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

by Brian C. Muraresku

Even before Parmenides came to Campania, the Italian region that stretches from Naples and Pompeii in the north to Velia in the south, Pythagoras was also obsessed with Persephone. It would explain why he constructed his home in southern Italy as a literal temple, complete with “a special underground room where he’d go and stay motionless for long periods of time.”10 Was it a Phocaean love affair with the same goddess that spawned those twenty-five hundred subterranean silos across the archaeological site at Mas Castellar de Pontós? And did it also send the earliest Christians into the subterranean vineyard of Dionysus underneath St. Peter’s Basilica, where the first Eucharist was celebrated in the City of the Dead? Or to the many catacombs around Rome, where Greek-speaking witches ruled the night?