Quick Summary

• The career of Julius Caesar illustrates the class war that gave rise to the Roman Empire and to Christianity.

• The experience of “ego death”—where self is revealed to be an illusion—was a fixture in pre-Christian religion.

• The Crucifixion was a public demonstration of the political power of self-transcendence that changed the course of history.

Julius Caesar

Roman society was history’s first great experiment in not forgiving debts. Across the Ionian Sea in Greece, Solon of Athens inaugurated a golden age for his city with a broad debt cancellation in 594 BC. But when rumors spread that the Roman king was considering a similar policy, Rome’s prominent families drove him out of town before he could cancel debts owed to them.

Thereafter, Rome was governed by a Senate populated by the wealthy. They established a social taboo against kingship so strict that the Latin word rex became an offensive pejorative. Under this guise of democracy, the Roman oligarchy eliminated the king, the only person with the power to protect the financial interests of the poor. So liberated, the Roman elite began amassing an unprecedented hoard of wealth through merciless exploitation.

Predictably, the Roman working class responded to their economic exploitation and their political disenfranchisement with increasingly violent uprisings. A devastating civil war culminated in Julius Caesar marching on Rome as a popularis, or a political representative of the working class.

But the Senate conspired against him in one of the most infamous political assassinations of all time. Caesar’s best friend, Brutus, belonged to an ancient Roman family that had been ringleaders in the ouster of the Roman king five centuries before. Familial duty compelled him to betray his best friend. The conspirators claimed to have killed Julius Caesar because he violated the long-standing Roman taboo against kingship. But in reality, Caesar’s plan to stabilize the Roman economy through redistribution threatened to prune the fortunes of the oligarchy, and was therefore intolerable.

Ego Death

This raging class war was the historical stage onto which Christianity strode. It prescribed the debt forgiveness commanded in Jewish scripture as the only way to prevent an impending apocalypse. Forgiveness, preached Christ, is the only hope for salvation.

This rejection of Rome’s cruel economic hierarchy resonated mightily with the exploited Roman working class. In addition to Jewish scripture, the Christian movement also adopted the symbology of the old Greek mystery religions. For a thousand years, Greek initiates had ritualistically consumed hallucinogens from sacred chalices in Mystery Schools. Much as they did in American society during the Vietnam War era, these drugs came to symbolize resistance to Roman authority. That further bolstered the appeal of the new faith to potential converts.

The psychedelic substances used in the Mystery Schools induced a profound experience known as “ego death”, where both the self and the physical world are revealed to be illusions. This insight profoundly influenced Greek culture. Democracy reflects it by canceling out egoic desires with collective decision-making. Greek drama embodies it with actors who adopt and discard multiple identities on stage. Even Plato’s philosophy, which holds that the physical world is illusory, seems to have been influenced by his initiation into several Mystery Schools.

These fruits of Greek civilization were shaped by the mystery religions that spiritually anchored that society. But in the crucible of a dying Roman Empire, Christianity took the concept of ego death to a shocking new extreme.

The Crucifixion

Ego death undermines the ability of political authorities to control their subjects. The ego is the basis of state power. The authorities can throw bodies in prison or torture bodies to death. But when we stop

identifying as our bodies, they have nothing more to threaten us with.

As Christianity spread, the story of the Crucifixion advertised this practical limit on state power to the entire Roman Empire. Jesus’s fierce advocacy for the poor and condemnation of the rich made his sermons so popular that local religious authorities felt threatened. They appealed to their Roman prefect, Pontius Pilate, to destroy the fledgling Christian movement by killing off its leader.

But his execution had the opposite of the intended effect. There exists a vast range of human experience beyond narrow individual identity. Jesus was so confident that he wasn’t just his body that he volunteered it for a gruesome public execution. Word of the equanimity with which Jesus bore his suffering as he died helped early Christianity spread like wildfire.

In the following centuries, Christians followed his lead by enthusiastically volunteering themselves for martyrdom. Though they could destroy the man himself and massacre his followers, the Roman state found that it was powerless to stop the story of Jesus from spreading to every corner of the Empire. Physical punishment is only effective when people are motivated to avoid the torture. When people volunteer for it, that threat of violence is drained of all its political power. The crucifixion was therefore a consummate demonstration of the limits of state power.

“And Pilate wrote a title, and put it on the cross,” says the gospel writer John in Chapter 19, “and the writing was, JESUS OF NAZARETH THE KING OF THE JEWS.” In depictions of the cross, Christian iconography often includes the letters INRI, which abbreviate that phrase in Latin: “Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum.”

That sign is a fixture in Christian iconography because it’s pregnant with significance. Like Julius Caesar, Jesus stood accused of violating the Roman taboo of claiming kingship for himself. The untimely deaths of Julius Caesar and Jesus Christ—just a few decades apart—shows how kingship effectively meant advocacy for the poor. The Roman enforcement of a taboo against kingship was actually a taboo against political representation for people other than the wealthy elite.

Conclusion

A war of ideas ran parallel to the class struggle that defined the course of Roman history. The Roman establishment wielded vast political power the likes of which the world had never seen. But early Christians had a weapon of their own: egolessness, as demonstrated by Jesus during the Crucifixion. This weapon canceled out the political power of the oligarchy. Massacring Christians who volunteered themselves for martyrdom only served to increase the notoriety of the new faith. Ultimately, the Roman oligarchy couldn’t beat the Christian movement, so they joined it instead. As the Empire lapsed into decline and began to crumble, the Roman elite converted to Christianity en masse and, in its twilight, made it the state religion of their dying empire.

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Further Reading

Describing Tarquinius’s hostility to the aristocracy, Livy (1.54) interjects a version of the story related by Herodotus (above, Chapter 2, fn41) about Thrasybulus of Miletus advising Periander to cut off the highest stalks of grain with a scythe. In Livy’s version, Tarquinius takes a messenger from his son Sextus to his garden to reply to a message asking what to do about the town of Gabii that was resisting Rome. Tarquinius is reported to have cut down the tallest poppies—a symbolic gesture for cutting down the leading potential rivals in local aristocracies.
Reacting against public spending by the kings, Rome’s oligarchy embraced an anti-government ideology as passionately as do today’s anti-socialists. Much like the Greek oligarchs who accused reformers seeking popular support by cancelling debts and redistributing land of being “tyrants,” Roman patricians accused reformers of “seeking kingship” by proposing debt reform and assignment of public land to settle the poor instead of letting patricians grab it for themselves. Such advocacy led to the most progressive reformers from the leading families being assassinated in political killings over the ensuing five centuries.
In the republican period the very idea of a king was viewed with an almost pathological dislike. ... The tradition is very likely correct when it says that the first acts of the founders of the Republic were to make the people swear never to allow any man to be king in Rome and to legislate against anyone aspiring to monarchy in the future. What was truly repugnant to the nobles was the thought of one of their number elevating himself above his peers by attending to the needs of the lower classes and winning their political support.
This explains why all the serious charges of monarchism (regnum) in the Republic were leveled against mavericks from the ruling elite whose only offence, it seems, was to direct their personal efforts and resources to the relief of the poor.
This Roman fear of kingship is what Judea’s upper class played upon when they sought to have Jesus condemned after he incited the hatred of the Pharisees and the creditor class with his first sermon (Luke 4), when he unrolled the scroll of Isaiah and announced that he had come to proclaim the Jubilee Year of the Lord, cancelling debts as called for under Mosaic Law. They accused him of aspiring to be “king of the Jews,” that is, “seeking kingship,” the familiar epithet the Romans applied to leaders whom they feared might cancel debts, including Catiline and Caesar around Jesus’s time.
Michael Hudson, The Collapse of Antiquity, 2023, page 187

Quick Summary

• Early Christianity involved stereotypical magical elements like magic books and wands.

• Early Christian artwork depicts the use of hallucinogenic drugs in magical potions.

• Jesus said false prophets are known by their fruit, a possible allegory for magic mushrooms.

Magical Christianity

Early Christians read from magic books and waved magic wands, both of which we recognize today as classic magical implements. One need look no further than the Harry Potter franchise to see them in action.

The bound book was the principal weapon used by early Christians in their spiritual conquest of the Roman Empire. The coronation of the first Roman emperor and the birth of Jesus took place less than 30 years apart, and the book was invented during that same era.

Before the advent of bound books, writing was done on scrolls. Slicing these scrolls into numbered pages and then adding Tables of Contents allowed readers to skip directly to any passage without having to parse an entire scroll.

Christians were early adopters of this technology. The ability to instantly jump to any chapter and verse made scriptural reference instantaneous, and having the Bible as a common reference point allowed Christians scattered across an Empire to present a coordinated challenge to power.

The Bible is still treated as a sacred object by secular people when they swear on it in the courtroom. In liturgical practice, modern Christians still elevate, kiss and treat the Bible as a magical object imbued with supernatural power.

While the sacred book remains a staple of modern Christianity, the Church long ago abandoned the use of magic wands. Yet these curious accessories appear prominently in early Christian artwork. The Resurrection of Lazarus fresco in the Catacombs of Via Latina in Rome is a prominent example. There, Jesus is depicted holding a long stick as he performs a miracle.

The Hypogeum of the Aurelii is another example. Because this 3rd-century underground burial chamber wasn’t discovered under Rome until 1919, its frescoes are unusually well-preserved. A large zodiacal circle split into quadrants adorns the ceiling, forming the pattern of the Greek cross. At the center, a man waves a long stick over a female initiate dressed in white.

The frescoes in the Hypogeum are a syncretic blend of Christian and pagan motifs dating back to the 3rd century AD, when Christianity was completing its conquest of Roman society. The magic wand depicted may be a holdover from the old Cult of Dionysus, the wine god who traditionally carried a thyrsus wand tipped with a pinecone.

A 13-foot pinecone stands today in the Cortile della Pigna, or Pinecone Courtyard at the Vatican. The huge bronze statue is flanked by two peacocks, whose feathers appear within the four arms of the Greek cross depicted on the ceiling of the Hypogeum of the Aurelii. This rich blend of symbology illustrates a magical heritage shared across multiple spiritual traditions, up to and including Christianity.

Magical Potions

The fresco on the ceiling of the Hypogeum of the Aurelii also depicts four smaller figures holding magic wands and bottles. Each figure stands atop a giant mushroom, hinting at the contents of their bottles. Like wands and books, potions are quintessential elements in our modern understanding of magic.

Early Christians borrowed many such elements from existing religions of the ancient Mediterranean Basin. The Christian Eucharist continued an older tradition of god-eating ceremonies in which psychedelic potions were consumed as religious observances. The kykeon of the grain goddess Demeter and the wine of Dionysus were combined to make the bread and wine of the Christian Communion.

References to psychoactive ingredients abound in Christianity. Dr. Jerry Brown and his wife, Julie Brown published The Psychedelic Gospels in 2016. They provide numerous photographs of Medieval Christian artwork portraying Jesus as a mushroom. The Browns suggest the Church’s psychedelic origins were not controversial until the time of the Inquisition:

Roman authorities frequently accused Christians of practicing sorcery through the use of hallucinogens. In addition, Irenaeus (130–200), the bishop of Lyon, argued that only the heretical churches, including the Gnostic churches, made use of hallucinogens in their secret rites. However, with the coming of the Inquisition, we see a dramatic decline in entheogenic images in Christian art after the High Middle Ages (1000–1200).

In 1970, Dead Sea Scrolls scholar John Marco Allegro published a book entitled The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, where he presented a painstaking linguistic argument that the story of the New Testament is really a veiled allegory for a specific species of magic mushroom. He proposed that the authors of that document referred to mushrooms allegorically to prevent the Roman authorities from cracking down on them.

The Sermon on the Mount

John Marco Allegro implies that Bible passages like Matthew 7:16, “Ye shall know them by their fruits,” refer to literal fruit in the form of a mushroom. As part of the famous Sermon on the Mount, that verse warns against following false prophets. A true prophet, in this sense, might mean someone bearing hallucinogenic mushrooms, since conventional fruit lacks the hallucinogenic properties of the genuine article.

Allegro’s notion that early Christians used an elaborate allegory to evade the authorities matches a similar dynamic in modern times, where visionary substances are still broadly illegal. The ruling classes of all societies want their employees showing up to work to generate revenue. But psychedelic drug use promotes the idea that reality is an illusion, and people who believe their job is illusory tend to make unreliable workers. For this reason, the wealthy elite in all times and places tend to view visionary substances as an economic inconvenience.

During the late stages of the Roman Empire, its ruling class switched from persecuting Christians to adopting their faith as the new state religion. Inevitably, the psychoactive ingredients vanished from the Christian Eucharist, leaving behind only the conventional bread and wine used today. The ruling elite gradually transformed Christianity, bending it to their interests and eventually rendering it downright lucrative.

By making Christianity the exclusive, state-sanctioned brand of magic, the Roman elite established a spiritual monopoly that endured through the Middle Ages. During that period, the Church began charging people for the remission of their sin with the infamous Sale of Indulgences.

Looking back at history, we’re left to reconcile two very different versions of Christianity. The original faith was openly contemptuous of the rich, glorified the poor, and involved hallucinogenic drug use. Meanwhile, the sanitized, state-sponsored version we’ve received from history emphasizes sobriety and is much more forgiving of immense wealth. John Marco Allegro might have bitterly opined that these are the fruits of false prophets.

Conclusion

Jesus’ warning against false prophets is part of the renowned Sermon on the Mount, the most frequently quoted text in the New Testament. It spans chapters 5-7 of the Gospel of Matthew, and chapter 6 contains the Lord’s Prayer. Verse 12 is rendered in the King James Bible as, “And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” Forgiving debts means a transfer of wealth from rich to poor, as the rich write off debts they previously expected to collect. But conveniently for Rome’s wealthy oligarchy, St. Augustine reinterpreted forgiveness to mean forgiveness for chiefly sexual misdeeds, rather than financial forgiveness. Thereafter, the poor began making the Church fabulously wealthy by donating what little they had to get their sins forgiven. Like the removal of psychoactive substances from Christian observances, this change in the meaning of “forgiveness” is another example of Christianity being tailored to the interests of the ruling class. Furthermore, it shows how REALITY itself is largely projected by the authority of the economic elite. That’s why economic collapses come with jarring paradigm shifts, where conceptions of reality self-servingly projected by elites crumble in tandem with decaying systems. That’s why the mass conversion of Roman society from polytheism to monotheism coincided with the Fall of Rome itself.

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Further Materials

As the presence of psychoactive mushroom images in Aquileia indicates, we know that early Christians consumed hallucinogens. This is confirmed by historical documents as well. Roman authorities frequently accused Christians of practicing sorcery through the use of hallucinogens. In addition, Irenaeus (130–200), the bishop of Lyon, argued that only the heretical churches, including the Gnostic churches, made use of hallucinogens in their secret rites.
However, with the coming of the Inquisition, we see a dramatic decline in entheogenic images in Christian art after the High Middle Ages (1000–1200). This is understandable, as the influence of the Inquisition expanded across Europe, receiving formal sanction for wider witch hunts in the fifteenth century when Pope Innocent VIII issued a papal bull (Summis desiderantes affectibus, 1484) authorizing the “correcting, imprisoning, punishing, and chastising” of devil worshippers. He did so at the urging of Inquisitors Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger, who published the notorious Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches), which became highly influential in secular witchcraft trials.
Jerry B. Brown, Julie M. Brown, The Psychedelic Gospels: The Secret History of Hallucinogens in Christianity, 2016, page 179

Key Takeaways:

1. Magic Cups: Many Greco-Roman religions were centered around mystical chalices with magical properties like the Holy Grail.

2. Class Struggle: The history of Greco-Roman religions is tied up with the class wars that consumed those societies.

3. Femininity: The magic cups in Greco-Roman religions contained psychoactive substances that induced ego death, an experience symbolized by femininity and later by mystical chalices.

Magic Cups

The concept of a “sacred vessel” or a “transformative drink” was a major archetype in ancient Mediterranean spirituality. The Kykeon of Demeter, the Kantharos cup of Dionysus, and the Holy Grail of Christianity are all variations on the same magical cup theme.

In his 2003 thriller The Da Vinci Code, author Dan Brown wove an intricate plot around the notion that the Holy Grail symbolizes the lost bloodline of Jesus. The Grail turned out to be an allegory for the person of his pregnant wife, Mary Magdalene. She was the literal vessel carrying the blood of Christ, as allegorized by the magic cup.

In The Da Vinci Code, the existence of Jesus’s child threatened the control of church fathers over the early Christian movement. Fearing for their safety, Mary Magdalene fled to France after the Crucifixion. The Holy Grail became an underground symbol for referring to this secret bloodline of Christ without arousing the suspicion of jealous Christian authorities.

But in reality, the magic cup theme is much older than Christianity. The Crater of Hermes was a symbolic cup mentioned in Hermetic, Orphic, and Platonist philosophy. It was often associated with divine oneness and spiritual transformation. Other examples include the Patera of Mithras and the Cyathus of Sabazius.

The magic cup religions of ancient Greece and Rome were intertwined with the class struggles that consumed those societies. Some of these cults were pressure valves that relieved class tension, while others were exclusive clubs that reinforced it. That’s how the Holy Grail became a symbol of opposition to entrenched power structures, as observed by Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code.

Class Struggle

Before Christianity, the spiritual center of the Greco-Roman world was Eleusis, a small town just outside Athens where the rites of Demeter were observed. Over the centuries, everyone from Plato to Julius Caesar visited Eleusis and drank from the mysterious Kykeon.

Though Eleusis was run by priestesses, the cult was ultimately endorsed and controlled by the ruling families of Athens. But in the 6th century BC, the fortunes of those elite families declined after a debt crisis ravaged the Athenian economy and Solon of Athens resolved it by canceling all debts and outlawing debt slavery.

Afterwards, worshipping the wine god Dionysus by drinking from his Kantharos cup became a working class reflection of the cult of Demeter. As Michael Hudson notes in his 2018 book …and Forgive Them Their Debts:

Solon’s successors, the Peisistratids, sponsored social reforms as secular leaders, building up the Dionysus festival and Homeric recitations as counterweights to the Eleusan religion controlled by the old aristocratic families.

Three centuries later, a disgruntled Roman working class began worshipping their own version of Dionysus, whom they called Bacchus. Wild nighttime observances of the Bacchic rites disturbed the Roman elite so much that the Senate put thousands of cultists to death and brought the cult under state control.

By the time Jesus was born two centuries later, Roman society had plunged into a bloody civil war among economic classes. The chaos was such that only an autocrat wielding supreme power could stop the fighting. Just 27 years before the birth of Christ, an exhausted Roman Republic finally accepted the rule of emperors and became the Roman Empire.

The Roman emperors used their unprecedented political power to forcibly bind Roman society together. But, being members of the aristocracy, they consistently failed to address the underlying wealth inequality that ignited civil strife in the first place. Because Christianity advocated for the interests of the working class and castigated the rich, it rapidly rose in popularity within the newly-minted Empire.

Early Christians augmented the popularity of their new faith by reviving the familiar symbols of existing religious movements, like the magic cups of Demeter and Dionysus. These symbols were references to the countercultural movements like the one quashed by the Roman Senate two centuries before. Recycled Dionysian symbology—like turning water into wine—advertised to potential converts that Christians opposed the cruel economic hierarchy of Rome, as Bacchic cultists once opposed the economic status quo during the Republican period.

Femininity

The connection between magic cups and class struggle lies in the psychedelic contents of those sacred chalices. Recent archeobotanical evidence reveals that the mystical experiences had at Eleusis resulted from ergot mixed into the Kykeon of Demeter.

The Greek physician Dioscorides devoted one-fifth of his famous pharmacopeia to the various psychoactive ingredients Greeks and Romans combined with their wine. The wine consumed by initiates into the cult of Dionysus was merely a mixer for potent ingredients like henbane or mandrake.

Though direct evidence of psychoactive compounds in Christianity remains elusive, the fact that early Christians borrowed so heavily from existing traditions of theophagy, or god-eating, makes it very likely that the Christian Eucharist was also originally psychoactive, being composed of the wine of Dionysus and the bread of the grain goddess Demeter combined.

Sacred vessels containing psychedelic drugs induced an experience called “ego death” that revealed reality to be an illusion. It dissolves the sense of a separate self, exposing the fact that the boundaries between self and world, or between subject and object, are mental constructs rather than inherent features of existence. The ego organizes experience. Without it, time, space, and identity lose their usual coherence, and the mind directly perceives reality as a fluid, interconnected field.

The dissolution of ego feels exactly like a personal death and a rebirth. Because women experience childbirth, femininity came to symbolize birth, death, and renewal in this sense. That’s how the insight that our individual identities are mere illusions came to be characterized as feminine, and represented by the symbol of a magic cup.

Femininity was a major theme at Eleusis, where the cult of Demeter was run by priestesses who passed down the secret recipe for brewing the Kykeon from generation to generation. It was also a major theme in the worship of Dionysus, who was portrayed as a gender-bender with long hair and effeminate features. His cult was led by women called maenads, and when the Roman authorities cracked down on the Bacchic cult, they found the ringleader to be a woman named Paculla Annia. And today, Christians still pray to the figure of Mary almost as often as they address her son, Jesus, who inherited the long hair of Dionysus.

Conclusion

Dan Brown recognized the Holy Grail as an underground symbol hidden from authority in The Da Vinci Code. But attributing this to an internecine power struggle within the early church misses the fact that ruling classes have every incentive to control or limit ego death experiences long symbolized by femininity. They don’t want their subjects waking up to the fact that reality is an illusion. Instead of achieving transcendence, they’d rather we all wake up and report to work, where we make them money. That’s why authorities have a long history of banning certain drugs as contraband while sanctioning others as medicine. Concern for public health is always the pretext, but political expedience is the real motive. Protecting a political monopoly surrounding the Christian Eucharist eventually led church authorities to demonize femininity itself as witchcraft. They wanted the public to pay the church for sin remission, not find their own path to God using substances growing wild in the forest. The Da Vinci Code is a fascinating read, but in reality the Holy Grail predates Christianity. It’s a symbol layered with themes of ego dissolution, femininity, and, above all, class struggle.

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Further Materials

When Solon of Athens and Sparta’s semi-mythical Lycurgus liberated their populations from debt bondage, they did so as authors of a new civic order, not as drawing on an ancient covenant. Solon’s successors, the Peisistratids, sponsored social reforms as secular leaders, building up the Dionysus festival and Homeric recitations as counterweights to the Eleusan religion controlled by the old aristocratic families.
Michael Hudson, …and Forgive Them Their Debts, 2018, page 267

Key Takeaways:

1. The Modern Drug War: Rather than being about public safety, the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 was actually a legal pretext to crack down on opponents of the Vietnam War.

2. The Ancient Drug War: The Roman Senate used public safety as a pretext to crack down on the Cult of Bacchus.

3. Countercultural Christianity: The Cult of Bacchus was a predecessor to Christianity, which also faced a violent crackdown at the hands of Roman Emperors like Nero.

The Modern Drug War

The Nixon administration passed the Controlled Substances Act in 1970, which introduced heavy penalties for the possession of drugs like magic mushrooms, heroin and marijuana. A “Schedule 1” category was created for these substances, indicating a high potential for abuse without any accepted medical use.

Nixon’s chief domestic advisor, John Ehrlichman, admitted that the Controlled Substances Act had nothing to do with public health. In a 1994 interview with journalist Dan Baum, he stated:

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

The Controlled Substances Act was a legal pretext to crack down on prominent opposition to the Vietnam War. It illustrates how the line between illegal contraband and sanctioned medicine exists not to serve public health but to serve political purposes.

The Ancient Drug War

The Second Punic War ended in 201 BC with a dramatic Roman victory over Hannibal and his Carthaginian army. But instead of sharing the spoils of war broadly, the Roman oligarchy reserved for themselves the newly-captured slaves and newly-conquered territory. These they combined into vast slave farms called latifundia.

All that cheap slave labor drove down agricultural prices below what non-slave farms could sustain. Because they couldn’t compete with slavery, Rome’s free farmers were financially ruined. When they couldn’t pay their debts, mass foreclosures delivered their family estates into the hands of the already wealthy, who used it to further expand the latifundia.

These mass foreclosures outraged a working class that had fought and bled to defend Rome from Hannibal. Seeing their family farms foreclosed upon was a bitter reward for their service to the Roman Republic. Desperate and discontented farmers poured into Rome from the countryside. By 186 BC, the Roman Senate feared they had a revolution on their hands.

That was the historical context in which the cult of the wine god Bacchus exploded in popularity. The all-night Bacchanalian raves were presided over by women. Cultists played raucous music and mixed wine with powerful psychoactive ingredients in emulation of the Greek worship of their wine god, Dionysus.

This Roman version of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll proved every bit as alluring as the American version would two thousand years later. And just as during the Vietnam War era, that trinity became the vehicle for a backlash against the political establishment.

That’s why the Senate cracked down on the Bacchanalian festivities. Like Nixon, they feigned concern for the youth and used that as a pretext to eliminate a political threat. But this Roman version of the 1970 Controlled Substances Act was a bloodbath. According to the Roman historian Livy, thousands of cultists were put to death. The Senate didn’t abolish the Bacchanalia. Instead, it converted the edgy Cult of Bacchus into a milquetoast, state-sanctioned celebration that was firmly under the control of political authorities.

Countercultural Christianity

The Senate’s crackdown on the Cult of Bacchus was, for them, a massive success. It forestalled any revolt, allowing the Senate to cling to power for another century of class struggle—before Rome’s grotesque wealth inequality finally erupted into a full-blown civil war.

For 500 years, the Roman oligarchy used its control of the Senate to fleece the working class at every turn. But in 49 BC, Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon stream with his army and marched on Rome as a popularis advocating for the economic interests of the working class. By then, the situation was so incendiary that only an autocrat could hold the warring factions within Roman society together. Thereafter Rome would be ruled by emperors, and the Senate was reduced to a largely ceremonial role.

This titanic class struggle was the historical backdrop against which Christianity emerged. Jesus’s hostility toward the entrenched economic hierarchy is richly illustrated by his fierce advocacy for the poor and his violent treatment of moneylenders.

Early Christians were involved in the class war that saw the end of the Roman Republic and the dawning of the Roman Empire. They revived and incorporated many rituals and symbols from the old Bacchic Cult that the Senate had repressed a century before. These included eating or drinking the flesh or blood of the gods, ecstatic or rapturous states of mind, speaking in tongues, and, most crucially, a rebellious opposition to the prevailing economic hierarchy.

In AD 64, the Great Fire of Rome consumed the city over the course of six days. Popular myth has the Roman Emperor Nero playing his fiddle with indifference during the blaze. After the flames died down, Nero blamed the devastation on the city’s Christian population. He proceeded to massacre them. It was the first state-sanctioned persecution of the new faith, and Christians were slaughtered as entertainment in the Circus of Nero—where St. Peter’s Basilica stands today—and later in the Colosseum. Nero famously lit up his personal garden by tying Christians to wooden stakes and burning them alive.

Conclusion

The Roman government succeeded in containing the Cult of Bacchus. But the violent persecutions of Nero only bolstered the popularity of Christianity—to the point where even the Roman elite were eventually forced to convert. But when they did so, they accepted St. Augustine’s interpretation of Christianity, in which the forgiveness commanded by Jesus was for personal moral failings, not for financial debts. This protected the balance sheets of the rich, so that they wouldn’t be compelled to forgive debts owed to them by the working class. It also sealed Rome’s fate, as broad debt forgiveness could have saved that society from collapse. The Neros and the Nixons of history crack down on popular movements to preserve their own power structures. But the irony is that such persecutions are ultimately destructive because they trade a manageable revolution today for a total collapse tomorrow.

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Further Materials

It is impossible to understand the roots of Christianity without understanding the world in which it appeared. For roughly the first three hundred years of its existence, Christianity was an illegal cult. Just like the cult of Dionysus. By appealing to poor folks, and especially women, Jesus was simply picking up where the Dionysian Mysteries left off. Politically he posed the same threat to the Roman establishment as Dionysus. Anything that directed attention and loyalty away from the public cult of the emperor and the traditional Roman gods was considered dangerous. Because at the time, separating young, eligible men from their military service and busy mothers from their family obligations upset the chain of command. Neither belonged in the wilderness, getting high with the God of Drugs. And they didn’t belong at the wedding party where Jesus unveiled Dionysus’s “signature miracle” either. John makes the general paranoia pretty explicit when he records the reaction of the Jewish high priests to Jesus’s string of magic acts following Cana: “If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation.”
Brian Muraresku, The Immortality Key, 2020, page 219

To the ancient Egyptians, the words of children held mystical significance—that’s why their sun god Horus the Child (Har-pa-khered) always pointed to his own mouth. After the Greeks adopted Harpocrates as their God of Silence, they misunderstood the gesture to mean “hush.” Aphrodite created roses as a gift to this god, persuading him to keep secret her many amorous indiscretions. The Romans hung roses in banquet halls to remind revelers that utterances made “under the rose” (sub rosa) were strictly confidential. During the Middle Ages, roses were carved into the ceilings of council chambers, government meeting rooms, and Christian confessionals for the same reason. And now the SUBROSA CLUB is an exclusive space for System Failure insiders…

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Key Takeaways:

1. Ergot in the 20th Century: Consciousness-altering drugs have had a tremendous—but often unrecognized—impact on human society.

2. Witchcraft: Ergot may have been the cause of the Salem Witch Trials of 1692.

3. The Anabaptist Revolt: Ergot may also have caused a shocking revolt that gripped the German city of Münster during the Protestant Reformation.

Ergot in the 20th Century

The story of human civilization is a duet between human consciousness and substances that alter it. There is a growing number of scholars, for example, advocating for the idea that the Agricultural Revolution wasn’t originally about farming food. They argue that the cultivation of cereal grains actually began in the service of brewing beer.

Drugs have played a major role in shaping human society ever since. Alcohol and sugar powered the infamous triangular slave trade between Africa, the Caribbean, and the capitals of Europe. Later, opium plunged England and China into two wars during the 1800s.

But no drug has had more of a profound impact on human story than ergot. This toxic fungus infests cereal grains so readily that beer brewers must constantly test their batches for it. In 2021, Brian Muraresku published a book called The Immortality Key where he presented findings that archeological artifacts once used in the Rites of Demeter tested positive for ergot. A human jawbone also reveals evidence of that psychoactive substance on the dental calculus. These clues point to the consumption of hallucinogenic ergot at Eleusis, a massively important religious observance in the Greco-Roman world.

Ergot also left an indelible mark on the 20th century. It was from this fungus that Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann first synthesized LSD back in 1938. That drug went on to influence the creativity of the Beatles and of Steve Jobs, whose contributions shaped the cultural milieu in which we live out our lives.

Albert Hofmann penned a letter to Steve Jobs in 2007, after his innovation of the iPod took off. Jobs had been so open about the impact of LSD on his revolution of the Apple computer corporation that Hofmann wanted to open a dialogue during the final years of his life.

The Beatles famously took an LSD-fueled trip to India in 1968. Their experience with the Maharishi delivered them from the poppy surf guitars of I Wanna Hold Your Hand into the visionary White Album. Under the guise of LSD, ergot has impacted both ancient and modern society in ways that we are only just beginning to grapple with.

Witchcraft

In 1976, Linnda R. Caporael published a famous paper that theorizes that ergot also caused the Salem Witch Trials. She titled it “Ergotism: The Satan Loosed in Salem?”. Her theory was that a late thaw caused moist conditions in the storehouses of Salem, Massachusetts in the fall of 1692. Unbeknownst to the town’s Puritan inhabitants, ergot fungus infested their grain. As the contaminated grain was consumed, some of the townspeople began to experience convulsions and strange visions.

The Puritans had no lens through which to understand these bizarre occurrences, except through the zealous Christian faith that had driven them from the Old World onto a dark new continent. Recognizing the nefarious influence of the devil, they turned on each other in an orgy of violence. Twenty people lost their lives, and the tragic incident still haunts the public imagination to this day.

The Anabaptist Revolt

A century and a half before the Salem Witch Trials, the people of Münster, Germany may have also unwittingly consumed grain contaminated with ergot. That city abruptly lapsed into sexual orgy and religious revelation during the broader Protestant Reformation, in 1534. The ecstatic population rose up and expelled its Prince-Bishop, who was forced to return with an army and lay siege to his own city.

Once the dust had finally settled, the three main co-conspirators had their skin ripped off with hot tongs, and were hoisted in iron cages to the steeple of St. Lambert’s Church. Though their bodies have long since decayed, their cages hang there still, and the Anabaptist Revolt of Münster is remembered as an incident of some moment within the broader Protestant Reformation.

The Anabaptists were a smaller movement within the Protestant Reformation that rejected the idea of infant baptism, preferring instead that adults should be baptized of their own free will. Both Catholics and Protestants found this idea to be a dangerous one, and they heavily persecuted the Anabaptists. To escape these persecutions, some of them fled to the Americas. There, they became the forebears of the Amish and Mennonite communities of rural Pennsylvania.

The Anabaptists were extreme pacifists, like their modern Amish descendants. Only in Münster did the movement take such a violent and overtly sexual turn. That fact lends credence to the notion that hallucinogenic ergot may have been involved in the Anabaptist Revolt, just as Linnda Caporael speculated it was behind the Salem Witch Trials.

Conclusion

The profound impact of drugs on human history is a reality that we’re only just waking up to. The Greeks and Romans observed ceremonies involving drug-induced ego death that later became significant influences on Christianity. Psychoactive compounds used in the worship of gods like Demeter and Dionysus chemically induced a collapse in the mental conception of the self. The experience feels like death and rebirth. The kykeon of Demeter and the wine of Dionysus live on to this day as the bread and wine of the Christian Eucharist. After the Fall of Rome, Christian authorities began harshly condemning the old pagan rites as devil worship; even the ones that had bequeathed to Christianity its themes of death and rebirth. The Medieval Church tolerated no spiritual competition to the Christian Eucharist. Magical ingredients like the ergot in the potions consumed at Eleusis were labeled as witchcraft. This history of repression has concealed the considerable influence that drugs have had on the mystical and creative experiences that define the human story. But today, in the 21st century, that history is finally coming to light.

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Facing famine and deteriorating morale. [John of Leyden] announced that all who wished might leave the city. Many women and children, and some men, seized the opportunity. The men were imprisoned or killed by the Bishop’s soldiers, who spared the women for divers services. One of the émigrés saved his life by offering to show the besiegers an undefended part of the walls. Under his guidance a force of Landsknechts scaled them and opened a gate (June 24); soon several thousand troops poured into the town. Starvation had so far done its work that only 800 of the besieged could still bear arms. They barricaded themselves in the market place; then they surrendered on a promise of a safe-conduct to leave Münster; when they had yielded up their arms they were massacred en masse. Houses were searched, and 400 hidden survivors were slain. John of Leyden and two of his aides were bound to stakes; every part of their bodies was clawed with red-hot pincers, until “nearly all who were standing in the market place were sickened by the stench”; their tongues were pulled from their mouths; at last daggers were driven into their hearts.
The Bishop regained his city and augmented his former power; henceforth all actions of the civil authorities were to be subject to episcopal veto. Catholicism was triumphantly restored. Throughout the Empire the Anabaptists, fearing for their lives, repudiated every member guilty of using force. Nevertheless many of these pacifist heretics were executed. Melanchthon and Luther advised Philip of Hesse to put to death all adherents of the sect.The conservative leaders felt that so serious a threat to the established economic and political order should be punished with an unforgettable severity.
Will & Ariel Durant, The Reformation, 1957, page 588

To the ancient Egyptians, the words of children held mystical significance—that’s why their sun god Horus the Child (Har-pa-khered) always pointed to his own mouth. After the Greeks adopted Harpocrates as their God of Silence, they misunderstood the gesture to mean “hush.” Aphrodite created roses as a gift to this god, persuading him to keep secret her many amorous indiscretions. The Romans hung roses in banquet halls to remind revelers that utterances made “under the rose” (sub rosa) were strictly confidential. During the Middle Ages, roses were carved into the ceilings of council chambers, government meeting rooms, and Christian confessionals for the same reason. And now the SUBROSA CLUB is an exclusive space for System Failure insiders…

The Doomed Gallipoli Campaign

The Gallipoli Campaign was an effort by Allied powers to knock the Ottoman Empire out of World War I. The plan was to open up the Dardanelles Strait in modern-day Türkiye. If it had succeeded, the Campaign would have exposed the Ottoman capital of Istanbul to naval bombardment.

Instead, the Gallipoli Campaign became a famous disaster. It’s a warning from history about what could happen if the United States attempts to invade Iranian territory in or around the Strait of Hormuz.

The Allies launched an amphibious assault in April of 1915, and successfully established multiple beachhead positions. But they were sitting ducks thereafter, and subjected to constant fire from Ottoman positions. By January of the next year, half a million casualties had piled up on both sides of the lines. The Allies were forced to withdraw.

The Turkish commander at Gallipoli, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, rose to prominence as a result of the battle, and became the founder and first president of the modern Republic of Turkey in 1923. On the British side, Winston Churchill was forced to resign as First Lord of the Admiralty. It took a considerable period of time for his career to recover from the disastrous Gallipoli campaign.

For the newly formed countries of Australia and New Zealand, Gallipoli became a tragic first chapter in the stories of those countries’ national identities. Hopefully, the events at Gallipoli will continue to resonate through history as warning to the United States. Attempting to occupy enemy territory is always a costly endeavor reckoned in human lives—but trying to hold isolated territories like beaches or islands is even more expensive in that grim currency.

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Key Takeaways:

1. The Hidden Dimension: Plato believed that the geometry of lines and angles demonstrate that we’re living in an illusionary universe with a Hidden Dimension.

2. The Illusion of Ego: Like the observable universe, the ego is also an illusion created by the way we perceive lines and angles.

3. Roman Platonism: Early Christianity was heavily influenced by Platonism; its Hidden Dimension became the Christian conception of heaven.

The Hidden Dimension

Platonism is the notion that the physical world is merely a projection emanating from a Hidden Dimension. Plato was obsessed with the geometry of that projection. He carefully traced lines and measured angles, believing that odd coincidences in the arithmetic of the vertices, edges, and faces of specific 3-D shapes afforded him a glimpse into the hidden structure of the universe.

To Plato, that geometry was like a sand dune sculpted by the wind, where the dune’s shape paints a portrait of unseen air currents swirling above.

Plato suggested that the observable universe is an illusion by likening it to a shadow-puppet show on a cave wall. Shadows are made of light: they’re warped or distorted versions of the solid objects casting them. Plato invoked dimensionality with his choice of imperfect two-dimensional shadows to allegorize a hidden, extra-dimensional “Realm of Ideals” revealed by geometry.

Plato’s conception of dimensionality can be understood by considering Peter Pan and his famously disobedient shadow. If Peter Pan handed his shadow a three-dimensional apple, Shadow Pan would experience that spherical fruit as a series of circular cross-sections, taken one at a time.

An MRI machine sees the human body in exactly the same way. Shadow Pan is two-dimensional; he has height and width but no depth. That geometry hides all but a thin slice of our 3D world from his narrow 2D view. Because he’s dimensionally disadvantaged in this way, Shadow Pan must experience the third dimension as a sequence of cross-sections.

The fact that we experience the 4th dimension (time) as a similar sequence of cross-sections is a major clue that we’re also dimensionally disadvantaged. Plato went so far as to conclude that, as with Shadow Pan, geometry hides a vast extra-dimensional reality from our limited view. This notion of a Hidden Dimension massively impacted the evolution of ideas during the Fall of the Roman Empire.

The Illusion of Ego

In the centuries before Christianity, so-called mystery religions dominated Greco-Roman culture. These Mystery Schools often used psychoactive plants to temporarily disable egos. Initiates described themselves as being “saved” by the experience, or as having achieved “immortality.” As an initiate in multiple such schools, Plato was heavily influenced by his experiences with egolessness.

In Timaeus, Plato described time as “the moving picture of eternity.” Today, Plato might have conveyed the same point by noting that the beginning and the end of a movie still exist on the reel, even while we’re watching the middle of the film. Those parts of the movie still exist, even though they’re hidden from us around the corner of time.

Our egos arise from this movie-like, sequential way we perceive time. Like Peter Pan’s shadow, we’re stuck viewing one frame of our film at a time. But if we could somehow ascend to a higher-dimensional vantage point, we’d perceive time all at once—as we do with the dimensions of length, width and height. We’d see childhood and deathbed versions of ourselves simultaneously, and every version in between.

But that’s not all. From this hidden, extra-dimensional perspective, we’d also see our ancestors stretching out behind us, and all our descendants fanning out before us. In the full view of all of time, we’d perceive ourselves to be bodily connected to our parents, and they to their parents in just the same way that the branches of a tree are connected to the trunk. Such a lofty perspective would obliterate any sense of individuality. We’d see ourselves as iterations in a contiguous pattern, rather than as discrete individuals. The illusion of ego is wholly dependent on the limited way we perceive time.

Roman Platonism

Centuries after his death, the philosophy of Plato was more popular with the Romans than it had ever been with the Greeks. As their Empire collapsed, Christianity filtered through the lens of Platonism that dominated the Roman mind.

Gnosticism embraced a dark and pessimistic version of Platonism. As they witnessed the decay of Rome, Gnostics concluded that only an evil god would trap humans inside Plato’s shadowy prison. Many avoided procreative sex, because they believed that each child born is a spark of divine light trapped within a universe of woe.

Neoplatonism was a direct reaction to the doom and gloom of Gnosticism. To Neoplatonists, the pain and anguish of the Fall of Rome was not the work of some evil god, but the result of distance from a benevolent god. They considered evil to be the absence of good, as darkness is merely the absence of light. Before he became a Christian, the Neoplatonists counted St. Augustine among their number.

Hermeticism held that the illusory reality we inhabit is a collaboration between God and man. According to this school of thought, observers and gods alike have the power to shape reality with the mind. It would later become the basis of alchemy during the Renaissance.

Christianity was yet another flavor of the popular Platonist intellectual framework that dominated Rome’s last centuries. For Christians like St. Augustine, escape from a flawed universe and ascent into a realm of perfection was to be achieved through acts of morality and repentance for sin. Legendary historians Will and Ariel Durant wrote of St. Augustine that “he was so fascinated by Plato that he called him a ‘demigod’, and did not cease to be a Platonist when he became a Christian.”

Christianity also borrowed heavily from the Greco-Roman Mystery Schools that preceded it. The story of the Crucifixion is the ultimate expression of egolessness. In that tale, Jesus is so confident that he’s NOT his body that he volunteers it for a gruesome public execution. This powerful story took Roman society by storm, spreading rapidly to every corner of the Empire. Christianity became an undeniable political force as Rome entered her twilight.

In a bid to consolidate waning political power, the last emperors of Rome embraced Augustine’s version of Christianity as the state religion of their dying Empire. That’s how it became the version of the Christian faith we inherited from history. Because the Christianity bequeathed to us is a flavor of Platonism, Plato’s Hidden Dimension of idealized perfection lives on to this day as the Christian conception of heaven.

Conclusion

Plato cast perhaps the longest intellectual shadow in all of human history. The genealogy of Platonist thought doesn’t end with Christianity. The Christian Emperors of Rome outlawed interpretations of Platonism and Christianity that rivaled the Augustinian version they endorsed. Gnosticism became a heresy, along with Hermeticism. A thousand years later—when the Medieval economic order crumbled and the political power of the Roman Catholic Church collapsed—old Platonic heresies from the chaotic Fall of Rome were revived. The works of Plato were reintroduced to European society during that period as a major part of the Italian Renaissance. Hermeticism gave rise to Alchemy, which was ultimately refined into modern chemistry during the Scientific Revolution. Like Christianity, the sciences have also been influenced by the long shadow of Plato.

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Fourth-century paganism took many forms: Mithraism, Neoplatonism, Stoicism, Cynicism, and the local cults of municipal or rustic gods. Mithraism had lost ground, but Neoplatonism was still a power in religion and philosophy. Those doctrines to which Plotinus had given a shadowy form—of a triune spirit binding all reality, of a Logos or intermediary deity who had done the work of creation, of soul as divine and matter as flesh and evil, of spheres of existence along whose invisible stairs the soul had fallen from God to man and might ascend from man to God—these mystic ideas left their mark on the apostles Paul and John, had many imitators among the Christians, and molded many Christian heresies.
Will & Ariel Durant, The Age of Faith, 1950, page 9

To the ancient Egyptians, the words of children held mystical significance—that’s why their sun god Horus the Child (Har-pa-khered) always pointed to his own mouth. After the Greeks adopted Harpocrates as their God of Silence, they misunderstood the gesture to mean “hush.” Aphrodite created roses as a gift to this god, persuading him to keep secret her many amorous indiscretions. The Romans hung roses in banquet halls to remind revelers that utterances made “under the rose” (sub rosa) were strictly confidential. During the Middle Ages, roses were carved into the ceilings of council chambers, government meeting rooms, and Christian confessionals for the same reason. And now the SUBROSA CLUB is an exclusive space for System Failure insiders…

The Great Schism of 1054

On a recent trip to Serbia, a country where the predominant religion is Orthodox Christianity, I was amused to be reminded that—from the Orthodox perspective—Protestantism is still considered Catholicism.

Coming from New England, which was colonized by English Protestants, this perspective was instructive. While we place great importance on the Protestant Reformation of the 1500s, Orthodox Christians are still thinking in terms of the Great Schism of 1054.

Publicly, the Great Schism of 1054 stems from profound theological differences between the Greek and Latin versions of the Christian faith. But like the current conflict in Iran, a struggle for power among elites was the real culprit. Prior to 1054, the Christian Church was governed by 5 Patriarchs seated in Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria, Constantinople and Rome. The Roman Patriarch, the Pope, decided to consolidate power over the other Patriarchates.

Later that century in 1095, the Crusades were advertised as a conflict with Islam when Pope Urban II announced them. But in reality, Catholic knights laid siege to the Christian cities of Constantinople and Antioch, in addition to sacking Jerusalem. These battles illustrate the fact that the Crusades are better understood as a conflict between Christian factions.

The actual history of Christianity during the Middle Ages reveals how the Greek Church was attacked by its Latin cousins. It’s no wonder that subsequent divisions among Latin Christians are of little consequence to those who still cherish the Greek version of the Church.

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