The hall was one of over two hundred buildings constructed on the property of Fairmount Park to display exhibits. Another building was built for the display of photography. The exposition received so many art contributions that a separate annex was built to house them all. Memorial Hall was designed to house the Centennial Exposition's art exhibits. Nearly 10 million visitors walked through Memorial Hall during the exhibition that lasted from May to November. The President was joined by both Houses of Congress, and Supreme Court, and the Emperor Pedro II of Brazil to kick off the event. Grant dedicated the building with a ribbon-cutting ceremony. Centennial ExpositionĬonstruction of the hall began on 6 July 1874 and was completed for the opening ceremonies on. Vestibule, during the 1876 Centennial Exposition. Memorial Hall was the inspiration for the Reichstag building in Berlin. At the corners of the dome stand four statues symbolizing industry, commerce, agriculture and mining. Surmounting the dome is the 23-foot-tall (7.0 m) statue of Columbia (the poetic symbol of the United States) holding a laurel branch. The building is 365 feet (111 m) by 210 feet (64 m) with basement and ground floor, and 150 feet (46 m) tall at the top of the building's most distinctive feature, an iron and glass dome.

The exterior is finished with granite and the interior is decorated with marble and ornamental plaster. The building cost $1.5 million to construct and was made without wood, making it fireproof, which was innovative for the time. Schwarzmann, the chief engineer of the Fairmount Park Commission, also designed the temporary Horticultural Hall for the Exposition. Schwarzmann, and is an early example of monumental Beaux-Arts architecture in the United States. Until now.Īrmed with key documents never before translated into English, convincing analysis, and a captivating spirit of quest, Muraresku mines science, classical literature, biblical scholarship and art to deliver the hidden key to eternal life, bringing us to what clinical psychologist William Richards calls 'the edge of an awesomely vast frontier.'įeaturing a Foreword by Graham Hancock, the New York Times bestselling author of America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization.Memorial Hall was designed by Herman J. No one has ever found hard, scientific evidence of drugs connected to Eleusis, let alone early Christianity. And with a single dose of psilocybin, the psycho-pharmacologists at Johns Hopkins and NYU are now turning self-proclaimed atheists into instant believers. The rapidly growing field of archaeological chemistry has proven the ancient use of visionary drugs. In recent years, vindication for the disgraced theory has been quietly mounting in the laboratory. Renegade scholars in the 1970s claimed the Greek potion was psychedelic, just like the original Christian Eucharist that replaced it. Shrouded in secrecy for millennia, the Ancient Greek sacrament was buried when the newly Christianized Roman Empire obliterated Eleusis in the fourth century AD. It promised immortality to Plato and the rest of Athens's greatest minds with a very simple formula: drink this potion, see God. But do any of them really know how it all started?īefore Jerusalem, before Rome, before Mecca-there was Eleusis: the spiritual capital of the ancient world. This is the real story of the most famous human being who ever lived (Jesus) and the biggest religion the world has ever known. In The Immortality Key, Muraresku explores a little-known connection between the best-kept secret in Ancient Greece and Christianity.

In the tradition of unsolved historical mysteries like David Grann's Killers of the Flower Moon and Douglas Preston's The Lost City of the Monkey God, Brian Muraresku’s 10-year investigation takes the reader through Greece, Germany, Spain, France and Italy, offering unprecedented access to the hidden archives of the Louvre and the Vatican along the way. The Immortality Key connects the lost, psychedelic sacrament of Greek religion to early Christianity-exposing the true origins of Western Civilization. A groundbreaking, controversial dive into the role psychedelics have played in the human experience of the Divine throughout Western history, and the answer to a 2,000 year old mystery that could shake the Church to its foundations.

Ykey artist