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

by Brian C. Muraresku

We can hopefully agree, therefore, that—as experiences—teachings, sermons, books, lectures, and papers are separate, distinctly different from, and of a lower order than, whatever it is they seek to describe, analyze, or elucidate. Just as to hear a lecture on sex is not the same as having sex, so to hear a sermon on the Kingdom of Heaven is not the same as visiting the Kingdom of Heaven and experiencing it directly.

Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind,

The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art

Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics and Religious Experiences,

The little ego (Latin for “I”) that seems so firmly in control is just an elaborate illusion. And only half the story, as brilliantly narrated by the Harvard-trained neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor in her 2008 book, My Stroke of Insight.

Whether it’s the Bible or the Qur’an, the mystics have never found God by reading about God. There is no class, no lecture, no homily that will ever bring you closer to God. Because there is, in fact, absolutely nothing you could ever learn about God. For the mystics, the only way to know God is to experience God. And the only way to experience God is to unlearn everything the ego has been trying so vigorously to manufacture since our infancy. In order to stop wetting the bed and become productive members of society, that “deep, inner-peace circuitry of the right hemisphere” has been sidelined along the way. To bring it back online, say the mystics, the simplest and most effective method is to die before you die.

if enough consenting, healthy adults could experience what Dinah experienced with proper preparation and guidance, even once in their lives, we just might have a new Reformation on our hands. That’s what British philosopher Aldous Huxley predicted back in the 1950s, in the wake of his sublime experience with mescaline, peyote’s visionary compound. In The Doors of Perception from 1954, Huxley recorded his own taste of “egolessness” resulting in the epiphany that “All is in all—that All is actually each.” His mescaline-occasioned mystical experience was described as the closest a “finite mind can ever come to ‘perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe.’”

My own belief is that, though they may start by being something of an embarrassment, these new mind changers will tend in the long run to deepen the spiritual life of the communities in which they are available. That famous “revival of religion,” about which so many people have been talking for so long, will not come about as the result of evangelistic mass meetings or the television appearances of photogenic clergymen. It will come about as the result of biochemical discoveries that will make it possible for large numbers of men and women to achieve a radical self-transcendence and a deeper understanding of the nature of things. And this revival of religion will be at the same time a revolution. From being an activity mainly concerned with symbols, religion will be transformed into an activity concerned mainly with experience and intuition—an everyday mysticism underlying and giving significance to everyday rationality, everyday tasks and duties, everyday human relationships.

Sixty years later, however, the religious establishment still generally shares the opinion of the federal government that mescaline, psilocybin, and their psychedelic sisters should remain entirely off-limits. Throughout history the mystics have been persecuted, and sometimes executed, for a reason. “Nothing could be more alarming to the ecclesiastical hierarchy,” the philosopher Alan Watts once observed, “than a popular outbreak of mysticism, for this might well amount to setting up a democracy in the kingdom of heaven.”32

Like this book, the pagan continuity hypothesis with a psychedelic twist is divided into two very simple questions: Before the rise of Christianity, did the Ancient Greeks consume a secret psychedelic sacrament during their most famous and well-attended religious rituals? Did the Ancient Greeks pass a version of their sacrament along to the earliest, Greek-speaking Christians, for whom the original Holy Communion or Eucharist was, in fact, a psychedelic Eucharist?

If the answer to the first question is “yes,” and the roots of Western civilization were soaked in mind-altering drugs, then the recent experiments at Hopkins and NYU would appear to be anything but a modern fad. Indeed, it would force a massive reassessment of our current relationship with naturally occurring substances that were not only sacred, but indispensable to the architects of democracy and the world as we know it. If the answer to both questions is “yes,” then the new Reformation is as well grounded and historically oriented as Martin Luther’s Reformation, and it becomes an immediate reality for the tens of millions of SBNRs and religiously disillusioned. But more pressingly, today’s 2.42 billion Christians (almost one-third of the global population) will have to decide whether they will continue sipping from a placebo amid “ninety minutes of boredom,” or join the revolution that just might rescue a dying faith and a civilization on the edge of extinction. Two thousand years in the making, the crisis is real. And the stakes couldn’t be higher.

The Road to Eleusis, first published in 1978. I had read it at Brown, in addition to every other book in the John D. Rockefeller Jr. Library that had anything to do with Ancient Greek religion. Together with coauthors Albert Hofmann and Carl Ruck, Wasson claimed a potent psychedelic was behind the life-changing vision universally witnessed over the millennia by initiates in Eleusis, the Greek spiritual capital, about thirteen miles northwest of Athens. From Boston University, Ruck would later suggest that Christianity itself was similarly founded on drugs. It was certainly an unconventional line of thought. At the time, however, there was very little scholarship specifically dedicated to drug use in Ancient Greece or early Christianity.

I logged straight on to my new Amazon account and used my law-firm salary to order everything Wasson, Hofmann, or Ruck had ever written. I then spent the next twelve years researching this book, as a thirty-year-old hypothesis became a forty-year-old hypothesis to which no one paid any attention. To this day I have never personally experimented with psychedelics, in the conscious effort to let the objective evidence guide the investigation that has consumed my adult life.

While the Hopkins and NYU data was compelling from a circumstantial perspective, hard evidence linking the Ancient Greeks or paleo-Christians to a psychedelic sacrament was pretty elusive. So I kept my nose to the grindstone on nights and weekends, when I wasn’t practicing law, as additional data started coming in from other scientific disciplines like archaeobotany and archaeochemistry, which have now proven the existence of hallucinogenic beer and wine in the ancient Mediterranean. And its possible consumption for ritual purposes.

This investigation has led me to conclusions I never could have anticipated twelve years ago. Not only is there evidence of psychedelic beer and wine at the heart of the Greek and Christian Mysteries, but also evidence of their suppression by the religious authorities.