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

by Brian C. Muraresku

Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who discovered LSD in 1938, came to believe that a related psychedelic compound was used by the ancient Greeks in the Eleusinian Mysteries, the secretive ritual that lasted for some two thousand years, and counted among its celebrants many of the leading lights of Greece and, later, Rome, including Plato, Cicero, and Marcus Aurelius. This potion, called the kukeon, allowed those who consumed it to travel to the underworld to commune with ancestors and preview the afterlife.

Meanwhile in Canada, Dr. Gabor Mate was offering phenomenally successful Ayahuasca healing sessions to his drug-addicted patients before the Canadian government stepped in and stopped his work on the grounds that Ayahuasca itself is an illegal drug.

“about 75 percent of the research volunteers consistently rate their one and only dose of psilocybin as either the single most meaningful experience of their entire lives, or among the top five.”

the Old Testament story of the serpent, the forbidden fruit, and God’s expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden as “the first psychedelic slapdown.” Pursuing that thought, Roman Catholicism’s persecution of “primitive” Christians and the extirpation of their visionary Communion wine might be described as the second psychedelic slapdown. And then, in the twentieth century, just as we seemed to be freeing ourselves from the loveless iron grip of the Church and opening up to new spiritual possibilities, governments around the world waded in with the so-called “war on drugs”—the third psychedelic slapdown.

that is what all psychedelic plants and fungi are—literally the ancient teachers of mankind.

For a few generations, perhaps the witches of Dionysus and the witches of Jesus were fairly indistinguishable. Why couldn’t they worship both wine gods? The women who prepared the psychedelic beer and wine in the Greek Mysteries could have been the same women who prepared the original Eucharist across the Mediterranean, where the line between pagan and Christian did not yet exist. And where it would not exist until all the men in Rome decided to exclude women from any positions of leadership in the official Church.

Has no one ever stopped to ponder why, two thousand years ago, “a considerable number” (hikanoi) of Corinthians were apparently dropping like flies during the proto-Mass? I cracked open my 1829 edition of the Greek New Testament and found koimontai, just where Ruck said it was, in 1 Corinthians 11:30. But his translation had to be off. How do people die from taking the Eucharist?

But the rest of his one-liner on 1 Corinthians 11:30 is priceless: “Even death sometimes resulted from their drunken orgies, either naturally, or by God’s direct visitation.”8 I love the thought of God the Father descending from the clouds to slap the wineglasses from the tipsy Greeks to deliver the touch of death. What an unexpected climax to an otherwise perfectly good orgy.

Some prefer reading about God. Others prefer experiencing God.

then the only way to experience God is to die before you die.

his favorite Einstein quote: “The cosmic religious experience is the strongest and the noblest driving force behind scientific research.”

There’s only right here, right now. “The Kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth,” said the Gospel of Thomas, “and people do not see it.” Once you enter into that “state of always being,” as Dinah put it, eternity opens up. And with it, the key to immortality.

Sauer’s notion that the Agricultural Revolution was, in fact, the Beer Revolution.

in 2000, the same year Marina Ciaraldi published her paper about a psychedelic lizard potion,