In the tradition of Jungian analysis, a psychiatrist and an anthropologist explore the meanings and manifestations of death through ritual, religion and myth.

The knowledge that he must die is the force that drives man to create. The tribal initiation of the shaman, the archetype of the serpent, exists universally in man's experience, exemplifying the death of the Self and a rebirth into a transcendent, "unknowable" life.

In The Wisdom of the Serpent: The Myths of Death, Rebirth and Resurrection, first published in 1963, the authors trace the images and patterns of psychic liberation through personal encounter, the cycles of nature, spiritual teaching religious texts, myths of resurrection, poems and epics. They translate these elements of common human experience into a them for modern man: the reinterpretation of the individual freed from the mortal boundaries of the Self.