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

by Brian C. Muraresku

As Kingsley explains, Waking is a form of consciousness, dreaming is another. And yet this is what we can live for a thousand years but never discover, what we can theorize or speculate about and never even come close to—consciousness itself. It’s what holds everything together and doesn’t change. Once you experience this consciousness you know what it is to be neither asleep nor awake, neither alive nor dead, and to be at home not only in this world of the senses but in another reality as well.

In order to achieve this special state of consciousness, according to Kingsley, there was no need for drugs. All you had to do was enter a cave and lie down “in utter stillness without any food for several days—just like animals in a lair.”

Even before Parmenides came to Campania, the Italian region that stretches from Naples and Pompeii in the north to Velia in the south, Pythagoras was also obsessed with Persephone. It would explain why he constructed his home in southern Italy as a literal temple, complete with “a special underground room where he’d go and stay motionless for long periods of time.”10 Was it a Phocaean love affair with the same goddess that spawned those twenty-five hundred subterranean silos across the archaeological site at Mas Castellar de Pontós? And did it also send the earliest Christians into the subterranean vineyard of Dionysus underneath St. Peter’s Basilica, where the first Eucharist was celebrated in the City of the Dead? Or to the many catacombs around Rome, where Greek-speaking witches ruled the night?

Another place for the witches to rest their weary bones would have been Pompeii. The Greek mystics liked volcanoes. According to Peter Kingsley, they “saw volcanic fire as the light in the depths of darkness”; it was “purifying, transforming, immortalizing.” While the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in AD 79 was nothing but disastrous for the ancient residents, it has given modern excavators unparalleled insight into the past. The seventeen feet of volcanic ash kept the Villa of the Mysteries in pristine condition, allowing the German scholar Nikolaus Himmelmann to notice the similarities between the Dionysian frescoes in Pompeii and the third chamber of the Hypogeum of the Aurelii, where Aurelia Prima is being initiated into the Greek Mysteries.

If the Vikings of Antiquity could seed the underworld cults of Demeter and Persephone as far west as Iberia, why not closer to home in Magna Graecia? Or if not them, why not any of the other Greek masters who would call Italy home for centuries after Velia’s founding. As only one example, consider Parmenides’ star disciple, Empedocles (495–435 BC), who lived in the Greek city of Akragas in Sicily. He left an enigmatic fragment about the magical use of pharmaka as a “remedy for death.” For a skilled shaman like Empedocles, familiarity with these unspecified drugs signals “a person capable of descending to and returning from the underworld at will.”17 If you were looking for a mystical experience with Demeter, Persephone, or Dionysus in the days before, during, and after the birth of Jesus, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better spot than Magna Graecia.

But the real kicker was the distinctive medley of opium (Papaver somniferum), cannabis (Cannabis sativa), and two members of the nightshade family, white henbane (Hyoscyamus albus) and black nightshade (Solanum nigrum). The inclusion of the nightshades might as well have been lifted straight from the pages of Dioscorides, who specifically lauded the psychedelic properties of black nightshade with its “not unpleasant visions.” The opium and cannabis, both profoundly mind-altering in high doses, are just icing on the cake. Pushing the bizarre medley even further into witch territory, however, were the skeletal remains of lizards (Podarcis sp.), frogs (Rana sp.), and toads (Bufo sp.). Tendrils and berries of the domesticated grape (Vitis vinifera L.) were found alongside a profusion of grape seeds, suggesting the combination of plants, reptiles, and amphibians was steeped in wine.

one thing is for sure. Just as Ruck seems to have correctly predicted the ergot-infused beer at Eleusis, there is now hard data suggesting that psychedelic wine did, in fact, exist in the earliest days of Christianity, right where the Mysteries of Dionysus and Jesus came into contact. And right where the paleo-Christians would have needed it most, in the burgeoning centers of the faith—Naples, Puteoli, and Capua.

The find from the Villa Vesuvio adds even more detail to the story of paleo-Christianity that we mapped out in the last chapter. The who, what, when, where, and why of the real origins of the world’s biggest religion. Who? Women. Specifically Greek-speaking women with pharmacological expertise, who may have used the portrayal of Mary Magdalene in both the Gospel of John and the Gnostic texts to justify their leading role in the newest mystery cult. Before Jesus generations of women brewed the graveyard beers and mixed the graveyard wines in the Indo-European ritual that spread east and west of Stone Age Anatolia, the “ritual act of communion” that was “by women for women.” After Jesus there were the many women who dominated the house churches and catacombs that defined the faith, offering a safe haven for the old Greek sacrament that needed shelter from the wilderness. The witches of Persephone, who were the primary missionaries of the Phocaeans’ secret cult, had every incentive to both influence, and in some cases even become, the witches of Christianity.

What? Drugged wine. All those plants, herbs, and fungi so heavily documented by the Father of Drugs in his sophisticated wine formulas, demonstrating a profound knowledge of dosing. With such toxic, deadly species at play, Dioscorides’s encyclopedia is proof of a long tradition that could induce the “not unpleasant visions” in carefully measured amounts of potent botanicals.

When? The first three hundred years after Jesus’s death. Before Christianity became legal under Constantine, it was an illegal mystery religion fighting for survival in a hostile and unfriendly world. Its secret meetings and magical sacraments came under just as much suspicion as the Dionysian Mysteries that were systematically targeted by the Roman senate in 186 BC. The idea of the God of Ecstasy obliterating all loyalty to family and country was not welcome in a Roman Empire in the thick of nation building. Similarly the idea of making visionary wine available to the poor folks and women of the 99 percent was just as offensive to the 1 percent of the religious establishment who had enjoyed their monopoly on religious ecstasy for millennia.

At their core Dionysus and Jesus were both absolute revolutionaries. To dismiss the real and present danger of their wine is to misunderstand the world into which the Sons of God were born. And the radical nature of their immortality potions. Because the sacrament is only a threat to the status quo if it’s driving people out of their minds. No one was worried about the “alcohol” that the Greeks or Romans never even found a word to name.

Where? Magna Graecia and Rome. Southern Italy was ground zero for Greek mysticism in the centuries before and after Jesus. It was almost more Greek than Greece itself. Hence the name “Naples,” the “new city” in Greek. In Pythagoras and Parmenides alone, Magna Graecia boasted the greatest prophet and the greatest philosopher the ancient world ever knew. In Empedocles, it found the greatest magician in the history of Western civilization. It was here that the “secret doctrine” of cave techniques flourished at least until the third century AD, when Plotinus died in Campania. It was here that t...

To ignore the spiritual history of Magna Graecia and Rome is to ignore the environment that actually produced the first generations of Christians and made the faith what it is. Simply put, the story of paleo-Christianity is Greek-speaking mystics in southern Italy demanding personal access to the Eucharist. It wasn’t the priests who attracted them to Jesus. It wasn’t the Church Fathers. And it certainly wasn’t the Bible or the basilicas, because neither existed. It was an experience of meeting God, free from doctrine, dogma, and any institution whatsoever. Surely that’s something people today can appreciate.

Why? The only reason religions ever find an audience, the promise of an afterlife. Immortality. There are those who talk about it or read about it. And there are true philosophers who actually die for it. To repeat Peter Kingsley’s single greatest insight about the Phocaeans who made Velia their new homeland: “To go down to the underworld when you’re dead is one thing. To go there while you’re alive, prepared and knowingly, and then learn from the experience—that’s another thing entirely.”

Not everyone needs psychedelic drugs to die before they die. Lying down in a cave for a few days will certainly get the job done. But not everyone has the time or temerity for that kind of exercise. That’s what sacraments are for. That’s what they’ve always been for, before the bureaucracy replaced them with empty rituals and placebos. In its early days, did Christianity solve the age-old problem of delivering a life-changing mystical experience to as many people as possible by offering a chemical shortcut to enlightenment?

If Greek-speaking witches and their drugged wine from Magna Graecia were so critical to the success of the world’s biggest religion in its first three hundred years, what happened to their immortality potions?

Unfortunately there’s only one way to silence a revolution. Sooner or later, the bodies start burning. And if there’s one thing the Church has always been good at, it’s a witch hunt.

Who inherited the Ancient Greek tradition of spiked wine?

Ruck charts a ping-pong battle between the Vatican and its sworn enemies. He notes “periods of suppression,” followed by revivals of “renewed heresies, no doubt neo-pagan continuations of Classical rites” that culminated in the “cults of witchcraft” during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Long disregarded by the classicists and theologians, Ruck has tried to convince his colleagues that drugs are integral to the history of Christianity.

What I was really after was written evidence of the Vatican, in its own penmanship, confronting this supposed network—something that would indicate the past use of drugs in black and white. I had to identify an individual heretic whom I knew the Vatican had hunted down and snuffed out. He or she had to be particularly famous, high-profile enough to have grabbed the Church’s attention in the first place. And then historically significant enough for the Vatican to have retained a record of the scandal. No easy task. But one obvious figure kept dancing through my head. The occult wizard I’d been studying since my days at Brown. The unapologetic genius who died spectacularly for his sins. Giordano Bruno.

The Dominican monk was born in Nola in 1548, in what was then the Kingdom of Naples in Magna Graecia. He was imprisoned by the Roman Inquisition for seven years, before they burned him at the stake in the Campo de’ Fiori in 1600.2 His crime? Among a long list of other heresies, proclaiming the “gospel of infinity” that proposed the existence of multiple earths orbiting multiple suns across the endless expanse of the cosmos.3 Earths that might contain other forms of human life, dethroning our species as God’s favorite. Four hundred years ahead of his time, the martyr for free thinking somehow foresaw the discovery of the first exoplanet by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope in 1995.

Galileo got off much easier than Bruno, living another eleven years in the Vatican’s custody until his natural death at seventy-seven. They never sent him up in flames like the wizard from the south who died at fifty-two. And I think I know why. A blasphemous cosmology is one thing. A blasphemous Eucharist is another.

In his attempt “to return to the earliest centuries of Christianity” by recovering “the monuments of classical antiquity,” Bruno longed for a lost period of history that the brilliant scholar Frances Yates calls “a pure golden age of magic” based on Greek philosophy of supposed Egyptian origin.6 Like his Greek-speaking ancestors from Magna Graecia, the “Renaissance Magus” was obsessed with the same “secret doctrine” that had earlier attracted Pythagoras, Parmenides, Empedocles, and Plotinus. Not to mention all those witches—the Phocaean priestesses of Persephone and the Dionysian maenads who were crushed by the Roman senate to teach Paculla Annia a lesson. They all came from Campania. And they all seem to have been very familiar with drugs. Just like Bruno.

According to a Pew poll from July 2019, 69 percent of self-described Catholics don’t believe a word of the Church’s core teaching.11 Instead, they see the bread and wine of the Eucharist as mere symbols of the body and blood of Jesus, and nothing more. As the writer Flannery O’Connor pointedly quipped back in 1955, “Well, if it’s a symbol. To hell with it.”12 Bruno couldn’t have agreed more.13 As a practical mystic he wanted to get back to basics. Back to the Drug of Immortality that his Greek-speaking ancestors in Campania seemed to know all about. And the kind of psychedelic lizard potion that turned up at the Villa Vesuvio, only twenty-three kilometers from Bruno’s hometown of Nola. His Eucharist was no mere symbol. And no placebo. It was an “elixir” of “god-like virtue,” spiked with the “plants,” “charms,” and “drugs” of antiquity’s most notorious Greek witch, Circe. Is that how Bruno gained his uncanny knowledge of the inexhaustible, starry universe that he accurately predicted by four centuries, and which modern cosmologists find hard to explain?

Which brings us right back to the one thing that unites every mystical tradition we have reviewed thus far. The beatific vision. That immediate sight of God, prompting the blind pilgrim from Eleusis to leave a timeless thank-you to Persephone for restoring his sight: the Eukrates votive relief. That strange, hallucinatory effect of Dionysus in The Bacchae, when he told his latest initiate, “Now you see as you ought to see.”

Those words straight from Jesus’s mouth in John 9:39, “I am here to give sight to the blind.” And John 1:51, “I tell you for certain that you will see heaven open and God’s angels going up and down.” That very Greek concept of gnosis or intuitive knowledge that restored true sight to the Christian Gnostics. “Recognize what is before your eyes,” said the Gospel of Thomas, “and what is hidden will be revealed to you.” That “secret doctrine” that passed from Pythagoras, Parmenides, and Empedocles to Plotinus over six centuries later, when the face painted on the wall of the Hypogeum of the Aurelii wrote, “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.”

No one had ever heard of psilocybin mushrooms until Gordon Wasson reported his mind-blowing experience with Maria Sabina in the Sierra Mazateca of Mexico. In 1957 he wrote that the fungi images were “more real to me than anything I had ever seen with my own eyes.” In language eerily similar to Bruno’s nine blind men, “inebriated with that which they saw so plainly” under the influence of Circe’s drugs, Wasson added, “I felt that I was now seeing plain, whereas ordinary vision gives us an imperfect view.” Incredibly both Bruno and Wasson compared these experiences to the Greek Mysteries.

But if the blind are able to join in, then the beatific vision seems to be an expansion of consciousness that has nothing to do with the eyeballs. Or the intellect. Plotinus warned that this extraordinary “faculty of vision” which “everyone possesses, but few people ever use” could never be “acquired by calculations” or “constructed out of theorems.”14 True religion, as Parmenides tried to teach Plato long ago from Velia, has nothing to do with logic, reason, or reflective thought.

To get the beatific vision, you have to die for it. The ego has to be destroyed. At least for a little while. Whether it’s a few minutes or a few hours or a few days, it doesn’t take very long. But everything you thought you knew about life—everything—has to be annihilated. It makes no sense, but it’s what the mystics have been saying all along. There is no way around it. It is the sole piece of advice rendered at St. Paul’s Monastery on Mt. Athos in Greece, hanging right there in the reception room: “If you die before you die; you won’t die when you die.”

Could the bad blood have anything to do with the fact that Bruno and his Eucharist still represent an existing threat? One that could render all the doctrine, dogma, and bureaucracy of the Vatican absolutely superfluous?

The “bishop’s factory,” as one journalist refers to it, knows better than to leave a paper trail. The Church of the last thousand years has been described as “a mix of bureaucracy, social mobility, and informal networks” where “not everything is written down.”

the witches never flew anywhere, of course. As discussed in our examination of the nightshade beers in ancient Iberia, the family of plants that includes black nightshade and henbane is widely known for provoking delirium, intense hallucinations, and unearthly out-of-body travel.19 Even the early commentators knew that witches “do not leave their homes,” rather, “the devil enters them and deprives them of sense, and they fall as dead and cold.”

After the fourth century AD, what happened to that mysterious brand of exotic wine?

The leading Italian scholar on these matters, Carlo Ginzburg, has observed, “Thanks to the preachings of San Bernardino of Siena, a sect hitherto considered peripheral was discovered in Rome at the very heart of Christianity.”

How psychedelics were the shortcut to enlightenment that founded Western civilization: first in the Eleusinian Mysteries, then in the Dionysian Mysteries. How paleo-Christianity inherited this tradition from the Ancient Greeks, later passing it to the witches of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. And how the Vatican would repeatedly suppress the original, psychedelic Eucharist to rob Christians of the beatific vision—first in Europe, and then around the world after the Catholic colonization of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. A truly global conspiracy.

Gianfranco, who has variously accused me of representing the CIA, Mossad, and the Freemasons, responds in Italian, “Credo che sia una stupidaggine pazzesca.” Which roughly translates: “I think that’s crazy-ass stupid.” Exactly what I thought twelve years ago too.

For any of Ruck’s scholarship on Christianity to hold water, I’ve always wanted to see the evidence that might be hidden behind these Vatican walls. Something right here, in the Church’s own handwriting, that might remove the reasonable doubt from Ruck’s bold theory about a secret chain of heretics that apparently ushered the Ancient Greek legacy of drugs through the Dark Ages.

As my confidence man and master archivist, Gianfranco Armando, advised me last year in the crypt-like cafeteria next to the Secret Archives, I needed to focus on the Archive of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Over the summer of 2018, I turned up a little-known register published by a team of researchers at Michigan University through Oxford University Press in 1998, Vatican Archives: An Inventory and Guide to Historical Documents of the Holy See.

In God’s Jury: The Inquisition and the Making of the Modern World, journalist Cullen Murphy calls overemphasis on the numbers “pointless and distasteful.”14 He compares it to Rudolf Hess, the former commandant of Auschwitz, who, when confronted with a copy of his confession after World War II, scratched out the part where “three million” victims were mentioned and replaced it with “two million.” At the end of the day, the one holy catholic and apostolic Church, a global fixture with a universal mandate to spread the love of the Gospels, went on a bloody rampage. However many lives were lost, Cullen focuses on the “deep psychological imprint” of an Inquisition that “levied penalties of some sort on hundreds of thousands of people” and generally affected millions. A campaign in which the “fear and shame instilled by any individual case, even a minor one, rippled outward to affect a wide social circle.”15 Now that’s how you kill the religion with no name.

The Vatican waged a profound psychological war on women. No doubt the witch hunts spilled over into the state courts, and were particularly violent in Protestant jurisdictions like German-speaking Central Europe, England, and Scotland.

And I’m particularly taken aback by the mention of ivy. Aside from the grapevine, it is the Dionysian plant par excellence. Why would anyone mix it into their wine? In the first century AD, Dioscorides specifically says that an ivy drink can “alter consciousness” or tarassousi ten dianoian (ταράσσουσι τήν διάνοιαν) when taken in higher doses.17 According to the Greek naturalist Pliny, who identified twenty varieties of the plant, ivy has the power to “derange the mind.”

In Religion and the Decline of Magic, historian Keith Thomas notes how the Eucharist had become “an object of supernatural potency” in the Renaissance. It was believed capable of everything from curing the blind, to keeping caterpillars out of the garden. The priests fancied themselves white magicians battling black magicians, who would line up in the Church to steal the literal body and blood of Jesus, intending to repurpose it for their own nefarious ends. According to one sixteenth-century commentator, the Eucharist had fallen into the hands of not only witches like Lucretia but also “sorcerers, charmers, enchanters, dreamers, soothsayers, necromancers, conjurers, cross-diggers, devil-raisers, miracle-doers, dogleeches and bawds.”

As for the lizard itself, the classicist A. D. Nock had a few ideas. Harvard’s greatest religious historian of the twentieth century, who postulated the secret “symbols” and “language” that bound together the followers of Dionysus, once wrote an obscure article about lizard magic, which I could only find in hard copy at Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C.

Could all this be at least part of the reason, largely unstudied by modern historians, why witches “represented the most dangerous of all enemies of the human race and the Christian Church”? What is more threatening to the institutional integrity of the Vatican than a Eucharist that provides a true beatific vision? If Lucretia and her sisters could properly “consecrate” a Eucharist for themselves, what was the point of the priest? And if they could establish a direct pipeline to God, perhaps the way it was always meant to be, what was the point of the Church? Is there really anything more worth defending than the Eucharist?

the very first page none of the savages’ godless habits provoke as much disgust as the sacred beverages that contained ololiuhqui, peyote, and tobacco. While the latter two are familiar, ololiuhqui was likely the most common psychedelic drug used by the Aztecs at the time. In 1960 none other than Albert Hofmann identified the plant as a species of morning glory (Turbina corymbosa) containing ergine, the LSD-like alkaloid that is also present in ergot. Ruiz de Alarcón documents some of its incredible properties. “By drinking it, they consult it like an oracle for everything whatever that they want to know, even those things which are beyond human understanding.”

there were holdouts. Two significant holdouts who refused to forfeit their psychedelic sacrament, forever altering the course of history. First, the American Indian. Over time peyote moved north into the territorial United States, where the Eucharist of the New World retained just as much honor as it had in the Mexico of 1629. Taking a cue from the Vatican, the Protestant missionaries and Washington, D.C., joined forces to take the very first federal action banning the use of a drug. It wasn’t opium or cocaine, which were banned by the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 and the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914. It wasn’t cannabis, which would remain unregulated until the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937. Yes, they all preceded President Nixon’s official War on Drugs of the 1970s as some of the first modern prohibition laws on the planet. And they were all inspired by an American Episcopal bishop named Charles Henry Brent, who formed the so-called Brent Commission in 1901 to combat opium addiction, resulting in the first international drug control treaty in 1912. But none of those substances was the genuine priority of the Christians and the bureaucrats who invented the War on Drugs as a latter-day Inquisition for purely religious reasons. The object of their hunt was peyote.

There were no public health and safety concerns. No issues with quality control or consumer protection. It wasn’t an administrative decision. It was an act of spiritual war. Like the Inquisitors in the Old World who predated them, it was Christian missionaries trying to eradicate a homemade Eucharist that actually worked.

And that’s how the War on Drugs actually begins. Ever since Paul yelled at the Corinthians for consuming a lethal potion, the entire history of Christianity has been one epic battle over the Eucharist. There has always been a right Eucharist and a wrong Eucharist. From the house churches and catacombs of paleo-Christianity, to the Italian graveyards and incubation temples of the Dark Ages, to the Sabbats of the Renaissance, the mystics have always tried to protect their version of the Drug of Immortality. And the bureaucrats have always responded with an iron fist: from the Church Fathers, to the Inquisitors, to Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón, to the Protestant missionaries, to the American federal government. When Uncle Sam got involved in 1890, and the international treaties got under way not long thereafter, this story seemed all buttoned up. Even if it took a couple thousand years, the bureaucrats had finally done away with the competition.

But there was a second holdout. The Mazatecs. While

were it not for one intrepid ethnomycologist, it’s quite possible the “little saints” would be hiding out still. That’s what the Mazatec witch Maria Sabina called them. In 1955 she let Gordon Wasson have a taste of the psilocybin mushrooms that dealt the beatific vision in no uncertain terms. Wasson instantly believed he’d cracked the code of the “Ancient Mysteries.” And in 1957 he let the whole world in on a prehistoric secret that would have sent the Spanish missionaries into cardiac arrest. By 1959 the Protestant missionaries among the Mazatecs had heard about Wasson’s discovery. And they knew exactly what had just been unearthed. In “Mushroom Ritual versus Christianity,” published in the journal Practical Anthropology, Eunice Pike and Florence Cowan penned the confession I’ve been trying to extract from the Vatican for years. A simple recognition that finally puts all my work in the Secret Archives and the Archive of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith into perfect context: