The heart of the religious ritual is mysticism, argues Brian Muraresku in “The Immortality Key.” After a 20-year ban on clinical psychedelics research, the U.S. government approved trials on DMT in 1990. At first, Rick Strassman, a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine, only wanted to study the physiological strain of injecting DMT: heart rate, blood pressure, and so on. Given that psychedelics had been contentiously demonized for a generation, he wondered if physical consequences were as dangerous as advertised. LSD had been administered tens of thousands of times in the 1950s and early 1960s. Did it really fry your brain like eggs, as the Reagans so confidently declared? Over the next five years, Strassman administered 400 doses of N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) to over 50 volunteers. It turned out that DMT, the fast-acting psychoactive ingredient in ayahuasca—the “soul vine” persists for hours only when blended with MAOIs to slow the breakdown of enzymes in your gut—has few negative effects. A longtime Zen Buddhist practitioner, Strassman noticed something else going on when over half of participants reported having profound religious experiences. They were dying before dying. Well, some of them were being visited by alien creatures, a phenomenon MAPS founder Rick Doblin possibly attributes to the “setting” part of “set and setting”: tripping out in a sterile hospital room surrounded by clinicians in white lab coats certainly felt foreign, perhaps otherworldly. Other volunteers saw a beautiful light at the end of a tunnel and returned—a sensation noted in the ayahuasca literature for as long as we have records. DMT is chemically related to serotonin and melatonin. The latter hormone is produced by the pineal gland, which is symbolically called the “third eye”—Descartes famously called it the “seat of the soul.” Since every mammal that’s been tested (including humans) produce endogenous DMT, could our third eye possibly release this structural analog of tryptamine at death? Is it a coincidence that the pineal gland, according to Strassman, appears in fetuses at 49 days, the exact duration of the “passage” of souls described in The Tibetan Book of the Dead? Strassman admits this is speculation. The anecdotes are irrefutable, however. His clinical work led to Charles Grob’s government-approved research on ayahuasca and MDMA in the 1990s, which opened the door to Johns Hopkins researchers studying psilocybin to treat the existential dread hospice patients encounter, which opened the floodgates to the psychedelic revolution occurring today. That initial Johns Hopkins study, which found that psilocybin (structurally similar to DMT) eases distress by helping initiates die before they die, helped give form to Brian Muraresku’s 12-year journey while writing his debut book, “The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion With No Name.”

Brian Muraresku explains the potential role of psychedelics in Christianity

Muraresku has been getting a lot of press since the book’s publication, in part boosted by his appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast. The classicist speculates that the Christian Eucharist is rooted in the Eleusinian Mysteries, which may have involved the ceremonial ingestion of wine spiked with psychedelic ingredients. The idea of a psychedelic Christianity is not new, but Muraresku brings a detailed level of scholarship and compassion to the topic. As he told me in a recent interview, the “immortality key” is not psychedelics, but the concept of dying before