First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

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.

Bojana Mojsov tells the story of the cult of Osiris from beginning to end, sketching its development throughout 3,000 years of Egyptian history. Draws together the numerous records about Osiris from the third millennium B.C. to the Roman conquest of Egypt. Demonstrates that the cult of Osiris was the most popular and enduring of the ancient religions. Shows how the cult provided direct antecedents for many ideas, traits and customs in Christianity, including the concept of the trinity, baptism in the sacred river, and the sacrament of the Eucharist. Reveals the cult’s influence on other western mystical traditions and groups, such as the Alchemists, Rosicrucians and Freemasons. Written for a general, as well as a scholarly audience.

With frequent references to archeological finds, this book explores the ancient Egyptian concept of the afterlife. Author Ernest Alfred Wallis Budge was an English Egyptologist who worked for the British Museum. While Budge was not exempt from the darker side of Egyptology--he was complicit in the smuggling of antiquities, and by purchasing from dealers rather than engaging in excavation he helped encourage archeological looting--his tenure was marked by a decided increase in the quality of the museum's collection. Budge wrote this book using the full resources of the British Museum, and the resulting work offers an in-depth look at ancient Egyptian funerary practices.

In Hair and Death in Ancient Egypt Maria Rosa Valdesogo describes the relation between hair and these rites, and the role hair played in death in ancient Egypt.