AUDIOBOOK
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A groundbreaking, controversial dive into the role psychedelics have played in the human experience of the Divine and the development of religion throughout Western history.
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 Muraresku's 10-year investigation takes the listener 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. A secret with the capacity to revolutionize our understanding of the past and chart a bold, new course for the future.
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' greatest minds with a very simple formula: drink this potion, see God. Shrouded in secrecy for millennia, the Ancient Greek sacrament was buried when the newly Christianized Roman Empire obliterated Eleusis in the fourth century AD.
Renegade scholars in the 1970s claimed the Greek potion was psychedelic, just like the original Christian Eucharist that replaced it. In recent years, vindication for the disgraced theory has been quietly mounting in the laboratory. The rapidly growing field of archaeological chemistry has proven the ancient use of visionary drugs. And with a single dose of psilocybin, the psycho-pharmacologists at Johns Hopkins and NYU are now turning self-proclaimed atheists into instant believers.
With convincing analysis and a captivating spirit of quest, Muraresku mines science, classical literature, biblical scholarship and art to deliver the hidden key to eternal life, bringing us to what clinical psychologist William Richards calls "the edge of an awesomely vast frontier."
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 Muraresku's 10-year investigation takes the listener 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. A secret with the capacity to revolutionize our understanding of the past and chart a bold, new course for the future.
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' greatest minds with a very simple formula: drink this potion, see God. Shrouded in secrecy for millennia, the Ancient Greek sacrament was buried when the newly Christianized Roman Empire obliterated Eleusis in the fourth century AD.
Renegade scholars in the 1970s claimed the Greek potion was psychedelic, just like the original Christian Eucharist that replaced it. In recent years, vindication for the disgraced theory has been quietly mounting in the laboratory. The rapidly growing field of archaeological chemistry has proven the ancient use of visionary drugs. And with a single dose of psilocybin, the psycho-pharmacologists at Johns Hopkins and NYU are now turning self-proclaimed atheists into instant believers.
With convincing analysis and a captivating spirit of quest, Muraresku mines science, classical literature, biblical scholarship and art to deliver the hidden key to eternal life, bringing us to what clinical psychologist William Richards calls "the edge of an awesomely vast frontier."