"If it has been believed hitherto that the human shadow was the source of all evil, it can now be ascertained on closer investigation that the unconscious man, that is, his shadow, does not consist only of morally reprehensible tendencies, but also displays a number of good qualities, such as normal instincts, appropriate reactions, realistic insights, creative impulses, etc." ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 423.
THE TREE OF LIFE IS THE CENTRAL SYMBOL OF MANKIND,
AND THE CENTRAL SYMBOL OF GENEALOGY
"I feel very strongly that I am under the influence of things or questions which were left incomplete and unanswered by my parents and grandparents and more distant ancestors.
[…]
Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements which were all already present in the ranks of our ancestors. The “newness” in the individual psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components.
[…]
I answer for them the questions that their lives once left behind. I care out rough answers as best I can. I have even drawn them on the walls.
[…]
The meaning of my existence is that life has addressed a question to me."
--Jung, Memories Dreams, Reflections
"Genealogy reveals the importance of ancestry to soul. The weight of human history is in the voices of the dead, in opening the mouth of the dead and hearing what they have to say. It's the actual living presence of history in the soul, the past in the soul, not just the deeply repressed or forgotten." ~James Hillman
"To be an ancestor you do not need to be dead, but you do need to know the dead – that is, the invisible world and how and where it touches the living.”
--James Hillman
AND THE CENTRAL SYMBOL OF GENEALOGY
"I feel very strongly that I am under the influence of things or questions which were left incomplete and unanswered by my parents and grandparents and more distant ancestors.
[…]
Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements which were all already present in the ranks of our ancestors. The “newness” in the individual psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components.
[…]
I answer for them the questions that their lives once left behind. I care out rough answers as best I can. I have even drawn them on the walls.
[…]
The meaning of my existence is that life has addressed a question to me."
--Jung, Memories Dreams, Reflections
"Genealogy reveals the importance of ancestry to soul. The weight of human history is in the voices of the dead, in opening the mouth of the dead and hearing what they have to say. It's the actual living presence of history in the soul, the past in the soul, not just the deeply repressed or forgotten." ~James Hillman
"To be an ancestor you do not need to be dead, but you do need to know the dead – that is, the invisible world and how and where it touches the living.”
--James Hillman
Preface
Facing Your Ancestors
GENEALOGY IS A WAY OF KNOWING
Your Pedigree is Your Own Book of the Dead
What I mean by this is that every epoch of our biological life has a numinous character: birth, puberty, marriage, illness, death, etc.
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 208-210.
The aim of individuation is nothing less than to divest the self of the false wrappings of the persona on the one hand, and of the suggestive power of primordial images on the other. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 269
We could therefore translate individuation as “coming to selfhood” or “self-realization.” ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 266
Individuation is an ineluctable psychological necessity.
~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 241.
First of all, individuation is not an intensification of consciousness, it is very much more.
For you must have the consciousness of something before it can be intensified, and that means experience, life lived.
You can only be really conscious of things which you have experienced, so individuation must be understood as life.
Only life integrates, only life and what we do in life makes the individual appear.
You cannot individuate, for instance, by locking yourself up in a cell, you can only individuate in your concrete life, you appear in your deed; there you can individuate and nowhere else.
Real consciousness can only be based upon life, upon things experienced, but talking about these things is just air.
It is a sort of conscious understanding, but it is not individuation.
Individuation is the accomplishment through life.
For instance, say a cell begins to divide itself and to differentiate and develop into a certain plant or a certain animal; that is the process of individuation.
It is that one becomes what one is, that one accomplishes one's destiny, all the determinations that are given in the form of the germ; it is the unfolding of the germ and becoming the primitive pattern that one was born with.
~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 757-758
The shadow is the block which separates us most effectively
from the divine voice. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 544-546
"My fantasies, my symptoms put me in my place. It is no longer to know at which place I belong - at which God - but at what place I belong, on which altar I give myself, my myth by which suffering is transformed into devotion. "
- James Hillman
The old myth, which always holds within it something yet older and more aboriginal, remains the same, this being an essential quality
of all forms of religion; it only undergoes a new interpretation.
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 482-488
Our age is striving to bring about a conglomeration and organisation of enormous masses of people in which the individual suffocates, whereas meditation on the Process of Individuation leads in the reverse direction : to the problem of the spiritual development of the individual. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 8th Nov 1940
Descent From Antiquity
Families are bound together eternally. The power of genealogy is the power of story. This is the story of the family and the diverse characters that populate the many branches of our family tree. These are stories that matter, that preceded your corporeal existence. This story reveals how things came to be as they are -- as you are.
Genealogy is a story we tell ourselves about ourselves. The stories of our ancestors open us to deeper experience. Our personal story is embedded in our larger inherited story and culture. Genealogy helps us connect more deeply with our unique story and meaning in life beyond a personal story. It is a mythic archaeology that connects us with that which has given us shape, opening a path to transformation.
Genealogy is the narrative of a pre-modern world. It has traditional roots in the ancient theogeny of gods and goddesses, divine-king lists and The Bible. Ancestral gods and ancestral religions developed over eons and are as old as particular branches of mankind -- gods of the blood. Astrologically determined gods and goddesses can often be found at the roots of dynastic houses. Royal houses claimed power through descent from ancestral gods.
Gods are difficult to destroy or conceal. Fictitious lines of descent blend indistinguishably with medieval forgeries. Some divinities may originally have been historical persons or war-chiefs, now lost to the mists of pre-history. Seedlines codify ancient ethnic identity and empires. Later, royals added them to their lines to bolster their claims to divine rule and the founding of thrones. Though not factual, traditional genealogy was a geographical and spiritual compass.
When Rome Christianized in the fourth century, it cut off the mythic corpus, and demoted gods to human status and allegories. The medieval period filled the gap with tales of the Holy Grail. The pagan content of mythology was codified in the mid-fourteenth century in Boccassio's Genealogy. Later, the Carolingians used such works to justify their right to rule, also citing the spurious Donation of Constantine, which the Church used to justify the appointment of rulers.
Traditional genealogy considered these mythological inclusions best-practice, yet it may be more of a psychic than historical "fact" -- the product of a collision between pagan and Christian societies and their reconciliation. Historical time required a linear descent, even if it masked pagan roots at the theological fringe. Even if medieval genealogies connecting ancient kings to Adam are pure invention, they retain certain psychic values that are part of the archaeology of the collective unconscious.
The Tree of Life
Our personal genealogy is a process of self-discovery and self-knowledge with its own procedures and measures of 'truth.' It seems ironic that technology is allowing us to retrieve such essential aspects of our own humanity. Curiously, genealogy is the second most popular online subject, second only to sex, much like sex precedes procreation.
Your family tree is an encyclopedia of human nature. Genealogy doesn't give our lives context; it is the context and material ground of our existence. The Tree of Life carries the evolution of the world, gives life to the universe, and understanding or consciousness. Life originates from and disappears back into the Tree. The Kabbalistic Tree of Life is a symbol of the process of creation and inner wholeness.
Jung said (CW5, para321) that, "The tree of life may have been, in the first instance, a fruit-bearing genealogical tree, and hence a kind of tribal mother." It was a central symbol of spiritual unity, wisdom, beauty, love, strength, and the power of the Universe rooted in the divine. Nietzsche pointed out that as with both people and trees, "The more one seeks to rise into height and light, the more vigorously do one's roots struggle earthward, downward into the dark, the the deep -- into evil."
The tree is an early symbol of spiritual development and our own immortal character, the living structure of our inner self -- transcendence to lofty heights. Below the surface, the subtext remains, "Who is this person having these experiences?" We are literally and symbolically the "fruit" of the Tree of Life. We need a powerful new story for our relationship with the Earth: we are, indeed, part of nature and not separate from it in any way. Genealogy helps ground us in this paradigm and helps develop our sense of deep time and rootedness in contemporary life with a global perspective.
Facing Your Ancestors
GENEALOGY IS A WAY OF KNOWING
Your Pedigree is Your Own Book of the Dead
What I mean by this is that every epoch of our biological life has a numinous character: birth, puberty, marriage, illness, death, etc.
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 208-210.
The aim of individuation is nothing less than to divest the self of the false wrappings of the persona on the one hand, and of the suggestive power of primordial images on the other. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 269
- "As bees gather honey, so we collect what is sweetest out of all things and build Him. Even with the trivial, with the insignificant (as long as it is done out of love) we begin, with work and with the repose that comes afterward, with a silence or with a small solitary joy, with everything that we do alone, without anyone to join or help us, we start Him whom we will not live to see, just as our ancestors could not live to see us. And yet they, who passed away long ago, still exist in us, as predisposition, as burden upon our fate, as murmuring blood, and as gesture that rises up from the depths of time. Is there anything that can deprive you of the hope that in this way you will someday exist in Him, who is the farthest, the outermost limit?"
- --Rilke, Letter Six (23 December 1903)
- Briefe an einen jungen Dichter, Dec. 23, 1903 (S.H. transl.)
- It must be immense, this silence, in which sounds and movements have room, and if one thinks that along with all this the presence of the distant sea also resounds, perhaps as the innermost note in this prehistoric harmony, then one can only wish that you are trustingly and patiently letting the magnificent solitude work upon you, this solitude which can no longer be erased from your life; which, in everything that is in store for you to experience and to do, will act as an anonymous influence, continuously and gently decisive, rather as the blood of our ancestors incessantly moves in us and combines with our own to form the unique, unrepeatable being that we are at every turning of our life.
- Rilke, Letter Ten (26 December 1908)
We could therefore translate individuation as “coming to selfhood” or “self-realization.” ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 266
Individuation is an ineluctable psychological necessity.
~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 241.
First of all, individuation is not an intensification of consciousness, it is very much more.
For you must have the consciousness of something before it can be intensified, and that means experience, life lived.
You can only be really conscious of things which you have experienced, so individuation must be understood as life.
Only life integrates, only life and what we do in life makes the individual appear.
You cannot individuate, for instance, by locking yourself up in a cell, you can only individuate in your concrete life, you appear in your deed; there you can individuate and nowhere else.
Real consciousness can only be based upon life, upon things experienced, but talking about these things is just air.
It is a sort of conscious understanding, but it is not individuation.
Individuation is the accomplishment through life.
For instance, say a cell begins to divide itself and to differentiate and develop into a certain plant or a certain animal; that is the process of individuation.
It is that one becomes what one is, that one accomplishes one's destiny, all the determinations that are given in the form of the germ; it is the unfolding of the germ and becoming the primitive pattern that one was born with.
~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Pages 757-758
The shadow is the block which separates us most effectively
from the divine voice. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 544-546
"My fantasies, my symptoms put me in my place. It is no longer to know at which place I belong - at which God - but at what place I belong, on which altar I give myself, my myth by which suffering is transformed into devotion. "
- James Hillman
The old myth, which always holds within it something yet older and more aboriginal, remains the same, this being an essential quality
of all forms of religion; it only undergoes a new interpretation.
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 482-488
Our age is striving to bring about a conglomeration and organisation of enormous masses of people in which the individual suffocates, whereas meditation on the Process of Individuation leads in the reverse direction : to the problem of the spiritual development of the individual. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 8th Nov 1940
Descent From Antiquity
Families are bound together eternally. The power of genealogy is the power of story. This is the story of the family and the diverse characters that populate the many branches of our family tree. These are stories that matter, that preceded your corporeal existence. This story reveals how things came to be as they are -- as you are.
Genealogy is a story we tell ourselves about ourselves. The stories of our ancestors open us to deeper experience. Our personal story is embedded in our larger inherited story and culture. Genealogy helps us connect more deeply with our unique story and meaning in life beyond a personal story. It is a mythic archaeology that connects us with that which has given us shape, opening a path to transformation.
Genealogy is the narrative of a pre-modern world. It has traditional roots in the ancient theogeny of gods and goddesses, divine-king lists and The Bible. Ancestral gods and ancestral religions developed over eons and are as old as particular branches of mankind -- gods of the blood. Astrologically determined gods and goddesses can often be found at the roots of dynastic houses. Royal houses claimed power through descent from ancestral gods.
Gods are difficult to destroy or conceal. Fictitious lines of descent blend indistinguishably with medieval forgeries. Some divinities may originally have been historical persons or war-chiefs, now lost to the mists of pre-history. Seedlines codify ancient ethnic identity and empires. Later, royals added them to their lines to bolster their claims to divine rule and the founding of thrones. Though not factual, traditional genealogy was a geographical and spiritual compass.
When Rome Christianized in the fourth century, it cut off the mythic corpus, and demoted gods to human status and allegories. The medieval period filled the gap with tales of the Holy Grail. The pagan content of mythology was codified in the mid-fourteenth century in Boccassio's Genealogy. Later, the Carolingians used such works to justify their right to rule, also citing the spurious Donation of Constantine, which the Church used to justify the appointment of rulers.
Traditional genealogy considered these mythological inclusions best-practice, yet it may be more of a psychic than historical "fact" -- the product of a collision between pagan and Christian societies and their reconciliation. Historical time required a linear descent, even if it masked pagan roots at the theological fringe. Even if medieval genealogies connecting ancient kings to Adam are pure invention, they retain certain psychic values that are part of the archaeology of the collective unconscious.
The Tree of Life
Our personal genealogy is a process of self-discovery and self-knowledge with its own procedures and measures of 'truth.' It seems ironic that technology is allowing us to retrieve such essential aspects of our own humanity. Curiously, genealogy is the second most popular online subject, second only to sex, much like sex precedes procreation.
Your family tree is an encyclopedia of human nature. Genealogy doesn't give our lives context; it is the context and material ground of our existence. The Tree of Life carries the evolution of the world, gives life to the universe, and understanding or consciousness. Life originates from and disappears back into the Tree. The Kabbalistic Tree of Life is a symbol of the process of creation and inner wholeness.
Jung said (CW5, para321) that, "The tree of life may have been, in the first instance, a fruit-bearing genealogical tree, and hence a kind of tribal mother." It was a central symbol of spiritual unity, wisdom, beauty, love, strength, and the power of the Universe rooted in the divine. Nietzsche pointed out that as with both people and trees, "The more one seeks to rise into height and light, the more vigorously do one's roots struggle earthward, downward into the dark, the the deep -- into evil."
The tree is an early symbol of spiritual development and our own immortal character, the living structure of our inner self -- transcendence to lofty heights. Below the surface, the subtext remains, "Who is this person having these experiences?" We are literally and symbolically the "fruit" of the Tree of Life. We need a powerful new story for our relationship with the Earth: we are, indeed, part of nature and not separate from it in any way. Genealogy helps ground us in this paradigm and helps develop our sense of deep time and rootedness in contemporary life with a global perspective.
The World Tree
Within 5-7 generations our family tree meets up and merges with the World Tree. This is especially true for American Colonial descent, where the progenitors and their droplines are well-known. Once you research back to your Gateway Ancestors who immigrated, you can easily find the lines that connect back as far as professional genealogists have determined and merge even further with fictional, legendary and mythological characters.
Outside of genealogy, the World Tree is often related to shamanism. As a link to ancestral spirits, it is an integral part of the shamanic cosmology. By our 13th Marriage Bridge we find ourselves in Medieval Times and common pool of noble ancestry. The World Tree is also a bridge that connects heaven, earth and underworld. When a shaman "climbs the tree," he or she ascends into the Upper World and the creative sources of power -- to the gods, to the zenith of heaven. The philosophical tree represents a sublimation of our spirit. The shaman receives intercessory messages.
In some ways the World Tree is identical with the shaman. Creatures can appear in the Tree, including snakes, birds, goats, and other totems and signs. The World Tree is a tree of initiation, ordeals, astral or mystic flight, vision quest, and fate or destiny. The shaman mediates between humanity and the spirit world, and in a simpler way, the genealogist performs a similar symbolic service, especially when interpreting a pedigree. To be cut off from the sacred tree is to be cut off from the spirit world, a condition which is likened to 'illness' and requires healing for loss of soul.
The serpents in our Tree are the individual lines of descent from various common ancestors. They lead us to question who and what we are, what we know, and what we thought we knew about our roots. They offer us Knowledge. They are part of the larger truth -- that we are born and we die -- and we stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. Yet, Jung said we fear our serpent as we fear the numinosum. He concludes, "All we have to give the world and God is ourselves as we are."
Good and evil unite in the growth of the Tree. It combines masculine phallic representations with feminine nurture and growth. We are the serpent of wisdom, the union of good and evil, in our own Tree. Genealogy is a ritual in which we climb up and down through the branches of our tree in deep remembrance, an exercise in 'time travel' that expands our consciousness.
Mircea Eliade and Joseph Campbell wrote exhaustively on this Tree as the center of the world, a vertical World Axis or dimension that symbolizes the capacity for non-ordinary experience, including shamanic trance that reinforces community links with cosmic consciousness. The Sacred Tree as such a center is potentially everywhere. The drum, like the heartbeat of the community is a means of climbing the tree and contacting the spirits. Campbell called the cosmic tree a wish-fulfilling, fruitful symbol of fertility, regeneration, and immortality.
Continuity
We need to know that we have a history of continuity that is profound. Our bloodline is our connection to Creation. We follow the steps created by the bodies and minds of the past. Our artform goes back to antiquity and is the measure of man. In this way we penetrate our own unknown origins and the culture of our ancestors. We think, feel, remember, and imagine. Memory is a form of imagination.
As existentially powerful as science or religion, genealogy can expand our worldview and help us weave our own coherent narrative. It helps us unravel our emotional inheritance. Sometimes what the forebearers did somehow becomes our story. We can re-imagine the whole planet as our ancestral lands. It helps us grasp how we are holistically embedded in a vast seamless web of life, a world alive with cosmic spirit, as counterpoint to death, tragedy, destruction, and despair.
Interpretation
Reading our genealogical lines is ultimately a heuristic process -- one requiring deep research and circumspect interpretation. But, connecting with the vitality of our lineage -- the living sap of the Tree -- elevates the mind and sublimes the thought. It is less about a "me generation" story than a grand "story of us" that ranges beyond illusions of time, space, and ego. We can cultivate the Elysian Fields of our ancestors to good effect. Thus, genealogy can be a transformative art. The Grail is a Mystery and the search for it a Quest for self-actualization, a way of initiation.
If we are too literal about it, we see only a string of corpses. But if we truly assimilate our heritage, we alter it creatively and give life to it through our individual understanding. We can bring our genealogy into meaningful dialogue with artistic and cultural disciplines. Genealogy is arguably one of the most "grounding" activities in which we can participate. From this fertile ground springs the acorn of the soul. It's an old Platonic and Jungian idea that the soul picks the father and mother of the child...and thereby the direct ancestors.
Deliteralization
The ancestors are the symbolic and material ground of our being. Psyche is not in us; we are in it which is everywhere. Jung pointed out in Letters Vol. II that without psyche we can neither know nor believe. We learn to center, reflect, and listen to voices within. The Great Work of genealogy is a small price to pay for turning the unconscious lead of uprootedness into the psychological gold of knowing one's true origins.
We live in relative autonomy but remain enmeshed in the epigenetic memories of our particular family. Our rich descent is about NOW, as much or more than it is about what has gone before. Our personal mythology is shaped in our formative years. The ancient myths live on in the stories we tell about our own lives. The old gods are there in spirit in our triumphs and struggles. Myths pertain to the primordial gods and goddesses, while legend is about historical human heroes.
Our life stories are personal myths that emulate the characters and themes found in old myths. We act on mythic archetypes without knowing we are doing it. We choose our identity as well as the shape and direction of our lives through such such scripts. When we resonate with our ancestors, it helps us make sense of our own lives.
We are cast in the natural form and and semblance of those who came before us. We must each answer the call of the Ancestors to the adventure of self-discovery in our own way. Group approaches generally devolve into the lowest common denominator, as Jung describes. We can approach our lineage in the spirit of individuation. In the genealogical matrix of personalities, each ancestor has a potential effect on our consciousness. Naturally, that potential will not be realized in full because many of our ancestral lines will stub out sooner or later in the dead ends of unknown individuals and lost family lines.
The Royal We
Because they were recorded better for historical and other reasons, noble and royal lines are more available. Anyone tracing to royal roots will meet and share the same medieval pool of progenitors -- the "usual suspects." It is only natural to identify with some more than others, depending on how we resonate with their stories, for good or evil. In Letters Vol. II, Jung said, "We think it is enough to discover new things, but we don't realize that knowing more demands a corresponding development of morality."
We may find ourselves in a participation mystique, or project our feelings onto them, or even become 'possessed' or fascinated by certain individuals and their qualities or deeds. For example, The Da Vinci Code fad has produced a group of fantasists riveted to alternative stories of Mary Magdalene and Jesus, while ignoring even their most recent ancestors, who are probably as, or more influential psychologically-speaking. In the worst cases such unconscious identification can lead to dissociation, 'possession,' and dysfunctionality. In an ideal world, genealogy supports maintaining our basic integrity, giving new meaning to "knowing who we are," and how deeply we are tied to self, world, and others.
Most connections in the world are not relationships, they are participation mystique [mystical connection]. One is then apparently connected, but of course it is never a real connection, it is never a relationship; but it gives the feeling of being one sheep in a flock at least, which is something. While if you disqualify yourself as a sheep you are necessarily out of the flock and will suffer from a certain loneliness, despite the fact that you then have a chance to reestablish a relationship, and this time a conscious relationship, which is far more satisfactory.
Participation mystique gives one a peculiar unconsciousness, which is in a way a function of the mother; one is carried in unconsciousness. Sometimes it is nice and sometimes it is not nice at all, but as a rule people prefer it because the average man gets awfully frightened when he has to do something which he cannot share with his world; he is afraid to be alone, to think something
which other people don’t think, or to feel something which other people don’t feel.
One is up against man’s gregarious instinct as soon as one tries to transcend the ordinary consciousness. Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 625
Some people even develop compensatory personas based solely on such spurious connections. Our interpretations of our genealogy may lead to a lowering (abaissment) of consciousness, while others expand awareness. But we cannot retrieve the worldviews of pre-literate, agrarian or feudal societies to solve today's problems of the information age and global society. The problem compounds when we try to grasp the functional realities of ancient civilizations and cultures. What we do experience is our fantasy images of what those individuals and times might have been like. Images are the basic experience of psyche. These images are our prima materia.
Personal Mythology
In The Interior Dialogue (2009), Stanley Krippner describes personal mythology as "... an approach to personal transformation using the development of participants' personal stories about existential human issues for self healing and personal growth. There are also cultural, institutional, ethnic, and familial myths which influence our personal myths.
We use our stories as personal myths. Often they can be found through our dreams, where we are often informed long before we know intellectually. There are four factors that influence personal myths: biology, culture, interpersonal experiences, and transpersonal experiences and how to work with them. By identifying, evaluating, and transforming dysfunctional myths, beliefs, and worldviews, and working with them you can transform them."
We live in a time of many competing mythologies. Genealogy can help us clarify personal, characterological, and familial issues. Our genealogy becomes a psychologically constructed reality. We have no real experience of ancestral habits of thought and expression nor by-gone eras of strife, order and disorder. Sentimentality, nostalgia, and confabulation are poor substitutes. Others spout idiosyncratic doctrines or cliche prophecies based on their so-called supernatural connections. Such raw mythologizing is a far cry from the aesthetic pursuit of personal mythology, as described by Krippner, and others.
Your Genealogical exploration is an archetypal Journey during which you travel back into the worlds inhabited by your ancestors. Some people are rationally motivated to find and preserve their lineage for the family. Others are emotionally driven by conscious and unconscious needs. Those who take a religious approach will emphasize legendary 'holy blood' aspects. Those who are fascinated with myths and tales may embrace them as 'real.'
We can often not put a face to our ancestors, but we can give them back their names, and thus FACE our ancestors in the most direct way possible, with honor and respect.
We create our own ultimate narrative of our genealogical story based on our self-image, beliefs and worldview. Because the 'spiritual' romantics embrace connections others consider 'false' or non-historical, the rationalist genealogists have moved toward removing or cutting off lines they consider 'fictional'. But they cannot cut off the deep root of the collective unconscious for which these ancient ideas are 'real.' For example, immortality may not be 'real', but our unconscious behaves as if it is so. The unconscious believes in immortality, even if we don't.
There is a simple solution to this polarization. Taking a psychological approach to the family and world tree de-literalizes the legendary and mythic lines. We can simply retain their fructifying and life-giving potential without making them into unsupportable 'facts.' Jung said, "mythological motifs are 'facts;' they never change; only theories change," (Letters II, p. 191). We can't deny their existence by pruning them from the World Tree.
Archetypal psychology has worked with such material to provide a viable model for approaching the integration of these ancient figures into our conscious lives. If we apply the methods, we cannot fail to discover archetypal motifs. It isn't a system as much as a way of "seeing through."
If we apply depth psychology methods conscientiously, we can avoid most of the literalization, projection, and ego inflation that affects many amateur genealogists who fail to comprehend the material in a way that reflects best-practice. Instead our approach to the "as if" real portions of the pedigree is poetic and deliteralized, and doesn't seek to retrieve the past as much as live more fully with it. We can "evoke" and "constellate" such material within the hermetically sealed process of Jungian Genealogy.
In one sense, all these lives are yours, but not in the individual new age sense of past lives. You will meet characters of all psychological types, and perhaps re-member your passed lives: villains and heroes, the famous and infamous, saints and sinners, priests and warriors, fair maidens, bastards and bold knights, kings and queens, genius and psychopaths, and a host of supporting ancestors. And they will all be your gr-grandparents.
We may judge, deny, or reject some ancestors while having an instinctive rapport with others. They help us reveal our shadow traits as well as self-actualizing capacities. In most cases they lived in a far more challenging world in which to survive, much less thrive. Their lives can inform and inspire us. The trail back through history can be followed in our lines of descent. History becomes personal. Your sense of time, depth, and intimacy expands. Our whole being, our whole body is an intergenerational as well as personal memory down to the cellular, genetic, and epigenetic level.
If to 'worship' is to show honor or give devotional attention or adoring regard, then in genealogy we can 'worship' our ancestors, without taking that too literally. We can respect, honor, and attend without being consumed in the labyrinthine matrix of the dead or in their many conflicts, infidelities, and vile deeds. We can view the sketchier, legendary parts of our pedigree with an imaginal eye.
Deities and Demigods
This is not concretized personal genealogy, over burdened by the literalized personal conflicts and traumas of the family system. Neither a lie nor a fantasy, it is our underlying archetypal genealogy, without the suffocating pressures of personal genealogy. This allows psychic movement within the archetypal possibilities and situations behind their images. Are Uranus, Aphrodite, Hercules, Isis, and Odin really our "ancestors"? Such deities and demigods represent our transpersonal potential. Are they really in our blood, or the roots of the psyche?
This is the traditional way of showing forth the ancient shared connection with our common roots -- with the collective unconscious, including the gods and goddesses that appear at the foundation of our genealogies. We learn the family trees of godforms in school, but not their specific relationships to our drop lines. Many of the deities are related in more than one way. Stories of gods and creation are not just about the past. They are about us now.
Ancestral Braiding
Our ancestral lines braid together through marriages and migration. Our histories are woven together in cross-cousin and foreign marriage bridges. Long royal genealogies include nearly every war and clash of cultures throughout history. You will have progenitors on both sides of many battles. There will be persecutors and victims, even genocides. While bordering on factual our historical gleanings may or may not be accurate.
We may find it hard to absorb that whole timeline of human turmoil at such a personal level. It takes time to digest and integrate as the actual stories of your ancestors, especially when they fade into myth and legend. They may not be historical facts, but psyche has its own facts and effects on our beliefs and behaviors. Genealogy reflects the psychic facts of our protracted existence. Psychic realities are expressions of soul cultivated by imagination.
Tracing one's lines becomes a meditational activity. Finding the homes and stories of ancestors helps us flesh them out and imaginally travel back to their times and places. Many of these simple tasks have the ritualistic effect of helping us grow closer to the ancestors -- to those whose names we can now readily recite and place.
One's entire pedigree symbolizes the totality of the Self and its transcendent nature. But no one can integrate the wholeness of the entire self because that would limit it. Jung said, "in reality its experience is unlimited and endless." Biologically, we do not contain or express the genes of all of our ancestors, and our specific combination that does manifest is what makes us unique individuals.
Ritual, Dreams, and Imagination
We can expand our awareness further with 'dream genealogy.' Jung said, "In the deepest sense, we all dream not of ourselves, but out of what lies between us and the other." We can gather information about our ancestors in our reveries, dreams and shamanic journeys. 'Big dreams' can reveal elusive family history. By entering the world of the ancestors, we tap our deep unconscious, collective memories, intuition, vision, and wisdom. Lucid Dreaming and Dream Walking have been used by some to open ancestral connections.
Rituals, such as a simple ancestral altar, to more elaborate enactments or recitals are an option. More than faith, habit or even magic, Jung saw rites as psychologically effective symbolic acts, "giving expression to the archetypal expectation of the unconscious." "Rites give satisfaction to the collective and numinous aspects of the moment, beyond their purely personal significance." (Letters II, p.208-210) Acts of imagination can also be seen as rituals that enrich our perceptions.
We can edit or amend our family story as we gain a more accurate understanding our lines and the past. We are a ripple on the ocean of this past experience. We can move systematically back in time or take quantum leaps into other realities. Other optional methods include hypnosis or even word association. Those with "Second Sight" will draw from those experiences while others try to foster that ability. Perhaps one of the most productive techniques we can use is the dialogical method, such as that outlined by Ira Progoff in his works on journaling.
Some seek answers to questions, while others seek only the Mystery in the darkness. We connect with something greater than ourselves, finding more than we know. Art integrates the material and spiritual. Artistic expression in all forms is another way to let the ancestors in, to give them a voice or presence -- to receive a blessing or healing. Genealogy is an evolving construction of our inner reality.
***********************
References
Cosmic Tree/World Tree http://jungiangenealogy.weebly.com/cosmic-tree.html
http://www.lib.jmu.edu/genealogy/
Within 5-7 generations our family tree meets up and merges with the World Tree. This is especially true for American Colonial descent, where the progenitors and their droplines are well-known. Once you research back to your Gateway Ancestors who immigrated, you can easily find the lines that connect back as far as professional genealogists have determined and merge even further with fictional, legendary and mythological characters.
Outside of genealogy, the World Tree is often related to shamanism. As a link to ancestral spirits, it is an integral part of the shamanic cosmology. By our 13th Marriage Bridge we find ourselves in Medieval Times and common pool of noble ancestry. The World Tree is also a bridge that connects heaven, earth and underworld. When a shaman "climbs the tree," he or she ascends into the Upper World and the creative sources of power -- to the gods, to the zenith of heaven. The philosophical tree represents a sublimation of our spirit. The shaman receives intercessory messages.
In some ways the World Tree is identical with the shaman. Creatures can appear in the Tree, including snakes, birds, goats, and other totems and signs. The World Tree is a tree of initiation, ordeals, astral or mystic flight, vision quest, and fate or destiny. The shaman mediates between humanity and the spirit world, and in a simpler way, the genealogist performs a similar symbolic service, especially when interpreting a pedigree. To be cut off from the sacred tree is to be cut off from the spirit world, a condition which is likened to 'illness' and requires healing for loss of soul.
The serpents in our Tree are the individual lines of descent from various common ancestors. They lead us to question who and what we are, what we know, and what we thought we knew about our roots. They offer us Knowledge. They are part of the larger truth -- that we are born and we die -- and we stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. Yet, Jung said we fear our serpent as we fear the numinosum. He concludes, "All we have to give the world and God is ourselves as we are."
Good and evil unite in the growth of the Tree. It combines masculine phallic representations with feminine nurture and growth. We are the serpent of wisdom, the union of good and evil, in our own Tree. Genealogy is a ritual in which we climb up and down through the branches of our tree in deep remembrance, an exercise in 'time travel' that expands our consciousness.
Mircea Eliade and Joseph Campbell wrote exhaustively on this Tree as the center of the world, a vertical World Axis or dimension that symbolizes the capacity for non-ordinary experience, including shamanic trance that reinforces community links with cosmic consciousness. The Sacred Tree as such a center is potentially everywhere. The drum, like the heartbeat of the community is a means of climbing the tree and contacting the spirits. Campbell called the cosmic tree a wish-fulfilling, fruitful symbol of fertility, regeneration, and immortality.
Continuity
We need to know that we have a history of continuity that is profound. Our bloodline is our connection to Creation. We follow the steps created by the bodies and minds of the past. Our artform goes back to antiquity and is the measure of man. In this way we penetrate our own unknown origins and the culture of our ancestors. We think, feel, remember, and imagine. Memory is a form of imagination.
As existentially powerful as science or religion, genealogy can expand our worldview and help us weave our own coherent narrative. It helps us unravel our emotional inheritance. Sometimes what the forebearers did somehow becomes our story. We can re-imagine the whole planet as our ancestral lands. It helps us grasp how we are holistically embedded in a vast seamless web of life, a world alive with cosmic spirit, as counterpoint to death, tragedy, destruction, and despair.
Interpretation
Reading our genealogical lines is ultimately a heuristic process -- one requiring deep research and circumspect interpretation. But, connecting with the vitality of our lineage -- the living sap of the Tree -- elevates the mind and sublimes the thought. It is less about a "me generation" story than a grand "story of us" that ranges beyond illusions of time, space, and ego. We can cultivate the Elysian Fields of our ancestors to good effect. Thus, genealogy can be a transformative art. The Grail is a Mystery and the search for it a Quest for self-actualization, a way of initiation.
If we are too literal about it, we see only a string of corpses. But if we truly assimilate our heritage, we alter it creatively and give life to it through our individual understanding. We can bring our genealogy into meaningful dialogue with artistic and cultural disciplines. Genealogy is arguably one of the most "grounding" activities in which we can participate. From this fertile ground springs the acorn of the soul. It's an old Platonic and Jungian idea that the soul picks the father and mother of the child...and thereby the direct ancestors.
Deliteralization
The ancestors are the symbolic and material ground of our being. Psyche is not in us; we are in it which is everywhere. Jung pointed out in Letters Vol. II that without psyche we can neither know nor believe. We learn to center, reflect, and listen to voices within. The Great Work of genealogy is a small price to pay for turning the unconscious lead of uprootedness into the psychological gold of knowing one's true origins.
We live in relative autonomy but remain enmeshed in the epigenetic memories of our particular family. Our rich descent is about NOW, as much or more than it is about what has gone before. Our personal mythology is shaped in our formative years. The ancient myths live on in the stories we tell about our own lives. The old gods are there in spirit in our triumphs and struggles. Myths pertain to the primordial gods and goddesses, while legend is about historical human heroes.
Our life stories are personal myths that emulate the characters and themes found in old myths. We act on mythic archetypes without knowing we are doing it. We choose our identity as well as the shape and direction of our lives through such such scripts. When we resonate with our ancestors, it helps us make sense of our own lives.
We are cast in the natural form and and semblance of those who came before us. We must each answer the call of the Ancestors to the adventure of self-discovery in our own way. Group approaches generally devolve into the lowest common denominator, as Jung describes. We can approach our lineage in the spirit of individuation. In the genealogical matrix of personalities, each ancestor has a potential effect on our consciousness. Naturally, that potential will not be realized in full because many of our ancestral lines will stub out sooner or later in the dead ends of unknown individuals and lost family lines.
The Royal We
Because they were recorded better for historical and other reasons, noble and royal lines are more available. Anyone tracing to royal roots will meet and share the same medieval pool of progenitors -- the "usual suspects." It is only natural to identify with some more than others, depending on how we resonate with their stories, for good or evil. In Letters Vol. II, Jung said, "We think it is enough to discover new things, but we don't realize that knowing more demands a corresponding development of morality."
We may find ourselves in a participation mystique, or project our feelings onto them, or even become 'possessed' or fascinated by certain individuals and their qualities or deeds. For example, The Da Vinci Code fad has produced a group of fantasists riveted to alternative stories of Mary Magdalene and Jesus, while ignoring even their most recent ancestors, who are probably as, or more influential psychologically-speaking. In the worst cases such unconscious identification can lead to dissociation, 'possession,' and dysfunctionality. In an ideal world, genealogy supports maintaining our basic integrity, giving new meaning to "knowing who we are," and how deeply we are tied to self, world, and others.
Most connections in the world are not relationships, they are participation mystique [mystical connection]. One is then apparently connected, but of course it is never a real connection, it is never a relationship; but it gives the feeling of being one sheep in a flock at least, which is something. While if you disqualify yourself as a sheep you are necessarily out of the flock and will suffer from a certain loneliness, despite the fact that you then have a chance to reestablish a relationship, and this time a conscious relationship, which is far more satisfactory.
Participation mystique gives one a peculiar unconsciousness, which is in a way a function of the mother; one is carried in unconsciousness. Sometimes it is nice and sometimes it is not nice at all, but as a rule people prefer it because the average man gets awfully frightened when he has to do something which he cannot share with his world; he is afraid to be alone, to think something
which other people don’t think, or to feel something which other people don’t feel.
One is up against man’s gregarious instinct as soon as one tries to transcend the ordinary consciousness. Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 625
Some people even develop compensatory personas based solely on such spurious connections. Our interpretations of our genealogy may lead to a lowering (abaissment) of consciousness, while others expand awareness. But we cannot retrieve the worldviews of pre-literate, agrarian or feudal societies to solve today's problems of the information age and global society. The problem compounds when we try to grasp the functional realities of ancient civilizations and cultures. What we do experience is our fantasy images of what those individuals and times might have been like. Images are the basic experience of psyche. These images are our prima materia.
Personal Mythology
In The Interior Dialogue (2009), Stanley Krippner describes personal mythology as "... an approach to personal transformation using the development of participants' personal stories about existential human issues for self healing and personal growth. There are also cultural, institutional, ethnic, and familial myths which influence our personal myths.
We use our stories as personal myths. Often they can be found through our dreams, where we are often informed long before we know intellectually. There are four factors that influence personal myths: biology, culture, interpersonal experiences, and transpersonal experiences and how to work with them. By identifying, evaluating, and transforming dysfunctional myths, beliefs, and worldviews, and working with them you can transform them."
We live in a time of many competing mythologies. Genealogy can help us clarify personal, characterological, and familial issues. Our genealogy becomes a psychologically constructed reality. We have no real experience of ancestral habits of thought and expression nor by-gone eras of strife, order and disorder. Sentimentality, nostalgia, and confabulation are poor substitutes. Others spout idiosyncratic doctrines or cliche prophecies based on their so-called supernatural connections. Such raw mythologizing is a far cry from the aesthetic pursuit of personal mythology, as described by Krippner, and others.
Your Genealogical exploration is an archetypal Journey during which you travel back into the worlds inhabited by your ancestors. Some people are rationally motivated to find and preserve their lineage for the family. Others are emotionally driven by conscious and unconscious needs. Those who take a religious approach will emphasize legendary 'holy blood' aspects. Those who are fascinated with myths and tales may embrace them as 'real.'
We can often not put a face to our ancestors, but we can give them back their names, and thus FACE our ancestors in the most direct way possible, with honor and respect.
We create our own ultimate narrative of our genealogical story based on our self-image, beliefs and worldview. Because the 'spiritual' romantics embrace connections others consider 'false' or non-historical, the rationalist genealogists have moved toward removing or cutting off lines they consider 'fictional'. But they cannot cut off the deep root of the collective unconscious for which these ancient ideas are 'real.' For example, immortality may not be 'real', but our unconscious behaves as if it is so. The unconscious believes in immortality, even if we don't.
There is a simple solution to this polarization. Taking a psychological approach to the family and world tree de-literalizes the legendary and mythic lines. We can simply retain their fructifying and life-giving potential without making them into unsupportable 'facts.' Jung said, "mythological motifs are 'facts;' they never change; only theories change," (Letters II, p. 191). We can't deny their existence by pruning them from the World Tree.
Archetypal psychology has worked with such material to provide a viable model for approaching the integration of these ancient figures into our conscious lives. If we apply the methods, we cannot fail to discover archetypal motifs. It isn't a system as much as a way of "seeing through."
If we apply depth psychology methods conscientiously, we can avoid most of the literalization, projection, and ego inflation that affects many amateur genealogists who fail to comprehend the material in a way that reflects best-practice. Instead our approach to the "as if" real portions of the pedigree is poetic and deliteralized, and doesn't seek to retrieve the past as much as live more fully with it. We can "evoke" and "constellate" such material within the hermetically sealed process of Jungian Genealogy.
In one sense, all these lives are yours, but not in the individual new age sense of past lives. You will meet characters of all psychological types, and perhaps re-member your passed lives: villains and heroes, the famous and infamous, saints and sinners, priests and warriors, fair maidens, bastards and bold knights, kings and queens, genius and psychopaths, and a host of supporting ancestors. And they will all be your gr-grandparents.
We may judge, deny, or reject some ancestors while having an instinctive rapport with others. They help us reveal our shadow traits as well as self-actualizing capacities. In most cases they lived in a far more challenging world in which to survive, much less thrive. Their lives can inform and inspire us. The trail back through history can be followed in our lines of descent. History becomes personal. Your sense of time, depth, and intimacy expands. Our whole being, our whole body is an intergenerational as well as personal memory down to the cellular, genetic, and epigenetic level.
If to 'worship' is to show honor or give devotional attention or adoring regard, then in genealogy we can 'worship' our ancestors, without taking that too literally. We can respect, honor, and attend without being consumed in the labyrinthine matrix of the dead or in their many conflicts, infidelities, and vile deeds. We can view the sketchier, legendary parts of our pedigree with an imaginal eye.
Deities and Demigods
This is not concretized personal genealogy, over burdened by the literalized personal conflicts and traumas of the family system. Neither a lie nor a fantasy, it is our underlying archetypal genealogy, without the suffocating pressures of personal genealogy. This allows psychic movement within the archetypal possibilities and situations behind their images. Are Uranus, Aphrodite, Hercules, Isis, and Odin really our "ancestors"? Such deities and demigods represent our transpersonal potential. Are they really in our blood, or the roots of the psyche?
This is the traditional way of showing forth the ancient shared connection with our common roots -- with the collective unconscious, including the gods and goddesses that appear at the foundation of our genealogies. We learn the family trees of godforms in school, but not their specific relationships to our drop lines. Many of the deities are related in more than one way. Stories of gods and creation are not just about the past. They are about us now.
Ancestral Braiding
Our ancestral lines braid together through marriages and migration. Our histories are woven together in cross-cousin and foreign marriage bridges. Long royal genealogies include nearly every war and clash of cultures throughout history. You will have progenitors on both sides of many battles. There will be persecutors and victims, even genocides. While bordering on factual our historical gleanings may or may not be accurate.
We may find it hard to absorb that whole timeline of human turmoil at such a personal level. It takes time to digest and integrate as the actual stories of your ancestors, especially when they fade into myth and legend. They may not be historical facts, but psyche has its own facts and effects on our beliefs and behaviors. Genealogy reflects the psychic facts of our protracted existence. Psychic realities are expressions of soul cultivated by imagination.
Tracing one's lines becomes a meditational activity. Finding the homes and stories of ancestors helps us flesh them out and imaginally travel back to their times and places. Many of these simple tasks have the ritualistic effect of helping us grow closer to the ancestors -- to those whose names we can now readily recite and place.
One's entire pedigree symbolizes the totality of the Self and its transcendent nature. But no one can integrate the wholeness of the entire self because that would limit it. Jung said, "in reality its experience is unlimited and endless." Biologically, we do not contain or express the genes of all of our ancestors, and our specific combination that does manifest is what makes us unique individuals.
Ritual, Dreams, and Imagination
We can expand our awareness further with 'dream genealogy.' Jung said, "In the deepest sense, we all dream not of ourselves, but out of what lies between us and the other." We can gather information about our ancestors in our reveries, dreams and shamanic journeys. 'Big dreams' can reveal elusive family history. By entering the world of the ancestors, we tap our deep unconscious, collective memories, intuition, vision, and wisdom. Lucid Dreaming and Dream Walking have been used by some to open ancestral connections.
Rituals, such as a simple ancestral altar, to more elaborate enactments or recitals are an option. More than faith, habit or even magic, Jung saw rites as psychologically effective symbolic acts, "giving expression to the archetypal expectation of the unconscious." "Rites give satisfaction to the collective and numinous aspects of the moment, beyond their purely personal significance." (Letters II, p.208-210) Acts of imagination can also be seen as rituals that enrich our perceptions.
We can edit or amend our family story as we gain a more accurate understanding our lines and the past. We are a ripple on the ocean of this past experience. We can move systematically back in time or take quantum leaps into other realities. Other optional methods include hypnosis or even word association. Those with "Second Sight" will draw from those experiences while others try to foster that ability. Perhaps one of the most productive techniques we can use is the dialogical method, such as that outlined by Ira Progoff in his works on journaling.
Some seek answers to questions, while others seek only the Mystery in the darkness. We connect with something greater than ourselves, finding more than we know. Art integrates the material and spiritual. Artistic expression in all forms is another way to let the ancestors in, to give them a voice or presence -- to receive a blessing or healing. Genealogy is an evolving construction of our inner reality.
***********************
References
Cosmic Tree/World Tree http://jungiangenealogy.weebly.com/cosmic-tree.html
http://www.lib.jmu.edu/genealogy/
CAMPBELL: Eden is. "The kingdom of the Father is spread upon the earth, and men do not see it." That is the way it feels, but this is it, this is Eden. When you see the kingdom spread upon the earth, the old way of living in the world is annihilated. That is the end of the world, The end of the world is not an event to come, it is an event of psychological transformation, of visionary transformation. You see not the world of solid things but a world of radiance.
--Power of Myth
--Power of Myth
The more you cling to that which all the world desires, the more you are Everyman, who has not yet discovered himself and stumbles through the world like a blind mind leading the blind with somnambulistic certainty into the ditch.
Everyman is always a multitude.
Cleanse your interest of that collective sulphur which clings to all like a leprosy.
For desire only burns in order to burn itself out, and in and from this fire arises the true living spirit which generates life according to its own laws, and is not blinded by the shortsightedness of our intentions or the crude presumption of our superstitious belief in the will. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 192
Everyman is always a multitude.
Cleanse your interest of that collective sulphur which clings to all like a leprosy.
For desire only burns in order to burn itself out, and in and from this fire arises the true living spirit which generates life according to its own laws, and is not blinded by the shortsightedness of our intentions or the crude presumption of our superstitious belief in the will. ~Carl Jung, CW 14, Para 192
CHAPTER 1
It's Not Where We Are Born, but What Is Born In Us
The "secret of life" is my life, which is enacted round about me, my life and my death; for when the vine has grown old it is torn up by the roots.
All the tendrils that would not bear grapes are pruned away. Its life is remorselessly cut down to its essence, and the sweetness of the grape is turned into wine, dry and heady, a son of the earth who serves his blood to the multitude and causes the drunkenness which unites the divided and brings back the memory of possessing all and of the kingship, a time of loosening, and a time of peace.
There is much more to follow, but it can no longer be told.
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II II, Pages 514-515
Holding lectures, giving instruction, pumping in knowledge, all these current university procedures are no use at all here. The only thing that really helps is self-knowledge and the change of mental and moral attitude it brings about.
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 533-534
[Carl Jung answers Can I help the spirit of my dead father…]
QUESTION 5: Can I help the spirit of my dead father by trying to live in accordance with the demands of the unconscious?
Dr. Jung: Yes, provided—one must always add—that the spirit of the dead father [remains a living idea].
I call this idea hygienic, because when I think that way everything is right in my psychic life and when I don't think that way everything goes wrong, then somewhere things don't click, at least in the biological sense.
~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 383-386.
R.I.P.
"Rest is a state of peace between man and nature....
Work is a symbol of conflict and discord;
rest is an expression of dignity, peace, and freedom."
--Erich Fromm, Forgotten Language
If you are not interested in your own fate, the unconscious is.
~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 359-364
It's Not Where We Are Born, but What Is Born In Us
The "secret of life" is my life, which is enacted round about me, my life and my death; for when the vine has grown old it is torn up by the roots.
All the tendrils that would not bear grapes are pruned away. Its life is remorselessly cut down to its essence, and the sweetness of the grape is turned into wine, dry and heady, a son of the earth who serves his blood to the multitude and causes the drunkenness which unites the divided and brings back the memory of possessing all and of the kingship, a time of loosening, and a time of peace.
There is much more to follow, but it can no longer be told.
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II II, Pages 514-515
Holding lectures, giving instruction, pumping in knowledge, all these current university procedures are no use at all here. The only thing that really helps is self-knowledge and the change of mental and moral attitude it brings about.
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 533-534
[Carl Jung answers Can I help the spirit of my dead father…]
QUESTION 5: Can I help the spirit of my dead father by trying to live in accordance with the demands of the unconscious?
Dr. Jung: Yes, provided—one must always add—that the spirit of the dead father [remains a living idea].
I call this idea hygienic, because when I think that way everything is right in my psychic life and when I don't think that way everything goes wrong, then somewhere things don't click, at least in the biological sense.
~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 383-386.
R.I.P.
"Rest is a state of peace between man and nature....
Work is a symbol of conflict and discord;
rest is an expression of dignity, peace, and freedom."
--Erich Fromm, Forgotten Language
If you are not interested in your own fate, the unconscious is.
~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 359-364
Well, if you don't call it art, but call it the creative impulse.
Naturally, the creative impulse has always been the maker of the individual.
You see, creative impulse does not appear in everybody in the same strength: certain individuals are picked, they have a particular gift.
They create something which is striking and they are then the innovators, and stick out like old man Prometheus, that great sinner against the gods.
He was an individual and he was punished for it, but he was made to stand out through his creative impulse.
Naturally, the creative impulse is forever the maker of personality and uses that individual form, that distinction.
Therefore it is absolutely necessary that, in the process of individuation, everybody should become aware of his creative instinct, no matter how small it is. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 668.
Certainly, Jung was aware, as others after him have been(Abraham & Torok,1994; Ancelin Schützenberger, 1998/2009), that history (narratives of one’s personal, familial,and collective pasts) shapes and informs an individual’s identity.
Jung(1963/1989) argues that we do violence to the present by distancing ourselves from our historical roots (pp.235-236). The loss of a connection with the past is for Jung the reason for the rise of the“‘discontents’ of civilization”(ibid., p.236).
A connection with the past, he reiterates, is crucial to the formulation of individuality and thus acts as a buffer to mass-mindedness (ibid.).“The less we understand of what our fathers and forefathers sought,” he comments, “the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle in the mass [...]”(ibid.).
Knowing one’s past, what Jung refers to as “the historical family” (by which he ultimately meant the collective unconscious [Lu,2011]), and how it resides in and plays out in each individual in the present,is crucial to psychological health.
It is in humanity’s best interest, then, to reconnect to this past, as the “ancestral psyches” within each of us can shed light on contemporary circumstances and situations (Jung, 1963/1989, p.237). It is equally important, however, not to become lost in these past images, not to be “imprisoned in these memories” (ibid., p.320).
http://jungiansociety.org/images/e-journal/Volume-8/Lu-2012.pdf
Naturally, the creative impulse has always been the maker of the individual.
You see, creative impulse does not appear in everybody in the same strength: certain individuals are picked, they have a particular gift.
They create something which is striking and they are then the innovators, and stick out like old man Prometheus, that great sinner against the gods.
He was an individual and he was punished for it, but he was made to stand out through his creative impulse.
Naturally, the creative impulse is forever the maker of personality and uses that individual form, that distinction.
Therefore it is absolutely necessary that, in the process of individuation, everybody should become aware of his creative instinct, no matter how small it is. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 668.
Certainly, Jung was aware, as others after him have been(Abraham & Torok,1994; Ancelin Schützenberger, 1998/2009), that history (narratives of one’s personal, familial,and collective pasts) shapes and informs an individual’s identity.
Jung(1963/1989) argues that we do violence to the present by distancing ourselves from our historical roots (pp.235-236). The loss of a connection with the past is for Jung the reason for the rise of the“‘discontents’ of civilization”(ibid., p.236).
A connection with the past, he reiterates, is crucial to the formulation of individuality and thus acts as a buffer to mass-mindedness (ibid.).“The less we understand of what our fathers and forefathers sought,” he comments, “the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle in the mass [...]”(ibid.).
Knowing one’s past, what Jung refers to as “the historical family” (by which he ultimately meant the collective unconscious [Lu,2011]), and how it resides in and plays out in each individual in the present,is crucial to psychological health.
It is in humanity’s best interest, then, to reconnect to this past, as the “ancestral psyches” within each of us can shed light on contemporary circumstances and situations (Jung, 1963/1989, p.237). It is equally important, however, not to become lost in these past images, not to be “imprisoned in these memories” (ibid., p.320).
http://jungiansociety.org/images/e-journal/Volume-8/Lu-2012.pdf
Ritual Theatre: The Power of Dramatic Ritual in Personal Development Groups ... By Claire Schrader
PREMIS
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 embodied memory and lineage.
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; 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; execution; molestation; extortion; conquering; major natural disasters, etc.
The Conclusion:
What distinguishes Transgenerational Genealogy from conventional or Jungian modes is plunging deeper into the Medieval, legendary, and mythic layers of one's pedigree, rather than just the first few generations. There is essentially no difference between doing genealogy or psychogenealogy, except perhaps the addition of a few evocative techniques. Information is naturally excited in the process in the form of intuitions, synchronicities, insights, and more.
The entire family tree is both a trauma archive and a resource for healing. Much of what is unconscious to us is revealed in our lines. We still have to amplify, work with, interpret, and integrate that information. This is part of the Genealogical Journey. In this way we follow Nature and our nature back to our Origin. 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.
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.
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 embodied memory and lineage.
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; 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; execution; molestation; extortion; conquering; major natural disasters, etc.
The Conclusion:
What distinguishes Transgenerational Genealogy from conventional or Jungian modes is plunging deeper into the Medieval, legendary, and mythic layers of one's pedigree, rather than just the first few generations. There is essentially no difference between doing genealogy or psychogenealogy, except perhaps the addition of a few evocative techniques. Information is naturally excited in the process in the form of intuitions, synchronicities, insights, and more.
The entire family tree is both a trauma archive and a resource for healing. Much of what is unconscious to us is revealed in our lines. We still have to amplify, work with, interpret, and integrate that information. This is part of the Genealogical Journey. In this way we follow Nature and our nature back to our Origin. 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.
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.
The Bridge of Spirits
PREMIS
The tale of our genesis is our prima materia and our ultima materia,
the unknown and self-knowledge. Our serpentine lines recursively bite their own tails.
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. 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 tale of our genesis is our prima materia and our ultima materia,
the unknown and self-knowledge. Our serpentine lines recursively bite their own tails.
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. 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 World Tree
Genealogy (n.) early 14c., "line of descent, pedigree, descent," from Old French genealogie (12c.), from Late Latin genealogia "tracing of a family," from Greek genealogia, from genea "generation, descent" (see genus) + -logia (see -logy). An Old English word for it was folctalu, literally "folk tale." Meaning "study of family trees" is from 1768.
https://books.google.com/books?id=mx9QBwAAQBAJ&pg=PA45&lpg=PA45&dq=healing+fiction,+hillman&source=bl&ots=BesN2t6DiC&sig=Bf_x5pPP7mxb4nE7TX0dvzrBobY&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CD8Q6AEwBzgKahUKEwjxyO3ikLTHAhXF7R4KHUDgC_4#v=onepage&q=healing%20fiction%2C%20hillman&f=false
https://books.google.com/books?id=mx9QBwAAQBAJ&pg=PA45&lpg=PA45&dq=healing+fiction,+hillman&source=bl&ots=BesN2t6DiC&sig=Bf_x5pPP7mxb4nE7TX0dvzrBobY&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CD8Q6AEwBzgKahUKEwjxyO3ikLTHAhXF7R4KHUDgC_4#v=onepage&q=healing%20fiction%2C%20hillman&f=false
“Orpheus and Eurydice”. Edward Poynter, 1862.
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.
But to be young was very Heaven!
-- William Wordsworth
“Spiritual life is like living water that springs up from the very depths of our own spiritual experience. In spiritual life everyone has to drink from his or her own well.”
--St Bernard of Clairvaux
What Psyche Knows
Approaches to Genealogy
As we recite our ancestors' names,
our soul recites a new poetic image.
The Ultimate Family Reunion
Your own BOOK OF THE DEAD is written in your DNA. Deciphering its inherent meaning is a Quest for the Grail and the journey of psychological transformation. We instinctively engage in semi-conscious conversations with these ephemeral figures from our past and find, perhaps to our surprise, that they inform us with a hitherto unknown wisdom or perplex us with unsolvable riddles. Genealogy is the never-ending story our emerging humanity.
Organizational Strategy
All practices have variables that reflect different forces and intrinsic meanings. Our lineage influences us individually. Our inherited unconscious interacts with our personal unconscious. The genealogical approach confronts ideas or practices that present themselves as universal -- who we are and why we do what we do.
Hillman suggests, "One also serves an invisible family, as if an archetypal force. With the passing of time a sense of its power grows within one's psyche, like the movements of its skeleton inside one's flesh, which keeps one in servitude to patterns entombed in our closest attitudes and habits. From this interior family we are never free. This service keeps us bonded to the ancestors."
Genealogy combines historical facts with local memory to establish historical knowledge and a felt-sense of the joys and challenges of our ancestors. Our whole bodies are actually our ancestral memory, but we carry such DNA genetic and epigenetic memories (genetic expression patterns) in a profoundly unconscious, corporeal way. Traits, behavior patterns, good and bad characters can be transmitted 'through the blood' of parents to their children.
Epigenetics is cellular memory of our ancestors' experiences such as depression, blocked feelings, and anxiety. We can awaken this somatic memory with soulful genealogy that enlivens our lineage and heritage. Our ancestors exist as the natural consequences of our genes and energetic patterns of thought, emotions, fate, and mental and physical illnesses. If we cannot truly know the other, we can know the phenomenon of our own experience and the common ground of being. We can find a way in our wasteland to drink from the healing waters for generational healing.
Attempts by professional genealogists to 'prune' legendary and mythic material from traditional genealogy reveals a narrower approach. After all, image and myth is the language of the soul. Standard and revisionist, accepted and acceptable history is necessarily fictional, but different than fiction. That problem is confounded by real and deliberate genealogical fictions (rogue events, people, and places) or non- existent 'ghosts' inserted over time into real lines of descent for profit or position.
The magic mirror of the past includes fantasy and history, metaphor, and bodily reactions. In some sense, all genealogy is fictional while presenting as historical. To some extent we have to 'believe' in it, somewhat like James Hillman's notion of 'healing fiction.' This poetics of the soul is a mythic method -- an intergenerational memoir built on psychological fantasies and subjective perceptions. The unconscious responds to dramatic, metaphorical and poetic gestures -- symbolic acts. The actual pedigree is the ground of this process -- the ancestral field or living matrix.
While Mircea Eliade spoke of the terrors of history, James Hillman encouraged empowering narratives -- ensouling historical events with something more metaphysically important than raw events, plain facts, and blunt data. The grand themes of death/rebirth, transformation, and restitution come into play. Imaginal life is fundamental, rather than an artifact of trying to describe our experience. We tend to orient with experiential metaphors. Our ancestors can block or enhance our destinies.
Ancestral Continuum
"We are born into a family and, at the last, we rejoin its full extension when gathered to the ancestors. . . . Our names are family names, our physiognomies bear family traits, and our dreams never let us depart from home -- father and mother, brother and sister -- from those faces and those rooms. Even alone and only ourselves, we are also always part of them, partly them. . . . ," says Hillman.
The family unit remains our ultimate truth and primordial antecedent. We exist solely because they were. In genealogy, we get to study history from the inside out -- triumphs and failures. Ancient memories as well as ancestors are buried in our subconscious, affecting our life, health, and relationships. The future calls us to this work as much as the past.
Self-knowledge is intrinsic to self-actualization or self-realization. This orientation requires a cross-disciplinary approach to wrestle the collective family treasure from the dragon of the unconscious. We can break through the barrier of ancestral amnesia to new life force potential. We are a ripple in the ocean of our extended family, living, dead and as-yet-unborn.
If we live only for our own time, we live a shallow life which can be extended into deep time simply by accessing what can be found. It isn't that we desert the present for the past, but enlarge our present with a powerful sense of presence. The search alone enriches our spirit. Finding enriches soul. Knowing unites them in the royal marriage of opposites. This legacy belongs to each and every one of us but we must answer the call to this adventure and heed the synchronicities and signs that invariably arise. We are motivated by desire and intention.
We bring our own values, morals, and aesthetics to the process of inquiry. Our past is deeply encoded in clusters of epistemological metaphors - how we 'know' what we know and what it's 'like'. They appear in our psychosomatic symptoms. Each of these metaphors, like each of our ancestors is a portal to deeper knowledge -- gateways to the subconscious. The soul lives on metaphors and images. This is how we describe our subjective experiences to ourselves, in a sensory-based language.
Soulful Genealogy
Indeed, if we need bigger stories, genealogy with its personal and transpersonal elements is about the biggest story and context we can concoct for ourselves. Even the absence of a genealogy or adoption is a story -- part real, part fiction, and part therapy that reveals psychic reality. Depending on which of our lines we follow we can reverse the roles of historical winners and losers. But we must unlock the doors that hold the secrets of our ancestral archives. Ancestral figures 'shadow' us until we build relationships with them.
We must know our corporeal legacy to know ourselves. The stories take on different flavors for different ethnicities, regions, cultures, . Some choose to combine their paper trail with genetic genealogy, having DNA tested for ancestral root groups. Genetic ancestry analysis of autosomal STRs inherited from both maternal and paternal ancestors target lands of origin and the combination of percentages from revealed areas and tribal ethnicities.
Healing the Family Tree
Restorative journeys back through time are possible vehicles for self-transformation. We can make history but we can also escape from it in a digestive process of soul-making. We compensate tragic events: unresolved trauma, mass suffering, bondage, narcissism, pain, loss, famine, incest, betrayal, abuse, alienation, abandonment, persecution, heartbreak, genocide, untimely or unresolved deaths, quarreling parents, acting out, family psychodrama and other unusual intergenerational family patterns.
We can ensoul them for the sake of insight and self-giving love. Such blessings are healing and break generational bondage. Time alone doesn't heal all wounds of family trauma, shame and disgrace, violence, addiction, painful mistakes, interrupted love, brokenness, gender wars, psychopathy, disabilities, guilt, or unresolved death. If we've buried our grief over such things we need to dig it back up. Digging into our ancestors is part of that process.
There are many ways to heal -- physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. We heal our family tree by fully embracing our nature, by reclaiming and transforming that which was formerly lost but now found. Our extended family reaches all the way back to our cosmic origins. We can appeal to the compassion of the archetypal Father and Mother, freeing our spiritual/emotional systems. Ultimately, family tree healing extends to all of humanity and the earth itself as our home.
We return to the Well or fount of our existence to get and be 'well' -- to connect with nurture and spirit that may not be available in our mundane lives that helps heal and reconcile the family spiritual disturbance. We can heal our family system by extending our work beyond the nuclear family to our ancestors. Any detrimental problems or intergenerational dysfunctions can be helped by ancestral healing. The ancestors help guide us in this process. This is another way, besides generativity, to be fruitful.
History Repeating
Epigenetics shows shared destructive behavioral patterns, compulsions, or generational 'curses' and triggers are not coincidences. Unresolved family situations, including family secrets, broken relationships, frustrations, illusions, deception, manipulation, sexual excess, tyranny, poverty, war, and unresolved grief from unborn children or infertility, miscarriages, still birth, or infant mortality, can leaves scars on the heart. Besides talents and accomplishments, we can learn to identify deeply ingrained shared beliefs, judgements, fears, and multigenerational neuroses, such as low self-esteem that leads to self-defeating patterns.
When we trace our family tree we should make notes of recurring patterns and traumas. Sometimes they are also passed on through religious or political groups. Even the family surnames may provide clues to origins, status, and occupations. We've carried these energies, anyway, and can learn to carry them more gracefully by making them conscious. Mere 'willingness to forgive' can open ancestral conversations that can free you of torment and foster emotional freedom from such burdens as jealousy, hatreds, mutual anger, and resentment.
'Finding the Treasure' means restoring and maintaining your own self-esteem. We can pray to heal every possible negative effect transmitted through all past generations, but we also need to do the psychological and spiritual work to restore our joy, which is essential to healing. Ancestors' life stories fuse with our own life story. The Tree that once trapped us can also set us free -- a combination of cosmos and consanguinity.
We must confront the energetic patterning, not just living family members. Chaotic, violent, unhappy ancestors are most likely to affect following generations. They live in our guts, our nervous system, limbic system, and our dreams. Their wounds are our wounds. They impel us toward a misdirected loyalty by living that negative pattern forward. Emotional entanglement is the human equivalent of quantum entanglement.
Ancestral Complex
If we imagine we can 'take care' of the unfinished business of thousands of ancestors, we need to realize that is a fiction, and that we are fortunate if we can even take care of part of our own. In other words, we should not just accept palliative self-deceptions, 'healing memes' or cliche therapies, but fully inhabit the ancestral field in all sorts of novel ways. Still, one of the best ways of 'honoring' the ancestors is to ferret them out yourself and re-establish their names and specific place in the golden braid of centuries that culminates in own lifetime and moves forward with the family offspring.
We can only heal their pain that is in us. We may discover very unpleasant things about the recent family. The further back in time we go the more barbaric life becomes. The royal lines are in almost constant conflict with their relatives, vying for power. We have to do more than pick from recent relations, asking them what they need or left undone. Arguably, the best meditational part of the work is to do your own lines and spend contemplative time in them. No single formula, like the now cliche shamanism is the ticket, anymore than substituting drugs for therapy.
Material and physical inheritance is beyond our free will. But we can untangle ourselves from these deeply neurotic patterns and move beyond the Groundhog Day repetition of unconscious compulsion. Healing changes our primordial self-image and worldview, and in some metaphorical way helps 'heal' our family oversoul. In our therapeutic efforts we pray for the dead and their peaceful repose. Implementing our own healing processes funds our compassion. We heal our dysfunctions so our children and grandchildren don't have to suffer them as core issues. We can reclaim some personal sovereignty -- our true nobility.
Nexus Events
We can identify nexus events in the family lineage which became turning points for the whole family. We can take symbolic refuge among our rightful progenitors. Traversing back through the history of mankind, we reclaim and integrate much of what belongs to us -- "self-completion," not "perfection." We learn to drink from our own well of ancestral wisdom. This helps us 'cook' our raw personality in the alchemical sense, so our ascents and descents of the soul are not premature transcendental escapes, that mimic geographical escapes.
Many of us seek stories for healing. Images remain the central reality in the telling of a lifestory. And we can work with these images like our own imaginal material, in a provisional, nonliteral way. At the same time, genealogy demystifies and ignites the family field. The unconscious or even the ancestors themselves seem to call us to such work. We need them to feel complete. Then the healing forces of the unconscious come into play. We find that the gods and goddesses themselves lie at the root of some of our oldest traceable lines.
Cosmos & Kairos
We have to trust the genealogical discovery process as it evolves from chaos to self-organization. We need it to be functionally accurate, so we should check and recheck our lines periodically. But we can never trace ourselves to a momentous singular origin. We can never know the whole truth and context of what has transpired, but we build up our perception and consciousness, bit by bit, as best we can. Sometimes we have to sacrifice our sacred cows -- family stories that prove less than provable. They may remain plausible even without evidence.
A Jungian approach emphasizes the preeminent role of language, myth and dream and other practices to establish and construct and the identities of the subjects, events, and historical meaning. The constituting role of these practices applies also to us: we are simultaneously the vehicles and the products of our narrative, discursive and nondiscursive genealogical practice and synthesis.
The effect of the soulful approach is kairos -- opening the moment when change is possible, when every moment is an opportunity. It is a passing instant when an opening appears that we must drive through with force to achieve success. It can be the moment in which proof is delivered and suggests possibilities -- a time when the cosmos may interact at our intersection with eternity -- the appointed or crucial time.
Some approach genealogy as a hobby, game, or puzzle to be solved. Others take a more meditational or depth approach with an intent to drive their ancestry back as far it can be taken. We may systemically find and record our ancestry, but at the same time we are obliged to react emotionally to what we find there with our own personal values. Inevitably, we are changed in the process, transformed by a deeper knowledge of our essential being and the chain of life in the great web of being.
A pedigree is a symbolic hologram of our intertwined histories and structure -- interacting waves upon waves of generations in the ocean of humanity. Because the ancestors number literally in the thousands, we come to understand the transformation is within the unfolding therapeutic practice, rather than contained only in each of the historical or fictional figures. The pedigree is more of a multilayered structure than merely a chart of lineal descent. As in the therapeutic process, we work from the parts to the whole for the blessings of a thousand generations.
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Structure Your Content
First we document to genealogical standards and complete our informational content. The first step is to work from yourself to your "Big 8" gr-grandparents. We can then move on to our "Big 16" great-great grandparents, and begin merging with the World Tree, while still carefully annotating each step to the best-practice standard with documentation.
We can emphasize simplicity, proof, or indexing at each stage. We can plot migrations and the stories that go with them. Some ancestors will have more available biographies than others. We may revisit old material with fresh eyes. Investigating for new data may require field trips or searches of civil records.
Our 32 great-great-great grandparents begin revealing broader strokes of our family history and direct lines. We may find new pride, but it may be mingled with stories of shame and regret. All these revelations need digesting to take their rightful place in our self-image.
The question of what to do with the results arises. We may publish or post the results for our family, share with other genealogists, or keep them as a close secret. Rather than mere droplines, you can create special categories to feature, using time periods, dynasties, ruling houses, nations, historical events, social or religious groups, even well-known legends and myths that we find where history fades into the mists.
We will share immigrant patriarchs and gateway ancestors with many others of colonial descent. Their lives and connections have been well-documented by professionals. Some colonials are still being added or subtracted as bearers of noble descent. Gateway ancestors left their homelands and ancestral populations and immigrated to a new lifestyle. But many have illustrious ancestors in their noble or royal lineage. The Great Migration provides many with tangible links to the medieval world.
Surname or family books are great, but online or interactive genealogy websites can be easily updated, annotated, or corrected, since typically all pedigrees contain mistakes of recording or disinformation from other sources. We can make overviews or summaries of certain important elements. We combine, consolidate, integrate, and extract meaning in a sort of alchemical process to articulate our vision of the historical panoply.
Genealogical research is a complex process that uses historical records and sometimes genetic analysis to demonstrate kinship. Reliable conclusions are based on the quality of sources, ideally original records, the information within those sources. Ideally evidence is drawn, directly or indirectly from primary or firsthand information.
In many instances, genealogists must skillfully assemble indirect or circumstantial evidence to build a case for identity and kinship. All evidence and conclusions, together with the documentation that supports them, is then assembled to create a cohesive genealogy or family history.
Genealogists begin their research by collecting family documents and stories. This creates a foundation for documentary research, which involves examining and evaluating historical records for evidence about ancestors and other relatives, their kinship ties, and the events that occurred in their lives. As a rule, genealogists begin with the present and work backward in time.
Some approaches are overtly Christian, or they may have religious overtones even for a non-religious person. Others will come to the subject with a pagan background or an affinity for the ancient ways. Paradoxically, we find ancestors listed from other ethnicities and religions.
The Prophet Mohammad often appears in Western royal lines, as do the emperors of the Han Dynasty, Attila the Hun, Turks, Khazars, and Xiongnu shamans of Siberia. We share roots with the Basque, Moors, Turks, Pashtun, and sub-Saharan Africa. A balanced approach to the heritage will not obsess on particular areas of the lineage to the exclusion of others, nor veer off into cos-play like fantasies of legendary beings. Genealogy shows your multi-ethnic heritage as well as a range of spiritual beliefs.
'Messianic complex' describes the phenomenon where individuals claim self-awareness of their proclaimed role as a 'savior'. Like those who claim to be Jesus, non-religious "Magdalene addicts" are prone to channeling her, or even claiming to be her. But most of these channelings are highly idealized and full of truisms.
The phenomenon is a complicated psychological problematic developed within a cultural group. In Jungian psychology a complex is a cluster of psychological energy that centers around a particular element that has developed partly through the disposition of a personality and partly through life experience (Jacobi). These energy clusters act as partial personalities within the psyche and are often unconscious and somewhat autonomous.
They don't reflect the deeply Gnostic belief in the evil of matter, the drive to perfection, or the demonic dominion of the Archons. Or, if they do embrace such ideas, they likely heard it on some internet show from a highly idiosyncratic speaker, invariably trying to sell his or her book. Somehow they all have a theory. But no one has made good on such claims yet.
They may be the victims of misguided inner authority. We can pick up misconceptions and self-delusions in the search for the soul. The faddish appearance of such identifications (a lived trance-state) is a social trend, and the meme-like nature of the Feminine proclamations reveal that this is a collective phenomena, not true individuation. It shows the collective influence of pop culture and the archetype on the psyche, no matter what you call "Her".
A relationship with the archetype can be primitive or sophisticated. James Hillman expands the concept of complex by adding a concept called personification to individual complexes, treating complexes as characters or entities within the psyche, with the proviso that it is not meant to be literal.
Jung’s complexes and James Hillman’s concept of personification permit the unconscious images to converse with the individual psyche in 'imaginal dialogue'. They manage to incorporate feelings, imagination, and metaphor, which other sciences reject.
Sociological identification, including intense physical reactions, and relationships between the body and the psyche, can be independent of linear historical inheritance in a culture that is a product of ideas rather than location or blood inheritance and also experimental. Emergent imaginal content is metaphor for thinking about experience, including experiences tied to intense belief structures.
When you don't know what a symbol is, it appears split-off, as 'other'. It attempts to enter consciousness in the expressive arts. Collectively, spiritual conflict is worldview warfare -- irreconcilable differences in belief, including the structure of the Cosmos. But only creative emotional and cognitive comprehension of the inherent meaning of experience leads to individuation and self-realization -- the Grail.
Jung spoke of such creativity:
"The creative process has feminine quality, and the creative work arises from unconscious depths--we might say, from the realm of the mothers. Whenever the creative force predominates, human life is ruled and molded by the unconscious as against the active will, and the conscious ego is swept along on a subterranean current, being nothing more than a helpless observer of events.
The work in process becomes the poet's fate and determines his psychic development. It is not Goethe who creates Faust, but Faust which creates Goethe....The archetypal image of the wise man, the saviour or redeemer, lies buried and dormant in man's unconscious since the dawn of culture; it is awakened whenever the times are out of joint and a human society is committed to a serious error.
When people go astray they feel the need of a guide or teacher or even of the physician. These primordial images are numerous, but do not appear in the dreams of individuals or in works of art until they are called into being by the waywardness of the general outlook.
When conscious life is characterized by one-sidedness and by a false attitude, then they are activated--one might say, 'instinctively'--and come to light in the dreams of individuals and the visions of artists and seers, thus restoring the psychic equilibrium of the epoch." (Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul).
"Every creative person is a duality or a synthesis of contradictory aptitudes. On the one side he is a human being with a personal life, while on the other side he is an impersonal, creative process...The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is 'man' in a higher sense--he is 'collective man'--one who carries and shapes the unconscious, psychic life of mankind. To perform this difficult office it is sometimes necessary for him to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being."
Worldview
Emotionally appealing truths are sandwiched into idiosyncratic notions ranging from the speculative to the fantastical, and trap many individuals like flypaper, because our minds love a good story. The brain feeds on stories, but the wrong stories just lead us down the garden path into ancient worlds that never happened, and mythic scenarios that were never meant to be taken literally. Accepting such beliefs uncritically is precisely the opposite of what Jung recommended as individuation.
Such false beliefs tend to cluster around an individual's personal issues and complexes, but are mistaken for and confounded with historical, philosophical and scientific 'reality'. Much of the "self-delusion" can be linked to exposure to memes functioning as emotional strange attractors or cultural artifacts or fallout,, as well as pre- and pseudo-scientific notions of by-gone centuries, and lack of understanding of standards and discernment.
The self-narrative may not match the reality. It's a truism that mediocrity (gaps and gaffs in awareness) boasts the loudest. Through hysteria, lack of critical judgment, and naive enthusiasm, a false idea can be hyped by the mainstream media to the point of not only looking entirely plausible, but even certain.
A world view is a set of presuppositions (or assumptions) which we hold (consciously or subconsciously) about the basic makeup of our world. Everyone has a world view, whether he can explain it or not. It can be likened to a pair of glasses through which one views the world. It is important to have the right prescription, or reality will be distorted. Modem man is faced with a supermarket of world views; all of them claim to represent reality, but they are points of view about reality -- mental constructs, beliefs.
To construct our own worldview we are still confronted with the old formula - the cosmological creative and destructive cycles of time. Cosmology is the study of the origin and nature of the universe. Ontology studies the nature of being as being and existence. We have to fit the pieces together from epistemologies and psychodynamics into some sort of cumulative understanding. Some basic epistemological agreement about the phenomena under examination is needed. Metaphysics abstracts universal conceptions. Some of these grand narratives are more fanciful than others.
We can be sincerely convinced of the utterly wrong. Why do we continue to accommodate the irrelevant and easily falsifiable? Are we conscientious about our own self-delusions or simply unconsciously immersed in them due to a delusional perspective on our own misguided "gnosis" and obsessions with misguided theoretical perspectives? Even conscience is no ineffable guide to inner authority. There is no shortage of new myths to capture our attention. Dreams tell us who we are, collectively and individually.
If Inner Authority is linked to authentic power and wisdom, we need to examine our personal interaction with inner wisdom figures (archetypes) and values in order to create lives of positive action that arise from deep inner wisdom. Most of us shirk such important inner work, substituting a fantasy of transformation and mindfulness. Delusional self-improvement projects are aimed at adorning the ego.
People claim to hear messages that ring in their hearts as truth, or 'resonate' with material that confirms their own tacit or recognized beliefs, but most it originates in cultural conditioning and memetic patterning. All we hold is a piece of the Mystery. Buzzwords such as True Nature, intentionality, and mis-identified integrity compound the situation. Premature spiritual fixation can just as readily be a form of transcendental escapism.
Both the strategies of "transcendence" and "reduction" are expressions of bad faith — i.e., forms of self-deception and escapism that seek to deny the realities of the human existential situation. Self-delusion may be self-evident but few give themselves a reality check on it and doing so is compounded by our own psychological blindspots. This is a form of escapism or neo-mythology.
The depth psychological approach is about psyche, which brings with it a sense of the sacred. It is a way of incorporation that assimilates what has been considered the "Not-I" into the core of being. It is informed by the Hero's Journey and many of the iconic tropes of the royal genealogical lines. Archetypal psychology has experience dealing with parental images and ego development, as well as life passages that might intertwine with genealogical interest and the predictable crises such as childbearing, mid-life, aging and confronting mortality.
Jungians claim that, "A psychologically-oriented approach to spirituality and a new God-image are emerging alongside the Judeo-Christian tradition. This form of spirituality expresses itself from the depths of the psyche, and stresses personal experience rather than belief or sacred texts. Depth psychology gives us a contemporary way to express this evolving step in the history of religious consciousness. Sometimes a new language enables things to be said that have yet to be articulated, and depth psychology is providing this voice."
Traditional ideas about God and religion do not always express the individual’s personal spirituality, because one may experience the sacred in ways that are not fully articulated in the traditional teachings. For people who are committed to a traditional religious practice, depth psychology can deepen their relationship to the tradition and their understanding of its archetypal underpinning. (Corbett)
Surviving in the wilderness
The Grail Quest took place in the vast Wasteland of the alienated soul.
In his book Deep Survival, Laurence Gonzales describes what it’s like to be lost in a wilderness, and how to survive the experience. Here are the stages he identifies in his description of the process:
1. You’re lost, but persist in thinking that everything will work out just fine if you continue along the same path.
2. You realize you’re lost, but you don’t have a clue what to do, so you continue on the wrong path, hoping against hope that home will be just over the next hill—even though somewhere within you, you know it’s not.
3. The knowledge that you are finally, irredeemably and undeniably lost causes makes you to panic—you run desperately through scrub and trees, burning yourself up, getting even more lost.
4. Exhausted by panic, you stop. You realize that wherever you are, you’re somewhere. You sit down where you are and take stock, making wherever you are your temporary home. What you do here is the key to whether or not you survive.
5. You rest, and take stock of the resources you have, and the information the landscape offers. With this, you begin to make a plan for the continuation of your life.
The House of Our Flesh
Each generation has added to the historical account of our progenitors. The story drifts back into the mythos of pre-history -- the neolithic era of the Goddess, legends of Atlantis and other lost civilizations, catastrophe theories, cryptozoological fantasies, and displaced scifi themes. Paranormal powers lurk just behind the mystic veil separating the Known from deep Mystery.
What we think we knew gets profoundly revisioned. The great symbols of mankind, the iconic symbols, are mostly attached to ancient royalty in some way or another, so we encounter and activate them in our generational viewing. They include animal, vegetable, and mineral images, as well as personifications.
Marriage is a psychological relationship. The Hieros Gamos is the Holy Grail of sexual rites. Jung addressed the symbolism of cross-cousin marriages, lived out in the bloodline, which tended to overlook the taboos of incest. There was ritualized brother/sister pairing prior to the days of Sumeria, where the priest-king of the country marries “the land” – in the form of a high priestess – to rejuvenate it. The Great Rite is blessed by the gods who participate in it as a sacred act -- a sexual sacrament uniting the Sun and the Moon.
This mystic marriage or union stands for conjunction of conscious and unconscious. The joining together of conscious ego and shadow is the end result of the penetration of the conscious mind by the unconscious and/or the penetration of the unconscious by consciousness.
Symbolically - in myths and in dreams - consciousness is usually represented as male, the unconscious as female; and the sexual penetration of female by male is therefore a common symbol of the descent of consciousness into the dark cave-like depths of the unconscious.
Cross-cousin marriage, designed to keep power and assets in the family, is based on the archetype of the quaternio. This early form of mating that ensured that endogenous (kinship) libido--incest--held the family together but didn't overpower exogamous libido. The endogamous side wants a sister, the exogamous a stranger, so marrying a cousin balances the two. Marriage of a man's sister to his brother's wife is a relic of the "sister-exchange marriage" of many primitive tribes.
Today's pure exogamy leaves the kinship-libido demands largely unsatisfied and increases their power, which expresses itself in the formation of religions and sects and nations--but only individuation will contain the still-rising force. The incest prohibition, with help from the urge to individuate, created the self-conscious individual, who previously had been mindlessly one with the tribe.
Prepare to be astonished, amazed, and repulsed by the overwhelming burdonsome knowledge of history experienced as the behavior of one's great-grandparents. You will be confronted with unbridled power, pathologizing, perversions, and mental illness (narcissism, sociopathy, sadism, bipolarity, schizophrenia, etc.) that spreads through some lines like a virus.
There are some real monsters in there, as well as marriages made in hell, not above sacrifice and murder within as well as without the family. If you know the histories of these regions it may provide some orientation, but the story reads differently from the inside out. Youhave entered the panoply of history. Everything you ever imagined or feared you might be is there, somewhere in time. You may also find the physiological disorders and illnesses that have plagued the bloodline from earliest recorded times.
Even as an imaginal exercise -- an "as-if" reality -- such revisioning helps us reown the shadow of mankind by making a place for it within our own being. This is much easier said than done, but forewarned is fore-armed.
Marriage is a psychological relationship. The Hieros Gamos is the Holy Grail of sexual rites. Jung addressed the symbolism of cross-cousin marriages, lived out in the bloodline, which tended to overlook the taboos of incest. There was ritualized brother/sister pairing prior to the days of Sumeria, where the priest-king marries “the land” – in the form of a high priestess – to rejuvenate it. The Great Rite is blessed by the gods who participate in the sacred act -- a sexual sacrament uniting the Sun and the Moon.
This marriage symbolizes the joining together of conscious ego and shadow, which is the end result of the penetration of the conscious mind by the unconscious and/or the penetration of the unconscious by consciousness. Symbolically - in myths and in dreams - consciousness is usually represented as male, the unconscious as female; and the sexual penetration of female by male is therefore a common symbol of the descent of consciousness into the dark cave-like depths of the unconscious.
Cross-cousin marriage, designed to keep power and assets in the family, is based on the archetype of the quaternio. It subconsciously recognizes that the anima and animus of both parties are involved in the archetypal relationship dynamic.
This early form of mating that ensured that endogenous (kinship) libido--incest--held the family together but didn't overpower exogamous libido. The endogamous side wants a sister, the exogamous a stranger, so marrying a cousin balances the two. Marriage of a man's sister to his brother's wife is a relic of the "sister-exchange marriage" of many primitive tribes.
Today's pure exogamy leaves the kinship-libido demands largely unsatisfied and increases their power, which expresses itself in the formation of religions and sects and nations--but only individuation will contain the still-rising force. The incest prohibition, with help from the urge to individuate, created the self-conscious individual, who previously had been mindlessly one with the tribe.
Prepare to be astonished, amazed, and repulsed by the overwhelming burdonsome knowledge of history experienced as the behavior of one's gr-grandparents. You will be confronted with unbridled power, pathologizing, perversions, and mental illness (narcissism, sociopathy, sadism, bipolarity, schizophrenia, etc.) that spreads through some lines like a virus. You may also find the physiological disorders and illnesses that have plagued the bloodline from earliest recorded times.
Even as an imaginal exercise -- an "as-if" reality -- such revisioning helps us reown the shadow of mankind by making a place for it within our own being. This is much easier said than done, but forewarned is fore-armed.
But Is It Real?
The bloodline as real as the psyche. Some say genealogy without proofs is meaningless, but that is certainly not true in the Jungian context which is happy to continue exploration within the mythic and imaginal realms, understanding them as such. There is a psychic if not historical truth to including archetypes in the lines, usually at the root. It is also possible that real culture heroes became ennobled as divinities over the eons.
Monks in the the Middle Ages constructed royal genealogies from Bardic tales that linked rulers not only to the dawn of time but to the legendary heroes and gods that inhabit that mystical realm. We all have an unconscious and conscious relationship to this world of the hyperdimensional imagination. How we choose to interact with it and what we call those processes characterizes our experience of it -- and how toxic, haphazard or sophisticated it is.
At first, genealogy served a purely serious purpose in determining the legal rights of related individuals to land and goods. Genealogy was cultivated since at least the start of the early Irish historic era. Upon inauguration, Bards and poets are believed to have recited the ancestry of an inaugurated king to emphasize his hereditary right to rule. With the transition to written culture, oral history was preserved in the monastic settlements. Over time, genealogy was pursued for its own merits.
Today, genealogy is second only to the topic of sex online. Humanity is re-discovering its roots and creating a BIG TREE in the Sky -- in the Cloud that describes our interconnections. Genetic Genealogy adds information to that big story -- filling in the migration patterns and tribal affiliations with molecular certainties. But it cannot provide the connective list of names -- the royal lines of descent -- that come from the pedigree. Both are equally important, but genetic genealogy may or may not add to what you already know. Genealogies always add new information.
Amateurs are demystifying the process by using rapid technological aids and open-source genealogical sites to help plug them into the "Motherboards". Experts continue their scholarly efforts within the crowd-sourced material to analyze and correct the public record. Thus, most ancestors have Master Profiles which have been vetted by experts, though the stubs and dead ends of amateurs can also be found. Be very careful to prove undocumented conclusions because many blind alleys have been created and deserted. Sometimes mistakes remain and get repeated.
The trend now is to disconnect lines from their legendary and mythic roots, and start a discussion with the last reliably known ancestor. Therefore, you may not be able to imagine how you ever connected with these mythic figures. Surely, this has psychological overtones perhaps as grave as literally believing in the descents created by the medieval Church after repeated efforts to suppress the Bloodline with genocidal crusades and witchhunts in Europe.
Even without erroneous digressions, our genealogical lines constitute a labyrinth of our soul. We can become lost within our ancestral lines, with an uncanny felt-sense of time travel as the time dimension seemingly collapses. The labyrinth is the Collective Unconscious and genealogy is but one method of entry into it.
The Internet is another labyrinth full of genealogical information colored by the beliefs of the writers. Often lies are hidden between two truths, so you have to exercise great discretion in separating the informational wheat from the chaff of fallacious material claiming to be truth. "Spin" or even popular memes are no substitute for objective scholarship.
The Red Thread Bloodline (Lost Tribes) of our ancestral lines keeps us from losing our way. Throughout the Bible 'scarlet' speaks of sacrifice made on the behalf of the believer, and it is seen in the vestments of the tabernacle and in the priestly garments in Exodus" (ibid., note on Joshua 2:18-21).
The scarlet thread running through the Bible is a picture of the Blood of Jesus. "For it is not possible that the blood of bulls and of goats should take away sins" (Hebrews 10:4). "Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus" (Hebrews 10:19). "For it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul" (Leviticus 17:11).
http://the-red-thread.net/
http://israelect.com/ChurchOfTrueIsrael/emahiser/emirishscott.html
Prepare to be A-Mazed
The early maze was a figurative vortex; a tornado or whirlpool. The Chartres Maze is associated with Melusine and Sheba and their vortex, source of life and life's blood. The Maze is associated with the root word from which we derive the adjective "to amaze".
The maze represented the shamanic "Spiral Dance of the Vortex" (sacrificial sword dance), and on another level "The Quest for the Holy Grail". It can be associated with the name Mazda or Ormuzd, the principle of light, suggesting that whatever was at the center of a Maze rendered enlightenment and that ecstatic amazement, or wonder, accompanied it.
A labyrinth is an ancient symbol that relates to wholeness. It combines the imagery of the circle and the spiral into a meandering but purposeful path. It represents a journey or Quest to our own center and back again out into the world. Labyrinths have long been used as meditation and prayer tools. A labyrinth is an archetype with which we can have a direct experience. Walking the labyrinth can be considered an initiation in which you awaken the knowledge encoded within your DNA.
A labyrinth contains embedded geometric and numerological prompts that create a multi-dimensional holographic field. These unseen patterns are referred to as sacred geometry. They allegedly reveal the presence of a cosmic order as they interface the world of material form and the subtler realms of higher consciousness.
The contemporary resurgence of labyrinths in the west stems from our deeply rooted urge to honor again the Sacredness of All Life. A labyrinth can be experienced as the birthing womb of the Great Goddess. Thus, the labyrinth experience is a potent practice of Self-Integration as it encapsulates the spiraling journey in and out of incarnation. On the journey in, towards the center, one cleanses the dirt from the road. On the journey out, one is born anew to consciously dwell in a human body, made holy by having got a taste of the Infinite Center.
The Grail Effect
Sovereignty: It is the individual's task to differentiate himself from all the others and stand on his own feet. All collective identities . . . interfere with the fulfillment of this task. Such collective identities are crutches for the lame, shields for the timid, beds for the lazy, nurseries for the irresponsible. . . .--Carl Jung (1875 - 1961)
We can call anyone of Sangreal blood who has yet to discover or prove their dynastic heritage, a "crypto-grail carrier." Over and over the phenomenon and transformative reaction repeats itself. We call it "the Grail Effect," which kindles an archaic revival and a recursive cycle of self-amplification -- a virtual awakening to a new order of reality, deep time, and sense of self-identity.
We are endowed with a genetic lust for life. Each new birth reminds us that life is a miracle. Genealogy is a Gnosis, a divine revelation, a Way of Knowing that only comes with the names that carry one's lineage back into the mists of pre-history. Our lines contain sacred mysteries.
Genealogy is a hermeneutic requiring interpretation and discretion between the literal, mythic, and symbolic. Gnosis is divine revelation not just philosophical reasoning. It is instantaneous spiritual understanding of the nature of man -- primordial awareness -- a direct experience of enlightenment. Hermetics had techniques for penetrating and discerning the order of the cosmos. Gnosticism was only philosophical when describing God's absolute transcendence. The mythic world described
We are involved in a pioneering project in the overlap of arts, sciences, humanities, network research, data science, and information design to log and archive our research. That which rings true, resonates. Imagination is a way of engaging reality. The flow of images creates thinking and the thinker -- the "seen" and the "seer". The wholeness of the Self is more than the sum of psyche's components. What was once only imagined is being proven with genetic genealogy. Dreams and philosophy make up myths.
It all begins when a seemingly ordinary person somehow develops an interest in their family genealogy, finds a historical Gateway Ancestor, whose pedigree leads them back to medieval times where they find they descend from multinational nobility and royalty. Because of intensive intermarriage among nobles in past eras, finding one royal usually means tapping into several blueblood lines.
Much like in dreamwork, where we are all parts of the dream, we are literally all of our ancestors incarnate -- male and female -- only this is a dream dreamt aloud in the manifest world, birth after noble birth. We are all the Fisher King. We go fishing for our ancestral legacies and voices in the deep lake of the unconscious, bringing them to the surface. We "fish" with our ancestral "lines", which tie us directly to our deep past.
When the Lady of the Lake responds spontaneously with the treasure of the magic sword, our intellects are sharpened and steeled, as well as our intuition. The 'fishing' is drawing these things up from the unconscious, but the 'fishing lines' are our progenitors, you might say -- the Fisher Kings and queens. And, the King and the land are one - that is, our divinity and our materiality are synonymous. We exist and in that sense we are 'divine' to the extent that we realize and actualize that blessing of our deepest Nature, balancing symbolic and material.
"It is the duty of one who goes his own way to inform society of what he finds on his voyage of discovery, be it cooling water for the thirsty or the sandy wastes of unfruitful error. The one helps, the other warns. Not the criticism of individual contemporaries will decide the truth or falsity of his discoveries, but future generations. There are things that are not yet true today, perhaps we dare not find them true, but tomorrow they may be. So every man whose fate it is to go his individual way must proceed with hopefulness and watchfulness, ever conscious of his loneliness and its dangers." (C.G. Jung)
At first we are struck with the richness of our personal family story, but soon come to realize many of our noble lines are intimately crossed with those already well-aware of their Sangreal heritage today. We learn to understand our lineage is that of the ancient dynastic houses, who are already deeply involved in their own historical reclamation and heritage projects. We begin to see that this is, indeed, our true extended family.
As the seeker's online search widens, sooner or later they come across some material on the Sangreal legend, legacy, or its many subcultures. Given a few hints on where and who to look for, suddenly they are faced with the mind-blowing distinction that they descend arguably from the oldest royal line on the planet, and that there is a deeper 'reality' to the mythic stories -- a living reality we each embody.
The God-Kings are rooted in mythic prehistory and extended their rule well into the Classical Period, before they were deposed and separated from their divine-rights by socio-political machinations. Looking to their own family lines and/or genetic genealogy reports, modern Grail-carriers come face to face with the revelation of their true being.
Thus awakened, they draw new energy from the collective unconscious and their Sangreal companions on the same journey to pursue the depths of their being and connection to Cosmos. So it has been, from the dawn of time. Suddenly their 'differences' make sense, possibly for the first time. They may experience an infusion of wisdom or Knowledge welling up from the Plenum within, which had formerly been experienced as a Void. The Void is not devoid.
Genealogists now use molecular genealogy, comparing and matching people by matrilineal DNA lineages -- matrilineal mtDNA or patrilineal Y-chromosome ancestry, SNP, and/or autosomal tests. People interested in ancestry now look at genetic markers to trace the migrations of the human species. You can trace your genealogy by DNA from your grandparents back 10,000 or more years.
Anyone can be interested in DNA for ancestry research, learning how different populations from a mosaic of communities reached their current locations. From whom are you descended? What markers shed light on your deepest ancestry? You can study DNA for medical reasons or to discover the geographic travels and dwelling places of some of your ancestors. DNA does not target specific ancestors by name but does reveal rare genetic markers. Specifically, you can interpret your DNA test and/or genealogy for family history.
Particular genetic markers are called ancestry informative markers (AIM). They correlate with populations of specific geographical areas. Autosomal DNA shows the "genetic percentages" of a person's ancestry from particular continents/regions or identify the countries and "tribes" of origin. SNPs are locations on DNA where nucleotides have "mutated" or "switched" to a different nucleotide. Tests listing geographical places of origin use alleles. Individual and family variations on various chromosomes across the genome are analyzed with the aid of population databases.
Initiation opens a communication link between the aspirant and divine guiding principle -- our inner genius -- fostering balance in the personality as the firm foundation for spiritual development. Maat or 'Balance' was the prime expression of the Egyptian Mystery Schools, because it gave order and meaning to life.
In the East, it is called the Tao, a dynamic blending of yin and yang. In Kabbalah, it is the Middle Way. Balance helps us to achieve the goals we want in life and to manifest our dreams. You can easily integrate this wisdom tradition in your own householder life. Empowerment comes through grounding and centering
Such knowledge transforms and activates a new level of Being, internally and in the world, at large. The Grail has come calling and collected its own, informing our sparks of consciousness with a connection to hyperdimensional depth, with a sense of mission and purpose, with a commitment to the recovery of our self-awareness and inherent potential of genius for clarity. This is the Path of Return.
We've had glimpses of a way of being human that embodies rare integrity, freedom, wholeness and beauty--and we dream of the life and world that could result from sustaining that ideal. Most of us are held back from our greater potential by a deep-rooted undertow pulling us down from the heights we could achieve. This persistent barrier to our optimal growth is the ancient, hardwired programming of our evolutionary past, the "software" of our primitive ancestry.
We operate (often unconsciously) from "inherited" instincts, assumptions, and responses that have been encoded into humankind for millennia--vestiges of an ancient animal past.
These unproductive patterns form an invisible ceiling preventing us from reaching our true potential. In fact, this innate and primitive "conditioning" is the key reason that most of our efforts at change fail--whether as individuals or as a society.
The key to breaking this "sound barrier" in consciousness is learning how to awaken and activate a latent spiritual capacity. It lives within each of us, but often remains dormant, just beneath the surface of our awareness. This often hidden dimension of our being is a boundless source of inspiration, passion, creativity and clarity--and when we learn how to tap into it, we rapidly find ourselves on the other side of everything that previously stood in our way.
"Grail Carriers" Today
We have reclaimed our voice on the world stage. We are speaking out, in part, because of the needful state of the world and because whole industries and memes are based on misapprehensions, out-right lies, and exploitation of our ancestral legacy. We are awakened.
We are engaged in a transpersonal, metaphysical method of knowing Truth. Namely, that Necessity binds us to our destiny, which is not to be confused with linear pre-ordination. The Underground Stream honors the Feminine. Cultural Transformation can only come through the cultural evolution toward partnership. We are here to set the record straight and define ourselves with our own narratives in today's world, as the stewards we rightfully claim to be.
"Jung found further that the mandala does not only mirror an inner state of order, but that its harmony or disharmony encompasses also the surroundings of the individual. Thus a mandala needs a symbol in which the outer and inner world merge. There is for Jung a ultimate reality beyond matter and psyche which he called the unus mundus, its empirical manifestation is the principle of synchronicity because in synchronistic events the inner world behaves as if it were outside and the outer world as if it were inside. As the mandala symbolism expresses the holistic order of matter and psyche it should have been investigated by physicists as well as psychologists because the mandala reappears in their hypothetical models of the atomic world. The atomic model of Niels Bohr is already a cosmic mandala and the models which the physicists construct nowadays to visualize the quarks are also mandalas." (M-L von Franz)
Imagine for a moment that the fate of the entire human race rested on your shoulders alone. That humanity's evolution out of brute self-interest depended entirely on your willingness to transform your consciousness.
What if you knew that the human race could advance past its smallness and negative conditioning --if you only became an exemplar of humanity's highest potential for the world? Imagine that for you, evolving beyond ego became an evolutionary imperative. Would you approach your path any differently?
Would the energy you bring to your spiritual practice intensify? Would the quality of awareness and care with which you approached your interactions with others become more profound? Would you find yourself reaching with inner muscles you didn't even know you had to actually stay awake to the depth you've tasted in your most profound spiritual moments? If you knew it all rested on you, would you have any choice but to change?
The Indian sage Ramana Maharshi once said that the spiritual aspirant must want liberation like a drowning person wants air. Why? Because the challenges of authentic spiritual growth and transformation are so great that most of us will choose to continue suffering in our smallness, rather than feel the pain of allowing that smallness to die forever.
Modern science has in recent decades been verifying what the ancient traditions intuited long ago: that, in both tangible and mysterious ways, we are all interconnected. Any one of us can have a profound effect on the whole. Add to that the reality that we are evolving beings living in an evolving universe. We are all part of a grand, cosmic evolutionary process. Then the question of our obligation to the whole starts to cut close to the bone.
To reframe the earlier question: What if you realized that the entire human endeavor, the evolution of consciousness itself, depended on your willingness to evolve your own consciousness? How would it affect the choices you make every day if you knew that in a very real sense, those choices were either contributing to the evolution of the whole--or holding it back?
At this time when it seems that our very future depends on our willingness to evolve as a species, would you have any choice but to act in alignment with the greatest evolutionary good? The point is that when we take a closer look at what spiritual work and growth is actually for, it quickly becomes clear that the path of awakening is not primarily about freeing ourselves from suffering or securing our own happiness. Sure, that's a nice by-product. But, as long as that's all we're seeking, we probably won't get very far.
Where the spiritual path really begins to get interesting is when we recognize that transforming ourselves in the deepest possible way is in fact an evolutionary imperative, with profound consequences far beyond ourselves.
If we begin to embrace the fact that our lives are not simply our own to do with as we please--that in everything we do, we are in fact accountable to the Whole--something truly miraculous begins to happen. Faced with the palpable responsibility to evolve for a greater good, we find that we suddenly have access to a seemingly infinite source of energy, intention, passion and courage to confront whatever challenges present themselves on our path.
What's more, all of the personal issues and problems--all of the fears and doubts and resistances that once seemed so insurmountable--begin to seem a lot less significant. Why? Because our attention is now captivated by something much bigger than ourselves. This is the power of context.
We see our individual concerns, the worries we fret over day to day, from a different vantage point. Held up against this larger picture and greater purpose, those concerns suddenly seem very small indeed. Realizing "it's not all about me," and ignited by a noble calling to participate in the grand adventure of conscious evolution, we find we no longer even want to give those worries the time of day.
Where Do We Come From?
By analyzing the genetic variation of modern Europeans, Cavalli-Sforza and Ammerman decided that Europeans are descended largely from populations of farmers who started migrating out of the Middle East 9,000 years ago. As the sons and daughters of farming families left their parents’ farms and moved into new territory, they interbred with the existing hunter-gatherer populations, which produced gradients of genetic change radiating from the Middle East.
Only in mountainous areas unattractive to farmers—the Pyrenees homelands of the Basques, for example—were the genes of the indigenous peoples comparatively intact. Other historical events, too, appeared to have influenced the European gene pool. For example, a genetic trail leads from the area north of the Black and Caspian Seas into the rest of Europe. Cavalli-Sforza linked this trail to the spread of the descendants of nomadic warriors and herders who first domesticated the horse, about 4,000 B.C.
Evidence clearly indicates that sometime in the period 100,000 to 200,000 years ago our ancestors went through a severe genetic bottleneck. Perhaps an environmental change drove ancient people to the brink of extinction. A more likely scenario, however, is that a relatively small group, numbering fewer than 20,000 at times and probably living in eastern Africa, was isolated for many thousands of years from the many groups of archaic human beings scattered throughout Africa, Europe, and Asia.
The people who emerged from this genetic bottleneck had traits never before seen in human beings. They had lighter builds, new ways of interacting among themselves, and perhaps a greater facility with language. Eventually the descendants of these people spread throughout Africa and beyond.
They reached Australia at least 60,000 years ago, probably traveling from the Horn of Africa and then along the South Asia shoreline. They arrived in the Middle East a bit more than 40,000 years ago. By 35,000 years ago anatomically modern people had spread into Europe from the Middle East and into East Asia from Southeast Asia. Sometime more than 12,000 years ago they entered the Americas.
Fewer than 10,000 generations separate everyone alive today from the small group of Africans who are our common ancestors. That’s much more than the twenty or so generations mentioned in Genesis, but it’s the blink of an eye in evolutionary terms. Even over thousands of generations human groups have not differentiated in any substantial way.
Rather, the genetic evidence indicates that modern human beings have expanded as a single, relatively well mixed population without subsequent genetic bottlenecks (bottlenecks tend to erase the evidence of previous bottlenecks, which is how geneticists know that the bottleneck in Africa was the most recent one). Our comparative youth as a species accounts for our extreme genetic homogeneity. The chimpanzees living on a single hillside in Africa have twice as much variety in their DNA as do the six billion people scattered across the globe.
There’s another reason for our biological homogeneity. Modern human beings have never been able to resist for long what Noël Coward called “the urge to merge.” A person traveling due east from Madrid to Beijing (both at about 40°N latitude) would pass Italians, Greeks, Turks, Armenians, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Kyrgyz, Uighurs, Mongolians, and Han Chinese, among others. All these groups resemble their immediate neighbors more than they do groups farther away because of the continual exchange of mates across group boundaries.
There’s a simple way of describing our genetic relatedness. Not only do all people have the same set of genes, but all groups of people also share the major variants of those genes. Geneticists have never found a genetic marker that is of one type in all the members of one large group and of a different type in all the members of another large group. That’s why ethnically targeted biological weapons would never work. Every group overlaps genetically with every other. We have cultural differences masquerading as race problems.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/04/the-genetic-archaeology-of-race/2180/
There is no singular gene, mutation, allele, STR or SNP that tells the whole story. There are clusters of mutations that show deep relationship patterns of regional origin in some individuals. There is no DNA report that is 100% conclusive. They use the statistical mathematics of the educated guess.
Statistical and sampling flaws can lead to misinterpretations, based on too small of samplings and comparison studies. So, our own conclusions about our own DNA tests are, in part, interpretations of an interpretation. We can only draw inferences about the past based on the patterns observed in human DNA. And this is what keeps our quest alive.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/04/the-genetic-archaeology-of-race/2180/
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.
But to be young was very Heaven!
-- William Wordsworth
“Spiritual life is like living water that springs up from the very depths of our own spiritual experience. In spiritual life everyone has to drink from his or her own well.”
--St Bernard of Clairvaux
What Psyche Knows
Approaches to Genealogy
As we recite our ancestors' names,
our soul recites a new poetic image.
The Ultimate Family Reunion
Your own BOOK OF THE DEAD is written in your DNA. Deciphering its inherent meaning is a Quest for the Grail and the journey of psychological transformation. We instinctively engage in semi-conscious conversations with these ephemeral figures from our past and find, perhaps to our surprise, that they inform us with a hitherto unknown wisdom or perplex us with unsolvable riddles. Genealogy is the never-ending story our emerging humanity.
Organizational Strategy
All practices have variables that reflect different forces and intrinsic meanings. Our lineage influences us individually. Our inherited unconscious interacts with our personal unconscious. The genealogical approach confronts ideas or practices that present themselves as universal -- who we are and why we do what we do.
Hillman suggests, "One also serves an invisible family, as if an archetypal force. With the passing of time a sense of its power grows within one's psyche, like the movements of its skeleton inside one's flesh, which keeps one in servitude to patterns entombed in our closest attitudes and habits. From this interior family we are never free. This service keeps us bonded to the ancestors."
Genealogy combines historical facts with local memory to establish historical knowledge and a felt-sense of the joys and challenges of our ancestors. Our whole bodies are actually our ancestral memory, but we carry such DNA genetic and epigenetic memories (genetic expression patterns) in a profoundly unconscious, corporeal way. Traits, behavior patterns, good and bad characters can be transmitted 'through the blood' of parents to their children.
Epigenetics is cellular memory of our ancestors' experiences such as depression, blocked feelings, and anxiety. We can awaken this somatic memory with soulful genealogy that enlivens our lineage and heritage. Our ancestors exist as the natural consequences of our genes and energetic patterns of thought, emotions, fate, and mental and physical illnesses. If we cannot truly know the other, we can know the phenomenon of our own experience and the common ground of being. We can find a way in our wasteland to drink from the healing waters for generational healing.
Attempts by professional genealogists to 'prune' legendary and mythic material from traditional genealogy reveals a narrower approach. After all, image and myth is the language of the soul. Standard and revisionist, accepted and acceptable history is necessarily fictional, but different than fiction. That problem is confounded by real and deliberate genealogical fictions (rogue events, people, and places) or non- existent 'ghosts' inserted over time into real lines of descent for profit or position.
The magic mirror of the past includes fantasy and history, metaphor, and bodily reactions. In some sense, all genealogy is fictional while presenting as historical. To some extent we have to 'believe' in it, somewhat like James Hillman's notion of 'healing fiction.' This poetics of the soul is a mythic method -- an intergenerational memoir built on psychological fantasies and subjective perceptions. The unconscious responds to dramatic, metaphorical and poetic gestures -- symbolic acts. The actual pedigree is the ground of this process -- the ancestral field or living matrix.
While Mircea Eliade spoke of the terrors of history, James Hillman encouraged empowering narratives -- ensouling historical events with something more metaphysically important than raw events, plain facts, and blunt data. The grand themes of death/rebirth, transformation, and restitution come into play. Imaginal life is fundamental, rather than an artifact of trying to describe our experience. We tend to orient with experiential metaphors. Our ancestors can block or enhance our destinies.
Ancestral Continuum
"We are born into a family and, at the last, we rejoin its full extension when gathered to the ancestors. . . . Our names are family names, our physiognomies bear family traits, and our dreams never let us depart from home -- father and mother, brother and sister -- from those faces and those rooms. Even alone and only ourselves, we are also always part of them, partly them. . . . ," says Hillman.
The family unit remains our ultimate truth and primordial antecedent. We exist solely because they were. In genealogy, we get to study history from the inside out -- triumphs and failures. Ancient memories as well as ancestors are buried in our subconscious, affecting our life, health, and relationships. The future calls us to this work as much as the past.
Self-knowledge is intrinsic to self-actualization or self-realization. This orientation requires a cross-disciplinary approach to wrestle the collective family treasure from the dragon of the unconscious. We can break through the barrier of ancestral amnesia to new life force potential. We are a ripple in the ocean of our extended family, living, dead and as-yet-unborn.
If we live only for our own time, we live a shallow life which can be extended into deep time simply by accessing what can be found. It isn't that we desert the present for the past, but enlarge our present with a powerful sense of presence. The search alone enriches our spirit. Finding enriches soul. Knowing unites them in the royal marriage of opposites. This legacy belongs to each and every one of us but we must answer the call to this adventure and heed the synchronicities and signs that invariably arise. We are motivated by desire and intention.
We bring our own values, morals, and aesthetics to the process of inquiry. Our past is deeply encoded in clusters of epistemological metaphors - how we 'know' what we know and what it's 'like'. They appear in our psychosomatic symptoms. Each of these metaphors, like each of our ancestors is a portal to deeper knowledge -- gateways to the subconscious. The soul lives on metaphors and images. This is how we describe our subjective experiences to ourselves, in a sensory-based language.
Soulful Genealogy
Indeed, if we need bigger stories, genealogy with its personal and transpersonal elements is about the biggest story and context we can concoct for ourselves. Even the absence of a genealogy or adoption is a story -- part real, part fiction, and part therapy that reveals psychic reality. Depending on which of our lines we follow we can reverse the roles of historical winners and losers. But we must unlock the doors that hold the secrets of our ancestral archives. Ancestral figures 'shadow' us until we build relationships with them.
We must know our corporeal legacy to know ourselves. The stories take on different flavors for different ethnicities, regions, cultures, . Some choose to combine their paper trail with genetic genealogy, having DNA tested for ancestral root groups. Genetic ancestry analysis of autosomal STRs inherited from both maternal and paternal ancestors target lands of origin and the combination of percentages from revealed areas and tribal ethnicities.
Healing the Family Tree
Restorative journeys back through time are possible vehicles for self-transformation. We can make history but we can also escape from it in a digestive process of soul-making. We compensate tragic events: unresolved trauma, mass suffering, bondage, narcissism, pain, loss, famine, incest, betrayal, abuse, alienation, abandonment, persecution, heartbreak, genocide, untimely or unresolved deaths, quarreling parents, acting out, family psychodrama and other unusual intergenerational family patterns.
We can ensoul them for the sake of insight and self-giving love. Such blessings are healing and break generational bondage. Time alone doesn't heal all wounds of family trauma, shame and disgrace, violence, addiction, painful mistakes, interrupted love, brokenness, gender wars, psychopathy, disabilities, guilt, or unresolved death. If we've buried our grief over such things we need to dig it back up. Digging into our ancestors is part of that process.
There are many ways to heal -- physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. We heal our family tree by fully embracing our nature, by reclaiming and transforming that which was formerly lost but now found. Our extended family reaches all the way back to our cosmic origins. We can appeal to the compassion of the archetypal Father and Mother, freeing our spiritual/emotional systems. Ultimately, family tree healing extends to all of humanity and the earth itself as our home.
We return to the Well or fount of our existence to get and be 'well' -- to connect with nurture and spirit that may not be available in our mundane lives that helps heal and reconcile the family spiritual disturbance. We can heal our family system by extending our work beyond the nuclear family to our ancestors. Any detrimental problems or intergenerational dysfunctions can be helped by ancestral healing. The ancestors help guide us in this process. This is another way, besides generativity, to be fruitful.
History Repeating
Epigenetics shows shared destructive behavioral patterns, compulsions, or generational 'curses' and triggers are not coincidences. Unresolved family situations, including family secrets, broken relationships, frustrations, illusions, deception, manipulation, sexual excess, tyranny, poverty, war, and unresolved grief from unborn children or infertility, miscarriages, still birth, or infant mortality, can leaves scars on the heart. Besides talents and accomplishments, we can learn to identify deeply ingrained shared beliefs, judgements, fears, and multigenerational neuroses, such as low self-esteem that leads to self-defeating patterns.
When we trace our family tree we should make notes of recurring patterns and traumas. Sometimes they are also passed on through religious or political groups. Even the family surnames may provide clues to origins, status, and occupations. We've carried these energies, anyway, and can learn to carry them more gracefully by making them conscious. Mere 'willingness to forgive' can open ancestral conversations that can free you of torment and foster emotional freedom from such burdens as jealousy, hatreds, mutual anger, and resentment.
'Finding the Treasure' means restoring and maintaining your own self-esteem. We can pray to heal every possible negative effect transmitted through all past generations, but we also need to do the psychological and spiritual work to restore our joy, which is essential to healing. Ancestors' life stories fuse with our own life story. The Tree that once trapped us can also set us free -- a combination of cosmos and consanguinity.
We must confront the energetic patterning, not just living family members. Chaotic, violent, unhappy ancestors are most likely to affect following generations. They live in our guts, our nervous system, limbic system, and our dreams. Their wounds are our wounds. They impel us toward a misdirected loyalty by living that negative pattern forward. Emotional entanglement is the human equivalent of quantum entanglement.
Ancestral Complex
If we imagine we can 'take care' of the unfinished business of thousands of ancestors, we need to realize that is a fiction, and that we are fortunate if we can even take care of part of our own. In other words, we should not just accept palliative self-deceptions, 'healing memes' or cliche therapies, but fully inhabit the ancestral field in all sorts of novel ways. Still, one of the best ways of 'honoring' the ancestors is to ferret them out yourself and re-establish their names and specific place in the golden braid of centuries that culminates in own lifetime and moves forward with the family offspring.
We can only heal their pain that is in us. We may discover very unpleasant things about the recent family. The further back in time we go the more barbaric life becomes. The royal lines are in almost constant conflict with their relatives, vying for power. We have to do more than pick from recent relations, asking them what they need or left undone. Arguably, the best meditational part of the work is to do your own lines and spend contemplative time in them. No single formula, like the now cliche shamanism is the ticket, anymore than substituting drugs for therapy.
Material and physical inheritance is beyond our free will. But we can untangle ourselves from these deeply neurotic patterns and move beyond the Groundhog Day repetition of unconscious compulsion. Healing changes our primordial self-image and worldview, and in some metaphorical way helps 'heal' our family oversoul. In our therapeutic efforts we pray for the dead and their peaceful repose. Implementing our own healing processes funds our compassion. We heal our dysfunctions so our children and grandchildren don't have to suffer them as core issues. We can reclaim some personal sovereignty -- our true nobility.
Nexus Events
We can identify nexus events in the family lineage which became turning points for the whole family. We can take symbolic refuge among our rightful progenitors. Traversing back through the history of mankind, we reclaim and integrate much of what belongs to us -- "self-completion," not "perfection." We learn to drink from our own well of ancestral wisdom. This helps us 'cook' our raw personality in the alchemical sense, so our ascents and descents of the soul are not premature transcendental escapes, that mimic geographical escapes.
Many of us seek stories for healing. Images remain the central reality in the telling of a lifestory. And we can work with these images like our own imaginal material, in a provisional, nonliteral way. At the same time, genealogy demystifies and ignites the family field. The unconscious or even the ancestors themselves seem to call us to such work. We need them to feel complete. Then the healing forces of the unconscious come into play. We find that the gods and goddesses themselves lie at the root of some of our oldest traceable lines.
Cosmos & Kairos
We have to trust the genealogical discovery process as it evolves from chaos to self-organization. We need it to be functionally accurate, so we should check and recheck our lines periodically. But we can never trace ourselves to a momentous singular origin. We can never know the whole truth and context of what has transpired, but we build up our perception and consciousness, bit by bit, as best we can. Sometimes we have to sacrifice our sacred cows -- family stories that prove less than provable. They may remain plausible even without evidence.
A Jungian approach emphasizes the preeminent role of language, myth and dream and other practices to establish and construct and the identities of the subjects, events, and historical meaning. The constituting role of these practices applies also to us: we are simultaneously the vehicles and the products of our narrative, discursive and nondiscursive genealogical practice and synthesis.
The effect of the soulful approach is kairos -- opening the moment when change is possible, when every moment is an opportunity. It is a passing instant when an opening appears that we must drive through with force to achieve success. It can be the moment in which proof is delivered and suggests possibilities -- a time when the cosmos may interact at our intersection with eternity -- the appointed or crucial time.
Some approach genealogy as a hobby, game, or puzzle to be solved. Others take a more meditational or depth approach with an intent to drive their ancestry back as far it can be taken. We may systemically find and record our ancestry, but at the same time we are obliged to react emotionally to what we find there with our own personal values. Inevitably, we are changed in the process, transformed by a deeper knowledge of our essential being and the chain of life in the great web of being.
A pedigree is a symbolic hologram of our intertwined histories and structure -- interacting waves upon waves of generations in the ocean of humanity. Because the ancestors number literally in the thousands, we come to understand the transformation is within the unfolding therapeutic practice, rather than contained only in each of the historical or fictional figures. The pedigree is more of a multilayered structure than merely a chart of lineal descent. As in the therapeutic process, we work from the parts to the whole for the blessings of a thousand generations.
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Structure Your Content
First we document to genealogical standards and complete our informational content. The first step is to work from yourself to your "Big 8" gr-grandparents. We can then move on to our "Big 16" great-great grandparents, and begin merging with the World Tree, while still carefully annotating each step to the best-practice standard with documentation.
We can emphasize simplicity, proof, or indexing at each stage. We can plot migrations and the stories that go with them. Some ancestors will have more available biographies than others. We may revisit old material with fresh eyes. Investigating for new data may require field trips or searches of civil records.
Our 32 great-great-great grandparents begin revealing broader strokes of our family history and direct lines. We may find new pride, but it may be mingled with stories of shame and regret. All these revelations need digesting to take their rightful place in our self-image.
The question of what to do with the results arises. We may publish or post the results for our family, share with other genealogists, or keep them as a close secret. Rather than mere droplines, you can create special categories to feature, using time periods, dynasties, ruling houses, nations, historical events, social or religious groups, even well-known legends and myths that we find where history fades into the mists.
We will share immigrant patriarchs and gateway ancestors with many others of colonial descent. Their lives and connections have been well-documented by professionals. Some colonials are still being added or subtracted as bearers of noble descent. Gateway ancestors left their homelands and ancestral populations and immigrated to a new lifestyle. But many have illustrious ancestors in their noble or royal lineage. The Great Migration provides many with tangible links to the medieval world.
Surname or family books are great, but online or interactive genealogy websites can be easily updated, annotated, or corrected, since typically all pedigrees contain mistakes of recording or disinformation from other sources. We can make overviews or summaries of certain important elements. We combine, consolidate, integrate, and extract meaning in a sort of alchemical process to articulate our vision of the historical panoply.
Genealogical research is a complex process that uses historical records and sometimes genetic analysis to demonstrate kinship. Reliable conclusions are based on the quality of sources, ideally original records, the information within those sources. Ideally evidence is drawn, directly or indirectly from primary or firsthand information.
In many instances, genealogists must skillfully assemble indirect or circumstantial evidence to build a case for identity and kinship. All evidence and conclusions, together with the documentation that supports them, is then assembled to create a cohesive genealogy or family history.
Genealogists begin their research by collecting family documents and stories. This creates a foundation for documentary research, which involves examining and evaluating historical records for evidence about ancestors and other relatives, their kinship ties, and the events that occurred in their lives. As a rule, genealogists begin with the present and work backward in time.
- Rational
- Spiritual
- Psychological
- Psychic
- Legendary
- Mythological
- Irrational
- Delusional
Some approaches are overtly Christian, or they may have religious overtones even for a non-religious person. Others will come to the subject with a pagan background or an affinity for the ancient ways. Paradoxically, we find ancestors listed from other ethnicities and religions.
The Prophet Mohammad often appears in Western royal lines, as do the emperors of the Han Dynasty, Attila the Hun, Turks, Khazars, and Xiongnu shamans of Siberia. We share roots with the Basque, Moors, Turks, Pashtun, and sub-Saharan Africa. A balanced approach to the heritage will not obsess on particular areas of the lineage to the exclusion of others, nor veer off into cos-play like fantasies of legendary beings. Genealogy shows your multi-ethnic heritage as well as a range of spiritual beliefs.
'Messianic complex' describes the phenomenon where individuals claim self-awareness of their proclaimed role as a 'savior'. Like those who claim to be Jesus, non-religious "Magdalene addicts" are prone to channeling her, or even claiming to be her. But most of these channelings are highly idealized and full of truisms.
The phenomenon is a complicated psychological problematic developed within a cultural group. In Jungian psychology a complex is a cluster of psychological energy that centers around a particular element that has developed partly through the disposition of a personality and partly through life experience (Jacobi). These energy clusters act as partial personalities within the psyche and are often unconscious and somewhat autonomous.
They don't reflect the deeply Gnostic belief in the evil of matter, the drive to perfection, or the demonic dominion of the Archons. Or, if they do embrace such ideas, they likely heard it on some internet show from a highly idiosyncratic speaker, invariably trying to sell his or her book. Somehow they all have a theory. But no one has made good on such claims yet.
They may be the victims of misguided inner authority. We can pick up misconceptions and self-delusions in the search for the soul. The faddish appearance of such identifications (a lived trance-state) is a social trend, and the meme-like nature of the Feminine proclamations reveal that this is a collective phenomena, not true individuation. It shows the collective influence of pop culture and the archetype on the psyche, no matter what you call "Her".
A relationship with the archetype can be primitive or sophisticated. James Hillman expands the concept of complex by adding a concept called personification to individual complexes, treating complexes as characters or entities within the psyche, with the proviso that it is not meant to be literal.
Jung’s complexes and James Hillman’s concept of personification permit the unconscious images to converse with the individual psyche in 'imaginal dialogue'. They manage to incorporate feelings, imagination, and metaphor, which other sciences reject.
Sociological identification, including intense physical reactions, and relationships between the body and the psyche, can be independent of linear historical inheritance in a culture that is a product of ideas rather than location or blood inheritance and also experimental. Emergent imaginal content is metaphor for thinking about experience, including experiences tied to intense belief structures.
When you don't know what a symbol is, it appears split-off, as 'other'. It attempts to enter consciousness in the expressive arts. Collectively, spiritual conflict is worldview warfare -- irreconcilable differences in belief, including the structure of the Cosmos. But only creative emotional and cognitive comprehension of the inherent meaning of experience leads to individuation and self-realization -- the Grail.
Jung spoke of such creativity:
"The creative process has feminine quality, and the creative work arises from unconscious depths--we might say, from the realm of the mothers. Whenever the creative force predominates, human life is ruled and molded by the unconscious as against the active will, and the conscious ego is swept along on a subterranean current, being nothing more than a helpless observer of events.
The work in process becomes the poet's fate and determines his psychic development. It is not Goethe who creates Faust, but Faust which creates Goethe....The archetypal image of the wise man, the saviour or redeemer, lies buried and dormant in man's unconscious since the dawn of culture; it is awakened whenever the times are out of joint and a human society is committed to a serious error.
When people go astray they feel the need of a guide or teacher or even of the physician. These primordial images are numerous, but do not appear in the dreams of individuals or in works of art until they are called into being by the waywardness of the general outlook.
When conscious life is characterized by one-sidedness and by a false attitude, then they are activated--one might say, 'instinctively'--and come to light in the dreams of individuals and the visions of artists and seers, thus restoring the psychic equilibrium of the epoch." (Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul).
"Every creative person is a duality or a synthesis of contradictory aptitudes. On the one side he is a human being with a personal life, while on the other side he is an impersonal, creative process...The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is 'man' in a higher sense--he is 'collective man'--one who carries and shapes the unconscious, psychic life of mankind. To perform this difficult office it is sometimes necessary for him to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being."
Worldview
Emotionally appealing truths are sandwiched into idiosyncratic notions ranging from the speculative to the fantastical, and trap many individuals like flypaper, because our minds love a good story. The brain feeds on stories, but the wrong stories just lead us down the garden path into ancient worlds that never happened, and mythic scenarios that were never meant to be taken literally. Accepting such beliefs uncritically is precisely the opposite of what Jung recommended as individuation.
Such false beliefs tend to cluster around an individual's personal issues and complexes, but are mistaken for and confounded with historical, philosophical and scientific 'reality'. Much of the "self-delusion" can be linked to exposure to memes functioning as emotional strange attractors or cultural artifacts or fallout,, as well as pre- and pseudo-scientific notions of by-gone centuries, and lack of understanding of standards and discernment.
The self-narrative may not match the reality. It's a truism that mediocrity (gaps and gaffs in awareness) boasts the loudest. Through hysteria, lack of critical judgment, and naive enthusiasm, a false idea can be hyped by the mainstream media to the point of not only looking entirely plausible, but even certain.
A world view is a set of presuppositions (or assumptions) which we hold (consciously or subconsciously) about the basic makeup of our world. Everyone has a world view, whether he can explain it or not. It can be likened to a pair of glasses through which one views the world. It is important to have the right prescription, or reality will be distorted. Modem man is faced with a supermarket of world views; all of them claim to represent reality, but they are points of view about reality -- mental constructs, beliefs.
To construct our own worldview we are still confronted with the old formula - the cosmological creative and destructive cycles of time. Cosmology is the study of the origin and nature of the universe. Ontology studies the nature of being as being and existence. We have to fit the pieces together from epistemologies and psychodynamics into some sort of cumulative understanding. Some basic epistemological agreement about the phenomena under examination is needed. Metaphysics abstracts universal conceptions. Some of these grand narratives are more fanciful than others.
We can be sincerely convinced of the utterly wrong. Why do we continue to accommodate the irrelevant and easily falsifiable? Are we conscientious about our own self-delusions or simply unconsciously immersed in them due to a delusional perspective on our own misguided "gnosis" and obsessions with misguided theoretical perspectives? Even conscience is no ineffable guide to inner authority. There is no shortage of new myths to capture our attention. Dreams tell us who we are, collectively and individually.
If Inner Authority is linked to authentic power and wisdom, we need to examine our personal interaction with inner wisdom figures (archetypes) and values in order to create lives of positive action that arise from deep inner wisdom. Most of us shirk such important inner work, substituting a fantasy of transformation and mindfulness. Delusional self-improvement projects are aimed at adorning the ego.
People claim to hear messages that ring in their hearts as truth, or 'resonate' with material that confirms their own tacit or recognized beliefs, but most it originates in cultural conditioning and memetic patterning. All we hold is a piece of the Mystery. Buzzwords such as True Nature, intentionality, and mis-identified integrity compound the situation. Premature spiritual fixation can just as readily be a form of transcendental escapism.
Both the strategies of "transcendence" and "reduction" are expressions of bad faith — i.e., forms of self-deception and escapism that seek to deny the realities of the human existential situation. Self-delusion may be self-evident but few give themselves a reality check on it and doing so is compounded by our own psychological blindspots. This is a form of escapism or neo-mythology.
The depth psychological approach is about psyche, which brings with it a sense of the sacred. It is a way of incorporation that assimilates what has been considered the "Not-I" into the core of being. It is informed by the Hero's Journey and many of the iconic tropes of the royal genealogical lines. Archetypal psychology has experience dealing with parental images and ego development, as well as life passages that might intertwine with genealogical interest and the predictable crises such as childbearing, mid-life, aging and confronting mortality.
Jungians claim that, "A psychologically-oriented approach to spirituality and a new God-image are emerging alongside the Judeo-Christian tradition. This form of spirituality expresses itself from the depths of the psyche, and stresses personal experience rather than belief or sacred texts. Depth psychology gives us a contemporary way to express this evolving step in the history of religious consciousness. Sometimes a new language enables things to be said that have yet to be articulated, and depth psychology is providing this voice."
Traditional ideas about God and religion do not always express the individual’s personal spirituality, because one may experience the sacred in ways that are not fully articulated in the traditional teachings. For people who are committed to a traditional religious practice, depth psychology can deepen their relationship to the tradition and their understanding of its archetypal underpinning. (Corbett)
Surviving in the wilderness
The Grail Quest took place in the vast Wasteland of the alienated soul.
In his book Deep Survival, Laurence Gonzales describes what it’s like to be lost in a wilderness, and how to survive the experience. Here are the stages he identifies in his description of the process:
1. You’re lost, but persist in thinking that everything will work out just fine if you continue along the same path.
2. You realize you’re lost, but you don’t have a clue what to do, so you continue on the wrong path, hoping against hope that home will be just over the next hill—even though somewhere within you, you know it’s not.
3. The knowledge that you are finally, irredeemably and undeniably lost causes makes you to panic—you run desperately through scrub and trees, burning yourself up, getting even more lost.
4. Exhausted by panic, you stop. You realize that wherever you are, you’re somewhere. You sit down where you are and take stock, making wherever you are your temporary home. What you do here is the key to whether or not you survive.
5. You rest, and take stock of the resources you have, and the information the landscape offers. With this, you begin to make a plan for the continuation of your life.
The House of Our Flesh
Each generation has added to the historical account of our progenitors. The story drifts back into the mythos of pre-history -- the neolithic era of the Goddess, legends of Atlantis and other lost civilizations, catastrophe theories, cryptozoological fantasies, and displaced scifi themes. Paranormal powers lurk just behind the mystic veil separating the Known from deep Mystery.
What we think we knew gets profoundly revisioned. The great symbols of mankind, the iconic symbols, are mostly attached to ancient royalty in some way or another, so we encounter and activate them in our generational viewing. They include animal, vegetable, and mineral images, as well as personifications.
Marriage is a psychological relationship. The Hieros Gamos is the Holy Grail of sexual rites. Jung addressed the symbolism of cross-cousin marriages, lived out in the bloodline, which tended to overlook the taboos of incest. There was ritualized brother/sister pairing prior to the days of Sumeria, where the priest-king of the country marries “the land” – in the form of a high priestess – to rejuvenate it. The Great Rite is blessed by the gods who participate in it as a sacred act -- a sexual sacrament uniting the Sun and the Moon.
This mystic marriage or union stands for conjunction of conscious and unconscious. The joining together of conscious ego and shadow is the end result of the penetration of the conscious mind by the unconscious and/or the penetration of the unconscious by consciousness.
Symbolically - in myths and in dreams - consciousness is usually represented as male, the unconscious as female; and the sexual penetration of female by male is therefore a common symbol of the descent of consciousness into the dark cave-like depths of the unconscious.
Cross-cousin marriage, designed to keep power and assets in the family, is based on the archetype of the quaternio. This early form of mating that ensured that endogenous (kinship) libido--incest--held the family together but didn't overpower exogamous libido. The endogamous side wants a sister, the exogamous a stranger, so marrying a cousin balances the two. Marriage of a man's sister to his brother's wife is a relic of the "sister-exchange marriage" of many primitive tribes.
Today's pure exogamy leaves the kinship-libido demands largely unsatisfied and increases their power, which expresses itself in the formation of religions and sects and nations--but only individuation will contain the still-rising force. The incest prohibition, with help from the urge to individuate, created the self-conscious individual, who previously had been mindlessly one with the tribe.
Prepare to be astonished, amazed, and repulsed by the overwhelming burdonsome knowledge of history experienced as the behavior of one's great-grandparents. You will be confronted with unbridled power, pathologizing, perversions, and mental illness (narcissism, sociopathy, sadism, bipolarity, schizophrenia, etc.) that spreads through some lines like a virus.
There are some real monsters in there, as well as marriages made in hell, not above sacrifice and murder within as well as without the family. If you know the histories of these regions it may provide some orientation, but the story reads differently from the inside out. Youhave entered the panoply of history. Everything you ever imagined or feared you might be is there, somewhere in time. You may also find the physiological disorders and illnesses that have plagued the bloodline from earliest recorded times.
Even as an imaginal exercise -- an "as-if" reality -- such revisioning helps us reown the shadow of mankind by making a place for it within our own being. This is much easier said than done, but forewarned is fore-armed.
Marriage is a psychological relationship. The Hieros Gamos is the Holy Grail of sexual rites. Jung addressed the symbolism of cross-cousin marriages, lived out in the bloodline, which tended to overlook the taboos of incest. There was ritualized brother/sister pairing prior to the days of Sumeria, where the priest-king marries “the land” – in the form of a high priestess – to rejuvenate it. The Great Rite is blessed by the gods who participate in the sacred act -- a sexual sacrament uniting the Sun and the Moon.
This marriage symbolizes the joining together of conscious ego and shadow, which is the end result of the penetration of the conscious mind by the unconscious and/or the penetration of the unconscious by consciousness. Symbolically - in myths and in dreams - consciousness is usually represented as male, the unconscious as female; and the sexual penetration of female by male is therefore a common symbol of the descent of consciousness into the dark cave-like depths of the unconscious.
Cross-cousin marriage, designed to keep power and assets in the family, is based on the archetype of the quaternio. It subconsciously recognizes that the anima and animus of both parties are involved in the archetypal relationship dynamic.
This early form of mating that ensured that endogenous (kinship) libido--incest--held the family together but didn't overpower exogamous libido. The endogamous side wants a sister, the exogamous a stranger, so marrying a cousin balances the two. Marriage of a man's sister to his brother's wife is a relic of the "sister-exchange marriage" of many primitive tribes.
Today's pure exogamy leaves the kinship-libido demands largely unsatisfied and increases their power, which expresses itself in the formation of religions and sects and nations--but only individuation will contain the still-rising force. The incest prohibition, with help from the urge to individuate, created the self-conscious individual, who previously had been mindlessly one with the tribe.
Prepare to be astonished, amazed, and repulsed by the overwhelming burdonsome knowledge of history experienced as the behavior of one's gr-grandparents. You will be confronted with unbridled power, pathologizing, perversions, and mental illness (narcissism, sociopathy, sadism, bipolarity, schizophrenia, etc.) that spreads through some lines like a virus. You may also find the physiological disorders and illnesses that have plagued the bloodline from earliest recorded times.
Even as an imaginal exercise -- an "as-if" reality -- such revisioning helps us reown the shadow of mankind by making a place for it within our own being. This is much easier said than done, but forewarned is fore-armed.
But Is It Real?
The bloodline as real as the psyche. Some say genealogy without proofs is meaningless, but that is certainly not true in the Jungian context which is happy to continue exploration within the mythic and imaginal realms, understanding them as such. There is a psychic if not historical truth to including archetypes in the lines, usually at the root. It is also possible that real culture heroes became ennobled as divinities over the eons.
Monks in the the Middle Ages constructed royal genealogies from Bardic tales that linked rulers not only to the dawn of time but to the legendary heroes and gods that inhabit that mystical realm. We all have an unconscious and conscious relationship to this world of the hyperdimensional imagination. How we choose to interact with it and what we call those processes characterizes our experience of it -- and how toxic, haphazard or sophisticated it is.
At first, genealogy served a purely serious purpose in determining the legal rights of related individuals to land and goods. Genealogy was cultivated since at least the start of the early Irish historic era. Upon inauguration, Bards and poets are believed to have recited the ancestry of an inaugurated king to emphasize his hereditary right to rule. With the transition to written culture, oral history was preserved in the monastic settlements. Over time, genealogy was pursued for its own merits.
Today, genealogy is second only to the topic of sex online. Humanity is re-discovering its roots and creating a BIG TREE in the Sky -- in the Cloud that describes our interconnections. Genetic Genealogy adds information to that big story -- filling in the migration patterns and tribal affiliations with molecular certainties. But it cannot provide the connective list of names -- the royal lines of descent -- that come from the pedigree. Both are equally important, but genetic genealogy may or may not add to what you already know. Genealogies always add new information.
Amateurs are demystifying the process by using rapid technological aids and open-source genealogical sites to help plug them into the "Motherboards". Experts continue their scholarly efforts within the crowd-sourced material to analyze and correct the public record. Thus, most ancestors have Master Profiles which have been vetted by experts, though the stubs and dead ends of amateurs can also be found. Be very careful to prove undocumented conclusions because many blind alleys have been created and deserted. Sometimes mistakes remain and get repeated.
The trend now is to disconnect lines from their legendary and mythic roots, and start a discussion with the last reliably known ancestor. Therefore, you may not be able to imagine how you ever connected with these mythic figures. Surely, this has psychological overtones perhaps as grave as literally believing in the descents created by the medieval Church after repeated efforts to suppress the Bloodline with genocidal crusades and witchhunts in Europe.
Even without erroneous digressions, our genealogical lines constitute a labyrinth of our soul. We can become lost within our ancestral lines, with an uncanny felt-sense of time travel as the time dimension seemingly collapses. The labyrinth is the Collective Unconscious and genealogy is but one method of entry into it.
The Internet is another labyrinth full of genealogical information colored by the beliefs of the writers. Often lies are hidden between two truths, so you have to exercise great discretion in separating the informational wheat from the chaff of fallacious material claiming to be truth. "Spin" or even popular memes are no substitute for objective scholarship.
The Red Thread Bloodline (Lost Tribes) of our ancestral lines keeps us from losing our way. Throughout the Bible 'scarlet' speaks of sacrifice made on the behalf of the believer, and it is seen in the vestments of the tabernacle and in the priestly garments in Exodus" (ibid., note on Joshua 2:18-21).
The scarlet thread running through the Bible is a picture of the Blood of Jesus. "For it is not possible that the blood of bulls and of goats should take away sins" (Hebrews 10:4). "Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus" (Hebrews 10:19). "For it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul" (Leviticus 17:11).
http://the-red-thread.net/
http://israelect.com/ChurchOfTrueIsrael/emahiser/emirishscott.html
Prepare to be A-Mazed
The early maze was a figurative vortex; a tornado or whirlpool. The Chartres Maze is associated with Melusine and Sheba and their vortex, source of life and life's blood. The Maze is associated with the root word from which we derive the adjective "to amaze".
The maze represented the shamanic "Spiral Dance of the Vortex" (sacrificial sword dance), and on another level "The Quest for the Holy Grail". It can be associated with the name Mazda or Ormuzd, the principle of light, suggesting that whatever was at the center of a Maze rendered enlightenment and that ecstatic amazement, or wonder, accompanied it.
A labyrinth is an ancient symbol that relates to wholeness. It combines the imagery of the circle and the spiral into a meandering but purposeful path. It represents a journey or Quest to our own center and back again out into the world. Labyrinths have long been used as meditation and prayer tools. A labyrinth is an archetype with which we can have a direct experience. Walking the labyrinth can be considered an initiation in which you awaken the knowledge encoded within your DNA.
A labyrinth contains embedded geometric and numerological prompts that create a multi-dimensional holographic field. These unseen patterns are referred to as sacred geometry. They allegedly reveal the presence of a cosmic order as they interface the world of material form and the subtler realms of higher consciousness.
The contemporary resurgence of labyrinths in the west stems from our deeply rooted urge to honor again the Sacredness of All Life. A labyrinth can be experienced as the birthing womb of the Great Goddess. Thus, the labyrinth experience is a potent practice of Self-Integration as it encapsulates the spiraling journey in and out of incarnation. On the journey in, towards the center, one cleanses the dirt from the road. On the journey out, one is born anew to consciously dwell in a human body, made holy by having got a taste of the Infinite Center.
The Grail Effect
Sovereignty: It is the individual's task to differentiate himself from all the others and stand on his own feet. All collective identities . . . interfere with the fulfillment of this task. Such collective identities are crutches for the lame, shields for the timid, beds for the lazy, nurseries for the irresponsible. . . .--Carl Jung (1875 - 1961)
We can call anyone of Sangreal blood who has yet to discover or prove their dynastic heritage, a "crypto-grail carrier." Over and over the phenomenon and transformative reaction repeats itself. We call it "the Grail Effect," which kindles an archaic revival and a recursive cycle of self-amplification -- a virtual awakening to a new order of reality, deep time, and sense of self-identity.
We are endowed with a genetic lust for life. Each new birth reminds us that life is a miracle. Genealogy is a Gnosis, a divine revelation, a Way of Knowing that only comes with the names that carry one's lineage back into the mists of pre-history. Our lines contain sacred mysteries.
Genealogy is a hermeneutic requiring interpretation and discretion between the literal, mythic, and symbolic. Gnosis is divine revelation not just philosophical reasoning. It is instantaneous spiritual understanding of the nature of man -- primordial awareness -- a direct experience of enlightenment. Hermetics had techniques for penetrating and discerning the order of the cosmos. Gnosticism was only philosophical when describing God's absolute transcendence. The mythic world described
We are involved in a pioneering project in the overlap of arts, sciences, humanities, network research, data science, and information design to log and archive our research. That which rings true, resonates. Imagination is a way of engaging reality. The flow of images creates thinking and the thinker -- the "seen" and the "seer". The wholeness of the Self is more than the sum of psyche's components. What was once only imagined is being proven with genetic genealogy. Dreams and philosophy make up myths.
It all begins when a seemingly ordinary person somehow develops an interest in their family genealogy, finds a historical Gateway Ancestor, whose pedigree leads them back to medieval times where they find they descend from multinational nobility and royalty. Because of intensive intermarriage among nobles in past eras, finding one royal usually means tapping into several blueblood lines.
Much like in dreamwork, where we are all parts of the dream, we are literally all of our ancestors incarnate -- male and female -- only this is a dream dreamt aloud in the manifest world, birth after noble birth. We are all the Fisher King. We go fishing for our ancestral legacies and voices in the deep lake of the unconscious, bringing them to the surface. We "fish" with our ancestral "lines", which tie us directly to our deep past.
When the Lady of the Lake responds spontaneously with the treasure of the magic sword, our intellects are sharpened and steeled, as well as our intuition. The 'fishing' is drawing these things up from the unconscious, but the 'fishing lines' are our progenitors, you might say -- the Fisher Kings and queens. And, the King and the land are one - that is, our divinity and our materiality are synonymous. We exist and in that sense we are 'divine' to the extent that we realize and actualize that blessing of our deepest Nature, balancing symbolic and material.
"It is the duty of one who goes his own way to inform society of what he finds on his voyage of discovery, be it cooling water for the thirsty or the sandy wastes of unfruitful error. The one helps, the other warns. Not the criticism of individual contemporaries will decide the truth or falsity of his discoveries, but future generations. There are things that are not yet true today, perhaps we dare not find them true, but tomorrow they may be. So every man whose fate it is to go his individual way must proceed with hopefulness and watchfulness, ever conscious of his loneliness and its dangers." (C.G. Jung)
At first we are struck with the richness of our personal family story, but soon come to realize many of our noble lines are intimately crossed with those already well-aware of their Sangreal heritage today. We learn to understand our lineage is that of the ancient dynastic houses, who are already deeply involved in their own historical reclamation and heritage projects. We begin to see that this is, indeed, our true extended family.
As the seeker's online search widens, sooner or later they come across some material on the Sangreal legend, legacy, or its many subcultures. Given a few hints on where and who to look for, suddenly they are faced with the mind-blowing distinction that they descend arguably from the oldest royal line on the planet, and that there is a deeper 'reality' to the mythic stories -- a living reality we each embody.
The God-Kings are rooted in mythic prehistory and extended their rule well into the Classical Period, before they were deposed and separated from their divine-rights by socio-political machinations. Looking to their own family lines and/or genetic genealogy reports, modern Grail-carriers come face to face with the revelation of their true being.
Thus awakened, they draw new energy from the collective unconscious and their Sangreal companions on the same journey to pursue the depths of their being and connection to Cosmos. So it has been, from the dawn of time. Suddenly their 'differences' make sense, possibly for the first time. They may experience an infusion of wisdom or Knowledge welling up from the Plenum within, which had formerly been experienced as a Void. The Void is not devoid.
Genealogists now use molecular genealogy, comparing and matching people by matrilineal DNA lineages -- matrilineal mtDNA or patrilineal Y-chromosome ancestry, SNP, and/or autosomal tests. People interested in ancestry now look at genetic markers to trace the migrations of the human species. You can trace your genealogy by DNA from your grandparents back 10,000 or more years.
Anyone can be interested in DNA for ancestry research, learning how different populations from a mosaic of communities reached their current locations. From whom are you descended? What markers shed light on your deepest ancestry? You can study DNA for medical reasons or to discover the geographic travels and dwelling places of some of your ancestors. DNA does not target specific ancestors by name but does reveal rare genetic markers. Specifically, you can interpret your DNA test and/or genealogy for family history.
Particular genetic markers are called ancestry informative markers (AIM). They correlate with populations of specific geographical areas. Autosomal DNA shows the "genetic percentages" of a person's ancestry from particular continents/regions or identify the countries and "tribes" of origin. SNPs are locations on DNA where nucleotides have "mutated" or "switched" to a different nucleotide. Tests listing geographical places of origin use alleles. Individual and family variations on various chromosomes across the genome are analyzed with the aid of population databases.
Initiation opens a communication link between the aspirant and divine guiding principle -- our inner genius -- fostering balance in the personality as the firm foundation for spiritual development. Maat or 'Balance' was the prime expression of the Egyptian Mystery Schools, because it gave order and meaning to life.
In the East, it is called the Tao, a dynamic blending of yin and yang. In Kabbalah, it is the Middle Way. Balance helps us to achieve the goals we want in life and to manifest our dreams. You can easily integrate this wisdom tradition in your own householder life. Empowerment comes through grounding and centering
Such knowledge transforms and activates a new level of Being, internally and in the world, at large. The Grail has come calling and collected its own, informing our sparks of consciousness with a connection to hyperdimensional depth, with a sense of mission and purpose, with a commitment to the recovery of our self-awareness and inherent potential of genius for clarity. This is the Path of Return.
We've had glimpses of a way of being human that embodies rare integrity, freedom, wholeness and beauty--and we dream of the life and world that could result from sustaining that ideal. Most of us are held back from our greater potential by a deep-rooted undertow pulling us down from the heights we could achieve. This persistent barrier to our optimal growth is the ancient, hardwired programming of our evolutionary past, the "software" of our primitive ancestry.
We operate (often unconsciously) from "inherited" instincts, assumptions, and responses that have been encoded into humankind for millennia--vestiges of an ancient animal past.
These unproductive patterns form an invisible ceiling preventing us from reaching our true potential. In fact, this innate and primitive "conditioning" is the key reason that most of our efforts at change fail--whether as individuals or as a society.
The key to breaking this "sound barrier" in consciousness is learning how to awaken and activate a latent spiritual capacity. It lives within each of us, but often remains dormant, just beneath the surface of our awareness. This often hidden dimension of our being is a boundless source of inspiration, passion, creativity and clarity--and when we learn how to tap into it, we rapidly find ourselves on the other side of everything that previously stood in our way.
"Grail Carriers" Today
We have reclaimed our voice on the world stage. We are speaking out, in part, because of the needful state of the world and because whole industries and memes are based on misapprehensions, out-right lies, and exploitation of our ancestral legacy. We are awakened.
We are engaged in a transpersonal, metaphysical method of knowing Truth. Namely, that Necessity binds us to our destiny, which is not to be confused with linear pre-ordination. The Underground Stream honors the Feminine. Cultural Transformation can only come through the cultural evolution toward partnership. We are here to set the record straight and define ourselves with our own narratives in today's world, as the stewards we rightfully claim to be.
"Jung found further that the mandala does not only mirror an inner state of order, but that its harmony or disharmony encompasses also the surroundings of the individual. Thus a mandala needs a symbol in which the outer and inner world merge. There is for Jung a ultimate reality beyond matter and psyche which he called the unus mundus, its empirical manifestation is the principle of synchronicity because in synchronistic events the inner world behaves as if it were outside and the outer world as if it were inside. As the mandala symbolism expresses the holistic order of matter and psyche it should have been investigated by physicists as well as psychologists because the mandala reappears in their hypothetical models of the atomic world. The atomic model of Niels Bohr is already a cosmic mandala and the models which the physicists construct nowadays to visualize the quarks are also mandalas." (M-L von Franz)
Imagine for a moment that the fate of the entire human race rested on your shoulders alone. That humanity's evolution out of brute self-interest depended entirely on your willingness to transform your consciousness.
What if you knew that the human race could advance past its smallness and negative conditioning --if you only became an exemplar of humanity's highest potential for the world? Imagine that for you, evolving beyond ego became an evolutionary imperative. Would you approach your path any differently?
Would the energy you bring to your spiritual practice intensify? Would the quality of awareness and care with which you approached your interactions with others become more profound? Would you find yourself reaching with inner muscles you didn't even know you had to actually stay awake to the depth you've tasted in your most profound spiritual moments? If you knew it all rested on you, would you have any choice but to change?
The Indian sage Ramana Maharshi once said that the spiritual aspirant must want liberation like a drowning person wants air. Why? Because the challenges of authentic spiritual growth and transformation are so great that most of us will choose to continue suffering in our smallness, rather than feel the pain of allowing that smallness to die forever.
Modern science has in recent decades been verifying what the ancient traditions intuited long ago: that, in both tangible and mysterious ways, we are all interconnected. Any one of us can have a profound effect on the whole. Add to that the reality that we are evolving beings living in an evolving universe. We are all part of a grand, cosmic evolutionary process. Then the question of our obligation to the whole starts to cut close to the bone.
To reframe the earlier question: What if you realized that the entire human endeavor, the evolution of consciousness itself, depended on your willingness to evolve your own consciousness? How would it affect the choices you make every day if you knew that in a very real sense, those choices were either contributing to the evolution of the whole--or holding it back?
At this time when it seems that our very future depends on our willingness to evolve as a species, would you have any choice but to act in alignment with the greatest evolutionary good? The point is that when we take a closer look at what spiritual work and growth is actually for, it quickly becomes clear that the path of awakening is not primarily about freeing ourselves from suffering or securing our own happiness. Sure, that's a nice by-product. But, as long as that's all we're seeking, we probably won't get very far.
Where the spiritual path really begins to get interesting is when we recognize that transforming ourselves in the deepest possible way is in fact an evolutionary imperative, with profound consequences far beyond ourselves.
If we begin to embrace the fact that our lives are not simply our own to do with as we please--that in everything we do, we are in fact accountable to the Whole--something truly miraculous begins to happen. Faced with the palpable responsibility to evolve for a greater good, we find that we suddenly have access to a seemingly infinite source of energy, intention, passion and courage to confront whatever challenges present themselves on our path.
What's more, all of the personal issues and problems--all of the fears and doubts and resistances that once seemed so insurmountable--begin to seem a lot less significant. Why? Because our attention is now captivated by something much bigger than ourselves. This is the power of context.
We see our individual concerns, the worries we fret over day to day, from a different vantage point. Held up against this larger picture and greater purpose, those concerns suddenly seem very small indeed. Realizing "it's not all about me," and ignited by a noble calling to participate in the grand adventure of conscious evolution, we find we no longer even want to give those worries the time of day.
Where Do We Come From?
By analyzing the genetic variation of modern Europeans, Cavalli-Sforza and Ammerman decided that Europeans are descended largely from populations of farmers who started migrating out of the Middle East 9,000 years ago. As the sons and daughters of farming families left their parents’ farms and moved into new territory, they interbred with the existing hunter-gatherer populations, which produced gradients of genetic change radiating from the Middle East.
Only in mountainous areas unattractive to farmers—the Pyrenees homelands of the Basques, for example—were the genes of the indigenous peoples comparatively intact. Other historical events, too, appeared to have influenced the European gene pool. For example, a genetic trail leads from the area north of the Black and Caspian Seas into the rest of Europe. Cavalli-Sforza linked this trail to the spread of the descendants of nomadic warriors and herders who first domesticated the horse, about 4,000 B.C.
Evidence clearly indicates that sometime in the period 100,000 to 200,000 years ago our ancestors went through a severe genetic bottleneck. Perhaps an environmental change drove ancient people to the brink of extinction. A more likely scenario, however, is that a relatively small group, numbering fewer than 20,000 at times and probably living in eastern Africa, was isolated for many thousands of years from the many groups of archaic human beings scattered throughout Africa, Europe, and Asia.
The people who emerged from this genetic bottleneck had traits never before seen in human beings. They had lighter builds, new ways of interacting among themselves, and perhaps a greater facility with language. Eventually the descendants of these people spread throughout Africa and beyond.
They reached Australia at least 60,000 years ago, probably traveling from the Horn of Africa and then along the South Asia shoreline. They arrived in the Middle East a bit more than 40,000 years ago. By 35,000 years ago anatomically modern people had spread into Europe from the Middle East and into East Asia from Southeast Asia. Sometime more than 12,000 years ago they entered the Americas.
Fewer than 10,000 generations separate everyone alive today from the small group of Africans who are our common ancestors. That’s much more than the twenty or so generations mentioned in Genesis, but it’s the blink of an eye in evolutionary terms. Even over thousands of generations human groups have not differentiated in any substantial way.
Rather, the genetic evidence indicates that modern human beings have expanded as a single, relatively well mixed population without subsequent genetic bottlenecks (bottlenecks tend to erase the evidence of previous bottlenecks, which is how geneticists know that the bottleneck in Africa was the most recent one). Our comparative youth as a species accounts for our extreme genetic homogeneity. The chimpanzees living on a single hillside in Africa have twice as much variety in their DNA as do the six billion people scattered across the globe.
There’s another reason for our biological homogeneity. Modern human beings have never been able to resist for long what Noël Coward called “the urge to merge.” A person traveling due east from Madrid to Beijing (both at about 40°N latitude) would pass Italians, Greeks, Turks, Armenians, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Kyrgyz, Uighurs, Mongolians, and Han Chinese, among others. All these groups resemble their immediate neighbors more than they do groups farther away because of the continual exchange of mates across group boundaries.
There’s a simple way of describing our genetic relatedness. Not only do all people have the same set of genes, but all groups of people also share the major variants of those genes. Geneticists have never found a genetic marker that is of one type in all the members of one large group and of a different type in all the members of another large group. That’s why ethnically targeted biological weapons would never work. Every group overlaps genetically with every other. We have cultural differences masquerading as race problems.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/04/the-genetic-archaeology-of-race/2180/
There is no singular gene, mutation, allele, STR or SNP that tells the whole story. There are clusters of mutations that show deep relationship patterns of regional origin in some individuals. There is no DNA report that is 100% conclusive. They use the statistical mathematics of the educated guess.
Statistical and sampling flaws can lead to misinterpretations, based on too small of samplings and comparison studies. So, our own conclusions about our own DNA tests are, in part, interpretations of an interpretation. We can only draw inferences about the past based on the patterns observed in human DNA. And this is what keeps our quest alive.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/04/the-genetic-archaeology-of-race/2180/
Bruneel
A Secret Unrest Gnaws at the Roots of Our Being
Our unconscious, on the other hand, hides living water, spirit that has become nature, and that is why it is disturbed. Heaven has become for us the cosmic space of the physicists, and the divine empyrean a fair memory of things that once were. But ‘the heart glows,’ and a secret unrest gnaws at the roots of our being.Dealing with the Unconscious has become a question of life for us. ~C.G. Jung, Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, Paragraph 50.
"I am astonished, disappointed, pleased with myself. I am distressed, depressed, and rapturous. I am all these things at once, and cannot add up the sum. I am incapable of determining ultimate worth or worthlessness; I have no judgment about myself and my life. There is nothing I am quite sure about. I have no definite convictions - not about anything, really. I know only that I was born and exist, and it seems to me that I have been carried along. I exist on the foundation or something I do not know. In spite of all uncertainties, I feel a solidity underlying all existence and a continuity in my mode of being. "
— Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections. On February 29, 1919, Jung wrote a letter to Joan Corrie and commented on the
Seven Sermons of the Dead, with particular reference to the last one:
"The primordial creator of the world, the blind creative libido, becomes transformed in man through individuation & out of this process, which is like pregnancy, arises a divine child, a reborn God, no more (longer) dispersed into the millions of creatures, but being one & this individual, and at the same time all individuals, the same in you as in me.
Dr. L[ong] has a little book: VII sermones ad mortuous. There you find the description of the Creator dispersed into his creatures, & in the last sermon you find the beginning of individuation, out of which, the divine child arises ... The child is a new God, actually born in many individuals, but they don't know it. He is a spiritual God. A spirit in many people, yet one and the same everywhere. Keep to your time and you will experience His qualities" (Copied in Constance Long's diary, Countway Library of
Medicine, pp. 21-22) ~The Red Book, Footnote 123.
The goal of psychological, as of biological, development is self-realization, or individuation. But since man knows himself only as an ego, and the self, as a totality, is indescribable and indistinguishable from a God-image, self-realization-to put it in religious or metaphysical terms-amounts to God’s incarnation.
That is already expressed in the fact that Christ is the son of God. And because individuation is an heroic and often tragic task, the most difficult of all, it involves suffering, a passion of the ego: the ordinary, empirical man we once were is burdened with the fate of losing himself in a greater dimension and being robbed of his fancied freedom of will. He suffers, so to speak, from the violence done to him by the self.
The analogous passion of Christ signifies God’s suffering on account of the injustice of the world and the darkness of man. The human and the divine suffering set up a relationship of complementarity with compensating effects. Through the Christ-symbol, man can get to know the real meaning of his suffering: he is on the way towards realizing his wholeness.
As a result of the integration of conscious and unconscious, his ego enters the “divine” realm, where it participates in “God’s suffering.” The cause of the suffering is in both cases the same, namely “incarnation,” which on the human level appears as “individuation.”
The divine hero born of man is already threatened with murder, he has nowhere to lay his head, and his death is a gruesome tragedy. The self is no mere concept or logical postulate; it is a psychic reality, only part of it is conscious, while for the rest it embraces the life of the unconscious and is therefore inconceivable except in the form of symbols.
The drama of the archetypal life of Christ describes in symbolic images the events in the conscious-life-as well as the life that transcends consciousness-of a man who has been transformed by his higher destiny. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, A Psychological Approach to the Trinity, Paragraph 233.
The factors which come together in the coniunctio are conceived as opposites, either confronting one another in enmity or attracting one another in love. To begin with they form a dualism; for instance the opposites are humidum (moist) / sicum (dry), frigidum (cold) / calidum (warm), superiora (upper, higher) / inferiora (lower), spiritus-anima (spirit-soul) / corpus (body), coelum (heaven) / terra (earth), ignis (fire) / aqua (water), bright / dark, agens (active) / patiens (passive), volatile (volatile, gaseous) / fixum (solid), pretiosum (precious, costly; also carum, dear) / vile (cheap, common), bonum (good) / malum (evil), manifestum (open) / occultum (occult; also celatum, hidden), oriens (East) / occidens (West), vivum (living) / mortuum (dead, inert), masculus (masculine) / foemina (feminine)., Sol / Luna. Often the polarity is arranged as a quaternio (quaternity), with the two opposites crossing one another, as for instance the four elements or the four qualities (moist, dry, cold, warm), or the four directions and seasons, thus producting the cross as an emblem of the four elements and symbol of the sublunary physical world. This fourfold Physis, the cross, also appears in the signs for earth, Venus, Mercury, Saturn and Jupiter. (Carl Jung Mysterium Coniunctionis, page 1, paragraph 3.)
So long as we are conscious of ourselves, we are supported by the psyche and its structures and at the same time imprisoned in them with no possibility of getting outside ourselves.
We would not feel and be aware of ourselves at all were we not always confronted with the unknown power.
Without this we would not be conscious of our separateness, just as there is no consciousness without an object. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 257-264.
A Secret Unrest Gnaws at the Roots of Our Being
Our unconscious, on the other hand, hides living water, spirit that has become nature, and that is why it is disturbed. Heaven has become for us the cosmic space of the physicists, and the divine empyrean a fair memory of things that once were. But ‘the heart glows,’ and a secret unrest gnaws at the roots of our being.Dealing with the Unconscious has become a question of life for us. ~C.G. Jung, Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, Paragraph 50.
"I am astonished, disappointed, pleased with myself. I am distressed, depressed, and rapturous. I am all these things at once, and cannot add up the sum. I am incapable of determining ultimate worth or worthlessness; I have no judgment about myself and my life. There is nothing I am quite sure about. I have no definite convictions - not about anything, really. I know only that I was born and exist, and it seems to me that I have been carried along. I exist on the foundation or something I do not know. In spite of all uncertainties, I feel a solidity underlying all existence and a continuity in my mode of being. "
— Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections. On February 29, 1919, Jung wrote a letter to Joan Corrie and commented on the
Seven Sermons of the Dead, with particular reference to the last one:
"The primordial creator of the world, the blind creative libido, becomes transformed in man through individuation & out of this process, which is like pregnancy, arises a divine child, a reborn God, no more (longer) dispersed into the millions of creatures, but being one & this individual, and at the same time all individuals, the same in you as in me.
Dr. L[ong] has a little book: VII sermones ad mortuous. There you find the description of the Creator dispersed into his creatures, & in the last sermon you find the beginning of individuation, out of which, the divine child arises ... The child is a new God, actually born in many individuals, but they don't know it. He is a spiritual God. A spirit in many people, yet one and the same everywhere. Keep to your time and you will experience His qualities" (Copied in Constance Long's diary, Countway Library of
Medicine, pp. 21-22) ~The Red Book, Footnote 123.
The goal of psychological, as of biological, development is self-realization, or individuation. But since man knows himself only as an ego, and the self, as a totality, is indescribable and indistinguishable from a God-image, self-realization-to put it in religious or metaphysical terms-amounts to God’s incarnation.
That is already expressed in the fact that Christ is the son of God. And because individuation is an heroic and often tragic task, the most difficult of all, it involves suffering, a passion of the ego: the ordinary, empirical man we once were is burdened with the fate of losing himself in a greater dimension and being robbed of his fancied freedom of will. He suffers, so to speak, from the violence done to him by the self.
The analogous passion of Christ signifies God’s suffering on account of the injustice of the world and the darkness of man. The human and the divine suffering set up a relationship of complementarity with compensating effects. Through the Christ-symbol, man can get to know the real meaning of his suffering: he is on the way towards realizing his wholeness.
As a result of the integration of conscious and unconscious, his ego enters the “divine” realm, where it participates in “God’s suffering.” The cause of the suffering is in both cases the same, namely “incarnation,” which on the human level appears as “individuation.”
The divine hero born of man is already threatened with murder, he has nowhere to lay his head, and his death is a gruesome tragedy. The self is no mere concept or logical postulate; it is a psychic reality, only part of it is conscious, while for the rest it embraces the life of the unconscious and is therefore inconceivable except in the form of symbols.
The drama of the archetypal life of Christ describes in symbolic images the events in the conscious-life-as well as the life that transcends consciousness-of a man who has been transformed by his higher destiny. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, A Psychological Approach to the Trinity, Paragraph 233.
The factors which come together in the coniunctio are conceived as opposites, either confronting one another in enmity or attracting one another in love. To begin with they form a dualism; for instance the opposites are humidum (moist) / sicum (dry), frigidum (cold) / calidum (warm), superiora (upper, higher) / inferiora (lower), spiritus-anima (spirit-soul) / corpus (body), coelum (heaven) / terra (earth), ignis (fire) / aqua (water), bright / dark, agens (active) / patiens (passive), volatile (volatile, gaseous) / fixum (solid), pretiosum (precious, costly; also carum, dear) / vile (cheap, common), bonum (good) / malum (evil), manifestum (open) / occultum (occult; also celatum, hidden), oriens (East) / occidens (West), vivum (living) / mortuum (dead, inert), masculus (masculine) / foemina (feminine)., Sol / Luna. Often the polarity is arranged as a quaternio (quaternity), with the two opposites crossing one another, as for instance the four elements or the four qualities (moist, dry, cold, warm), or the four directions and seasons, thus producting the cross as an emblem of the four elements and symbol of the sublunary physical world. This fourfold Physis, the cross, also appears in the signs for earth, Venus, Mercury, Saturn and Jupiter. (Carl Jung Mysterium Coniunctionis, page 1, paragraph 3.)
So long as we are conscious of ourselves, we are supported by the psyche and its structures and at the same time imprisoned in them with no possibility of getting outside ourselves.
We would not feel and be aware of ourselves at all were we not always confronted with the unknown power.
Without this we would not be conscious of our separateness, just as there is no consciousness without an object. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 257-264.
REBIRTH
To be that which you are is the bath of rebirth. In the depths,being is not an unconditional persistence but an endlessly slow growth.
You think you are standing still like swamp water, but slowly you flow into the sea that covers the earth's greatest deeps, and is so vast that firm land seems only an island imbedded in the womb of the immeasurable sea.
As a drop in the ocean you take part in the current, ebb and flow.
You swell slowly on the land and slowly sink back again in interminably slow breaths.
You wander vast distances in blurred currents and wash up on strange shores, not knowing how you got there.
You mount the billows of huge storms and are swept back again into the depths.
And you do not know how this happens to you.
You had thought that your movement came from you and that it needed your decisions and efforts, so that you could get going and make progress.
But with every conceivable effort you would never have achieved that movement and reached those areas to which the sea and the great wind of the world brought you.
From endless blue plains you sink into black depths; luminous fish draw you, marvelous branches twine around you from above.
You slip through columns and twisting, wavering, dark-leaved plants, and the sea takes you up again in bright green water to white, sandy coasts, and a wave foams you ashore and swallows you back again, and a wide smooth swell lifts you softly and leads you again to new regions, to twisting plants, to slowly creeping slimy polyps, and to green water and white sand and breaking surf.
But from far off your heights shine to you above the sea in a golden light, like the moon emerging from the tide, and you become aware of yourself from afar.
And longing seizes you and the will for your own movement. You want to cross over from being to becoming, since you have recognized the breath of the ;sea, and its flowing, that leads you here and there without your ever adhering; you have also recognized its surge that bears you to alien shores and carries you back, and gargles you up and down.
You saw that it was the life of the whole and the death of each individual.
You felt yourself entwined in the collective death,from death to the earth's deepest place, from death in your own strangely breathing depths.
Oh-you long to be beyond; despair and mortal fear seize you in this death that breathes slowly and streams back and forth eternally.
All this light and dark, warm, tepid, and cold water, all these wavy; swaying, twisting plantlike animals and bestial plants, all these nightly wonders become a horror to you, and you long for the sun, for light dry air, for firm stones, for a fixed place and straight lines, for the motionless and firmly held, for rules and preconceived purpose, for singleness and your own intent.
The knowledge of death came to me that night, from the dying that engulfs the world.
I saw how we live toward death, how the swaying golden wheat sinks together under the scythe of the reaper, / like a smooth wave on the sea-beach. He who abides in common life becomes aware of death with fear.
Thus the fear of death drives him toward singleness.
He does not live there, but he becomes aware of life and is happy; since in singleness he is one who becomes, and has overcome death.
He overcomes death through overcoming common life. He does not live his individual being, since he is not what he is, but what he becomes.
~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Pages 266-267.
To be that which you are is the bath of rebirth. In the depths,being is not an unconditional persistence but an endlessly slow growth.
You think you are standing still like swamp water, but slowly you flow into the sea that covers the earth's greatest deeps, and is so vast that firm land seems only an island imbedded in the womb of the immeasurable sea.
As a drop in the ocean you take part in the current, ebb and flow.
You swell slowly on the land and slowly sink back again in interminably slow breaths.
You wander vast distances in blurred currents and wash up on strange shores, not knowing how you got there.
You mount the billows of huge storms and are swept back again into the depths.
And you do not know how this happens to you.
You had thought that your movement came from you and that it needed your decisions and efforts, so that you could get going and make progress.
But with every conceivable effort you would never have achieved that movement and reached those areas to which the sea and the great wind of the world brought you.
From endless blue plains you sink into black depths; luminous fish draw you, marvelous branches twine around you from above.
You slip through columns and twisting, wavering, dark-leaved plants, and the sea takes you up again in bright green water to white, sandy coasts, and a wave foams you ashore and swallows you back again, and a wide smooth swell lifts you softly and leads you again to new regions, to twisting plants, to slowly creeping slimy polyps, and to green water and white sand and breaking surf.
But from far off your heights shine to you above the sea in a golden light, like the moon emerging from the tide, and you become aware of yourself from afar.
And longing seizes you and the will for your own movement. You want to cross over from being to becoming, since you have recognized the breath of the ;sea, and its flowing, that leads you here and there without your ever adhering; you have also recognized its surge that bears you to alien shores and carries you back, and gargles you up and down.
You saw that it was the life of the whole and the death of each individual.
You felt yourself entwined in the collective death,from death to the earth's deepest place, from death in your own strangely breathing depths.
Oh-you long to be beyond; despair and mortal fear seize you in this death that breathes slowly and streams back and forth eternally.
All this light and dark, warm, tepid, and cold water, all these wavy; swaying, twisting plantlike animals and bestial plants, all these nightly wonders become a horror to you, and you long for the sun, for light dry air, for firm stones, for a fixed place and straight lines, for the motionless and firmly held, for rules and preconceived purpose, for singleness and your own intent.
The knowledge of death came to me that night, from the dying that engulfs the world.
I saw how we live toward death, how the swaying golden wheat sinks together under the scythe of the reaper, / like a smooth wave on the sea-beach. He who abides in common life becomes aware of death with fear.
Thus the fear of death drives him toward singleness.
He does not live there, but he becomes aware of life and is happy; since in singleness he is one who becomes, and has overcome death.
He overcomes death through overcoming common life. He does not live his individual being, since he is not what he is, but what he becomes.
~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Pages 266-267.
James Hillman, A Blue Fire
FAMILY
We are born into a family and, at the last, we rejoin its full extension when gathered to the ancestors. . . . Our names are family names, our physiognomies bear family traits, and our dreams never let us depart from home -- father and mother, brother and sister -- from those faces and those rooms. Even alone and only ourselves, we are also always part of them, partly them. . . .
Where does family fit in the modern myth of individual independence? That myth says home is what you leave behind. . . . Marriages and family foundings . . . are more and more countered by separations, living apart, single-parent households, divorces. Generations divided: children in day care; elders in Arizona. . . . Is it too much to assert that the most devastating effect of Western psychology is neither the reductive sexualization of the mind nor the pseudoreligion of self-centeredness, but rather its deliberate rupture of the great chain of generations, which it has accomplished by means of its myth of individual development toward independence? Not honor your father and mother, but blame them and you will come out strong. . . . The overwrought, exhausting difficulties that consume family life indicate that something important is going on. . . . Let's see what we can recover from . . . typically emotional moments in family life. . . . Relatives and in-laws
Most lives are spent among likes . . . The people whom we choose to be with do not truly force us beyond our usual psychological boundaries. In the family, however, just where you might expect to be with those most like you, you encounter instead a collection of the strangest folk! At any large family gathering there come together the most extraordinary behaviors and most incompatible opinions, yet all this is in the same clan. Voltaire supposedly said, "Nothing human is alien to me." Relatives and in-laws provide the opportunity of extending our human understanding to what strikes us as alien, indeed. Where else, how else would one ever spend an evening with a man from Orange County who pays dues to the Klan, or with a math professor who interprets signals from outer space, or a junkyard dealer who did time in the state penitentiary. And the manners, the clothes, the bodies! This is more than "alien," Voltaire. This is downright outlandish, freakish.
Here we realize that large family affairs, rather than being scenes of convention, are actually performances of high comedy, outrageously funny, which also serve to encourage one's own peculiarities. After all, as an in-law and relative yourself, you too appear, and are, rather freakish to the others. . . . Family seems to evoke a profound curiosity in each of its members about the others . . . Shadows come rushing out of the closet and join the party without moral opprobrium.
A large family reception receives, in magnificentia et gloria, all shadows; all events, whether good news or bad, associated with family members, are magnified and glorified, thereby extending the size of the family's heart. The measure of a family's magnanimity is not what it gives to charity but rather its capacity to shelter the shadows of its members.
Charity begins at home. We each feel this heart extending when, for instance, a little pride arises over the naming as "best insurance salesman in the county" a seemingly unremarkable young man who is, nonetheless, married to your great niece. . . . There follows a delicious section on "Family Meals" -- "tension is always on the menu" -- which I will reluctantly skip, in favor of this, which I defy anyone not to recognize:
Going back home
Whether from prison camp after a war or just taking the bus home for Thanksgiving, homecoming is fraught with dreadful anticipation. Opening the front door releases overwhelming emotions -- and also the counterforce of repression against those emotions that so often characterizes the stifled atmosphere of returning. . . .
[G]oing home is always going back home. Returning is essentially a regressive act in keeping with an essential function of family: to provide shelter for the regressive needs of the soul. Everyone needs a place to crawl and lick his wounds, a place to hide and be twelve years old, inept and needy. The bar, the bed, the boardroom and the buddies do not meet the gamut of needs, which always limp along behind the myth of independent individuality. . . . Going back may mean sleeping till two in the afternoon, or taking refuge in the bathroom, crying with mom in the kitchen, or just complaining as do the grandparents who fall ill during every visit.
Going home, at whatever age, offers going back, regression. And the fight against family during these return trips is therefore a displacement of the fight against regression. . . . We don't want to admit that we have not "grown up," and so blame the family both for bringing out our worst and then for not indulging it enough. Meanwhile: that strange sense of consciousness ebbing away, going down the family drain. The debilitating energy loss strikes everyone alike as if a communal power outage. Everyone caught in repeating, and resisting, old patterns. Nothing changed, after all these years!
No one can get out even for a walk to break the spell, the whole family sinking deeper into the upholstery. . . . No one is at fault, no one is kicked out, and no one can be helped. In the paralysis lies the profoundest source of acceptance. . . . Everyone goes down the drain because family love allows family pathology, an immense tolerance for the hopeless shadow in each, the shadow that we each carry as permanent part of our baggage and that we unpack when we go back home. Hillman goes on to talk about the deep psychic importance of the house and its contents, of servants, and of the family pet, "considered often a familiar." Of Odysseus' homecoming: "His family, by the way, included his old nurse and his old dog. Again, that emphasis upon ties beyond blood, and upon animals and things. . . . " and on "family service." Finally:
One also serves an invisible family, as if an archetypal force. With the passing of time a sense of its power grows within one's psyche, like the movements of its skeleton inside one's flesh, which keeps one in servitude to patterns entombed in our closest attitudes and habits. From this interior family we are never free. This service keeps us bonded to the ancestors. . . . I have been attempting to present family as supreme metaphor for our life on earth because it presents that force of human attachment to a dwelling place, of domestication of the savage and the nomad, of honoring the invisible, the demonic and the dead, of making intimate and familiar and "owned" the persons, animals and things of this world, taking them home to the hearth, ourselves as long-term caretakers in bondage to our fate on earth, playing out the comedy of human continuity. From Extending the Family: From Entrapment to Embrace
©1985 James Hillman
Excerpted in A Blue Fire
FAMILY
We are born into a family and, at the last, we rejoin its full extension when gathered to the ancestors. . . . Our names are family names, our physiognomies bear family traits, and our dreams never let us depart from home -- father and mother, brother and sister -- from those faces and those rooms. Even alone and only ourselves, we are also always part of them, partly them. . . .
Where does family fit in the modern myth of individual independence? That myth says home is what you leave behind. . . . Marriages and family foundings . . . are more and more countered by separations, living apart, single-parent households, divorces. Generations divided: children in day care; elders in Arizona. . . . Is it too much to assert that the most devastating effect of Western psychology is neither the reductive sexualization of the mind nor the pseudoreligion of self-centeredness, but rather its deliberate rupture of the great chain of generations, which it has accomplished by means of its myth of individual development toward independence? Not honor your father and mother, but blame them and you will come out strong. . . . The overwrought, exhausting difficulties that consume family life indicate that something important is going on. . . . Let's see what we can recover from . . . typically emotional moments in family life. . . . Relatives and in-laws
Most lives are spent among likes . . . The people whom we choose to be with do not truly force us beyond our usual psychological boundaries. In the family, however, just where you might expect to be with those most like you, you encounter instead a collection of the strangest folk! At any large family gathering there come together the most extraordinary behaviors and most incompatible opinions, yet all this is in the same clan. Voltaire supposedly said, "Nothing human is alien to me." Relatives and in-laws provide the opportunity of extending our human understanding to what strikes us as alien, indeed. Where else, how else would one ever spend an evening with a man from Orange County who pays dues to the Klan, or with a math professor who interprets signals from outer space, or a junkyard dealer who did time in the state penitentiary. And the manners, the clothes, the bodies! This is more than "alien," Voltaire. This is downright outlandish, freakish.
Here we realize that large family affairs, rather than being scenes of convention, are actually performances of high comedy, outrageously funny, which also serve to encourage one's own peculiarities. After all, as an in-law and relative yourself, you too appear, and are, rather freakish to the others. . . . Family seems to evoke a profound curiosity in each of its members about the others . . . Shadows come rushing out of the closet and join the party without moral opprobrium.
A large family reception receives, in magnificentia et gloria, all shadows; all events, whether good news or bad, associated with family members, are magnified and glorified, thereby extending the size of the family's heart. The measure of a family's magnanimity is not what it gives to charity but rather its capacity to shelter the shadows of its members.
Charity begins at home. We each feel this heart extending when, for instance, a little pride arises over the naming as "best insurance salesman in the county" a seemingly unremarkable young man who is, nonetheless, married to your great niece. . . . There follows a delicious section on "Family Meals" -- "tension is always on the menu" -- which I will reluctantly skip, in favor of this, which I defy anyone not to recognize:
Going back home
Whether from prison camp after a war or just taking the bus home for Thanksgiving, homecoming is fraught with dreadful anticipation. Opening the front door releases overwhelming emotions -- and also the counterforce of repression against those emotions that so often characterizes the stifled atmosphere of returning. . . .
[G]oing home is always going back home. Returning is essentially a regressive act in keeping with an essential function of family: to provide shelter for the regressive needs of the soul. Everyone needs a place to crawl and lick his wounds, a place to hide and be twelve years old, inept and needy. The bar, the bed, the boardroom and the buddies do not meet the gamut of needs, which always limp along behind the myth of independent individuality. . . . Going back may mean sleeping till two in the afternoon, or taking refuge in the bathroom, crying with mom in the kitchen, or just complaining as do the grandparents who fall ill during every visit.
Going home, at whatever age, offers going back, regression. And the fight against family during these return trips is therefore a displacement of the fight against regression. . . . We don't want to admit that we have not "grown up," and so blame the family both for bringing out our worst and then for not indulging it enough. Meanwhile: that strange sense of consciousness ebbing away, going down the family drain. The debilitating energy loss strikes everyone alike as if a communal power outage. Everyone caught in repeating, and resisting, old patterns. Nothing changed, after all these years!
No one can get out even for a walk to break the spell, the whole family sinking deeper into the upholstery. . . . No one is at fault, no one is kicked out, and no one can be helped. In the paralysis lies the profoundest source of acceptance. . . . Everyone goes down the drain because family love allows family pathology, an immense tolerance for the hopeless shadow in each, the shadow that we each carry as permanent part of our baggage and that we unpack when we go back home. Hillman goes on to talk about the deep psychic importance of the house and its contents, of servants, and of the family pet, "considered often a familiar." Of Odysseus' homecoming: "His family, by the way, included his old nurse and his old dog. Again, that emphasis upon ties beyond blood, and upon animals and things. . . . " and on "family service." Finally:
One also serves an invisible family, as if an archetypal force. With the passing of time a sense of its power grows within one's psyche, like the movements of its skeleton inside one's flesh, which keeps one in servitude to patterns entombed in our closest attitudes and habits. From this interior family we are never free. This service keeps us bonded to the ancestors. . . . I have been attempting to present family as supreme metaphor for our life on earth because it presents that force of human attachment to a dwelling place, of domestication of the savage and the nomad, of honoring the invisible, the demonic and the dead, of making intimate and familiar and "owned" the persons, animals and things of this world, taking them home to the hearth, ourselves as long-term caretakers in bondage to our fate on earth, playing out the comedy of human continuity. From Extending the Family: From Entrapment to Embrace
©1985 James Hillman
Excerpted in A Blue Fire
(c)2015; All Rights Reserved, Iona Miller, Sangreality Trust
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[email protected]
Fair Use Notice
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
