The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion With No Name by Brian C. Muraresku

Author:Brian C. Muraresku [Muraresku, Brian C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Non-Fiction, History, Religion, Philosophy, Ancient History
ISBN: 9781250270917
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group
Published: 2020-09-29T18:00:38.123000+00:00

“Whenever Christianity spread,” says the scholar Torjesen, “women were leaders of house churches.”34 Before the religion upgraded to the more ornate buildings of worship familiar today, these house churches were one of the two primary venues where paleo-Christians gathered until the erection of basilicas in the fourth century AD.35 Along with family tombs in the underground catacombs from Italy to Greece to North Africa, the house churches functioned as “private associations,” where the “centrality of the banquet meal” perfectly suited women’s entrenched authority over the home, including “receiving, storing and distributing” all the ingredients necessary for the Eucharistic ritual.36 The New Testament is full of examples of such female luminaries.37

In Ephesus, it was Priscilla, who is actually mentioned in three of Paul’s Letters and the Acts of the Apostles. A well-to-do tent-maker, she established a house church not only in the ecstatic territory of Artemis and Dionysus, but also later in Rome.38 It’s there we find a profusion of impressive female leadership. In addition to Priscilla, Paul mentions several by name: Mary, Tryphaena, Tryphosa, and Persis were all addressed as “coworkers.” Three more—a certain Julia, the mother of Rufus, and the sister of Nereus—all enjoyed a “high profile in the community.”39 But it was Junia who was hailed as “foremost among the apostles.”40 She is thought to have belonged to a movement of Greek-speaking Jews who descended on Rome at the time in order to establish the permanent roots of the religion’s future global capital.41

Ever since Paul’s first journeys in the mid-first century AD, women like Junia embraced and nurtured their new sacrament, as well as the promise of apotheosis that would later be made so explicit in John 6:53–56. Over the previous centuries the maenad’s ritual meal of raw flesh and blood paired with magical wine had been infrequently showcased in the mountains and forests of the ancient Mediterranean, perhaps only once every two years by some estimates. When they became more frequent and more organized, that’s when things got tricky.

After the brutal crackdown by the Roman senate in 186 BC, their peripheral religion faced a real existential crisis in Italy.42 The suppression could always happen again, especially during the first century AD, when the empire that had spread across the Mediterranean was hyper-conscious of promoting Roman identity in public displays of religious worship. A subversive cult dedicated to an exotic god like Dionysus, defined by secret meetings and magical sacraments, remained under constant suspicion of conspiring behind the scenes, just one step away from launching all-out revolt against Rome.43 The emperor could tolerate the state-run Mysteries of Eleusis, with its relative order and long cultural legacy. The undying devotion of women to the God of Ecstasy, with their “inappropriate desire for knowledge” and “ritual cannibalism,” according to the historians Beard, North, and Price, was another thing altogether: “fundamental breaches of the code of humanity.”44

Witches could hardly rest easy. But hope was in the air. In the same way that Dionysus rescued his sacrament from Eleusis and brought it

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