What is it about?
The Immortality Key (TIK) will entice general readers but exasperate academics, even those who may agree with its specific conclusions regarding the role of entheogens in the Eleusinian Mysteries or early Christianity. Despite its popular appeal as a New York Times Bestseller, TIK fails to make a compelling case for its grand theory of the "pagan continuity hypothesis with a psychedelic twist" due to recurring overreach and historical distortion, failure to consider relevant research on shamanism and Christianity, and presentation of speculation as fact.
Featured Image
Photo by Cristina Gottardi on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Author Brain Muraresku is a practicing attorney and a student of ancient languages (Greek, Latin and Sanskrit), whose twelve-year odyssey through the archives of Western religion culminated in the publication of The Immortality Key (TIK). According to Muraresku, this work, which “presents the pagan continuity hypothesis with a psychedelic twist,” addresses two fundamental questions: “Before the rise of Christianity, did the Ancient Greeks consume a secret psychedelic sacrament during their most famous and well-attended religious rituals? Did the Ancient Greeks pass a version of their sacrament along to the earliest, Greek-speaking Christians, for whom the original Holy Communion or Eucharist was, in fact, a psychedelic Eucharist?”
Perspectives
Viewed from my perspective as an anthropologist, there are multiple flaws both conceptual and historical with this line of reasoning. The first is with the basic assumption enshrined in the book's subtitle that we are dealing with a “religion with no name.” In fact, for anthropologists the religion does have a name: “shamanism.” Furthermore, among diverse cultures that have historically practiced or currently practice some form of shamanism, the religion is known by many different names. In addition to simply being called the “mysteries” by the Ancient Greeks, it is known as the “Little-One-Who-Springs-Forth” among the Mazatec of Mexico and was known as “Soma” among the Aryan invaders of Ancient India, to name but a few. Muraresku asserts that this no-name religion “survived for millennia, in the total absence of the written word.” To the contrary, in the case of the Rigveda, one of the world's oldest religious texts written in Sanskrit some 3,500 years ago, the tenth mandala is devoted to praise of Soma. This belies Muraresku's narrative that TIK has unearthed an unnamed religion which “had been deleted completely from the human record.”
Founding Professor Jerry B. Brown
Florida International University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name, Journal of Psychedelic Studies, May 2021, Akademiai Kiado,
DOI: 10.1556/2054.2021.00170.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
