The Day the Pope Met a Psychedelic Evangelist
The pope met an emissary from the psychedelic world at a “holy meeting” at the Vatican, where a Jesuit lawyer named Brian Muraresku presented Pope Francis with a manifesto for a psychedelic “New Reformation.”
Popes and reformations do not historically get along, but Francis accepted a copy of Muraresku’s 2020 book The Immortality Key at the meeting, which took place in late 2021 or early 2022. The book argues that psychedelics might rescue a “dying faith” and save Western civilization.
Though the science journalist Michael Pollan has called it “groundbreaking,” The Immortality Key is largely a rehash of others’ work shaped into a dubious Da Vinci Code–style thriller. Trade publishers would otherwise have little interest in a 400-page goose chase for what intoxicants the oracles and prophets might have been smoking or sipping, and so the book begins with a message for today. Western civilization, Muraresku argues, is in the grip of a cataclysmic “spiritual crisis” that can be remedied only through a “popular outbreak of mysticism,” the result of retrieving what he says are the Eucharist’s ancient, and until now secret, pharmacological roots.
And what are those roots? Muraresku is convinced that Christianity evolved from pagan mystery cults whose most sacred ritual involved the ingestion of a psychedelic fungus—and that this sacrament, the kykeon, eventually became the Holy Eucharist.
A protégé of Graham Hancock (an Economist reporter turned conspiracy theorist who has made a fortune writing speculative bestsellers about purported lost civilizations), Muraresku has written that “about seventy-five percent would leave the FDA-approved house church permanently transformed. And ready to begin a lifelong spiritual journey that cou
Article from Reason.com
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