champion Dr. Christiane Northrup's latest viral science fictions, as well as the bizarre Nazi comparisons trending on conspiritualist pages.
Matthew looks at nested repressions returning with a vengeance, QAnon resurrecting the satanic panic, Bill Gates as the return of the vampire, and the strange new phenomenon of the agro-spiritual boss babe Rage Witch, whose coin seems to be on the rise just as Mark Walsh's spiritual pickup artist currency tanks.
He also considers distinctions between canceling and punching sideways, picking up from last week's episode.
Then, in a rich interview with author Brian Murarescu, Derek explores the ancient psychedelia of Christianity, both forgotten and repressed, and hopes for its return, as it would probably make Paula White and Kenneth Copeland chill the fuck out. as it would probably make Paula White and Kenneth Copeland
One of the very first figures that I heard about on this conspiracy scene was Australian chef Pete Evans, and that was back in March or April when lockdowns began.
I didn't pay too much attention to him because he's He's in Australia and chefs aren't really my scene, at least not pro chefs like on TV and stuff.
But interestingly, we have a pretty big listener base in Australia for this podcast.
Outside of the US, that is the next country that most people listen to.
And so a number of people have commented about him and sent us videos and it's got a little out of hand.
So I really felt like we had to finally address him because people listen to him.
And I want to give a shout out to Kelly Sheenan who fed me a lot of the links that I'm going to be referencing here.
I really appreciate the diligence and the back work on that.
But first I want to play a clip of Pete Evans from a recent interview that kind of sets this all up.
Is that what we've come here to do?
Do we have the belief in ourselves that we are contagious?
That we are spreaders of something?
I choose not to believe in that narrative because it doesn't make any sense to me.
But what if that choice led to spreading something that could kill more vulnerable people?
It doesn't.
Okay.
Oh, man, that's so awful.
OK, go ahead, Derek.
Just run it down for us, please.
Since it's a podcast, you can't see his face, but I think Matthew's laughter there expressed all of it.
Before he says it doesn't, let's just say Pete Evans's face, it's a rather special look.
It's the look of a man who likely never admits that he's wrong and anything you could say to him couldn't convince him otherwise.
But first off, Just notice how he says, that's not what we have come here to do.
What is he referencing?
Humans didn't come here.
We're the product of billions of years of evolution, but obviously Evans doesn't know that much about history as we'll get to in a moment.
But just his look.
Well, you can reference it in the show links for yourself.
Apparently, Evans has been going down the rabbit hole for a while with the paleo diet.
And interestingly, again, talking about history, paleo, as we reference it right now, is not how our ancestors actually ate.
And I have nothing really against that particular diet.
I actually tried it for a few months and it's fine, but the fanaticism around it and the certainty that people have that that's how our ancestors ate is actually ludicrous.
As Brian Murorescu talks about in his book that You'll hear the interview later on, is that we were drinking a lot of beer back in the day.
That was probably how agriculture began, so coconut oil, not so much.
But Pete Evans ran into contractual problems during that time and he began taking a sort of me-against-the-world approach.
Now, there's another link that I have where he claims to be ignorant of QAnon, but he has boosted their hashtags and he even wore a Q hat once.
Even though he says he doesn't know anything about QAnon.
So this is the kind of figure we're talking about.
In April, he was fined $25,000 for selling a light machine that cures COVID.
I mean, the Wuhan coronavirus, as he phrases it.
Is this a UV light machine?
Is that, and where do you shine it?
Is it like in your mouth?
Is it along with the colonics or something?
Like, what is it?
You got, you know what?
You got to read the show notes, Matthew.
That's why I put it in there.
The complexities of the light machine are beyond my pay grade, so I can't really get into that.
But interestingly, he sold a $25,000 light machine that cures COVID, and then he said that the disease doesn't exist.
So again, this is... But is that after everybody used a light machine that it didn't exist, or that it doesn't exist while he's selling the machine?
He might have used the machine to kind of like Superman or Batman, and Batman spotted it out into the world.
I mean, it's also, it's also a somewhat like it downgrades the level of diabolical, you know, uh, action to sell something like that.
If you don't think the thing you're claiming to cure actually exists, right?
Right.
Instead of plausible deniability in some way.
Yeah.
Um, now here's, this might sound familiar to you guys.
He's trying to set up his own commune right now.
Awesome.
With, and the residents will live in earth ships.
No, no, wait a minute.
Now, this was a big thing in Vermont when I used to live there, which they're pretty cool.
They're like old tires that you ram with earth and you make sure that the back wall is deep down under the frost line and it's on the north side and then you can set up with nice south-facing light.
That's all pretty cool.
Is he talking about old tires?
I think he's talking about your vacation home, Matthew.
No, he's actually, the funny thing is they call it Earthships, but they're only selling plots of land and then they kind of give you instructions on how to build your own.
So it's kind of like, pay us money and here, do this yourself.
Now he's being backed by a group that previously tried to start the Bula Bula Community Village, and that That project fell apart in 2017 with the team $2.5 million in debt.
But now they're partnering with Evans to offer 3,500 square foot acre blocks of land where you can build your own ship.
Previously we called these cabins, but they're now ships.
And this is in Nimbin, New South Wales.
Is this to kind of cover up the fact that it is going to end up being swampland and you will sail away?
Everything I've read about it, that's what it seems like.
But this area actually, it's sort of Australia's woodstock.
Right, and in fact, in 1973, the region got an economic bump when they produced the Aquarius Festival, so it really was a follow-up on Woodstock, and the community that moved in there was very much part of the hippie scene, lived back to the land, and as you can imagine, that sort of mindset has breeded this conspiracy theorist mindset, which is now prevalent there as well, so that's why it's also huge in cannabis horror culture there, and that's very much what is happening there.
Now, he should have considered Austin, of course, but who knows?
We still have time.
Well, that's what I was going to say.
I mean, it's the timeline here just seems to be somewhat predictable that these figures, eventually they realize that they've reached this huge audience that they can now monetize based on all the conspiritualist stuff.
It also, there's some weird sort of return to the pre-modern with the digital economy then being rolled into a land base, right?
I mean, I suppose that's a long-standing fantasy amongst the progressive wellness left is to, you know, be able to afford your own acreage at some point.
Yeah, it's the intentional community.
But also, we're going to be able to grow things, we're going to be able to really do things, and that must provide some sort of relief or a light at the end of the tunnel after all of this money has been made in digital nowhere land.
Yeah, it's kind of like Esalen with extraterrestrial enemies.
Right, okay.
Well, one thing about the Back to the Lamb movement that's important to consider is the quality of soil.
And one reason that America has become an economic powerhouse historically is because we have some of the best soil in the world.
If you look at soil in Asia and in China specifically, What they have to go through to grow rice is tremendous.
And Australia also does not have the best soil for starting a commune, whereas they might fare a little bit better in Austin when they try to grow their own crops there.
Right.
Now, was Evans, was his foodie stuff, was it linked into sort of, you know, micro agriculture or to farmers markets or to, you know, food security stuff?
Was that all part of the plan?
I don't know enough about his chef history.
I really only picked up on him again when the I only know a little bit about the paleo stuff, but he's from what I can tell.
And again, this is me being ignorant of his history.
So if I'm wrong, you know, please hit us up.
But he just seems like he's been jumping on the reality show trend.
He was he was booted off one recently, actually, because of his conspiritualist views.
But he seems very much of just jumping from thing to thing, as some chefs like to do, paleo being indicative of that.
But this is why I decided I wanted to talk to him about this week, because it kind of ties into a lot of the themes we're talking about and we'll get to with Northrop today as well.
Last week, he posted a Nazi symbol of the Black Sun on Instagram twice.
Now, the black sun is associated with an old SS paramilitary wing, and one time in Evans Post, the black sun was being sported by a butterfly who was talking to a caterpillar that was wearing a MAGA hat.
And the idea of the cartoon was that Trumpism evolves into white supremacy, and Evans called this, his tag on that post was, this is an oldie but a goldie.
And the caterpillar is saying, I'm so depressed or something like that, or... You've changed.
When will things change?
You've changed.
The caterpillar's saying, you've changed, and the butterfly's saying, that's what we're supposed to do.
Right, right, right.
Yeah, so what's amazing is that Evans actually does know about evolution, because obviously, you know, so his history, his understanding of history, let's call it nuanced.
Now, Target, Kmart and Woolworths, I didn't know Woolworths still exists, pulled his books.
Channel 10 let him go from an upcoming reality show, as I mentioned.
And in response, Evan said, sincere apologies to anyone who misinterpreted a previous post of a caterpillar and a butterfly having a chat over a drink and perceived that I was promoting hatred.
I look forward to studying all of the symbols that have ever existed and research them thoroughly before posting.
Now, this is such a great example, and this is where I want to pivot into what we were discussing last week, and we got a lot of comments about cancel culture from last week's episode, and I'll just tell you that it definitely got a lot More listens quickly than other episodes have, and I think that's because it is a hot topic.
But I just want to say that selling fake COVID cures, claiming that 5G is a hoax, which he's big on as well, and recycling Nazi propaganda is not being on a side And that's where this conversation, maybe I didn't express it well last week, but this whole like, that's your side.
This is where we get into tricking territory because if people are buying $25,000 light machines or colloidal silver or whatever, Sham, you're trying to sell them.
That is not being cancelled.
That's just taking down disinformation period.
And if you're going to use Nazi propaganda and pretend, oh, I didn't know this symbol or all of that, that's just trolling.
That's gaslighting.
And it really doesn't have a place in a time when we need better information.
Is he doing this all as he's selling essential oils?
Apparently, he had some relationship with doTERRA.
Oh, wait a minute.
Didn't doTERRA just drop him?
Yeah.
Yeah, that was I did not mention that.
But yes, they have.
Right.
Right.
So so I think I think Ben Lee, friend of the podcast, sent us a tweet, an actual friend of the podcast, sent us sent us the announcement from the Australian, I don't know, distributors network of of of doTERRA saying that they had canceled Pete Evans, which is kind of hilarious because I don't think they want to look too closely at the rest of their echelon of sellers, but maybe they will, I don't know.
To his credit, as Ben was really calling them out on doing.
So let's talk about this, guys.
Is us this cancelling Evans?
And were we cancelling Mark Walsh in your piece about him, Matthew?
Because this whole topic, it's been really heated, and I feel like there's some good distinctions we can maybe fumble our way towards here.
Totally.
First off, I can say that we're totally fucking cancelling Pete Evans.
Absolutely.
There's no question about it.
And I would say Northrop is in that category as well.
We'll get to more of her shenanigans with your Vax Dust later.
So what's the difference between cancel culture in a way that we might have questions or concerns about versus the kind of criticism and even maybe condemnation that we may have towards figures like these?
Let me just say that going forward, we're actually going to be featuring a new segment on the podcast called The Jab, because it really does seem that at this point, the discourse around conspirituality is going to gel in material terms around whether or not the influencers that we're talking about are able to push the needle towards vaccine hesitancy globally.
I see what you did there.
Well, I mean, this is the thing.
Why do we cancel Pete Evans?
Why do we cancel Christiane Northrup?
Because at this point, the ideologies are hateful and deadly.
I mean, we don't know what the coverage is going to have to be for the COVID-19 vaccine at this point, but what is it?
Do either of you guys know what the coverage has to be for the polio vaccine, or for MMR, or like 70%?
It changes, right?
It changes.
Herd immunity is always, 70% is sort of where they land as a general guideline, but it does change dependent upon the actual virus and the viral load.
Right, so here's what I propose is that we're not criticizing or condemning or asking for better critical thinking with regard to messianic influencers who are trying to make people suspicious of a vaccination that we don't yet know that much about, but of course we'll have to go through testing processes and so on, because
It's the only way that anybody can really see that COVID-19 and its global implications are going to start to wind down in any significant way.
And let's just imagine that we could figure out how to measure the vax hesitancy impact of the propaganda put out by people like Northrop to half a million Facebook followers every day, or however many followers Pete Evans has.
We're talking about Rising body counts because of the possibility that we don't meet 70% coverage in a given place.
We're not talking about people we don't like anymore or people we don't disagree with anymore.
We're talking about people who will be killing other people or helping to kill other people through their ideology.
So yeah, totally cancelled.
And that's not punching down, it's not punching sideways, it's punching up when we're talking about somebody who has that kind of power.
But yeah, in response to last week's discussion of cancel culture, we might actually be cancelling the phrase cancel culture.
Not because it isn't real, not because it doesn't happen, not because it doesn't ruin people's lives in many different social strata and for many different reasons, but because the term has a kind of low resolution or definability.
You know, the fact that it's been mainly instrumentalized against the left in culture war terms that are related to but not exactly what we're talking about, that's a real problem.
So I brought this topic to the show, so I'm going to take responsibility for the kind of mess that it's caused by fruitful mess I'd say by by saying that my main concern has always been community health in wellness and progressive spaces and that's why I'm really interested in how you know ecological movements can become home to cults just the way that Buddhist movements can.
So you know on a personal level I'm horrified at how easy it is for really vicious trolling horizontal violence to erupt in These spaces over minor disagreements in language, politics, tone.
I've been targeted by this many times over the past six years, so I'll talk about that next week because, you know, we're running an AMA and now I'm stuck because somebody asked about it.
And I also know that I've contributed to this landscape in my own way, so I'll own up to that too next week.
But when I heard Clementine and Jay of Fucking Canceled do their thing, I was immensely relieved that folks were brave enough to begin this conversation.
But, you know, having said that, I also didn't anticipate what I would call some trust and translation issues.
And the main feedback that reflected this, and I want to shout out especially to Jamie and Melody Walker for the time you took on Facebook to communicate with us about it, was that Clementine and Jay are somewhat vulnerable to preaching to their choir.
And for an American progressive audience that Doesn't know what Montreal-based eco-socialism looks like?
Yeah, it comes with a Marxist point of view that's unabashed, that refuses to overlook class as an organizing issue, but at the same time it works really hard on behalf of marginalized identities, right?
And it does so through the lens of decolonization and anti-poverty and, you know, working class solidarity.
So, when I ask them, how do we make sure that a discussion about cancel culture doesn't give ammunition to the right, maybe you heard their response.
They didn't really even pay that much attention.
They didn't really blink.
Because they know who they're talking to.
Progressives or leftists like them who are destroying each other online instead of building, in real life, solidarity.
But if we take this language internationally, and especially into the US, it kinda does sound like we're dog-whistling the right.
And also, even internally amongst us, the term can cue differently, which is why there was this category difference, I believe, in talking about Natalie Wynn of ContraPoints, which I didn't bring up specifically, but we put into the show notes, and how she faced cancellation over working with a trans actor who other trans people disagree with in terms of politics.
And that happens in the nexus that has been described on Fucking Cancelled.
But then discussing the action that you brought to the table, Julian, against Jonathan Haidt, which, you know, is much more vertical and institutional in nature, and it plays out not so much on social media as in mainstream media and in the universities.
You know, I think the bottom line is that our focus, or my focus, really is on online horizontal violence.
When it's lopsided, disproportional, transitive, like it's contagious, it draws in friends and relations, when it involves dogpiling attacks on individuals for like relatively minor disagreements or behavioral infractions, when it's performative, when it is gang-like, when it's just cultish, that's That's what I believe we all want to avoid and slow down.
And so, I'm gonna opt for the term, like, horizontal violence now.
Yeah, I mean, the other thing, and it's so, like, not academic and simple, that always comes up for me is, is it fair?
Is it fair?
Is it an accurate interpretation of what the person is saying?
Are the arguments against this person being presented in bad faith?
Is there a way that the interaction has a kind of choreographed A Kafka trap kind of inevitability where now that we've got you, you're done, right?
And so I get one of the things I wanted to ask is that I can easily hear someone saying, well, listen to these three cis hetero white guys who now are claiming they're the authorities on who deserves to be canceled and who doesn't, right?
And so I want to ask you guys seriously, like, What's the distinction that we might make about how we go about critiquing people and calling them out?
I have a few thoughts on that because it's something that we talked about at the beginning of this podcast and this is something I will take responsibility for because I asked the two of you to be on my podcast and that's how this all started.
And I didn't think about your identity when I did.
I didn't think about you, because you're both friends and you are two of the only people I know who thought about the topics that we discuss in the sort of detail and depth that I do.
And that's why I asked, because I wanted to have this conversation.
I didn't expect it to turn into an entire podcast.
I'm glad you said that.
I'm glad you said that, Derek.
I mean, I haven't really actually thought about that because in the conversations that I've had privately with people who have asked me, like, why are you doing a podcast with two white men?
I'm like, uh, I guess because we're friends and we were all working on the same stuff together.
But now I can say, well, Derek wanted me to.
So I'll add that in there.
Right.
Right.
Absolutely.
I'll take it.
I'll take it.
I'm fine with that.
Exactly.
Right.
Here's the transcript.
Apologize for episode 26.
And I've said this before, when I'm reading our comment threads, and when I see three white cis men, I stop reading, because I don't care at that point.
And I'll explain why.
You mean when you're looking at a criticism?
Yes.
Because I'm happy to engage in dialogues and debates all the time.
I'm in one on Twitter right now between mindfulness and Islam.
I mean, it's fine.
It's totally, I'm in that.
But when I see that, because that's a conversation ender to me.
Now, one example I want to bring up, and this will kind of give frame to it, I wrote about it in my first book in 2005 called Global Beat Fusion.
Calling someone a gypsy is equivalent in the Rome community to saying the N-word in America.
It is completely derogatory.
If you know anything about Rome or Roma people, they have been politically ostracized and ethnically cleansed for hundreds of years.
And the term gypsy is derogatory to them.
Now, does that mean that all Rome hate?
I know one from a family and he uses the term.
He's fine with that.
But when I see yoga and wellness people say that they're a gypsy and they're traveling on their trust fund, I'm like, you don't understand the depths of what you're actually saying right now.
And And it's the same thing with this term about the three way.
Does that mean that we're not sensitive to issues?
No, we bring guests in and that was the whole idea of bringing guests in that can speak to things that we cannot.
And that's why I love the process of being a journalist, because I learn from people about those things.
But that particular, when you are completely just shutting someone off, that you don't want to see them.
First of all, as I've said, if someone doesn't want to listen to us, don't.
And start your own.
That's the thing about this media.
It's all there for everyone to get their points across.
And I think that's really important.
And going back to the lack of historical understanding, it is always, always only relative.
Julian talks all the time about growing up under apartheid.
I can go on about the situations in Poland, Hungary, and Russia in which my grandparents fled those countries, right, to talk about discrimination and oppression.
I understand where I am right now in terms of my culture, and I spend a lot of time thinking about diversity in every facet I spent a decade in world music trying to help people to learn about global cultures through music.
And so taking a platform and trying to showcase different ideas, I think is one of the best things you can do.
So when I come up and into this argument that people say this, That's why I just bow out of conversations now, because it's not worth having certain conversations when people are going to be stuck on the identity.
And this is what I said last week.
This is what the right has figured out and why they have so much power in this country.
Because they do have differences, but they don't care.
They see the bigger picture at play.
And if the left doesn't start to do that in this country, we're going to continue to lose seats.
get gerrymandered and lose power and then we're going to keep this infighting going over and over again i would say with regard to um i you know i appreciate that there can be a kind of conversation stopping phrase that's used to peg the identity of this speaker and to say and i think this is what tada hazumi was getting at with the the dirty blow which is which is i'm going to
i'm going to invoke something that you can't actually argue back against except through kind of a muzzle or wearing a mask or something like that uh and And I think that his point, he might correct me if I'm wrong, is that that really obscures the content.
Now, I think the identitarian argument is that the content is inevitably going to be sort of filtered through that particular context and privilege.
But I think what my response is to that attempt to shut down is to say, okay, well, I do accept and honor the work that has been done, all of the work that has been done, not by people like me to expose the stratifications of privilege in my society.
And I'm always going to try to take more responsibility and to learn a little bit more about how my own identity and set of privileges are invisible to me.
They have given me a normalized world in which I don't have to deal with certain stresses, and my cortisol is probably a lot lower than it would otherwise be, and I don't even know that.
So to me, I can see on one hand that the discourse isn't going to go farther, and on the other hand, I'm also willing to accept the challenge— Whether the conversation goes farther or not is its own issue.
I would rather talk to people than not talk to people, but I'm not totally closed down to being challenged that way, because I've learned a lot through it.
Oh, absolutely.
And I think there's a big difference between a conversation in which the topic of positionality gets brought up and there can be some good faith exchange about, well, what do you think about this?
And have you thought about that?
And are you familiar with this point of view?
Right?
And then the person you're talking to can basically let you know how hip they are to those concepts.
There's a difference between that and...
In the middle of a disagreement saying, I am this identity and so I'm right, or you are this identity and so you're wrong, and you don't have a right to speak.
Well, often, often that the impasse doesn't, first of all, it's locked into the paralysis of a common thread and it doesn't really reflect the fact that people are learning and changing all the time.
Exactly.
And, you know, the thing is that some of the, I don't know, most beneficial and humbling realizations that I've had about my own life over the last five years have come out of identitarian conversations in which I have realized things like, with my partner for example, that the reason that we're having an argument, she and I are having an argument about whether or not
I'm going to take a taxi cab to the airport at three o'clock in the morning from a dodgy part of the city, or whether or not I'm going to take the bus is reflective of the difference in the way we perceive our city that I have no access to until I actually talk to her and really take in the fact that she's basic, that her level of safety walking around at night is totally different from my own.
And I don't, and I don't, and I don't know that.
I don't know her body that way and her experience until the penny drops.
And then, and, but here, here, the thing is, is that up until that point, uh, I am blinded by a certain type of, um, uh, you know, privilege and, and, uh,
It's not like it will go away, but so often in these conversations, it feels like the label that's applied to strategically stake out space is not the label that is going to serve a process of learning or
respect for a changing orientation towards what one is doing in the world or how one understands oneself which is which is deeply ironic because if as uh someone who is doing a kind of social political activism online you want to change people's minds oh yeah there are ways to do that and unfortunately anytime in my experience that i might point that out that's called tone policing so it's it's just it becomes very it becomes very very difficult to do
i just want to say right now that uh you know i'm confident that all three of us are or Really progressive with regard to social issues and that, and that, you know, we're, we're, we're comfortable with that and we're on board with that.
We're really supportive of that.
And I wanted to, to backtrack just a little and say, you know, I think when I ask you guys about the distinctions we might make about what we do, and we're talking about people like Evans and Walsh and Northrup and others is that, you know, we have a, we have this red pill page, right?
Have we ever taken anyone off that page that we put on?
Yes, because we acknowledge that we're in an ongoing process, right?
And we are open to counter-arguments.
We are open to people defending themselves and saying, hey, you know what, I think you misunderstood where I was coming from.
And they can be quote-unquote uncancelled, even though we're not cancelling people, but you get the reference, right?
And also, when we do make very critical observations about people, we're basing that on things they've actually said.
We're basing those on arguments we're making in good faith and looking at the evidence.
And there's a level of wanting to be as fair and as truthful as we possibly can, and not just immediately deciding that we can condemn and go after someone in a way that is ruinous.
Oh, for sure.
When I'm going through producing a feature article on Kelly Brogan and Sayer G, not only am I terrified of getting anything wrong, of misrepresenting their views, of not reaching out enough time for comments so that they can walk things back if they need to, but I've also got You know, lawyers at Medium who are looking over my shoulder and who are saying, okay, let's make sure that all your ducks are in a row here.
Yeah, there's just no, I mean, there are really clear guardrails for landing clean blows, right?
For landing clean blows, yeah, exactly.
The Jab, our weekly segment on the crucial COVID vaccine and the misinformation conspiritualists love to spread about it.
Now that the news is looking good for a COVID vaccine, the conspiritualist focus is turning from Q prophecies about the election to now recycling misinformation about vaccines.
Now, new, alongside familiar fear-mongering and tired tropes about the dangers of vaccines in general, Civil liberties objections and repeating motifs about 5G and surveillance nanotechnology is the ominous sounding luciferase and claims that the vaccine contains ingredients that will alter our DNA to make us part Oh boy.
So guys, Christiane Northrup is at it again.
A now very widely circulated excerpt from an interview she did with Pauly Tommy makes some scary sounding claims.
First of all, she says this new vaccine will alter human DNA Which fact checks as false, because to summarize, and there's a longer thing that we can link to in the show notes here, though the vaccine uses messenger RNA to deliver a blueprint of the viral spike protein so that your cells create antibodies to it, it cannot, and does not, penetrate the cell nucleus to interact with your DNA at all.
That's just not how this works.
Are you saying that her science was wrong?
Science was wrong, even though she went to all the universities she did and was an OBGYN, she apparently doesn't know about this stuff, oddly enough.
But okay, so I think it's significant because in the discourse of conspirituality, DNA is coded as the essential self, right?
Like, DNA is not really a scientific concept the way it's thrown around, so she isn't talking about science.
She's using her medical degree to get her followers to believe that she's talking about science when she's actually talking about, you know, the essentialism of the inviolate soul that can't possibly be altered through, you know, the intervention of Bill Gates.
Yeah, I mean, what's interesting about it is that you see how the science fiction kind of supernatural preoccupations of the Q mythology are now showing up in terms of how the science gets interpreted as you're creating these wild speculative connections between things.
As part of that confused DNA claim, she invoked the fear that the vaccine would make us part animal.
She used the word chimers, which is actually- - We are animals. - Yeah, exactly.
We'll become sort of somehow blended with other types of animals.
Now check it out, she uses the word Chimers, which as it turns out is a mispronunciation of the ancient mythic term Chimera.
Right.
And she's saying that this is going to happen because the vaccine has animal proteins in Where does Chimera come from?
Is that how you say Chimera if you went to Latin school in Maine?
I think that she was in that moment thinking it would be the plural of Chimera.
But it sounds like she's watched too many movies.
Come on, she did Latin back then.
I don't know.
It sounds like she's watched some superhero movies though.
And then third, Northrop recycles the old 5G chestnut.
Here we are again, right?
So as the insubstantial pageant of Q prophecies about the elections are fading into thin, thin air, here we go back to 5G.
How the vaccine is going to contain metals that will make us antennae for 5G so that we can be remotely controlled.
And this is apparently by the same cryptocurrency Technology that Vandana Shiva has warned us Microsoft holds a patent for, which of course has three sixes in its name.
Okay, so three sixes in the name of the Microsoft patent.
But then also, you use the word luciferase.
Now, what is that?
What's going on there?
It's a beautiful word.
Yeah, it's almost too on the nose in terms of the mark of the beast shit, right?
MIT developed this invisible ink marker to potentially be used in countries with low levels of medical infrastructure as a way of tracking who's been given essential childhood vaccines in very large populations, right?
Right.
This is an ink that contains infrared readable enzymes that are used in bioresearch and these enzymes are naturally present in bioluminescent animals like fireflies and jellyfish.
Nice.
The generic name for this type of enzyme, this bioluminescence that was discovered back in the 19th century, or named back then, is luciferase.
And so, luciferase refers to the whole class, and there's lots of different versions of it and ways that it's used.
And this, going back to your question about Latin, has to do with the Latin root for luciferase, which means bearer of light.
But of course, given how completely immersed Dr. Northrup is in the fever dream, this must be about lucifer.
Doesn't she realize that if we merge with jellyfish, we'll all be lightworkers?
Maybe it'll put lightworkers out of business.
Maybe that's what she's scared of.
Okay.
There's something here, though, and it's going to, I think, segue nicely into your interview with Brian, who's a classicist.
There's like this return of of beautiful, evocative, and creepy words into the conspirituality discourse that are medicalized, but they also carry this kind of like 19th century Latinate nomenclature.
There's a long sort of tangled history here that's really, like just reading Lucifer Reyes, I'm thinking that, you know, we've talked over and over again about Thimerosal, which is another gorgeous word that I'd love to know the etymology of, just, you know, to see how it might be twisted back against the way conspiritualists use it.
Yeah, it's making me think of that Showtime show from a few years ago, I'm not remembering the name of it, but that basically remixed all of the early, sort of late 19th century Frankenstein and Dracula and all of those kinds of stories in terms of their incredible medical paranoia and techno-paranoia, right?
That somehow you're going to create these horrible beasts.
Oh yeah, that's the history of monsters in the 19th century, is what's happening to our technology and to bodies.
And yeah, talk about the return of the repressed, absolutely.
Much of what we study is the study of the fear of zombies, really.
Yep.
Yep.
Yeah.
So none of this is really new.
We have we have fact checks about all of it in the show notes.
What is noteworthy is that this four minute clip of her interview was really widely circulated.
And part of what makes it so is the argument from authority fallacy right at the beginning where she lists all of her qualifications and her background.
And so unsuspecting people coming across her for the first time will see a clip like this and go, wow, she must really know what she's talking about.
And then, you know, here comes all the All the fantasy.
It is incredible.
It's kind of like, I wonder if that's a tick like we mentioned last week with Mickey Willis always mentioning that he's not making money from projects.
It's like listing your credibility over and over again.
Is it a questioning of your credibility or are you just trying to always say that I'm an authority and so listen to me now?
There's a double edge with Northrup and with Brogan as well, because the credentials are there, but they have to kind of speak about them from both sides of their mouth.
Because on one hand, they'll rattle them off, and on the other hand, they'll say, and now I realize that most of my training was bullshit, or that I was indoctrinated by Western medicine.
Because I learned about germ theory, I was completely brainwashed, and now it's all terrain theory and what have you.
So, I'm not surprised that she rattles it off, but you also, I've seen enough interviews with Northrop to see that she's bored as she does so.
I think it's almost as if she holds those degrees in a little bit of contempt.
Right, because it's why anybody is listening to her, but she doesn't believe it at the same time.
What a terrible place to be in, actually.
And it's also situational, right?
If she's talking to an audience that she thinks needs that credibility, she listened in a certain kind of way, which can be kind of bored, but it's still like, I am an authority.
If she's talking to, say, the Andrew Wakefield podcast audience, she'll say, I went into medical school already radicalized and already knowing I was going to go in as a double agent.
Yes, you're right.
Yeah, it'd be good to do, oh so much, so many things to do, so little time, but I mean, it would be good to do like a tracking of how the intros work, because yeah, the way she introduces herself to Sasha Stone is not gonna have anything to do with that either, right?
Exactly, exactly.
Well, here's the other thing from this week.
Nazis.
Uh oh.
Yeah, so Northrop made, and I said she's the returning champion, she is for so many reasons.
How do we love thee?
She put out a tweet in this past week comparing people who are willing to follow quarantine measures, because the quarantine measures of course are tightening up again as COVID is surging, to those who enabled the Nazis.
And so the tweet is a split image.
The top image is of all of these Nazi soldiers giving the Heil Hitler salute.
The bottom image is two kind of normie white Americans, you know, hugging one another in fear, clutching at one another while they wear surgical masks or protective masks.
And the caption says, how could they all have just complied?
Which is supposed to be these, these two modern day sort of quarantine people talking about the Nazis.
We would never do that.
Oh my God.
God, it's so equally, so incredibly insulting and so incredibly stupid at the same time.
It's like I can't decide, my brain is split between, am I totally insulted or is this the most absurd thing ever?
And I also, when people use that, I really wonder, do they realize that Jewish people still exist and that they likely have family members who were involved?
Like, the lack of foresight and historical understanding and empathy on when using that symbolism is really, I don't know, like Matthew said, it's cognitively disorienting.
Yeah, I also I want, however, to just put a plug in for Godwin's Law here because there seems to be something about the structure of the memosphere that just, just people can't stop reaching towards the Fascist imagery to make their stupid points.
And it seems like a product.
I mean, what does Godwin's Law say?
It says like, the more a comment thread goes on that is disputatious in a forum or online, the closer you will come to somebody invoking Hitler.
And I think the The other phrase he made up was reductio ad Hitlerum or something like that.
Which is even better.
Yeah, the longer an internet debate goes on, the more the likelihood of Hitler being brought up becomes one.
Right.
But this kind of brings me back to Pete Evans, which is, I feel with Pete, I need some sort of Australian decoder ring for mood and tone.
Because I know all of the Australians that I've known and loved in my life are incredibly ironic and have...
You know, an amazing sense of humor and they're piss-taking all the time.
And so I want to watch Pete Evans a little bit more and try to figure out how much he's LARPing at what he's doing.
Because I have the same question about Christiane Northrup.
Like, does she mean what she means?
And then of course, you know, as I argued on Instagram this week, it doesn't really matter because they're helping to kill people.
Yeah, the Nazi stuff is never okay.
There's another example that was sent to me, and I don't want to boost this person's name, I don't want to boost their traffic by naming them, but I was shown to a page where, here's this post, it was liked over 300 times, shared by 131 people.
Now, those are not huge numbers in terms of a lot of the people we cover, but it is indicative of the enthusiasm within the bubble that this influencer operates in.
And this is a post of a meme quote.
It's just a quote on the image from a journalist named Naomi Schulman, who writes as follows.
My mother was born in Munich in 1934 and spent her childhood in Nazi Germany, surrounded by nice people who refused to make waves.
And when things got ugly, they chose not to focus on politics, instead busying themselves with happier things.
They were lovely, kind people who turned their heads as their neighbors were dragged away.
This is posted with the caption from the poster saying you're just following orders, right people?
This is right after the new quarantine measures.
And if we look further at the page, all sorts of anti-vax misinformation like vaccines cause sudden infant death syndrome, vaccines are what make your kids turn out to be transgender, That sort of thing.
Really, really hateful stuff.
Okay, so who's the person being quoted, and is she a conspiritualist who opposes vaccines and quarantine, or is that just not the point?
Well, funny you should ask, that was my question exactly.
So the name of the person is included in the meme, it's Naomi Schulman, and I thought before I kind of You know, critique this person.
Maybe I should look.
Maybe this is someone who really, you know, who really is talking about the Nazis, right?
Because that's how we roll on this podcast.
So I had a look.
We take a look.
We do our research.
Is Naomi Schulman a character in a Karl Marx poem?
Oh boy, oh boy.
Yeah, as it turns out.
So ironically, a couple minutes looking this up, I find, yes, she is a Holocaust survivor's daughter.
And these words, here's the thing.
These words are pulled actually from an article she wrote talking about the necessity of protesting Trump when he was elected in 2016.
She is saying, my Holocaust survivor mother's friends look the other way, let's not do the same in the face of Trump.
And so here it is being used by these people who no doubt are Trump supporters, I'm confident saying.
And then here's the other thing, I also found that Naomi Schulman is a vocal on-the-record proponent of getting flu shots to protect those more vulnerable than yourself.
So not only is she a lib, not only does she think Donald Trump is kind of the fascist, but she's also pro-vaccine.
Naomi, we salute you.
We're so sorry.
That your quote has been stolen and subverted that way, but hey, that's what happens because words don't mean anything, right?
Yeah, and it's, I mean, this is something I'm very, very comfortable condemning in the strongest terms.
It's grotesque.
It's an insult to everyone who fought against the Nazis, everyone who died at the hand of the Nazis, and all the survivors and family members.
So, Derek, in listening to your interview with Brian about ancient Christian psychedelia, the most obvious thing that was running through my mind as an ex-Catholic is that the church in general seems to exist to actually bury the ecstasy of the pharmacon.
and And I wanted to just give a personal memory here that I remember being a very devout Catholic boy.
I went to an all boys Catholic school, choir school, St.
Michael's Choir School here in Toronto, shout out.
Actually, I guess.
Not really mixed memories there but I remember spending a lot of time in the cathedral and in the chapel and I remember the strange pain of the gory yet beautiful and sexualized Catholic iconography.
It was very glossy but it was also bloody and I remember I remember kneeling there, or standing there, smelling the candle wax, and having these fantasies of wanting to smash everything in sight.
Not because it was disturbing me, not because... I mean, I think I had to struggle with a feeling that, oh, maybe I'm evil.
Or maybe I'm possessed or something like this.
Maybe something inside me is bad and wants to destroy what is good.
But I think what I came around to was the understanding that I wanted to smash things because they were frozen.
Because they were veneered, they were like shut down and paralyzed in place and there was something so un-lifelike about this thing that was supposed to represent the most mysterious and impassioned part of One's life.
And around that same time, I'm thinking, I'm remembering being eight years old or so, my grandfather died.
My mother's father died.
And he was, he wasn't Catholic, but he had a church funeral in Windsor.
And he loved me.
I loved him, like, I mean, just with all of my heart, and he loved me back.
But I also knew that he was a very troubled person.
Uh, and he had come back from the second world war after six years, um, away.
And he came back as an alcohol user for the rest of his life.
And I remember, uh, trying to process all of the emotions at about eight years old, uh, around his death and standing next to his comp coffin and him being in, I believe his military uniform, but also being embalmed.
And I, I don't think I had ever seen an embalmed body before.
And And my dad was standing at my shoulder and I had this same feeling that I got around the Catholic iconography when looking down at my grandfather's body.
And I remember trying to make sort of awkward small talk with my dad about like, well, is he, what's inside him now?
Or what did they do to him?
I can't remember what I asked, but I think my father tried to gently explain that they put some kind of fluid inside him to make him look presentable so that we could say goodbye to him.
And I remember the same impulse that I'd had in church rising up in me like some kind of primal rage, because there was something so wrong about not only his death, but the fact that he had been frozen in time like that into a facade of himself.
And I remember actually, I was in my little like choir boy suit and I remember raising my fist and cocking my arm and saying to my dad, so if I punch this guy, and I use the word this guy, if I punch this guy right in the belly, would all that stuff, all of that embalming fluid, would it just come out of his mouth?
Like, is that what would happen?
And my dad I think just held my arm and said, and said, you know, that might happen, but, and I don't remember what, he said something kind and nurturing and kind of steered me away, or he just held me, he held me a little closer, like he was, he was, I think he realized what, that I was having, that I was having a moment.
And so, you know, I feel like one of the topics that I want to open up for the podcast going forward is how many of the things that we talk about You know, that are so disruptive to community health, that are so disruptive to critical thinking, are like some kind of rising up of a repressed energy.
Something that wants to, you know, move up and out, something that wants to overflow and that can't find a space to do that.
And that's why I was, that was in the background of me listening to Derek's interview with with Brian because, you know, Brian's talking about how the Catholic Church has probably lost the fact that, you know, these early Greek Eucharistic rituals were actually psychedelic experiences.
And to think about that as an ex-Catholic is very sweet but also really painful.
You know, and I think we tend to appreciate the stuff that remains outside of institutional religions that signifies that or remembers that, you know, the mystic pathways as cool or liberatory.
But then I also think that it feels like we're sometimes surrounded by, you know, undigested passions that come out sideways and, you know, that there's this old Freudian idea that Primal energies and experiences and yearnings that are neither fully recalled nor fulfilled in one's life can erupt into passions.
I mean, he would call them symptoms and he's kind of dreary, but that they would overflow and burst forth.
And that's actually what I felt after I got over the humor of watching Trump's pastor, Paula White, rapping about divine forces and angels Coming from Africa to win the election for Trump, and we've got this mashup that somebody threw together where she's rapping over Eminem, so we can take a listen to that.
Strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and strike and Yeah, you have to see the cat if you're listening to this.
I hear a sound of victory.
Oh, she so much wants to be in an Eminem video.
And her shoulder is going to hurt so much after that.
Oh, there's the guy walking by.
Let's talk about that guy.
We're going to totally talk about that guy.
That cast got rid of There he is again.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The cat has more than rhythm, he's got attitude.
Oh, there it is, the Glastonbury.
There goes the guy walking by again.
Oh man, that's so awesome.
Oh, that's fantastic.
You know, the saxophone, I just had this visual of Giuliani playing it.
I don't know why.
And we should point out that when she did that it wasn't on rhythm and it wasn't with a beat.
that something is, I mean, I know this is common in Pentecostal circles. - And we should point out that when she did that, it wasn't on rhythm and it wasn't with a beat.
It was actually much more frenetic.
- Oh, did they alter it?
Did they alter the, did they, did they regulate the beat?
The timing?
Yes.
Yes.
All right.
Well, I, I, cause I heard the, I heard the raw and it sounded pretty much like that as well.
I mean, she wasn't that far off.
It is a slight mashup in terms of the timing of it.
You can watch where the video skips.
The cat kind of takes your attention.
It still is an attempt at rhythmic trance induction, right?
That's the whole vibe.
Totally, totally.
Yeah, but I mean, what I got from this was like, okay, so it feels like there are these realms of unbelievability that we navigate.
Like, first of all, okay, how many millions of people voted for Trump?
And then, so you gotta be at some level there, and then above that, there are the people who believe that, you know, there's some sort of spiritual process going on that's going to enable Trump to overcome his enemies.
Trust the plan!
Right, there's another level there, but imagine, imagine being Imagine the amazing human contortions you would have to do to be the pastor who is actually invoking angels from Africa to strike the election officials or the domino machines or whatever.
What were they called?
Dominion, not Domino's Pizza.
So, yeah, like, amazing, amazing what people can do.
People are incredibly amazing, but she's trying so hard, and this is what stood out to me, is that, like, it's not going to happen, right?
The angels aren't going to come from Africa.
What are the angels doing in Africa anyway?
Are they black angels?
Well, they're also in South America.
You don't hear that part on this remix, but they're also coming from South.
So it's the whole world sending their angel fleets.
I think that's what she's really getting at.
But I'm trying to understand, are there angels that are like, like army divisions that are like the US military are assigned to various places and then we recall them and then they can help her.
hover above the election officials?
I'm not going to touch it.
There's so much there.
It's going to be a very long episode.
Okay, so this is totally speculative, but I feel that the amount that she has to work, and I think we'll hear this in Kenneth Copeland as well, it's really indicative of some kind of compensatory it's really indicative of some kind of compensatory thing where, you know, and I get this from the a dude walking back and forth behind her as well.
It's that he's totally unimpressed by the fact that she's speaking in tongues.
Like he's carrying some sort of file folder or something.
I don't know.
Maybe he's like doing some tech work or, but he's completely, he doesn't even notice that she's in her own trance world.
And I think it, wouldn't it be true that in actual That there would be nobody in the space that would be untouched?
Well, yeah, sure, but he probably saw this in rehearsal.
Right.
Okay.
Right, if he's one of the tech guys or administrative guys.
Or that it just happens so often that it's... But it made it feel like she was in her own world, right?
And that she was working really Hard at it.
And I just have this guess that it's really the, it's kind of like compensatory sadism because it's all about spite and contempt, right?
Oh yeah.
And it's acted out by people who know, who actually know that they have no real connection to the whole, to the holism that they love or to the God.
It's all performance.
It's all performance.
But it's like there's a tragedy and like an anxiety at the heart of it too.
The overwork is extraordinary.
And I just want to point out that glossolalia, the speaking in tongues, it's a very old technique.
And interestingly, it really is, from my perspective, about the hypnosis of it.
Because rhythmically, I always think of an example as flamenco, because before the guitars, way before the castanets, flamenco was just body slaps and singing.
It's a guttural, it's called gitano, the guttural singing.
And folk music always comes from, worldwide this is a phenomenon, it comes from poor communities.
And it's a form of expression and there's a form of hypnosis and trance because a lot of times the parties, going back to the Roma culture, they'll play overnight.
And it's a form of storytelling.
My problem My problem with what they're doing with this performative, as Julian said, aspect of it is that they're not communicating anything.
It's all about just the syllables and it makes it seem like they're saying something.
If you look at flamenco again, the storytelling actually makes sense.
There's no sense making in any of this language that she's using.
It literally is baby language whenever you're Yeah, and it also doesn't seem to me like she's in an actual ecstatic mystical trance, where she might be in a kind of brain state where her language centers were interacting with whatever other, you know, trippy thing was going on for her.
No, not at all.
Right, I mean, yeah, I'm not, yeah, I don't, I don't, I don't get that.
You don't get that from Kenneth Copeland as well, who seems very, very rehearsed in his glossolalia, but also super rehearsed in his strange, maniacal laughter, which we'll cue up for you now.
The media said what?
The media said Joe Biden's president.
Oh, man.
He's going to focus on one black guy.
He's he's he's going to give himself a stroke.
Oh, boy.
Oh.
This is like granddad at Thanksgiving when you made a joke.
Who's granddad?
Well, you know, the granddad who has no sense of humor and is just abusive.
It's so grotesque.
It reminds me of Lost Highway.
I'm a David Lynch fan.
Lost, you're right, you're right.
The guy, oh, the actor who plays Beretta who was on trial for killing his wife a few years ago, what's his name?
I can't remember his name, but he's in Lost Highway and he plays this terrifying demonic character.
You gotta put the synth music behind it, we have to remix Copland.
Yeah.
Yeah, he's the guy who comes up to Bill Pullman and he says, uh, he says, call me.
And he hands him a cell phone.
He says, where are you?
He says, I'm in your house right now.
Call me.
You'll see.
It's the most creepy thing I've ever seen in a movie.
And that's what this guy reminds me of.
Yeah.
So, so the, the laughter again, there's this like incredibly, he's not into it.
He's planned to do this.
There's this, there's this, there's this force quality to it.
And, I don't know.
What do they say about... I mean, going back to Freud again, what do we say about humor when it's forced?
I mean, when it's not forced, it's revealing something about, you know, the psychic repressions or things that we would rather bury.
But, like, if you force laughter out of a kind of spite like that...
He pointed out in the longer version of this book, to prep it, some research from Johns Hopkins, which you couldn't pronounce.
That was pretty funny.
But he does point out that it does have a sort of cathartic effect.
And what you just said is really important, intent.
Because I remember back when I was doing my yoga training, probably 2003, there's a musician named Laraji and he does a laughter meditation workshop.
And I was skeptical going in because I was like, why am I just going to laugh?
And I have to say that after about 10 minutes, my resistance came down and it was pure laughter.
And there was a sense of when you're in a room being led through that, it was powerful and I totally get it.
But this instance, this is pure spite.
And that really is a different effect on the consciousness of the people there.
Yeah, and again, you're describing an experience where, as a group of people, you went into this altered state together using a technique where you kind of fake it until it starts really happening and then it triggers a response that does take you into a certain state that is cathartic and probably has all sorts of somatic implications about it.
This is something else.
There's a hollowness to him just as a human being.
The sound is coming out of this shriveled husk of You know, of rage and fading social power.
And, I mean, this is the guy, you know, to speak of demonology, who won't fly outside of his private jet because demons fly in commercial, right?
Well, with both of them, too, I think, to your point, there's the forcedness really, to me, expresses how defiant they are in the face of reality.
How they're putting on this incredibly forceful show that we believe in this completely delusional construct.
Right.
And also I think you really nailed it, Matthew, when you said fading social reality because This week I had published an article on the wellness grift of J.P.' 's series, and we can apply the same logic or thinking to Paula White and Kenneth Copeland, which is that listen to what they say and then watch what they're selling.
They both realize that what they're selling isn't going to be worth much soon, and so they're just using whatever resources they have available to make sure that they don't lose that power.
Yeah, I mean, really, if that crowd in front of Copeland did go into a trans state emotionally, they would all start weeping, because that's what's really going on underneath it, right?
The last sort of coming out of repression thing that I want to look at is that I've been sent a number of influencer profiles over the last little while that are starting to form into a category that I'm calling the aggro spiritual boss babe rage witch.
And the first one that I looked at that was sent to me was a story, an IG story from a woman named Angela Sumner, so we'll put her profile up onto the page.
There's a couple of others that I've pointed to, but she actually says as she's walking down the beach to her followers, she's got tens of thousands of followers, she Has this kind of like clipped and very sort of irritated and abrupt manner here that seems quite like on the nose and integral to how she's feeling.
She actually says, someone asked me, what do you say when someone says to you?
Yeah, but Angela, a quarter of a million people have died.
I say a few things.
The first is, humans aren't supposed to live forever, and viruses are meant to eliminate those people from the population that don't have what it takes to face what's coming.
Imagine if we all just lived together, never got sick, and never died.
That's called artificial intelligence.
That's not called being human.
If you do survive the virus, then you get a genetic upgrade.
That's the point of a virus.
So it's hard to hear that like, yeah, if you have a compromised immune system, if you're obese, if you're not taking care of yourself, probably you're not going to survive the virus.
And then she gives this incredibly broad shrug, like a fuck you shrug.
It's kind of incredible to watch.
And so I just want to drop it with, you know, maybe this is premature, but I wonder as we And when we see the, you know, the space that the Mark Walshes of the world occupy in which, you know, this kind of machismo and alt-right discourse is confused with spiritual liberation, is that – Is somebody going to move into that particular archetypal space, and are women going to start doing that?
Are there going to be women influencers increasingly empowered to kind of take up this, like, you know, fuck this, I'm not selling doTERRA anymore, I'm going to, you know, be an anti-mask, you know, I don't know, terrorist or something, and that's going to be my spirituality.
I just want to say, too, that the incredible widespread influence of Zach Bush on all of these folks and a lot of these women is very, very evident.
There's always something about the virome and about how the virus is supposed to interact with you and, you know, whether you, that it's actually good for you.
And if you die, well, too bad.
Brian Mororescu is the author of The Immortality Key, The Secret History of the Religion with No Name.
And while the basis of that religion is the concept of dying before dying, something he connects with from the Eleusian Mysteries up through the founding of Christianity, in particular the Eucharist,
He feels that perhaps it wasn't wine in a wafer that was the original Eucharist, that it was perhaps a spiked sort of wine, spiked with psychedelics, perhaps something from a lizard or a blue water lily, perhaps ergot, which as we know much later was the psychoactive ingredient of LSD.
Now, I wanted to talk to Brian for a number of reasons as someone who is fascinated with psychedelics and religion and that's really been my own path for well over a quarter century of my life.
When the book was published, I just had to find out what all this was about and it's a fantastic book.
As you'll hear during our interview.
And interestingly, he's never done a psychedelic before.
And he spent 12 years writing this book, including going to the Vatican Secret Archive, talking with Vatican priests, traveling through Greece and Paris and studying artwork.
It's just fascinating.
And in the beginning, You'll hear us laugh a little bit as we talk because I had found his book from a Daily Beast article but very shortly after he was on the Joe Rogan podcast and that was his first bit of press, the first time he talked about the book.
So you can imagine Going from being your first book ever to being in front of an audience of 10 million people.
Graham Hancock, who is a regular Rogan guest, wrote the foreword to the book.
I can't recommend the book enough and I really hope you enjoy this interview.
We talk a lot about conspiracy theories, and something that listeners often point out is that, first of all, some conspiracy theories are often rooted in truth, and then how do you differentiate between what's purely a conspiracy theory, something like QAnon, which we discuss often here, and something that actually just might take a little bit more scholarship and understanding and connecting the dots, as in, say, the psychedelic origins of Christianity.
Listen, judge for yourself, but I also really recommend reading the book, because even though we got to chat for an hour, and he's a lovely person to talk to, and you'll learn a lot of insights during this talk, the book is one of the deepest dives into this topic that I can imagine.
Enjoy.
It was a trial by fire in Austin, Texas, man, so I'm used to this now.
Oh, is that your first one?
So that's a story in itself.
I mean, you spend 12 years writing this book and your first press is the Rogan Podcast.
That was the publisher's idea, not mine, by the way.
Well, that's great that they landed that.
I mean, that's such a great, and I mean, it's very topical for him, obviously, as well.
But how was the experience?
Almost exactly as I expected.
He can dip into, you know, an uber nerddom on this.
I mean, I think he and I share like the identical library, at least at least one section of our library is identical.
So I thought I thought he was fantastic, man.
That's awesome.
That's good to hear.
And you did.
I mean, it was it was fantastic.
I went to Las Vegas to I live in Los Angeles.
I went to Vegas to visit my father.
So that's a four hour ride.
So I got to listen to it.
And my wife sometimes with my podcast choices is always, you know, like.
And I said, look, I need to listen.
I want to interview Brian.
I need to listen.
She's like, okay, I get it.
And when you came on, she's because of coronavirus, she's going back to school now because she lost her career in events.
So she's decided to get her master's in linguistics.
Oh my goodness.
So because she speaks numerous languages and she's always loved them.
And so as soon as you said your pedigree and where you come from, she's like, I want to listen to all this.
All right.
That was great.
Yeah.
And especially, you know, actually let's, I have so many different places I want to start but since we're on that topic, coming from that and what do you think the importance of linguistics are and especially in a culture now in America where most of our communications are on tweet and grammar is no longer so much of a consideration.
Why is the study of language important?
I think the study of classics in particular is vital in every sense of the Latin word.
I think it's a matter of life and death.
In the book, I talk about the death of the classics.
I quote these two Stanford-educated professors, Hanson and Heath, who released this somewhat incendiary book, Who Killed Homer?
About the death of classical education.
I mean even for me when I picked it up by accident in the 90s it was it to me it still seemed like a throwback a generation ago.
It seemed like something that came out of the 1950s and tweed jackets and dead poet society and you know a part of the academy I didn't really belong to or belong in.
But as I started studying I started realizing that It's the only way to really pierce through some of these big questions.
So I dropped this loaded phrase about the best-kept secret in history, quoting the great Houston Smith and his opinion about the mysteries of Eleusis.
But it's also the secret of Christianity, too.
I mean, I think we lose sight of the fact that the sacred language of Christianity is Greek.
I mean, would you study the Torah with somebody who didn't know Hebrew?
Would you study the Quran with somebody who didn't know Arabic?
And here we are with all these Christian denominations all over the world, and even me, growing up Catholic, I very rarely heard the Greek.
I very rarely spoke to a priest about the Greek.
It wasn't until studying with the Jesuits.
And so there's always this tension in classics between the sacred and the profane.
I mean, you spend all this time reading this Greek literature that came out of Athens, but another big part of it is the New Testament.
And when I started to look at the New Testament with those classical eyes, the Greek eyes, everything changed, especially in the Gospel of John and some of the texts that came after.
It's just, I think that's where the crux of the matter is.
Well, I am not a fan of Las Vegas in general, but they do have a fantastic bookstore, and I picked this up when I got there.
I don't know if you know it, but after listening to you about the importance of the Greeks, and it is interesting because I mentioned on Twitter to you, my academic study is in religion, and I found it fascinating the way you posit it, and I've thought about it before, but never so succinctly, the idea that The Christian religion kind of pretends that it just was formed whole cloth out of nothing.
It just emerged.
And so you have this very distinct cutting off between mythology and religion.
And if we know anything about biology or history, we don't go that way.
Everything comes from something else.
When did it hit you, that connection about the underpinnings of Christianity being so heavily influenced by these traditions?
That's a good question.
I mean, at some point along the way, I mean, I think it was even early.
I mean, as a teenager, you know, again, I'm there reading Homer.
That's kind of one of the first things you're reading when you're reading Greek.
And then I'm at this Jesuit prep school and I'm also reading the New Testament for the first time in Greek.
And it's kind of like, it's almost so obvious that people forget about it.
But I have Homer in one hand and the Gospel of John in the other.
And I realized, well, this is the same language.
I mean, there must be something to this.
And it's pretty clear that the Gospel writers were aware of what was happening in this Hellenistic world.
I mean, so the political prominence of the Greeks had fallen, obviously, by the first, second centuries AD, but Hellenism itself, I mean, the Greek influence itself was still there.
So when you're reading Paul's letters, for example, the 21 of the 27 books of the New Testament, he's writing two Greek speakers in Greek places.
So the roots of Christianity obviously are in Galilee and Jerusalem, but the seeds start to sprout in communities like Corinth and Ephesus and Rome and all over Italy.
I mean, this is how Christianity becomes Christianity, and it's doing that in a Greek world.
So even if you just approach the Gospels from that sense, the obvious question is, why were they writing in this language to people who knew about things like the mysteries and who, for generations, Right?
Had been hearing stories from their parents and grandparents about all these gods and goddesses.
It's really hard to make a left turn into Christianity and divorce everything that came before, which is not what happened, obviously.
I think that to read the Gospels just in a very plain sense with that in mind begins to open up a world of possibilities.
Now you could have just as easily, in my opinion, called the book, The Catholic Church Started the War on Drugs.
It's interesting because I also posted on social yesterday that I was going to be talking to you with the book cover and some people chimed in.
And one comment that I've received from a few people is that, oh, I thought it was just a book on wine.
And with the title that you chose, which is a great title though, there is no hint that it's about psychedelics or psychoactive substances.
Was that a conscious choice to leave that out of the title?
I think it was.
Whether you ask me or the publisher, I think so.
And also to leave Jesus out of the title, by the way, which I went back and forth.
One of my alternative titles, which made it into one of my favorite chapters, is The Drug of Immortality.
I still think that That works by the way, the pharmakon athanasias, that's the phrase that Ignatius of Antioch used to describe the Eucharist in the early 2nd century AD, which is awfully interesting, the word pharmakon.
But I think that I like the ambiguity because at the end, it's actually a very important point.
At the end of the day, the key I'm referring to is not psychedelics.
And I've seen some misinterpretations out there.
What I mean by the immortality key is what I have in the very beginning of the book, which is the concept of dying before dying and this near-death mystical experience.
Now, certainly psychedelics seem to be an awfully fast-acting, reliable way to enter into that state, right?
That state between life and death.
But it's not the only one.
I want to be very, very clear about that.
It's one tool in the spiritual toolkit.
But what I mean by the key is, again, in Greek, and this is something that's preserved at the St.
Paul's Monastery, for example, which is, αν πεθάνεις, πριν πεθάνεις, δεν τα πεθάνεις, οταν πεθάνεις.
If you die before you die, you won't die when you die.
That's the actual key.
That is the key.
It's not psychedelics.
It's not drugs.
It's this concept of Navigating the liminal space between what you and I are doing right now and dreaming and death and in that state, the mystics tell us, the sages tell us, is the potential to grasp a very different view of reality.
You took 12 years to write the book.
Most of the action of the book though happens in the last couple of years.
So did you have a clear picture of what you were getting into in the beginning or did it just evolve and were those first eight or so years mostly spent doing research?
It was research.
It was raising two daughters.
It was moving from New York to DC.
Yeah.
I mean, I say the, the first eight, yeah, that's about right.
The first eight to 10 years was, was nights and weekends just playing with this mystery.
I mean, I had a, I had a real job as a practicing attorney.
And, um, when I came across that, that study from Hopkins about the, this early psilocybin experiments, and these volunteers describing it in mystical terms, two-thirds saying it was among the most meaningful of their life.
That's when the circumstantial evidence kind of pulled me into this mystery.
And then I'd never read anything about psychedelics ever and haven't tried them to this day.
So it was eight years of like educating myself and doing this multidisciplinary thing where I would reach out to a biblical scholar one day and I'd reach out to an archaeologist the other day and then I'd reach out to a linguist one day and then I'd reach out to a botanist the other day and then I'd reach out to a neuropsychopharmacologist I mean, there was never like one silo to go to and explore this stuff.
So, I mean, even though it was like my pastime, the real difficulty was trying to combine all these disciplines.
And the only way to do that is one at a time.
And that was, I mean, just painstaking work for like a lot of years until, um, we sold the proposal.
And that's when I, I, uh, cast off on the adventure.
Okay.
All right.
Well, but they do seem to merge around cannabis in some, in some sense, because you represented Mike James, I believe, uh, uh, for, you know, an athlete, uh, for using cannabis, uh, The fact that, and I've thought about this a lot about athletes in recovery, the fact that they have readily available opioids, which we know the problems with, and yet they can get kicked out of the league for cannabis use.
Was your work so far up until that point influential in your decision to start working in that space?
Yeah, I have a good answer for that for someone who doesn't do drugs, by the way.
My very quick answer for why I got involved in cannabis advocacy was because I saw it as instrumental in psychedelic advocacy.
And just kind of reassessing our relationship with drugs and realizing that the war on drugs is a very new phenomenon.
If you look back over the history of Western civilization, I mean, there's always lore and there's always, you know, a certain caution around these pharmaka, both in the Greek and Roman worlds.
But they weren't really illegal the same way that they are today.
There was always suspicion about how they were used and for what purposes.
Nobody wants to poison anybody or throw a hex on somebody.
But they weren't, they didn't have the same relationship that we have.
Today.
And it's all just because of when you and I happened to be born by just by shit luck that we're in this war on drugs.
And at some point, I realized that it's not just the substance itself, but it's who's using the substance.
Ethan Nadelman at the Drug Policy Alliance, I think I saw a TED Talk of his that really struck me.
But the main reason I got involved in advocacy for cannabis is social justice.
I mean, the idea that a person of color is four times More likely to be arrested for simple cannabis possession and then enter the criminal justice system is ridiculous.
And in athletics, the idea that a guy like Mike James, NFL players are four times more likely than the general population to develop an opioid addiction is something that shouldn't be.
We need to think of alternative ways to treat some of these conditions.
And we absolutely need drugs out of the criminal justice system.
And just last week was described by NBC as a tipping point.
I mean, a real watershed, not just what happened with cannabis, but in Oregon, decriminalizing all drugs and about to set up a regulated system for therapeutic psilocybin.
It'll be the first jurisdiction on the planet with a really robust regulated system for psilocybin.
It's a sign of things to come.
This is going to change a lot over the next 5-10 years.
We're entering now a space that I've been doing work in for a long time.
I published a month ago a book on psychedelics and ritual and therapy and talking about how ritual and therapy aren't that dissimilar and specifically around rethinking psychiatry around benzodiazepines and SSRIs and the ways that we treat people in mental health.
I was introduced to psychedelics in college at the same time I was introduced to religion.
So I grew up very loosely Catholic, unlike you.
In sixth grade, when I said I didn't want to go to CCD anymore, parents were like, yeah, that's fine.
So there was no problem with that from that.
So I had no religious upbringing in that sense.
And so being introduced to psilocybin and LSD and the Buddhist and Hindu texts at the same time, It just made sense.
And so I come at it from a very different perspective, one that is anecdotal and communal, admittedly, and your research is fantastic.
Let me just add in the way you wrote the book, too.
I mean, it's a well-written book.
It's got the mystery and suspense, but the research and so everything about that.
How much resistance did you face with the general treaties that psychedelics were involved in the Eucharist?
Hmm, I haven't, I'm sure it's coming.
I haven't gotten too much backlash just yet and I think every conversation I have I'm a little bit more careful of what I was trying to say.
I think it's definitely clear from the book that I'm not talking about The Last Supper.
And when I'm investigating the original Eucharist, there's no data to go on from King David's upper chamber there.
I mean, we're looking for the Holy Grail, right?
It hasn't been found for a reason.
So what I'm looking for are proxies for what may have happened on that evening.
Which is nothing less than a turning point in Western civilization.
Bart Ehrman calls it one of the greatest turning points for what happened thereafter.
How this illegal cult manages to transform, convert the Roman Empire in only 300 years.
Like, why is that?
I mean, Rodney Stark writes about this.
Elaine Pagels writes about this.
All my heroes write about this.
And I think we're all looking at pieces of the puzzle.
Psychedelics are just one, perhaps, very tiny piece of what was happening in those 300 years and that great cultural transformation.
Again, amongst Greek people, mainly Greek people, who probably spoke some Greek, probably some Latin, but why would they have converted so quickly?
Why was the faith kept alive?
I'm really interested in how the earliest Greek speakers would have interpreted the Gospel of John, for example, and how an alternative Eucharist may have made its way into some of these early Greek-speaking communities and not just made its way, but really just had been retained from what came before.
I mean a place like Corinth for example, my goodness, like today an hour west of Eleusis, essentially the spiritual capital of the ancient Greek world, the most famous mystery site.
There's Corinth.
An hour to its left today.
What are the odds that some of those Corinthians themselves weren't initiated at Eleusis?
Or didn't have parents and grandparents who were initiated at Eleusis?
Or went to Delphi, just north of them, to consult the Oracle?
Or went, you know, west to the mountains to worship Dionysus with some of this spiked wine?
I think that when we get a little more granular about what was really happening in the 1st, 2nd, 3rd centuries AD, this hypothesis, I think, gains value that way.
And I try not to be dispositive with my language.
We're looking for the archaeochemical data to show this once and for all.
But, you know, the book is only proof of concept for what's out there.
And the fact that this archaeobotany, archaeochemistry really hasn't received the funding And attention that it deserves.
But once it gets that, and I'm working on that, we can talk about that, once it gets that attention, what's going to happen over the next 10 years?
What chalice are we going to find next?
What vessel?
What proto-mass is going to be unearthed?
I mean, I think that we're living at a time when the roots of this faith are really going to emerge for the first time.
And again, I do appreciate your commitment to scholarship, right, and the evidence.
And I do think that's really important.
In modern ayahuasca circles, for example, there is this sentiment that the plants taught humans how to mix them, to take the dimethyltryptamine and mix it with the MAO inhibitor and all that.
And from my perspective, We didn't have whole foods a few thousand years ago.
Humans likely, I mean, they tried everything.
Lizards, for example, which you write about.
I mean, everything.
And I feel like that our ancestors would have Kept the things that do what psychedelics do and and possibly because there's also a long in speculation that psychedelics underpin religious ritual in general because of what it does to your body and your relationship to the environment as well.
And so I do think that anecdote does play some role in this and I think it's important to point out but but more specifically to your work.
There's just so many questions.
Let's go.
Yeah, because again, there's things that have been in my head for a long time.
Why do you think that from what I've studied and you've studied Sanskrit, people are more open to the idea that Soma is made of some sort of psychedelic and the Eastern religions.
Whereas anytime I've seen this conversation come up over the last 20 years around Christianity and the Western circles, there's much more resistance. - Mm.
Why do you think that is?
It's a great question.
I do mention it very briefly in the book, I think.
I think it's just a general bias, and maybe not even a hard bias, but I call it a blind spot as well in academia, and particularly among classicists.
As well.
I guess the short answer is that we've lost our sacred pharmacopeia.
When we think about plant medicine, right?
That phrase that's thrown about a lot today.
You mentioned the Amazon.
I think about the Amazon too.
I think about ayahuasca tourism.
I think that you'll find a lot of books talking about soma.
and other Eastern mysticism.
You'll find a lot of books on Eastern mysticism in general.
It's hard not to walk around and find a yoga studio near where you're living.
I think these are all products of a different generation, our parents' generation.
And what really struck me about the heart of Western civilization is that there was once a sacred pharmacopoeia.
It's undeniable from the literature.
Back to your very first question, part of the reason we don't know this is that we don't study Dioscorides.
The second you pick up Dioscorides, the father of drugs, father of pharmacology, who wrote his Materia Medica in the first century AD, the exact same time the Gospels are being written, you're seeing wine spiked with all kinds of really colorful ingredients.
Plants and herbs and toxins and it's part of a tradition that you can easily trace back in the literature all the way back to Homer and from Homer to the fall of the Roman Empire over a thousand years what you're seeing is wine described as a pharmakon right back to that pharmakon Athanasius the drug of immortality.
It's no mistake that the Eucharist is described as the drug of immortality by the early church fathers, because there was this sense of really sophisticated botanical understanding that goes all the way back to Homer and this person Circe, this mythical witch Circe, mixing up the pharmakalugra for Odysseus and his mates, and obviously it goes back a lot further than that.
And so part of the reason I wrote the book is just to show people that within Western civilization, at its roots in fact, is this very sacred pharmacopoeia.
Not that it was or was not the sacrament at Eleusis or the original Eucharist, whatever that means, but that this tradition was certainly there and, you know, it begs the question, how prevalent it was?
How widespread was it really?
But one thing you made me laugh in the book, you know, we talked about language earlier and how important it is.
And if you think of something like the Mahabharata and the Shaloka, like the language was so specific for a reason and every syllable has meaning.
And yet you point out that Greeks never invented a word for alcohol.
Yeah, yeah.
I should have mentioned that, by the way.
Yeah, I'm giving you these silly... I'm going to give shorter answers from now on.
How about this one?
Yeah, there's no word for alcohol in Greek.
I'm sorry, I'm running on.
If you just think of the word alcohol, the A-L, alcohol, is obviously from the Arabic, and it comes from all these chemical experiments that were happening in the 8th, 9th, 10th centuries, when this distillation enters Europe.
But before that, the Greeks and the Romans didn't invent a word for alcohol.
Again, the Greek word for it, amongst other things, I mean, the common word is oinos, obviously, where we get vine.
But the common, you know, appellation was pharmakon, pharmacy.
I mean, that's how they referred to it as wine, because there was no difference between cuisine and pharmacology.
You took your medicine with your wine.
So, that's what it was.
I also want to ask you about the sort of the second idea in the book that I think is important.
I mean, hugely important, especially in our time.
But you did mention something that you bring up at the end of the book, which is you almost had a chalice or a vessel analyzed.
You almost had the Vatican release it.
And then that didn't quite work out by the time the book was published.
But you just said that, you know, you're still working on it.
So has there been any advancement on that since the since you ended up since you submitted the final copy of the book?
Absolutely, and it wasn't that long ago, that was over the summer, and you're the first person to ask me that, so I'll tell you the answer.
So the ancient world, let me give a shorter answer, the ancient world is full of secrets.
So ever since, well actually from earlier this year and last year, I profile Andrew Koh, in the book.
He's one of the world's leading archaeochemists currently at MIT, but there's never been a proper center for this.
There's never been a home for all those different silos that I mentioned earlier, right?
That this real transdisciplinary methodology, which is the only way to crack these secrets, because the science of archaeochemistry is a bit of a misnomer.
It's not really just the science.
You know, on the one hand, you're taking these ancient artifacts and blasting them with this high-tech instrumentation, gas chromatography, mass spectrometry, but once you get the results, You have to feed that into a cultural matrix and figure out what was really there.
So you need to know the ancient Greek text, you need to know the ancient text in Latin, and put all this stuff together and compare it with all the ethnobotanical literature, and compare it with these paleoecological maps to see what was growing where and when, and make this composite picture of what this was.
So all that said, we've been having a series of really Fruitful discussions at Harvard with various departments about putting all this together, getting rid of the silos and attacking this issue in a very serious way at the highest levels of academia and not just Harvard but elsewhere.
So, this conversation is really percolating amongst a lot of different specialties, and with that, I won't say exactly what, but there's a lot of sites that are now ripe for investigation.
Andrew Co.
is sitting on 5,000 to 10,000 organic samples that haven't been properly analyzed.
At the end of my book I say it may have been discovered already, whatever that it was.
It may be sitting in a museum somewhere.
It may be sitting in Andrew Koh's archives.
It's a process of slowing down and taking the time and money to test this stuff and there's a lot of exciting developments on the way.
So you do make a shout out at the very end of the book asking the Pope to join you on your first psychedelic experience, if and when that does happen, which I hope it does, but that's again my bias.
But I really enjoyed at the end how you Talk about how the Catholic Church was going through this entire sex scandal, obviously, which abuse sex scandal.
And yet, you know, they, they, there's so much they try to cover up.
Do you talk a little bit about what you think happened around that time, three to 400 years into the religion that they started to, and specifically, I'd love you to touch upon that.
As I mentioned, the second part, which is you write women in drugs.
For 2,000 years, they have been the two biggest thorns in the side of the church.
Right.
Yeah, I'll do deference to Pope Francis.
I do, I want to be respectful about this.
And yesterday was a very hard day for the Catholic Church, for fellow Catholics out there who've read the report on Cardinal McCarrick, who actually had the opportunity to meet at some point in Washington, D.C.
The church is going through hard times, and another reason I wrote this book is not to attack the church, but to talk about the church and Catholicism in a way that tells a fuller story.
And all this is ancient history about the women and drugs, largely is ancient history.
I'm not doing this to impugn the Pope or the current leadership.
I'm just trying to tease out the details of how women do seem to be involved in the consecration of the early Eucharist.
We do know from the writings of Hippolytus and other Church Fathers from as early as the 2nd century into the 3rd century A.D.
that Gnostic groups like the followers of Marcus included women consecrating their sacrament and throwing pharmakon into it.
I mentioned this one passage from Hippolytus in his refutation of all the heresies where he talks about women throwing drugs in and he uses the word pharmakon seven times in a row to describe their Eucharist.
And I descend into the catacombs under Rome and look at all these frescoes and what you see are women consecrating wine.
Now whether it was a Eucharist or whether it was the wine of the Refrigerium, which was the pagan Roman ritual of uniting the living and the dead, we're not quite sure.
But those 300 years were this intercultural encounter.
Where you see not just paganism and Christianity bumping up against each other, but power politics of women and men.
And in many ways, it shouldn't be a surprise, and it's not new, but the Church really just stepped in to the role of the Roman Empire.
Which was a largely patriarchal, male-led proposition.
It should be no surprise how the priesthood came to be.
But it's not the only version of Christianity that was around.
There were women deeply involved.
And I'll just finish with this.
Let's not forget that Mary Magdalene in the Gospel of John is the first and only witness to the resurrection of Jesus.
It's she who sees him, has a visionary experience of Jesus, and is tasked by Jesus of telling the male apostles about the resurrection.
So for a time, Mary Magdalene, without getting too damn brown about it, she was the church.
The church was a woman, and John is explicit about that in chapter 20.
And don't feel the need to truncate your answers.
I like listening.
So you keep saying that, but don't worry about that.
I find it funny that you can see over my shoulder, Osiris is sitting there.
He usually curls up during my interviews and yet he's very active during yours.
So, and he's also almost 21.
So he's going for immortality as well, I think.
Now in the process of writing the book, how did your own relationship to Catholicism change?
Thank you for asking that, and I'm going to send this to my friends in the Vatican.
It got deeper.
I'll be totally honest with you.
It got deeper.
I still go back and forth about this.
I title the introduction to my book, A New Reformation.
And I'm still going back and forth about what I mean by that.
I don't know what I mean by that, but I do know that each attempt to reanalyze the faith has always been an attempt to get back to the roots, right?
So, beginning with Martin Luther and the humanism movement, I talk a lot about in the book this concept of ad fontes.
Back to the source, back to the fountain, back to the real source of wisdom.
It begins with the Protestants.
You see it all the way through the evangelical community and the sola scriptura and just looking to the Word of God.
And I think there's always an attempt just to figure out what was happening.
What was the message of this Jesus?
And the only honest answer is that there was no monolithic Christianity, just like today You look around and you see 33,000 denominations of Christianity, a few of which include psychedelics as their sacrament.
I'm thinking of the Santo Daime and others, or even the Native American Church, which has some Christian syncretism to it.
I think that the possibility of a psychedelic sacrament in antiquity is not laughable.
In fact, it's quite plausible according to some of the literature and some of the data that's just beginning to emerge on the scientific front.
And so for me, when I look and I see this kind of very Hellenic, you know, Christianity that was very much at the roots of the Catholic Church, which landed in Rome, not by mistake, but because Rome was there in Magna Graecia, this very Greek riddled environment that called to Greek mystics.
Mystics dedicated to Demeter, Persephone and Dionysus for centuries, including Pythagoras and Parmenides and Empedocles.
I mean, this is the religious tradition, based on Peter Kingsley's writing, that really, really speaks to me.
And the more I found that Greek influence I mean, in some cases, literally, in the catacombs, the more I began to really love and appreciate what this was all about.
And the more I read the Greek and the more evidence that I see, I mean, I talked to Andrew Sullivan about this, the more in love with Christianity I become.
Now it might not be your version of Christianity or some people's definition of Christianity today, but again, if you just step back and take a very honest look at the Greek of the New Testament and the Greek landscape in which it emerged, I think it's a really powerful statement because to me, My Christianity combines the best of the ancient Greek mysteries and the best of the morality and the ethics and the love and the agape that comes with Christianity.
And that to me does seem like an innovation in the first and second centuries.
And I think it's a very powerful call that Jesus was making to love your neighbor.
You didn't mention the Church of Coltrane, which I think is up there, which I actually do love that idea. - Well, cannabis is a sacrament in their church, so, and the music, so that's very much more my speed.
The mysticism, I've always thought of the Gnostics along the lines of the Sufis.
I mean, in every religion, you have sort of the structure that comes to say, this is what we are.
And then you have the mystics who actually want to experience what the charismatic leaders experience.
They don't just want to regurgitate the rituals.
They want to live them.
And I think that's really important.
And I wonder how willing, especially at this point, I mean, this is sort of sidetracked, but one of the things that on the podcast and in my work that I've been studying this year is what does a digital religion look like?
And does QAnon fit that?
And, you know, we don't know because this is brand new territory.
But like, how does how does a charismatic leader who's a cult leader operate in virtual reality?
Right.
Is there a presence through the lens in the same sense that they have this this power?
And I think these are all questions we have to reckon with because they're starting to emerge right now and influence politics on a pretty big level.
But getting back to the mystical aspect of it, why do you think that certain leaders are so hesitant about the ability for their following to actually experience what Jesus experienced, not why do you think that certain leaders are Not just sort of hope to, at the end of their life, get to this place where they're accepted for what they did, but actually experience, you know, the ritual itself.
Hmm.
Well, this is okay.
Now we're cooking with grease.
I mean, that's the question.
And again, I didn't write this book to be anti-organized religion.
In some cases, it's the exact opposite, which we can talk about.
But, you know, in the intro, I mentioned Brother David Schindler-Rosch, this Benedictine monk, who's a hero of mine.
And he talks about that age-old tension between the mystics and the dogma and doctrine of organized faith.
I don't think you can have one without the other.
Quite frankly.
And the balance, as Brother David says, is just to rediscover that original visionary power and live in it.
Live in it as a lived experience.
This is what Joseph Campbell says of religion, about a lived experience.
Maybe why the charisma of QAnon and other leaders resonates with people, because it's a lived experience.
We're talking about emotional potential.
That's how the great anthropologist Clifford Geertz defines religion.
These Powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations, he talks about.
That only happens when you're talking about something that gets inside people's bones.
And that's what the mystical experience is.
It's how these religions are born.
Brother David says it's virtually impossible to start a religion without mystical experience, like Moses in the burning bush and Paul on the road to Damascus, or Peter in Acts is caught up in a trance.
You know, this is always there in our past and the idea is that it was only mystics and saints, largely, who were authorized to experience that.
And the Catholic Church has always had a quirky relationship with the saints and mystics and visionaries.
Because what good is the hierarchy of the church if there's this direct pipeline, this Gnostic pipeline to God?
And I would argue that there's every reason for the church.
And I play with this question throughout the book and I use different language in different ways, but I think that the church is there as a sacred container.
For this experience, and like in my own case, I can speak just for me.
I haven't done psychedelics, but I can envision a time when it's legal in five to ten years time, maybe earlier, where I can go to a retreat center and experience psilocybin, not just under the care and guidance of trained medical personnel, but under the care of a priest.
Or a pastor, or a chaplain, a psychedelic chaplain, who would go with me on this journey, which is nothing less than a journey.
I mean, two years preparing for it, emotionally and psychologically, in my case, is what I would want.
I mean, intense preparation in the days that precede it, by my side while it's happening, talking about it afterwards.
That's what I envision.
I think that would speak to lots of people.
It's impossible to predict, but I do think that there's a way for the structure of organized faith to invite in these mystical experiences and give them meaning, give them structure.
Well, exactly.
And that's one of the biggest points I made in my book.
And again, getting back to ritual, ritual was therapy.
Like when you're in smaller tribal structures, you know, the mental health and health in general is communal.
It's never just about the individual.
One topic I write about often is the difference between the perceptions of individual cultures like America and then Asian cultures which are much more collectivist and how they perceive like there's no there's no anti-mask rallies in Asian countries like because they Because they understand that their health is dependent upon everyone else around them.
And I think that's something that's lost in our culture.
And there are many things about our culture that I love, but that is definitely lost, this understanding of the strength.
And I think that does speak to religion at its best.
You mentioned the moral.
Dictates and I've always found that that's what religion brings to people much more than the metaphysics.
The metaphysics to me are, you know, when you see people speaking in tongues, you know, what is that really?
But if you're loving your neighbor and you're going out and partaking in charity, that's really powerful.
Yeah, and that's my Christianity.
That's what I say with a straight face at the end of the book.
I do consider myself a Christian.
Maybe Pope Francis disagrees.
Maybe evangelicals might disagree.
I hope not.
I really do hope not because I'm struggling with my own identity crisis here, which is, I talk about in the afterword, where the only reason I came across Latin and Greek and this investigation into the roots of the faith was through the Jesuits.
And the Jesuits always asked me, propelled me to question, to question everything.
What good is faith if it's untested?
But these were the folks who also taught me to be a man for others.
And I've carried that into my legal practice.
To make sure I dedicate my pro bono efforts to where they need to go.
I try and carry that to my family and my friends.
I try and be a good citizen.
And I think it was that training that I had and all those pro-social behaviors, which I found in the psychedelic literature, by the way.
Something else that really intrigued me is how the volunteers talk about, and some psychologists refer to it as the science of awe, whereby after one of these experiences, all these pro-social behaviors are unleashed, like kindness and self-sacrifice and resource sharing.
And it seems crazy and hippie, but maybe under the right settings and with the right mindset, a very powerful experience like that can guide us all towards, what, a more humane society?
It seems like the kind of things that we could use right now.
Yeah, absolutely.
And especially, I mean, you reference hippies.
You know, I always point out that in the 1960s, one out of every three adults in America were on some form of tranquilizer.
So, like, Miltown was the first blockbuster drug.
And I actually grew up in Miltown, which is the town that it was named for.
So, I have a long history with, like, thinking about these things.
But the You mentioned a little a moment ago, and I want to kind of close with a little bit of more speculation.
You've kind of made some of these points, but I think it's important.
Joseph Campbell said that he thinks that there should effectively be a reformation every 20 years.
Because in order for a religion to suit the times that they live in, it has to update because we're always evolving creatures.
And so recently when the Pope came out and said that he'll accept homosexuals or he wants to accept homosexuals as a civil union, in my head, I was like, you can't just say marriage.
Like, is it really that revolutionary at this point?
But what in your eyes, what Say you do get these chalices analyzed and the evidence is irrefutable that there were some substances in there that we haven't really thought about before.
The church in general hasn't thought about.
What does that reformation look like?
What does a ritual look like 10 years from now if that knowledge is accepted and how could it strengthen the religion?
Okay, so it's a little above my pay grade, but I'll be happy to speculate and keep it short.
I think with the lawyerly proviso that it's illegal right now, and the additional proviso that it's somewhat impossible to predict, I can see this going in lots of different directions.
What's going to happen in Oregon, what is happening as we speak in real time, is the very beginning of a regulated system, a therapeutic system.
And in short order, the mental health care industry is going to change pretty quickly.
So folks will be able to avail themselves of psilocybin only as one example in the coming years for things like anxiety, depression, PTSD, maybe end of life distress, which for me raises religious and spiritual questions, particularly end of life distress.
You know, in the Catholic Church, there's not just a Eucharist.
There is the viaticum.
There's the last rites, which help usher you into the afterlife.
It's a concept you find in lots of different faiths, by the way.
So I can envision if I were approaching my last days, I can envision receiving psilocybin, not just from, again, a medical professional in one of these licensed FDA approved retreat centers.
But if you're a person of faith and you've been going to church every Sunday for 50, 60 years, wouldn't you want your pastor there with you?
So, Maybe that's an opportunity for some of this biotechnology to find its way to the faithful.
And that could really change faith for folks facing the end of life, which is why the scientists I think we need to keep doing this research to figure out what kind of effect that does have on people approaching death.
It could be a real boon, a real gift to people.
Something else that might happen is you find people gathering in community, like you have today.
In Brazil, in the Santo Daime.
It occupies this space in Brazil and a few other countries, but it's not unthinkable to imagine a psychedelic sacrament in a small community.
Many years from now.
Again, in a way that's legal and protected.
If more and more evidence is forthcoming on the scientific side.
So there's all kinds of ways that this could go.
I really do think it's this decade though.
I think it's within this decade.
I think by 2030, all these questions are going to start arising and really influencing the direction of not just Christianity, but Judaism and potentially other faiths.
From my experiences, Judaism has been much more open to mysticism.
Maybe not orthodox, but just my general group of friends and the culture, which is, I think, important.
But they've always been.
That's why the link between Judaism and Buddhism has been so strong, and Judaism and Kundalini Yoga.
I'll preface this with one that I have, because again, writing about psychedelics for a long time, I was very happy when ketamine, which is not a psychedelic chemically, but it kind of gets lumped in there.
It was fast-tracked by the FDA and it showed efficacy.
I was very happy about that.
But the trials that passed were not solid.
Six people died and three committed suicide and the FDA allowed the explanation that that was because they came off the drug, not that it was a side effect of coming off of the drug.
So I'm just saying that we're entering a space where you have substances that are thousands of years old.
You've referenced it's probably been going on much longer than we have records for.
I agree with that.
And now you have pharmaceutical companies coming in and trying to create patents off of different molecules, just changing molecules in order to do that.
Do you see any dangers of that as it enters the healthcare system?
Because what you just presented was beautiful and it is the future I hope for, having suffered from anxiety disorder and been on a benzo and understanding what that is.
I think that this is a good way to go, but do you foresee any dangers?
What I foresee is a very complicated landscape, I guess is the best way to put it.
Because these therapeutics, and there are different interests investigating them, some from the purely clinical research, some from the for-profit pharma-biotech vantage, but they're all converging on these substances at the same time for different reasons.
And I do think they're powerful.
I do think they're dangerous.
Psychedelics are absolutely not for everybody, which is why I myself haven't yet taken them.
And I do think they're sacred.
At the same time, at least when used with the right intention and in the right circumstances.
And so how do all these conflicting interests bounce off each other?
I don't really know.
I don't think anyone knows yet, but I think you can already glimpse what's happening in cannabis and the commercialization of cannabis.
Which wasn't the case even 10 years ago, which is why I keep saying 10 years from now, what does this landscape look like?
It's going to be everything.
It's going to be a potluck of pharmaceutical interventions and hopefully insurance-backed retreat centers, off-the-grid churches, you know, folks receiving the viaticum at the end of life.
It's going to be a hodgepodge of different things.
I think that it's important To keep in mind, even from the therapeutic angle, is that the mystical experience seems to be key to what's happening.
And when you talk to the researchers like Tony Bosses at NYU or Bill Richards at Hopkins, this is what they talk about.
And they are quick to remind me that despite the therapeutic outcomes, it's the depth of the mystical experience that seems to be determinative.
And, you know, even when atheists are describing themselves as being bathed in God's love, that ought to stop you in your tracks if you're a pharmaceutical CEO and question how best to structure these sessions.
Because it's not a magic pill.
It has very much to do with how it's consumed and why it's consumed and the preparation that goes into that.
I think that that's almost stupidly clear from the past half century of research into these substances, let alone the thousands of years and this book of mystery traditions that I write about to show that there was this really sacred container to this stuff.
So it would be my hope that even in a very secular setting that some of this sacredness were somehow maintained.
Well you do write about your atheist friends.
I am an atheist.
I just find all religions fascinating and so I Rather than deciding on one, I've just decided to take the best of all of them and understand that.
But I do concur with their assessment that there is something transcendent about the experience itself.
I do hope you get to experience that.
Last thing, and it is short, now that you have a New York Times bestseller, congratulations, and you are getting a lot of press, and I'm sure this is going to be a long-tail book as things progress.
Has your wife signed off on the second book?
She's here actually.
We were just talking about that a couple days ago.
What should I say?
I think she's happy for me to proceed and I owe her an enormous, enormous debt of gratitude for being by my side the entire way and keeping me honest, which is what I meant to tell Joe Rogan, by the way.
She's very sharp, much sharper than me.
She went to Harvard Law School and every time I came to her with a new piece of data, she would say, really?
Can't you do better?
I mean, you know, make an argument here.
So she kept me honest.
She provided a wonderful home for our daughters and took care of them when I was off in the catacombs.
So this is why I dedicated the book to her.
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