Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1543 - Brian Muraresku & Graham Hancock
Uploaded: 2020-09-30T17:00:16.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1543 - Brian Muraresku & Graham Hancock' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-09-30. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1543 - Brian Muraresku & Graham Hancock' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-09-30. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1543 - Brian Muraresku & Graham Hancock

Joining us by Skype is the great and powerful Graham Hancock, my friend, how
are you, sir?
Hi, Joe. It's really good to be back with you. I wish I could be there in
person.
It feels very strange to be on this technology, but these are the times we live
in.
Yeah, well, I'm just happy we could talk at all. In this day and age.
Me too.
It's the little things, like little victories. And Brian, I'm going to try it.
I'm going to try it.
Murarescu.
You nailed it, bro.
Thank you. And this is the first time we've ever done one of these as well in
the studio where one, maybe ever, visual.
We've never done one. We did one with you guys. Remember we did Randall Carlson.
Yeah, and Mark Defant came in by telephone, I think.
Yes, which is very strange. It was like a sound coming from nowhere.
At least I could see you. But we've never done one of these like this.
This book, tell me, this is the immortality key. The secret of the secret
history of religion, of the religion with no name. I'll say it again. The
secret history of the religion with no name. Now, this is obviously when I
found out the subject matter, Graham, this is right up your alley.
And it made total, complete sense why you and Brian worked together on this. So
who wants to start and explain? Graham, why don't we have you start since you're,
you know, you're over there in the UK?
Yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean, for me, in fact, Joe, I think you and I
originally got in touch because of my interest in psychedelics in human culture
and a book that I published in 2006 called Supernatural.
Yes, which looks at the huge role that psychedelics have played in cultures and
in religions all around the world. And I touched in that book on the role of
psychedelics in the origins of Christianity, which of course is a dynamite
subject.
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.
And Brian, how did you get involved in this?
It's a long story.
You look like a stoner, by the way, I just tell you right now, you look like a
guy who's done a few mushrooms in his day.
Oddly enough, I don't do drugs and I've never done psychedelics.
Wow, that's crazy.
Yeah, you want to start today?
Well, I wish we were in L.A. I could hook you up.
In Texas, the laws are sketchier here.
What led you to this then?
I was fascinated by Graham's work, which I only came across about 12 years ago.
I was a Latin, Greek and Sanskrit undergrad major.
And instead of getting the PhD or becoming a priest, which are the two options
when you study Latin and Greek,
I went to law school instead for no reason whatsoever and then wound up at a
law firm.
And a couple of years into it, started reading about these psilocybin studies
coming out of Hopkins and NYU.
And that amazing statistic that two thirds 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 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 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 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.
Now, with Eleusis, how much history do we have?
How much recorded history that documents these rituals?
And is there any that describes the actual contents of this mixture?
No, there isn't much.
I mean, I say Eleusis is like the fight club of the ancient world.
The first rule about Eleusis is you don't talk about Eleusis.
You know, all we have is this fragmentary testimony, again, 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.
Because 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.
And we don't know why or how.
We know this potion is involved.
We know they make this pilgrimage 13 miles from Athens to Eleusis to drink this
potion.
We know they prepare for months, if not years, before it.
And they're forever changed afterwards.
But we have very little hard data to actually look into it.
And so in 1978, this trio of renegades, Gordon Wasson, Albert Hoffman, who
discovered LSD,
and Karl 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 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.
We've talked about ergot before in this podcast connecting it to the Salem
witch trials,
which is 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, unintentionally eating acid.
Unintentionally, it happened a lot.
There were ergot outbreaks across time, especially in the Middle Ages.
They would call it St. Anthony's fire, the Ignis Saker, because it's so, so
common.
In fact, if you talk to any brewer today, at least the brewers that I was
talking to,
I went to see this beer scientist in Munich, Germany, Martin Zarnkow, and he
says,
you can't avoid it.
Now 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?
According to Albert Hoffman, absolutely.
So as a matter of fact, I went into the Harvard archives,
where Wasson's papers are kept to this day in the botany libraries.
And I found a letter that Albert wrote Gordon, his coauthor, in 1976,
saying that Albert had self-experimented with Ergonavine, which is one of these
alkaloids
in ergot.
And he claimed in 1976, it was five to 10 times more potent than psilocybin.
It's fascinating to me that these cultures seem to have hid some of these
rituals.
And this goes back to really as far back as we have recorded psychedelic use,
like Soma.
We still to this day don't know what that is.
And it's described in these incredible ways in ancient Hindu texts, but we don't
know what it is.
We have an idea. I actually brought some Sanskrit to show you.
Really?
You want to see some Sanskrit?
Hell yeah.
Can you put it up on the screen?
It's under the Soma tab.
Oh, look at how beautiful that is.
There it is.
Their language, writing it in Sanskrit, God, it's so pretty.
Do you want me to read it for you?
Please, you can read that?
Yeah. So this was my major in college.
So in the very middle there, you can see,
And what he's saying there is this is from the Rig Veda, right?
And it's the oldest literature in Western civilization.
We think it's 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 all the Indo-European languages.
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 making this ritual potion,
very much like the Kukyan that we find among the ancient Greeks.
And here, Soma is described as a mixed potion.
Yavashira means mixed with barley.
Gavashira, from Sanskrit Go, Gava 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,
or some psilocybin containing species, or DMT.
The way that they describe Soma here is always a mixed potion,
which, so in this case, mixed with barley and milk.
So that would be an ergot, some sort of...
Already they're mentioned.
I mean, and so that's what Rock Hoffman and Wasson were saying in 1978.
We have literature from the 7th century BC.
It's called the hymn to Demeter,
where they record these ingredients of what the Kukyan was.
You ask like, where's the actual evidence?
So in the 70s, we didn't have much.
It starts with the literature, which is what classicists do.
And so 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 found in there in line...
Sorry, Graham.
We're in Texas, man.
Absolutely.
Well done.
I'm all for independence.
I'd like to be independent of my own country, if possible, as well.
Well, Texas is taking refugees at the moment, is it not?
Well, that's what's happening here.
That's why we're here.
We're refugees from the country of California.
Exactly.
The nation state of California.
So why do we know why they combined it with milk?
Was it just so that it was easier to consume?
That's what we don't know.
We don't know why the Kukyan was this mixed thing either.
But so in the hymn to Demeter, they record these ingredients.
It's alfi, which is barley, hudor, which is water,
and blechon, which means mint.
And that's all we had.
So it doesn't say milk?
You didn't say milk?
That was in Soma.
In Soma.
Yeah.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Which they mix with all kinds of things, and not just barley and milk, but also
honey.
As a matter of fact, Soma is often identified with madhu, which is honey in
Sanskrit.
McKenna speculated that there was a transfer in culture of psychedelic-based
culture to an
alcohol-based culture based on climate change and also based on preserving
things in honey,
and that honey would create mead.
And mead, which, if people don't know, is an alcohol beverage that's actually
made with honey.
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Do you think that this was the case with the use of honey as well, that is used
as a preservative,
or was it used to make it taste better, more palatable?
Well, we don't know.
We don't know.
That's the problem.
When we're talking about ancient plants and fungi, plants especially, we don't
know what
plants they're talking about.
So the ancient literature records all kinds of plants across the language.
If I could jump in, Joe, you're absolutely right.
There was secrecy that surrounded the use of these potions in the ancient world.
There's a case 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 sacred and
spiritual purposes of which it was intended.
So there was a great deal of secrecy 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 anothe