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October 10 - December 21, 2021
Over the centuries, therefore, enormous and often deadly forces (with the power, for example, to burn people at the stake or imprison them for decades) have repeatedly been unleashed to prevent people from experiencing direct contact with realms and realities other than the mundane.
that is what all psychedelic plants and fungi are—literally the ancient teachers of mankind.
And right there, plain as can be, is the stated goal of every mystic or saint who has ever tried to put any of the world’s religions to the ultimate test. To die before you die.
“Once you’ve plunged into the ocean, does it really matter whether or not you believe in water?”
A God that you can actually experience in a direct and personal way is a God that makes sense. A God that erases depression and anxiety like a cosmic surgeon, obliterates the fear of death, and sends a shock wave of love through your fragile heart is a God that lives in high definition. And a God that could hardly be expected to start a war against nonbelievers.
If there’s a spiritual crisis in the West, it’s because the defenders of the three great monotheistic faiths have forgotten their roots.
“Every religion has its mystical core. The challenge is to find access to it and to live in its power.”
When it comes to “God”—a word rarely used by the mystics—there is total unanimity on one crucial issue of paramount importance. God does not reside in a holy book.
For the mystics, the only way to know God is to experience God. And the only way to experience God is to unlearn everything the ego has been trying so vigorously to manufacture since our infancy. In order to stop wetting the bed and become productive members of society, that “deep, inner-peace circuitry of the right hemisphere” has been sidelined along the way. To bring it back online, say the mystics, the simplest and most effective method is to die before you die.
“Nothing could be more alarming to the ecclesiastical hierarchy,” the philosopher Alan Watts once observed, “than a popular outbreak of mysticism, for this might well amount to setting up a democracy in the kingdom of heaven.”
Beyond any doubt, they claimed, death was not the end of our human journey. We do, in fact, survive the physical body. And underneath this mortal clothing, we are all immortals in disguise—gods and goddesses destined to the stars for eternity.
Back in the Garden of Eden, maybe the forbidden fruit was forbidden for a reason. Who needs the fancy building, the priest and all the rest of it—even the Bible—if all you really need is the fruit?
Only when chaos and cosmos work together do the raw psychedelic ingredients of the sacrament result.
Our ancestors could quote the Greek uttered in this amphitheater as easily as we might quote favorite lines from Hollywood.
The Bacchae left behind a thick trail of clues that we will begin exploring later in this book. Clues that lead to a magical version of Jesus: equal parts natural healer, initiator of mysteries, and concoctor of drugged wine. Unknown to many faithful today, it’s a version that places the founder of Christianity in the kind of detailed historical context that would have been self-evident to the earliest generations of Greek-speaking paleo-Christians.
If the Church simply stole everything from the Greeks, it could be argued that the whole Christian enterprise is fatally flawed. And its one-of-a-kind mandate to save the human species from eternal damnation goes from something quite exceptional to something quite ordinary.
Eventually the Bavarian revolt won the day, making the innocent hop (Humulus lupulus) the only socially acceptable additive now servicing the global beer industry. But before that, perhaps as far back as the Stone Age, beer was a wild ride.
I would later learn that a scene from Game of Thrones was shot here, which makes sense in retrospect.
The same people who invented science also invented techniques for entering the underworld and communing with the immortals, whether gods, goddesses, or ancestors. Techniques, that is, for becoming immortals themselves.
In 1978, a lone classicist at Boston University tried to tell the world about this whole “perverse” idea. But the world wasn’t quite ready. Before we leave the Benedictine Abbey of Sant Pere de Galligants, I have to ask Ruck one final question. “Do you think this vindicates the past forty years of your tortured life?” He grinned. “Well, it will certainly make some people unhappy, won’t it?”
It’s well established that fermentation comes to a sudden halt when the alcoholic content of wine or beer approaches about 15 percent by volume. Most yeast can no longer survive past that natural barrier; they just die off, blocking any further production of the heady ethanol. So something else had to give ancient wine its infamous kick.
As mentioned earlier, the objective of the maenads or female devotees of Dionysus was the state of “divine frenzy” or “god-possessed inspiration.” Having been “filled with the spirit” of the God of Ecstasy and “acquired his divine powers,” the priestesses became “identified with the god himself.”3 Now that’s some kick-ass wine.
Rather than looking to an external God, far off in the clouds, the atypical priest might counsel forward-thinking Christians to focus on their own, hidden potential deep within.
It’s a neat line of succession: Osiris to El to Dionysus to Jesus. The critical thing that unites them all is extraordinary wine that blurs the boundary between life and death. Immortality potions.
Of all the places for Jesus to call home, the drug-riddled Napa Valley of the ancient world just happened to be the one. Where wine was a sacrament for the cult of the dead that found inspiration in both the long-running marzeah and the Dionysian Mysteries.
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.
Imagine the intoxicated, all-night affair, promising an in-person appearance by your dead relatives, the holy saints, and possibly the Lord himself—all made possible by the Eucharistic funerary meal that laid the very foundations for the Catholic Mass.
Simply put, the story of paleo-Christianity is Greek-speaking mystics in southern Italy demanding personal access to the Eucharist. It wasn’t the priests who attracted them to Jesus. It wasn’t the Church Fathers. And it certainly wasn’t the Bible or the basilicas, because neither existed. It was an experience of meeting God, free from doctrine, dogma, and any institution whatsoever.
pack of Dionysian satyrs, as depicted on any bottle of Strega—a popular herbal liqueur named after the Italian word for “witch” and distilled in Benevento since 1860.
Yes, such coincidences are possible. But I didn’t come here for coincidences. I came here for evidence. Evidence that the Vatican’s war against women and drugs was real.
the end of the day, the one holy catholic and apostolic Church, a global fixture with a universal mandate to spread the love of the Gospels, went on a bloody rampage.
If the use of plants and herbs as natural remedies proliferated and proved successful, everyone would begin to question the white magic of the Eucharist that was supposed to be a cure-all. And with it, the magical God on which the Most Blessed Sacrament depended.
the mystics have always tried to protect their version of the Drug of Immortality. And the bureaucrats have always responded with an iron fist:
The bureaucrats couldn’t possibly burn every witch, torch every plant, and throw every Indian or hippie who ever wanted a taste of God into jail, could they?
And one of the most reliable ways to do that, say the heretics, is with the kind of drugs that reveal the cosmos for what it truly is. Eternal. Timeless. Only then might the blind learn to see. Only then might the mortal become immortal.
The teams at Hopkins and NYU are somehow doing what the Greek and Christian Mysteries were never able to accomplish in antiquity. And what Aldous Huxley prophesied in 1958 would result in a “revival of religion” to outdo all others in the history of the species. Today’s scientists have now solved the critical flaws of the religion with no name: safety, reliability, and scalability. Delivering a profound mystical experience in the most cautious way possible, as effectively as possible, to the most number of people possible. The technology is all there: a safe, pharmaceutical-grade hallucinogen
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When I point out the irony of a Greek scientist on the cusp of resurrecting the original religion of Ancient Greece, Bossis digs around on his desk and pulls out his favorite Einstein quote: “The cosmic religious experience is the strongest and the noblest driving force behind scientific research.”
If we all died before we died, maybe we’d all discover the big secret that was known to the initiates of the Mysteries. We are all God.
“The Son of Man is within you,” said the Gospel of Mary Magdalene. But if you don’t die now, you might never realize that. You might never understand that Heaven is not what happens when the physical body wastes away. And that there is no afterlife. Because there is no after. There’s only right here, right now.
It was never about life after death. It was always about escaping into the timelessness of the infinite present. “There’s no beginning or end,” said Dinah. “Every moment is an eternity of its own.”
