BRIDGE OF SPIRITS
PREMIS
The tale of our genesis is our prima materia and our ultima materia, the unknown and inherent self-knowledge of consciousness itself in the transformational process.
Our serpentine lines recursively bite their own tails. Paradoxically, our most personal past is a telos. This emergent aim or purpose pulls us forward into our deep past through a process in the present. Through such a path, through sacred movement of the soul we discover our Self, a dynamic emancipation of our life energies.
Our ancestors embody our innate unconscious metaphors and archetypal autonomy. In this sense, genealogy is a transcendent function, concerning the meaning of being in time -- psyche's innate purposiveness, aesthetics, and biocultural evolution. Looking at what lies ahead becomes part of our noncausal intepretation of the past, an emotional movement from darkness to light.
Both future and past operate in the present, symbolizing our as-yet-unlived life potential, including extension into eternity. Anticipation fuels the process, but everything cannot happen at once as we need time to digest it. We tend to overlook the infinitely vast scale of time at every moment. Genealogy helps us keep such insights in sight by softening the boundaries of birth and death in our narrative, exposing us experientially to the unbound sweep of deep time.
Our collective unconscious -- the primary phenomena -- informs the experience of being. Suffering merges with hopeful transcendence. Instead of dissociating, we experience it by creatively collapsing the future-past timeline, reflectively and reflexively interpreting that experience.
From some perspective there is a single psyche and a single subject that is not acquired through personal experience. All individual lives are simultaneously participating in the collective unconscious, as graphically depicted in our genealogical charts. Our story is a living symbol of personal and collective eternal mystery.
Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood? -Jung
But for him who has seen the chaos, there is no more hiding, because he knows that the bottom sways and knows what this swaying means.
He has seen the order and the disorder of the endless, he knows the unlawful laws.
He knows the sea and can never forget it.
The chaos is terrible: days full of lead, nights full of horror. . .
I know that chaos must come over men, and that the hands of those who unknowingly and unsuspectingly break through the thin walls that separate us from the sea are busy. For this is our way, our truth, and our life.
~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 299.
The tale of our genesis is our prima materia and our ultima materia, the unknown and inherent self-knowledge of consciousness itself in the transformational process.
Our serpentine lines recursively bite their own tails. Paradoxically, our most personal past is a telos. This emergent aim or purpose pulls us forward into our deep past through a process in the present. Through such a path, through sacred movement of the soul we discover our Self, a dynamic emancipation of our life energies.
Our ancestors embody our innate unconscious metaphors and archetypal autonomy. In this sense, genealogy is a transcendent function, concerning the meaning of being in time -- psyche's innate purposiveness, aesthetics, and biocultural evolution. Looking at what lies ahead becomes part of our noncausal intepretation of the past, an emotional movement from darkness to light.
Both future and past operate in the present, symbolizing our as-yet-unlived life potential, including extension into eternity. Anticipation fuels the process, but everything cannot happen at once as we need time to digest it. We tend to overlook the infinitely vast scale of time at every moment. Genealogy helps us keep such insights in sight by softening the boundaries of birth and death in our narrative, exposing us experientially to the unbound sweep of deep time.
Our collective unconscious -- the primary phenomena -- informs the experience of being. Suffering merges with hopeful transcendence. Instead of dissociating, we experience it by creatively collapsing the future-past timeline, reflectively and reflexively interpreting that experience.
From some perspective there is a single psyche and a single subject that is not acquired through personal experience. All individual lives are simultaneously participating in the collective unconscious, as graphically depicted in our genealogical charts. Our story is a living symbol of personal and collective eternal mystery.
Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood? -Jung
But for him who has seen the chaos, there is no more hiding, because he knows that the bottom sways and knows what this swaying means.
He has seen the order and the disorder of the endless, he knows the unlawful laws.
He knows the sea and can never forget it.
The chaos is terrible: days full of lead, nights full of horror. . .
I know that chaos must come over men, and that the hands of those who unknowingly and unsuspectingly break through the thin walls that separate us from the sea are busy. For this is our way, our truth, and our life.
~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 299.
Dream Spirit, Iona Miller, 1981
TRANSGENERATIONAL GENEALOGY
The Argument:
After the deconstruction of the postmodern era, we need a reconstruction from the ground up -- a post-postmodern coagulatio to match that solutio. The metadata hidden in our genealogy can supply such information hidden in the cognitive and emotional unconscious as structure, embodied memory, lineage, and collective wisdom. Significant knowledge can enlighten our whole being. We can participate with it or remain unconscious of it. Jung noted that we are losing contact with our instincts, with the age-old forgotten wisdom stored up in us. Few forces are as strong in the psyche as genetics, sex and death.
History often reveals who underwent trauma:
wars; plague; torture; physical and mental abuse; abandonment; disowning; miscarriage; stillbirth; orphaning; kidnapping; birth trauma and defects; neglect; arson; homelessness; migration; toxic caregivers; suicide; murder; terror; spiritual abuse; divorce or never marrying; family secrets; attachment disorder; banishing; grief; dependence; incest; rape; affairs, separation; isolation; "mystery ancestors"; addictions; exhaustion; hypochondria; obsession; paranoia; personality disorder; schizophrenia; depression; emotional numbness; heresy; chronic anxiety; crime; social, financial, legal, displacement; zealotry; excommunication; poverty; famine; humiliation; internment; fanaticism; bigotry; cults; expulsion; eviction; slavery; betrayal; genocide; revenge; anger; execution; molestation; extortion; conquering;
natural disasters; catastrophes, cataclysm; cultural and ethical issues, etc.
The Conclusion:
Obviously, all genealogy is transgenerational. So long as our ancestry remains unconscious, we are marginalizing Nature and our nature. Yet, nature encompasses us. Jung notes that dreams are pure nature. He was concerned for our culture if we lost our roots. The same holds true at the personal level.
Genealogy can be approached as a clinical science but remains more of an art -- in many cases a shamanic art or self-initiation, as well as the art of relationship. We thread our way through a labyrinth of of light and dark characters. Our charts are catacombs of our forebearers. Our noble lineage becomes a royal road to ancient ancestors. But such a labyrinth of projections in the charts of a fantasist can produce self-delusion. In the chart of a realist it may remain dry facts. Fabulists embellish, while pragmatists may be stale. A middle way might be both enlivened and informed.
We Re-Collect
While some people may deeply pursue formal therapy, complex genogram relationships, or workshops, the vast majority will not. Those genealogical explorers will experience a spectrum of spontaneous effects, developing their own theories, interpretations, and directions from their ancestral encounters and revelations. It may be, as Jung suggests, that through dreams the ancestors compensate our ego attitudes. Even then, we make subjective and objective observations
and interpretations. In the blink of an eye, we can change our feelings about culture and human nature.
How little must the root-ancestors of each of our hoary lines have imagined in their own day for their millions of descendants? Even our "dead end" ancestors had antecedents; we just cannot know them, at least not through history. But seeds of knowledge in the head blossom in the fertile soil of the heart. We are formed directly from within.
Our Genesis
Genealogy used to be largely a quest for the father's direct line. But with today's algorithms we can find numerous distaff lines back through the ancestral field into the Heart of the Feminine and our mitochondrial inheritance, shared genetically by all genders.
Often these matriarchal lines reach further back in time than the paternal line. This is the realm of the mothers and their families brought to the tree -- our gateway into the unconscious. We descend from it, and like Faust, into initiation in this womb of potentiality from which the world is continuously born as the creative flow of the unconscious.
The ancients often incorporated images of death in their funeral rites, on mummy cases, the walls of tombs, and death masks. Some might find death photos macabre and yet they are simply a final remembrance of the beloved, which can help us personify that relative.
Imagistically, the dead continue their very long journey in the afterlife. The unconscious believes in the afterlife. Their events become our meaningful experiences -- their actions our ideas and reflections, insights alive with creativity and fantasy. Our persistent search for Who? leads us down and back. Each one strikes a different part of us.
Psychological effects of the genealogical pursuit will be different for everyone, with certain commonalities, such as symptoms, identification, projection, participation mystique, etc. Without guidelines much of this natural personal process remains unconscious and can be problematical -- individually, in the family, and in genealogical and heritage groups. At a cultural level, we also assimilate the shock of a personal descent from historical figures -- the historical burden. The collective is mythic and archetypal, while the cosmological is integrative.
The deeper we work into the World Tree the more widely shared the ancestry becomes. Chances are that most individuals seeking their ancestry will not seek treatment but can benefit from a contextualization of those experiences. We can jump to wrong conclusions from too little information. It happens to our beliefs and our cognitive interpretations.
They also will not stop at the Fourth Generation. What distinguishes de facto Transgenerational Genealogy from conventional or Jungian approaches is plunging deeper into the Medieval, legendary, and mythic layers of one's pedigree, rather than just the first few generations. But we can not concentrate only on the royal lines, because many other descents far out number them. Genetically, they have no priority; we may carry none of their genes.
Myths are our deep background. We need myth because it speaks emotionally of and to the soul, giving meaning to loss and suffering. It may be a painful struggle that reminds us we are very much alive. We find myth not only at the root of our ancient lines but in each and every life between, in the roles and archetypal patterns that constitute our direct heritage. Jung suggests the dynamic is the same whether we think of them as instincts or gods and goddesses. We can re-enchant our world by saying a prayer to the lords and ladies, by whatever names they wish to be known. Invisible spirits are made visible.
Grail Bearers
The genealogical Quest for the Grail shares something in common with the quest for the Philosopher's Stone, which forms itself. The magic of genealogy as the magic of the Stone is in the seeking after it. The Grail is our own transformation.
The Philosopher's Stone declares,
"My light, exceeds every light, and my good things are better than all other good things. I give freely and reward the intelligent with joy and gladness, glory, riches, delights; and them that "seek" after me I make to know and understand, and to posses divine things." --Golden Tractates of Hermes
In the search for the stone, it is the work that counts. One should not worry too much about the right way. The right way with the wrong person will never succeed. The wrong way with the right person will eventually right itself, for the stone is found at the crossroads of Heaven and Earth. Those who seek the Stone with true heart, shall be found by the Stone itself.
As someone's descendant we answer the call. Like the Fisher King, we seek the Salmon of Knowledge. The transgenerational group is integrated within the individual. Much of the effect is intrinsic. For Jung, fantasy is an integrative function. Imaginative expressions of hidden forces appear spontaneously as the direct expression of psychic life, creative and imaginative activity inherent in each and every moment.
Our lineage is our own, personal Mystery Play. We can allow the phenomena to speak - the multitude of personalities to speak, to be personified. Images are also voices -- messages from the dead. We need a sense of the ancestors. For most, that sense may be more poetic than clinical...the poetry of everyday life as it stretches back into the mists before time.
What is the power of the individual against the voice of the whole people in him? ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 365.
There is essentially no difference between doing genealogy or psychogenealogy, except perhaps the addition of a few evocative techniques. We don't just study it, but interact with it -- with the ancestors. It may be less what we think about it and more its effect on us. Information is naturally excited in the genealogical process as images, sensations, intuitions, synchronicities, insights, and more.
But psychogenealogy attempts to find workable answers when elements embedded in the family memory are now limiting an individual in a particular way.
Individual and collective consciousness is shaped in crucial ways by cognition of collective family experiences. What tends to get passed on is the overwhelming, unbearable, unthinkable. Much of history has been lost, distorted, or blotted out. We can focus on genetics, culture, spirit, and emotion as keys to the ancestral door. We can break our identification with a traumatic or unresolved past and still honor and consciously grieve our ancestors.
Genealogy is a tool for family therapy and self-knowledge. We carry secret stories from before our lifetime. The entire family tree is both a trauma archive and a resource for healing. Yet children raised in difficult circumstances often show enhanced mental flexibility. Much of what is unconscious to us is revealed in our lines. We still have to amplify, work with, interpret, and integrate that information.
We can reframe our relationship with pain, fear, and grief at the familial and ancestral level. Current research on well-being describes two perspectives: the hedonic approach, which focuses on happiness and defines well-being in terms of pleasure attainment and pain avoidance; and the eudaimonic approach, which focuses on meaning and self-realization and defines well-being in terms of the degree to which a person is fully functioning. The later may be more important. Composed of the words "eu" ("good") and "daimōn" ("spirit") it fits the ancestral theme.
This spirit is an autonomous psychic happening, a hush that follows the storm, a reconciling light in the darkness of man’s mind, secretly bringing order into the chaos of his soul. ~Carl Jung; CW 11; Paragraph 260.
This is part of the Genealogical Journey.
In this way we follow Nature and our nature back to our Origin.
We can pursue both a psychological and genealogical approach to wisdom. Realizations and self-actualization arise naturally in the process of compiling such a genealogy, as we recall exactly who we are, thereby approaching our wholeness...
for a 21st century Renaissance.
Spiritually, genealogy can strengthen our faith in the ancestors. We may find spiritual meaning in reconstructions of suppressed ancient religions or eclectic practices. In conducting Celtic genealogical research we rediscover the folk stories of our ancestors or the ancient deities once worshipped in other lands. The precise meaning and value of the old gods and goddesses will vary between listeners, but some find spiritual meaning in reclaiming ancient mysteries nearly lost to the modern ages.
Subjective mental life is a primary metaphor of
subjective Experience;
Primary Metaphor Becomes Embodied
and maps across generations.
The Grounding of the Whole is the grounding of its parts.
We reason with such metaphors.
(Lakoff & Johnson)
This argument against expunging legend and myth
from traditional genealogy practice is simple:
What happens outside us in these days is the image that the peoples live in events, to bequeath this image immemorially to far-off times so that they might learn from it for their own way; just as we learned from the images that the ancients had lived before us in events. ~Carl Jung, The Red book, Page 239.
"But if the believer without religion now thinks that he has got rid of mythology he is deceiving himself: he cannot get by without "myth."
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 482-488
Psychology Today: Why do people spend decades tracing their lineages? Thinking about one's ancestors provides comfort, improves one's ability to deal with challenges and actually boosts cognitive performance, new research shows.
In a simple experiment, researchers asked people to think about their ancestors (or something else) and then measured their beliefs about their own performance on several cognitive tests. People who had been made to think about their ancestors expected to do better on the tests.
But did they actually do better? Yes. Researchers Peter Fischer, Anne Sauer, Claudia Vogrincic and Silke Weisweiler found that people who had recently thought about their ancestors actually did better on cognitive tests of intelligence than people who had been made to think of other things.
Learning Objectives:
To understand the significance of our genealogy as more than
a metaphor for the cyclical unfolding of our life story
To understand the timing of transgenerational patterns throughout
different eras of history, and times of transition
To apply the timing of great cycles to our genealogy and life events
and reflect on the unfolding of our goals
If his individual experience is a living thing, it will share the quality of all life, which does not stagnate but, being in continual flux, brings ever new aspects to light.
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 482-488
The Argument:
After the deconstruction of the postmodern era, we need a reconstruction from the ground up -- a post-postmodern coagulatio to match that solutio. The metadata hidden in our genealogy can supply such information hidden in the cognitive and emotional unconscious as structure, embodied memory, lineage, and collective wisdom. Significant knowledge can enlighten our whole being. We can participate with it or remain unconscious of it. Jung noted that we are losing contact with our instincts, with the age-old forgotten wisdom stored up in us. Few forces are as strong in the psyche as genetics, sex and death.
History often reveals who underwent trauma:
wars; plague; torture; physical and mental abuse; abandonment; disowning; miscarriage; stillbirth; orphaning; kidnapping; birth trauma and defects; neglect; arson; homelessness; migration; toxic caregivers; suicide; murder; terror; spiritual abuse; divorce or never marrying; family secrets; attachment disorder; banishing; grief; dependence; incest; rape; affairs, separation; isolation; "mystery ancestors"; addictions; exhaustion; hypochondria; obsession; paranoia; personality disorder; schizophrenia; depression; emotional numbness; heresy; chronic anxiety; crime; social, financial, legal, displacement; zealotry; excommunication; poverty; famine; humiliation; internment; fanaticism; bigotry; cults; expulsion; eviction; slavery; betrayal; genocide; revenge; anger; execution; molestation; extortion; conquering;
natural disasters; catastrophes, cataclysm; cultural and ethical issues, etc.
The Conclusion:
Obviously, all genealogy is transgenerational. So long as our ancestry remains unconscious, we are marginalizing Nature and our nature. Yet, nature encompasses us. Jung notes that dreams are pure nature. He was concerned for our culture if we lost our roots. The same holds true at the personal level.
Genealogy can be approached as a clinical science but remains more of an art -- in many cases a shamanic art or self-initiation, as well as the art of relationship. We thread our way through a labyrinth of of light and dark characters. Our charts are catacombs of our forebearers. Our noble lineage becomes a royal road to ancient ancestors. But such a labyrinth of projections in the charts of a fantasist can produce self-delusion. In the chart of a realist it may remain dry facts. Fabulists embellish, while pragmatists may be stale. A middle way might be both enlivened and informed.
We Re-Collect
While some people may deeply pursue formal therapy, complex genogram relationships, or workshops, the vast majority will not. Those genealogical explorers will experience a spectrum of spontaneous effects, developing their own theories, interpretations, and directions from their ancestral encounters and revelations. It may be, as Jung suggests, that through dreams the ancestors compensate our ego attitudes. Even then, we make subjective and objective observations
and interpretations. In the blink of an eye, we can change our feelings about culture and human nature.
How little must the root-ancestors of each of our hoary lines have imagined in their own day for their millions of descendants? Even our "dead end" ancestors had antecedents; we just cannot know them, at least not through history. But seeds of knowledge in the head blossom in the fertile soil of the heart. We are formed directly from within.
Our Genesis
Genealogy used to be largely a quest for the father's direct line. But with today's algorithms we can find numerous distaff lines back through the ancestral field into the Heart of the Feminine and our mitochondrial inheritance, shared genetically by all genders.
Often these matriarchal lines reach further back in time than the paternal line. This is the realm of the mothers and their families brought to the tree -- our gateway into the unconscious. We descend from it, and like Faust, into initiation in this womb of potentiality from which the world is continuously born as the creative flow of the unconscious.
The ancients often incorporated images of death in their funeral rites, on mummy cases, the walls of tombs, and death masks. Some might find death photos macabre and yet they are simply a final remembrance of the beloved, which can help us personify that relative.
Imagistically, the dead continue their very long journey in the afterlife. The unconscious believes in the afterlife. Their events become our meaningful experiences -- their actions our ideas and reflections, insights alive with creativity and fantasy. Our persistent search for Who? leads us down and back. Each one strikes a different part of us.
Psychological effects of the genealogical pursuit will be different for everyone, with certain commonalities, such as symptoms, identification, projection, participation mystique, etc. Without guidelines much of this natural personal process remains unconscious and can be problematical -- individually, in the family, and in genealogical and heritage groups. At a cultural level, we also assimilate the shock of a personal descent from historical figures -- the historical burden. The collective is mythic and archetypal, while the cosmological is integrative.
The deeper we work into the World Tree the more widely shared the ancestry becomes. Chances are that most individuals seeking their ancestry will not seek treatment but can benefit from a contextualization of those experiences. We can jump to wrong conclusions from too little information. It happens to our beliefs and our cognitive interpretations.
They also will not stop at the Fourth Generation. What distinguishes de facto Transgenerational Genealogy from conventional or Jungian approaches is plunging deeper into the Medieval, legendary, and mythic layers of one's pedigree, rather than just the first few generations. But we can not concentrate only on the royal lines, because many other descents far out number them. Genetically, they have no priority; we may carry none of their genes.
Myths are our deep background. We need myth because it speaks emotionally of and to the soul, giving meaning to loss and suffering. It may be a painful struggle that reminds us we are very much alive. We find myth not only at the root of our ancient lines but in each and every life between, in the roles and archetypal patterns that constitute our direct heritage. Jung suggests the dynamic is the same whether we think of them as instincts or gods and goddesses. We can re-enchant our world by saying a prayer to the lords and ladies, by whatever names they wish to be known. Invisible spirits are made visible.
Grail Bearers
The genealogical Quest for the Grail shares something in common with the quest for the Philosopher's Stone, which forms itself. The magic of genealogy as the magic of the Stone is in the seeking after it. The Grail is our own transformation.
The Philosopher's Stone declares,
"My light, exceeds every light, and my good things are better than all other good things. I give freely and reward the intelligent with joy and gladness, glory, riches, delights; and them that "seek" after me I make to know and understand, and to posses divine things." --Golden Tractates of Hermes
In the search for the stone, it is the work that counts. One should not worry too much about the right way. The right way with the wrong person will never succeed. The wrong way with the right person will eventually right itself, for the stone is found at the crossroads of Heaven and Earth. Those who seek the Stone with true heart, shall be found by the Stone itself.
As someone's descendant we answer the call. Like the Fisher King, we seek the Salmon of Knowledge. The transgenerational group is integrated within the individual. Much of the effect is intrinsic. For Jung, fantasy is an integrative function. Imaginative expressions of hidden forces appear spontaneously as the direct expression of psychic life, creative and imaginative activity inherent in each and every moment.
Our lineage is our own, personal Mystery Play. We can allow the phenomena to speak - the multitude of personalities to speak, to be personified. Images are also voices -- messages from the dead. We need a sense of the ancestors. For most, that sense may be more poetic than clinical...the poetry of everyday life as it stretches back into the mists before time.
What is the power of the individual against the voice of the whole people in him? ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 365.
There is essentially no difference between doing genealogy or psychogenealogy, except perhaps the addition of a few evocative techniques. We don't just study it, but interact with it -- with the ancestors. It may be less what we think about it and more its effect on us. Information is naturally excited in the genealogical process as images, sensations, intuitions, synchronicities, insights, and more.
But psychogenealogy attempts to find workable answers when elements embedded in the family memory are now limiting an individual in a particular way.
Individual and collective consciousness is shaped in crucial ways by cognition of collective family experiences. What tends to get passed on is the overwhelming, unbearable, unthinkable. Much of history has been lost, distorted, or blotted out. We can focus on genetics, culture, spirit, and emotion as keys to the ancestral door. We can break our identification with a traumatic or unresolved past and still honor and consciously grieve our ancestors.
Genealogy is a tool for family therapy and self-knowledge. We carry secret stories from before our lifetime. The entire family tree is both a trauma archive and a resource for healing. Yet children raised in difficult circumstances often show enhanced mental flexibility. Much of what is unconscious to us is revealed in our lines. We still have to amplify, work with, interpret, and integrate that information.
We can reframe our relationship with pain, fear, and grief at the familial and ancestral level. Current research on well-being describes two perspectives: the hedonic approach, which focuses on happiness and defines well-being in terms of pleasure attainment and pain avoidance; and the eudaimonic approach, which focuses on meaning and self-realization and defines well-being in terms of the degree to which a person is fully functioning. The later may be more important. Composed of the words "eu" ("good") and "daimōn" ("spirit") it fits the ancestral theme.
This spirit is an autonomous psychic happening, a hush that follows the storm, a reconciling light in the darkness of man’s mind, secretly bringing order into the chaos of his soul. ~Carl Jung; CW 11; Paragraph 260.
This is part of the Genealogical Journey.
In this way we follow Nature and our nature back to our Origin.
We can pursue both a psychological and genealogical approach to wisdom. Realizations and self-actualization arise naturally in the process of compiling such a genealogy, as we recall exactly who we are, thereby approaching our wholeness...
for a 21st century Renaissance.
Spiritually, genealogy can strengthen our faith in the ancestors. We may find spiritual meaning in reconstructions of suppressed ancient religions or eclectic practices. In conducting Celtic genealogical research we rediscover the folk stories of our ancestors or the ancient deities once worshipped in other lands. The precise meaning and value of the old gods and goddesses will vary between listeners, but some find spiritual meaning in reclaiming ancient mysteries nearly lost to the modern ages.
Subjective mental life is a primary metaphor of
subjective Experience;
Primary Metaphor Becomes Embodied
and maps across generations.
The Grounding of the Whole is the grounding of its parts.
We reason with such metaphors.
(Lakoff & Johnson)
This argument against expunging legend and myth
from traditional genealogy practice is simple:
What happens outside us in these days is the image that the peoples live in events, to bequeath this image immemorially to far-off times so that they might learn from it for their own way; just as we learned from the images that the ancients had lived before us in events. ~Carl Jung, The Red book, Page 239.
"But if the believer without religion now thinks that he has got rid of mythology he is deceiving himself: he cannot get by without "myth."
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 482-488
Psychology Today: Why do people spend decades tracing their lineages? Thinking about one's ancestors provides comfort, improves one's ability to deal with challenges and actually boosts cognitive performance, new research shows.
In a simple experiment, researchers asked people to think about their ancestors (or something else) and then measured their beliefs about their own performance on several cognitive tests. People who had been made to think about their ancestors expected to do better on the tests.
But did they actually do better? Yes. Researchers Peter Fischer, Anne Sauer, Claudia Vogrincic and Silke Weisweiler found that people who had recently thought about their ancestors actually did better on cognitive tests of intelligence than people who had been made to think of other things.
Learning Objectives:
To understand the significance of our genealogy as more than
a metaphor for the cyclical unfolding of our life story
To understand the timing of transgenerational patterns throughout
different eras of history, and times of transition
To apply the timing of great cycles to our genealogy and life events
and reflect on the unfolding of our goals
If his individual experience is a living thing, it will share the quality of all life, which does not stagnate but, being in continual flux, brings ever new aspects to light.
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 482-488
PREMIS
The tale of our genesis is our prima materia and our ultima materia, the unknown and self-knowledge. Our serpentine lines of descent recursively bite their own tails. Paradoxically, our most personal past is a telos. This emergent aim or purpose pulls us forward into our deep past through a process in the present. The red thread passes through the eye of the cosmic needle. By such a path, through sacred movement of the soul we discover our Self, a dynamic emancipation of our life energies and self-actualization.
Reassume the Past
Our ancestors embody our innate unconscious metaphors and archetypal autonomy. In this sense, genealogy has a transcendent function, concerning the meaning of being in time -- psyche's innate purposiveness, aesthetics, and biocultural evolution.
We must watch our conditioned responses directly. Naturally, in that process we will make many assumptions, commit cultural errors, and encounter lacuna we cannot fill with any evidence. Looking at what lies ahead becomes part of our noncausal intepretation of the past, an emotional movement from darkness to light. We live nested in two levels of personal and transpersonal being.
Self-Compassion
Both future and past operate in the present, symbolizing our as-yet-unlived life potential, including extension into eternity. Anticipation fuels the process, but everything cannot happen at once as we need time to digest it. We tend to overlook the infinitely vast scale of time at every moment. Genealogy hives is insight by softening the boundaries of birth and death in our narrative, exposing us experientially to the unbound sweep of deep time.
We are neither gods nor demons, and neither were our ancestors though we are all filled by archetypal potentials, their archetypal pathologies, and symptoms. Our collective unconscious -- the primary phenomena -- informs the experience of being. Suffering merges with hopeful transcendence. Instead of dissociating, we experience it by creatively collapsing the future-past timeline, reflectively and reflexively interpreting that experience. From some perspective there is a single psyche and a single subject that is not acquired through personal experience.
Archetypal Merger
All individual lives are simultaneously participating in the collective unconscious, as graphically depicted in our genealogical charts. Our story is a living symbol of eternal mystery, personal and collective. Jung spoke of the '2 million year old man' within us all. But Genus homo is as much as 3 million years old, with ancient patterns including hunting strategies, mating patterns, and intergroup relations. Genetics has shown that modern man is a hybrid of at least three species. Some ethnic groups include 4-5% Neanderthal or Denisovan genes in their DNA.
We continue to change.
Genome researchers at the University of Chicago have identified more than 700 regions in human DNA where apparently strong selection has occurred, driving the spread of genes linked to a broad range of characteristics.
"These are very recent events—within the past ten thousand years," said Jonathan Pritchard, a geneticist whose laboratory team conducted the study.
The results suggest that humans in different regions have continued to adapt in numerous ways to both environmental changes and cultural innovations.” (2006)
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/03/0308_060308_evolution.html
Embedded In Each Other
We participate in that Royal Marriage, the telos of Jungian work, when we lovingly hold those opposites. All those couples metaphorically and literally express the union of personal and archetypal mediators -- anima and animus. Authentic and genuine relationship is complimentary. These are our grandmothers and grandfathers to the nth degree.
Genealogy is thus another way to experience and integrate the concept that psyche is matter, and matter is pyche. What is-is, and it is divine. As St. Augustine said, "For it is secretly, and in the hidden depths of the spirit, that the soul of man is joined to the word of God, so that they are two in one flesh." This is the marriage of heaven and earth, the eternal and transient.
Sacred Marriage, Sacred Feminine
Perhaps the archetypal appeal of sacred marriage -- the union of alchemical opposites, hierosgamos, or Mysterium Coniunctionis -- is one reason many people become fascinated with royal lines almost to the exclusion of others. Yet it is only the royal lines that are traceable back to ancient times.
Spiritual marriage recalls the union of archetypal figures in the rebirth mysteries of antiquity. These are ancient rites of fertility, regeneration, and psychophysical transformation, an archetypal drive inherent in our nature and a primordial mystery of sexuality.
Myths come to life in ways that resonate with our own lives. According to Jung, the deeper mystery of the unifying myth represents the psychological process of "individuation," the "inner marriage" of the opposites within the psyche - masculine/feminine, conscious/unconscious, divine/human - giving birth to the archetype of wholeness.
Naming Our Ancestors
When writing appeared in the 2nd and 3rd millennium BC, “a new concept of creation enters religious thinking: Nothing exists unless it has a name. The name means existence.” “Naming has profound significance in the Old Mesopotamian belief system. The name reveals the essence of the bearer; it also carries magic power . . . What is important to observe here is that the concept of creation has changed, at a certain period in history from being merely the acting out of the mystic force of female fertility to being a conscious act of creation ” by merely expressing “the name”. (Gerda Lerner, 1986)
As preparation for eternity, the ancient Egyptians made a priority not only of preserving the body but also preserving the name of the deceased. The body, a combination of the non-physical ka, ba, name and shadow, was thought to make a person complete in this life and in the next.
So, perhaps in this archaic sense, we complete our ancestors as we recollect and re-member them, particularly by name. Just as archaeologists can only tell so much from digging up artifacts and interpreting archival material, psychologists and genealogists can do no more.
Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood? --Jung
"In alchemy, Mercurius is symbolized by the tree as well as the dragon. He is notoriously "duplex", is both masculine and feminine, and is made one in the hierosgamos of the chymical wedding." [Collected Works vol 13, par 315].
But for him who has seen the chaos, there is no more hiding, because he knows that the bottom sways and knows what this swaying means.
He has seen the order and the disorder of the endless, he knows the unlawful laws.
He knows the sea and can never forget it.
The chaos is terrible: days full of lead, nights full of horror. . .
I know that chaos must come over men, and that the hands of those who unknowingly and unsuspectingly break through the thin walls that separate us from the sea are busy. For this is our way, our truth, and our life.
~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 299.
The tale of our genesis is our prima materia and our ultima materia, the unknown and self-knowledge. Our serpentine lines of descent recursively bite their own tails. Paradoxically, our most personal past is a telos. This emergent aim or purpose pulls us forward into our deep past through a process in the present. The red thread passes through the eye of the cosmic needle. By such a path, through sacred movement of the soul we discover our Self, a dynamic emancipation of our life energies and self-actualization.
Reassume the Past
Our ancestors embody our innate unconscious metaphors and archetypal autonomy. In this sense, genealogy has a transcendent function, concerning the meaning of being in time -- psyche's innate purposiveness, aesthetics, and biocultural evolution.
We must watch our conditioned responses directly. Naturally, in that process we will make many assumptions, commit cultural errors, and encounter lacuna we cannot fill with any evidence. Looking at what lies ahead becomes part of our noncausal intepretation of the past, an emotional movement from darkness to light. We live nested in two levels of personal and transpersonal being.
Self-Compassion
Both future and past operate in the present, symbolizing our as-yet-unlived life potential, including extension into eternity. Anticipation fuels the process, but everything cannot happen at once as we need time to digest it. We tend to overlook the infinitely vast scale of time at every moment. Genealogy hives is insight by softening the boundaries of birth and death in our narrative, exposing us experientially to the unbound sweep of deep time.
We are neither gods nor demons, and neither were our ancestors though we are all filled by archetypal potentials, their archetypal pathologies, and symptoms. Our collective unconscious -- the primary phenomena -- informs the experience of being. Suffering merges with hopeful transcendence. Instead of dissociating, we experience it by creatively collapsing the future-past timeline, reflectively and reflexively interpreting that experience. From some perspective there is a single psyche and a single subject that is not acquired through personal experience.
Archetypal Merger
All individual lives are simultaneously participating in the collective unconscious, as graphically depicted in our genealogical charts. Our story is a living symbol of eternal mystery, personal and collective. Jung spoke of the '2 million year old man' within us all. But Genus homo is as much as 3 million years old, with ancient patterns including hunting strategies, mating patterns, and intergroup relations. Genetics has shown that modern man is a hybrid of at least three species. Some ethnic groups include 4-5% Neanderthal or Denisovan genes in their DNA.
We continue to change.
Genome researchers at the University of Chicago have identified more than 700 regions in human DNA where apparently strong selection has occurred, driving the spread of genes linked to a broad range of characteristics.
"These are very recent events—within the past ten thousand years," said Jonathan Pritchard, a geneticist whose laboratory team conducted the study.
The results suggest that humans in different regions have continued to adapt in numerous ways to both environmental changes and cultural innovations.” (2006)
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/03/0308_060308_evolution.html
Embedded In Each Other
We participate in that Royal Marriage, the telos of Jungian work, when we lovingly hold those opposites. All those couples metaphorically and literally express the union of personal and archetypal mediators -- anima and animus. Authentic and genuine relationship is complimentary. These are our grandmothers and grandfathers to the nth degree.
Genealogy is thus another way to experience and integrate the concept that psyche is matter, and matter is pyche. What is-is, and it is divine. As St. Augustine said, "For it is secretly, and in the hidden depths of the spirit, that the soul of man is joined to the word of God, so that they are two in one flesh." This is the marriage of heaven and earth, the eternal and transient.
Sacred Marriage, Sacred Feminine
Perhaps the archetypal appeal of sacred marriage -- the union of alchemical opposites, hierosgamos, or Mysterium Coniunctionis -- is one reason many people become fascinated with royal lines almost to the exclusion of others. Yet it is only the royal lines that are traceable back to ancient times.
Spiritual marriage recalls the union of archetypal figures in the rebirth mysteries of antiquity. These are ancient rites of fertility, regeneration, and psychophysical transformation, an archetypal drive inherent in our nature and a primordial mystery of sexuality.
Myths come to life in ways that resonate with our own lives. According to Jung, the deeper mystery of the unifying myth represents the psychological process of "individuation," the "inner marriage" of the opposites within the psyche - masculine/feminine, conscious/unconscious, divine/human - giving birth to the archetype of wholeness.
Naming Our Ancestors
When writing appeared in the 2nd and 3rd millennium BC, “a new concept of creation enters religious thinking: Nothing exists unless it has a name. The name means existence.” “Naming has profound significance in the Old Mesopotamian belief system. The name reveals the essence of the bearer; it also carries magic power . . . What is important to observe here is that the concept of creation has changed, at a certain period in history from being merely the acting out of the mystic force of female fertility to being a conscious act of creation ” by merely expressing “the name”. (Gerda Lerner, 1986)
As preparation for eternity, the ancient Egyptians made a priority not only of preserving the body but also preserving the name of the deceased. The body, a combination of the non-physical ka, ba, name and shadow, was thought to make a person complete in this life and in the next.
So, perhaps in this archaic sense, we complete our ancestors as we recollect and re-member them, particularly by name. Just as archaeologists can only tell so much from digging up artifacts and interpreting archival material, psychologists and genealogists can do no more.
Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood? --Jung
"In alchemy, Mercurius is symbolized by the tree as well as the dragon. He is notoriously "duplex", is both masculine and feminine, and is made one in the hierosgamos of the chymical wedding." [Collected Works vol 13, par 315].
But for him who has seen the chaos, there is no more hiding, because he knows that the bottom sways and knows what this swaying means.
He has seen the order and the disorder of the endless, he knows the unlawful laws.
He knows the sea and can never forget it.
The chaos is terrible: days full of lead, nights full of horror. . .
I know that chaos must come over men, and that the hands of those who unknowingly and unsuspectingly break through the thin walls that separate us from the sea are busy. For this is our way, our truth, and our life.
~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 299.
TRANSGENERATIONAL GENEALOGY
The Argument:
After the deconstruction of the postmodern era, we need a reconstruction from the ground up -- a post-postmodern coagulatio to match that solutio. We know the whole circular alchemical opus is contained in the formula "dissolve and coagulate." The desire for meaning coagulates. There is really no substitute for drawing one's own lines and engaging them with psychogenealogy.
A sense of metaphor is a gnosis rooted in alchemy. Our old self image dissolves as we embrace our larger being. Losing and finding repeats in unending cycles. Like Orpheus, our extended family narrative is a story of love, loss, descent, failure to restore what has been lost, dismemberment, and transformation. We makes the descent into the heart-caves of our ancestors.
Heart-Caves
We may or may not carry certain ancestors' DNA, but we are still psychophysically entangled with them whether it is deliberate or not, open to interaction or not, 'mutually unconscious' or not. This catalytic process may be more than a metaphor -- some sort of psychic synchronization or interwovenness, resonance, empathy, intersubjectivity, transference of unconscious material, or even mystic unity.
Modus Vivendi
As in life, when we interact with someone, we effect each other by sharing certain unconscious contents. We may or may not attribute it to the other, but we transcend our individual self with a bridge to the universal, the dynamic tension of opposites -- conscious/ unconscious, body and mind, self and world. The sense of separate selves dissolves in that solutio. The drop merges in the ocean of consciousness.
In the weird world of quantum physics, two linked particles can share a single fate, even when they’re miles apart. Two physicists have mathematically described how this spooky 'entanglement' effect could also bind particles across time. “You can send your quantum state into the future without traversing the middle time,” says lead author S. Jay Olson of Australia’s University of Queensland. Curiously, they plan to use it to encrypt messages.
The metadata coded in our genealogy and genetics can supply such information hidden in the cognitive and emotional unconscious as wave, structure, embodied memory, lineage, and collective wisdom. Genetics has even revealed seemingly improbable tales where a biological mother or father does not test positive as the parent of their known biological children.
Unknown to anyone they absorbed a twin in the womb who's DNA is found in their offspring, rather than their own. The parent has two sets of DNA. These chimeras with a vanishing twin, also known as fetal resorption, were undetectable and unimaginable in the last decade.
Even the DNA of former lovers whose cells have colonized another can show up in otherwise unrelated children. Identical and fraternal twins can become chimeras, trading chromosomes in the womb, including from another gender. A sense of destiny may reveal previously unintegrated reality potentials -- a glimpse of the ground or absolute field of being.
Attitudes and beliefs about genealogy are related to general beliefs and spirituality. Naturally, some will approach the psychogenealogical aspects with more purposiveness than others. Thus, it is one thing to a Mormon and another to a Jungian, new ager, heritage group member, or bloodline zealot. There are religious factors, generational divides, scientific understanding, gender, and ethnicity. In breezy noetic terms, we could call genealogy a transformative technology for hacking consciousness...but it hacks us back! High-tech tools help us expedite the research and discovery process.
Significant knowledge can enlighten our whole being. We can participate with it or remain unconscious of it. Jung said that "Dissolving an image means that you become that image." Jung noted that we are losing contact with our instincts, with the age-old forgotten wisdom stored up in us. The creative force and renewal of cycles are universal. Few forces are as strong in the psyche as genetics, sex and death. Ancestor veneration was one of the first primordial sacred notions to emerge in human culture.
Ancestors are those people you directly descend from, not extended family members. An ancestor or forebear is a parent or (recursively) the parent of an ancestor (i.e., a grandparent, great-grandparent, great-great-grandparent, and so forth). An ancestor is "any person from whom one is descended. In law the person from whom an estate has been inherited."
The World Tree is the global genealogical tree. Shamanic initiation requires multiple ascents and descents of the World Tree, a central axis that provides access to the other realms. Each time we gain greater consciousness of the unified reality of the transcendent dimension. In everyday life, we each must make a descent in order to gain experience, encounter deeper aspects of ourselves, and emerge again, transformed, in the experiential process of initiation.
The Conclusion:
Obviously, all genealogy is transgenerational. So long as our ancestry remains unconscious, we are marginalizing Nature and our nature. Yet, nature encompasses us. Jung notes that dreams are pure nature. He was concerned for our culture if we lost our roots. The same holds true at the personal level. Jung declares, "The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are."
Genealogy can be approached as a clinical science but remains more of an art -- a hermeneutic art, a shamanic art or self-initiation, as well as the art of relationship. We thread our way through a labyrinth of light and dark characters. Our charts are catacombs of our forebearers. We might have a different attitude to our lines in the process of discovery than we do once we have fully traced our descent from antiquity.
Our noble lineage becomes a royal road to ancient ancestors. But such a labyrinth of projections in the charts of a fantasist can produce self-delusion or over-heated zealotry. In the chart of a realist it may remain cold facts. Fabulists embellish, while pragmatists may be dry or stale.
A middle way might be both enlivened and informed. Genealogy mediates between the conscious and unconscious as we struggle to reveal what has so long been hidden. We also gain a reflective vantage point between ourselves and events we perceive. We allow the transcendent function to mold and re-shape us.
We Re-Collect
While some people may deeply pursue formal therapy, complex genogram relationships, or workshops, the vast majority will not. Those genealogical explorers will experience a spectrum of spontaneous effects, developing their own theories, interpretations, and directions from their ancestral encounters and revelations, conflated with their own beliefs. It may be, as Jung suggests, that through dreams the ancestors compensate our ego attitudes. Even then, we make subjective and objective observations and interpretations. In the blink of an eye, we can change our feelings about culture and human nature.
How little must the root-ancestors of each of our hoary lines have imagined in their own day for their millions of descendants? Even our "dead end" ancestors had antecedents; we just cannot know them, at least not through history. But seeds of knowledge in the head blossom in the fertile soil of the heart. We are formed directly from within.
Our Genesis
Genealogy used to be largely a quest for the father's direct line. But with today's algorithms we can find numerous distaff lines back through the ancestral field into the Heart of the Feminine and our mitochondrial inheritance, shared genetically by all genders. This type of DNA, stored in the cell's "batteries," is inherited from the mother, more or less unchanged. Like Y-DNA, distinct mtDNA lineages, are known as "haplogroups".
Often these matriarchal lines reach further back in time than the paternal line. This is the realm of the mothers and their families brought to the tree -- our gateway into the unconscious. We descend from it, and like Faust, into initiation in this womb of potentiality from which the world is continuously born as the creative flow of the unconscious.
The ancients often incorporated images of death in their funeral rites, on mummy cases, the walls of tombs, and death masks. Some might find death photos macabre and yet they are simply a final remembrance of the beloved, which can help us personify that relative.
Imagistically, the dead continue their very long journey in the afterlife. The unconscious believes in the afterlife. Their events become our meaningful experiences -- their actions our ideas and reflections, insights alive with creativity and fantasy. Our persistent search for Who? leads us down and back. Each one strikes a different part of us. From this churning, this dialectical tension, creativity emerges -- a myriad of intoxicating things, including the archetypal images of immortality.
Psychological effects of the genealogical pursuit will be different for everyone, with certain commonalities, such as symptoms, identification, projection, participation mystique, etc.
Without guidelines much of this natural personal process remains unconscious and can be problematical -- individually, in the family, and in genealogical and heritage groups. At a cultural level, we also assimilate the shock of a personal descent from historical figures -- the historical burden. Myths have a vital meaning, linking us with psychic processes and experiences "beyond consciousness in the dark hinterland of the psyche," as Jung notes (CW 9ii, Pg. 154). The collective is mythic and archetypal, while the cosmological is integrative.
The deeper we work into the World Tree the more widely shared the ancestry becomes. Chances are that most individuals seeking their ancestry will not seek treatment but can benefit from a contextualization of those experiences. We can jump to wrong conclusions from too little information. It happens to our beliefs and our cognitive interpretations.
They also will not stop at the Fourth Generation. What distinguishes de facto Transgenerational Genealogy from conventional or Jungian approaches is plunging deeper into the Medieval, legendary, and mythic layers of one's pedigree, rather than just the first few generations. But we can not concentrate only on the royal lines, because many other descents far out number them. Genetically, they have no priority; we may carry none of their genes.
Mythic Genealogy
Emerging from pre-conscious psyche, myths are our deep background and connect us with our instincts. Myth bridges conscious and unconscious cognition with an archaic quality and networks of symbols and imagery. It represents the meaning of being. They help us interpret the world. We need myth because it speaks emotionally of and to the soul, giving meaning to loss and suffering. It may be a painful struggle that reminds us we are very much alive. For example, in Wotan we find the ecstatic experience of fighting as well as the ecstatic joy of death.
English kings claimed descent from Wotan or Odin. Medieval monks pushed Woden’s ancestry back to Troy, then connected the Trojans to the Jewish scriptures and the lost tribe of Dan. They linked the Franks to the kings of Troy and the Merovingian descent from the family of Jesus. The Chronicle of Fredegar (7th century) mentions the legend. It was elaborated in the Liber historiae Francorum (probably 727). Such legends grew over time.
Our genealogy shows us how these stories migrated between cultures over time. We can imagine our descent from Aphrodite herself. Descending through Macedonians and Ptolemaic Egyptians, then Spanish and English nobility, she would be somewhere around a 100th great-grandmother. A pedigree prepared for Philip II of Spain traces his paternal descent from Hercules Lybius, said to have been a son of Dodanim / Rodanim, who is said to have been a great grandson of Noah (Genesis 10:4, 1 Chronicles 1:7).
The confabulations of the Welsh royals made them descendants of Joseph of Arimathea. They included a legendary cycle of Fisher Kings, and culminated in the Grail Cycle and stories of King Arthur's court and the magic of Avalon. Given the right gateway ancestors and royal lineage, all of these lines will show up in the standard genealogies of millions of people.
Many accept their fabulous descent from antiquity as literally true, while scholars know it to be false. But neither view is accurate. Even though confabulated at some point for political purposes, such mythical genealogies linking man to the divine are actually traditional, and considered 'best practice' for eras of history.
Even 'fictious' genealogies and medieval forgeries have a place in our lines, if only to show us how these connections used to be made. Medieval genealogies connecting ancient kings to Adam are pure invention. In the Historia Brittonum, the Welsh monk Nennius (9th century) grafted northern Europeans onto the classical tradition by making them not only descended from Noah, but the brothers of Romulus, legendary founder of Rome.
Modern genealogists want to cut bad connections, but myth is the DNA of our psyche. That is like killing the root of the tree. This is genealogy without proof, so it must be mythic. How about the mighty Zeus himself, king of the gods? With over 200 offspring, divine and demigods, there are many lines of potential descent. Or, the venerable Isis? She may be 100 - 150 generations back.
We find myth not only at the root of our ancient lines but in each and every life between, in the roles and archetypal patterns that constitute our direct heritage. Jung suggests the dynamic is the same whether we think of them as instincts or gods and goddesses. We can re-enchant our world by saying a prayer to the lords and ladies, by whatever names they wish to be known. In a prayer to all our relations, invisible spirits are made visible. Eternal being lies within each and every one of us.
Grail Bearers
The genealogical Quest for the Grail shares something in common with the quest for the Philosopher's Stone, which forms itself. The magic of genealogy as the magic of the Stone is in the seeking after it. The Grail is our own transformation.
We are filled by the Grail when we point ourselves toward it. The Grail serves the whole community.
The Philosopher's Stone declares,
"My light, exceeds every light, and my good things are better than all other good things. I give freely and reward the intelligent with joy and gladness, glory, riches, delights; and them that "seek" after me I make to know and understand, and to posses divine things." --Golden Tractates of Hermes
In the search for the stone, it is the work that counts. One should not worry too much about the right way. The right way with the wrong person will never succeed. The wrong way with the right person will eventually right itself, for the stone is found at the crossroads of Heaven and Earth. Those who seek the Stone with true heart, shall be found by the Stone itself.
As someone's descendant we answer the call. Like the Fisher King, we seek the Salmon of Knowledge. The transgenerational group is integrated within the individual. Much of the effect is intrinsic. For Jung, fantasy is an integrative function.
Imaginative expressions of hidden forces appear spontaneously as the direct expression of psychic life, creative and imaginative activity inherent in each and every moment. We meet each wondrous, wild moment by relating to it, not controlling it. We really can't separate the past from the present.
Relationship is created and recreated from what has been and what is yet to be. Our challenge is to claim a place for our own imagination and intellect. We learn to see and bear the pain of seeing and suffering. Healing and wounding alternate in a rhythm echoing a sense of transience and death.
"You will feel me with you even from the Land of the Dead."
Our lineage is our own, personal Mystery Play. You can only enter into your own mysteries. We can allow the phenomena to speak - the multitude of personalities to speak, to be personified. Images are also voices -- messages from the dead. We need a sense of the ancestors. For most, that sense may be more poetic than clinical...the poetry of everyday life as it stretches back into the mists before time.
From the earliest societies to contemporary civilizations, genealogical methods have traced ancestries back to gods, animal totems, and legendary heroes. Originally the oral history narratives of clan or tribe bequeathed the lineage. In ancient Sumeria, Babylon, Egypt, India and China, kings and heads of state claimed their rights to the throne through genealogy. Royal totems include dragon, eagle, lion, wolf, serpent, boar, etc.
The Old Testament recounts the "begats" of Adam, Noah and Abraham, and later the royal bloodline of the House of David. Muslims trace their descent from Muhammed, while the Greeks and Romans and Vikings linked their heritage to the gods. The importance of ancestry to soul appears in Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian genealogies. In Germanic folklore the soul was considered, in certain respects, something inherited.
What is the power of the individual against the voice of the whole people in him? ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 365.
There is essentially no difference between doing genealogy or psychogenealogy, except perhaps the addition of a few evocative techniques. We don't just study it, but interact with it -- with the ancestors. It may be less what we think about it and more its effect on us. Information is naturally excited in the genealogical process as images, sensations, intuitions, synchronicities, insights, and more.
But psychogenealogy attempts to find workable answers when elements embedded in the family memory are now limiting an individual in a particular way.
Individual and collective consciousness is shaped in crucial ways by cognition of collective family experiences. What tends to get passed on is the overwhelming, unbearable, unthinkable. Much of history has been lost, distorted, or blotted out. We can focus on genetics, culture, spirit, and emotion as keys to the ancestral door. We can break our identification with a traumatic or unresolved past and still honor and consciously grieve our ancestors.
Genealogy is a tool for family therapy and self-knowledge. We carry secret stories from before our lifetime. The entire family tree is both a trauma archive and a resource for healing. Yet children raised in difficult circumstances often show enhanced mental flexibility. Much of what is unconscious to us is revealed in our lines. We still have to amplify, work with, interpret, and integrate that information.
We can reframe our relationship with pain, fear, and grief at the familial and ancestral level. Current research on well-being describes two perspectives: the hedonic approach, which focuses on happiness and defines well-being in terms of pleasure attainment and pain avoidance; and the eudaimonic approach, which focuses on meaning and self-realization and defines well-being in terms of the degree to which a person is fully functioning. The later may be more important. Composed of the words "eu" ("good") and "daimōn" ("spirit") it fits the ancestral theme.
This spirit is an autonomous psychic happening, a hush that follows the storm, a reconciling light in the darkness of man’s mind, secretly bringing order into the chaos of his soul. ~Carl Jung; CW 11; Paragraph 260.
This is part of the Genealogical Journey.
In this way we follow Nature and our nature back to our Origin.
We can pursue both a psychological and genealogical approach to wisdom. Realizations and self-actualization arise naturally in the process of compiling such a genealogy, as we recall exactly who we are, thereby approaching our wholeness...
for a 21st century Renaissance.
Spiritually, genealogy can strengthen our faith in the ancestors. We may find spiritual meaning in reconstructions of suppressed ancient religions or eclectic practices. In conducting Celtic genealogical research we rediscover the folk stories of our ancestors or the ancient deities once worshipped in other lands. The precise meaning and value of the old gods and goddesses will vary between listeners, but some find spiritual meaning in reclaiming ancient mysteries nearly lost to the modern ages.
Subjective mental life is a primary metaphor of
subjective Experience;
Primary Metaphor Becomes Embodied
and maps across generations.
The Grounding of the Whole is the grounding of its parts.
We reason with such metaphors.
(Lakoff & Johnson)
This argument against expunging legend and myth
from traditional genealogy practice is simple:
What happens outside us in these days is the image that the peoples live in events, to bequeath this image immemorially to far-off times so that they might learn from it for their own way; just as we learned from the images that the ancients had lived before us in events. ~Carl Jung, The Red book, Page 239.
"But if the believer without religion now thinks that he has got rid of mythology he is deceiving himself: he cannot get by without "myth."
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 482-488
Psychology Today: Why do people spend decades tracing their lineages? Thinking about one's ancestors provides comfort, improves one's ability to deal with challenges and actually boosts cognitive performance, new research shows.
In a simple experiment, researchers asked people to think about their ancestors (or something else) and then measured their beliefs about their own performance on several cognitive tests. People who had been made to think about their ancestors expected to do better on the tests.
But did they actually do better? Yes. Researchers Peter Fischer, Anne Sauer, Claudia Vogrincic and Silke Weisweiler found that people who had recently thought about their ancestors actually did better on cognitive tests of intelligence than people who had been made to think of other things.
Therapeutic Initiation
Inner Voices: Reverence Toward the Souls of the Ancestors
"Take pains to waken the dead. Dig deep mines and throw in sacrificial gifts, so that they reach the dead. Reflect in good heart upon evil, this is the way to the ascent. But before the ascent, everything is night and Hell." ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 244.
Psychologically this means that the souls of the ancestors (potential factors, qualities, talents, possibilities, and so on, which we have inherited from all the lines of our ancestry) are waiting in the unconscious, and are ready at any time to begin a new growth.
~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 230.
These are, so to speak, the re-animated souls of the ancestors which have been lying dormant in the unconscious, and the alchemists call these units or souls the sleepers or the dead in Hades who are resurrected by the "holy waters" (that is the miraculous water of alchemy, the fertilizing Mercury). ~Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 230.
Learning Objectives:
To understand the significance of our genealogy as more than
a metaphor for the cyclical unfolding of our life story
To understand the timing of transgenerational patterns throughout
different eras of history, and times of transition
To apply the timing of great cycles to our genealogy and life events
and reflect on the unfolding of our goals
If his individual experience is a living thing, it will share the quality of all life, which does not stagnate but, being in continual flux, brings ever new aspects to light.
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 482-488
History often reveals who underwent trauma:
wars; plague; torture; physical and mental abuse; abandonment; disowning; miscarriage; stillbirth; orphaning; kidnapping; birth trauma and defects; neglect; arson; homelessness; migration; toxic caregivers; suicide; murder; terror; spiritual abuse; divorce or never marrying; family secrets; attachment disorder; banishing; grief; dependence; incest; rape; affairs, separation; isolation; "mystery ancestors"; addictions; exhaustion; hypochondria; obsession; paranoia; personality disorder; schizophrenia; depression; emotional numbness; heresy; chronic anxiety; crime; social, financial, legal, displacement; zealotry; excommunication; poverty; famine; humiliation; internment; fanaticism; bigotry; cults; expulsion; eviction; slavery; betrayal; genocide; revenge; anger; execution; molestation; extortion; conquering;
natural disasters; catastrophes, cataclysm; cultural and ethical issues, etc.
The Argument:
After the deconstruction of the postmodern era, we need a reconstruction from the ground up -- a post-postmodern coagulatio to match that solutio. We know the whole circular alchemical opus is contained in the formula "dissolve and coagulate." The desire for meaning coagulates. There is really no substitute for drawing one's own lines and engaging them with psychogenealogy.
A sense of metaphor is a gnosis rooted in alchemy. Our old self image dissolves as we embrace our larger being. Losing and finding repeats in unending cycles. Like Orpheus, our extended family narrative is a story of love, loss, descent, failure to restore what has been lost, dismemberment, and transformation. We makes the descent into the heart-caves of our ancestors.
Heart-Caves
We may or may not carry certain ancestors' DNA, but we are still psychophysically entangled with them whether it is deliberate or not, open to interaction or not, 'mutually unconscious' or not. This catalytic process may be more than a metaphor -- some sort of psychic synchronization or interwovenness, resonance, empathy, intersubjectivity, transference of unconscious material, or even mystic unity.
Modus Vivendi
As in life, when we interact with someone, we effect each other by sharing certain unconscious contents. We may or may not attribute it to the other, but we transcend our individual self with a bridge to the universal, the dynamic tension of opposites -- conscious/ unconscious, body and mind, self and world. The sense of separate selves dissolves in that solutio. The drop merges in the ocean of consciousness.
In the weird world of quantum physics, two linked particles can share a single fate, even when they’re miles apart. Two physicists have mathematically described how this spooky 'entanglement' effect could also bind particles across time. “You can send your quantum state into the future without traversing the middle time,” says lead author S. Jay Olson of Australia’s University of Queensland. Curiously, they plan to use it to encrypt messages.
The metadata coded in our genealogy and genetics can supply such information hidden in the cognitive and emotional unconscious as wave, structure, embodied memory, lineage, and collective wisdom. Genetics has even revealed seemingly improbable tales where a biological mother or father does not test positive as the parent of their known biological children.
Unknown to anyone they absorbed a twin in the womb who's DNA is found in their offspring, rather than their own. The parent has two sets of DNA. These chimeras with a vanishing twin, also known as fetal resorption, were undetectable and unimaginable in the last decade.
Even the DNA of former lovers whose cells have colonized another can show up in otherwise unrelated children. Identical and fraternal twins can become chimeras, trading chromosomes in the womb, including from another gender. A sense of destiny may reveal previously unintegrated reality potentials -- a glimpse of the ground or absolute field of being.
Attitudes and beliefs about genealogy are related to general beliefs and spirituality. Naturally, some will approach the psychogenealogical aspects with more purposiveness than others. Thus, it is one thing to a Mormon and another to a Jungian, new ager, heritage group member, or bloodline zealot. There are religious factors, generational divides, scientific understanding, gender, and ethnicity. In breezy noetic terms, we could call genealogy a transformative technology for hacking consciousness...but it hacks us back! High-tech tools help us expedite the research and discovery process.
Significant knowledge can enlighten our whole being. We can participate with it or remain unconscious of it. Jung said that "Dissolving an image means that you become that image." Jung noted that we are losing contact with our instincts, with the age-old forgotten wisdom stored up in us. The creative force and renewal of cycles are universal. Few forces are as strong in the psyche as genetics, sex and death. Ancestor veneration was one of the first primordial sacred notions to emerge in human culture.
Ancestors are those people you directly descend from, not extended family members. An ancestor or forebear is a parent or (recursively) the parent of an ancestor (i.e., a grandparent, great-grandparent, great-great-grandparent, and so forth). An ancestor is "any person from whom one is descended. In law the person from whom an estate has been inherited."
The World Tree is the global genealogical tree. Shamanic initiation requires multiple ascents and descents of the World Tree, a central axis that provides access to the other realms. Each time we gain greater consciousness of the unified reality of the transcendent dimension. In everyday life, we each must make a descent in order to gain experience, encounter deeper aspects of ourselves, and emerge again, transformed, in the experiential process of initiation.
The Conclusion:
Obviously, all genealogy is transgenerational. So long as our ancestry remains unconscious, we are marginalizing Nature and our nature. Yet, nature encompasses us. Jung notes that dreams are pure nature. He was concerned for our culture if we lost our roots. The same holds true at the personal level. Jung declares, "The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are."
Genealogy can be approached as a clinical science but remains more of an art -- a hermeneutic art, a shamanic art or self-initiation, as well as the art of relationship. We thread our way through a labyrinth of light and dark characters. Our charts are catacombs of our forebearers. We might have a different attitude to our lines in the process of discovery than we do once we have fully traced our descent from antiquity.
Our noble lineage becomes a royal road to ancient ancestors. But such a labyrinth of projections in the charts of a fantasist can produce self-delusion or over-heated zealotry. In the chart of a realist it may remain cold facts. Fabulists embellish, while pragmatists may be dry or stale.
A middle way might be both enlivened and informed. Genealogy mediates between the conscious and unconscious as we struggle to reveal what has so long been hidden. We also gain a reflective vantage point between ourselves and events we perceive. We allow the transcendent function to mold and re-shape us.
We Re-Collect
While some people may deeply pursue formal therapy, complex genogram relationships, or workshops, the vast majority will not. Those genealogical explorers will experience a spectrum of spontaneous effects, developing their own theories, interpretations, and directions from their ancestral encounters and revelations, conflated with their own beliefs. It may be, as Jung suggests, that through dreams the ancestors compensate our ego attitudes. Even then, we make subjective and objective observations and interpretations. In the blink of an eye, we can change our feelings about culture and human nature.
How little must the root-ancestors of each of our hoary lines have imagined in their own day for their millions of descendants? Even our "dead end" ancestors had antecedents; we just cannot know them, at least not through history. But seeds of knowledge in the head blossom in the fertile soil of the heart. We are formed directly from within.
Our Genesis
Genealogy used to be largely a quest for the father's direct line. But with today's algorithms we can find numerous distaff lines back through the ancestral field into the Heart of the Feminine and our mitochondrial inheritance, shared genetically by all genders. This type of DNA, stored in the cell's "batteries," is inherited from the mother, more or less unchanged. Like Y-DNA, distinct mtDNA lineages, are known as "haplogroups".
Often these matriarchal lines reach further back in time than the paternal line. This is the realm of the mothers and their families brought to the tree -- our gateway into the unconscious. We descend from it, and like Faust, into initiation in this womb of potentiality from which the world is continuously born as the creative flow of the unconscious.
The ancients often incorporated images of death in their funeral rites, on mummy cases, the walls of tombs, and death masks. Some might find death photos macabre and yet they are simply a final remembrance of the beloved, which can help us personify that relative.
Imagistically, the dead continue their very long journey in the afterlife. The unconscious believes in the afterlife. Their events become our meaningful experiences -- their actions our ideas and reflections, insights alive with creativity and fantasy. Our persistent search for Who? leads us down and back. Each one strikes a different part of us. From this churning, this dialectical tension, creativity emerges -- a myriad of intoxicating things, including the archetypal images of immortality.
Psychological effects of the genealogical pursuit will be different for everyone, with certain commonalities, such as symptoms, identification, projection, participation mystique, etc.
Without guidelines much of this natural personal process remains unconscious and can be problematical -- individually, in the family, and in genealogical and heritage groups. At a cultural level, we also assimilate the shock of a personal descent from historical figures -- the historical burden. Myths have a vital meaning, linking us with psychic processes and experiences "beyond consciousness in the dark hinterland of the psyche," as Jung notes (CW 9ii, Pg. 154). The collective is mythic and archetypal, while the cosmological is integrative.
The deeper we work into the World Tree the more widely shared the ancestry becomes. Chances are that most individuals seeking their ancestry will not seek treatment but can benefit from a contextualization of those experiences. We can jump to wrong conclusions from too little information. It happens to our beliefs and our cognitive interpretations.
They also will not stop at the Fourth Generation. What distinguishes de facto Transgenerational Genealogy from conventional or Jungian approaches is plunging deeper into the Medieval, legendary, and mythic layers of one's pedigree, rather than just the first few generations. But we can not concentrate only on the royal lines, because many other descents far out number them. Genetically, they have no priority; we may carry none of their genes.
Mythic Genealogy
Emerging from pre-conscious psyche, myths are our deep background and connect us with our instincts. Myth bridges conscious and unconscious cognition with an archaic quality and networks of symbols and imagery. It represents the meaning of being. They help us interpret the world. We need myth because it speaks emotionally of and to the soul, giving meaning to loss and suffering. It may be a painful struggle that reminds us we are very much alive. For example, in Wotan we find the ecstatic experience of fighting as well as the ecstatic joy of death.
English kings claimed descent from Wotan or Odin. Medieval monks pushed Woden’s ancestry back to Troy, then connected the Trojans to the Jewish scriptures and the lost tribe of Dan. They linked the Franks to the kings of Troy and the Merovingian descent from the family of Jesus. The Chronicle of Fredegar (7th century) mentions the legend. It was elaborated in the Liber historiae Francorum (probably 727). Such legends grew over time.
Our genealogy shows us how these stories migrated between cultures over time. We can imagine our descent from Aphrodite herself. Descending through Macedonians and Ptolemaic Egyptians, then Spanish and English nobility, she would be somewhere around a 100th great-grandmother. A pedigree prepared for Philip II of Spain traces his paternal descent from Hercules Lybius, said to have been a son of Dodanim / Rodanim, who is said to have been a great grandson of Noah (Genesis 10:4, 1 Chronicles 1:7).
The confabulations of the Welsh royals made them descendants of Joseph of Arimathea. They included a legendary cycle of Fisher Kings, and culminated in the Grail Cycle and stories of King Arthur's court and the magic of Avalon. Given the right gateway ancestors and royal lineage, all of these lines will show up in the standard genealogies of millions of people.
Many accept their fabulous descent from antiquity as literally true, while scholars know it to be false. But neither view is accurate. Even though confabulated at some point for political purposes, such mythical genealogies linking man to the divine are actually traditional, and considered 'best practice' for eras of history.
Even 'fictious' genealogies and medieval forgeries have a place in our lines, if only to show us how these connections used to be made. Medieval genealogies connecting ancient kings to Adam are pure invention. In the Historia Brittonum, the Welsh monk Nennius (9th century) grafted northern Europeans onto the classical tradition by making them not only descended from Noah, but the brothers of Romulus, legendary founder of Rome.
Modern genealogists want to cut bad connections, but myth is the DNA of our psyche. That is like killing the root of the tree. This is genealogy without proof, so it must be mythic. How about the mighty Zeus himself, king of the gods? With over 200 offspring, divine and demigods, there are many lines of potential descent. Or, the venerable Isis? She may be 100 - 150 generations back.
We find myth not only at the root of our ancient lines but in each and every life between, in the roles and archetypal patterns that constitute our direct heritage. Jung suggests the dynamic is the same whether we think of them as instincts or gods and goddesses. We can re-enchant our world by saying a prayer to the lords and ladies, by whatever names they wish to be known. In a prayer to all our relations, invisible spirits are made visible. Eternal being lies within each and every one of us.
Grail Bearers
The genealogical Quest for the Grail shares something in common with the quest for the Philosopher's Stone, which forms itself. The magic of genealogy as the magic of the Stone is in the seeking after it. The Grail is our own transformation.
We are filled by the Grail when we point ourselves toward it. The Grail serves the whole community.
The Philosopher's Stone declares,
"My light, exceeds every light, and my good things are better than all other good things. I give freely and reward the intelligent with joy and gladness, glory, riches, delights; and them that "seek" after me I make to know and understand, and to posses divine things." --Golden Tractates of Hermes
In the search for the stone, it is the work that counts. One should not worry too much about the right way. The right way with the wrong person will never succeed. The wrong way with the right person will eventually right itself, for the stone is found at the crossroads of Heaven and Earth. Those who seek the Stone with true heart, shall be found by the Stone itself.
As someone's descendant we answer the call. Like the Fisher King, we seek the Salmon of Knowledge. The transgenerational group is integrated within the individual. Much of the effect is intrinsic. For Jung, fantasy is an integrative function.
Imaginative expressions of hidden forces appear spontaneously as the direct expression of psychic life, creative and imaginative activity inherent in each and every moment. We meet each wondrous, wild moment by relating to it, not controlling it. We really can't separate the past from the present.
Relationship is created and recreated from what has been and what is yet to be. Our challenge is to claim a place for our own imagination and intellect. We learn to see and bear the pain of seeing and suffering. Healing and wounding alternate in a rhythm echoing a sense of transience and death.
"You will feel me with you even from the Land of the Dead."
Our lineage is our own, personal Mystery Play. You can only enter into your own mysteries. We can allow the phenomena to speak - the multitude of personalities to speak, to be personified. Images are also voices -- messages from the dead. We need a sense of the ancestors. For most, that sense may be more poetic than clinical...the poetry of everyday life as it stretches back into the mists before time.
From the earliest societies to contemporary civilizations, genealogical methods have traced ancestries back to gods, animal totems, and legendary heroes. Originally the oral history narratives of clan or tribe bequeathed the lineage. In ancient Sumeria, Babylon, Egypt, India and China, kings and heads of state claimed their rights to the throne through genealogy. Royal totems include dragon, eagle, lion, wolf, serpent, boar, etc.
The Old Testament recounts the "begats" of Adam, Noah and Abraham, and later the royal bloodline of the House of David. Muslims trace their descent from Muhammed, while the Greeks and Romans and Vikings linked their heritage to the gods. The importance of ancestry to soul appears in Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian genealogies. In Germanic folklore the soul was considered, in certain respects, something inherited.
What is the power of the individual against the voice of the whole people in him? ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 365.
There is essentially no difference between doing genealogy or psychogenealogy, except perhaps the addition of a few evocative techniques. We don't just study it, but interact with it -- with the ancestors. It may be less what we think about it and more its effect on us. Information is naturally excited in the genealogical process as images, sensations, intuitions, synchronicities, insights, and more.
But psychogenealogy attempts to find workable answers when elements embedded in the family memory are now limiting an individual in a particular way.
Individual and collective consciousness is shaped in crucial ways by cognition of collective family experiences. What tends to get passed on is the overwhelming, unbearable, unthinkable. Much of history has been lost, distorted, or blotted out. We can focus on genetics, culture, spirit, and emotion as keys to the ancestral door. We can break our identification with a traumatic or unresolved past and still honor and consciously grieve our ancestors.
Genealogy is a tool for family therapy and self-knowledge. We carry secret stories from before our lifetime. The entire family tree is both a trauma archive and a resource for healing. Yet children raised in difficult circumstances often show enhanced mental flexibility. Much of what is unconscious to us is revealed in our lines. We still have to amplify, work with, interpret, and integrate that information.
We can reframe our relationship with pain, fear, and grief at the familial and ancestral level. Current research on well-being describes two perspectives: the hedonic approach, which focuses on happiness and defines well-being in terms of pleasure attainment and pain avoidance; and the eudaimonic approach, which focuses on meaning and self-realization and defines well-being in terms of the degree to which a person is fully functioning. The later may be more important. Composed of the words "eu" ("good") and "daimōn" ("spirit") it fits the ancestral theme.
This spirit is an autonomous psychic happening, a hush that follows the storm, a reconciling light in the darkness of man’s mind, secretly bringing order into the chaos of his soul. ~Carl Jung; CW 11; Paragraph 260.
This is part of the Genealogical Journey.
In this way we follow Nature and our nature back to our Origin.
We can pursue both a psychological and genealogical approach to wisdom. Realizations and self-actualization arise naturally in the process of compiling such a genealogy, as we recall exactly who we are, thereby approaching our wholeness...
for a 21st century Renaissance.
Spiritually, genealogy can strengthen our faith in the ancestors. We may find spiritual meaning in reconstructions of suppressed ancient religions or eclectic practices. In conducting Celtic genealogical research we rediscover the folk stories of our ancestors or the ancient deities once worshipped in other lands. The precise meaning and value of the old gods and goddesses will vary between listeners, but some find spiritual meaning in reclaiming ancient mysteries nearly lost to the modern ages.
Subjective mental life is a primary metaphor of
subjective Experience;
Primary Metaphor Becomes Embodied
and maps across generations.
The Grounding of the Whole is the grounding of its parts.
We reason with such metaphors.
(Lakoff & Johnson)
This argument against expunging legend and myth
from traditional genealogy practice is simple:
What happens outside us in these days is the image that the peoples live in events, to bequeath this image immemorially to far-off times so that they might learn from it for their own way; just as we learned from the images that the ancients had lived before us in events. ~Carl Jung, The Red book, Page 239.
"But if the believer without religion now thinks that he has got rid of mythology he is deceiving himself: he cannot get by without "myth."
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 482-488
Psychology Today: Why do people spend decades tracing their lineages? Thinking about one's ancestors provides comfort, improves one's ability to deal with challenges and actually boosts cognitive performance, new research shows.
In a simple experiment, researchers asked people to think about their ancestors (or something else) and then measured their beliefs about their own performance on several cognitive tests. People who had been made to think about their ancestors expected to do better on the tests.
But did they actually do better? Yes. Researchers Peter Fischer, Anne Sauer, Claudia Vogrincic and Silke Weisweiler found that people who had recently thought about their ancestors actually did better on cognitive tests of intelligence than people who had been made to think of other things.
Therapeutic Initiation
Inner Voices: Reverence Toward the Souls of the Ancestors
"Take pains to waken the dead. Dig deep mines and throw in sacrificial gifts, so that they reach the dead. Reflect in good heart upon evil, this is the way to the ascent. But before the ascent, everything is night and Hell." ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 244.
Psychologically this means that the souls of the ancestors (potential factors, qualities, talents, possibilities, and so on, which we have inherited from all the lines of our ancestry) are waiting in the unconscious, and are ready at any time to begin a new growth.
~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 230.
These are, so to speak, the re-animated souls of the ancestors which have been lying dormant in the unconscious, and the alchemists call these units or souls the sleepers or the dead in Hades who are resurrected by the "holy waters" (that is the miraculous water of alchemy, the fertilizing Mercury). ~Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 230.
Learning Objectives:
To understand the significance of our genealogy as more than
a metaphor for the cyclical unfolding of our life story
To understand the timing of transgenerational patterns throughout
different eras of history, and times of transition
To apply the timing of great cycles to our genealogy and life events
and reflect on the unfolding of our goals
If his individual experience is a living thing, it will share the quality of all life, which does not stagnate but, being in continual flux, brings ever new aspects to light.
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 482-488
History often reveals who underwent trauma:
wars; plague; torture; physical and mental abuse; abandonment; disowning; miscarriage; stillbirth; orphaning; kidnapping; birth trauma and defects; neglect; arson; homelessness; migration; toxic caregivers; suicide; murder; terror; spiritual abuse; divorce or never marrying; family secrets; attachment disorder; banishing; grief; dependence; incest; rape; affairs, separation; isolation; "mystery ancestors"; addictions; exhaustion; hypochondria; obsession; paranoia; personality disorder; schizophrenia; depression; emotional numbness; heresy; chronic anxiety; crime; social, financial, legal, displacement; zealotry; excommunication; poverty; famine; humiliation; internment; fanaticism; bigotry; cults; expulsion; eviction; slavery; betrayal; genocide; revenge; anger; execution; molestation; extortion; conquering;
natural disasters; catastrophes, cataclysm; cultural and ethical issues, etc.
Image: "the sound of creation", Painting of ostad farschian
“Look in thy life for this order. Balance and order thy life. Quell all the Chaos of the emotions and thou shalt have order in Life. Order brought forth from Chaos will bring thee the Word of the Source, will thee the power of Cycles, and make of thy Soul a force that freewill extend through the ages, a perfect Sun from the Source.”
– Emerald Tablets of Thoth, the Egyptian God of Wisdom and Science
PREMIS
"It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live according to nature."
--Marcus Aurelius [my 61st great grandfather]
10,000 Paths to the Passed
The tale of our genesis is our prima materia and our ultima materia, the unknown and self-knowledge. Our serpentine lines of descent recursively bite their own tails. A study of our tree provokes reflection on our destiny. Connection to Source is the basis of creation, which manifests something unique from formless nothing.
Genealogy has a dry factual basis but the imaginal dimension is also inherent in the form of self-unfolding. It helps us create and cultivate an imaginal sacred space where soul and spirit unfold. It creates a wealth of energy we find is a source of wisdom and containment. We awaken from our illusion of separateness.
We cross the threshold from the edge of the sacred, into the temenos, moving toward the numinous at the far boundaries of our mythically-rooted lines. As we stay with a family line, working our way up through the children, we get to "know" them. The sacred makes claims on us as well as offering gifts. It takes the form of personal experience.
Resonance Phenomena
Our ancestral deep field is a plenum of personalities and procreation -- a community of virtual beings and sacred space of wholeness. It pulsates with life force and the creative energy of love. We can imagine messages resonating along the many family lines -- waves of vibration that connect with the ancient past like some archaic tin-can and string 'telephone.' Suck 'kindling' is an important part of our neurological process. Listening and sounding is interactive.
In The Emerald Tablet, Thoth says, "Send through thy body a wave of vibration, irregular first and regular second, repeating time after time until free. Start the wave force in thy brain center. Direct it in waves from thine head to thy foot."
The recipient then becomes the receiver and, through the process of entrainment, modulates the same frequency and the same waveform in a reversed phase. They become coupled and are no longer distinguishable from one another. Entrainment, the second stage of this process in-between two physical systems, is a process of synchronization causing object ‘X’ to vibrate in an identical way in response to object ‘Y’ (Miller, 2013). Nature’s ensemble of voices curiously leads to systems of increasing complexity, and hints at a collective intelligence.
Follow the Pain & Fear Deeper
Pain also leads us into liminal space. When we surrender control, something genuinely new can happen. We see beyond our self-interest and security issues. The liminal opens a space for alternative consciousness to emerge.
Furio Jesi suggests the mask of pain and despair counterfeits the reality of death. He cites Dionysus as the God of pain because loss of the past is painful when the truth of the past is not mentioned. Primordial initiation was about the experience of death and rebirth -- change from one state to another, from one Time to another. The death that precedes rebirth is the abandonment of the past, but rebirth includes everything from the past that was and is alive that we don't remember.
Furio Jesi, Mythological material. Myth and anthropology in Central European culture, Einaudi , Turin 1979.
House-Burial
Some cultures wanted their dead so close to home and family, they buried them under their house. In the Neolithic era, the dead "slept" beneath the floor where their kindred continued their activities. The Greeks and Minoans interred loved ones, especially children, in jars buried in the floor. The Dravidians buried the dead in the house so their spirits could be more easily reborn as children in the same family. Poverty is another reason of under home burials.
The Cherokee buried their dead in the floor directly under the place where the person died. Some cultures later removed the bones and venerated them in the house. Sometimes only the soul of the dead is returned to the house after burial elsewhere. We likely wouldn't do so, but we might have file boxes of photos and genealogical research "buried" in the basement or elsewhere, symbolically echoing the ancient sentiment of "housing" the dead.
Even grieving can be a sacred space. We cannot get rid of the pain until we discern what it has to teach us. Much of our understandable anger is actually disguised and denied sadness. Meditative dialogues and co-meditation with the ancestors become possible. As we penetrate the unknown we have to tolerate not knowing and maintain trust in the process.
As we work, formlessness congeals into form and we arose from that. Such a healing space is naturally therapeutic and traditionally described as "the center of the world." In our case this archetypal center is the Tree of Life that connects heaven and earth. It realigns us with the Cosmos with a new perspective -- a much larger story. We repeat the cycle of discovering and adding ancestors and the images and symbolism of their lives. We get out of it the transformed energy we put into the process.
In Letters, Vol. I, Jung suggests, "The community is nothing without the individual and if a community consists of individuals that do not fulfill their individual telos, then the community has not telos or a very wrong one" (p. 464). The only thing we need to know is ourselves, the greatest secret, the greatest gnosis.
In Liber Novus, (Pg. 274, Fn 75), Jung notes that life is an energetic process with its own goal. "But every energetic process is in principle irreversible and therefore unequivocally directed toward a goal, and the goal is the state of rest ..."
All These Paths Lead to You
The call to adventure is the call to the future and interiority. Genealogy makes it graphically obvious that many paths lead to the central experience and facilitate the other paths that lead there. An underground stream runs through the hidden ground of our being. We can meander through the furthest reaches of the transpersonal imagination, purposefully seeking that which remains as-yet-unknown in the depths. It is just a matter of being present with our experience, open to what is found along the way, be it answers or ambiguity.
Mankind has wandered in the fields of reality seeking its true nature since the dawn of time. A fiercely lived life is an artform -- illumination in action, based on discipline, practice and service. The specific “Art” is alchemical, a merger of inner and outer reality in One World. Jung said, "To live what is right and to let what is false die, that is the art of life." (Liber Novus, Pg 274, Footnote 75).
Rootedness
Conscious experiences belong to slipstreams of consciousness, and these streams are part of nature’s process. They can be described in physical and psychological terms as our sacred journey. Experience is a process rooted in the stream of consciousness and happens “to” a person in that stream of consciousness. Each person is an aspect of nature’s process whose stream can flow forth like a fountainhead to quench and nourish many over the course of time.
Whose Trauma Is It?
Whether your genealogical methods are clinical or intuitive, you face your lineage as an individual. Each ancestor relationship you form is special to you because intuition is never completely conscious. Regardless of our style of genealogy practice, we need to approach recovery of our deep identity with a sense of balance. We want to recover our ancestors, not reinvent them. We want to recontextualize them and reinvigorate that spirit. At some point all family lines fade into amnesia.
Trauma can be physical or psycho-emotional impact. We may seek specific trauma recovery while a variety of behavioral, emotional and physical conditions are rooted in unresolved traumatic experiences, whether in real-time crisis or or post-event disorder. Anger and hate may be there but so is our inner guidance system, the capacity to love and accept.
Transgenerational Inheritance
Our inheritance from ancestors is both good and burdensome. Their issues become our issues through genetics, epigenetics, and shared trauma. Not only our emotions, but what we eat and breath affect the genes of our descendants. The environment affects gene expression and disease development.
Transgenerational integration suggests that trauma can become displaced in time, leading to symptoms and repetition compulsion. Freud saw repetitious compulsions or symptoms as a way of “working through” or exorcising the pain of traumatic events and thoughts. But it is also re-traumatizing. Working through requires some degree of re-living of events as we re-enliven emotional and mental patterns.
Metaphors Be With You
However, we can safely use metaphors rather than the historical dimension. How we know what we know is expressed naturally in metaphor. Images arise as self-generating metaphors -- what is happening and what it's like. Thus, we can dig up our buried sorrow, or release bottled-up anger.
We can express our experiences symbolically. Metaphoric expressions are tied to our unconscious or implicit experiences. They are inherent to our language. Metaphor functions like dreams and symptoms that simultaneously express material from different dynamic, structural, and topographical psychic levels.
With metaphor we can link our experiences across diverse times and situations. Change the root, change the reaction. We treat the figurative language as real. The figures of the subconscious pictures or constructs are treated as real. Resistance is also information from which a metaphor can emerge. Such metaphors are naturally healing.
Lacan reversed Freud's conception: Symptoms help us reorganize our life so we continue to derive a secret enjoyment from something that, on a conscious level, we want to be rid of. We may not really enjoy it, but what is "familiar" from family life, even chaos, is often more comfortable than what is healthy.
Trauma Crosses Generations
Trauma in one generation can be transmitted consciously and unconsciously to later generations. For example, three or more generations can share similar traumas, such as early loss of a parent, and/or early loss of a spouse. They may all share multi-generational denial, repression, triggers, PTSD, unresolved grief and attendant depression.
The contradiction between conscious aversion and unconscious enjoyment actually warps our symbolic-imaginary spacetime, causing the strange tail-chasing, repetitive “orbiting” behavior of all neuroses and obsessive behavior. Our miseries or dreary compulsions conceal,
preserve, and protect a vital and enlivening unconscious dimension. Genealogy and therapy help us unbury these toxic attachments from our genetic tree. Expressive therapies address intergenerational trauma and psychophysical conditions.
There are numerous changes at the physical, neurobiological, emotional, and spiritual levels. There are phases of response after trauma. We can map traumas across our own lives and related others in a timeline revealing personal challenges and stress triggers. For self-care and self-regulation we can make a stress management plan. Some might choose to use expressive or genogram techniques for trauma integration.
Often it is necessary to clarify a vague content by giving it a visible form. This can be done by drawing, painting, or modeling. Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.” (Jung, CW 16, Para 181)
Cross Time Communication
Paradoxically, our most personal past is a telos. This emergent aim or purpose pulls us forward into our deep past through a process in the present. In genealogy, it is one thing to know what to look for and another to know where to look. The red thread passes through the eye of the cosmic needle.
Like Aboriginal song-lines from the Dreamtime, our genealogical lines reveal place names with their own stories. We have to sense our way along, to navigate through the terrain of the unconscious. Such dreaming-tracks cut through the wilderness of the unknown. We catch the rhythm and 'observe' the landscape. By such a path, through sacred movement of the soul we discover our Self, a dynamic emancipation of our life energies and self-actualization.
"Our concepts of space and time have only approximate validity, and there is therefore a wide field for minor and major deviations.
In view of all this, I lend an attentive ear to the strange myths of the psyche, and take a careful look at the varied events that come my way, regardless of whether or not they fit in with my theoretical postulates." (Jung, MDR, Pg. 300)
Reassume the Past
Our ancestors embody our innate unconscious metaphors and archetypal autonomy. Archetypes give form to chaos and intuition. Jung said, "An archetypal content expresses itself, first and foremost, in metaphors." In this sense, genealogy has a transcendent function, concerning the meaning of being in time -- psyche's innate purposiveness, aesthetics, and biocultural evolution.
False Trails
We must watch our conditioned responses directly. As we engage in this Great Work, we encounter merge issues, dead ends, and false trails. We cannot rewrite the past. We must be willing the surrender understanding we thought we had found if it proves fallacious.
We must frame and reframe our pictures of the past as it grows and changes each time we access our genealogy, each time we contemplate it within. In that process we will make many concretizations and assumptions, commit cultural errors, and encounter lacuna we cannot fill with any evidence. The gap in time is also a gulf in mores and ways of life, so be careful making anachronistic personal judgments from today's standpoint.
Hypnoidal Dynamics
We all have our own wounds and our ancestors did, too. The wound healing cycle is an instrument of recovery. Pathological traumatic stress (PTSD) has hypnoidal dynamics indicating unresolved trauma. Fostering resilience with direct suggestion, metaphor, and transpersonal methods that bring healing from beyond the self is another long-term recovery tool. Analytical methods help internal conflict resolution and transformation. Bio-energetics and hands on methods help the physical and energy body.
Looking at what lies ahead becomes part of our noncausal interpretation of the past, an emotional movement from darkness to light. We live nested in two levels of personal and transpersonal being. We should be watchful for our own projections and distortions.
We must bear in mind that we do not make projections, rather they happen to us. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 563.
Of course you really don't make projections: they are; it is a mistake when one speaks of making a projection, because in that moment it is no longer a projection, but your own property. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1493.
Ghosts and Spirits. These phenomena are projections from the background of the psyche, autonomous inner images of a subjective nature, obeying no conscious intention, but coming and going at their own volition. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Vol. 1, Page 40
Those wounds teach us something about ourselves that effects a holistic re-patterning. Going through our wound means realizing we will never again be the same once we emerge from this initiatory process. All forms are dissolved in the underground stream, the rushing stream of consciousness, in a baptism or healing immersion in the vast ocean of deep consciousness. We ride the dragon on the backs of our ancestors to the realm of the Unborn, returning to the pure creative energy of the cosmic womb for the mystery of alchemical rebirth.
Going through our wound is a genuine (ego) death experience, as our old self "dies" in the process, while a new, more expansive and empowered human potential is born. Thus, the Grail is not only about birth, it is about catalyzing transformational rebirth into a nonlinear, nonlocal expanded sense of self beyond mere ego inflation. Self-actualization or self-realization implies the stabilizing or grounding of the spiritual fruits of inner exploration. This is gnosis.
Marie-Louise Von Franz, said "the wounded healer IS the archetype of the Self (our wholeness, the God within) and is at the bottom of all genuine healing procedures," resulting in a more open-ended and expansive sense of who we think we are, and who we imagine others are in relation to us. The wound is not only a personal experience, but a doorway, a hyper-dimensional portal into the transpersonal / archetypal realm, which is a higher order (in terms of freedom) of our being.
Self-Compassion
Both future and past operate in the present, symbolizing our as-yet-unlived life potential, including extension into eternity. Anticipation fuels the process, but everything cannot happen at once as we need time to digest it. We tend to overlook the infinitely vast scale of time at every moment. Genealogy helps us keep such insights in sight by softening the boundaries of birth and death in our narrative, exposing us experientially to the unbound sweep of deep time.
We are neither gods nor demons, and neither were our ancestors though we are all filled by archetypal potentials, their archetypal pathologies, and symptoms. Our collective unconscious -- the primary phenomena -- informs the experience of being. Suffering merges with hopeful transcendence. Instead of dissociating, we experience it by creatively collapsing the future-past timeline, reflectively and reflexively interpreting that experience. From some perspective there is a single psyche and a single subject that is not acquired through personal experience.
Archetypal Merger
All individual lives are simultaneously participating in the collective unconscious, as graphically depicted in our genealogical charts. Jung links the realization of withinness with the image of the World Mother, Mother Bride, rebirth, and the archetype of vision of what is waiting to be seen and known -- a symbolic within. Our revelations express the aims and instincts of the soul which invites us into the sacred marriage with psychic life. Our story is a living symbol of eternal mystery, personal and collective.
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3 Million Year Old Man
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Jung spoke of the '2 million year old man' within us all. But Genus homo is as much as 3 million years old, with ancient patterns including hunting strategies, mating patterns, intergroup relations. Genetics has shown that modern man is a hybrid of at least three species. Some ethnic groups include 4-5% Neanderthal or Denisovan.
We continue to change.
Genome researchers at the University of Chicago have identified more than 700 regions in human DNA where apparently strong selection has occurred, driving the spread of genes linked to a broad range of characteristics.
"These are very recent events—within the past ten thousand years," said Jonathan Pritchard, a geneticist whose laboratory team conducted the study.
The results suggest that humans in different regions have continued to adapt in numerous ways to both environmental changes and cultural innovations.” (2006)
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/03/0308_060308_evolution.html
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We participate in that Royal Marriage, the telos of Jungian work, when we lovingly hold those opposites, all those couples that metaphorically and literally express the union of personal and archetypal mediators, anima and animus. Authentic and genuine relationship is complimentary.
Genealogy is thus another way to experience and integrate the concept that psyche is matter, and matter is psyche. What is-is, and it is divine. Jung says, "In this deification mystery you make yourself into the vessel, and are a vessel of creation in which the opposites reconcile." As St. Augustine said, "For it is secretly, and in the hidden depths of the spirit, that the soul of man is joined to the word of God, so that they are two in one flesh." This is the marriage of heaven and earth, the eternal and transient.
The divine is a divine couple, the father and mother of souls, who give birth to the divine child in the depth of winter. Jung speaks of the path of soul as a phenomenological path -- the soul lives and knows. This is Gnosis. It is a psychic fact we are born in the divine world to the divine couple. The divine is within the unconscious but autonomous. It gives birth to the divine child, to possibility, the potential of the soul. Our spiritual task is to protect the child.
Sacred Marriage, Sacred Feminine
Perhaps the archetypal appeal of sacred marriage -- the union of alchemical opposites, hierosgamos, or Mysterium Coniunctionis -- is one reason many people become fascinated with royal lines almost to the exclusion of others. Yet it is only the royal lines that have epic historical scope and are hypothetically traceable back to ancient times.
Spiritual marriage recalls the union of archetypal figures in the rebirth mysteries of antiquity.. These are ancient rites of fertility, regeneration, and psychophysical transformation, an archetypal drive inherent in our nature and a primordial mystery of sexuality.
Myths come to life in ways that resonate with our own lives. According to Jung, the deeper mystery of the unifying myth represents the psychological process of "individuation," the "inner marriage" of the opposites within the psyche - masculine/feminine, conscious/unconscious, divine/human - giving birth to the archetype of wholeness.
Naming Our Ancestors
When writing appeared in the 2nd and 3rd millennium BC, “a new concept of creation enters religious thinking: Nothing exists unless it has a name. The name means existence.” “Naming has profound significance in the Old Mesopotamian belief system. The name reveals the essence of the bearer; it also carries magic power . . . What is important to observe here is that the concept of creation has changed, at a certain period in history from being merely the acting out of the mystic force of female fertility to being a conscious act of creation ” by merely expressing “the name”. (Gerda Lerner, 1986)
As preparation for eternity, the ancient Egyptians made a priority not only of preserving the body but also preserving the name of the deceased. The body, a combination of the non-physical ka, ba, name and shadow, was thought to make a person complete in this life and in the next.
So, perhaps in this archaic sense, we complete our ancestors as we recollect and re-member them. Just as archaeologists can only tell so much from digging up artifacts and interpreting archival material, psychologists and genealogists can do no more.
Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood? --Jung
TRANSGENERATIONAL GENEALOGY
The Argument:
After the deconstruction of the postmodern era, we need a reconstruction from the ground up -- a post-postmodern coagulatio to match that solutio. We know the whole circular alchemical opus is contained in the formula "dissolve and coagulate." The desire for meaning coagulates. In coagulatio the self-conscious ego and the transpersonal Self meet and interact. There is really no substitute for drawing one's own lines, engaging, and 'grounding' them with psychogenealogy.
A sense of metaphor is a gnosis rooted in alchemy. Our old self image dissolves as we embrace our larger being. The conscious standpoint expands in self-actualizing to accommodate a proliferation of transpersonal projections emerging from the unconscious together. They exponentially strengthen and enlarge the essence of the contracted ego.
When we form inner relationships we render a transpersonal force personal by incorporating it into our manifest world. They begin to take on form and substance for us. The concretization of psychic forces of coagulatio grounds our self-actualization -- actualizing psychic energies. We bring them back to earth as a living part of our psychophysical nature. All standard procedures of family therapy can be used to amplify the process -- psychodrama, family sculpting, empty chair, roundtables, genogram, etc.
Coagulation incites the dreambody to action, churning up the deeper dynamics which are drawn into the imaginal world, into the realm of symbols and archetypes. They manifest there as a whole continuum of dreams, emergent memories, art, and hypnagogic images.
Trends and patterns become evident as the raw prima materia cooks. Arousing our empathy and resistance, what was unconscious or elusive gains solidity. What escaped you before becomes crucial. Family logic and repeating patterns emerge. We imitate or create. Ancestors, with their accomplishments, secrets and shame, begin to take their places as part of our natural world. Image becomes manifestation in a grounded multisensory moment.
A Life of Their Own
Our descent into our genealogy may be shallow or steep, depending on our focus, rate, and capacity to integrate the genealogical material. There are major and minor inroads through which we will travel again and again. Losing and finding repeats in unending cycles. Something we thought we 'got' may later be amplified beyond our previous conception. Or, we suppress or 'forget' important points we once knew about our ancestors and ourselves. Each ancestor becomes a stepping stone. We consolidate and move deeper.
We may realize we've embraced some illusions or that emancipation, amalgamation, and transfiguration cannot be grounded. Dig deeper. Like Orpheus, our extended family narrative is a story of love, loss, descent, failure to restore what has been lost, dismemberment, and transformation. Opening to the ancestors we embrace the individuation process with open arms.
"This is how madness begins, this is madness ... You cannot get conscious of these unconscious facts without giving yourself to them. If you can overcome your fear of the unconscious and can let yourself go down, then these facts take on a life of their own." (Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Pg. 253. Fn. 211)
Heart-Caves
We make the descent into the heart-caves of our ancestors. Joseph Campbell said, "The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek." In MDR, Jung (pg. 88) echoes a similar statement, "My own understanding is the sole treasure I possess, and the greatest. Though infinitely small and fragile in comparison with the powers of darkness, it is still a light, my only light."
We may or may not carry certain ancestral DNA, but we are still psychophysically entangled with them whether it is deliberate or not, open to interaction or not, 'mutual unconscious' or not. We are seemingly knotted together with some ancestors, through our dysfunctions and unconscious style of perception. If the symptom ties together the Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic it is beyond meaning. This might shake up our psychogenealogical assumptions and reinvigorate our practice. Glimmerings of the whole is all that can be expected. Our genealogy grows its own self, like a plant.
Lacan's debatable theory of phenomenological experience
describes mirroring as a stage with a significant symbolic dimension -- a field of radical alterity. Within our genealogical work, we can produce subjective changes at the symbolic level, resulting in imaginal and real effects. Whether such theoretical claims are true or false, changes in subjective attitudes, (including those involving our ancestors), lead to real world changes (natural consequences) in behavior, emotions, thoughts, and spirit.
For Lacan, the symptom (sinthome) is not a call for interpretation, but a preferred mode of "enjoying the unconscious." For example, depression may be an appropriate response to the world we live in, not something to medicate away. We gain personal and historical perspective seeing how our ancestors responded to the unknowns and challenges in their own lives. We don't need answers to the wrong questions but a tolerance for ambiguity, uncertainty, not-knowing and tolerating the terror of not having answers.
Hillman says, it may be easier to talk about these ideas as archetypes, the soul’s relation with death, with body, the world, other souls, love, beauty, sickness, family, ancestors, power, history, time. The gods return to us as archetypes. This may be a move beyond the Collective Unconscious to the World Unconscious.
This can be backed up by Hillman's soul-making approach that a singular interpretation of a dream stops the process cold, in a perhaps erroneous, if resonant idea of what it means. For Hillman, dreams are underworldly (from the viewpoint of death/the dead) commentaries on or critiques of our waking life. We don't need to determine how our dreams help us achieve our goals, as much as discover what the dream-self thinks of those goals.
Hillman refuses to make meaning of dreams, preferring to follow the uncertainty. There is no attempt at a cure or even enrichment. In genealogy the mythic root informs us about human behavior. This happens naturally, unconsciously and doesn't need to be driven by a therapeutic or self-development agenda. It's not about the past, present, or future but about the soul-world. In the Red Book, Jung says, "Dreams pave the way for life, and they determine you without your understanding their language."
Hillman locates dreams in the mysterious and hidden House of Hades (Pluto), a journey through the Underworld much like Orpheus. He deals with the dream in relation to the soul and death. He considers them messengers of the Underworld and of soul that first dissolve and then transform us. There is inherent multiplicity of perspectives and meaning in the images themselves, rather than a single truth. It is the soul that takes on meaning, rather than an image that reveals meaning to the ego or narrative. The dream remains alive.
We sense that dreams mean well for us, back us up and urge us on, understand us more deeply than we understand ourselves, expand our sensuousness and spirit, continually make up new things to give us … It is like the love of an old man, the usual personal content of love voided by coming death, yet still intense, playful, and tenderly, carefully close.
— James Hillman, The Dream And The Underworld
We might draw an analogy between dreams and our ancestral phenomenology. Awake or asleep, it is the dreaming that is important. If we dream of the ancestors, they may dream of us right back - perhaps, poetically they dream unceasingly. In some sense we are that dream. This catalytic process may be more than a metaphor -- some sort of psychic synchronization or interwovenness, resonance, empathy, intersubjectivity, transference of unconscious material, or even mystic unity.
Modus Vivendi
As in life, when we interact with someone, we effect each other by sharing certain unconscious contents. We may or may not attribute it to the other, but we transcend our individual self with a bridge to the universal, the dynamic tension of opposites -- conscious/ unconscious, body and mind, self and world. The sense of separate selves dissolves in that solutio. The drop merges in the ocean of consciousness.
In the weird world of quantum physics, two linked particles can share a single fate, even when they’re miles apart. Two physicists have mathematically described how this spooky 'entanglement' effect could also bind particles across time. “You can send your quantum state into the future without traversing the middle time,” says lead author S. Jay Olson of Australia’s University of Queensland. Curiously, they plan to use it to encrypt messages.
The metadata coded in our genealogy and genetics can supply such information hidden in the cognitive and emotional unconscious as wave, structure, embodied memory, lineage, and collective wisdom. The body remembers everything. Genetics has even revealed seemingly improbable tales where a biological mother or father does not test positive as the parent of their known biological children.
Unknown to anyone they absorbed a twin in the womb who's DNA is found in their offspring, rather than their own. The parent has two sets of DNA. These chimeras with a vanishing twin, also known as fetal resorption, were undetectable and unimaginable in the last decade.
Even the DNA of former lovers whose cells have colonized another can show up in otherwise unrelated children. Identical and fraternal twins can become chimeras, trading chromosomes in the womb, including from another gender. A sense of destiny may reveal previously unintegrated reality potentials -- a glimpse of the ground or absolute field of being.
Attitudes and beliefs about genealogy are related to general beliefs and spirituality. Naturally, some will approach the psychogenealogical aspects with more purposiveness than others. Thus, it is one thing to a Mormon and another to a Jungian, new ager, heritage group member, or bloodline zealot. There are religious factors, generational divides, scientific understanding, gender, and ethnicity. In breezy noetic terms, we could call genealogy a transformative technology for hacking consciousness...but it hacks us back! High-tech tools help us expedite the research and discovery process. Though they take the Spirit World literally, Mormons imagine that dead family members are already doing missionary work "on the other side of the veil." And we participate in that work on "this side of the veil" through genealogy and other means.
Significant knowledge can enlighten our whole being. We can participate with it or remain unconscious of it. Jung said that "Dissolving an image means that you become that image." Jung noted that we are losing contact with our instincts, with the age-old forgotten wisdom stored up in us. The creative force and renewal of cycles are universal. Few forces are as strong in the psyche as genetics, sex and death. Ancestor veneration was one of the first primordial sacred notions to emerge in human culture.
The World Tree is the global genealogical tree. Shamanic initiation requires multiple ascents and descents of the World Tree, a central axis that provides access to the other realms. Each time we gain greater consciousness of the unified reality of the transcendent dimension. In everyday life, we each must make a descent in order to gain experience, encounter deeper aspects of ourselves, and emerge again, transformed, in the experiential process of initiation.
The Conclusion:
Obviously, all genealogy is transgenerational. So long as our ancestry remains unconscious, we are marginalizing Nature and our nature. Yet, nature encompasses us. Jung notes that dreams are pure nature. He was concerned for our culture if we lost our roots. The same holds true at the personal level. Jung declares, "The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are."
Genealogy can be approached as a clinical science but remains more of an art -- a hermeneutic art, a shamanic art or self-initiation, as well as the art of relationship. We thread our way through a labyrinth of light and dark characters. Our charts are catacombs of our forebearers. We might have a different attitude to our lines in the process of discovery than we do once we have fully traced our descent from antiquity.
Our noble lineage becomes a royal road to ancient ancestors. But such a labyrinth of projections in the charts of a fantasist can produce self-delusion or over-heated zealotry. In the chart of a realist it may remain cold facts. Fabulists embellish, while pragmatists may be dry or stale.
A middle way might be both enlivened and informed. Jung urged, "For the understanding of the unconscious we must see our thoughts as events, as phenomena." (Liber Novus, p. 249) Genealogy mediates between the conscious and unconscious as we struggle to reveal what has so long been hidden. We also gain a reflective vantage point between ourselves and events we perceive. We allow the transcendent function to mold and re-shape us.
He [Philemon] confronted me in an objective manner, and I understood that there is something in me which can say things that I do not know and do not intend, things which may even be directed against me. (Jung, MDR, Page 183)
We Re-Collect
While some people may deeply pursue formal therapy, complex genogram relationships, or workshops, the vast majority will not. Those genealogical explorers will experience a spectrum of spontaneous effects, developing their own theories, interpretations, and directions from their ancestral encounters and revelations, conflated with their own beliefs. It may be, as Jung suggests, that through dreams the ancestors compensate our ego attitudes. Even then, we make subjective and objective observations and interpretations. In the blink of an eye, we can change our feelings about culture and human nature.
How little must the root-ancestors of each of our hoary lines have imagined in their own day for their millions of descendants? Even our "dead end" ancestors had antecedents; we just cannot know them, at least not through history. Genetic genealogy tells us our ancient tribes and ancestral lands, but not the names of any of them or their families. But seeds of knowledge in the head blossom in the fertile soil of the heart. We are formed directly from within.
Our Genesis
Genealogy used to be largely a quest for the father's direct line. But with today's algorithms we can find numerous distaff lines back through the ancestral field into the Heart of the Feminine and our mitochondrial inheritance, shared genetically by all genders. This type of DNA, stored in the cell's "batteries," is inherited from the mother, more or less unchanged. Like Y-DNA, distinct mtDNA lineages, are known as "haplogroups".
Often these matriarchal lines reach further back in time than the paternal line. This is the realm of the mothers and their families brought to the tree -- our gateway into the unconscious. We descend from it, and like Faust, into initiation in this womb of potentiality from which the world is continuously born as the creative flow of the unconscious.
The Distaff Line is an old Craft term, the Mother's Line, as opposed to the Father's Line (called the Spear Line). The Matrilineal bloodline contains the spiritual, true essence of a person's "self", by which the spirits of the departed leave the Unseen world and re-enter into their families on earth. The Old Dame, as the Mother of Creation and the Supreme Being, and the Spinner of Fate, holds the "Distaff" by which she Spins the threads of creation. Since all ‘lines’ or threads begin with her and return to her, the Mother's Line is called the "Distaff Line." Mitochondrial DNA remains strong, persisting in the cells of both sexes longer than nuclear DNA.
The ancients often incorporated images of death in their funeral rites, on mummy cases, the walls of tombs, and death masks. Some might find death photos macabre and yet they are simply a final remembrance of the beloved, which can help us personify that relative.
Imagistically, the dead continue their very long journey in the afterlife. The unconscious believes in the afterlife. Their events become our meaningful experiences -- their actions our ideas and reflections, insights alive with creativity and fantasy. Our persistent search for Who? leads us down and back. Each one strikes a different part of us. From this churning, this dialectical tension, creativity emerges -- a myriad of intoxicating things, including the archetypal images of immortality.
Psychological effects of the genealogical pursuit will be different for everyone, with certain commonalities, such as symptoms, identification, projection, participation mystique, etc.
Without guidelines much of this natural personal process remains unconscious and can be problematical -- individually, in the family, and in genealogical and heritage groups. At a cultural level, we also assimilate the shock of a personal descent from historical figures -- the historical burden. Myths have a vital meaning, linking us with psychic processes and experiences "beyond consciousness in the dark hinterland of the psyche," as Jung notes (CW 9ii, Pg. 154). The collective is mythic and archetypal, while the cosmological is integrative.
The deeper we work into the World Tree the more widely shared the ancestry becomes. Chances are that most individuals seeking their ancestry will not seek treatment but can benefit from a contextualization of those experiences. We can jump to wrong conclusions from too little information. It happens to our beliefs and our cognitive interpretations.
They also will not stop at the Fourth Generation. What distinguishes de facto Transgenerational Genealogy from conventional or Jungian approaches is plunging deeper into the Medieval, legendary, and mythic layers of one's pedigree, rather than just the first few generations. But we can not concentrate only on the royal lines, because many other descents far out number them. Genetically, they have no priority; we may carry none of their genes.
Mythic Genealogy
Emerging from pre-conscious psyche, myths are our deep background and connect us with our instincts. Myth bridges conscious and unconscious cognition with an archaic quality and networks of symbols and imagery. It represents the meaning of being. They help us interpret the world. We need myth because it speaks emotionally of and to the soul, giving meaning to loss and suffering. It may be a painful struggle that reminds us we are very much alive. For example, in Wotan we find the ecstatic experience of fighting as well as the ecstatic joy of death.
English kings claimed descent from Wotan or Odin. Medieval monks pushed Woden’s ancestry back to Troy, then connected the Trojans to the Jewish scriptures and the lost tribe of Dan. They linked the Franks to the kings of Troy and the Merovingian descent from the family of Jesus. The Chronicle of Fredegar (7th century) mentions the legend. It was elaborated in the Liber historiae Francorum (probably 727). Such legends grew over time.
Our genealogy shows us how these stories migrated between cultures over time. We can imagine our descent from Aphrodite herself. Descending through Macedonians and Ptolemaic Egyptians, then Spanish and English nobility, she would be somewhere around a 100th great-grandmother. A pedigree prepared for Philip II of Spain traces his paternal descent from Hercules Lybius, said to have been a son of Dodanim / Rodanim, who is said to have been a great grandson of Noah (Genesis 10:4, 1 Chronicles 1:7).
The confabulations of the Welsh royals made them descendants of Joseph of Arimathea. They included a legendary cycle of Fisher Kings, and culminated in the Grail Cycle and stories of King Arthur's court and the magic of Avalon. Given the right gateway ancestors and royal lineage, all of these lines will show up in the standard genealogies of millions of people.
Many accept their fabulous descent from antiquity as literally true, while scholars know it to be false. But neither view is accurate. Even though confabulated at some point for political purposes, such mythical genealogies linking man to the divine are actually traditional, and considered 'best practice' for eras of history.
Even 'fictious' genealogies and medieval forgeries have a place in our lines, if only to show us how these connections used to be made. Medieval genealogies connecting ancient kings to Adam are pure invention. In the Historia Brittonum, the Welsh monk Nennius (9th century) grafted northern Europeans onto the classical tradition by making them not only descended from Noah, but the brothers of Romulus, legendary founder of Rome.
Modern genealogists want to cut "fictitious" connections, but myth is the DNA of our psyche. That is like killing the root of the tree. This is genealogy without proof, so it must be mythic. How about the mighty Zeus himself, king of the gods? With over 200 offspring, divine and demigods, there are many lines of potential descent. Or, the venerable Isis? She may be 100 - 150 generations back.
We find myth not only at the root of our ancient lines but in each and every life between, in the roles and archetypal patterns that constitute our direct heritage. Jung suggests the dynamic is the same whether we think of them as instincts or gods and goddesses. We can re-enchant our world by saying a prayer to the lords and ladies, by whatever names they wish to be known. In a prayer to all our relations, invisible spirits are made visible. Eternal being lies within each and every one of us.
Grail Bearers
The Holy Grail and the Blood Royal are twin myths. Bron and the Fisher Kings link the Grail to the vales of Avalon and the Hidden Stream. We must be careful not to misconstrue the Grail for our own purposes, from a medieval retrieval, to spiritual literalism, to reactionary ideologies. We can't take it literally, realizing the genealogies are made up. We certainly can't return to either the politics or religion of a legendary era or new age revisionist theories like "the evil Archons" and proliferating self-styled incarnations of Mary Magdalene. We retain a psychological approach to the subject.
"We have to finish it. We have to carry it on. Even though we don't talk about grails and castles and enchanted maidens, still it is our myth to be completed in our lives. The myth has taken us to exactly the point where modern people are now. Collectively speaking we are stuck at the point where the French poem ends. So if you want a quest, if you want something meaningful for your life, pick up the grail myth where it now lies in you." (Robert Johnson)
When he first finds the Grail Castle, Perceval fails to ask the crucial questions about the origins of evil, the king's wound, and the Grail's meaning. He does get another chance to find wholeness -- to redeem the divine in matter. That doesn't mean he had a cognition of the whole but it is said to be so. Emma Jung and M-L von Franz describe how The Grail is brought to the Old Grail King; the goal of the quest is death to the old king, who 'dies' to the dominant collective consciousness of the day with its one-sided god image and is restored.
Encountering the Grail is an emotional readiness for reflective experience and to receive numinous experience. With the secret words spoken and Perceval’s royal ancestry revealed, the Grail is placed in his care. The Grail disappeared with his death, went back into concealment in the unconscious of each living person, available as an inner guide, the voice of the divine, inviting each of us to our individual completeness.
The genealogical Quest for the Grail shares something in common with the quest for the Philosopher's Stone, which forms itself. The magic of genealogy as the magic of the Stone is in the seeking after it. The Grail is our own transformation.
We are filled by the Grail when we point ourselves toward it. The Grail serves the whole community.
The Philosopher's Stone declares,
"My light, exceeds every light, and my good things are better than all other good things. I give freely and reward the intelligent with joy and gladness, glory, riches, delights; and them that "seek" after me I make to know and understand, and to posses divine things." --Golden Tractates of Hermes
In the search for the stone, it is the work that counts. One should not worry too much about the right way. The right way with the wrong person will never succeed. The wrong way with the right person will eventually right itself, for the stone is found at the crossroads of Heaven and Earth. Those who seek the Stone with true heart, shall be found by the Stone itself.
As someone's descendant we answer the call. Like the Fisher King, we seek the Salmon of Knowledge. The transgenerational group is integrated within the individual. Much of the effect is intrinsic. For Jung, fantasy is an integrative function.
Imaginative expressions of hidden forces appear spontaneously as the direct expression of psychic life, creative and imaginative activity inherent in each and every moment. We meet each wondrous, wild moment by relating to it, not controlling it. We really can't separate the past from the present.
Relationship is created and recreated from what has been and what is yet to be. Our challenge is to claim a place for our own imagination and intellect. We learn to see and bear the pain of seeing and suffering. Healing and wounding alternate in a rhythm echoing a sense of transience and death.
"You will feel me with you even from the Land of the Dead."
Our lineage is our own, personal Mystery Play. You can only enter into your own mysteries. We can allow the phenomena to speak - the multitude of personalities to speak, to be personified. Images are also voices -- messages from the dead. We need a sense of the ancestors. For most, that sense may be more poetic than clinical...the poetry of everyday life as it stretches back into the mists before time.
From the earliest societies to contemporary civilizations, genealogical methods have traced ancestries back to gods, animal totems, and legendary heroes. Originally the oral history narratives of clan or tribe bequeathed the lineage. In ancient Sumeria, Babylon, Egypt, India and China, kings and heads of state claimed their rights to the throne through genealogy. Royal totems include dragon, eagle, lion, wolf, serpent, boar, etc.
The Old Testament recounts the "begats" of Adam, Noah and Abraham, and later the royal bloodline of the House of David. Muslims trace their descent from Muhammed, while the Greeks and Romans and Vikings linked their heritage to the gods. The importance of ancestry to soul appears in Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian genealogies. In Germanic folklore the soul was considered, in certain respects, something inherited.
What is the power of the individual against the voice of the whole people in him? ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 365.
There is essentially no difference between doing genealogy or psychogenealogy, except perhaps the addition of a few evocative techniques. We don't just study it, but interact with it -- with the ancestors. It may be less what we think about it and more its effect on us. Information is naturally excited in the genealogical process as images, sensations, intuitions, synchronicities, insights, and more.
But psychogenealogy attempts to find workable answers when elements embedded in the family memory are now limiting an individual in a particular way.
Individual and collective consciousness is shaped in crucial ways by cognition of collective family experiences. What tends to get passed on is the overwhelming, unbearable, unthinkable. Much of history has been lost, distorted, or blotted out. We can focus on genetics, culture, spirit, and emotion as keys to the ancestral door. We can break our identification with a traumatic or unresolved past and still honor and consciously grieve our ancestors.
Genealogy is a tool for family therapy and self-knowledge. We carry secret stories from before our lifetime. The entire family tree is both a trauma archive and a resource for healing. Yet children raised in difficult circumstances often show enhanced mental flexibility. Much of what is unconscious to us is revealed in our lines. We still have to amplify, work with, interpret, and integrate that information.
We can reframe our relationship with pain, fear, and grief at the familial and ancestral level. Current research on well-being describes two perspectives: the hedonic approach, which focuses on happiness and defines well-being in terms of pleasure attainment and pain avoidance; and the eudaimonic approach, which focuses on meaning and self-realization and defines well-being in terms of the degree to which a person is fully functioning. The later may be more important. Composed of the words "eu" ("good") and "daimōn" ("spirit") it fits the ancestral theme.
This spirit is an autonomous psychic happening, a hush that follows the storm, a reconciling light in the darkness of man’s mind, secretly bringing order into the chaos of his soul. ~Carl Jung; CW 11; Paragraph 260.
This is part of the Genealogical Journey.
In this way we follow Nature and our nature back to our Origin.
We can pursue both a psychological and genealogical approach to wisdom. Realizations and self-actualization arise naturally in the process of compiling such a genealogy, as we recall exactly who we are, thereby approaching our wholeness...
for a 21st century Renaissance.
Spiritually, genealogy can strengthen our faith in the ancestors. We may find spiritual meaning in reconstructions of suppressed ancient religions or eclectic practices. In conducting Celtic genealogical research we rediscover the folk stories of our ancestors or the ancient deities once worshipped in other lands. The precise meaning and value of the old gods and goddesses will vary between listeners, but some find spiritual meaning in reclaiming ancient mysteries nearly lost to the modern ages.
Subjective mental life is a primary metaphor of
subjective Experience;
Primary Metaphor Becomes Embodied
and maps across generations.
The Grounding of the Whole is the grounding of its parts.
We reason with such metaphors.
(Lakoff & Johnson)
This argument against expunging legend and myth
from traditional genealogy practice is simple:
What happens outside us in these days is the image that the peoples live in events, to bequeath this image immemorially to far-off times so that they might learn from it for their own way; just as we learned from the images that the ancients had lived before us in events. ~Carl Jung, The Red book, Page 239.
"But if the believer without religion now thinks that he has got rid of mythology he is deceiving himself: he cannot get by without "myth."
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 482-488
Psychology Today: Why do people spend decades tracing their lineages? Thinking about one's ancestors provides comfort, improves one's ability to deal with challenges and actually boosts cognitive performance, new research shows.
In a simple experiment, researchers asked people to think about their ancestors (or something else) and then measured their beliefs about their own performance on several cognitive tests. People who had been made to think about their ancestors expected to do better on the tests.
But did they actually do better? Yes. Researchers Peter Fischer, Anne Sauer, Claudia Vogrincic and Silke Weisweiler found that people who had recently thought about their ancestors actually did better on cognitive tests of intelligence than people who had been made to think of other things.
Therapeutic Initiation
Inner Voices: Reverence Toward the Souls of the Ancestors
"Take pains to waken the dead. Dig deep mines and throw in sacrificial gifts, so that they reach the dead. Reflect in good heart upon evil, this is the way to the ascent. But before the ascent, everything is night and Hell." ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 244.
Psychologically this means that the souls of the ancestors (potential factors, qualities, talents, possibilities, and so on, which we have inherited from all the lines of our ancestry) are waiting in the unconscious, and are ready at any time to begin a new growth.
~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 230.
These are, so to speak, the re-animated souls of the ancestors which have been lying dormant in the unconscious, and the alchemists call these units or souls the sleepers or the dead in Hades who are resurrected by the "holy waters" (that is the miraculous water of alchemy, the fertilizing Mercury). ~Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 230.
Learning Objectives:
To understand the significance of our genealogy as more than
a metaphor for the cyclical unfolding of our life story
To understand the timing of transgenerational patterns throughout
different eras of history, and times of transition
To apply the timing of great cycles to our genealogy and life events
and reflect on the unfolding of our goals
If his individual experience is a living thing, it will share the quality of all life, which does not stagnate but, being in continual flux, brings ever new aspects to light.
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 482-488
"It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live according to nature."
--Marcus Aurelius [my 61st great grandfather]
10,000 Paths to the Passed
The tale of our genesis is our prima materia and our ultima materia, the unknown and self-knowledge. Our serpentine lines of descent recursively bite their own tails. A study of our tree provokes reflection on our destiny. Connection to Source is the basis of creation, which manifests something unique from formless nothing.
Genealogy has a dry factual basis but the imaginal dimension is also inherent in the form of self-unfolding. It helps us create and cultivate an imaginal sacred space where soul and spirit unfold. It creates a wealth of energy we find is a source of wisdom and containment. We awaken from our illusion of separateness.
We cross the threshold from the edge of the sacred, into the temenos, moving toward the numinous at the far boundaries of our mythically-rooted lines. As we stay with a family line, working our way up through the children, we get to "know" them. The sacred makes claims on us as well as offering gifts. It takes the form of personal experience.
Resonance Phenomena
Our ancestral deep field is a plenum of personalities and procreation -- a community of virtual beings and sacred space of wholeness. It pulsates with life force and the creative energy of love. We can imagine messages resonating along the many family lines -- waves of vibration that connect with the ancient past like some archaic tin-can and string 'telephone.' Suck 'kindling' is an important part of our neurological process. Listening and sounding is interactive.
In The Emerald Tablet, Thoth says, "Send through thy body a wave of vibration, irregular first and regular second, repeating time after time until free. Start the wave force in thy brain center. Direct it in waves from thine head to thy foot."
The recipient then becomes the receiver and, through the process of entrainment, modulates the same frequency and the same waveform in a reversed phase. They become coupled and are no longer distinguishable from one another. Entrainment, the second stage of this process in-between two physical systems, is a process of synchronization causing object ‘X’ to vibrate in an identical way in response to object ‘Y’ (Miller, 2013). Nature’s ensemble of voices curiously leads to systems of increasing complexity, and hints at a collective intelligence.
Follow the Pain & Fear Deeper
Pain also leads us into liminal space. When we surrender control, something genuinely new can happen. We see beyond our self-interest and security issues. The liminal opens a space for alternative consciousness to emerge.
Furio Jesi suggests the mask of pain and despair counterfeits the reality of death. He cites Dionysus as the God of pain because loss of the past is painful when the truth of the past is not mentioned. Primordial initiation was about the experience of death and rebirth -- change from one state to another, from one Time to another. The death that precedes rebirth is the abandonment of the past, but rebirth includes everything from the past that was and is alive that we don't remember.
Furio Jesi, Mythological material. Myth and anthropology in Central European culture, Einaudi , Turin 1979.
House-Burial
Some cultures wanted their dead so close to home and family, they buried them under their house. In the Neolithic era, the dead "slept" beneath the floor where their kindred continued their activities. The Greeks and Minoans interred loved ones, especially children, in jars buried in the floor. The Dravidians buried the dead in the house so their spirits could be more easily reborn as children in the same family. Poverty is another reason of under home burials.
The Cherokee buried their dead in the floor directly under the place where the person died. Some cultures later removed the bones and venerated them in the house. Sometimes only the soul of the dead is returned to the house after burial elsewhere. We likely wouldn't do so, but we might have file boxes of photos and genealogical research "buried" in the basement or elsewhere, symbolically echoing the ancient sentiment of "housing" the dead.
Even grieving can be a sacred space. We cannot get rid of the pain until we discern what it has to teach us. Much of our understandable anger is actually disguised and denied sadness. Meditative dialogues and co-meditation with the ancestors become possible. As we penetrate the unknown we have to tolerate not knowing and maintain trust in the process.
As we work, formlessness congeals into form and we arose from that. Such a healing space is naturally therapeutic and traditionally described as "the center of the world." In our case this archetypal center is the Tree of Life that connects heaven and earth. It realigns us with the Cosmos with a new perspective -- a much larger story. We repeat the cycle of discovering and adding ancestors and the images and symbolism of their lives. We get out of it the transformed energy we put into the process.
In Letters, Vol. I, Jung suggests, "The community is nothing without the individual and if a community consists of individuals that do not fulfill their individual telos, then the community has not telos or a very wrong one" (p. 464). The only thing we need to know is ourselves, the greatest secret, the greatest gnosis.
In Liber Novus, (Pg. 274, Fn 75), Jung notes that life is an energetic process with its own goal. "But every energetic process is in principle irreversible and therefore unequivocally directed toward a goal, and the goal is the state of rest ..."
All These Paths Lead to You
The call to adventure is the call to the future and interiority. Genealogy makes it graphically obvious that many paths lead to the central experience and facilitate the other paths that lead there. An underground stream runs through the hidden ground of our being. We can meander through the furthest reaches of the transpersonal imagination, purposefully seeking that which remains as-yet-unknown in the depths. It is just a matter of being present with our experience, open to what is found along the way, be it answers or ambiguity.
Mankind has wandered in the fields of reality seeking its true nature since the dawn of time. A fiercely lived life is an artform -- illumination in action, based on discipline, practice and service. The specific “Art” is alchemical, a merger of inner and outer reality in One World. Jung said, "To live what is right and to let what is false die, that is the art of life." (Liber Novus, Pg 274, Footnote 75).
Rootedness
Conscious experiences belong to slipstreams of consciousness, and these streams are part of nature’s process. They can be described in physical and psychological terms as our sacred journey. Experience is a process rooted in the stream of consciousness and happens “to” a person in that stream of consciousness. Each person is an aspect of nature’s process whose stream can flow forth like a fountainhead to quench and nourish many over the course of time.
Whose Trauma Is It?
Whether your genealogical methods are clinical or intuitive, you face your lineage as an individual. Each ancestor relationship you form is special to you because intuition is never completely conscious. Regardless of our style of genealogy practice, we need to approach recovery of our deep identity with a sense of balance. We want to recover our ancestors, not reinvent them. We want to recontextualize them and reinvigorate that spirit. At some point all family lines fade into amnesia.
Trauma can be physical or psycho-emotional impact. We may seek specific trauma recovery while a variety of behavioral, emotional and physical conditions are rooted in unresolved traumatic experiences, whether in real-time crisis or or post-event disorder. Anger and hate may be there but so is our inner guidance system, the capacity to love and accept.
Transgenerational Inheritance
Our inheritance from ancestors is both good and burdensome. Their issues become our issues through genetics, epigenetics, and shared trauma. Not only our emotions, but what we eat and breath affect the genes of our descendants. The environment affects gene expression and disease development.
Transgenerational integration suggests that trauma can become displaced in time, leading to symptoms and repetition compulsion. Freud saw repetitious compulsions or symptoms as a way of “working through” or exorcising the pain of traumatic events and thoughts. But it is also re-traumatizing. Working through requires some degree of re-living of events as we re-enliven emotional and mental patterns.
Metaphors Be With You
However, we can safely use metaphors rather than the historical dimension. How we know what we know is expressed naturally in metaphor. Images arise as self-generating metaphors -- what is happening and what it's like. Thus, we can dig up our buried sorrow, or release bottled-up anger.
We can express our experiences symbolically. Metaphoric expressions are tied to our unconscious or implicit experiences. They are inherent to our language. Metaphor functions like dreams and symptoms that simultaneously express material from different dynamic, structural, and topographical psychic levels.
With metaphor we can link our experiences across diverse times and situations. Change the root, change the reaction. We treat the figurative language as real. The figures of the subconscious pictures or constructs are treated as real. Resistance is also information from which a metaphor can emerge. Such metaphors are naturally healing.
Lacan reversed Freud's conception: Symptoms help us reorganize our life so we continue to derive a secret enjoyment from something that, on a conscious level, we want to be rid of. We may not really enjoy it, but what is "familiar" from family life, even chaos, is often more comfortable than what is healthy.
Trauma Crosses Generations
Trauma in one generation can be transmitted consciously and unconsciously to later generations. For example, three or more generations can share similar traumas, such as early loss of a parent, and/or early loss of a spouse. They may all share multi-generational denial, repression, triggers, PTSD, unresolved grief and attendant depression.
The contradiction between conscious aversion and unconscious enjoyment actually warps our symbolic-imaginary spacetime, causing the strange tail-chasing, repetitive “orbiting” behavior of all neuroses and obsessive behavior. Our miseries or dreary compulsions conceal,
preserve, and protect a vital and enlivening unconscious dimension. Genealogy and therapy help us unbury these toxic attachments from our genetic tree. Expressive therapies address intergenerational trauma and psychophysical conditions.
There are numerous changes at the physical, neurobiological, emotional, and spiritual levels. There are phases of response after trauma. We can map traumas across our own lives and related others in a timeline revealing personal challenges and stress triggers. For self-care and self-regulation we can make a stress management plan. Some might choose to use expressive or genogram techniques for trauma integration.
Often it is necessary to clarify a vague content by giving it a visible form. This can be done by drawing, painting, or modeling. Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.” (Jung, CW 16, Para 181)
Cross Time Communication
Paradoxically, our most personal past is a telos. This emergent aim or purpose pulls us forward into our deep past through a process in the present. In genealogy, it is one thing to know what to look for and another to know where to look. The red thread passes through the eye of the cosmic needle.
Like Aboriginal song-lines from the Dreamtime, our genealogical lines reveal place names with their own stories. We have to sense our way along, to navigate through the terrain of the unconscious. Such dreaming-tracks cut through the wilderness of the unknown. We catch the rhythm and 'observe' the landscape. By such a path, through sacred movement of the soul we discover our Self, a dynamic emancipation of our life energies and self-actualization.
"Our concepts of space and time have only approximate validity, and there is therefore a wide field for minor and major deviations.
In view of all this, I lend an attentive ear to the strange myths of the psyche, and take a careful look at the varied events that come my way, regardless of whether or not they fit in with my theoretical postulates." (Jung, MDR, Pg. 300)
Reassume the Past
Our ancestors embody our innate unconscious metaphors and archetypal autonomy. Archetypes give form to chaos and intuition. Jung said, "An archetypal content expresses itself, first and foremost, in metaphors." In this sense, genealogy has a transcendent function, concerning the meaning of being in time -- psyche's innate purposiveness, aesthetics, and biocultural evolution.
False Trails
We must watch our conditioned responses directly. As we engage in this Great Work, we encounter merge issues, dead ends, and false trails. We cannot rewrite the past. We must be willing the surrender understanding we thought we had found if it proves fallacious.
We must frame and reframe our pictures of the past as it grows and changes each time we access our genealogy, each time we contemplate it within. In that process we will make many concretizations and assumptions, commit cultural errors, and encounter lacuna we cannot fill with any evidence. The gap in time is also a gulf in mores and ways of life, so be careful making anachronistic personal judgments from today's standpoint.
Hypnoidal Dynamics
We all have our own wounds and our ancestors did, too. The wound healing cycle is an instrument of recovery. Pathological traumatic stress (PTSD) has hypnoidal dynamics indicating unresolved trauma. Fostering resilience with direct suggestion, metaphor, and transpersonal methods that bring healing from beyond the self is another long-term recovery tool. Analytical methods help internal conflict resolution and transformation. Bio-energetics and hands on methods help the physical and energy body.
Looking at what lies ahead becomes part of our noncausal interpretation of the past, an emotional movement from darkness to light. We live nested in two levels of personal and transpersonal being. We should be watchful for our own projections and distortions.
We must bear in mind that we do not make projections, rather they happen to us. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 563.
Of course you really don't make projections: they are; it is a mistake when one speaks of making a projection, because in that moment it is no longer a projection, but your own property. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1493.
Ghosts and Spirits. These phenomena are projections from the background of the psyche, autonomous inner images of a subjective nature, obeying no conscious intention, but coming and going at their own volition. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Vol. 1, Page 40
Those wounds teach us something about ourselves that effects a holistic re-patterning. Going through our wound means realizing we will never again be the same once we emerge from this initiatory process. All forms are dissolved in the underground stream, the rushing stream of consciousness, in a baptism or healing immersion in the vast ocean of deep consciousness. We ride the dragon on the backs of our ancestors to the realm of the Unborn, returning to the pure creative energy of the cosmic womb for the mystery of alchemical rebirth.
Going through our wound is a genuine (ego) death experience, as our old self "dies" in the process, while a new, more expansive and empowered human potential is born. Thus, the Grail is not only about birth, it is about catalyzing transformational rebirth into a nonlinear, nonlocal expanded sense of self beyond mere ego inflation. Self-actualization or self-realization implies the stabilizing or grounding of the spiritual fruits of inner exploration. This is gnosis.
Marie-Louise Von Franz, said "the wounded healer IS the archetype of the Self (our wholeness, the God within) and is at the bottom of all genuine healing procedures," resulting in a more open-ended and expansive sense of who we think we are, and who we imagine others are in relation to us. The wound is not only a personal experience, but a doorway, a hyper-dimensional portal into the transpersonal / archetypal realm, which is a higher order (in terms of freedom) of our being.
Self-Compassion
Both future and past operate in the present, symbolizing our as-yet-unlived life potential, including extension into eternity. Anticipation fuels the process, but everything cannot happen at once as we need time to digest it. We tend to overlook the infinitely vast scale of time at every moment. Genealogy helps us keep such insights in sight by softening the boundaries of birth and death in our narrative, exposing us experientially to the unbound sweep of deep time.
We are neither gods nor demons, and neither were our ancestors though we are all filled by archetypal potentials, their archetypal pathologies, and symptoms. Our collective unconscious -- the primary phenomena -- informs the experience of being. Suffering merges with hopeful transcendence. Instead of dissociating, we experience it by creatively collapsing the future-past timeline, reflectively and reflexively interpreting that experience. From some perspective there is a single psyche and a single subject that is not acquired through personal experience.
Archetypal Merger
All individual lives are simultaneously participating in the collective unconscious, as graphically depicted in our genealogical charts. Jung links the realization of withinness with the image of the World Mother, Mother Bride, rebirth, and the archetype of vision of what is waiting to be seen and known -- a symbolic within. Our revelations express the aims and instincts of the soul which invites us into the sacred marriage with psychic life. Our story is a living symbol of eternal mystery, personal and collective.
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3 Million Year Old Man
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Jung spoke of the '2 million year old man' within us all. But Genus homo is as much as 3 million years old, with ancient patterns including hunting strategies, mating patterns, intergroup relations. Genetics has shown that modern man is a hybrid of at least three species. Some ethnic groups include 4-5% Neanderthal or Denisovan.
We continue to change.
Genome researchers at the University of Chicago have identified more than 700 regions in human DNA where apparently strong selection has occurred, driving the spread of genes linked to a broad range of characteristics.
"These are very recent events—within the past ten thousand years," said Jonathan Pritchard, a geneticist whose laboratory team conducted the study.
The results suggest that humans in different regions have continued to adapt in numerous ways to both environmental changes and cultural innovations.” (2006)
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/03/0308_060308_evolution.html
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We participate in that Royal Marriage, the telos of Jungian work, when we lovingly hold those opposites, all those couples that metaphorically and literally express the union of personal and archetypal mediators, anima and animus. Authentic and genuine relationship is complimentary.
Genealogy is thus another way to experience and integrate the concept that psyche is matter, and matter is psyche. What is-is, and it is divine. Jung says, "In this deification mystery you make yourself into the vessel, and are a vessel of creation in which the opposites reconcile." As St. Augustine said, "For it is secretly, and in the hidden depths of the spirit, that the soul of man is joined to the word of God, so that they are two in one flesh." This is the marriage of heaven and earth, the eternal and transient.
The divine is a divine couple, the father and mother of souls, who give birth to the divine child in the depth of winter. Jung speaks of the path of soul as a phenomenological path -- the soul lives and knows. This is Gnosis. It is a psychic fact we are born in the divine world to the divine couple. The divine is within the unconscious but autonomous. It gives birth to the divine child, to possibility, the potential of the soul. Our spiritual task is to protect the child.
Sacred Marriage, Sacred Feminine
Perhaps the archetypal appeal of sacred marriage -- the union of alchemical opposites, hierosgamos, or Mysterium Coniunctionis -- is one reason many people become fascinated with royal lines almost to the exclusion of others. Yet it is only the royal lines that have epic historical scope and are hypothetically traceable back to ancient times.
Spiritual marriage recalls the union of archetypal figures in the rebirth mysteries of antiquity.. These are ancient rites of fertility, regeneration, and psychophysical transformation, an archetypal drive inherent in our nature and a primordial mystery of sexuality.
Myths come to life in ways that resonate with our own lives. According to Jung, the deeper mystery of the unifying myth represents the psychological process of "individuation," the "inner marriage" of the opposites within the psyche - masculine/feminine, conscious/unconscious, divine/human - giving birth to the archetype of wholeness.
Naming Our Ancestors
When writing appeared in the 2nd and 3rd millennium BC, “a new concept of creation enters religious thinking: Nothing exists unless it has a name. The name means existence.” “Naming has profound significance in the Old Mesopotamian belief system. The name reveals the essence of the bearer; it also carries magic power . . . What is important to observe here is that the concept of creation has changed, at a certain period in history from being merely the acting out of the mystic force of female fertility to being a conscious act of creation ” by merely expressing “the name”. (Gerda Lerner, 1986)
As preparation for eternity, the ancient Egyptians made a priority not only of preserving the body but also preserving the name of the deceased. The body, a combination of the non-physical ka, ba, name and shadow, was thought to make a person complete in this life and in the next.
So, perhaps in this archaic sense, we complete our ancestors as we recollect and re-member them. Just as archaeologists can only tell so much from digging up artifacts and interpreting archival material, psychologists and genealogists can do no more.
Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood? --Jung
TRANSGENERATIONAL GENEALOGY
The Argument:
After the deconstruction of the postmodern era, we need a reconstruction from the ground up -- a post-postmodern coagulatio to match that solutio. We know the whole circular alchemical opus is contained in the formula "dissolve and coagulate." The desire for meaning coagulates. In coagulatio the self-conscious ego and the transpersonal Self meet and interact. There is really no substitute for drawing one's own lines, engaging, and 'grounding' them with psychogenealogy.
A sense of metaphor is a gnosis rooted in alchemy. Our old self image dissolves as we embrace our larger being. The conscious standpoint expands in self-actualizing to accommodate a proliferation of transpersonal projections emerging from the unconscious together. They exponentially strengthen and enlarge the essence of the contracted ego.
When we form inner relationships we render a transpersonal force personal by incorporating it into our manifest world. They begin to take on form and substance for us. The concretization of psychic forces of coagulatio grounds our self-actualization -- actualizing psychic energies. We bring them back to earth as a living part of our psychophysical nature. All standard procedures of family therapy can be used to amplify the process -- psychodrama, family sculpting, empty chair, roundtables, genogram, etc.
Coagulation incites the dreambody to action, churning up the deeper dynamics which are drawn into the imaginal world, into the realm of symbols and archetypes. They manifest there as a whole continuum of dreams, emergent memories, art, and hypnagogic images.
Trends and patterns become evident as the raw prima materia cooks. Arousing our empathy and resistance, what was unconscious or elusive gains solidity. What escaped you before becomes crucial. Family logic and repeating patterns emerge. We imitate or create. Ancestors, with their accomplishments, secrets and shame, begin to take their places as part of our natural world. Image becomes manifestation in a grounded multisensory moment.
A Life of Their Own
Our descent into our genealogy may be shallow or steep, depending on our focus, rate, and capacity to integrate the genealogical material. There are major and minor inroads through which we will travel again and again. Losing and finding repeats in unending cycles. Something we thought we 'got' may later be amplified beyond our previous conception. Or, we suppress or 'forget' important points we once knew about our ancestors and ourselves. Each ancestor becomes a stepping stone. We consolidate and move deeper.
We may realize we've embraced some illusions or that emancipation, amalgamation, and transfiguration cannot be grounded. Dig deeper. Like Orpheus, our extended family narrative is a story of love, loss, descent, failure to restore what has been lost, dismemberment, and transformation. Opening to the ancestors we embrace the individuation process with open arms.
"This is how madness begins, this is madness ... You cannot get conscious of these unconscious facts without giving yourself to them. If you can overcome your fear of the unconscious and can let yourself go down, then these facts take on a life of their own." (Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Pg. 253. Fn. 211)
Heart-Caves
We make the descent into the heart-caves of our ancestors. Joseph Campbell said, "The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek." In MDR, Jung (pg. 88) echoes a similar statement, "My own understanding is the sole treasure I possess, and the greatest. Though infinitely small and fragile in comparison with the powers of darkness, it is still a light, my only light."
We may or may not carry certain ancestral DNA, but we are still psychophysically entangled with them whether it is deliberate or not, open to interaction or not, 'mutual unconscious' or not. We are seemingly knotted together with some ancestors, through our dysfunctions and unconscious style of perception. If the symptom ties together the Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic it is beyond meaning. This might shake up our psychogenealogical assumptions and reinvigorate our practice. Glimmerings of the whole is all that can be expected. Our genealogy grows its own self, like a plant.
Lacan's debatable theory of phenomenological experience
describes mirroring as a stage with a significant symbolic dimension -- a field of radical alterity. Within our genealogical work, we can produce subjective changes at the symbolic level, resulting in imaginal and real effects. Whether such theoretical claims are true or false, changes in subjective attitudes, (including those involving our ancestors), lead to real world changes (natural consequences) in behavior, emotions, thoughts, and spirit.
For Lacan, the symptom (sinthome) is not a call for interpretation, but a preferred mode of "enjoying the unconscious." For example, depression may be an appropriate response to the world we live in, not something to medicate away. We gain personal and historical perspective seeing how our ancestors responded to the unknowns and challenges in their own lives. We don't need answers to the wrong questions but a tolerance for ambiguity, uncertainty, not-knowing and tolerating the terror of not having answers.
Hillman says, it may be easier to talk about these ideas as archetypes, the soul’s relation with death, with body, the world, other souls, love, beauty, sickness, family, ancestors, power, history, time. The gods return to us as archetypes. This may be a move beyond the Collective Unconscious to the World Unconscious.
This can be backed up by Hillman's soul-making approach that a singular interpretation of a dream stops the process cold, in a perhaps erroneous, if resonant idea of what it means. For Hillman, dreams are underworldly (from the viewpoint of death/the dead) commentaries on or critiques of our waking life. We don't need to determine how our dreams help us achieve our goals, as much as discover what the dream-self thinks of those goals.
Hillman refuses to make meaning of dreams, preferring to follow the uncertainty. There is no attempt at a cure or even enrichment. In genealogy the mythic root informs us about human behavior. This happens naturally, unconsciously and doesn't need to be driven by a therapeutic or self-development agenda. It's not about the past, present, or future but about the soul-world. In the Red Book, Jung says, "Dreams pave the way for life, and they determine you without your understanding their language."
Hillman locates dreams in the mysterious and hidden House of Hades (Pluto), a journey through the Underworld much like Orpheus. He deals with the dream in relation to the soul and death. He considers them messengers of the Underworld and of soul that first dissolve and then transform us. There is inherent multiplicity of perspectives and meaning in the images themselves, rather than a single truth. It is the soul that takes on meaning, rather than an image that reveals meaning to the ego or narrative. The dream remains alive.
We sense that dreams mean well for us, back us up and urge us on, understand us more deeply than we understand ourselves, expand our sensuousness and spirit, continually make up new things to give us … It is like the love of an old man, the usual personal content of love voided by coming death, yet still intense, playful, and tenderly, carefully close.
— James Hillman, The Dream And The Underworld
We might draw an analogy between dreams and our ancestral phenomenology. Awake or asleep, it is the dreaming that is important. If we dream of the ancestors, they may dream of us right back - perhaps, poetically they dream unceasingly. In some sense we are that dream. This catalytic process may be more than a metaphor -- some sort of psychic synchronization or interwovenness, resonance, empathy, intersubjectivity, transference of unconscious material, or even mystic unity.
Modus Vivendi
As in life, when we interact with someone, we effect each other by sharing certain unconscious contents. We may or may not attribute it to the other, but we transcend our individual self with a bridge to the universal, the dynamic tension of opposites -- conscious/ unconscious, body and mind, self and world. The sense of separate selves dissolves in that solutio. The drop merges in the ocean of consciousness.
In the weird world of quantum physics, two linked particles can share a single fate, even when they’re miles apart. Two physicists have mathematically described how this spooky 'entanglement' effect could also bind particles across time. “You can send your quantum state into the future without traversing the middle time,” says lead author S. Jay Olson of Australia’s University of Queensland. Curiously, they plan to use it to encrypt messages.
The metadata coded in our genealogy and genetics can supply such information hidden in the cognitive and emotional unconscious as wave, structure, embodied memory, lineage, and collective wisdom. The body remembers everything. Genetics has even revealed seemingly improbable tales where a biological mother or father does not test positive as the parent of their known biological children.
Unknown to anyone they absorbed a twin in the womb who's DNA is found in their offspring, rather than their own. The parent has two sets of DNA. These chimeras with a vanishing twin, also known as fetal resorption, were undetectable and unimaginable in the last decade.
Even the DNA of former lovers whose cells have colonized another can show up in otherwise unrelated children. Identical and fraternal twins can become chimeras, trading chromosomes in the womb, including from another gender. A sense of destiny may reveal previously unintegrated reality potentials -- a glimpse of the ground or absolute field of being.
Attitudes and beliefs about genealogy are related to general beliefs and spirituality. Naturally, some will approach the psychogenealogical aspects with more purposiveness than others. Thus, it is one thing to a Mormon and another to a Jungian, new ager, heritage group member, or bloodline zealot. There are religious factors, generational divides, scientific understanding, gender, and ethnicity. In breezy noetic terms, we could call genealogy a transformative technology for hacking consciousness...but it hacks us back! High-tech tools help us expedite the research and discovery process. Though they take the Spirit World literally, Mormons imagine that dead family members are already doing missionary work "on the other side of the veil." And we participate in that work on "this side of the veil" through genealogy and other means.
Significant knowledge can enlighten our whole being. We can participate with it or remain unconscious of it. Jung said that "Dissolving an image means that you become that image." Jung noted that we are losing contact with our instincts, with the age-old forgotten wisdom stored up in us. The creative force and renewal of cycles are universal. Few forces are as strong in the psyche as genetics, sex and death. Ancestor veneration was one of the first primordial sacred notions to emerge in human culture.
The World Tree is the global genealogical tree. Shamanic initiation requires multiple ascents and descents of the World Tree, a central axis that provides access to the other realms. Each time we gain greater consciousness of the unified reality of the transcendent dimension. In everyday life, we each must make a descent in order to gain experience, encounter deeper aspects of ourselves, and emerge again, transformed, in the experiential process of initiation.
The Conclusion:
Obviously, all genealogy is transgenerational. So long as our ancestry remains unconscious, we are marginalizing Nature and our nature. Yet, nature encompasses us. Jung notes that dreams are pure nature. He was concerned for our culture if we lost our roots. The same holds true at the personal level. Jung declares, "The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are."
Genealogy can be approached as a clinical science but remains more of an art -- a hermeneutic art, a shamanic art or self-initiation, as well as the art of relationship. We thread our way through a labyrinth of light and dark characters. Our charts are catacombs of our forebearers. We might have a different attitude to our lines in the process of discovery than we do once we have fully traced our descent from antiquity.
Our noble lineage becomes a royal road to ancient ancestors. But such a labyrinth of projections in the charts of a fantasist can produce self-delusion or over-heated zealotry. In the chart of a realist it may remain cold facts. Fabulists embellish, while pragmatists may be dry or stale.
A middle way might be both enlivened and informed. Jung urged, "For the understanding of the unconscious we must see our thoughts as events, as phenomena." (Liber Novus, p. 249) Genealogy mediates between the conscious and unconscious as we struggle to reveal what has so long been hidden. We also gain a reflective vantage point between ourselves and events we perceive. We allow the transcendent function to mold and re-shape us.
He [Philemon] confronted me in an objective manner, and I understood that there is something in me which can say things that I do not know and do not intend, things which may even be directed against me. (Jung, MDR, Page 183)
We Re-Collect
While some people may deeply pursue formal therapy, complex genogram relationships, or workshops, the vast majority will not. Those genealogical explorers will experience a spectrum of spontaneous effects, developing their own theories, interpretations, and directions from their ancestral encounters and revelations, conflated with their own beliefs. It may be, as Jung suggests, that through dreams the ancestors compensate our ego attitudes. Even then, we make subjective and objective observations and interpretations. In the blink of an eye, we can change our feelings about culture and human nature.
How little must the root-ancestors of each of our hoary lines have imagined in their own day for their millions of descendants? Even our "dead end" ancestors had antecedents; we just cannot know them, at least not through history. Genetic genealogy tells us our ancient tribes and ancestral lands, but not the names of any of them or their families. But seeds of knowledge in the head blossom in the fertile soil of the heart. We are formed directly from within.
Our Genesis
Genealogy used to be largely a quest for the father's direct line. But with today's algorithms we can find numerous distaff lines back through the ancestral field into the Heart of the Feminine and our mitochondrial inheritance, shared genetically by all genders. This type of DNA, stored in the cell's "batteries," is inherited from the mother, more or less unchanged. Like Y-DNA, distinct mtDNA lineages, are known as "haplogroups".
Often these matriarchal lines reach further back in time than the paternal line. This is the realm of the mothers and their families brought to the tree -- our gateway into the unconscious. We descend from it, and like Faust, into initiation in this womb of potentiality from which the world is continuously born as the creative flow of the unconscious.
The Distaff Line is an old Craft term, the Mother's Line, as opposed to the Father's Line (called the Spear Line). The Matrilineal bloodline contains the spiritual, true essence of a person's "self", by which the spirits of the departed leave the Unseen world and re-enter into their families on earth. The Old Dame, as the Mother of Creation and the Supreme Being, and the Spinner of Fate, holds the "Distaff" by which she Spins the threads of creation. Since all ‘lines’ or threads begin with her and return to her, the Mother's Line is called the "Distaff Line." Mitochondrial DNA remains strong, persisting in the cells of both sexes longer than nuclear DNA.
The ancients often incorporated images of death in their funeral rites, on mummy cases, the walls of tombs, and death masks. Some might find death photos macabre and yet they are simply a final remembrance of the beloved, which can help us personify that relative.
Imagistically, the dead continue their very long journey in the afterlife. The unconscious believes in the afterlife. Their events become our meaningful experiences -- their actions our ideas and reflections, insights alive with creativity and fantasy. Our persistent search for Who? leads us down and back. Each one strikes a different part of us. From this churning, this dialectical tension, creativity emerges -- a myriad of intoxicating things, including the archetypal images of immortality.
Psychological effects of the genealogical pursuit will be different for everyone, with certain commonalities, such as symptoms, identification, projection, participation mystique, etc.
Without guidelines much of this natural personal process remains unconscious and can be problematical -- individually, in the family, and in genealogical and heritage groups. At a cultural level, we also assimilate the shock of a personal descent from historical figures -- the historical burden. Myths have a vital meaning, linking us with psychic processes and experiences "beyond consciousness in the dark hinterland of the psyche," as Jung notes (CW 9ii, Pg. 154). The collective is mythic and archetypal, while the cosmological is integrative.
The deeper we work into the World Tree the more widely shared the ancestry becomes. Chances are that most individuals seeking their ancestry will not seek treatment but can benefit from a contextualization of those experiences. We can jump to wrong conclusions from too little information. It happens to our beliefs and our cognitive interpretations.
They also will not stop at the Fourth Generation. What distinguishes de facto Transgenerational Genealogy from conventional or Jungian approaches is plunging deeper into the Medieval, legendary, and mythic layers of one's pedigree, rather than just the first few generations. But we can not concentrate only on the royal lines, because many other descents far out number them. Genetically, they have no priority; we may carry none of their genes.
Mythic Genealogy
Emerging from pre-conscious psyche, myths are our deep background and connect us with our instincts. Myth bridges conscious and unconscious cognition with an archaic quality and networks of symbols and imagery. It represents the meaning of being. They help us interpret the world. We need myth because it speaks emotionally of and to the soul, giving meaning to loss and suffering. It may be a painful struggle that reminds us we are very much alive. For example, in Wotan we find the ecstatic experience of fighting as well as the ecstatic joy of death.
English kings claimed descent from Wotan or Odin. Medieval monks pushed Woden’s ancestry back to Troy, then connected the Trojans to the Jewish scriptures and the lost tribe of Dan. They linked the Franks to the kings of Troy and the Merovingian descent from the family of Jesus. The Chronicle of Fredegar (7th century) mentions the legend. It was elaborated in the Liber historiae Francorum (probably 727). Such legends grew over time.
Our genealogy shows us how these stories migrated between cultures over time. We can imagine our descent from Aphrodite herself. Descending through Macedonians and Ptolemaic Egyptians, then Spanish and English nobility, she would be somewhere around a 100th great-grandmother. A pedigree prepared for Philip II of Spain traces his paternal descent from Hercules Lybius, said to have been a son of Dodanim / Rodanim, who is said to have been a great grandson of Noah (Genesis 10:4, 1 Chronicles 1:7).
The confabulations of the Welsh royals made them descendants of Joseph of Arimathea. They included a legendary cycle of Fisher Kings, and culminated in the Grail Cycle and stories of King Arthur's court and the magic of Avalon. Given the right gateway ancestors and royal lineage, all of these lines will show up in the standard genealogies of millions of people.
Many accept their fabulous descent from antiquity as literally true, while scholars know it to be false. But neither view is accurate. Even though confabulated at some point for political purposes, such mythical genealogies linking man to the divine are actually traditional, and considered 'best practice' for eras of history.
Even 'fictious' genealogies and medieval forgeries have a place in our lines, if only to show us how these connections used to be made. Medieval genealogies connecting ancient kings to Adam are pure invention. In the Historia Brittonum, the Welsh monk Nennius (9th century) grafted northern Europeans onto the classical tradition by making them not only descended from Noah, but the brothers of Romulus, legendary founder of Rome.
Modern genealogists want to cut "fictitious" connections, but myth is the DNA of our psyche. That is like killing the root of the tree. This is genealogy without proof, so it must be mythic. How about the mighty Zeus himself, king of the gods? With over 200 offspring, divine and demigods, there are many lines of potential descent. Or, the venerable Isis? She may be 100 - 150 generations back.
We find myth not only at the root of our ancient lines but in each and every life between, in the roles and archetypal patterns that constitute our direct heritage. Jung suggests the dynamic is the same whether we think of them as instincts or gods and goddesses. We can re-enchant our world by saying a prayer to the lords and ladies, by whatever names they wish to be known. In a prayer to all our relations, invisible spirits are made visible. Eternal being lies within each and every one of us.
Grail Bearers
The Holy Grail and the Blood Royal are twin myths. Bron and the Fisher Kings link the Grail to the vales of Avalon and the Hidden Stream. We must be careful not to misconstrue the Grail for our own purposes, from a medieval retrieval, to spiritual literalism, to reactionary ideologies. We can't take it literally, realizing the genealogies are made up. We certainly can't return to either the politics or religion of a legendary era or new age revisionist theories like "the evil Archons" and proliferating self-styled incarnations of Mary Magdalene. We retain a psychological approach to the subject.
"We have to finish it. We have to carry it on. Even though we don't talk about grails and castles and enchanted maidens, still it is our myth to be completed in our lives. The myth has taken us to exactly the point where modern people are now. Collectively speaking we are stuck at the point where the French poem ends. So if you want a quest, if you want something meaningful for your life, pick up the grail myth where it now lies in you." (Robert Johnson)
When he first finds the Grail Castle, Perceval fails to ask the crucial questions about the origins of evil, the king's wound, and the Grail's meaning. He does get another chance to find wholeness -- to redeem the divine in matter. That doesn't mean he had a cognition of the whole but it is said to be so. Emma Jung and M-L von Franz describe how The Grail is brought to the Old Grail King; the goal of the quest is death to the old king, who 'dies' to the dominant collective consciousness of the day with its one-sided god image and is restored.
Encountering the Grail is an emotional readiness for reflective experience and to receive numinous experience. With the secret words spoken and Perceval’s royal ancestry revealed, the Grail is placed in his care. The Grail disappeared with his death, went back into concealment in the unconscious of each living person, available as an inner guide, the voice of the divine, inviting each of us to our individual completeness.
The genealogical Quest for the Grail shares something in common with the quest for the Philosopher's Stone, which forms itself. The magic of genealogy as the magic of the Stone is in the seeking after it. The Grail is our own transformation.
We are filled by the Grail when we point ourselves toward it. The Grail serves the whole community.
The Philosopher's Stone declares,
"My light, exceeds every light, and my good things are better than all other good things. I give freely and reward the intelligent with joy and gladness, glory, riches, delights; and them that "seek" after me I make to know and understand, and to posses divine things." --Golden Tractates of Hermes
In the search for the stone, it is the work that counts. One should not worry too much about the right way. The right way with the wrong person will never succeed. The wrong way with the right person will eventually right itself, for the stone is found at the crossroads of Heaven and Earth. Those who seek the Stone with true heart, shall be found by the Stone itself.
As someone's descendant we answer the call. Like the Fisher King, we seek the Salmon of Knowledge. The transgenerational group is integrated within the individual. Much of the effect is intrinsic. For Jung, fantasy is an integrative function.
Imaginative expressions of hidden forces appear spontaneously as the direct expression of psychic life, creative and imaginative activity inherent in each and every moment. We meet each wondrous, wild moment by relating to it, not controlling it. We really can't separate the past from the present.
Relationship is created and recreated from what has been and what is yet to be. Our challenge is to claim a place for our own imagination and intellect. We learn to see and bear the pain of seeing and suffering. Healing and wounding alternate in a rhythm echoing a sense of transience and death.
"You will feel me with you even from the Land of the Dead."
Our lineage is our own, personal Mystery Play. You can only enter into your own mysteries. We can allow the phenomena to speak - the multitude of personalities to speak, to be personified. Images are also voices -- messages from the dead. We need a sense of the ancestors. For most, that sense may be more poetic than clinical...the poetry of everyday life as it stretches back into the mists before time.
From the earliest societies to contemporary civilizations, genealogical methods have traced ancestries back to gods, animal totems, and legendary heroes. Originally the oral history narratives of clan or tribe bequeathed the lineage. In ancient Sumeria, Babylon, Egypt, India and China, kings and heads of state claimed their rights to the throne through genealogy. Royal totems include dragon, eagle, lion, wolf, serpent, boar, etc.
The Old Testament recounts the "begats" of Adam, Noah and Abraham, and later the royal bloodline of the House of David. Muslims trace their descent from Muhammed, while the Greeks and Romans and Vikings linked their heritage to the gods. The importance of ancestry to soul appears in Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian genealogies. In Germanic folklore the soul was considered, in certain respects, something inherited.
What is the power of the individual against the voice of the whole people in him? ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 365.
There is essentially no difference between doing genealogy or psychogenealogy, except perhaps the addition of a few evocative techniques. We don't just study it, but interact with it -- with the ancestors. It may be less what we think about it and more its effect on us. Information is naturally excited in the genealogical process as images, sensations, intuitions, synchronicities, insights, and more.
But psychogenealogy attempts to find workable answers when elements embedded in the family memory are now limiting an individual in a particular way.
Individual and collective consciousness is shaped in crucial ways by cognition of collective family experiences. What tends to get passed on is the overwhelming, unbearable, unthinkable. Much of history has been lost, distorted, or blotted out. We can focus on genetics, culture, spirit, and emotion as keys to the ancestral door. We can break our identification with a traumatic or unresolved past and still honor and consciously grieve our ancestors.
Genealogy is a tool for family therapy and self-knowledge. We carry secret stories from before our lifetime. The entire family tree is both a trauma archive and a resource for healing. Yet children raised in difficult circumstances often show enhanced mental flexibility. Much of what is unconscious to us is revealed in our lines. We still have to amplify, work with, interpret, and integrate that information.
We can reframe our relationship with pain, fear, and grief at the familial and ancestral level. Current research on well-being describes two perspectives: the hedonic approach, which focuses on happiness and defines well-being in terms of pleasure attainment and pain avoidance; and the eudaimonic approach, which focuses on meaning and self-realization and defines well-being in terms of the degree to which a person is fully functioning. The later may be more important. Composed of the words "eu" ("good") and "daimōn" ("spirit") it fits the ancestral theme.
This spirit is an autonomous psychic happening, a hush that follows the storm, a reconciling light in the darkness of man’s mind, secretly bringing order into the chaos of his soul. ~Carl Jung; CW 11; Paragraph 260.
This is part of the Genealogical Journey.
In this way we follow Nature and our nature back to our Origin.
We can pursue both a psychological and genealogical approach to wisdom. Realizations and self-actualization arise naturally in the process of compiling such a genealogy, as we recall exactly who we are, thereby approaching our wholeness...
for a 21st century Renaissance.
Spiritually, genealogy can strengthen our faith in the ancestors. We may find spiritual meaning in reconstructions of suppressed ancient religions or eclectic practices. In conducting Celtic genealogical research we rediscover the folk stories of our ancestors or the ancient deities once worshipped in other lands. The precise meaning and value of the old gods and goddesses will vary between listeners, but some find spiritual meaning in reclaiming ancient mysteries nearly lost to the modern ages.
Subjective mental life is a primary metaphor of
subjective Experience;
Primary Metaphor Becomes Embodied
and maps across generations.
The Grounding of the Whole is the grounding of its parts.
We reason with such metaphors.
(Lakoff & Johnson)
This argument against expunging legend and myth
from traditional genealogy practice is simple:
What happens outside us in these days is the image that the peoples live in events, to bequeath this image immemorially to far-off times so that they might learn from it for their own way; just as we learned from the images that the ancients had lived before us in events. ~Carl Jung, The Red book, Page 239.
"But if the believer without religion now thinks that he has got rid of mythology he is deceiving himself: he cannot get by without "myth."
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 482-488
Psychology Today: Why do people spend decades tracing their lineages? Thinking about one's ancestors provides comfort, improves one's ability to deal with challenges and actually boosts cognitive performance, new research shows.
In a simple experiment, researchers asked people to think about their ancestors (or something else) and then measured their beliefs about their own performance on several cognitive tests. People who had been made to think about their ancestors expected to do better on the tests.
But did they actually do better? Yes. Researchers Peter Fischer, Anne Sauer, Claudia Vogrincic and Silke Weisweiler found that people who had recently thought about their ancestors actually did better on cognitive tests of intelligence than people who had been made to think of other things.
Therapeutic Initiation
Inner Voices: Reverence Toward the Souls of the Ancestors
"Take pains to waken the dead. Dig deep mines and throw in sacrificial gifts, so that they reach the dead. Reflect in good heart upon evil, this is the way to the ascent. But before the ascent, everything is night and Hell." ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 244.
Psychologically this means that the souls of the ancestors (potential factors, qualities, talents, possibilities, and so on, which we have inherited from all the lines of our ancestry) are waiting in the unconscious, and are ready at any time to begin a new growth.
~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 230.
These are, so to speak, the re-animated souls of the ancestors which have been lying dormant in the unconscious, and the alchemists call these units or souls the sleepers or the dead in Hades who are resurrected by the "holy waters" (that is the miraculous water of alchemy, the fertilizing Mercury). ~Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 230.
Learning Objectives:
To understand the significance of our genealogy as more than
a metaphor for the cyclical unfolding of our life story
To understand the timing of transgenerational patterns throughout
different eras of history, and times of transition
To apply the timing of great cycles to our genealogy and life events
and reflect on the unfolding of our goals
If his individual experience is a living thing, it will share the quality of all life, which does not stagnate but, being in continual flux, brings ever new aspects to light.
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 482-488