Isis and Osiris
Exploring the Goddess Myth
Description:... "The ancient Egyptian myth of Isis and Osiris - the story of a goddess's search for and reassembling of her brother/husband's dismembered body has haunted humanity's imagination since the dawn of time. Over the centuries this tale of love and betrayal, of death and resurrection, has made its way from the fertile Nile valley to affect cultures throughout the world. The Cult of Isis flourishes even to this day in many corners of the globe, five thousand years after its first mention in ancient Egyptian tents." "This myth's significance as an archetype is undeniable. As books like Joseph Campbell's The Power of Myth and Clarissa Pinkola Estes's Women Who Run with the Wolves have taught us, the retelling of a myth over scores of generations serves to fertilize the deepest levels of our imagination, and few myths have appeared over the last fifty centuries in as many different forms as this one. Isis's journey to find and awaken Osiris echoes Psyche's quest for Eros and Orpheus's search for Eurydice, and direct parallels exist between the worship of the Madonna in early Christianity and the Cult of Isis and her many devotees in Greece and Rome. From Walt Whitman to Bob Dylan, from Ishmael Reed to Sam Shepard, from D. H. Lawrence and Norman Mailer to a Saturday-morning animated children's cartoon called "Isis," modern reworkings of the myth are legion. The story of Isis and Osiris has become inextricably linked to the way we think about loss and love, forgetting and remembering, suffering and healing." "How does one explain this story's enduring power and far-reaching influence? Acclaimed author Jonathan Cott has journeyed around the world and visited scores of worshipers, philosophers, historians, Egyptologists, artists, and psychologists in an effort to answer this question. He visits Clonegal Castle, Ireland, where Archpriestess Olivia Robertson holds court over the Fellowship of Isis, a group with more than 15,000 followers in sixty countries whose membership roll has included a coal miner in Newcastle, a police constable in Cameroon, and writer Jorge Luis Borges. Cott journeys to Cairo, where he meets secretly with Her Grace Sekhmet Montu, the leader of the Ammonites, a group that claims to have been founded by the ancient Egyptian boy-king Tutankhamen. And he travels to Canada to meet with two psychologists, Evangeline and Franklin Kane, whose patients reenact the story of Isis and Osiris with dramatic results. By examining this still-seminal and life-giving tale, Jonathan Cott explores the ways in which an ancient myth can be used to empower our lives today."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
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