When the earliest Christians began celebrating their Eucharist up the coast in Rome, the Velians would insinuate themselves into the very foundations of the latest mystery religion. Where the precious secret of how to die before you die was practiced by the first generations of Christians, the so-called paleo-Christians, and later suppressed by the growing bureaucracy of a faith that chose to deny its Greek heritage. Ruck knows that, of course. Raised Catholic, he has been researching the origins of Christianity his entire career and writing about it since the early 2000s. The evidence at Emporion doesn’t just implicate the Ancient Greeks. It implicates their Phocaean sister city in Velia. And by a documented line of succession that we will explore, it implicates Rome. For the devotees of Jesus and the Catholic Church especially, the notion that their religion was midwifed by Greek-speaking Italian mystics with a spiked Eucharist could prove a very hard pill to swallow. But Ruck has been down this road before. So even if it takes a little while for the evidence to come to light, the old professor is confidant that a new generation of archaeochemists will be able to scientifically confirm the true nature of the original Eucharist in the years to come. And in the process, explain why the paleo-Christians in southern Italy and other Greek-speaking pockets of the ancient Mediterranean would have embraced the religion of Jesus. Not as something unfamiliar or unique, but a convenient take on the same Mysteries that had coaxed their Greek ancestors to Eleusis for two thousand years. And the same Mysteries that had inspired their Greek cousins at Mas Castellar de Pontós to create their very own house temple with their very own home brew. More than two hundred years before Jesus and his Last Supper brought the Mysteries into the dining room, the Greeks in Iberia beat him to the punch. They and their fellow witches in southern Italy were paving the way for the world’s biggest religion to find easy converts in every kitchen across the Roman Empire. In 1978, a lone classicist at Boston University tried to tell the world about this whole “perverse” idea. But the world wasn’t quite ready. Before we leave the Benedictine Abbey of Sant Pere de Galligants, I have to ask Ruck one final question. “Do you think this vindicates the past forty years of your tortured life?” He grinned. “Well, it will certainly make some people unhappy, won’t it?”
— Brian C. Muraresku
The most important book published in this century.