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

by Brian C. Muraresku

Despite Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s observation in 1950 that “a natural and unconscious process” might explain the similarities between the Greek and Christian Mysteries, John appears to have quite consciously spoken to women in Ephesus who were predisposed to a direct mystical experience of God. There were women just like them in Corinth who came before, and there’d be women just like them in Rome who came after.

If aboveground the Eucharist was being confused with the Greek agape, the tombs below proved to be the real melting pots of the pagan and Christian sacraments. Instead of relying on the Ancient Greek of Saint Paul, we can look at the material evidence that is still there to see. Evidence that the Vatican itself qualifies as “the most significant assets of the paleo-Christian era.”

In Latin refrigerium literally means a “cooling,” hence the English word “refrigerator.” But in practice it came to describe “the commemorative rite that was intended to refresh the soul of the deceased in the afterlife and ensure its peaceful existence in the world of the dead.”

Ramsay MacMullen, professor emeritus of history at Yale, has coined the best term for these intoxicated get-togethers: a “chill-out.” He paints a vivid re-creation of the “traditional beliefs and rites” that “prevailed among Christians” in Rome: Such loving times in the recall of the dead went on for as long as the celebrants’ mood and their wine might last, even as an “all-nighter,” a vigilia. The dead themselves participated. They needed such remembrances for their tranquil existence in the Beyond. They were to be offered whatever food was at hand and, most especially, a toast in wine to be tipped onto their sarcophagus or into a pipe leading down to the head-end where they rested, athirst and happy. A party mood was essential. Participants, if they were challenged to defend the bad behavior that might attend too much eating and drinking, answered indignantly that loving thoughts, respect, and the recollection of fleshly pleasures offered to ancestors whose favor was certainly of more effect than any mere human’s—all this was not just picnicking. This was religion.

It was not until the tenth century that Christian churches, with their accompanying graveyards, moved into the centers of town, finally uprooting the rural death cult. Throughout the Middle Ages the churches and their cemeteries remained “the sacred place of the people.” Where their plays, dances, revels, and “drinking-bouts” continued in full force.

In calling for a sober end to the intoxication, an “emergency so great and hazardous,” Augustine himself quotes the First Letter to the Corinthians, where Paul rebukes the Greeks’ routine of “getting drunk.” If that didn’t already lump the agape and the refrigerium together into one paleo-Eucharistic tradition that was slowly taking shape in the early centuries after Jesus, the Catholic Encyclopedia from 1907 removes any doubt. It says that the Eucharist, at its origin, is clearly marked as funerary in its intention, a fact attested by the most ancient testimonies that have come down to us. Our Lord, in instituting the Eucharist, used these words: “As often as you shall eat this Bread and drink this chalice, you shall show forth the Lord’s Death.” Nothing could be clearer. Our Lord chose the means generally used in His time, namely: the funeral banquet, to bind together those who remained faithful to the memory of Him who had gone.

It’s easy to forget, even for most Catholics. But at its core, the Mass is a séance, where the living and the dead come together through the magic of the “True Food” and “True Drink.” The fact that Jesus himself makes an appearance in the Eucharist is only half the story.

What kind of wine was it? What kept the all-nighters alive for centuries? And why did the cult of the dead refuse to surrender to Christian orthodoxy?

In Rome alone the forty or so catacombs excavated to date run underfoot for hundreds of miles along damp, darkened tunnels—an entire shadow-city hosting thousands upon thousands of ancient tombs.

He calls it “the bizarre realm” of neo-Pythagoreanism influenced by Plato, perhaps best represented by an enigmatic thinker like Plotinus (ca. AD 205–270), who was born in Egypt and died in the Italian region of Campania in Magna Graecia. It’s still unknown if Plotinus’s roots were Roman, Greek, or Hellenized Egyptian, but it doesn’t matter. It’s just another example of the intellectual melting pot of the time. In his introduction to the Vatican’s monograph, Fabrizio Bisconti, the superintendent of Christian Catacombs, actually gives a nice shout-out to Plotinus. That bearded figure on the wall behind me, whom Father Francis and others have likened to Saint Paul? Well, Bisconti says the Aurelii must have borrowed it from the marble portraits of Plotinus that were just coming into vogue and had a major influence on all later Pauline iconography.

In the last seventeen years of his life, Plotinus wrote a massive six-part treatise in Greek called The Enneads that repackaged the Greek genius Pythagoras for a whole new audience. In a passage that acknowledges the entire Odyssey as a parable of spiritual liberation, and specifically describes the Greek of Odysseus’s escape from Circe’s island as full of “hidden meaning,” Plotinus compares our journey through life (and the afterlife) to that of Homer’s main character. The real adventure, however, lies within. Our focus should be directed inward. “We must not look, but must, as it were, close our eyes and exchange our faculty of vision for another. We must awaken this faculty which everyone possesses, but few people ever use.”

So what exactly did Pythagoras teach them?

True to his forty years of scholarship on the subject, Ruck suggests that both Pythagoras and Euripides entered into “deified states of ecstasy” in their respective chambers through the “Dionysian pathway” of sacred drugs. He speculates that “the mystic rites celebrated in the cave” of Euripides, in particular, “probably involved the tragedian and his troupe of actors in a subterranean frenzy in which they communed with the god [Dionysus], who imbued their tragedian leader with his divine persona in a Eucharistic liturgy attended by an elite assemblage of his female bacchanalian devotees.”

I never knew how Lamberton’s “secret doctrine” could have possibly survived as an oral tradition in Magna Graecia from Pythagoras in the fifth century BC to Plotinus in the third century AD. Until now. Is this Homeric fresco proof that subterranean rituals of death and rebirth not only flourished in southern Italy in the centuries before and after Jesus, but also entered paleo-Christianity through Greek speakers like the Aurelii?

the work of Calvert Watkins, that “towering figure” from my Sanskrit days who scoured a dozen Indo-European languages to ultimately conclude that the soma ritual of the Rigveda and “the ritual act of communion of the Eleusinian mysteries, by women for women,” were one and the same, “just too striking for a fortuitous resemblance to be plausible.” From this very passage of Homer about Circe’s kukeon and her pigs, Watkins was able to extract the holy language “describing a religious ritual.” He called it “a liturgical act” stretching back thousands of years, perhaps to the Proto-Indo-Europeans whose graveyard beers conquered Europe during the Stone Age.

With soma it was the juice of a plant or fungal sacrament that Watkins explicitly characterized as “the source of the hallucinogenic agent.”25 With the Greeks he couldn’t say for sure. But like Gordon Wasson, he thought the Amanita muscaria mushroom was a good candidate. The hard data from Mas Castellar de Pontós suggests another mushroom, ergot, spiked the beer-based kukeon at Eleusis. As for the Dionysian wine that replaced Demeter and Persephone’s beer, Watkins said, “clearly it is no ordinary wine.”

Like the soma, kukeon, and Dionysian wine before it, the Eucharist appealed to women around the Mediterranean in the agape meals of the female-run house churches (especially in Corinth), and the graveside refrigeria of paleo-Christianity (especially here in Rome and Augustine’s city of Hippo).

Women and drugs. For two thousand years they have been the two biggest thorns in the side of the Church. Both senselessly scrubbed from the origins of the faith, as I’ve now witnessed in the Hypogeum.

With the initiation of Aurelia Prima into the Dionysian Mysteries, the whole sequence leaves no doubt that women enjoyed a privileged position in early Christianity. Was it their ability to manufacture a mind-altering Eucharist that kept the ecstasy alive in the house churches and underground catacombs of the new faith? At a very dangerous time in the Roman Empire, when fans of both Dionysus and Jesus had to watch their backs?

For the intoxicated agape and refrigeria to have survived as long as they did, something must have made the Christian initiates believe they had ingested and become one with the Son of God.

Before the Church Fathers drew a sharp line between paganism and Christianity in the fourth century AD, whatever was happening in the Hypogeum of the Aurelii was far from unusual. For the paleo-Christians who vanished long ago, it was the norm. And the evidence is sitting right under the Pope’s feet. As the humanists might urge, ad fontes! When in doubt, go to the source.

There were those like the Aurelii and the Gnostics, on the one hand, who thought initiation into Christianity’s biggest secrets belonged to anybody who consumed the “True Food” and “True Drink” of the Lord of Death, just as John promised. And there were those like the Church Fathers, on the other, who thought a few men within the 1 percent were uniquely called by God to handle the Eucharist, perpetuating a tradition of elitism that had existed among the Egyptian pharaohs, Near Eastern royalty, and Jerusalem’s high priests for many thousands of years.

Traces of the tangled history, where women and drugs once competed for the survival of their version of Christianity, have all been wonderfully preserved in the building that classicist Helen F. North once described as “the reason why Rome is still the center of the civilized world.”1 St. Peter’s Basilica.

Father Francis reminds me that the earliest Popes were, in fact, all Greek speakers, including Pope Clement I (ca. AD 88–99), who actually died in Greece; Pope Telesphorus (ca. AD 126–137), who came from a Greek family in Calabria to the south; and Pope Anicetus (ca. AD 155–160), whose name is Greek for “unconquered.” After all, what good was a Pope who couldn’t read the Greek of the New Testament? Or unpack the hidden teachings of Jesus that even the Gospel of Mark had plainly referred to as musteria, “religious secrets, confided only to the initiated and not to be communicated by them to ordinary mortals”?

In the early centuries of the faith, there were many Christians in Rome who professed knowledge of the “True Drink.” Ruck mentions several in his “Jesus, the Drug Man” chapter from The Apples of Apollo: Pagan and Christian Mysteries of the Eucharist. The earliest high-profile example is Simon Magus, the Samaritan sorcerer of the first century AD who traveled to Rome all the way from Jesus’s neck of the woods in what today is Israel. He would establish a “rival sect” to the mainline Church, becoming “the founder of all heresies, with a religious following of Simonians who considered him a god.”3 His partner in crime was an alter–Mary Magdalene named Helena, a prostitute whom Simon Magus had picked up at a brothel in Tyre. She claimed to be the reincarnation of Helen of Troy. The Church historian Eusebius (AD 263–339) relates how Simon Magus won over “many of the inhabitants of Rome” through his “magic.” Justin Martyr claimed a statue in his honor was erected on an island in the Tiber, now to my left, with the inscription: SIMONI DEO SANCTO (to Simon, a holy god).

Princeton scholar Elaine Pagels has written extensively about the forbidden nature of the Greek gnosis (knowledge) that was the Gnostics’ chief aim. “Self-knowledge is knowledge of God; the self and the divine are identical.” Pagels looks to the Greek-educated Valentinus (ca. AD 100–160) as the most famous and influential of the early Gnostics, a “spiritual master” who established his school in the Eternal City around AD 140.7 Just like Simon Magus, Valentinus was out there trying to steer Romans toward the true version of Christianity. He claimed to have been initiated by Theudas, a direct disciple of Saint Paul, “into a secret doctrine of God.”8 Pagels explains the position: “Paul himself taught this secret wisdom, he [Valentinus] says, not to everyone, and not publicly, but only to a select few whom he considered to be spiritually mature.”

In perfect accord with John’s word choice—the gnawing and munching on the flesh of Jesus, just like the Dionysian Eucharist of raw flesh and blood (omophagon charin) from Euripides—part of the “secret doctrine” that apparently passed from Jesus to Paul to Theudas to Valentinus was a magical, drugged Eucharist.

was Valentinus’s student, Marcus, who unleashed the pharmakon on the ancient Mediterranean in the years he was active, between AD 160 and 180. Ruck notes that “although all the heretical sects had a reputation for herbalism and sorcery, Marcus himself was apparently notorious for his expertise with drugs: thus Irenaeus accused him of pharmacological deviltry.”11 Similarly to Simon Magus, Marcus apparently seduced the wife of one of Irenaeus’s deacons to become a Marcosian with a blasphemous “love potion.” For some inexplicable reason, both Irenaeus and another Church Father named Hippolytus (ca. AD 170–235) went to great lengths to document the procedure by which the secret sacrament was actually made. And how the fairer sex, instead of throwing together some leftovers for the kids, was busy cooking up a healthy dose of drugged wine.

a time the heretical Eucharists of the Simonians, Valentinians, and Marcosians posed a genuine threat to Church. But like the Greek Mysteries themselves, Gnosticism in any robust form would not survive the fourth century AD.

For Pagels the shadowy practices of the Gnostics simply “did not lend themselves to mass religion.”16 The Eucharist of John’s Gospel may have been intended for the 99 percent, but the Greek-speaking Christian mystics ran into the same problem as their Dionysian sisters centuries earlier. It’s hard to mainstream this stuff.

No wonder the Vatican went with the cardboard wafer and grape juice.

By the death of Eleusis in AD 392, the Eucharist of the female-run house churches and subterranean refrigeria was no more. In perfect imitation of Roman governance and law, women had been systematically excluded from the priesthood. And the bishop had come more and more to resemble a monarch, seated on his throne at the head of the new aboveground basilicas. Like loyal subjects, the parishioners lined the pews to witness the consecration of very ordinary bread and wine by very ordinary men with no particular pharmacological expertise.

In a mix of misinterpreted Greek philosophy and shameful Biblical reasoning, Saint Augustine (AD 354–430) and others blamed the passions and appetites of the female body for distancing women from the religious life. Free of the chains of the menstrual cycle, childbirth, and breastfeeding, only men could properly control and tap into the rational aspect of the soul that liberated the male species from their own irrational physicality, connecting them to a spiritual heaven.

Am I really accusing the Church that raised me of serving up a placebo for the better part of two thousand years? And suppressing the heavenly visions promised in the first chapter of John’s Gospel: “I tell you for certain that you will see heaven open and God’s angels going up and down”?

St. Peter’s Basilica is where past, present, and future all converge.

In his analysis of Mausoleum M, art historian John Beckwith says “the luxuriant vine of Dionysus has become the True Vine of Christ.”30 Sure, but why? What does it all mean? In John’s Gospel, the purpose of the secret “symbols” and “language” postulated by the eminent A. D. Nock and systematically identified by the Biblical scholar Dennis MacDonald is to connect Jesus to an intoxicating, sacramental beverage far more ancient than Christianity itself. To the Greek mind—and any Greek-speaking Romans who may have camped here overnight in the City of the Dead to commune with their ancestors and their wine god—the vine didn’t just represent the God of Ecstasy. The vine was the God of Ecstasy.

When an ancient Roman came here to mourn the dead with her Eucharist, which wine would she have chosen? The immortal blood of the Dionysus that I saw on the way in here with his magic wand, or the immortal blood of Jesus?

It is built into our DNA to long for the departed, and to want them back in a visceral way. But unlike the tame religions of today, the ancient mind refused to leave the mystery of death unexplored. They focused their efforts on the art and science of dying before dying, achieving that momentary glimpse of the hereafter for the sake of themselves and the ancestors.

Much as Dionysus and Jesus wanted to make that experience available to everybody, the tradition didn’t last. Up above, the Greek bureaucrats won the day. And the Greek mystics were left in the City of the Dead, where they belonged. Along with the original priestesses of the world’s biggest religion, where the world’s smallest country can pretend they never existed.

Like the Simonians, Valentinians, and Marcosians who preceded them, women were not just members of the underground churches that continued blurring the line between the Mass and the refrigerium. They were in charge. Because well into the fourth century AD, whenever a Eucharist was needed to summon the dead, only one gender could do the job.

The woman is in charge of not just elevating, designating, or presenting the wine, but also of mixing the wine. Which, like the mixing rituals we analyzed on G 408 and G 409 back at the Louvre, raises the very real possibility that no ordinary wine was being consumed in these paleo-Christian meals that gave birth to the Mass as we know it.

Tulloch translates calda as “a hot mix of wine and water mixed together.”48 In Rodolfo Lanciani’s Pagan and Christian Rome, published in 1893, we get a little more detail: The meaning of the word calda is not certain. There is no doubt … that the ancients had something to correspond to our tea: but the calda seems to have been more than an infusion; apparently it was a mixture of hot water, wine, and drugs, that is, a sort of punch, which was drunk mostly in winter.

But the one question I’ve been trying to answer since the Louvre is whether the tradition of hallucinogenic Greek sacraments that we traced to Mas Castellar de Pontós really entered Christianity in the centuries after Jesus. And if so, how? Is there any merit to the pagan continuity hypothesis with a psychedelic twist?

Without much archaeological evidence from the house churches themselves, we turned to the only other place a psychedelic Eucharist might show up. What the Vatican characterizes as “the most explicit and concrete evidence” for the true origins of Christianity: the subterranean crypts.

In the City of the Dead underneath St. Peter’s Basilica, we saw the oldest Christian mosaics in the world. From the late second and early third centuries, the God of Ecstasy sarcophagus in Tomb Z and the “True Vine” in Mausoleum M are striking proof that the foundations of the Catholic Church are literally built on top of Dionysus, just as John’s Gospel tried to communicate with all those secret “symbols” and “language” ending in the True Drink that promises immortality. Who knows what kind of potion was consumed in the Vatican Necropolis before Constantine covered it up. But if it was anything like the magical Eucharist of the Gnostics who cherished the Gospel of John above any other, then the all-night feasts between the living and the dead would have been a much more psychedelic affair than today’s Mass.

Witches who may have revered Mary Magdalene as the “apostle to the apostles,” just as the Gospel of John and the Gospel of Mary Magdalene originally intended. Witches who may have followed Junia, “the foremost among the apostles,” to the Eternal City. Witches who, generations after Aurelia Prima, were still consecrating their special Eucharist for the ancestors in the “cemetery church” of the Greek Chapel, deep within the Catacombs of Priscilla. And witches who shouted prayers of “Peace” and “Love” in Ancient Greek as they mixed their drugged wine for spectators both living and dead in the Catacombs of Marcellinus and Peter.

This, then, is the overlooked story of paleo-Christianity. For almost three hundred years, it was an illegal mystery cult, with women in Greek-speaking Italy leading funerary banquets in the underworld that was said to offer access to the Other Side.

the classicist Peter Kingsley is the world’s foremost expert on the esoteric tradition that seduced Italy in the wake of Plato’s guru, Parmenides, who was born in Velia in 515 BC. It was Parmenides’s relatives who introduced Magna Graecia to their cult practices from the Phocaean homeland in the east. The Greek-speaking community in Phocaea was the beneficiary of spiritual influences from the world’s oldest and highest cultures—from the proposed Indo-European homelands of both Anatolia and Central Asia, to the Egyptians, Babylonians, Persians, and Indians. The melting pot that created the first scientists of Western civilization between 600 and 400 BC, laying the foundation for all the technology of the modern world, also created a secret tradition of magicians, healers, and prophets who perfected the ancient art of dying before dying.

True philosophy has nothing to do with books. The starting point for the rationality and logic too heavily associated with Western thought was anything but the witty repartee and educated arguments that fill Plato’s dialogues. Behind all the mental gymnastics was a timeless teaching, mentioned only briefly by Socrates in Plato’s Phaedo: “those who engage with philosophy in the right way are practicing nothing else but dying and being dead.”

Velia was the source of it all. The epicenter of an exercise that focused on the underworld, where the whole point was to enter a “state of apparent death, of suspended animation when the pulse is so quiet you can hardly feel it.”4 In language that eerily resembles the testimony of the volunteers from the Hopkins and NYU psilocybin experiments, not to mention the marzeah ritual of the Near East, Kingsley describes the supreme goal of Parmenides and his disciples as a “cataleptic” state of trance in a “world beyond the senses,” where “space and time mean nothing” and “past and future are as present as the present is for us.”5 Kingsley’s summary of the neglected tradition that most classicists simply ignore is the playground of every Jewish, Christian, or Muslim mystic who ever dared to explore the inner core of their faith. “To go down to the underworld when you’re dead is one thing,” says Kingsley. “To go there while you’re alive, prepared and knowingly, and then learn from the experience—that’s another thing entirely.”