"...wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born.
Live in time among the gods who have fled, and the gods who are not yet."
--Matthew Arnold, Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse

"Egyptian goddess, from Greek Isis, from Egyptian Hes, female deity identified by the Greeks with Io. She is distinguished in visual representations by the solar disc and cow horns on her head."
--Online Etymology Dictionary

"But when the mother, my soul, was pregnant with the God, I did not know it. It even seemed to me as if my soul herself was the God, although he lived only in her body."
~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 244.

GEN-ISIS
The Goddess in the Roots of Your Family Tree
Iona Miller, July 2017
Prepared for Summer 2017 Issue of Isis-Seshat Journal

“Man is in need of a symbolic life . . . we don’t have it . . . we have no time no place . . .
only symbolic life can express the need of the soul--the daily need of the soul.”
--Jung, 1939, The Symbolic Life
http://www.depthinsights.com/pdfs/On_Depth_Psychology.pdf

"...symbolic life in any form is a fundamental prerequisite for psychic health".
--Edward Edinger, Ego and archetype

There is possibly no older tradition than that of honoring our ancestors. Genealogy is both a traditional and modern way to see how the gods fit into our personal existence. The metadata hidden in our genealogy can supply information hidden in the cognitive and emotional unconscious as structure, embodied memory, and lineage. It can inform our neo-traditional practice, rooted in the present.

Few forces are as strong in the psyche as genetics, sex and death. We don't have to take the ancient ancestral lines as literally accurate. But we can appreciate how they directly connect us to the gods and goddesses as our ancestors. Genealogy mediates their voices, helping us live a full complete life, including alternative modes of structuring human experience and ways of inhabiting space. Creativity means discovering something new.

In this regard, Isis (Aset) is one of the most ancient goddesses. She still bestows her gifts to humanity in a wide variety of cultural forms, including non-conceptual experience, and magic skills to move through darkness and light. The collective unconscious is the universal template of meaning and experience, while the personal unconscious is specifically what it means to you.

Tracing our family tree back to descent from antiquity is a way to actively tap the mythic dimension and the archetypal field of the ancestors. Myth, as Homer noted, includes speech, conversation, advice, opinion, and promise. If myth is the maker of the psyche, soul-making is our return to the poetic and imaginal root of consciousness. If we want to know about psyche, we have to go to psyche, that other realm which is just as real and dangerous as this one.

Psychoretrocausality
Only a world of soul offers intimacy and coherent resonance to help us see and know the thought of the heart, as if in a mirror. Genealogy is a mythic journey through the intergenerational labyrinth, and there are many ways to make it experiential and interactive. We may discover that selfhood is a multiplicity of incompatible selves, a paradoxical psycho-biology.

But woe unto you, who replace this incompatible multiplicity with a single God.
~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 351.

Happy am I who can recognize the multiplicity and diversity of the Gods.
~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 351.

We can suggest poetically that archetypes function nonlocally. Their anchored position as super-ancestors means they permeate our lines with psycho-retrocausality, as interpenetrating mazes of psycho-energetic fields. We're entangled. We can actively engage our ancestors by knowing them with our individual consciousness. We've missed each other in our dreams. Our primal self can get lost in the complexity of modern life.

As we turn and 'face' ourselves and our forebears, we move back naturally through history to the timeless root of our inception, our mythological and spiritual origins. Each of our lines of descent is a valuable vein to mine for insight. Psyche moves indirectly in circular reasonings. Imagination is the foundational process of psyche.

The nature of the pre-phenomenal remains a mystery. Ultimately, it is The Feminine root we wish to reveal, the all-pervading essence of anima mundi. Awareness itself is beyond thought. In other words, she is constantly present, if we are present with Her in our constantly unfolding lives, open to permeability, and circular movement of regress.

In Dream and the Underworld, Hillman reminds that, "the repetitiveness of those circular states, which is in the turns of our contradictions, forces us to admit that these conditions are precisely our essence and that the circular motion of the soul [...] cannot be distinguished by blind fate. It's like the soul is free from blindness, but for its continuous turn into it."

Breathing Life Into Our Ancestors

The ancient Egyptian mystery school, the Per Ankh (House of Life, Wisdom, Art, Healing, and Knowledge) is the inspiration for a hermeneutic and healing approach to genealogy. It is a transgenerational vision. We share spiritual and energetic universal aspects of our personalities. What we share in common includes mother, father, and self.  The Ankh symbol harmonizes the male/female life-force giving and receiving in the non-gendered ascending soul.

Every hermeneutical perspective constructs and reconstructs more or less coherent and meaningful pictures of the past. They are based on the particular spiritual needs and expectations of their real or imagined audiences. The founder of each line is the convergence of all those ancestral images, our connection to something bigger.

This soulful approach to psyche and our forebears reveals the mysteries of death, transformation, and spiritual rebirth, honoring soul and body. We give life to the ancestors within as a loving practice. Resuscitating powers continuously arouse the life force. This is our deep memory. The living one awakens the dead.

The one blood transferred from generation to generation forms one life of great complexity and depth -- a unity of action and time. This voice that is not a voice, the "stream of consciousness" is poetically called the "Heart of The River of Created Forms." It flows out along the great curve of consciousness.

The frame drum was the trance-inducing heartbeat. The drum beat marks the rhythm of life. A frame drum from the Ptolemaic period has a skin head painted with a woman playing a frame drum in front of the goddess Isis. The inscription on the drum reads, “Isis, Lady of the Sky, Mistress of the Goddesses.”

The psychophysical approach is rooted in our being, land, water, and air. This includes our very first to our final breath -- the fire of the breath of life, the divine spark. Along the way, we are learning to live and learning to die with wisdom and meaning. Wisdom is not as concerned with a particular kind of thought as a wisdom about thinking. An analysis of what it means to think is an inquiry into the nature of the ultimate ground of thought.

Ancient Egypt and its cosmology is part of our shared collective mythology. Our family tree is rooted in narrative and history which traces back to ancient Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Biblical traditions, spanning continents and regional conflicts. The gods are still here even if the path to worship is blocked to all but the poetic spirit that allows us to move from outer to inner worlds. As poets, we conserve and witness nature and our own nature.

We study the psychological and metaphysical meanings of the mythologies that anchor our longest lines of lineage. It is possible to 'relate' to such content. It includes mental activities, spiritual dimensions, methods, attitudes, practices, or even behavioral and ritual patterns that give us image and form. M.-L. von Franz suggests an imaginal approach: "the conscious self allows unconscious content to enter the field of consciousness as a fantasy, as objectively as possible, and so it faces them as before an independent interlocutor."

What Is-Is

One of the best documented connections to Isis are the traditional lines of royal descent. Often royal descent is claimed through a female line. Branches can be found from the ancient King Lists to many modern families. We want to connect with the goddess Isis, to be related in deeply meaningful and tangible ways -- to rise with her on the Phoenix wings. We find her in our own family by reversing our lines of descent as we ascend the Tree.

We all want to  know at some level Who Am I? If you have royal medieval lines, you are likely to have traceable ancient ones, including Egyptian. Naturally, such deities will never show up in any DNA test, but that doesn't mean they cannot inform our entire descent through their spirit and our embodiment -- our puzzle of flesh. Genealogy isn't two-dimensional but has hundreds of interconnected dimensions.

DNA science reveals that our biased ideas about race and heredity are antiquated superstitions rather than genetic reality. If we do the ancestral math, we are all cousins, closer than we ever imagined. 80 percent of all marriages in history have been between second cousins or closer. Some geneticists believe we're all at least 50th cousins to everyone else.

"But when we get to 40 generations ago, in the time of Charlemagne, we arrive at a trillion ancestors and that is a problem because we now have more ancestors than there were people. Thus one can deduce that a lot of those ancestors must be the same person."
(Peter Ralph) Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2013-08-dna-earth.html#jCp

Soul work resurrects the lost or dormant gods at our ancestral roots. No one is left out. The mathematical study of genealogy indicates that everyone in the world is descended from super-ancestors. Nefertiti, Genghis Khan, and Confucius, and everyone of European ancestry is descended from Muhammad and Charlemagne. "Scientific Adam" lived only 60,000 years ago and passed his Y chromosome to every man alive.

At this level we can presume anyone who shares a sense of kinship with Isis or other founder divinities has one and can foster a bond of love, like any extended family. We need her to quicken our dead earth, our dead ancestors. Her myths are central and cosmological. Because archetypes are universal, even without a known genetic link we can be called by certain divinities.

We remain primordially connected whether we are orphans, in vitro, illegitimate, adopted, indigenous, or unrelated ethnicities, etc. We feel them in our flesh and bones, and it is not to be denied, as a call to belonging, worship, practice, or service.

The Hidden God
Gods are difficult to destroy or conceal, though materialist genealogists want to sequester them from the historical parts of the World Tree. We can't understand the genealogical process by stopping it or cutting it short. Fantasy-thinking and imagination cannot be institutionally or personally shut out. Even an illusion of control and order is just an ego-based 'control-fantasy.'

They want to cut the lines, cutoff and cut out the gods -- to isolate them within the ancestral field. The effect of such fragmentation is an attempted dismemberment and de-spiritualizing of what has always been a deeply meaningful engagement with one's primal source. Most of our so-called thinking is unconscious like our deep ancestral past. The dead void disappears once you connect with the fertile void of the dynamic ground, the formless state of pure potential.

Self is an emergent property of everything. Human permeability to visionary, ideational, auditory, symptomatic, and personified incursions is a psychic fact, the essential nature of the human mind. Anyone called to the long Journey naturally awakens deep structures in the psyche. Marie-Louise von Franz notices that, "whenever consciousness produces something, even two words, there are always four, because the unconscious is always present."

Unconscious memory is flashback, regression, or useless nostalgia. Conscious remembering with intention and integration is healing and leads to wholeness. Remembering makes the connection between heaven and earth. Vision with conscious integration is is a creative expression of inspiration, of spirit, of creative expression made real. Unconscious vision is fantasy and distraction.

When we have a vision, we have to integrate and actively realize it, to make it part of our own self history. It's not enough to just have a fantasy of doing it. We have to do something with it using spiritual intelligence for guidance. Knowledge and memory are not just remembrance but recollection. This is re-membering, re-connecting. Rather than striving in vain to cut the ties to our origins, we need to progressively integrate them.

Cutting the gods and goddesses up and cutting them off, like some metaphor of Osiris, attempts to reduce them to scattered bits of legendary detritus. It seems these rationalist genealogists have lost the feeling of the rooted sensation of a living spiritual parentage. They would banish the irrational. But consciousness of the individual life and fate as well as of the deity is the transformative idea, according to Carl Jung.

We contend that the "best practice" of genealogy must include legendary, mythic, and divine predecessors in order to serve psyche or soul. They are an intrinsic part of our regeneration and rebirth Mysteries. We imagine visions of great streams of writhing bodies that have perpetuated the archetype of Life itself. They help us perceive things as they really are throughout ordinary and deep time back to Zep Tepi. Just a whisper from Isis across Aeons allows us to flow into that space. Love brings an explosion of emotion.

Traditional genealogy is an archetypal activity, recapitulating and extending humanity's oldest activities, including the imaginal root. When we begin our journey back into the unknown we only know what, not who, we are. Genealogical work stimulates our dreams to plunge us into the depths of millennia. We learn about other cultures from the inside out. And they look different from inside than outside one's family.

The aesthetic response is an ethical response -- a response of the heart -- that values the ancestors and the genealogical history. Genealogy amplifies and tunes our ancestral channels, showing us historical events of our own grandfathers and grandmothers. It gives equal representation to the patriarchal and matriarchal views. It is the Feminine that introduces new currents of wisdom and life into patriarchal lines. And Isis is our common mother, whether we can trace our specific descent, or not.

Transgenerational Integration

I have used this transgenerational technique in combination with integrative therapies, magick, and Hermetic practices for healing and gnosis. Gnosis is a Mystery because its revealed truth can only emerge from direct experience. Therefore, it remains a secret that cannot be told, because it is numinous -- a naked encounter with the divine.

An integral or inclusive approach roots us in both past and present. It is a common model for real life and consciousness that fosters transgenerational bonds, transformation, and integration. Both Transgenerational Integration (TI) and genealogy are full of rich themes to explore. Intergenerational connections are mostly unconscious; the term 'transgenerational' evokes awareness, healing, and therapeutics. The family lines become paths to self-knowledge and wisdom as well as creative ways of tending the ancestors.

There are several branches in my family tree connecting with various pantheons. At least four of my branches descend directly from Isis through various paths, countries, and ethnicities. Thus, my own genealogy shows how the Egyptian goddess spread through royal houses to the Middle East, ancient Greece and Italy, Iberia, and the British Isles. There was even a Temple of Isis in Roman London. The Isis bloodline was the source of pharaonic and Graeco-Roman legitimacy as 'divine' hereditary rulers.

The Path of Souls
When we recognize the Great and Terrible Mother Isis as our common ancestor we also recognize our multi-ethnic roots. There are undoubtedly more lines than I have found in my descents. Most of them, like the line where Isis is my 99th Great-Grandmother place her about 100 generations ago. Divine kings were descendants of gods. My offspring of Isis include:

1. One line proceeds through Horus to the Scorpion King, Narmer, and Semiramis to Nimrod, and a "Pure Arab Descent" into Moorish and Spanish royalty, where the World Tree gives way to individual family descents.

2. Another line leads again from Horus to the Scorpion King and Narmer, but after Semiramis it migrates to the Kings of Argos and Mycenae through Hercules to King Phillip of Macedonia...to the Ptolomies...and Julian Romans.

3. Yet a different line follows the same immediate descent, including Snofru, Kheops and Pepi, but wends down to the Egyptian Priest Prince Ankhfn-Khonsu, a priest of the Egyptian god Mentu of Thebes (25th-26th dynasty; c. 725 BCE), a prominent character in Thelema for the Stele of Revealing.

4. The Gaelic version has the classic descent and continues through all the pharaohs of Egypt down to the Eighteenth dynasty royal daughter Princess Meritaten. Evans believes that Scota was Meritaten, oldest daughter of Akhenaten and Nefertiti.  She is also known as the legendary Queen Scota, who ruled the domains of ancient Ireland and Dalriada. There is new archaeological evidence of ancient Egyptians in Ireland.

Nothing highlights our own hidden or unconscious genetic diversity better than our descent from antiquity. DNA tests can show where we come from but not who we come from. It shows the oneness in diversity that ultimately is rooted in our symbolic descent from the gods. The tree of life or World Tree is a meta-symbol.

Not everyone will be able to find royal lines. Even those who do have them have mostly unrecorded ancestors who were 'ordinary people', who are every bit as important in our make-up. The royal lines are just the ones that were best preserved. But if you find such lines you can determine the alleged path of your genetics through history back to ancient eras. Historical records do at least exist for royal and noble families.

The downside of inbred "noble blood" in Europe's royal houses was false beliefs and insane, pain-wracked monarchs plagued by seizures, delusions, and violent outbursts, and finally impotence. Even the average pharaoh only ruled 10 years. As for the gods, family betrayal was always possible.

Dismembering Osiris?

Modern genealogists want to cut off the traditional mythic roots of genealogy. But I contend retaining them upholds the tradition, even if we don't take it literally, in our dayworld sense. How can we simply lop off our roots? We know that the life we don't live -- unlived life, could have been life -- accumulates in the unconscious personal shadow hidden in our psyches. Isis can be a part of that unclaimed potential. As she resurrected Osiris, we can resurrect her in our lives.

We can reclaim the energy of the lost self, this parallel life, by intentionally reconnecting. By midlife, whatever has been unlived calls to be integrated. What has been denied must be recognized and its silent voice heard. There is psychic value in maintaining this acknowledged link to our psychophysical origins -- to the lifeforce itself. This is the natural history of our soul.

All knowledge has gaps, and our self-knowledge is no exception. Climbing our family tree helps us fill in some of those gaps with myth, symbol, history, and immediate experiences of the power of presence and healing transformation. An occurrence can appear and be understood as a material event or a psychological experience, depending on the attitude, faith, and worldview of the observer.

We can take a liminal stance and engage in imaginal conversations with our ancestors. Psychology is a 'study of the soul,' so a psychological approach to our family tree means working that tree with a focus toward its effect on our soul, and honoring the 'transgenerational laws' that have been neglected in modern culture. The object of the psychological approach is the inside subject engaged with psyche.

To be engaged with the psyche, inevitably means to be engaged with the ancestors:

"There is one ego in the conscious and another made up of unconscious ancestral elements, by the force of which a man who has been fairly himself over a period of years suddenly falls under the sway of an ancestor." (Jung, 1925 Seminar, pg 38.)

This is a depth psychological approach to Ancestry -- mythic, symbolic and metaphorical, not metaphysical, religious, or literal. Our genealogy is that Tree and cosmic center that keeps us connected and balanced. We can ascend and descend the World Tree in a way that keeps deep time, the transcendent, and our family of flesh alive within us. Genetic testing is revealing suppressed identity formerly hidden in the shadows, though unlived life  and unrealized dreams remain an inescapable presence.

Infinite Regress

A post-Jungian approach to traditional genealogy keeps the historic/mythic gestalt of The World Tree alive as a symbol of wholeness -- a holistic resonant field pattern. According to Jung, trees are a symbolic reference to the self, so family tree is self-defining. As well as our lineage, our ancestors also form a vast symbol chain, rooted in the mythic unconscious and pre-history.

The symbolic function is beyond innate impulse and ideological bias. Through introversion, we are fertilized, inspired, regenerated, and reborn. Self-incubation, self-castigation, and introversion are closely related ideas. Immersion in oneself (introversion) is a penetration into the unconscious, the imaginal world of psyche.

The World Tree is the Axis Mundi of genealogy, a worldwide database of genealogical connectivity. At this point travel and correspondence is made between higher and lower realms. Communication from lower realms may ascend to higher ones and blessings from higher realms may descend to lower ones and be disseminated to all. The Tree connects our psychophysical aspects from sub-nuclear to macrocosmic scales.

The trunk is the axis of psychic growth that unites Heaven and Earth, spirit and matter. The serpents of our family lines are entwined like Celtic knots in and around the World Tree. Celtic snakes symbolize the notion of rebirth. They still promise us primordial Knowledge -- unverified personal gnosis.

Jung said, "the serpent is the earthly essence of man of which [s]he is not conscious. Its character changes according to peoples and lands, since it is the mystery that flows to him [or her] from the nourishing earth-mother."

The healer traversing the axis mundi to bring back knowledge from the other world is a common shamanic concept. Anyone or anything suspended on the axis between heaven and earth becomes a repository of potential knowledge. The Tree is the means of communication with spiritual realms. It is our Tree of Voices -- Tree of Souls. Remembering is a noble and necessary act. The call of memory, the call to memory, reaches us from the very dawn of oral history.

On the global-level, spiritual experiences have been shown to buffer against the negative effects of stress on well-being for older adults. Spiritual experience potentially moderates the deleterious impact of a given day’s perceived stress on that day’s positive and negative affect. Thus, it relates to self-care, well being, and healing. Sometimes physical pain is a substitute for psychic pain. Healing is not always physical: it can occur in the emotional, mental and spiritual life, moderating immunity and neurochemistry.

Genealogy contains a spiritual healing potential, the living sap of the Tree, a manifestation of the sacred. It is a Grail banquet of cultures, customs and symbolism. We see in many manuscripts that wings are used to mark progress or advancement of an alchemical solution toward perfection.

Crowns mark the final stage of a spirit or solution: perfection, completion, ascension. The spirit, by death or enlightenment, will produce the pure, perfected, incorruptible spirit. In alchemical terms, the incorruptible body is the potential of the philosopher's stone.

By engaging in genealogy we create a sacred space, a sacred center. There is a deep ecology to the flow of relationships. Our return to the womb of the Mothers is a creative regression. Experientially, it manifests within us as a spiritualizing instinct, a recursive "bending back" toward the primordial and divine.

We link backward to the bond that transcends the limitations of the physical form. Consciousness turns back on itself, reiterating each level of organization, de-structuring each strata as it dives deeper toward the unconditioned, formless beginning, or "unborn" state -- the Void of the Cosmic Womb. In essence, we re-enter the womb as we are initiated in the mysteries of the psyche. We re-conceive our primal self image, healed by communion with the creative Source - - our own Royal Wedding.

Genealogy can be seen as a way of honoring the ancestors with a ritual from ancient times. Lists of god-kings describe the natural order of things rooted in mythic and 'divine' ancestors. The only way to revision and interact with this gestalt matrix includes the fictional, legendary, and mythological lines of this traditional World Tree. It is but one way to acknowledge our divinity, nobility, and humanity. Genealogy is a sure path to the heart. We can "gather our ancestors" before we are gathered unto them.

Mythology lost its role of explaining the forces of nature. But its role of delivering insights into the hidden, deep endeavors and fears of any human seems more alive than ever. It is a Mystery how our ancestors pass memories to us across the generations.

They relate us to our ontological questions about space, time, and eternity, the deep structure of the human mind and perception, life and death -- what exists and what doesn't. Time concerns the existential nature of things -- temporal relationships.

The mythology of our ancestors is as important as their cosmology. We can explore the mystic in ourselves and in our ancestors. Our worldview is the root of our identity and relationship to Nature and our own deep nature. Researching the cosmologies of our direct ancestors in the historical era provides a quick path into dream shamanism, as these ways are still half-remembered. Our common destiny lies beyond any worldview.

"You could study the ancestors, but without a deep feeling of communication with them it would be surface learning and surface talking. Once you have gone into yourself and have learned very deeply, appreciate it, and relate to it very well, everything will come very easily." (Ellen White, Nanaimo)

Psyche creates reality every day. We have a mystical connection with our primitive ancestors. The primordial ancestors are still alive within the depths of our psyches and reach out to us with their ancient wisdom. We instinctively behave and feel the same ways as generations of our ancestors have in their lives.

This is also a relationship to the collectivity of the dead; for the unconscious corresponds to the mythic land of the dead, the land of the ancestors. Jung was the first to link the concept of ancestors to unconscious thinking. We learn to remember what our soul already knows. Our personality is literally expressed through our ancestors, including Isis.

The gods and goddesses have 'gone to seed', and we are that -- their seed, their progeny. As James Hillman says, their minds and powers are living us in poetic moments of fantasy, insight and intuition. Nature, psyche and life are unfolding divinity. We are only cut off from the dead by what we have buried and forgotten. Working with our ancestral connection means connecting to everything around us and how we are placed in the world.

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.

Genealogy is the science and art of what is emerging into the collective consciousness in one of the biggest hobbies of our era. It is a vast reclamation and reconstruction of our holographic connections, and certain emotionally toned experiences and images inherited from our ancestors, our spiritual guides. We translate meaning into life.

The entire gestalt of the World Tree is an iconic image -- a multidimensional symbol requiring hermeneutics as much as history for best practice. Genealogy has the problem of only focusing on the ancestors with surviving records, not all your ancestors. Of course, all the expansive aspects of the ancestors leave their shadow traces. With the light comes darkness. Ancestral blessings are not unaccompanied by ancestral curses.

The shadow is transmitted in a million subtle gestures and intonations. As you become aware of them in yourself, you can look back over your shoulder at your ancestors and see where these patterns came from. The family shadow is not the sole answer, but it's a place to do some work. It's a realm that is within our means to influence. When we stop passing the shadow on to the next generation, we spare them and break the chain. They don't pass it on either.

Genealogy is the narrative of a pre-modern world. It has traditional roots in the ancient theogeny of gods and goddesses, divine-king lists and The Bible. Ancestral gods and ancestral religions developed over eons and are as old as particular branches of mankind -- gods of the blood. Astrologically determined gods and goddesses can often be found at the roots of dynastic houses. Royal houses claimed power through descent from ancestral gods.

When Rome Christianized in the fourth century, it cut off the mythic corpus, and demoted gods to human status and allegories. The medieval period filled the gap with tales of the Holy Grail. The pagan content of mythology was codified in the mid-fourteenth century in Boccassio's Genealogy. Later, the Carolingians used such works to justify their right to rule, also citing the spurious Donation of Constantine, which the Church used to justify the appointment of rulers.

Traditional genealogy considered these mythological inclusions best-practice, yet it may be more of a psychic than historical "fact" -- the product of a collision between pagan and Christian societies and their reconciliation. Historical time required a linear descent, even if it masked pagan roots at the theological fringe. Our ancient genealogies still retain certain psychic values that are part of the archaeology of the collective unconscious.

We seek, not only ancestors, but signs, symbols, and symbolic meaning -- our origin in the One foundation of being -- with an eye to restoring sacred harmony and transformative connection to Cosmos, an indissoluble unity of potentiality and act, darkness and light. Systems of archetypal symbolism come from the mysteries of death, transformation, and spiritual rebirth, and related cosmogonical theories.

Many of these ideas had their roots in Egyptian philosophy. Philosophy is a rite of rebirth, the very essence of which is participation in divine reality and, therefore, its activities are primarily those of inner vision rather than mere logic. The Tree of Life is a logically coherent meta-structure of metaphysical knowledge -- its own body of wisdom.

REFERENCES

Boccaccio, Giovanni, trans. Jon Solomon, (2011) Genealogy of the Pagan Gods, Harvard Univ. Press, 2011.
 
Guillard, Thierry, (2016) Shamanism, Ancestors, and Transgenerational Integration, Ecodition

Hillman, James, (1985), “Extending the Family: From Entrapment to Embrace”, The Texas Humanist 7/4, 1985, p. 6-11.
 
Miller, Iona, "Ancestors & Archetypes", http://ancestorsandarchetypes.weebly.com/

Miller, Iona, "Jungian Genealogy", http://jungiangenealogy.weebly.com/

Whether she is known as the White Goddess, Great Mother, or Virgin Isis the Great Goddess is the symbol of the archetypal Feminine. Her image is inexorably linked to the Moon and the death-rebirth cycle. The worship of the Great Goddess was common in the matriarchal agricultural groups of the Mediterranean and Near East. All the later goddesses of
the Greek pantheon are contained in this universal symbol of the Earth Mother.

The Goddess is associated with the vegetarian cycle and the processes of agricultural life. She rules the domestic area of life as well as nature. Her primary characteristic is fertility. This fertility extends to the fecundity of imagination. This feminine goddess is single in essence, but displays many forms.

Great Goddess
To the Egyptians, this Great Goddess was known as Isis and her worship continued into the period of rulership by Imperial Rome. At this point the religion became a mystery cult. This cult is described in detail in The Golden Ass of Apuleius, which includes the tale Eros and Psyche which describes the psychological development of feminine consciousness. The
initiation procedures of this mystery cult involved a voluntary ritual death and revival. The Isis Mysteries were the same as the Eleusian Mysteries in honor of Demeter/Persephone. They celebrate the immortality of the mother/daughter relationship.

Isis embodies all contrasts. Like the moon, she is light and dark, life and death, beginning and end. This Great Mother is the matrix of all manifestation perceivable by man. The whole life of man is governed by the goddess, Mother of all-that-exists. Isis worship even persists in the
modern Christian world through the cult of the Virgin Mary.

Even though matriarchal consciousness characterizes the spiritual nature of woman, it also exists in men who allow their anima consciousness to manifest. As she is the source of creative inspiration, the hunches of instinct and intuition, and the raw life energy itself, it is an advantage for men to establish a harmony with the moon power. She counsels
meditation, contemplation, waiting and watching, dreaming, and remembering.

Matriarchal consciousness focuses around growth and transformation. In this mode understanding has the meaning of a "conception" and the metaphors of pregnancy and birth are common. The knowledge revealed by the goddess is not one of imparted truths but the personal experience of transformation. She encourages participation.

When rational over-achieving ego-consciousness has run its course, quite, reflective lunar consciousness emerges to cool the fires of the spirit. The feminine image holds the keys to experience of the inner planes for both men and women. This is shown in Qabalah by the fact that the two highest paths of the Middle Pillar correspond with the Moon. She rules the transformative mysteries of initiation.

As initiatrix, the Goddess progressively educates the emotions of the aspirant. Magickal training of the image-making faculty is the beginning of a new way of using the mind. One may become self-initiated into the Moon mysteries through careful attention to the stirring of subconscious memories.

There is much to learn through psychology concerning the lunar aspects of the soul. However, the magickal working of Yesod brings a personal relationship to the Goddess which manifests far more than one could ever understand through psychology. The imaginal construction of
the personified form of the soul enables a linking between your consciousness and the subtle matter of the Great Mother's Soul.

The dual nature of the Goddess is shown by her two characters. Her elementary nature has both a positive (good) and negative (bad)! She is pictured either as all-embracing protectress, or alternately as the devouring Terrible Mother. Her transformative nature also carries good
and bad imagery. She not only governs cyclic rebirth and inspiration, but also the mysteries of intoxification, madness, and death. The negative characteristics are symbolized by the Dark Moon, and the positive are symbolized by the bright Full Moon.

The Great Goddess appears in tandem with her Son-Lover. His death and rebirth are symbolic of the cycle of the seed in the ground and the masculine counterpart of divinity. She is soul. He is Spirit. The stages of the Feminine Mysteries remain valid psychological milestones in personal experience even in modern life.

The worship of the Great Goddess involved a period of contemplation in her temple, religious prostitution with a man who represented "masculine divinity" in an impersonal ceremony designed so the woman experienced a surrender to her instincts. This sexual union was considered a sacred marriage, but it was a wedding which resulted in the "death" of her former condition. But, miraculously, she is transformed into the pregnant Moon Mother,
filled with the divine Spirit. This magickal child grows slowly in an organic process which had its initiation at the conception of the child. It is a process which takes place in the dark subconscious, far from the eyes of men.

With the birth of the virgin-born child, the symbolism switches from that of sexuality to that of maternal solicitude. This birth is the woman's spiritual rebirth of her hidden potentialities. Because of her dual nature, she does not remain exclusively compassionate, but turns fierce and intolerant when it comes time to sacrifice this child. What is sacrificed is her incestuous identification with him. Any man must touch upon the depths of his own emotional intensity, not continue to require this from his mortal mother. Each facing this emotional intensity is the second stage of initiation to the Goddess, the impersonal aspect of the Feminine.

The period of the Virgin's Pregnancy corresponds with Yesod. In this period she is One-In-Herself. As Virgin, she is represented by the crescent moon. She is a divine power in her own right. With the incorporation into her body of the masculine solar-seed, she embarks on
Path 25, Art, which represents the harmonization of lunar and solar components of the psyche. This results in the birth of the magickal child, his divinity revealed, his demise immanent. Child, King, and Sacrificed God are all symbols of Tiphereth, Sphere of the Resplendent Sun.

Moving past Tiphareth on Path 13, The High Priestess, we are again in the realm of the Virgin Goddess, but this time she confers the gifts of potential revealed as the Full Moon, knowledge of the unconscious as past and future. Entry into this timeless realm is the experience of
immortality, the supreme inspiration of the medial Feminine. Here the priestess of the Moon appears as sibyl, or wise old woman. Moving further through the cycle of woman's ages, the waning crescent moon represents the old crone, full of arcane lore, elusive and sinister.

Thus woman's cycle moves through organic biological changes from untouched virgin, to initiated sexually-active Virgin, to Mother, to wise old woman. This trinity was known in ancient Greece Goddess (Virgin, Mother, Hag). This divine being is the symbol of the Feminine Self, core of all being.

Yashjub bin Ya'rub, Father of "Pure Arabs"
his father →
Ya'rub (Yarbah) bin ibn Qahtan
his father →
Qahtan
his father →
Eber .
his father→
Nebrod .
his wife→
Nimrod King of Assyrie in Babylon
her father→
Belo
his son→
Ninus
his son→
Semiramis ★ The Two Babylons
his wife→
Aha (Menes) Pharaoh of Egypt
her father→
Narmer, Pharaoh of Egypt
his father→
Serket (Scorpion) Pharaoh of Egypt
his father→
Ka, Pharaoh of Egypt
his father→
Iry-Hor, Pharaoh of Egypt
his father→
Horus (Egyptian Mythology)
his father→
Osiris / Isis
his father and mother→
Nut Diosa del Cielo

https://amoretmortem.wordpress.com/2017/06/19/traditions-thriving-in-the-cross-currents-of-global-paganism-a-call-for-submissions-for-the-summer-2017-issue-of-isis-seshat-journal/?preview_id=2084&preview_nonce=cdd5ec6559
“Traditions Thriving in the Cross-Currents of Global Paganism”: A Call for Submissions for the Summer 2017 Issue of Isis-Seshat Journal Seeking Submissions for the 2017 Summer Issue of Isis-Seshat Journal on the Theme of “Traditions Thriving in the Cross-Currents of Global Paganism”

Deadline: Monday, August 7
Some Traditions practiced by modern Pagans in urban as well as rural settings are inherently syncretistic: an initiate in Brazilian Candomblé living in São Paolo, for example, can incorporate elements of traditional Portuguese witchcraft already woven into folk Catholicism and combine that with Orixa devotionals to accomplish a magical working. Similarly, a root worker deep in the heart of Texas’ Hill Country faithfully reads from Psalm 59 while calling upon La Santa Muerte Negra to smite his enemies.
For many other Pagans, devotional sensibilities and magical workings ensue from a commingling of practices and pantheons that might raise eyebrows with some, but such intensely personal, pragmatically driven spiritual alignments reflect the tightly woven skeins of globalization that we all find ourselves in.
Do you participate in an eclectic tradition that adopts two or more culturally defined magical or religious practices? If so, how does that impact your everyday living, your engagement with the world? What is your opinion on Deities of specific cultures choosing people outside of those cultures to serve as Their devotees? Or do you follow a tradition/serve Deities based upon your ethnicity and think others should do the same? What does it mean to follow a tradition rooted in one culture if you’ve been uprooted from your peoples’ lands and live in a completely different kind of landscape? What has the process of adaptation been like for you—how do the Gods’ and spirits’ voices get mediated?

Those are just a few examples of the content I’d like to explore in the Summer 2017 issue of Isis-Seshat journal, a quarterly journal of the worldwide Fellowship of Isis open to all theistic Pagans, Polytheists, shamans, spirit-workers, and related practitioners besides FOI members (clergy and laity).
Topics may also include, but certainly aren’t limited to, the following:

• The hot-button topic of cultural appropriation—how do you distinguish it from someone’s respectful adoption of a culture’s beliefs and practices? Or is there no such distinction?
• Personal narratives describing the intersectionalities of race/ethnicity/gender/class/sexual orientation and the impact on one’s Pagan/Polytheist/magical worldview and practices
• Expositions of personal spiritual practices that feature Deities of widely divergent backgrounds “playing nice”
• Profiles of specific sacred sites from around the world and the kinds of activities locals engage in to venerate the Powers there
• Celebrations of Goddesses, Gods, Ancestors, etc. tied to specific locales

So those are some ideas that merit exploring in this upcoming Summer issue of Isis-Seshat. However, I will also gladly accept any of the following:

• Reports of Summer Solstice (Northern Hemisphere), Winter Solstice (Southern Hemisphere), or Lughnasad (Northern Hemisphere) group or solitary rituals
• News from FOI Lyceums and Iseums, announcements of clergy ordinations or other special events
• Seasonal musings set in a context of spiritual development
• Devotional poetry
• Original photography or works of art tied to the issue’s theme

This Call for Submissions is open to all Polytheists and theistic Pagans, irrespective of which cultural pantheon one’s honored Powers derive from–i.e., you don’t have to be a devotee of the Kemetic Neteru (i.e., the Gods of Ancient Egypt) to contribute content to Isis-Seshat journal.
Here’s my laundry list of criteria for acceptable content:

• Essays, articles, poetry, meditations, electronic images of artwork that are yours, not someone else’s–you retain full copyright of your work.
• If your pieces have been previously published elsewhere, that’s okay–just say so (identify where and provide the copyright date).
• There is no word count limit. Previously published essays/articles have ranged from 1,000-4,000 words.
• Please use MLA style when citing any references.
• The preferred format for written material is MS Word; kindly don’t send me RTFs or PDFs.
• The preferred format for digital art is JPEG or .TIF; please ensure it’s a high-res file (minimum of 300 x 600 dpi).

The deadline is Monday, August 7, 2017, and the anticipated release date is Friday, August 11.
Switching from Print to Digital
I sadly am not in the position to financially compensate Isis-Seshat contributors. All contributors will receive a complimentary PDF copy of the magazine. If you have any questions, please email me at jackalmoondesigns at gmail dot com.
I look forward to hearing from you! Blessings in the name of Isis-Seshat, Goddess of Writing! May She always render you True of Voice!

• RelatedThe Spring 2016 Issue of Isis-Seshat Journal Is AvailableIn "The Fellowship of Isis in Chicago"

Holy Powers, Holy Places, Sacred Spaces: A Call for Submissions for the Summer Issue of Isis-Seshat JournalIn "The Fellowship of Isis in Chicago"
The Summer Issue of Isis-Seshat Magazine: A Call for SubmissionsIn "The Fellowship of Isis in Chicago"

Embodying Osiris
Review for Alchemy Journal

EMBODYING OSIRIS: The Secrets of Alchemical Transformation, by Thom F. Cavalli

Iona Miller

"The road to the unconscious is not a one way street; rather, it is a living part of the psyche that responds in its own mysterious way to all that happens in our conscious lives. Building an image of a lost god revives ancient memories, and in this way Osiris is psychologically recalled and brought back to life."

Life, Death & Immortality

Egypt remains a realm of mystery as does the psyche. The ancient land of Egypt is not the same as the eternal sunshine of the Egypt of our modern minds. We can never "embody Osiris" with concepts, but only through fully entering the inherent mystery of alchemical processes that define the rhythms of life.

In this insightful Jungian volume, Dr. Thom Cavalli is correct in insisting that "empathic engagement of the god on an imaginal and physical level" is required. In this way a more meaningful life springs from death, through a "body" of integrative experience. The Egyptians presumed "death" was not the only option.

Universal Solvent

There is a generic process in nature and consciousness which dissolves and regenerates all forms. Inherently unpredictable holistic repatterning is the essence of transformation.  The dissolution (solve) of death can be followed by a sublimation (coagula) that releases the Ultima Materia of the Soul. Coagulation transcends heaven and earth, producing a transcorporeal incarnation that can survive both. Through this Body of Light we learn to exist at all levels of reality, fusing individual and universal fields.

In Anatomy of the Psyche, analyst Edward Edinger describes seven major aspects of solutio symbolism, which recapitulate the cycle of Osiris: (1) return to the womb or primal state; (2) dissolution, dispersal, dismemberment; (3) containment of a lesser thing by a greater; (4) rebirth, rejuvenation, immersion in the creative energy flow; (5) purification ordeal; (6) solution of problems; and (7) melting or softening process. 

The most undesirable outcome of any Egyptian life was to become nonexistent. But, we can resurrect that portion of the Osirian spirit that we carry in our unconscious.  We can resurrect the magical names of Osiris: 'Wenennefer" or "Wennofry", "joy of existence" or "beautiful being". Osiris is a realization -- a Way of being, not simply a philosophical worldview.

Epic Ordeals

The consensus of all authors on the subject of Osiris may be "dead" wrong. Dynasties of priests, priestesses, and royals practiced the Royal Art. Cavalli claims there is scant evidence of abstracted philosophical thought among the ancient Egyptians. We don't know if they were having mystical experiences, but we know they consumed alcohol and drugs that altered their perceptions.

We will never know the felt-sense of Osiris in the Old Kingdom. There was no structural separation between thinking and doing. Cavalli calls the ancient Egyptian art “unconscious alchemy”. Maybe being closer to nature they grasped it with more immediacy, without cognitive dissonance or dissociation.

We share this ancient wisdom when we dive into our experiential depths. Does this subjective Jungian narrative of theories, dreams and myth illumine or inform our alchemical practice in a necessary way, or does benchwork provide our projections with a certain objectivity that promotes insight into universal processes? Adopting the so-called "spiritual" or "practical" approach depends on our essence.

As unconscious, Osiris is the paradoxical life/death ground where integrative impulses arise. His epic ordeals mirror our own. Perhaps the Jungians need alchemy for articulating psychic processes more than alchemy needs Jungian models. After all, benchwork went on for millennia without Jung's hermeneutics. Alchemy had its own ways of describing proto-scientific interpretations of phenomena. Still, Jung and Cavalli's categories, metaphorms and mytho-poetic language broaden our descriptive vocabulary, helping us articulate the deep meaning of what we see in the vessel.

An alchemical mytheme exists on a higher level than simple narrative. There is a relationship between bundles of relations which produce meaning. They emerge from the structural oppositions of the alchemical process. The psychological approach is valuable and can add depth to practice if not taken literally or used to preempt what needs to emerge organically and experientially.

Applicants for the priesthood of Osiris entered the tomb alive to await his light. They spent the night in the coffin, entering their fear to achieve mastery. Left alone in the darkness of the crypt, the initiate in the sarcophagus felt the cold of the grave. Under sensory deprivation, the initiate experienced a life review or began to see colors and lights. Such illumination was recognized as the visionary light of Osiris. Some aspirants had conversations with Isis or Osiris. Others visualized themselves in the land of the dead, walking and talking with departed spirits and receiving special teachings from Osiris before a resurrection like those conducted in Mystery Schools today.

Zero Point / Dark Light

Embodying Osiris presents a belief system about a belief system of a belief system. It may speak to the psyches of today's audience and appeal to their spiritual desires, but it remains an interpretation that only hints at mystery. It fails to carry us into either the Old Kingdom or alchemical being as many practitioners define it. Still, Cavalli's luminous treatise helps our journey be Light and our lead turn to gold. Jung's brilliant interpretation and codification of alchemy remains just that. However, he renewed the relevance of alchemy in our modern lives.

Jung suggested we find language that unifies psyche and physics. Using a sub-quantum physics view, the downloadable "universal information field of Osiris" is directly available as the coherent biophotons of our living system, zero-point energy. The Egyptians had their Zep Tepi, home of all creational forces. From this "First Time" the gods move through the void continuously creating reality.

Zep Tepi is also embodied as an alchemist which makes him a Magician, Magi, Master, who can bend light to create illusion in the electromagnetic program or our reality. He is Thoth, (thought), "Lord of Magic and Time" - Hermes, 'Messenger of the Gods" – and,   the enigmatic wizard Merlin, who disappears up an apple tree to mythic Avalon, seeking the secret of immortality and vowing to return.

Zep Tepi claims he will return at the end of this Cycle of Time through the alchemy of DNA and consciousness. He brings with him the secret keys to the gates of a sacred land or golden age, meaning a spiraling vortex of consciousness returning to higher frequencies of light and understanding. DNA, the Tree Of Life is a live vibrating structure, a shimmering waveform configuration, modulated by light, radiation, magnetic fields or sonic pulses.

For thousands of years, the Egyptians conducted genetic experiments in the quest for immortality. Only the pharaoh intermingled with the god as the conduit for all the people in ancient dynasties. That is a very different model than presuming such experiences are universally available to those who engage in the therapeutic process outlined by Jung with his alchemical metaphors and psychological practices. Alchemy calls its concrete result the Stone.

The Opening of the Way

"Osiris" is Greek for the sacred name 'Wasir". The Greeks also called him Typhon, "the passionate, titanic, reasonless aspect of the Soul." His adversary Set or Seth was/is the universal principle of destruction and dissolution. We cannot speak of Osiris apart from the rejuvenating processes of Isis (Aset), who complements and completes him.

Only those who live close to nature can unlock her secrets. The Egyptians themselves loved their world so much they considered their whole country a universal temple they wished to perpetuate in the afterlife. Is the perpetuation of an ideal life after death the ultimate? Fraser had a formulaic interpretation of Osiris as a tree spirit and fertility god, a symbol of "dying and resurrecting" plant life of an agricultural society. Mastering nature's secrets meant becoming like a god. But clearly this view, while not inaccurate, is reductionistic.

Color-coded Transformation Cycle

Interpretation of dynastic Egypt and the Osiris cult is riddled with Western religious and psychological bias. .A thousand books cannot convey its true essence. E. A. Wallis Budge wrote two exhaustive volumes on Osiris. Still, no extant Egyptian records confirm these scholarly deductions or illuminate their experiential levels. No one can read hieroglyphics forward, backward and inside out for all the sacred symbolism they encapsulate. R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz came far closer to describing the nuanced esoterics of the Egyptians. His writing "makes sense" of Osiris. Cavalli's volume makes it pertinent to each refreshing nanosecond of our existence.

Jungian psychology is "informed" by hermetics and uses its symbols and metaphors as benchmarks of the transformative process/goal. Active immersion in the "anima-ted" alchemical worldview binds us to the process.  Wisdom is encoded in the fundamental perceptions of black, red, white, green and gold. Alchemy is a science/art wed to observation and experiment.

Spiritual & Practical

Alchemy opens the imaginal, the psychic dimension of reality, realm of depth. Energy/life/matter cannot be split into "organic" or "inorganic". Today, alchemy is divided into "spiritual alchemy" and "practical alchemy," but the Egyptians had no such artificial divisions. Jungians institutionalized this split to bolster their interpretation of psychic phenomenology, using alchemical homologues. At best, it is one level of lab work.

Rituals were recipes. The Egyptians were "hands on" artificers. Their alchemy was a collective social process, requiring a whole society for its execution. The proto-science of medieval alchemy turned the tables making alchemy an extremely private, even secretive encoded practice in which one experimented upon oneself, physically and spiritually.  Its execution was idiosyncratic. Artists in action seamlessly weld thinking, doing and being, stimulating the creative flow of innovation.

The Egyptians noted the hidden processes of nature, such as desiccation and preservation of the body, and emulated nature to speed it up. They solved their problems with their hands. Their hands were not separate from their hearts and spirit; soul was not separate from body. Their experience of time was cyclic, not linear. Metallurgy, tanning, baking bread, and brewing still had their magic.

They kept their recipes secret, but it was no secret that their Pharaohs were being prepared for immortality. In preserving the corpse they perpetuated the soul. Perpetuating a Name by remembrance assured immortality. This Great Work went on long after the ruler left the realm of the living and was conducted by an elaborate support system. At death the pharaoh surrendered to the passive portion of the process, trusting his intention had been set in motion and the universe would conspire to make it so -- forever.

Radical Resurrection in the Womb of Space

Many ancient royals have been retrieved by archeologists and their corpses are still cared for while their names and deeds are noted and sung. Is this a testament to the continuing power of their heka (magic)? In loving their stories, we love them with remembrance. We perform the sacred act of Isis.

Modern conservation constitutes a sort of "second coming" for each mummy, though the cult of academia is quite different from their original priesthood.  Their evolving society first merged the individual with the collective, then launched one representative into eternity as an archetypal symbol, merging individual with universal. Society served the redemptive function of the person who was the social glue of the kingdom. Later, mummification of wealthy but common people emulated this act on a broader scale. The priests developed a cottage-industry, duplicating their Book of the Dead instructions for all who could afford it.

Re-Membering Osiris

Human beings weave imaginal tales about the nature of nature, their experience and dreams. We still stave off our fears of death with hopes of eternal life when the existential fact remains that it is impossible for us to leave the sacred source field that undergirds both our corporeal existence and our potential immortalization in the virtual field, the groundstate of continuous creation.

We will never know if their ardent efforts granted the Pharaohs primordial awareness or not. We just change form -- and that may be the essence of alchemy. Our alchemy is kept alive by practice and open-ended questions and spiritual questing that keeps the transformative process flowing. The method works if we do. What we derive from it has everything to do with what we put into it.

A Jungian approach is not a requirement for alchemical practice, "spiritual" or otherwise. It is a valid approach with its own coherence. A book of this sort can probably help us articulate some of our experiences. It can also highlight where we might strongly disagree about our style of practice. Both resonance and cognitive dissonance add to our self-awareness.

Theory and Practice

None of this reduces the inherent value of Cavalli's book. He admits he does not take on the burden of unifying Egyptian life conceptually as it is beyond the scope of his practice. The scholarship and points he makes can help us in our daily lives as well as our transformative journey. Analytical psychology is a coherent system that produces objective healing and integrative effects.

The first rule of process therapy is not to "import" foreign notions and symbols into the system. We facilitate the emergence of inherent metaphors that alone create healing deeper than a "one size fits all" formulaic approach. We deepen the process through the childhood, ancestral, cultural and cosmological layers of the psyche, kindling the redemptive metaphor, the inner healer.

Remaining true to his profession as an analyst, Cavalli interprets one cult, (Osiris), in light of another, (Jungianism) to illuminate a third -- Alchemy. But whose "alchemy" is it? His "unpacking" of ideas interprets one belief system, with another belief system, calling it a third belief system that has evolved over the centuries to suit its own social, political and scientific environment.

Ultimately, "Jung" can be just another limiting model that conveniently codifies the one process into neat categorical boxes which must be explored via "active imagination". If today's alchemy mirrors this process it is not the fault of our art, but of ourselves -- a failure to launch our unfettered imagination in truly novel ways. Perhaps this is why we can only illuminate our search further by asking more open-ended questions that keep the Mystery if not our individual "Self" alive. Mystery can only be known by gnosis, revelation and grace. Alchemy helps us stand in this Mystery, embodying Osiris.

Sacred Knowledge

This Jungian interpretation is a narrative which is legitimately imaginal, yet its validity may not extended beyond its own cultural context. While Jung's ideas are widely accepted in Western culture, there is no consensus within psychology that his is the correct or only view, anymore than there is consensus in models of physics. The Standard Model is accepted despite its flaws because it "allows us to do work." Jung's theory has a similar relationship to the science/art of alchemy.

The One World of alchemy remains elusive in both psychology and physics, so we have no unified field theory. What we have are the models that guide our practice. The alchemy of Jung is not necessarily the alchemy of Osiris or Old Egypt. It may not even be representative of contemporary alchemical practice by anyone but Jungians. Further, contemporary lab work may have little in common with the immersive alchemical experience and processes of ancient Egypt that were necessarily tied to their culture. 

In Jung's allegedly phenomenological model we find a repertoire of constructs or categories that may or may not relate -- archetypes, individuation, the "Self", psychological transformation. There is dissention among professional therapists about the relevancy or accuracy of such notions, though they have proven themselves invaluable for grasping and experiencing aspects of the unconscious (aka, "Osiris"). Certainly "reading the recipe" is not the same as "tasting the dish." But this may not be the alchemy of Egypt despite the nomenclature.

Is Alchemy Psychological?

Cavalli's last work was Alchemical Psychology and now he has written about a "psychological alchemy". What about labwork? Can we really substitute the therapeutic hour for the laboratory? Alchemy isn't only conceptual. Many practitioners of the royal art insist that the experimental side must be practiced in order to bring about its transformations by remaining true to the hands-on alchemical spirit. Is it unavoidable that we impose multiple layers of interpretations from alien societies, muddled by foreign worldviews onto the Egyptian foundation?

None of this is a criticism of Cavalli's scholarship, hermeneutics, nor healing methodology. Just as archeologists can only tell so much from digging up artifacts and interpreting archival material, psychologists can do no more. Such works may point us in the right direction, but the path itself is necessarily experiential. We cannot fully "embody Osiris" without the realization that he always undergirds our being, just as death informs life in the most fundamental way, giving life its edge and immediacy.

Statue of Isis, from Passo Corese, Italy

Copyright ©2017 Iona Miller, All Rights Reserved.
FAIR USE NOTICE
This site may contains some copyrighted material which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. This constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law, in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107. The material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.