THE EGYPTIAN BOOK OF THE DEAD is one of the oldest and greatest classics of Western spirituality. Until now, the available translations have treated these writings as historical curiosities with little relevance to our contemporary situation. This new version, made from the hieroglyphs, approaches the Book of the Dead as a profound spiritual text capable of speaking to us today. These writings suggest that the divine realm and the human realm are not altogether separate; they remind us that the natural world, and the substance of our lives, is fashioned from the stuff of the gods. Devoted like an Egyptian scribe to the principle of "effective utterance," Normandi Ellis has produced a prose translation that reads like pure, diaphanous verse.