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

by Brian C. Muraresku

According to a Pew poll from July 2019, 69 percent of self-described Catholics don’t believe a word of the Church’s core teaching.11 Instead, they see the bread and wine of the Eucharist as mere symbols of the body and blood of Jesus, and nothing more. As the writer Flannery O’Connor pointedly quipped back in 1955, “Well, if it’s a symbol. To hell with it.”12 Bruno couldn’t have agreed more.13 As a practical mystic he wanted to get back to basics. Back to the Drug of Immortality that his Greek-speaking ancestors in Campania seemed to know all about. And the kind of psychedelic lizard potion that turned up at the Villa Vesuvio, only twenty-three kilometers from Bruno’s hometown of Nola. His Eucharist was no mere symbol. And no placebo. It was an “elixir” of “god-like virtue,” spiked with the “plants,” “charms,” and “drugs” of antiquity’s most notorious Greek witch, Circe. Is that how Bruno gained his uncanny knowledge of the inexhaustible, starry universe that he accurately predicted by four centuries, and which modern cosmologists find hard to explain?