THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
As seen on The Joe Rogan Experience!
A groundbreaking dive into the role psychedelics have played in the origins of Western civilization, and the real-life quest for the Holy Grail that could shake the Church to its foundations. The most influential religious historian of the 20th century, Huston Smith, once referred to it as the “best-kept secret” in history. Did … referred to it as the “best-kept secret” in history. Did the Ancient Greeks use drugs to find God? And did the earliest Christians inherit the same, secret tradition? A profound knowledge of visionary plants, herbs and fungi passed from one generation to the next, ever since the Stone Age?
There is zero archaeological evidence for the original Eucharist – the sacred wine said to guarantee life after death for those who drink the blood of Jesus. The Holy Grail and its miraculous contents have never been found. In the absence of any hard data, whatever happened at the Last Supper remains an article of faith for today’s 2.5 billion Christians. In an unprecedented search for real answers, The Immortality Key examines the archaic roots of the ritual that is performed every Sunday for nearly one third of the planet. Religion and science converge to paint a radical picture of Christianity’s founding event. And after centuries of debate, to solve history’s greatest puzzle once and for all.
Before the birth of Jesus, the Ancient Greeks found salvation in their own sacraments. 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. In the 1970s, renegade scholars claimed this beer and wine – the original sacraments of Western civilization – were spiked with mind-altering drugs. In recent years, vindication for the disgraced theory has been quietly mounting in the laboratory. The constantly advancing fields of archaeobotany and archaeochemistry have hinted at the enduring use of hallucinogenic drinks in antiquity. And with a single dose of psilocybin, the psychopharmacologists at Johns Hopkins and NYU are now turning self-proclaimed atheists into instant believers. But the smoking gun remains elusive.
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? Was the Eucharist of the earliest Christians, in fact, a psychedelic Eucharist?
With an unquenchable thirst for evidence, Muraresku takes the reader on his twelve-year global hunt for proof. He tours the ruins of Greece with its government archaeologists. He gains access to the hidden collections of the Louvre Museum to show the continuity from pagan to Christian wine. He unravels the Ancient Greek of the New Testament with the world’s most controversial priest. He spelunks into the catacombs under the streets of Rome to decipher the lost symbols of Christianity’s oldest monuments. He breaches the secret archives of the Vatican to unearth manuscripts never before translated into English. And with leads from the archaeological chemists at the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he unveils the first scientific data for the ritual use of psychedelic drugs in classical antiquity.
The Immortality Key reconstructs the suppressed history of women consecrating a forbidden, drugged Eucharist that was later banned by the Church Fathers. Women who were then targeted as witches during the Inquisition, when Europe’s sacred pharmacology largely disappeared. If the scientists of today have resurrected this technology, then Christianity is in crisis. Unless it returns to its roots.
Featuring a Foreword by Graham Hancock, the New York Times bestselling author of America Before: The Key to Earth’s Lost Civilization.
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The Immortality Key is an astonishing and remarkable book that explores the mysterious links between psychedelic drugs, human consciousness, and the origins of Christianity. It presents truly ground-breaking research on many levels, tracing the use of psychedelic drugs from Ancient Greece through Rome and into the early days of Christianity, where they played a role―possibly a crucial one―in the new religion of Jesus Christ. This is a fascinating book, which I highly recommend.
That `The Immortality Key’ has been written has been of great comfort for someone who has lived two separate lives. The first life involved an experience with pharmakon in the form of psilocybe cubensis (magic mushrooms) mixed with honey, that together with cannabis resulted in a vision from God.
I wrote a fictionalised memoir about the events that occurred during the 1980’s around that experience, but due to the hostility and fear of a society that no longer understands such experiences, very few have read “Life Before Death”.
The circumstances of the vision were as follows: A Sunday afternoon get-together with my older brother and two Greek friends was enhanced by the consumption of the mushroom mixture mentioned above. After what may have been a few hours, the effects of the ‘trip’ subsided, and we then sat around and partook of some cannabis. One of my Greek friends went to each member of the group and ‘annointed’ them with a spot of balm on the forehead. Then my brother and I were left alone in the lounge room.
Lying back on a couch, I went into a state which is described in Muraresku’s book as a ‘sleep of death’. My soul left my body, and I was taken to the end of the universe. It was a scene of myriad golden orbs leading toward a bright golden light and surrounded by a vast black emptiness. I experienced a monumental sense of loss, and a deep regret that everything was ending. Then a voice boomed out, “Help Make It All Worthwhile”.
The voice was unmistakably that of God.
I then became aware of being ‘hosted’ within a physical being – a body, which began to fall backwards, leaving the End of the Universe behind as I fell.
I woke up in the loungeroom to see my brother rousing at the same time. On the drive home we discussed what had happened and found to our amazement that we had both experienced exactly the same vision of the end of the universe and God calling out the same message.
Muraresku’s book has resonated chords of familiarity between the rituals in ancient Greece, Spain and Rome described in his book, and to my own vision. It gives me much consolation, and a sense of justification, that consuming the organic compounds provided to us by nature, is not a criminal act.
With education, expertise and consumption among friends, these compounds can be highly beneficial. For myself, the vision was the opening of a door to enhanced perception, which has led to many other insights of a spiritual nature.
In the years following my experience, I finished university, began a successful career in Information Technology, and proceeded to raise a family – living my `second life’ in a world that branded me as a criminal for my previous spiritual explorations.
As cannabis becomes widely legalised, and psilocybin available for medical purposes, I hope that `The Immortality Key’ will help to open doors for further tolerance and understanding after centuries of disinformation and corruption by the church, and the social injustices that have subsequently resulted.
This is beyond interesting. I was hooked. History examined with modern scientific techniques that end up shedding more light on the past… a great read.
A fascinating analysis of the mystical roots of ancient religion, and a rediscovery of a forgotten ritual for the modern world.
A mindblower.
In Brian Muraresku, the psychedelic theory of religion has its newest and most accomplished scholar-historian (who also happens to be very funny). This is no crackpot idea. This is genuine scholarship at its deepest, most comparative, and most conceptually radical. The breadth of the investigation is simply astonishing: the Eleusinian Mysteries; the cosmic love of God; Göbekli Tepe and Indo-European studies; Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, and Catalan; flying witches and the long religious war on women; the Vatican Secret Archives; democracy, ethics, and the unity of humankind; hard archaeochemical and DNA evidence; the first (Dionysian) miracle of Christ in the Gospel of John; the political radicalism of the Eucharist; LSD-laced graveyard beer and psychedelic wine. Buckle up tight, Toto. You were never in Kansas. It’s Oz everywhere and always.
Muraresku has successfully unwrapped one of history’s greatest riddles with a measured, skeptical eye. His ability to sift through the evidence with an open mind and discriminating wit keeps the pages turning.
Brian Muraresku’s The Immortality Key connects the lost, psychedelic sacrament of ancient Greek religion to early Christianity―exposing the true origins of Western Civilization. Muraresku brings to light a secret with the capacity to revolutionize our understanding of the past and chart a bold, new course for the future.
With his new book, The Immortality Key, Brian Muraresku offers an invigorating look at the birth of religion as the ancient secret of dying before dying, providing us with a rejuvenating blast of what my friend Huston Smith described as authentic enthusiasmos, an ecstatic experience of the god within.
A manifesto, briskly paced and engaging from page one, on the very real possibility of a psychedelic eucharist. I strongly recommend this intriguing, provocative, and thoughtful book.
Well written foray into the history of psychedelic experience with a concerted effort to tie together the past present and future of psychedelic therapies. Identified history related to the great transition from the hunter-gather world to our modern global universe when agriculture began and Mysteries and eucharistic ceremony reigned supreme. Leaves us with this question. Is this psychedelic history about the key to immortality or the key to mortality?
I found it a bit tedious. Maybe because I understood what the book tries to prove right at the start. Worthy of a read.