The pope met an emissary from the psychedelic world at a “holy assembly” on the Vatican, the place a Jesuit lawyer named Brian Muraresku offered Pope Francis with a manifesto for a psychedelic “New Reformation.”
Popes and reformations don’t traditionally get alongside, however Francis accepted a duplicate of Muraresku’s 2020 guide The Immortality Key on the assembly, which came about in late 2021 or early 2022. The guide argues that psychedelics would possibly rescue a “dying religion” and save Western civilization.
Although the science journalist Michael Pollan has known as it “groundbreaking,” The Immortality Key is essentially a rehash of others’ work formed right into a doubtful Da Vinci Code–type thriller. Commerce publishers would in any other case have little curiosity in a 400-page goose chase for what intoxicants the oracles and prophets would possibly have been smoking or sipping, and so the guide begins with a message for right this moment. Western civilization, Muraresku argues, is within the grip of a cataclysmic “non secular disaster” that may be remedied solely by means of a “well-liked outbreak of mysticism,” the results of retrieving what he says are the Eucharist’s historical, and till now secret, pharmacological roots.
And what are these roots? Muraresku is satisfied that Christianity developed from pagan thriller cults whose most sacred ritual concerned the ingestion of a psychedelic fungus—and that this sacrament, the kykeon, ultimately grew to become the Holy Eucharist.
A protégé of Graham Hancock (an Economist reporter turned conspiracy theorist who has made a fortune writing speculative bestsellers about purported misplaced civilizations), Muraresku has written that “about seventy-five p.c would go away the FDA-approved home church completely remodeled. And able to start a lifelong non secular journey that might, as soon as once more, make life livable on this planet. This could start taking place by 2030, if not sooner.”
Unsurprisingly, The Immortality Key has been surrounded by controversy. Critics have already assailed it as a piece of scholarship. Many individuals depicted within the guide have began talking out in opposition to it too; I discover their criticisms in a narrative to be printed within the situation of Purpose that may hit newsstands in January. (Subscribe now to learn it when it comes out.)
Muraresku grew to become a part of the inside circle of psychedelic researchers at Johns Hopkins College after penning a guide arguing their analysis into mystical expertise was the important thing to unlocking Christianity’s “secret historical past.” Muraresku additionally suggests the New Testomony—”outdated and impenetrable,” in his phrases—would possibly sooner or later get replaced by the “sacred know-how” of psychedelics.
This group—additionally to be coated in larger depth in that situation of Purpose—has attracted a variety of latest criticism as properly, together with a bombshell exposé in The New York Occasions. One frequent critique accuses the late psychopharmacologist Roland Griffiths of infusing his analysis along with his personal non secular beliefs, together with the concept that there’s one fact and one common core to all religions. That notion is on the coronary heart of Perennialism, a college of mysticism with an extended historical past.
Whereas it is not clear whether or not Pope Francis has really learn Muraresku’s guide, the Vatican did not too long ago host a psychedelic convention. And in September, for what it is value, a controversy broke out when Francis expressed an thought akin to Perennialism: “Each faith,” he stated, “is a option to arrive at God.”
