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The Joe Rogan ExperienceThe Joe Rogan Experience

Joe Rogan Experience #1543 - Brian Muraresku & Graham Hancock

Attorney and scholar Brian C. Muraresku is the author of The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name. Featuring an introduction by Graham Hancock, The Immortality Key is a look into the psychedelic origins of the world's great spiritual practices and what those might mean for how we view ourselves and the world around us. Hancock's most recent book is America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization, now available in Paperback.

Brian C. MurareskuguestGraham HancockguestJoe Roganhost
Sep 30, 20202h 34mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:02 – 2:24

    Setting the stage: The Immortality Key and psychedelics in early religion

    1. BM

      (drum music) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.

    2. GH

      The Joe Rogan Experience.

    3. JR

      Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (rock music) Joining us by Skype is the great and powerful Graham Hancock. My friend, how are you, sir?

    4. GH

      Hi, Joe. It's really good to be back with you. I wish I could be there in person. Uh, it feels very strange to be on this, uh, this technology, but these are the times we live in.

    5. JR

      Yeah. Well, I'm just happy we could talk at all in this day and age.

    6. BM

      Me too.

    7. JR

      Uh, l- it's the little things, like little victories.

    8. BM

      Yes.

    9. JR

      And, uh, Brian, I'm gonna try it, I'm gonna try it, Muraresku.

    10. BM

      You nailed it, bro. (laughs)

    11. JR

      Ta! Thank you. And, uh, your b- this is the first time we've ever done one of these as well in the studio where one per- maybe ever visual. We've never done ... Well, we did one with you guys. Remember we did Randall Carlson and you.

    12. GH

      Yeah, and Mark, Mark Defant came in by telephone, I think.

    13. JR

      Yes.

    14. GH

      Yes.

    15. JR

      Whi- which was very strange. It was like a sound coming from nowhere.

    16. GH

      Yeah.

    17. JR

      At least I could see you. But we've never done one of these like this. But this book, tell me ... This is, uh, The Immortality Key: The Secret of Hi- The Secret History of Religion ... Of the Religion with No Name. I'll, I'll say that again. The Secret History of the Religion With No Name. Um, now this is ob- obviously when I found out the subject matter, Graham, this is right up your alley. And, uh-

    18. GH

      Yeah.

    19. JR

      ... it made total complete sense why you and Brian worked together on this. So, uh, who wants to start and explain? Why don't ... Graham, why don't we have you start since you're, you know-

    20. GH

      Yeah.

    21. JR

      ... you're over there in the UK.

    22. BM

      (laughs)

    23. GH

      Yeah, absolutely. Well, I, I mean, for me, I, I ... In fact, Joe, I think you and I originally got in touch because of my interest in psychedelics in human culture, uh, and a book that I published in 2006 called Supernatural.

    24. JR

      Yes.

    25. GH

      Which, which looks at the huge role that psychedelics have played in cultures and in religions, uh, all around the world. Uh, and I touched in that book, uh, on the role of psychedelics in the origins of Christianity, uh, which of course is a dynamite subject. Uh, and what Brian has done in The Immortality Key has been to present hard and fast evidence that the first Christians were using psychedelics and that their religious experiences were mediated by psychedelic experiences.

  2. 2:24 – 4:21

    Muraresku’s origin story: classics scholar-turned-lawyer chasing a mystery

    1. JR

      And Brian, how did you get involved in this?

    2. BM

      It's a long story. (laughs)

    3. JR

      You look like a stoner, by the way.

    4. BM

      (laughs)

    5. JR

      I'll just tell you right now, you look like a guy who's done a few mushrooms in his day.

    6. BM

      Uh, oddly enough, I don't do drugs and I've ne-

    7. JR

      At all?

    8. BM

      I've never done psychedelics.

    9. JR

      Wow.

    10. BM

      Yeah.

    11. JR

      That's crazy.

    12. BM

      Yeah.

    13. JR

      You wanna start?

    14. GH

      (laughs)

    15. BM

      Today?

    16. JR

      Well, I wish we were in LA. I could hook you up.

    17. BM

      (laughs)

    18. GH

      (laughs)

    19. BM

      (laughs)

    20. JR

      But in Texas, it's a little ... It's ... The laws are sketchier here.

    21. BM

      (laughs)

    22. JR

      Um, what, what led you to this then?

    23. BM

      I was fascinated by Graham's work, um, which I only came across about 12 years ago. Uh, I was a, a Latin, Greek and Sanskrit, uh, undergrad major.

    24. JR

      Oh.

    25. BM

      Uh, and instead of getting the PhD or becoming a priest, which might, uh, the two options when you study Latin and Greek, uh, I went to law school instead for no reason whatsoever, uh, and then wound up at a law firm. And, uh, a couple years into it, started reading about these psilocybin studies coming out of Hopkins and NYU and that amazing statistic that 2/3 of the participants were describing it as one of the most amazing experiences of their lives. And it hit me that there was something there because the testimony coming out of Hopkins and NYU in a very clinical setting immediately reminded me of what I heard about Eleusis. And for those who don't know what Eleusis is, it's essentially the, the spiritual capital of the ancient world. It was where the best and brightest of Athens and Rome went to essentially meet a goddess in the flesh and have this mind-blowing, visionary experience. So before Jerusalem, before Rome, before Mecca, there was Eleusis. And for some reason, we're not taught about this in our high school mythology or, or Western civ classes. But it was there that Plato, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius all went to drink a magical potion and in their words, have this vision, what Plato calls a, uh, a blessed sight and vision, the holiest of mysteries in which they claim to have a direct encounter with the goddess and completely eradicate their fear of death. It was very similar to what the volunteers are saying with their single experience of psilocybin.

  3. 4:21 – 7:25

    Eleusis: secrecy, kykeon ingredients, and the ergot hypothesis

    1. JR

      Now, with Eleusis, how much history do we have? Like, how much recorded history that documents these rituals and is there any that describes the actual contents of this mixture?

    2. BM

      No, there isn't much. I mean, Eleusis ... I, I say Eleusis is like the Fight Club of the ancient world. You know, the first rule about Eleusis is you don't talk about Eleusis. You know, all we have is this fragmentary testimony, again, from, from Plato, Pindar, Sophocles and others. They do talk about a vision that's almost universal and they almost universally talk about this once in a lifetime transformative event where they become initiates and only they properly have life after death. 'Cause at the time, the Greeks didn't really look forward to the afterlife. In fact, there was no afterlife. You just disappear into Hades to do God knows what. But people walk away from Eleusis saying that they'd found salvation. Uh, and we don't know why or how. We know this potion is involved. We know they make this pilgrimage, uh, 13 miles from Athens to Eleusis to drink this potion. We know they, they prepare for months, if not years before it. Uh, and they're forever changed afterwards but we have very little hard data, uh, to actually look into it. And so in 1978, this, this trio of renegades, uh, Gordon Watson, Albert Hofmann, who discovered LSD, and Carl Ruck, who was then the chair of the Classics Department at Boston University, they put out this book, The Road to Eleusis, claiming they'd found the secret after 2,000 years and what they claimed is that this potion was actually spiked with ergot, which is that naturally occurring fungus, uh, from which you can synthesize LSD. And in fact, it's where Albert ... It's how he synthesized LSD by accident in 1938 with cultures of ergot.

    3. JR

      Well, we've talked about ergot before in this podcast, connecting it to the Salem witch trials.

    4. BM

      Mm-hmm.

    5. JR

      Which is, uh, very speculative but they think there's real evidence that shows that there was a late frost during the time of the Salem witch trials that probably led to mold growth on their wheat, which probably led to ergot infestation of their food and so these poor people were, you know, uh, uh, unintentionally eating acid.

    6. BM

      (laughs) Unintentionally.

    7. JR

      Yeah.

    8. BM

      It happened a lot.

    9. JR

      Yeah.

    10. BM

      There, there, there were erg- ergot outbreaks, uh, th- across time, especially in the Middle Ages. They would call it, um, St. Anthony's Fire, the ɪgni sacer-

    11. JR

      Mm.

    12. BM

      ... because it's so, so common. Uh, in fact, if you talk to any brewer today, at least the, the brewers that I was talking to, I went to see this beer scientist in Munich, Germany, Martin Zarnkau, and he says, "You can't avoid it." Now it's, it's more common on things like rye, but it also pops up on barley and wheat too and again, it's unavoidable and it's highly, highly toxic. The question is does it really produce the kind of vision, the visionary experiences that people have on psilocybin, LSD, mescaline and others? Uh, according to Albert Hofmann, absolutely. So as a matter of fact, I went into the Harvard archives, uh, where Wasson's papers are kept to this day in the Botany Libraries, and I found a letter that Albert wrote Gordon, his co-author, in 1976, uh, saying that Albert had self-experimented with, uh, with ergonovine which is one of these alkaloids in ergot and he claimed in 1976 it was five to ten times more potent than psilocybin.

  4. 7:25 – 11:47

    Soma and ancient recipe logic: mixed potions, barley, milk, honey

    1. JR

      Whoa. I- it's fascinating to me that these cultures seem to have hid some of these rituals, um, and this goes back to, really, uh, as far back as we have recorded, uh, psychedelic use, like soma.

    2. BM

      Mm-hmm.

    3. JR

      We still to this day don't know what that is and it's described in these in- in- incredible ways in, uh, ancient Hindu texts, but we don't know what it is.

    4. BM

      We have an idea.

    5. JR

      Hm.

    6. BM

      I actually brought some, some Sanskrit to show you.

    7. JR

      Really?

    8. BM

      You, you wanna see some Sanskrit?

    9. JR

      Hell yeah. (laughs)

    10. BM

      Can you put it up on the screen? It's under the, the soma tab.

    11. JR

      Oh, look at how beautiful that is.

    12. BM

      There it is. I can-

    13. JR

      Their, their language, writing it in Sanskrit. God, it's so pretty.

    14. BM

      Do you want me to read it for you?

    15. JR

      Please. You can read that?

    16. BM

      Yeah. So this was my major in college.

    17. JR

      Hmm.

    18. BM

      So at the, in the very middle there you can see (17:24) . And what, what he's saying there, um, is this is from the Rigveda, right?

    19. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    20. BM

      And it's, it's the oldest literature in Western civilization. Uh, we, we think it, it's, uh, uh, among the Indo-European languages, it's the oldest recorded literature that we have. It could be 1500 BC, 1700, perhaps much earlier, like the Iliad and the Odyssey in Greek. This is the mother tongue of, of all the Indo-European languages. Uh, and what they write about a lot is soma, which is both a god and the juice that is pressed from this god. And what they're talking about there is, uh, is making this ritual potion, very much like the kykeon that we find among the ancient Greeks. And here, soma is described as a mixed potion, yavashira means mixed with barley, govashira, from Sanskrit go, uh, gova is milk, mixed with milk. And so I've read all the theories that you have about what soma was, whether it was the Amanita muscaria mushroom-

    21. JR

      Hm.

    22. BM

      ... or some psilocybin-containing species or, or DMT. Uh, the way they, that they describe soma here is always a mixed potion-

    23. JR

      Hm.

    24. BM

      ... which, uh ... So in this case mixed with barley and, and milk.

    25. JR

      So that would be an ergot? Some sort of ...

    26. BM

      Already they're mention-

    27. JR

      Yeah.

    28. BM

      I mean, and so that's, that's what Rock Hoffman and, and Wasson were saying in 1978. Um, we have, we have literature from the, the seventh century, uh, BC. It's called the Hymn to Demeter where they record these ingredients, uh, of what the kykeon was. You asked, like, what, w- where is the actual evidence? So in the '70s, we didn't have much. It starts with the literature, which is what classicists do. And so the- there's this Hymn to Demeter that was discovered in 1777, a year after we declare our independence from Graham's people, and what they, what they found in there in, in line ... (laughs) Sorry, Graham. (laughs)

    29. JR

      (laughs)

    30. BM

      We're, we're in Texas, man.

  5. 11:47 – 19:30

    Psychedelics, morality, and the fear of death: modern parallels to ancient initiation

    1. GH

      And by ... If I could, if I could jump in, Joe, you're, you're absolutely right. There was a secrecy that surrounded the use of these potions in the ancient world. There's a, a case from, from Athens of the potion from Eleusis being used for recreational purposes, and this is roundly condemned by all concerned that it should only be used for the, for the sacred and, and spiritual purposes of which it was intended. So there was a great deal of secrecy, uh, that surrounded the use of these potions, and the potions were a doorway or a gateway into another level of reality. And what's fascinating from Eleusis and many other ancient accounts is the way that people come back having lost their fear of death, that they don't regard death as the end anymore, it's just another stage on the journey, just the beginning of the next great adventure.... uh, and- and, um, it- it's- Bryan is absolutely right to draw attention to the- to the modern word with psilocybin. And again, we find people who are terminal cases, who are imminently facing death, losing their fear of death as a result of- of using p- psilocybin. So we can begin to see connections between what we understand about these extraordinary substances in the modern world and how the ancient world used them.

    2. JR

      That- that- that does seem to be a universal theme, this, uh- this theme of alleviating the fear of death. And this- this- this comes up constantly with people that I know personally that have had it, had these psychedelic experiences. They- they say, "Well, I feel like I went to heaven," or, "I feel like now I understand why people believe there's this perfect afterlife, that I've- I've actually experienced it."

    3. GH

      You see, a lot of- a lot of the critics will say that it's some kind of natural human tendency that we don't want to die, and that we're afraid of death, and that- and that, uh, re- religions provide us with some sort of solace, uh- some- some sort of feeling of security. But I- I don't think that washes at all. I think it's- I think what's striking about the psychedelics is it's a direct experience that the person has. They have an experience. It's not a teaching. It's not something that they're told about. It's not a scripture that they read. It's an experience that they have, and that experience eliminates the- the fear of death. I think Bryan, by the way, uh, having written The Immortality Cave, for which I've only provided the forward, uh, I think Bryan is absolutely right to be a psychedelic virgin. Um, in- in my case, because I have used psychedelics and many other substances, a lot of my critics just try to write off all my work, whether it's on lost civilizations, uh, or on psychedelics. They try to write it all off as the rantings of a sort of drug-fueled maniac. Uh, and I think-

    4. JR

      (laughs)

    5. GH

      ... it's very smart of Bryan- very smart of Bryan not to put himself in that situation. I hope he will work with psychedelics in the future. But I think he was right not to work with psychedelics before writing this book and to concentrate on the evidence.

    6. JR

      Well, uh, Michael Pollan, who, uh, later in life experienced psychedelics and, uh, w- wrote pretty brilliantly about them.

    7. GH

      Mm-hmm.

    8. JR

      For me, that- it's- he's one of the more interesting, uh, people to discuss it, because Michael's an investigative journalist. He- he- he di- takes deep dives into these subjects, and his deep dive into psychedelics was incredibly illuminating. And so for him-

    9. GH

      Mm-hmm.

    10. JR

      I- I really enjoyed talking to him about it, and I really enjoyed his book as well. His- his perceptions of it were really unique, because you're talking about a guy who lived his whole life without them, you know, and then-

    11. GH

      Mm-hmm.

    12. JR

      ... really dove headfirst for his book.

    13. GH

      Mm-hmm.

    14. JR

      And convinced him-

    15. GH

      It's kind of what happened- kind of what happened to me when I- when I wrote Supernatural. I had- I had-

    16. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    17. GH

      Apart from one experience with LSD in 1974, I hadn't used any psychedelics until I began to research, uh, Supernatural back in the early 2000s. And because I'm a kind of boots-on-the-ground researcher, I felt it was essential that I have these experiences. What I couldn't guess was the way that the experiences would utterly change and transform my life. And I- I can understand from a level of personal experience why psychedelics do lie at the root, I think, of all the world's religions. Uh, and those religions are now busily at work trying to deny that connection.

    18. JR

      Well, th- they're not just trying to do it. Uh, there's many people in science that are trying to deny these connections too, and it's- it's so unfortunate that the people that are trying to deny these connections or the significance of these experiences haven't had them.

    19. GH

      Yeah.

    20. JR

      I- I don't think anybody who has a dimethyltryptamine experience can just dismiss it as being no-

    21. GH

      (laughs)

    22. JR

      ... no big deal. It's t- it's too crazy. The fa- and I- we- I-

    23. GH

      (laughs)

    24. JR

      You need to do it, sir.

    25. GH

      (laughs)

    26. JR

      This guy- I mean, just the fact that it's- it's one of those things where everyone who does it comes out of it saying, "I can't believe that's real."

    27. GH

      Yeah, yeah.

    28. JR

      "I can't- I can't believe you can just get there that quickly, that three puffs and all of a sudden you're in Narnia. I just- I- I can't-"

    29. GH

      Yeah.

    30. JR

      "...and world not way more intense than Narnia." What- it's just-

  6. 19:30 – 29:00

    Policy and medicine: clinical legalization, addiction treatment, and cannabis hypocrisy

    1. JR

      No, I don't think you could be the same. Um, when, when you write about all this, uh, how curious are you personally of the experience and do you plan on having it?

    2. BM

      I do under the conditions that, that, that you said. I mean, I think that we're in a period now where everything is about to change.

    3. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    4. BM

      Uh, the clinical research is advancing. Uh, Rich Dobbin is moving to phase three. You have researchers at Hopkins, NYU, now UCLA, uh, looking at psilocybin, uh, for a host of different conditions, uh, from depression, anxiety, end-of-life distress, which is really fascinating. And I think that sometime over the next five years, the FDA's gonna get involved and these will become available, at least for specified conditions. And what I look forward to is maybe in 10 years' time or less, these retreat centers, which are licensed and regulated with, uh, you know, professional staff and medical supervised, uh, uh, staff who essentially guide people through what would be a novel initiation experience, not, not unlike what may have happened 2,700 years ago.

    5. JR

      I'm hoping they're going to be backdoored in as therapy for people with preexisting conditions that we have right now, like opioid addiction, Iboga-

    6. BM

      Mm-hmm.

    7. JR

      ... like ibogaine being introduced and MDMA for people with post-traumatic stress disorder-

    8. BM

      Mm-hmm.

    9. JR

      ... for soldiers 'cause there's been so much real, solid evidence that it's incredibly-

    10. BM

      Yeah.

    11. JR

      ... beneficial to these people, particularly, uh, the opioid crisis. I mean, uh, we have a real problem in this country with people being addicted to these pills and then wind up dying from them.

    12. BM

      Mm-hmm.

    13. JR

      Um, that can be nipped in the bud, like, really effectively with ibogaine. And the fact that you have to leave the country to have these ibogaine experiences is r- really-

    14. BM

      Mm-hmm.

    15. JR

      ... it's, it's a terrible statement on the r- the rational thinking of our culture today 'cause it's not like these are unknown things. We're talking about it right now on a podcast that millions of people are listening to.

    16. BM

      Mm-hmm.

    17. JR

      And we've talked about it dozens of times in the past, and it's something that scientists are aware of, researchers are aware of, and, uh, particularly people who have come back from there and have had these experiences and have been cured of their, their addictions. They're... It literally rewires the way the brain interfaces with these opioids. And the fact that it's not available to people and they have to go through traditional counseling and just, and, and, and benefit from their willpower and somehow or another try not to, to, to relapse-

    18. BM

      (clears throat)

    19. JR

      ... it's, it's, it's terrible, terrible.

    20. BM

      Or even, or even just mitigating some of that. I mean, even cannabis, for example, which, which can be... which can, which can mitigate some of those addictive potentials.

    21. JR

      Yes.

    22. BM

      Uh, I worked, I worked with athletes, for example, which, which might interest you. Uh, so I represented a guy named Mike James, who was an NFL player-

    23. JR

      (laughs)

    24. BM

      ... who we, we believe is the first professional athlete in the US to seek a therapeutic use exemption from the NFL to get off his opioids and use cannabis instead.

    25. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    26. BM

      And we were there at 51st and Park Avenue at NFL headquarters, arbitrating with the NFL to try and get him, uh, a cannabis supply, and, and he lost, and he was fined six figures in the process and he-

    27. JR

      Oh.

    28. BM

      ... and he left the league because of it.

    29. JR

      S- he's not the first one, right? Wasn't... There was a... Who's the other f- Jamie, you're a football fan. Who's the other famous, uh, football player who couldn't k- kick the weed?

    30. BM

      Ricky?

  7. 29:00 – 32:47

    Early Christianity and the Eucharist: Allegro’s mushroom theory and linguistic critique

    1. JR

      One of the things you talked about was that there was this transference, like the Eucharist eventually became a placebo. Do you- do you- do you think that that... What do you think it was initially? Do you think it was a psychedelic mushroom?

    2. BM

      So that's... Allegro certainly thought that, right?

    3. JR

      Right.

    4. BM

      So Al- Alle-

    5. JR

      Jean-Marc Allegro, author of The Sacred Mushroom and the Scroll.

    6. BM

      So he releases that book in 1970 and he claims that Christianity is the guise for a Near Eastern fertility cult. And it's... I mean, I think it's very interesting, but there aren't many linguists who- who support the proposition.

    7. JR

      Right. There's- there's a lot of people that disagree with him pretty heavily, right?

    8. BM

      I mean from- from like a purely linguistic perspective, it's... I mean, to explain it briefly, so he- he says that-

    9. JR

      Did you read The Sacred Mushroom and the Scroll?

    10. BM

      Yeah. Yeah.

    11. JR

      Did you read it?

    12. BM

      Several times.

    13. JR

      Did you read The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth as well?

    14. BM

      From Allegro?

    15. JR

      Yeah.

    16. BM

      Yeah.

    17. JR

      That's the one that was... So the Catholic Church bought out the original one, right? And they... It- It was very difficult to get ahold of for the longest time, you had to buy copies of it.

    18. BM

      I've- I've heard rumors to that effect, yes.

    19. JR

      Yeah. And then he... So he comes out with a second book, The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth. What- What- What did... Knowing as much as you know about language, like what-

    20. BM

      Yeah.

    21. JR

      What did you... Did you feel like he made leaps? Did you feel like he made these connections that maybe were based on speculation?

    22. BM

      It's, so he writes, it, it's pure philology, right? So it's, it's word games and things that only linguists ... I mean, I, I think it's incredible that, that people who aren't linguists can actually read that. It's really, really difficult to read Sacred Mushroom and the Cross. But it, the, the basic premise is that the New Testament, written in Greek, has this Semitic substratum. So underneath the Greek, uh, the, the, the auth- the gospel writers and, and, and Paul are actually referring to different terms in Hebrew or Aramaic, and that these terms have in, in turn come from the Sumerian, which any linguist would say is a, a language isolate, that there is no real relationship between Sumerian and the Indo-European languages like Greek and the Semitic. So the, the premise of the argument is something that most linguists don't accept; however, and, and Carl Ruck has written the afterword to, uh, one of the editions you probably have of Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, and he gets into some complex theories about psycholinguistics and this interesting idea that just because they, they aren't related, there are certain words, certain names, certain vocabulary, like plant definitions, which wo- which would carry across the different languages. And I find that somewhat interesting, but when you, when you dig into the, the words that Allegro was recreating, he's, he places an asterisk, actually, n- next to, to, to these words because they can't be corroborated by the ancient texts. So some of these Sumerian words, he, he straight up hypothesizes as existing, uh, but they're, they're not, they can't really be found in the existing tablets, so it's- it's hard to correlate some of those meanings he, he draws down from the Sumerian.

    23. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    24. BM

      But that said, he makes very interesting claims. For example, like in 1 Corinthians, uh, 22, there's this interesting line where he says about that we, we preach Christ crucified is, um, is a skandalon for the Jews and a folly for the Greeks. And skandalon in Greek means like, um, a bolt or a snare, like a trap. And Allegro ties it to, like, a, a, a tikla, uh, in, in Aramaic, which is, like, the, what, what he calls the, the bolt mushroom. And in Sumerian, ukushtigilla. And so he's saying that Paul's actually telling the Jews that, you know, the, the Christ crucified is a mushroom instead of a skandalon. It's like a, like a code word, like the skandalon is a mushroom, and then for the Greeks, he says it's a folly, which is moira in, in Greek, which actually means mandrake, which is another psychedelic plant. So there's all this, this different, you know, word play going on.

    25. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    26. BM

      But it's really hard to tease out any physical, forensic evidence for this stuff, which was what I went after.

  8. 32:47 – 38:49

    Amanita muscaria, preparation problems, and Santa Claus folklore overlaps

    1. JR

      Was, was, was Allegro's, uh, position, if I recall correctly, that the sacred mushroom was, uh, Amanita muscaria?

    2. BM

      Yeah.

    3. JR

      Yeah, that was even the cover of his book-

    4. BM

      Yeah.

    5. JR

      It was a photo of Amanita muscaria.

    6. BM

      The c- and that, and that's where I have a ... I, I think, uh, j- Allegro did amazing work, but that's, that's one area where I, where I have a problem with, with Amanita muscaria as the, as the psychedelic of choice in, in early Christianity because in sh- in shamanic, uh, cultures where Amanita muscaria is used, it's recognized that the potion, that the mushroom is much more effective after it's been passed through a human body or indeed through the body of a reindeer, uh, and emerged in urine. And so, so the ... Those, those, uh, sh- shamanistic cultures of Siberia use Amanita muscaria by drinking it in the urine of a shaman who has previously consumed the mushroom. And I don't see a lot of evidence for that in early Christianity, and it's why I like, uh, the work that Brian has done, uh, looking at the really hard evidence for psychedelics, uh, in early Christianity, which are not, which are not, in this case, Amanita muscaria, if I'm correct, Brian.

    7. JR

      Isn't the speculation about Amanita muscaria that it's seasonable? Uh, it's, it's, it's seasonal. It's also genetically variable. Like, there's, there's, there's different species of it, like ... Much like different fruits taste differently, there's different versions of the Amanita muscaria that have more psychedelic chem- compounds in them and that there's all sorts of ways of preparing them that we've completely lost. Isn't it ... Am, am I getting this wrong? 'Cause I've only had-

    8. BM

      Well, the-

    9. JR

      ... one Amanita muscaria experience, and it wasn't very convincing.

    10. BM

      Hmm. Yeah, and this is, this is often, often the case, but, but I, I, I'm told, I have not had the experience myself, but I'm told that if you can bear the idea of drinking the shaman's urine after he or she has consumed the Amanita muscaria, you will have a really powerful journey.

    11. JR

      Yeah, but you don't want a shaman just laughing hysterically after you drink his urine.

    12. BM

      (laughs) Yes, absolutely. (laughs)

    13. JR

      Like, the joke's on you, stupid. Yeah. There's, there's also so many correlations between, uh, the Amanita muscaria and Santa Claus and Santa Claus to-

    14. BM

      Yeah.

    15. JR

      ... to shamans. There's so many-

    16. BM

      The colors, the red and white, yeah.

    17. JR

      Yes. Yeah, there's ... But also the, the, you know, the bag, the toys, the, the fact that they would dry them on, on these, uh, coniferous trees, the fact that this, these mushrooms have this mycorrhizal relationship with coniferous trees where they, they tend to grow under pine trees-

    18. BM

      Mm-hmm.

    19. JR

      ... which is the tree-

    20. BM

      Yeah.

    21. JR

      ... that we use for Christmas trees, the, the fact that they're bright red like a toy li- is, you know, in a package waiting for a child to open it up. It's, there's so many of these weird connections. The colors, the fact that reindeer are with Santa Claus, the fact these reindeer fly, you know?

    22. BM

      Fly through the heavens. Yeah.

    23. JR

      I mean, uh, it's, uh, that caribou are notoriously attracted to, uh, Amanita muscaria mushrooms.

    24. BM

      Yeah.

    25. JR

      In fact, people that have had psychedelic rituals and gone outside to urinate have, have talked about caribou knocking them over to try to get to their urine, and caribou are reindeer.

    26. BM

      Yeah.

    27. JR

      You know?

    28. BM

      Yeah.

    29. JR

      It's, uh ... And they have been observed eating these things. So they have this weird relationship. All those things are together connected in some sort of a strange way, and there's also a history of shamanic rituals being outlawed in Siberia, and the way they got around it was they would come through the chimney.... which is just crazy.

    30. GH

      Yeah.

  9. 38:49 – 44:56

    Textual ‘red flags’ in Corinthians: deadly Eucharist and wine as pharmakon

    1. JR

      So what is the speculation of what the Eucharist originally was?

    2. BM

      According to the early Gnostics?

    3. JR

      Yeah, I mean, what, is there any text that explains what the ini- initial food was?

    4. BM

      Well, I mean, we have the canonical explanation from the Gospels. We have, and we have Saint, Saint Paul's letter. Um, I mean, the honest answer, and I think an- any priest would say this too, is the honest answer is we don't know. Uh, you know, the, the Gospels are written anytime between 65 and 100 AD. Paul's letters are some of the earliest, uh, writings that we have. Uh, like the, the letter to the Corinthians, for example, uh, he's wri- he writes that in about 53 AD. And the way he describes what's happening there is very, very interesting. Maybe we can, we can pull it up actually. I brought, uh, some of the, some of the Greek from, uh, the New Corinthians. It's, it's under, uh, Christian Pharmakon. And the 4 Corinthians 11:30. So, um, at, at some point, I was looking for, I was looking for what that original Eucharist was depen- and, and where it was taken. So you have to, you have to think about the, the Greek world at this time. Uh, you know, Jesus is born in, in the, in the Holy Land, but Christianity really takes root in the Greek speaking parts of the empire, which is why Paul's letters are written to Greek speaking people, right? And, and why it's interesting to follow this theory because you have the, the ancient Greeks speaking Greek in the pagan world, but you also have ancient Greeks speaking Greek in this Christianizing world. And so the people in Corinth is this church not far from Eleusis, by the way. In fact, today it's only an hour west of Eleusis. And one of the earliest churches is there, and Paul is addressing this early church in, in Greek. And at the, at the bo- You can read the, the English, but he's essentially yelling at them for consuming the wrong kind of Eucharist.

    5. JR

      Hmm.

    6. BM

      And earlier in this, in this chapter, he calls it a cup of demons. And at the end he says, "That's why so many of you are weak and sick and a number of you have fallen asleep." And I highlighted the, the word (Greek) there. So (Greek) in Greek, I can tell you for certain does not mean to fall asleep. (Greek) means to die because it's the exact word that John's Gospel uses about Lazarus. Remember the famous miracle-

    7. JR

      Hmm.

    8. BM

      ... where Lazarus dies-

    9. JR

      Hmm.

    10. BM

      ... and he's resurrected? That'd be a pretty shitty miracle if Lazarus was just taking a nap and Jesus went to wake him up from a nap.

    11. JR

      (laughs)

    12. BM

      (laughs) . So-

    13. JR

      Right.

    14. BM

      ... the, and uses the, the same verb there. What Paul is saying here is that he's concerned that so many Corinthians are drinking a wine that is causing them to die. Why would wine cause you to die in a Greek world that had no distilled liquor? There was no hard alcohol in ancient Greece.

    15. JR

      Hmm.

    16. BM

      Distilled liquor doesn't enter Europe until much, much later, 8th, 9th, 10th centuries AD, right? At this time, there's no word for alcohol either. Alcohol is Arabic. If you listen to the word, like alchemy or algebra or alcove, all these A-L words all come from the Arabic. Uh, A-L is like the, the article in Arabic, like el in Spanish or il in Italian. So at, at this point, wine is not known for its alcoholic content. Wine is a potion that is routinely mixed with all kinds of stuff, toxins, spices, perfumes and plants, herbs and fungi. And here, we don't know what to make of it, but the Corinthians are drinking something that's causing them to die.

    17. JR

      But it, the word is die.

    18. BM

      (Greek) absolutely means to die because it's the word that, uh ... In fact, you can go to the next slide, Jamie.... it's, it's the-- if you look it up right there, it means, just like we would say the sleep of death-

    19. JR

      Hmm.

    20. BM

      ... but it means death. And, and elsewhere in the gospels, it's the exact word used for what happened to Lazarus before his miraculous resurrection. It's the whole point of the miracle. He is Ɣómao. He has fallen asleep to the death of sleep.

    21. JR

      Whoa. So, the speculation is that there's some sort of a psychedelic or a fungi or something that's in the wine that's causing them to die, and they're using it recreally- recreationally, and they're, they're trying to discourage this.

    22. BM

      That's, that, that's how I read it.

    23. JR

      Hmm.

    24. BM

      And it's, it's, and it's not just based on a random read of, of this one line in Corinthians. It's based on an understanding of, of, of what Greek wine actually was, how far back it goes, which is centuries and centuries before this, how it was mixed, what it was mixed with. Um, even in the first century, there's a guy called Dioscorides, a Gr- a, a Greek, uh, pharmacologist. In fact, he's called the Father of Drugs. And at the same time that these gospels and Paul's letters are being written, he writes something called the Materia Medica. It's these five books in Greek, and every drug prescription you've ever had in your life exists because Dioscorides wrote that manuscript. And in that manuscript, in book five, he lists out, in, in book five alone, 56 different recipes for spiked wine.

    25. JR

      Hmm.

    26. BM

      And in the Greek, he shows you how to spike wine with everything from salvia to hellebore, uh, to, uh, henbane, which he says is good for swollen genitals. So, if you have swollen genitals, you, you, you dissolve henbane into wine. He says if you drink mandrake wine, like Allegro was talking about mandrake, uh, it'll kill you in one cupful. And then he says this about black nightshade in book 474. He says if you dissolve nightshade into wine, it will produce phantasias ou aedeis, which in Greek means not unpleasant visions. So, just from the literature, we can tell that the Greeks absolutely knew how to spike wine with very powerful substances.

    27. JR

      Uh, Graham, I gotta tell you, your, your, your microphone is really sensitive. So anytime you do anything, it, it, any movement or breathing, it, it bangs around for whatever reason. (laughs)

    28. BM

      (laughs)

    29. JR

      I'm sorry. It's, I just, just have to make you aware of it. Um-

    30. GH

      So I have to sit, I, be still?

  10. 44:56 – 50:14

    Incense and hard archaeochemistry: cannabis on Judahite altars at Tel Arad

    1. NA

      Yeah.

    2. JR

      ... he's writing down all the noises. That's how good Jamie is. Um, I wanted to bring up sage to you 'cause, uh, one of the things that you, you, you, you talked about with salvia, salvia is sage, right? They are basically in the same species at least. When those priests would be walking down the aisle and they would be blowing sage, they're burning sage, was that for some sort of a psychedelic effect? Is that the reason why they were doing that?

    3. BM

      Uh, so when it, when it comes to incense, we actually have an answer now. I'm not sure if you know this, but earlier this year, in, in May, there were some researchers in Israel who released one of the first, um, archaeochemical studies of ancient incense. Have you heard about this?

    4. JR

      No.

    5. BM

      Oh, it's the, uh, so just in May, at a place called Tel Arad in Israel, um, south of Jerusalem, west of the Dead Sea, there was the, the organic remains of some kind of incense that was burned on these two altars that is described by the researchers as kind of, um, a scaled-down version of Solomon's Temple. Um, it's, it's dated to the eighth century BC, so in the Judahite period. So, we could feasibly say the beginnings of the Judeo-Christian period. Oh, yeah, there it is.

    6. JR

      Frankincense. I love that word.

    7. BM

      So, under archaeochemical analysis, and, and this, uh, this sample had actually been excavated years ago in the 1960s and was deposited in the museum. But the thing with, with, uh, with this, this science, which is amazing, is that they can resurrect this stuff no matter when it was excavated. So fortunately, it wasn't contaminated. And after analysis, they found it contained THC, uh, CBD, and CBN. So-

    8. JR

      Wow.

    9. BM

      ... tetrahydrocannabinol, cann- uh, cannabidiol, and cannabinol. Uh, and so it's, it's, it's the fir- they say it's the first example of psychoactive drug use, uh, in, in the ancient holy land, essentially.

    10. JR

      So, when they were walking down the aisle, um, would they use only... Well, we know that was cannabis, but sage was used as well, right? And sage is Salvia divinorum, which is a more potent psychedelic than cannabis.

    11. BM

      Yeah, but I think that's a New World plant, though.

    12. JR

      Is it?

    13. BM

      If I'm not mistaken.

    14. JR

      Oh, okay.

    15. BM

      Yeah. There, I mean, at least the one you're, you're thinking of, uh-

    16. JR

      So when they use sa- when you say New World, you're talking about European world?

    17. BM

      And the Americas.

    18. JR

      Oh, Americas.

    19. BM

      In the Amer-

    20. JR

      Really? So, sage use when they would have it in that, what is that... Graham, do, you would know this. What is that thing that they walk down the aisle with when they blow that smoke?

    21. GH

      The censor. A censor.

    22. JR

      A censor. That's really what it's called, a censor?

    23. GH

      C-E-N-S-O-R, yeah.

    24. JR

      Right. Oh. So-

    25. GH

      Or, yeah, a cen- a cen- a censor.

    26. NA

      (laughs)

    27. GH

      It's a interesting double entendre there.

    28. JR

      Yes. (laughs)

    29. GH

      Censorship, yeah. (laughs)

    30. JR

      (laughs) So, they were most certainly using cannabis or something else that they were burning, and they were getting everybody high.

  11. 50:14 – 58:10

    Tracing beer back prehistory: Göbekli Tepe, Raqefet Cave, and visionary cave art

    1. JR

      So, the, the literature that connects the, um, banning of these, uh, psychedelic rituals in 4th century you were saying, how, how does it describe it and what, what was the, w- what was the reaction by, by the people?

    2. BM

      I mean at, at the time ... So you have to remember that the, the Greek mysteries existed for a long, long time.

    3. JR

      Yeah.

    4. BM

      Um, we don't know exactly how long, but the excavators and, and this, this began in Eleusis, for example, in 1887. Uh, they, they, they date it back to at least 1500 BC. So, if, if it survives until the 4th century AD, you're talking almost 2,000 years, as long as Christianity itself has been around and the mysteries themselves, and there are serious scholars who came along in the '70s to say this, uh, could have prehistoric roots, which is how I started the investigation, uh, by, by asking how, how this actually got to the Greeks, uh, because what's interesting about this Kerkykeion potion, for example, is that it's not wine-based. Uh, and, and that Hymn to Demeter that came down to us, she's actually offered wine in this mythical story that takes place. She's out looking for her daughter Persephone who's been abducted and kidnapped to the underworld, and she looks for her for nine days and nights and can't find her and she, she, uh, rests her bones exhausted at Eleusis and they try to offer her wine and she says no. She wants that water, barley and mint. And again, uh, Hoffman, Wassen and Ruck thought it was kind of like a primitive version of beer if you think about it. It reads like a very simple beer recipe. Now for the Greeks, all the way through the classical period, through Plato and afterwards, uh, for them to be drinking beer instead of wine is very, very weird. For them to have a secret mystery religion that's not written down, remember, the civilization that birthed literature and the concept of the university as we know it, is also very weird. So it's like they're, they are retaining this very prehistoric, uh, ritual and this very prehistoric beverage which is beer, and as I trace it back further and further, you can see clues of beer being used in funerary and mortuary rituals as far back as 13,000 years and there are some who think that that beer actually precedes bread at that moment we call the agricultural revolution where the Upper Paleolithic becomes the Neolithic and Graham writes a lot about this and very beautifully at Göbekli Tepe, for example.

    5. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    6. BM

      Uh, so I was able to trace back, uh, the potential brewing of religious beer all the way back to Göbekli Tepe.

    7. JR

      And the speculation is that this religious beer had some ergot in it possibly.

    8. BM

      It's, it's possible. It's possible. We, we haven't done much testing for ergot that far back. I mean we're ... That, that, that's why I wanted to write this book is because the science is relatively new.

    9. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    10. BM

      Um, archaeochemistry, for example, is relatively new. It's, it's, uh ... Some of the, the better findings have been coming out over the past 20 years, uh, which is, which is like a baby in the sciences. In fact, uh, Pat McGovern, uh, at the University of Pennsylvania who I interviewed for the book, described archaeochemistry at the time in the late '90s when he was, uh, producing some incredible finds as li- as like an infant which would make it like a toddler today. And so we're just beginning to put these pieces together, so we can't say there was psychedelic beer 13,000 years ago. The question right now is kind of was there beer at all, and there are ... There's very, uh, early indications at Göbekli Tepe itself that they were brewing beer, and at another site, uh, to the southwest in Israel at Mount Carmel outside Haifa, there's this really interesting place called the Raqefet Cave and it was a burial site with about 30 individuals. This is between 11,700 BC and 9,700 BC. A team from Stanford went in there and they found these boulder mortars in which they found traces of the malting and mashing of grains which they think was for beer. This is 13,000 years ago.

    11. JR

      Graham.

    12. GH

      Which brings, which brings us to the, to the Upper Paleolithic and then we have the whole mystery of rock and cave art all around the world. So Brian is right, we haven't got the analysis that proves that a psychedelic was in that 13,000-year-old beer, but what we do have 13,000 years ago and going back much further, 27, 40, 50,000 years ago, uh, is art. Uh, and that art really only makes sense as psychedelic art. I mean, what, where else but in a visionary state do you see an entity that is part human and part animal, uh, in, in form, that is part a lion and part a human being?

    13. JR

      Mm-hmm.

    14. GH

      It's not something you see every day, it's not something you see when you're out hunting game. But seeing these therianthropes, as they are called, is a very common experience in deeply altered states of consciousness. So the art itself speaks to us of artists who had had powerful experiences in deeply altered states.

    15. JR

      What, what is the conventional, conventional speculation about those images, the half man, half animal images?

    16. GH

      Increasingly it is that, uh, that they document psychedelic states. Uh, there's a professor at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa, David Lewis Williams, written a book called The Mind In The Cave, who's documented this in, in great detail, that the only possible explanation for this art, which is found all over the world, it's not just found in, in one region or one place, is that the artists were shamans, that they were experiencing altered states of consciousness and when they returned to a normal everyday state of consciousness, they remembered their visions and painted them on cave walls. And those visions would, might well be a lion man or a bison man, and that entity had communicated with them, just in the way that entities communicate with us today under the influence of DMT or psilocybin.

    17. JR

      Did you have a sense of urgency while you were writing this? Like did you understand that this is something that very few people who are legitimate scholars are gonna really tackle?

    18. BM

      (laughs) Well, it hadn't been done and I don't, I don't know why nobody was, was doing this, um, and combining the humanities and the linguistics with, with, with the sciences. Um, I'd been waiting for this book to come along and, and no one wrote it, so ... (laughs)

    19. JR

      So you had to write it yourself.

    20. BM

      Since I wasn't doing DMT-

    21. JR

      (laughs)

    22. BM

      ... I had, I had plenty of free time.

    23. JR

      How long did it take?

    24. BM

      12 years.

    25. JR

      Wow. Did, was there any point in time where you were like, "What the fuck am I doing?"

    26. BM

      Uh, if you ask my wife, yeah, especially.

    27. JR

      (laughs)

    28. BM

      (laughs) Like, "You, you're supposed to be a lawyer, man."

    29. JR

      (laughs)

    30. BM

      (laughs) "No one's paying you for this. You went to the Vatican?"

  12. 58:10 – 1:34:28

    The Spain breakthrough: Greek mystery artifacts, ritual chapel, and ergotized beer evidence

    1. JR

      Well, let's get to that now. Who, who are they and what do they...

    2. BM

      So there, there's a couple different guys. One, uh, uh, there, so there are two finds that, that I really went out of my way, uh, to, to put into this book. Uh, one is trying to find hard evidence of this ergotized beer and the other is trying to find actual hard evidence of, of wine that's been spiked, uh, and ideally that would, that would be spiked wine in the context of some kind of Christian ceremony or, or some syncretic Greek Christian ceremony in the first century AD. And so I spent years and years, uh, trying to get in contact with these folks and reading through the archaeobotany journals, um, and I'll, I'll start with ergot first since I was really kinda fascinated with ergot and this hypothesis from 1978, because it sits there for now 40 years and there's no hard data to come by and, and people often argue about ergot the same way we argue, uh, argue about Amanita and the other candidates 'cause it's, it, it doesn't make sense. Um, we, we know it's there, we know it's common, but it doesn't make the most sense as the thing that would have spiked this beer. Uh, so I spent a long time looking for ergotized beer, or any beer that was spiked. Now, if you go to the top archaeochemists or archaeobotanists in the US, the UK, or, or Europe, and I did for many years and I asked them the very simple question, "Is there any botanical or chemical data of beer having been spiked with psychedelics?" And the universal answer that would always come back is "No." Uh, and so I'd ask them again and the answer would be "No." And so I started to think about the ancient world and what that meant and what ancient Greece meant, and so, um, first I went to the site at Eleusis to ask the archeologist there if we could test her vessels and I couldn't believe that nobody had ever asked her if they could submit the test, uh, the vessels to chemical testing. And so I flew there and I talked to her about it and she said, "Unfortunately, they've all been treated for conservation purposes. You know, they put them in museums, uh, and they exhibit them to the public and when you do that, uh, you, you contaminate the, the artifact and it's no longer testable."

    3. JR

      Ugh.

    4. BM

      So that was my dead end. And that's where things stopped for a while, and that's where my wife starts asking, you know-

    5. JR

      (laughs)

    6. BM

      (laughs)

    7. JR

      "Ryan."

    8. BM

      "You f- (laughs) You flew to Greece by yourself and left your two daughters at home for no reason, so you could ask a lady if she could test her, her chalices, and she told you no. And now what are you gonna do?" And so I said, "Well, I'm gonna get creative, man." And so I thought about the ancient Greek world. Uh, here's the thing about the ancient Greek world. In, in, in the wake of Alexander the Great, who was called The Great for a reason, the Greek influence, um, after the fourth, third centuries BC w- stretched all the way from Iberia, Spain, and Portugal, to Afghanistan and the East. I'm not sure if, if many folks realize that, but the, the, the Greek-speaking or the Greek-influenced part of the world was enormous. And so, if you're looking for evidence of this kerkeon, why would you restrict yourself to Athens and Eleusis? So I took a step back and I started thinking, "Where else would there be a Greek presence?" And I didn't expect to find one, but I wa- I landed on Iberia eventually, uh, because I started, um, researching ergot in different languages. That was, that was my first clue. Uh, you know, there ... In, in English we have this one weird word for it, ergot. But actually, in German, there's lots of words for it, bizarrely enough. Maybe it's because of the history of brewing. But in German there's afterkorn, mutterkorn, Tollkorn, which means crazy corn, crazy grain, or Totenkorn, which means death corn. And so it's, it's weird that, uh, you know, as, as you look elsewhere, it's, it seems to be more common to the German mind. And then in Spanish I just started random Googling for what that is. It's called cornisuela de, de centeno in Spanish. And a couple things started popping up. Um, and this, these notions of, of spiked beer started popping up, where they weren't supposed to. I never expected to find them. So the first hit that came in was from an archaeological site kind of in the, in the middle, Midwest of Spain called, uh, the Valladolid. And there, in 2003, they found a Greek vessel called ... a Greek chalice called a kerinos, and it's the same kind of vessel that's used in the Eleusinian Mysteries. Uh, it's a, it's like this little cup with a tiny cup on the outside. I brought a picture for you, if you wanna see it.

    9. JR

      Sure.

    10. BM

      Um, Jamie, in, um, in Mas Castellar, if you scroll to the bottom, and copy of P29. So this, this, this ca- That's it. So this came from a site called the Necropolis of Las Ruedas. And the Necropolis of Las Ruedas is this archaeological site that was dated to about the second century BC. Now these aren't Greek people, uh, this is a pre-Roman population called the Vaccae, or the Vaccaeans. Uh, but for some reason, in this kerinos, it tested positive for beer spiked with hyoscyamine. If you go to the, to the next tab, Jamie, you'll see the, they wrote it up. It, it's in Spanish, um, but there you'll see that the, at the nu- number 76 and 77, when they tested the, the, the kerinos, which is a very Greek word, by the way, when they tested the kerinos, it tested positive for traces of hyoscyamine. And hyoscyamine can only occur in these solanaceous plants, these nightshade plants. You're talking ... So the, it's the family of plants that includes very boring things like, uh, the tomato-

    11. JR

      Eggplants.

    12. BM

      ... and, or the potato or tobacco.

    13. JR

      Yeah.

    14. BM

      But it has these nightshades, like mandrake again, uh, or, or henbane. And so it's one of those tropane alkaloids that could've been in henbane, for example. So here, you're talking about a henbane beer, which is really weird. The even weirder part is that this is found in a, in a funeral complex-

    15. JR

      Hmm.

    16. BM

      ... just like, just like you would find at Gobekli Tepe or the Raqefet Cave in Israel 13,000 years ago. Here, after thousands and thousands of years, you're seeing this pre-Roman population using beer spiked with henbane in a, in a death cult. And where, where the researchers say that it was used to either facilitate the deceased's travel to the other world, or maybe the people who were there ushering the deceased into the other world. They actually use that phrase.

    17. JR

      Holy shit. Go back to that image of the, uh, cup again, please. So why does it have the cup on the outside of it, again? There's the-

    18. BM

      Yeah.

    19. JR

      ... the large vessel-

    20. BM

      Yeah.

    21. JR

      ... and then there's a small vessel to the side of it.

    22. BM

      We, we don't know. Th- that's just what the, that's what a kerinos is. If you scroll-

    23. JR

      It could possibly have been, uh, portion control?

    24. BM

      Exactly.

    25. JR

      Hmm.

    26. BM

      If you scroll to the, to the top, Jamie, uh, you'll see, uh, two other kerinoi, on the top right there. Yeah.

    27. JR

      Ah.

    28. BM

      And so this is-

    29. JR

      Hmm.

    30. BM

      ... this is the next part of the, of the clue. Uh, so, so these came from, um, a colony on the East Coast of Iberia called Emporion, which was a bustling, uh, Greek colony. And these are, are, are, are other kerinos vessels, just like you would see at Eleusis. These are the kinds of things that they think the initiates were drinking from. Now they don't make for very good drinking vessels, but maybe they, they make for good mixing vessels, like-

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