The Immortality Key

A new best-seller suggests the roots of classical civilization and early Christianity were psychedelic drugs. It shows the risk of hype and reductionism in today’s psychedelic boom.

It’s not every day you see the psychedelic mystery cults of ancient Greece discussed on CNN, but then, it’s 2020. The occasion was the publication of a new book, The Immortality Key by Brian Muraresku, which explores the ‘secret psychedelic religion’ that connects the ancient Greeks to the early Christians, and which Brian says is now being revived in the psychedelic renaissance.

Brian was also a guest on the Joe Rogan Podcast, along with Graham Hancock, and their conversation has several million views and listens, instantly propelling Brian’s book to the top of the bestseller list.

Muraresku is a smart American lawyer who works on legalizing cannabis, and in his free time he’s devoted the last decade of his life to this research. Why? He says he’s a ‘psychedelic virgin’, so it’s not because the drugs told him to. It emerges, I suspect, from his troubled relationship to Catholicism, on which more later.

What’s the secret? The first half of the book explores the Mysteries of Eleusis, an ancient Greek cult which existed from around 1500 BC to 391 AD, when it was closed down by the Christians. Participants took part in a mysterious ritual in which they drank a potion then descended to the underworld, to be reborn as children of Demeter. The initiation helped them feel they could ‘die with a better hope’, as Cicero put it. Cicero was initiated there, as was Socrates, Plato, Sophocles, Pindar, Plutarch, Marcus Aurelius and all the ‘greats’ of classical civilization.

Brian’s secret is that the potion they drank contained a psychedelic substance, possibly ergot — a fungus that grows on wheat and barley, and which contains a chemical close to LSD.

This is not a very big secret. People have suggested the Eleusinian Mysteries involved psychedelics ever since Aleister Crowley organized a mescaline-fuelled public ritual in London in 1910, which he called ‘the Rite of Eleusis’. In 1978, Albert Hoffman and Gordon Wasson teamed up with classicist Carl Ruck to pen The Road to Eleusis, in which they first suggested the Mysteries involved ergot. Brian acknowledges this, and Ruck appears in the book, as a sort of ageing John the Baptist to Brian’s Jesus.

More recently, I suggested the ‘psychedelic Eleusis’ hypothesis in The Art of Losing Control, in which I compared accounts of initiates in the Mysteries to participants in recent psychedelic trials. Plutarch described initiates’ experience as

wandering through the dark…terrors, shivering, trembling…after this a strange and wondrous light, voices, and the majesty of holy sounds and sacred visions.

And here is the account of one participant in a 2014 trial of LSD for those with terminal cancer:

It was just really black…I was afraid, shaking…It was total exhaustion…like an endless marathon…Suddenly a phase of relaxation came…It became bright. Everything was light…It was really gorgeous…The key experience is when you get from dark to light.

Also recently, the philosopher Peter Sjöstedt-H speculated on the influence of psychedelics on ancient philosophy, and on mystical visions like Plato’s ascent of the soul or the Stoic belief in a living, breathing, interconnected cosmos.

So, if this is a secret, it’s not very well kept. However, Muraresku does a great job of gathering academic research on the topic, including a study which discovered residues of ergot in a ritualistic drinking vessel, found in an Eleusis-esque shrine in the Hellenic community of Emporion, in modern Catalonia.

This discovery follows in the steps of Patrick McGovern, the scientific director of biochemical archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania, who has used chemical analysis to analyse very ancient beers and wines from around the world (some of which have been re-made by enterprising microbrewers).

McGovern has proven that the ‘extreme beverages’ of the ancient world had more powerful substances in them than alcohol.

Was Jesus the ‘Drugs Man’?

In the second half of the book, Muraresku goes deeper, into the roots of Christianity. He defends the ‘pagan continuity hypothesis’ — the idea that Christianity inherited and adopted various ideas, symbols and practices from pagan cultures. I don’t think many would disagree with that.

But he puts this hypothesis in a more controversial form. He suggests that early Christians adopted the psychedelic-infused wine of the cult of Dionysus. Jesus basically was Dionysus, he says. He was the iatros, ‘the Drugs Man’, in Ruck’s charming phrase. But then the church became bureaucratized and they took the fun stuff out of the wine.

There is no physical proof for Christians using psychedelic substances (although there is recent evidence for the ancient use of cannabis in Jewish temples, and see also the work of Danny Nemu on psychoactive plants in the Bible). Certainly, the language of the gospels draws on Dionysian imagery — ‘I am the grape-vine’ says Jesus. But the gospels draw on all kinds of imagery — I am the lamb, I am the bread, I am the Light, and so on.

This much we can say with certainty. Ecstatic experiences inspire many religious movements. Some of those experiences may be triggered by drugs, but also by other conditions, like fasting or going into caves. It’s becoming less taboo in academia to talk about the role of altered states and psychedelics in academia. Which is good.

However, it’s the introduction to the book that worries me, where Muraresku calls for a ‘new reformation’.

Psychedelic exclusivism

He begins the book with Dinah, a participant in a psychedelic therapy trial for the terminally ill, at NYU medical college. Dinah is an atheist, but she feels bathed in God’s love. She comes away less afraid of dying. According to Anthony Bossis, director of palliative care at NYU:

Participants in our study often described this experience with the newfound knowledge that consciousness survives bodily death — that we are not only our bodies — which is a profound gift to a person with a body that is failing.

What worries me is how much weight Murareksu puts on this experience and its power to ‘prove’ immortality, revive religion and save the world. He says that Dinah had

a genuine religious experience. And it’s the kind of experience that just might speak to the rising tide of seekers who could spend a lifetime in the church, temple or mosque and never once feel the rapture that is consistently delivered in a single afternoon at Hopkins and NYU

He goes on:

The God now rejected by America’s largest generation [ie millennials] is not the God of Dinah. A God that you can actually experience in a direct and personal way is a God that makes sense. A God that eases depression and anxiety like a cosmic surgeon obliterates the fear of death, and sends a shock wave of love through your fragile heart is a God that lives in high definition. And a God that could hardly be expected to start a war against nonbelievers.

He dismisses several millennia of organized religion as fake and superficial, because it didn’t involve drugs. He writes:

More troubling is the God of organized religion and his army of spokesmen — those priests, rabbis and imams who stand between superficial definitions of heaven and a common-sense public who have every right to demand proof…it’s time to cut out the middleman in the private search for transcendence….

He calls for a ‘new Reformation’, and makes ‘British philosopher’ Aldous Huxley his Martin Luther. He quotes a 1958 article by Huxley, which suggests that the ‘revival of religion’ would come about because of new ‘mind-changers’ which would allow ‘mass transcendence’. Huxley was calling for a revival of ancient psychedelic Christianity, Brian says.

That isn’t accurate. Huxley’s influential framing of psychedelic experience relied much more on eastern wisdom, particularly Buddhism, than early Christianity. But what really worries me about Muraresku’s faith is its psychedelic exclusivism — the insistence that only psychedelic encounters with the divine are genuine ‘proof’ and non-drug encounters with God are boring and superficial.

Biochemical reductionism is the dominant ideology in western mental health. And it emerged, in fact, out of the first wave of psychedelic therapy — Huxley’s friend Humphrey Osmond, the psychiatrist who coined the word ‘psychedelic’, was an early champion of the chemical theory of mental illness — the idea that conditions like schizophrenia have a chemical origin and are therefore best treated with chemicals. Later anti-depressants like Prozac also grew out of the chemical hypothesis for mental illness.

Muraresku’s faith is a mystical version of biochemical reductionism. He says the ‘ecstatic source and true lifeblood of the biggest religion the world has ever known’ is…psychedelic drugs. Not God, drugs. In his rhapsody about a ‘God that eases depression and anxiety like a cosmic surgeon’ (which I quoted earlier ), if you changed the word ‘God’ for ‘drug’, you have every hyped-up American advert for a new miracle drug.

He says it’s time to do away with the middle men, but there are always middle-men who frame our experience for us, and for Dinah in NYU medical college, it’s ‘shamans in white coats’, offering expensive drug treatments.

He says:

In order to find our soul again, a popular outbreak of mysticism could be just what the doctor ordered. And the prescription could be exactly what it was in the beginning: to die before we die with a solid dose of the religion that started it all.

Doctor, prescription, solid dose. It’s a sort of mystical psychiatry — to be free of flesh and all its woes, you just need to take this ‘God pill’.

There’s also a bookish nerdiness which one often finds in occult literature — he talks a lot about ‘direct experience’ beyond books, and yet Muraresku’s ‘immersion in the mystery’ is only through books. He says that if we can find the historical evidence for what they took at Eleusis and Jerusalem, then

the new Reformation [would be] as well-grounded and historically oriented as Martin Luther’s Reformation, and it becomes an immediate reality for the tens of millions of [spiritual-but-not-religious]. But more pressingly, today’s 2.42 billion Christians will have to decide whether they will continue sipping from a placebo amid ‘ninety minutes of boredom’ or join the revolution that just might rescue a dying faith and a civilization on the edge of extinction.

Why does it matter what people did two millennia ago at Eleusis or Rome, beyond historical interest? Yes, it gives a good historical pedigree to psychedelic use, but it’s not going to suddenly transform 2.4 billion Christians into hippies. And it’s offensive to suggest modern Christians don’t have a connection to God, that they’re ‘sipping from a placebo’.

His search for historical evidence shows a paradoxical search for roots. He dismisses all the infrastructure of organized religion — the books, the priests, the community. We have the experience, the magic drug. Yet at the same time, what’s an experience without a culture to ground it? Hence his historical search. It’s a lapsed Catholic’s attempt to get back to Rome.

In the last paragraph of the book, he imagines evidence emerging that early Christians took psychedelics. He will travel to Rome and drink the psychedelic sacrament — and he will ‘insist’ the Pope partakes with him. Force that potion down the Holy Father’s throat. Brian may have Papa-issues.

In 480 pages, he talks at length about the drugs people take, but hardly anything about the Divine they sometimes connect us to. It’s like the Zen parable of getting fixated on the hand that points at the moon, rather than the moon itself.

If there is a divine reality, must we take drugs to connect to It? He calls the Eucharist a ‘placebo’. What do you think psychedelics are? Every spiritual technique is a placebo. Yes, some things help: Books, churches, art and music, prayer, meditation, community, good works. Priests sometimes help. Substances sometimes help as well (wine, incense, mushrooms etc). But any means to the divine can become a fixation, a false idol.

That’s what happened with LSD in the late Sixties, when you had articles like one from the Village Voice, which declared:

CAN the World Do Without LSD? Can a person be human without LSD?… The answer, as far as the writer of this article can see, is a highly qualified, cautiously rendered, but emphatic, definitely NOT. BUT, the psychedelic experience is not exclusively tied to LSD. There are at least five other effective psychedelic drugs. [quoted in Theodore Roszak’s Makings of the Counter-Culture]

I am the Spray, the Truth and the Light

In other words, the psychedelic renaissance could actually exacerbate what Theodore Roszak called ‘our disastrously drug-dependent’ culture, and our belief that we are somehow less than human without a pharmaceutical boost. The big pharma companies are already lining up to turn us on — Johnson & Johnson has launched its ketamine nasal spray, Sprovato, for $5000 a month.

We’re in a psychedelic boom, with psychedelic companies getting billion-dollar valuations. We can expect as much hype for psychedelic therapies as there was for Prozac. It’s worth remembering that ecstatic sites like Eleusis and Delphi were financial centres, early nexuses between psychedelics and international finance, and there are already new psychedelic companies trying to cash in on the Eleusis brand.

There is, alas, no magic pill for human suffering. However, sometimes psychedelics help people, and — for all my scepticism — I hope psychedelic therapy continues to be researched and legalized. It won’t save the world, but properly managed it may help some people suffer less and even grow a bit wiser.

Beware of psychedelic exclusivism, spiritual inflation, and Big Pharma trying to sell you instant enlightenment. With all that proviso, this is still a fascinating book which has brought classics research to a huge audience, and it’s part of an important dialogue between trippers and religions. But the dialogue needs to be careful and respectful on both sides.