If You Die Before You Die: Brian Muraresku's Secret History of Psychedelics

Lex Fridman opens with an easy question: who or what is God, and how has the idea changed? Brian Muraresku, author of *The Immortality Key*, answers that God is a thought whose reference lies beyond thinking, beyond even the categories of being and non-being. To talk about it is almost to get it wrong. Joseph Campbell's line, which he quotes, is that any god not transparent to transcendence is an idolatry — a mental construct that cannot speak to the incomprehensible.

The useful language, he says, is poetic: the being of beings, the infinite life energy of the universe, unqualified is-ness. The mystical insight is that we participate with that principle here and now, as flesh and blood, rather than pointing at an external force. Mechthild of Magdeburg, a thirteenth-century German mystic, dated her spiritual awakening to the day she saw God in all things and all things in God. Muraresku insists this is not lightweight theology. The mystical cores of the Abrahamic faiths all talk about encountering divinity within, and his book is a hunt for the archaic techniques of ecstasy that let that eternal principle rise in consciousness.

Fridman presses the loop: if our talk of God is a creation of the mind, are we not the creators? Muraresku does not pretend the question makes tidy sense, then points to the Upanishads, where God pours themselves into creation and the knower becomes a creator. Humanists of the Renaissance treated mentation itself as part of our divine nature. Mystical traditions, he adds, describe the work as unlearning — peeling back thoughts, emotions, and traumas that built a false self until something that looks like God remains. Fostering a relationship with God is one thing. Identifying as God is another, and he means it literally, without heresy.

The same emptying shows up across Sufism, Kabbalah, and Christian mysticism. Rumi says that if you could get rid of yourself just once, the secret of secrets would open. Rabbi Lawrence Kushner writes that emptying selfhood lets the soul attach to true reality, the divine nothingness. Meister Eckhart says that if you could not yourself for an instant, you would possess all. Fridman offers a physicist's inversion: maybe the universe needs human brains to understand itself. Muraresku notes Robert Lanza's biocentrism, Eckhart's claim that the eye with which I see God is the same eye that sees me, and the Sanskrit idea of *lila* — existence as play. The conversation is already heading toward Terence McKenna's invisible world of archons and discarnate entities.

Gordon Wasson, the J.P. Morgan banker turned ethnomycologist, is Muraresku's hinge between Plato and the 1960s. Wasson is largely credited with the rediscovery of psilocybin mushrooms after visiting María Sabina in Mexico; Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin, and the Stones followed in his wake. What Wasson wrote in *Life* magazine in 1957 was not hippie scenery. He felt he was spying Plato's archetypes: images so sharp, brilliant, and detailed that ordinary reality looked like an imperfect copy. William James called that the noetic sense — the temptation, when something feels more real than real, to believe you have tapped the underlying structure of the cosmos.

Fridman steers straight to McKenna's self-transforming machine elves and the DMT hyperspace that Rick Doblin, whom he had just interviewed, also described. Ancient philosophers asked the same question — is it real? — and tried to answer by dying. Plato's definition of philosophy, practiced in the right way, is practicing dying and being dead. People still describe psychedelic states in near-death terms. In the Trialogue tapes from Esalen around 1989, McKenna sat with Ralph Abraham and Rupert Sheldrake and offered a taxonomy of discarnate entities.

Option one is semi-physical and elusive, Bigfoot territory, somewhere between mythology and zoology. Option two is the mentalist reduction: autonomous fragments of psychic energy that have temporarily escaped the ego, Jungian projections, essentially unreal. Option three is the most tantalizing. The beings are both non-physical and autonomous. They exist in some real place, communication is possible, and McKenna speaks of the whisperings of the demon artificers. Meetings with them, he speculated, may have coaxed the species into self-expression at different points in history.

The speculation runs into the scientific Enlightenment. Descartes reported a dream in which an angel said the conquest of nature would be achieved through measure and number. John Dee, high magician of the Elizabethan court, recorded decades of what we would now call extraterrestrial or interdimensional communication. Peter Kingsley finds similar encounters among the pre-Socratics. Fridman notes that the origin of intelligent life is still a giant mystery, and that 2001-style phase shifts keep showing up in the record. That, Muraresku agrees, is the core of his work: whether non-ordinary states, not molecules alone, steered the intellectual growth of civilization. It is a hypothesis worth investigating.

Mircea Eliade, the great scholar of religions, defined the history of religions as the intersection of metaphysics and biology. Early humans, Muraresku says, would have been archaic ecologists, learning which plants and fungi worked. McKenna's stoned-ape theory asks whether psychedelics were involved in one of several leaps forward. Jared Diamond's Great Leap Forward sits around 60,000 years ago: the species had already been around for a couple of hundred thousand years when cave painting appears. Paul Stamets's version is not a one-time cascade. It is the ingestion of psilocybin fungi millions of times over millions of years, an accumulation of experience.

The claim is hard to test, which is why Muraresku has been talking with paleoanthropologist Lee Berger at the University of the Witwatersrand. Berger, a National Geographic explorer, is known for *Homo naledi*, morphologically archaic yet dating to about 300,000 years ago. At the Rising Star cave system he believes he has found the first bipedal ape deliberately disposing of its dead: recognition of self-mortality, ritual around burial. If you have burials that early, Berger suggests, maybe you have language. McKenna was obsessed with language in the stoned-ape story, arguing that psilocybin enhanced visual acuity, perhaps facilitated sexual arousal, and led toward proto-language.

Muraresku floats a coincidence he does not know how to weigh. The Khoisan of Botswana and Namibia hold the largest sound inventory of any language, something like 164 consonants and 44 vowels against English's roughly 45. Complex language, recognition of mortality, and pharmacology may travel together. The way to test it is chemistry: gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, proteomics, tools that barely exist for this question. Berger has already pulled diet from dental calculus. In *Australopithecus sediba*, phytoliths — fossilized plant tissue — show bark, leaves, grasses, fruits, and palm going back two million years. No psychedelics there, but the method is real.

A 2012 study from El Sidrón cave found Neanderthals, 50,000 years ago, ingesting yarrow and chamomile identified as medicinal. Last fall, the first archaeochemical data tying ritual psychedelics to cave art were published, from Pinwheel Cave, a Chumash site in California. The finds were only four or five hundred years old: chewed datura quids, tropane alkaloids, likely an initiation site. Graham Hancock's *Supernatural* had sent Muraresku down this rabbit hole in 2007, when the idea still looked kooky. Archaeochemists remain scarce, more dozens than hundreds. Pat McGovern at Penn and Andrew Koh at MIT, whose OpenARCHEM project gathers organic-residue data on his own time, are among the few. No university has stood up a dedicated team. The discipline, Muraresku says, is still becoming a toddler.

Fridman had been emailing Pat McGovern, author of *Ancient Brews* and director of a biomolecular archaeology center at Penn. McGovern has not, in Muraresku's reading, found hard data for psychedelics. What he offered was more important for the book: the idea that beer and wine could have been vehicles for administering them. Ancient beer and wine were not Budweiser. They were cocktails, often fortified and mixed with fruits, berries, herbs, plants, maybe even fungi. Distilled liquor did not exist. In Russia, Muraresku notes, hard alcohol arrives maybe in the twelfth century; Europe a bit earlier. To pack a punch, people spiked what they had with whatever nature offered.

McGovern found early data for those spiked wines and beers — not overtly psychedelic, but mixed. In the sixteenth century B.C. at Grave Circle A in Mycenae there is a Minoan ritual cocktail of beer, wine, and mead. The same kind of mix shows up across the Aegean at Gordion, in King Midas's tomb. McGovern and Sam Calagione at Dogfish Head resurrected it as Midas Touch, some 2,800 years later. That a recipe could be recovered from residue and drunk again is what excited Muraresku a decade ago. The next question is the one his book tries to answer with chemistry rather than lore.

Fridman finally asks what story the book tells. Muraresku calls it a twelve-year search for hard scientific data on the ritual use of psychedelics in classical antiquity — among Greeks, Romans, and the paleo-Christians who would give birth to a religion now numbering two and a half billion people. The question was asked in the 1960s and 1970s. John Marco Allegro is in the background. The book he follows, *The Road to Eleusis*, was published in 1978 by Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann, who synthesized LSD from ergot, and Carl Ruck, still a classics professor at Boston University and the only surviving member of that renegade trio, now 85.

What those decades lacked was technology. For years Muraresku asked archaeobotanists and archaeochemists a basic question: is there evidence for psychedelics in classical antiquity? The answer, almost invariably, was no. McGovern sent him to Hans-Peter Stika in Germany, Tania Valamoti in Greece, and colleagues in Italy. He went around asking one question and getting the same answer. The book is the search, and then the uncovering of two points he takes as key. One shows the ritual use of a psychedelic beer in Iberia, in today's Spain. The other shows what looks like a psychedelic wine just outside Pompeii, from the first century A.D. — the right place and time, as the earliest Christians were showing up in Italy.

Asked what psychedelic wine might have meant in the life of Jesus, Muraresku says it is impossible to understand Jesus and the birth of Christianity without ancient Greek. You can read the entire New Testament in Greek and never find a reference to alcohol, because there was no such word. *Alcohol* is Semitic, from Arabic, later tied to kohl and alchemy. In the first century A.D., the power of wine was not tied to fermented grapes as we think of them. Dioscorides, writing a massive treatise at the same time the Gospels were being written, details 56 recipes for spiking wine with salvia, hellebore, frankincense, myrrh, henbane, and mandrake — the last of which, he says, can be fatal with one cupful. In the *Materia Medica* he describes black nightshade producing *phantasias*, visions not unpleasant: what we would call psychedelic.

The early church takes root in a Greek-speaking world. Paul writes letters in Greek to Corinth, Philippi, the Colossians, the Galatians, the Romans. For those readers, to think about wine was to think about a mixed potion. *Oinos* appears in the New Testament, but another word existed for a thousand years before, during, and after Jesus: *pharmakon*, the root of pharmacy, meaning drug. Classicist Ruth Scodel talks about it as a ritualistic formula. Wine was a compound beverage, a drug against grief, a medicinal elixir that could harm or heal, or a sacrament to put you in touch with wine gods old and new.

Dionysus precedes Jesus, and in some tellings the story of Jesus recapitulates his mysteries. He is not the god of alcohol. He is the god of madness, delirium, and frenzy, whose blood is equated with his wine. Sacramental drinking was interpreted, Walter Burkert among others writes, as consuming the god in order to become the god. That is where *enthusiasm* comes from: to be filled with the spirit of the god. His principal followers, the maenads, are women. At the Theater of Dionysus a wine called *trima* — pounded or rubbed — was served. Ruck suggests drugs were rubbed into that theatrical beverage to help the play come alive. Comedy, tragedy, poetry, and music, Muraresku says, come from that hillside. Hollywood starts there, with a spiked drink instead of a hot dog and a beer.

Fridman asks whether Jesus was a historical person or an idea that came to life through wine rituals. Muraresku shies from the controversy in the book and is willing to accept a historical Jesus. He leans on Dennis MacDonald's *The Dionysian Gospel*: once you analyze the Greek of John, Jesus is presented in the guise of Dionysus. The wedding at Cana, the water-into-wine sign, occurs only in John. Greek speakers already knew that at Elis, around Epiphany, priests of Dionysus left empty basins and found them magically filled with wine; on Andros, wine ran from the temple like a river for a week. Titian's *Bacchanal of the Andrians* still hangs in the Prado. The signature miracle of Dionysus would not have been lost on a first-century Greek audience. The answer to Christianity's extraordinary growth, Muraresku says, is not psychedelics. It is visionary experience, and continuity from the pagan mysteries into the new, illegal cult of a dozen illiterate day laborers.

Ritual is the centerpiece of ancient life, not a side cult. The Mysteries of Eleusis were probably the most famous and longest lasting of the Greek rites, running some two thousand years, from about 1500 B.C. into the fourth century A.D. The name implies secrecy: *myo* means to shut the eyes or the mouth. Cicero called what happened at Eleusis the most exceptional and divine thing Athens ever produced — not democracy, the arts, or philosophy, but the vision encountered there, perhaps through a potent psychedelic, by thousands if not millions of initiates. Pilgrims walked from Athens to confront whatever was shown in the sanctuary. As the newly Christianized empire moved to exterminate the rites, a passage in the literature says that in their absence life becomes unlivable.

Reconstructed, the pilgrimage of about thirteen miles northwest of Athens was a confrontation with mortality. You went to Eleusis to die, to experience a death before death. Only those who witnessed the vision were said to be vouchsafed the afterlife; they became, in that sense, immortal. Cicero's gloss is that you then live with more joy and die with a better hope. Fridman brings up Ernest Becker and the claim that the fear of death is the worm at the core, the engine of culture. Muraresku flips it. If the ancients were known for anything, it was running toward death.

The immortality key, he says, is not a psychedelic. It is the notion preserved in Greek: if you die before you die, you will not die when you die. The same self-naughting appears in Sufism, Kabbalah, and Christian mysticism as death before death, the divine nothingness. Saints, visionaries, and ancient philosophers prized that terrifying, transformational encounter. The message he wanted the book to carry is that life can only be fully embodied in the wake of it. The future he hopes for is not better pharmaceutical flight from mortality. It is a return, with modern tools, to that older direction of travel.

In 1958 Aldous Huxley wrote an op-ed that still stops Muraresku. As the fog of the war on drugs lifts, he thinks we have come full circle to the late 1950s. Huxley looked forward to a revival of religion — hence the book's subtitle, *The Secret History of the Religion with No Name* — that would not come through televangelistic mass meetings or photogenic clergymen. Biochemical discoveries would let large numbers of men and women achieve radical self-transcendence and a deeper understanding of the nature of things. Alan Watts added that nothing is more dangerous to authority than a popular outbreak of mysticism. Huxley envisioned everyday mysticism undergirding everyday rationality, duties, and human relationships. Religion, in that frame, has to mean something.

The altered states produced quite easily in labs at Johns Hopkins, NYU, and elsewhere with psilocybin look to Muraresku like part of that prediction: legal, safe, efficacious access, insight in an afternoon. What happens when millions of people can become mystics before dinner? Fridman asks for a definition of religion. Muraresku starts from the Latin *religio*, to bind back to a meaningful tradition or to the source, then quotes Clifford Geertz at full difficulty: a set of symbols that establish long-lasting moods and motivations by formulating a general order of existence and clothing it in an aura of factuality. Stripped down, religion has to make you feel something, but not the way sex, sports, or a concert does. The emotion has to arrive with an existential insight that answers, in the morning, why you are here.

If you find that meaning in science, he says, that is your religion, and we should be more honest about it. Fridman is uneasy with slogans like "facts don't care about your feelings." Facts are real and feelings are real; football colors and nations are real because we agree they are. Love does not feel like a reproductive hack. Muraresku will not pretend these questions are answerable, only that striving to answer them is the point. Science is one way, religion another, and they intersect. The ancient mysteries look to him like people exploring alternate states, arriving at conclusions, and deriving meaning that governs a life. He cannot prove he loves his two daughters. Everything he does at forty is inspired by that love anyway. The meeting ground is where paleo-Christianity was born: near identification of ultimate reality, another name for God.

Fridman frames the Sam Harris–Jordan Peterson fight over religion: Peterson finds value in ritual and story despite the flaws; Harris sees religion as getting in the way of a scientific confrontation with mystery. Muraresku had just recorded with Peterson, joined in a rare public appearance by Carl Ruck. Peterson had recently hosted Roland Griffiths of Johns Hopkins. The statistic they could not move past is Griffiths's: over twenty years of modern psilocybin research, about three in four volunteers walk away from a single high dose saying it was among the most meaningful experiences of their entire lives, if not the most. How do you synthesize that? The compounds leave people feeling more loving and compassionate. The science talks about cooperation, resource sharing, and kindness welling up from a chemical intervention, as if enlightenment could be flipped on like a switch. The data are there.

Muraresku understands Harris's position. He still thinks a reading of the mystical core of the big faiths, and of the ancient mystery cults, speaks to those Geertzian moods. Volunteers walk away permanently transformed, as initiates once did. Language is part of the problem. He starts *The Immortality Key* with Dinah Bazer, an NYU psilocybin volunteer who still calls herself an atheist and still says the experience was like being bathed in God's love. He asked why *God*, why not the cosmos or Mother Nature. She said we do not know about any of this stuff, and God made sense — like the way your mother's love must have felt when you were a baby. Fridman hears Einstein's God who does not play dice: poetry, humility, and a laugh at the absurdity.

The clinical pipeline is not only for people with a named demon. Psilocybin and MDMA are useful for anxiety, depression, end-of-life distress, PTSD, alcoholism. Because of that research they will probably be legal in some FDA-regulated way within five years of this 2021 conversation. The question Muraresku puts on page one is why they work across conditions. The best answer he found is meaning. Tony Bossis at NYU calls psilocybin meaning-making medicine, somewhere between a therapeutic and an ontological instigator. What excites him as much as the FDA is the First Amendment. America is a refuge for religious pioneers. The Native American Church and Brazilian-spawned churches already use psychedelics. What if Judaism, Christianity, or Islam incorporated their discreet, sacred use as extra-credit liturgy — not replacing Sunday Eucharist, but testing, through practice, how essential it is?

Fridman describes a 72-hour fast that turned hallucinogenic, and asks whether fasting, meditation, and similar disciplines could be as essential to religious experience as psychedelics. Muraresku says yes — if not more so. He looks at psychedelics as a catalyst for spiritual investigation, not a superficial means to an end. Their value is serving as Google Maps for the kingdom of heaven. Ram Dass's teacher said they will get you in the room with Jesus but will not keep you there. That is fine if you already know where the house is. If you have never had a mystical experience, if religion is anathema, if God means nothing, the coordinates of those irrational states have been lost. Psychedelics orient mind, body, and soul toward them quickly, potently, and, in the clinics, reliably. Maybe once in a life. Maybe that is the beginning of a life examined.

Fridman then asks about Neuralink and brain-computer interfaces, Elon's wizard hat, versus the infinite complexity of the mind. Muraresku wonders how McKenna would answer, then refuses to discount AI. The winning combination, he thinks, is AI paired with the archaeology of consciousness and the archaic techniques of ecstasy. Set and setting matter. Eleusis worked for two thousand years, assuming the psychedelic hypothesis has merit, because you were born into a mythology about Demeter and Persephone and waited a lifetime to meet them in the flesh. Early church fathers mocked the Greeks for merely peaking curiosity; anticipation was part of the outcome. You do not pop into a laboratory or a retreat from one day to the next. He has been preparing twelve years and is still preparing.

McKenna's warning, as Muraresku paraphrases it, is historical: if you met someone who did not know where they were between 1995 and 2005, you would call them damaged, yet who among us knows what was happening in the West between 900 and 1300, let alone 2,500 years ago. History cuts to how Western civilization was born. Fridman wants that history loaded into systems that could steer a heroic dose with the right words at the right time. Eleusis, Muraresku reminds him, was known for three things: the *legomena*, the *dromena*, the *deiknumena* — things said, things done, things shown. Pack that into an interface and he is in. The gray areas of legality are partly language, a social decision about what counts as a drug versus a religious experience. The ancients had tools we are still not using, rigorously and safely, to explore the mind.

Fridman asks whether LSD was a crutch or an aid for people like Ken Kesey, who wrote *One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest* partly under its influence. One person's crutch, Muraresku says, might be another's bungee cord; it depends on the mind. We might not have some of the better Beatles music without LSD. In 1967 Paul McCartney said he recognized the dangers but used it with a deliberate purpose: he wanted to find the answer to what life is all about. He is probably not doing LSD this week. That fits the catalyst theory. In the absence of some such experience — a three-day fast, lying down in a cave, ritual chanting, a Sun Dance — at the right time, entrance to the kingdom of heaven, which Muraresku thinks is here and now, may otherwise be very difficult.

What did Nietzsche mean by God is dead? Muraresku likes him because the cranky German knew a lot about Dionysus. Gallup had just found church membership in the minority in the United States, at 47 percent; twenty years earlier it was closer to 70. The unaffiliated, the "nones," were already about a third of millennials. In that sense God is absolutely dead. Maybe not the God they tried to define at the start of the conversation. Nietzsche looked toward an Übermensch who would not fall into nihilism after that death. Commentators who talk about eternal recurrence and the techniques of antiquity, not doctrine, are the ones Muraresku hears. Biochemical discoveries point back to Dionysus: a responsible incorporation of the irrational into a society of otherwise rational people.

Fridman connects the religious longing in UFO culture to the same hunger. Muraresku, asked about aliens for the first time in eight months, quotes J. Allen Hynek from 1966: when the long-awaited solution to the UFO problem comes, it will prove not a small step but a mighty and unexpected quantum leap. He does not think we are dealing with flesh-and-blood beings in nuts-and-bolts craft. It takes him back to the invisible college, to geniuses and muses. The first document in Western civilization, Homer's epics, begins by invoking an alien: *Tell me, O Muse, about the man.* Homer is not inventing poetry. He is channeling it. Julian Jaynes argued that the ancient Greek mind heard gods as voices in the head, commands that could not be ignored. Discarnate entities are everywhere in Greek and Latin, and they persist — fairies, gnomes, elves, sylphs, jinn, elementals. Jacques Vallée writes about that folklore. Every society seems to have them.

Asked how he thinks about consciousness, Muraresku has no good answer to the hard problem — the three-pound lump of jelly that contemplates infinity and itself contemplating infinity. He is attracted to Lanza's biocentrism; the double-slit experiment makes it difficult not to wonder why we seem capable of collapsing a quantum wave function. Maybe consciousness is the fundamental thing. Peter Kingsley, no fan of the psychedelic hypothesis, describes pre-Socratic rites of incubation practiced by Pythagoras, Parmenides, and Empedocles: suspended animation in cave-like settings, Pythagoras lying motionless in a basement, hunting a state beyond life and death, waking and dreaming, aware of the senses and another reality at once. Kingsley calls it sensation. Fridman's engineering ethic is fake it till you make it: consciousness is easy to build, hard to understand. Muraresku is satisfied because he knows how unsatisfied others will be.

The books that rerouted him all cluster around 2007 and 2008, when he first heard of the Hopkins psilocybin experiments. Jeremy Narby's *The Cosmic Serpent* was an impulse buy at a Barnes & Noble on Sixth Avenue and led him to Hancock's *Supernatural*, which tried to prove a long story tying ritual psychedelics to cave art via David Lewis-Williams's neuropsychological model — at the same South African university where Lee Berger works. Daniel Pinchbeck's *Breaking Open the Head* was a New Yorker's romp through contemporary shamanism, including iboga with the Bwiti, the first firsthand accounts that made the compounds impossible to ignore. Then came *The Road to Eleusis* and everything Wasson and Ruck wrote, until Kingsley's *In the Dark Places of Wisdom* and *Reality*. The best Muraresku can read Kingsley is that Western civilization is a gift from the goddess Persephone. Ruck's challenge in the late 1970s was convincing colleagues that famous, intelligent Greeks could enter so fully into irrationality. After *Reality*, Muraresku's life was never quite the same.

The meaning of life is a question the three-pound jelly cannot answer, so he plagiarizes Joseph Campbell. We are not looking for a meaning of life. We are looking for an experience of being alive, so that physical events have resonances of our innermost being. Absolute truth is a construct that acquires Geertz's aura of factuality day by day. Meaning-making is subjective, hard to talk about, hard to quantify. Families are not created from an Excel sheet. He and his wife fell in love and made babies. To fall in love is to surrender to an intelligence beyond us, a god-like intelligence. Richard Rohr writes that the divine is often encountered in the other; that is bedrock sacramental theology, the proving ground for identifying as God rather than merely relating to God. Irrational states play a big role in that. Fridman ends on love. Muraresku says he loves him back.