The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name

… a merging of the individual consciousness in a group consciousness: the worshipper θιασεύεται ψυχὰν [“joins his soul to the group”], he is at one not only with the Master of Life but with his fellow-worshippers; and he is at one also with the life of earth.

copies of the trippy vegetation until my neck can’t take it anymore. In the middle of the bull’s-eye, the focal point of this entire chamber, two men flank a veiled woman. She is clothed from head to toe in a white robe. Only her face is visible. The males are dressed like the fungal surfers that surround them, complete with elaborate sandals. The

“to be the student and beneficiary of all traditions, and the slave to none.”

And the prescription could be exactly what it was in the beginning: to die before we die, with a solid dose of the religion that started it all. The religion with no name.

“achieve a radical self-transcendence and a deeper understanding of the nature of things.”

And yet, as I learned from thirteen years of Catholic school, there’s only one thing the Vatican finds more suspicious than drugs. And that’s women. For both of them to have been integral to a pagan ritual that turned humans into God is pretty much the most heretical thing you could

After my Ayahuasca experiences I’m no longer so sure that logic and reason can effortlessly reduce us to our bodies in this way. On the contrary, I’ve seen much to convince me that although consciousness manifests in the body during life it is neither made by the body, nor confined to the body, nor inevitably extinct on the death of the body.

The prophecy comes at a critical moment in the history of Western civilization when very little stood between Eleusis and the torches and pitchforks of the Christian mobs.

“Rather than having women in the control of men,” says Dr. Fiachra Mac Góráin, a classicist at University College London, “this cult is putting young, impressionable men under the control of women.”41 In a staunchly patriarchal society like Rome, that was an act of war. So the authorities made the flood of magical wine slow to a trickle.