Name: Evidence of Early Christian Psychedelic Rituals in Ancient Rome
Uploaded: 2023-10-11T17:08:12.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Evidence of Early Christian Psychedelic Rituals in Ancient Rome' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-10-11. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Evidence of Early Christian Psychedelic Rituals in Ancient Rome' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-10-11. Transcript available.

- The Joe Rogan Experience.
- 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?
- Yeah. - Okay, cool.
- Let's do it, I love it.
I love talking to you.
- Okay, cool. - What do you got?
- Jamie, there should be a folder called Circe.
- Circe like the lady from Game of Thrones?
- Like the lady from Game of Thrones, yeah.
- And she's my favorite.
- Then you'll get to know her a lot better.
- Such a great character.
- You'll get to know her a lot better.
- Shame.
Shame.
- What am I looking for here?
- It's in my Google Drive.
- Oh, no, no, yeah, I have the folder.
What do you want me to pull up?
Because the first few pictures are just words.
- Yeah, just from the first one, yeah.
We can start with, we can go into the pictures.
- My point, it's just words, though.
- That's fine, we can move forward from there.
So what I'm gonna 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,
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 were in small,
in private homes, in this agape meal.
And then sometimes you'd go underground,
into these 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 of weeks ago,
I reached out to the Vatican specifically,
to ask them if I could show these images to you today.
And they said yes.
- All right, thank you, Vatican.
Take back all the shit I said about you.
- They're actually, they're great research partners.
It's the Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archaeology.
So it's the archeological 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 like 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 like 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.
Like the line, 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
like,
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 is, that's just a bunch more texts 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.
There was, it was discovered in 1919, I think, as a Fiat shop around the corner.
It was trying to expand into a sunken garage.
They came across these monuments, which is not uncommon in Greece and Italy and
around the Mediterranean.
So they found this hypogeum, which dates to the third century AD.
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 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 is 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.
So we're not really sure.
How do they interpret that?
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 McMullan 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.
Whoa.
So that's Aurelia participating in a funeral banquet that's happening
underground.
Oh.
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.
So that's either interpreted as St. 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, obviously.
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 kukio,
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 just it's a really strange image to have there.
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.
If you go to the next slide.
What is, can I ask you?
Yeah.
What are those people laying down?
If you zoom in on Circe.
Oh, right here.
Yeah.
Up above?
What are those people laying down?
Yeah, that's the interpretation from the monograph is that that's some sort of
funeral beer.
So those are dead people.
That could be dead people.
Yeah.
Which is also strange.
What's that?
Satan.
That we can't make out.
So the loom was another telltale sign.
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, maybe it's just
Circe and 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 called the Virgilius Vaticanus.
You can find this online.
And 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 the confidence is rising.
And for folks who don't know what a loom is, it's how you create cloth with
threads.
Some people, yeah.
Yeah, that's true.
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?
Why was she known as a person who makes cloth?
Because that's what Homer said.
That's what Homer says in his epic poetry.
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 like, it's a very, it's a very strange, 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,
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.

Evidence of Early Christian Psychedelic Rituals in Ancient Rome

- The Joe Rogan Experience.
- 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?
- Yeah. - Okay, cool.
- Let's do it, I love it.
I love talking to you.
- Okay, cool. - What do you got?
- Jamie, there should be a folder called Circe.
- Circe like the lady from Game of Thrones?
- Like the lady from Game of Thrones, yeah.
- And she's my favorite.
- Then you'll get to know her a lot better.
- Such a great character.
- You'll get to know her a lot better.
- Shame.
Shame.
- What am I looking for here?
- It's in my Google Drive.
- Oh, no, no, yeah, I have the folder.
What do you want me to pull up?
Because the first few pictures are just words.
- Yeah, just from the first one, yeah.
We can start with, we can go into the pictures.
- My point, it's just words, though.
- That's fine, we can move forward from there.
So what I'm gonna 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,
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 were in small,
in private homes, in this agape meal.
And then sometimes you'd go underground,
into these 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 of weeks ago,
I reached out to the Vatican specifically,
to ask them if I could show these images to you today.
And they said yes.
- All right, thank you, Vatican.
Take back all the shit I said about you.
- They're actually, they're great research partners.
It's the Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archaeology.
So it's the archeological 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 like 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 like 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.
Like the line, 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
like,
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 is, that's just a bunch more texts 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.
There was, it was discovered in 1919, I think, as a Fiat shop around the corner.
It was trying to expand into a sunken garage.
They came across these monuments, which is not uncommon in Greece and Italy and
around the Mediterranean.
So they found this hypogeum, which dates to the third century AD.
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 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 is 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.
So we're not really sure.
How do they interpret that?
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 McMullan 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.
Whoa.
So that's Aurelia participating in a funeral banquet that's happening
underground.
Oh.
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.
So that's either interpreted as St. 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, obviously.
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 kukio,
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 just it's a really strange image to have there.
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.
If you go to the next slide.
What is, can I ask you?
Yeah.
What are those people laying down?
If you zoom in on Circe.
Oh, right here.
Yeah.
Up above?
What are those people laying down?
Yeah, that's the interpretation from the monograph is that that's some sort of
funeral beer.
So those are dead people.
That could be dead people.
Yeah.
Which is also strange.
What's that?
Satan.
That we can't make out.
So the loom was another telltale sign.
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, maybe it's just
Circe and a loom.
But if you go to the next slide, there's a, and the next one.
Yeah.
There's a m