
The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name
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THE NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER
As seen on The Joe Rogan Experience!
This program includes a Foreword written and read by Graham Hancock.
A groundbreaking dive into the role psychedelics have played in the origins of Western civilization, and the real-life quest for the Holy Grail that could shake the Church to its foundations.
The most influential religious historian of the 20th century, Huston Smith, once referred to it as the "best-kept secret" in history. Did the Ancient Greeks use drugs to find God? And did the earliest Christians inherit the same, secret tradition? A profound knowledge of visionary plants, herbs and fungi passed from one generation to the next, ever since the Stone Age?
There is zero archaeological evidence for the original Eucharist - the sacred wine said to guarantee life after death for those who drink the blood of Jesus. The Holy Grail and its miraculous contents have never been found. In the absence of any hard data, whatever happened at the Last Supper remains an article of faith for today’s 2.5 billion Christians. In an unprecedented search for real answers, The Immortality Key examines the archaic roots of the ritual that is performed every Sunday for nearly one third of the planet. Centuries in the making, religion and science converge to paint a radical picture of Christianity’s founding event. And to solve history’s greatest puzzle once and for all.
Before the rise of Christianity, the Ancient Greeks found salvation in their own sacraments. Sacred beverages were routinely consumed as part of the so-called Ancient Mysteries – elaborate rites that led initiates to the brink of death. Athens’ best and brightest flocked to the spiritual capital of Eleusis, where a holy beer unleashed heavenly visions for two thousand years. Others drank the holy wine of Dionysus to become one with the god, achieving immortality. In the 1970s, renegade scholars claimed this beer and wine - the original sacraments of Western civilization - were spiked with mind-altering drugs. In recent years, vindication for the disgraced theory has been quietly mounting in the laboratory. The constantly advancing fields of archaeobotany and archaeochemistry have suggested the use of psychedelic drinks in antiquity. And with a single dose of psilocybin, the psycho-pharmacologists at Johns Hopkins and NYU are now turning self-proclaimed atheists into instant believers.
If these sacraments survived for thousands of years in our remote prehistory, from the Stone Age to the Ancient Greeks, did they also survive into the age of Jesus? Was the original Eucharist of Christianity, in fact, a psychedelic Eucharist? Is this the real secret behind the Holy Grail?
With an unquenchable thirst for evidence, Muraresku tours the ruins of Greece with its government archaeologists. He gains access to the hidden collections of the Louvre Museum to show the continuity between pagan and Christian wine. He unravels the Ancient Greek of the New Testament with the world’s most controversial priest. He spelunks into the catacombs under the streets of Rome to decipher the lost symbols of Christianity’s oldest monuments. He breaches the secret archives of the Vatican to unearth documents never before translated into English. And with leads from the archaeological chemists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania, he unveils the first hard data for the ritualistic use of psychedelic drugs in antiquity.
The Immortality Key reconstructs a suppressed history of women consecrating the forbidden, drugged Eucharist that was later banned by the Church Fathers. Women who were later targeted as witches during the Inquisition, when Europe’s sacred pharmacology largely disappeared. If the scientists of today have resurrected this technology, then Christianity is dead. Unless it returns to its roots.
A Macmillan Audio production from St. Martin's Press
- Listening Length15 hours and 11 minutes
- Audible release date29 September 2020
- LanguageEnglish
- ASINB082VLVP68
- VersionUnabridged
- Program TypeAudiobook
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Product details
Listening Length | 15 hours and 11 minutes |
---|---|
Author | Brian C. Muraresku, Graham Hancock - foreword |
Narrator | Brian C. Muraresku, Graham Hancock |
Whispersync for Voice | Ready |
Audible.com.au Release Date | 29 September 2020 |
Publisher | Macmillan Audio |
Program Type | Audiobook |
Version | Unabridged |
Language | English |
ASIN | B082VLVP68 |
Best Sellers Rank | 294 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals) 1 in History of Christianity (Books) 1 in History of Christianity (Audible Books & Originals) 1 in Christian Church & Bible History |
Customer reviews
Top reviews from Australia
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The profundity of the research is astonishing. This book is a much needed contribution to this culture’s slow and crucial revisioning of its relationship to psychedelics. I recommend it, provisos notwithstanding.
Top reviews from other countries

I wrote a fictionalised memoir about the events that occurred during the 1980’s around that experience, but due to the hostility and fear of a society that no longer understands such experiences, very few have read “Life Before Death”.
The circumstances of the vision were as follows: A Sunday afternoon get-together with my older brother and two Greek friends was enhanced by the consumption of the mushroom mixture mentioned above. After what may have been a few hours, the effects of the ‘trip’ subsided, and we then sat around and partook of some cannabis. One of my Greek friends went to each member of the group and ‘anointed’ them with a spot of balm on the forehead. Then my brother and I were left alone in the lounge room.
Lying back on a couch, I went into a state which is described in Muraresku’s book as a ‘sleep of death’. My soul left my body, and I was taken to the end of the universe. It was a scene of myriad golden orbs leading toward a bright golden light and surrounded by a vast black emptiness. I experienced a monumental sense of loss, and a deep regret that everything was ending. Then a voice boomed out, “Help Make It All Worthwhile”.
The voice was unmistakeably that of God.
I then became aware of being ‘hosted’ within a physical being - a body, which began to fall backwards, leaving the End of the Universe behind as I fell.
I woke up in the loungeroom to see my brother rousing at the same time. On the drive home we discussed what had happened and found to our amazement that we had both experienced exactly the same vision of the end of the universe and God calling out the same message.
Muraresku’s book has resonated chords of familiarity between the rituals in ancient Greece, Spain and Rome described in his book, and to my own vision. It gives me much consolation, and a sense of justification, that consuming the organic compounds provided to us by nature, is not a criminal act.
With education, expertise and consumption among friends, these compounds can be highly beneficial. For myself, the vision was the opening of a door to enhanced perception, which has led to many other insights of a spiritual nature.
In the years following my experience, I finished university, began a successful career in Information Technology, and proceeded to raise a family - living my `second life’ in a world that branded me as a criminal for my previous spiritual explorations.
As cannabis becomes widely legalised, and psilocybin available for medical purposes, I hope that `The Immortality Key’ will help to open doors for further tolerance and understanding after centuries of disinformation and corruption by the church, and the social injustices that have subsequently resulted.
Matthew William Frend

If you are unsure whether it is your cup of tea I recommend watching podcast with the author on youtube: JRE- brian muraresku


The author describes how, since ancient times, a religion existed across the Western world that connected us to the earth and the spiritual realm through a psychedelic 'Eucharist' - a sacred beer or wine. He makes a case for Jesus being a key player in this tradition, and women having a central role in the brewing and delivery of this sacred drink - including within Christianity for the first 400 years - before they were marginalised and then destroyed by the Church after it became dominated by the patriarchy, and the psychedelic eucharist replaced by the bland offering it is today. It offers the hope of a return to a personal connection to god/gods/spirit without the mediation of priests, and with it a rebalancing of our relationship to the planet.
A couple of criticisms. despite me giving it five stars. It felt as if the author didn't trust his readers to follow his argument, so reprised the evolving story in a repetitive series of loops that made the book probably a third bigger than it needed to be. A tougher editor would have been a help.
Also, being an American Classicist, he seems unaware of the Northern European traditions relating to sacred liquids - such as the Norse 'Maiden with the Mead', the Celtic Horn of Plenty, and the indigenous use of psychedelics amongst groups like the Sami. Had he included these, I think his argument would have become even more compelling - because there is no doubt in my mind that he's tapped into something that's been hidden - and which the church and state would prefer remained that way. Is the 'war on drugs' to keep the population from connecting to knowledge that would make us less willing to be led as badly as we are? I think so. So might you by the end of this. Especially if read in conjunction with Michael Pollen's 'How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics.

There may be many environmental problems facing the world, but the real problem for many of us living on our planet remains greed and selfishness. The book explains why with the collapse of Christianity, we need a spiritual and cultural transformation. The problem is that scientisats don't know how to that.