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.
