Joe Rogan Experience 2349 - Danny Jones

Video: https://youtu.be/89IEFOiW-Z0?t=1h55m25s

LadyBabylon section starts at 1:56:56 and runs till 2:17:22

Danny: I had this dude on my show, speaking of the academic, the strife between the academics and the self-taught online people, influencers, whatever you want to call them. This dude was kicked out of his university. First of all, he wrote a dissertation on ancient pharmacy, the Roman pharmacy and Greek pharmacy. And it was a dissertation based on this guy named Galen who was like the surgeon general of ancient Rome. and he had a chapter in his dissertation, (his PhD dissertation) about recreational drugs in Rome. And the head of the department reviewed his dissertation and said, "Everything looks great. Delete the section on recreational drugs in ancient Rome." So he's like, "Okay, why?" They're like, "Cuz the Romans wouldn't do such a thing." So he's like, "Okay." He deleted it and then submitted it, got his PhD, and then wrote a book based on that part of the dissertation that he left out, which the book was called The Chemical Muse. (And I learned about this from Hamilton Morris. He did a podcast with the dude first) and I read that book and you know he was basically making the case that drugs were ubiquitous in antiquity during the Roman times. Like they were being used for everything because people were not dying from old age. They were dying from war, hand-to-hand combat, famine, plague, infection, all these things. Infection. So like people were constantly using drugs, and there was a law in ancient Rome that he said there was only one law when it came to using drugs, and that was you were not allowed to kill people with drugs. You were not allowed to murder people. Which is why Marcus Aurelius was using this drug compound called a Theriac. And the Theriac was a concoction of like 11 different North African vipers, their flesh and their venom combined with opium and all kinds of bodily fluids. And he was using this as a performance-enhancing drug.

Joe: Whoa.

Danny: Because people were trying to assassinate him with poisons. That's how they assassinated people. They were using scorpions, poisons, arrows, all different kinds of weird things to sneak in and kill him. So he was drinking this Theriac to build up his immune system against the venoms. And this dude Galen who wrote about this shit he was talking about giving, he was Marcus Aurelius's physician, and he was like (Marcus Aurelius) "it's getting ridiculous, it's getting annoying, I keep having to up his opium dose, he keeps using more and more fucking opium, I can't get him off of it."

Joe: Oh my god.

Danny: Yeah. And so Galen, the physician, the surgeon general of the Roman Empire, under Marcus Aurelius and Nero (I think) basically equates to 10% of all the Greek literature from antiquity. 10% of it, is medical. And this dude that wrote this dissertation based it all off Galen, is talking about all these drug compounds that are used and, so what does is he looks at all the ancient literature from Homer to (you know like 800BCE) to like the time that Beowulf was written (basically... 80CE) and he's like finding all of this evidence of crazy drug use. And he has this crazy theory also that (I don't know if it's crazy I don't know) the problem like with talking to people like him is that I don't know ancient Greek. I can't read it. Right. And I've tried to have four or five academics come on the show to refute him, but they won't come on with him. They all refuse to debate him except for one guy.

Joe: Interesting.

Danny: Yeah.

Joe: Why?

Danny: Cuz he's saying Christ is a drug.

Joe: Oh, I saw that video.

Danny: Oh, you saw the whole thing.

Joe: No, I saw that video pop up my YouTube. I'm like, Danny Jones going crazy like what is he doing? Christ is a drug. What? but that's also what John Marco Allegro alleges

Danny: kind of, kind of.

Joe: Well, he said that the ancient Sumerian word for a mushroom, for Christ, is a mushroom that's covered in God's semen. Yeah. Cuz the mushrooms would come out of the ground and they thought the rain was God coming on the earth and that's where (you know) that's what gave life to the earth and then they would take these mushrooms and see God.

Danny: Right. Yeah. I don't know much about John Marco Allegro but I think that I read his book "the sacred mushroom and the cross". He was like using Sumerian roots or something to translate the Dead Sea Scrolls. But this guy is basically saying the word Christ, the word the root of the word Christ is "Chrio" (χρίω) in Greek, right? And it was used since Homer, and there's all these passages which this dude sent me. I literally call him all the time, and I ask him, "I need more evidence. Send me more shit", And he sends me passages from like ancient literature, Homer, that's translated with the English directly under it. And they're using this word Christ as a term for "applying drugs to people" in antiquity.

Joe: Whoa.

Danny: Like Christing arrows with poisons, right?

Joe: and what year was this, where they were doing this?

Danny: Back all the way to like 800 BC was when Homer starts using it.

Joe: So they're using this term before Christ.

Danny: Way before Christ. It was well, so to be clear, in antiquity, if you look it up on the thesaurus, the actual Greek thesaurus, it's called the TLG, and you look up the word Christ, there's there's over 200,000 or more uses of the word Christ. And there's like 350 times where it's used in the context of drugs before Jesus Christ is ever written about.

Joe: Whoa.

Danny: And what he's what he's basically claiming is that there's like it's the the process of applying something, like there's there's different contexts, there's a guy who Christed himself in cow shit, There's people who are Christing ships with plaster to make them more waterproof. But there's a vast majority of literature, including Galen, who writes about Christing using drugs. And he's coming up with this controversial theory, which is, you know, super controversial, that Christ was: if you think of the word Christ, a person can be a Christ, like a Christ. Like, think of Bob the Builder. He's a builder. He builds shit. Christ was, they called him Jesus "the Christ". So he thinks Christ was somebody who was involved with drugs, taking drugs, giving people drugs,

Joe: A shaman

Danny: performing magic like a shaman. Yeah, exactly. Similar to that. And like

Joe: by the way, a real shaman would say all the things that Jesus said.

Danny: Yes, that's a good point. So and it gets like, it gets way weirder, bro. And again, this is all according to him. I don't know if any of this is real. I just find it fascinating and I wish I could find somebody who really knows the Greek to debate this dude and call him out in his "bullshit" but I can't. The only person I found was an exorcist who's done like 10,000 exorcisms on Skype.

Joe: A Skype exorcist !!!! (haha).

Danny: Skype exorcist.

Joe: Boy, that sounds like a scam and a half.

Danny: And he came in and they were just arguing about it for a little while. And the guy tried to baptize me with holy oil. And you know, I got into an argument with him about drugs.

Joe: He tried to baptize you?

Danny: Yeah. He brought holy oil, and he tried to baptize me with the holy oil.

Joe: Did he say why he was doing this?

Danny: Because he thinks that Satan is inside of me.

Joe: Of you?

Danny: Of me. Yeah. And which he might be.

Joe: What did what evidence did he have that Satan was inside of you?

Danny: Because I like to consume drugs recreationally. And I was telling him "if Satan is drugs, if I can smoke marijuana and it's prescribed by a doctor, is it still Satan?" He goes, "No, don't play those games with me." And I'm like, "Well, how come every time I get really really bombed, I think about things spending more times with my kids, and good things?" Like, yeah. And he's like, "Don't try to patronize me. You know what it is, It's the devil."

Joe: Oh, he's a fool.

Danny: Oh, yeah. Like that's a problem. Like this guy's a show. It's a showman.

Joe: Well, cannabis was used in churches. They used to, you know, the incense where they would go around, that was cannabis. They would use that and they would get everybody in the church high, and fumigate it. They would literally hotbox the church. And this is a part of this whole ritual of, you know, giving in to Christ, giving in to God. The idea that it's bad because some people have bad experiences, man. You could apply that to almost anything. I think marijuana makes people more compassionate, kinder, more sensitive, but also paranoid. You could freak out. You could if you're riddled with anxiety and you have a hard time controlling that anxiety in your mind and you take a high dose of marijuana, you could freak out. Yeah. It's also connected to schizophrenia. Because I think there's people that have a tendency towards schizophrenia anyway and then a large dose of marijuana tends to give them psychotic breaks. There's like real literature. There's real real evidence of that. So, this is like important that if you're a person who thinks that marijuana is overall net positive, which I do, it's important to talk about the negatives. Just like everything else, like alcohol, food, everything. There's a lot of different things that if you do, if you drink too much water, you'll fucking die, okay? There's a lot of things that aren't good for you under certain circumstances. But the only way we know how to do it and how not to do it, is to do studies. And when it's illegal and you're terrified you can go to jail, or if you're an academic and you want to study this as your main... you just get dismissed. It's could be career suicide. So these people are foolish.

Danny: Yeah. And that's the problem, this was the only dude I could get to agree to come sit with him because this guy had a YouTube channel. He wanted to promote himself and all this stuff. But like a lot of the academics I talked to a lot of Harvard philologists to try to come debate this guy. And like the philologists like there's a difference between a linguist which I think Marco Allegro was and a philologist where the linguists look at the actual complexities of the text itself and the language but the philologists what they do is they're looking for context. So what they do is they take words and they try to figure out what these specific words meant in certain time periods. So they take a word, take their time machine back. Let's take it back to 200 BC, 100 BC, whatever it is, and they say, "Okay, let's just use the example of the word Crio (Christ). Let's look at all of the corpus of all the literature that existed in the library of Alexandria. There there was ancient comedy, ancient plays.

Joe: What did you say there?" The the the word frio, What did you say?

Danny: Crio. Chrio. Crio. Yeah, It's spelled X R I O, but it's pronounced like chrio. hchrio (heavy breathing back of throat on the "ch").

Joe: And that was the original word for Christ?

Danny: The original word for Christ is chrio (χρίω). Yeah. Oh. And I've had people like confirm this with me. And I recently had a scholar on the show, a religious scholar who turned atheist. Weirdly enough, he started out Christian and turned atheist. And he was telling me "I'd be surprised if the word crio was ever used before Christ." And I literally pulled up the source of Euripides talking about using Christing drugs, in like I think it was 200 BC. And the dude was like blown away.

Joe: So he didn't know that.

Danny: He didn't know it! And this dude's like a serious academic.

Joe: So this guy that you had on your podcast, what is his name again? The Christ drug guy.

Danny: Ammon Hillman.

Joe: Ammon Hillman.

Danny: Yeah.

Joe: And so he's a legit scholar.

Danny: He's a legit scholar. PhD.

Joe: And other legit scholars are unwilling to even entertain this?

Danny: Yes. I've talked to many of them on the phone. And a lot of them say, they don't want to give him (I won't name the people) but one of them said that they just don't want to give him the platform or the credibility of being in the same room. Other people say that it would just take too much time for them to prep for it. And I just think it's bullshit. This is the only way to get to the truth, is to hear a credible person dismantle his argument. Right? So I have it. I just keep falling deeper and deeper into this rabbit hole of all this crazy ancient Greek shit, And you know, he's talking about ancient vaccines that they were using, like similar to what we're talking about, he says that there's text that talks about cutting children, soaking bandages in snake venoms, and wrapping the cut with a snake venom so that that the young person would create antibodies (because they have more robust immune systems because they're younger) and they would use that kid's bodily fluid as vaccines to snake bites.

Joe: Oh, they were making kids into vaccine factories?

Danny: They were turning kids into vaccine factories

Joe: so that they get snake venom

Danny: cuz everyone was getting bitten by snakes back then. And then they would take drugs too like they would I'm sure they would take psychotropic drugs (they would call them death inducing drugs) where they would have snake venoms. They would take snake venom drugs that if you don't have an antidote for it, an antichrist (anti chrio) for it that you would die. So you have to take this antidote. so you don't die from the drug you just drank, right? These antidotes. And he connects this all to Jesus in this elaborate way where there's Mark 14:53 where Jesus is caught in the Garden of Gethsemane with the naked boy, right? And then there's a scene of the the young boy running away naked, right? When the when the when the Roman SWAT team pulls up on him and then the little kid runs away and he goes, "Oh, I'm not a trafficker. I'm not a robber." Whatever the word Lestes means. Means like pirate, trafficker, robber. And then they take him and then he's on the cross the next day and he's like screaming out, dying of thirst (common symptom of the dipsas venom) in between two traffickers, and he's asking .... and there's this dude Nonus who writes about this scene specifically in ancient Greek and he talks about them trying to give him the sponge, and he's denying the sponge, right? so the sponge Nonus is writing about this, that the sponge is the andidoton to the Dipsas venom, which is the antidote to the North African viper, but he's refusing to take the antidote. He's just dying because he took this death inducer at 4:00 a.m. in the park in the garden of Gethsemane. And now he's just going to let himself die on the cross. So like, yeah, there's that. I don't know. I don't know what to make of any of this stuff. I just, you know, I hear people saying that it's all bullshit but like fuck is it interesting!

Joe: Well, bizarre that they use the term Christ, before Christ.

Danny: Yeah

Joe: just bizarre.

Danny: It's been used. Yeah, you can look it up. It's used all throughout Homer, Euripides, all these other authors. Again, getting back to the philology stuff. The philologists, they go back in time and they look at the context of all of the literature, not just the biblical cannon, which is a narrow lane of ancient literature, right? But they're looking at the philosophy, the the legal texts, the medical texts, everything, and saying, "Okay, let's take this word, look where it's used in all of these different texts throughout all kinds of professions, and see what the consensus is of what it meant during that time period." And what he's claiming is that the fuckin' word Christ meant "drugs" back then.

Joe: Whoa.

Danny: Yeah.

Joe: Whoa.

Danny: Pretty bananas.

Joe: Well, it's so hard to know what all that stuff was about. It's so hard to know why these people wrote these things down. You know, when I had Wes Huff on. one of the things he talked about is the book of Isaiah. When you see it in The Dead Sea Scrolls, and then a thousand years later, it's verbatim. A thousand years after the Dead Sea Scrolls, the version that they find of the book of Isaiah, is word for word.

Danny: Really?

Joe: Yeah. A thousand years. Like, what were they trying to document? Like, what were the original stories? Cuz like human beings are not a good source of information, especially back then. It's just too hard to be accountable. Why would you be honest? People make grandiose claims. They exaggerate. We see it today. It's like, humans today are the same as humans back then. We're flawed, right? So, we know today that our versions of history are deeply biased. our versions of world events, our versions of - I mean - if the United States government could write the story about the invasion of Iraq without investigative journalists, right? What would be the story? And this is part of the problems like we don't really know what they were trying to say. It was an oral history for who knows how long before they ever wrote down the Old Testament.

Danny: Yeah. And it got redacted and added to over time. And there's like all kinds of weird secret gospels, secret gospel of Mark that they claim that this dude Morton Smith came up with, which was similar to Ammon's theories, but that then, you know, people say, "Oh, that's a forgery. It's a forgery. That the Secret Gospel of Mark's a forgery, that he knew Greek really well, and he knew the culture really well, and all the cults you know, and like dude, like, you know even like the mysteries of the hospitals in ancient Rome, the temples of Asclepius and doing all those rituals in the the temples of Asclepius using medicine and drugs simultaneously and these venoms and all this stuff. It's interesting to learn, you know, and especially when you compare that stuff to the biblical stuff, you know, like how much has it been changed? How much has the meaning been changed? And the people, most of the academics, who study this stuff are maybe (not most of them but a large majority, a large percentage of them) that I've talked to, they're religious scholars, scholars of the Bible and Christianity, but they also subscribe to Christianity, you know? so it's weird that there's kind of like a built-in bias into this stuff. You kind of want this stuff to mean something, right? You know what I'm saying?

Joe: Yes. For sure. That was what was interesting about Alegro because John Marco Alegro was an ordained minister who once he became a theologian, a theologist, theologian rather, once he studied theology, he started to have agnostic thoughts. And so when he was one of the decipherers of the Dead Sea Scrolls when he was on the committee, he was agnostic at the time. Mhm. So he had already decided and through his study of all these different religions that maybe he wouldn't subscribe to any of them and leave an open mind. So he was the only person on the commission that was deciphering the Dead Sea Scrolls over a period of like 14 years. He studied this stuff. He was the only one who was agnostic. And again, his claims are widely dismissed by many people. But I think

Danny: yeah this dude Ammon thinks he's full of shit,

Joe: Does he? what does he think?

Danny: He came up under some of the top classical scholars, of modern times. One of those dudes is Carl Ruck. He wrote The Road to Eleusus. And this other guy is John Scarborough, who's dead now. And for some reason, none of them whenever I ask him about Alegro, like, "I don't fuckin' know". They don't pay attention to it for some reason.

Joe: Well, I think you would have to be a real scholar in biblical languages to even understand what the fuck he's saying. And to be able to translate ancient Sumer, yeah, ancient Sumerian, like according to Wes Huff, he's like, "I tried. I couldn't even figure it out to do it."

Danny: Also, how does ancient Sumerian connect to Hebrew? Is there any correlation between ancient Sumerian and ancient Hebrew? Do they share any roots? Are there any bridges that connect those two languages? I have no idea.

Joe: I don't know either. But, you know, you're dealing with if if it really goes back that far. So if he's talking about this term from ancient Sumer where they are calling it a drug, they're saying it's a mushroom, and this is from 5,000 years ago, 6,000 years ago, you know, you're predating the Bible by a long stretch. And how old was that? How I mean, if if they're right about Turkey, and Turkey was the original civilization. Like when is that? Is that 12,000 years ago? What what is the real date of Egypt? What is the real date of the original structures of Egypt? Do they know? I mean, we're told it's 2,500 BC for the Great Pyramid, but boy, there's a lot of people that don't agree with that, including geologists. When you get guys like Robert Shock who say like this water erosion is thousands of years of rainfall....

....and then they didn't mention the topics of Dr Hillman again in their interview....

Learn More

Dr Hillman covers the interview in his livestream Your Savior, adding relevant details