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

by Brian C. Muraresku

material evidence for the Dionysian Mysteries found that “initiation with its practices of possession and sacrifice” was ordinarily denied to men in the Greek tradition. A close reading of all the “symbols” and “language” in the Gospel of John, and the plain meaning of the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, both suggest the same.

For almost three hundred years, it was an illegal mystery cult, with women in Greek-speaking Italy leading funerary banquets in the underworld that was said to offer access to the Other Side.

Behind all the mental gymnastics was a timeless teaching, mentioned only briefly by Socrates in Plato’s Phaedo: “those who engage with philosophy in the right way are practicing nothing else but dying and being dead.”

Pythagoras was also obsessed with Persephone. It would explain why he constructed his home in southern Italy as a literal temple, complete with “a special underground room where he’d go and stay motionless for long periods of time.”

With such toxic, deadly species at play, Dioscorides’s encyclopedia is proof of a long tradition that could induce the “not unpleasant visions” in carefully measured amounts of potent botanicals.

In its early days, did Christianity solve the age-old problem of delivering a life-changing mystical experience to as many people as possible by offering a chemical shortcut to enlightenment?

anyone who drank the toad Eucharist was said to “understand all the secrets of the sect and forever question orthodox teaching.”37

In 1320 a letter to the Inquisitors in France from a certain Cardinal William gave full papal permission to hunt down practitioners of the dark arts “who abuse the sacrament of the eucharist or the consecrated host and other sacraments of the Church by using them or things like them in their sorcery.”21

There’s also an intriguing recipe from the so-called Greek Magical Papyri. If a sorcerer wishes “to make the god appear,” they simply drown a lizard in oil.25 Just as Lucretia did.

“The Catholic Church Started the War on Drugs.”

In an effort to banish the sacrament that was making a comeback on sovereign American Indian land throughout the United States, particularly among the Kiowa and Comanche, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) issued an instruction to all federal agencies on July 31, 1890, that they “seize and destroy the mescal bean, or any preparation or decoction thereof, wherever found on the reservation.”

Which was nothing less than a war on the religion with no name. There were no public health and safety concerns. No issues with quality control or consumer protection. It wasn’t an administrative decision. It was an act of spiritual war.

There has always been a right Eucharist and a wrong Eucharist. From the house churches and

“It seems feasible to suggest that the use of cannabis on the Arad altar had a deliberate psychoactive role.” They call this the “first known evidence of [a] hallucinogenic substance found in the Kingdom of Judah.”1 Interestingly, the altar with the cannabis remains had been excavated in the 1960s, and was just sitting in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem waiting for the right technology to come along.

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.

Today’s scientists have now solved the critical flaws of the religion with no name: safety, reliability, and scalability. Delivering a profound mystical experience in the most cautious way possible, as effectively as possible, to the most number of people possible. The technology is all there: a safe, pharmaceutical-grade hallucinogen and a finely-tuned protocol that maximizes spiritual breakthrough while minimizing risk. These are the “biochemical discoveries” that Huxley predicted would “make it possible for large numbers of men and women to achieve a radical self-transcendence and a deeper understanding of the nature of things.”

I can envision regulated centers all over the country—from fairly secluded to inner-city settings, and everywhere in between. Where one could visit for a week or two. There’d be a regimen of psychotherapy, of course. But there could also be adjunct modalities like mindfulness, meditation, yoga, and healthy cuisine in a comfortable, spa-like setting. There would be one or two psilocybin sessions with well-trained clinical teams. And then you go back home. Just like Eleusis.”

Would a “popular outbreak of mysticism” be able to heal our lost connection to Mother Nature and each other?

“The reaction of most cultured people to the idea of gaining any deep psychological or philosophical insight through a drug is that it is too simple, too artificial, and even too banal to be seriously considered. A wisdom which can be ‘turned on’ like the switch of a lamp seems to insult human dignity and degrade us to chemical automata.”5

Archaeology in China unveiled the discovery of bona fide Stone Age graveyard beer. “9,000 years ago, funerals in China involved a lot of beer” went my favorite headline.

For the hunter-gatherers experimenting with grain twelve to thirteen thousand years ago, which came first: bread or beer? Or in this case: rice or rice beer? According to the team, Qiaotou lends further credence to Sauer’s notion that the Agricultural Revolution was, in fact, the Beer Revolution.

for some psychoactive plants, whole plant material may be eaten, but minimal or no psychoactive compounds will be absorbed because they are locked into the fibrous structure of the plant material. Alcohol/water solutions can liberate such compounds from the plant matter, and can potentially help absorption once ingested.