Summary of Brian C. Muraresku's The Immortality Key

By IRB Media

Get the Summary of Brian C. Muraresku's The Immortality Key in 20 minutes. Please note: This is a summary & not the original book. Original book introduction: The most influential religious historian of the 20th century, Huston Smith, once referred to it as the "best-kept secret" in history. Did the ancient Greeks use drugs to find God? And did the earliest Christians inherit the same secret tradition? A profound knowledge of visionary plants, herbs, and fungi passed from one generation to the next, ever since the Stone Age?

There is zero archaeological evidence for the original Eucharist - the sacred wine said to guarantee life after death for those who drink the blood of Jesus. The Holy Grail and its miraculous contents have never been found. In the absence of any hard data, whatever happened at the Last Supper remains an article of faith for today's 2.5 billion Christians. In an unprecedented search for real answers, The Immortality Key examines the archaic roots of the ritual that is performed every Sunday for nearly one third of the planet. Centuries in the making, religion and science converge to paint a radical picture of Christianity's founding event - and to solve history's greatest puzzle once and for all.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Jan 24, 2021
• ISBN: 9781638150084

IRB Media

With IRB books, you can get the key takeaways and analysis of a book in 15 minutes. We read every chapter, identify the key takeaways and analyze them for your convenience.

Book preview

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

Though we are liable to forget, Western civilization was not founded as a Christian enterprise. The ancient Greece that invented democracy, and birthed all the arts and sciences we now take for granted, never heard of Jesus. Before Jerusalem, before Rome, before Mecca, there was Eleusis.

#2

The Eleusinian Mysteries were a secret religious cult that flourished in ancient Greece, in honor of Demeter and Persephone, the goddesses of grain and fertility. They were performed for 2,000 years in Eleusis, a town near Athens. The cult was very popular and attracted people from all over the world.

#3

Well before Jesus walked the shores of Galilee, Eleusis was a beacon of hope in a nasty age of uncertainty, when the average life expectancy was much lower than today. But as long as the Mysteries were celebrated once a year around the fall equinox, everything was in order.

#4

It was a foolproof formula that ran uninterrupted from about 1500 BC until 392 AD, when the annual festivities were abruptly outlawed by the Roman Emperor Theodosius, a die-hard Christian.

#5

The theory is that Jesus was a Greek-speaking philosopher from the school of Plato who was initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries.

#6

Jesus and his disciples were trying to preserve the secret of Eleusis and keep the Eleusinian Mysteries alive. But the Church wanted to suppress the secret, so they made Jesus into a Jewish Messiah, and they made him into a Christian God, so that