Mind-Altering Drugs, Plant Medicines & Psychedelics In The Old Testament, How Altered States of Consciousness Can Enhance Spiritual Experiences & Much More With Danny Nemu.

On this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness Podcast, very clear example of the oil immediately producing some kind of the entrance of the spirit of this character. And it's being affected by two different chemicals or two different resins which are burnt in what's called the dabir, which is related to the word Word. And the angels would speak to the high priest and he would speak through words. There's no reason why you need to take drugs to get closer to God, but there is every reason why you should leave other people alone who want to do that.

Help performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and much more. My name is Ben Greenfield. Welcome to the show. My podcast guest today, Danny Namu. Interesting guy. We took a little while to get into the groove in terms of Mika, kind of reeling him into some of the things I really wanted to touch on. And so stick with this podcast. It gets super interesting as we go on and on. But, dude, the guy can definitely talk, so bear with him as we move along. You know what got me interested in interviewing Danny in the first place was I was doing some research for some articles I was working on, and I came across an article by him called how the High Priest Got High. Cannabis and Other Drugs Amongst the Ancient Israelites was. Well, I thought it was super interesting. And just to give you a little bit of a flavor of what we're gonna talk about, and I think this will help you better understand what we're gonna talk about is in that particular short article. And I'll link to that and everything that Danny and I talk about if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Nemu that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com N E M U that's Danny's last name. Danny had this to say. Cannabis residues have been identified on the altar of a Judahite shrine in Israel dating from the 8th century B.C. according to the Tel Aviv Institute of Arch. And then Danny cites a relatively recent article, meaning several. Well, I guess it was kind of like mid-2020 that this article came out. And he goes on to say this is not the first time that cannabis has been found in the area. In 1993, archaeologists found cannabis at a burial tomb near Jerusalem and forms suggesting medical application by both fumigation. Fumigation means like breathing it in and oil massaged into the skin. Another dig in Egypt found cannabis pollen on the mummy of Ramses ii, confirming the plant was used in the religious rites of the Egyptians. And also that cannabis has transported along trade routes that pass through Palestine for many millennia. We also know from ancient papyri that cannabis oil was used in both the medicine and magic of Egypt. Though it is difficult to make positive identifications from any plants in the Bible, the evidence has convinced rabbis, ministers, linguists, archaeologists, anthropologists, botanists and others that the resin the Bible calls kanebosum is what we call cannabis. It appears to be the same as the cannabis that appears in an account by Herodotus from the 6th century BC burned by the Scythians after they sealed down the fl their tents, Herodotus says immediately it smokes and gives out such a vapor as no Grecian vapor bath can exceed the Siths. Delighted shout for joy. Well, despite a massive amount of literary evidence assembled by a guy named Chris Bennett and others, the idea that ancient Israelites used one of the most interesting and useful plants on the planet remains controversial. This is a testament to the conservatism and entitlement of many of the people who claim to be interested in the Bible, where it agrees with their politics at least. But it need not concern us here. What is more surprising is the technology and deep understanding of pharmacolog that the ancient apothecaries brought to their drug culture. While modern pharmacology tends to extract active compounds from natural sources, Ayurveda, Chinese medicine, and various other ancient medical systems work differently, prescribing mixtures of compounds that work together in synergy. The Amazonian ayahuasca brew provides a good example of how this works, using two ingredients to produce an effect that's much greater and much more trippy than the sum of its parts. One ingredient is the Psychotria viridis leaf, which contains dmt. But the DMT is inactive when taken by mouth because your MAO enzymes break it down in the gut before it gets to your brain. When the leaf is boiled with the banisteriopsis vine, the vine contributes chemicals called MAO inhibitors, which prevent your body's MAO enzymes from breaking DMT down. So the DMT gets into the brain and does all kinds of fascinating things. In the Bible, the ingredients Kane balsam is consumed with suggest an impressive functional understanding of synergistic enzyme inhibition. Take thou also unto thee principal spices of pure myrrh 500 shekels and of sweet cinnamon half so 250 shekels and of Kane bossum, 250 shekels and of cassia, 500 shekels after the shekel of the sanctuary and of olive oil, 6 liters and thou shalt make it an oil of holy ointment, an Ointment compound after the art of the apothecary. Cinnamomum verum and Cinnamomum cassia are both species of cinnamon. The former is used in ancient Persian medicine as a convoy medicine co administers with other medicines to make them more active. According to modern pharmacology, cinnamon works by inhibiting the enzymes of the human cytochrome system, which is responsible for breaking down many of the chemicals we encounter in our food. By preventing those enzymes from functioning, it allows other drugs to remain in the system for long enough to travel through the blood to the organs where they are effective. This cytochrome system contains many enzymes, five of which are involved in breaking down approximately 99% of drugs. Cinnamonum verum inhibits four of them, but not the fifth. The fifth is inhibited by the other cinnamon species, Cassia cinnamon. Together these plants knock out the entire Cytochrome system regarding 99% of drugs. That means the effects of cannabis are much increased and last longer, and also that the compounds that are usually inert become psychoactive. The fourth ingredient in the recipe is myrrh, which contains at least three opioids which can cause euphoria. The other chemicals in myrrh and in cannabis are explored in more detail. And then he cites some articles and we also get into it a little bit in our podcast today. And then we go on. The anointing oil in Hebrew is called shemin ha mishka, where shimon means oil and mishka is derived from the word mashak, meaning to rub or paint, suggesting it was massaged into the skin. Indeed, mash may be the root of our word massage. Moshak is also the root of the word mashihach, the anointed one, which is Latinized as Messiah. The anointing oil was supremely important in the rites of the Israelites and also in early Christianity when Christ instructs his followers to anoint the sick in Mark 6:13. This is the medico magical anointing oil he is recommending. The anointing oil is of two psychoactive preparations found in Exodus 30, taken by all priests when they enter the tabernacle. The other is an incense of psychoactive compounds taken by the high priest alone after being anointed, finally ground and burned in huge quantities inside a completely sealed chamber at the back of the tabernacle called the Holy of Holies. One of the ingredients this mixture was frankincense, which has a range of psychoactive chemicals that work on your gaba and also the TRPV3 ion channel residues of this frankincense were also found along with cannabis by the team from the Tel Aviv Institute of Archaeology, citing that recent finding that they had last year. There are several more preparations in the Bible and other ancient Jewish scriptures, including the showbread that's so potent in doses the size of a being that the delicate priest refused to take it altogether, but the voracious ones accepted and consumed. There's also manna, which is eaten before the only collective vision and the only example of synesthesia in the Old Testament when all the people are seeing the voices and the flames and the sound of the trumpet. The evidence suggests this is lsa, a close cousin of LSD that is extracted from the ergo by the simple process described in Exodus. Danny goes on to cite a bunch of the references for this, but it's just this article was so interesting to me, you know, as a guy who's in a like nootropics and who likes to study plant medicines, and also as a Christian and a guy who likes to study theology. I just thought this was interesting enough to where I figured I'd get Danny on, we'd chat about all this. I know I have a lot of listeners to my own podcast who are not only a Christian, but also interested in things like plant medicines and psychedelics and some of these ancient remedies. And so an interesting episode. Strap yourself in. Here we go. Well, folks, if you've been to my website of late, you may have noticed that I wrote a couple articles on entheogens and how we come across these plant medicines and psychedelics even within the Bible, and even wrote an article about how my wife and I wound up finding the incenses and the oils that are talked about in exodus in chapter 30, you know, from myrrh to frankincense to bits of olive oil and other spices I can barely even pronounce. And we actually wound up burning these incenses and oils just to kind of see. See what it would like, what it was like. And it resulted in. Well, I wrote a whole article about it, but a crazy kind of combination of a psychedelic and spiritually enhancing experience that wound up leaving us both sitting in the sauna just basically wanting to sit there and talk to God. And it was a very experience. One of my friends, Brian Murarcu, whose last name I constantly mispronounce, he wrote a book called the Immortality Key, popular book of late, in which he gets into the idea of the spiced wine in Scripture and in everything from Jewish to Greek to Roman history, being something that was an entheogenic substance designed to shift one into an altered or elevated state of consciousness. And I just find all of this absolutely fascinating. And so as I'm kind of researching some of this stuff and going around looking at it, I come across this book, or not book, video. I believe it was called Drugs in the Bible or something along those lines. And it was this guy lecturing about all of these different oils and incenses and shorebreads and resins described in the Bible, even like the manna and the daily bread and how there's a big, big tie between many of these things and so called entheogenic substances. His name is Danny Nemu. And Danny, he's an author, he's got an academic background in the history of medicine, about 20 years of experience, actually also working with an ayahuasca community and even has spent some time down in the Amazon. And his fundamental interest is basically this whole concept of drugs in the Bible and revelation and the idea of linguistics and neurobiology and cognition, the connections between them. He has tons of really, really super interesting videos and lectures. And he also has two books, one called Science Revealed and one called Neuro Apocalypse. And so super interesting fella. And I'm honored to have been able to have connected with him and finagled him into sitting here and shooting the shit with me little while about all these concepts because I think, or at least I hope you find it as fascinating as I do. So Danny, welcome to the show, man.

Hi Ben, thanks very much. I'm honored as well. You just said you were talking to God just recently and now you're talking to little old me. So I hope I don't disappoint.

No, I guess you're in good company. By the way, speaking of talking to God, I noticed in a few of your bios that you say you're a reverend. A reverend? Is this like Elvis Presley marry people in Vegas type of thing or what's to do with the reverend status?

Yeah, well, I have married people. I haven't married anyone in Vegas. I used to marry people in Japan. I lived in Japan for six years. Yeah, if you look like me, like a white guy, you can get away with all kinds of things in Japan, including marrying people. So yeah, I got ordained on the Internet. It cost me 15 back in gosh. We're going back quite a long time now, about 20 years ago. It might be a little bit more expensive now, but yes, I'm a fully ordained reverend.

So really, was it just like to marry people or just for. For Shits and giggles or.

Well, yeah, I had to get it to marry people, but, you know, Prince Buster is a prince and Lady Gaga's a lady, so why can't I be a reverend?

What's that feather in your cap? And you're an author too. You have these books, Science Revealed and Neuro Apocalypse. And you're obviously pretty interested in this whole idea of entheogens and in particular entheogens in the Bible. So what kind of got you interested in all this in the first place? We got time. Fill me on your backstory and how you kind of, kind of delved into this particular film.

I guess my interest in entheogens and more broadly, psychedelics and just things that make your brain do weird things, that's been for quite a long time, recreational. And I've always found a lot of insight in all kinds of extraordinary things that you find on this beautiful planet. The Bible came from a completely different perspective, really. I was. I was doing my dissertation at university and I was actually, I was sitting in my. In my place and I was a little bit. I'd been. I've been smoking all day. I was a little bit stoned and the Jehovah's Witnesses knocked on my door and I got talking to them and the chat was really fascinating. Like a genuine apocalyptic cult rocking up my door. And I studied my degree of medicine. It was also history of science and history of medicine, the philosophy of medicine. And I got fascinated by apocalyptic cults and their particular perspectives on health and medicine. We could talk about. There's a whole load of real characters, but. But Sydenham would be one. Thomas Sydenham Paracelsus, who's considered the father of. Yeah, father of a chemical.

I've actually gone to a Paracelsus medical clinic over in the Swiss Alps. What's an apocalyptic cult?

Well, they can kind of. There's a few different types, really, but generally they think that the end is nigh. And not just nigh, but very nigh, like just around the corner. So Paracelsus, for example, his last book that he penned was called. I think it was called Prophecy for the next 26 years. I think it was called something like that. And it was about the seas rising and, you know, monsters coming out the sea and all that kind of stuff. Like proper old school apocalyptic visionary people in many ways have severed their ties with this world because they're really waiting for the next world. And part of that means that they. They sever their times with medicine. So the Jehovah's Witness is a good example. You know, they. They refused to have blood transfusions. You know, that's their reading of the Bible. And it's meant that medical practices had to develop because how do you treat someone who you would normally give a blood transfusion to if they're refusing a blood transfusion? So there's lots of ways in which apocalyptic ideas, you know, and that's a minor example, but Sydney was another example. He was the guy who considered the father of nosology, basically, which is how diseases progress. And he was the guy who introduced statistics into medicine. He did that very. For a very specific reason, because he thought that the idea of making theories about what? About God's work as it went on in the world, as, you know, as it formed mucus in children's lungs and as it festered away in boils. He said that all these theories have as much to do with navigation. And he said our job as humans, as people is not to make theories, but to observe the work of God. And so he started to take statistics on his patients and watching the progress of disease. And so this whole something very fundamental in modern medicine, which is statistical analysis of what's going on, that dates back to a guy who was. He was a screaming apocalyptic. He was a Puritan revolutionary in England. So I'm kind of interested in how what we think about influences the kind of medicine that we. That we make and not just medicine, science in various ways. And they. They think some pretty interesting things. So that was. So I got interested in the Bible because I was interested in their reading, the Jehovah's Witness reading of certain bits. So I started studying apocalyptic texts, Daniel, Matthew. And I just started noticing very, very early on that the translations are pretty suspect. So, for example, is it Matthew who talks about the end of the world and all these horrible things that will happen? The good shall be saved and the evil should be cast into a furnace. But the word that we translate as world is not world, is not world. In Greek, it's aeon. And aeon means. Doesn't mean world. It means an epoch or a period or age or something like that. So my interest in the Bible began with mistranslation, actually, of how people were using the Bible to press political ends. Because that particular translation, the King James translation, was made with a very political end in mind. It was made by, well, King James in time of King James. And he was dealing with all kinds of revolutionary behavior in England. And he really didn't want, you know, the Puritans at the time, they really wanted the end of the Aeon, but no one wants the end of the world. The end of the world is a horrible thing. But the end of the Aeon is really good. Especially if you've got a kind of. You're trying to introduce a parliamentary system and get rid of the, you know, get rid of the monarchical. Yeah, so that's where I got into the Bible. And the Bible is as just a spectacular, A spectacular book I think is up there with the pyramids in terms of construction. And I was, you know, I was interested in pharmacology and psychopharmacology and how drugs work. And not just from a kind of, kind of recreational or entheogenic perspective, but also just in medicine. I'm interested in herbal medicine and ancient medicine. And so I just started looking at the pharmacology of things like myrrh and frankincense. And then I got really into the synergies and how they work together at the level of the cyan. And you can just go deeper and deeper and deeper. But the upshot, I guess the take home message is these guys were doing stuff that we didn't discover until enzyme inhibition, for example. We didn't get that until the 20th century was the first time that western medics came up with an idea of enzyme inhibition. And that was happening in the jungles of the Amazon.

Yeah, we hear about that with Ayahuasca, with dmt, how you need to combine the vine with the. Oh gosh, yeah, with the acuna. And that basically would cause the long term release of DMT with the kind of like the complexity of the enzymes in that particular mix. But you know, I found it fascinating when I started to get into some of your writings, particularly your paper. You have a paper called Getting High with the Most High and a video by the same name. And what you get into entheogens in the Old Testament and how some of these enzymes would actually work together. So before we dig into maybe some of the science behind how something like myrrh and frankincense and even cinnamon, a common household spice, could shift one into an altered state of consciousness when it comes to the actual idea of these type of things potentially being something that we see, for example, in Scripture, would you say that it's Moses interaction with the burning bush where you first something like this pop up? Or where do we first see the idea arise of entheogens in the Old Testament?

That's an interesting question, pulling into different bits because you've asked me quite a bunch of different stuff there. So for example, Moses and the burning bush, what have we got there? We've got the example of something which burns or something which burns with a fire that doesn't consume. Right. And there's two examples of that in the Bible actually. One is the burning bush and, and one is Mount Sinai. Mount Sinai. And it's the only time we see that when you're looking at something on DMT or on acid and you get these interesting geometric patterns that are going wrong, going, which are happening around it, you know, how would you describe that in language if you didn't have the language that we have for drug experience? And actually the language in the Bible, Hebrew doesn't have a whole lot of words. It uses a lot of words say, it uses rather few words to say a lot of things. So this idea of something burning, you know, a flame which burns but doesn't consume, seems to me very much like a visionary experience. But that's not to say that the visionary experience was caused by, by pharmacology, but caused by a drug. So I want to be really clear from the outset that visionary experiences, whether they're in the Bible or whether they happen to people through their prayers or through their meditations, or the way they happen through epileptic fit or something like that, that they're not always caused by drugs. And I think the prophets, the stories of the prophets, for example, I don't think there's any evidence there that they were caused by any kind of plants. You know, the Bible is quite open about the fact that for example, the anointing oil, it's put upon. So here's a line from the first book of Samuel. Then Samuel took the horn of oil and anointed him in the midst of his brethren. And the spirit of Yahweh came upon David from that day forward, right? So very clear example of the oil immediately producing some kind of, you know, the entrance of the spirit of this character. But you don't have that in the case of Moses, for example. You don't have that in the case of Daniel. You don't have that in case of any of the prophets. In fact. And the technologies that we see, you mentioned it before, Exodus 30, these are the technologies of the priests, not the prophets.

So when you say technologies, you're referring to like the oil and the incense that God literally gave like very precise instructions for. In terms of like, I know Exodus, I think it's for the oil. It's like liquid myrrh, sweet smelling cinnamon, Cassia, calamus, something Else that I think a lot of people hypothesize is cannabis, cone bossum or something like that, and then an olive oil. And they would mix all of these together. And you have a paper that digs into how the science of that would actually work. But. But it seems to actually be triggering certain enzymes within the body. Yeah. So similar to that ayahuasca combination that we talked about.

Yeah, exactly that. So the technologies. Part of those would be the technologies of combinations, and that's a prime example there. But also the physical technologies. For example, the tabernacle and the holy of holies in the tabernacle is described over five chapters in the Bible. And you know, the Bible. The Bible is pretty succinct. Generally. The story of Babel gets half a chapter, I believe. But you got five chapters devoted to explaining how to construct this tent. You know, how many pegs and how many rings and how far apart the rings are and how you make the frame and how many cloths. And it's immaculate detail. Nothing like that is described in the Bible in such detail. And what you end up with there is, is, to put it simply, a hot box. You know, it's the four and a half meter cubed chamber.

And that's like the inner sanctuary of the tabernacle. Right. You're saying it was developed to be almost like a hot box for all these fumigated materials to concentrate.

Exactly that, yeah. And this is something that you see in the region. You see the Scythians, for example, this is how they. They didn't have pipes at that time. You know, the pipe was introduced much later. And so if you wanted to get smoke into your lungs, the way that it was done was with. Was basically by hotboxing a tent. And this is a technology you see in China. You see it all over the place. The oracle at Delphi, for example, burning all kinds of different herbs there whilst in a cave. So this idea of fumigating a very enclosed, small chamber is quite common in the region. And yeah, that's what's described in immaculate detail in the tabernacle. Not the whole tabernacle. The back of the tabernacle, which is the holy of.

So, for example, with the. Well, let's use the enzymes that we're talking about just to step back here for a second so people can wrap their head around this. We have all these neurotransmitters, right, like serotonin and dopamine and noradrenaline. And those are all classified as monamins. Right. Or MMAs. And they're broken down by enzymes called monamine oxidase enzymes. And you can block those monamine oxidase enzymes with certain inhibitors. And thus that would cause some pretty significant changes in the levels of serotonin and dopamine and noradrenaline and all these things that tend to be kind of amped up when one might be using something like a plant medicine, like in modern times. That's something someone might experience with psilocybin or with LSD or with ayahuasca or something like that. But the unique combinations of each of these elements, like myrrh or cinnamon or cassia or olive oil or that. How do pronounce the one that a lot of people think is Cannabisum?

Kannabasam.

Yeah, cannabis. Basically, these would act on both opioid receptors and then on these neurotransmitter receptors to create almost like this euphoric state.

Yeah, okay. Yeah, so let's go slowly with this because it's pretty complicated.

Okay, that's fine. We got time. And we talk about science a lot on this show, so go ahead.

Great. Okay, so the mixture in the oil is. Got four ingredients, not five. It's got four. The one that you mentioned, which is translated as calamus, and it's been translated as that for a long time. It goes all the way back to the first Greek translation of the Bible. That is kanebosem, or kanebosem pronounced differently in different. In different contexts. And, yeah, I mean, the evidence there for that being cannabis is overwhelming. You've got. In the Talmud, you've got a description of kanebos, which is the singular version of that. That. And that's used as, you know, it's translated as hemp there. Right. And we know that it was the shirts which corpses were buried in were made out of this stuff. Right. You can't make out calamus. Calamus is a reed, and reeds decompose within days. You put it on a corpse, it's gonna. It's not gonna be there after a couple of days. But we have made textiles out of cannabis for, you know, thousands of years. Probably the oldest textile that we. That we have is cannabis is where the word canvas comes from, in fact. Yeah. The evidence for it being calamus is pretty slight. The evidence for it being cannabis is completely overwhelming. For example, I mentioned the Scythians earlier. We know that the Scythians use cannabis because Herodotus mentions it in about 500 B.C. he goes and visits the. He goes and visits the Scythians he says they throw cannabis. He says they fold down the flaps of their tail, they throw cannabis on the fire, and then they jump up and down and they start singing. Right? So we know that it was used in the area. We know we have, in fact, archaeological evidence from Tel Arad. There was quite a recent finding. I think it was last year or maybe, maybe a year before they found frankincense and cannabis. But it's found in every single culture around there. So the Greeks had it and the Egyptians, you know, it's found on the. On the mummy of. I think it was Ramses ii. Cannabis pollen, and it's not native to Egypt. It had to be brought in, and it was brought in through the trade routes that went through the Holy Land. There's a whole bunch of reasons Chris Bennett is the guy to look at for the research on cannabis. And so, yeah, I mean, we all know that cannabis is already psychoactive. Myrrh is another one that's in the. In that mix. Right? So myrrh, you mentioned the opioid system. Myrrh works, among other places on the opioid system. It's got these. It's got three different furano, sequestere, sequesterer, pinoids, basically terpenoids, which work on the opioid system. And of the three, one of them is described as having a tenth of the. Well, in tests, in animal tests, it's described as having a tenth of the potency of morphine. Right, so we're not talking about a mild opioid here. Like. Well, we got. There's other opioids. There's other things that work on the opioid system. Right. So myrrh works in the opioid system among other systems. But here's what's really interesting. So we're talking about cassia and cinnamon, which are both two different types of the cinnamon. The cinnamon family, Cinnamomum verum, which is what we call cinnamon, and then cinnamomum, cassia. And the stuff that's in your kitchen is probably Chinese cinnamon. It's probably cassia.

I have both. I have the Cassia, but then I have the Ceylon, mostly because the Ceylon seems to be good for stabilizing blood sugar, insulin, sensitivity. So I use a lot of my cooking combined with carbohydrates, for example, almost as like a blood glucose disposal agent. But I had no clue that it. Until I started to look into some of your work, that it has some pretty interesting interactivity with some of these same receptors that would allow for better absorption of the oil or something like that.

Yeah. So cinnamon does that. I mean, if you put it on your skin, your skin will go red. And if you make an oil out of it, in fact, if you do make this oil out, which is, by the way, forbidden in the Bible, but if you do decide to make it and you rub it on yourself, you'll find that it's quite spicy.

Yeah, yeah. And by the way, I didn't make it, but I bought it. There's a website I found that actually sells all these oils and incenses, like all these mixes from the Bible. And I forget what the website. I'll hunt it down and put it in the show notes. By the way, everybody listening in the show notes are going to be@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Nemu that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com NEMU but when my wife and I got this oil and incense, we didn't make it. I just didn't. It seemed pretty laborious to hunt everything down from the four corners of the plant. And luckily enough I found this website that mixed everything together except the cannabis component, which was pretty easy to add in. But, yeah, we didn't make it. We just bought it online.

Yeah. So the enzyme system that we're talking about is the cytochrome system. So you've got the monoamine oxidases, which, yeah, they break down in ayahuasca. They're. They're a little bit more important. But the cytogram system is a little bit more complex than monoamine oxidase. And the cytochrome system, it has, I believe, 51 or 52 different enzymes in it. Five of them break down 99% of the drugs that you're going to encounter. So an enzyme is a biological kind of catalyst. It's a protein, basically, which makes one. Well, one of the things that they do is they make one chemical into another chemical. Yeah. So they break. They break things down. They metabolize things. And so these cytochrome enzymes are called things like cwe, cyp.

The CYP enzymes. We've talked about those before on the show a couple of times.

Okay, so four of them are inhibited by cinnamon. That means if you take cinnamon in significant quantities, out of the five enzymes which break down all the drugs, pretty much all the drugs you're about to encounter, four of them are broken down by cinnamon. The other one, and that's cinnamaldehyde, which is one of the. One of the components of cinnamon. The other one is broken down by Cassia. CYP2D6, which is also a very interesting enzyme for another reason. So the mixture of these two different, different cinnamons from the cinnamon family together, they break down, or rather they inhibit. They stop from working all of the enzymes which act as your kind of, let's say, your drug defense. Defense or metabolism mechanisms. So what happens is the myrrh and the cannabis, for one thing, they last a lot longer. But also it's a much more. It will increase the intensity because those, those enzymes break down the drugs in myrrh and they break down the drugs in. In cannabis as well. And in some parts of their. Of their function, it gets rather complex there. Sometimes you'll have something, for example, eugenol or estrogel or these kind of things. And I'm sorry, I'm just jumping ahead there a little bit. Basically, once you've. The anointing of the oil, which happened to priests was only the first stage of what happened inside the tabernacle, because first there would be the high priest. Well, the high priest and the other priest. They'd all be anointed with this oil, oil. And then they would go and they would consume other things as well, on top of it, with their enzymes inhibited. And when we're talking about anointing, people tend to think of it in terms of, like the rites of the Chrism, for example, where you have a little dribble of oil on your head. The word for this stuff is shemen hamishka in Hebrew, shemin hamishka, which means the oil of anointing. And the word mishka comes from the word masha. And masha means to wipe or to paint. Right? It's where we get the word massa. It seems to be where we get the word massage from Masha through the Arabic, through the French and then into English. Shemin hamisha. Mashiach in Hebrew means the anointed one, which is Messiah in the word we recognize as Messiah. So Mashiach, back in the day, from the kind of Jewish or Israelite perspective, wasn't the character we was. It was. Was an anointed king, basically was mashiach. And then there was all kinds of political and spiritual aspects that were. That came into that came into that and more that came into it later. So this stuff was wiped on people when they went, or wiped on the priests when they went into the tabernacle as the first stage of their introduction into the space of God.

Do you know if it was like over the head that the oil was anointed or if it was just Wiped across the entire body or areas where there would be higher blood flow, like the, you know, the inside of the arms or the carotid artery or something like that.

No, we don't know. So we've got no idea. We don't, we don't know what went in there. But the fact that it means to wipe and to paint it suggests that it wasn't, wasn't poured. I would, there's no reason why it wouldn't be wiped all over the body. You know, if you're wiping something on someone's body in order to have an effect and its effect is stronger if you wipe it all over the body. Seems like a pretty much a no brainer that it would be wiped all over the body, buddy.

So we have basically all of these components working together. You've got the cinnamon, which is going to inhibit these CYP enzymes and thus allow for anything that is placed on the body topically or consumed along with the cinnamon to kind of like stay in the bloodstream or have heightened activity for a longer period of time. And I know that some of the cytochrome inhibitors in cinnamon, I think there's one called beta carophylline that makes your cell receptors more sensitive to say like the, the THC and cannabis. You'll even find that in some like topical muscle creams and things like that is they'll put components in there that have that beta cropholing in it for that reason. I think myrrh has some of that as well. And then you've got, of course the, the cinnamon is dilating the skin capillaries and I think it's also got.

You.

Know, some other things in that mix that would have some, some apparently like lsd, like psychedelic properties like, like the Safrol and the Astragali and the Elemisin and things like that that you mentioned. Mentioned.

Yeah. So the beta carophylline, it works on the CB2 receptor. And the CB2 receptors are really complex because THC pushes it in one direction and CBD pushes it in the other direction.

Yeah.

So, you know, it gets really, really complex there. But then this, the CYP2D6, which is the enzyme which is inhibited by Cassia, that one is activated more by cannabis. Right. So these things get really, really complicated. So basically it becomes more efficient under the influence of cannabis. And something which I find absolutely fascinating in this, in this is that when you look at. Which one is it? It's the Song of Solomon. I'm just gonna read it to you actually. No, sorry. It's. Yeah, it's Proverbs, right? This is line from Proverbs Verbs. No, sorry, you know, it's Song of Solomon. Thy plants are an orchard of pomegranates with pleasant fruits. And then it gives a list of plants which are psychoactive. Campfire with spiconard, spicinard and saffron cane, which is caneh, basem, cinnamon, with all trees of frankincense, myrrh and agar wood with all the chief spices. Now, everything I've just listed there, with the exception of campfire, which is. Which we know as Henry has. If you can go into journals of pharmacology, psychopharmacology, and you can find the effects that they have on the GABA system and the effects that they have on the. On the opioid system, etc. Etc. And then you've got. Thy plants are an orchard of pomegranate. So it's got, you know, it brings in the pomegranate. So I looked into pomegranates as well. Pomegranates are fascinating. For one thing, they're superfood and. But pomegranates also have effects on these enzymes. And that one I just mentioned before, which was cyp, the gene which produces that enzyme, Right, gets switched off if you eat enough pomegranate. So basically, if you eat enough pomegranates, you will have less of this CYP2D6 in your. In your system, which means that you'll have, you know, if you take cannabis, it won't have so much CYP2D6 to increase the effectivity of. So you have another level. I think this is just a hint of this because it doesn't say that they. A whole load of pomegranates. Pomegranates. But it does say in this particularly fascinating orchard of plants, there's an orchard of pomegranates. There's loads and loads of pomegranates and then there's all these. All these other things.

Yeah, yeah. Well, it's similar to, like, grapefruit. You know, pomegranate is a cytochrome enzyme inhibitor. That's why you gotta be careful with grapefruit consumption along with like, different pharmaceuticals or other compounds, because it can. It can markedly increase the absorption of that or kind of amp up the effect or cause it to be. It can cause it to be like, spiked in the bloodstream more quickly or at least more bioavailable in greater amounts. And I think pomegranate is very similar to grapefruit in that respect. There's a lot of like modern day supplement manufacturers and chemical at home psychonaut tinkerers who will mix grapefruit in with different compounds for that kind of like that amplifying effect that grapefruit has. And pomegranate may possibly be doing something similar, right?

Well, yeah, and there's a really interesting other line on pomegranate, which is in the myth of Persephone and Demeter, which is the myth of going into the underworld. The character who ends up getting taken into the underworld, she gets told she eats six pips of a pomegranate and because of that she has to stay in the underworld for six months of the year. Which is why we have a winter. Right. That's the story of a winter. Which is super interesting because it doesn't say that the pomegranate took her into the underworld, but it does say that pomegranate kept her longer, which is exactly what you'd expect from. If we're talking about something which switches off the gene which makes a cytochrome enzyme which increases the length that a psychoactive compound has an action.

Interesting. Okay, so we've got all of this stuff being basically burnt in what would be the equivalent of a hot box, as you alluded to. Like the inner super duper closed off, almost like the inside of the holy of holies was, was designed in this very, very precise manner that you described to basically keep all these chemicals kind of concentrated in a container for this incense to the extent to where, and correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the high priest who had entered into that chamber after being anointed and then begin to burn some of the compounds? We'll talk about here in a second. Didn't they have like a chain or something attached to their leg in case they passed out or something like that?

Well, yeah, exactly that. So the oil which we just mentioned, again, myrrh, cinnamon, cassio and cannibal, that's put upon them so those ones aren't burnt. The burning happens, as you said, in the inner chamber of the tabernacle, the high priest would fix a chain to himself, and in the Talmud it says it's so people outside would know if he stopped moving.

And the Talmud, by the way, you brought that up a couple of times just in case my listeners aren't familiar. That's like the central text of Rabbinic Judaism and like the primary source of Jewish religious law, right?

Yeah, and not just law, so folklore as well. It's basically so you have two Torahs, you have the Oral Torah and you have the written Torah. Yeah. So the Bible, the five books of Moses is the written Torah. And then you have the Oral Torah, which is all the stories that were told and all the commentaries upon. And they weren't written down until, until much later in history, until the Roman kind of the Roman catastrophe when the, when the second temple was, was destroyed and the Jews were exiled. And that's when you, well, you have a Babylonian, you have two Talmuds basically. But these, these were written, written down. So yeah, it's writing down the law, but it's also the folklore. And so for example, the, the incenses, which means, which is the, basically the temple incense and the stuff that the, the high priest burnt on his own in the chamber. We have some ingredients of that from Exodus 30, but most of, the, most of the ingredients for that we know from the Talmud. We don't know that from Exodus 30. Yeah. So the chamber as I described a little bit, I just want to kind of flesh out a little bit. It's four and a half meter cubed chamber. And it has two skins, it has four skins over it. Right. And two of those skins are kind of pegged all the way down to the ground. And then a further, two of those skins or two of those materials rather are kind of going over it as a windbreak. Right. And one of those materials was also used to make shoes. And it's some kind of a leather, probably some kind of impermeable leather. Right. And then you've got the veil. And there's two veils in the tabernacle. You've got the veil at the front of the tabernacle, which is, is just a normal veil. This one has a different word in Hebrew. I'm saying that the veil that seals the chamber, this, the holy of holies, which is called Dabir in Hebrew, by the way. And I'll come back to Dabir because it's a fascinating word. So the screen which seals it in the time of the Temple was described in the Talmud again as the thickness of a man's hand and it took 10 men to raise it in the time of the Temple. So, so we're not talking about a normal veil here. We're not talking about curtain. We're talking about a thick screen which goes all the way to the ground. And think about this. It's meant to be the dwelling place of the Israelite God. And no screen is going to keep the Israelite God if he's super powerful. And you don't need a very thick screen to keep prying eyes out of what's going on. But for some reason they have a very thin, thick screen. And that says to me, it seems to be much more evidence that it's, it's to keep the smoke in. And the only thing that you're. The only objects in that room are the Ark of the Covenant. Right, The Covenant. That's a whole interesting story as well, because that covenant means a kind of a, an alliance. Yeah. And if you look at shamanic tradition, the way that shamans progress is that they encounter spirits and they make, make alliances with them, and they make alliances through special words. And they call those words or special phrases. And they call those phrases. Icarus is a word of power which is used to call the spirits. And we have 10 very special words in the Bible translated as the 10 Commandments. But actually the word in Hebrew is barim. Right. Which doesn't actually mean commandment. If you look in the text in Exodus, when the chapter that talks about the 10 words words doesn't actually mention all this like thou shalt not tell lies in court. Thou shalt not commit adultery. That's from an entirely different chapter. It's another trip up the, up the, up the mountain. But the 10 words comes. We don't know, we don't find out from the Bible what the 10 words are. But this is quite a complicated story and you really want to, if you want to delve into that story, you should have a look at my second book, which is called Neuro Apocalypse. But anyway, back to the. So you have the, the Ark of the Covenant and in it you have the magic tax and you've got the two angels sitting on top of it. And we'll come, maybe we'll come back to the two angels. Why are there two angels in there? Especially when one of the ten Commandments make graven images and then you've got some graven images sitting on top of it. That's an interesting story as well. But the only other thing you're allowed to take in there is a sensor. And the sensor has. And what the high priest does is he takes a censor full of hot coals and he takes it into this four and a half meter cube cubed chamber and then he burns handfuls of finely ground incense. So we're not talking about a little stick of incense here, we're talking about very large doses. I mean, imagine literally handfuls of finely ground insects. So what do these things contain? And we can, let's talk about it with the various different systems. If your listeners are interested in neurotransmitters, we can start with the opioid system, for example. And there are three things in there which affect the opioid system. One of those is saffron. Right. Saffron is the, it's known from food, it's kind of the yellow stuff that people put into food. This was in, in Islamic jurisprudence, this was described as one of the permissible drugs. It was one of the drugs that gives joy. Right, okay. Smoking saffron.

Yeah, it's kind of like you, it's kind of like euphoric. Right?

It's absolutely lovely. It's just such a, it's a wonderful thing to smoke. You know, there's a reason that opioids are problematic because opioids are, they're rather pleasant. So saffron, you know, no one's going to get, you're not going to end up in skid row, you're not going to end up down an alley, you know, from smoking.

So it's almost a little bit similar to a lot of people these days are using, are using like kratom as a, as a pre workout or as an alternative to opioid painkillers. And saffron seems to act on some of those, those similar receptors to induce like this euphoric painkilling type of effect.

Yeah, exactly that. So it's the stigma, it's a part of the plant. It's the part of the sexual organs of the crocus sativus and it contains saffronol and it also contains crocin. Crocin is an interesting one because when crocin is given to rats more erections than usual and it alters their mount behavior, which basically means it changes their sexual behavior. And we know that the opioid system is related to euphoria and also it's an aphrodisiac as well. So, so that's one of them. Pliny talks about saffron. He says it has a gentle effect on the head and it wets the sex drive.

Then you've got, which is probably why it's also you, you mentioned that, that Song of Solomon, you know, the great love poem in the Bible. In the orchard of pomegranate, saffron is listed amongst the, the mixes that are used as like an aphrodisiac in the Song of Solomon as well.

Well, exactly right, yeah. So we've already mentioned myrrh as well. That's, that, that's, that's not in the, in the smoke, but it's in the oil. And then you've got stacta. This is one of the ones that's mentioned in Bible. We're not entirely sure what stacked it is, but the, the jury tends to rule that it's high grade myrrh. Right. And the word in Hebrew is nataf and nata means it was. It's one of these fascinating Hebrew words which means quite a lot of different things. One of which is to drop or to drip, one of which is to distill and one of which is to prophecy. Right now they all seem quite distantly, they don't seem very much related. But actually if you think about the kind of drops of purity coming down from heaven in terms of prophecy, that's pretty interesting. And then also myrrh drops and drips off the, off the tree as well. So, so that one seems to be high grade mer. And then you've got Galbanum ferrulegomosa, which is another one that's in there which works on the opioid system. And then if we jump across to The GABA system. GABA. The GABA system. Basically you have GABA receptors on 40% of your neurons. And it's the most widely distributed receptor in the brain. It's in every system in the brain. And, and pretty much every neuron is either directly affected by GABA or its next door neuron is affected by gaba. So frankincense, which is in the incense is one of the ones which works on the GABA system. GABA system is inhibitory. Right. So that's to say that it calms down or it stops. It basically makes the synapse less likely to fire. And so it kind of calms you down. But because the brain's very complex and you have inhibitory systems, you have excitatory neurons which are sometimes you can, you can inhibit an inhibitory neuron. So it can actually end up making certain neurons fire more than others. So again, it's very, very complex. Frankincense and onika, which is the other one, I believe personally that onica is labdanum. It's kind of complex as to why, but I will say that the translation that you'll be familiar with from the, from the Bible is just, just it. Complex. It can't be. Right. Basically it's described as a mollusk in the Bible. And when I say in the Bible, I'm talking about the King James here. And mollusks are an abomination. Mollusks aren't kosher. The idea that you would take a mollusk into the holy of holies and offer it as incense to the tribal God is like, you wouldn't have a ham sandwich in a synagogue and you wouldn't have a mollusk in the holy holies. It just simply wouldn't happen. So there's again, it gets kind of complex, but it's described again in the Talmud as from the ground but not the tree. So we know it's, you know, it looks like it comes from a bush. And there's a 10th century rabbi who says it's labdanum, which is rock rose. Labdanum is the stuff that Pharaoh used to put in his fake beard. And yeah, I don't get too granular about it. Again, it's in my book Neuro Apocalypse. You can see the reasoning as to why this is the most thing. But this again contains crocin and crocitin, which works on better rats, earlier contains saffronol. And then you've got frankincense. So when you, when you mentioned, right in the beginning, you know, that you had some time with frankincense. My own experience with frankincense is that the high, you know, if you're looking to get absolutely mashed up, I don't think frankincense will do that. It may do in combination, but what it does do very reliably actually, is it gives you visual kind of imagery and inspiration. And it seems to me. Let me just kind of step back a little bit. There was a very. These things were used for a specific reason. Right. The high priest had a job, and it was the same job as a shaman has in any of the jungle tribes or anywhere you see shamanism. And that's to look after his tribe. Yeah. And so traditional shamanism, shamans, they go in, they go. They go into their. Their hut and they take their mushrooms or they take their ice. Ask. They take. And then they come back to the tribe with information. And the information tends to fall into about three or four categories. One of those is, where can we find food? Yeah. To go and find game. Another one. And you find that in the Bible, you find that Moses goes off into the. Into the tabernacle, he does his thing and then he comes out and he says, there's water. Let's go and find the water. And he goes and taps a rock and he finds water, which is, you know, we've had water divination for thousands of years. Years. The idea that you would go and find a rock and then tap it seems to Be a description of water divination.

Yeah, Kind of similar to like, well witching, which is what I had done at my property up here in Spokane. The guy walks around with the, what do you call it, the little dowel that allows you to determine where the different water sources are. And it seems like magic or witchcraft, but a ton of people use these so called well witchers to actually successfully find water. They're surprisingly accurate.

It. They use them to find water pipes. You know, the, the water department got in trouble in England a couple of, a few years ago because they were using water dividers to find out where the pipes were. And it was all in the papers, like, what are they doing? These crazy, these crazy crazies. So, so that was one of the divinatory questions. Where is the food? Another one is how do we deal with this disease? Which again, Moses does. And he'll deal with plagues by going in to the, the tabernacle, finding out why the tribal God is angry and alleviating the plague. Another one is when are our enemies going to attack? Basically war, divination. We tend to think of, you know, people in the Ayahuasca world tend to think of Ayahuasca as all love and light. But ayahuasca has traditionally been, among other things, a weapon of war and a means of, you know, knowing where your enemy is and knowing when they're going to attack and maybe ambushing them first or whatever it might be. And you find that a lot in the Bible. You know, man, Moses heads off into the, into the tabernacle, out he comes. He says, right, it's time to attack or it's time to move. So, so the reason I'm saying this is because they weren't going there to get, to get mashed up. They were going in there to get information and then bring that information back.

Right. To commune with the divine. And like this, this altered state of consciousness that these substances would induce.

Yeah, but not just that. It's not just to go and get high and enjoy yourself on your own. It's to bring information back which is useful for the TR tribe, for the tribe survival. Yeah. So against things like disease, against starvation, against enemy tribes, and also against internal strife. So sometimes there'll be an argument and you might have to resolve it through going into, you know, working out what the beef is and working out how, how God wants it resolved. So on this matter of, of divination. Right. A lot of the things here like, like we've talked about, we talked about thc, we Talked about cat. Cannabis. Cannabis affects your short term memory, as anyone who's familiar with it will know. But you also have, for example, spikenard in the mix. Spikenard is kind of famous from the New Testament because the disciples spend a whole lot of money on it. And Judas complains, he said, why are we spending all this money on this expensive ointment when we could give it to the sick? And there's that wonderful line where Christ goes, you're always going to have the poor, but you're not always going to have me. So Spicinard is neuroprotective and one of the things, it's called a nootropic. And nootropic means it assists in the formation of memories. Right. Which is super interesting. And also on a kind of synapse level, it seems to have this kind of effect where it reduces some of the effects of certain aspects of the effects of cannabis as well. So basically what I'm saying is that, that there are. And it's not just bikinar, there's. There's other things that are in the mixture which stimulate your. The formation of memories. Yeah, which is super useful because you imagine you go, you go into this wiped with cannabis and other stuff, and then you get surrounded in smoke, which contains all kinds of things, and you may have your vision. And that was the point. The high priest was meant to go in there, he was meant to talk to angels, and he was meant to come out and give his pronouncements. And interestingly enough, sometimes when the pronouncements are given, they're given in song, which is the same situation in the shamanic world as well. Sometimes the shaman will come out and he'll kind of musically or poetically present what he was. Or the Oracle of Delphi, in fact, is another one. You know, her pronouncements came in the form of verse. Right. So Spikenard is a nootropic, which means that it helps in the formation of memories. And then finally, I could go on like this all day.

Oh, this is super duper interesting because we've done a lot of podcasts on nootropics, on smart drugs, on psychedelics, on plant medicine, but I just don't think people are aware. And this is why I wanted to really get into this, because I find it fascinating for me, as a Christian, as a Bible enthusiast, as a guy who loves to study theology, but also loves to study some of these really, really unique molecules, how they interact with the human body. This is fascinating. So you were talking about Spichner Yeah.

So they've got Spiconard. It's. Yeah, it's been tested to improve learning and improve memory and recall and stuff. This is a really interesting one. At low doses it said sedative, and at high doses it's a stimulant. And this also has antidepressant character as well. And then. Well, actually, something else to say about it is it boosts serotonin and dopa and dopamine and gaba. And I do want to come back and talk about dopamine in a minute, but Costas Sasarea Costis, which is another one. That's what you find in Jostics, used quite a lot in Ayurvedic medicine. That one is used has effects on cognitive disorders. But again, this one's neuroprotective. And specifically it protects cells. It protects neurons from dopamine induced apoptosis. So it protects cells from too much dopamine. Yeah, because dopamine can be toxic in high quantities. So I guess one of the things that's just fascinating about this is the degree of the level of understanding that these people had is just off the map, you know, compared to the kind of stuff that we do. Right.

Well, it's a level of complexity that's just fascinating. And I know that, you know, if you look at shamanic medicine and I recently, I wish I could remember the name of the book. It was a great book about. About the use of like, you know, animal poisons and venoms and plants and all these. These pharmaceuticals that are derived from the Amazon. You know, if you ask many of these shamans, they'll tell you that the plants told us or the plants revealed this to us. Which is super interesting because in the Bible, you know, there are specific verses that say God reveals himself to us through nature or through creation. And in the case of some of these mixes in Leviticus and Exodus, literally they're passing, passed straight down from God to Moses. It's not as though the plants are telling people as much as God himself is telling people these things.

Interesting, isn't it? I wonder if the book you were talking about was the Cosmic Serpent by Jeremy Narvi.

No, but I'll find it. I recently ordered it on Amazon. So while we're talking, I'll pull open my phone and find my Amazon orders and hunt it down, tell people what it is. So go on.

Yeah, so then you've got Agarwood as well, which is called oud. It's known to a lot of people as oud. This is a really, really complex stuff. It comes from the aquilaria tree. And if you infect aquilaria with a fungus, then it produces a resin as a defense mechanism. And this resin contains. I mean, we know about. We have already 300 compounds which have been isolated from it. And it just does a load of stuff. It's aphrodisiac, euphoric, described as hypnotic, meaning it helps you go to sleep. Antidepressants, the systems it works in, it works on the serotonin system, norepinephrine system, inhibits the up. Inhibits uptake, reuptake of dopamine, for example, through acetylcholine. And if I could, I wonder if it's a good moment, but if we talk about just the, Just the interaction between cannabis and frankincense, for example. Right. And the reason this is interesting is because this archaeological find at Tel Arad quite recently found those two. There's these two altars and they're inside a chamber. Debir. Again debir, meaning the holy of holies. So they're inside a chamber. This was found at the southern tip of the, of the. Of the Israelite empire and it was a garrison. Right, so this was state religion. I think it was 8th century, I think it was 8th century BC. But yeah, they found a couple of stains on this, on these, on the altars there. Archaeological dig has been. Has been known about for quite a while. But they took the tools of modern analytical chemistry to analyze the stains and they found that one of them was cannabis and one of them was frankincense. Right. Everyone's gone, oh, wow, there's a whole cannabis here. And not many people have talked about the frankincense. Right, so frankincense. And if we take just the dopamine system, it gets, it gets really complicated because. Let's go find my notes here. Yeah, Right, So, for example, THC, the influence of THC on the CB1 receptor, which is. And this is a receptor which you find at the. Before the synapse. Yeah. So the end of the neuron comes in and it's the presynaptic terminal. So it's. So you got the, you got the pre. Synaptic terminal, then you've got the synapse, then you've got the post synaptic terminal and then you've got the next neuron. I hope that's, that's clear for people.

Yeah.

Right, so THC, for example, working on the CB1 receptor, increases dopamine. So if it's a dopaminergic cell if there's THC in the area, it basically makes more dopamine flow from the one neuron into the synaptic cleft into the synapse. Right. And then on the other side, you have frankincense. Frankincense can take one. One of the many things that frankincense contains is ethyl acetate. Ethyl acetate is an inhibitor of acetylcholine cholinesterase. Right. Which is an enzyme which is on the post synaptic terminal which is involved in the reuptake of dopamine. So what does this mean? It means that on one side of the synapse you have cannabis, or specifically thc, which is increasing the amount of dopamine which floods into the cleft. And then on the other side of the synapse, you have a different chemical which is working on a different system, which is making the reuptake of that dopamine happen slower. Right. So it's kind of a double whammy. Yeah. Which is. Which is different to having, you know, if you have one joint and then you have another joint and you have another joint and you have another joint, you're not going to be four times more high than you were after your first joint because you've only got so many receptors to work on. The presynaptic clip left. But when. If you start messing with other systems and there's quite a lot of other other ways to mess with it. There's also the. The trip V. Well, there's also the iron channels as well. There's a whole lot of stuff you can do, but this is a way of increasing dopamine from both sides. And dopamine, which is what I found absolutely fascinating, is connected to language production and it's connected to meaning production. Right. So it's. You know, anyone who listens to hip hop, they'll be aware that. That a lot of rappers will smoke and then they'll rap. It's a trope that you see a lot. Right, right, right. This idea that not only rapping, but.

Just general creative output, it is associated quite a bit with cannabis, this ability to be able to unlock a lot of creative portals when used particularly in moderation and not to the extent where you're stuck with couch lock and Cheetos.

Yeah, yeah, exactly that. So what is creative output? Creative output is taking. Taking ideas, you're taking bits of. Bits of concepts and putting them in. Into a new formation. Yeah. Which is also what rapping is. Which is also what poetry is. You know, taking you know, we're all familiar with what with words. But then when you find a new way to put them together. Well, that's very interesting. Now, the word for word in Hebrew is tabar, right? And the word for the chamber is debir, which is the word tabar, dalit, beit rosh. With an extra yod. Yeah. So it's. It's the same word with an extra letter. And that word yod, which is the first letter of the word yod. Hey. Vav. Hey. Which is the holy name of the Israelite. God is. You know, it's considered where God comes into. Well, I don't know how to put this exactly, but a lot of the God names begin with that. You know, yah, Yahweh, Yahweh, all these. All these kind of words, they contain this yod. And you see it all over the place where it's talking about when God manifests on an earthly plate. And then you've got kind of God unmanifest, which is more in the realm of Elohim. So isn't that interesting? You've got the dopamine system, which we know is involved in language production, and it's being affected by two different chemicals or two different resins, which are burnt in what's called the dabir, which is called. Which is related to the word word. And the angels themselves would speak to the prophet, whoever happened. Not the prophet. Sorry, that's the wrong term. The high priest or Moses or whoever happened to be in the box, and then he would come out and he would speak through words.

Interesting. Okay. So, you know what I find fascinating is that when I was doing some research for this interview, I found this whole concept of neurotheology something that popped up over and over again. Meaning, like, there's a lot of modern research showing that people who take psychedelics for spiritual purposes score higher on what's called the mysticism scale. And when I've talked with guys like Jamie Wheal before on my podcast, he talks about this idea of, like, a group. He doesn't call it a group bliss, but something very similar to a group bliss. When people consume these type of substances together and then worship together, there are mystical experiences that people find highly formative to the religious experience as a whole. And then there's this whole field of neurotheology, which blends biology and neurology and psychology and theology. And one basic premise of it is that these mystical or spiritual experiences can be triggered or enhanced by all these exogenous and endogenous chemicals that we're talking about like dopamine and serotonin and gaba. And so this idea of shifting one into a different state in order to have a more dangerous, deep and meaningful spiritual experience is something that's just fascinating and is now being studied in some really interesting ways. One thing that I came across as I was looking into this was even this idea of. I think it's called henbane, which contains the hallucinogenic compound scopolamine and grows in a bunch of different spots in Israel. Isn't that actually pictured as an actual flower on the Jewish high priest's ceremonial house hat?

Yeah, that's another. That's super interesting. That comes from the, from the Talmud as well. It was, yeah, it was, it was the. There was a golden Hein flower on the high priest hat. Yeah. And it's, it's Josephus who, who mentions this. Yeah. So. Yeah. And that's the only reference we have in, in, in the scriptures that I'm aware of. For heaven, babe.

Yeah. And then another, another thing that, that kept popping up. I mean. Well, I, I mentioned Brian and he has this book called the Immortality the Secret History of the Religion with no Name, where he describes how these visionary plants and herbs and fungi were passed from one generation to the next for eons of time, including in the spiritual old world capital of Eleusis, where he proposes that this holy beverage unleashed heavenly visions for like 2000 years. That the original sacraments of the church were spiked with mind altering drugs, and that it wasn't just like wine or grapefruit, but a lot of other components similar to those that we've already described, that might shift one into an altered state of consciousness when consuming the Eucharist or the communion. But going even farther back than that, there's also the idea of the manna we all hear in Sunday school about the manna that comes down from heaven, that feeds the Israelites in the desert. But isn't there even. The manna itself is associated with some of these same type of compounds.

Right. Okay, so this is the point at which I will have to just be really clear that I'm going to speculation here. Okay. So what I've talked about before, there's nothing. This isn't any speculation at all. This is psychopharmacology. You can look up in any journal and you can find the, the identities of the plants, at least some of those plants with some degree of confidence in the Bible. When we're talking about manna. Yeah. We're into a slightly different realm. Right. So, so Manna. We talk about manna coming down from heaven, and people have this idea that it's kind of like food aid or something. Manna. It doesn't drop like that. It drops in a different way. Manna means secretion. And in fact, there's something called man, which is still eaten today by Bedouins. And it's a secretion from. It's a tamarisk plant, basically. But the tamarisk plant drops this kind of pellets, or it produces a kind of sticky, viscous stuff. And that's called man, right? Yeah. The linguistics are fascinating because in Hebrew, man who means, what is this? Right. Or it's actually mahu, but in the. In the. In the. The particular line where somebody says to Moses in the Bible, what is this? They say, man who? And the rabbi, man who means, what is this?

This?

But it also means this is man, as in this is manna. And people and the rabbis talk about this in the Talmud. They say, okay, why are they saying man and not ma? Because in Hebrew, what is not man? It's ma. Yeah. And then they say, oh, maybe it's an Egyptian word they picked up from Egypt or whatever. It gets really, really complex, that kind of thing. So. But kind of the simpler bit of the mana story, manna is described in a couple of different ways. Just bear with me for one second, actually. Y. Yeah.

And while you're looking that up, by the way, that book that I mentioned earlier, I found is called Medicine In Search of Nature's Healing Secrets. It's written by Mark Plotkin. It actually has a pretty good podcast about the different medicines that we find from around the world, both old and new. And that'd be an interesting one for folks that are digging. This is called Medicine Quest. I'll link to that one in the show notes@bengreenfieldfitness.com Nimu N E M U. Okay, so the mana. Go ahead.

Yeah. I mean, just props to Mark Plotkin. Plotkin as well. I mean, that guy knows what he's talking about. So it's found in the form of. It's described in two ways. Right? This is from Numbers. Manna was like coriander seed and looked like resin. Right. That's one way it's described in Exodus 16. It's white like coriander seed and tasted like wafers made with honey. In another part of the Bible, it says it is like thin flakes, like frost on the ground. So we've got two descriptions. We've got descriptions of basically something round, small, white, and when it says has the eye in. Has. That has the eye of resin, it looks like resin. Right. I'm gonna. I'm gonna describe what I think. It's ergot, right? Ergot is a secretion that is found. It grows on various different cereals and it's endemic. It's found in the region. It's not only found in the region, but it's found at the time of year when the Israelites are looking around. You know, it comes out of its dormancy in early spring. And the period in which it's found in the Bible is early spring. Right. It's also found in. So there's three wildernesses. The second wilderness, the first wilderness, they don't find any water and they don't find any manna. The second wilderness, they find water and they find manna, which is also interesting because manna has to grow on vegetation, obviously, because it's a. It's a parasite on plants. And if you don't have any water, you don't have any vegetation. So that's another reason why I think it's ergot. So when, as it secretes, it kind of flows out of whatever it happens to infect. It might be sorghum or something like that, and it forms pellets. If it dries on the plant, it forms little pellets. They're about the size of a coriander seed and they're white and they have a kind of resinous nature to them. If it doesn't dry on the plant and it drops on the floor, it splashes and it makes a kind of thin frost. Right? And if you look at the talk that I'm. That you mentioned at the beginning and theogens in the Bible, getting high with the most high, you can see pictures of what ergot secretion looks like, right? It looks like thin flakes, like frost on the ground. It's called a horse frost in. In the King James Bible. Another thing, which. So there are other secretions, like I mentioned one before, man, which comes from the tamarind tamarisk, actually, when that splashes onto the ground, when that hits the ground, it doesn't splash. It forms a kind of viscous mound because it's. It's a viscous stuff. Also mana, or rather man, Bedouin man, because there are. There is a kind of line of reasoning that scholars will say. And they say, oh, it's just. It's Bedouin man because it's the same word, but it doesn't really fit the description. And Bedouin Man. Or the stuff that Bedouins pick up, this secretion, they keep it and they keep it for a long time. And in the Bible it says, or Moses says, let no man leave of it till the morning. But some of them left of it until the morning and it bred worms and it stank.

Interesting. So it's kind of like a fungus.

Oh yeah, exactly that. I mean, something that, you know, it does actually taste like, like, you know, it's described in Exodus, tastes like wafers made in honey. If you look at the naturalist, you look at the. Sorry, the people who've actually eaten this stuff, at the first stage of infection, it does actually taste sweet. And then in the second stage infection, it rots very quickly and it starts getting disgusting. So those are some of the reasons. Another thing is that it's not ready to eat. In the Bible it has to be prepared, which is kind of curious, you know, why would that Israelite God give them something which is. Isn't, isn't. Isn't prepared. Interesting one. But anyway, it has to be ground in mills or beaten. A mortar. That's from numbers 11. And then it. And then we know. So we know it's ground and we know it's baked and we know it's boiled. Right. The way that you can get ergot, or rather you can get lsa, which is a kind of cousin of LSD out of ergot, you've got to be really careful with ergot because ergot can give you horrible poisoning and it can, you know, it can, it can absolutely, absolutely mess you up. But there's a toxic part of it and there's a non toxic part of it. And the way that you would separate the one from the other is by grinding it and then boiling it, basically. And when you, when you boil it, you separate the soluble fraction and the insoluble fraction. The insoluble fraction, you get rid of it. And the soluble fraction, the part which stays in the water, then you bake it and you get crystals and you get crystals of super powerful nsf. And that will most certainly make you encounter God. So that's the form of it. Right. Actually, I was being a bit flippant there. That won't most certainly make you encounter God just because you need to do a little bit more than just snuffle drugs down you.

Yeah, I in no way would be a guy who'd want to endorse on my show that you need drugs to connect to God. But what I am saying is that the deliberate Initiation with the divine, using altered or elevated states of consciousness from some of these compounds is something that, that. Well, gosh, I think that in like the highly rational, scientific kind of like logical, even disconnected from the sacred elements of nature status of. For example, the modern church has dictated that. I feel like we've lost touch with a lot of these compounds or even painted them into the same category. And I have a whole article about this on my website as like being drunk, as violating the scriptural laws for sobriety or temperance. When in fact, I think that in the proper set and setting, and especially when you look at a lot of the examples from Song of Solomon to Exodus to Leviticus that we've been talking about, these things can be used to enhance meditation, prayer, scripture reading. We already know they're wonderful for things like personal and professional breakthroughs and sexual intercourse and things like that. But in terms of weaving these into, like burning this type of incense during a morning prayer session, or sprinkle a little bit of frankincense on cannabis flower and smoking that before you go deep into prayer, I mean, there's actually some very, very interesting use cases for this type of approach. It just seems like not a lot of people are talking about it because in Christianity you kind of get your hand slapped if you mention plant medicines, AKA drugs and reefer madness and all that just because of the association.

Yeah, that's an unfortunate path that I wouldn't say. Yeah, it's a fortunate part that certain priests and certain people who are a little bit too comfortable with their power have taken because the Bible, you know, it's very clear. It says God made grass for the.

Well, God made all things for a purpose and made all things good indeed.

Yeah, yeah. So. And you know the laws on kosher. There's no drug to. All kinds of things are non kosher, but none of the plant drugs are. The only drug that you might think of as unkosher is the toad. Because you're not meant to lick toads. Toads are not kosher. But there's this wonderful line. This is from Exodus as well. And this is from the scene where the Israelites are looking at Mount Sinai and Moses has gone up, right? And the rest of them are down there and they have all eaten manna at this particular scene. And this is the only time in the Bible where you see a collective vision, right? You often see visions, but they don't happen to lots of people at the same time. So, for example, you know, Daniel sees the writing on the wall, Right. Not everybody else sees the writing on the wall. So the argument there, I would say that the writing in the wall was what Daniel was saying, and you could say that it was in his head, or you could say he was seeing some other level of reality or whatever you might want to say. But the point I'm making is that not everyone gets to see the writing on the wall. And in some scenes, for example, you'll get someone who will see something and someone will hear something, but you don't. But you never have a collective vision, except in one point of the. Of the book, and that is the vision of Sinai, which is another one. And this is a line, it says, and all the people are seeing the voices and the flames and the sound of the trumpet. Right. Now, I've never seen a voice. I've never seen the sound of a trumpet. Because you don't see sounds unless you're.

Kinesthetic or under the influence of sound. Something.

Yeah. So synesthesia is where you mix.

Yeah, synesthetic. Yeah, that's what I meant.

So this is the only example of synesthesia in the Bible, and it's the only example of collective vision. And it's the time when all the Israelites are eating manna. So I think that's rather a. Rather interesting. An interesting addition to the argument that manna is Ergon.

Yeah, yeah. And by the way, when it comes to these altered states of consciousness, you know, it's not as though plant medicines are the only route to achieve these states. You know, I. I read a couple of books two months ago, one called Meditation in the Bible, another one called Jewish Meditation by this guy named Arya Kaplan, who's like a rabbi and an author, and he has this whole series of different meditations that apparently were used by the prophets to attain altered states of consciousness. These meditative practices were widespread among the Jews throughout Jewish history. And these ancient secret forms of attaining an altered state of consciousness, you know, it's something that apparently has been lost, that particular vocabulary of meditation to a large degree during the last century. But these books reveal some really interesting meditative practices that can be combined with these medicines or even used on their own to achieve an altered state of consciousness. Kind of like one could, instead of using lsd, take Stanislav Grof's approach of using something like holotropic breathwork instead of. So it's not as though you have to have, again, like a drug or a medicine or something like that to achieve these states, but combining some of these things with other elements such as meditation or breath work or Using them on their own or not using them and using meditation and breathwork and things like that are all things that I think. I guess a lot of people, especially for example the average Christian person might be listening in, who just sits down with their Bible every morning to read the Bible and pray. Absolutely nothing wrong with that. But I've found that at certain times of the year, certain times of the month, taking a deeper dive and incorporating a lot of these strategies that God has literally revealed in scripture. It's super interesting, but again, I get some backlash for being like a hippie patchouli smelling Christian for doing some of this stuff. Have you seen some backlash from the Christian community as far as some of the things that you've written or video recorded? Do people get upset about some of the stuff?

I remember once I was, I was doing a tour of Irish universities and these guys were giving out flyers and there was a university professor, he wasn't even a theologist, he was a professor of something else. And the talk was called Drugs in the Bible. And then there was this literally a professor at university saying, ah, there's no drugs in the Bible. And yeah, I mean that kind of ignorance. I found it quite astonishing from someone who's teaching university. But I haven't had a lot of backlash. No, I mean no one's come and hassled me about it in particular. I think Christians, certainly English Christians tend to be, I don't know, generalized, but they tend to be quite quiet. The Anglican faith is, has quite a quiet vibe to it really. So no, I haven't really dealt with too much backlash. I just want to add something to what you said there. Yeah, there's no reason why you need to take drugs to get closer to God, but there is every reason why you should leave other people alone who want to do that because it's certainly not your place to go against what it says in the Bible if you're a Christian. And in the Bible it says the plants are good. And that's really, really simple in terms.

Of your books that you've written and I've actually seen your videos and read some of your articles and papers, all of which I'll link to in the show notes. But these books that you've written, Neuro Apocalypse and Science Revealed, do both of those take deeper dives into this particular topic or those books have a different theme.

The one which looks at this closely is Neuro Apocalypse and the, the drugs in the Bible is one chapter of it, the rest of it is part of it's about linguistics. I mean, the overall theme is what can we do to our heads to give us access to revelation? And when I'm talking about revelation, I'm not necessarily talking only in the spiritual sense of spiritual secret. But, for example, there's a kind of famous old experiment with psilocybin where people are looking at parallel lines on a screen and the parallel lines are slightly moving. And the subjects in the experiment asked to say when they can see that the lines aren't parallel anymore, and if you give someone psilocybin before they do that, lo and behold, they spot it quicker. Right. And I think the head researcher of that, that his comment was that this compound undoes the. What is it undoes the certainties or the fixties. I forget the exact phraseology he uses. But often when we look at something, we decide it's like that, and then we don't have to look at it anymore. And psychedelics undermine that in quite an interesting way, which is to say that you can see something as it actually is rather than as you've already decided it is. And, you know, you can take that into all kinds of. Of different fields, like, for example, into psychotherapy, where you've got a very fixed idea of, I don't know what your wife is like, for example, when you're angry with her. And then you can, you know, if you can reframe that and you can see it from another angle, you can say, maybe it's not actually my wife, maybe it's the dynamic between me and my wife, you know, because it gives you another angle. But, yeah, so the book in general is about various different things which will affect. Affect how we perceive. So I start off looking at different languages. I'm looking at the Japanese language and the English language. I spent six years in Japan. The way that the language is constructed and the way that the culture is constructed I believe influences the way that Japanese people see. An example of that is if you ask a Japanese to. And an American, and this has been done to look at an animation of fish moving around inside fish tanks and then ask them to describe it, the first thing an American will say almost always is there was a big fish doing a certain thing. Whereas the first thing a Japanese will say is, it looks like a fish tank. And then the Japanese will go on to describe things in the background and the relationships between different. The sizes of things and the relationships between different fish in the tank. Whereas the American would generally say, and the big fish was trying to do this and trying to do that. That's quite interesting. But what's even more interesting is if you. Then five minutes later, later, you show pictures of the fish that were in the tank to Americans and Japanese, but you put them on different backgrounds. So if you show. If you show a picture of a fish to an American on different background and say, was this fish in the video? They won't have any trouble identifying whether it was or whether it wasn't. But if you show that to a Japanese, they take longer to answer the question, and they get it wrong more often, because for whatever reason, it seems that the individual and the context are coded together in the Japanese mind, which is fascinating. And then if you look at their artworks, for example, you know, those traditional long charcoal paintings, you'll often have an individual figure in high definition, whereas all around it, you'll have kind of mountains and waterfalls in low definition. So that relationship between the individual and the context is all the way through Japanese society. You see it in, for example, salary men, office workers who don't take their holidays. You know, that's craziness, not taking your holidays, but they don't take the holidays. Why? Because the relationship between the individual and his context, which is his workplace, is a whole lot stronger than it is in Western cultures. And I believe that that is partly because of the way the language is constructed. And it would take me too long to go into it here, but basically, the way that verbs and nouns work in Japanese and English are different. And the result is that we see a world that's different, and we code it different, and we remember bits of it different, and we behave differently as a result of that. So I'm looking at how linguistics influences the way that we see the world and how getting outside of linguistics can allow us to see other things. I'm looking at conditions like autism, for example, looking at how savantism works, people who can spot things that others can't spot. One in ten artists has some kind of heightened skill. You know, we have this idea that you have these savants and the rest of them not. But that's not actually the case, and that's only in areas that we're actually looking for. But, I mean, there's. I don't know if you've ever seen this guy J. Mac. If you look up j.Mac on YouTube, who is this. Who is this guy who was really into basketball in kind of college basketball. And this guy, you know, he was so into basketball, as autists will often get fascinated with subject. And he was the mascot of the team. He used to kind of get the water and stuff. And on the last game of the season of his college basketball, they let him play for the last three minutes. And he missed his first shot from miles, missed the second shot and then he started sinking baskets from all over the place and turned out to be an absolute ninja at basketball. And he describes the basket as huge. He says it was like a big old bucket that was huge. And autists have very interesting visual cortexes. They've got highly branching visual cortexes. And you hear of these people who can count, like in Rain man, for example, the guy who counts all the matches on the floor. Well, I'm looking to that. I won't go into it too deeply because there's a whole lot of neuroscience there. So it's about neuroscience, it's about linguistics.

Yeah. I'll link to the books in the show notes for sure. And I know we're kind of running up against time. I could talk about this stuff for like hours with you. But the interesting thing, I think I heard you say this in another interview or in a video somewhere. Like this idea that drugs are not the only route to God and God isn't some type of hallucination produced by any of these substances. And I think the example you gave was like a short sighted person who put on glasses and the glasses allow them to see objects, but that doesn't mean the objects that they see are the products of the glasses. The glasses are just allowing them to be able to see those objects that already existed just a little bit more clearly or interact with them in a little bit more clear way. And I think that's a pretty good analogy for a lot of this stuff.

Yeah, yeah. And I think another thing to be very aware of, if people are getting, you know, obviously I'm very keen on my psychedelics and I'm very keen on my theology. And one of the places where Christians can get quite annoying actually is in their missionary zeal and evangelical zeal. So let's be really careful that if you do get into your, into your, into your drugs and you see God with them and you do whatever you do, don't be running up to people and trying to get them to take drugs. Right. I would suggest that if you do learn anything from your experiences, that should come through in your behavior, it should come through in your morality, it should come through in your humor.

Yeah. Your fruits, your fruits will show themselves and people will know you by your fruits. And that's of course straight out of the Bible. And yeah, I agree. Some people are Called some are not. I think some people do well with these type of compounds and some people for both biochemical as well, well as life history reasons are not necessarily called to the use of these. But I certainly think that at least considering them and checking out some of the resources that I'll put in the show notes. If you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Nemu not only will I link to a couple of articles that I've written about this topic, I'll link to Danny's videos, his book Science the Neuro Apocalypse, some of Chris Bennett's writings on cannabis in the Bible. Bible. That book I mentioned Medicine Quest In Search of Nature's Healing Secrets, the incense blends and the oils that my wife and I experimented with based on some of this stuff. And you guys can go knock yourself out if you want to take a deep dive. But my main goal for getting Danny on was to really begin to educate people and start to make them aware that there's this whole world of ways that we can kind of of tap into this new science of neurotheology that are just absolutely fascinating. And we may even have to do a round two at some point, Danny, because I feel like we scratched the surface of some of this stuff.

Yeah, man, I could talk about this for days and days and days. I'd be delighted to. So my. Both of my books, if you. I've got a code for you if you want to get a 20 discount from psychedelicpress.co.uk the code is NEMU N E M U101.

Okay.

That'll get you 20% off your, your books.

Okay. I'll toss that in the show notes as well. Well, Danny, thank you so much for coming on and sharing all this stuff with us. And I think it's just absolutely fascinating and I'm glad I was able to connect with you, man.

My total pleasure, Ben. It's been. It's been a real pleasure. Well, I've just got the space. I would just like to direct people in direction of some other work when I'm not doing this kind of thing. I run a reforestation organization. We work in Brazil with indigenous group groups, black women's groups in the slums we work with, we're planting 50,000 trees of the trees which are used to make violin bows. In Brazil that's called rain. So if you look up rainumbrella.org we're doing all kinds of things with reforestation and you know, any support with that would be very, very well appreciated. And yeah, that's the other little bit of work that I do.

Cool.

Cool.

I'll link to that as well in the show notes. Sounds like a cool project. So. So anyways, that's all gonna be@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Nemu that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com N E M U and until next time, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Danny Nemu signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have an amazing week. In compliance with the FTC guidelines, please assume the following about links and posts on this site. Most of the links going to profit products are often affiliate links, of which I receive a small commission from sales of certain items. But the price is the same for you, and sometimes I even get to share a unique and somewhat significant discount with you. In some cases, I might also be an investor in a company I mention. I'm the founder, for example, of Kion llc, the makers of Kion branded supplements and products, which I talk about quite a bit. Regardless of the relationship, if I post or talk about an affiliate affiliate link to a product, it is indeed something I personally use, support and with full authenticity and transparency recommend. In good conscience, I personally vet each and every product that I talk about. My first priority is providing valuable information and resources to you that help you positively optimize your mind, body and spirit. And I'll only ever link to products or resources, affiliate or otherwise, that fit within this product purpose. So there's your fancy legal disclaimer. Sa.