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

by Brian C. Muraresku

Religious revolution was afoot in pre-Christian Galilee. The intoxicant had begun leaking from the Near Eastern palaces and mansions the same way the kukeon had slipped from Eleusis, traveling to wealthy homes across Athens during the scandalous imitation of the sacred rites known as the Profanation of the Mysteries. As A. D. Nock insightfully remarked in the last chapter, the spiritually curious were being drawn to a kind of “private spontaneous pagan piety,” where elements of “choice, movement, and individual enthusiasm” were preferable to whatever soul-crushing boredom the local temples had to offer the pagan and Jewish residents of the area. By the time of Jesus, a democratizing trend led by ecstatic women had revamped sacred wine into what Euripides, four centuries earlier, had called a sacrament for “simple folk” or phauloteron (φαυλότερον): “equally to the rich and to the lowly has [Dionysus] given the painless joy of wine.”