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

by Brian C. Muraresku

Velia was the source of it all. The epicenter of an exercise that focused on the underworld, where the whole point was to enter a “state of apparent death, of suspended animation when the pulse is so quiet you can hardly feel it.”4 In language that eerily resembles the testimony of the volunteers from the Hopkins and NYU psilocybin experiments, not to mention the marzeah ritual of the Near East, Kingsley describes the supreme goal of Parmenides and his disciples as a “cataleptic” state of trance in a “world beyond the senses,” where “space and time mean nothing” and “past and future are as present as the present is for us.”5 Kingsley’s summary of the neglected tradition that most classicists simply ignore is the playground of every Jewish, Christian, or Muslim mystic who ever dared to explore the inner core of their faith. “To go down to the underworld when you’re dead is one thing,” says Kingsley. “To go there while you’re alive, prepared and knowingly, and then learn from the experience—that’s another thing entirely.”