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

This is a truly fascinating book that melds history, religious studies, linguistics, pharmacology, chemistry, biology, and a hefty dose of travelogue. What at first seems like a book about the history of psychedelics in the age of Jesus Christ, turns out to be much more that. The author is entertaining and clearly a very funny dude who brings his intelligence and curiosity to topics that are at the heart of life’s biggest questions. This may seem cliche, but one can travel through this treatise with a belief that you are reading a book that would be written by a character in a Dan Brown book, hoping he never meets the character in the hair shirt. The author truly knows his stuff, when to draw on experts in the fields critical to this journey, and how to spin it all together in an entertaining yarn, although you get to enjoy the whole spool. His ability to synthesize classics, linguistics, religion, chemistry, biology, and archeology is stunning. A wonderful book, not for the faint of heart, but if you’re willing to open your mind to new concepts this is the book for you.

I am now watching the author (and Graham Hancock!!) talk to Joe Rogan and I think that anyone thinking about reading this book should spend some time with the JRE podcast. Regarding the book, I read it in one (long) sitting. This book merges themes that I have been chasing after for years. Ancient Greek mythology (and Christianity) and psychedelics – how can it get any better? The book is incredibly well researched. The author does his homework in the US and then takes off for Europe to investigate some more. He is not shy about chasing scholars and scientists and probing the living hell out of them. Finally someone that’s willing to hold their feet to the fire! So, Muraresku is this unique product of post-Gen X America. He majored in Sanskrit – and Greek! He worked for a New York law firm (I guess someone had to pay the student loans). And he’s curious and incredibly entertaining in person (at least in the podcast) and in the book. As you read, you can actually find yourself rooting for him as he unspools the thread of the mystical use of psychedelics as the basis for the whole of Western civilization – and he nails it! I’ve read (and imagine that anyone thinking about reading this book has read as well) a significant amount of the current literature on psychedelics and this is by far the more entertaining one I’ve laid hands on. Muraresku heads to Greece, Spain, France, Germany and Italy with a fascinating romp through Rome. The most fun is had when he makes it to the Vatican and rummages around in archives where he focuses with laser type precision on closely kept secrets. Unlike the author (who sounds a little straight edgy to me) I’ve consumed psylocibin – several times. And it gave me an intuitive understanding of the new testament – a new understanding, a welcome reconciliation, a coming home. Enjoy this book, folks. I know I did.

So, this came up in my recommendations and after seeing a few of, what I thought were odd endorsements (Moss – really it\’s not that odd for her, and Arey – and only because I am a convert to Eastern Orthodoxy) – I thought why not burn an Audible credit. –Additional remarks in the comment section– So, first off, the author has a deep interest in seeing psychedelic drugs legitimized. I have no issue with this. I\’m nervous of course with opting onto a journey into altering my own neuro-chemistry, but, as a Christian, you should assume the natural world would be \”gift-giving\”, beneficial to man. So, I\’m more fascinated than super-overcautious. At the same time, the numerous ayhuascaa \”trips\” that people have taken include serpents who \”wrap them up in love\” – quite interesting from the Christian point of view – that view, the author attacks starting in Eden, then into early Christianity – seeing the Garden as a Jewish smack on psychedelics, then the 4th Century, always the whipping boy for Christianity, as the death-kneel. After you endure the tirades on Christianity as boring and non-experiential, and I sympathize because modern Christianity is often not participative but passive, you get the premise that the rise of the “nones” is due to boredom, the supposed fact that Christianity is fraught with hidden information that would make faith impossible for most, and that atheism has gone too far in the other direction but that we could all get along around a shaman and some elixirs – that\’s a little crude but not unwarranted. Maybe, I don\’t know. But, it\’s this accusation that experience does not happen when according to Orthodoxy, and many others, experience is the goal. There is no “heaven” or New Jerusalem unless you actually get to see Christ. But whatever he makes of visions, we could shortcut the whole thing with a pharmacy. Sounds like atheists who say we should all be on antidepressants, maybe? –I edited the review here to make space– So, I was thinking about all of these admonitions in the Bible against drunkenness and I kept thinking about Jesus refusing the \”gall\” mixture during the crucifixion Matt 27:34. The Greek work is chole which means yellowish-green. This is just a guess here, but it would ruin the book if it were right. Demeter was called Chloe which means the same thing, same root word. I need to see if there are text variants here where chloe was here instead of chole. No one knows what the gall was in the Gospel, a painkiller, a cruel device, etc.? The drink Demeter drinks, the kykeon, is made with mint, barley – yellowish green. In the Homeric hymn to Demeter she refuses the wine (Jesus spits out this gall) and goes for the kykeon (Jesus drinks the vinegar: soldier\’s wine John 19:29-30 – he asks for this wine, drinks and succumbs willingly). Now, I\’m not suggesting kykeon was in the cup, but this is interesting. There are monumental differences in epistemology East/West which the author does not recognize. I affirm wholeheartedly that experience trumps discursive reasoning. Reason is only there, or dogma, to safe guard a path to experience. This is decidedly Orthodox. God is completely unknowable in His Essence, and known through His energies. Theoria is the goal of the Orthodox Christian and it is experience not reason. Orthodoxy often accuses Scholasticism and Classical Apologetics as reducing God or the experience of God to reasoning within the brain when the entire body of the person and the entire physical world is sacramental. The Torah and the entire of the Bible is unapologetically \”against the gods\” – whom the author loves with devotion. He is a Classicist and goes the modern route of mourning the loss of Greek culture/ideas at the supposed expense of Christianity\’s rude intrusion into history. The Christians screwed up everything that the Greeks could have given us and Constantine gets his usual verbal spanking along with other Christian emperors. Forgetting to thank monks for copying these manuscripts, again, the paganophile blames everything wrong in the world on the fact that the Greeks were replaced by the misogynist Christians who stamped out psychedelics that the \”paleo\” Christians/the truer Christians supposedly imbibed. But the presupposition which is stated with support from Pagels, but never examined, is that gnostic Christianity was equivalent or really superior to \”orthodoxy\”. You have to buy into Pagels to buy his story and into post-modern readings of history where the winner is always the bad guy and the editor of history. You have to see Constantine as the intruder, which raises the question, which Constantine does he believe in? The bad one who messes up the Church and who was never really Christian, or the good one who supported the Church? The people who mourn never tell the \”bad\” side of Greek or Roman behavior or that the cult which supposedly morphed into early Christian liturgical/Eucharistic assemblies, was elitist. Their \”mysteries\” were supposedly the cause of a higher, sort of monotheistic Greek elite that was less primitive than the Greek mythology the public consumed. But the divide in the imagination of the ordinary person and the elite sounds like these were two different worlds altogether. The mysteries are known to all, have festivals everyone knows about and yet there is a wide division between the upper class and the peasants imaginatively in their approach to religion. Much like the Masons, if you wanted these mysteries you couldn\’t go get a prescription, it was restricted. We have just now supposedly cracked their neuro-cocktail that they wanted no one to have but them. Get it? They didn\’t want you to have it, but we should esteem them for it? The author realizes this and still sees a short-cut method to divinity. He just fails to realize the polemical nature of the entire Bible. The gods are real in the Bible and they\’re not nice. He depends on the Gospel of John as proto-Gnosticism with a psychedelic flair. He jumps to the wedding at Cana as borrowing/morphing the aspirations of Dionysus. And, to give him the benefit of the doubt, maybe there is something here – but when you jump over John 1 and the ascription of Logos to Jesus – you also miss the theme, the narrative that Jesus is the fulfillment of the hopes of all men given to the world in its time, in every time. So, today, it would be quite simple to find examples of converts who found their fulfillment not in ______ but in Christ as the fulfillment/superior to – whatever was getting them by, coping. It\’s not borrowing, it\’s using language to express the superiority of Jesus. If someone was converting to Christianity from Islam, would you develop entirely new language for God? Or, would you use the familiar language which most closely represents what you are trying to express and show the superiority or the fulfilling? Language is flexible, experience is flexible, but when you add on Logos, add on that this Logos is the Creator, you\’ve communicated familiarity and played an ace. Quite simple, and the Bible is full of it. I mean, bread and wine are pretty common items. Sight can be used to describe all sorts of experiences. There are not many words used in such isolated instances that they stand out in such a way that they lose their flexibility. At the same time, if there was a hallucinogenic Eucharist, and Jesus did institute it – if that was true – it would no more reduce Christianity to materialism that the author implies throughout. Jesus and Dionysus are only who they are due to the material they knew how to manipulate. The materialistic bias of the book is everywhere – but it seems the author is fine with this because if we had a magical experience we\’d be convinced of a materialistic supernatural realm and it would be the perfect recipe for both worlds. Synthesis, which the author is after, drives the book, but it\’s a synthesis of two irreconcilable positions. The Christian and the atheist will leave the trip the same as it relates to their worldview, but both will have had the same trip, and the elixir that holds the world together will do its thang – creating an empirical experience you don\’t know how to explain and may leave you open \”spiritually\” – but entirely vague as to what spiritual might mean. The author repeatedly regards the trip of a hallucinogen as exponentially better than the boredom of the Temple, Church. He doesn\’t however thrown other religions under the bus which he should to be consistent. He is fascinated as to how the Eleusinian mysteries could have flourished so long without – really good explanatory power given to the draw. This makes sense. But the same could be said of Judaism and Christianity. The fallback though will be something of politics and patriarchy – the bad penguins in Happy Feet – as the real reason Christianity and Judaism ever drew a crowd. This dismisses religious experience in a major way and employs logical fallacies to get it done, the genetic fallacy for one. While the author supposedly hasn\’t drank any of his own libations, you have to ask, how are you so sure? My next reads are on \”bad trips\”. I wasn\’t immune to experimentation as a teenager, but never did any hallucinogens., yet I had friends who did and the experience wasn\’t always great. The author mentions how the craft was easy to master, to make beer/wine/drug mixtures, and I can\’t help but think how – if you accidentally took 1000mg of caffeine versus 100mg, it might just kill you – and of course the author knows this about the psychedelics – but in a big way his argument depends on regulated psychedelics, dose controlled. So, how many people died, tripped really badly, went mad, etc., on ancient smack? All worth it I guess compared with the boredom of God. In the Eastern Orthodox Church the Eucharist and other sacraments are referred to as mysteries, would have been secretive, and to this day you can read in the liturgy regarding guarding the secrecy/privacy of the Eucharist, the line, \”I will not give thee a kiss as did Judas\” meaning, I won\’t tell people what we\’re doing here. Also, catechumens would have been released before the Eucharistic liturgy because they were not yet illumined – in baptism. So, I assume up front, that there were competing \”mysteries\”. Catholic theology preserved pagan elements of salvation. The sacrifice of Christ appeases the wrath of God. Orthodoxy on the other hand preserves the Jewish mind, Second Temple mind, of the Bible and its world. So, in ignoring the soteriological differences East and West he misses that early Christianity had continuity with Judaism and seeing only the Western world, sees Greek influence and can tie paganism to Christianity and its practices. But this is only possible after hundreds of years of anti-Catholic Protestant revisions of early Christianity, and because, he is partially right about the influence of paganism on Western Christianity. Luther becomes the selling point for the Evangelical or Reformed audience, \”ad fontes.\” But the secrecy of the Eucharist/Mysteries was not due to Bread and Wine getting mixed with psychedelics, but that they were under suspicion of cannibalism. Eventually the practice of secrecy was dropped because of this – to avoid this suspicion. Read the liturgy, there are lines to make it clear we\’re eating a “bloodless” sacrifice (the liturgy of St. John Chrysostom and he surely likes Chrysostom – it\’s as if he expects the Christians to be inclusive of the gods – it\’s an ahistorical, post-modern reading of history). The first Christians were called atheists because they refused to worship the gods. This created fear in the people because the relationship with the gods was tit for tat, and had they tolerated more atheists, this would put the relationship in jeopardy. So, don\’t give your pinch to Caesar and maybe you\’ll get eaten by a lion. But why? Because, politically and spiritually the Christians seem like a liability. St. John\’s liturgy dates to the end of the 4th century and is based on earlier liturgies (St. Basil, St. James). There is an underlying presupposition that only the illumined were worthy of the Eucharist, but how do you get to take the Eucharist in the first place – you must be baptized – illumined. In baptism – you die before you die- not in the Eucharist. This is why baptism is baptism into Christ\’s death. \”You died with Christ\” – St. Paul. Illumination was tied to baptism not the Eucharist alone. Read the Orthodox baptismal liturgy. Besides this, exorcism preceded baptism, and after baptism, Chrismation, anointing with Holy Chrism – like the OT prophets as the New Eden was kickstarted again with New Humanity. Illumination refers mainly to baptism and Chrismation and the Eucharist was given to those worthy of it. If you sinned dramatically you were excluded. If the supposed psychedelic compound was the cause of your moral aptitude, as the book credits these drugs for the awakening of the conscience and awareness of your place in cosmos, then the cart is after the horse. Why exclude someone from the drug if the drug was what was making you holy? That\’s like taking an addict out of rehab because they relapsed as a punishment. The premise of this book makes the Eucharist more foundational/primary than baptism and baptism for early Christianity is associated with illumination, not the Eucharist alone – yet there is no reason to think that immersion was immersion into a psychedelic. Really, the assumption that the Eucharist is higher than baptism is flawed from the beginning. Identity as a Christian was tied more to your baptism that it ever was to the reception of the Eucharist. For example, in the early Church, if you had gone after a heretical sect, you were received back into the Church, if you had been baptized, and could provide some evidence you were. No one was asking whether or not you\’d received communion. The criterion of baptism for inclusion in the Christian community, along with genuine repentance/penance, was your entry, not your Eucharistic participation. If the Eucharist was the condition, then the author may have had an argument. The only reason the supplanting/fulfilling Pagan/Jewish religious/anthropological expectations/hopes is surprising – and leads to the assumption of Pagan borrowing/morphing – is because the Pagan landscape the Bible was written in has been lost on us due to Catholic and Protestant soteriology. In short, Christus Victor was replaced by Penal Substitution. Catholic and Protestant theology made God what you were getting saved from in salvation. Orthodox theology has affirmed the reality that idolatry, sins, Satan, and death, fear of death, are the enemies Christ came to conquer. Therefore, if you follow this theme, then coming out from the dominion of the gods, real ones, was salvific. The author I assume, does not believe in angels and demons and rival gods. He must assume these beings do not exist and opt for a pantheistic world (with a snake as it\’s main visionary experience – that may be more to pin on Hancock – or a materialism that mimics a pantheism). Protestant and Catholic theologians made the gods/turned the gods into imaginary beings people worshiped and God was their main enemy due to their sin in Adam and could only be forgiven through being elected/chosen to salvation in the New Adam who was punished by the vengeance of God due man – on behalf of the elect. Long story short, the differences/alterations in Western soteriology are more the story if as the author claims, what he wants to do is bring the rational atheist and the Christian who should have already abandoned his faith long ago, into a mutuality by getting them to take the drugs of the Greeks. In missing the epistemological differences though between the early Church and later Western developments, he misses that it is actually the difference between the mind/thinking attempts to get to God that always leaves you in the \”about\” created by Western theology versus the empirical theology of the East that has had tremendous ramification throughout the last 2000 years. This empirical/visionary Christianity could have flourished just fine without psychedelics (while being firmly against them – maybe incorporating?) and actually does to this day in Eastern Christianity. By conflating everything pre-Reformation with Roman Catholicism he misses that it\’s actually an epistemological problem in the West that sets up the problem of non-experience – and a soteriological problem that would have the same result on its own – the problem of Original Sin and Guilt and the byproducts/side-products of predestination, determinism, epistemological uncertainty, divine impassibility, etc. In terms of piety though, it will make for a mere-morality in many instances to give evidence that you are truly among the elect, the proliferation of dogmas to assure that you believe according to the faith of the elect, and will usually never give you direct experience. The problem of non-experience is not due to the lack of psychedelics but to a theology that makes direct experience impossible from the get-go. There\’s no ascetical path to vision in Protestantism and largely it is gone to my knowledge in Catholicism because of Original Sin and the soteriology it sets up. You\’re saved to the uttermost once you have faith in Reformed theology and works/getting closer to God is practically impossible because God had to overpower your will to save you, there\’s nothing left to do but wait for death while you try and be good and evangelize or improve society. The author is flippant, sarcastic, and deceptive when it comes to the portrayal of the Church Fathers. He reduces their life\’s works to a sentence, like when he tells us how brilliant Irenaeus was since he believed there were 4 Gospels because there were 4 winds – as if anyone reading Irenaeus would have seen that as anything more than elevated poetry. Athanasius gets dismissed, Augustine – who I am suspicious of, same thing. On and on… Again, he misses, and I believe due to his Western bent, that the gods were real in the minds of the early Christians, early Pagans, early Jews – and this was the world they were being saved from, not saved for with a psychedelic twist. From the Orthodox perspective, since it lacks a belief in Original Sin, or an Original Perfection to man – the sin in the Garden is seen as a shortcut to theosis – to godhood. This fits quite well imaginatively with drugs that have you cuddling with serpents and make you gods, and fearless in the face of death. It\’s interesting to me, that in Revelation there is a verse about people not repenting of their \”pharmaceuticals\” (9:21). If the author wanted to put the Eucharist in the realm of psychonaut-ing then there should be precedent in Judaism. The problem to me is that you can\’t have it both ways. If Jesus is truly Jewish, you need a Jewish precedent. If Jesus is truly paganized, then you need to take away the only viable explanation for how Jews could worship a man: that Jesus was really Israel\’s long awaited King shown by deeds, teaching, Passion, and Resurrection. So, the author wants us to swallow a lot more than the premise that the Eucharist was tainted, but an entire new vision of who Jesus is. https://www.amazon.com/Heresy-Orthodoxy-Contemporary-Understanding-Christianity/dp/1433501430 https://www.amazon.com/Destroyer-gods-Early-Christian-Distinctiveness/dp/1481304747/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=hurtado&qid=1602706283&s=books&sr=1-1

Its a very interesting (and long) reading. If you are curious about the use of hallucinogens through out the human history based on real evidence and findings. If you are unsure whether it is your cup of tea I recommend watching podcast with the author on youtube: JRE- brian muraresku

This book is amazing. Such a stunning journey he took finding all these clues. I am so impressed. If you are unsure, listen to the Joe Rogan show with Brian before you buy. Its one of the most interesting shows I have heard in a long time and is why I bought the book. I have a fascination with ancient brews, this book did not disappoint.

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