Loosed Upon the World with a Sun-Filled Voice
Reading Brian Muraresku’s The Immortality Key and wondering why the Catholic Church doesn’t spike the Kool Eucharist with acid anymore.
Pinky and the Brian
One of the most compelling books I’ve read recently is Brian Muraresku’s debut, The Immortality Key. He’s a lawyer, but his first degree was in classics, and he brings his working knowledge of Latin, Greek and Sanskrit to bear on his independent research.
Among other things, The Immortality Key is about archaeochemistry and archaeobotany. This is a nascent academic field that more or less does what it says on the tin. Archaeochemists scrape biological residue off really old pots. The idea is to work out what people were eating and drinking a really long time ago.
The reason this is a nascent field of study is that it’s only been possible to conduct research into it because of recent scientific advancements.
As a researcher, Muraresku’s sights have, for some time, been trained on the Ancient Greek city of Eleusis. There’s also a modern city of Eleusis, which I’ve seen from the island of Salamina, but it’s not much to look at. The history you can’t see is much more interesting than the city you can see.
The reason he’s so interested in Eleusis is because of the initiations that were held there every year from circa 1500 BCE for nearly two thousand years, as part of the cult of Demeter and Persephone. Demeter is — or was — the Ancient Greek goddess of the harvest. She makes the plants grow and the crops ripen. Persephone is her daughter.
The ceremonies and festivities that took place in and around Eleusis were called the Eleusinian Mysteries, and they ran for nearly two thousand years until late in the 4th century CE. They took place in a building called the Telesterion, or “Initiation Hall”, which was destroyed by the armies of Alaric I, king of the Visigoths, in 396 CE. This is also around the same time that Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire.
The Eleusinian Mysteries are one of the most wildly fascinating things ever to have happened, not least because of how little we know about what the actual ceremonies actually involved. Despite being the most famous and well attended religious rituals of Ancient Greece, and one of the longest running in human history, no one knows for sure what made them so special, although a picture is certainly emerging.
What we do know is that people embarked on epic pilgrimages to attend them. Muraresku’s research churned up descriptions, by initiates, of transformative — even transformational — experiences unlike anything available elsewhere. The rituals were there to prepare them for something, a way to elude the finality of death. The idea was to “die before dying”.
There’s an inscription above the entrance to St Paul’s monastery in Mount Athos in Greece that reads: “If you die before you die, you won’t die when you die”. It refers to the Mysteries of Eleusis.
When Roman emperor Valentinian I tried to shut the operation down, Muraresku writes, the pagan high priest told him outlawing the Mysteries “would make the life of the Greeks unliveable”. The future of humanity would suffer if the rites were lost. There was a belief, widely held, that whatever happened in the Telesterion once a year held the fabric of society together.
What mysteries happened at Eleusis?
The University of Pennsylvania provides a basic outline of what took place during the Greater Eleusinian Mysteries, mapping the festival’s activities against the tale of Demeter and Persephone told in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter.
A major, multi-day festival housed the set of rites, during which messengers from Eleusis were sent out to proclaim a holy truce lasting nearly two months.
First, following preliminary sacrifices, mysterious “holy things” (“Hiera”) were paraded from Eleusis to Athens. Then, in the Agora, the Archon Basileus read a proclamation calling the initiates forth. This was crucial because not everyone was allowed to take part. Murderers, barbarians and anyone who couldn’t understand Greek were ineligible.
On the second and third days, the initiates cleansed themselves and made sacrifices. On the fourth, latecomers were given the opportunity to purify themselves while the others stayed at home (or, one presumes, in a nearby Airbnb). A procession from Athens back to Eleusis took place on the fifth, midway through which they paused on the banks of the river Kephisos so that gephyrismoi, or “bridge men”, could hurl insults at them.
No, really. Penn has this: “The purpose of this action is opaque, but perhaps it was to humble these citizens, or vet them so that evil spirits could not affect them.”
Anyway, this is where it gets funky, by which I mean mysterious.
On the sixth day the initiates fasted, and they broke their fast by drinking the kykeon. Muraresku spells it kukeon. According to his research, the kukeon was a barley-based beverage, basically a beer, made with water and mint. But not a beer like Carlsberg or Spitfire. Nowadays, we use commercial yeasts in carefully sterilised environments. Modern chemicals are effective at sterilising environments, while commercial yeasts allow brewers to brew quickly, limiting the time available for any leftover contaminants to take root.
Brewing practices have come on a long way. It wasn’t always easy to ensure a contaminant-free brew.
One of the types of fungi that most persistently infects rye grains is ergot, which is toxic and turns rye ears black. Longterm ergot poisoning leads to ergotism, which causes such lovely symptoms as convulsions, gangrene and gastrointestinal disorders, according to Science Direct’s webpage on the pathogen responsible for it. The US Forest Service notes that ergotism has also, through the ages, been known as “St Anthony’s fire” and “Devil’s curse”. Ergot poisoning, it adds, manifests as extremities being “eaten up by the holy fire that blackened like charcoal”. In large quantities, it’s lethal.
Ergot also contains a number of psychoactive alkaloids, including lysergic acid, which more often goes by another name: Albert Hoffmann (RIP) used the ergot fungus to synthesise LSD in 1938. Famously, he discovered its effects through self-experimentation. In small, controlled quantities, ergot acts as a hallucinogen.
Because of how difficult it is — even today — to prevent fungal infestations from growing on barley grains during the magical process of fermentation, Muraresku suggests that most early beer contained some ergot. And the Greeks, being smart cookies, were certainly attuned to the psychoactive properties of the ergot fungus.
Brian Muraresku believes the Greeks of yesteryear actually wanted their barley beers infected with ergot. He argues they may have deliberately ergotised their brews. By doing so, they turned the Devil’s curse on its head.
As supporting evidence, he cites a Greek encyclopaedia of herbal medicine from 40–90 CE called De Materia Medica, a document containing 56 detailed recipes for wines spiked with botanical ingredients including black nightshade. The concoction, in Muraresku’s translation, produced “not unpleasant visions”.
Similarly, there are depictions in ancient art of goddesses and priestesses mixing mushrooms and herbs into wine. And at Pompeii, volcanic ash has preserved hard evidence of herbal preparations mixed with wine.
(It’s worth noting, too, that engravings in the catacombs under Rome show scenes of female-led, or entirely female, rituals centred around wine, bread and fish; women mixing and dispensing calda (“warm stuff”); women officiating ceremonies; women presiding over men, and so on. Women played a crucial role in preserving these ancient, transformative rituals.)
In other words, those entering the Telesterion to participate in the Eleusinian Mysteries drank beer made from barley, deliberately infected with ergot in a process of “controlled contamination”. So goes the theory. Which goes some way to explaining why the initiates described their experiences in such grandiose terms. They were tripping. For concrete evidence, he turns to archaeochemistry.
Must be something in the water
When archaeological scientist Andrew Koh unearths a dusty artefact, say a clay pot or alabaster jar, the last thing he’ll do is clean it.
So reads YaleNews’ profile on Koh. As an archaeochemist, he finds the grimy residues left on clay pots and alabaster jars more exciting than the jars themselves. Archaeochemistry involves chemical analysis of substances found on ancient objects in the hope of gaining insights into how people used to live, what they ate and drank, or how they died.
Brian Muraresku isn’t the first to hypothesise that the secret potion consumed by initiates at Eleusis was an admixture containing a hallucinogenic ergot. Classicist Carl A P Ruck, ethnomycologist R Gordon Watson and chemist Albert Hoffmann proposed the theory in 1978, in their book The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secrets of the Mysteries. But Muraresku is the first to test the theory through archaeochemical analysis.
As stated above, this kind of analysis is only possible due to recent scientific advancements. Unfortunately, the vessels excavated at Eleusis that might have contained Muraresku’s hypothesised psychedelic brews were all cleaned before he got there. Or at least before archaeochemical methods became available. Archaeochemists need uncleaned vessels. Muraresku needs uncleaned vessels.
The good news is that there are uncleaned vessels from sites in the area. The bad news is that they’re currently stored at the Vatican, and the Vatican doesn’t want anybody testing them. Why the Vatican doesn’t want people looking too closely at what people were eating and drinking during the first four centuries of the Common Era will hopefully become clear as we continue on this little journey, if it hasn’t already.
So Muraresku cast his net wider. He found traces of ergotised beer in a “miniature chalice” unearthed at an Ancient Greek settlement in present day Catalonia, on the northeastern coast of Spain. The chalice resembled the kernos from which initiates drank the kukeon in Eleusis.
“Here Greek citizens, who could not sail across the Mediterranean to celebrate the annual mysteries at Eleusis, had constructed a sanctuary dedicated to Demeter and her daughter Persephone,” reads anthropologist Jerry B Brown’s review of The Immortality Key, published in the academic Journal of Psychedelic Studies.
The settlement had a ritual space similar to the one in Eleusis, with depictions of Demeter and Persephone to boot. Traces also existed on the teeth of a human male jawbone, and the chalice. This means there were Greeks making psychedelic brews in Spain at the same time Greeks were probably consuming psychedelic brews in Eleusis.
What the hell has this got to do with Jesus and the birth of Christianity?
Dates for your diary:
- The Mysteries of Eleusis ran from about 1500 BCE until nearly 400 CE.
- Parts of the Hebrew Bible were written as long ago as the 10th century BCE, but the whole thing wasn’t finished until around 100 CE.
- The texts that make up the New Testament were written roughly between 60 and 110 CE, plus or minus 10 years — there’s no absolute consensus on the exact dates.
- The 27 books of the Bible were formally canonised in 393 CE — just a few years before the destruction of the Telesterion and the cessation of the Eleusinian Mysteries.
- During this period of proto-orthodox Christianity (i.e., from the end of the first century CE until Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, in the year 380), Koine Greek was the dominant language in areas that had come under Hellenistic rule. These included swaths of Europe, the eastern Mediterranean, and parts of North Africa and the Middle East. Jesus spoke Aramaic; he was a lowly carpenter. But Herod the Great had been declared “King of the Jews” 40 years (ish) before Jesus’ birth; Roman general Pompey conquered Jerusalem and its surrounding areas by 63 BCE.
- Koine Greek was the region’s “official” language, and a lingua franca throughout the Roman Empire. It was a varied language with a spectrum of styles covering conservative-literary affectations to a common vernacular. It emerged as a common dialect around 300 BCE under Alexander the Great (of Macedon); Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote what would later become Meditations — the OG of self-improvement textbooks — in Koine Greek; and Matthew, Mark, Luke and John all wrote their gospels in Koine Greek. And, despite morphing into Medieval Greek sometime between 300 and 600 CE, the Greek Orthodox Church continues to use Koine Greek as a liturgical language today.
Even if you haven’t studied the Bible formally, you know some of its preoccupations. The Old Testament, or Hebrew Bible, is particularly fond of sheep, while fish are an enduring symbol in the New. Earlier this year, I wrote about the sheep-to-fish transition, and how it relates to our ancestors’ way of interpreting the movements of the stars and planets, in a lengthy and fairly thorough essay titled ‘Ceremony of Innocence’ (link). Loyalty, sacrifice, self-multiplying loaves of bread, wayward fig leaves and… wine. The Bible is about many things.
The most famous of Jesus’ miracles might just be the turning of water to wine.
He did so at the wedding of Cana, probably by pouring water into large clay pots containing the thick, viscous residue of the previous ferment, diluting the flavoursome sediment and giving it a second wind. But rational explanations aside, the symbolism is worth dissecting.
In order of importance, the main products of ancient Palestine were cereal, wine and oil. Scholars argue that, in ancient Rome, adults drank a litre of wine a day. Even slaves drank wine. Romans got a quarter of their calories and a third of their iron intake from wine.
But they didn’t drink it to get drunk: limitations of fermentation (such as available yeasts and sterilisation methods) made it hard to make it very alcoholic, and distillation methods didn’t exist yet. Scholar Carl A P Ruck, mentioned earlier, estimates that the “wine” drunk in the Graeco-Roman world had about 1% alcohol content. So it may come as a surprise that he also cites contemporary descriptions of people becoming severely intoxicated after drinking just two glasses.
The thing is, in Koine Greek, the original language of the New Testament, there is no word for alcohol. We get “alcohol” from the Arabic word al-kuḥl, meaning “kohl”, a dark powder originally used as eye makeup. So when Jesus turned water to wine, per the story, his intention wasn’t to get everyone pissed. The point of wine wasn’t its alcohol content; it was something else.
So what was it for? What were they drinking?
Revising Derrida, whom you might have run into on your Comparative Literature degree
In Greek, the Catholic Eucharist is referred to as the pharmakon athanasius, or “drug of immortality”.
The Russian Orthodox Church’s writeup on the teaching of St John Cassian on the Eucharist and Communion refers to several biblical scholars who used the word pharmakon to describe that which is consumed during the ritual of the Eucharist:
- Early Christian writer Ignatius of Antioch (who died in 140 CE, condemned to death for his faith in Christ) used the term pharmakon athanasius in his Epistle to the Ephesians.
- Clement of Alexandria (150–215 CE) continued the tradition in Protrepticus, written in the third century CE.
- St Serapion of Thmuis refers to the Eucharist as pharmakon zois, or “medicine of life” in the fourth century CE.
- And St Macarius of Magnesia calls it the pharmakon tis Theotitos, or “medicine of the Divinity”, in Apocritica.
And so on.
That the earliest biblical texts use the word pharmakon may ring bells for anyone who has studied literary theory, specifically Jacques Derrida, an Algerian-French scholar most famous for developing the philosophy of deconstruction and the literary theory of poststructuralism.
Fair warning: if you’re not into literary theory at all, maybe skip this part.
In 1968 Derrida wrote an essay called ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, in which he discusses one of Plato’s dialogues, Phaedrus. Phaedrus has two characters (Socrates and the eponymous Phaedrus), and takes the form of a long conversation between them.
In the story, Phaedrus has just listened to a speech (on the subject of love) by someone called Lysias. Socrates, being “sick with passion for hearing speeches”, wants to hear it.
The speech is uninspiring, so Socrates tries to improve on it. But, Socrates being Socrates, excitement gets the better of him. He tries to leave; convinces himself to stay; condemns both Lysias’ speech and his own; and finally sets out to right both their wrongs.
He talks about the myth of the chariot (good horse, bad horse) and finding a balance between human self-control and divine madness. When he’s done, he and Phaedrus ask the gods to forgive them for making such awful speeches.
This is where pharmakon comes in. After all their speeches, Socrates and Phaedrus start talking about speech and writing, and which one is better. Speech is livelier, more living, whereas writing is dead and can’t answer questions. On the other hand, writing has structure, and a kind of authority that speech doesn’t have. It owes this authority to the fact that words can be re-read. They’re final, immutable, while speech, like an animal, is unfixed, and has the ability to manipulate and persuade in a way that is disingenuous or, at worst, malicious.
In his discussion of Phaedrus, Jacques Derrida calls writing a pharmakon, which is the Greek word for both “remedy” and “poison”. It can also mean “scapegoat”.
It’s a perfect example of polysemy — the capacity of a word to have multiple meanings. Derrida points to a 1933 translation of Phaedrus, which translates pharmakon as “remedy” to the exclusion of the word’s other two meanings. To avoid the same pitfall, Derrida sidesteps, and translates pharmakon to the French pharmacie. Hence, ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’.
The point is: a pharmakon can be multiple things: good, bad or indifferent; remedy, poison or scapegoat. It can cause an illness, cure an illness, or be blamed falsely for illness.
Just as ergotised beer, if produced under the correct conditions (“controlled contamination”), can cause “not unpleasant visions” and possibly even enabled Eleusinian initiates to “die before dying”, in overlarge quantities it can cause gangrene and gastrointestinal disorders. It is both poison and remedy, equally capable of good and evil.
And when the various authors of the New Testament describe miracles involving significant quantities of pharmakon (i.e., wine made from water), we can be sure they’re not talking about 12% ABV fermented grape juice, because research has shown that most of what they drank was no stronger than 1% ABV. They’re talking about a spiked beverage made primarily — but not exclusively — from grape juice.
Jesus didn’t just turn water to wine. He spiked the Kool Aid with LSD.
The warping of Jesus Christ’s core message
Jesus’ central message was that the Kingdom of Heaven was, or is, accessible to everybody. Slaves, too, are made in God’s image. All are equal in the eyes of the Lord.
Drink the blood of the Son of man, he said. “Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life.” Eternal life! Remember, “If you die before you die, you won’t die when you die”? Blood which, in the context of religious ceremony, is represented by wine: by pharmakon. Drink the pharmakon (poison/remedy) and you, too, will be able to commune with God.
This threatened Jewish orthodoxy, which held that communion with God was only available in the Temple of Jerusalem. He sought to remove the gatekeepers of religious communion. The First Temple was the only place of sacrifice in the Kingdom of Judah, and the reconstructed Herodian Temple was the centre of Israelite life, not only the focus of religious ritual but also the highest court of Jewish law, the meeting place of the Sanhedrin, and the repository of the Holy Scriptures.
It also threatened the state of play of the Roman Empire, which held dominion over a strictly stratified society. That slaves and slavemasters could be equal in the eyes of God was a troubling concept for slavemasters. Scholars estimate that between a tenth and a fifth of the population of the Roman Empire was enslaved.
Similarly, that women could occupy a central position in the empire’s most significant annual set of rituals threatened those at the top of the Graeco-Roman social hierarchy, which was fundamentally patriarchal.
As Muraresku writes, religious traditions had become deeply fractured by the fourth century CE. On the one hand, there were those followers of Jesus who continued the mystical traditions that had evolved out of earlier pagan practices: communing with God in private by (symbolically) drinking Jesus’ blood (and in actual fact drinking psychedelic kukeons brewed by women following recipes passed down from generation to generation). These were the Gnostic proto-Christians.
On the other were a growing number of powerful leaders who wanted to establish Christianity as an ecclesiastical tradition: hierarchy, gatekeepers, limited access to divinity, and so on. This would become Orthodox Christianity — Christianity as we know it today.
In The Making of a Christian Aristocracy, historian Michelle Salzman writes that, in the process of converting the aristocracy of the Roman Empire, Christianity absorbed the values of that aristocracy. In other words, in order to make it big, it had to sacrifice that which made it special.
Specifically, establishing this particular set of traditions required eliminating two things sacred to the mystical tradition: the importance of women, and the democratisation of the religious experience. The women had to go, and so did the drugs.
Female plant healers: revolutionaries the church can’t stand
To this day, women cannot be ordained into the priesthood. Catholic doctrine holds that priests should represent Jesus’ likeness.
Pope John Paul II wrote in 1995 that women “help the church and all mankind to experience a ‘spousal’ relationship to God”… Close but not too close. In the same letter, he defends the church’s deprivileging of women by arguing that we are but “heirs to a history which has conditioned us”. This conditioning “has been an obstacle to the progress of women”, he added, and has resulted in a “spiritual impoverishment of humanity”. But not so great an impoverishment as to justify equality.
(The Holy See has doubled down on this stance in the 21st century: it issued a decree in 2007 stating that the attempted ordination of woman would result in her automatic excommunication; in 2010, the attempted ordination of a woman was branded a “grave delict”.)
But Jesus doesn’t appear to have had any problem with women. Women were prominent in the ministries of both Paul and Jesus, even if they weren’t protagonists, per se.
The exclusion of women from the corridors of Christian influence was a political decision. As Christianity morphed from a fringe movement to one with established spaces of worship, write Sarah Bond and Shaily Patel for the Los Angeles Review of Books, women were “systematically excluded from leadership positions”.
They cite The Making of Biblical Womanhood, in which author Beth Allison Barr explains that this exclusion happened at specific historical moments at the hands of men who sought only to consolidate their own power.
As Christianity developed rigid hierarchies and male-dominated systems of authority, Christianity went from a system of beliefs that placed women at the centre of its most revered ritualistic practices to a cantankerous system of oppression for anyone, especially women, who sought to continue such practices.
The church’s persecution of women with a working knowledge of plant medicine is most clearly on display in the witch hunts that occurred throughout Europe during the Middle Ages, Muraresku argues. In France alone, two thousand witch trials took place between 1550 and 1700, according to the US Library of Congress. Witchcraft was deemed demonic in origin; witches were “the most dangerous of all enemies to the human race and the Christian Church”, according to the church itself.
Why were women with plant knowledge such a threat to the Catholic church? Because, Muraresku writes, the potions they brewed made people realise they could commune directly with the divine without the need for an established church. And because, in blunt terms, generations of men had conspired to keep power mostly between themselves. Mysticism defied hierarchies because it democratised the sacred experience — which, ironically, had been part of Jesus’ central message. It undermined the power the church sought to wield over the human soul.
So the Orthodox branch of the church worked towards eradicating the Gnostic mysteries, and replaced the original sacrament (spiked wine or ergotised beer) with a placebo. It’s Muraresku’s contention that the Vatican has “repeatedly suppress[ed] the original, psychedelic Eucharist to rob Christians of the beatific vision”. He calls it a “truly global conspiracy”.
Anthropologist Jerry Brown, mentioned earlier, contends that Muraresku misses numerous artistic images of entheogenic mushrooms in chapels and churches in his eagerness to paint the church as monolithically anti-psychedelic. But I think it’s fair to say that psychedelic experience is far from central to the Catholic Church’s current praxis. Following a recent spate of clinical trials into the benefits of using psychedelic drugs for therapy (e.g. for people with PTSD or depression), Christianity Today published an opinion piece railing against the “serious spiritual risks of psychedelics — including the idolatry of spiritual experience”. Religious practitioners within the Christian tradition aren’t known for their capacity to welcome private, psychedelic-induced communion.
Which is why, if you go to church on Sunday, the only wine you’ll drink will be regular, boring, alcoholic wine, rather than wine fermented in such a way that it’ll allow you to see God.
The ‘religion with no name’ actually has a name: shamanism
Brian Muraresku’s thesis in The Immortality Key is that the glimpse of immortality, ecstatic visions and ego death achievable via the consumption of carefully crafted psychedelic pharmakons is the common element to numerous cultures’ and civilisations’ capacity for healthy communion and longevity. All religion originates from the ritualised ingestion of psychedelic concoctions.
He calls this common thread the “religion with no name”, and argues that organised religions have suppressed this common element in order to wield power over the masses.
And therefore the “Reformation to end all Reformations”, suggested by various countries’ movement towards tolerance for mind-altering drugs, will take place when the vast number of “religiously unaffiliated”/“spiritual but not religious” people embrace the role of entheogenic intoxication in achieving spiritual transformation.
He tries to explain how “psychedelics were the shortcut to enlightenment that founded Western civilisation”, and that by renewing our embrace for what we might call Sacred Tripping, we might find our way, once again, on the path of love and light.
But anthropologist Jerry Brown, mentioned earlier, contends that there is no “religion with no name”. It has a name: shamanism.
The Mazatec of Mexico are famous for cultivating ndixito, a mushrooms whose name translates to “little ones who spring forth”, for use in psychedelic rituals. And among early Vedic Indo-Aryans, soma was a ritual drink of great importance. Equivalent to the Iranian haoma, soma was thought to produce immortality, when drunk. The Rigveda, one of four sacred canonical Hindu texts, contains a whole mandala (“book”) dedicated to the ritual of consuming it. No one knows exactly what soma comprised, but researchers have speculated that it contained Amanita mascara (aka fly agaric), Psilocybin mushrooms, or Peganum harmala (aka wild rue), a noxious weed popular in Middle Eastern and North African folk medicine.
But shamanistic traditions don’t rely exclusively on psychoactive plants to achieve altered states of consciousness. Other methods include fasting, self-mutilation, trance dancing, sensory overload, meditation, chanting, and solitary vision quests, writes Jerry Brown. And therefore Muraresku’s theory that there exists a “religion with no name”, which foregrounds drug-taking rituals above all else, has holes. It has a name (shamanism), and drugs represent just one of the tools in its armoury.
Still, he makes compelling arguments about the psychedelic origins of Christianity, and the pagan continuity hypothesis — the notion that early Christianity grew out of, and actively embraced, traditions and practices common among pagans. His investigation into what initiates consumed at the Eleusinian Mysteries offers much food (or drink) for thought. And his suggestion that Jesus was as much a Dionysian figure as a Jewish one casts an interesting light on the way in which Christianity was moulded and reshaped on the way to becoming the world’s most successful religion.
Thus concludes part two of my attempt to understand the role of the natural world in the development of spiritual traditions. Part one is available to read on Substack, where this post was originally published.
If you liked this, please consider subscribing! Or share it with someone who might find it interesting.
