The Immortality Key (2020) Brian C. Muraresku

History is only just beginning to come around to the fact that drugs move history. The Immortality Key joins a growing genre of psychedelic history. The newsflash here is that the original Christian Eucharist was a psychedelic substance. The argument is as follows: wine in ancient Greece was always fortified wine, mixed with a wide variety of botanicals, from deadly nightshade, to cannabis, to opium, to mandrake, to mushrooms and hey why not!? Lizards, frogs and DMT toads. The makers of this wine were a class of women pharmacologists who would otherwise be known in our modern era as witches. These women were likewise priests in the mystery cults of Dionysius and Eleusis in a traditions that lasted some 1500 years before the common era. This tradition was re-appropriated by the early Christians when they stole the popular “dying god” Dionysius—who demanded that his followers “eat his flesh”—and transformed him into the new “dying god” Jesus Christ. And yet for the first 400 years of Christianity as practiced around the Mediterranean the cult maintained female priests and the “witches brew” as mystical initiation into the new religion. All of this ends once Christianity becomes the state religion and Emperor Theodosius outlaws the “pagan religions,” whereupon the Christians killed the pagan female priests (witches), destroyed their artifacts, and burned down libraries in one of the greatest destructions of antiquity in the west, thus ushering in the Dark Ages. Thereafter the eucharist becomes mere placebo, retaining the language of the psychedelic experience while jettisoning the psychedelics. And yet we may still find traces of this psychedelic power in the language of conversion found throughout the new testament. The “death to self” of which St Paul speaks is such a psychedelic death, most faithfully represented by the greek saying above St Paul’s monastery on Mount Athos: "If you die before you die, then you won't die when you die."

Circe Invidiosa, 1892, John William Waterhouse