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

by Brian C. Muraresku

In his attempt “to return to the earliest centuries of Christianity” by recovering “the monuments of classical antiquity,” Bruno longed for a lost period of history that the brilliant scholar Frances Yates calls “a pure golden age of magic” based on Greek philosophy of supposed Egyptian origin.6 Like his Greek-speaking ancestors from Magna Graecia, the “Renaissance Magus” was obsessed with the same “secret doctrine” that had earlier attracted Pythagoras, Parmenides, Empedocles, and Plotinus. Not to mention all those witches—the Phocaean priestesses of Persephone and the Dionysian maenads who were crushed by the Roman senate to teach Paculla Annia a lesson. They all came from Campania. And they all seem to have been very familiar with drugs. Just like Bruno.