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

Description

The world's biggest religion has a problem. 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 and its miraculous contents have never been found. In the absence of any hard data, whatever happened at the Last Supper remains a mystery for today's 2.5 billion faithful. The Immortality Key attempts to crack the best-kept secret in history by examining the archaic roots of the ritual that is performed every Sunday for nearly one third of the planet. Two thousand years in the making, religion and science converge to paint a radical picture of Christianity's founding event. In the tradition of David Grann's Killers of the Flower Moon and Douglas Preston's The Lost City of the Monkey God, Muraresku's 10-year investigation takes the reader across the globe for a journey through time. From Stone Age archaeological sites to cutting-edge laboratories, from the hidden collections of the Louvre to the secret archives of the Vatican, this code-breaking adventure reveals the long tradition of psychedelic beer and wine that influenced the earliest Christians. The Ancient Greek of the New Testament is unraveled. The art of Christianity's oldest monuments is deciphered. And the botany and chemistry of Western civilization's original, psychedelic sacraments is unveiled for the very first time.

BRIAN C. MURARESKU graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Brown University with a degree in Latin, Greek and Sanskrit. As a member of the New York Bar, he has been practicing law internationally for fifteen years. In 2016, he became the founding executive director of Doctors for Cannabis Regulation, whose work has been featured by CNN, ESPN, VICE and The Washington Post. In arbitration with the NFL, he represented the first professional athlete in the United States to request a therapeutic use exemption for cannabis. Muraresku lives outside Washington D.C. with his wife and two daughters.