X
Melusine/Sheela-Na-Gig, Eglise de St Radegonde, Poiters.
I AM the Threshold
In the beginning, when we start our genealogical exploration, we necessarily begin with ourselves as Ground Zero of the ancestral field. This is our first step across the Threshold of the genealogical journey.
There may be clues to our place in the family -- naturally from our surname, often from our given name, as well as the tales we hear on the knees of our family, each with their own overt and covert versions of our early history. Many adventurers, new world migrants, and pioneers had many chances to turn back, but they didn't. They kept going because they were holding on to something.
Now and Again
Those family names, separate from our social persona, may open a chink in the brick wall of our heritage, and provide a unique perception of our genesis. In this author's case, I was named Iona after my Father's favorite cousin who died in her youth.
'Iona' became the clue. I learned the historical nexus into which my life fit. What's in a name? It encompassed everything I was and that was everything. The unusual name opened back to a sacred island in Scotland, providing a psychic center of gravity for further exploration that led into a broad field of self-discovery in both inner and outer worlds to join the people in whose company I belonged.
Like Jung's report in MDR of his near-death experience, "I would know what had been before me, why I had come into being, and where my life was flowing. . .My life seemed to have been snipped out of a long chain of events, and many questions had remained unanswered. Why had it taken this course? Why had I brought these particular assumptions with me? What had I made of them? What will follow?"
A friend's mother brought me a touchstone of white marble from the holy Isle many years before that inspired a quest in which I traced many lines of my descent back to the Scottish Royal Court, other royal lines to the Merovingians of the magical Grail legends, and roots in Mount Olympus.
Since then, I have ascended and descended those lines as if walking the labyrinth of my psyche as well as history. I was drafted as a Seneschal in a royal court, a sovereign society of the most ancient heritage and learned of my lineage from the inside out. I began writing on a Jungian approach to genealogy, completely unaware of psychogenealogy as practiced in Europe and elsewhere.
The name Iona is older than Scotland itself, opening the way to deep time, to all of those people to whom I belong in reality. The island of Iona, "the motherland of dreams," has Druid and Celtic roots. Geologically, it is the oldest earth on the planet, 2500 million year old Precambrian crystalline basement, and a place between worlds where "the veil is thin" -- a peaceful holy island where only the sea breaks the silence.
In the beginning, when we start our genealogical exploration, we necessarily begin with ourselves as Ground Zero of the ancestral field. This is our first step across the Threshold of the genealogical journey.
There may be clues to our place in the family -- naturally from our surname, often from our given name, as well as the tales we hear on the knees of our family, each with their own overt and covert versions of our early history. Many adventurers, new world migrants, and pioneers had many chances to turn back, but they didn't. They kept going because they were holding on to something.
Now and Again
Those family names, separate from our social persona, may open a chink in the brick wall of our heritage, and provide a unique perception of our genesis. In this author's case, I was named Iona after my Father's favorite cousin who died in her youth.
'Iona' became the clue. I learned the historical nexus into which my life fit. What's in a name? It encompassed everything I was and that was everything. The unusual name opened back to a sacred island in Scotland, providing a psychic center of gravity for further exploration that led into a broad field of self-discovery in both inner and outer worlds to join the people in whose company I belonged.
Like Jung's report in MDR of his near-death experience, "I would know what had been before me, why I had come into being, and where my life was flowing. . .My life seemed to have been snipped out of a long chain of events, and many questions had remained unanswered. Why had it taken this course? Why had I brought these particular assumptions with me? What had I made of them? What will follow?"
A friend's mother brought me a touchstone of white marble from the holy Isle many years before that inspired a quest in which I traced many lines of my descent back to the Scottish Royal Court, other royal lines to the Merovingians of the magical Grail legends, and roots in Mount Olympus.
Since then, I have ascended and descended those lines as if walking the labyrinth of my psyche as well as history. I was drafted as a Seneschal in a royal court, a sovereign society of the most ancient heritage and learned of my lineage from the inside out. I began writing on a Jungian approach to genealogy, completely unaware of psychogenealogy as practiced in Europe and elsewhere.
The name Iona is older than Scotland itself, opening the way to deep time, to all of those people to whom I belong in reality. The island of Iona, "the motherland of dreams," has Druid and Celtic roots. Geologically, it is the oldest earth on the planet, 2500 million year old Precambrian crystalline basement, and a place between worlds where "the veil is thin" -- a peaceful holy island where only the sea breaks the silence.
An example of a naming tradition from England, Scotland and Ireland:
Child Namesake
1st son paternal grandfather
2nd son maternal grandfather
3rd son father
4th son father's oldest brother
1st daughter maternal grandmother
2nd daughter paternal grandmother
3rd daughter mother
4th daughter mother's oldest sister
Child Namesake
1st son paternal grandfather
2nd son maternal grandfather
3rd son father
4th son father's oldest brother
1st daughter maternal grandmother
2nd daughter paternal grandmother
3rd daughter mother
4th daughter mother's oldest sister
The Doors of Genealogical Perception
or Shamanic Doors to Genealogy
Transgenerational Healing through the Family Tree
Iona Miller, ©2015
I speak against the mother who bore me, I separate myself from
the bearing womb. I speak no more for the sake of love, but for the sake of life.
~Carl Jung to his Ego, Liber Novus, Page 327.
I Am the Threshold
In the beginning, when we start our genealogical exploration, we necessarily start with ourselves as Ground Zero of the ancestral field. This is our first step across the Threshold of the genealogical journey.
There may be clues to our place in the family -- naturally from our surname, often from our given or 'true' name, as well as the tales we hear on the knees of our family, each with their own overt and covert versions of our family history. As in literature, the true name may be an important means of maintaining mastery of one's own life.
Now and Again
Those given names, family names, separate from our social persona, may open a chink in the brick wall of our heritage, and provide a unique perception of our genesis. In this author's case, Iona was named after her Father's favorite cousin who died in her youth. There is no recipe for such useful descriptions, which must be extracted like alchemical gold from the lead of causal connections.
'Iona' became the acausal clue, the telos, drawing my story forward by the divine nature of logos. I learned the historical nexus into which my life fit. What's in a name? It encompassed everything I was and that was everything (atonement) -- the subquantal organic flux more fundamental than particles and waves.
The shaman-therapist knows the power of names and naming. Each name has its own history and its own memory. It connects beings with their origins. A true name expresses, or is somehow identical with, its true nature. The name is not approximization or idealization, but it is important to unpack in just what ways it is true than to simply announce it is so.
The notion that language, or some specific sacred language, refers to things by their true names is central to philosophical study as well as various traditions of magic, religious invocation and mysticism (mantras) since antiquity. Speech is eternal and meaning is its permanent aspect -- verbal testament to ultimate reality.
Global Namespace
The unusual archaic name opened back to the sacred island of Iona in the Hebrides of Scotland, providing a psychic center of gravity for further exploration. That led into a broad field of self-discovery in both inner and outer worlds to join the people in whose company I belonged.
Perhaps some people are like designated 'Tree-herders' for their family. Untended, trees grow wild and dangerous -- profoundly unconscious. We risk forgetting our own name. We can "take back" the psychic and metaphorical nature of our true name. It changes what you care about. Maybe, for certain purposes, we should care about people, and not the messy real-world things we all are, which are only approximately people.
But beware of literalization, fantasies, and idealization. With fantastical dogmatism, the world doesn’t really match your descriptions of it. If we lose track of that fact, we come to believe that our metaphysics are just true. Some develop a selective blindness to what's actually going on around them, in both intellectual and day-to-day life. Somehow we manage to see things and not see them.
Like Jung's report in MDR of his near-death experience, "I would know what had been before me, why I had come into being, and where my life was flowing. . .My life seemed to have been snipped out of a long chain of events, and many questions had remained unanswered. Why had it taken this course? Why had I brought these particular assumptions with me? What had I made of them? What will follow?"
A friend's mother brought me a touchstone of white marble from the holy Isle many years before that inspired a quest in which I traced many lines of my descent back to the Scottish Royal Court, other royal lines to the Merovingians of the magical Grail legends, and roots in Mount Olympus.
Since then, I have ascended and descended those lines as if walking the labyrinth of my psyche as well as history. I was drafted as a Seneschal in a royal court, a sovereign society of the most ancient heritage and learned of my lineage from the inside out. I began writing on a Jungian approach to genealogy, completely unaware of psychogenealogy as practiced in Europe and elsewhere.
The name Iona is older than Scotland itself, opening the way to deep time, to all of those people to whom I belong in reality. Dove is the emblem of the Holy Grail Knights. The island of Iona is shaped like a dove-head and Iona means 'Dove' in Hebrew. But the island has Druid and Celtic roots, and is the burial place of ancient kings. Geologically, it is the oldest earth on the planet, 2500 million year old Precambrian crystalline basement, and a place between worlds where "the veil is thin" -- a peaceful holy island where only the sea breaks the silence.
http://ionamiller.weebly.com/iona-mystic-island.html
Genealogy helps us break through the doors of normal perception, routinized ways of generating those self-aware misdescriptions, preferably toward ones we can apply in a great many cases. We have to confine our descriptions of the world around us, of our inner life and all the rest of it, to the descriptions that someone has invested in, doing what was needed to embed them in a network of usable inferential links.
Pathologizing
Psyche has the ability to create suffering in any aspect of behavior or experience, deforming or afflicting our perspective. Beyond will and reason, such symptoms arise spontaneously. Suffering is central to the human experience, a way soul becomes conscious of itself. Genealogy can offer some unique symbolic solutions or channels of expression for certain syndromes.
Some people suffer a profound sense of absence and ardent longing for something transcendent. In German it is called sehnsucht -- “thoughts and feelings about all facets of life that are unfinished or imperfect, paired with a yearning for ideal alternative experiences. Almost of us have felt ‘life’s longings’ that cannot be resolved by what the world has to offer.
Such feelings can be positive, negative, or ambivalent. Our individual search for happiness proceeds while we cope with the reality of the unattainable. Psychologists identify Sehnsucht by six core characteristics: “(a) utopian conceptions of ideal development; (b) sense of incompleteness and imperfection of life; (c) conjoint time focus on the past, present, and future; (d) ambivalent (bittersweet) emotions; (e) reflection and evaluation of one's life; and (f) symbolic richness.”
There are other ways we try to make sense of existence. Saudade is Portuguese and Galician for soulful ephemeral memories of the miseries of life and the already dead, lost or missing. We miss all the physical elements that shaped our early experience. What calls to our memory that inspires such yearning and melancholy nostalgia, such longing mixed with desire? Or more importantly, how does this initiate communicating across boundaries?
This is a deep emotional state of nostalgia or epic melancholic longing for an absent loved one, likely never to return. For a lost lover, or a family member who has gone missing, moved away, separated, or died, saudade is "the love that remains." The loss can be in the past or in future potential, roads not taken, blocked paths. Extreme feelings can lead to sickness unto death.
“The famous saudade of the Portuguese is a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present, a turning towards the past or towards the future; not an active discontent or poignant sadness but an indolent dreaming wistfulness.” (In Portugal, by AFG Bell, 1912)
or Shamanic Doors to Genealogy
Transgenerational Healing through the Family Tree
Iona Miller, ©2015
I speak against the mother who bore me, I separate myself from
the bearing womb. I speak no more for the sake of love, but for the sake of life.
~Carl Jung to his Ego, Liber Novus, Page 327.
I Am the Threshold
In the beginning, when we start our genealogical exploration, we necessarily start with ourselves as Ground Zero of the ancestral field. This is our first step across the Threshold of the genealogical journey.
There may be clues to our place in the family -- naturally from our surname, often from our given or 'true' name, as well as the tales we hear on the knees of our family, each with their own overt and covert versions of our family history. As in literature, the true name may be an important means of maintaining mastery of one's own life.
Now and Again
Those given names, family names, separate from our social persona, may open a chink in the brick wall of our heritage, and provide a unique perception of our genesis. In this author's case, Iona was named after her Father's favorite cousin who died in her youth. There is no recipe for such useful descriptions, which must be extracted like alchemical gold from the lead of causal connections.
'Iona' became the acausal clue, the telos, drawing my story forward by the divine nature of logos. I learned the historical nexus into which my life fit. What's in a name? It encompassed everything I was and that was everything (atonement) -- the subquantal organic flux more fundamental than particles and waves.
The shaman-therapist knows the power of names and naming. Each name has its own history and its own memory. It connects beings with their origins. A true name expresses, or is somehow identical with, its true nature. The name is not approximization or idealization, but it is important to unpack in just what ways it is true than to simply announce it is so.
The notion that language, or some specific sacred language, refers to things by their true names is central to philosophical study as well as various traditions of magic, religious invocation and mysticism (mantras) since antiquity. Speech is eternal and meaning is its permanent aspect -- verbal testament to ultimate reality.
Global Namespace
The unusual archaic name opened back to the sacred island of Iona in the Hebrides of Scotland, providing a psychic center of gravity for further exploration. That led into a broad field of self-discovery in both inner and outer worlds to join the people in whose company I belonged.
Perhaps some people are like designated 'Tree-herders' for their family. Untended, trees grow wild and dangerous -- profoundly unconscious. We risk forgetting our own name. We can "take back" the psychic and metaphorical nature of our true name. It changes what you care about. Maybe, for certain purposes, we should care about people, and not the messy real-world things we all are, which are only approximately people.
But beware of literalization, fantasies, and idealization. With fantastical dogmatism, the world doesn’t really match your descriptions of it. If we lose track of that fact, we come to believe that our metaphysics are just true. Some develop a selective blindness to what's actually going on around them, in both intellectual and day-to-day life. Somehow we manage to see things and not see them.
Like Jung's report in MDR of his near-death experience, "I would know what had been before me, why I had come into being, and where my life was flowing. . .My life seemed to have been snipped out of a long chain of events, and many questions had remained unanswered. Why had it taken this course? Why had I brought these particular assumptions with me? What had I made of them? What will follow?"
A friend's mother brought me a touchstone of white marble from the holy Isle many years before that inspired a quest in which I traced many lines of my descent back to the Scottish Royal Court, other royal lines to the Merovingians of the magical Grail legends, and roots in Mount Olympus.
Since then, I have ascended and descended those lines as if walking the labyrinth of my psyche as well as history. I was drafted as a Seneschal in a royal court, a sovereign society of the most ancient heritage and learned of my lineage from the inside out. I began writing on a Jungian approach to genealogy, completely unaware of psychogenealogy as practiced in Europe and elsewhere.
The name Iona is older than Scotland itself, opening the way to deep time, to all of those people to whom I belong in reality. Dove is the emblem of the Holy Grail Knights. The island of Iona is shaped like a dove-head and Iona means 'Dove' in Hebrew. But the island has Druid and Celtic roots, and is the burial place of ancient kings. Geologically, it is the oldest earth on the planet, 2500 million year old Precambrian crystalline basement, and a place between worlds where "the veil is thin" -- a peaceful holy island where only the sea breaks the silence.
http://ionamiller.weebly.com/iona-mystic-island.html
Genealogy helps us break through the doors of normal perception, routinized ways of generating those self-aware misdescriptions, preferably toward ones we can apply in a great many cases. We have to confine our descriptions of the world around us, of our inner life and all the rest of it, to the descriptions that someone has invested in, doing what was needed to embed them in a network of usable inferential links.
Pathologizing
Psyche has the ability to create suffering in any aspect of behavior or experience, deforming or afflicting our perspective. Beyond will and reason, such symptoms arise spontaneously. Suffering is central to the human experience, a way soul becomes conscious of itself. Genealogy can offer some unique symbolic solutions or channels of expression for certain syndromes.
Some people suffer a profound sense of absence and ardent longing for something transcendent. In German it is called sehnsucht -- “thoughts and feelings about all facets of life that are unfinished or imperfect, paired with a yearning for ideal alternative experiences. Almost of us have felt ‘life’s longings’ that cannot be resolved by what the world has to offer.
Such feelings can be positive, negative, or ambivalent. Our individual search for happiness proceeds while we cope with the reality of the unattainable. Psychologists identify Sehnsucht by six core characteristics: “(a) utopian conceptions of ideal development; (b) sense of incompleteness and imperfection of life; (c) conjoint time focus on the past, present, and future; (d) ambivalent (bittersweet) emotions; (e) reflection and evaluation of one's life; and (f) symbolic richness.”
There are other ways we try to make sense of existence. Saudade is Portuguese and Galician for soulful ephemeral memories of the miseries of life and the already dead, lost or missing. We miss all the physical elements that shaped our early experience. What calls to our memory that inspires such yearning and melancholy nostalgia, such longing mixed with desire? Or more importantly, how does this initiate communicating across boundaries?
This is a deep emotional state of nostalgia or epic melancholic longing for an absent loved one, likely never to return. For a lost lover, or a family member who has gone missing, moved away, separated, or died, saudade is "the love that remains." The loss can be in the past or in future potential, roads not taken, blocked paths. Extreme feelings can lead to sickness unto death.
“The famous saudade of the Portuguese is a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present, a turning towards the past or towards the future; not an active discontent or poignant sadness but an indolent dreaming wistfulness.” (In Portugal, by AFG Bell, 1912)
For Whom Does Orpheus Sing?
In the deep still woods upon the Thracian mountains
Orpheus with his singing lyre led the trees,
Led the wild beasts of the wilderness.
With my song
I will charm Demeter's daughter,
I will charm the Lord of the Dead,
Moving their hearts with my melody.
I will bear her away from Hades.
O Gods who rule the dark and silent world,
To you all born of a woman needs must come.
All lovely things at last go down to you.
You are the debtor who is always paid.
A little while we tarry up on earth.
Then we are yours forever and forever.
But I seek one who came to you too soon.
The bud was plucked before the flower bloomed.
I tried to bear my loss. I could not bear it.
Love was too strong a god, O King, you know
If that old tale men tell is true, how once
The flowers saw the rape of Proserpine,
Then weave again for sweet Eurydice
Life's pattern that was taken from the loom
Too quick. See, I ask a little thing,
Only that you will lend, not give, her to me.
She shall be yours when her years' span is full.
In the deep still woods upon the Thracian mountains
Orpheus with his singing lyre led the trees,
Led the wild beasts of the wilderness.
With my song
I will charm Demeter's daughter,
I will charm the Lord of the Dead,
Moving their hearts with my melody.
I will bear her away from Hades.
O Gods who rule the dark and silent world,
To you all born of a woman needs must come.
All lovely things at last go down to you.
You are the debtor who is always paid.
A little while we tarry up on earth.
Then we are yours forever and forever.
But I seek one who came to you too soon.
The bud was plucked before the flower bloomed.
I tried to bear my loss. I could not bear it.
Love was too strong a god, O King, you know
If that old tale men tell is true, how once
The flowers saw the rape of Proserpine,
Then weave again for sweet Eurydice
Life's pattern that was taken from the loom
Too quick. See, I ask a little thing,
Only that you will lend, not give, her to me.
She shall be yours when her years' span is full.
“Orpheus and Eurydice”. Edward Poynter, 1862.
"When I worked in my family tree, I understood the strange communion of the destiny that unites me to my ancestors. I had the strong feeling that it was under the influence of events and problems that were incomplete and unresolved by my parents, my grandparents, and my other ancestors. I had the impression that there is often in the family an impersonal Karma transmitted from parents to children. I always knew that I had to answer questions already asked by my ancestors or I had to conclude, or continue on the previously unresolved issues". ~Carl Jung
"What the ancients did for their dead! You seem to believe that you can absolve yourself from the care of the dead, and from the work that they so greatly demand, since what is dead is past. You excuse yourself with your disbelief in the immortality of the soul. Do you think that the dead do not exist because you have' devised the impossibility of immortality? You believe in your idols of words. The dead produce effects, that is sufficient. In the inner world there is no explaining away, as little as you can explain away the sea in the outer world. You must finally understand your purpose in explaining away, namely to seek protection." ~Carl Jung; Red Book.
“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.” ― William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
"There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception." - Aldous Huxley
"When I worked in my family tree, I understood the strange communion of the destiny that unites me to my ancestors. I had the strong feeling that it was under the influence of events and problems that were incomplete and unresolved by my parents, my grandparents, and my other ancestors. I had the impression that there is often in the family an impersonal Karma transmitted from parents to children. I always knew that I had to answer questions already asked by my ancestors or I had to conclude, or continue on the previously unresolved issues". ~Carl Jung
"What the ancients did for their dead! You seem to believe that you can absolve yourself from the care of the dead, and from the work that they so greatly demand, since what is dead is past. You excuse yourself with your disbelief in the immortality of the soul. Do you think that the dead do not exist because you have' devised the impossibility of immortality? You believe in your idols of words. The dead produce effects, that is sufficient. In the inner world there is no explaining away, as little as you can explain away the sea in the outer world. You must finally understand your purpose in explaining away, namely to seek protection." ~Carl Jung; Red Book.
“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.” ― William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
"There are things known and there are things unknown, and in between are the doors of perception." - Aldous Huxley
Gate to Eternity., Felipe Carrasquilla., https://500px.com/fcarrasquilla
Star Matrix by Luminaya
Shamanic medicine restores power, harmony and spirit. Your “inner shaman” is a guide or bridge between the physical world and the spirit world. Our shamanic journeys help us step outside confining personality and ego to “see” the soul and restore power and harmony.
The First Peoples use many plants and herbs as remedies or in spiritual celebrations, creating a connection with spirits and the after life. Some of these plants and herbs used in spiritual rituals included Sage, Bear Berry, Red Cedar, Sweet Grass, Tobacco, and many others. Some birth rituals use a 'corn mother' placed by the child for 20 days. When the ceremonies are done the child now belongs to the family and the earth.. http://www.firstpeople.us/FP-Html-Legends/TheBirthRitual-Hopi.html
Medicine is more about healing the person than curing a disease. Traditional healers worked to make the individual “whole,” believing that most illnesses stem from spiritual problems. Healers use sweats, rites, dreams, and healing practices to drive away angry spirits and invoke the healing powers of others.
In Re-Visioning Psychology, James Hillman describes "the archetypal figure of the Wounded Healer, another ancient and psychological way of expressing that the illness and the healer are one and the same" (76). In the essay "Puer Wounds and Ulysses' Scar" in Senex and Puer, Hillman explains that the act of healing is not "because one is whole, integrated, and all together, but from a consciousness breaking through dismemberment" (234).
Integrating Indigenous & Transpersonal Healing
The shaman/therapist represents a hybrid or gestalt. We can combine powerful consciousness-altering rituals, worldviews, and shamanic visionary experiences with the techniques, theories, and practices of depth psychologies. The shaman/therapist is not just a simple mixing, or borrowing of techniques from one to the other, but a radical shift in worldview.
As well as living, the work of our mortality involves paying fulfilling attention to death and dying. Armed with this, we can undertake the creation of a profound healing. Through and beyond the ego we access a profound and creative state of consciousness that provides our form and the core of our being.
Here, we create our healing from within. We experience first-hand that personal power (empowerment) arises from within. Hallmarks of the shamanic experience include The Journey, Spirit Guides, Otherworld, Shamanic Calling, and Shamanic Awareness, including a cyclic worldview.
The Medicine Wheel, the circle of life, is a shamanic healing model. The magic circle synergy of chaos and order is a mythic model for creation and a device for magical orientation and protection. It functions like a homing device, calling us backward to our foundation and forward to the future. As Hesse says in Steppenwolf, "We have no one to guide us. Our only guide is our homesickness."
This motif illustrates four phases in the healing process as 1) Initiation, threshold experience; arousal 2) Letting Go, surrender to process; conception 3) New Vision, connecting with power; gestation, 4) Actualization, integration; rebirth. Newly-learned skills and intuition are put into fruitful practice, connecting one to self, community, and Universe, restoring balance.
In his Process Meditation, Progoff (1982) offered some “Entrance Meditations” designed to open the experiential dimension. Such paradigms for self-inquiry facilitate therapeutic experience, meditative experience, and a transformative experience. “The White-Robed Monk” begins as we enter through a door in a tree. Then we 'descend' to find the wisdom figure. Such twilight states are a trance that intentionally encourages exploration of the depth dimension.
Each us is the special door to our family tree. Progoff recommends journaling, too, and in some sense working the pedigree is like writing a transgenerational journal, especially if we use it in conjunction with a dialogue process. The personal narrative takes on a new dimension when it is extended to the family of the World Tree.
Narrative is a powerful form. In our genealogical work the story unfolds of itself. The main requirement is simply participation. Participatory wisdom is an emergent function. Hillman reminds us, "To heal the symptom, we must heal the person, and to heal the person we must first heal the story in which the person has imagined himself."
The universality of storytelling indicates it is not just social learning but reflects something deep-seated in our genes. Professor Daniel Siegel M.D. believes there is a neurological subplot of the well-made story involving the integration of the brain’s left and right hemispheres. Stories link the factual to the emotional, the specific to the universal, the past to the present. A psychological approach takes such imagery symbolically and metaphorically. A religious approach is usually more literal.
We carry our histories, as well as the whole history of humanity, with us into the present through our bodies. Our feelings and thoughts become manifest in our physical structure. The past is "sedimented" in the body -- that is, it is embodied. Our bodies' sensory apparatus is the only way we experience the larger world. It is the medium through which we meet and respond to that world, feeling its reciprocal impact on us. Thus our symptoms can reflect our cultural as well as personal attitudes.
Jungian Wisdom
Psychogenealogy implies transgenerational or genealogical integration. Deeper communion is the foremost issue. So, we look not only at fingers pointing toward the moon, but to the moon itself, and the darkside of the moon for material pertaining to our quest.
Family work can be approached as an artform and art therapy that allows us to create images not otherwise accessible to our consciousness. With it we ‘paint’ a picture of our extended family, and create the bigger stories we need to nourish and sustain us in modern life. Thus, we also create a more visible and transmutable legacy for our future generations.
Jung said, "Life is a luminous pause between two great mysteries, which themselves are one." These doors open to this other dimension where we can work on our roots. Such stories represent enactments of our own psychic process in projections. Emotions are concealed in such images. We might, for example, be carrying within us a manic active father, opposed by a depressed passive mother.
Much of our psychogenealogical pursuit echoes shamanic traditions. Estrangement from our ancestors points to the modern decay of dialogue, essential to our well-being. Instead of estrangement or entanglement, we suggest archetypal recognition of life-themes – the soul of the life cycle. Embracing a call to your genealogy does not have to mean embracing a shamanic lifestyle, by any means.
A child’s first experience of the process of transformation recalls the birth experience and is incorporated into the child’s myth as a prototype of the theme of rebirth that may be activated later in life during religious or quasi-religious experiences.
“At mid-life another phase begins. The now overdeveloped ego may become so estranged from its mythical roots in psychic experience that the person begins to feel a need for spiritual wholeness, for a meaning in life. During this period the person counteracts the growing sense of alienation by returning to inner experiences or spiritual and religious sources for support and reintegration (Edinger 1973, pp. 37-71). If he is successful, the result is the emergence of a new, more complete identity called the self. This is the culmination of personal actualization; the process of self-development (called individuation) may continue for the rest of the person’s life.” (Spotts & Shontz)
When he worked his family tree, Jung said in Memories, Dreams, and Reflections (1997) that partnership with fate became clear to him. Such a partnership binds us all to our ancestors. He added, “I have always felt that I must answer the questions fate put before my ancestors, or that I must finish things they did not have the time to complete” (p, 283).
We do not react to our parents and grandparents as they are but to parental images. Such unconscious images are heavily influenced by fantasies and archetypal contents. When we work back through our recent ancestors and our Personal Unconscious into the World Tree of shared ancestry, we may be surprised to find that beyond the medieval era we run into legendary and mythological characters “as if” we descend directly from them.
Though modern genealogists don’t take such material literally, such links provide us entrée to the legendary worlds of the Quest for the Holy Grail and our mythic inheritance. While others may see this as mere fiction, we can understand it in Hillman’s sense of a “healing fiction” and embrace the notion provisionally.
This allows us a more personal relationship with the depths of the Collective Unconscious, the roots of humanity, toward our Self archetype. Jung carved a motto on his threshold at his Kusnacht home, Vocatus atque non vocatus deus aderit, that is, “Called or not called, the god will be present.” It implies we are entering a sacred space.
Our ego consciousness may be challenged with another way of knowing when we shake up our family tree and find missing parts of ourselves in our ancestors within. Adult orphans, a subject not often addressed, may find particular solace in working their tree, reconnecting with what they thought they had lost in new and deeper ways. Such knowing is the knowledge of the soul on the road to Self.
The First Peoples use many plants and herbs as remedies or in spiritual celebrations, creating a connection with spirits and the after life. Some of these plants and herbs used in spiritual rituals included Sage, Bear Berry, Red Cedar, Sweet Grass, Tobacco, and many others. Some birth rituals use a 'corn mother' placed by the child for 20 days. When the ceremonies are done the child now belongs to the family and the earth.. http://www.firstpeople.us/FP-Html-Legends/TheBirthRitual-Hopi.html
Medicine is more about healing the person than curing a disease. Traditional healers worked to make the individual “whole,” believing that most illnesses stem from spiritual problems. Healers use sweats, rites, dreams, and healing practices to drive away angry spirits and invoke the healing powers of others.
In Re-Visioning Psychology, James Hillman describes "the archetypal figure of the Wounded Healer, another ancient and psychological way of expressing that the illness and the healer are one and the same" (76). In the essay "Puer Wounds and Ulysses' Scar" in Senex and Puer, Hillman explains that the act of healing is not "because one is whole, integrated, and all together, but from a consciousness breaking through dismemberment" (234).
Integrating Indigenous & Transpersonal Healing
The shaman/therapist represents a hybrid or gestalt. We can combine powerful consciousness-altering rituals, worldviews, and shamanic visionary experiences with the techniques, theories, and practices of depth psychologies. The shaman/therapist is not just a simple mixing, or borrowing of techniques from one to the other, but a radical shift in worldview.
As well as living, the work of our mortality involves paying fulfilling attention to death and dying. Armed with this, we can undertake the creation of a profound healing. Through and beyond the ego we access a profound and creative state of consciousness that provides our form and the core of our being.
Here, we create our healing from within. We experience first-hand that personal power (empowerment) arises from within. Hallmarks of the shamanic experience include The Journey, Spirit Guides, Otherworld, Shamanic Calling, and Shamanic Awareness, including a cyclic worldview.
The Medicine Wheel, the circle of life, is a shamanic healing model. The magic circle synergy of chaos and order is a mythic model for creation and a device for magical orientation and protection. It functions like a homing device, calling us backward to our foundation and forward to the future. As Hesse says in Steppenwolf, "We have no one to guide us. Our only guide is our homesickness."
This motif illustrates four phases in the healing process as 1) Initiation, threshold experience; arousal 2) Letting Go, surrender to process; conception 3) New Vision, connecting with power; gestation, 4) Actualization, integration; rebirth. Newly-learned skills and intuition are put into fruitful practice, connecting one to self, community, and Universe, restoring balance.
In his Process Meditation, Progoff (1982) offered some “Entrance Meditations” designed to open the experiential dimension. Such paradigms for self-inquiry facilitate therapeutic experience, meditative experience, and a transformative experience. “The White-Robed Monk” begins as we enter through a door in a tree. Then we 'descend' to find the wisdom figure. Such twilight states are a trance that intentionally encourages exploration of the depth dimension.
Each us is the special door to our family tree. Progoff recommends journaling, too, and in some sense working the pedigree is like writing a transgenerational journal, especially if we use it in conjunction with a dialogue process. The personal narrative takes on a new dimension when it is extended to the family of the World Tree.
Narrative is a powerful form. In our genealogical work the story unfolds of itself. The main requirement is simply participation. Participatory wisdom is an emergent function. Hillman reminds us, "To heal the symptom, we must heal the person, and to heal the person we must first heal the story in which the person has imagined himself."
The universality of storytelling indicates it is not just social learning but reflects something deep-seated in our genes. Professor Daniel Siegel M.D. believes there is a neurological subplot of the well-made story involving the integration of the brain’s left and right hemispheres. Stories link the factual to the emotional, the specific to the universal, the past to the present. A psychological approach takes such imagery symbolically and metaphorically. A religious approach is usually more literal.
We carry our histories, as well as the whole history of humanity, with us into the present through our bodies. Our feelings and thoughts become manifest in our physical structure. The past is "sedimented" in the body -- that is, it is embodied. Our bodies' sensory apparatus is the only way we experience the larger world. It is the medium through which we meet and respond to that world, feeling its reciprocal impact on us. Thus our symptoms can reflect our cultural as well as personal attitudes.
Jungian Wisdom
Psychogenealogy implies transgenerational or genealogical integration. Deeper communion is the foremost issue. So, we look not only at fingers pointing toward the moon, but to the moon itself, and the darkside of the moon for material pertaining to our quest.
Family work can be approached as an artform and art therapy that allows us to create images not otherwise accessible to our consciousness. With it we ‘paint’ a picture of our extended family, and create the bigger stories we need to nourish and sustain us in modern life. Thus, we also create a more visible and transmutable legacy for our future generations.
Jung said, "Life is a luminous pause between two great mysteries, which themselves are one." These doors open to this other dimension where we can work on our roots. Such stories represent enactments of our own psychic process in projections. Emotions are concealed in such images. We might, for example, be carrying within us a manic active father, opposed by a depressed passive mother.
Much of our psychogenealogical pursuit echoes shamanic traditions. Estrangement from our ancestors points to the modern decay of dialogue, essential to our well-being. Instead of estrangement or entanglement, we suggest archetypal recognition of life-themes – the soul of the life cycle. Embracing a call to your genealogy does not have to mean embracing a shamanic lifestyle, by any means.
A child’s first experience of the process of transformation recalls the birth experience and is incorporated into the child’s myth as a prototype of the theme of rebirth that may be activated later in life during religious or quasi-religious experiences.
“At mid-life another phase begins. The now overdeveloped ego may become so estranged from its mythical roots in psychic experience that the person begins to feel a need for spiritual wholeness, for a meaning in life. During this period the person counteracts the growing sense of alienation by returning to inner experiences or spiritual and religious sources for support and reintegration (Edinger 1973, pp. 37-71). If he is successful, the result is the emergence of a new, more complete identity called the self. This is the culmination of personal actualization; the process of self-development (called individuation) may continue for the rest of the person’s life.” (Spotts & Shontz)
When he worked his family tree, Jung said in Memories, Dreams, and Reflections (1997) that partnership with fate became clear to him. Such a partnership binds us all to our ancestors. He added, “I have always felt that I must answer the questions fate put before my ancestors, or that I must finish things they did not have the time to complete” (p, 283).
We do not react to our parents and grandparents as they are but to parental images. Such unconscious images are heavily influenced by fantasies and archetypal contents. When we work back through our recent ancestors and our Personal Unconscious into the World Tree of shared ancestry, we may be surprised to find that beyond the medieval era we run into legendary and mythological characters “as if” we descend directly from them.
Though modern genealogists don’t take such material literally, such links provide us entrée to the legendary worlds of the Quest for the Holy Grail and our mythic inheritance. While others may see this as mere fiction, we can understand it in Hillman’s sense of a “healing fiction” and embrace the notion provisionally.
This allows us a more personal relationship with the depths of the Collective Unconscious, the roots of humanity, toward our Self archetype. Jung carved a motto on his threshold at his Kusnacht home, Vocatus atque non vocatus deus aderit, that is, “Called or not called, the god will be present.” It implies we are entering a sacred space.
Our ego consciousness may be challenged with another way of knowing when we shake up our family tree and find missing parts of ourselves in our ancestors within. Adult orphans, a subject not often addressed, may find particular solace in working their tree, reconnecting with what they thought they had lost in new and deeper ways. Such knowing is the knowledge of the soul on the road to Self.
Crossing the Threshold
Old men ought to be explorers Here and there does not matter We must be still and still moving Into another intensity For a further union, a deeper communion Through the dark cold and empty desolation, The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning. --T.S. Elliott, "East Coker"
The threshold can involve change guiding toward a preferred state. Kung healers cross the threshold they call kia – the threshold of the beyond -- through dance, concentration, and song. It is a trance state, beyond the threshold of reality. In Britain, Druid and Celtic shaman were called "Walkers Between the Worlds."
Threshold also refers to phenomena other than tangible matter. For example, a psychic threshold refers to the place of transition from one belief to another or the shift from one state of being to another. Thus threshold is both place and process. As place, it is the point of transition marking the boundary between two opposing regions (Barrie, 1996); as process, threshold holds together the tension inherent in duality and paradox (Eliade, 1987). The entrance, beginning, and opening to a state or action (Onions, 1955), threshold is a powerful place of communication between the opposing worlds that lie on either side of it - the profane temporal world of history, of human affairs and events, on the one side, and the sacred metaphysical world of soul or psyche on the other (Eliade, 1987).
Threshold is the in-between zone where passage from one sphere or one way of being to another is made possible. Inside and outside, sacred and profane, psyche and matter, conscious and unconscious, are among the significant "regions" that the threshold both divides and brings together at its borders. At its essence, threshold is the stable center that mediates between and holds the tension of the opposites; it is a place of possibilities where both sides have the potential to be seen and where energy has the opportunity to flow in either direction. (Buck, 2004)
There is a traditional wisdom saying: “to forget one’s ancestors is to be a tree without a root.” Combining personal, familial, and collective talents can transform our destiny by analyzing and integrating familial patterns.
Jung points our in Modern Psychology that "Homer in his "Odyssey", Pythagoras, Orpheus, and later Goethe in his "Faust" all speak of journeys to the underworld." Like Orpheus, an old shamanic tale, we may make heroic efforts to collect our dead only to have them slip through our fingers back into the unconscious.
.If Orpheus is guardian of the sacred arts, then it is possible that never before has there been a century so much in need of his song. This is because the world insists, on a daily basis, that we lose ourselves rather than commune with loss, to be drawn to darkness as logos rather than seek out its mythos. The myth of Orpheus has an integral role today in that it returns us and brings us back into communion with the sacred through poetry, dance, music and art. (Lisa Jacobson, A Shrine for Orpheus)
For Odysseus, death meant perpetual imprisonment in the dark. But, we remain in the unconscious darkness if do not travel to the Underworld and face our mortality and the fate of the soul. Some of us, like Orpheus may not be able to retrieve much, but that is a story, too, and our fate. We may glimpse a line we would love to pursue only to find it an oft-repeated error or even forgery. We are forced back onto other ways through our family labyrinth. If we are lucky we find an underground stream of forgetfulness or remembrance to guide us back to the Source.
We are fortunate if our living elders describe both the factual and imaginal family (notable or legendary ancestors, distorted family stories, self-delusions, and misapprehensions) to us directly. If ritual is a channel to the ancestors, psychogenealogy as one form of transgenerational integration is such a ritual, literally as well as metaphorically.
In The Earth Has a Soul, Jung says, “Moreover, my ancestors' souls are sustained by the atmosphere of the house, since I answer for them the questions that their lives once left behind. I carve out rough answers as best I can. I have even drawn them on the walls. It is as if a silent, greater family, stretching down the centuries, were peopling the house.”
Genealogy is a mythic journey. The threshold is an archetype of beginnings, the initial conditions of the unfolding fractal of our psychic process. The threshold challenges us to follow the call of our ancestors and begin our adventurous genealogical quest for deeper meaning. It may be more of a crisis, a birth or death in the family that spurs the process. Our threshold moments may be full of anxiety or tentative ambivalence.
Transgenerational Integration means risking transgenerational wounding and healing. Sometimes there are obstacles to development and integration. Some of our family lines will lead to what in genealogy are known as Dead Ends or impenetrable Brick Walls. Other lines simply go extinct. Life’s thresholds include the grief of death, the anxiety of birth, and the trepidation of the unknown. Family is the initiatory vessel in which our raw psyche is alchemically cooked and transformed. We reclaim what has been lost.
We approach it as artistic experimentation. As in shamanic training, we begin our epic journey when we cross the first threshold. Initially, we don’t need to be concerned with the therapeutic issues. Healings are natural consequences of the unfolding process. You don’t have to try to get into a state.
We must trust that the process will carry us along as we creatively research and work on our life-issues, genealogical challenges, and process. Mythic figures have summoned the dead or traveled to the land of the dead from time immemorial. Oh, yes, there will be digging, but not in the earth -- in researchable archives. We echo the founding myth that the way up (ancestors) and the way down (descendants) are essentially the same.
Jung noted that everything psychic has an upper and lower meaning -- a hidden symbolic significance. He likened the symbol to a living body. Symbols define what we cannot yet define or comprehend. When our ancestors become symbols for us, they live again. Each one tells something has happened -- projection of a process taking place inside us. As much as relatives, we find and relinquish our grief. These are stepping-stones in the long chain of our descent and ascent up our genealogical lines meeting the people to whom we belong in reality.
Our initial meeting with our ancestors may be the most meaningful. The end is in the beginning, as they say. The mystery of the beginning urges us toward self-realization. We may encounter our core issues right away in our closest relatives – the family shadow. There will be tragedy and trauma in your family tree – beyond shock, shame, and blame. We may be poised to pass such traumas down through our offspring, through epigenetics or toxic behaviors.
Likewise, psychogenealogy can be healing, uncovering and resolving old secrets or mysteries. Crossing the return threshold involves sharing what we have found with the family and perhaps the world. We may find new creative ways to do so and live from and with that knowledge. What are you preserving? What haunts you? What family secrets have you found, kept, or shared; which have found you?
While not the only reason, loss of ancestors can be likened to loss of soul. Soul-knowing includes who we are and where we come from. This is the foundation upon which the threshold is built. Such knowledge is otherwise inaccessible to ordinary ego consciousness. Crossing the threshold can be serious business. We should approach threshold experiences with reverence. The grave can also be a threshold as a point of passage.
There is a traditional wisdom saying: “to forget one’s ancestors is to be a tree without a root.” Combining personal, familial, and collective talents can transform our destiny by analyzing and integrating familial patterns. If we are fortunate, our living elders describe both the factual and imaginal family (notable or legendary ancestors, distorted family stories, self-delusions, and misapprehensions) to us directly. If ritual is a channel to the ancestors, genealogy is such a ritual, literally as well as metaphorically.
Like a dream, this remembrance is a jumping off point for further self-exploration. While working the fractal nature of the family system, we insist on the particularity or specificity of any individual's life story and the singularity of historical situations.
Genealogy can be approached as a curatorial project – collecting, ordering and honoring. Ritual grounds us and manifests spiritual potential. It connects us to the wisdom of the ancients and the subconscious mind. Through remembrance and conscious awareness of our ancestors, we give them our attention, contemplation, and compassion.
Such techniques are thresholds that act as Doors to the Dead, which shamanic societies have always found powerful. Our ancestors are a natural part of the universal mindfield and the personal mindfield we embody. Epigenetics supports this view that inheritable non-physical changes in DNA expression -- turning genes on and off -- can change the whole system. If a single trauma can create a wound, a healing moment can transform it.
Joseph Campbell describes the beginning of the heroic journey as a ‘crossing of the threshold,’ an initiatory act that leads beyond the commonplace into the collective unconscious. But we don’t just cross it once; we cross it over and over again, each time pushing the limits of our previous findings. We begin to discover signs, synchronicities, fingers pointing at the moon.
We leave our known limits and venture off into the unknown. Psycho genealogy provides an unfolding narrative for just such a soul journey. It is the beginning of our own particular way – a genealogical conversion of all lineage threads -- back to the origin of all creation, the original common genetic ancestors.
Old men ought to be explorers Here and there does not matter We must be still and still moving Into another intensity For a further union, a deeper communion Through the dark cold and empty desolation, The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning. --T.S. Elliott, "East Coker"
The threshold can involve change guiding toward a preferred state. Kung healers cross the threshold they call kia – the threshold of the beyond -- through dance, concentration, and song. It is a trance state, beyond the threshold of reality. In Britain, Druid and Celtic shaman were called "Walkers Between the Worlds."
Threshold also refers to phenomena other than tangible matter. For example, a psychic threshold refers to the place of transition from one belief to another or the shift from one state of being to another. Thus threshold is both place and process. As place, it is the point of transition marking the boundary between two opposing regions (Barrie, 1996); as process, threshold holds together the tension inherent in duality and paradox (Eliade, 1987). The entrance, beginning, and opening to a state or action (Onions, 1955), threshold is a powerful place of communication between the opposing worlds that lie on either side of it - the profane temporal world of history, of human affairs and events, on the one side, and the sacred metaphysical world of soul or psyche on the other (Eliade, 1987).
Threshold is the in-between zone where passage from one sphere or one way of being to another is made possible. Inside and outside, sacred and profane, psyche and matter, conscious and unconscious, are among the significant "regions" that the threshold both divides and brings together at its borders. At its essence, threshold is the stable center that mediates between and holds the tension of the opposites; it is a place of possibilities where both sides have the potential to be seen and where energy has the opportunity to flow in either direction. (Buck, 2004)
There is a traditional wisdom saying: “to forget one’s ancestors is to be a tree without a root.” Combining personal, familial, and collective talents can transform our destiny by analyzing and integrating familial patterns.
Jung points our in Modern Psychology that "Homer in his "Odyssey", Pythagoras, Orpheus, and later Goethe in his "Faust" all speak of journeys to the underworld." Like Orpheus, an old shamanic tale, we may make heroic efforts to collect our dead only to have them slip through our fingers back into the unconscious.
.If Orpheus is guardian of the sacred arts, then it is possible that never before has there been a century so much in need of his song. This is because the world insists, on a daily basis, that we lose ourselves rather than commune with loss, to be drawn to darkness as logos rather than seek out its mythos. The myth of Orpheus has an integral role today in that it returns us and brings us back into communion with the sacred through poetry, dance, music and art. (Lisa Jacobson, A Shrine for Orpheus)
For Odysseus, death meant perpetual imprisonment in the dark. But, we remain in the unconscious darkness if do not travel to the Underworld and face our mortality and the fate of the soul. Some of us, like Orpheus may not be able to retrieve much, but that is a story, too, and our fate. We may glimpse a line we would love to pursue only to find it an oft-repeated error or even forgery. We are forced back onto other ways through our family labyrinth. If we are lucky we find an underground stream of forgetfulness or remembrance to guide us back to the Source.
We are fortunate if our living elders describe both the factual and imaginal family (notable or legendary ancestors, distorted family stories, self-delusions, and misapprehensions) to us directly. If ritual is a channel to the ancestors, psychogenealogy as one form of transgenerational integration is such a ritual, literally as well as metaphorically.
In The Earth Has a Soul, Jung says, “Moreover, my ancestors' souls are sustained by the atmosphere of the house, since I answer for them the questions that their lives once left behind. I carve out rough answers as best I can. I have even drawn them on the walls. It is as if a silent, greater family, stretching down the centuries, were peopling the house.”
Genealogy is a mythic journey. The threshold is an archetype of beginnings, the initial conditions of the unfolding fractal of our psychic process. The threshold challenges us to follow the call of our ancestors and begin our adventurous genealogical quest for deeper meaning. It may be more of a crisis, a birth or death in the family that spurs the process. Our threshold moments may be full of anxiety or tentative ambivalence.
Transgenerational Integration means risking transgenerational wounding and healing. Sometimes there are obstacles to development and integration. Some of our family lines will lead to what in genealogy are known as Dead Ends or impenetrable Brick Walls. Other lines simply go extinct. Life’s thresholds include the grief of death, the anxiety of birth, and the trepidation of the unknown. Family is the initiatory vessel in which our raw psyche is alchemically cooked and transformed. We reclaim what has been lost.
We approach it as artistic experimentation. As in shamanic training, we begin our epic journey when we cross the first threshold. Initially, we don’t need to be concerned with the therapeutic issues. Healings are natural consequences of the unfolding process. You don’t have to try to get into a state.
We must trust that the process will carry us along as we creatively research and work on our life-issues, genealogical challenges, and process. Mythic figures have summoned the dead or traveled to the land of the dead from time immemorial. Oh, yes, there will be digging, but not in the earth -- in researchable archives. We echo the founding myth that the way up (ancestors) and the way down (descendants) are essentially the same.
Jung noted that everything psychic has an upper and lower meaning -- a hidden symbolic significance. He likened the symbol to a living body. Symbols define what we cannot yet define or comprehend. When our ancestors become symbols for us, they live again. Each one tells something has happened -- projection of a process taking place inside us. As much as relatives, we find and relinquish our grief. These are stepping-stones in the long chain of our descent and ascent up our genealogical lines meeting the people to whom we belong in reality.
Our initial meeting with our ancestors may be the most meaningful. The end is in the beginning, as they say. The mystery of the beginning urges us toward self-realization. We may encounter our core issues right away in our closest relatives – the family shadow. There will be tragedy and trauma in your family tree – beyond shock, shame, and blame. We may be poised to pass such traumas down through our offspring, through epigenetics or toxic behaviors.
Likewise, psychogenealogy can be healing, uncovering and resolving old secrets or mysteries. Crossing the return threshold involves sharing what we have found with the family and perhaps the world. We may find new creative ways to do so and live from and with that knowledge. What are you preserving? What haunts you? What family secrets have you found, kept, or shared; which have found you?
While not the only reason, loss of ancestors can be likened to loss of soul. Soul-knowing includes who we are and where we come from. This is the foundation upon which the threshold is built. Such knowledge is otherwise inaccessible to ordinary ego consciousness. Crossing the threshold can be serious business. We should approach threshold experiences with reverence. The grave can also be a threshold as a point of passage.
There is a traditional wisdom saying: “to forget one’s ancestors is to be a tree without a root.” Combining personal, familial, and collective talents can transform our destiny by analyzing and integrating familial patterns. If we are fortunate, our living elders describe both the factual and imaginal family (notable or legendary ancestors, distorted family stories, self-delusions, and misapprehensions) to us directly. If ritual is a channel to the ancestors, genealogy is such a ritual, literally as well as metaphorically.
Like a dream, this remembrance is a jumping off point for further self-exploration. While working the fractal nature of the family system, we insist on the particularity or specificity of any individual's life story and the singularity of historical situations.
Genealogy can be approached as a curatorial project – collecting, ordering and honoring. Ritual grounds us and manifests spiritual potential. It connects us to the wisdom of the ancients and the subconscious mind. Through remembrance and conscious awareness of our ancestors, we give them our attention, contemplation, and compassion.
Such techniques are thresholds that act as Doors to the Dead, which shamanic societies have always found powerful. Our ancestors are a natural part of the universal mindfield and the personal mindfield we embody. Epigenetics supports this view that inheritable non-physical changes in DNA expression -- turning genes on and off -- can change the whole system. If a single trauma can create a wound, a healing moment can transform it.
Joseph Campbell describes the beginning of the heroic journey as a ‘crossing of the threshold,’ an initiatory act that leads beyond the commonplace into the collective unconscious. But we don’t just cross it once; we cross it over and over again, each time pushing the limits of our previous findings. We begin to discover signs, synchronicities, fingers pointing at the moon.
We leave our known limits and venture off into the unknown. Psycho genealogy provides an unfolding narrative for just such a soul journey. It is the beginning of our own particular way – a genealogical conversion of all lineage threads -- back to the origin of all creation, the original common genetic ancestors.
Queen: Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted colour off, do not forever seek for thy
noble father in the dust. Thou know'st 'tis common: all that lives must die.
noble father in the dust. Thou know'st 'tis common: all that lives must die.
Sheelahs
The significance of the threshold arose in shamanic culture. The threshold can be precise or ambiguous, a moment or a process. We can presume the first thresholds – dark thresholds -- were the mouths of labyrinthine caves, which echo our expulsion from the confines of the womb, and any birth trauma associated with it, as well described by Grof’s perinatal states.
This was expressed in the Druid’s tradition, or native folk religion, by the Sheela-na-Gig whose precise function remains unknown. But, symbolically, sheelahs represent our primordial origin, genealogical and genetic ground zero – the feminine essence of creation.
Highly significant, the Sheelha-na-Gig are often associated with doors, or Thresholds. Mostly found in the British Isles, Sheela-na-Gigs are related to earlier Goddess/Fertility figures and the Goddess symbolism of the early pre-historic and Celtic periods.Appearing during the latter part of the Early Christian (or Celtic Christian) period, they were still erected during the later Middle Ages. No two are alike. Some older relics were re-set into medieval buildings.
Sheelas are usually located in liminal or borderline positions, above doorways, by windows, and gables. There is one over a window in the Nunnery on the sacred island of Iona in Scotland.
Sheelas are thought to be religious carvings of naked women exposing their genitals, representing femininity, female deities or Goddesses. They were placed on churches and castles from the medieval period until quite recently, Dedicatory or protective symbols promoting good luck and fertility, they also arrested the Evil Eye. Some of these entrance shrines have touch-holes, the traces of girdles and the signs of objects descending from the genital area or lying between the legs of the figure.
But their meaning goes much deeper and the fact that they were erected over the doorways of churches and castles and overlooking holy wells or gate pillars suggests that they were a very potent and powerful image. Passing through such an aperture recapitulates birth with rebirth. It is also an encounter with the Dweller on the Threshold. The primary threshold is between the conscious and the unconscious.
Neumann (1972) saw the feminine archetype in "the house, door, threshold, and tomb." His three most important and eternal threshold experiences of human existence are the processes of birth, maturation, and death. In ancient China both newborn infants and the dying were placed upon the ground. Eliade says, “To be born or to die, to enter the living family or the ancestral family (and to leave one or the other), there is a common threshold, one’s native Earth.”
The Earth herself decides if the birth or death is valid. The true Mother legitimizes and confers protection. Sometimes the sick are buried for regeneration and rebirth. Initiation requires a ritual death and resurrection. We recognize double movement: when something is created or comes into life, we should give some offering back to the Divine Darkness recognizing the authorization for something to live even for a limited time. Devoting time and attention to psychogenealogy can be one such offering.
Movement toward self-integration and transgenerational integration can be another threshold. Eliade (1987) describes the shamanic roots of threshold symbolism. It represents not only the difference between two spaces but also between two ways of being, and a vehicle of passage. Eliade says, “The threshold is the limit, the boundary, the frontier that distinguishes and opposes two worlds – and at the same time the paradoxical place where those worlds communicate where passage from the profane to the sacred world becomes possible.”
This ritual function extends to thresholds in human habitations and houses of the dead. In the ancient Middle East, the threshold was a judgment place. Sacrifices or libations to guardian divinities or demons are offered here. Within the sacred precinct the profane is transcended. Communication with the depths becomes possible.
The point of reference remains the threshold experience, which we can associate with our psychogenealogical journey, where we go from ordinary awareness toward the synchronous and numinous. M.-L. von Franz ratifies this notion:
“Synchronistic events are therefore characterized by the intrusion into our "normal" state of consciousness a second psychic state, which usually remains below the threshold. In our normal state of consciousness we are seldom aware of the fact that the unconscious psyche makes a substantial contribution to our perception of reality and that we can never perceive reality as such....” (Italics in original).
The significance of the threshold arose in shamanic culture. The threshold can be precise or ambiguous, a moment or a process. We can presume the first thresholds – dark thresholds -- were the mouths of labyrinthine caves, which echo our expulsion from the confines of the womb, and any birth trauma associated with it, as well described by Grof’s perinatal states.
This was expressed in the Druid’s tradition, or native folk religion, by the Sheela-na-Gig whose precise function remains unknown. But, symbolically, sheelahs represent our primordial origin, genealogical and genetic ground zero – the feminine essence of creation.
Highly significant, the Sheelha-na-Gig are often associated with doors, or Thresholds. Mostly found in the British Isles, Sheela-na-Gigs are related to earlier Goddess/Fertility figures and the Goddess symbolism of the early pre-historic and Celtic periods.Appearing during the latter part of the Early Christian (or Celtic Christian) period, they were still erected during the later Middle Ages. No two are alike. Some older relics were re-set into medieval buildings.
Sheelas are usually located in liminal or borderline positions, above doorways, by windows, and gables. There is one over a window in the Nunnery on the sacred island of Iona in Scotland.
Sheelas are thought to be religious carvings of naked women exposing their genitals, representing femininity, female deities or Goddesses. They were placed on churches and castles from the medieval period until quite recently, Dedicatory or protective symbols promoting good luck and fertility, they also arrested the Evil Eye. Some of these entrance shrines have touch-holes, the traces of girdles and the signs of objects descending from the genital area or lying between the legs of the figure.
But their meaning goes much deeper and the fact that they were erected over the doorways of churches and castles and overlooking holy wells or gate pillars suggests that they were a very potent and powerful image. Passing through such an aperture recapitulates birth with rebirth. It is also an encounter with the Dweller on the Threshold. The primary threshold is between the conscious and the unconscious.
Neumann (1972) saw the feminine archetype in "the house, door, threshold, and tomb." His three most important and eternal threshold experiences of human existence are the processes of birth, maturation, and death. In ancient China both newborn infants and the dying were placed upon the ground. Eliade says, “To be born or to die, to enter the living family or the ancestral family (and to leave one or the other), there is a common threshold, one’s native Earth.”
The Earth herself decides if the birth or death is valid. The true Mother legitimizes and confers protection. Sometimes the sick are buried for regeneration and rebirth. Initiation requires a ritual death and resurrection. We recognize double movement: when something is created or comes into life, we should give some offering back to the Divine Darkness recognizing the authorization for something to live even for a limited time. Devoting time and attention to psychogenealogy can be one such offering.
Movement toward self-integration and transgenerational integration can be another threshold. Eliade (1987) describes the shamanic roots of threshold symbolism. It represents not only the difference between two spaces but also between two ways of being, and a vehicle of passage. Eliade says, “The threshold is the limit, the boundary, the frontier that distinguishes and opposes two worlds – and at the same time the paradoxical place where those worlds communicate where passage from the profane to the sacred world becomes possible.”
This ritual function extends to thresholds in human habitations and houses of the dead. In the ancient Middle East, the threshold was a judgment place. Sacrifices or libations to guardian divinities or demons are offered here. Within the sacred precinct the profane is transcended. Communication with the depths becomes possible.
The point of reference remains the threshold experience, which we can associate with our psychogenealogical journey, where we go from ordinary awareness toward the synchronous and numinous. M.-L. von Franz ratifies this notion:
“Synchronistic events are therefore characterized by the intrusion into our "normal" state of consciousness a second psychic state, which usually remains below the threshold. In our normal state of consciousness we are seldom aware of the fact that the unconscious psyche makes a substantial contribution to our perception of reality and that we can never perceive reality as such....” (Italics in original).
Doors to the Dead
This is the work of the soul. In many ways genealogy functions as a map of the psyche -- a map to the archaic threshold through which the ancestors await us. Doors and thresholds are primary metaphors for liminal or transformational states in ritual and burial practice. While we go through many doors, the crossing of the first threshold is special. Crossing the Return Threshold is the full-circle completion of our quest – the search for self.
Dividing inner and outer inhabited space, doorways signify transition and transformation. While the term 'portal' has become a New Age buzzword for all sorts of nonsense, out of the hands of the fabulists it remains a profound psychic reality that can initiate our spiritual journey. Just as the doors of a church or temple open into sacred space, we can enter the transgenerational story of ourselves through genealogy with a sense of reverence and mystery.
The door to our ancestral past holds the key to our own myth of origin -- the vast migrations and epic challenges faced by those who brought you here to inhabit the eternal present. Through them we are temporarily immortal. Our whole psychophysical being, both structural and ephemeral, is our memory -- personal and collective. We are informed by their presence as well as their genes. They may venture forth from the portal of sleep in our dreams.
Be the Key; Open Me
Doors or gates are often associated with guardians. Imagine you are the guardian of the labyrinth of your ancestral lines and those of your future generations. What would you do to nurture, sustain, and protect them? What intuitive and creative methods can you employ?
Opening the door in your tree itself serves as an 'entrance meditation,' the first part of the inner journey. We may feel we are answering a deeper calling to decode the chronicle of our significance. We may find exemplar characters that embody guides, the shadow, anima/animus and our higher selves.
What family secrets might you find behind the door? How we are like them is as important as how we differ, or how we wish we were different. When we confront their stories we know such things immediately. We discover that others have been there before us when the door to the World Tree of shared ancestry swings wide. There may be impressions, apprehensions, or symbols that gradually reveal themselves to our conscious minds.
This frees us from trying to deal our issues on the apparent level of things, without any depth and meaning, apart from any dialogue with life. It opens the perspectives, a relief from most everyday discourses in our lives. You may think that you are living the “here and now”, but chances are that you are unconsciously reenacting unresolved issues of your ancestors. The need to address our genealogy reflects a general law of life for how we want to become ourselves. There is significant evidence now, especially in the French literature, about these ancient schema haunting the present, waiting for conscious integration.
‘Doors to the dead’ appear as freestanding portals, dolmans, causewayed ring-ditches, stone henges, or thresholds to grave mounds or cave shrines. The passage tomb at Newgrange has a sculpted entrance stone. Archaeologists in Transylvania discovered a "tepes", cave/mine or rath with a fire-pit dating to 5000 BCE. In the ashes they found remains of a human sacrificial victim and two clay tablets.
Sometimes, as on the ancient Isle of Iona, the dead or volunteer sacrifices were buried in the doorway to prevent the walls from caving in. Again, we see the offering to the Dark Divine in return for existential support. Many believe Relig Odhráin has been in continuous use as a royal graveyard since St. Columba's day, 500 CE. It became the traditional burial place for the Kings of Dalriada and, later, Scotland. Macbeth lies there. A 1549 CE survey listed 48 Dalriadan/Scottish kings burials, as well as 8 Norwegian and 4 Irish kings. Those with royal lines in their pedigrees are likely to be descended from many if not all of them.
The purposes of sacred doorways included connections between the dead and the living, In creating controllable boundaries and thresholds they formed between-spaces. Such deviant spaces summoned the supernatural to obtain contact with the dead in the Otherworld, materially and metaphorically. In Iona, the veil between worlds is traditionally considered 'thin,' encouraging 'second sight.' Jung said second sight is a 'gift' that carried the burden of responsibility. Perhaps we should call it 'first sight' as it is more primordial.
Liminal Lineage
Your own genealogy and the pursuit of your lineage and name provide a metaphorical door to connect with and approach the dead. It is a key to the labyrinth of self-knowledge that holds answers to the perennial question, "Who am I?" Where we come from is related to where we are going. As Gaillard (2012) shows, this quest and the renascence that emerges through it is the real message of Sophocles in his masterpiece on Oedipus.
Genealogy is a highly ritualized environment, with rites of contemplative or meditative research, entry work, synchronicities, documentation, initiations to genealogical or bloodline groups, and pilgrimage. This is one of the metaphors we live by that can expand our sense of self-knowledge. Each time we learn about an ancestor we knock on a door. Knowledge is the key that unlocks the door, the direct experience of gnosis. Our attention enlivens their presence.
The door controls access and marks the boundary between antagonistic and confrontational spaces or a psychophysical transition in social roles. This architectural element allows us to abandon one space for the next. Doors and thresholds are thus closely linked with rites of passage. Not every crossing of a threshold is a liminal ritual but the opportunity with many social and metaphorical implications is there.
The Soul Foretells
Therefore a wise man does not want to be a charioteer, for he knows that will and intention certainly attain goals but disturb the becoming of the future. ~Carl Jung to his Ego, Liber Novus, Page 311
Like remembering the past, consciousness of the future depends on where you get your information in an intuitive leap. If we 'go to the future' we can "see" in our contemplation what is going on if we visualize the problem. And you can do this, too. As described by physicist Fred Alan Wolf and others, from the physics point of view, the future is already there, 'around the corner.' Certain potential pathways are more accessible than others, following the path of least resistance, unless you modify your path of least action.
This involves relaxing into a state where you have an awareness of yourself in that future time. You drift off into a twilight state with the thought that this is something you want to do intentionally. There is no need to force it. You can potentially 'undo' things in the past and create new potential for the future. It matters little whether such experiences, which are like ancient shamanic journeys or vision quests, are 'real' or imaginal. The effects are real and change our attitudes, which changes our being.
The Mindfield
We don't have to take it literally, nor dismiss it. If we don't sense it, it isn't there. We have to make a move in that direction. It is already out there for us to experience, certainly in terms of healing and transformation. Faith and trust in our ability to be on the right track increases creativity.
And the same is true moving through your genealogical lines. How would you describe your relationship with your grandmother, with your ancestral women? Have you ever had a vision of a female wisdom figure? How do the men in your pedigree differ from the men of today? How might our ancestors have affected our relational and spousal choices?
Much of genealogical and psychogenealogical best-practice includes mythic and fictional characters. So, the process is best approached with a Jungian orientation, rather than as hard historical fact. In terms of the collective unconscious it has psychic reality, and Jungian and post-Jungian practices allow us to interact poetically with such material in a deeply meaningful way that enhances personal and trangenerational integration.
The Taking In of Solace: The Many Into One
The Portuguese word "Saudade" cannot be directly translated, but describes the feeling of intensively missing something -- a yearning for the future or connection to a destiny in time that is NOT YET. It may be a particular skill or gift of the genetic serpent inhabiting time itself. It transcends us all.
This deeply emotional state is profound melancholic longing for an absent beloved who might never return, such as a lost lover, or a family member who has gone missing, failed to thrive or moved away, separated, or died. Or, maybe they are unborn.
Saudade is "the love that remains" after someone is gone. Emptiness is an integral aspect of mind/matter and psychophysical being. This emotional vacuum can be likened to the Void or absolute vacuum of space which is actually a plenum of infinite potential. Sad and happy feelings come all together.
Self Initiation
Hillman said, “the community of the dead …. are already there, like presences waiting for you.” Like the ancient Egyptians, we can open the mouth of the dead. And you can reunite through genealogical practice without dying. Ritual initiation requires a formal symbolic ego-death and rebirth but this occurs as a natural effect of engagement with our depths.
Jung said transpersonal psychic life "is the mind of our ancient ancestors, the way in which they thought and felt, the way in which they conceived of life and the world, of gods and humans beings. The existence of these historical layers is presumably the source of belief in reincarnation and in memories of past lives,” (Jung, 1939, p.24).
In 'Extending the Family' (1985), Hillman says, "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." Some report a sort of "calling illness" until they respond to the ancestors calling them to do the work. So, why think about your ancestors at all? It is life-enhancing.
He also suggests we “turn the trap of entanglement in the personal family into an archetypal recognition of family as the supreme metaphor for sustaining the human condition,” (pg. 6). In this sense, our genealogical work signifies a Homecoming. Like the homecoming quest of Odysseus, it extends beyond meaningful connections of the nuclear family into our vast archetypal family with its full imagistic panoply.
Such family therapy isn’t restricted to standard theories and practices but to the epistemology that informs them. It is not an investigation of historical causality, but a circular, synchronistic, non-linear epistemology with archetypal considerations. The influence is interactional with the positive teleological functions of the symptoms. Within the pedigree we encounter representations of the actual forces of epoch-making political, economic, philosophical, and religious collectives.
A 2011 study appearing the European Journal of Social Psychology hypothesizes that thinking about one's genetic origin (i.e. ancestors) provides people with a positive psychological resource that increases their intellectual performance. They tested this by manipulating whether participants thought about their ancestors or not (manipulation of ancestor salience). Then, they measured their expected as well as actual intellectual performance in a variety of intelligence tasks.
“Four studies supported our assumptions: participants show higher expected (Study 1) and actual intellectual performance (Studies 2–4) when they are reminded about their ancestors. We also have initial evidence that this effect may be fuelled by increased levels of perceived control and promotion orientation. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. It is certainly desirable to be well descended, but the glory belongs to our ancestors. (Plutarch 46–120 AD)” (Fischer, et al).
Psychogenealogy is a process of self-initiation – a vital part of the Great Work, much like alchemy or meditation. Initiation simply means “beginning,” a dedication to a sacred practice. Once you get the ball rolling, it rolls of its own momentum. You make the first gesture, an explicit commitment to realize your potential within the method. The meaning of this commitment unfolds slowly over a lifetime.
Conclusions
The World Tree contains ample opportunities for both self-realization and the experience of chaos, multiplicity, and disintegration. In this sense, psychogenealogy reflects the nature of the soul: 1) makes all meanings possible, 2) turns events into experiences, 3) involves a deepening of experiences, 4) is communicated in love, 5) and has a special relation with death, (Hillman, 1977, p. xvi, Hillman, 1976, pp. 44-47).
We can apply much of what we learn in this process. The recollection of feelings, experiences, places or pleasurable events and well-being stimulates the senses and guides us toward living into our psychophysical potential. Tangible, symbolic, and imaginal experience of our ancestors and progeny can have real effects on our attitudes and compassion, and the main effect is Transgenerational Integration. By embracing the World Tree we find transgenerational healing.
This is the work of the soul. In many ways genealogy functions as a map of the psyche -- a map to the archaic threshold through which the ancestors await us. Doors and thresholds are primary metaphors for liminal or transformational states in ritual and burial practice. While we go through many doors, the crossing of the first threshold is special. Crossing the Return Threshold is the full-circle completion of our quest – the search for self.
Dividing inner and outer inhabited space, doorways signify transition and transformation. While the term 'portal' has become a New Age buzzword for all sorts of nonsense, out of the hands of the fabulists it remains a profound psychic reality that can initiate our spiritual journey. Just as the doors of a church or temple open into sacred space, we can enter the transgenerational story of ourselves through genealogy with a sense of reverence and mystery.
The door to our ancestral past holds the key to our own myth of origin -- the vast migrations and epic challenges faced by those who brought you here to inhabit the eternal present. Through them we are temporarily immortal. Our whole psychophysical being, both structural and ephemeral, is our memory -- personal and collective. We are informed by their presence as well as their genes. They may venture forth from the portal of sleep in our dreams.
Be the Key; Open Me
Doors or gates are often associated with guardians. Imagine you are the guardian of the labyrinth of your ancestral lines and those of your future generations. What would you do to nurture, sustain, and protect them? What intuitive and creative methods can you employ?
Opening the door in your tree itself serves as an 'entrance meditation,' the first part of the inner journey. We may feel we are answering a deeper calling to decode the chronicle of our significance. We may find exemplar characters that embody guides, the shadow, anima/animus and our higher selves.
What family secrets might you find behind the door? How we are like them is as important as how we differ, or how we wish we were different. When we confront their stories we know such things immediately. We discover that others have been there before us when the door to the World Tree of shared ancestry swings wide. There may be impressions, apprehensions, or symbols that gradually reveal themselves to our conscious minds.
This frees us from trying to deal our issues on the apparent level of things, without any depth and meaning, apart from any dialogue with life. It opens the perspectives, a relief from most everyday discourses in our lives. You may think that you are living the “here and now”, but chances are that you are unconsciously reenacting unresolved issues of your ancestors. The need to address our genealogy reflects a general law of life for how we want to become ourselves. There is significant evidence now, especially in the French literature, about these ancient schema haunting the present, waiting for conscious integration.
‘Doors to the dead’ appear as freestanding portals, dolmans, causewayed ring-ditches, stone henges, or thresholds to grave mounds or cave shrines. The passage tomb at Newgrange has a sculpted entrance stone. Archaeologists in Transylvania discovered a "tepes", cave/mine or rath with a fire-pit dating to 5000 BCE. In the ashes they found remains of a human sacrificial victim and two clay tablets.
Sometimes, as on the ancient Isle of Iona, the dead or volunteer sacrifices were buried in the doorway to prevent the walls from caving in. Again, we see the offering to the Dark Divine in return for existential support. Many believe Relig Odhráin has been in continuous use as a royal graveyard since St. Columba's day, 500 CE. It became the traditional burial place for the Kings of Dalriada and, later, Scotland. Macbeth lies there. A 1549 CE survey listed 48 Dalriadan/Scottish kings burials, as well as 8 Norwegian and 4 Irish kings. Those with royal lines in their pedigrees are likely to be descended from many if not all of them.
The purposes of sacred doorways included connections between the dead and the living, In creating controllable boundaries and thresholds they formed between-spaces. Such deviant spaces summoned the supernatural to obtain contact with the dead in the Otherworld, materially and metaphorically. In Iona, the veil between worlds is traditionally considered 'thin,' encouraging 'second sight.' Jung said second sight is a 'gift' that carried the burden of responsibility. Perhaps we should call it 'first sight' as it is more primordial.
Liminal Lineage
Your own genealogy and the pursuit of your lineage and name provide a metaphorical door to connect with and approach the dead. It is a key to the labyrinth of self-knowledge that holds answers to the perennial question, "Who am I?" Where we come from is related to where we are going. As Gaillard (2012) shows, this quest and the renascence that emerges through it is the real message of Sophocles in his masterpiece on Oedipus.
Genealogy is a highly ritualized environment, with rites of contemplative or meditative research, entry work, synchronicities, documentation, initiations to genealogical or bloodline groups, and pilgrimage. This is one of the metaphors we live by that can expand our sense of self-knowledge. Each time we learn about an ancestor we knock on a door. Knowledge is the key that unlocks the door, the direct experience of gnosis. Our attention enlivens their presence.
The door controls access and marks the boundary between antagonistic and confrontational spaces or a psychophysical transition in social roles. This architectural element allows us to abandon one space for the next. Doors and thresholds are thus closely linked with rites of passage. Not every crossing of a threshold is a liminal ritual but the opportunity with many social and metaphorical implications is there.
The Soul Foretells
Therefore a wise man does not want to be a charioteer, for he knows that will and intention certainly attain goals but disturb the becoming of the future. ~Carl Jung to his Ego, Liber Novus, Page 311
Like remembering the past, consciousness of the future depends on where you get your information in an intuitive leap. If we 'go to the future' we can "see" in our contemplation what is going on if we visualize the problem. And you can do this, too. As described by physicist Fred Alan Wolf and others, from the physics point of view, the future is already there, 'around the corner.' Certain potential pathways are more accessible than others, following the path of least resistance, unless you modify your path of least action.
This involves relaxing into a state where you have an awareness of yourself in that future time. You drift off into a twilight state with the thought that this is something you want to do intentionally. There is no need to force it. You can potentially 'undo' things in the past and create new potential for the future. It matters little whether such experiences, which are like ancient shamanic journeys or vision quests, are 'real' or imaginal. The effects are real and change our attitudes, which changes our being.
The Mindfield
We don't have to take it literally, nor dismiss it. If we don't sense it, it isn't there. We have to make a move in that direction. It is already out there for us to experience, certainly in terms of healing and transformation. Faith and trust in our ability to be on the right track increases creativity.
And the same is true moving through your genealogical lines. How would you describe your relationship with your grandmother, with your ancestral women? Have you ever had a vision of a female wisdom figure? How do the men in your pedigree differ from the men of today? How might our ancestors have affected our relational and spousal choices?
Much of genealogical and psychogenealogical best-practice includes mythic and fictional characters. So, the process is best approached with a Jungian orientation, rather than as hard historical fact. In terms of the collective unconscious it has psychic reality, and Jungian and post-Jungian practices allow us to interact poetically with such material in a deeply meaningful way that enhances personal and trangenerational integration.
The Taking In of Solace: The Many Into One
The Portuguese word "Saudade" cannot be directly translated, but describes the feeling of intensively missing something -- a yearning for the future or connection to a destiny in time that is NOT YET. It may be a particular skill or gift of the genetic serpent inhabiting time itself. It transcends us all.
This deeply emotional state is profound melancholic longing for an absent beloved who might never return, such as a lost lover, or a family member who has gone missing, failed to thrive or moved away, separated, or died. Or, maybe they are unborn.
Saudade is "the love that remains" after someone is gone. Emptiness is an integral aspect of mind/matter and psychophysical being. This emotional vacuum can be likened to the Void or absolute vacuum of space which is actually a plenum of infinite potential. Sad and happy feelings come all together.
Self Initiation
Hillman said, “the community of the dead …. are already there, like presences waiting for you.” Like the ancient Egyptians, we can open the mouth of the dead. And you can reunite through genealogical practice without dying. Ritual initiation requires a formal symbolic ego-death and rebirth but this occurs as a natural effect of engagement with our depths.
Jung said transpersonal psychic life "is the mind of our ancient ancestors, the way in which they thought and felt, the way in which they conceived of life and the world, of gods and humans beings. The existence of these historical layers is presumably the source of belief in reincarnation and in memories of past lives,” (Jung, 1939, p.24).
In 'Extending the Family' (1985), Hillman says, "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." Some report a sort of "calling illness" until they respond to the ancestors calling them to do the work. So, why think about your ancestors at all? It is life-enhancing.
He also suggests we “turn the trap of entanglement in the personal family into an archetypal recognition of family as the supreme metaphor for sustaining the human condition,” (pg. 6). In this sense, our genealogical work signifies a Homecoming. Like the homecoming quest of Odysseus, it extends beyond meaningful connections of the nuclear family into our vast archetypal family with its full imagistic panoply.
Such family therapy isn’t restricted to standard theories and practices but to the epistemology that informs them. It is not an investigation of historical causality, but a circular, synchronistic, non-linear epistemology with archetypal considerations. The influence is interactional with the positive teleological functions of the symptoms. Within the pedigree we encounter representations of the actual forces of epoch-making political, economic, philosophical, and religious collectives.
A 2011 study appearing the European Journal of Social Psychology hypothesizes that thinking about one's genetic origin (i.e. ancestors) provides people with a positive psychological resource that increases their intellectual performance. They tested this by manipulating whether participants thought about their ancestors or not (manipulation of ancestor salience). Then, they measured their expected as well as actual intellectual performance in a variety of intelligence tasks.
“Four studies supported our assumptions: participants show higher expected (Study 1) and actual intellectual performance (Studies 2–4) when they are reminded about their ancestors. We also have initial evidence that this effect may be fuelled by increased levels of perceived control and promotion orientation. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. It is certainly desirable to be well descended, but the glory belongs to our ancestors. (Plutarch 46–120 AD)” (Fischer, et al).
Psychogenealogy is a process of self-initiation – a vital part of the Great Work, much like alchemy or meditation. Initiation simply means “beginning,” a dedication to a sacred practice. Once you get the ball rolling, it rolls of its own momentum. You make the first gesture, an explicit commitment to realize your potential within the method. The meaning of this commitment unfolds slowly over a lifetime.
Conclusions
The World Tree contains ample opportunities for both self-realization and the experience of chaos, multiplicity, and disintegration. In this sense, psychogenealogy reflects the nature of the soul: 1) makes all meanings possible, 2) turns events into experiences, 3) involves a deepening of experiences, 4) is communicated in love, 5) and has a special relation with death, (Hillman, 1977, p. xvi, Hillman, 1976, pp. 44-47).
We can apply much of what we learn in this process. The recollection of feelings, experiences, places or pleasurable events and well-being stimulates the senses and guides us toward living into our psychophysical potential. Tangible, symbolic, and imaginal experience of our ancestors and progeny can have real effects on our attitudes and compassion, and the main effect is Transgenerational Integration. By embracing the World Tree we find transgenerational healing.
References
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http://jungiansociety.org/index.php/home-hearth-and-grave-the-archetypal-symbol-of-threshold-on-the-road-to-self
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European Journal of Social Psychology, Volume 41, Issue 1, pages 11–16, February 2011.
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Hillman, James, (1998), Healing Fiction, Spring Publications; Reprint edition (May 15, 1998).
Iona burials: http://www.findagrave.com/php/famous.php?FScityid=404505&page=city
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Miller, Iona (2015), Sacred Wounding: The Family Shadow - Transgenerational Wounding & Healing, http://jungiangenealogy.weebly.com/sacred-wounding.html
Miller, Iona (2014), Jungian Genealogy: Bridge of the Spirits
http://jungiangenealogy.weebly.com/sacred-wounding.html
Miller, Iona (2015), Ancestors & Archetypes, http://ancestorsandarchetypes.weebly.com/
Neumann, Erich, (1972), The Great Mother, Princeton University Press; 2 Reprint edition (July 1, 1972).
Progoff, Ira (1982), The Practice of Process Meditation, Dialogue House Library; 1st Printing edition (January 1982)
Spotts, James and Shontz, Franklin, (1980), “Life-Theme Theory of Chronic Drug Abuse”, in Theories on Drug Abuse, NIDA Research Monograph 30, March 1980, Ed. Dan J. Lettierr, et al.
von Franz, M.-L., (1985), Projection and Re-Collection in Jungian Psychology, Reflections of the Soul, p. 195, Open Court Publishing Company; Reprint edition (December 19, 1985).
Native American Religious Traditions By Suzanne Crawford O Brien