THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER As seen on The Joe Rogan Experience! A groundbreaking dive
into the role psychedelics have played in the origins of Western civilization and a real-life
quest for the Holy Grail. The most influential religious historian of the 20th century
Huston Smith once referred to it as the "best-kept secret" in history. Did the Ancient Greeks
use drugs to find God? And did the earliest Christians inherit the same secret tradition? A
profound knowledge of visionary plants herbs and fungi passed from one generation to the next
ever since the Stone Age? There is zero archaeological evidence for the original Eucharist -
the sacred wine said to guarantee life after death for those who drink the blood of Jesus. The
Holy Grail and its miraculous contents have never been found. In the absence of any hard data
whatever happened at the Last Supper remains an article of faith for today's 2.5 billion
Christians. In an unprecedented search for real answers The Immortality Key examines the
archaic roots of the ritual that is performed every Sunday for nearly one third of the planet.
Religion and science converge to paint a radical picture of Christianity's founding event. And
after centuries of debate to solve history's greatest puzzle once and for all. Before the
birth of Jesus the Ancient Greeks found salvation in their own sacraments. Sacred beverages
were routinely consumed as part of the so-called Ancient Mysteries - elaborate rites that led
initiates to the brink of death. The best and brightest from Athens and Rome flocked to the
spiritual capital of Eleusis where a holy beer unleashed heavenly visions for two thousand
years. Others drank the holy wine of Dionysus to become one with the god. In the 1970s
renegade scholars claimed this beer and wine - the original sacraments of Western civilization
- were spiked with mind-altering drugs. In recent years vindication for the disgraced theory
has been quietly mounting in the laboratory. The constantly advancing fields of archaeobotany
and archaeochemistry have hinted at the enduring use of hallucinogenic drinks in antiquity. And
with a single dose of psilocybin the psychopharmacologists at Johns Hopkins and NYU are now
turning self-proclaimed atheists into instant believers. But the smoking gun remains elusive.
If these sacraments survived for thousands of years in our remote prehistory from the Stone
Age to the Ancient Greeks did they also survive into the age of Jesus? Was the Eucharist of
the earliest Christians in fact a psychedelic Eucharist? With an unquenchable thirst for
evidence Muraresku takes the reader on his twelve-year global hunt for proof. He tours the
ruins of Greece with its government archaeologists. He gains access to the hidden collections
of the Louvre Museum to show the continuity from pagan to Christian wine. He unravels the
Ancient Greek of the New Testament with a Catholic priest. He spelunks into the catacombs under
the streets of Rome to decipher the lost symbols of Christianity's oldest monuments. He
breaches the secret archives of the Vatican to unearth manuscripts never before translated into
English. And with leads from the archaeological chemists at the University of Pennsylvania and
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology he unveils the first scientific data for the ritual
use of psychedelic drugs in classical antiquity. The Immortality Key reconstructs the
suppressed history of women consecrating a forbidden drugged Eucharist that was later banned
by the Church Fathers. Women who were then targeted as witches during the Inquisition when
Europe's sacred pharmacology largely disappeared. Have the scientists of today resurrected this
lost technology? Is Christianity capable of returning to its roots? Featuring a Foreword by
Graham Hancock the New York Times bestselling author of America Before: The Key to Earth's
Lost Civilization .
