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A review by sonofatreus
The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name by Brian C. Muraresku
2.0
It gives me no great pleasure to have been so sorely disappointed by this book. And disappointed is maybe putting it mildly. I went into it optimistic, if skeptical. Based on its summary, I wanted it to work. It argues, in a nutshell, that Christianity not only borrowed much of its Eucharistic ritual from Greek predecessors, but also that those predecessors included psychedelic drugs. In broad strokes, I think this might be true: Christianity certainly borrowed from Greek ritual and Greek cultural references (as well as Roman, and, obviously, Jewish). It also seems likely that drugs of some kind could have been involved, certainly in the Greek/Roman predecessors, and possibly early Christian ritual too. They didn't have the same predilections that we do around drugs (they had their own).
Unfortunately, Muraresku pushes and prods the evidence to support his argument to such a degree that in some cases he's pretty blatantly breaking it. To give a few examples:
1) he refers to Galen as a "pharmacologist" rather than the more standard (and accurate) "physician," because Galen was well-trained in all sorts of areas of medicinal healing, especially surgery;
2) he makes a repeated point to suggest that early Christianity placed women in leadership (which is somewhat true), while Rome adamantly didn't (this is less true, especially regarding religion, where Rome had a great deal of important priestesses, such as the Vestals and others);
3) perhaps most egregious out of the entire book, he said "when it comes to weaving, there's only one mythical woman who instantly comes to mind," to which any normal person would say Penelope, or maybe Arachne (and by extension Athena), but his solution is Circe. He says this because a) she is famous for drugs and witchcraft (true) & b) a fresco that he is examining has a female figure at a loom, with Odysseus and his men. And while that figure might be Circe, she is definitely not the most famous female figure for weaving.
Anyway. He does this sort of thing all the time. He seems oblivious to Judaism's influence on Christianity — and at one point even rejects it, since Judaism scorns cannibalism, as though the Greeks were eating each other all the time — but this might square with Muraresku's emphasis on "Western civilization" and Christianity's and Greece's "foundational" place therein.
Then there's the style. It's all told in the first person, which is a little odd for a quasi-academic book. He relates the story of how he found the evidence he did, rather than simply presenting it in a coherent way. Weirdly, he sometimes withholds evidence that would chronologically fit in one place so that he can reveal it later for when it logically makes more sense (i.e., where it makes sense within the argument). He goes in and out of various archives and museums, in the Vatican or the Louvre. This made it all read like The Da Vinci Code or something. Then there's his habit of naming where various scholars come from — "so and so from Harvard" or "Yale's eminent historian" — which, to me, just made me think he wanted to impress me with these institutions and that that alone would convince me (it did not).
I could go on. It's been a while since a book has made me this annoyed, but maybe that's because I want to agree with its conclusions, even if its evidence is so poorly presented.
Unfortunately, Muraresku pushes and prods the evidence to support his argument to such a degree that in some cases he's pretty blatantly breaking it. To give a few examples:
1) he refers to Galen as a "pharmacologist" rather than the more standard (and accurate) "physician," because Galen was well-trained in all sorts of areas of medicinal healing, especially surgery;
2) he makes a repeated point to suggest that early Christianity placed women in leadership (which is somewhat true), while Rome adamantly didn't (this is less true, especially regarding religion, where Rome had a great deal of important priestesses, such as the Vestals and others);
3) perhaps most egregious out of the entire book, he said "when it comes to weaving, there's only one mythical woman who instantly comes to mind," to which any normal person would say Penelope, or maybe Arachne (and by extension Athena), but his solution is Circe. He says this because a) she is famous for drugs and witchcraft (true) & b) a fresco that he is examining has a female figure at a loom, with Odysseus and his men. And while that figure might be Circe, she is definitely not the most famous female figure for weaving.
Anyway. He does this sort of thing all the time. He seems oblivious to Judaism's influence on Christianity — and at one point even rejects it, since Judaism scorns cannibalism, as though the Greeks were eating each other all the time — but this might square with Muraresku's emphasis on "Western civilization" and Christianity's and Greece's "foundational" place therein.
Then there's the style. It's all told in the first person, which is a little odd for a quasi-academic book. He relates the story of how he found the evidence he did, rather than simply presenting it in a coherent way. Weirdly, he sometimes withholds evidence that would chronologically fit in one place so that he can reveal it later for when it logically makes more sense (i.e., where it makes sense within the argument). He goes in and out of various archives and museums, in the Vatican or the Louvre. This made it all read like The Da Vinci Code or something. Then there's his habit of naming where various scholars come from — "so and so from Harvard" or "Yale's eminent historian" — which, to me, just made me think he wanted to impress me with these institutions and that that alone would convince me (it did not).
I could go on. It's been a while since a book has made me this annoyed, but maybe that's because I want to agree with its conclusions, even if its evidence is so poorly presented.