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

by Brian C. Muraresku

Massalia was flagged as the Phocaeans’ first colony around 600 BC. Emporion soon followed, around 575 BC. Before their home on the Anatolian coast was taken over by the invading Persians, Herodotus says the Phocaeans packed up “all the votive offerings from the temples” and set sail.53 Their final headquarters would eventually take root in the heart of Magna Graecia. The now-defunct settlement of Velia, Italy, dates to 530 BC. There the Phocaeans would give birth to a philosopher. But not just any philosopher. He was a magician, a healer, and a prophet. According to the scholar Peter Kingsley, one of the few classicists worth reading aside from Ruck, the Greek genius known as Parmenides “was among the first generation of children brought up by Phocaean parents in Velia, with the memories of Phocaea and of the journey from Phocaea still running fresh in their blood.”54 Why does that matter? Because the region known as Ionia, where Phocaea was located, left an indelible mark on the modern world: what astrophysicist Carl Sagan once described as the “glorious awakening” into the laws of nature that happened between 600 and 400 BC in “the remote islands and inlets of the Eastern Mediterranean.”