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

by Brian C. Muraresku

Where are the drugs? Was a low-alcohol, lukewarm Budweiser really to credit for the Agricultural Revolution? If the first farmers were drinking their crop instead of eating it, they probably had a good reason. The Stanford researchers determined that the brew at the Raqefet Cave was laced with other “additive ingredients.” Is it possible one of the original graveyard beers in the Fertile Crescent was infused with a psychedelic secret? Or that it later developed, at some point in the many thousands of years separating the founders of the Eleusinian Mysteries from their Proto-Indo-European, Anatolian ancestors?

Hofmann thought the word Tollkorn (mad grain), in particular, demonstrated a “folk awareness” of the “psychotropic effects of ergot”—“deeply rooted in European traditions.”

“Right—the ergot poisoning of St. Anthony’s Fire. They called it the ignis sacer: the ‘holy fire’ that caused the seizures and hallucinations.” “But these guys were professionals,” continues Zarnkow, referring to the prehistoric brewers, “and the ones who knew about medicines and such things could do a controlled contamination of Mutterkorn. So if we’ve had beers for feasting, and beers for medicine, why not this special type of drink? I totally believe we’ve had beers like that before.”

If brewing really is the oldest biotechnology on the planet, and if potentially fatal hallucinogens were in the mix, then it would have taken highly trained specialists to pass that skill along.

By definition, the spread of agriculture had to involve a profound relationship with the natural world. But familiarity with the flora that alter human consciousness was all but assured much earlier in the protracted history of our species, which is at least three hundred thousand years old and counting.

archaeologist Scott M. Fitzpatrick, “given that we have been hunters and gatherers for 99 percent of human history and would have come into contact with, consumed, and experimented with a wide array of plants.”

According to Burkert, the expertise transferred for tens of thousands of years from Neanderthal to Neanderthal, and Stone Age homo sapiens to Stone Age homo sapiens, somehow came to a dead stop at the temple of Demeter. Without ever explaining how, the German scholar suggested that by the time these primitive rites arrived in Eleusis, the drugs had somehow vanished from the “festival of immortality” that “seemed to guarantee some psychedelic Beyond.” That “expansion of consciousness”—a decadent escape from reality—was simply an embarrassing episode from the pre-Hellenic past. As John Silber would tell Ruck in 1978, “The Greeks just wouldn’t have done that sort of thing.”

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.”

Perhaps no single individual has done more for Greek branding over the past twenty-five hundred years than Parmenides. Plato claimed the wizard from Velia as his personal guru. For Kingsley there is no such thing as hyperbole when it comes to Parmenides: And

there’s no coming to grips with the history of philosophy or wisdom in the West without understanding him. He lies at the central nerve of our culture. Touch him, and indirectly you’re in touch with everything else. He’s said to have created the idea of metaphysics. It’s said that he invented logic: the basis of our reasoning, the foundation of every single discipline that has come into existence in the West. His influence on Plato was immense. There’s a well-known saying that the whole history of western philosophy is just a series of footnotes to Plato. With the same justification Plato’s philosophy in its developed form could be called a series of footnotes to that man.

The same people who invented science also invented techniques for entering the underworld and communing with the immortals, whether gods, goddesses, or ancestors. Techniques, that is, for becoming immortals themselves.

Where the precious secret of how to die before you die was practiced by the first generations of Christians, the so-called paleo-Christians, and later suppressed by the growing bureaucracy of a faith that chose to deny its Greek heritage. Ruck knows that, of course. Raised Catholic, he has been researching the origins of Christianity his entire career and writing about it since the early 2000s. The evidence at Emporion doesn’t just implicate the Ancient Greeks. It implicates their Phocaean sister city in Velia. And by a documented line of succession that we will explore, it implicates Rome. For the devotees of Jesus and the Catholic Church especially, the notion that their religion was midwifed by Greek-speaking Italian mystics with a spiked Eucharist could prove a very hard pill to swallow.

While similar data from the rest of the continent appears to be lacking, it’s important to remember that the beer of yesterday was very different from the beer of today. In the absence of fermentable sugars from the grapes that were more abundant in the east, the old brewers in the north and west of Europe turned to honey, berries, and other fruits. They were constantly experimenting with different ingredients to create more intoxicating drinks. So in addition to the nightshades, why not other mind-altering compounds?

the Roman conquest of places like modern-day Spain and France in the two centuries before the birth of Jesus was just as much cultural as political—where the wine of the Romans was regarded as the only civilized “drink of choice.”8 And a powerful tool. Perhaps the best way to educate those savage, western Europeans like the Celts was to get rid of all their archaic, barbarian beer.

The Romans inherited their taste for wine from the Greeks.9 And the Greeks had picked it up from the Canaanites and Phoenicians, who managed an active wine trade across the eastern half of the Mediterranean in the first and second millennia BC.

In my conversations with the Swiss classicist Fritz Graf, he confirmed how the sanctuary that had always belonged to the prehistoric goddesses suddenly assumed a Dionysian flair in the fifth century BC. If the God of Ecstasy became the Holy Child born of Persephone only to keep his antiestablishment fans from abandoning Demeter’s temple, it was a clever move. But it wasn’t enough.

According to Ruck, the so-called Profanation of the Mysteries is clear evidence of the movement that would replace beer with wine as the vehicle for the drugs. In a series of incidents that occurred in 414 BC, several patrons of the Mysteries were caught initiating their dinner guests into the holiest secrets.

Jesus was born into the wine country of Galilee during the wine millennium. And no less influenced by the historical accident that made wine the premier beverage of the day, the first Christians in Anatolia, Greece, and Italy had already ditched their grain for the vine at a time when—just like the prehistoric beer we’ve managed to unearth so far—wine was a very different animal.

How did it do that? How did Christianity succeed in a Mediterranean world that was already full of magic wine? By tapping into some of the magic, Ruck believes. If there’s any proof that the original Eucharist was actually psychedelic, then the hard evidence should be out there—lurking somewhere in the attics and basements of the Old World, where no one even bothers to look anymore.

If Christianity really did base the Eucharist on a mind-altering drink that existed in the classical world at the time of Jesus, then our first task in this part of the investigation is to identify that original Ancient Greek potion. We know the first Christians didn’t traffic in beer. But the discovery of an ergot-infused brew at Mas Castellar de Pontós does show the incredible longevity of graveyard beers on the European continent. If they survived from the Stone Age to the birth of Christianity, and the whole concept of drugged beverages is not just a figment of Ruck’s imagination, then the long tradition of secret ingredients and hidden recipes could have easily found a home among the fans of Dionysus.

But this time around, we’re not necessarily looking for ergot, which has such a unique relationship with grain. We’re looking for anything psychoactive. Because the simple fact is that Greek wine of the era did not remotely resemble anything we would call “wine.”

It’s well established that fermentation comes to a sudden halt when the alcoholic content of wine or beer approaches about 15 percent by volume. Most yeast can no longer survive past that natural barrier; they just die off, blocking any further production of the heady ethanol. So something else had to give ancient wine its infamous kick.

“The Greek language did not distinguish between madness and inebriation,” he writes in The Road to Eleusis, “because Dionysus was the god of all inebriants and not of wine alone.”

The first two lines of the play stress the unusual bond between the wine god and his father in heaven. Dionysus calls himself the “Son of God” or Dios pais (Διὸς παῖς), and refers to his earthly mother as the “young girl” or kore (κόρη), which could also be “maiden” or “virgin.” Yes, mortals do mix with immortals. And as the ultimate hybrid, the God of Ecstasy is the miraculous result, both human and divine. As The Bacchae proceeds, these two sides of Dionysus are in constant tension. He wants to introduce the Greeks to a new sacrament for a new millennium, but he doesn’t want to repeat Zeus’s lightning mishap. So in order to avoid scaring everybody to death with the full force of his godhood, the shape-shifter “exchanges his divine form for a mortal one.”

Nock acknowledges Euripides’s The Bacchae as our main classical source for the Mysteries of Dionysus. Its rich, descriptive vocabulary offers unique access to the nocturnal “congregations” of god-filled spiritual seekers. In The Dionysian Gospel, published in 2017, Dennis MacDonald of the Claremont School of Theology compares the Ancient Greek of The Bacchae with the Ancient Greek of the Gospel of John to prove that the Evangelist was intimately familiar with these Dionysian “symbols” and “language.” In order to portray Jesus as the consummate Son of God, John knew all the loaded terms that would appeal to any Greek speaker of the time. And he used them throughout his Gospel to depict Jesus as the second coming of Dionysus.

Contemporaneous with Jesus, the Beidha complex confirms the “abundantly attested” presence of Dionysus in the founder of Christianity’s backyard. The elder wine god could be spotted all across the southern Levant, from the Nabataeans’ stronghold in Petra, up through the Hellenized quarters of Scythopolis and Sepphoris in Galilee.

John’s audience would have understood that the Wedding at Cana wasn’t just a party trick, and that the wine wasn’t just party wine. It was a liquid pharmakon, with a rich heritage behind it. The use of drugged wine didn’t just accidentally creep its way into Galilee in the first century AD. A couple of thousand years before the Greeks, and long before Jesus and the Gospel of John, the sacrament that would turn eastern Mediterraneans from beer drinkers into wine drinkers didn’t just make a passing visit to the vineyards of Galilee.

Particularly fascinating about the marzeah is the possibility that it acted as the bridge between the more archaic drinking ceremonies from Egypt and the Near East, including Tel Kabri, and the later Mysteries belonging to both Dionysus and Jesus. Common to all these rituals is the concept of ingesting a special potion for a singular purpose: to transcend ordinary time and space, reaching a state of consciousness where the ancestors still live and breathe, and the gods and goddesses are made real. For lack of vocabulary, scholars often refer to this place as the “underworld.” And maybe the initiates of the marzeah truly believed they went somewhere, just like the initiates of the Greek and Christian Mysteries in the centuries that followed. But at the end of the day, we’re only trying to get hold of the mechanism that created the sensation of otherworldly travel, and the conviction that creates whole religions in the wake of these unforgettable mystical experiences.

Every GOVERNMENT WARNING label on every bottle of Pinot in the United States cautions against a series of risks: birth defects, car accidents, machinery disaster. Not a single one mentions the possibility of dead relatives showing up at the door.

think about beer these days, for example: it’s not just for drinking and watching football. We have some really complex beers with different alcohol and flavor profiles. Ancient wine was no different. If you look carefully at the historical record, there was wine for very casual settings, all the way to very formal events like the Mysteries. But like everything else in life, it’s probably not so binary. Maybe it’s our puritanical background, but we want to separate the two—the casual, mundane drinking from the sacred, religious drinking. Back then, however, the lines were more blurred, and things more intertwined.”

I think what we in the archaeological community have been missing for a while now, is that wine is such a perfect beverage—once the right ingredients are added to it—to have a profound religious experience, with a psychotropic effect. So I call that kind of wine a potion, because it’s not just a drink. It’s a sacrament.”

But another part of the wine god would simply stay put, right where it all began over three thousand years before Jesus, who would become the latest God of Ecstasy to overcome death. The Nazarene was well acquainted with the underworld from the Harrowing of Hell episode that supposedly took place in the three days between Jesus’s death and resurrection, when “the Gospel was proclaimed to those who are now dead.”

It’s a neat line of succession: Osiris to El to Dionysus to Jesus. The critical thing that unites them all is extraordinary wine that blurs the boundary between life and death. Immortality potions. But there’s a major difference between Dionysus and Jesus on the one hand, and their divine predecessors on the other: a political disagreement. Did this wine belong to the 1 percent or the 99 percent? Was it meant for the pharaohs, royalty, and elite? Or was it meant for everybody? Who should have access to the nectar of the gods?

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.”

Forget the Jewish high priests who banned the marzeah, with all its “occult” implications.35 And forget the buzzkill Pharisees, who later in the Gospels would call Jesus a “drunk” or oinopotes (οἰνοπότης).36 People were aching for their own little taste of that miraculous wine. And for the already-smashed wedding guests at Cana, where the only way for the Jesus of John’s Gospel to prove his divinity was to perform the “signature miracle” of Dionysus, that’s exactly what they got: 180 gallons’ worth. By

From the beginning, the Christian potion was destined for mass consumption, just like the Dionysian potion that had been working its magic in Greece and Greek-speaking hubs of the eastern Mediterranean for centuries, including parts of Galilee. Unlike the ritual beverages that preceded it, the wine at Cana was meant to travel all over the ancient world,

into the hands of humble people with humble hopes for the afterlife. And into humble parts of the Roman Empire, still farther west of Greece, where the wine god that Jesus would soon replace was in desperate need of a revival. All thanks to the politicians in Rome.

Not through any fault of Veronese. The Wedding Feast at Cana is a fair interpretation of John’s Gospel, but the scene almost certainly never happened. Why is the raucous episode from ancient Galilee recorded in John and nowhere else? And why the shameless infringement of the Dionysian epiphanies from Elis and Andros? Scholars like Dennis MacDonald have concluded that John cast Jesus in the same mold as the God of Ecstasy to emphasize his godhood. Fair enough. John gets zero points for originality.

A sneak peek of the real dinner, three years later, that would forever alter the course of human history, putting Jesus at the top of our species’ virtual Twitter feed with 2.42 billion followers. The biggest religion on the planet today. The biggest religion ever. It all started at the Last Supper, a more intimate affair among friends. Where the wine became blood, and Jesus introduced part two of the trademark Dionysian sacrament: the raw flesh.

To the Greeks this magical procedure was known as apotheosis, or deification. Anyone who ate and drank the god became the god. Once the exclusive property of Egyptian pharaohs and Near Eastern elite, the sacrament had been dribbling over the mountains and forests of the Mediterranean ever since Euripides.

By the time of Jesus the world was ready for another injection of holy madness. At long last, the faithful may have cheered, the Son of God had come home to Galilee. Call him Jesus, if you like. But when John’s Gospel called him the “only-begotten” or “unique offspring” of God, residing in the “lap” of the Father, his audience knew what he meant. After all, where else but Nazareth would Jesus grow up?

Of all the places for Jesus to call home, the drug-riddled Napa Valley of the ancient world just happened to be the one. Where wine was a sacrament for the cult of the dead that found inspiration in both the long-running marzeah and the Dionysian Mysteries. And where the magician from Nazareth and his earliest followers could have sourced an endless supply of those mind-altering substances the southern Levant had been pumping into the area for three millennia.

Even if they didn’t feel it on the eastern frontier of the Roman Empire, the would-be Christians knew the Dionysian Mysteries had faced an existential crisis in Italy, where as many as six thousand followers of the God of Ecstasy were executed in one fell swoop during the Roman senate’s bloody campaign in 186 BC.

In the Gospel of John, the Wedding at Cana may have set the Drug of Immortality loose on the streets of Galilee. But it was the Last Supper that brought the Christian Eucharist into people’s homes. Even Dionysus himself never managed to pull that off.

So as far as John’s audience was concerned, this new Dionysus had just upstaged the old Dionysus. And their interpretation of John’s Gospel would have been very different from today’s. The Jesus they would have seen was a Jesus who didn’t come to start a new religion. But a Jesus who came to save the fragile Mysteries with an epic, encore performance. A Jesus who came to open source the magical wine for the masses, and to finish the populist movement he started in Greece. When his name was Dionysus.

For roughly the first three hundred years of its existence, Christianity was an illegal cult. Just like the cult of Dionysus. By appealing to poor folks, and especially women, Jesus was simply picking up where the Dionysian Mysteries left off. Politically he posed the same threat to the Roman establishment as Dionysus. Anything that directed attention and loyalty away from by the public cult of the emperor and the traditional Roman gods was considered dangerous. Because at the time, separating young, eligible men from their military service and busy mothers from their family obligations upset the chain of command. Neither belonged in the wilderness, getting high with the God of Drugs. And they didn’t belong at the wedding party where Jesus unveiled Dionysus’s “signature miracle” either.

But the politics and legality were only part of the concern. At stake was the entire social order. Jesus and Dionysus were two peas in a pod. They both stood for the revolutionary principle that everybody deserved the nectar of the gods, regardless of class. While the Greeks and southern Italians had many centuries to manage the uncomfortable balancing act between the 1 percent and the 99 percent, Jesus’s open invitation to an immortality potion like the Eucharist would have shocked the wealthy pagans of Galilee, as well as the influential Jewish families of Jerusalem. Magical wine was supposed to be their prerogative, just the way it had been for thousands of years.

In the end Dionysus and Jesus were both really bad for the status quo. There’s a reason the crackdown on the Bacchanalia by the Roman senate in 186 BC was the first large-scale religious persecution in European history.46 And there’s a reason Christianity followed suit. In the eyes of the ruling class, the idea of continuity between the Greek and Christian Mysteries was pretty darn clear. Barbaric to the core, they both offered direct access to the Lord of Death following the consumption of the god himself in the form of fortified wine.

According to Mary Beard, John North, and Simon Price, the leading historians of Roman religion, “The issue was exacerbated by the appeal of Christianity to women. The combination of stereotypes of foreign and female, which had been deployed by classical Greeks of eastern women out of control, has always been especially potent.”

The same people who were attracted to the radical cult of Dionysus were the same people who were attracted to the cult of Jesus. They were not so different from the spiritual-but-not-religious of today, seekers on the hunt for transcendence. A real experience with real meaning, where the key to that Dionysian experience was the kind of wine that was universally regarded as a pharmakon.