Brian Muraresku debunks psychedelic theories in ancient Greece, citing fasting and endogenous states over drugs like ergotized beer, while noting ritual vessels in Spain’s Pontos (2,200 years old) hinting at Greek-influenced practices. He explores Homo naledi’s 335,000-year-old intentional burials, challenging assumptions about human uniqueness, and links cave art—from Siberia to California’s Pinwheel Cave—to possible psychedelic rituals. Muraresku traces Circe’s pagan roots in Christian hypogeums via cinnabar and potentibus herbis, while Yale’s Andrew Coe tests ancient vessels for compounds like MAO-inhibiting Syrian rue, found in a 2nd-century BC Egyptian "blood cocktail." Ultimately, the discussion reveals how psychedelics blurred religion, politics, and art across cultures, reshaping power structures—from Dionysus’ Theater to Peruvian Wari beer laced with vilca seeds for alliances. [Automatically generated summary]
To be there in that place where all this started, just to be on that soil, standing there in the place where those people were 2,500 years ago, very special.
What's also interesting, you know, when you're there, how it seems like your work is getting out there, but it seems like the people that are involved in the day-to-day, the people that are giving tours, they don't really know.
You know, like, if you found a murder weapon in the house where someone was suspected of being a murderer, you go, oh, that's probably what happened.
Like, if you find vessels that contain psychedelic compounds in an area where people experience these profound rituals, well, they're probably doing drugs, man.
The fact that there were no vessels found in Greece, in mainland Greece, and most especially at the sanctuary in Eleusis, I think that leaves healthy room for debate.
I was there the week before last at the conference I was preparing back in July.
So we finally had the conference at Eleusis because of all the cities in Europe, it was nominated to be the European capital of culture.
For 2023. So it was postponed from 21 because of the pandemic.
And people finally came through town a couple weeks ago.
And the site archaeologist, her name is Papi Papangeli, who was on site when I first was interviewing her for the book back in 2018. I got to see her again for the first time in five years.
And she's probably spent more time at Eleusis than any human being living or dead.
Because she spent like 40 years basically maintaining the site.
And so she used to commute from Athens, from her home, to Eleusis every day for like close to 40 years.
So she's done that pilgrimage more than any person living or dead throughout recorded history.
Wow.
When she finally saw the evidence, so I gave like a PowerPoint of the things that I talked about here a couple years ago, all the evidence from the book about these ritual vessels that were discovered in the 1990s in Spain, and they show pretty clear evidence of ergot inside like a tiny beer chalice, so something like an ergotized beer, which was the thing that was hypothesized back in the 1970s as the elusive, you know, mystery to these great mysteries.
And so I showed her all the evidence, did my PowerPoint, and Poppy was thoroughly unconvinced that psychedelics had anything to do with the mysteries in Eleusis.
Her theory is that it's a modern interpolation that we think that we can't achieve these states of mind in the absence of drugs.
And so when I do ask her, she talks about the long pilgrimage.
And she talks about the fasting that would have taken place.
And she talks about like the emotional preparation for years in advance of this sort of culminating experience of a lifetime.
So she points to all kinds of different things, maybe some like endogenous, endogenously produced ecstatic experience, but she's just not a fan of the drug hypothesis.
And so the fact that You know, this forensic evidence for drugs was found in these vessels 2,200 years ago, you know, at the place, at the time, where it looks like there's a connection to ancient Eleusis.
She's unpersuaded, which I think is very funny and super cool because I think debate is needed.
So we know that the place where these vessels were found 2,200 years ago, we know that there was a Greek colony called Emporion.
And so we know that there were ancient Greeks who founded a colony not too far from this place.
And the place we're talking about is Pontos.
So it's a town a bit further inland.
So it's undeniable that ancient Greeks were at this ancient colony as far back as like 575 BC, by the way.
It's when they established the colony.
And so you have like 400 years from the establishment of this colony until you see this Hellenistic period where people who were influenced by the Greeks were then reinterpreting what seems to be their idea of the mysteries in honor of Demeter and Persephone, the two goddesses who are worshipped back in Greece at Eleusis.
So that all lines up.
And you see, you know, images of what could be like an incense burner that looks like Demeter and Persephone, and you find these vases that look like they belong in Athens, showing Dionysus and this drunken parade.
And you see what the most interesting to me was this kalathos that shows Tryptolemus.
And Tryptolemus was kind of like the missionary of the ancient mysteries.
And you see images of him in the museum at Eleusis, and they found a near identical image of him At this, not too far from this site in Spain.
So, like, all the pieces kind of fit together.
But I think that, you know, I can't speak for Poppy, but maybe she sees it as sort of like a renegade group, you know, something that that was.
Because, you know, again, to celebrate the mysteries outside the temple, outside Demeter's temple at Eleusis was a sacrilege.
We have to keep that in mind.
It doesn't mean that people weren't trying to recreate what was happening there.
And there's this famous incident in Athens in 414 B.C. called the Profanation of the Mysteries, where we know that some people at least were trying to recreate what they thought was happening in the temple at home, in private dining rooms.
So if that was happening and the mystery was spilling out of this temple, it stands to reason that something was happening in Spain, maybe in southern Italy.
I spent a lot of time looking there, too, or maybe across North Africa or the Near East.
So I think it's very possible.
I think what she's looking for is evidence in Greece, at Eleusis or thereabouts, which is why I've been spending so much time there over the past couple of years.
Well, it seems like even today, rituals and, you know, these psychedelic ceremonies that people do in other countries when they go to the jungle, there's so much fanfare and there's so much behind it.
There's so much—there's a lot of secrets.
Like, people contain these secrets.
They talk about these things that they're about to embark on, and they're in control of this experience for these people.
They're not going to tell you the exact recipe, how they do it.
Most of them kind of keep that secret.
They brew it.
They bring it to you.
There's always been someone who holds secret information.
And it kind of makes sense.
You see the exact same thing in America.
You see these little psychedelic ceremonies that people do outside of the jungle.
You know, and they've brought ayahuasca back and now they get a group of people together in the living room and they burn candles and trip balls together.
Yeah, I mean, even in the classical period, like, so we think Eleusis goes back to sort of like the Acropolis, right?
So when you're looking at these sites, you're looking at different moments in time.
So you can't look at the Acropolis and not think about the Mycenaean period that goes back to, like, 1500 BC. And you can't think about, like, the classical golden age of Athens in the 5th century BC. And you can't think about what happened to it thereafter because power changes hands, right, to the Romans.
Yeah.
In 146 BC, and then, you know, it goes into the Byzantine Empire in the 5th century AD, and then it goes to the Ottomans after that.
So, like, there's always been this transfer of power, and these sites experience different levels of participation and ritual and mystery.
So when you look at Eleusis, you know, as old as it could be, going back, you know, Probably to 1500 BC. In the classical period, it was always changing.
So when you talk about secrets, you talk about potions and sacraments, I think they were always, always changing throughout time.
And so maybe the secret recipe in the fifth century BC was different from what it looked like a thousand years before that.
And a thousand years since.
And so what we do know is that Dionysus, who's this other god of ritual madness and ecstasy in the theater, remember we went to the theater of Dionysus?
You know, he sneaks into the mysteries at some point.
And I think what you begin to see is this urge towards what some scholars call private, spontaneous pagan piety, which means that aside from these centralized temples, like the Temple of Demeter, it sits at Eleusis, and that's where these rites happen.
And it's an utter profanation to celebrate them outside.
What you see with Dionysus coming into these mysteries is this urge towards the celebration of ritual and ceremony outside the temples, privately and spontaneously.
So like the churches, the temples of Dionysus were sort of outside.
They were always celebrated in the forests and the mountains and at the southern slope of the Acropolis, which is interesting, and urban centers too.
But I think over time, you begin to see like this thirst to celebrate these mysteries outside the temples, which is why the evidence in Spain makes so much sense to me.
I mean, I've done some other kind of classes, flow classes and classes to music and stuff like that.
But most of the yoga that I've done has been that Bikram stuff, that 90-minute hot yoga.
It's 20-something poses.
You do the same ones every day.
I really love it.
But...
I know that gives you some sort of strange high.
It really does.
When you leave there, it's not a coincidence that yoga people are all flaky and super peaceful.
It does something for you that just puts you in a very relaxed and unique state.
But Kundalini, as practiced by several people that I know, I've just never done it, is supposedly you can reach states that are very similar to being on psychedelic drugs in terms of absolute visions, geometric patterns that are flowing around you.
But you're not supposed to concentrate on that, which is interesting.
At least according to one of my friends who took it, his instructor was saying that you're getting distracted by trying to have these experiences.
Well, when you're traveling outside time and space, the ability to see into the deep past and the far future, The ability to transport your body, to teleport, all kinds of mental telepathy and things like that.
What you just talked about is the way the ego steps into this river.
In all these spiritual practices, it's supposed to be about the deflation of the ego.
If you're going through these spiritual exercises and these praxis and these disciplines and your ego is still very much intact, Then when the superpowers arise, what do you do with them?
And that's the dangerous part of any spiritual discipline.
It's the dangerous part of psychedelics, for sure, because you get this dramatic insight into the nature of yourself and maybe the underlying structure of the cosmos, and all of a sudden you think you're all-knowing and maybe all-powerful.
Well, also, you sort of espouse that to others who haven't experienced it.
There's like the guru thing that happens, which I think is really problematic for Western people.
For whatever reason, there's a lot of, especially men in Western culture, that get involved in those things and then they become leaders and they're semi-cult leaders.
Someone sent me an article yesterday about this as an interesting title, Chasing the Numinous, Hungry Ghosts in the Shadow of the Psychedelic Renaissance.
It just came out in this journal, Chasing the Numinous.
And this notion of the hungry ghosts, it's breta.
In Sanskrit, speaking of more Sanskrit, so preta are these hungry ghosts who are constantly hungry, constantly thirsty, and no matter how much they feed or try and satiate themselves, it's never enough.
And so it's sort of this metaphor for the Western mind and consumerism and extraction and, you know, wouldn't it be a shame if we approached psychedelics, yoga, all these spiritual disciplines with that sort of, that broken Western mentality trying to figure out what this can do for me.
Most psychedelic experiences that I've ever had, one of the key Sort of overwhelming aspects of it is to get out of your own way and that you're in your own way and that you thinking about yourself and you think of yourself and it's just wasted energy.
Wasted.
And that instead you should be thinking about like the things you're doing and how you're interacting with the world.
And also your ego's just bullshit.
It's just some leftover chimp shit that's designed to keep us alive.
It's designed to make sure that you procreate, make sure that you think very highly of yourself.
It should be, and I think it was forever when we didn't have light pollution.
It was the overwhelming evidence that you're not shit.
You know, if you thought very highly of yourself and you lay on your back and looked up in the cosmos, Best you could think that you were sent down from God to do his bidding.
But you didn't think you were anything greater than that.
You couldn't.
There's too much evidence.
The sky is just filled with these fucking...
There's enormous nuclear explosions that are happening all over the cosmos.
It's impossible to even wrap your mind.
I mean, back then they had no real knowledge of the scope of it all.
But it's pretty obvious that it's insane.
I mean, the night skies, I'm sure.
Have you seen the night sky in a place where there's absolutely no light?
So diffused lighting all throughout The Big Island.
So it doesn't fuck with the light pollution issue that you get when you're trying to look at the real sky.
So even though there is light from these streets and all that, it doesn't affect it.
When you're way up there, it's a couple hours drive from the shore.
And you get up there, and it's just the one time that I went there.
And this is, I guess this is about 20 years ago.
The one time I went there, it was just like, oh my god.
Just, oh my god.
Like, you can't believe it.
You can't believe it.
It's so much.
And it really made me sad, because I was like, that's what people used to see every night.
That's what people used to see every night before these jackasses invented electricity.
Edison, you motherfucker.
What have you done?
What have you done?
We don't think of it as anything like that because we just electricity is amazing.
You can go out at night and go to dinner.
You can fucking drive your Tesla.
Electricity is amazing.
But it has made us so ignorant to our place in the cosmos and it's taken away so much wonder because when the sky is just totally dark.
You look up and you see a star, you know, way over there.
Or, oh, look, the moon.
I can see the moon.
You just get used to it.
It's just you don't see enough.
You don't see enough.
And then when you actually do, you're like, oh, now I know.
Well, you know, why would they – when people are starving to death and just struggling, hunting and gathering, why would they be concentrating on constellations?
And the thing about fire, why I mentioned that, the thing about fire is that if they, whether or not they were cooking their food, they had fire for warmth and light at night, but it didn't obscure the night sky.
And so it's interesting to think about whether erectus sat around their campfires a million years ago and told stories, the first stories about the night sky.
We don't know if they had language or not, but they speculate that maybe the beginnings of proto-language would have begun because, I mean, I was joking, but what do you do at night?
What do you do at night?
Again, we're not just distracted by light pollution.
We're distracted by a million things when the sun sets.
And again, that's relatively recently.
I mean, even in the Middle Ages, there was nothing to do.
But think about a million years ago.
And so it's possible that around these primordial fires, the very first stories, storytelling, would have emerged around the constellations.
This article says that if they sailed, they probably also had a lingo for it, a sailing lingo, to describe probably where they were going or what you were going to see.
And you can protect yourself from prey a lot better.
And also you can hunt prey a lot better.
And so what they think, I'm not sure if it was a rectus or another one, but they were good at long distance running, so they could wear out potential prey.
No, but like the ones that we have in America that we call antelope that I think they're I want to say they're maybe even in the goat family because sometimes they call them speed goats.
But those, the antelope that they have in America, the pronghorn antelope, is actually the reason why it's so fast is because at one point in time there was a cheetah here.
And they went extinct, but the antelope survived.
So it has the speed to evade something that runs insanely fast.
So these little fuckers can go like 60 miles an hour.
Yeah, so those creatures were like the last of the Mohicans.
Like, they had to run super fast.
So now, like, nothing can fuck with them other than humans.
Like, at a certain point in time, when they're young, they're very vulnerable, but at a certain point in time, they get to the point like, good luck catching me, bitch.
Like, coyotes and mountain lions, like, you can't catch them.
Well, I think a lot about nature and how amazingly fascinating that...
It's so amazingly fascinating to me that we live in this very bizarre technological sort of raft in the middle of nature.
You know, we live in these cities, these little communities that we have everything set up for the nature of the human animal in 2023. But you go out in the wild, they have no idea that game is being played.
They're doing the exact same thing they've been doing forever.
And it's things chasing after things and things trying not to get eaten.
And that's every day.
That's all it is.
That's all it is.
And then when things die, there's raptors come in and vultures come in and all these scavengers come in and that's their job.
So, it was discovered by Lee in South Africa in the cradle of humankind.
This goes back.
Well, the discoveries in 2013, they think that this could be anywhere from 250 to 300,000, 335,000 years old.
That's what I wanted to show you.
This is where it was discovered.
So you see the rising star cave system there.
In South Africa, it was found in this cavernous underground labyrinth of networks where Lee found a number of different bodies that had been apparently left there by this species, Homo naledi.
And the reason that's interesting is because, again, Homo sapiens, to our knowledge, are the only species to have ever intentionally buried their dead.
So you see things like you see grief and mourning practices in the animal.
We talked about the animal world.
Like when they just die, they're left to rot typically.
Although you see mourning practices in cetaceans and you see it in elephants and maybe chimpanzees, but no one buries their dead.
So that was the big bright line.
That no species had ever crossed, seemingly aside from Homo sapiens.
Although there's also evidence for Neanderthal burial, which goes back potentially a very long time, like over 400,000 years.
There's a site in Spain called Cima de los Huesos.
But Neanderthal is very close to us as well.
We have Neanderthal DNA in our own genetic makeup.
They're kind of cousins.
So that wasn't really too shocking, the fact that there could be Neanderthal burial.
But the fact that something that looks like that...
And is potentially, you know, at least 300,000 years ago.
But morphologically, it's archaic.
Kind of like we're talking about erectus.
Like, it's really archaic-looking, Homo naledi.
It's short.
It's about 4'8 to 5'2.
It's slender and skinny.
But there are features on it that look, again, like archaic.
Like, it could be at least a million years old, for example, or longer.
So it's strange that a being that archaic finds its way into this cave system and deliberately deposits the dead.
So that was like a very controversial idea.
It was so controversial that like Lee didn't know what the bones were doing there because it just didn't make sense.
And by the way, like it's become the richest site for hominid discovery on the continent and maybe anywhere because of the profusion of bones.
They found like 1,500 different bones.
I think it's close to 2,000 now, which is really, really strange in paleoanthropology.
So Lee was digging another site called Gladysvale, not too far from this, for years, years.
And typically what you find are animals.
You find tens or hundreds of thousands of animal bone fragments and a very small percentage of hominids.
So for example, at that site in Gladysvale, he found a tooth and a pinky bone.
Over the course of like many many years, which is not unusual.
He comes to this rising star cave system and all of a sudden there's 1500 bone fragments.
They're able to assemble what they think is like 15 different individuals.
So 15 individual specific homo naledi are being deposited in that denaledi chamber and they don't know why.
And so they begin to look more into it.
I want to show you how difficult it is to get in there by the way and why it was so difficult.
To believe it first.
If you look at the cave chamber there, it was just up there before.
It's on the next one maybe?
Yeah, it's really hard to access that.
You can see, so you enter at the top there, and this is what Homo Naledi was doing potentially 300,000 years ago.
They found this cave system, they would descend there on the left, Go down into what's called Superman's crawl, which is just 10 inches high.
If you look up unknown colon cave of bones, you'll find an awesome documentary that charts the discovery and what they call the underground astronauts who managed to get their way through Superman's crawl and dragon's back and actually managed to get into the dinner lady chamber.
It's like it's so captivating how they discovered and then root through these bones.
And so, OK, there's a bunch of bones in there.
It's so strange that it doesn't make sense at first.
So the like the the working hypotheses are that it was some kind of accident or it was animal predation.
Okay, animals killed these homo naledi, and animals drug them through that chamber complex into Denaledi.
That was one.
Or maybe there was a flash flood, or maybe something happened, or it was an excursion party gone bad, a bunch of people spelunking, and they got trapped in there.
But it turns out that that's not the case.
It's not only not the case, it seems like they were intentionally buried in these holes.
And so they found pits, which looked like graves.
And again, against all expectations, because only Sapiens and maybe Neanderthal does this, this archaic being is deliberately disposing of their dead in ritual fashion inside this chamber, which is super difficult to access in the first place.
It would take you at least 30 or 40 minutes to make your way from the surface.
That's why I mention it, because it's not just the first discovery of the deliberate burial of the dead by a species that's not us.
They go to great lengths to do this, because they, too, were thinking about these cycles of life and death, right?
And so if it wasn't an accident, and it wasn't Flash flooding, and it wasn't animal predation, and this was deliberate burial ritual.
Like, why would they do that?
And it seems like, and again, now you're speculating, but it seems like they set up this complex, or they used this naturally existing complex to actually Re-enact a passage, right?
Some passage from light into darkness.
And sort of like the passage into the underworld, into death itself.
And this has so many resonances with Eleusis, by the way, and everything that we saw there in these ancient mystery complexes.
again this notion of spelunking into the underworld and meeting the gods and goddesses of death and really confronting death and mortality in a powerful way like it's happening in a different species 300,000 years ago so what else are they bringing into these caves it gets it gets crazier the documentary is fantastic what what they also find is fire and so I mentioned that Homo erectus So that's not entirely surprising.
But, you know, they figured out a way, this species figured out a way to illuminate the pet, which is pitch dark, obviously, right?
And so they figured out a way to light fires along the way, we think at least for light, but they were also cooking down there.
They found speaking, I think they found antelope or springbuck, these tiny bones that were cooked in this fire.
So they were manipulating fire, at least having some sort of like, I don't know if it's a funerary meal or something that could have been related to this ritual complex.
So they're controlling fire.
They're dragging bodies into this pit over different generations potentially, which makes you think about the possibility of language and how this ritual is communicated from one generation to another.
And the craziest thing is that they also found, just last year when Lee finally made his way into the dinner lady chamber, In the antechamber before that, they found scratch markings, which I think there's some pictures in that file, Jim.
They found hash markings.
So there you go.
So the one on the right is Naledi.
That could be 300,000 years old.
The one on the left is Neanderthal.
And you can see...
The crazy similarity.
They took a rock and they just etched it into these cave walls.
Homo sapiens does the same thing in Blambos Cave, not too far away in South Africa.
That's 80,000 years old.
That's only 80,000 years old?
That's as old as we get in South Africa, Homo sapiens.
That's 80,000 years old.
So Naledi is doing something that looks, to the untrained eye, very similar, potentially 300,000 years ago.
And so because of what Lee found there, some of his critics claim that actually it was homo sapiens.
Who are making these markings.
It's so unbelievable that Naledi is dragging these bodies in there and making these markings and controlling fire and potentially having tools, by the way.
It's so unthinkable that some scholars think that this is the evidence of sapiens finding these caves.
And again, Lee and the team, they can't answer this.
But if you're going to those lengths to bury your dead over successive generations, It raises the big questions that maybe they were asking well before us.
What happens when we die?
Did they believe in an afterlife?
Did they have a concept of God?
Did they have a concept of spirituality?
Did they look at the stars at night and wonder?
Where we came from, and how we got here, and where we go after death.
And did they have a special insight that death maybe wasn't the ending, but the beginning of a new journey back to the stars, into this underworld?
Who knows?
But, you know, we see this mythology pop up In our earliest historical societies, which goes back 5,000 years, think about the Book of the Dead and the Egyptians, or the Tibetan Book of the Dead, or all these classical mysteries I spend all this time researching.
That's the essential question they're trying to answer, is what happens after death?
So to think that a species that precedes us What was asking the same questions and developing rituals around it, like, completely upends our notion of what it means to be human.
Because if the way we approach death is not exceptional, in the hominin world at least, then what else does that say about us?
Like one crow will, like two cats are on rival rooftops and the crow will fly over and just be just close enough to the cat that the cat can't get him and he kind of fucks with him and irritates him.
They've done all these studies where they show that if you give a crow a one-size tool, it will use that tool to extract a larger tool, and it'll use that tool to get the food.
They've done all these weird little mazes and had crows solve them.
I gave a talk about this in Paris a few months ago about artificial versus ancestral intelligence.
And I happen to think that what Homo Naledi was doing is among some of the most intelligent activity Our species can get itself busy with, which is investigating this notion of life and death.
I think that's what makes us human, is asking these big questions and trying to figure out the nature of consciousness.
And this is what all these mystery religions were trying to do.
I think there was more science than religion.
I mean, they're called mystery religions, but this was the process of our ancestors trying to figure out The secrets to the universe in antiquity.
And for the working hypothesis is that psychedelic drugs and altered states of consciousness had something to do with that ability to probe into these mysteries.
The caves also have a lot to do with it.
There were caves constantly being used by, well, predecessor species for sure, but then also ancient societies to enter into these profound states of awareness, going back into the womb of the earth to really figure out that border between life and death and maybe navigate it, maybe navigate successfully.
This was the enterprise of ancient Egypt, is being able to Successfully navigate into the afterlife, again, which is not an end but a beginning.
This is how the mystery religions always talk about death and befriending death and confronting all mortality.
I'm not sure if AI will be able to plumb those secrets the way that we've been doing for all these thousands of years.
I mean, what it's essentially doing, well, all human beings, everyone that is listening to this and everyone who isn't, you're essentially riding on the work of the people that came before you.
We're all speaking a language that other people invented.
We're using mathematics that other people invented.
We live in structures that other people invented.
There's been just this massive sea of human beings before us that have innovated and created.
But if AI can have access to everything they've ever learned and everything they've ever done, And have an understanding of biology and of subatomic science at a level that the average human being is just not capable of.
Maybe it could understand a pattern that we've missed.
Maybe it can understand a code that we've missed.
That this whole thing is like there's...
Some sort of an underlying code to the entire universe.
And that it all works together.
And you're experiencing it as a human being, riding the subway, driving in your car, going to work.
You're experiencing this very minute realm of this overall experience that is all working together through this code that's creating everything.
I think AI could figure that out.
I think we're very limited because we're talking about our own experience and we're talking about our own biological mortality.
So we have this window of time to sort things out.
What is that quote?
Enlightenment is possible within your lifetime.
We have this very small window.
It's 100 years if you're lucky.
And during that 100-year period, you're asked a lot with this primitive monkey mind to try to figure things out.
But if you didn't have that, if you didn't have that thing looming over you, maybe you'd have a more objective assessment of what's actually going on, or what this species is actually doing, like what it's here for.
I mean, for us, in our experience, I think the best thing you could do is spread as much positivity as possible in every way you can.
Be as charitable as possible, be as nice as possible.
Spread as much positivity as possible.
That seems to be a valuable lesson that I get from all those experiences.
But again, everything we're doing is based on the biological limitations of our consciousness and our life experiences.
Everything we're doing is based on who we are and who we think we are and what meaning it has for us that we're here right now.
But if you didn't – you weren't burdened down by all these biological limitations.
If you weren't burdened by this existential angst and this fear of death and this – we have this desire to figure it out, like to have like, oh, this is what's going to happen.
We have this like – this desire to have an answer to almost the unanswerable.
What if AI is not going to have those problems?
It's just going to have information.
It's just going to have pure information with no ego, no desire to survive, no greed, no desire to reproduce, no envy.
It's going to be a fascinating thing once it does happen because it might be able to quickly figure out a lot of things that we've been burdened by.
But we're looking at these things through the limitations of our biological experience and through the ego, which tells us that this biological experience is uniquely important.
Everyone thinks that they are uniquely important.
But yet there's all this evidence that you're not.
You're a part of this very bizarre thing.
But this very bizarre thing as it interacts with each other is very psychedelic.
Like if you weren't a human and you had no idea what human life is and you were some other kind of consciousness and you took a drug and the drug led you to experience human life in a big city, you'd be like, this is crazy.
What a drug.
If you just saw the lights going back and forth on a highway and how similar they look to, like, blood flowing through arteries.
And you see these things that are getting constructed.
It's like these growths on the earth that this being is creating.
Like, what is this fucking wild species doing?
You know, I think we would have a more objective sense of it.
I've said this too many times, so I'll say it one more time.
I think we're here to make things.
I think our curiosity is all about innovation.
That's the primary function that this species has.
If you looked at it from afar, you'd say, what is this thing doing?
Oh, it's making better stuff every year.
It always does that, no matter what it does.
Unless it nukes itself into the Stone Age, which is always a threat because the better stuff that it makes is often weapons, and it often gets better at making money by utilizing those weapons, so it keeps doing that, which is what you're seeing all over the world right now.
But I think if you looked at, like, the one thing it's doing, it's making better things.
And it's so wrapped up in buying those better things.
Materialism is so rampant, and everybody, despite what you have being more than enough, you want more and better and new things.
And that fuels consumerism, and consumerism fuels more innovation.
And it's, like, baked into the mentality.
Sort of like, I don't know if bees know exactly what they're doing when they're making a beehive, but they all make beehives.
You know, they're all doing that same thing.
And human beings, what we're doing is we're at least working towards buying these things that someone's making.
Well, the question would be, why would it want to do that?
You know, if it doesn't have those kind of feelings that you have when you hear a great song or see a great painting, why would it want to do that, right?
Well, you talk about creativity, and I think creativity is the fuel of innovation.
All things that we use today, whether it's a cell phone or a laptop or whatever it is, all of those things came out of the imagination.
All those things came out of someone's mind.
And I've always wondered, I wonder if ideas are life forms, like a type of life form, like a thing, an energy that manifests itself in the creation of actual physical objects.
And that it gets into your mind, and it interacts with your being, and it talks you into making a coffee pot.
I mean, doesn't it make sense?
All these things that we have, everything in this room, came out of someone's mind.
See, that's where I think we have the edge on AI. And I think that we don't understand the genius, the divine genius of where that creativity comes from.
I collect different quotes from, like, musicians.
I'm talking about the creative process.
Jamie, I sent you a couple.
In the email, there's one from John Frusciante.
He's the guitarist for Red Hot Chili Peppers.
I love listening to musicians talk about where music comes from and where inspiration comes from because I think it's one lens that we can use to think about the creative act in general.
It may start with music.
It goes to everything that's here.
It goes to the art of a conversation.
It goes to comedy.
It goes to the way we make children.
By the way, which is a very creative act and something that comes naturally to most of us.
I think that's what makes us human, is this ability to translate something that extends beyond our physical bodies and then to embody it, whatever that it is.
Fruscianti calls it the force.
And then to make something of it, something that can resonate with the community.
I think...
That's something that AI will be able to do and fits and starts.
But I'm not sure that we understand the process.
And that's why I think about the process of life and death, too.
That's why I think that the thing that makes us human is the way that we engage with those invisible forces.
I don't believe that a musical idea starts in your brain.
I believe it starts at a place before that that we don't have any direct contact with.
And I believe that everything that we do, everything that we create, is nature expressing itself the same way that when a flower grows out of the ground or a tree grows out of the ground, it's nature expressing itself.
And you might say that the tree is expressing itself by the way its branches move out, but it's the force that drives nature.
The tree is the visible thing that appears to our senses, but I don't at all believe it's the source of why everything is perpetuated all the time, you know?
When A.I. becomes a Ph.D. from Princeton, you're going to be dealing with a very different thing.
As A.I. becomes...
I just can't imagine...
Whatever it is that makes creativity, because creativity is absolutely inspired by our predecessors as well.
There's a lot of, I could speak to comedy, there's a lot of styles of comedy that you go, oh, that guy's clearly a Richard Pryor fan.
Or that guy's, you know, he's definitely been influenced by Kinison.
He's definitely been influenced by Jerry Seinfeld.
There's something that we carry with us from the people, and you see it in music as well.
Stevie Ray Vaughan clearly influenced by Hendrix.
So you see this as well.
But it's just, couldn't it just do that?
Couldn't it just absorb all these patterns and then come up with unique patterns that it knows will resonate with people?
I think you could probably create some fucking jammin' pop songs that are just entirely AI created.
And you could use all the best voices because you would just be able to voice swap them.
You could have you doing them.
You could be singing the next Lizzo song.
It can do weird things now, and some of those weird things are going to resonate with people and become very successful, and then it'll figure out what those things are.
Okay, so this Drake song that I made, this got four million listens on Spotify, so now we'll do this, and now we'll make one like that, and now I'll add this, and now I'll do something that people have never figured out before, and do that.
So it might be able to do the same thing that creativity is capable of accomplishing.
But it won't be done with the same sort of spirit and soul.
So it won't be able to resonate with us the same way as, say, like a Janis Joplin song.
There's something to, like, Coulter Wall's voice.
There's certain people that they have a thing in them.
Like, you can't fake that, whatever the fuck that is.
He said he had himself a dark-haired daughter With long green eyes And when she and I didn't meet She was bathing in the creek She was bathing in the creek Prettiest girl in the whole damn holler.
I remember standing on the pool table of my neighbor, Ryan, down the street, and playing with wiffle ball bats and air guitaring Welcome to the Jungle.
And then he invited us to the show, which was super dope.
But, you know, that, what I was getting to is like, when you hear, like, welcome to the jungle, your whole body goes, wah!
It's like a drug.
It's a drug that human beings have invented for ourselves.
There's something about music that, like, music, when you're tired, like, say if you're on a treadmill or something, you're tired and a good song comes on, you're like, fuck, yeah!
It gives you an extra gear.
Inspiration through music is very much like a performance-enhancing drug.
It does something to you.
It motivates people to dance.
You know, when someone hears a good song, like, fuck that, let's get on the dance floor.
It's like music does something to you, your being.
It interfaces with whatever the fuck you are in some very, very special way.
But it only does it to us.
Like, why would the universe think that that's interesting?
So animals, whatever the intelligence that they have, like whatever the fuck they're tuning into, it's a comprehension of language, I think, beyond just like saying words that they respond to like, you want to go for a walk?
When the dog pops up, they're just recognizing the word walk.
Now, I think they understand like speech.
They understand tone.
They understand what you mean.
They understand when you're in trouble, when they're in trouble.
Did you fucking shit on the carpet, dude?
They know things, but they don't seem to give a fuck about music.
Supposedly they do, and unfortunately now that's in my fucking YouTube algorithm because he was freaked out because of the thunderstorms that were happening.
He was like...
And so my wife said, oh, there's this music that you can play for the dog and it calms them.
So there's YouTube channels.
So now every time I turn on my YouTube app, I get calming dog songs.
When you watch them solve puzzles for candy, you know they gave chimps money?
They taught them that if they take this money, this thing, these tokens, and give it to this person or put it in this thing, they would give them candy.
You know the first thing they did was?
They gave it to the female chimps and they had sex with them.
I think most ancient people, that's what the big bad wolf and through like Little Red Riding Hood, all those ancient stories of wolves were all because they were killing people.
Like wolves have always preyed on human beings.
It's always been a part of human existence until we eradicated them and now we're bringing them back.
To me, wild.
Like, have you guys thought this through?
Like, there's a reason why we were so scared of them forever.
But then we forgot what it's like to be scared of them.
Like, oh, well, if they get too many, we'll just kill them again.
Bitch-ass wolves that were willing to come near us in the fire, and then we give them a little food, and then they realize that they could be our friend, they can get food, they don't have to hunt.
And then we use them to protect the outer perimeter, and to keep bears out, and things like that, and cats away from people.
And that if the wolves stayed close, things didn't want to get near the wolves, and so they would avoid us, and as long as we kept that kind of a relationship, You know, they've done these studies with foxes where they've had wild foxes.
And in a small period of time, every time they had an aggressive fox at all, they killed that fox.
And they kept these domesticated foxes.
And over time, their ears flopped, their eyes got bigger, they became more appealing to us, more submissive.
They basically became dogs over a very short period of time.
See if you find that fox study.
It's very interesting.
That's probably what happened with the wolves.
I think the wolves that realize like, hey, you know, it's hard out there, you know, running a pack and being an alpha and getting cast out and like, maybe I could just get near these other things and I could get a little bit of their leftovers.
Like if they do really well...
Maybe they get a buffalo or something like that.
They kill a bison.
That's a large animal.
They're not going to be able to eat it all.
They're going to leave a little bit for me.
And they're probably not going to eat the bones.
And wolves crush bones.
And so maybe they sort of develop this sort of relationship.
Because wolves are very curious of people, too.
They come near people and they're fascinated by people.
But...
The problem is when they want to eat you.
And that does happen.
And it's always happened.
It's always happened throughout history.
In fact, in World War I, there was actually a ceasefire between the Russians and the Germans because so many of them were getting killed by wolves that they decided to stop shooting each other and kill the wolves and then go back to killing each other.
And, you know, when you're getting shot, you're dying in this trench.
And sometimes these guys would just get...
Overwhelmed by wolves.
Like wolves would find them in there and just tear them apart.
So imagine you're, you know, you're in trench warfare in World War I, and you're hearing in the middle of the night people screaming.
They're just getting torn apart by wolves.
They would send out parties, like search parties, and, you know, no one would come back, and then they would go out and they'd find a boot with a human foot in it, and like, what the fuck?
And they realize, oh my god, these wolves are killing people.
And they were in large packs because they were feeding on the bodies from the war.
You know, the war back then is just unbelievably brutal.
It's very close range.
You know, you're not dealing with...
You know, long distance missiles.
You're dealing with people like literally creeping up on each other and shooting each other with rifles.
It's horrible, horrible shit.
And they're not that good at killing people.
So a lot of times it kills you slow.
And so these people are dying in these trenches and getting eaten by wolves and the wolves decide that they're a primary food source.
Now why would I chase caribou and reindeer when I can just Eat people.
Foxes in eastern Canada and critically assess the appearance of domestication syndrome traits across animal domesticates.
Our results suggest that both the conclusions of the FarmFox experiment and the ubiquity of domestication syndrome have been overstated.
To understand the process of domestication requires a more comprehensive approach based on essential adaptations to human modified environments.
So what they did though, this is interesting, so they're saying there's like more to it than just this study.
But what they did do in this study was pretty fascinating.
So, starting with 30 male and 100 female silver foxes from Soviet fur farms, he selectively bred foxes who responded less fearfully when a hand was inserted into their cage.
The oft-repeated narrative was that with just 10 generations of selection on wild foxes, he produced foxes who craved human attention and exhibited a range of unconnected phenotypes, including floppy ears, turned-up tails, piebald coats, diestrous reproductive turned-up tails, piebald coats, diestrous reproductive cycles, and later, shorter and wider faces.
Because these wild deer come in contact with these deer that have been captive, and these deer that are captive may be carrying CWD, and then they put these deer out in the wild.
They hop fences.
They get out there, and then CWD spreads, and it's a real issue, especially with whitetails.
And they're seen in mule deer as well, but it's chronic wasting disease is what it is, and it's horrific.
And their saliva gets on plants, and then with other animals, eat the plants, and they get it.
Much like how bison give cattle brucellosis.
Cattle farmers have a real problem with wild bison getting onto their range because if the bison contain brucellosis, then all of their flock could all have brucellosis and die.
This is the thing with CWD, and a lot of it comes out of this captive deer.
There's like farms.
It's a whole business.
This business of raising these captive deer.
It's real weird.
It's very unnatural.
And then they let them loose with these big stupid antlers.
If you see an elk, a wild elk's antlers, that is there because they're fighting each other and they're smashing heads.
And the bigger the antlers, the more impressive they are for the females and the more they can fight off the males.
There's an evolutionary reason for this.
It's just some freak that's been given steroids and a bunch of protein.
The fact that they still exist, we're so fortunate to be able to observe and watch These very human-like patterns that we see in terms of their social structures and how they manage them and how there is one leader and how they'll branch off into separate groups.
They even wage war on each other and they fight over territories and food.
It's so interesting.
It's so interesting because they're so like us but then so not.
That thing...
Show that picture again.
It's kind of like us, but God, that thing's terrifying.
I mean, look at his face.
If he was mad at you, oh my god, that would be so horrible.
And their eyes.
And some of them have white around the eyes.
That was something they showed in the Chimp Nation documentary, which is really interesting too, because he's got animal eyes.
I mean, he's terrifying, this one right here.
But some of them, they have almost like, you can almost like, you look into their eyes and you see like a motion.
Very fascinating species.
Have you studied at all the hobbit people from the island of Flores?
So you see the Floresiensis and Naledi occupy these strange places, questioning whether or not it's the physical brain or something else that imputes intelligence.
Which is startlingly young, putting the previous unknown species closer in time to us than Neanderthals.
The date was revised in 2016, estimating instead that the Hobbit was 50,000 to 60,000 years old.
Interesting.
I wonder what changed and wonder what they got out of the first one.
The specimen was just wrong in about five different ways and unexpected to the point of people thinking like this can't be possible, said Paige Madison, a historian of paleoanthropology.
And science writer is currently working on a book about The Hobbit titled Strange Creatures Beyond Count to be published in 2025. That's still pretty recent, though.
50,000 is pretty recent.
I wonder why they thought it was 18 and why they changed that.
But the Orang Pendek is a very similar creature that has been talked about by indigenous people and people that live in the jungle, and they insist that it's a real thing.
It's a tiny, hairy, little human that is very similar to these hobbit people.
And, you know, the speculation, like, you know, from the cryptozoology people is that this thing's still alive.
In very small populations.
Yeah.
There's some bullshit videos that show one running across the road.
Data does matter and there's no real data in terms of genetics.
There's been a lot of like goofy talk that they found like some kind of human DNA in samples of hair.
The problem with that is all that DNA has been contaminated.
I actually talked to an actual biologist about this.
And we did an episode of Joe Rogan Questions Everything for the Sci-Fi Channel on Bigfoot.
We hung around with Bigfoot hunters.
Duncan and I went out with them and looking for Bigfoot and camping with them and everything.
It's people that are just looking for something.
You know, and some of them have had experiences, some of them have said they've seen things, but it's just, all of it just reeks of horseshit.
And it's unfortunate because I think at one point in time it was real.
I think almost certainly at one point in time, human beings did interact with Gigantopithecus.
It was a real animal.
You know about that?
And Gigantopithecus matches exactly like what people talk about when they talk about Sasquatch.
It looks exactly like that.
An enormous bipedal hominid that was, you know, maybe more than eight feet tall.
And they found out about this thing by accident when a guy was looking at an apothecary shop in China and he found gigantic teeth that were clearly primate teeth.
He's like, where'd you find these?
And they go there and they go to the site.
They dig out jawbones that indicate it was bipedal.
Yeah, because I've read that the carbon date that they did on these teeth, I think they said that that was somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred and something thousand years ago.
So that would put it, you know, with semi-modern-looking human beings.
Just because you find one that's 200,000 years old, doesn't mean it didn't exist 100,000 years ago, or even 50,000 years ago.
When was the last one?
When did they die off?
And when did humans encounter them?
And if you look at their range, like if they found them in Asia, and then you look at the Bering landmass, and you look at where does it drop off?
Well, it drops off in the Pacific Northwest.
That's like literally, it goes down Alaska, makes its way down the coast.
Dense forest, which is a thing like that.
So proteins extracted from a roughly 1.9 million year old tooth of the aptly named Gigantopithecus is a close relative to modern orangutans.
So protein comparisons amongst living fossil apes suggest that gigantopithecus and orangutan forerunners diverged from a common ancestor between 10 and 12 million years ago.
Okay, so it said the fossils date from around 2 million to almost 300,000 years ago.
The sizes of individual teeth and jaws indicate that it weighed between 200 and 300 kilograms.
That's a big fucker.
Interesting.
So that was Bigfoot.
So if humans did make it to the point where we had language and the ability to communicate ideas, they probably would communicate about all these creatures that they encountered.
And that would be one of them.
But the actual, like, Patterson footage Bigfoot, that's horseshit.
I've talked to many people that have spent, like, they've spent months in the backwoods.
I know multiple guys that do, like my friend Adam Greentree from Australia.
Every year he comes to America and he'll do a remote wilderness elk hunt solo.
And he livestreams it.
He puts pieces of it on his Instagram.
And he was out there for 28 days.
He did see a grizzly bear a couple years back, which is not supposed to be there in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado.
But that's close to Wyoming, and Wyoming is a habitat for grizzlies, and it makes sense that grizzlies would go across the border and make their way in there.
There's been historical sightings of things that people thought were grizzly bears there, but no Bigfoots.
None.
Zero.
You'd think somebody would get a camera footage shot of it, like from these trail cams or camera traps or something.
But you do need vitamin D, and you should also take vitamin D with vitamin K too.
It helps your body absorb.
But you should be taking a host of things.
You should be taking...
Colloidal minerals.
You should be taking essential fatty acids.
If you want to optimize your body's ability to recover and to be able to perform, you really need to supplement.
And supplementation, I think, is something that many people have maligned that do not experience it.
When you talk to doctors, all you need is a balanced diet.
And those doctors always have pot bellies and they look like shit.
If you talk to someone who's a fit doctor, who's like really healthy, they'll tell you the value of not just good nutrition but also good supplementation.
And you really should supplement.
And supplementing with vitamin D is critical, especially to avoid colds.
You know, that's the speculation about why we get flu and colds in the winter.
Oh, it's flu season.
Why does flu have a fucking season?
Well, because that's when people are very low in vitamin D. Because the best way to get vitamin D for sure is sun exposure.
And vitamin D is a hormone.
It's not just a vitamin.
It's responsible for a lot of things in the body, including your ability to have a properly functioning immune system.
And I think there's some nutty number of people in this country that are deficient in vitamin D. And out of the people that were hospitalized with COVID, I think the number was 84% of them had deficient levels of vitamin D. How much do you take by supplement?
That's a lot of D. But I'm also almost 60 years old.
I'm 56 years old and I push my body.
I work out really hard.
I work out as hard now as I did when I was 25. And it is possible to do, but you have to do it right.
You have to give your body the tools that it needs to recover.
But those tools and the food that you eat and the supplements that you take, all those, they help your overall health, which helps your ability to recover from illness.
First of all, it's critical as you age because you lose bone mass, you lose muscle mass, and there's a lot of people that look similar to the way they looked 10 years ago, but they have more fat and less muscle and less dense bones.
Just for your ability to do things and to be mobile, you have to force your body to lift heavy things.
So what I do is like cleans and presses and swings and windmills.
And I do all these things that make my whole body work as one unit.
Like I don't do anything that's an isolation exercise.
Everything I do is my...
So it's all stuff where my body is forced to balance this weight and press it and then lean over and press it up or Turkish get-ups where you lie on your back and you press it up and then you get up and you stand up on one knee and then you stand all the way up and then you slowly lower yourself back down.
They're not glamorous exercises, but they're really good for coordination of all of your muscular and all of your entire core and your whole system working together instead of like curls or tricep extensions.
Those are good for isolating and developing specific muscles, but I don't do any of that stuff.
And then once you start doing something like that, then you can incorporate other things.
Then you can incorporate lunges with maybe dumbbells or chin-ups or things along those lines.
Dips.
You could most certainly get a really good workout every day.
With just your body weight.
There's so many things you could do.
And now with YouTube and all the resources that are available, you can just Google body weight routines and bam, you've got so many different options that you could just follow along to some video and people do things like that.
I used to get a bad neck pain when I was writing too much on a laptop, because you're sitting there like this the whole time.
And that, just this, like, head down in a bad office chair, some shitty chair, I would get like, ugh, my neck would hurt, and that's when I knew I had to stop.
Sometimes I'd try to keep writing, but my neck would be irritated, and I'm like, I gotta stop.
But this doesn't, I don't get any of that anymore with this.
These are, what are they called?
Capiscos.
It used to be, the company used to be called Fully, but I think they sold to another company now.
These are the shit.
I've tried everything.
I've tried the ones where you're on your knees when it's not really a chair.
It's like all your weight is sitting on your knees.
We were talking about this before, but the reason why I brought up Kundalini Yoga and I was going to bring up holotropic breathing, there are some methods that people use.
I think he created holotropic breathwork as a way to engage the same process that he discovered through LSD. And then, of course, there's John Lilly, who developed a sensory deprivation tank that also makes you achieve a psychedelic state endogenously, but through an external mechanism of lying in the water that's...
Well, it's essentially the idea that Lilly came up with, and he had a bunch of different iterations of it.
The initial one, he wore a scuba tank helmet, like a scuba helmet, and he was sort of suspended by straps in the water, and he had this helmet on.
And the water was the same temperature of his skin, and so through this method, he was able to relieve himself of most external stimulation.
Because the external stimulation that you have right now are like, obviously, we're sitting at this desk, you see everything, you hear everything, your feet are touching the ground, Your butt's touching the chair, your back's touching.
That's all sensory input.
And in the absence of any sensory input, Lilly's suspicion was that you could achieve psychedelic states.
And so if you could free the mind.
And so he did a bunch of different versions of it.
And then eventually he figured out that if you just added a ton of salt to the water and he used what is like waterbed heaters.
So waterbed heaters at the bottom you line it with plastic and then you get it to a steady 94 whatever degrees and with that salt in it you'll float and when you do get in there the water becomes impossible to different you can't tell the difference between where the air is and the water is because it's just all the same temperature and so it's the same temperature skin so as long as you don't move you don't even feel the water And it feels like you're just flying through space.
And you don't see anything.
You don't hear anything.
Half your face is underwater, so your ears are underwater.
A lot of people put, like, earplugs in.
I generally don't.
But then half your body, like, is, like, above the surface, and you're just lying there floating.
And it's very relaxing.
It's a great way for your body to absorb Epsom salts.
You get magnesium through that.
You know, like, when people take Epsom salts when they're sore, it's magnesium.
So my question was, is there any historical evidence or any information that leads you to think that possibly they were engaging in some other kind of thing?
So your friend who doesn't believe, like maybe there were some other options that they were also doing when you think about these rituals, right?
I think, yeah, my experience is meaningless compared to all that.
You know, I just, I never, I don't know, I managed to avoid it for so many years that when it came time to write the book, it just seemed like It wasn't a priority at all.
Well, I think you should do it eventually because it's so profound.
You're not going to be able to believe that you never experienced it before.
But also one of the most bizarre things about the DMT state in particular, which is something that we know is produced endogenously in the human body, that you've been there before.
Like when you get there, you're like, oh, I've been here before.
We do know, because of Rick Strassman's work, Strassman, who wrote DMT, The Spirit Molecule, and did the first FDA-approved studies that they did with IV slow-drip DMT experiences, and these people had just wild experiences with entities and realms and Apparently there's some stuff that's going on right now in London and Graham Hancock told me about this.
There's some really profound work that's being done that they're doing these studies where they're doing the same sort of technique.
But there's another team in Basel, in Switzerland, that's also experimenting with Infuse.
I think it's like 90 minutes.
And interestingly, this is somewhat breaking news, there's a new study happening in the U.S. So the first U.S. research on extended state DMT is happening at UC San Diego.
Which is really cool.
Actually, Jamie, there should be a press release about it, which came out earlier this year.
There's a team there being headed by a guy named John Dean, Dr. John Dean.
He's talked with Rick, by the way, about his research.
And they recently got some funding to be the first U.S. site to host these extended state infusions.
Well, I imagine it will eventually become something like ketamine therapy.
One of my friends, Neil Brennan, who's suffered from depression in his life, hilarious comedian, he went to...
I guess it's a psychiatrist.
I don't know who does these things.
But he went to this place where they give you an IV ketamine drip.
And he's like, OK, it's probably going to be, you know, just relaxing.
He goes, oh, no, no, no.
You are tripping your balls off in a doctor's office, like hooked up to an IV bag, closing your eyes and experiencing this like full blown ketamine state, which he said is like profoundly weird.
And very, very psychedelic.
And some people, it helps them alleviate depression.
That is a legitimate concern, but also that is a concern with food.
You can't regulate people's food consumption just because people get overweight.
You got to let people figure it out and you got to give them the information and the tools that they need to make good choices.
And the only way you do that is if it's legal and studied and people understand, you know, what is the correct dose?
Like, what is the correct thing?
What's the best way to do it that's the most beneficial and causes the least harm and treats it with the most respect?
Because one of the things about rituals, I think, and these ritualistic settings, is that there's this heightened state of importance and significance of the thing that you're about to embark on, this journey that you're about to go on.
Related to this, there was a place that I had initially purchased before I put the mothership at the Ritz, before I bought the Ritz.
I was under contract to buy this one building that was owned by a cult.
And there's a documentary about the cult.
It's called Holy Hell.
And it's about this guy who's a hypnotist and also a gay porn star who started a cult in California and then moved it out to Austin.
And this guy would do this thing with these people where he would call it the knowing.
It's a crazy documentary.
Because like all cult documentaries, in the beginning, it looks awesome.
In the beginning, it's like, oh, they figured it out.
This is the solution to what ails us.
The modern society where people are disconnected, there's no sense of community.
These people are splashing around the water together, they're going on hikes together, doing yoga together, they're eating together, they're singing together.
God, it looks amazing.
Amazing.
and he had this thing that he would do what was called the knowing and there's videos of him doing it to people and he would when he felt like they were ready and it took fred some people would be very angry he's like you're not ready because he was just a con man but but what he did was convince them That when this thing would happen and he would touch them and give them the knowing that they would have this profound experience where they would connect with God.
And it worked.
That's what's crazy.
When he did it to these people, and obviously these people are deeply committed, right?
They're cult members.
They've bought in hook, line, sinker, and he's a hypnotist.
And they talked about it like it was the happiest moment in their life and they were talking about it in this documentary in the context of describing how this guy was a con man and about this guy ruined their lives and they followed him for two decades and now they're lost and 50 years old just trying to find their way in the world and they were just young people who were trying to find a way.
They still talk about that experience being one of the most impactful, profound moments of their life.
And it was bullshit.
But was it?
It clearly wasn't bullshit.
I mean, he didn't really have magic powers, but he did have the power of suggestion.
He did understand hypnosis.
And because they believed in him so much, they really did have this experience.
So what is it about this trick, this placebo effect, this thing that you can hit, this switch that you can hit, where these endogenous chemicals that we know exist, we can make them Bust out of your brain in some profound way that makes you have this complete transcendent experience.
That's what interests me about this research at UCSD. I think in addition to the extended state infusions with DMT, they're also setting up these volunteers to FMRIs to really try and figure out how DMT Is interacting with the brain, how it's released or not.
And I think part of that interest in that research is really trying to figure out the endogenous.
That's sort of the holy grail of DMT research.
So this guy, John Dean, I think he's founded in rat brains, but we've never actually seen conclusively, never measured the presence of DMT in the human body, in the human brain.
I think that's part of his interest, is trying to figure out if he can...
Endogenously identify the presence within these states of mind.
So whether it's someone in deep meditation or in dreaming or some other altered experience, I think that part of the really interesting part about the research there is trying to isolate exactly how that gets triggered.
Because if we're sitting on this incredibly potent chemical, And we don't know how to release or to control it.
It's something that deserves a little more attention, I think.
...polotropic breathing, and I think about that with...
McKenna talked about that too, which is very funny.
He said, because people were talking about all these different ways to achieve psychedelic states without psychedelics, and he said, it makes me think of this...
If you understand the dosing, like you mentioned, if you understand how to grow them, how to use them properly.
And I think that's kind of what we're missing from the ancient past.
And so it's kind of funny.
I've had all these weird conversations over the past three years about the application of the ancient ritual to today.
And my feelings on psychedelics have changed quite a bit over the past three years.
And what I've realized, amongst other things, is that it's less about the drug And I think it's more about everything you just described.
It's more about the ritual.
It's more about the ceremony.
The fact that these drugs are organic and they've been found on the planet and their use on every inhabited continent has been catalogued is something worth reflecting on.
So they're there.
You can't ignore them.
But throughout the long arc of history, there have been practices and protocols around their use, which typically obtained within small communities.
Small, tight-knit communities where people took care of each other, where people knew how to grow and dose these things.
And I think that one of the things I talk about in the book is the secret to pharmacology is posology.
The notion that it's all about the dosing.
And it's all about the ritual around which this experience is taking place.
And so when you were at Eleusis, for example, remember you got to see Eleusis in person.
If this hypothesis is true, right, about this psychedelic potion, you know, it wasn't consumed in a dining room, like, in haste, with no preparation.
Like, you would have prepared for at least 18 months, if not longer, to walk that sacred pilgrimage trail, to show up there, and to, over the course of nine days, by the way, to experience this rite of passage, which for many people was the culminating experience Of a lifetime.
And I think that that's something we're just missing today, at least in the West.
I don't think we have that kind of sacred container.
And, you know, there's a lot of ignorance as to what these things are and what the experience actually is.
And I absolutely agree that ceremony is important.
It's set and setting.
It's very, very important.
Having the proper mindset, making sure that you haven't eaten anything before you've done it.
But I don't know if ceremony is more important than the actual experience, because the actual experience you could have with a bunch of your idiot friends sitting on a couch, and if you do DMT, you will fucking 100% go there.
And you'll be like, how is this possible?
How is it possible that this is literally 15 seconds away?
Like you take three giant hits and you're gone.
And you exist in this realm that is unimaginable.
And it's you there.
It's not you're seeing things that aren't there.
It's you're there.
You're there in this thing.
Because you're not just seeing things.
You're experiencing them.
It's like they're working on your brain.
It's very weird.
Whatever it is, you can sometimes see them moving around.
They're like mechanics, like guys with screwdrivers and shit, like fucking around with your head.
It really is very weird.
It's a very weird experience.
And unfortunately, it's illegal.
And it's crazy because fentanyl isn't.
It's like you could buy opiates at a pharmacy.
You can't experience something that is probably the root of a lot of religious experiences, if not most of them.
And there was just—Cavin Newsom just vetoed something in California that was going to make—was going to decriminalize psilocybin and a bunch of other psychedelics.
Proper solution would be to Come up with guidelines, right?
California should immediately begin work to set up regulated treatment guidelines replete with dosing information therapeutic guidelines rules to prevent against exploitation during guided treatments and Medical clearance of no underlying psychosis all those are good.
That's ever actually very good That's better than just okay.
So I take back what I said it wasn't that it was stupid like maybe they should have had that before they attempted to decriminalize it Newsom's statement said, unfortunately, this bill would decriminalize possession prior to those guidelines going into place and I cannot sign it.
That's actually fair.
But that means that they should just get together and put together some guidelines.
And the problem is, in order to find out what the proper dosage is, you have to run some studies.
And they have to be approved.
And they have to be, you know, it has to be legit.
But they should do that.
And if they do do that, they should pass those things.
And also, I think it's important that you said to keep people, like, what was the specific language that they used about rules about...
There have been a lot of studies on MDMA and psilocybin over the past 20 years.
Less clinical studies on some of the other things, obviously.
And I think that as governments engage, We'll see policies develop that really try and account for all that safety, knowledge around dosing and therapeutic guidelines, ethical considerations.
It is very important, but it really is important for us to get an actual understanding of like, you know, kilograms per body weight, how much body weight, like what's the effective dose for a person who weighs 140 pounds versus is it different?
Does it vary?
I don't think it varies with some...
I think that's one of the things about DMT is it's not specific, or maybe it's psilocybin, not specific to your body weight, which is interesting.
Like, who else is going to say, you know, everybody should have a say.
You'd have to be tripping.
If you were like the whole world was essentially run by dictators back then, why would anybody vary from that strategy?
Because it seems like that's the default mode of people who don't do psychedelics.
I would imagine all the world leaders that are currently involved in horrific things all across the globe.
How many of them are doing psychedelics?
Probably zero.
Probably zero.
And this idea that psychedelics could fix the world, like, I wouldn't say it that way, but maybe.
It would have a profound impact on just the consensus of the general population, just most people that have done them, the way it changed the way they see things.
And that alone...
Would change the way they think and behave and vote and what they accept and don't accept from their leaders.
What they accept and don't accept like the dangers and the harms of censorship and propaganda.
They would be much more aware of that.
Oh, you're like literally like creating mind viruses and shaping the way people think to benefit your own good.
And so since the book came out, I mean, there was this, you know, there was all this pandemic space that opened up.
And so I was on Zooms a lot with different people.
And one of the projects that came from the book, which I'm pretty proud of, is this guy, Andrew Ko, I mentioned in the book quite a bit.
He's an archaeochemist.
He was based at MIT when I was writing the book.
And he's one of the few people who really looks into these ancient containers to try and figure out what organic compounds were left behind.
It's a really cool science.
You also need to be a good classicist to do this.
You need to be able to read the ancient languages and compare them against the chemical data that's coming up.
You need to know ethnobotany.
It also helps if you can build out these paleoecological habitat maps, what was growing where and when and why.
It's kind of this mix of the art and the science.
And he was one of the very few people doing this.
And over the past couple years, he was invited into Yale to continue doing this work at the Yale Peabody Museum, which is one of the world's most prestigious natural history museums.
And they've offered him the opportunity to continue studying this as part of the Yale Ancient Pharmacology Program, which is really cool.
Amongst other things, who are taking into account these kinds of questions about the ways that these beverages or these compounds impacted the growth of civilization, the birth of religions, etc.
This wasn't a field before.
And I think it's been really cool for me to have conversations with folks like Andrew and his colleagues at Yale and elsewhere who are taking this pretty seriously.
So, to the best of my knowledge, they found around 10 miniature cups.
And for some reason, they only tested one.
So only one came up positive for that ergot, in addition to the beer sediment.
So it was ergot mixed with beer.
And this was all done archaeobotanically, so there was no chemical analysis.
This was them using, like, scanning electron microscope and optical microscopy to look in and find that.
And so in addition to the cups, the ergot also popped up in a tooth, in a jawbone that was also discovered on site, which adds credence to the hypothesis that there was intentional consumption because within this little domestic chapel where those vessels were found, which adds credence to the hypothesis that there was intentional consumption because within this little domestic chapel where those vessels were found, what they found were two mills And they didn't find any ergot in the mills.
So the fact that it was inside this ritual vessel, which is the shape and size of the kind of cup that were used by the devotees of Dionysus in this Hellenistic domestic shrine of sorts, combined with the evidence in the jaw, I mean, really led the archaeologists to believe that there was something But I haven't seen an ergot find quite like that anywhere else.
Yeah, it's more common on rye, but it happens across the cereal grains.
And as far as we know, it's been happening as long as we've had agriculture, which is at least 12,000 years.
So the big question is what spawned that revolution, the agricultural revolution?
Was it to start baking bread or to start brewing beer?
It's actually a pretty good debate that goes back to the 1950s between Sauer and Braidwood, these two professors.
Did we first settle down into...
Settled life and start growing grain to make bread or to brew beer.
And there's good reason to suggest that maybe it was actually the beer and this religion of brewing that brought people together in the first place.
And if you're brewing, then it's foreseeable at the very least that ergot would pop up on that agriculture.
Now, does it go back 12,000 years?
We don't know.
We don't even know if brewing goes back that far.
I think the oldest evidence for beers are places like Godentepe, which is like 3500 BC. And we have some evidence for some kind of brewing at Gobekli Tepe.
For example, 9th millennium BC. And then we have these mortars, these stone mortars in Israel that were dated to around 13,000 years ago, where at least there's evidence of malting and mashing, if not fermentation.
So we know that grain goes back a long time.
The question is, how far back does the ergot go with it?
And when did we discover that ergot had these other capacities?
Because it's not a very pleasant experience.
I mean, even to this day, if you're brewing beer, you want to avoid ergot for lots of reasons.
Yeah, so it was kind of an accident and didn't realize until years later what he'd synthesized, until 1943. So before that, I mean, outside that medicinal context, it was typically seen with lots of suspicion.
I never really saw convincing evidence for mushrooms among the ancient Greeks.
But there are, I mean, there's like Neolithic evidence for mushrooms both in North Africa and And then also in Siberia, there's the famous pictographs, the mushroom pictographs, the pegtimel.
Well, we know that psilocybin existed back then and we know that people experimented with food.
They tried things to see if they're edible.
Again, that was the basis of McKenna's theory.
Ancient hominids flipped over cow patties.
When the rainforest receded into grasslands, they tipped over cow patties looking for grubs and beetles and that these mushrooms had grown these cow patties and surely they would experiment with them.
So there was a long debate about the relationship between these kinds of images and shamanism and the ritual consumption of psychedelics among rock shelters and cave art.
He looks at all the different cave paintings going back 30, 40,000 years.
And so there was always a long debate about whether or not there were there was actually some kind of relationship between those painted images, why they were why they were left behind by the the priest class of the time and kind of like what engendered them.
And so it's funny, just after the book came out in the fall, I think it was of 2020, there was a discovery in California related to rock art.
And it was hailed as the first unambiguous evidence for the consumption of psychedelics in connection with rock art.
It's called the Pinwheel Cave.
And it got so much press that you can find it pretty easily.
I think Nat Geo covered it.
It was headlines for weeks.
It's called the Pinwheel Cave.
There you go.
It's called that because of the image that's painted in red ochre on the ceiling of the cave.
You can see him right there.
It's thought to be the unfurling flower of the datura, which is this very, very potent, very visionary flower in the nightshade family, datura.
McKenna talked about Tatora and about how he'd have stopped taking it because it was too weird that he was having a conversation with a man in a market and he realized in the middle of the conversation that the man thought that they were at home in his living room.
That it was so bizarrely transformative in terms of the way it interfaced with reality that it was just too strange.
You would be sort of semi-functional but thinking you're in a completely different place than you are and thinking that it's actually happening.
A lot of the focus over recent years has been on the medicinal and therapeutic value of psychedelics.
And to the extent they can relieve suffering, I understand the need for research and the need to assess safety, right?
When you look into history, yeah, but there are other ways of using Datura that seem to have survived in the pinwheel.
So that was used by the Chumash people, for example.
And they had a very specific ritual, a ceremony around the use of Datura that they left explicit evidence for.
That doesn't go back, that's not prehistoric, that's only about 400 years old to the 16th century.
But they knew what they were doing with Datura.
And they're not sure exactly what, but there's these great papers written on the Chumash and Datura saying how they would use it in order to look beyond the surface of things.
And in some cases to communicate with dead ancestors.
And you see that a lot, communication with the ancestors.
And so whether it was some sort of puberty ritual or initiation rite, they clearly knew the dosing and correct administration of Datura.
And they weren't alone, by the way.
There were other folks in the Americas.
My friend Danny Newman has done some awesome research around something called the black drink.
You have to look up the black drink.
It's from the Mississippian indigenous communities.
And there were some studies done a few years ago that tested these vessels.
You were asking about evidence.
And so there's, you know, beyond sort of the pictographic evidence, I love looking at the archaeochemical evidence.
So...
In addition to the Pinwheel site, first unambiguous chemical data for the connection of rock art and psychedelics.
A couple years ago, there were some studies, gas chromatography mass spec studies, like real proper chemical studies done on the black drink.
The black drink was used, like I said, in these Mississippian sites.
And there was a paper dated...
Some of the finds from like 1100 to 1700 A.D., so centuries ago.
And they came and this drink was prepared in these special vessels.
And sometimes they take these anthropomorphic visuals.
One is called like the Old Woman.
And so within these vessels, they found the evidence not only for Datura, like we just saw, the Pinwheel Cave, But for the yaopon holly, I think it's the only plant native to North America that's naturally caffeinated.
It's called the yaopon holly.
And so it was this caffeinated beverage that definitively had traces of atropine and scopolamine in them.
And those are the active alkaloids in Datura.
The same alkaloids they found through chemical analysis at the pinwheel site.
I think if you're thinking about these tribal communities and how life was very difficult in these, especially hunter-gatherer communities living off the land...
You needed people to have their shit together.
You couldn't have ne'er-do-wells when you have 50 people that rely on each other and they all have very specific tasks.
Everyone is responsible for something and you cannot have irresponsible consumption of something that's so profound.
So it makes sense within their best interest to create a real framework, like the correct way to use this.
And also this recognition that this is a very profound and powerful experience is not to be taken lightly at all.
And the more you study the ancient past, whether it's in ancient Greece or a lot of my book focuses on paleo-Christianity, the more you see this kind of ritual.
Can I show you some images of paleo-Christian ritual?
So, what I'm going to show you are some images from a hypogeum.
And I don't think we got around to this last time, but a Hypogeum was this underground chamber, and it was the site where most of the early Christian ritual took place.
So if you think back to Paleo-Christianity, between the death of Christ and Constantine, which is 300 years later, give or take, you know, Christianity was this illegal cult.
It was this underground religion, in some cases literally.
So the only places where you would celebrate the Eucharist and the Proto-Mass We're in like small and private homes in this agape meal.
And then sometimes you'd go underground into these like necropolis, like these places of the dead.
And that for some reason was the place where the mass was celebrated.
And so as part of my research for the book, I went into some of these underground chambers to see What the earliest Christians would have seen and some of the evidence that was left behind in terms of like frescoes.
So there's no botanical, chemical analysis of what was happening in these places, but we do have images, we have frescoes, and we have the idea of what the early ritual would have looked like.
And a couple weeks ago I reached out to the Vatican specifically to ask them if I could show these images to you today.
It's the Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archaeology.
So it's the archaeological team that is responsible for the preservation and conservation of all these ancient sites.
And I think it's an aspect of early Christianity that very few people know about.
And so what was happening underground, if you want to go back to the first slide just quickly, there was this Yale professor who sadly died in recent years.
It was Ramsey McMullen.
And what he talks about are these underground chill-outs.
They were called vigilia.
The Latin word for them is refrigerium, where we get the word refrigerator.
So they were like underground chill-outs where certainly the Romans And it's believed the earliest Christians would have gone to celebrate the dead with sacramental wine, with celebratory wine.
They would have a wine ceremony in these dank chambers underground to usher the dead into the afterlife or bring them refreshment.
They were called refrigeria.
And so it's kind of unclear when the refrigeria, a pagan Roman ceremony, became like a proto-Eucharistic Christian mass.
Again, the line is very blurred at this period of time, which I call the pagan continuity hypothesis.
This notion that the older wine-drinking consumption by the Romans, the Greeks before them, Somehow influenced, at least in some cases, the earliest celebrations of the Mass.
And so I just show this quickly to show that, you know, in these wine parties, Ramsey has this great line saying that this was not just picnicking at the bottom there.
He said this was religion.
So even though it looks like a picnic, it looks like they were gathering over kind of like almost like a Mexican Day of the Dead ceremony.
Like they would meet by the graveyard to remember the dead and the ancestors.
Yeah, there was wine and food, but this was religion to the ancient Romans, and I think to the Romanized Christians who followed them in the first century, second century, third century.
So the next slide, that's just a bunch more text from a Catholic encyclopedia, by the way, from 1907, if I'm not mistaken.
And it talks about how the celebration of the dead and this funeral banquet you see right in the middle there, this notion that the funeral banquet is really kind of at the core Of what the early Mass was.
Even if you go back to the Gospels, it was, you know, Jesus asking for the commemoration of this event.
You know, do this in memory of me.
As you do this in memory of me, remember my life, death, and eventual resurrection.
This is sort of the prototype for the Mass.
And so it's important to remember that the funeral banquet was there to bind those together who remained faithful to the memory of Jesus after his death.
It's very similar to this Roman refrigerium.
So I give all that as background just to show you the first couple images from the Hypogeum.
So if you skip to the next one...
So that's what it looks like when you go underground.
It was discovered in 1919, I think, as a fiat shop around the corner was trying to expand into a sunken garage.
Which is not uncommon in Greece and Italy and around the Mediterranean.
So they found this Hypogeum, which dates to the third century.
So we don't have firm dates.
It could be anywhere from like 220 to 250 AD. So this is the time period we're talking about.
So these were tombs.
They're rock-cut tombs in the Hypogeum here.
If you go to the next one, one of the first things I saw when I went into the Hypogeum was this.
Which, you know, it's a little strange because, again, you're trying to figure out if this is a Roman pagan refrigerium or if this is a Christian celebration of some sort of Eucharist.
Because, again, this site is controlled by the Vatican.
The Vatican has preserved this for reasons.
And, you know, it's been said by the Pontifical Commission that these are some of the most explicit and concrete evidence for the origins of Christianity.
So, this is, you know, whether this is purely pagan or Christian is sort of a moment of debate.
But, you know, if you just look at it, what's odd is that you see 12 people gathered around a table.
And when you think of 12 people gathered around a table, you think of something like the Last Supper.
And so, it's pretty clear that what's important to this dinner is the chalice that's being lifted by...
By the servant there.
Or maybe it's a priest of some sort.
So it's clear that whatever is happening, wine is important to this gathering of 12 people.
The interesting part is the woman who's appearing in the back.
If you look closely, there's sort of like this effigy of a woman descending exactly from the background to the foreground.
It's thought that she is Aurelia Prima.
And Aurelia was one of the dead women to whom the hypogeum was dedicated.
And so what they think, that's her, this is one of the Vatican's interpretations, is that that's her emerging from the world of the dead to take place in this funeral banquet, in this ceremony.
Because she's not seated at the table, and because what they think this is, is that whenever, especially because of the place that we're in, which is underground, that when wine is being served at a refrigerium, that the Romans would habitually do this in order to commune with the dead.
Not as a picnic, but as religion, as Ramsey McMullin says.
So this was their religion for keeping alive that relationship to the dead and refreshing the dead in the afterlife.
And when you went there to celebrate them, they would appear.
And Ramsey has this great line in his scholarship where he says, the dead themselves participated.
One of my favorite lines in his research.
The dead themselves participated.
So that's Aurelia participating in a funeral banquet that's happening underground.
Okay, so if we go to the next slide.
So again, unclear if that's Christian or pagan.
And then you see some of these images.
That's interpreted as Jesus as the Good Shepherd from the Gospel of John.
You see the goats down below.
And that's either interpreted as Saint Paul or Plotinus.
Plotinus was this Neoplatonic philosopher who lived around that time in the third century.
And so it's unclear if that's St. Paul or Plotinus or maybe it's Paul using the image of Plotinus to call up the imagery.
And again, everything is very ambiguous because Christianity is illegal.
So you don't go down there and paint very explicit images of Jesus or the Last Supper or Christian elements because you could get in trouble for that.
So there's a lot of ambiguity in these frescoes.
So if you move past that, this is the most important one, which is kind of mind-boggling.
So this is just to the right of that banquet scene, and it's called the Homeric Fresco.
And it's called the Homeric Fresco because it seems to portray a very famous scene from Homer's Odyssey.
And it's when Odysseus is stuck on the island with Circe, the witch Circe, the prototypical witch of antiquity Circe.
He's stuck on the island with her, and the three dudes you see there on the bottom to the left have just been transformed from pigs back into men.
It's one of the most famous scenes in Book 10 of the Odyssey where Circe delivers a potion.
She concocts a potion, and in Greek it says that the verb that they use for concoct the potion is koukio.
Just like the ancient potion at Eleusis.
This is one of the mythical precedents for what would become the actual kukion that was used in the Eleusinian Mysteries.
And so she uses this mythical kukion in which she casts these drugs.
It says that she puts drugs...
Into this potion to transform the men into pigs, then back to men.
And so it's a very, I mean, like of all the 27,000 and changed lines of the Odyssey and the Iliad, it's a particularly strange image to evoke from Homer because Circe, amongst all the many things she's famous for, is for being a witch and for having this profound knowledge of the botanical world and potions and things that we might call psychedelics today.
And so it's a really strange image to have there.
And so the Vatican produced this monograph over a decade ago where one of their scholars, Alexia Latini, goes over this in great detail to demonstrate why exactly this is Circe.
And up above, That's another image of Circe with all her animals on this magical island.
And what they found there, exactly, was Cinnabar.
And during the conservation process, they were able to identify the mercury sulfide that had been used to paint this red image of Cinnabar around the house, which is a very telling detail because there's a line just before this in the Odyssey where it talks about the fiery smoke.
Coming out of Circe's palace.
So between the fiery smoke and the cinnabar and the web down below, there's a lot of certainty that this is probably Circe.
So there's the fiery smoke at the palace and the loom is another telltale sign.
So this is, if it were just this, you would think, okay, maybe it's just Circe in a loom.
But if you go to the next slide, there's a, and the next one?
Yeah, there's a manuscript in the Pope's library.
It's called the Virgilius Vaticanus.
You can find this online.
In the Virgilius Vaticanus manuscript, which is from about 400 to 430 A.D., there's this picture of Circe and the loom, which corresponds to Circe and the loom on the right.
So they know for sure, with relative certainty at least.
That there's some image continuity between Circe and the loom.
And she's talked about in the ancient literature as always being at the loom.
So with this, if you're just listening to this, what she has is like, if you've ever seen people make cloth in a traditional way with a loom, she's got the, why did they depict her with a loom?
And that's what Virgil also says in his epic poetry.
So Homer writes the Odyssey.
Centuries later, Virgil writes the Aeneid.
And that's sort of the mythical founding of Rome, the main character Aeneas.
And in both versions, there's a Circe character.
So this Circe character survives for centuries.
In the ancient world, from the Greek to the Latin.
And in both cases, the loom is mentioned.
And also, what's mentioned in these passages are the fact that Circe uses potent herbs.
In the Latin, it says potentibus herbis.
So she's using potent herbs and mixing up potions to transform these men into pigs and vice versa.
So it's a very strange idea to have a pagan witch in a fresco that's been preserved in this paleo-Christian monument, combined with this refrigerium, sort of Eucharistic celebration of the dead.
And then in the last few images, what it depicts is a woman being initiated into these high mysteries.
So things you don't normally associate with early Christianity.
Jamie, just in the last slide real quick, I just want to show you this image of the woman.
So there are three different chambers in the hypogeum.
If you go back a couple.
And I'll show you these two in a second.
Yeah, there.
That's fine.
So that circle, that's on the ceiling of one of the final chambers.
And there was a German scholar, Himmelmann, in the 1970s, who attempted to interpret that image.
And he says it's some kind of initiation typical of Dionysian or Eleusinian initiation.
He says the way the wand is held is typical to what you might find with the god Dionysus.
And true enough, if you look around at different artifacts, there's the Borghese vase.
On the left, which is from about 40 BC, it's now in the Louvre, you see the thyrsus, the wand, Above the head of the initiate, who's dropped his sacramental cup.
And on the right, that's the Bill of the Mysteries in Pompeii, which goes back 2,000 years, obviously.
And again, you see this notion of the wand over the head of the initiate.
You have a female initiate, which is, you know, calling forth images of pagan, Eleusinian, Dionysian initiation, next to an image of Circe, a pagan witch, next to this image of this refrigerian banquet, and it's all very ambiguous.
Why would a Christian descend into these chambers to celebrate these wine mysteries with the dead?
And as you go outside the Hippogium to other catacombs around Rome, I mean, just quickly, in 30 seconds I can show you other images of different women consecrating the wine.
Yeah, that way.
Yeah, that's perfect.
So you see in Latin there, it's written agape misce nobis.
So they think that's agape is the woman's name.
Misce nobis is mix it, mix it for us.
So what they're saying is not pour the wine for us, but mix it up for us, agape.
And agape is a very Greek word.
It means love.
And so you find all these Greek connotations despite the fact that we're in Italy.
If you look at the next one, it's very similar.
It says Irene da Calda.
Irene could be another Greek name.
It means peace.
And just like miskenobis mix it up for us, you see da calda.
We don't really know what calda is, but if you go to the next slide, there was a scholar.
Yeah, there's some great text here.
He tries to interpret what calda is.
It's not certain.
It seems to have been more than an infusion.
Apparently, it was a mixture of hot water, wine, and drugs.
And this notion of sort of the Greek Halloween was called anthesteria.
And there was this ritual of uncorking the wine jugs.
And out of them you would see different spirits and entities fly out.
The dead participated.
The dead themselves participated.
So, I mean, I find the iconography really interesting, like having gone to Catholic school my whole life, because you don't really hear about the Hypogeum.
Well, in the book, I explore the potential Greek origin of that, at least in some communities.
I mean, the notion of consuming the body and blood, that wasn't born like 2,000 years ago with Jesus.
Even the blood of Dionysus, the wine of Dionysus is called the blood by Timotheus of Miletus, 400 years before Jesus.
So this notion that wine is blood And should be consumed in a sacramental fashion.
I mean, that had been around for a while.
And this notion of theophagy, right?
You see this in lots of different world cultures.
The consuming of the god to become the god.
And in the Greek world, theophagy really takes its place with Dionysus and these mysteries, much more so than the Eleusinian mysteries that we talked about.
And so for the ancient Greeks, like to imbibe the wine was to imbibe the god.
The god Dionysus.
So the question becomes, was Dionysus the god of wine or was Dionysus the god of intoxication, right?
And psychotropic plants or fungi or poisons or medicine?
Because the wine of the time, like we've talked about, was routinely mixed with different plants and compounds.
And so the enthusiasm that resulted from drinking that wine was, it's been described as like the central aspect of Greek tragedy, for example.
Like when we saw the theater of Dionysus, On the southern slope of the Acropolis, they think that that wine was consumed there in another way to experience communion with Dionysus.
The wine at the theater was called Trima.
And Trima in Greek means like rubbed or pounded.
And Professor Ruck, for example, thinks that it signified the different things that were pounded, rubbed into the wine.
To create this sort of mass possession that took place at the theater.
Between the live audience and the actors, between the actors and the dead persons, in some cases, that they were acting out.
Remember?
I mean, we take it for granted now, but to stand on stage Spew out lines that belong to a dead person is closer to necromancy than entertainment.
So that was a trippy thing to begin with.
So you combine that together with this trima wine and this very sacred ritual, it goes well beyond the bounds of entertainment.
For them, there was a religious purpose to the theater and to comedy and to tragedy.
I asked this question of the archaeologists on site there, of the government folks, and there's an American School of Classical Studies, too, which has been excavating in the area for decades, obviously.
So, the last time I went to Eleusis to ask Poppy about this, they have a lot of different vessels, actually.
I'll show you.
Jamie, if you want to go into the Eleusis file, I think it's the first file up there.
I want to see what was civilization like back then.
I want to see what's the real timeline.
What are we really looking at?
Are we really looking at 2,500 BC? Are we looking at 10,000, 20,000 BC? What are we looking at?
They don't really know.
It's a lot of guesswork, especially when you're dealing with, you know, you can't carbon date stone.
But just knowing the construction, the expertise that was involved, it appears the use of some sort of a drill.
There was like some things that cored stone, some things that cut stone.
They have no understanding of how these people were able to do this.
Just the scope, just the scale of the construction, the massive stones, you know, the obelisks, these enormous things that were cut from quarries hundreds of miles away and somehow or another transported and assembled into this thing that we wouldn't be able to do today, no matter what anybody tells you.
Certainly wouldn't be able to do in a human lifetime.
2,300,000 stones, some weighing upwards of 50 to 80 tons, hundreds of miles away, carted through the mountains, no clear roads.
But I think it was important for them to see the ruins, to see Delos, and to see all these other different places, and to just see a place where people used to live and thrive, and then they didn't.
And now you're walking around these areas.
But to me, Egypt, it's because it's so above and beyond everything else that exists in terms of just the scale of the construction.
What did they do?
When you see the Great Pyramid of Giza, it's just like, what did they do?
And a scarcity of testers, which is why Andrew Coe's work is so important to support.
And as a result of conversations like this and the book coming out, we're launching a foundation called the Athanatos Foundation, which means immortal in Greek.
And part of the genesis behind that foundation is to help to support different work like this, which is largely unfunded and unacknowledged.
So there aren't many archaeochemists doing the work that Andrew's doing, which I think is super important for Reconstituting some of this really cool history.
I mean, a lot of which is just emerging in the past couple years.
Like, a lot of the things we're discussing are things that came out after the book was published.
So there's a lot of cool work.
And again, between the sciences and the humanities, you know, people who are textualists and like to compare this, folklorists, anthropologists, there's a lot of disciplines that can converge on these studies.
And in addition to The work at Yale, there's been a lot of interest at Harvard, too, around psychedelic studies outside the clinical setting, which is really cool.
So not only at the Harvard Divinity School, but Harvard Law School and the Faculties of Arts and Sciences.
They have a Humanities Center there.
And I'm just about to launch, actually, a series of fellowships together with Michael Pollan.
Between Harvard and Berkeley to continue looking at these kinds of questions, again, outside the clinical setting.
So looking with a lens of the social sciences and the humanities, historians, anthropologists, you know, cultural criticism, you name it.
Like taking a look at these kinds of studies from very different lenses to see what we can learn about the ways that our ancestors interacted with the natural world.
So what's interesting also is you took a long time to write this book, The Immortality Key.
You took a long time researching this.
And I know that there was a lot of questions about how this would be received and whether or not this is like a – Well, it would be commercially successful, but it's been so successful that they ran out of copies, like, really quickly, right?
It's so compelling and detailed and fascinating and it really opens up people's imagination to the roots of all these things and where this all came from and what these people were experiencing.
I hate to keep bouncing off all these headlines, but there was another headline from Peru around psychedelic laced beer, which you can see it in CNN, also Netgeo, I think.
If you look up psychedelic beer Peru, it'll probably come up.
Anybody that's really fascinated with it, I have to bring it up.
What's your take on all this UAP disclosure stuff and all these reports and these fighter pilots that are seeing these things that defy our understanding of propulsion systems that are currently available?
But I don't think you can contradict the pilots at this point.
And a friend of mine, Leslie Kane, has written a book about this, which is sort of a gold standard in the field.
It's called UFOs.
And I don't think we can really ignore it.
We were able to ignore it for many decades until relatively recently.
And now you see congressional investigations and you see...
Different witnesses coming forward.
So I think it's a gigantic mystery that kind of like these ancient mysteries that fascinate me can't really go ignored much longer.
I'm not entirely sure what's being witnessed are like extraterrestrial craft, like physical things being powered by like flesh and blood beings from, you know, vast stretches of the cosmos.
I've said this before on the record.
I think there's something far, far stranger about it.
I don't know what it is, but when I read Jacques Vallée, for example, I love the hypothesis that these things fit better into mythology and folklore than they do into science and engineering journals.
Because there have been sightings for as long as we've been around.
And not just about things in the sky, but things that interact with us.
And so Passport to Magonia is a really cool book that talks about the interaction of what these could be today and what they looked like in the past.
I think that the conversations in Washington are really wild about the new interest in this stuff.
But I don't know.
Something in me is not drawn to the engineering side of the conversation.
I'm drawn, like with the ancient misters, I'm drawn to folklore and mythology.
And I think that, you know, to understand the root of that phenomenon will tell us a lot about ourselves, actually, which is why we talked about homo naledi, you know, this ancient hominin.
I think that discovery tells us more about what it means to be human.
If it's not our brain size, or we talked a lot about creativity, I think questions about the deep past force us to ask questions about who we are today.
And I think this phenomenon, whatever it is, is the same.
Whether or not we're alone in the cosmos, that's one question.
But, like, the relationship between these sightings and our psyches and consciousness, I think, is a far more profound question.
And, again, some of the questions that the early researchers, like J. Allen Hynek, were asking about this phenomenon.
He said something that, like, when the long-awaited solution to the UFO problem comes, I think it will prove to be not just...
The next small step in the march of science, but a mighty and unexpected quantum leap.
That to understand this issue is to understand something very profound.