Bridging the gap between our ancient and modern worlds
Current Collaborations
Yale Ancient Pharmacology
Across the ancient world, cultures relied on an embedded and sophisticated knowledge of plants that could be used for healing or ritual, for sustenance or leisure. While their use was pervasive in antiquity, these plants and with them the knowledge of their use faded from memory. The distinctive transdisciplinary approach of the recently established Yale Ancient Pharmacology Program (YAPP) offers a key to their rediscovery.
Flourish Trust Fellowship Fund
A new initiative, based at both Harvard and Berkeley, to fund pathbreaking research across all disciplines by undergraduate and graduate students, post docs and faculty. The cross-campus fellowship program is intended to stimulate original, meaningful collaborations among the hard sciences, social sciences, arts and humanities around questions of transcendence, consciousness and psychedelic studies.
If you die before you die, you won’t die when you die.
If you die before you die, you won’t die when you die.
If you die before you die, you won’t die when you die.
If you die before you die, you won’t die when you die.
If you die before you die, you won’t die when you die.
Roots of our work
A real-life quest for the Holy Grail
Sacred beverages were routinely consumed as part of the so-called Ancient Mysteries – elaborate rites that led initiates to the brink of death. The best and brightest from Athens and Rome flocked to the spiritual capital of Eleusis, where a holy beer unleashed heavenly visions for two thousand years. Others drank the holy wine of Dionysus to become one with the god.
The constantly advancing fields of archaeobotany and archaeochemistry have hinted at the enduring use of hallucinogenic drinks in antiquity.
Questions we are trying to answer
If these sacraments survived for thousands of years in our remote prehistory, from the Stone Age to the Ancient Greeks, did they also survive into the age of Jesus?
Over the past two thousand years, what happened to the sacred pharmacology of the West? How do these lost traditions reflect the ritual use of psychedelics as a universal religious heritage of humankind — East and West, North and South?
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