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The Immortal Key
Posted: Tue Dec 01, 2020 1:11 pm
by MrMacSon
The Immortal Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name, a recently released book by Brian Muraresku
From the Amazon page (presumably by the publisher)
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 the world’s most controversial 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.
Re: The Immortal Key
Posted: Tue Dec 01, 2020 1:22 pm
by Benway
Was Jesus murdered, or did he just trip?
Re: The Immortal Key
Posted: Tue Dec 01, 2020 1:31 pm
by MrMacSon
Some of the reviewers are not impressed
https://www.amazon.com.au/Immortality-K ... geNumber=2
The manuscript information might be interesting.
Re: The Immortal Key
Posted: Tue Dec 01, 2020 3:12 pm
by lsayre
Sounds like early DSS translator John Allegro's 1970 published book titled "The Sacred Mushroom & the Cross, Fertility Cults and the Origins of Judaism and Christianity".
Re: The Immortal Key
Posted: Wed Dec 02, 2020 12:22 am
by mlinssen
Drugs and alcohol mix very badly, really. Psilocybin is best taken medically sober, and sugars can neutralise its effects strongly. When you get to the likes of ayahuasca even a little yeast can impede the effects
And no people have ever shared the same trip, that is not how it works.
So, utterly unlikely
At least that's what I've heard
Re: The Immortal Key
Posted: Wed Dec 02, 2020 2:25 am
by Giuseppe
MrMacSon wrote: ↑Tue Dec 01, 2020 1:31 pm
The manuscript information might be interesting.
It is becoming a boring feature of many books of equal tenor.
Re: The Immortal Key
Posted: Sun Jan 16, 2022 1:43 am
by schillingklaus
The wine was not originally part of the eucharist; consequently, the liturgy of pre-Vaticanum II Roman Catholicism showed little love for the cup, which had been accomodated into the Eucharist only because it had been inevitable when establishing the Eucharist in a Judaizing environment, which prescribed the consumption of wine.
The Cena is, therefore, by no means the place to start for primitive eucharist rites; rather, it is late patchwork to first justify the wine and themn, after redaction, to keep bread and wine artificially in one place. The proper place to look for the institution of the eucharist are the feeding miracles earlier in the gospels. These accounts are multiply distorted but still contain traits which the Roman Catholic church could not drop in ages.
Re: The Immortal Key
Posted: Sun Jan 16, 2022 3:29 am
by GakuseiDon
Those secret Vatican archives have everything! They hold the bones of Jesus, and also hold the evidence that Jesus never existed.
Re: The Immortal Key
Posted: Sun Jan 16, 2022 3:37 am
by GakuseiDon
I've seen a few articles proposing that the oracle at Delphi was made high by gas floating up from fissures in the earth below.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2 ... 075959.htm
The temple's high priest, Plutarch (c.46-c.120), explained that the Pythia's trance state was induced by gaseous emissions and that the Oracle's power began to wane because the source of the emissions was running out. Other ancient authorities also attributed the Oracle's "power" to geological features—a fissure in the bedrock, a gaseous vapor, and a spring. When French archaeologists failed to find such features a century ago, they dismissed the notion of intoxicating vapors as the "source" of the revelations. The modern misconception that vapors and gases can only be produced by volcanic activity has also discouraged scientists from probing the geological forces behind the Oracle.
But these days, scientists are revisiting the problem with results that would definitely please the ancients. In the August issue of GEOLOGY, J.Z. de Boer reports on a four-year interdisciplinary study that has successfully identified young faults at the Oracle site and has also pinpointed the emissions responsible for the Pythia's trance state—light hydrocarbon gases from bituminous limestone. De Boer and colleagues found ethane, methane, and ethylene in spring water near the Oracle. The euphoric effects of ethylene, which had been used as anesthesia in the last century, jibe very well with Plutarch's description of the gas the Pythia inhaled.
It could have been any one or any combination of all those things -- wine, drugs, gas, even chanting.
Entheogens
Posted: Sun Jan 16, 2022 11:41 am
by billd89
Wasn't it Pliny (?) who mentioned henbane wine?
For such as the Dionysian and Corybantic Revels, I suppose dried ivy laurels were soaked in vats of 'henbane wine' (mandrake, belladonna, etc.), re-hydrated for the ecstatic celebrations.
In Egypt, Cannabis Sativa was certainly used in a time when medicine & magic were blurred: the psychoactive impact on patients was relevant.
In Israel, the Biblical Temple Ointment wasn't psychoactive to someone walking past, but Temple Incense probably was. YHWH certainly appreciated the good stuff! I suspect this practice came from Chaldeans ['Persian Jews'], via Egypt.
Philo Judaeus gives no hint of this; on the contrary, psychedelic usage seem to have been officially suppressed already by 25 AD.
I believe the Hellenistic mystery cults died out 50-350 AD.
Were psychoactive salves generally used in folk-ritual throughout the Levant much longer? I'm inclined to doubt that, but relic 'shamanistic' knowledge may have been preserved in odd corners.
The record is poor - I don't think we can say w/ strong confidence either way. (My deep interest in this, incl. correspondence w/ Terrence McKenna, the Shulgins, etc. was +30 yrs ago, therefore dated.) I'm still open-minded to see new evidence or a better case made.