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

by Brian C. Muraresku

The way the Greek and Christian Mysteries were targeted by the Roman Empire is well documented in the historical record. Largely ignored by modern scholars, however, is the degree to which the common sacrament of wine motivated the harsh suppression of these revolutionary movements. And whether the great secret of Dionysus and Jesus alike—the secret that unlocked the key to immortality—was, in fact, drugged wine.

the Borghese Vase is one of the best representations of the madness that overtook the initiates of this religion. Madness that did not come from wine as we know it, but an infused potion spiked with any number of drugs. What G 408 and G 409 tried to communicate, and what Dioscorides later recorded with his wine formulas, is now a scientific fact.

The theme of tonight’s dinner is apotheosis. What does it mean to become God? If Father Francis has no problem with lesser mortals like ourselves bursting into kaleidoscopic rainbows after decades of intense meditation, then why not simply drink the sacred potion and cut to the chase? At the end of the day, aren’t we both talking about that cryptic promise from Eleusis: overcoming the limitations of the physical body and cheating death? That “moment of intense rapture” sought by the maenads of Dionysus, until they “became identified with the god himself.” And aren’t he and Ruck both committing the same arch-heresy by suggesting that the original, obscured truth of Christianity has nothing to do with worshipping Jesus, and everything to do with becoming Jesus? Aren’t we all just gods and goddesses in the making?

Maybe the concept of apotheosis doesn’t sound particularly heretical today. But a few hundred years ago, it got the likes of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola into a load of trouble. In 1484 the upstart Italian was only twenty-one years old when he met Lorenzo de’ Medici, who promptly invited him into the Florentine Academy that was about to punch the Renaissance into high gear. Already a student of Greek, as well as Latin, Hebrew, and Arabic, the newest Florentine got to work writing Oratio de hominis dignitate (Oration on the Dignity of Man): the so-called Manifesto of the Renaissance. He wanted to publicly debut the Oratio, together with his 900 Theses, in Rome on the Epiphany of 1487, the God’s Gift Day. But Pope Innocent VIII was not impressed. He put a halt to the spectacle and condemned every one of Pico della Mirandola’s theses for “renovating the errors of pagan philosophers.” All for the young man’s simple but revolutionary act of applauding the infinite goodness and unlimited potential of every man, woman, and child on this planet. Under the principle of ad fontes (“back to the source”), the humanists were just beginning to tap the wisdom of the founders of Western civilization in their original language.

If drugged wine was the Greeks’ path to immortality, did a drugged Eucharist offer the first Christians the kind of experience reported by the participants of the psilocybin experiments at Hopkins and NYU? If that original Eucharist could cause the “dissolution of the self” and “melting away of barriers” mentioned by Dinah Bazer—as well as by the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic mystics throughout history—then it all makes sense. But without the genuine psychedelic sacrament inherited from the Greeks, how could a placebo Eucharist convince anyone to drop paganism and the entrenched religion of their ancestors? In just four centuries, how did Christianity go from being an obscure cult of “twenty or so illiterate day laborers” in a neglected part of the Mediterranean to the official religion of Rome, converting half the empire, perhaps some thirty million people, in the process?2 What was the secret to Christianity’s success?

In The Apples of Apollo: Pagan and Christian Mysteries of the Eucharist, published in 2001, Ruck devotes almost a hundred pages to this subject in a chapter titled “Jesus, the Drug Man.” It’s actually a decent translation of “Jesus,” whom the Greeks knew as Iesous (since they never heard of the letter “j”). Iesous, in turn, was a spin-off of Iesoue, the Greek word for Joshua, the Israelites’ leader following the death of Moses.3 But according to Ruck, the true origin of Jesus’s Greek name is the root for “drug” or “poison” (ios), which supplies the Greek words for “doctor” or iatros (ἰατρός). Ruck says the “drug man.” Either way, it’s unlikely a Greek speaker of the first century AD would have heard the name Iesous and not thought of Ieso or Iaso, the Greek goddess of healing and the daughter of Asclepius, who was taught the art of drugs, incantations, and love potions by the centaur Chiron.

Each of them uses the verb iaomai (ἰάομαι) to describe Jesus’s healing miracles. A literal translation would be “to cure by means of drugs.”5 In Matthew 9:12, Mark 2:17, and Luke 4:23, after all, Jesus does specifically refer to himself as iatros, which instead of “drug man” is generically rendered as “physician.”

“The more you read the Greek,” I start off, “the weirder it gets.” Though Father Francis doesn’t know it, I’m referring to A. D. Nock’s secret system of “symbols” and “language” that John used to tip off the Greek speakers of the time who were either initiated into or at least familiar with the Mysteries.

As it turns out, no one was more heretical than Jesus. But to put John’s Eucharist in context, it’s important to review the origins of the sacrament itself. While New Testament scholars acknowledge the Bible isn’t the most accurate record of historical events, they have two general criteria for assessing authenticity: the age of the sources, and their multiplicity.

Like the advanced religious biotechnology of the ancient Near East discussed in the last chapter, the Pope explicitly identified the “precise objective” of Jesus’s Eucharistic ceremony during a homily from St. Peter’s Square in 2015: “that we might become one with him.”12 Eating the god to become the god. Drinking the god to become the god.

But in order for Dionysus to pass the baton to Jesus, there could be no room for ambiguity. So with all due respect to Dr. King, it appears that John did, in fact, deliberately copy the language of Euripides to make the greatest recruitment pitch in the history of Christianity. And perhaps the most significant point of his entire Gospel: the sacrament of Dionysus and the sacrament of Jesus are one and the same. Both of them are steeped in the same primitive rites of theophagy that had been transforming archaic humans into gods since time immemorial.

As Jesus announces the key to the Christian Mysteries in John 6:53–56, he makes crystal clear that the “True Food” and “True Drink” of his flesh and blood are nothing less than the flesh and blood of Dionysus. Not only because the words that John uses for “flesh” (sarx/σάρξ) and “blood” (haima/αἷμα) are identical to what Euripides wrote in the The Bacchae five hundred years earlier, but because of what Jesus asks his followers to do to that “flesh.” Twice in this passage the Evangelist drops the word trogon (τρώγων). But to translate trogon as “eat,” as do most English translations of John’s Gospel, is at best to ignore, and at worst to suppress, the visceral act of theophagy so obviously intended to jump off the page. Yet another language barrier, stubbornly fixed in place for centuries.

Only in John’s Eucharist does trogon appear. Indeed, the only other instance of the verb trogon in the entire New Testament is in Matthew 24:38, in reference to the pagan feasting of the pre-Flood population “in the days of Noah.” Why would Jesus ask people to gnaw and munch on his flesh in such graphic, barbaric language? In The Dionysian Gospel, Dennis MacDonald believes the Greek of John points rather obviously to “Dionysian cult imagery,” “specifically the eating of the flesh and blood of the god and the immortality that initiates gain by such activity.”16 How could any Greek speaker of the time conclude otherwise?

The God of Ecstasy lived in the wine, for sure, but there were other ways of consuming his divine blood. As Ruck made clear in The Road to Eleusis, “Dionysus was the god of all inebriants and not of wine alone.” In addition to psychedelic plant life, the shape-shifting God of Ecstasy could come in many different animal forms.

John’s Gospel opts for an adorable substitute. In his first chapter, Jesus is referred to as the “Lamb of God” or amnos tou theou (ὁ Ἀμνὸς τοῦ Θεοῦ). Like the Wedding at Cana, it’s another of John’s inventions that will echo for centuries in Christian art—in the Ghent Altarpiece, for example, which shows the holy blood draining from the chest of the still-living lamb directly into the Eucharistic chalice. It is the chalice of the Mass that holds the blood of Jesus to this day, just like the blood that once poured from the goat as the blood of Dionysus to become the Eucharist of raw flesh (omophagon charin) for Euripides.

This ancient precedent for the magical wine of Jesus was certainly not lost on the great Walter Burkert. It was the God of Ecstasy, the classicist openly recognized, “whose blood is represented in the sacramental drinking of the wine.” Long before the Last Supper, “the drinker of the [Dionysian] wine would be drinking the god himself.”

The “True Drink” was no ordinary drink. It was a tool. The Drug of Immortality that might teach the first Christians how to die before they die. The Gospel of John is full of references to the concept of death and rebirth. In John 15:13, Jesus says: “the greatest way to show love for friends is to die for them.” In John 3:3, he adds, “I tell you for certain that you must be born again before you can see God’s Kingdom.”

And the celestial visions that follow the mystical experience are emphasized time and again. In John 9:39, “I am here to give sight to the blind.” In John 1:51, “I tell you for certain that you will see heaven open and God’s angels going up and down.” The strange, hallucinatory effect that Dionysus has on his followers is identical in The Bacchae. “Now you see as you ought to see,” the wine god tells King Pentheus following his conversion to the wine god’s new religion.

The Greek of Jesus couldn’t have been more explicit in John 6:53–56, when he revealed the key to the Christian Mysteries. You had to actually do something. You had to sample the “True Drink.” That “communion with the god, the goal of all mysticism” is best achieved through the fruit of the vine, says historian Philip Mayerson: “Once divinity had entered into the celebrant, deity and devotee became one, god and man became one.”

You do not become one with Dionysus by reading about him, or praying to him. You do it by drinking him. Even by the most mainstream interpretations of the Dionysian Mysteries, the wine of Dionysus is a pharmakon that results in apotheosis.

In that environment the words that come out of Jesus’s mouth in John 6:53–56 don’t actually belong to Jesus. They don’t even belong to John. “They were said as homilies of ecstatic individuals channeling Christ in the liturgy,” Father Francis continues, pointing to the Greek of the weathered Bible lying open on the table. “John’s Last Supper scene is poetic theology that doesn’t correspond at all to the Last Supper of the Synoptics, because it’s all coming out of a much later tradition of ecstatic, prophetic speech. Where the followers of John’s community are channeling the voice of Christ in their time. Because Christ is just as much present in the Eucharist as he is in Galilee in the year 30. In the year 90, he’s still risen. He’s still there.”

What was once a sacrilegious act worthy of the death penalty in classical Athens was becoming a new way, perhaps the only way, of keeping the Greek Mysteries alive in the Roman Empire. But that awesome responsibility fell on one, very specific gender.

As I dart through the unsettling language in John 6:53–56 one more time, it all clicks. Finally. Was John writing for women? “If John is addressing a group of female visionaries getting high in Ephesus, then I think I finally understand his Gospel,” I tell the priest. Father Francis chuckles.

And yet, as I learned from thirteen years of Catholic school, there’s only one thing the Vatican finds more suspicious than drugs. And that’s women. For both of them to have been integral to a pagan ritual that turned humans into God is pretty much the most heretical thing you could ever discuss with a priest.

In the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, a group of women led by Mary Magdalene are the first to witness Jesus’s impossible resurrection three days after his death and burial. Only in John does the risen Jesus appear to Mary Magdalene all by herself.

But I never understood John’s conflicting ending until now. In antiquity women were universally the leaders of the Dionysian faith. Euripides had described the Dionysian Mysteries as “an immoral trick aimed at women.”

No less an authority than Raymond E. Brown, the late Catholic priest and onetime premier scholar of John in the English-speaking world, endorsed a reading of the Gospel that did indeed make women heirs to Jesus. If not to the exclusion of men, then certainly their equals as “first-class disciples.”30 His groundbreaking study from 1975, “Roles of Women in the

Where John’s Gospel was censored, others simply disappeared. In 1896, about fifty years before the discovery of the Nag Hammadi codices that I mentioned during our tour through the ruins of Eleusis, another secret book came to light in Egypt. Like all Gnostic literature, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene never made it into the New Testament. Because it didn’t fit the Church Fathers’ agenda. This precious text preserves a Jesus who came not to be idolized as an external God, but to reveal the divine spark that lives in us. And to unlock our own “innate capacity to know God,” says Princeton scholar Elaine Pagels—to actually experience that divinity here and now.

For Pagels, the conclusion is obvious: “Without visions and revelations, then, the Christian movement would not have begun.”

the house churches functioned as “private associations,” where the “centrality of the banquet meal” perfectly suited women’s entrenched authority over the home, including “receiving, storing and distributing” all the ingredients necessary for the Eucharistic ritual.36 The New Testament is full of examples of such female luminaries.

Witches could hardly rest easy. But hope was in the air. In the same way that Dionysus rescued his sacrament from Eleusis and brought it to the masses, Jesus was open-sourcing the wine of the Eucharist away from the palaces and mansions of the Near East.

the untested religion to have any chance of success, however, the Eucharist simply had to involve the kind of genuine mystical experiences so well documented in the Dionysian tradition.

Unlike the cardboard wafer and cheap boxed wine of today’s Mass, it had to actually deliver. When Pope Francis says the “precise objective” of the Eucharist is to “become one” with Jesus, I’m not sure what he means. Like many Catholics, I’ve taken Communion hundreds and hundreds of times in my life, and never once felt a fraction of the ecstasy reported in the art and literature of Ancient Greece. And never once did I taste the apotheosis that was promised to me in John 6:56: “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them.”

as Pico della Mirandola would later risk his life to advertise across Christendom in 1487. Who cares about the god at the head of the table when the only point of the banquet is to get “drunk” with that “nectar of eternity”?

Like some corporate gimmick by Amazon Prime, the Son of God from Nazareth had just made it perfectly respectable to order the Drug of Immortality straight to your front door. If the Mysteries had any chance of making it through the unfriendly climate of the Roman Empire, maybe women and their kitchens were the last refuge for a risky sacrament that needed an insurance policy.

For a few generations, perhaps the witches of Dionysus and the witches of Jesus were fairly indistinguishable. Why couldn’t they worship both wine gods? The women who prepared the psychedelic beer and wine in the Greek Mysteries could have been the same women who prepared the original Eucharist across the Mediterranean, where the line between pagan and Christian did not yet exist. And where it would not exist until all the men in Rome decided to exclude women from any positions of leadership in the official Church. Because if the crackdown on the Bacchanalia in 186 BC had taught the priests and bishops anything, it was that women and their sacrament were the single greatest threat to law and order.

The women and their Eucharist had to go. It may have started by altering John’s Gospel and getting rid of the Gospel of Mary Magdalene. But the campaign against women and drugs would last for a very long time. As we will see toward the end of this investigation, it is a war that still very much continues to this day.

But for today’s otherwise ordinary bread and wine to hold this power over some of the 1.3 billion Catholics like Father Fournier, the original Drug of Immortality simply had to mean something. The way it meant something to the Greek-speaking mystics in the centuries preceding Christianity’s rebranding of the Dionysian Mysteries in the first century AD.

Before Jesus, that primitive ritual of drinking the god to become the god had largely survived in the wild. With John’s Gospel, apotheosis came home. And it went viral. Because that’s how religions are born. And that’s how religions flourish. Until the bureaucrats come along. But technology that time-honored and that advanced doesn’t just evaporate. The witches would never allow it.

And so, when it comes to drugs, that blind spot of the classicists continues. If even the professionals won’t bother with the topic, what hope is there for the rest of us? And what hope is there of proving or disproving the pagan continuity hypothesis, and getting to the true origins of Christianity, when the potential key to the Mysteries has been ignored by both secular and religious historians for so long? Because if ever there was a missing link between the Ancient Greeks of the final centuries BC and the paleo-Christians of the early centuries AD, it’s the spiked wine I have been discussing with Father Francis for the past three days straight.

The seeds of Jesus’s sacrament may have been planted in Galilee and Jerusalem, but they took root here, in the onetime capital of the Roman Empire and home to the oldest functioning institution the planet has ever known: the Roman Catholic Church.

it’s high time to reconstruct what Christianity actually looked like in the period between the death of Jesus around AD 33 and Emperor Theodosius in the fourth century AD, when the illegal cult suddenly became the official religion of the Roman Empire.

Before the legalization of Christianity, and before the public churches and basilicas of the fourth century AD, there were only two places the paleo-Christians got together to celebrate their secret Eucharist. It was either in subterranean catacombs like the one I’m about to inspect with Father Francis. Or it was in the house churches, with the doors closed and the curtains drawn. To see how different they were from today’s Mass, the ritual dinners that filled wealthy homes across the Mediterranean deserve a quick review.

In the old days, the female witches of Christianity who preceded the male priests were known for serving up a deadly concoction. The kind of wine the Ancient Greeks would have had no problem calling a pharmakon, or Dioscorides would have easily included as one of his wine formulas in the Materia Medica. Judging from the Ancient Greek of Saint Paul, there’s no doubt the Eucharist of yesterday was very different from the Eucharist of today.

Aboveground, the original Eucharist was being consumed as part of a larger meal, a Greek-inspired pagan banquet called an agape (ἀγάπη) or “love feast,” that was “often marked by excessive convivial drinking.”

While the smoke and mirrors may have kept the Roman authorities off their backs, Paul and the other Church Fathers weren’t so happy about confusing sacred and profane intoxication. Eating and drinking Jesus to become Jesus was very different from getting smashed.

When I first read his translation of 1 Corinthians 11:30 about ten years ago, I remember being completely blown away by what instantly became, and remains to this day, my vote for the most fascinating line in the entire New Testament. It left me with little doubt that one of those unusually intoxicating, seriously mind-altering, occasionally hallucinogenic, and potentially lethal elixirs had snuck its way into paleo-Christianity.

The nineteenth-century English theologian Charles John Ellicott—dean of Exeter and bishop of Gloucester—compiled a sweeping commentary of the New Testament in 1878 that is still consulted by pastors and students of the faith to this day.

The plain meaning of koimontai could not be any clearer. The Corinthians seem to have incorporated an extreme beverage into their liturgy. The boundary between psychedelic wine and poisonous wine is razor thin, however, and fatal dosing mistakes can be made. Could the makers of the potentiated Eucharist have gotten their measurements wrong? Did the participants ingest too much of the elixir at hand? Or maybe they simply appeared dead, reveling in the near-death experience that brought the Corinthians closer to Jesus and the community of departed Christian saints. If Paul is to be believed, and there really was a lethal potion in Corinth, who mixed it? And why? The answer once again points to women.

If whatever happened during the Last Supper was crystal clear, the Christian faith wouldn’t have splintered into thirty-three thousand distinct denominations over the past two millennia.