The Strange Case of The Immortality Key
Though the science journalist Michael Pollan called the book “groundbreaking,” Brian Muraresku’s The Immortality Key is largely a rehash of others’ work shaped into a Da Vinci Code–style thriller. To flesh out his search for the Holy Grail, the author joined the theories of classicist Carl Ruck and ethnomycologist Gordon Wasson with the research of both Roland Griffiths and Patrick McGovern, an expert in archaeological chemistry.
Trade publishers would have little interest in a 400-page goose chase for what intoxicants the oracles and prophets might have been smoking or sipping. (Ancient wines were frequently blended with botanicals, roots, fungi, and other potentially psychoactive ingredients.)
And so The Immortality Key begins with a message for today. Western civilization, Muraresku argues, is in the grip of a cataclysmic “spiritual crisis” that can only be remedied through a “popular outbreak of mysticism,” the result of retrieving the Eucharist’s ancient, and until now secret, pharmacological roots.
And what are those roots? According to Muraresku, Christianity evolved from pagan mystery cults whose most sacred ritual involved the ingestion of a psychedelic fungus—and 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 told Vox that he has never taken psychedelics himself but eventually came to believe that the drugs can begin “a life of dedicated introspection, a path to love of self and others.” His book claims that “about seventy-five percent would leave the FDA-approved house church permanently transformed. And ready to begin a lifelong spiritual journey that could, once again, make life livable on this planet. This should begin happening by 2030, if not sooner.”
Like the religious professionals’ paper, The Immortality Key has been surrounded by controversy. Critics have already assailed it as a work of scholarship. Now many people depicted in the book are speaking out against it too.
McGovern agreed to advise Muraresku in assessing several organic residue samples from ancient sites in Spain and Greece; he is mentioned more than 70 times in The Immortality Key, including 20 citations in the endnotes. “Brian ingratiated himself to me to get as much out of me as possible, promised that he was being objective and only was interested in the process of discovery, etc.,” McGovern says. “He then produced a book very much at odds with those goals, and instead promoted his psychedelic mysticism agenda to the general public, from the sounds of which he has been greatly profiting.”
More specifically, McGovern says that Muraresku “misconstrues and overinterprets the very limited, ambiguous archaeological and archaeobotanical data for religious use of psychedelics in antiquity to reinvigorate the discredited ergot theory for Eleusis and to build a fanciful tale about the Eucharist with no basis in Christian tradition.”
Long a source of fascination—particularly to Victorian-era mythologists, satirized by George Eliot in Middlemarch as the pedantic bore Edward Casaubon—the secretive rituals of the Greek mystery religions, long suggested to resemble early Christian communities, were centered around a magical beverage called the kykeon. Murareksu’s book is a search for the recipe, which he argues is a “proxy” for the drinking vessel used at the Last Supper. The book also attempts to correlate the testimonies of clinical trial volunteers with descriptions of mystical experience found in Christian literature.
Any scientific evidence supporting a connection between psychedelics and Christianity, McGovern s
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