Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

July 19, 2021 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast

01:59:01

The Immortality Key; Psychedelics and the Ancient Age | Brian Muraresku & Prof. Carl Ruck | EP 183

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	What about Jung?
	Do you think that he experimented with hallucinogens?
	Who?
	Carl Jung.
	Because he knew things.
	He knows things that you just can't believe anybody could know.
	We know he spent a year in Taos.
	I have a house in Taos.
	And that year is not documented, but he was experimenting with mind-altering substances.
	Psilocybin?
	Probably.
	Was that before or after the Red Book?
	Do you know?
	I think the bread book came out of that.
	Hello everyone.
	I'm pleased to talk with two people today.
	First with author Brian C. Murescu, and then later in the discussion with Professor Carl A. P. Ruck, Professor of Classical Studies at Boston University.
	Mr.
	Murescu, the author, wrote the recent book, The Immortality Key, The Secret History of the Religion with No Name, which was published by St.
	Martin's Press in 2020.
	That's the book here.
	I read it from cover to cover last month.
	It was as excitingly plotted as Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code which is really saying something given that was a best-selling novel and this is actually a work of adventure, non-fiction, inquiry and scientific exploration all compacted into something that was extraordinarily readable.
	Mr.
	Rurescu graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Brown University with a degree in Latin About the book.
	For 2,000 years prior to the birth of Christ, the ancient Greeks found revelation in their own sacraments.
	Sacred beverages were routinely consumed as part of the so-called ancient mysteries, elaborate rites that led initiates to the brink of death and beyond at Aloysius.
	Others drank the holy wine of Dionysius to become one with the God.
	In the 1970s, scholars, including Dr.
	Karl Rock, claimed that this beer and wine, the original sacraments of Western civilization, were spiked with mind-altering drugs.
	In recent years, vindication for the disgraced theory has been quietly mounting in the laboratory.
	The constantly advancing fields of archaeobotany and archaeochemistry have been hinting at the enduring use of hallucinogenic drinks in antiquity.
	And with a single dose of psilocybin, the psychopharmacologists at Johns Hopkins and NYU are now producing powerful revelatory religious slash mystical experiences in the lab.
	But the smoking gun remains elusive.
	If these sacraments survived for thousands of years in our remote prehistory, from the Stone Age to the ancient Greeks, did they also survive into the Age of Jesus?
	Was the Eucharist of the earliest Christians, in fact, a psychedelic Eucharist?
	The Immortality Key takes its readers on an adventurous 12-year global hunt for evidence.
	Professor Karl Ruck, who will join us for the latter part of the discussion, is an authority on the ecstatic rituals of the god Dionysius.
	With the ethnomycologist R. Gordon Wasson and Albert Hoffman, who discovered LSD, he identified the secret psychoactive ingredient in the visionary potion that was drunk by the initiates at the Eleusinian Mysteries.
	In Persephone's quest in theogens and the origins of religion, he proclaimed the centrality of psychoactive sacraments at the very beginning of religion, employing the neologism in theogen to free the topic from the pejorative connotation for words like drug or hallucinogen.
	So we're very much looking forward to talking to Professor Ruck as well.
	So hello, Brian.
	Thank you so much for agreeing to talk to me today about your book.
	Thank you, Jordan.
	It's an honor.
	It's good to see you doing well.
	Oh, thank you very much.
	I'm very much looking forward to this discussion.
	I did find the book of substantive intellectual interest, that's for sure.
	For anyone who's interested in the history of religious experience, it's quite the trip, let's say.
	But it was remarkably well plotted as well.
	It was a book that was very dense with information, but almost impossible to put down.
	And so that's quite the thing to pull off.
	Why?
	Why did you do this?
	How did you do it?
	I'm still trying to figure that out, Jordan, to be totally honest.
	It was my avocation.
	I mean, no one was writing checks for me to fly to the Mediterranean and look at ancient secrets.
	It's not the thing that you do when you're supposed to be a practicing attorney raising children.
	But this bug got into me, I guess, when I was a teenager.
	I was studying Latin and Greek.
	With the Jesuits at an all-boys school, got a scholarship to attend that school, otherwise would not have afforded to go, and then was recruited by Brown, as you mentioned, to study Latin and Greek and piled on some Sanskrit, some Arabic, and other things in between.
	And along the way, you hear about this best-kept secret in history.
	That's what Houston Smith, perhaps one of the greatest religious scholars of the 20th century, that's how he referred to these mysteries.
	And particularly the sacrament within these ancient mysteries, these sacramental potions that have since gone missing.
	For a couple thousand years, we've been trying to crack this mystery to no avail.
	But there's Houston Smith saying it's a mystery worth investigating.
	And so I don't really know what to do with that.
	In the late 90s and early 2000s, there's not a lot of scholarship.
	On ancient pharmacology.
	And I read this crazy book, The Road to Eleusis, which comes out in 1978.
	And I'm trying to figure out how the ancient Greeks could have consumed, you know, a beer, otherwise spiked with LSD. But there's no hard scientific data to support it.
	So I leave it to one side.
	Until 2007.
	And it was Roland Griffiths, who you recently talked to.
	It was his early studies with psilocybin, the active compound in magic mushrooms.
	That began in the early 2000s.
	The initial results are released in 2006.
	It doesn't come onto my radar until 2007, but what I'm reading about are people today, modern-day volunteers, having a transformative experience from one and only dose of psilocybin.
	And Gordon Wasson is mentioned in the first line of this article, The God Pill, and it immediately reminds me of the road to Eleusis, and it reminds me of Eleusis itself, 2500 years ago, and this notion That it was a once-in-a-lifetime psychedelic encounter that was very much part and parcel of the origins of Western civilization.
	So from there I was off.
	Let's talk about the Eleusinian mysteries to begin with.
	Clue everybody in about what they were and why you believe, and not just you obviously, but why they're of enduring significance, both to us now, but also you make the case in the book that The very essence of Greek civilization, from which so much of our civilization is derived, was rooted in these hallucinogenic mysteries, essentially, or at least in the hallucinian mysteries.
	So please elaborate on the mysteries and their significance.
	So we say the ancient mysteries.
	There were lots of mysteries in the ancient world.
	The mysteries of Eleusis, the mysteries of Dionysus, the mysteries of Isis and Osiris.
	But Eleusis, which today is this relatively small town of only about 30,000 people, 13 miles northwest of Athens, For about 2,000 years, it was kind of the epicenter of the Mediterranean spiritual universe.
	It was not a sideshow.
	I sometimes refer to it as the real religion of the ancient Greeks and the best and brightest among them.
	It called to initiates like Plato.
	Pindar.
	Cicero, who actually called it the most divine thing that Athens ever produced.
	The most divine thing.
	So not democracy, the arts and sciences and philosophy, but Eleusis.
	Marcus Aurelius famously rebuilt Eleusis when it was almost destroyed.
	So it mattered to these people, both to the Greeks.
	Your case in the book, you lay out your belief that The Eleusinian mysteries were absolutely central to the animating spirit of Greek civilization.
	So it wasn't rationality versus the mysteries of Dionysius, let's say.
	It was rationality embedded in some more profound religious experience that was integrally related with whatever was happening in Eleusis.
	Absolutely integral.
	And we can say that with a straight face and very confidently because of the way its destruction is recorded in the 4th century AD under the newly Christianized Roman Empire.
	So at the time, in the 4th century, the Roman Emperor Valentinian tries to get rid of Eleusis, and we have the testimony of this high priest, Praetextatus, who says literally that life in the absence of Eleusis would be unlivable, abiotos in Greek.
	And so there's lots of ways to translate that or interpret that.
	But even Karl Kerenyi, this famous classicist writing in the 1960s, he looks at that language and says, you know, the sharpness of this formulation That life is unlivable without the mysteries has no precedent in Greek literature.
	Even Carl doesn't know what to make of this.
	And he draws a distinction between...
	He worked with Jung, Carl Curran, as well.
	Exactly, exactly right.
	Published with Bollingen.
	Yeah, very impressive scholar.
	And this impressive scholar didn't know what to make of this testimony from Praetikstatus.
	And he thinks that Praetikstatus is clearly drawing a distinction between what was available in the pagan mysteries versus what was available in the rise of Christianity at that time in the fourth century.
	So again, Eleusis is bound up not just with the notion of Greek existence, but human existence and the survival of our species.
	Okay, so back to you as a teenager.
	Now you got interested in this when you were relatively young.
	What?
	Why?
	What was calling to you, do you think?
	It's that perennial search for meaning.
	I mean, I was raised Catholic.
	This is a very particularized derivative of it, though.
	So there's some story there.
	There's something going on there.
	Because it's...
	As you also pointed out in your introduction, what you did is not...
	It's not within the realm of normative behavior.
	You have your law degree.
	You have your family.
	You have your children.
	You're a sensible, educated person.
	And you took a 12-year hiatus to pursue something that's very abstract, spiritual, historical.
	There's something driving you, for sure.
	And then you related it back to your teenage years.
	What was gripping you?
	Because part of that's the animating spirit of this book.
	Okay.
	So, I mean, if I'm being honest, you know, I was the first person in my family to go to college.
	And the whole reason I went to college was because of Latin and Greek.
	There's no doubt about it.
	I may not have gone if it weren't for the classics or the Jesuits who were teaching me these classics.
	And for me, this is a major identity crisis.
	And I talk about our societal crisis, you know, our loss of connection with that tradition.
	Well, exactly.
	And I wanted to know what that tradition was and how my Catholicism, I went to Catholic school for 13 years, how does my Catholicism and everything I've learned about the Christian lineage, how does that square with Eleusis, for example?
	Yes, and that's something I really want to talk to you about because there is some transformation.
	Even if the Christians were using the hallucinogenic sacraments that you characterize as being typically used by a more archaic Greek society, which I think...
	There's some reason for the Christian transformation, and I don't understand the relationship between that and the hallucinogenic story, so I would definitely like to return to that.
	Okay, so you're interested in Greek and Latin, and you're the first person in your household to go to college.
	How did you get interested in Greek and Latin?
	It was forced upon me by the Jesuits.
	Latin was mandatory at this school, St.
	Joe's Prep.
	I otherwise wouldn't have taken a shine to it.
	And then Greek was an elective, but I stuck with that.
	And my professor, Dr.
	Henry V. Bender, insisted that I stick with it, actually helped me apply to college, hopped me on a train to go up to Providence to Brown to check it out.
	And that's how it happened.
	You know, I wasn't touring colleges with my family.
	It was the Jesuits.
	Who got me thinking about this stuff and actually, to their credit, very open-mindedly encouraged me to ask very fundamental questions about the origins of the faith and this whole pagan continuity idea that we can talk about, this transference from the pagan world to the Christian world and what it all means.
	And the interest in the hallucinogenic element of it, was that a consequence of your knowledge that something was being used as a sacrament, some substance was being used as a sacrament, ateloosis in particular?
	Or is there more to it than that?
	So the great irony is that I've never experimented with psychedelics.
	That's the great irony of this book and all this research.
	Because it really was Roland's work at Hopkins.
	That just, it hit me like a punch in the face.
	The idea of people experiencing psilocybin and over the course of a few hours, having their lives completely transformed.
	You know, not just positive changes in attitudes, behaviors, and belief, but fundamental psychological change in an afternoon.
	If I had to come up with a definition of elusis, that would be it, except it was an over...
	I see.
	So you saw the connection.
	You...
	But it wasn't a consequence of personal experience.
	It was a consequence of intellectual realization.
	That's what it was.
	And those numbers have stayed consistent, Roland will tell you.
	When I asked him before publishing the book if this number still makes sense, he will tell me that 75% of these volunteers will report that their one and only dose of psilocybin remains one of the most meaningful experiences of their entire lives, if not the most meaningful experience.
	And this is data going back 20 years now.
	Okay, so this provided you with some insight into what might have been going on with the ancient mysteries.
	And of course, there's other scholars who push towards that conclusion, let's say, like Dr.
	Ruck, who we're going to talk to later.
	Gordon Wasson, for example, who's mentioned continually in your book, made the claim that the Amanita muscaria mushroom was the Soma of the ancient Hindus, was the inspiration for the Rig Veda.
	Mircea Eliade, who worked with Karen Yee and also with Jung, wrote a great book on shamanism.
	I don't know if you know the book, you likely do, but Eliade claimed that the use of hallucinogens among the shamanic practitioners was a deviation from the historical norm, but I think the The bulk of the evidence that's been accrued since Iliad wrote his great book, because it is a great book, shamanism, it's a great book, I think he was wrong about that.
	I think it's absolutely crystal clear that throughout human history, for at least 50,000 years, perhaps longer than that, Our spiritual guides, especially in the archaic world, were using whatever hallucinogenic substances they could get their hands on with their vast knowledge of local biology to produce these mystical experiences.
	And we have no idea to what degree that shaped us culturally or how that shaped our Our religious structures, beliefs, presumptions, all of that.
	And so that would make Elusis a continuation of the shamanic tradition.
	And so I think it fits nicely into the anthropological literature in that manner.
	Okay, so on to your voyage.
	You go to Brown and study Latin and Greek and so forth.
	And then what happens?
	And then I have a great time learning Latin and Greek, and then I'm a senior, and I hear all the grad students grumbling about the job market because there is no livelihood to become from classics.
	I mean, for me, it was either becoming a priest or a classics professor.
	And I still remain interested in both, oddly enough.
	But I took a left turn into law school and decided to enter the marketplace and to acquire, you know, marketable skills.
	It was largely an economic decision.
	And despite going to law school, you also went on this decade-long hiatus.
	Well, because I couldn't put it down.
	I mean, when I was, you know, even when I was interviewing for the law firm, we wound up talking about Sanskrit, because that's obviously on my resume, and people wonder why the hell I wrote a senior thesis translating a 13th century giant poem from Sanskrit, and it comes up in conversation.
	People find it mildly interesting, and so you go off from there.
	The liberal arts have a way of preparing you for all kinds of things.
	And in my case, I would still read Latin and Greek on my lunch breaks.
	And that's what drove the imagination until 2007 when psychedelics came on my mental radar and propelled me on this journey for another 12 years.
	All right.
	Well, let's walk through the journey.
	Tell us what you did first.
	Well, I used my law firm's salary to purchase every book that Ruck himself had ever written and Wasson and Hoffmann.
	Then I started reading about Terence McKenna quite a bit and was reading his information and listening to his lectures.
	And I spent most of the day doing that for a couple of years.
	And then I started to realize that some newer disciplines like the archaeobotany and archaeochemistry that you mentioned earlier, and with the advance of technology, new tools, new techniques, we were suddenly able to peer back into history in a way that we never could before.
	In other words, things like gas chromatography, mass spectrometry, and these wonderful, you know, lab additions, Had it allowed us to look into, to peer into these ancient containers, these cups and these chalices and these grails of sorts, and tell us for certain, relatively certain, what our ancestors were consuming and why.
	This is all relatively new.
	This did not exist in 1978.
	That was a big break for me in this research, trying to attract the hard scientific data to prove this one way or the other.
	You spent a lot of time in the book writing about beer, for example.
	And make it case, too, that one of the motivating factors for the development of agriculture was likely the easy transformation of barley into alcoholic beverage, or perhaps not just alcoholic.
	But I thought that was also a very interesting speculation.
	So maybe we can talk about that a bit.
	It's mainly because I like beer, and it was a great excuse to go to Germany to talk to a beer scientist to talk about beer, which was a lot of fun.
	And beer could go back 12,000 years.
	As a matter of fact, beer might be responsible for the birth of civilization as we know it.
	If you look to Gobekli Tepe, for example, about 10 years ago, there was some evidence from this giant site of megalithic architecture, sometimes described as the world's first temple.
	Turns out the world's first temple might be the world's first bar in this giant megalithic site.
	This, by the way, is 6,000 years before Stonehenge, 7,000 years before the high civilizations of Egypt and Sumeria.
	But in this site, they did find initial traces of calcium oxalate, which points to beer fermentation.
	And, you know, at the time, it might be safer to drink some beer versus some water in some cases.
	And so it could very well be the case that beer is bound up With these ancient sites, with ancient ritual, these T-shaped pillars meant to be the depictions of early gods.
	It's possible that there was some intoxicating affair there.
	We don't know for certain, but beer could go back an awfully long way.
	Right, well we do think of beer as a spirit and alcohol as a spirit and that's not accidental because it's the ingestion of a substance that changes you psychologically and so it's not that great a leap to posit that there's some spirit that inhabits the beverage and that's the spirit of wine, that's the spirit of drunkenness, Dionysius.
	You talk about ergot and its relationship to beer manufacture as well.
	Urgot is a fungus.
	It's a fungus that produces an LSD-like substance.
	And so you speculate, and some of that's backed up by the archaeobotany that you described, that perhaps beer was accidentally contaminated with urgot to begin with, but the consequences of that were non-trivial, to say the least.
	Mm-hmm.
	It could be.
	And this was the hypothesis put forward in this book, The Road to Eleusis.
	So this was the idea that Wasson, Hoffman, and Ruck had stumbled upon.
	And I think I largely credit Albert, who famously discovers LSD from ergot, right?
	So he synthesizes LSD from this natural fungus, which contains lots of other alkaloids, by the way.
	So things like LSA, LSH, etc.
	To this day, we don't know which alkaloid it may have been that spiked this beer potion, but could very well have been something like an ergotized potion that was consumed by these initiates century after century to open the gates of death and convince them of their immortality.
	This was the idea in 1978.
	And so I ran with that hypothesis and I looked for ergot anywhere I could.
	In Iliad's description of the shamanic transformation, he describes, and this is analogous to your description of the Eleusinian Mysteries trip and its association with death.
	Okay, so one of the things we should point out, just to begin with, is that Roland Griffiths gave psilocybin to cancer patients who were facing death, and that transformed their relationship to death itself.
	Now, when Eliade details out the shamanic experience, he said that the shaman who undertake their ritual, likely with the use of hallucinogenic substances, are typically reduced to something resembling a skeleton.
	So they undergo a death, and the nature of that experience is not precisely clear.
	Iliad never experienced it, so these are accounts that he derived from the anthropological literature, and the shamanic culture stretched perhaps all the way around the world because there are analogues between shamanic reports from Siberia and from the Amazon jungle, so it's conceivable that That was all disseminated from a single source, or maybe it's a consequence of the fact that hallucinogenic substances produce the same effects worldwide, or maybe both, who knows?
	But in any case, the shaman die.
	They commune with their ancestors.
	They commune with their ancestral spirit.
	They climb the ladder or tree or rope or pole that links the domains of existence together.
	So they climb up this pole into heaven where they commune with the gods.
	That's the classic shamanic experience.
	It's like Jack and the Beanstalk.
	I believe Jack and the Beanstalk is actually a carryover from shamanic tales, I think.
	It looks like it if you look at the story carefully.
	But in any case, there's a death and then a rebirth that's associated with the experience.
	There's a communion with ancestral spirits.
	The spirits of the forefathers, let's say.
	There's the transformation of that into something resembling communion with God.
	And then the transformation of people's understanding of death.
	Now, I don't know what happened to Griffith's subjects that transformed their understanding of death in relationship to their cancer, because the research reports don't contain much in terms of description of content of experience, right?
	It's not like people are magically transformed.
	Something happens to them as a consequence of an extremely packed and dense experience that's all condensed into a very, very short period of time.
	And they come out neurologically transformed.
	They showed transformations in personality that were quite profound even a year later.
	Many of them quit smoking, different studies, which also indicates a kind of transformation even on a pharmacological level.
	So back to Aloysius, there's something going on that you talk about death and facing death in Aloysius.
	It's the classic shamanic journey.
	I mean, Roland's volunteers will sometimes talk about experiencing their psilocybin journey as a foreshadowing of death.
	And again, we don't know all the details, all the content, but it's something like, this is what death will be like, is one of the overarching conclusions.
	And that was the mysteries.
	Again, if I have to put it in a few words, it is essentially a ceremony of death and rebirth.
	Right, well, your words at the beginning of the book are...
	Let me just get this here from the Greek.
	If you die before you die, you won't die when you die.
	And that certainly has Christian overtones as well, interestingly enough.
	Well, that comes directly from a plaque at the St.
	Paul's Monastery on Mount Athos in Greece, one of the holiest sites of Orthodoxy.
	It's very Christian.
	It's also very Greek, going back to that, you know, personality struggle I was talking about.
	Are we Greek or are we Christian?
	Like the old narrative is that the Greeks who invented all this stuff, democracy, the arts and sciences, etc., these rational people somehow, you know, birthed civilization into existence, but then Christianity comes along and saves our soul.
	But here's Eleusis is the contraindication.
	Eleusis was the place where these initiates went to find meaning by dying before they die in some sense.
	I mean, experiencing the same underworld journey as the goddess Persephone.
	They identified with her, not in any symbolic or metaphorical way, but something visceral happened to them in an experience.
	Experientially.
	Yeah, well, those myths look like they're reflections.
	They're narratized reflections of an experience that...
	That people actually went through and that a journey to the underworld is a journey to the land beyond death.
	I mean, it's more than that because it's a metaphor as well as perhaps the description of some kind of experiential reality and we certainly can't probe it particularly deeply.
	We don't understand what these chemicals do.
	We don't understand the meaning or the reality, the significance of mystical experience of this sort.
	But it is very interesting to note that It's very interesting to note that the people who gave birth to our civilization, so to speak, or at least certain aspects of it, regarded this experience with a tremendous amount of respect.
	They didn't feel it was something antithetical to what they were doing.
	They felt that it was something that was nourishing what they were doing.
	Right.
	Plato calls it the holiest of mysteries in talking about Eleusis.
	Aristotle says that you go there not to learn something.
	He uses the Greek word mathene, like mathematics.
	You don't go there to learn something, but to experience something.
	And if you think about philosophy in its broadest sense, Plato himself says that, you know, those who engage with philosophy in the right way practice nothing else but dying and being dead.
	So again, it's this constant sense of death and rebirth.
	Something fundamentally life-altering happens at Eleusis that convinces these people, right, convinces these initiates that they have transcended their mortality and they are guaranteed an afterlife.
	It was said only those who go to Eleusis, only them, will experience the afterlife.
	Well, I suppose they experienced it when they went to Aloysius and then perhaps had it with them for the rest of their life.
	At least that's the idea.
	So, take us on some of your trips.
	You went to talk to the world's leading beer scientists, so to speak.
	You went to Greece.
	You went to Rome.
	You went to the Vatican.
	You went to the Vatican libraries.
	What was that like?
	And what did you find there?
	And how were you received?
	With relatively open arms.
	I made decent friends with the archivists and the librarians, largely over strong Italian coffee.
	So that's always a tip for your future Vatican visit.
	Well, it's so interesting that you didn't meet a lot of resistance to what you were doing because you'd think that...
	Now, is that because people didn't understand what you're doing or did they understand and let you anyways?
	Because it's not that obvious that the Vatican would be that thrilled with the proposition that the original sacraments of Christianity were...
	The most potent hallucinogens that we know.
	And what sort of response have you got from classically religious people, traditionally religious people, Christian people most particularly, as a consequence of laying out the claims that you've made?
	It's been somewhat surprising, to be totally honest, in that there has been generally good reception amongst the Catholics and the Orthodox and the Protestants with whom I talk.
	And I think if you take a step back and just think about it, you know, I'm not impugning anybody today.
	This is all ancient history.
	A lot of it has been gone over well before me.
	I mean, just the notion of other forms of Christianity, Gnosticism, for example.
	Those 52 books of the Nag Hammadi corpus that were discovered in 1945.
	We've been talking and writing about them for decades.
	So, I mean, it's known that there were other versions of the faith out there.
	You know, throwing a psychedelic twist in there is somewhat controversial, but, you know, that would presuppose that Christianity and psychedelics are somehow mutually exclusive.
	And I'm not sure that they are.
	I mean, even today, if you look at the Native...
	I wouldn't be so convinced of that if you read the book of Revelation, which looks for all intents and purposes like the account of a hallucinogenic experience.
	And so does some of the language in the Gospel of John, or so does Mark, for example, in 411.
	It might not be psychedelics, but when Jesus is asked why he speaks in parables, you know, why talk about the mustard seed in the prodigal son?
	Why not speak plainly to people?
	The response from Jesus is that he's trying to relay a musterion, and that's the Greek word for mystery, the very same mystery as you would use in the mysteries of Eleusis, for example, or the mysteries of Dionysus.
	It's that word which, if you look at the Thayer Greek-English lexicon of the New Testament, Published in the 19th century, they will define that musterion in Mark as a religious secret, you know, confided only to the initiated, not to be communicated by them to ordinary mortals.
	I mean, so the idea that Christianity is born with secrets, right, potentially secret rituals, I think has been known for some time.
	I think that the big question is whether or not that included some kind of ancient pharmacology.
	Yeah, well, that's definitely the big question.
	And the other big question, of course, is what relevance does that have to a church that increasingly seems to be dying, at least in the West?
	Rick Griffiths told me that Harvard Divinity School is thinking about starting up a psychedelic divinity program.
	Yeah, and I actually had a great talk with Charlie Stang at Harvard Divinity.
	He interviewed me and grilled me in a very respectable way.
	But he's had a year-long series of wonderful presentations on psychedelics and the future of religion, which I hope will continue.
	So of all places, you know, we're the same campus that spawned Timothy Leary and Dick Alpert.
	It seems like there's some interest in this again in a very sober way.
	Yeah, so to speak.
	So to speak, yeah.
	Okay, so let's go to the Vatican.
	What did you do there in Rome and what did you discover?
	Well, I discovered a version of the faith, like we've been talking about, that I didn't hear about in my 13 years of Catholic school.
	And I was investigating this notion of continuity, pagan continuity, the idea that if there were these psychedelic rituals in antiquity, in pagan antiquity, did some of that somehow make its way into the Christian world?
	And so I went spelunking.
	I went literally under the Vatican, into the necropolis, Atop which it sits and went to Mausoleum M inside the Vatican.
	And right there, under the cathedral, you will see the vines of Dionysus painted onto this mosaic.
	Could be one of the earliest Christian mosaics that we have, as a matter of fact.
	And art historians point out that clearly these are the vines of Dionysus that have been co-opted as the vines of Christianity.
	In John's Gospel, Jesus refers to himself as the true vine.
	I mean, so it's a very kind of just silly example of how You know, the edifice of the church is, in some sense, is literally built on top of these pagan roots.
	And if you go to, you know, other catacombs around the city under the streets of Rome, you will find frescoes from the third and fourth century.
	And in these frescoes, you will see women Consecrating what looks like wine in what looks like some kind of version of a proto-mass or a proto-Eucharistic meal.
	The Vatican itself identifies these women as, you know, participating in a Eucharistic vigil, not what you often hear about.
	Next to one of these women consecrating wine, you'll see the Greek witch Circe, who, if anything, is known for her pharmacological expertise going as far back as Homer.
	So it's difficult to explain these images, these very Greek images that somehow reference pharmacology, somehow reference the role of women in the birth and development of the church.
	It's not a Christianity that's often talked about.
	So, why do you think, if Christianity, or at least some branches of Christianity...
	Okay, so first, do you think that Christianity itself had its origins in hallucinogenic use?
	I mean, that's certainly what John Allegro claimed, right, with the sacred mushroom and the cross.
	I read that when I was...
	Pretty young, 15, and I had no idea what to do with that book.
	I mean, because there was no way I could criticize it.
	He was a philologist, essentially, right?
	He derived almost all of his evidence from the derivation of words, from the etymology of words.
	And I just still don't have enough expertise in that field to evaluate his claims.
	But I read that, and I thought Christianity originated as a...
	Hallucinogenic mushroom cult?
	Really?
	That's actually possible?
	And he compiles a tremendous amount of evidence.
	It's a very scholarly book.
	It destroyed his career because it was published at the height of the hippie revolution, which Timothy Leary was responsible for and has a consequence, I would say, of his carelessness more than anything else.
	Allegro is very serious.
	It's a very serious book, but it's not one that's easy to...
	It's not easy to know what to do with that book.
	And...
	And Allegro was put aside because of it.
	And lots of people paid the price for this, and Ruck, who we're going to talk to later, was one of them as well.
	I mean, the pathway was laid for you in some sense, because all these other people had already suffered for putting forward this hypothesis earlier, right?
	I'm the first.
	I had it easy, Jordan.
	There was no hard going here, which is maybe part of the reason why I was welcomed into the Vatican or why I've had great conversations with people at Harvard and Yale and elsewhere because times have changed, I think largely thanks to Roland Griffith's clinical work and the extraordinary promise that is being shown on clinical depression, anxiety, end-of-life distress, PTSD, addiction, you name it, with these compounds, the study of which was interrupted for decades.
	And I think people, You know, are beginning to realize that there's something here worth looking at when the front page of the New York Times earlier this week is talking about the future of psychiatry being revolutionized because of psychedelics with psilocybin and MDMA. Right, the same sort of thing occurred in the early 1960s when LSD and mescaline and all of the powerful psychedelics were being revolutionized.
	Utilized, partly for the treatment of alcoholism, for example, and there was some evidence that that was successful.
	But things got out of hand very, very rapidly.
	I mean, maybe that's why Christianity, as it formalized, put the psychedelic sacraments to rest.
	I mean, when we introduced them back into our civilization, speaking as a, you know, Westerner, so to speak, I mean, that was only in the 1950s.
	When did, it was Wesson who went into Mexico and discovered the psilocybin mushrooms and brought them back.
	He's quite the character.
	I'd recommend that everyone who's listening read about Gordon Wassong because he was quite the person.
	Pull these powerful hallucinogens back into our culture.
	I mean, they blew us into pieces in the 1960s so badly.
	We had to make them all illegal.
	It scared the hell out of everyone.
	Well, so to speak.
	Maybe it didn't scare the hell out of everyone.
	That would have been the positive outcome.
	But our authorities...
	Certainly regarded them as radically disruptive, and that seems to me to be not such an unreasonable judgment, even though there's a very powerful counter-argument to be made.
	It's something to be very, very cautious about.
	Are you still a practicing Christian?
	And you don't have to answer that.
	I want to put you on the spot.
	I'd love to.
	I very much still consider myself a Christian in the way I learned about it from the Jesuits, which was largely about social justice and contemplative mysticism and being of service.
	I was taught to be a man for others, and in that sense, yeah, I still consider myself a Christian, maybe even more so after discovering the pagan roots of this faith.
	And what I do think is an interesting way for Christianity to sit with these mystery traditions and the possibility that in these early centuries of Paleo-Christianity, there was a type of Christianity that clearly attracted people.
	And I think it's the kind of Christianity that attracts me today, 2000 years later.
	This notion of personal, direct experience of the divine.
	Something was happening in those centuries to turn this carpenter's son Something was happening for this illegal cult of a dozen or so illiterate day-laborers to convert the entire Roman Empire in only a couple centuries and become the world's biggest religion.
	Well, that's also the great mystery that's in your book, too, because the hallucinian mysteries are going along for 2,000 years, let's say, and then they're disrupted, and Christianity comes along, and there's a hallucinogenic end to it.
	So what was it about...
	What happened?
	Something happened that isn't merely a continuation of the psychedelic, the shamanic psychedelic tradition, or that's what you have to think if you're a Christian, but that's also what you have to think historically because Christianity did do exactly what you said it did.
	And so that's something I can't I'm very interested in Christian ideas.
	I'm very interested in the continuity of religious experience across tens of thousands of years, and maybe more than that.
	And I don't understand at all what constitutes the shift that occurs from the transformation from the pagan Structures, let's say, predicated as they might have been on hallucinogenic experience, extending way back into the shamanic depths of time.
	God only knows how long.
	There's some transformation, though, that's specific to Christianity that's tangled up with the hallucinogen use that I don't understand at all, and that has something to do as well with this idea of the defeat of death.
	And the resurrection of the body and all of this mystical elements and the hallucinogenic elements of Christianity that are integrated into the book of Revelation and so on.
	So there's a pharmacological story, but there's a story of the transformation of religious ideation that also is a complete mystery.
	Why was Christ able to displace Dionysius, let's say?
	And what does it signify that that was the case?
	That's what I'm trying to figure out.
	I think Allegro kind of sits on the more extreme end of the spectrum of the psychedelic hypothesis.
	I don't think that the religion begins as a mushroom cult, for example.
	I'm not sure if there were psychedelics at the Last Supper.
	I think the hypothesis I'm pursuing is whether or not there could have been some communities of early Greek-speaking Christians who at some place in the ancient Mediterranean Would have availed themselves of some kind of mind-altering sacrament.
	You know, the prevalence of that kind of tradition, we simply don't know.
	At the end of the book, I say it's probably not a majority.
	There were other things that led to the rise and success of Christianity.
	It's often distinguished from its pagan predecessors by this sense of community and love and charity that the ancient sources talk about.
	But there was something else.
	That was inspiring people to abandon the faith of their ancestors, perfectly good religion, like Eleusis, by the way, which survives all the way through the early Christian period.
	The Mysteries of Dionysus, a perfectly good religion to the Greek speakers of Greece and elsewhere, that survives before, during, and after the life of Jesus.
	So I think for at least some of these communities, the way the gospel was communicated to them in the Greek language may have reminded them.
	Of some of these mystery rites, some of these pagan rituals.
	Well, that is, relatively speaking, a very moderate hypothesis.
	I guess the problem I have with that hypothesis, insofar as I have a problem with it, because it could well be accurate, is that, as you have pointed out, the hallucinogenic experience is so unbelievably powerful that it's hard to believe that it would have had a tremendous impact.
	And you see, also, these odd...
	There are correspondences between the development of Christian ideas and the mysteries of facing death that you described that aren't trivial.
	So Christ is crucified.
	He dies three days later.
	So he spends time in the underworld.
	He spends time in hell.
	He resurrects.
	That's a death and resurrection story that's very much akin to a shamanic Death and rebirth.
	It's hard to believe that those ideas aren't in some manner integrally related, especially given that that's something that can be experienced as a consequence of chemical transformation.
	And then the next question is, what the hell does it mean that that sort of thing can be Initiated in people repeatedly and reliably as a consequence of chemical manipulation.
	You'd say, well, it's an aberration, it's a form of poisoning.
	That's the most reasonable hypothesis.
	But then you'd expect that if it was a consequence of poisoning that the downstream effects would be negative, not positive.
	And I read a large-scale study, hundreds of thousands of people, it's retrospective analysis, looking at the comparative mental and physical health of hallucinogen users versus non-users.
	And on virtually every measure of physical and mental health, the hallucinogen users were healthier.
	It's not what you'd expect if it's poison.
	And so, it's not poison, but it's a chemical that produces this incredibly powerful spiritual experience.
	What the hell are we supposed to make of that?
	And it's at the foundation of our religious belief, historically speaking, perhaps at the foundation of Christian ideas themselves, It looks like it's integral to the emergence of Greek rationality in all of the civilization that's flourished in the Mediterranean.
	It can't just be brushed away.
	And then there's the clinical evidence coming in from Griffith's end, showing that it does appear to be positively transformative.
	It points to something that we just don't understand at all.
	I've read a fair bit about mushrooms and they're very, very strange things.
	Paul Stamets, I imagine you're familiar with his work.
	He's quite the genius and a very strange person.
	I should really interview him.
	He's a remarkable person.
	Mushrooms are very, very complicated things.
	It isn't obvious why psilocybin mushrooms produce psilocybin.
	It doesn't seem to do much for the mushroom.
	So there's a mystery there.
	Well, and then there's all of the speculation that...
	McKenna, I met his brother at a conference on awe.
	He came and spoke up at the U of T, so that was extremely interesting.
	But his stoned ape theory is extremely interesting as well.
	I mean, it's definitely on the fringe ends of speculation, but...
	It's not like there's any shortage of evidence that every human culture that ever existed did everything they possibly could to identify every hallucinogenic substance within reach and become masters of them.
	Right.
	Well, we co-evolve with these things.
	I love talking to Paul and to Dennis, Dennis McKenna.
	They're great stewards of this tradition.
	And I'm not a mycologist, or a scientist for that matter, but this is the kind of stuff that asks deep questions about our past.
	And when we're talking about pagan continuity, maybe we should say anthropological continuity.
	Right, because that's farther back than pagan, by tens of thousands of years, right?
	We had no idea how far back this goes.
	It could be tens of thousands of years.
	It's likely.
	It's highly likely.
	I cite one study in my book about Neanderthals.
	This is from a decade ago.
	They found medicinal plants like chamomile and yarrow in the dental calculus of Neanderthal bones in Spain.
	That goes back 50,000 years.
	There's some evidence that chimps use medicinal plants, and cats eat grass when they're ill.
	The relationship between animals and plants is extraordinarily complicated.
	And you know, the thing is too, the farther back you go in history to identify something, and you see it there, the farther back it's likely that that occurred.
	Because the farther back you go, the more stable cultures are, and the less likely they are to have radically transformed.
	So if you go back 15,000 years and something's there, well, you can make a pretty good guess that maybe it was there 80,000 years ago, because there just wasn't that much change.
	And lack of change is what's typical, rather than change, you know, despite our current culture.
	So, yeah, so this stuff goes back as far as we can possibly imagine.
	You said, just moments ago, that we co-evolved with mushrooms.
	And so, can you elaborate on that a bit?
	What do you mean?
	Well, they certainly precede us.
	Plants go back about 470 million years.
	If you talk to Paul Stamets, he will say there's a fossilized mushroom that's two and a half billion years old.
	So the mushroom actually far precedes the plants that we know of.
	391,000 species, 80,000 of which might be edible.
	This is in orders of millions of years before us.
	And let's just think about it commonsensically.
	If we weren't made to interact with our environment, why would these plants have an impact on us?
	Why are we equipped with CB1, CB2 receptors?
	Why are we equipped with the 5-HT2A receptor?
	Why do these things have any impact on us whatsoever?
	It seems that we've co-evolved together with our planet, and just maybe we're not aliens to it, but together these things are more allies than foes, in some cases, poisons though they may be.
	Yeah, well that's the question.
	Are they allies or foes?
	and if they're allies, what exactly does that, what exactly is the significance of that?
	Hello Dr.
	Ruck, it's a pleasure to meet you and thank you very much for agreeing to come and talk with me.
	We've been talking obviously about Brian's book and about co-evolution with mushrooms and about the potential significance of whatever the potential significance is of the fact that our religious ideas which seem to sit at the basis of our culture may have been profoundly influenced across thousands of years by hallucinogenic use and what in the world are we supposed to make of that and I won't read the intro because I've already done that, so people are already informed as to who you are.
	I'm going to start by asking you about The Road to Aloysius.
	So you co-authored, if that's okay, can we start there?
	Does that seem reasonable to you?
	Sure, yeah.
	Why not jump right in?
	You co-authored The Road to Aloysius in 1978 with R. Gordon Wasson and Albert Hoffman.
	Wasson was an amateur mycologist.
	I believe that his primary occupation, I think he was a banker, but he was a very accomplished thinker and explorer.
	Yes, he found banking very boring, he told me.
	Well, it's certainly, compared to the other things he did, it was a very run-of-the-mill occupation.
	And he wrote this famous book, Soma, which is well accepted now, I think, as an authoritative hypothesis, at least, that the ancient Hindus, in particular, were using Amanita muscaria, the fly agaric, the red mushroom with white dots, the fairy-tale mushroom, as an entheogen, in your terminology.
	And Albert Hoffman, who discovered LSD, and you co-authored this book, The Road to Aloysius, in 1978.
	And so, first of all, what was that like?
	And why did they pick you?
	And then we can get into what the consequences of that were.
	Well, actually I had a sabbatical year and decided that I would travel across Europe.
	So I bought a car in London and then shipped it over to the mainland and drove to Greece.
	But while I was in London, I thought I should buy books to have to read while I was traveling.
	And so I noticed a copy of John Allegro's Sacred Mushroom of the Cross in a bookstore window, and I put it in the car.
	And in that time that I was traveling and staying in Greece, I read it.
	And I read it naively.
	I was unaware of the fact that I was not supposed to like it.
	But I couldn't judge Where Allegro was dealing with Hebrew or with Sumerian.
	But I certainly could judge when he cited classical sources.
	And I was amazed that he brought to my attention things that I had not been taught.
	So I'm going to interrupt you there just for one second if you don't mind.
	We were just talking about the sacred mushroom and the cross.
	I read that when I was about 15 or 16 and it completely blew the top of my head off and of course I was completely incapable of assessing it apart from the fact that it looked to be a very scholarly work and was hard to just ignore.
	But it's interesting to hear you say that even when he moved out of his area of specialty Into your area of specialty, you found him to be a credible scholar who had actually found things that you didn't know about.
	His citations were fantastic.
	I was interested in Dionysus, and he was giving me information about the nature of the mania induced by possession by Dionysus.
	And so when I came back from the trip, I wrote two scholarly essays that were accepted in reputable journals, peer journals, and published.
	And then I became aware of Gordon Wasson's work and read his work on SOMA. And a friend said, why don't you send your essays to Gordon?
	And so I did.
	I didn't mean to, but I presented myself to Wasson as an authority already on this topic.
	So I always thought that he overestimated my abilities.
	But I almost immediately got a phone call from him.
	He was coming to Boston, and we had to meet.
	So we did, and then the second time, very shortly after, he came to Boston, and we met in Dick Schulte's office this time.
	The first time we met at a restaurant.
	He announced to Schultius, without having told me, that he and I were going to work on Eleusis.
	It had to do with the grain goddess.
	And Schultius, being a botanist, he said, oh grain, very interesting.
	But that's the first I knew that we were going to work together.
	Please go ahead.
	We were going to drive to his house in western Connecticut.
	On the drive, he told me what the project was.
	He essentially dropped on my lap.
	He had the theory that it would be ergot.
	It was a sensible theory because it would have to be something connected with grain, and the nature of the experience of the most classicists would not have accepted it, was visionary, which would mean, in those days we would have called hallucination, but come to know better that we shouldn't call it that.
	It is a transcendent vision.
	But it had to be something connected with grain, and the most obvious intoxicant that would be a toxin, if you wish, connected with grain would be ergot, which is a fungus that grows on mushrooms.
	Wassum was always interested only in mushrooms because of The experience which he describes many times of his honeymoon in the Catskills where he went for a walk with his new wife Valentina Pavlovna and she saw mushrooms growing everywhere and he saw only toadstools.
	And that's why they became interested in discovering that people had definite attitudes about mushrooms and that they figure prominently in art and literature.
	And so he was really only interested in mushrooms.
	I remember When we received a specimen of ergot from Hoffman that had fruited, the sclerotia looks just like a kernel of grain that's become clubby and purplish.
	The real mushroom is the root-like growth, which is called the sclerotia.
	It permeates its host, but under suitable conditions, it fruits.
	This is true of ergot.
	We didn't have the actual specimen.
	We had a photograph from Hoffman Of the fruiting kernel of grain, and you could see that mushrooms were sprouting out of it.
	So he was ecstatic.
	Of course, fungus is a fungus, but this wasn't a mold.
	This was, as he called it, a higher form of mushroom that produced the fruiting bodies.
	He was ecstatic, but it was my task, and it seemed very plausible.
	I really didn't know anything about Eleusis and mysteries.
	It was peripheral to ordinary classical education.
	It was my task to show that it fit the mythological scenario.
	And when you say, okay, I have three questions.
	You distinguish between hallucinogen and visionary experience, and then you also just...
	Because hallucinogen means that you've lost your way and you're wandering, and it is pejorative.
	You're hallucinating.
	I mean, if I saw God and someone said, you're hallucinating, the person is saying, you haven't seen God.
	You've imagined something...
	Probably devilish.
	And so, for that reason, I was asked to come up with a new term and invented the term entheogen, which is actually a Greek adjective describing the way the devotees of Dionysus became when they were possessed by him.
	It means you have the deity within you, and I just coined it.
	It's quite a coinage because it is very different from hallucination.
	LSD and psilocybin have been given to people who are schizophrenic who do have hallucinations.
	And the LSD and psilocybin do not exacerbate schizophrenic hallucinations.
	If you want to exacerbate schizophrenic hallucinations, you use amphetamines, a different class of drugs entirely.
	And so whatever it is, the visionary experiences that this alternative class of drugs is producing does look pharmacologically distinct.
	Entheogen obviously has, well, it's an interesting word because it actually caught on.
	People use it.
	It's not that easy to coin a word.
	There needs to be a space for it and a demand for it, and it has to be poetically apt.
	So you captured something.
	But entheogen obviously has a whole set of connotations that are very much unlike hallucinogen.
	You mentioned the God within, so you were thinking about all these things when you came up with the word, so maybe you could tell me about that.
	Well, about the connotations of entheogen, in fact, it does prejudice one to accept that the vision is in some way related to religion.
	So I have worked with scientists I co-authored a paper with him, and he wouldn't use the word entheogen, but we use the word neurotropic.
	It means it just changes the way your brain works without judging what the significance of that change is.
	It definitely is a term that is used by people who believe there is something like a spiritual dimension to our existence.
	Well, let me ask you about that.
	You've been thinking about this for an extraordinarily long time, and it's cost you a fair bit to think about it, although I imagine it's been an adventure as well.
	Are you still pleased with the coinage?
	Were you pleased with the coinage of entheogen to begin with, the word, and do you stand by that?
	Yes, because of its roots, it goes into European languages.
	You find it in French and German and so on.
	Slight adaptations to make it fit their language, but it's the same word.
	So, what's your impression of the validity, significance, meaning, etc., of the entheogenic experience?
	What sense do you make out of it?
	The fact that this chemically induced, a chemical induction of a mystical experience, what sense do you make of that?
	What significance is there in that?
	What I make of it is quite profound, but it's not something that really one can share easily.
	But I can put it very simply, that as we each sit in our present rooms, we have constructed what we consider to be the reality by the things that we see.
	And we have not constructed that reality by the things that we don't see.
	But it's quite obvious that what we see is only those things that our organs of perception allow us to react to.
	And so anything that we are not capable of reacting to with our organs of sensation isn't part of a reality.
	And you can train yourself to see the fringes of reality.
	Well, as a matter of fact, it's a rather humorous event.
	I was at a conference with Dick Schultes and Albert Hoffman, and Dick Schultes, the botanist at Harvard, Who had participated in many shamanic experiences, had taken many drugs.
	The people in the audience said, someone in the audience said, what has it meant for you to have taken all those drugs?
	And Schulte, I'm sure he was lying, but he was a very common sense, sane person.
	He said, means nothing.
	Means absolutely nothing.
	Means the next morning you get up and go to work.
	And then they asked Albert, and Albert said, well, I think it means that the defining lines of reality are a bit fuzzy.
	A bit fuzzy, yeah.
	As I sit here, I can imagine, and at certain gifted times, perhaps I can respond to the fact that there are a lot of other things going on in this chamber, and where you are also.
	I talked a bit to Brian about the Eleusinian Mysteries and the idea that he opened his book with, that To overcome death, you have to experience death.
	Griffith's work with psilocybin has showed that cancer patients who take psilocybin and have a mystical experience have a profoundly altered relationship with death, a profoundly altered understanding of death.
	This would be associated with those chambers of mystery that you just described that can be opened under some circumstances.
	Do you have anything to say about that transformation and attitude towards death, which seems like a highly relevant issue, all things considered, since we all have to face death?
	I think it's sad that one should be aware of that totality of existence only when you're about to leave it.
	And what do you think, if anything, that the entheogenic experience can contribute to our, what would you say, our ability to tolerate our mortality, our ability to understand it, our ability to transcend it?
	We're talking about something that's unknowable.
	And by definition, that means that anything you say about it can't be it because it's unknowable.
	We can only speak in paradigms and parallels and so forth.
	But it is perhaps an outrageous supposition to assume that we are mortal.
	And why do you say that?
	Why do you think that's an outrageous supposition?
	Believe me, I'm not trying to trap you here.
	I'm genuinely curious about this.
	The whole mystery of being and procreation is Inexplicable.
	Yeah, well, it certainly seems to be that consciousness itself is inexplicable.
	We don't have a good causal theory for consciousness.
	We have no understanding whatsoever of the relationship between consciousness and neurological functioning, as far as I've been able to tell.
	I've read a lot of books on consciousness and neurology, and most of them aren't particularly credible.
	Some of them are good.
	But there's also a mystery about the fact of experiential existence itself, which is obviously dependent on consciousness.
	What we don't know about consciousness could fill many, many volumes.
	And so that speaks to your many-chambered experiential realm argument.
	What happened?
	Okay, let's talk about Hoffman, because you wrote the book, you wrote two voices with Hoffman as well.
	So you talked about Wesson.
	How did you meet Hoffman?
	I only met him at that conference with Schultes.
	And then, again, I met him on his 100th birthday at a conference in Basel.
	And I hadn't seen him for 30 years.
	I mean, well, I'd seen him, I guess, in the 80s.
	I hadn't seen him for a couple of decades.
	And he didn't recognize me.
	When I got up to speak, I was announced.
	And he said, oh, Carl, is that you?
	Well, that's a long time.
	Yes.
	I just saw one of my colleagues a week ago or so, a couple of weeks ago.
	I had seen him for 20 years, and I wouldn't have recognized him 25 years.
	I wouldn't have recognized him if I would have passed him on the street.
	I don't know if he would have recognized me either.
	So that's a long time.
	So can you briefly outline the thesis of the Road to Aloysius?
	It...
	The thesis is very simple.
	It was one of many what were termed mystery initiations in antiquity.
	But in the case of this mystery initiation, it was first of all a Panhellenic.
	Right.
	So many people, not just from a village or a tribal group of Greeks, or you didn't even have to be Greek, anyone who had the means to do it would do it.
	It was considered the experience of a lifetime.
	And so it was a kind of universal experience.
	But it was only one of many of these things which were formed locally.
	And it was institutionalized, which is very interesting.
	Because Brian and I were talking about the reintroduction of psychedelics into the West in the 1960s.
	Of course, that caused tremendous cultural disruption and then clamped down on the use of psychedelics in general.
	But the Greeks had figured out how to institutionalize their use and to...
	Well, maybe the Greeks had, maybe the precursors to the Greeks had, because God only knows how old the tradition was, but they seem to be able to keep the genie in the bottle, so to speak, and do you have any sense of how they managed that?
	Well, Athens was becoming an imperial power, and it annexed Eleusis, and then took over the religion.
	And so, Athens, as the religion, as the right became more popular, of course, people knew about it, but there was no reason.
	Eleusis was a separate town.
	A separate state.
	There was no reason why it would be identified with Athens other than the fact that Athens annexed Eleusis and then took over the administration of the rights and, in fact, had a preliminary right which was performed in Athens a half year before the right at the village in Eleusis, about 14 miles outside of Athens to the west.
	But in the case of Lucis, which makes it so interesting, not only was it this important classical mystery religion, but there are others which were equally important.
	In this case, we have in Homeric hymn to the goddess Demeter, these are poems in the style of Homer, but not by Homer, in Homeric type of poetry.
	We have the precise ingredients for a potion that was drunk as part of the mystery.
	And, of course, you could just disregard it as causes as have, as meaning nothing, or you could think that it was responsible for the fact that people...
	We know what happened, although it can't be believed what happened, and as I said, it's unknowable, so what I'm saying isn't what happened.
	But they all saw something at exactly the same time in a chamber after they had been prepared by long indoctrination as to what they were supposed to see and so forth.
	But on cue, they saw something.
	Do you see that as a continuation of the shamanic tradition?
	Yes, of course.
	There's no way you can make a group of people, several thousand people, See something all at the same time by drumming or fasting or anything of that kind.
	It's going to be haphazard.
	Some people may have a transcendent experience and others won't.
	But on cue, every year, a large group of people had a vision After they drank a potion whose ingredients are known.
	That's what makes it interesting.
	Do you have some sense of the contents of the vision?
	Yeah.
	Can you outline that?
	I can quote, because of course to say what it was openly was prohibited under the pain of death, but in a play of Euripides, the Ion, The chorale says that when you pass through the gates of the Hall of Initiation,
	you will see the stars dance and with them dance the moon.
	But I have to remind you that the Hall of Initiation has a solid roof.
	You cannot see the sky.
	The only way you can see the stars dance and with them dance the moon is if you have transcended the physical past to the edge of the cosmos, which is what is described in ancient poems of the shamanic journey, to the edge of the cosmos and are there dancing amongst the celestial bodies, planets and the stars.
	Let me ask you a side question.
	Of course, that's impossible, isn't it?
	Well, yeah.
	Who knows what's impossible precisely?
	It's what's described over and over again, though.
	It's what Plato describes in the Phaedrus.
	It's what Parmenides describes in his poem.
	In the shamanic tradition, at least according to Iliad and to other sources that I've read, the shaman who, although Iliad didn't accept this part of the hypothesis because he didn't accept the hallucinogenic, the centrality of hallucinogenic substances in the shamanic experience, but we talked about that earlier in the podcast, but the shamanic initiate, the shamanic practitioner, would die, would be reduced to a skeleton.
	That's one way of thinking about one part of the experience.
	And sometimes have his bodily organs replaced, or sometimes have them replaced by something that represented a crystalline structure that was more pure, but would die anyways, would reliably commune with the ancestors.
	Would then leave the cosmos as we know it traveling up and down something like the layers of like a structure that represented the different layers of experience which seemed to me something like imagine the standard three three dimensions of reality plus time so you've got width and height and depth and and time but there's there's another dimension of sorts which is the dimension that we experience when we go down into the micro realm of being and that We experience when we go up into the macro realm
	of being, so from the subatomic to the cosmological level.
	That seems to me to be portrayed by the idea of the world tree, You can see that in Scandinavian mythology because the world tree is associated with the cosmos as such and then the ability to move up and down that tree seems to be associated with the ability to move between the earthly realm and the heavenly realm and to move into the heavenly realm is to move outside of the normal cosmos which is reminiscent to me of the idea that God,
	the Christian idea that God exists in a place and that and time that's outside of our universe so it's it's Which is quite a remarkable and non-obvious idea This So why am I I'm wondering to what degree that idea that?
	cosmological idea of the world tree is associated with this idea of the journey through the cosmos and the and the experience of divinity in the hallucinian mysteries Is that a variant of the shamanic story?
	Everything that you've been saying is documentable also in classical mythology.
	These are themes which are waiting for scholars to recognize, and they are now, but when I embarked in the study of classics, there were very few classicists who even knew that these things were being spoken of.
	Which things are you referring to more specifically?
	Like the body being attacked by Demons and spirits and the internal organs being rearranged and a part of the body replaced with some badge of immortality.
	All of the descendants of Pelops.
	You see that here?
	Something flashed into my mind.
	I'm an admirer of the Disney film, Pinocchio.
	Now, Pinocchio goes down to the depths, right?
	He's an initiate.
	He goes down to the depths.
	He goes down to the bottom of the ocean, like Gilgamesh.
	He finds his father, that's the ancestral spirits, in the body of a dragon.
	It's a whale, but that whale breathes fire.
	It's a dragon for all intents and purposes.
	And when he's transformed into a genuine person, so that's his rebirth and transformation, he comes back from the dead.
	His conscience, Jiminy Cricket, is given a gold badge.
	That's an echo of that shamanic idea of the replacement of something, the soul-like.
	It reflects the stars, actually.
	That's how the movie closes.
	This badge reflects the stars.
	So you see these unbelievably deep, classical, mythological, slash shamanic ideas popping up in places that you'd never expect them to pop up continually and constantly.
	What you're talking about is a subject for another series of your investigations.
	It's what the Disney artists knew about entheogenic, or do now know about entheogenic experience, because they fit the pattern perfectly.
	Yeah, so do you have any specific knowledge of that?
	I mean, that movie was made in the 1930s.
	Yes.
	I mean, it's a work of absolute genius.
	That movie is so deep.
	It just stuns me every time I watch it because there's always something more to discover in it.
	In Fantasia, isn't there an episode of Dancing Mushrooms?
	Yes.
	I believe there is.
	Well, that's incredible.
	I mean, it must have been crazy.
	No one would know what that meant.
	Yeah, yeah.
	There always has been an inner core of people who know very well what it all means.
	So what happened to you after this book was published?
	First of all, what did you expect would happen when you published this book?
	That's the first question.
	And then what actually happened?
	I expected that other classicists would take the idea and work with it in fields of expertise that I did not master.
	I expected that they would take the ball and run with it.
	Like you did with Allegro's book.
	Yeah, but it didn't happen.
	And in particular, my situation at Boston University was that at the time I was acting chairman and...
	President Silber was a great supporter of classics, but he had his own idea of what classics were.
	And I worked with him, in fact, in starting the build-up of the department, which has become quite a respected department.
	But he had his own idea about what he would have thought drugs and his idea of Greek rationality.
	He was a philosopher.
	And so he certainly was not willing, even though Dodds had written a book on Greeks and the Irrational, which greatly influenced me, he was not one of those people that was interested in Greek irrationality.
	And so I was at a chairman's meeting in his office and he was talking to us about, we had to stress the fact that publications were necessary for advancement.
	And then he looked at me and he said, unless it's a publication by the Vanity Press, I had nothing to do with the publication, and Harcourt Brace is not a vanity press, and Watson didn't pay for the publication, so that would be what the definition of vanity press is.
	John, Harcourt Brace is certainly not a vanity press.
	I mean, there's no doubt about that.
	Her son was very interested in the work.
	He's a classicist and she was our particular editor.
	But I was labeled as Publishing with Vanity Press and he disliked me from that point on.
	And you believe it was because of his belief in the rationality of the Greek?
	Not the Dionysian element of the Greek, the Apollonian element.
	Yes, absolutely.
	And he was a very divisive figure.
	And so it became a way for people who wanted to advance themselves to denigrate me.
	So I had colleagues in my department who turned against me because that way they could climb upon my corpse and promote themselves.
	It's all changed now.
	I mean, the people who were involved are no longer there, except for a few people who are my friends.
	They're not hostile to me at all now, but it was a very divisive period at Boston University.
	And to put Carl's experience in context, maybe, this is in the late 1970s.
	One of Carl's colleagues at the time was Howard Zinn, who famously wrote A People's History of the United States, published in 1980.
	John Silber, who was the president of BU at the time, this sort of no-nonsense Texan of conservative Presbyterian roots.
	He didn't have the best relationship with Howard Zinn either.
	He would deny the Marxist, as he called him, sabbaticals, promotions, and pay raises.
	And Silber was no fan of the anti-war movement or revolutionaries.
	And the idea of aligning the psychedelic gospels of enlightenment from Tim Leary and others with this anti-war movement was not welcome on campus in the late 70s.
	Or to suspect that a faculty member was going to introduce students to drugs, which was of course not anywhere in the realm of possibility.
	Right, but I guess there's the, what would you say, the uncertain consequence of taking this sort of hypothesis seriously, right?
	Which is an uncertain, there are uncertain consequences.
	It's a very dangerous proposition because it opens up the possibility that religious experience or spiritual realities are A part of our basic nature as humans.
	That calls into question the validity of all the religions.
	Well, I think it's worse.
	I think it opens up the possibility that they're correct.
	They're correct.
	They have just defined it in their own manner.
	Well, yes, yes.
	But I think the idea, this might be my own personal peccadillo, but I think the idea that there's something in the central religious doctrine that's fundamentally correct is much more terrifying than the idea that there isn't.
	That's how it looks to me.
	I mean, if there's something divine and immortal about human beings, and it's our ultimate ethical responsibility to let that shine into the world, and that's part of reality itself, then heaven help us when we don't manage that.
	That's how it looks to me.
	Yes, absolutely.
	You know, I've heard Freudian criticisms of religious belief, for example, know that the belief in life after death is nothing but a myth that's designed to, what would you say, keep us in childhood denial of the terrible realities of our existence.
	But, you know, that doesn't really account for the...
	Prevailing stories of hell, let's say, because if you're going to invent a religion that does nothing but satisfy your childish delusions, why would you bother with hell?
	I could challenge you to prove that you're alive.
	You're just hallucinating.
	My God, you really are off the wall.
	Well, there's no doubt about that, but I get your point.
	So I'm not exactly sure what the more revolutionary idea is.
	And there's another part of this that's extraordinarily problematic, too, from a philosophical perspective, which is that If the entheogens are pointing towards something that resembles a genuine religious experience, and if that religious experience is profound and valid and constitutes part of the base from which our culture,
	both Greek and Christian, was derived, let's say, rather than being antithetical to it in this Dionysius versus Apollo way, if it's actually at the core of it, which is the case Brian makes, for example, in his book, Then this is all something that we need to take extraordinarily seriously, and that's really revolutionary, as far as I'm concerned.
	And now we have a chemical, you know, because part of the problem for Western people has always been, well, we've got the material realm and science, and look at how powerful it is.
	We have the spiritual realm, and it's separate, but all of a sudden now you have something that bridges the gap, right, which is these strange psychedelic chemicals, which are material in the utmost, but have this intense spiritual...
	What would you say?
	Nature, or at least are capable of eliciting that in us.
	And so then that calls into question the entire relationship between the material structure of existence and the spiritual realm, and that's revolutionary.
	I was talking to a physicist last week, Unfortunately, his name momentarily escapes my mind, but he's a famous atheist, and I mentioned Griffith's work to him.
	It's like, well, he's one of the people who originated the idea that the entire universe could spring into being from nothing, as elementary particles do, and He sees no materialist evidence whatsoever for a spiritual realm.
	But then I said, well, what do you do with Griffith's work?
	What do you do with the entire corpus of psychedelic experience?
	What do you make of that?
	Because ignoring it isn't going to help.
	There's the shamanic tradition.
	There's the continuation of that into Greece and the Eleusinian mysteries.
	There's the development of that throughout Christianity.
	That can't just be easily set aside, especially if Mororescu is right, for example, and there was some influence of These sacramental potions on the development of early Christian ideas.
	And those ideas are central to our culture.
	Yes.
	So we've got a big problem here, conceptually.
	I would say it's actually a testament to the integrity of the universities that something as revolutionary as what you did didn't completely destroy your career.
	It's true, Ian.
	At the time, I had several students who were writing a dissertation, so I'm not imagining that this event happened.
	They were told that they would never get their degree unless they dropped me as their advisor.
	They remained my friends and that's the story they told me.
	Their work was then finished by other people and in some cases they've been quite successful.
	They've been published and so forth, but it was the work they did with me and was stolen by somebody else.
	And this was not Silver who did it.
	It was someone in the department who was definitely trying to get credits for what he was doing, who stole the students away from me.
	Well, it's heartening to me that you were able to maintain your career as an academic despite wandering into this most...
	It's incendiary territory.
	I'm not sure that that would be the case today, at least under some circumstances.
	I'm going to blame all these questions on Brian, by the way, because he sent them to me.
	But they're good questions, so I'm going to go ahead with them.
	You apparently tested the Kukion potion yourself in the 1970s.
	Albert Hoffman sent you in Wasson some ergot in the mail.
	Could you share that story?
	Yeah, it's just rather humorous because we did do it.
	It was at the very beginning, in fact, because Wasson was very direct.
	If we were going to write about this, we should know what the experience was like.
	And so it was one of the times that I visited him.
	About once a month, I went to I spent the weekend at his house in Connecticut and as we were driving there, he said, we're going to take the potion tonight.
	And so I said, oh really?
	And we had dinner.
	His old nanny was there, an elderly black woman, and he announced, we're going to take the potion tonight.
	This is awfully open because, you know, I believe this is illegal to be taking drugs.
	And so, he said, the custom is To fast before you do this and so we can't eat anything.
	So we sat there while the other people ate.
	Then when dinner was over, we got up to go down to the barn.
	He stayed in his studio which was converted in the barn, not in the main house.
	And as we got to go, the other people said, well, have fun.
	This is rather flippant, too.
	So when we got there, he put on some music, and he said, the custom is to observe silence.
	So I knew that I wasn't supposed to talk.
	I didn't know at the time, but we were listening to the chanting of Maria Sabina, the Mazatec shaman.
	So it was very moving, and we sat wrapped up in blankets by the fireplace.
	His daughter, who was a PhD in nursing, sat in the corner as the monitor in case anything went wrong.
	And so no one spoke, and the chanting went on.
	About midnight, I finally said, Gordon, I don't think anything has happened.
	And he said, yes, yes, it's been most disappointing.
	But we were hungry, so we went up to the house and raided the pantry to have something to eat.
	And the next morning, we took out Albert's letter in which he gave a very detailed account of what he had experienced with this potion.
	So we just decided, well, apparently it works.
	It just didn't work for us.
	We didn't take enough of it.
	And so we went ahead with it on the basis of Albert's experience, not our own.
	Gordon said, Albert's a very small man.
	He didn't send enough for people our size.
	And was the potion an LSD derivative?
	Was it purified LSD? No, it was Ergonavine, which was one of the chemicals in ergot.
	And at the time, we had settled upon that because...
	Ergot has some 300 toxins.
	It's a very complicated chemical complex, but only one of them is water-soluble, and that's Ergonivine.
	And so, by simple extraction in water, which is what's required for the recipe in the Homeric Chem, we could get Ergonivine.
	But other people have tried it since, and ergotamine doesn't seem to be that active.
	But I've worked with Peter Webster in France, who's a chemist, and we have decided to discover ergotamine.
	Which is what's marketed for migraines.
	It dilates the blood vessels in the brain and treats migraines.
	Ergotamine in itself is not psychoactive.
	But in a aqueous solution, which is alkaline, and the achieving of making it alkaline is simple.
	You just add some bone ash to it, and that would fit also the scenario and significance of the mythological paradigm of the Ellicinian mystery.
	So it has to be something simple like that.
	Some bone ash produces an alkaline solution, And then Ergonovine goes into a, it's not a solution, but it's called hydrolysis, which is a combination with water.
	Something like what happens when you chew on starches in your mouth.
	And it is an unstable chemical of itself in its mirror image, going back and forth between the two constantly, and that apparently is psychoactive.
	So, the potion that you took with Wausau wasn't effective.
	What about other experiences that you've had, if you want to talk about them, and you're certainly not obligated to?
	Yes, of course, anything that was done, in those days, narco-tourism was not the vogue.
	Anyone can do this now legally, by traveling to South America or to Mexico, and there's quite a tourist trade in that sort of thing.
	But in those days, it was illegal to have access to these substances.
	And so whatever experience I had was given by friends who had gotten them, unfortunately, from the illegal drug trade.
	But I did have experience with LSD and with psilocybin.
	And did you have a classic shamanic experience with those substances?
	Yes, very intense.
	And did it involve dying?
	It involved I mean, it's very hard to talk about this because if I talk about it, some people will think I'm a religious leader and I'll have a following and they want me to establish a church and all that sort of thing.
	Have you ever read Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious by Carl Jung, just out of curiosity?
	I have, yes.
	Okay, okay.
	Because he provides some psychological hygiene tips in precisely that regard, although for him I don't know if it was a consequence of knowing anything about hallucinogenic use.
	The reason I got into classics, I was originally going to be a psychiatrist, and I did pre-med, but I had a philosophy course.
	At Yale, and the philosophy teacher was one of those charismatic young guys.
	He said, you're studying psychology, psychiatry, because you're interested in the soul, and you think that psychiatry will give you access to the soul.
	But psychiatry is a doctoring, a medicine, It deals with six souls.
	And it's true, I was really interested in psychiatry because I was fascinated by the delusional realities that were reported in case histories.
	I very much wondered what they meant and was dying to experience safely that kind of delusional reality.
	But he said, if you want to study the soul, you have to study the humanities.
	And so I took seriously what he said and thought that classics was the most basic of the humanities.
	So I switched into classics.
	But I was interested in the soul to begin with.
	Now, so you're a trained classicist who experimented with psychedelic substances.
	So my presupposition is that your training as a classicist likely influenced and expanded your experiences with psychedelic substances.
	It provided structure and content.
	I became a mythologist.
	Mythology gives me a framework for understanding a way of structuring Imaginary reality, let's call it that.
	Okay, so can you tell me a little bit about how you've structured your understanding of that?
	Imaginary, did you say imaginary reality?
	Did you say mythological reality?
	Well, if I look at it from my sane vantage point, I would call it imaginary reality, but I very much wanted to enter into the world of myth.
	Right, but that's a strange kind of imagination, isn't it?
	I could enter it, yes.
	Well, because there's this transpersonal element to it.
	This is the thing that I can't quite understand, is that you could describe the landscape of the imagination as purely subjective, but the problem with that is that the features of the landscape are transpersonal.
	That's what's expressed in mythology, and if they weren't, we couldn't talk about it.
	And so, even though it's subjective, it has a transpersonal or impersonal element that seems to be grounded in...
	You can't say objective reality precisely because you experience it subjectively, but it's not only like idiosyncratic imagination.
	It has this death, underworld element, this rebirth element.
	Okay, so I'm going to push you again if you don't mind.
	I would be more interested in your take on this.
	You've had these experiences.
	You're a trained classicist.
	What is this reality that's being laid out in these experiences, and how do you understand it?
	I think of it as a journey to discover who you are.
	And when you go on this journey, it gets dangerous.
	You feel that maybe you should turn back.
	But just up ahead, it looks as though it might be even more interesting up there.
	So you go further and further and further.
	And when you get to the end of the journey, what you find is yourself looking back.
	I said I'm not going to come to church, but there is no God.
	You're so stupid, don't you realize you are God?
	And so, I guess what I wonder about is what happens if you What are the implications of that kind of realization for how you conduct your life?
	Like, look what happens with Griffith's subjects.
	They quit smoking.
	Okay, so now it's easy to think about that as a pharmacological effect.
	Purely, right?
	That their brains undergo a chemical transformation.
	They're no longer addicted to nicotine.
	I don't believe that's what happens.
	I believe what happens is that they undergo a mystical experience that alerts them to who they should and could be, and that doesn't involve poisoning themselves with a deadly substance.
	So, in light of the new information they've received about their potential and maybe the actuality of their being, They decide to desist in that self-destructive pattern of behavior.
	I think the same thing happens to alcoholics that are cured, so to speak, as a consequence of psychedelic experience.
	Does that seem reasonable to you?
	It does seem reasonable, yes.
	But I have to...
	I mean, we're talking about a very dangerous subject because many of these substances are addictive and...
	And causing tremendous hardship for people who get hooked on them.
	And even alcohol, which is legal, is extremely dangerous and there are many people who are addicted to it.
	It's clearly the most dangerous of drugs.
	I know people have died.
	Yes.
	Alcohol is an absolute catastrophe.
	I mean, there'd be virtually no violence, domestic violence, for example.
	There's no alcohol.
	Alcohol is a catastrophe in 50 different ways.
	That doesn't necessarily mean it should be illegal, but it's definitely a catastrophe.
	That's just it.
	I mean, there has to be an etiquette of use.
	And...
	And these addictive substances you described, the hallucinogens don't technically fall into that category, oddly enough, right?
	Because people tend not to abuse them.
	In the case of LSD, you build up an immediate immunity to it, so if you take it the second day, nothing happens at all.
	Yes, and something similar has been reported with psilocybin and with DMT. So these seem to be self-limiting substances, at least to some degree, as opposed to drugs like cocaine, which is classic psychomotor stimulants, or the benzodiazepine class, or the opiates, for that matter, which all have that addictive tendency.
	So...
	Here's a question.
	Let's move away from the personal experience end a bit, although I'm so tempted to push it deeper, but I won't.
	I'll leave it be for the time being.
	This is something I did discuss with Brian.
	His book, and he's obviously profoundly influenced by you, his book, I believe, is predicated on the assumption that the great Greek rationality, everything that we admire And understand about Greek culture was embedded inside this mystical tradition.
	It wasn't antithetical to it.
	It was embedded inside it.
	Like our thought is embedded inside a dream, if you think about it from a Jungian perspective.
	And I think that's an accurate way of looking at the world.
	Rationality embedded in a dream, embedded in a body, something like that.
	What do you think was the value of non-ordinary states of consciousness in classical antiquity?
	The value for us is that we would not have the great works of sculpture and literature and painting if that society did not have access to this awareness of spiritual entities.
	Okay, so I...
	They call it the Muses, but they're not imaginary.
	They're actually possessing spirits.
	People testify over and over again that in the act of creation, and I find that in my life even though I'm just writing an essay, In the act of creation, you don't know what you're doing.
	Someone is working through you.
	Something is working through you.
	Or, if I don't want to go that far, it allows me to reconfigure the functioning of my brain in a way that, ordinarily, I would not have access to.
	There is this idea of the communion with the ancestors seems to me to be analogous on the shamanic front to the idea of being possessed by the creative spirit that drives mankind, essentially.
	The experience that's induced by the psychedelics that puts the users in touch with their ancestors, puts them in touch, that's exactly the right way to think about it, I think, with the central animating spirit of And that's part of that spirit that drives that continual conversation that we're all supposed to be involved in, for example, as humanities practitioners, right?
	The golden chain that exists down the centuries that stretches all the way back to the shamanic rituals.
	That's all part of this.
	And that's the spirit that animates you.
	When you're creative and animates means to be possessed by a spirit because it's related to anima, right?
	And so you are possessed by a benevolent spirit that produces and utters truth if you're engaged in the creative activity properly.
	And that mystical experience seems to be associated with the ability to move away the blinders that would stop you from being able to perceive the existence of that spirit.
	Yes, that's reasonable.
	It isn't reasonable at all.
	Of course, none of this is the least bit reasonable.
	Albert had synthesized LSD five years before he was aware of its visionary potential.
	But at the time, it didn't seem to have any use.
	So he put it aside on a shelf in his laboratory.
	And five years later, as he was passing the shelf, he sensed that the vial said, take me.
	And so he took it off the shelf and took the smallest amount, assuming that it would be too small to be deadly poisonous or to have any effect, and he would work his way up to see what its effect might be.
	And so the smallest conceivable dosage produced the first LSD documented trip in our era.
	Well, is it still the case, when I was studying pharmacology to the degree that I studied it, that the claim was made that LSD is the most potent pharmacological substance ever discovered, that 100 million molecules or some tiny trivial amount is sufficient to induce a mystical state.
	It's unbelievably potent.
	Yes.
	Maybe there have been pharmacological agents.
	I'm unaware.
	There may be some new things, but that's what I understand, too.
	It's extraordinary.
	Here's a question Brian came up with as well.
	If the ancient Greeks used drugs to find God, so what?
	Why should anybody care about this today?
	What are you really looking for in this research?
	Well, I guess that's a reasonable set of questions.
	What about Jung?
	What about Jung?
	Do you think that he experimented with hallucinogens?
	Carl Jung.
	Because he knew things.
	He knows things that you just can't believe anybody could know.
	We know he spent a year in Taos.
	I have a house in Taos.
	And that year is not documented, but he was experimenting with mind-altering substances.
	Psilocybin?
	Probably.
	Was that before or after the Red Book?
	Do you know?
	I think the Red Book came out of that.
	How sure are you that that happened?
	Well, I can't be sure.
	Yeah, I know, I know, I know.
	Because I wasn't there, and one could try to find if there were any people who knew him at the time.
	He had a strange family background.
	There were lots of visionaries in his family, so he might have been one of those spontaneously visionary types like, what about William Blake?
	That's one of the things that we're very interested in tracking down, the use of entheogens amongst people reputable, great monuments of our cultural tradition.
	Did they have access to altered consciousness?
	I'm quite sure that Blake did.
	Milton?
	Well, each one of these is a whole study.
	I don't know.
	I can't come up with a passage in Milton, but it certainly would be a fertile thing to do.
	It's one of the things on the agenda for Brian, me, and my other associates.
	Brian, you said when we were talking that you hadn't tried anything that was psychedelic, despite your intense interest.
	And so I'm going to be nosy and rude and ask you, what's stopped you?
	Hmm.
	Maybe I've been influenced by Carl's story too much.
	You must be dying of curiosity, given that you are so curious.
	His testimony is all the more valuable because he hasn't done it.
	So people cannot say that he's ruined his mind on drugs.
	So that if he ever does do it, he should keep it secret.
	I would take a lie detector today.
	I still have not done it.
	I'm dying of curiosity.
	I wanted to approach this book in as objective a manner as possible.
	I do think that's important, but it's not off the table for the future.
	What I've said in the past is And I mentioned this earlier, Jordan, I don't think that psychedelics are mutually exclusive of organized faith or traditional faith.
	And Carl and I were both raised Catholic, as a matter of fact.
	And, you know, there's a version, there's a way of doing this that is both...
	I think honest and respectful of the ancient mysteries, the pagan mysteries, and paleo-Christianity.
	I keep coming back to those first few centuries after Jesus as this ancient cultural internet.
	Well, if we can't integrate Christianity, let's say, with its precursors, how the hell are we going to integrate Christianity with the rest of the world?
	And this might be a way.
	As odd as that sounds, or mysticism writ large, and you see this all over the Catholic religious orders, from the Franciscans to the Jesuits and Carthusians, I mean, there's a periphery to Christianity where mysticism lives and breathes.
	The same mysticism, I would argue, as the ancient mysteries, psychedelic or otherwise.
	And so if there was a vehicle, a container for this, it would be in that periphery, the Meister Eckhart periphery, where if you could knot yourself for an instant, You know, you would possess all.
	The dogma, generally speaking, has to be the container for the mystical experience, too.
	You know, I mean, people who have a spiritual bent, who are on the openness and personality-wise, let's say, of the religious continuum, they tend to be antithetical to dogma, but dogma contains the tradition that constrains and, I suppose, in some sense delimits the insanity of the psychedelic mystical experience.
	Those two things have to be brought together.
	And I think it has a way of interpreting the experience, too.
	I've asked Carl in the past, what should I be doing to prepare for my first psychedelic trip?
	And he's told me, you've done it.
	It's in the study of classics, as we were talking about before.
	I'm not sure if that's true or not, but, you know, when it comes to psychedelics...
	It's a framework for disentangling.
	Well, there's an ethical idea, too.
	Before the ancient Hebrews encountered the God of the Ark of the Covenant, they purified themselves ethically.
	That's something to be cognizant of.
	If the layers of reality are peeled back and the distinction between good and evil is drawn for you, you want to be sure you're as far away from the malevolence in your own spirit as you can possibly be.
	And that's no joke.
	I mean, that's part of the reason that set is so important, because these experiences can become hellish in no time flat, and I suspect that's likely more to be the case to the degree to which there's a certain amount of hellishness in your psyche.
	So that's a warning of sorts.
	I have another question for you, Dr.
	Ruck.
	I asked Brian this, and...
	If the Dionysian, first of all, how do you view the relationship between, this is a terribly complicated question, Dionysius and Christ, and why was it necessary, so to speak, for Dionysius to transform into Christ?
	Let me just make a simple observation that Christ is a Hellenized Jewish tradition.
	Christ is a Greek deity.
	The Christian story is a Greek myth.
	So it's the consequence of Judaism and Greece coming together?
	This does not mean to say that it is an inauthentic religion.
	I understand.
	Okay, so let me ask you a question.
	So I studied, to the degree that I'm capable, the emergence of the Of the god Marduk in Mesopotamian culture.
	And one of the things that I stumbled across was the fact that Marduk was, for example, known by at least 50 different names.
	And they were all attributes.
	And I thought, well, each of those names was likely, at some point in history, the signifier of a tribal deity.
	And the tribal deity...
	So imagine this.
	Imagine that we abstract up what we admire into something resembling the deity that guides our tribe.
	We attribute to that a personality and we try to enter into a relationship with it because it's the personality that represents the ideal, just like the personality that animates you when your creative represents the creative spirit that permeates mankind.
	Each tribe has its own idealized representation, but when tribes come together, those ideals fight.
	That's the battle between Gods in heaven that Eliade writes about so prolifically.
	So you imagine that as tribes come together, their gods fight in psychological space and arrange themselves into something resembling a hierarchy and a higher god emerges as a consequence of the conflict, something that's more sophisticated.
	And so, as we aggregate, as human beings, as we aggregate across tribes, we develop a more sophisticated and universal conception of the highest ideal.
	So you have Greece and Judaism combined, and out of that emerges the figure of Christ, this transformation of Dionysius.
	And as you said, it's not something that doesn't invalidate the revelation.
	You'd expect some revelation to occur as the consequence of the interaction between two cultures that had been separated, because they had their own profound developmental history.
	Of course it would be cataclysmic.
	Something has to come out of that.
	And what I don't understand is the role that the hallucinogens played in that.
	Of course, there's many things I don't understand, but that's certainly one of them.
	Yeah, I mean, the fact that religions fight with each other, that tribes have their own contingent of deities, and they fight with each other and so on, that's the whole tragedy of this.
	Because once you define it, you try to own it.
	Then you have people with their set of belongings and opposing people with another set of belongings.
	Whereas the basic nature of this experience is that that's all immaterial.
	There's only one Reality.
	It can't be defined that way.
	I mean, you don't have to see, you don't have to explain these other entities that are in these rooms with us as animals or as animate human hybrids or as humans and so forth.
	Equally, in this ancient mystery tradition, what could be seen would be the perfect relationships of mathematics and geometry.
	And we know that Pythagoras was He didn't figure out with pencil and paper the relationship of geometric forms and so forth.
	He saw it, and he saw it while he was in a cave.
	And the way he did this is that from the cave, as in the Ellicinian Chamber of Initiation, he transcended in the spirit out of the cave to the edges of the universe and saw those things.
	Of course, that's impossible.
	He couldn't have done that.
	But that's what he did.
	Well, he was Pythagoras, after all.
	Yeah, I know.
	So, we don't have to define them as this goddess or that god, and so forth.
	We already are working on a really great system of definitions, which we call science.
	Right.
	I mean, even, Carl, even scholars who don't support the psychedelic hypothesis necessarily, and I'm thinking of maybe Peter Kingsley, who's also a great inspiration, will nonetheless talk about the dark places of wisdom or his book, Reality.
	Kingsley goes into great detail about these cave techniques and these incubatory techniques practiced.
	By Pythagoras in his basement that he built for these techniques in Italy, entering into these states of trance, these cataleptic states of trance beyond time, beyond space, this kind of apparently near-death state.
	This was practiced by the likes of Pythagoras, Parmenides, and Pedocles.
	These pre-Socratics, with or without drugs, Would enter into these states to commune with the goddess and bring back the things that we would call at least part of Western civilization.
	So, I mean, these states of non-irrationality, you know, I think this is relatively accepted by classicists, Carl.
	This goes back to E.R. Dodds, the Greeks and the Irrational, a couple generations ago.
	So I think psychedelics are just one twist on this.
	Gilgamesh goes down to the bottom of the ocean like Pinocchio does, and he brings back the herb of immortality, but it's stolen, I believe, by a snake on the way back.
	That's the case.
	That's the story.
	Is that a shamanic story as well?
	Yes.
	And so we go out to the edge of the world to gather wisdom, but on the way back we lose it and we can't bring it back.
	Or we can only bring back fragments of it.
	We're not capable of bringing back at all.
	Once you wake up it's hard to remember the dream.
	That's a good place to stop We could add one thing.
	A very important technique is to enter the dream world and when you're dreaming, don't decide you want to wake up, but carry consciousness into the dream.
	In which case, you enter this world.
	You're in the spirit world.
	You're in control of everything.
	Have you been able to lucid dream?
	Yes.
	Are you an avid practitioner?
	I used to practice it more than I do now because I came to realize that what I was trying to do was die.
	There's no sense in hurrying the process.
	Once you do that, once you disassociate your spirit from your body, you might decide you don't want to go back in again.
	And that's what happens when you die.
	But the moment when you do that, when you bring consciousness into your unconscious reality, is an extremely orgasmic, pleasant when you bring consciousness into your unconscious reality, is an extremely Thank you.
	Thank you very much, Brian.
	Thank you, Jordan.
	Much appreciated.
	Thank you.
	Enjoyed talking to you both.
	I appreciate your candor, to say the least.
	And your work, for that matter.
	You know, you're participating in something that's of staggering significance.
	Thank you, Jordan.

▲