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

This weeks book of the week hit my radar off the Joe Rogan Experience, making this weeks book The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name by Brian C. Muraresku.

I am going to start by saying this book surprised me, on many levels, in all the best ways. In many ways it reads like a mystery novel. He starts with the basic premise that a little known book initially published in like 1978, called The Road to Eleusis by Robert Gordon Wasson, Albert Hoffman, and Carl Ruck, was quite accurate. The basic summary of THAT book, and I haven’t read it yet, so I’m running off of what I picked up from reading this book, is that the key to the ancient Eleusinian Mysteries, is drugged beer. And Muraresku runs down why that premise is accurate, then asks the logical question, of what happened next?

Using his research to really do a deep dive on the Pagan Continuity Hypothesis, which according to Wikipedia, the Witch-Cult hypothesis, which is part of this, is discredited but after reading THIS book…I feel like it’s highly credible. If you’re not familiar with the Pagan Continuity Hypothesis, well, you actually probably are, just didn’t know that’s what it was called. This is the belief that pagan traditions continued well into the Christian/Catholic takeover of Europe, simply hiding in plain sight. Like Christmas being in December, despite historical record indicating Jesus was actually born in August. Christmas is to overwrite the ancient Yule traditions or Saturnalian traditions. Stuff like that falls under the umbrella of the Pagan Continuity Hypothesis. Not quite meeting the scientific definition of a theory, Muraresku advances the hypothesis pretty far down the road. But he is still looking for the smoking gun, and freely admits that in his afterword.

The first question to answer in the question for the Religion with No Name is which came first: Beer or Bread? Because the answer to that question changes the narrative of humanity significantly. The current popular hypothesis is that bread came first. It was because of grain growth in bulk needed to bake bread, that humanity went from being hunter/gatherer’s to farmers. However, Dr. Martin Zarnkow, who is the head of research and development at the Weihenstephan Research Center for Brewing and Food Quality at the Technische Universität München, readily embraces beer as he first advance in food technology. And his logic is simple and sound. Beer is easier to make.

Not the modern beer, obviously, that requires heat, and massive vats. But original beer, was probably a happy accident. The original hunter/gatherer grabbed some barley for later eating, maybe put it in water to make it easier to hull. The natural yeast on their hands, combined with the water and barley grains, a little time, and voila! Basic beer. And all by itself, that would be alcoholic, which would make the ancient hunter/gatherer’s happy and relaxed when they went to consume it. And I get that it’s fashionable to assume everyone born before the 20th century was obviously dumber than us, because otherwise they would have been born in the 20th century, obviously, but really…our ancestors were quite smart. And they were survivors. They knew what was good to eat and what wasn’t. And with the invention of early beer, it wasn’t long before they realized that if they wanted more of that lovely floaty feeling, they would have to stay put to grow more of what created that lovely floaty feeling.

So, it didn’t take long for me to agree that beer probably came first. Bread is very involved, and requires actually hulling the barley before baking can occur. Hulling requires you be stationary for a long time as you grind out barley berry from the hull. Then figure out baking. Tossing barley into water and accidentally making beer is logically consistent with what is known about a hunter/gatherer lifestyle—namely they were constantly on the move, so it had to be portable. Carrying around a grindstone is added weight for little benefit, given that you would have to hand grind in one place for hours.

So, having accepted the head canon that beer fueled the agricultural revolution, not bread, it’s not that big a leap to determine that ergotized beer ALSO happened by happy accident. Why ergotized beer? Why an accident? This is where Albert Hoffman’s contribution to the Road to Eleusis comes in. Hoffman is the scientist who manufactured LSD from Ergot back in 1938. Why Ergot? Ergot is a fungus that grows quite naturally on barley. I think it grows on other grains too, but barley is its most widely known companion plant. It’s so prevalent that Dr. Zarnkow recognizes it immediately and says it’s dangerous for us…meaning brewers. It has to be pulled out immediately or it will ruin the beer.

Let’s throw in a disclaimer here, for my own legal safety. I am NOT advertising experimenting with manufacturing your own ergotized beer. Ergot can be quite deadly. And that’s no exaggeration. In the middle ages, they had a spout of St. Anthony’s Fire, i.e. ergotism, erupted through parts of Europe, when ergot was NOT identified and removed from barley, resulting in ergot poisoning. Basically, the alkaloids in ergot build up in your system, cutting off blood flow to your extremities, resulting in gangrene. If not treated early enough, this can lead to amputation. So it’s serious stuff. Don’t go playing around looking for a cheap high. It’s not quite that simple.

But the intriguing thing about Hoffman’s contribution is not just that he conclude ergotized beer may have been the source of the Eleusinian Mysteries, which we’re going to discuss more in a bit, but that he believed it was fully possible for the Eleusinian priestesses to manufacture LSD with what they had on hand in their ancient Greek kitchens. This threw my google search into what I’m sure will land me in an uncomfortable conversation with the DEA soonish, while I tried to google how to manufacture LSD. Google seems to think you need a degree in organic chemistry and a full chem lab to make LSD. So that didn’t jive with what Hoffman….you know, the guy who actually discovered LSD….his belief it could have been done quite easily in ancient Greece.

So because I am a bad friend, I asked two of my friends, both of who were STEM majors in college and in all seriousness are smarter than me, if they thought it was possible to make LSD 3000 plus years ago, looping them into the impending DEA investigation into my activities. They both said yes, by the way, and walked me through their logic. One even said google was lying and she could probably make LSD just with what she has in her kitchen right now…NOT THAT SHE WOULD! Just getting this out there for the record, none of us would, none of us have seen the inside of a jail cell, and would very much like to continue that positive trend. My dogs are very nice, please don’t shoot my dogs when you come to question me.

Having satisfied my own curiosity on that matter, I continued to read the book. And almost the very next chapter included something one of my super smart friends mentioned above had said. It’s the dose that makes the poison. Sometimes that dose is zero, as in instant death awaits you if you ingest this. Zero is not the dose for ergot. And given that, at a small necropolis in Catalonia Spain, Las Ruedas at the Pintia, they have found at least one chalice AND part of a human jaw bone, both with ergot in them, there is proof that the ancients were consuming ergot.

Muraresku does trace how a Greek cult could have traveled as far west as Spain and as far east as India, using the “Vikings of the ancient world” the Phocaeans, who were a widely traveled band of Greeks known to settle in France and Spain and other parts.

Why a necropolis? That ties directly back to the Eleusinian Mysteries. Which were a graveyard death cult. And the beer Muraresku was seeking was a graveyard beer. Now, this is not to be confused with death cults a la Jim Jones or David Koresh or Marshall Applewhite. The ancient death cults, who were consuming their ergotized beer in cemeteries or necropolis, were not seeking to die die. They were seeking ultimate knowledge. They were seeking the meaning behind the Greek saying, “If you die before you die, You won’t die when you die.” Now, what the hell does that mean?

Muraresku actually opens his book with a chapter on the Johns Hopkins studies on use of psychedelics on patients with terminal cancer. And a whopping 75% of them rate it among the top five most influential experiences of their lives, as the optimal condition in which the hallucinogens are administered virtually guarantees a “good trip.” And remember from last years book, The Psychedelic Handbook, a bad trip IS a negative side effect. But happily, they all reported good trips. And that their fear of death has been erased. They report feeling more open, more kind, more forgiving. One of the doctors who oversaw the study, Dr. Anthony Bossis, reported that participants came away with “the newfound knowledge that consciousness survives bodily death—that we are not only our bodies…It has been described as a transcendence of past, present, future…The insight that we are not bound by the material world is a powerful one. It is psychologically, existentially, and spiritually liberating.”

So the ancients, who may have been practicing this religion since we were hunter/gatherer’s, were just trying to contact that other side, to understand that we are all connected outside of time and space. Why is this called a death cult? Because the Eleusinian Mysteries, when they started, were a cult in worship of Demeter and Persephone. You know…Persephone, Queen of the Dead. I gotta wonder if the creator of Lore Olympus is going to address THIS elephant in the room. The ancients WERE trying to contact their deceased loved ones. Hence the name death cult.

Now, at some point in time, around the rise of Dionysus as a popular god, they shifted from ergotized beer, to wine as the sacred drink. This is important for the rest of the book, and the introduction of The Bad Guy, so bear with me. The Dionysian Mysteries were also female centered, as in, the women were the keepers of keys, the brew masters and mix masters who created the sacred beverage that would throw everyone into divine frenzy. And one of Greece’s most famous playwrights, Euripedes, wrote in The Bacchae, in 405 BC, “Two things are chief among mortals, young man: the goddess Demeter—she is Mother Earth but call her either name you like—nourishes mortals with dry food. But he who came next, the son of Semele {Dionysus}, discovered as its counterpart the drink that flows from the grape cluster and introduced it to mortals. It is this that frees trouble-laden mortals from their pain—when they fill themselves with the juice of the vine—this that gives sleep to make one forget the day’s troubles: there is no other treatment for misery. Himself a god, he is poured out in libations to the gods.”

Except, the translation is wrong, as Muraresku points out. It’s not “treatment for misery.” The word in the original play is pharmakon. Meaning drugs. It is interesting to note, that wine is wine, drugs are drugs, in Greek. The word alcohol did not exist…that’s an Arabic word. So the very deliberate use of the word pharmakon should be recognized. But is always mistranslated. Why would that be? Time to introduce the Bad Guy in this mystery. The Catholic Church.

See, as mentioned above, women were the keepers of knowledge in the mystery religions. Women knew the recipes, and did not write them down. Because they were mysteries, and secret knowledge is meant to be kept secret. But the church wasn’t all bad. There was at least one honest apostle who’s book is one of the Big Four, and included in every bible. Saint John. The Book of John differs in some pretty significant ways. John is the only one who says Mary Magdalene was the first to see Jesus rise on the resurrection. The other books say Jesus appeared to a group of women. John says it was Mary Magdelene alone. John is the only one who seems to think Women could and should be priests. Because women know how to make the blessed sacrament—the Eucharist.

There it is. This is where the book veers off from seeking additional proof of Ruck, Wasson, and Hoffman’s theory on the Eleusinian Mysteries, and starts searching for proof of the Pagan Continuity Hypothesis. And he does a pretty credible job of detailing how Dionysus was converted to the new religion, starting with Rome. While eventually the Catholic Church will be the bad guy of this tale, it actually does start with the Roman Caesar’s. See, while men could not be made the keepers of the knowledge of how to make the sacred wine, they could be inducted into the Dionysian mysteries. But the priestesses would not accept any male over the age of 20. So instead of joining the military and being good Roman soldiers, an alarming number…alarming to the Senate at least…an alarming number of young men were running off to join this women led cult. So Rome started by making the Bacchanalia illegal and driving it literally underground.

So when Jesus was born, and his credo started spreading west to Rome and Greece, John took the opportunity to start converting women. Basically saying, look, it’s the same thing. Dionysus was born of a God, Jesus is the son of God. Both use wine as part of the sacrament…there are other similarities in the stories which are detailed in the book, but I feel like my recap is getting a little long here, so I’m going to stop there. But John advised the women that they can and should be priestesses of the new god, and to ensure the mysteries survive the ROMAN purges, the women should teach the drink to as many women as possible, so that ALL women can be priestesses IN THEIR OWN HOMES, in worship of the new Son of God, Jesus of Nazareth. And it worked. It took 300 years for Christianity to emerge as the dominant religion, becoming legal under Emperor Constantine in the early 4th century, and becoming the State Religion under Emperor Theodosius I in 380.

What comes next? Well, the church had itself a problem. See, the women refused to give up the recipe for the sacred wine. But the church only allowed men to become priests. The Book of John initially ends with Mary Magdalene being specifically instructed…BY HERSELF…to carry the message that Jesus had risen from the dead. A later copyist ADDED an additional final chapter, indicating Jesus also appeared to Peter…the first Pope, incidentally…along with other male disciples, instructing them to “feed my lambs” for the rest of human history.

So Johns story ends with Mary Magdalene. Someone else added an addendum blessing Peter as the first pope. So now we’re at an impasse. Only men can perform the eucharist, because only men can become priests in the new faith. But when women perform the eucharist at home, they can actually deliver on the promise to see God. At church, with the men in charge, it’s all show. At home, with the women in charge, it’s the real deal.

Does the church re-evaluate it’s stance, allowing women equal access and opportunity within the largest and fastest growing religious movement on the planet? Or does the church implement the first and longest running war on drugs? You got a 50/50 chance at getting the answer right here. What do you think happened?

If you guessed that the church went on an 1500 year killing spree, murdering approximately 45,000 women over the span of history on charges of witchcraft, you would be correct. Muraresku points out it’s no coincidence that the women were usually murdered in mother/daughter pairs. Because who else is the leader of the family going to pass down the sacred knowledge to, other than her daughter?

Muraresku knows that he hasn’t quite found the smoking gun that will push the Pagan Continuity Hypothesis into being full on Theory. I think he’s still working on it. Which is interesting, because he is Catholic. In fact, his upbringing made him uniquely suited to this quest for truth. He went to school where he was able to learn ancient Greek and Latin, and received his undergraduate degree in the Classics. Like a true blue, classical liberal education. Then he went to law school and does that full time while researching the ancient death cults and The Religion with No Name. Which he believes has been in operation for more than 10,000 years. And while he knows he lacks that smoking gun that would secure a criminal conviction, I think he’s shown a preponderance of evidence. And I don’t doubt the proof exists, in Vatican City somewhere, in the miles and miles of underground libraries owned by the Church, and closed off to the public. But he’s working on it. So there’s hope for a part two to the Immortality Key.

I quite enjoyed this book, it was fascinating, and Muraresku lays out his research in a compelling and believable manner. If I were on a jury for a civil trial, and he was the plaintiff’s attorney, representing women throughout history against the Church in Rome, I’d find for the plaintiff’s. And ask the judge to order the Church to open their archives for further research. Won’t happen, Vatican City is technically a micronation, operating under the benign dictatorship of the sitting Pope. But I’d love to see it.

This review is also available on YouTube, Rumble, and PodBean.