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

Brain Muraresku is a practicing attorney and a student of ancient languages (Greek, Latin and Sanskrit), whose twelve-year odyssey through the archives of Western religion culminated in the publication of The Immortality Key (TIK). According to Muraresku, this work, which "presents the pagan continuity hypothesis with a psychedelic twist," addresses two fundamental 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, Greekspeaking Christians, for whom the original Holy Communion or Eucharist was, in fact, a psychedelic Eucharist?" TIK is a fascinating, audacious and important book. It is fascinating for general readers and scholars alike in the journalistic manner in which it investigates and interprets difficultto-access data from diverse fields. Muraresku takes us along on his often breathless journey, describing visits to the nonpublic ceramic collections of the Louvre Museum in search of the pagan roots of Christian wine; explorations of Rome's vast catacombs to decipher archaeological traces of entheogen use in early Christian symbols; and rare access to recently-opened Vatican archives to translate Inquisition proceedings documenting the dual persecution of mothers and daughters in medieval witchcraft trials.