The Strange Case of The Immortality Key

Though the science journalist Michael Pollan called the book "groundbreaking," Brian Muraresku's The Immortality Key is largely a rehash of others' work shaped into a Da Vinci Code–style thriller. To flesh out his search for the Holy Grail, the author joined the theories of classicist Carl Ruck and ethnomycologist Gordon Wasson with the research of both Roland Griffiths and Patrick McGovern, an expert in archaeological chemistry.

Trade publishers would have little interest in a 400-page goose chase for what intoxicants the oracles and prophets might have been smoking or sipping. (Ancient wines were frequently blended with botanicals, roots, fungi, and other potentially psychoactive ingredients.)

And so The Immortality Key begins with a message for today. Western civilization, Muraresku argues, is in the grip of a cataclysmic "spiritual crisis" that can only be remedied through a "popular outbreak of mysticism," the result of retrieving the Eucharist's ancient, and until now secret, pharmacological roots.

And what are those roots? According to Muraresku, Christianity evolved from pagan mystery cults whose most sacred ritual involved the ingestion of a psychedelic fungus—and this sacrament, the kykeon, eventually became the Holy Eucharist.

A protégé of Graham Hancock (an Economist reporter turned conspiracy theorist who has made a fortune writing speculative bestsellers about purported lost civilizations), Muraresku told Vox that he has never taken psychedelics himself but eventually came to believe that the drugs can begin "a life of dedicated introspection, a path to love of self and others." His book claims that "about seventy-five percent would leave the FDA-approved house church permanently transformed. And ready to begin a lifelong spiritual journey that could, once again, make life livable on this planet. This should begin happening by 2030, if not sooner."

Like the religious professionals' paper, The Immortality Key has been surrounded by controversy. Critics have already assailed it as a work of scholarship. Now many people depicted in the book are speaking out against it too.

McGovern agreed to advise Muraresku in assessing several organic residue samples from ancient sites in Spain and Greece; he is mentioned more than 70 times in The Immortality Key, including 20 citations in the endnotes. "Brian ingratiated himself to me to get as much out of me as possible, promised that he was being objective and only was interested in the process of discovery, etc.," McGovern says. "He then produced a book very much at odds with those goals, and instead promoted his psychedelic mysticism agenda to the general public, from the sounds of which he has been greatly profiting."

More specifically, McGovern says that Muraresku "misconstrues and overinterprets the very limited, ambiguous archaeological and archaeobotanical data for religious use of psychedelics in antiquity to reinvigorate the discredited ergot theory for Eleusis and to build a fanciful tale about the Eucharist with no basis in Christian tradition."

Long a source of fascination—particularly to Victorian-era mythologists, satirized by George Eliot in Middlemarch as the pedantic bore Edward Casaubon—the secretive rituals of the Greek mystery religions, long suggested to resemble early Christian communities, were centered around a magical beverage called the kykeon. Murareksu's book is a search for the recipe, which he argues is a "proxy" for the drinking vessel used at the Last Supper. The book also attempts to correlate the testimonies of clinical trial volunteers with descriptions of mystical experience found in Christian literature.

Any scientific evidence supporting a connection between psychedelics and Christianity, McGovern says, is "extremely weak to nonexistent."

McGovern claims that Muraresku "dropped him like a hot potato" after appearing on Joe Rogan's podcast. The final severing of ties came when Muraresku proposed recreating a fermented beverage, an Immortality Key–themed beer, as part of the program of Ancient Ales and Spirits that McGovern carried out in collaboration with Dogfish Head Brewery.

"Were we supposed to lace a beer with ergot (perhaps call it 'St. Anthony's Fire')," McGovern joked, "and wait for the imbibers to go crazy and die—or just in moderate amounts to spur their imaginative faculties? Or maybe add some LSD to the brew with even more unpredictable results?"

McGovern is not the only one who feels bamboozled by Muraresku. The central figure in The Immortality Key, Carl Ruck, is now conflicted about his role in the project, which he believed was aimed at gaining wider acceptance for his work.

Ruck stands by the ideas he, Gordon Wasson, and Albert Hofmann proposed back in 1978, including the notion that it was psychedelics that first "awakened" humanity. "The accidental or deliberate induction of such altered states was probably the original instance millennia ago of humankind's first awareness of consciousness as spiritually separate from what appears to be inanimate matter," he says.

But the 89-year-old professor thinks it is "suspect and potentially dangerous" for existing religions to endorse psychedelics, and he wants no part of any "New Reformation." Religions, he says, have been the "cause of global conflict for millennia," and those trying to revitalize this primordial experience—"imposing upon it their traditional mode of interpreting it"—might result in "newer generations of ardent believers."

"The danger in this area of research," Ruck adds, "is that you could come across as a guru, and I definitely don't want to do that, to be a figurehead for a new religion of mind control. That is totally against everything that I believe."

Ruck has also become skeptical of Murareksu's claim of being a psychedelic virgin. "From the very beginning, Brian has presented himself as someone who's never had an experience of altered consciousness," he says. "I can't imagine, it's been about 10 years now, that he hasn't been tempted to see what he's supposedly talking about. But if you admit that you had this experience, then you become unreliable as a witness."

David Hillman, a controversial classicist and scholar of ancient medicine who advised Muraresku, says he was unaware at the time of the author's larger philosophical commitments. When the book was finally released, he tells me, he felt his research had been "hijacked" for purposes that he and Ruck are now suspicious of.

"I felt like he screwed up the direction of the research," he says. "He took it in a way to make it user-friendly to whatever he happens to be connected with or interested in."

Many of the scholars I spoke with condemned The Immortality Key as opportunistic. Kevin Clinton, a Cornell University classicist who specializes in the Eleusinian mysteries, told me that Muraresku "demonstrates how not to do research on ancient religion, particularly if you are interested in finding out whether hallucinogenic drugs were used in rituals: You take a one-day tour of an ancient sanctuary (e.g. Eleusis), as he did, in the company of the site's head archaeologist, who was well aware that no evidence of drug use has ever been found! And what did he learn by the end of the day? No evidence of any psychedelic drugs!"

Clinton notes that "Athenian sanctuaries, their priests, and their administrators produced annual financial accounts that were publicly audited and published on stone; any expenses for drugs would have been public knowledge. Athens produced a financial account of its entire production of barley and wheat, from which a portion of grain was given to the sanctuary, to be sold and the funds used for sacrifices and dedications, none of it for the production of ergot or drugs—all published on stone."

Jan Bremmer, a Dutch expert on ancient mystery cults, agrees the book's argument is fantasy: "No cult is known that used mushrooms in antiquity, and Christianity was not a mystery cult."

The kindest remarks were offered by the Biblical scholar Bart Ehrman. "I admire Brian's tenacity in exploring this topic in depth," he says, "but I don't think his findings at all plausible."

In one of the most perceptive reviews of The Immortality Key, David Hewett of The Paideia Institute for Humanistic Study argued that rather than contributing to the field of research, it is a "regressive work," distorting history (and Ruck's scholarship) while calling for a special class of government medical administrators who would tightly control access to religious experience.

"The book has a predatory approach to the topic of Western religion: pick out the parts useful for its social agenda, demonize and discard the rest," Hewett wrote on the cyberdisciple blog. "In doing so, the book shuts itself off from understanding Western religion and undermines progress in the field. The book is not a well-intentioned scholarly work, dedicated to making a contribution to the field and moving the field forward. The book is instead a P.R. campaign for its author and contemporary psychedelic therapy."

If the scholarly response to Muraresku's book has been negative, what about the more legitimate scholars whose work he built on? How are their ideas faring?

Christian Greer, a Stanford University–based scholar of religious studies who focuses on psychedelic culture, tells me that some scholars regard Wasson and Ruck's soma thesis as "remarkably insightful despite being incorrect," crediting it with "opening the doors for other (and better trained) scholars" to explore similar but better-grounded ideas. "Ultimately, though, we will never have proof enough to fully accept or dismiss Wasson's ideas," he notes.

One of the most influential thinkers in psychedelic research was Mircea Eliade, who taught the history of religions at the University of Chicago from the mid-1960s up until his death in 1986. It is practically impossible to overstate Eliade's influence on the field's thinking about the nature and characteristics of the mystical experience and its significance for the modern world. Wasson naturally sought Eliade's approval for his idea that psychedelics were the key to all mythologies, including Christianity.

"At first [Eliade] dismissed hallucinogens," says Andrei Znamenski, a scholar of Eliade and contemporary spirituality. "He didn't pay attention to this in the 1940s and '50s. Read his book Shamanism, you hardly find anything there….And when Wasson started pedaling this fly agaric mushroom, Eliade even went further. He said, 'Oh, it's a bunch of crap, a bunch of nonsense.'" But in the '60s, when "everybody became crazy about hallucinogens," Eliade "started to scratch his head, 'Ah, maybe there was something about it.' And now he changes his mind and he embraces it."

Long before Carlos Castaneda came along, Eliade advanced the idea of the shaman as a primitive psychedelic expert and priest-doctor-pharmacist-magician-psychologist who connects modern man to the ultimate "archaic" reality, promoting this notion both in novels and in traditional academic monographs brimming with citations (though Eliade himself never met a shaman). Terence McKenna, a major influence on Muraresku, later borrowed and popularized many of Eliade and Wasson's ideas about religion.

Eliade didn't like "official Christianity," Znamenski says. He wanted to strip away all local context to uncover a "universal basis" for religion and its most basic unit: the mystical experience or primitive revelation. "So basically he argues that if you go to the bones, to the roots of human spirituality, you will see that the bare bottom of spirituality is a bunch of basic concepts that Carl Jung called archetypes." (Eliade and Jung knew each other.) "So we need to go to the roots of human spirituality, to a Stone Age spirituality. That is why they have this obsession with paganism."

The aim, in Znamenski's words, was "to create some kind of organic religion," a "unity" to be found "when you strip away all this 'civilizational husk.'"

These same ideas would come to inform the current psychedelic movement, which is ultimately guided more by philosophy than by science. For example: Anthony Bossis, one of Griffiths' co-authors on the religious professionals paper, believes that the ultimate goal of the psychedelic renaissance is not to develop "super Prozacs" but to revitalize the world's faith traditions, which he likens to empty containers.

That said, Bossis' vision may trouble those who don't want the federal government regulating religious activity under the guise of medicine. He has imagined a future where prescription psychedelics are administered through a chain of government-regulated spas offering psychedelic therapy alongside yoga, meditation, and health food.

"There would be one or two psilocybin sessions with well-trained clinical teams," Bossis told Muraresku. "And then you go back home. Just like Eleusis."

In Reason's March 2025 issue, Kitchens also took a deep dive into Roland Griffiths' research project in which two dozen religious clergy were given psilocybin and explained how this study of the connection between faith and psychedelics may never see the light of day. Read it here.