Immortality Key
"A groundbreaking, controversial dive into the role psychedelics have played in the human experience of the Divine throughout Western history, and the answer to a 2,000 year old mystery that could shake the Church to its foundations. The Immortality Key connects the lost, psychedelic sacrament of Greek religion to early Christianity-exposing the true origins of Western Civilization. In the tradition of unsolved historical mysteries like David Grann's Killers of the Flower Moon and Douglas Preston's The Lost City of the Monkey God, Brian C. Muraresku's 10-year investigation takes the reader through Greece, Germany, Spain, France and Italy, offering unprecedented access to the hidden archives of the Louvre and the Vatican along the way. In The Immortality Key, Muraresku explores a little-known connection between the best-kept secret in Ancient Greece and Christianity. This is the real story of the most famous human being who ever lived (Jesus) and the biggest religion the world has ever known. Today, 2.4 billion people are Christian. That's one third of the planet. But do any of them really know how it all started? Before Jerusalem, before Rome, before Mecca-there was Eleusis: the spiritual capital of the ancient world. It promised immortality to Plato and the rest of Athens's greatest minds with a very simple formula: drink this potion, see God.
Stats for nerds
7recommend
10mentions
8people
2020–2025years
80% recommend20% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- You can read Brian Muraresku's The Immortality Key for a detailed exploration of this topic.
It certainly isn't beyond criticism, but it's points are substantive and well referenced, giving the reader enough scope to tackle the controversial points themselves, not just take the authors presentation on face value.
- Check out The Immortality Key by Brian Muraresku, it has a few theories on through lines. The book is about these mystery cults, and specifically how they may have been using and early form of LSD. Part of the theory is the classically reported ego death experience might be what is referenced by the rebirth/resurrection claims. As for overlaps with Christianity, there are lots of fun theories including that John the Baptist was an initiate and may have actually initiated Jesus. This is a little difficult to square with the fact that the greek mystery cults claim to have exclusively initiated women, but hey they don't call them mystery cults because they are fully understood.
- Good read is The Immortality Key by Brian Muraresku
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51174256-the-immortality...
Good interview with the author:
https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/346...
- That's true but with a twist.
Christianity is actually a weird hybrid of Abrahamic religion and pre-existing graeco-roman traditions, and is so in a rather complex way, i.e it's not just absorbing a couple of rites here and there, but it also has roots in hybridation with mystery cults like the mysteries of Eleusis and the cult of Dionysus.
Good read: The Immortality Key, by Brian Murarescu.
The reason I said "true" and not "false" is that the church was very successful at rebranding the whole spiel to the point where the memory of the link was utterly removed from the collective awareness and only through digging and analysis we can reconstruct the story (and even then many people will just find it quite unbelievable).
- The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name Brian C. Muraresku https://www.amazon.com/Immortality-Key-Uncovering-History-Re...
Well written, engrossing book on the historical underpinnings and the pharmacological foundations behind liturgical practices in modern religions. The motivation and gist of the book isn't new but the author paid great attention to existing evidence and wrote the book carefully enough to not diverge into hippie territory.
- To those interested in the history of human consumption of hallucinogens I can't recommend this book enough: The Immortality Key.
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