Although the science journalist Michael Pollan known as the guide “groundbreaking,” Brian Muraresku’s The Immortality Key is basically a rehash of others’ work formed right into a Da Vinci Code–model thriller. To flesh out his seek for the Holy Grail, the creator joined the theories of classicist Carl Ruck and ethnomycologist Gordon Wasson with the analysis of each Roland Griffiths and Patrick McGovern, an professional in archaeological chemistry.
Commerce publishers would have little curiosity in a 400-page goose chase for what intoxicants the oracles and prophets would possibly have been smoking or sipping. (Historic wines had been ceaselessly blended with botanicals, roots, fungi, and different doubtlessly psychoactive components.)
And so The Immortality Key begins with a message for at this time. Western civilization, Muraresku argues, is within the grip of a cataclysmic “religious disaster” that may solely be remedied by means of a “in style outbreak of mysticism,” the results of retrieving the Eucharist’s historic, and till now secret, pharmacological roots.
And what are these roots? In line with Muraresku, Christianity advanced from pagan thriller cults whose most sacred ritual concerned the ingestion of a psychedelic fungus—and this sacrament, the kykeon, finally turned the Holy Eucharist.
A protégé of Graham Hancock (an Economist reporter turned conspiracy theorist who has made a fortune writing speculative bestsellers about purported misplaced civilizations), Muraresku instructed Vox that he has by no means taken psychedelics himself however finally got here to consider that the medicine can start “a lifetime of devoted introspection, a path to like of self and others.” His guide claims that “about seventy-five p.c would depart the FDA-approved home church completely remodeled. And able to start a lifelong religious journey that might, as soon as once more, make life livable on this planet. This could start taking place by 2030, if not sooner.”
Just like the spiritual professionals’ paper, The Immortality Key has been surrounded by controversy. Critics have already assailed it as a piece of scholarship. Now many individuals depicted within the guide are talking out in opposition to it too.
McGovern agreed to advise Muraresku in assessing a number of natural residue samples from historic websites in Spain and Greece; he’s talked about greater than 70 occasions in The Immortality Key, together with 20 citations within the endnotes. “Brian ingratiated himself to me to get as a lot out of me as doable, promised that he was being goal and solely was within the means of discovery, and many others.,” McGovern says. “He then produced a guide very a lot at odds with these objectives, and as a substitute promoted his psychedelic mysticism agenda to most of the people, from the sounds of which he has been drastically profiting.”
Extra particularly, McGovern says that Muraresku “misconstrues and overinterprets the very restricted, ambiguous archaeological and archaeobotanical information for spiritual use of psychedelics in antiquity to reinvigorate the discredited ergot idea for Eleusis and to construct a fantastic story in regards to the Eucharist with no foundation in Christian custom.”
Lengthy a supply of fascination—significantly to Victorian-era mythologists, satirized by George Eliot in Middlemarch because the pedantic bore Edward Casaubon—the secretive rituals of the Greek thriller religions, lengthy advised to resemble early Christian communities, had been centered round a magical beverage known as the kykeon. Murareksu’s guide is a seek for the recipe, which he argues is a “proxy” for the consuming vessel used on the Final Supper. The guide additionally makes an attempt to correlate the testimonies of scientific trial volunteers with descriptions of mystical expertise present in Christian literature.
Any scientific proof supporting a connection between psychedelics and Christianity, McGovern says, is “extraordinarily weak to nonexistent.”
McGovern claims that Muraresku “dropped him like a sizzling potato” after showing on Joe Rogan’s podcast. The ultimate severing of ties got here when Muraresku proposed recreating a fermented beverage, an Immortality Key–themed beer, as a part of this system of Historic Ales and Spirits that McGovern carried out in collaboration with Dogfish Head Brewery.
“Have been we purported to lace a beer with ergot (maybe name it ‘St. Anthony’s Fireplace’),” McGovern joked, “and anticipate the imbibers to go loopy and die—or simply in reasonable quantities to spur their imaginative schools? Or perhaps add some LSD to the brew with much more unpredictable outcomes?”
McGovern shouldn’t be the one one who feels bamboozled by Muraresku. The central determine in The Immortality Key, Carl Ruck, is now conflicted about his function within the challenge, which he believed was geared toward gaining wider acceptance for his work.
Ruck stands by the concepts he, Gordon Wasson, and Albert Hofmann proposed again in 1978, together with the notion that it was psychedelics that first “woke up” humanity. “The unintended or deliberate induction of such altered states was in all probability the unique occasion millennia in the past of humankind’s first consciousness of consciousness as spiritually separate from what seems to be inanimate matter,” he says.
However the 89-year-old professor thinks it’s “suspect and doubtlessly harmful” for current religions to endorse psychedelics, and he desires no a part of any “New Reformation.” Religions, he says, have been the “trigger of world battle for millennia,” and people attempting to revitalize this primordial expertise—”imposing upon it their conventional mode of deciphering it”—would possibly end in “newer generations of ardent believers.”
“The hazard on this space of analysis,” Ruck provides, “is that you would come throughout as a guru, and I positively do not need to do this, to be a figurehead for a brand new faith of thoughts management. That’s completely in opposition to all the pieces that I consider.”
Ruck has additionally grow to be skeptical of Murareksu’s declare of being a psychedelic virgin. “From the very starting, Brian has introduced himself as somebody who’s by no means had an expertise of altered consciousness,” he says. “I can not think about, it has been about 10 years now, that he hasn’t been tempted to see what he is supposedly speaking about. However if you happen to admit that you simply had this expertise, you then grow to be unreliable as a witness.”
David Hillman, a controversial classicist and scholar of historic medication who suggested Muraresku, says he was unaware on the time of the creator’s bigger philosophical commitments. When the guide was lastly launched, he tells me, he felt his analysis had been “hijacked” for functions that he and Ruck at the moment are suspicious of.
“I felt like he screwed up the course of the analysis,” he says. “He took it in a option to make it user-friendly to no matter he occurs to be related with or all in favour of.”
Most of the students I spoke with condemned The Immortality Key as opportunistic. Kevin Clinton, a Cornell College classicist who specializes within the Eleusinian mysteries, instructed me that Muraresku “demonstrates how not to do analysis on historic faith, significantly in case you are all in favour of discovering out whether or not hallucinogenic medicine had been utilized in rituals: You are taking a one-day tour of an historic sanctuary (e.g. Eleusis), as he did, within the firm of the location’s head archaeologist, who was properly conscious that no proof of drug use has ever been discovered! And what did he be taught by the tip of the day? No proof of any psychedelic medicine!”
Clinton notes that “Athenian sanctuaries, their clergymen, and their directors produced annual monetary accounts that had been publicly audited and printed on stone; any bills for medicine would have been public information. Athens produced a monetary account of its whole manufacturing of barley and wheat, from which a portion of grain was given to the sanctuary, to be bought and the funds used for sacrifices and dedications, none of it for the manufacturing of ergot or medicine—all printed on stone.”
Jan Bremmer, a Dutch professional on historic thriller cults, agrees the guide’s argument is fantasy: “No cult is thought that used mushrooms in antiquity, and Christianity was not a thriller cult.”
The kindest remarks had been provided by the Biblical scholar Bart Ehrman. “I love Brian’s tenacity in exploring this matter in depth,” he says, “however I do not suppose his findings in any respect believable.”
In some of the perceptive opinions of The Immortality Key, David Hewett of The Paideia Institute for Humanistic Examine argued that reasonably than contributing to the sphere of analysis, it’s a “regressive work,” distorting historical past (and Ruck’s scholarship) whereas calling for a particular class of presidency medical directors who would tightly management entry to non secular expertise.
“The guide has a predatory method to the subject of Western faith: pick the elements helpful for its social agenda, demonize and discard the remainder,” Hewett wrote on the cyberdisciple weblog. “In doing so, the guide shuts itself off from understanding Western faith and undermines progress within the discipline. The guide shouldn’t be a well-intentioned scholarly work, devoted to creating a contribution to the sphere and transferring the sphere ahead. The guide is as a substitute a P.R. marketing campaign for its creator and modern psychedelic remedy.”
If the scholarly response to Muraresku’s guide has been unfavourable, what in regards to the extra reliable students whose work he constructed on? How are their concepts faring?
Christian Greer, a Stanford College–primarily based scholar of spiritual research who focuses on psychedelic tradition, tells me that some students regard Wasson and Ruck’s soma thesis as “remarkably insightful regardless of being incorrect,” crediting it with “opening the doorways for different (and higher educated) students” to discover related however better-grounded concepts. “Finally, although, we’ll by no means have proof sufficient to totally settle for or dismiss Wasson’s concepts,” he notes.
Probably the most influential thinkers in psychedelic analysis was Mircea Eliade, who taught the historical past of religions on the College of Chicago from the mid-Nineteen Sixties up till his demise in 1986. It’s virtually not possible to overstate Eliade’s affect on the sphere’s excited about the character and traits of the paranormal expertise and its significance for the trendy world. Wasson naturally sought Eliade’s approval for his concept that psychedelics had been the important thing to all mythologies, together with Christianity.
“At first [Eliade] dismissed hallucinogens,” says Andrei Znamenski, a scholar of Eliade and modern spirituality. “He did not take note of this within the Forties and ’50s. Learn his guide Shamanism, you hardly discover something there….And when Wasson began pedaling this fly agaric mushroom, Eliade even went additional. He mentioned, ‘Oh, it is a bunch of crap, a bunch of nonsense.'” However within the ’60s, when “all people turned loopy about hallucinogens,” Eliade “began to scratch his head, ‘Ah, perhaps there was one thing about it.’ And now he alters his thoughts and he embraces it.”
Lengthy earlier than Carlos Castaneda got here alongside, Eliade superior the concept of the shaman as a primitive psychedelic professional and priest-doctor-pharmacist-magician-psychologist who connects fashionable man to the final word “archaic” actuality, selling this notion each in novels and in conventional educational monographs brimming with citations (although Eliade himself by no means met a shaman). Terence McKenna, a significant affect on Muraresku, later borrowed and popularized a lot of Eliade and Wasson’s concepts about faith.
Eliade did not like “official Christianity,” Znamenski says. He wished to strip away all native context to uncover a “common foundation” for faith and its most simple unit: the paranormal expertise or primitive revelation. “So mainly he argues that if you happen to go to the bones, to the roots of human spirituality, you will notice that the naked backside of spirituality is a bunch of primary ideas that Carl Jung known as archetypes.” (Eliade and Jung knew one another.) “So we have to go to the roots of human spirituality, to a Stone Age spirituality. That’s the reason they’ve this obsession with paganism.”
The purpose, in Znamenski’s phrases, was “to create some form of natural faith,” a “unity” to be discovered “whenever you strip away all this ‘civilizational husk.'”
These similar concepts would come to tell the present psychedelic motion, which is finally guided extra by philosophy than by science. For instance: Anthony Bossis, one in all Griffiths’ co-authors on the spiritual professionals paper, believes that the final word aim of the psychedelic renaissance is to not develop “tremendous Prozacs” however to revitalize the world’s religion traditions, which he likens to empty containers.
That mentioned, Bossis’ imaginative and prescient could bother those that don’t desire the federal authorities regulating spiritual exercise beneath the guise of drugs. He has imagined a future the place prescription psychedelics are administered by means of a sequence of government-regulated spas providing psychedelic remedy alongside yoga, meditation, and well being meals.
“There can be one or two psilocybin periods with well-trained scientific groups,” Bossis instructed Muraresku. “And you then return house. Identical to Eleusis.”
In Motive‘s March 2025 subject, Kitchens additionally took a deep dive into Roland Griffiths’ analysis challenge wherein two dozen spiritual clergy got psilocybin and defined how this examine of the connection between religion and psychedelics could by no means see the sunshine of day. Learn it right here.
