The modern Western movement to embrace Eastern spiritual traditions usually stops with India and the Orient. Westerners have yet to discover the wisdom that dates back even further to ancient Egypt. With a Jungian perspective, clinical psychologist Dr. Thom F. Cavalli plumbs that wisdom through the myth of Osiris, the green-skinned Egyptian god of vegetation and the Underworld. As no one else has done, Cavalli draws on Osiris’s death and resurrection as a guide to spiritual transformation. The myth represents the joining of the conscious and the unconscious, the light and the dark, life and death, and shows how to live our temporal existence in service to and anticipation of eternal life. Cavalli sees the ancient art of alchemy — which attempted to turn lead into gold — as the key. The alchemical recipe "solve et coagula" (solution and coagulation) encoded in the myth describes the integration of all parts of a person and the method for achieving an experience of immortality in life and eternal life after death. The Osiris myth thus provides a model for the contemporary quest for individuation, the Jungian term for integrating ego and self, body and soul, in the process of becoming whole.

This monograph provides an alternative model for looking at the old question about Paul and the mysteries in a new light. Specifically, this study compares rituals—baptism in the Pauline communities and the initiation rituals of the mysteries—through the lens of cultural anthropology and the sociology of religion. Three research questions lead the project: What benefits does each initiation ritual promise its participants? What are the underlying messages or structures that guarantee the efficacy of those rituals? How and to what extent is the initiation ritual connected to the participants’ cognition and ethics beyond initiation itself? Taking those questions as the analytical framework, this study substantiates two points: first, in terms of ritual messages, baptism in the Pauline communities is a ritual analogous to mystery initiation, and second, Paul is an innovative interpreter of ritual who recalibrates the messages of preexisting rituals for his theological and ethical program, seeking to radically extend the implications of initiation to the embodied life of every Christ-believer. Students and scholars of New Testament, early Christianity, classics, and ritual studies will benefit from engaging this volume.

In Egypt, from the Old to the New Kingdom, enigmatic texts were created on the basis of non-standardized lists of characters and phonetic signs, the exact principles of which are still unclear to this day. For the first time, this study examines in detail the three most comprehensive known inscription texts from the New Kingdom, which were discovered in the tombs of Tutenchamun, Ramses VI and Ramses IX. Darnell shows that these three texts have a theological, iconographic and formal connection, and calls them collectively the "Book of the Solar-Osirian Unity". Differentiated and lively, he presents the content and theological peculiarities of these texts that deal with the afterlife with each other and in relation to other enigmatic texts of the new as well as the Middle and Old Kingdom.

The Fifth International Conference on the Ancient Novel, which was held in Houston, Texas, in the fall of 2015, brought together scholars and students of the ancient novel from all over the world in order to share new and significant developments about this fascinating field of study and its important place in the field of Classical Studies. The essays contained in these two volumes are clear evidence that the ancient novel has become a valuable part of the Classics canon and its scholarly attempts to understand the ancient Graeco-Roman world.

In Ancient Egypt and Modern Psychotherapy, Todd Hayen explores what the spiritual concepts of the enigmatic ancient Egyptians can teach us about our own modern psyches and the pursuit of a meaningful life. Hayen examines the ancient Egyptians’ possession of a concept contemporary academics have labeled "consciousness of the heart": an innate knowledge of the entirety of the universe. While all human beings possess this consciousness of the heart, our modern culture has largely lost the ability to tap into this inborn knowledge. By examining the material accomplishments of ancient Egypt, and how their seemingly deeper awareness of their inner world created a harmonious outer world, we can begin to understand how modern psychotherapy, through a Jungian perspective, could be instrumental in achieving a more profound and meaningful personal experience of life. Ancient Egypt and Modern Psychotherapy will be insightful reading for analytical psychologists in practice and in training, Jungian psychotherapists and psychologists, and academics and students of Jungian and post-Jungian studies and ancient spirituality.

Existential Psychology East-Westis a collection of chapters exploring existential psychology in a cross-cultural context. The original version was published in preparation for the First International Conference on Existential Psychology held in Nanjing, China in 2010. This revised and expanded edition includes several updated chapters as well as four new chapters. The book consists of three sections. The first section provides an introduction to existential-humanistic psychotherapy along with a case illustration. Section two contains 13 chapters from Eastern and Western scholars exploring the theory of existential psychology. The third section contains 10 chapters building from Rollo May's work on myth. Each chapter explores the existential themes of a myth embedded within a particular cultural context. The book concludes with an Annotated Bibliography of important works in existential psychology. Existential Psychology East-Westis an important contribution to the field with many influential Eastern and Western scholars including Kirk Schneider, Xuefu Wang, Ilene Serlin, Mark Yang, Ed Mendelowitz, Heyong Shen, Erik Craig, Myrtle Heery, Alan G. Vaughan, Louis Hoffman, and Nathaniel Granger, Jr.