Immortality Key

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.

Featuring a Foreword by Graham Hancock, the New York Times bestselling author of America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization.