#2047 - Brian Muraresku

Joe Rogan (0:04)

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Brian C. Muraresku (0:14)

Good to see you.

Joe Rogan (0:16)

Last time I saw you, we were on another continent.

Brian C. Muraresku (0:18)

The European continent.

Joe Rogan (0:20)

Yeah, it was fun.

That was exciting. Thank you very much for that.

Brian C. Muraresku (0:23)

You're welcome.

Joe Rogan (0:24)

Going to visit the Greek ruins with you is really special. That was very cool.

Brian C. Muraresku (0:30)

Was that your first time seeing the Acropolis in downtown?

Joe Rogan (0:33)

It was my first time in Greece.

Brian C. Muraresku (0:35)

Really?

Joe Rogan (0:35)

Mm-hmm.

Brian C. Muraresku (0:36)

And the girls, too?

Joe Rogan (0:37)

My wife had been, but the girls hadn't been.

It was exciting. It was fun, man. It's so crazy. Just to be there in that place where all this started, just to be on that soil standing there and the place where those people were 2,500 years ago, very special.

Brian C. Muraresku (0:57)

Or longer.

Joe Rogan (0:58)

Or longer, yeah.

Brian C. Muraresku (0:59)

Yeah, by thousands of years, potentially. Yeah.

Joe Rogan (1:02)

Really exciting stuff.

Brian C. Muraresku (1:03)

It's cool, man.

Joe Rogan (1:05)

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 there, like the people that are giving tours and the people, they don't really know.

Brian C. Muraresku (1:26)

Yeah, I think it's still, I wouldn't say it's controversial, but I think it's still a subject of debate, which is the way it should be. And what we're talking about is the potential of the ancient Greeks using psychedelics to find God, which is a big idea.

Joe Rogan (1:40)

Well, it seems not just likely.

All the pieces, I mean, it's like, oh, duh. You know, like if you found a murder weapon in the house where someone was suspected of being a murderer, you'd 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.

Brian C. Muraresku (2:11)

Well, at least in Spain they were.

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. And when she finally saw the evidence, so I gave like a PowerPoint of the things that I talked about here a couple of 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.

Joe Rogan (3:49)

Interesting. What's her theory?

Brian C. Muraresku (3:50)

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 lung 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 this forensic evidence for drugs was found in these vessels 2,200 years ago 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.