Description

The Mysteries of Osiris is intended to be both scholarly (with detailed references and footnotes), and also imaginative, in that it tries to make Egyptian mythology more accessible to people who are not only Egyptologists. This would include those who  are looking for a perspective that makes sense of what has become known as the Mystery Tradition, especially the  parallels between Ancient Egyptian myth and ritual  and the Christian story. In that way it offers an exploration of the way archetypal images are handed down through generations and different cultures,  as being both universal and timeless, as well as  specific to their local, ethnic time and place.

The audience for The Mysteries of Osiris would then include those who study Mythology as a subject in its own right as an early form of philosophy explored through story and image. I gave  courses on this, called ‘Before Philosophy,’ at Birkbeck College for Extra-Mural Studies in London. This could reach university students and also extra-mural students attached to universities. Also, all those interested in Mythology as a form of psychology (inspired by the work of Jung, who wrote that the whole of mythology is an expression of the collective unconscious, and also Joseph Campbell, for whom ‘dream is the personalized myth, myth the depersonalized dream.’ This would include students of Campbell and Jung at university, and also Jungian Analysts and other psychologists and psychotherapists, especially those in the US and the UK who work with symbolism in dreams and in literature And also those interested in the Mystery Traditions of death and rebirth, and the Imagination more generally (for several years I contributed to ‘Mythic Imagination’ weekends in Dorset, where the Mystery traditions were intensively studied). People attending these were also interested in self-exploration through the Imagination.