Nowadays we are often asked one question: How does Peter Kingsley understand what’s happening in and across the world?
We feel we should draw attention to the fact that for twenty long years he has been talking and writing, through his books as well as recordings, about what was coming. And you will find the most direct answer to this question as to where we collectively are headed, together with detailed explanations of why, in his two newest books: Catafalque and A Book of Life.
Because A Book of Life has only just been published, it can be easy to assume that this book is more recent than Catafalque. But that’s not correct. 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 tiny chapter, on prophetic tradition, for A Book of Life. Each single sentence and word inside it had such an intensity that this little chapter grew into an 850-page book: a book that could only be completed with the help and support of Carl Jung.
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down to the most intricate of details, by what he eventually encountered in Jung’s published works — but especially in unpublished texts he was shown which almost no one before him had seen.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, in the new reality we all find ourselves plunged into by the pattern of events unfolding everywhere around us, 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.