Original subtitles

>> Through the scope of religious texts and art,

unexplained and quite mystical type experiences seem

to revolve around all of the heroes.

In legends and myth, supernatural powers,

from walking on water and astral projection

to stories of resurrection and transcendence,

have baffled the rationale of skeptics and pragmatists alike.

But the story was about to change

after an unlikely ancient relic was discovered after being

lost for 2000 years.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

On March 14 of 1952, at an archaeological site

on the West Bank in Israel's Qumran National Park,

15 scrolls were unearthed, the last of which

was famously called the copper scroll.

It was corroded to the point where it could not be unrolled.

So English archaeologist, John Marco Allegro,

recommended that the scrolls be sent

to Manchester University in order

to cut them into pieces, making them easier to read.

After 15 years of study, Allegro published his book, "The Sacred

Mushroom and the Cross."

He argued that the linguistics of this dead language

revealed that the roots of Christianity

were born in fertility cults, with the use

of sacramental and psychedelic mushrooms,

also stating that these rituals survived

in secrecy within Christian artwork seen

in cathedrals and churches.

But the most popular of Allegro's interpretations

was the fresco at Plaincourault Chapel.

>> Right before his book, "The Sacred Mushroom" got published,

he saw a grainy image of the Plaincourault fresco

and thought it was an amanita muscaria,

so he put it in the dust jacket of his book.

Like all people, when I first saw the Plaincourault fresco,

I was like, oh, my god.

That's an amanita muscaria, of course.

>> Professor Jerry Brown served as the founding professor

of anthropology at Florida International University

in Miami, where he taught a course on psychedelics.

>> It really started with my first psychedelic experience

which was on LSD at a Rainbow Family gathering,

high in the Rocky Mountains.

It was a frightening experience, and I wasn't alone.

I mean, Albert Hoffman thought he was

dying in his first experience--

discovery of LSD.

And it really made me pause and want to learn

a lot more about psychedelics.

I mean, I didn't have the instant nirvana

that Larry was talking about, and so being an anthropologist

I designed and taught a course on hallucinogens in culture.

Then, fast forward to 2006.

My wife, Julie, and I are in Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland,

and I discovered, in the head of the most prominent green man,

a fertility head of which there are about 100

in Rosslyn Chapel, about two weeks after buying

this replica of this Rosslyn Chapel green man,

I turned it around on a table.

And I looked, and was staring at a replica of an amanita

muscaria mushroom.

The bulbous bottom, the little veil around the stem,

the little white dots, the dots.

And it was this discovery of a psychoactive mushroom

in a Catholic church that led Julie and me to start thinking,

are there other psychedelic mushrooms in Christian art?

Julie and I had the opportunity to meet with Paul Stamets, one

of the world's most eminent and knowledgeable mycologists.

And we said, Paul, do you agree with our interpretation

that this is an amanita muscaria mushroom?

And he said, oh, absolutely.

It is.

And I said, and now I'm embarrassed about this, I said,

Paul, are you sure?

That's like asking the pope, are you sure you're Catholic?

And he laughed, and he said, this is a taxonomically correct

amanita muscaria mushroom.

>> As Jerry and Julie Brown found their conviction that

this was indeed a secretive depiction of the psychoactive

amanita muscaria mushroom by the artist Sir William Sinclair,

the author of "The Witches' Ointment," Tom Hatsis,

with a master's in history, has a different view on the matter.

>> Every image put forth by the holy mushroom advocates,

and they all have different--

they all have different details in their theories,

but they're all trying to say the same thing, that there

are mushrooms in Christian art.

While I do believe that there's a lot to say about psychedelics

in early Christianity and medieval Christianity,

I don't believe that there is anything to say about mushrooms

secretly hidden in art.

An example would be the green man from Rosslyn Chapel.

Paul Stamets and Jerry Brown both say

that that's an amanita muscaria mushroom,

and that it's a taxonomically correct amanita muscaria

mushroom.

But that's only because they put an unnatural line

of demarcation at the nub where the mushroom should end.

If you get rid of that line of demarcation,

it goes on, and on, and on.

It doesn't look like it amanita muscaria that I've ever seen.

One of the things about the holy mushroom hypothesis,

if we can call it that, is that it actually

has a lot of shortcomings.

Now, these shortcomings are often

overlooked by the people bolstering the theory,

but for others who pay a little bit more careful attention

to detail, we see a big problem.

There's a disconnect.

And in my opinion, the biggest problem

is that Christians, especially the church fathers,

wrote about their psychedelic experiences.

I mean, St. Basil recommended taking mandrake.

Theodoret of Syria would smoke opium and then

read from the gospels.

So these guys were totally open about discussing

their psychedelic use, so why not say,

hey, we're secretly painting it in art, too.

Why talk about cannabis, and opium, and mandrake,

and henbane, and never bring up a mushroom?

It makes no sense historically.

>> Tom asked, he said, look, if there is all of these

psychedelics, why aren't the church fathers--

why aren't there more about this in

the early Christian writings?

And my answer to Tom on this point is twofold.

One, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Just because they didn't write about it doesn't mean

it wasn't there.

And when we come back to this point

that these were the holies of holy,

that people talked about them in secrecy, that the pope said,

let art be the Bible of the illiterate, they expressed it,

but they expressed it in the artwork and not

in the writings.

It was too sacred to put into the writings.

>> Tom began researching the holy mushroom theory years ago,

and was even on the path to writing a book on the topic.

>> So I used to actually believe the holy mushroom theory in its

totality.

And I actually, I didn't think that anybody

had written a good book on the topic, so I'm like, OK.

Well, I'm going to write that book.

So before I wrote "The Witches' Ointment," the first book

in psychedelics I was going to write was on the holy mushroom

theory.

But the more I investigated it, the more I came to realize,

none of these things are actually mushrooms.

A lot of the times, the advocates

don't know what they're looking at.

And some of them have kind of mushroomy shapes,

but in an odd way, so does a stop sign.

And look, it's red at the top, and it's on a stem.

So I was just trying to make this theory fit--

the evidence fit what I already thought, and I was like, well,

aren't I a sucker?

There's just nothing to it.

I fell for it.

And so now I spend my time investigating these photos,

and these pictures, and showing what they actually

are because I think it's an important question.

Look, if Jesus had anything to do with magic mushrooms, that

is a big deal.

>> By the time Jerry and Julie Brown's book came out in 2016,

many other books had been published regarding

psychedelics and Christian art.

The concept was growing in popularity,

yet because there were so many unanswered questions

and wild speculations, Jerry and Julie

found it imperative to write a comprehensive book on where

the debate sits today.

>> Are there other entheogens in Christian art?

Does Christianity have a psychedelic history?

If it does, what does this imply for the life

of Jesus and the disciples?

And before we slipped into a kind

of a rambunctious overthrow of reason,

Carl Sagan's famous words came to us,

"extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

>> Extraordinary claims require ordinary evidence,

and the holy mushroom hypothesis doesn't even have base

evidence, let alone extraordinary evidence.

It doesn't even-- it's got nothing.

Of all the pieces that I've seen,

they're easily explained away by using

very basic historical criteria in detective crime solving

methods, every single one of them.

In those days, psychedelics were not

classified the way we classify drugs today.

They didn't classify them.

They classified magic.

So you could give somebody cannabis, right, to heal them.

And they're healed.

Well, that's good.

That's good magic.

You're a good witch.

Congratulations.

Now, you give somebody cannabis and let's say

they start to freak out because they don't

know what's going on or mushrooms-- well,

now you're a bad witch.

And now you didn't try to heal that person,

you were trying to send demons into them.

You were trying to possess them.

So much of it depended on, really, the outcome.

>> If psychedelics were not as important as the intentions

of the people using them in magic,

then would it make sense to keep them secret?

The extraordinary claims that Jerry and Julie

Brown were looking to back up had many obstacles to overcome.

>> We had some serious reservations at the beginning.

But we finally came to a point where

we gathered so much information at a distance

that Julie and I said, you know, we

will regret it the rest of our lives

if this insight was given to us, if we

don't undertake this journey of discovery

to see if we can find psychedelic images

in Christian art.

>> Jerry and Julie set out for Europe and the Middle East

to hunt down the original artwork, take pictures,

and gather the extraordinary evidence that they were after.

>> The first place we went was to Plaincourault, France,

to the tiny chapel, 20 feet wide by 60 feet deep

in Plaincourault, where there is a giant amanita mushroom

on a fresco of the temptation scene in the Garden of Eden.

We went there because this place was

the source of the debate between Gordon Wasson and John Allegro

as to, is this an amanita muscaria mushroom,

or is it not?

Wasson said, no, citing the art historian

Panofsky, who said it's a stylized Italian pine tree.

And Allegro said, oh, it absolutely is.

It was an incredibly emotional day for both of us,

but especially for me.

I had been waiting for 40 years to see this giant amanita

mushroom in Plaincourault Chapel.

The guide to the chapel showed up.

He spoke in French which we could understand,

and he described it as an amanita.

And when we looked at it, it was completely clear

that this was an amanita mushroom because

of the meticulous white dots on the cap, which were obviously

drawn with intention because Adam and Eve were covering

themselves with mushroom caps, not fig leaves.

And Eve was partially skeletonized which

in shamanism is associated with transcendence.

I mean, skeletonization in the bones

are very key to shamanism.

And Julie noticed that.

So it was the first place we stopped in our journey,

and it was the initial confirmation to say,

yes, Allegro was right about Plaincourault,

and we have our first major signpost

on the trail of finding compelling evidence

of mushrooms in Christianity.

>> There are shamanic skeletal references in books as well

as rock art, in which the motifs represent death and rebirth

of the spirit or transcendence.

And the image even has definitive markings

to depict that Eve is either starving or becoming

skeleton-like.

But was John Marco Allegro truly correct in his claim

that this was a name amanita muscaria mushroom?

>> Well, Allegro himself came to believe that that

wasn't a mushroom.

And in every edition of the sacred mushroom and the cross,

that photo was taken out.

He died believing only in his linguistic interpretations.

All these people today don't read dead languages,

so they picked up on the art because it's just easy to--

it's art.

We can all interpret whatever we want to see in art.

So it's simple, especially because some of the trees

are kind of zany looking.

They do have purple tops, or red tops,

and have kind of a bulbous top with a long stem.

Yeah, go outside.

That's what trees look like.

>> Well, I would point out that this is from about the 1100s,

and perspective did not come into art until the 15th

century.

So the artist could--

look.

This is not an anatomically correct Adam and Eve,

nor is it an anatomically correct amanita muscaria fly

agaric mushroom.

So this could be the artist drawing a cluster of mushrooms

there.

And as an anthropologist, I always

like to see what do the locals, the natives, say.

A bishop in early France said that these were psychoactive,

or really mind altering substances,

using the language of that time.

When it was first introduced to the Mycological

Society of France, the mycologist presenting it

said, and look, the artist has drawn a giant fly agaric.

When I asked the guide to Plaincourault,

who was taking us around, why did the artist put this there?

He said, because he wants people to understand

that they have to have a transcendental experience

to come closer to God.

>> The double-edged sword of art is that some pieces can be

interpreted in many ways, whereas others are quite

on the nose.

Making a distinction between which of those categories

these Christian renderings fall into

is the debate that has raged for the better part of a century.

But Jerry and Julie kept on with their investigation,

wondering where else they might find evidence of psychedelics

in Christian art.

>> After Plaincourault, we drove about two hours east in France

to the Parish Church of Saint-Martin de Vic, again,

about 1,000 years old.

And when we came into the choir, Julie took my arm

and she said, do you see what I see?

And I looked at the joint scene of the purification

of Isaiah's lips and Jesus entering Jerusalem.

And up in the right hand corner of the scene of Jesus entering

Jerusalem, the joyful youth, who are welcoming him to Jerusalem

on the Passover, one of them is holding

onto the stem of one of five, large, tan psilocybin

mushrooms.

And as we looked to the next wall,

Jesus is going towards the Tower of Jerusalem.

On top of the Tower of Jerusalem,

there are other youth with long knives,

cutting down unmistakable psilocybin mushrooms,

cutting through the stem.

If that was not enough on this wall, the painting, the fresco,

of the Towers of Jerusalem is looking down

on the Last Supper.

It is not bread on the table.

It's mushroom caps.

If it were bread, it would be pulled apart.

It would be baked in loaves.

And the same knives are on the table

that were used to cut down the mushrooms

in the Tower of Jerusalem.

>> So a lot of people look at that image without knowing

exactly where it comes from.

And when I say exact where it comes from,

I mean, literally, the Bib--

the chapter and verse of where it comes from.

It comes from the Gospel of Mark.

It's often misappropriately titled,

The Triumphal Entry, by people who are not New Testament

historians.

Because New Testament historians know that it was not

a triumphal entry.

Mark's Gospel is a war gospel.

This was a counter-protest.

In the Gospel, you have Jesus coming

in from one side of town.

OK?

He's contrasted by Caesar coming in from the other side

with the standards and the warhorses.

So Jesus is not on a war horse.

He's on a lowly donkey.

Right?

And even though the Romans are coming in

with their parasols of victory getting back to that peace,

you see the young boys, handing the parasol of victory,

instead, to Jesus.

>> Parasols and umbrellas seem to be a point of debate between

scholars looking into religious art.

Even in Hindu, Babylonian, and Assyrian art,

we find many parasols.

But are these really meant to depict the same objects?

And why would the children be using knives

to cut down the parasols of victory

instead of pulling them out of the ground?

A knife would make more sense to cut a mushroom from the ground

than an umbrella.

As Jerry and Julie continued their investigation,

they found many images that look far less like parasols,

but still peculiar enough to question.

>> In the opening folio of the great Canterbury Psalter,

which was created at Canterbury Cathedral,

it started about 1180, it tells the story of Genesis,

all the way through the life of Christ.

And there's this scene where Jesus heals the leper.

And the leper says, master, please cleanse me.

And Jesus says-- and his scroll reaching out to the leper,

says, I will be cleansed.

But what is fascinating about this

is that the scroll that the leper is holding

goes from his hand not to Jesus, but to a very clear, tan

psychedelic mushroom at the bottom of the painting.

Jesus is hovering, sort of suspended in air,

over that mushroom.

And the artist obviously was showing us

the significance of mushrooms in Jesus' healing ministry.

In this fresco in the Parish Church of Saint-Martin de Vic

in central France, there is a fresco

that brings together to the New Testament, Jesus entering

Jerusalem and the Old Testament, Isaiah's lips, the purification

of his lips.

And the story is that the Seraphim, the angel,

took a burning coal with tongs and put it in

to cleanse his lips, and metaphorically

wash all of his sins away.

What's in this painting is a tan,

round object in Isaiah's lips.

It is not burning hot black like a coal.

It's not burning red.

There are no tongs.

And given the relationship, the context

of mushrooms in the rest of the scenes there,

we believe that this story is talking about an entheogen,

even back in the Old Testament time.

And it was at that moment that we had our aha discovery,

and said, this is a psychedelic Gospel.

This is an alternative history of Christianity.

And this shouldn't be so surprising,

because back in the sixth century,

Pope Gregory said, let art be the Bible of the illiterate,

because most of the people throughout the entire medieval

period were illiterate.

>> Is illiteracy the reason why these seemingly psychedelic

mushrooms show up in Christian art?

One other theory is that from early on in the construction

of the religious institution, these plants

were suppressed and kept only in the hands of the inner circles

of the church.

But Jerry sees this point a bit differently.

>> When it comes to secrecy of the mushrooms and these

rituals, the major point to make here is that secrecy is not

suppression.

There are some people who argue that entheogens were suppressed

in Christianity.

Absolutely not.

This did not happen until after the Inquisition.

That's the point where they really disappear

for a variety of reasons.

The reason that these mushrooms are there for the initiates

to see is because this is the holy of holies.

These are the sacred plants.

And so in all of the shamanistic and classic religious

traditions that use entheogens, these are treated reverently,

and secretly, and quietly.

Among María Sabina and the Mazatec shaman,

they're talked a little--

landslide mushrooms, the little saints of the Mazatec,

are talked about in whispers at night

at veladas, at midnight healing ceremonies.

>> The use of secrecy in magic and religion is seen

ubiquitously through many different spiritual traditions.

Kees Willem Bolle opens his book, "Secrecy and Religion"

by saying, not only is there no religion without secrecy,

but there is no human existence without it.

Religious expressiveness and all human life cannot be understood

if we ignore their peculiar codes, reservations,

self restraints, and cautions that seem their very grammar

and idiom.

Many in modern self encounter groups

state that the only difference between magic practice

and religion is that religion is sanctioned

by a near governmental size authority,

and magic refers to the groups that

didn't build the mass congregation or business

model around it.

But authors like Jordan Maxwell seem

to find that obscure passages in the Bible

might point to mushroom worship amongst the Israelites.

Exodus 16:14 states, and when the dew that lay was gone up,

behold upon the face of the wilderness,

there lay a small round thing, as small

as the hoarfrost on the ground.

He also points out that the hats worn by Jewish priests

look similar to mushroom caps.

Professor Carl Ruck, who wrote "Mushrooms, Myth and Mithras,"

says of Mithraism, the religions kept its secrets well.

The teachings were never codified

in official scriptures.

He also says that Mithras, like the amanita muscaria mushroom,

was said to be born wearing a red, star-spotted cap

from a pine cone or philosopher's stone.

Many of these religions were born

in a similar area of the old world,

while we also find mushroom idolatry

among many North, Central, and South American indigenous.

Even if only a few of these references

are, in fact, historically accurate, speaking

about psychedelic worship leading

to widespread religions, what, then,

is the incentive to keep the secrecy

alive in the information age that we live in today?

>> Institutions that are very invested in telling large

numbers of people what they should think, like religions,

is probably the best example, psychedelics are very

threatening to that because you're saying, no.

I'm not going to accept your doctrine, your dogma, whatever.

I'm going to think for myself.

A society of people that actually think for themselves

is a very dangerous thing to established institutions.

>> What this research reveals is the plant-based shamanic

origins of religion itself.

And that's something that fundamental religion

has been rallied against ever since they took hold.

Ever since the Christian religion took hold,

it began with the suppression of the pagan cults

and suppressed the peyote cults, and the mushroom

cults, and the sacred use of drugs and plants and everything

throughout the whole world, because of this fear out of it.

>> Once religions adopted public persuasion and political power,

the claims of magic powers coming from plant sacraments

were seen as blasphemous, and may have fueled the mass

genocide of shamanic tribes in the Americas.

Even today, it is a controversial claim

to say that psychedelics like psilocybin mushrooms

can elicit a religious or mystical experience.

But if it were true, could this account

for the nature of the transformation

that Christ, and possibly other religious heroes,

claim to have had?

>> There are many writings that indicate that Jesus achieved

his immortality and divinity through entheogens.

Let me give you just one--

for example, eat of my flesh, drink of my blood,

and you will achieve immortality.

I mean, this is in the New Testament.

This is John.

What is Jesus talking about?

Is he advocating cannibalism?

I think not, because this would be anathema

to Romans and to Jews alike.

Number two, when we get into gnostic gospels,

in the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says to the disciples,

to whom can you compare me?

And Thomas answers and he says, master,

I am wholly incapable of comparing you to anyone.

And Jesus replies, I am not your master.

Because you have drunk from the bubbling spring

that I have measured out, you have become like me,

and I have become like you.

And all that is hidden within has been revealed.

Now, what we're talking about is a bubbling spring.

Drinking the drink from my mouth, and a drink

that I have measured out.

We all know that dose is very important.

I mean, here, as close as you can

get without going into volume, he's

talking about measuring out a dose of this particular drink.

We think this is a code for the original Eucharist,

the mushroom.

>> There is something uniquely powerful and re-organization

all about these experiences.

They appear to map on to naturally occurring

mystical or transformative type experiences that

have been reported throughout the ages

by mystics and religious figures.

Now, as a clinical pharmacologist

who's been doing research with all kinds

of different psychoactive compounds for decades,

that's just a remarkable and unprecedented finding.

>> If the leading researcher in psilocybin mushrooms trials

with control groups with nearly two decades of studies can make

the claim that these mushrooms might account for the wildly

mystical stories of religious heroes,

then we may now truly have evidence of the psychedelic

origins of religions around the world.

The ancient Egyptians called mushrooms the sons of the gods,

and plants of immortality, closely resembling the idea

that psychoactive mushrooms were involved

in the divine soma drink of immortality

for the ancient Indians.

The Egyptian origin myth of the sacred mushrooms

was that Set, the storm god, created them

by hurling lightning bolts with spores in them to the earth.

This has relevance to the theory that the first lifeforms

on the planet may have been mushrooms from large molecules

in the oceans that were struck by lightning.

Similar beliefs crop up in anxious Greek, Roman, Indian,

and even Scythian idolatry.

Across the ocean, the Zapotec civilization,

who built impressive temple grounds in Mexico,

prayed to the great lightning bolt that breeds the mushrooms

after their ceremonies.

The Olmec, Maya, Aztec, and quite possibly

many more ancient religions from around the world,

believe that these were divinely intelligent, highly important

holy mushrooms.

As the holy mushroom theory develops and the world becomes

aware of it, perhaps the biggest revelation to come

is not an encouragement to take these substances,

but at the very least, to balance the view

that the modern culture has taken

on psychedelic plants and their role in spiritual pursuits.

Up next, join us as we take a look at the potential future

of psychedelics in society and where the merging of those two

might take us.