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

by Brian C. Muraresku

the classicist Peter Kingsley is the world’s foremost expert on the esoteric tradition that seduced Italy in the wake of Plato’s guru, Parmenides, who was born in Velia in 515 BC. It was Parmenides’s relatives who introduced Magna Graecia to their cult practices from the Phocaean homeland in the east. The Greek-speaking community in Phocaea was the beneficiary of spiritual influences from the world’s oldest and highest cultures—from the proposed Indo-European homelands of both Anatolia and Central Asia, to the Egyptians, Babylonians, Persians, and Indians. The melting pot that created the first scientists of Western civilization between 600 and 400 BC, laying the foundation for all the technology of the modern world, also created a secret tradition of magicians, healers, and prophets who perfected the ancient art of dying before dying.