The Psychedelic Origins Of Western Civilisation - Brian Muraresku | Modern Wisdom Podcast #276

Brian Muraresku is a lawyer and an author. The Mysteries of the ancient world are just getting stranger and stranger. Did Plato, Marcus Aurelius and thousands more attend a secret psychedelic ceremony which formed the basis for the Christian Sacrament? Expect to learn why an annual parade finished with a secret ceremony in ancient Greece, why the Christians may have wanted to keep this secret, what it was like to research in the Vatican secret archives, the implications if all this is true and much more... Sponsors: To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom Extra Stuff: Buy The Immortality Key - https://amzn.to/2NhfbqP Check out Brian's Website - https://www.brianmuraresku.com/ Follow Brian on Twitter - https://twitter.com/BrianMuraresku Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #eleusis #psychedelics #brianmuraresku - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I call it the best kept secret in history are essentially two questions. Number one, did the ancient Greeks use drugs to find God? And number two, did the earliest Christians inherit part of that tradition? If the answer to both of those questions is yes, then it means that Western civilization as we know it was somewhat founded on a visionary experience. And Christianity, the world's biggest religion today with two and a half billion people, might be tapping into those same psychedelic waters.

• 0:28Chris Williamson?

  You're a qualified lawyer. Why are you talking about the psychedelic origins of Western civilization?

• 0:35Speaker 00

  That's a great question. I feel like I'm still a barrister, still back. Do you, is that what you call it barristering?

• 0:41Chris Williamson?

  Uh, lawyering? Like being a, being a barrister, being a barristering. Yeah, if anyone can tell us if the verb is to barrister.

• 0:53Speaker 00

  So I still do that, believe it or not. I'm, I'm still in good standing in New York State and Washington DC for the moment. And I don't know, I don't know. I just, I started reading about psychedelics and I couldn't stop.

• 1:06Chris Williamson?

  But weren't tempted to try them? You actually, oh, sorry, decided not to try them. You remained psychedelically uninitiated throughout the writing of your book.

• 1:17Speaker 00

  My virginity was and remains intact.

• 1:21Chris Williamson?

  Is that going to change at any point soon?

• 1:24Speaker 00

  Um, soon, in the coming years. I'm not sure exactly when, but as it becomes legal and as the facilities come online, where you can have an experience that is, uh, you know, responsible and scientifically rigorous. And also for me, authentically sacred and historical, I think that'll be my moment.

• 1:44Chris Williamson?

  It's going to be so fascinating to see what happens to you, having spent over a decade, thinking, reflecting, considering, and then also going into wondering what other people's experiences are. Like the, the meta experience, what did they think? What did they feel? Man, whatever it is that you end up going through is, are you going to be shot into another universe?

• 2:10Speaker 00

  I can't wait. I'm always, part of me is always thinking the great irony of all of this would be if absolutely nothing happened.

• 2:18Chris Williamson?

  All this time, all this time.

• 2:22Speaker 00

  I was wrong.

• 2:24Chris Williamson?

  Fucking what a waste. It was all a big troll. Is there a movie coming out? Is there a movie coming out about the book?

• 2:30Speaker 00

  Um, we, we hope so. Um, at least a documentary series. So we're busy pitching that to different networks and streamers uh here in the US. But obviously it'll have a, a global audience.

• 2:41Chris Williamson?

  Dude, that's so cool.

• 2:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, man, we have that. That's, that's been a, you know, a big part of my, my job the past few weeks and months.

• 2:50Chris Williamson?

  But negotiating what sort of a series it should be, who should play you, can we get Tom Hanks, all that sort of stuff?

• 2:59Speaker 00

  All, all of the above and where do you go and how do you get there and why are you doing it? And is this, you know, is this one episode, is this a thousand episodes? And how do we pair the mystery and suspense with the rigorous academic scholarship? And, you know, make it, make it a feast for the eyes and for the ears. It's gotta be a killer soundtrack, right?

• 3:17Chris Williamson?

  Nice. Yeah. So it's going to be barristering, writing, producing, the triple threat. That's the, that's the big triple threat.

• 3:27Speaker 00

  That's my new business card, Chris.

• 3:29Chris Williamson?

  I love it. I love it. If you need an agent, speak to me. So right, laid on us. What, what's the story arc of history that you're following here?

• 3:35Speaker 00

  Right. So it's, um, you know, I call it the best kept secret in history, which are, which is not my words. These are the words of Huston Smith, uh, who, if you've never heard of him, he's one of the most influential scholars of the 20th century. Um, and what he was referring to are essentially two questions. Number one, did the ancient Greeks use drugs to find God? And number two, did the earliest Christians inherit part of that tradition? If the answer to both of those questions is yes, then it means that, you know, like Western civilization as we know it was somewhat founded on a visionary experience. And Christianity, the world's biggest religion today, with two and a half billion people, might be tapping into those same psychedelic waters. So these are big questions, obviously very controversial.

• 4:18Speaker 00

  And there's lots of great literature out there and artifacts you can go hunt down. But what I tried to do over the past 12 years is, is sniff out the hard scientific data to really make, you know, heads or tails of this for the first time.

• 4:30Chris Williamson?

  Why does it matter, or why is there a distinction between it happening just for the Greeks and it happening for also the foundation of Christianity?

• 4:38Speaker 00

  So, the first chapter of my book is called "Identity Crisis", and it talks a lot about this. I mean, at some point, or for a long time, there was no separation between church and state. And I feel like in the West, we're still grappling, at least in the United States, we're still grappling, well, in the UK as well, we're still grappling with this sense of the sacred and the profane. I mean, so the old narrative is that the ancient Greeks birthed political life as we know it, and gave us the arts and sciences and the concept of a university. And, you know, we took their theaters and made it into Hollywood. And we took their Olympic Games and we made it into the sports industry. And all this stuff that they gave us, you know, they were able to do all this, but when it came to

• 5:21Speaker 00

  the meaning of life, you know, they got it all wrong, is the prevailing narrative. And here comes Jesus and Christianity and the Christianized Roman Empire, and they're the ones who go off and evangelize. And they're the ones who colonized the Americas, for example, and Africa and Asia. It was this evangelization movement, you know. And we live in 2021, anno domini, the year of our Lord. I mean, so there's all these identity crises that I think we're still grappling with. Like, sometimes we're Greek and rational, and sometimes we're very Christian and irrational, faith-based. And which is it? And how do we heal that divide? So, if you can answer both of those questions, and weirdly, if psychedelics is the thing that unites the ancient Greeks and the Christians, when, you know, we're

• 6:05Speaker 00

  hard up trying to figure out anything that unites them, what a powerful story.

• 6:09Chris Williamson?

  Absolutely. So where do we begin? What even suggests, why psychedelics?

• 6:15Speaker 00

  So, I mean, I spent years asking myself the same question. It starts, for me, it started in 1955. I wasn't there. But this guy Gordon Wasson, who, like me, was working on Wall Street, he was working at JP Morgan, this former banker turned ethnomycologist. He became obsessed with mushrooms, and went all around the world hunting them. We think he's the first to really document this ceremony in the Mazatex of Mexico, psilocybin-attaining mushrooms, under the tutelage of Maria Sabina. He takes the mushrooms in a very ritual setting. And he has a crazy visionary experience, but what's weird about Gordon is that instead

• 6:57Speaker 00

  of saying just, "Oh, wow, wasn't that some crazy geometry or crazy visuals or what the hell was that?" This guy, because he's well-read and lettered, he says, "I think that I've tapped into the Platonic archetypes." He says that these divine mushrooms must have been what was behind the ancient mysteries, because what happened to me was so real, so vivid, and so clear, that I think I've tapped into the realest version of reality. And if I just did that here in 1955, maybe our ancient ancestors 2,500 years ago were doing the same thing, because psychedelics are freaking, they're a mind buster. And so when someone like that is doing psychedelics and thinking about the classics and history, without doing them, I was relying on his testimony to kind of ferret out the same details. I was reading

• 7:42Speaker 00

  these studies coming out of Hopkins, very similar kind of testimony. One and only dose of psilocybin, crazy visuals, crazy mystical insights. And the first thing I think of is Gordon Wasson and his theory that maybe the Greeks were doing this. And I flashed to this book from 1978, where they were spouting this controversial theory that psychedelics are the roots of Western civilization, and off I go.

• 8:06Chris Williamson?

  Why, like, that's a wonderful postulated theory from some guy that once did mushrooms, but that doesn't necessarily justify doing 12 years of a book on it?

• 8:17Speaker 00

  That's a good, that's a good point. My wife mentioned something similar at some point. So where's the, I mean, that's my point. So where's the data? So in 1978, what they had was really interesting literary references around what was happening at Eleusis. And so for those who don't know, Eleusis is like the spiritual capital of the ancient world. It survives for about 2,000 years, that is to say, as long as Christianity, over the past 2,000. It called to everybody from Plato in classical Athens to Marcus Aurelius in the Roman Empire centuries later. And they all talk about this vision, they all talk about this life-transforming event. Like, if you went to Eleusis, you confronted death

• 8:59Speaker 00

  and became an immortal. Only people who'd gone there and had this experience walked away from it guaranteed of an afterlife. That's where you went to get your afterlife. And so it's this really central pivotal moment in Greek history, in the history of Western civilization. And there's some testimony from Plato and others that they saw this thing. And there's old poetry, like the hymn Tedemeter, from a couple centuries before that, which talks about this magic potion. And it lists out the ingredients of this potion called the kukion. And what we're told in the ancient literature and the ancient sources that survived, and not much survived, because this was all secret, but what we're left with is the idea of this magical beer that propelled this vision. And it was water, mint, and barley, which again, is not something to stake 12 years

• 9:44Speaker 00

  of your life on, but according to Gordon Wasson and Albert Hofmann, who discovers LSD in 1938, they were kind of reading between the lines. And they said, it's not water, barley and mint, it's water-ergotized barley and mint. So barley that had been infected by ergot. Ergot is where we get LSD. And it's a really, really elegant theory, because ergot is totally natural, it pops up on all the cereal crops. And it's interesting to think that that may have been there 2,500 years ago, or a lot, lot longer, by the way, which I explore in the book. But again, no hard scientific data to support that.

• 10:21Chris Williamson?

  What would be the reason for someone, an intellectual like Plato, or an emperor like Marcus Aurelius, what would be the reason for them to go to this bizarre place and have some odd ritual and change their state? I thought that they would be much more down-to-earth, grounded humans.

• 10:40Speaker 00

  I think that's the thing that brought them down to earth. So, you know, Marcus Aurelius, classic textbook Stoic, he didn't just go to Eleusis. And again, this place survives from the ancient Greek times to the ancient Roman times. And Marcus Aurelius is the perfect example of why, because someone like him... We think he's one of the only laypeople to go inside the Holy of Holies in this sanctuary, this temple at Eleusis. It was almost destroyed in the second century AD, and he rebuilds it to Roman standards. He wanted to keep this thing alive, this thing that had spoken to his ancestors and all of our ancestors in the West, going back to ancient Greek times. There was something very, very powerful and very special

• 11:25Speaker 00

  about this place, uh, that's difficult to, to capture in words. But I, I think that, you know, at the center of Greek existence was this idea that you can't think your way into enlightenment. Um, or you can't read your way into enlightenment. If you read through Plato, what he says about philosophy. He says, "True philosophy is nothing else but the practice of dying and being dead." And so it, the concept that these Greeks were obsessed, obsessed with investigating death, the same way they would investigate the other phenomena in the natural world. I mean, to them, Eleusis was more of a science than a religion. You went there to test the God hypothesis, to have this vision for yourself and peer back the veil on reality and see what's there.

• 12:07Chris Williamson?

  What is the "die before you die" quote? Can you say that in the original language for us?

• 12:13Speaker 00

  Right, so that comes to us in Greek and it's inscribed on a plaque at St. Paul's monastery in Mount Athos. In Greek, it's one of the holiest sites in Orthodox Christianity. Uh, but I think it does tap back because of this Greek lineage into ancient times. And it, it goes, "An Bethanis, print Bethanis, uh, dentapatanis, otampatanis." Um, if you die before you die, you won't die when you die. Um, and, and I, and I think this is the kind of thing that was practiced at Eleusis. This kind of near-death experience, this pre-death experience that many walked away from saying was one of the most meaningful events of their lives.

• 12:50Chris Williamson?

  And that ties in with what we're seeing at Johns Hopkins at the moment, right? That it's one of the top five most meaningful spiritual experiences that they've had. It's also being used as a tool to help avoid or deal with death anxiety for people who are perhaps terminally ill as well.

• 13:07Speaker 00

  Right, and that's, I mean, I didn't answer your question, but that's why I went down the rabbit hole. So there's lots of ancient literature, testimony, data, for what it's worth. But, you know, in 2007 and 2008, I was reading those studies. And since then, this crazy statistic has remained stable. If you talk to Roland Griffiths at Johns Hopkins today, for example, he'll say that 75% of those volunteers over the past roughly 20 years, 75%, 3 and 4, will call their one and only dose among the most meaningful experiences of their lives, if not the most meaningful experience. And so, not having done psychedelics, I can still look at that kind of stat and think there's probably something there.

• 13:49Chris Williamson?

  Can you describe, based on what you know and what the research has suggested, what Eleusis would look like? Let's say that we're a bird's eye viewer in a drone and we can go around. What would be happening? Who would be there? Where is it? What's going on?

• 14:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a pretty fun place. Or I think, you know, it attracted all kinds of different people. I think it was probably less Burning Man and more Fight Club.

• 14:16Chris Williamson?

  Psychedelic Fight Club.

• 14:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it was the psychedelic Fight Club of the ancient world. There was definitely a party atmosphere or a raucous nature to it. I mean, so it's a nine-day, nine-night extravaganza. It starts in Athens and you make, you do this processional march. You make a ritual pilgrimage 13 miles from Athens all the way to Eleusis. And along the way, there's all kinds of raughty, bawdy behavior and women lifting skirts and telling dirty jokes and all kinds of fun stuff. And then you get there and it's serious as a heart attack. You know, you experience eventually the culmination of these nine days and nights is a night inside the temple, this all-night, this panougia, this all-night affair

• 15:03Speaker 00

  in this torchlit sanctuary that was dedicated to the goddess Demeter. And along with you, we think that the temple could accommodate about 3,000 people. There were kind of like stairs that line the perimeter of this sanctuary. At some point, a gong is struck, a light emits from the center of the temple. This is after a magic potion's been passed around and...

• 15:29Speaker 00

  Here appears Persephone, the goddess of the underworld. And sometimes she's described as holding a baby. The baby Dionysus, or the baby Yahus. And it's this idea that from death springs life. And, you know, it's interpreted for a long time as just this very visceral initiation into the cycles of fertility and the seasonal cycles. But there was something very personal happening to these people. So they didn't just like see a stage act. It wasn't just stagecraft. There may have been some of that going on, but again, all the testimony, what Little Survive tells us, there was something deeply personal about whatever they witnessed there. Hence, the theory that part of what they were witnessing was in the mind's eye.

• 16:11Speaker 00

  You know, behind closed eyes, for example, something perhaps psychedelic.

• 16:17Chris Williamson?

  It seems juxtaposed to have something that's incredibly sacred where only one layperson got to go, Marcus Aurelius, and yet there's this raucous nature on the way there. What's going on?

• 16:31Speaker 00

  It's a great question. I think, you know, so there's also a Mardi Gras element, right? There's Mardi Gras and Fight Club and Burning. It's a mix of all this. It's definitely a public festival at some point, right? And I think it's breaking down boundaries. It's breaking down physical boundaries and mental boundaries. And it's kind of, it's like it's intentional mind benders, you know? You know, making just horrible jokes at you to kind of break down your ego before you even get there. And on your first visit, you're not deemed eligible enough to see that magical vision. So you have to visit twice, which is why this whole initiation sequence lasts at least a year and a half, if not longer.

• 17:12Chris Williamson?

  So you don't drink on the first time?

• 17:15Speaker 00

  No, you become a moustache. That was the title you got. On your first visit, you become a moustache, which is a mystic. It's only on your second visit that you became an ephoktes, which in Greek is kind of like, you know, somebody who sees it all. So it was a long, long process to get there. And, you know, part of it is intellectual instruction and part of it is a really rigorous, you know, physical, exhausting march, where you show up thirsty and hungry and just kind of beaten down. And I think those are the conditions, after all that priming, where maybe just the right medicine would put you into the state of mind to actually experience some kind of death and rebirth.

• 17:57Chris Williamson?

  Who would be invited?

• 18:00Speaker 00

  So technically, anybody could go, under two conditions. You had to speak some ancient Greek, and you can't have committed murder. So if you're not a murderer, and you know some Greek, you're in.

• 18:11Chris Williamson?

  Okay. So I run, I run nightclubs in the UK, and it would be interesting if my door policy was based on that. Excuse me, mate, do you speak, do you speak ancient Greek? And have you committed a murder? He's like, well, I can, I can wax some Greek out to you, but I'm afraid on the second card, I'm gonna have to go somewhere else. Um, yeah.

• 18:32Speaker 00

  That might be the, the only nightclub where I'd be welcome.

• 18:35Chris Williamson?

  Perhaps, perhaps indeed. What are the, what are the mysteries, then? You talk about it throughout the book. What are the mysteries?

• 18:44Speaker 00

  Right. So Eleusis is one example of the mysteries that existed in the ancient world. I talk about the mysteries of Dionysus in ancient Greece. There are lots of other mysteries, that Samothrace, the mysteries, the Egyptian mysteries of Isis and Osiris, the mysteries of Magna Mater, and different cults from the Near East. I mean, if you had to break it all down and say something very simple, I would, I would say that these are ceremonial experiences of death and rebirth. So something is happening where you're shedding your identity, and you're losing that identity in some kind of ego dissolving event, and you're being reborn, reawakened into a new identity. And that identity is something that is in accord

• 19:25Speaker 00

  with the natural world, and in accord with the cosmos. So clearly, there's an experience happening there. That's why I always say an experience of death and rebirth, not, not just like, you know, a crazy theory or something you were listening to, but, but a real visceral experience.

• 19:41Chris Williamson?

  Why was all of this, if it's such a transformative experience, 3,000 people going, is it annual? Was it every year?

• 19:50Speaker 00

  It was, we think around the fall equinox, once a year, every year.

• 19:55Chris Williamson?

  Got you. And it was lasting for quite a long time. And there's multiple different of these mysteries. If that's the case, why is it seemingly kept hidden, then? Like, sacred religion is written and repeated everywhere. Why is this sacred ritual not?

• 20:11Speaker 00

  I've been asking myself the same question for many years. I mean, so I'll tell you, I'm not, I've been asked this question before, but I'm going to answer it differently this, this time. I'm, I'm going to say this, I, I, I think that because the way I describe it, this ceremonial death and rebirth, my personal belief is that I, I, I think there was something to do with the anticipation. And I think that if you know what's about to happen to you, it takes away some of the magic. And, and I think part of the reason this was kept secret is because you're not supposed to know what's happening to you. So imagine, if you will, like initiation into a secret society, right? And, you know, you, you come into the sacred chamber and you see a pool filled with alligators, hungry alligators. And, you know, your mates tell you, you gotta hop into that pool and get out the other side

• 20:55Speaker 00

  and then you're one of us. And you say, holy shit, why would, why would I do that? You know, it's a, it's a, it's a death sentence. And so you hop in, you get through the whole thing and it's the most terrifying experience of your life and out you come reborn. Now, if you'd been told beforehand that those alligators were perfectly well fit and didn't want anything to do with you, it would kind of take away from the experience. And so I think Eleusis is something similar. There was this priming going on and this anticipation that was being built up and this mythology that was transmitted from generation to generation. If you know exactly what's going to happen, if you know you're going to drink this potion and it's not going to kill you, but it will, you know, mess with your senses for a while. If you're told, you know, every detail of that, I don't, I don't think it's as special.

• 21:37Chris Williamson?

  Why in that case, I, I understand why it might have been kept quiet from the people who were going. But in terms of noting things down in history, if you've got over a couple of hundred years, several thousand, tens of thousands of people perhaps attending this, you would have thought that it would have been easier to find the most transformative experience of 30,000 people's lives. Why are you scrabbling for little scraps of paper and having to go to the Vatican and run off to Greece and ask to do testing on the inside of pots and stuff like that? Surely it would be written everywhere?

• 22:14Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, I'd ask the same question about Jesus. I want to know what Jesus was all about in this religion of two and a half billion people. And the guy never wrote a goddamn word down. And so we're left with these four somewhat contradictory gospels that are written a generation after after his death. We're left with the epistles of Saint Paul, who never met the guy in the flesh. You know, he receives all his information in these visionary experiences. And yet, it's the world's biggest religion, man. It's two and a half billion people. And we don't have a word from this guy. I mean, how is that possible?

• 22:46Chris Williamson?

  Very, very good point. So what happened? Like, you've got this amazing transformative ceremony. Why is it still not happening today?

• 22:55Speaker 00

  So there's a lot of different answers to that. Part of the answer, I talk about this in the book. I mean, part of the answer is the Christianized Roman Empire. The Christian emperors weren't too happy with Eleusis and the other pagan traditions stalking around, messing up the show. And so by the end of the fourth century AD, a number of decrees are issued in the second half of that century, trying to do away with this stuff. They try to do away with nocturnal ceremonies, which would include Eleusis, and then it comes back. And, you know, a lot of the old libraries and statuary kind of disappear. Not exclusively at the hands of the Christianized Roman Empire. But there's this generational loss of knowledge. And to your point, if nothing's written down, there's no doctrine, there's no dogma, there's no records for this stuff.

• 23:41Speaker 00

  If anything's going to go up in smoke pretty quickly, it's something like these mysteries.

• 23:45Chris Williamson?

  Have you got any idea of what the last time it happened would be? You said it went away, came back?

• 23:51Speaker 00

  More or less. I mean, so in the last decade of the fourth century AD, 392, more or less, is the last time I think we see this celebrated in a ritual way.

• 24:00Chris Williamson?

  And how's the banning of these rituals described? Like, what went on? Was it burning down the temple and?

• 24:09Speaker 00

  See, at some point, this is why I say you can't exclusively blame the Christians. I mean, at some point, the barbarians get their hands on Eleusis. And the big question is, you know, how did they just march in and take this place down? Well, they did it once in the second century. It happens again at the end of the fourth century, but, you know, part of me thinks that the Christian emperors kind of opened the gates and just let the rioters stampede.

• 24:29Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. So why does this matter? Like, what are the implications if it's true? The broader implications, other than Plato and Marcus Aurelius and a bunch of other famous people that we know about had a great time?

• 24:42Speaker 00

  Because what if this is the real religion of the ancient Greeks? And what if this identity crisis that we have is a false one? What if the people who created the foundations for our life today were the same people who were very obsessed with finding out a meaning for life? I mean, what if it, in addition to our faith traditions, in addition to the Bible, the New Testament, what if in addition to all that, these ancient philosophers and mystics had ideas that weren't that distinct from Christian mystics and some of these heretical sects like the Gnostics? Or some of the very mainstream followers of Jesus? I mean, the big question I ask in the book is, you know, is the ancient Greek of the pagan world and their rites and practices at all related to the ancient Greek of the New Testament and their rites and practices?

• 25:26Speaker 00

  And, you know, again, it's this Greek is the sacred language of Christianity. And so by looking into these mysteries, what I'm really studying is what's called the pagan continuity hypothesis. Was there something about Plato and the rest of them and his philosophy and these rites at Eleusis? Is there some of that that actually made its way into Christianity, into the earliest Christian communities that we know for 300 years were practicing secret, illegal, mystery traditions inside private homes and graveyards? I mean, there's a lot of crossover.

• 25:58Chris Williamson?

  It seems to me, looking back at what I know about Greek philosophy and what I understand about Christianity, that they do seem like two pieces of opposite puzzles, or of the same puzzle perhaps, that you had this incredibly grounded, very virtuous, not too woo-woo, there was limited, at least in my experience, to do with the Greeks, they had their gods, but it wasn't a sort of a personal transcendence type of philosophy with regards to that. Whereas with Christianity, almost everything was about the theology, it was about the paying tribute to the higher power, and a lot less to do with the personal sovereignty

• 26:41Chris Williamson?

  that seems to be based around the Greeks. And it does seem odd that you could go from a society that we're now in 2020, that Ryan Holiday is making a living off in 2020, you could go from such a pragmatic society and philosophy into one that I think even to Christians now, they're not superbly proud of a lot of the things that went on around that time. There was, it was very militant, the way that Christianity kind of came aboard with conversions and crusades and things like that. It really does feel like there is a missing piece there.

• 27:25Speaker 00

  And that's what I'm looking for. And part of the hard, you know, the hard investigation is that when you go looking for answers, you find this sacred territory split into two departments. So, you know, in most universities, most institutions, theology is very different from the classics. So if you're interested in what all the pagans were up to, you're studying classics, you're studying the ancient Greek works of Plato and others. If you're into the Jesus stuff, same language by the way, you're suddenly in the theology department or divinity studies. And there's a quote I have in the book from an old scholar from like the early 20th century. Who says that, you know, the literature and civilization of a very extensive part of world history is very much neglected by the very ones best able to investigate it,

• 28:10Speaker 00

  which is the classicists. I mean, these are the people who study, uh, you know, all the, that powerful syntax and grammar and gorgeous language of the ancient Greek. And when you ask a classicist to read the New Testament, they read it a little bit differently, which is why I got obsessed with this theory from 1978. Um, it wasn't just Gordon Wasson and Albert Hoffman who I mentioned, it was Carl Ruck, this Harvard Yale trained classicist, who reads the New Testament very differently from the way your average priest might read it. And he reads it with the lens of a pagan and with the lens of someone who was initiated into these mystery schools. Um, and I say, I say with a lens of a pagan, which is not fair. He's a good Catholic boy, uh, just like me, just like me.

• 28:52Chris Williamson?

  What, outside of the rhetoric and what was written down and the presence of ergot in the barley or in the wheat, um, what other convincing evidence have you found?

• 29:08Speaker 00

  Um, I, I'm looking at everything, right? So part of me is looking for that hard scientific data. Is, is there actual, which we haven't talked about yet, but is there any, you know, archeobotanical data for one of these spiked beers, these ergotized beers or one of these spiked wines out there? I mean, that, that's a whole separate question, but like, what's in the literature? Um, you know, just from the literary perspective, and this is what classicists do, is they read the old texts and find out what's there. I mean, um, I didn't spend a lot of time reading Diosgordes when I was learning Latin and Greek, but afterwards, I started reading his Materia Medica. And he writes this, Diosgordes is the father of drugs. And he writes this massive treatise in ancient Greek in the first century AD, the same time the gospels are being written. And in his magnum opus, he has all these formulas,

• 29:52Speaker 00

  these recipes for spiking wine with all kinds of funky herbs and plants and different things. And he says, even at one point, That one of these plants will cause not unpleasant visions. Fantasias uaei dies. So he's talking about psychedelics. At the same time that Matthew, Mark and Luke are writing their gospels. And later John. And it makes you wonder, you know, if the Greeks knew about all this stuff, if they knew about pharmacology. What are the odds that some of that pharmacology would make its way into the same ancient Greek speaking communities? Who had inherited all this stuff from their ancestors? Um, one place you would look at is Corinth, for example. No Paul's letter to the Corinthians. You hear it at every wedding you go to.

• 30:34Speaker 00

  Um, Corinth today is forty-five minutes to the west of Eleusis. This ancient spiritual capital. Now, what are the odds that an early Corinthian? Who heard about this, uh, this son of God, born of a virgin? With this new magical gift of immortal wine, this magic potion. What are the odds that either they themselves or someone they knew was not initiated? At Eleusis, where this magic potion had been splashing around for, for centuries and centuries. And so to me, the gospels are playing off of this pagan continuity.

• 31:05Chris Williamson?

  What research has been done into the archaeobotany or the archaeochemistry of it?

• 31:13Speaker 00

  So that, that's the fun part. That's the fun part. Um, the short answer is not a hell of a lot. So I had to, I had to try and find out. The, the scholars were working on this stuff and I eventually came across Andrew Ko, who's at MIT. Uh, I mean, I, I would say the world's leading archaeochemist. Um, he's responsible amongst other things for unearthing the world's oldest wine cellar in Galilee. The same Galilee where Jesus is born, except it dates, it did, it dates well before Jesus to about seventeen hundred B.C. From the Canaanite period. And it's wine that, again, through gas chromatography, mass spectrometry. Uh, their finding is spiked with all kinds of funky stuff like honey, Storax, terpenes, cypress, cedar, et cetera, et cetera.

• 31:55Speaker 00

  Now, you know, you might say, oh, it's just interesting, you know, aromatic flavor profile enhancing type stuff. And that's certainly true. But the big question I'm always asking Andrew is were there others psychoactive? Additives, psychotropic additives. And theoretically, his answer's always been yes, uh, why not? Let's go find the data. So, you know, based off some leads from him, I was pouring into these archaeobotany journals and eventually came across um, a couple of different things. So one hit for ancient beer, one hit for ancient wine. Um, both discovered in the 1990s and largely ignored by the academic community. And as best as I can tell, like never reported to the public. Uh, just archaeologists doing what they do, finding amazing things. And there it sits in a, in a journal.

• 32:40Speaker 00

  Uh, but in Spain, from the second century B.C., uh, I came across this study of an ancient Greek sanctuary. There were Greeks in Spain, just like there were Greeks in, in Greece and Italy. And from the second century B.C., they found this tiny chalice about a couple of inches high. And it went under analysis and they found the remains of beer and ergot. So there's your ergotized beer, this crazy idea from 1978. We now have, you know, actual scientific data to corroborate that, um, which is pretty crazy.

• 33:11Chris Williamson?

  I'm trying to think about what the reason would be. I, I understand that the Christian church was being pretty forthcoming at trying to convert everybody. They were, you know, they were, they were full on, they were, it was a big relationship with the Christians. Um, but I'm trying to work out what the, the fear that they would have had as opposed to repurposing the existing ritual and just rebranding it. Um, why they would get rid of it? And I think I've heard you talk about this before, that it would, taking a psychoactive substance gives you direct access to God in one form or another. You no longer actually need the medium that is the church or the priest or the, um,

• 33:56Chris Williamson?

  the religion at wide. You just, it's you and him speaking directly to him. Is that your sort of conception of it as well?

• 34:03Speaker 00

  I think that's, again, I think that's part of the answer. It's hard for me to figure out what was going on in the 4th century. And I think I'm on record saying something like, "I sympathize with the Church Fathers." And I'm not sure what I mean by that. But they were in the business of church building, which at the time is in the business of nation building. And how do you do that with this secret, illegal cult, where people are meeting in private with no standards? Who the hell knows what's going on behind closed doors? Or literally underground in family catacombs? I mean, this is where Christianity took root, in private houses and catacombs for 300 years. There was no brick-and-mortar churches. There were no physical basilicas until Constantine in the 4th century AD.

• 34:48Speaker 00

  So, once it comes above ground, literally, and once Christians are being hunted down by lions, how do you get this faith off the ground? And I think that you need standards. And you need dogma, which is why all these church councils get together and they figure out which books go in and which don't. And, yeah, there was a hack job going on. I mean, the Gnostic literature disappears. All these texts from Nag Hammadi, Egypt, for example, that were dug up in the middle of the 20th century, and these beautiful testimonies that talk about a different Jesus, like in the Gospel of Thomas, or the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, which is now, I think, over 125 years old. There were other versions of the faith out there.

• 35:30Speaker 00

  And slowly but surely, they start to disappear in the 4th and 5th centuries. Now, again, part of that is the Church trying to do what it does, which is build a bureaucracy, create something coherent, which they've never been able to do successfully, right? This is why we have the schism between the Catholic and Orthodox. And then we have the Protestants. Now we have the Evangelicals and everything else. I mean, it's hard to hold this thing together. What I sensed in the early years was an attempt to cohere a religion that was very much in danger of disappearing. And along with that goes all these secrets and all these mysteries.

• 36:08Chris Williamson?

  Talk us through your experience researching in the Vatican. Obviously, this sounds pretty heretical. Why did they even let you near Rome?

• 36:18Speaker 00

  I don't know. That's a good question.

• 36:23Speaker 00

  I'm still trying to figure that out.

• 36:24Chris Williamson?

  So what do you do? Do you email the Pope? Do you send him a DM on Twitter? What happens?

• 36:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was like, you know, Frank, it's Brian. You've got some cool stuff. I'd love to see it.

• 36:37Speaker 00

  It's not that, I mean, it is, it's very difficult to get your way into the Vatican secret archives and the catacombs.

• 36:46Speaker 00

  You know, I was very honest with folks. You know, I talked to the archivist at the secret archives and the archive of the congregation for the doctrine of the faith, which holds these Inquisition records. And I went underground with this Vatican archaeologist to look at the frescoes and these catacombs. And I, you know, I would tell people, here's my crazy idea about this psychedelic Eucharist. And I think it's just as crazy as you do. And because I don't know, I haven't seen the hard scientific data for it. I'm out there looking for it all over the Mediterranean. I'd like to know if there's any evidence here. You know, so part of it is just asking them if we could test different vessels and different chalices, which they're sitting on in the hundreds of thousands, you know, in their own handwriting from the 16th century or the 15th century. Is there, is there a mention of these magical potions?

• 37:31Speaker 00

  And the short answer is there is, you know, they were, they were hunting and targeting witches, at least partly because of their knowledge of these traditional healing mechanisms and sometimes visionary medicines. So it's, it's all there preserved in the literature.

• 37:47Chris Williamson?

  What does it feel like being underneath the absolute epicenter for the Christian faith?

• 37:57Chris Williamson?

  Rooting through, I mean, you're in the necropolis, which is this bit below the, not below the Sistine Chapel, below the Vatican, right? And there's multiple-

• 38:08Speaker 00

  The St. Peter's.

• 38:09Chris Williamson?

  Is it below St. Peter's Basilica? Just multiple layers below that. What's it feel like? You must have been, it must, it's proper Dan Brown shit.

• 38:16Speaker 00

  That's what I said to the priest who was with me. This is Dan Brown shit. And I felt like I'd never get out. Like there was, you know, there would be the clank of a gate. And that'd be the last time I breathe fresh air. Everyone, they're all cool, man. Everyone's very cool in the Vatican. I might be one of the few people to say that. But everyone, they're all super cool to me in the Officio Scavi, the excavation office there. I was looking at what could be one of the first mosaics, one of the first representations of Christian art directly under St. Peter's Basilica in one of these tombs, the tombs of the Yulee. And there you see these vines just curling all around this figure seated on a horse.

• 38:58Speaker 00

  And I'm not the first person, art historians have said, there's a real mix-up here of Jesus and Dionysus. All these Dionysian vines, you know, rolling their way around this mosaic. It's hard to know what to make of that. And it's hard to know what was going on down there. Because from the records we have, there was some pagan shit going on underneath the Vatican in the early days. This is where they went, like other catacombs, to commune with the dead. They went there to meet St. Peter, before there was a St. Peter's Basilica. They went there to camp out amongst these graves and host these parties, which the professor emeritus of history at Yale University calls chill-outs.

• 39:40Speaker 00

  They went to have chill-outs with the dead, to drink their wine and have a feast every day in some cases. So, I mean, you know, Rome was a fun place to be.

• 39:49Chris Williamson?

  How does the mysteries at Eleusis relate to the Holy Sacrament?

• 39:55Speaker 00

  I mean, well, there's the big question. And how I try to answer that in the book is by using the mysteries of Dionysus as the translator. So you have all these mysteries at Eleusis, right? And it's these pilgrims making this march, drinking this potion, having this vision. It's all administered by the state. So even though it's technically open to lots of different people, as we mentioned, it's a very formal event. At some point, you have the mysteries of Dionysus, and it takes the concept of a magical potion, takes it out of the sanctuary, away from the temple. So where are the mysteries of Dionysus being celebrated? Outdoors. Open-air churches in the forests and mountains. It's people getting smashed in these drunken orgies in honor of the god of wine, right? And then here comes Jesus.

• 40:41Speaker 00

  Not too long after that. In fact, at the same time, I mean, in Galilee, ancient Israel, ancient Palestine, you will find images of Dionysus all around Galilee. I mean, so, you know, his cult was there at the same time that the cult of Jesus was just gathering steam. And what is Jesus doing with this magic potion? He's saying, "Not only can you take it out of the temple, not only can you take it to the open-air church, but take this magic potion that makes you immortal, nothing less than that, and take it into your dining room." So I, I think by domesticating these mysteries, I think that for some early Christians, I think that's how they would have read the early accounts of Jesus. Here's this guy taking an immortality potion, that's his blood,

• 41:24Speaker 00

  the same way that the one of Dionysus was described, by the way, the blood of Dionysus. And he's taking it inside the dining room and saying, "You can celebrate this at home. It's okay to do this at home." Because at the time, that was a sacrilege in Eleusis. You were not allowed to celebrate that at home. We have accounts of people trying to do that, and it was this massive scandal in Athens. And so here comes Jesus with a new model to preserve, in some cases, these mysteries.

• 41:50Chris Williamson?

  Well, you see the imagery of the Last Supper, and you've got... Everyone looks fairly cozy, you know, they look pretty... They look pretty merry at that situation. I'm aware it's not a photograph.

• 42:07Speaker 00

  No, but we, I mean, we have the accounts, aside from Leonardo's imaginings of it. It's, you know, the Eucharist, the Last Supper is recorded in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. And in John, it's really, it's weird. In John, it's different. It's Jesus giving a sermon outside, but he's talking about the same thing. He's talking about his flesh and blood. And he uses really weird language, that, by the way, is not Jewish. You know, so people think about the Last Supper and this cozy affair amongst friends. It's this, you know, this Passover meal before his death, this mourning of Jesus before his death. I can't think of a single Jewish dinner where, where, where human flesh and blood is being served. And yet here comes Jesus saying,

• 42:51Speaker 00

  "Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life."

• 42:56Speaker 00

  Not will have, not will go to heaven, right here tonight, if you drink and eat, you are an immortal. This is the same, the same way these sacraments were described by the pagans. And think about it, like munching on this flesh. It's a really evocative word that Jesus uses in Greek there, trogon, to munch on my flesh. It's like this really graphic visceral event that's being described. Um, so who the hell knows what was going on?

• 43:22Chris Williamson?

  Did, did you totally lose your shit with how many questions you have to ask yourself? Because every situation that you come across, everything that you find out is that, oh, that's interesting. And now here's 3,000 questions that are implied by me knowing this one extra bit.

• 43:39Speaker 00

  Uh, you just, you described the, the torturous process of, of me talking to my editor for a couple of years.

• 43:48Speaker 00

  But this chapter is so important, man. They're, they're gonna love this chapter. You know, it's, it's really essential to the argument.

• 43:56Chris Williamson?

  One thing I was thinking about while reading the book was how our existing cultural structures affect the way that we experience psychedelics. I know that this may not necessarily be your precise field of study, but it's an interesting question that I want to ask you anyway. So can you imagine what would be seen by a human who grows up in a lab with no cultural input? So what would they see? Like, how much is the transcendent effect intrinsic to the drug? And how much is enabled by the existing narrative frameworks that we have in our own minds?

• 44:32Speaker 00

  That's a great question, man. Um, it's, you know, it, it dovetails, it dovetails to my work. I mean, I do talk to the clinical psychologists about this stuff and the psychopharmacologists. What everyone agrees on is that set and setting are integral. I mean, this is, it's not a wonder drug. Um, and more importantly, psychedelics just are not for everybody, which is why they've been successful in their trials at Hopkins and NYU by screening certain people out. Um, you know, it takes, it takes, um, a really heroic emotional psychological preparation.

• 45:05Speaker 00

  To prepare for this stuff and you know, ju- just think about what the word psychedelic means in Greek, it means to manifest the contents of the psyche is how I translate it, psychedelos. And so when that happens, I mean, before you even begin thinking about that, why don't you try dusting off those contents for yourself? I mean, you know, you dream about them every night. Have you addressed some of those traumas from your childhood? Have you addressed some of those pitfalls in your relationships? Um, some of that, that shadow work that plays out in your everyday life. There's lots of work that you can do before psychedelics and which is part of the reason I haven't done them. I mean, there's lots of stuff that you can do, um, including mindfulness and meditation and all, and all the rest of it.

• 45:46Speaker 00

  Um, you know, so once you get to that point, when, when all this stuff is being laid bare, and I don't know what would happen to someone who was grown in a lab, um, uh, that'd be an interesting experiment, uh, it'd be hard to get FDA approval for that. Uh, but, uh, you know, what's, what, what people are, I think people are playing on memories and people are playing, you know, on the archetypal things that live inside the subconscious of all humans, uh, which is really powerful stuff. There's this thing, this, th- th- these images come out. I mean, you know, a Christian will have an image of a, of an Indian deity and you know, uh, some guy in the UK will have an image of a Mayan god and it's really hard to explain why that's the case.

• 46:24Chris Williamson?

  That's what, that's what fascinated me about it. I wonder, obviously, as you say, slightly unethical and, um, perhaps unrealistic experiment to run, but it would be fascinating to see, would, because that would be the ultimate, um, control. You'd be able to control exclusively for cultural inputs, for all of the existing narratives. There's certain things, you get the visual distortion that almost everybody says in terms of geometric patterns, for instance. So you're perhaps always going to have that, uh, no matter what you're looking at, no matter who you are, what you've grown up, what your thought patterns are like inside of your mind. But can you imagine if people reported, these people who were grown up without these cultural

• 47:09Chris Williamson?

  inputs, cultural narratives and frameworks inside of their mind, and they reported similar manifestations, which would be, this is something universally held within us all. I don't know, I just thought that was, I thought that was a really interesting thought experiment.

• 47:27Speaker 00

  I like that. I mean, but you know, some of the researchers do write about this. Bill Richardson, who's one of the researchers at Hopkins, does write about this, about the encounter with the archetypes. I mean, there are people who haven't been trained in, or to the best of their knowledge, haven't been substantively exposed to some of these traditions that do pop up. I mean, kind of spontaneously, like, you know, gods and goddesses from different faith traditions that just don't belong in the contents of someone's psyche on the eastern coast of the United States. And yet, in comes this stuff.

• 48:00Chris Williamson?

  Did you discuss with anybody about the potential dosage, or an equivalent dosage, that people may have been consuming?

• 48:09Speaker 00

  In the interim, that's what's really hard, man. So even though, even though we found some of the archaeobotanical, archaeochemical evidence, to this day, to the best of my knowledge, this kuki on potion, or some of this spiked wine, hasn't been recreated to the standards of antiquity. So I mean, that's something I very much want to do. Even with this find in Spain, we still want to retest that chalice and really figure out, like, what was the formula here? What were the measurements? Because by all accounts, like, ergotized beer is not the most pleasant trip. I mean, it's kind of terrifying. I mean, ergotism, traditionally, leads to all kinds of really unfun things, like gangrene and convulsions and stuff like that. But maybe what I've been thinking recently is that maybe it was a very low dose,

• 48:54Speaker 00

  and other folks have mentioned this to me, who are more experienced than me. But maybe it was a low dose, that again, just kind of, that rejiggered the brain somehow, that just set it, I mean, just to the left of normal, after all that fasting, maybe some sleep deprivation, the long march from Athens, for example. A low dose, a lower dose of ergotized beer, could have been the kind of thing to have a really powerful vision. I don't know.

• 49:21Chris Williamson?

  It's just, there's so many questions, man. Has anything come out since your book was published? Has there been, are you continuing to research? Are you still, is there a sequel? Like, what's your current... Oh, there is a sequel. Wow.

• 49:34Speaker 00

  It's all, it's all happening, man. As just one, one tiny example, National Geographic and others reported in November, I think it was, about this, you can Google it, the Pinwheel Cave, the Pinwheel Cave in California from the Chumash tribe. I think it's only a few hundred years old, so it's, it's not going into deep antiquity. But about 400 or so years ago, they found this cave with a datura flower painted on the ceiling of this cave. And inside crevices in the rock, they actually found the organic remains of daturaquids, which is a very hallucinogenic plant, flower. It has, contains all these tropene alkaloids,

• 50:16Speaker 00

  the same kind of alkaloids that may have been present in these wine potions I mentioned that Dios Correios was writing about in the first century AD. So a very interesting find, and it was called the very first archaeochemical evidence for the coexistence of rock art and psychedelic drugs. And I mean, that happens in 2020 for no reason whatsoever, at the time that all this, you know, we're talking about all this stuff. So, you know, every time I open the, the computer, there, there's another story out there.

• 50:44Chris Williamson?

  What's next for you?

• 50:46Speaker 00

  So we're, we're still doing this documentary series and pushing forward on that. I am writing a second book that is very much related to, but distinct from the first one, without giving too much away. Lots more clues, lots of more ancient signals. And, you know, the big question, what does this mean for the future? Of medicine, religion, society, all those kind of questions in the midst of a global pandemic and economic turmoil and civil unrest and political discontent. I mean, I think it's a very interesting moment that we're living in and people are looking for meaning. And isn't it interesting to think about

• 51:28Speaker 00

  this continuity, right? Not just from the Greeks and the Christians, but maybe to us. And maybe we're living at this moment where some of this technology is is being resurrected. It's a it's a big question.

• 51:40Chris Williamson?

  Well, think about what people have turned to in this time of need. Copies of Marcus Aurelius's Meditations and paperback were sold out at the beginning of 2020. You think, why would someone go 1800 years back to a philosophy that, was it Aristotle or Plato, that thought the brain only existed to get rid of heat out of the body? And you're like, you know, on some stuff, they were so right and on other stuff, so far off. In germ theory, you hadn't gone through when, as a Marcus Aurelius is dying from the plague, as he's caught in the Antonine plague, that he's struggling to breathe because of the amount of incense that's burning in the room, because they

• 52:25Chris Williamson?

  thought that incense would get rid of the plague, it would help to get rid of the air particles in the air. And all that they were doing was forcing Marcus Aurelius to smell at someone's awful auntie's house. Like the the spiritual, the spiritual auntie who's always burning incense, it was just like forcing him to do that. So on one side, you have these people who are obviously incredibly detached from what we understand now. And yet, the more universal elements, the things that they were able to observe more accurately, human nature, meaning flourishing, what does it mean to be virtuous, to have temperance? Those things are what people in 2021 are going back to. They're relying more on the writings of Marcus Aurelius than they are on anybody for the last 1800

• 53:10Chris Williamson?

  years. And this

• 53:14Chris Williamson?

  Crescent, this story arc that we're coming back to psychedelics, precisely the same. If what you say is true, if what you've discovered is correct, and it's taken us around about 2,000 years to start using therapeutically something which could have aided the last two millennia of human civilization, then we have a lot of catching up to do. And it is just fascinating the way that these things are coming in full circle.

• 53:45Speaker 00

  I agree. That's beautifully put, man. I couldn't say it better than that. You just, you just wrote the back cover. That's perfect.

• 53:50Chris Williamson?

  Fine. That's, that's, I'll give you the rights. We can, we can discuss deals off air. Man, I've, I've loved today, Brian. It's so fascinating. Your dedication to this, you've been told it a million times, but your dedication to this project is ridicu- it's psychopathic. And in, in, in the good way, in the, in the great way, not in the Brian Rose from London Real way. Where can people go? They want to keep up to date with what it is that you're doing. Where should they head?

• 54:19Speaker 00

  I'm not going to spell my Romanian name. So I'll say theimmortalitykey.com. If you go to theimmortalitykey.com, you'll see my homepage there and it links to all my social media. So I try and keep it updated and I'm usually terrible about it, but I'm better on Twitter and Instagram. So you can see some updates there.

• 54:39Chris Williamson?

  Everything will be linked in the show notes below, including a link to the immortality key, wherever you can get a hold of it. Man, I'm going to have to get you back on. We're going to have to talk about the new book and the, when Tom Hanks decides to accept the role and whatever new discoveries we've got. So round two will happen soon.

• 54:55Speaker 00

  I'm, I'm there, brother.

• 55:14Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company foreme of the explosion on our rig.

• 55:17Speaker 03

  On October 2nd.

• 55:18Speaker 02

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 55:23Speaker 03

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 55:30Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped doing it? You start, you freeze in there, that's what.

• 55:34Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 55:38Speaker 04

  I'm not the first man.

• 55:39Speaker 03

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a middle without parent.