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December 6 - December 19, 2025
When a Greek celebrant ingested the fruit of the vine, she ingested the god himself. How else do we explain the concept of “enthusiasm” (derived from entheos (ἔνθεος), meaning “divine frenzy” or “god-possessed inspiration”), considered the “one quality … more than any other” that gave birth to tragedy?25 The British scholar Peter Hoyle best described how “at that moment of intense rapture,” Dionysus’s maenads, or female devotees, “became identified with the god himself.… They became filled with his spirit and acquired divine powers.”26
Gus Speth, said it best: “I used to think the top environmental problems facing the world were global warming, environmental degradation and eco-system collapse, and that we scientists could fix those problems with enough science. But I was wrong. The real problem is not those three items, but greed, selfishness and apathy. And for that we need a spiritual and cultural transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that.”34
Alienation from nature and the loss of the experience of being part of the living creation is the greatest tragedy of our materialistic era. It is the causative reason for ecological devastation and climate change. Therefore
self-knowledge is knowledge of God; the self and the divine are identical.
To the dismay of many fine classicists and historians, it looks as if civilization began with a toast. And the party never stopped.
And the religion with no name that sprang from its soil just may have been the drunken, hallucinogenic religion that made the Mysteries possible.
If beer really is the oldest biotechnology, it could very well be responsible for what archaeologists call “one of the most significant turning points in the history of mankind.”3 That sudden shift from hunting and gathering to a sedentary, community-based lifestyle known as the Neolithic or Agricultural Revolution.
If the brewing of beer really preceded the baking of bread, then the mysterious origins of the poorly understood Agricultural Revolution would be rewritten as the Beer Revolution.
Religion wasn’t a by-product of civilization. It was the engine.
When properly monitored and harvested, the creative applications of fungi, antibiotics, and other micro-organisms—humanity’s “first pets”—are seemingly endless. Their symbiotic relationship with grain was already locked in place from the very beginning of the apparent Beer Revolution thirteen thousand years ago.
He noticed the same blue water lilies (Nymphaea caerulea) depicted on Karnak’s pillars were also found as a garland around the golden neck of Tutankhamun, when the pharaoh’s tomb was first opened in 1922.12 Another incarnation of Osiris, the blue water lily is now extremely rare in the wild, but once grew abundantly on the shallow banks of the Nile. It was considered Ancient Egypt’s most sacred plant. And with the active compounds, apomorphine and nuciferin, it was full of psychoactive possibility.
Some of the best evidence for ancient spiked wine just happens to come from modern-day Galilee. Where the magical appeal of the drink that would later show up in the Wedding at Cana and Christianity’s founding event, the Last Supper, extended far beyond its alcohol content.
Forty jars of herbal wine were unearthed in what became known as the “world’s oldest wine cellar,” dating to about 1700 BC.14 Organic residue from each of the jars was subjected to thorough testing at the Brandeis University Department of Chemistry. The results of the GC-MS analyses showed remarkable consistency across the entire batch, indicating “a sophisticated understanding of the botanical landscape and the pharmacopeic skills necessary to produce a complex beverage that balanced preservation, palatability, and psychoactivity.”15
well-known wine banquet in Ancient Greece, the symposium.
McGovern says, “music, dance and the recital of Canaanite myths accompanied the merriment, along with bouts of sexual intercourse to match any Roman bacchanal.”22 But the main purpose of the marzeah, as with the skull cults and graveyard beers we tracked over ten thousand years from Stone Age Israel and Turkey to Ancient Greece and classical Iberia, was to acquaint its participants with the afterlife and “to secure their beatification after death.”
Common to all these rituals is the concept of ingesting a special potion for a singular purpose: to transcend ordinary time and space, reaching a state of consciousness where the ancestors still live and breathe, and the gods and goddesses are made real. For lack of vocabulary, scholars often refer to this place as the “underworld.”
Dioscorides, nothing about the marzeah’s special brew even remotely resembles anything we would call “wine.” McGovern’s “extreme beverage culture” of the eastern Mediterranean had crafted an extreme drinking ritual to accompany their extreme drink, perhaps providing the optimal setting to showcase their “sophisticated understanding of the botanical landscape” and “pharmacopeic skills.” The
Did this wine belong to the 1 percent or the 99 percent? Was it meant for the pharaohs, royalty, and elite? Or was it meant for everybody? Who should have access to the nectar of the gods?
Pharisees, who later in the Gospels would call Jesus a “drunk” or oinopotes (οἰνοπότης).
And for the already-smashed wedding guests at Cana, where the only way for the Jesus of John’s Gospel to prove his divinity was to perform the “signature miracle” of Dionysus, that’s exactly what they got: 180 gallons’ worth.
In John’s poetic treatment of the event, the sacred combination of bread and wine, flesh and blood, represents the most advanced biotechnology in all of antiquity. What Saint Ignatius would later call the pharmakon athanasias, the Drug of Immortality that guaranteed instant divinity and life everlasting. To the Greeks this magical procedure was known as apotheosis, or deification. Anyone who ate and drank the god became the god.
Paculla Annia refused to initiate any men over the age of twenty.40 “Rather than having women in the control of men,” says Dr. Fiachra Mac Góráin, a classicist at University College London, “this cult is putting young, impressionable men under the control of women.”41 In a staunchly patriarchal society like Rome, that was an act of war. So the authorities made the flood of magical wine slow to a trickle. By the time of Jesus the
There was no predicting the next moral panic. The most powerful empire in the world, an all-male enterprise, was clamping down on a female-led religion that promised immortality to its initiates. With only a few ounces of its secret potion, this religion with no name had finally broken the spiritual exclusivity of Egypt and the Near East, and the monopoly of the Greek families in Eleusis. And for largely political reasons the Romans wanted this dangerous religion, what Euripides once called “an immoral trick aimed at women,” to simply go away.44 But
is impossible to understand the roots of Christianity without understanding the world in which it appeared. For roughly the first three hundred years of its existence, Christianity was an illegal cult. Just like the cult of Dionysus.
Jesus’s open invitation to an immortality potion like the Eucharist would have shocked the wealthy pagans of Galilee, as well as the influential Jewish families of Jerusalem. Magical wine was supposed to be their prerogative, just the way it had been for thousands of years. Salvation didn’t belong in the hands of commoners. After his success in classical Athens, Dionysus was the first monopoly-buster in the Near East. For an extra kick in the pants, Jesus showed up a few centuries later with an even more convenient solution for anyone dissatisfied with the old-time religions. A solution the
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In the eyes of the ruling class, the idea of continuity between the Greek and Christian Mysteries was pretty darn clear. Barbaric to the core, they both offered direct access to the Lord of Death following the consumption of the god himself in the form of fortified wine.
The English plaque calls Dionysus the “god of wine and revelry.” In French he’s the “god of wine and intoxication” (dieu du vin et de l’ivresse). The language barriers never stop.
The latest archaeochemical data from the Near East show that herbs, resins, and other plant additives were mixed into wine for at least three thousand years before the birth of Christianity to increase its psychoactive profile. Why would that time-honored tradition suddenly stop at Jesus?
Father Francis is an open-minded guy, but how do I even start down this road? Looking at twenty-five-hundred-year-old Greek pottery is one thing. Suggesting the religion to which the priest has dedicated his life was chiseled from Greek stone and ripped from the pages of The Bacchae is another thing altogether. Such things are best discussed over drinks.
the original, obscured truth of Christianity has nothing to do with worshipping Jesus, and everything to do with becoming Jesus?
In just four centuries, how did Christianity go from being an obscure cult of “twenty or so illiterate day laborers” in a neglected part of the Mediterranean to the official religion of Rome, converting half the empire, perhaps some thirty million people, in the process?2 What was the secret to Christianity’s success?
But according to Ruck, the true origin of Jesus’s Greek name is the root for “drug” or “poison” (ios), which supplies the Greek words for “doctor” or iatros (ἰατρός). Ruck says the “drug man.” Either way, it’s unlikely a Greek speaker of the first century AD would have heard the name Iesous and not thought of Ieso or Iaso, the Greek goddess of healing and the daughter of Asclepius, who was taught the art of drugs, incantations, and love potions by the centaur Chiron.
Each of them uses the verb iaomai (ἰάομαι) to describe Jesus’s healing miracles. A literal translation would be “to cure by means of drugs.”5 In Matthew 9:12, Mark 2:17, and Luke 4:23, after all, Jesus does specifically refer to himself as iatros, which instead of “drug man” is generically rendered as “physician.”
The “True Drink” was no ordinary drink. It was a tool. The Drug of Immortality that might teach the first Christians how to die before they die.
The obvious answer is to communicate on their level, to convince the Greek speakers that they could find in Christianity everything they loved about the Dionysian Mysteries.
Dionysus were being domesticated. After centuries in the wild mountains and forests of the eastern Mediterranean, John was offering a safe haven for the magical wine, inviting it into people’s homes. What was once a sacrilegious act worthy of the death penalty in classical Athens was becoming a new way, perhaps the only way, of keeping the Greek Mysteries alive in the Roman Empire.
there’s only one thing the Vatican finds more suspicious than drugs. And that’s women.
For Pagels, the conclusion is obvious: “Without visions and revelations, then, the Christian movement would not have begun.”32
The women who prepared the psychedelic beer and wine in the Greek Mysteries could have been the same women who prepared the original Eucharist across the Mediterranean, where the line between pagan and Christian did not yet exist. And where it would not exist until all the men in Rome decided to exclude women from any positions of leadership in the official Church. Because if the crackdown on the Bacchanalia in 186 BC had taught the priests and bishops anything, it was that women and their sacrament were the single greatest threat to law and order.
what hope is there of proving or disproving the pagan continuity hypothesis, and getting to the true origins of Christianity, when the potential key to the Mysteries has been ignored by both secular and religious historians for so long?
In the old days, the female witches of Christianity who preceded the male priests were known for serving up a deadly concoction.
This is clearly not the ordinary eating, for many of them have fallen sick from taking the sacrament incorrectly, and some have even died, as if it could be a poison.
on 1 Corinthians 11:30 is priceless: “Even death sometimes resulted from their drunken orgies, either naturally, or by God’s direct visitation.”8 I love the thought of God the Father descending from the clouds to slap the wineglasses from the tipsy Greeks to deliver the touch of death. What an unexpected climax to an otherwise perfectly good orgy.
Participants, if they were challenged to defend the bad behavior that might attend too much eating and drinking, answered indignantly that loving thoughts, respect, and the recollection of fleshly pleasures offered to ancestors whose favor was certainly of more effect than any mere human’s—all this was not just picnicking. This was religion.
In the Roman system, slaves could be highly skilled and hyper-educated—for example, a paedagogus snatched from the sophisticated part of the empire to initiate privileged children into all the knowledge that put Greek tutors in especially high demand.28 It was one of the great ironies of the Roman Empire that it simultaneously ruled over and bowed to the cultural supremacy of the Greek-speaking
Lamberton traces this visionary technique to “the legend of Pythagoras’ own temporary death and resurrection.”19 It was said to take place in a cave on the island of Samos, where the sage reportedly discovered his well-known mathematical theorem that everyone learns in high school, a2 + b2 = c2. What everyone doesn’t learn about is the altered state of consciousness that apparently gave birth to the breakthrough in Ionia,
The whole scheme is a deliberately designed external presentation that would be acceptable in a society where Christianity was not a lawful religion.
We are facing a border monument, where pagan thought and Christian thought are joined, giving rise to a sort of syncretism.…
Princeton scholar Elaine Pagels has written extensively about the forbidden nature of the Greek gnosis (knowledge) that was the Gnostics’ chief aim. “Self-knowledge is knowledge of God; the self and the divine are identical.”
Just a few feet overhead, where Pope Francis blesses the watered-down grape juice that is the “beating heart of the Church,” the idea of a drugged Eucharist is now called “heresy.” It’s been that way for eighteen hundred years. But down here in a forgotten moment, before the Vatican grew too big for its britches, it was called “Christianity.” And before that, for many thousands of years, it was a religion with no name.
