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(More customer reviews)I wish I could add as many stars as one finds in the tombs at the Valley of the Kings. This is a superb book that should be read slowly while sipping tea. Having just completed my own book on Osiris and all the research involved in that project, I thought it was time for a break. Instead, at the suggestion of a dear friend, I picked up The Sungod's Journey and could not put it down. While there are many excellent books on ancient Egypt, it takes someone as gifted as Andreas to recast old interpretations into a new and exciting paradigm. While Andreas stirs up his views of the Amduat in a Jungian vas, anyone with an appreciation for Depth will come away transformed after drinking down this powerful potion. Andreas keen insights, his alchemical allusions, eloquent writing and wisdom carefully guides the reader through the maze of the underworld, the duat, by one who knows the landscape. As the reader emerges from the darkness, he or she cannot but celebrate the transformation that has occurred. A simply brilliant book!Embodying Osiris: The Secrets of Alchemical Transformation
Click Here to see more reviews about: The Sungod's Journey Through the Netherworld: Reading the Ancient Egyptian Amduat
The Amduat (literally 'that which is in the netherworld') tells the story of the nocturnal journey of Re, the Egyptian Sungod, through the netherworld from the time when the sun dies, after setting in the west, to its rebirth at sunrise in the east. In the middle of the night, in the profoundest depths of the netherworld, this resurrection is made possible by a mystical union of the sun with the mummified body of Osiris, god of the dead. This great mystery of the union between the freely moving soul of the Sungod, longing for the bright and boundless sky, with Osiris's corpse, which is irrevocably bound to the subterranean realm of the dead, evokes the renewal of all life and the restoration of totality. In the Egyptian belief system, the pharaohs and in later times all blessed dead embarked on this same 'night-sea journey' after death, ultimately becoming one with Re and living forever. The vision of the afterlife elaborated in the Amduat, dating from around 1500 B.C.E., has been influential for millennia, providing the model for an entire genre of Egyptian literature, the Books of the Afterlife, which in turn endured into the Greco-Roman era. Its themes and images persisted into gnostic and alchemical texts and made their way into early Christian portrayals of the beyond. In The Sungod's Journey through the Netherworld, Andreas Schweizer guides the reader through the Amduat, offering a psychological interpretation of the principal verbal and visual (iconographic) images. He is concerned with themes that run deep and wide in human experience, drawing on Jungian archetypes to find similar expression in many cultures worldwide: sleep as death; resurrection as reawakening or rebirth; and salvation or redemption, whether from original sin (as for Christians) or from the total annihilation of death (as for the ancient Egyptians).
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