Nowadays we are often asked how Peter Kingsley understands what’s happening in and across the world.
For well over twenty years he has been actively addressing this issue through his books as well as recordings. And he gives the most direct answer to the question of where we collectively are headed in his two most recent books: Catafalque and A Book of Life.
Because A Book of Life was published after Catafalque, this doesn’t mean it was written later. On the contrary: the process of writing A Book of Life already started in 2012, as a simple account of what it means to live an ancient tradition in the modern world. And much of the book was finished before the work of researching, then writing, Catafalque had even begun.
In fact the whole of Catafalque started life as one small chapter, on prophetic tradition, for A Book of Life. But each single sentence and word inside that tiny chapter had such an intensity that it grew by itself into an 850-page book.
So A Book of Life, in spite of its smallness, is not just the starting point for Catafalque but also its container. What Peter Kingsley set about writing from his own experience ended up being confirmed, down to the most intricate of details, by what he eventually encountered not only in Carl Jung’s published work — but especially in unpublished texts of Jung which he was shown that almost no one before him had seen.
While writing the early chapters of A Book of Life, he often found himself stating things that could hardly have sounded stranger in 2012 or 2013. Now, as new patterns of existence unfold around us everywhere, what he wrote then as well as later in Catafalque makes the most perfect sense. And both of the books, together, are more pressingly relevant than ever before.
A Book of Life was first published in September 2021; Catafalque has been available in paperback since November 2021.