Read 2021.02.08

The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name

“A God that you can actually experience in a direct and personal way is a God that makes sense. A God that erases depression and anxiety like a cosmic surgeon, obliterates the fear of death, and sends a shock wave of love through your fragile heart is a God that lives in high definition. And a God that could hardly be expected to start a war against nonbelievers.” (8)

I heard of this book through author Brian Muraresku’s appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience, in which he mentions that the origins of Christianity could have involved the consumption of psychedelic Eucharists (#1543).

I just wanted to add a disclaimer here that what I’m going to write below will fail to sound convincing because I am unable to recall the specific pieces of historical evidence Muraresku utilizes (a list of citations constitute the last fifty pages of the book if that says anything about the plethora of material captured inside).

“The following pages track my full immersion into the mystery. I explore an Ancient Greece that is in serious danger of vanishing from the university curriculum. And an early, secret form of Christianity that has been scrubbed from the record. I present every piece of evidence that, taken together, finally convinced me of the psychedelic reality behind Western civilization’s original religion. A prehistoric ritual that survived for millennia, in the total absence of the written word, before finding a good home among the Greeks. A tradition that was later inherited by the first, Greek-speaking Christians, especially in Italy, where they came under attack by the Church Fathers. A vast knowledge of drugs that was kept alive through the Dark Ages by pagans and heretics. Until the witches of the world were hunted down for centuries, erasing all memory of the longest-running religion the planet has ever known. It doesn’t have a name, and probably never had one. But one thing is certain: that storied tension between the mystics and the bureaucrats has reached a breaking point. In order to find our soul again, a popular outbreak of mysticism could be just what the doctor ordered.

And the prescription could be exactly what it was in the beginning: to die before we die, with a solid dose of the religion that started it all.

The religion with no name.” (21)

The theory, as I understand it, discusses millennia-old pagan rituals where attendees consume beverages spiked with psychedelic substances to experience death before dying. The pagan continuity hypotheses, then, proposes that this religion with no name has percolated into multiple cultures, including that of ancient Greece, to withstand the trial of time. Readers are introduced to Eleusis, a municipality of Grece known for its annual festival of the “Mysteries” that honored Demeter and Persephone by consuming the spiked beverages. Eleusian initiates have been recorded to recount their experience as educational, enlightening, and necessary for the progress of mankind. Unfortunately, the ancient temple of Demeter was destroyed around 400 AD through religious persecution.

The rituals, however, lived on by adapting. It placed itself outdoors for a while, and then within catacombs. Later, it came indoors, into the houses of everyday Christians in the form of wine (we must remember that this was a time when Christianity was a persecuted religion). Muraresku brings up many similarities between the religion with no name and Christianity, as well as the overlap between Dionysus and Jesus. The Bible’s references to the effects of the win Eucharist also seem to align more with the experience of consuming a psychedelic beverage, rather than the diluted impotent version today. There is also the Church’s decision to persecute “witches,” who have traditionally upheld the role of preparing the spiked beverage as well as running the ritual of mysteries.

I regret that I have failed to retain enough information to be able to convincingly relay my enthusiasm for The Immortality Key. The connections are simply too numerous and vast, it is difficult to keep all of them in mind. However, I cannot forget the feeling that the case is evidently very solid. I have found myself convinced of the likelihood of there being a psychedelic origin to the most popular religion today. I also cannot adopt certainty because I do not possess knowledge in the fields of classics or archaeological chemistry to dispute any of Muraresku’s claims. I have found the book extremely enjoyable to read and plan on listening to the audiobook in the near future. The relationship between psychedelic and religious experiences is one I am always interested to learn more about.

For this book, I will not include my other annotations below. They are limited in capturing the full story and mostly pertain to details that have helped me keep track of developing arguments.