Can archaeology help us recover the ecstatic experiences of ancient peoples from the Aegean or Near East? And, if so, what evidence is there that such ecstatic experiences were induced by what we now call “psychedelics”? To what degree was the ancient pursuit of ecstasy understood as an individual or a collective imperative, or both? And in pursuing such questions, what do we learn not only about the ancient Mediterranean world, but about our own modern world, and the contemporary psychedelic renaissance and its priorities? CSWR Director Charles M. Stang will host archaeologists Karen Polinger Foster (Yale) and Andrew Koh (Harvard) to present their research and to discuss these and other questions about “the archaeology of ecstasy.”Karen Polinger Foster is Lecturer Emerita in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and the History of Art at Yale University.
Andrew Koh recently joined the faculty of the Harvard Department of Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations from the MIT Center for Materials Research in Archaeology & Ethnology to inaugurate a new interdisciplinary program in ancient pharmacology and medicine.
Charles M. Stang is Professor of Early Christian Thought and Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School.
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.
SPEAKER 2: "The Archeology of Ecstasy, Psychedelics in the Ancient Mediterranean World," October 25, 2021.
CHARLES M. STANG: Good evening. My name is Charles Stang, and I have the pleasure of serving as the director of the Center for the Study of World Religions here at Harvard Divinity School. And of course, you all know Zina, who often joins me for these events. Welcome to the second event in this year's series on Psychedelics and the Future of Religion, a series now in its second year and part of the center's new initiative on transcendence and transformation, or T&T for short.
As always, the best way to keep abreast of this series, the new initiative, and everything else we do at the center is to sign up for our weekly newsletter. So if you missed our last event on "The Native American Church and Peyote," that video is now posted to our website, as is our event launching the new T&T initiative. We have many more events planned for this year's Psychedelic series, but none yet firmly scheduled, so please stay tuned.
The next event in the broader T&T initiative will be part of our Gnosiology series. On Wednesday, November 11 at 12 noon, Professor Yvonne Chireau from Swarthmore College will be giving a talk entitled "Black Magic Matters, Hoodoo as Ancestral Religion," which will be hosted by my colleague, Giovanna Parmigiani.
Now, it's my pleasure to welcome Karen Polinger Foster and Andrew Koh this evening. Karen has recently retired from a long career as a lecturer in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations and the History of Art at Yale University. Andrew recently joined the faculty of Harvard's Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, coming from the MIT Center for Materials Research in Archeology and Ethnology. And he's come here to Harvard to inaugurate a new interdisciplinary program in ancient pharmacology and medicine.
Karen and Andrew will be speaking on the topic of "The Archeology of Ecstasy, Psychedelics in the Ancient Mediterranean World." This evening's event is a follow up to my interview last year with Brian Muraresku, whose wildly popular book, The Immortality Key, brought attention to the contributions that archeology and the more recent field of archeochemistry can bring to our understanding of the history of psychedelics and their use in ancient ritual and religious contexts.
So this evening, we'll be asking whether and how archeology can help us recover the ecstatic experiences of ancient peoples, in this case from the Aegean and the Near East. And if so, what evidence is there that such ecstatic experiences were induced by what we now call psychedelics? To what degree was the ancient pursuit of ecstasy understood as an individual or a collective imperative or both? And in pursuing such questions as these, what do we learn, not only about the ancient Mediterranean world, but about our own modern world, and especially the contemporary psychedelic renaissance and its priorities?
So we have an hour and a half together this evening. I will soon disappear from the screen, and Karen and Andrew will appear and speak one after the other in that order. And then I will reappear to host the Q&A session with both of them. So if you'd like to pose a question or a comment, you can do so with the Q&A function at the bottom of your Zoom screen.
I imagine we'll get a good many questions, and it's likely we'll only be able to get through a small number of them, but rest assured that we will pass on your questions and comments to our two guests so that they can see what their remarks provoked in you. So Karen and Andrew, thank you once again for joining us, and Karen, the floor is yours.
KAREN POLINGER FOSTER: All right. Well, thank you so much. It's really a pleasure to be part of this event, and I only wish it could be somewhat in person. But on the other hand, I think that we have zoomers from as far away as Australia, so I think that's pretty cool. OK, next slide, please.
One more moonlit night at Knossos. Sir Arthur Evans, beset by fever, chanced to look down the grand staircase, as he wrote in the palace of Minos such was its quote, "strange power of imaginative suggestion that the whole place seemed to awaken a while to life and movement, as if the cup bearer and his fellows had stepped down from the walls and passed and re-passed on the flights below."
A century later, on a full moon evening in August, a visitor to the palace had an equally vivid moment. For her, it was the bull on the North Tower Relief Fresco which appeared to come alive. These two waking dreams, the first by the man whose life work was the rediscovery of Minoan civilization and the second, by a complete non-specialist, make a compelling case for the transcendent ability of this art to engender visions and affect the mind's eye.
But does it also betoken ecstatic psychedelic experience as both a memory and a stimulant? I think the answer is yes, and to convince you as well, I offer this evening a pair of case studies, one, on Kamara Square and the other, on the wall paintings from Xesté 3 on .
In 1895, archeologists investigating the Kamares on Mount Ida discovered dark, lustrous pottery decorated with remarkable polychrome patterns. When a few years later, Evans excavated similar ceramics at Knossos, he called it Kamara Square, a name that's kept. The centers of production were the first Minoan palaces, especially Knossos and Festos. At its height, in the 18th century BCE, there seems to have been no limit to its inventiveness, complexity, and technical prowess. No two paths are alike.
Formal stylistic studies have isolated its decorative elements, some of which you see on the left. These twists flow, whirl, and change direction over the entire vessel's surface. In her seminal analysis, [INAUDIBLE] identified certainly these patterns that she felt to be un-Kamares. As you see on the right, most are lattice grids of checkerboards and networks. These, I believe, should actually be acknowledged as paradigmatic form constants integral to the psychedelic visual vocabulary and to the Kamares syntax.
Now, I'd like to show you seven representative examples. So here we are. I'd like to show you seven representative examples. We'll look, first, at the Kamares pot and then pair it with a work of modern psychedelic art, bridging the gap of 3,500 years. So this is our first example. Don't advance from here.
So dominating this footed dish, four conjoined S spirals, to boldly serrated, and two with interior disk spirals, illusionistically whirl around a central pair of petaloid loops. Between this and the rim are four loops filled with lattices. Visual instabilities of figure ground reversals abound. Focus on the center, and the pattern shimmers, the dots scintillate and the form constants glow. The next.
Frank Tomaselli regularly draws on the hallucinogenic experiences of his youth, coding his work with glossy resin so the colors and intricate forms pop against their black grounds. The out spread wings of his hummingbird seem to work as nectar droplets spill from petals hanging from a dizzying array of spirals, dots, radiating motifs, and petaloid loops, some even with serrated edges. Next.
Here, an orange fish arcs in a sea shown above and below. A large petaloid loop emerges from its mouth, which presents a major ambiguity. Do we read the white lattice insets as a net signifier thrown out across dark waters or the black inner shape as a fish signifier of catches once in future. As our brain goes back and forth, the marine scape begins to pulsate, and the spiral is running below each handle roll in waves around the vessel. The next.
After taking LSD in the dream laboratory in New York, Isaac Abrams turned to painting and founded 1963, the first gallery devoted to psychedelic art. In Flying Leap, a luminous blue field is alive with radiating and spiral form constants in which calligraphic black fish jump from the water and plunge back in splashes of white and red. The next.
Four sets of foliated scrolls densely cover each side of this bridge-spouted jar from Knossos. A special note here is a selective use of orange and crimson and outlying the small, central circles, adding tiny eyes to the loops above the handles and highlighting the whirling motif at the heart of the scroll work. The colors flash, as a strobe light does, augmenting the figure ground reversal effects. Next.
In the 1950s, the experimental psychologist, Oscar Janiger, began to investigate in depth the relationship between artistic creativity and LSD experience. As their trips progressed, the participants, himself included, made crayon sketches. This one has a very Kamares look. Streaks of orange shoot out in four directions, from the attenuated ends of black in curved triangles, each of which has a tiny eye in its center. The next.
Compared to the previous examples, this cup's decoration seems, at first glance, less complex, where its side is taken up by a single rotating device set within a white bordered circle. But as it spins its curving veins about a red-ringed center, the foreign constant acts powerfully and ambiguously, sometimes funneling us deep into a tunnel, other times pushing forward toward us, changing how we read the shape of the vessel. Next.
In her 2005 work, Barbara Takenaga painted thousands of different sizes of dots in yellows and oranges on a black ground to create her own curvy things, pinwheeling an ever expanding motion from a bright center. We soon find ourselves following individual strands of dots to enter into a quasi meditative state. But whether on a cosmic or microscopic scale is the ambiguity the artist offers for our contemplation. The next.
A stick-like tangents to the hoop of a tunnel form constant, exuberant J spirals with latticed petaloid loops propel it into a kaleidoscopic sequence from its red center to the inner red ring to the joined semi circles at its circumference. Large red dots are seemingly randomly placed in the field. But as our eye traces a path from one to the next, they become stepping stones to a mind-altering, visual experience. The next.
The work of Fred Tomaselli, again, offers a thought provoking modern analog. Millennium Phosphene Bloom features kaleidoscopic, tunnel-form constants against a black ground, each of which appear several of the geometric elements seen in our Kamares jar as well as tiny images of flowers, butterflies, and birds, and actual drug capsules. Next.
The upper part of this ceramic relief vessel bears rows of white dot protuberances. Their grid-like formation parting on each side of the jar for a circle filled with white dots ringed by red. The repetitive relief elements and white dots produce illusions of movement and visual instability, while the white and red dots challenge our bigger ground in two three-dimensional perceptions. Next.
Luis Tomasello is among several optical artists using relief. In his reflection number 47, he set up small cubes in rows and columns, each pivoting at a slightly different angle from its neighbors. His periodicity we strive to determine, as the shadows create secondary illusions. Next.
Opposite the spout, free-form curvilinear shapes, illusions quickly flow from the rim. Did we see a face, rosette eyes, handle nose, open mouth, luminous aura? But what of the naturalistically rendered a creamy goat? We appear to have moved into the later hallucinatory phase, during which vision iconography can assume cultural significance. So it's not surprising to find an animal popular in the Minoan bestiary. Next.
For modern analogs, there is much to choose from, as depictions of hallucinatory experiences often show faces. Chiho Aoshima, City Glow animation, faces emerge from facades morphing from and into a lush landscape with an exquisite crane in the starry sky, a staple of Japanese avian art. The next.
In my time remaining, we now head north to the [? secluded ?] Island of Hera, where its volcano exploded about 1525 BCE and the largest eruption in Europe in the past 100,000 years. Spyridon Marinatos' spectacular discovery of a Bronze Age town buried in the eruption debris-- and you see here are some early photos; it was just starting to emerge-- earned the site the nickname Pompeii of the Aegean. Next.
As with the Vesuvian sites, the fall of volcanic ash protected a wealth of architecture and wall paintings, many of them still on their actual walls. By Aegean lights, this is an extraordinarily well-preserved fresco, in fact, one of the ones we'll be discussing. Next.
My focus is on the splendid building known as Xesté 3. Here you have a composite view of its elaborately decorated and constructed spaces. Each floor has multiple, large, and small-scale murals. Their subjects include scenes of young women gathering saffron crocuses, monkeys playing musical instruments and brandishing swords, and an enthroned woman attended by a monkey and a leashed griffin. Next, please.
Up on the top floor, several sets of monumental frescoes have now been conserved with more to come. On the north wall directly above the enthroned woman, the large composition known as The Blue Spirals. The Red Spirals cover the wall on the south side. In my opinion, these reflect altered states of consciousness and/or induced psychedelic responses in the viewer with their illusions, colors, ambiguities and form constants, spinning us rapidly into other realms. Next, please.
This is what the restored blue spirals look like. I would draw your attention, especially to the precise optical geometry, the blue and red reversals, and the spiral embellishments, the dots running parallel within the spirals, the anther-like crescents along scalloped edging, and the dot-bordered bisques in the J flourishes. Next.
No, back one, please. Yeah. And you can see many of these elements, again, in the restored red spirals. We'll come back to them in a moment so that you can see them at greater length. And now the next one.
On the same floor as the spirals, we have the relief lozenges and rosettes, which turn a corner a short distance away. The illusion of throbbing, wave-like movement comes from the undulating relief bend held together by perspectival rings, as well as from the rosette variations. In some, murex purple was used, whose extreme rarity in Aegean wall painting creates a kind of visual hiccup in the brain. And now, next, let's go back to The Red Spirals. Next.
I show here some modern analogs for two of its elements. On the right is a South American yarn image, made to depict a peyote-induced vision with aura sparkling around a form constant tunnel. On the left, is a work by Victor Vasarely, often called the founder of optical art.
Here, as in our red and blue spirals, he capitalizes on the processing instability created in our minds by two juxtaposed, highly saturated colors far apart on the spectrum. And the next.
I think the closest modern parallels to the collected and collected visions of the top floor of Xesté 3 are the skylight galleries of the Vasarely Foundation. As with our spirals, his murals gain momentum from the connections made one to the other, back and forth across the space, or through the open doorways to other displays. The next.
I suggest that whatever was going on in our [? hearing ?] building started on the top floor. Again, we have a modern guide and hallucinatory memory sequence painted by a South American tribesman. Let's follow some [INAUDIBLE] through Xesté 3. I see them consuming a psychoactive substance, perhaps served at the heirloom marble bowl found there. Their initial visions would have been geometric optical illusions and scintillating form constants, their effect heightened by the huge red and blue spirals and dizzying rosettes.
As their psychedelic experience progressed, their visions would have transitioned to more figurative ones, ebbing and flowing in hallucinatory vibrancy, room after room on the floors below. The next.
There are still so many questions, but I hope that my case studies convinced you and may encourage others to seek the psychedelic elsewhere in Aegean Bronze Age art. To this end I conclude as I began with a quotation from Sir Arthur Evans, here reflecting on the fantastic ceilings from Zakro. Quote, "The types shift and transform themselves like the phantoms of a dream. A facing Sphinx take shape again as a winged cherub with lions feet, but hey, presto, the new impersonation, in turn, dissolves itself, and so the metamorphoses proceed." Thank you.
ANDREW J. KOH: Thank you for that, Karen. I hope to segue now from your wonderful presentation to some of the things that we're doing in the field. I want to start with definitions and some background. What do I mean by an invisible archeology?
What I mean is a new approach to detecting some of the psychedelia, ancient pharmacology in medicine that Dr. Foster referred to. These case studies, I'll present three of them, span over the past two decades. And I want to end with also talking about some new directions we could go to in the coming years.
First of all, I want to start with the premise that we have, indeed, undoubtedly discovered archeological evidence for psychedelia. Some of you are familiar with recent discoveries such as evidence for the use of psychedelics associated with cave paintings, and it is my suspicion and premise that there is actually much more than we have actually presented and published. And I'll go into some of the reasons why.
So the more pertinent question is, how much has been actually misconstrued, overlooked, or even downplayed. And what I want to present today is that a transdisciplinary approach, which I'll explain in a second overcomes these siloed outlooks that have hindered a better understanding of how we can discern and better understand psychedelia in the ancient world in the past, in general.
So what exactly is transdisciplinarity? I want to start by saying it's distinct from disciplines working in parallel, so multidisciplinarity where different specialists do their own thing, and they might meet at the end or even in dialogue with each other, interdisciplinarity. I want to stress that there is this qualitative difference because oftentimes, we think that these adjectives or describers are just an intensive thing.
Transdisciplinarity is just more of working with others, but I propose that in the way I define it, it actually means a new way to approach how we study the past. So in fact, it's the seamless fusion of disciplines to create a novel unified approach resulting in newly obtainable results. So the idea of obtaining new information is really at the crux of the matter.
And what's been driving this transdisciplinarity approach is organic residue analysis, or aura. It's been the engine driving my own research for the past couple of decades.
To start off, what are we dealing with? And when we talk about ancient pharmacopeia, first of all, organics were central and very prevalent in the ancient world, but are now largely invisible. So if you look at this poster that a team member of mine he led a couple of years ago, you can see that if you're a ubiquitous potter that you discover all over the ancient world. But what we do by using this transdisciplinarity approach is make this mute pottery come alive.
So rather than just viewing it as an Egyptian style jar, in fact, we detected honey in there. So why is that honey in this jar, so on, and so forth. So I will explain with my examples I'm doing of what ramifications this transdisciplinarity approach has.
Also, we know about modern pharmacopeia that, as we see with products such as Moroccanoil, that these organic goods from this region are still abundant and increasingly valued today. I learned about Moroccanoil from my wife, and it's a perfect example of how complex this idea of ancient pharmacopeia might be.
In this example of Moroccanoil, it's a company based in London who sources the raw materials from Morocco, hence its name, but it's actually manufactured in the modern country of Israel. So you can see the complex interplay between the different locations, and it very much reflects what I believe happened in the past. So the ultimate question is, how much can we retrieve from antiquity in terms of understanding pharmacopeia, psychedelia, et cetera?
In essence, where can we go after these two passed decades of foundational research? So I had some initial questions concerning psychedelia and ecstatic experiences in the ancient world. That kind of riffs off what Dr. Stang mentioned at the start. I want to kind of focus it more in my realm of research.
So for example, did the peoples and cultures of antiquity view these phenomena the same way as us? How much do our modern worldviews and sensibilities affect our ability to perceive and interpret ancient evidence? To what degree can we understand the fundamental nature and role of these phenomena in ancient societies? And finally, to what extent can we unravel the ramifications any understanding holds for us today?
And I hope to start addressing these questions by using these case studies and to give you an idea of the complexities and the challenges that we face, as we try to really grasp this past evidence and have it come to bear on our present and future. I want to start with probably my earliest major project dealing with ancient organic residues and discerning what this evidence means.
It occurred in the Eastern part of Crete right in the center of the Eastern Mediterranean, really at the crossroads between the Aegean world that Dr. Foster just mentioned-- here is -- and the Ancient Near East Cyprus, Egypt, et cetera. So this really the theater of my research for the past 20 years.
So the question I ask is, what's in a name? So this gets you an example that some of the hurdles that we faced in recognizing this psychedelia. So this research was the topic of my dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania. It concerned a Late Bronze Age building at a site called Mochlos, a Harbor Town in East Crete, affiliated with what we called the Minoan peoples. And it deals with this Room 5.
You can see the state of affairs here in the right when it was excavated approximately 20 years ago. This is after it was cleaned, but the vessels, for the most part, were left. There was a jar that was very interesting that was found right in this region. Initially, my job here was just to be the survey supervisor. It was not to do any kind of scientific research of this sort.
But I saw this room, and something piqued my interest about it, that there was something, perhaps, unusual. The initial analysis-- to give you an idea of how archeology works-- is, everyone said, for the most part, this is wine press room. Let's chalk it up to that, and let's move on. We have other things to do.
And this was the supposition for good reason. Because the second phase of this building on the left, they found this cache of these large jars that are over half a meter tall. And these jars have been widely recognized to be wine jars. So they said there's a vat. That's where they pressed the grapes to make the wine. Never mind that it's from a different area of the building, approximately a generation apart.
So nevertheless, they amused me, and they allowed me to take organic residue samples from these various vessels. So I automatically assumed that we would find wine based upon everything pointing to it. And that's how it had been published if I hadn't intervened.
But the science tells us something different. The organic residues point to the fact that there is no evidence for wine. In fact, what these compounds point to is some kind of olive oil-based aromatic.
You can see the olive oil remnants and then all these archaeobotanical ingredients. So where the discussions that automatically leapt to is a perfumed oil workshop. This is somewhat of a technical term in the discipline based upon tablets that have been discovered in the past and named such because of the ingredients that these tablets list. But what I want to propose today is that even this name, I think, should be called into question.
So here are some of the ingredients, and they, in fact, do reflect the ingredients in these tablets are written down as inventory at a workshop in the mainland of Greece. And you can see for the most part, it reflects an aromatic production. Until, I would propose you look at some of the details.
And by the way, one of the ingredients in this workshop was from Cretan rock relic, is this Creticus, which is actually displayed in the Xesté 3 building that Dr. Foster had just mentioned. So with that, having the context of Dr. Foster just described, that immediately gives a clue that something else might be going on in this workshop other than making perfumed oils.
For instance, wormwood was one of the ingredients, and as we know, it was described in great detail by later historians and scientists, for instance, by the D. Escortes, when he describes the qualities and the effects of wormwood. Many of you might be familiar with it, as it relates to abstinence, for instance.
So once again, evidence that this is something more than perhaps we would call a perfume or something like that. But let me outline here an example, going back to the tablets of how a transdisciplinarity approach can really change our understanding of the evidence.
So this is the very tablet that has come to give name to this type of industry in this Late Bronze Age Aegean world, the Perfumed oil Workshop tablet from the side of Pylos in southwest mainland Greece. So this is the transliteration of the tablet. It's done in the earliest surviving evidence we have for the earliest Greek, so it's related to ancient classical Greek, but a century earlier.
And you can see one of the earliest translations in 1985 by Dr. Cynthia Shelmerdine, and she writes "Thus, Alxoitas gave to Thyestes the perfume-boiler aromatics for perfume destined for boiling." So as you know, there's a subjective aspect of translating these text, and oftentimes, especially this early stage of the Greek language, we often don't know the exact definition of some of these terms.
So it's very much flavored and colored by our preconceived notions of what this should be. So automatically, you see things like here's the list of ingredients at the bottom of the tablets, and when you see things like coriander and other evidence for botanicals, you automatically assume this is a perfume ring. But to give you an idea of how complex this process is, 30 years later, Tom Palaima translated as, "A-ko-so-ta gave incense materials to Thyestes, the unguent boiler, so they might be boiled."
Here I agree with Dr. Shelmerdine that unguent isn't correct because the radiogram afterward chose a liquid, and unguents, of course, are solid at room temperature. But regardless, the other aspects kind of shows you that perfume is actually not set in stone in the translation. So there's very much a subjective way and the connotation that we bring out that often isn't displayed in these translations.
But with this transdisciplinarity approach, we have new evidence. So here are the vessels associated with the workshop that I mentioned just earlier, and you can see what the science and other evidence can do in terms of affecting things like translations. Because, for example, here we can see how this funnel was used with this vat. And one thing fascinating about the science is that there was evidence for cholesterol and other kinds of lipids in this funnel, but none in this vessel, the vat, the main part itself.
So this actually, I believe, reflects the ingredients in this tablet because they've never been able to figure out why is wool attached to these lists of ingredients. What I proposed, in fact, is that the wool was placed in this funnel as a filter of sorts. I do believe this is also honey because I have a proposed purpose for it, but I won't get into that right now.
But with this additional information, using the ingredients from the science, combining it with the original Mycenaean Greek, as preposterous as it is, I have proposed a new translation. You got to understand that Professor Shelmerdine is one of the foremost experts ancient perfumes, and Tom Palaima was probably the expert in Aegean script. So for me to propose a different translation normally would be absolutely preposterous, but I have the advantage of having additional information.
So the way I would translate it is, "A-ko-so-ta gave pharmacopeic materials to Thyestes, the ointment maker," literally, oil boiler is what it is, not perfumer, "for infusing or the infusion process." So right away, you can see that this really calls into question the identification of these workshops as perfumed oil workshops. In my opinion, they're more akin to something like an apothecary or even a lab. So then that starts to get you thinking what else have we, perhaps, misinterpreted or misconstrued through our research and siloed kind of outlooks.
There's another mystery with this context, and it's the fact that ferulic acid was found in the vessel. The science doesn't lie. The toughest part is trying to figure out where it came from. It perhaps could be as simple as giant fennel, but giant fennel is usually used for culinary purposes. So it doesn't fit with the character of any of these, whether the texts or the archeology. So perhaps we should look at other areas.
For instance, another ferula plant is asafoetida, and you can see this much more fits along the lines of an apothecary or something like that. It has more of these medicinal effects, and what's fascinating is when you go to the roughly contemporaneous time period, we even have another ferula plant that's even more fascinating, ancient silphium. It is was renowned in antiquity because it only grew in ancient Libya, in the brackish coast, and was more valuable than gold.
It was valuable enough that they overharvested it to extinction, and the legend goes that the last surviving example was given to the Emperor Nero as a curiosity. It provided enough money to the site of Sirene, they were able to mint their own coins and gave them this vast wealth based upon this one product. And also, because of its extinction, it rapidly declined going into late antiquity.
What did it do? Why was it so valuable? Here's another fascinating thing, Pliny, the historian, Pliny, the Elder, he actually dances around what it did, but we get clues. And there are probably reasons why he didn't come out and say it, but from what we can tell, it was probably the most powerful abortifacient in antiquity judging by the qualities of other ferulas.
So once again, this is clearly an example of something that is not culinary or just an aromatic simply, but perhaps something much more. In case this seems like a jump and a leap, there's actually contextual archeological support for this potential, and the fact that next to the workshop at Mochlos I just described, they found multiple seal stones, as you can see here-- and here's the impression that makes-- depicting silphium seeds. Nobody doubts this.
So once again, why are they depicting silphium seeds in the exact same time period next door which, again, lends credibility to the fact that they might have been brewing something, making something with silphium as a major ingredient centuries before it was leveraged to extinction by the people in the classical periods.
So perfumed oil workshop, that's how it is in the record books, but to me, with the new evidence in looking here with my mapping of the context, it very much more looks like a lab of sorts. There's no context ever found like this so far. If you were just making wine, you would just have the vat there. You wouldn't have it ensconced like an insulation, you wouldn't have this nice platform, et cetera, et cetera. So I think we've got to start rethinking what this evidence means and even contrasting it with two paintings, which have always been considered perfume making, but once again, what are these additional processes that have never been common to bond?
A second case study is the challenge of interpretation. So in addition to preconceived notions of what the evidence might mean, even when we're presented with the interpretation right in front of us, it doesn't necessarily mean that we will take it to heart and then reevaluate what it might all mean.
So I want to take you now to a ritual site in the center of the Peloponnese of Greece before we head to the Ancient Near East. It's a site of Mt. Lykaion, one of the earliest sanctuaries to Zeus. They even claimed that that's, in fact, where the God, Zeus, was born.
Regardless, there's a lower and upper sanctuary. The lower sanctuaries mainly classical, but the upper sanctuary goes back approximately 4,000 years, all the way to the Bronze Age. And it's up here in the upper sanctuary some of the most intriguing evidence came up. It's very difficult to make out, but all of these little pieces and a lot of this and also in the back, it's not stone or pebbles, it's burnt bone.
So this altar was constantly burning sacrifices over millennia, presumably even with Zeus all the way going back to the Bronze Age, so it leads to a lot of interesting questions about the continuity of cult, of ritual, et cetera. So this was approximately 10, 15 years ago, when I was asked to study this.
So this was found up in the altar. It's not these vessels itself, but I want to show what these vessels might look like. This is a kylix, or kylikes, and unsurprisingly, there was wine in one of the body shirts. So that's how we were going to publish it, but what's absolutely fascinating is this sample-- there were additional samples-- had this very tall unusual peak, and every evidence points to it being colchicine.
There is a challenge of this interpretation, which is why I first started to think that this has to be done in the transdisciplinarity way and not just relying on the science, is that here is a nice chemical reference of colchicine, the mass spectrum of it. And you can see when you're dealing with degraded ancient samples that are over 3,000 years old, though the fragmentation patterns are an exact match, the quantities can be a little tricky.
So this is when you've got to look at the historical context, the text, and also use, in addition to pure chemical standards, also, ethnobotanical standards, ethnographic samples, et cetera. So that's when I first started thinking about this. To add this additional evidence to fingerprint what you find so it's without doubt believed to be the botanical specimen that is referenced.
This method, this transdisciplinarity approach, allows you to even nuance storax products goods down to exactly the different plant it might have come from. So it certainly has proven efficacious. Ethnographic references are also important, whether you're doing things like oil or wine, murex for purple dye or honey, et cetera, et cetera. So these more modern examples of use of these products can serve as excellent references because they're producing, in essence, the same products that were produced centuries ago.
Experimental archeology helps. There's been a lot of very helpful people who've come and approached us. For example, one was interested in producing a perfume or aromatic for us using these two different types of resins and again, serving as a nice reference sample that proves beyond the shadow of doubt what we're finding is interpreted correctly.
So to sum up in terms of colchicine, it's clearly not something that could be construed as just a preservative. It only naturally derives from Colchicum autumnale. It's poisonous in high doses, yet to this day, it is the best antidote for gout. It's not synthetically produced, but it's actually extracted from Colchicum autumnale to this day.
And it also serves as a remedy for all sorts of ailments that is used to this day-- rheumatism, familial Mediterranean fever, Crohn's disease, lupus, et cetera. So clearly, not something that can just easily be put into a category of perfumes or additives for preservation.
Once you zoom back out and bring the ethnohistory, it gets even more interesting. We know that it was used medicinally as early as 3,500 years ago by the Egyptians. D. Escortes himself confirms that it grew abundantly really, but in two locations-- Messenia, which is right near this side of Mt. Lykaion and Colchis in the Black Sea region. And also, legend states that the first example was produced from the blood of Prometheus, and Medea produced a potion from it to protect Jason.
I'm not saying that this is exactly what happened, but this reference, again, should make us question the categories we've placed some of these ingredients. Obviously, to the ancients, they had some kind of special meaning. Can we unravel what this meaning actually was conveying? What was actually happening on the ground?
Just very quickly, for instance, Colchis is way up here. Mt. Lykaion is here, and as a fascinating twist, Colchis, of course, connected directly to the myth of Medea and the Golden Fleece and all that. So is this an allegory. This cannot only illuminate topics such as psychedelia, but also, the ritual practices, the mythology, and that's really what makes it absolutely fascinating to me.
So the final interpretation of colchicine-spiked wine is a poison, ritual, medicine, fertility, all of the above. That's something that we're going to determine now since this evidence is increasingly pointing in this direction. But nevertheless, the interpretation part is always tricky for the reasons I mentioned.
My final case study, psychoactive potions. This gives you an idea, once again, similar to the first example, when you have an idea of what the evidence should be or has traditionally been interpreted to be that can often put blinders on or guardrails in terms of really thinking clearly about what this evidence might mean.
So this takes us to the Levant, to the upper Galilee, to a Middle Bronze Age palace from almost 4,000 years ago. I gave a talk on this around five years ago at Harvard, so I'm not going to go too much into the details since that video is online. But what I do want to focus on is not so much the simple evidence for wine, but once again, this transdisciplinarity approach and how we can rethink where psychedelia exists and how we can better discern it in the empirical evidence.
So this is a very fortuitous discovery in the sense anytime you discover something that changes the very definition of something as important as the wine industry, viticulture, et cetera, here in The New York Times, it's, of course, something that you're very thankful for because then you can ask questions that you normally can't answer.
So here we are in 2013, field sampling these multitude of jars, thousands and thousands of liters of wine. And as many of you might know, the evidence, it clearly shows wine unlike at Mochlos it's not an aromatic. The base was wine, but what I want to focus on today unlike last time I presented this is the rest of it that I just kind of glossed over.
All of these ingredients, very complex, and this is probably just a portion of a dozen or more ingredients that was added in this interesting context. Once again, we get more clues to help us interpret the context, in this case from contemporaneous ethnohistorical references as diverse as Egyptian kyphi recipes.
So this concoction that was first mentioned as early as the Old Kingdom and the pyramid text all the way to the later classical periods, Roman even, we see here that it mentions that the recipe includes things like honey, wine, raisins, cyperus, so things that we found in this context. But I want to point to this last sentence, the fact that it's mentioned not as just a simple beverage, but a potion and a salve.
It's taken internally to cleanse internal organs, so on and so forth, so again, a very medicinal context for this type of wine. The contemporaneous Mari Wine Tablets, kind of shows the same thing, go with strong wines, sweet wines. And then it talks about three major categories, depending on the herbal aromatics added to it coming from some kind of oil from Cyprus, myrtle oil, and a juniper oil.
So once again, it's clearly showing that these lines are blurred between a simple beverage, alcoholic or not, and beyond that, these botanicals that are added to it. So like I originally concluded years ago, the room was a place to wine cellar, but for what? It contained these resonated herbal wines. What do these herbal wines mean?
Is it as simple as just making regular wine for export as displayed here in the contemporaneous Egyptian tomb? But if you look at the context here, it very much seems more similar to the first context I showed you at Mochlos. There's a platform. There were measuring cups found just like at Mochlos ladles, bowls. And it's clear that this isn't just a simple production facility, a little simple line, but there's somebody with some knowledge here.
At the platform and as jars come, in they're adding these botanicals that we found. And we know this because the jars that are further south here, they don't contain any of the botanicals. So it's clear that it's coming from wherever the wine was fermenting, and before consumption, they were adding all these botanicals to it. Once again, it sounds like more than a simple winery or simple facility just for nourishment.
We get additional evidence to support this. Is it the same as simple household feasting like here? I would say because of the context, once again, the wine cellar is here. There was a fancy building with Ashlar masonry and orthostates here, which was probably akin to this kind of elite feasting context, with a bovine that was sacrificed.
So what I would propose is that they were adding things to this wine that we're only just beginning to understand. It's not just simply resonated wine, but they're clearly adding these botanicals for effect. And I think the sooner that we have that perspective, the more likely we're going to make these discoveries and be able to present it in a coherent manner.
So in sum, this transdisciplinarity approach, it provides fresh answers and high resolution. It allows us to recover ancient organics to reveal humanity's past to inform our present. It can answer questions related to ecology and what the sourcing of these organics do because we know just as with the silphium plant, there was much denuding a forest to produce some of these items.
We can talk about manufacturing and innovation, the recipes themselves, potentially, and also, what this means on a more global scale, on the local and global scale. The exchange and consumption are people consuming the same products, same goods when they're exported thousands of miles away. How is the technology and the notion of these items transferred-- branding, market demand, et cetera.
We can also reconstruct the paleoenvironment, paleoecology, which we see that clearly in one example where they changed one ingredient a couple of centuries later, perhaps due to aridification. And perhaps what's most interesting for our audience today, what ramifications this has for economic and social cultural practices, whether it's localized rituals, scentscapes, as some have called it-- I would call it something like, perhaps, psychedelia escapes-- and ultimately, perspectives on modern life and corresponding applications, as Dr. Stang mentioned at the very start.
So I hope this was just an example. This might be new information for many of you. We are just starting in many ways, but I feel with this approach really coming to the forefront, we can make incredible head ways to finally answer the question of, can archeology answer and discern questions related to ancient psychedelia. Thank you.
CHARLES M. STANG: Thank you, Andrew. So there you go. I don't want to cut short your beautiful closing slide there, but there we go. And Karen, if you would please turn on your audio and video now, we'd like to have you join the conversation. There's Karen. Wonderful.
Thank you both so much. What I'm going to propose is that I'm going to invite you each to ask the other any questions you have because you two are experts, and you may have questions that would be illuminating for those of us who aren't experts. And while you're doing that, I will mine the questions that people have submitted. There's a good number here.
But before that, Andrew, there's one question that I want to ask you. Well, first of all, let me say, Karen, I've gotten a number of requests from people to know the names of the artists that you cited, the modern artists. And I suggest they email you directly for that. People quite interested in that.
So Andrew, there's one thing that I and at least one other person of the hundreds attending this event missed and that is, when you mentioned the silphium that is in the ferula family, the one that's from Libya that was over harvested to extinction, you said that it was the most important something, and that it, perhaps, changed our understanding of what was being done in this site. But I missed what's the effect that you think Pliny is talking around?
ANDREW J. KOH: Well, it's not just Pliny. It's a very fascinating topic, I think. It's not really my focus, but there's, I'm sure, plenty of articles that could be written. Because Pliny, as you know, is very verbose to the point of exaggeration, perhaps.
So if anything, it sticks out because he is so squirrelly about describing what it does. So it's, obviously, something that might be, maybe it's something considered taboo or something like that, but we have other evidence. For instance, this is the human aspect of this fascinates me.
So I'm not even sure I like to go there. I don't normally read all of it. I don't do that much Latin, to be honest with you. I'm sorry, Charlie, but--
CHARLES M. STANG: Neither do I. I don't like it.
ANDREW J. KOH: OK, good. So I love this one description by Alvid, I believe it was Alvid who says, if those two keep going at it, they're going to need some silphium.
CHARLES M. STANG: Say that again.
ANDREW J. KOH: If those two keep going at it, they're going to need some silphium. And we know what ferula asafoetida does. It's much weaker, but what we think is-- and I went through a little bit too fast. We think silphium, back then, of course, but even today, if it existed would be the most powerful abortifacient, the morning after pill. All the evidence points to, basically, serving that function.
CHARLES M. STANG: OK. Yes, someone asked precisely that question, and you did move by it fast, and so I'm glad we came back to that. So that's the possible kind of use of that. All right. Fascinating. All right. So I'm going to invite you each to ask each other questions, and meanwhile, I'll prepare some questions from the audience.
So Andrew, why don't you ask any questions you might have of Karen, and then Karen, in turn, can ask you.
ANDREW J. KOH: Great. Karen, I had one that's kind of I've been thinking about with your wonderful presentation is, I'm thinking about Harvard's own Emily Vermeule, who had commented-- she's a legend. She's one of the reasons why I got into all this, and she had mentioned the fact that there's so much in ancient art, and in particular, Aegean art, that involves the individual and strange.
I love the way she kind of phrases it that way as in presumably back decades ago, it was even much more difficult to talk about some of these interpretations and what's actually going into art than it is today. In your opinion, when she talks about the strange and kind of dances around, we all know what it is, in general, but when she dances around it, in your opinion, how much kind of relate to what I just talked about.
Over the decades of people have studied this art, especially even Akrotiri as a lot of that so recent, how much do you think, as a society, are whatever you going to call it, our culture, our morals, or whatever have kind of filtered and affected the way we discover and interpret these scenes?
It doesn't just have to be Thiran art, of course. We can go back generations earlier.
KAREN POLINGER FOSTER: Right. Well, that's a wonderful question. And to answer that, I think I will tell you a small story. When the Thira Wall Painting Symposium took place on the Island of Thira, they arranged a display of what had been restored at that point, and this is now going back 15, 18 years now, of some of these monumental wall paintings. And they were photographed with a good friend of a somewhat older generation.
Now, I who came of age in the famous '60s, looked at these and said, wow, they are so psychedelic. And she looked at me, drew herself up and said, oh, no. Oh, no, that couldn't possibly be. So that sort of sat in my mind for a very long time.
And as you all probably know, that is to say two co-editors and I have a book about to come out called Ecstatic Experience in the Ancient World, and it has 27 chapters on the subject of ecstatic experience, indeed. And so that seemed to me a perfect opportunity to go back to what my impression had been when I looked at these images.
And to my absolute delight, Andreas Orkopoulos and his incredibly talented restorer artist had also, in the course of years of restoring these works, come to very similar conclusions, particularly about the Xesté 3. And it was just wonderful to think that that really is there. It really is there.
And with that, I began looking at other examples of Aegean art to see what was there. And of course, I went back to Kamara Square, and [? Gisela ?] Wahlberg who is, again, slightly older generation and not prone to flights of fancy at all, shall we say, in that seminal work on Kamara Square, she said, well, this just isn't Kamares. I don't know what it's doing here, but it's just not Kamares.
And when I began looking into psychedelic vocabulary, visual vocabulary, that is, I said, wait a minute, these are form constants. They're absolutely part of psychedelic vocabulary. They're absolutely part of Kamara syntax. Do those two stories sort help answer your question, I hope?
ANDREW J. KOH: It does. I mean, when I think about Kamares where I remember in my younger days, you could probably relate to this, we want to recreate, perhaps, what they're doing at Kamares Caves. So we hiked from Vorizia all the way up, and we spent the night up at the cave.
KAREN POLINGER FOSTER: Did you? Wow.
ANDREW J. KOH: Yeah, and then when you go into the cave, it clearly is a sanctuary or ritual site. I mean, there's something going on there. I mean, they're bringing the wealth up. And again, I mean, again, I know more of the archeology side, of course, more than the art side, but I kind of, as we joked, could you do this if you were completely sober?
Because there is something about that side in the context, and are we missing some of this. Because some of these sites were dug in the Victorian era, right?
KAREN POLINGER FOSTER: 1890s, yeah. Exactly. Although Evans, as you heard, in both my opening and concluding quotations from him, he was absolutely right on it. Yes? He was absolutely on it. That last slide, that's mine on the left, those blue magic mushrooms, where, actually, in our back garden, it's been an amazing year for mushrooms.
CHARLES M. STANG: [INAUDIBLE]
KAREN POLINGER FOSTER: Yeah, hasn't it?
CHARLES M. STANG: It's uncanny here in New England. It's like a bumper crop of fungus is taking over the forest.
KAREN POLINGER FOSTER: And it's kinds I've never seen before.
CHARLES M. STANG: Amazing. Yeah.
KAREN POLINGER FOSTER: But there they were, and when you look at that glyptic from Zakro, and you look at those right next to those magic mushrooms, I hope it didn't go by too fast, but it's really just inescapable. So I'm kind of hoping that others will be encouraged to look at other aspects of Aegean art and say, hey, wait a minute, that's probably what's going on here. And I mean, I did these two case studies, but obviously, there are lots more, and I would think that some in the audience are beginning to wonder about that. Good. Great.
ANDREW J. KOH: Well, you bring up a good point just quickly is that from the time of the wall paintings that Dr. Foster brought up in the workshop I mentioned, in let's say around 1415 Thira 1600 BCE, it precipitously got more arid. So you've got to ask where the ingredients starting to be missing and how are they adapt.
So that's one of the reasons why I went to this earlier time period because I knew that a lot of people would say, well, we don't think this plant grew. Well, when you go to the Akrotiri in the Melodic Scenes, they call it, that must be totally fanciful. I'm beginning to doubt that, that wasn't just an imaginary landscape. But because of the climate being so much wetter, that's something we've got to rethink, I believe.
CHARLES M. STANG: I think one of the things that's so fascinating about both your presentations is that they're invitations to reassess evidence and re-categorize things. In some sense, it feels as if we're on the cusp of the threshold of a reassessment of things that we thought we knew well.
So can I jump in, Andrew, and ask Karen a question, which is sort of a comparative question. And Karen, I don't know if this will go beyond your expertise. This is from James Woodruff. He wants to know whether you see similar artistic motifs in indigenous art from pre-Colombian peoples in the Western, in the Americas, so to speak.
So what evidence do we have that these motifs, ancient or less so, can be attributed to the use of entheogens. So you've made this case by putting side to side ancient Near Eastern and modern art, suggesting that the ancient might be inspired by psychedelia. If that's the case, we would expect a similar sort of recurrence of those motifs in other places where we think entheogens were used. So do you have thoughts on that?
KAREN POLINGER FOSTER: I do. Two of the slides that I showed towards the end did include images made by folks in the Amazon region, Amazon, that is the river, not the global monolith. Yeah, and I wish there were some way that we could look at those two again to answer this question.
Nick, is there any way that he could get back to this, or is this hopelessly--
CHARLES M. STANG: No, I don't think that's-- Nick, can you share Karen's PowerPoint again, and she can walk us through?
KAREN POLINGER FOSTER: It's almost at the end, and there was a yarn image from some tribes people of the Amazon Orinoco region. And then there was also just the second slide from the end was yeah, way down. Yes, keep going. Keep going. Keep going.
NICK: Unload a little bit.
KAREN POLINGER FOSTER: Yeah. They're such big images, but wait. Yes, wait. Number 28 will, I think, answer that. Pardon me? So the one down in the lower right is a yarn image made specifically to commemorate a psychedelic experience that this person had. And if you look then up at the spirals, can you see that we have just the same sort of tunnel form constants in the hooks of the spirals. Do you see that? I wish I could point somehow.
But you can see that, I think, quite clearly, even the same colors that's sort of radiating motifs. And then if you look at slide 30, can you do that? So the upper one is the record that was made, this painting, the record was made by this individual whom you see there in the upper right, and those are exactly the kinds of images that he had in, what shall we say, the more geometric phase of hallucinatory images.
Our colleagues in the cognitive neurosciences tell us that hallucinations, generally speaking, they go from form constants to much more representational imagery. And so this is the beginning of his trip.
CHARLES M. STANG: But those are contemporary instances. Do we have any pre-Colombian, so to speak, art from the Americas?
KAREN POLINGER FOSTER: Well, I'm going to leave that to my pre-Colombian colleagues. Yes.
CHARLES M. STANG: But fascinating question.
KAREN POLINGER FOSTER: Yeah, the continuity of experience there is, I think, something that you should find, but I'll leave that part. But certainly, in the modern era, the correspondences are, I think, really telling and compelling.
CHARLES M. STANG: I want to tell you that Brian Muraresku is joining us, and he says, not a question, but a comment for Karen-- Bravo. I'm going to correct his-- Brava. But thrilling presentation reminiscent of the once controversial now archeochemically substantiated work of David Lewis Williams.
And Brian says, "I'm so excited to read The Routledge Companion to Ecstatic Experience in the Ancient World. Just pre-ordered for hardcover." So I put the title of the book in the chat so anyone else who's interested, it is The Routledge Companion to Ecstatic Experience in the Ancient World.
I've seen the table of contents. It's going to be amazing. It is amazing. I just don't have my hands on it yet.
KAREN POLINGER FOSTER: We don't either, but the end is in sight. We're just at the absolute final stages of tweaking the page proofs and so forth. And you'll be happy to know that the cover girl is that first Kamara Square pot.
CHARLES M. STANG: Here's a question for-- I think this goes for either of you, but I'm guessing that Andrew, you might want to take a stab at it first, given your piece about transdisciplinarity. So this is from James Lowery, and there's another version. I'm going to combine two questions. Did the peoples of the ancient Mediterranean, either through epigraphy or iconography, make explicit reference to psychotropic substances?
So another way of putting that is, do we have any textual evidence for what we're calling for better or worse psychedelics? And Andre Arapata, if I'm saying your name right, asks or comments, it seems that the psychedelic experience is absent from the written text we have access to. Is this a symptom of historic censorship, or the very nature of the subject matter that in every era it was in some way underground, whether it was legally prohibited as today or a sort of esoteric secret [INAUDIBLE] was held in the Eleusinian mysteries?
So maybe just one way to put it is, what's the textual record, and if there's not a thick textual record, how do we explain that?
ANDREW J. KOH: I mean, kind of referring to what I referenced before, there is a good textual record, but again, as I tried to point out in short time is that I think the interpretation is partially the filter I talked about. So oftentimes, texts that I would consider in this realm are put into things like magic or as you know, especially, when you go to the early Christian age.
So when you even go-- I talked about Plutarch, for instance. He has one of the best accounts. It's exactly what I referenced when he talks about Egypt. And you can imagine the filters it goes through. So basically, you have a Greek person group in a Roman world looking at ancient Egyptian culture that's then translated and interpreted by whoever we are for the last 100 years.
So you can imagine through that type of filter, by the time it gets to us, it's either kind of put into this nonsense category, I would say almost, like this is just like voodoo medicine or if it even gets to us. So one of the [INAUDIBLE] people doing this and another question is, why are you doing this in the humanities in a place like [? now. ?]
And the reason for that is, as much as I have to understand the chemical reactions and all that and know the archeological context, I got to know the original languages. And it's painful to learn a dozen languages, but if you don't do that, then you're reliant on the English, and it's going through all these filters, as I mentioned.
So I would like to encourage more and more students and scholars to think about that, and hopefully, we can start removing some of these filters and re-investigating how these things were present in the past. And even reading something as simple as the Ebers Papyrus or even the Vienna D. Escortes, it's, oh, this is very scientific. But then why does the author then go into this magic territory? And my suspicion is that a lot of that is actually, to them, I don't think they differentiate it.
CHARLES M. STANG: Yeah. Go on. I'm sorry.
ANDREW J. KOH: No. Hopefully, that answers the question.
CHARLES M. STANG: [? Beltzer ?] Hannah Graf from the University of Amsterdam in a series last year, speaking about the so-called Mithra's liturgy, which was a text so named by the German scholar who first published an influential study of it, I believe in the early 20th century, but it's probably not actually, a mis-rated text, and it's probably not a liturgy. But one thing it includes is a detailed recipe for an eye ointment that will catalyze visions of the God, Helios.
And so a fascinating text, that again, has been pushed to the margins and mis-categorized. So that's one. But the Q&A function is actually exploding with people who are telling me that there's ample textual evidence that apparently none of us are reading.
So we have Galen cited Ammon Hillman, saying we need to read Galen. Others are saying, of course, many of the stories in The Odyssey that's long been thought to some of the episodes in The Odyssey could be construed as evidence for psychedelia.
KAREN POLINGER FOSTER: Can I just say one small thing?
CHARLES M. STANG: Yes, please.
KAREN POLINGER FOSTER: Sorry. And that is to say that a good half dozen chapters in this book are by people, authors who are presenting textual evidence exactly from the Akkadian, Sumerian, Egyptian, Hittite sources. So we don't have to go even as late as Homer. So they're there, and it's pretty exciting what our colleagues have come up with.
CHARLES M. STANG: Good. Thank you, Karen. I am very much looking forward to digging into that volume, and perhaps, we can have a follow-up event to sort of dig into some of the other chapters in it as well.
KAREN POLINGER FOSTER: Great.
CHARLES M. STANG: Richard Rauschenbusch has asked whether anyone-- I'm not looking for the comment here, but I can remember it. Basically, has anyone experimented with recreating some of these infused wines or other sorts of subject mixtures in an attempt to recreate the effects? I suppose either of you could answer that, but maybe that's closer to your work, Andrew, so why don't you take a stab at it.
ANDREW J. KOH: I mean, what's both in one hand, it could be discouraging, but it's also exciting is I truly do believe-- your initiative kind of shows the same thing. We're really approaching an exciting time, where I feel like it's this pivot. And this notion to the interest addition to these kind of outlets such as this, as bad as COVID has been, this idea to connect with people relatively easily, if not in person.
Right now, I've been working, for instance, with different wineries to recreate some of these things. We were thinking about this five years ago, but what's exciting for me is as much as I would like to just create a wine that, is as we defined the modern day, I would really like to start experimenting with some of the things that I found of this more pharmacological nature. And perhaps, it would have been difficult in the past, but with smaller wineries, even microbreweries on the beer side, you see that you have these people who are much more interested in going along with it.
So we're right in the midst of working with a winery to do some of these kind of things. And of course, as fun as that is, it's not just about producing the wine, but also, as I'm going through some of the questions here, it is also, I think, important to think about how does this affect whether you're going to call it ritual, the ecstatic experiences. And I think that's the first step.
I mean, of course much of what you've been discussing, especially with Brian Muraresku is talking about the work of Wasson and Hoffmann and Rock and all that, and that was like a huge jump. But we can start, I think, with smaller things. So I guess you can say we could be on the relative loosest, but let's start with not so much of a light-year jump, but let's talk about the wines, even just getting to the point where it's not just a beverage. I think that's the first step.
And some of the questions are like, tell us what exactly they were doing. Well, I have hypotheses, but I think just to even get past that initial point would be incredibly helpful. So again, the downside and the upside. The downside is, oh, my gosh, we have so much more to do, but the upside is now it feels like we're going to be able to do it.
CHARLES M. STANG: Great. Karen, do have something to add?
KAREN POLINGER FOSTER: Do you remember when Pat McGovern-- or maybe this was before your time at Penn. Do you remember when Pat McGovern made wine based on textual evidence? Do you remember that? Was that before your time at Penn maybe?
ANDREW J. KOH: It was kind of right when I was getting going, but yeah, again, it shows you the timing and the zeitgeist and all that matters, doesn't it? And he was able to produce the Midas Touch Beer with-- I'm not sure if I'm allowed to advertise a brewery, but it's not a curiosity at this point. And you really have scientifically-minded intrigue, very knowledgeable people across society, whether they're brewers, vintners, or whatever, and it's really exciting.
KAREN POLINGER FOSTER: Yeah, great.
CHARLES M. STANG: Yeah, I think Brian's book does a wonderful job, especially because it reached such a popular audience of making the case that's well known to people in your field, of course, that these ancient beverages had effects well beyond what we think of as just the alcohol proof of something, that something else is going on with these beverages. That was also news to me. I'm a textualist, so I'm learning an enormous amount, although I allegedly am a scholar of the ancient world.
So I think that goes back to your point, Brian, and yours too, Karen, that with the way we're trained has rendered much of this evidence invisible or at least illegible or read differently.
ANDREW J. KOH: Just if I could comment real quick, Charlie. I mean, one question that seems to be occurring is something that affect, well, is a psychedelic or not, or where's the evidence? And what I've been proposing is, I almost wish we could get rid of some of these categories. Because I would propose many of these categories are modern.
And as I referenced before about why are we saying this is magic, and this is whatever, I think we really have got to kind of blow that up and start from in terms of our outlook and perspective and start thinking, not so much of these compartments, but the fact that there was much more fluidity back then. And then that can, I think, really inform what we do now.
CHARLES M. STANG: Yeah, and Brian uses the category. He sort of moves between psychedelic and psychoactive and others, I think, precisely to try to widen this so that we're not-- it's not that we're just after the substances that are treated and say, Michael Pollan's book, as if we know that this is the set of things that we're looking for.
What I hear from both of you is we're looking for evidence for things that can change consciousness embodiment and widely, and that we do not have a sufficient understanding of that spectrum at all. Am I hearing you right?
KAREN POLINGER FOSTER: M-hm.
ANDREW J. KOH: I think that's very much the case, and there's practical aspects. One quick one I can bring up-- hopefully, it won't get me in trouble-- is that some people are asking, why is this kind of hard. And an example of that we as academics can relate to is, for instance, when I was publishing an article-- hopefully, nobody could figure it out.
But it was very difficult to really convey clearly what I think the evidence was presenting. Because when the reviews come back and they want to edit it, you kind of have to go along with it, but it's clear that the editing wasn't just done from a scholarly perspective, but a cultural one.
What I mean by that is, for instance, they didn't want me to use words like psychotropic. So they, in fact, did not want me to use the word psychoactive, but that's where I kind of drew the line. They allowed me to use psycho-- I hate to say that now because people know which journal it is. But I had to fight to get psychoactive, actually, in my article. They wanted to just get rid of those words.
KAREN POLINGER FOSTER: Well, one question that I had at the very beginning of when I started putting this together was, if I or you can agree that something that we're looking at is psychedelic, yeah, according to how we'd like to define that, would someone 3,500 years ago or 4,000 years ago or 5,000 years ago have had a similar reaction to what they were seeing.
And I really wondered about that. And if somebody in the audience could correct me, that would be great, but from all of my reading in cognitive and neuroscience and so forth, the answer is, our brains are working the same way as they did. So the things that happened inside our brains when we look at these visual instabilities, that we look at these form constants, that that basically shows that, yes, if we are seeing something as psychedelic, they did too.
CHARLES M. STANG: Again, with the caveat that we want to widen the category of what psychedelic means from how it's typically deployed today. Yeah, but that's a great point. I think we need to wrap up and be respectful of the time. And what I am conscious of now is that Karen, you have asked questions of Andrew, but we didn't give you the floor to ask a question of Andrew. But I do feel like we've had a wonderfully fluid discussion here.
One thing I'd like to acknowledge from the comments is, many people are interested in whether and how we could have a parallel conversation about this in the Indian subcontinent, where, of course, there's a long-standing, obviously, ancient texts and speculation about Selma and whatnot. So that is an idea for a future event.
But I also want to invite everyone who's still with us to look into this book that Karen is a part of, that edited volume on Ecstatic Experience in the Ancient Mediterranean world. Is that right?
KAREN POLINGER FOSTER: No, in the Ancient World.
CHARLES M. STANG: in the Ancient World, writ large. Wonderful. So are there chapters in there on Indian traditions?
KAREN POLINGER FOSTER: No, just peripherally, we have a few authors touch on that, but we go as far as Inner Asia. We go as far as Inner Asia, but we don't get further South. And then, of course, the Near East Egypt, Anatolia, the Aegean, the Greek world. Yes, Rome.
CHARLES M. STANG: So it really is--
KAREN POLINGER FOSTER: We go to Eleusis.
CHARLES M. STANG: Literally here and went back to the ancient world, and this context really does mean the ancient Mediterranean world, but it stretches into Inner Asia.
KAREN POLINGER FOSTER: Yeah.
CHARLES M. STANG: OK, wonderful. Well, I want to thank you both so much. This is fascinating work. For those of you who want to know more, I think it's a matter of stay tuned. I'm getting the impression that this is just beginning. Both of these scholars are pioneers, in some sense, trying to change the way the field operates and the way it looks at its own evidence. And I want to commend you both.
And Andrew, I know you and I will collaborate because you're now a neighbor. And Karen, I commend you for taking a different look at these materials and challenging the assumptions of our history or our historical scholarship, see these things differently. And those of you who have attended, thank you so much. I look forward to the next time I see you or rather, the next time you see me because I never get to see you.
And it's a strange experience, these Zoom webinars, where I just look at a screen and yet, hundreds of people are looking at us. But it's really been thrilling to learn about this research. And thank you once again. So Andrew, Karen, and everyone who's attended, good night, until the next time.
ANDREW J. KOH: Thank you, Charlie. Thank you, all.
KAREN POLINGER FOSTER: Thank you. Bye.
CHARLES M. STANG: Bye-bye now. Take care.
SPEAKER 2: Sponsors, Center for the Study of World Religions and Esalen.
SPEAKER 1: Copyright, 2021. President Fellows of Harvard College.