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

by Brian C. Muraresku

If drugged wine was the Greeks’ path to immortality, did a drugged Eucharist offer the first Christians the kind of experience reported by the participants of the psilocybin experiments at Hopkins and NYU? If that original Eucharist could cause the “dissolution of the self” and “melting away of barriers” mentioned by Dinah Bazer—as well as by the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic mystics throughout history—then it all makes sense. But without the genuine psychedelic sacrament inherited from the Greeks, how could a placebo Eucharist convince anyone to drop paganism and the entrenched religion of their ancestors? In just four centuries, how did Christianity go from being an obscure cult of “twenty or so illiterate day laborers” in a neglected part of the Mediterranean to the official religion of Rome, converting half the empire, perhaps some thirty million people, in the process?2 What was the secret to Christianity’s success?