"Follow in the footsteps of your ancestors, for the mind is trained through knowledge. Behold, their words endure… follow their wise counsel." --"The Book of Kheti," The Husia: Sacred Wisdom of Ancient Egypt
"The ancestral part is given to us by our body, we take over the life of our ancestors in that way. It is the terrace of life because it is here that life renews itself." --Carl Jung, ETH Lecture, 12 July 1935, Page 240.
“We are continually overflowing toward those who preceded us, toward our origin, and toward those who seemingly come after us. ... It is our task to imprint this temporary, perishable earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again “invisibly,” inside us. We are the bees of the invisible. We wildly collect the honey of the visible, to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible.” "It is fortunate if something of the ancestors lives on in it and continues to be loved and protected; only then does the past become fruitful and effective." --Rilke, Early Journals
"The ancestral part is given to us by our body, we take over the life of our ancestors in that way. It is the terrace of life because it is here that life renews itself." --Carl Jung, ETH Lecture, 12 July 1935, Page 240.
“We are continually overflowing toward those who preceded us, toward our origin, and toward those who seemingly come after us. ... It is our task to imprint this temporary, perishable earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again “invisibly,” inside us. We are the bees of the invisible. We wildly collect the honey of the visible, to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible.” "It is fortunate if something of the ancestors lives on in it and continues to be loved and protected; only then does the past become fruitful and effective." --Rilke, Early Journals
THE LONG SELF
The story of a life does not always start with birth and end with death....
"All human lives are so profoundly and intricately entwined—those dead, those living, those generations yet to come—that the fate of all is the fate of each, and the hope of humanity rests in every heart and in every pair of hands.“ -Dean Koontz
DROP ROOTS
Genealogy is a Descent, a Katabasis
into the Psychic Labyrinth
…a descent into the cave of initiation and secret knowledge, a model for deep self-descent toward healing.
The story of a life does not always start with birth and end with death....
"All human lives are so profoundly and intricately entwined—those dead, those living, those generations yet to come—that the fate of all is the fate of each, and the hope of humanity rests in every heart and in every pair of hands.“ -Dean Koontz
DROP ROOTS
Genealogy is a Descent, a Katabasis
into the Psychic Labyrinth
…a descent into the cave of initiation and secret knowledge, a model for deep self-descent toward healing.
"Let there be no doubt that I am the assemblage of our ancestors, the arena in which they exercise my moments. They are my cells and I am their body. This is the favrashi of which I speak, the soul, the collective unconscious, the source of archetypes, the repository of all trauma and joy. I am the choice of their awakening. My Samadhi is their Samadhi. Their experiences are mine! Their knowledge distilled is my inheritance. Those billions are my one." --Frank Herbert, The God-Emperor of Dune, p. 260.
"Journal of Psychologists", October 2020:
Excerpt: ′′ Th. Gaillard progressively clarifies his intention to show, in addition to the efficiency of unconscious transmissions on behaviors, the tragic consequences of the lack of knowledge of original symbolic legacies, especially the faults and crimes attributable to heads of bloodlines. Meaning in the mythological universe considered here, blood debts cannot not be paid, on any floor of genealogy. But also, what Sophocle's text shows (quoted by Gaillard) is that conditions exist for the outcome of the tragedy not to be dramatic, fatal. They want to intervene at some point, in one of the characters in the generation channel - in this case at Oedipe - from restorative conducts of remorse or autopunition. This is what happens at the end of the mythological narrative, when Oedipus (after assuming the role of scapegoat), a refugee at Theseus, after dying his eyes, becomes the spiritual father and the wise counselor of him, somehow accessing symbolic fatherhood. It seems important notion at the heart of Sophocle's message and thought, taken over by Gaillard. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Page 304
"Psychologically, the central point of a human personality
is the place where the ancestors are reincarnated."
~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis, Page 304
"The ancestral part is given to us by our body, we take over the life of our ancestors in that way. It is the terrace of life because it is here that life renews itself." ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 12 July 1935, Pages 240.
"Unfinished business cannot be resolved by going back in time. Indeed, our business with the dead will always feel unfinished if we try to meet them in a past which they no longer inhabit. From the imaginal point of view the dead are not in history. On the contrary, it is history which is in the dead. Our lives are haunted not so much by what once *was* as by *how* what was is and shall be. As the dead speak to us in our dreams and fantasies, the pas manifests itself in the present where it can enact itself in novel ways." --Greg Mogenson, Greeting the Angels: An Imaginal View of the Mourning Process, p. 29
“All the eggs a woman will ever carry form in her ovaries while she is a four-month-old fetus in the womb of her mother. This means our cellular life as an egg begins in the womb of our grandmother. Each of us spent five months in our grandmother’s womb, and she in turn formed in the womb of her grandmother. We vibrate to the rhythm of our mother’s blood before she herself is born, and this pulse is the thread of blood that runs all the way back through the grandmothers to the first mother.”
~ Layne Redmond, When the Drummers were Women
"We do not die alone," James Hillman says. "We join ancestors and all the little people, the multiple souls who inhabit our night world of dreams, the complexes we speak with, the invisible guests who pass through our lives, bringing us the gifts of urges and terrors, tender sighs, sudden ideas."
"Unfinished business cannot be resolved by going back in time. Indeed, our business with the dead will always feel unfinished if we try to meet them in a past which they no longer inhabit. From the imaginal point of view the dead are not in history. On the contrary, it is history which is in the dead. Our lives are haunted not so much by what once *was* as by *how* what was is and shall bee. As the dead speak to us in our dreams and fantasies, the pas manifests itself in the present where it can enact itself in novel ways." --Greg Mogenson, Greeting the Angels: An Imaginal View of the Mourning Process, p. 29
"The less we understand of what our fathers and forefathers sought, the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle in the mass, ruled only by what Nietzsche called the spirit of gravity." -Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
"Journal of Psychologists", October 2020:
Excerpt: ′′ Th. Gaillard progressively clarifies his intention to show, in addition to the efficiency of unconscious transmissions on behaviors, the tragic consequences of the lack of knowledge of original symbolic legacies, especially the faults and crimes attributable to heads of bloodlines. Meaning in the mythological universe considered here, blood debts cannot not be paid, on any floor of genealogy. But also, what Sophocle's text shows (quoted by Gaillard) is that conditions exist for the outcome of the tragedy not to be dramatic, fatal. They want to intervene at some point, in one of the characters in the generation channel - in this case at Oedipe - from restorative conducts of remorse or autopunition. This is what happens at the end of the mythological narrative, when Oedipus (after assuming the role of scapegoat), a refugee at Theseus, after dying his eyes, becomes the spiritual father and the wise counselor of him, somehow accessing symbolic fatherhood. It seems important notion at the heart of Sophocle's message and thought, taken over by Gaillard. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis Seminar, Page 304
"Psychologically, the central point of a human personality
is the place where the ancestors are reincarnated."
~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis, Page 304
"The ancestral part is given to us by our body, we take over the life of our ancestors in that way. It is the terrace of life because it is here that life renews itself." ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 12 July 1935, Pages 240.
"Unfinished business cannot be resolved by going back in time. Indeed, our business with the dead will always feel unfinished if we try to meet them in a past which they no longer inhabit. From the imaginal point of view the dead are not in history. On the contrary, it is history which is in the dead. Our lives are haunted not so much by what once *was* as by *how* what was is and shall be. As the dead speak to us in our dreams and fantasies, the pas manifests itself in the present where it can enact itself in novel ways." --Greg Mogenson, Greeting the Angels: An Imaginal View of the Mourning Process, p. 29
“All the eggs a woman will ever carry form in her ovaries while she is a four-month-old fetus in the womb of her mother. This means our cellular life as an egg begins in the womb of our grandmother. Each of us spent five months in our grandmother’s womb, and she in turn formed in the womb of her grandmother. We vibrate to the rhythm of our mother’s blood before she herself is born, and this pulse is the thread of blood that runs all the way back through the grandmothers to the first mother.”
~ Layne Redmond, When the Drummers were Women
"We do not die alone," James Hillman says. "We join ancestors and all the little people, the multiple souls who inhabit our night world of dreams, the complexes we speak with, the invisible guests who pass through our lives, bringing us the gifts of urges and terrors, tender sighs, sudden ideas."
"Unfinished business cannot be resolved by going back in time. Indeed, our business with the dead will always feel unfinished if we try to meet them in a past which they no longer inhabit. From the imaginal point of view the dead are not in history. On the contrary, it is history which is in the dead. Our lives are haunted not so much by what once *was* as by *how* what was is and shall bee. As the dead speak to us in our dreams and fantasies, the pas manifests itself in the present where it can enact itself in novel ways." --Greg Mogenson, Greeting the Angels: An Imaginal View of the Mourning Process, p. 29
"The less we understand of what our fathers and forefathers sought, the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle in the mass, ruled only by what Nietzsche called the spirit of gravity." -Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections
Archetypal Genealogy
Jung contended we can make no progress with ourselves until we become "very much more acquainted" with nature, our own nature, and that of the Other. Genealogy is one opportunity to do so.
Geneology is a soul science. That the reality of the soul is capable of expressing "intelligible" statements does not mean they are "understandable".
Understanding is the virtual place where the infinite hermeneutics come into play and interface. The image instead characterizes the nature of the soul, (the image is Soul). It is already intelligible in itself because of the language with which the soul weaves the web of existence, welcomes it and expresses itself. James Hillman tells us that the images are not "ours"; instead we belong to them.
Depth Genealogy is an approach with its own roots in Jungian and archetypal psychology, Transgenerational Integration, phenomenology, genetic genealogy, the arts, and other relevant areas. It is a soulful approach, attuned to the Earth, Nature, and Feminine with an eye for the imaginal, the ecological, the embodied, and mythological.
We cannot describe symptoms without acknowledging the human origins of the ecological crisis. Our way of understanding human life and activity has gone awry, to the serious detriment of the world around us.
Beliefs organize our experience and condition our experience and interpretation of sensed presence. You can't unperceive a perception once perceived, but you can erroneously project, interpret, or concretize it. However we attribute 'sensed presence' or 'liminal entities' we know that they are evoked potentials, rather than literal beings, but they exhibit phenomenological qualities that carry meaning.
In the genealogical journey our lineage descent becomes an initiatory experience of the depths of the human psyche and collective unconscious. Genealogy is a firm foundation for self-knowledge and any spiritual practice. Our ancestors become living presences informing our lives and being -- our relationship with the past, present, and future and the great cycle of life -- birth, death, and rebirth.
"To give birth to the ancient in a new time is creation."
~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 311
The soul path is often associated with the setting sun (and thus the direction of west), the descent to our earthy roots, into the wildness of the soil and the soul, a journey into the underworld, a voyage into darkness or shadow.
"If we surrendered to earth’s intelligence we could root down ascendant, like trees." Our spiritual growth is meant to go toward the fertile darkness and the glorious light, each of us having the opportunity to bridge earth and heaven—the underworld and the upper world—through the trunks of our middle world lives.
Rilke saw the intrinsic value of darkness: "You darkness from which I come, I love you more than all the fires that fence out the world, for the fire makes a circle for everyone so that no one sees you anymore."
In soul retrieval power is restored to the individual who has experienced soul loss. Soul loss is a shamanic term used to describe the loss of vital life force experienced in trauma, often linked to family of origin trauma. Lack of conscious connection to this source cuts us off from that which births and sustains us. We become detached and dissociated, losing our soul connection to the Sacred Feminine.
We must do the re-membering in order for the ancestors to inform our lives and to drink from the deep well within. Our approach includes many disciplines: archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, genetics, history, mythology, comparative religions, psychology, poetry, and the visual arts.
Ancestor retrieval is information retrieval. Like alchemists of old, we become miners of data, trying to turn raw information and literature narratives into meaningful 'gold'. Extraction of characteristics from text is one of the main tasks in text mining. Family relationships help link people across different genealogical documents and sources.
Jung contended we can make no progress with ourselves until we become "very much more acquainted" with nature, our own nature, and that of the Other. Genealogy is one opportunity to do so.
Geneology is a soul science. That the reality of the soul is capable of expressing "intelligible" statements does not mean they are "understandable".
Understanding is the virtual place where the infinite hermeneutics come into play and interface. The image instead characterizes the nature of the soul, (the image is Soul). It is already intelligible in itself because of the language with which the soul weaves the web of existence, welcomes it and expresses itself. James Hillman tells us that the images are not "ours"; instead we belong to them.
Depth Genealogy is an approach with its own roots in Jungian and archetypal psychology, Transgenerational Integration, phenomenology, genetic genealogy, the arts, and other relevant areas. It is a soulful approach, attuned to the Earth, Nature, and Feminine with an eye for the imaginal, the ecological, the embodied, and mythological.
We cannot describe symptoms without acknowledging the human origins of the ecological crisis. Our way of understanding human life and activity has gone awry, to the serious detriment of the world around us.
Beliefs organize our experience and condition our experience and interpretation of sensed presence. You can't unperceive a perception once perceived, but you can erroneously project, interpret, or concretize it. However we attribute 'sensed presence' or 'liminal entities' we know that they are evoked potentials, rather than literal beings, but they exhibit phenomenological qualities that carry meaning.
In the genealogical journey our lineage descent becomes an initiatory experience of the depths of the human psyche and collective unconscious. Genealogy is a firm foundation for self-knowledge and any spiritual practice. Our ancestors become living presences informing our lives and being -- our relationship with the past, present, and future and the great cycle of life -- birth, death, and rebirth.
"To give birth to the ancient in a new time is creation."
~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 311
The soul path is often associated with the setting sun (and thus the direction of west), the descent to our earthy roots, into the wildness of the soil and the soul, a journey into the underworld, a voyage into darkness or shadow.
"If we surrendered to earth’s intelligence we could root down ascendant, like trees." Our spiritual growth is meant to go toward the fertile darkness and the glorious light, each of us having the opportunity to bridge earth and heaven—the underworld and the upper world—through the trunks of our middle world lives.
Rilke saw the intrinsic value of darkness: "You darkness from which I come, I love you more than all the fires that fence out the world, for the fire makes a circle for everyone so that no one sees you anymore."
In soul retrieval power is restored to the individual who has experienced soul loss. Soul loss is a shamanic term used to describe the loss of vital life force experienced in trauma, often linked to family of origin trauma. Lack of conscious connection to this source cuts us off from that which births and sustains us. We become detached and dissociated, losing our soul connection to the Sacred Feminine.
We must do the re-membering in order for the ancestors to inform our lives and to drink from the deep well within. Our approach includes many disciplines: archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, genetics, history, mythology, comparative religions, psychology, poetry, and the visual arts.
Ancestor retrieval is information retrieval. Like alchemists of old, we become miners of data, trying to turn raw information and literature narratives into meaningful 'gold'. Extraction of characteristics from text is one of the main tasks in text mining. Family relationships help link people across different genealogical documents and sources.
LIVING ANCESTORS
The Long Self & Long Body:
Breathing Life Into the Past
"So turn to the dead, listen to their lament and lovingly take care of them. Don't be the dazzled spokesperson, there are prophets who eventually stone themselves. But we seek redemption, so we need to deeply respect what is done and accept the dead, who have long immemorial floating in the air and in the guise of bats dwell under our roof. Something new will be built on the old, and it will multiply the meaning of what has been accomplished. So you will redeem your poverty into what is accomplished by turning it into the richness of the future. The best way to start the day." --C.G.Jung, Red Book
Do I feel very strongly that I am under the influence of things or questions which were left incomplete and unanswered by my parents and grandparents and more distant ancestors. It often seems as if there were an impersonal karma within a family, which is passed on from parents to children. It has always seemed to me that I had to answer questions which fate had posed to my forefathers, and which had not yet been answered, or as if I had to complete, or perhaps continue, things which previous ages had left unfinished. ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams, Reflections; Pages 233-234.
Katabasis
A meaningful katabasis into the cave of initiation and secret knowledge is for the restoration of the whole person. The dead become an imaginal presence, "the growing understood as descent in the world, becoming useful to it and contributing to form, requires that it is descend in the world that is under the world. To be an ancestor, a benefactor, a conservative and a mentor you must have knowledge of the shadows, being trained "from the dead" (from past things, which have become invisible and however continue to vivify our life with their influence). The "Dead" return as ancestors, especially in moments of crisis, when we feel lost. Then the dead "yes", offering a deeper knowledge and support. Having already fallen, they know the chasms; there their extraordinary resources. They don't need to come back literally in the form of voices and visions, because they are already palpable in anything tends to jump down, on any occasion we are not up to. They are the gravity force of the psyche." --James Hillman
Do not situate the presence of the dead in the
―parapsychology of spiritism, the theology of afterlife, the morality of rewards, and the scientific fantasies of biochemical chance or evolution‖ (Hillman, 1979a, p. 67), but in the psychology of soul.
The Long Self & Long Body:
Breathing Life Into the Past
"So turn to the dead, listen to their lament and lovingly take care of them. Don't be the dazzled spokesperson, there are prophets who eventually stone themselves. But we seek redemption, so we need to deeply respect what is done and accept the dead, who have long immemorial floating in the air and in the guise of bats dwell under our roof. Something new will be built on the old, and it will multiply the meaning of what has been accomplished. So you will redeem your poverty into what is accomplished by turning it into the richness of the future. The best way to start the day." --C.G.Jung, Red Book
Do I feel very strongly that I am under the influence of things or questions which were left incomplete and unanswered by my parents and grandparents and more distant ancestors. It often seems as if there were an impersonal karma within a family, which is passed on from parents to children. It has always seemed to me that I had to answer questions which fate had posed to my forefathers, and which had not yet been answered, or as if I had to complete, or perhaps continue, things which previous ages had left unfinished. ~Carl Jung; Memories, Dreams, Reflections; Pages 233-234.
Katabasis
A meaningful katabasis into the cave of initiation and secret knowledge is for the restoration of the whole person. The dead become an imaginal presence, "the growing understood as descent in the world, becoming useful to it and contributing to form, requires that it is descend in the world that is under the world. To be an ancestor, a benefactor, a conservative and a mentor you must have knowledge of the shadows, being trained "from the dead" (from past things, which have become invisible and however continue to vivify our life with their influence). The "Dead" return as ancestors, especially in moments of crisis, when we feel lost. Then the dead "yes", offering a deeper knowledge and support. Having already fallen, they know the chasms; there their extraordinary resources. They don't need to come back literally in the form of voices and visions, because they are already palpable in anything tends to jump down, on any occasion we are not up to. They are the gravity force of the psyche." --James Hillman
Do not situate the presence of the dead in the
―parapsychology of spiritism, the theology of afterlife, the morality of rewards, and the scientific fantasies of biochemical chance or evolution‖ (Hillman, 1979a, p. 67), but in the psychology of soul.
"For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out." James Baldwin
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, and upon which we can ascend and descend in a way that keeps deep time, the transcendent, and our family of flesh alive within us. Genetic testing is revealing suppressed identity.
Our genealogies are living systems, which are constantly expanding and correcting. We work with others on the World Tree to create the most accurate droplines we can, and correct as we go, breaking brick walls and lopping off obsolete branches. The tree continues to grow.
Like an arborist, we understand the deep interweaving growth, and just how much time such development takes (for trees, sometimes centuries) and how ecologically interconnected events and lives are. Our relationship really seems to exist in a kind of ancestral tree-time. New routes through life are found; tree intelligence sends signals out through the roots. Tree existence can be lived with warmth and an intimate sense of one’s inner core.
Our unconscious still functions like it did four million years ago. We have discovered that trauma can be passed between generations. The epigenetic inheritance theory holds that environmental factors can affect the genes of future generations. Chemical tags acting like Post-its can latch onto our DNA, switching genes off and on.
Such complexes are usually deeply unconscious, alienating, and distorted. Our legacy conditions us. The conscious and unconscious minds don't speak to one another; they don't even speak the same language. So, we tend to reenact experiences our families have not integrated.
Integration proceeds by perceiving and acknowledging our ancestors with our conscious minds, including our intergenerational wounds and trauma and the weight of the transgenerational history. It is a processing leading toward wholeness.
Jung says, "Take pains to waken the dead. Dig deep mines and throw in sacrificial gifts, so that they reach the dead." (Liber Novus, Page 244). Our genealogy is a psychic treasure house of latent wisdom
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, and upon which we can ascend and descend in a way that keeps deep time, the transcendent, and our family of flesh alive within us. Genetic testing is revealing suppressed identity.
Our genealogies are living systems, which are constantly expanding and correcting. We work with others on the World Tree to create the most accurate droplines we can, and correct as we go, breaking brick walls and lopping off obsolete branches. The tree continues to grow.
Like an arborist, we understand the deep interweaving growth, and just how much time such development takes (for trees, sometimes centuries) and how ecologically interconnected events and lives are. Our relationship really seems to exist in a kind of ancestral tree-time. New routes through life are found; tree intelligence sends signals out through the roots. Tree existence can be lived with warmth and an intimate sense of one’s inner core.
Our unconscious still functions like it did four million years ago. We have discovered that trauma can be passed between generations. The epigenetic inheritance theory holds that environmental factors can affect the genes of future generations. Chemical tags acting like Post-its can latch onto our DNA, switching genes off and on.
Such complexes are usually deeply unconscious, alienating, and distorted. Our legacy conditions us. The conscious and unconscious minds don't speak to one another; they don't even speak the same language. So, we tend to reenact experiences our families have not integrated.
Integration proceeds by perceiving and acknowledging our ancestors with our conscious minds, including our intergenerational wounds and trauma and the weight of the transgenerational history. It is a processing leading toward wholeness.
Jung says, "Take pains to waken the dead. Dig deep mines and throw in sacrificial gifts, so that they reach the dead." (Liber Novus, Page 244). Our genealogy is a psychic treasure house of latent wisdom
THE SOUL OF THE FAMILY
"Life is lived forward but understood backwards."
- Kierkegaard
"The richest knowledge of the tree includes both myth and botany." Outside the creature, nothing can be known, out of Pleroma, there is nothing to know." --Gregory Bateson
Genealogy is a written testament to the endurance of the archaic. Breath is life -- in Latin, Hebrew and Greek, 'breath' means 'soul.' The breath of life is the vital force which animates the body and shows itself in breathing. In ancient Greek medicine, each of the four humors became associated with an element. Blood was the humor identified with air, since both were hot and wet. And blood means kin.
A Jungian approach to genealogy is not a requirement for practice, but it is a valid approach with its own coherence. Archetypal psychology is a legitimate 'ground' for an aesthetic, phenomenological approach to genealogy. It is a trustworthy framework for understanding a more holistic genealogical process, with a clear sense of humanness or personhood, and irreal and quasi-real experience -- intangibles produced by psyche itself.
'Any student of magic who reaches beyond the superficial levels will have realized that magic is somehow concerned with genetics. Our ancestors, from whom we inherit our magic as well as our physical characteristics, were most concerned to perpetuate certain blood lines that held special abilities. If the Grail legends are considered in this light, they are found to be replete with indications of genetic magic, especially aimed at spiritual regeneration attuned to physical regeneration.' - John Matthews, At the Table of the Grail.
- Kierkegaard
"The richest knowledge of the tree includes both myth and botany." Outside the creature, nothing can be known, out of Pleroma, there is nothing to know." --Gregory Bateson
Genealogy is a written testament to the endurance of the archaic. Breath is life -- in Latin, Hebrew and Greek, 'breath' means 'soul.' The breath of life is the vital force which animates the body and shows itself in breathing. In ancient Greek medicine, each of the four humors became associated with an element. Blood was the humor identified with air, since both were hot and wet. And blood means kin.
A Jungian approach to genealogy is not a requirement for practice, but it is a valid approach with its own coherence. Archetypal psychology is a legitimate 'ground' for an aesthetic, phenomenological approach to genealogy. It is a trustworthy framework for understanding a more holistic genealogical process, with a clear sense of humanness or personhood, and irreal and quasi-real experience -- intangibles produced by psyche itself.
'Any student of magic who reaches beyond the superficial levels will have realized that magic is somehow concerned with genetics. Our ancestors, from whom we inherit our magic as well as our physical characteristics, were most concerned to perpetuate certain blood lines that held special abilities. If the Grail legends are considered in this light, they are found to be replete with indications of genetic magic, especially aimed at spiritual regeneration attuned to physical regeneration.' - John Matthews, At the Table of the Grail.
Above: Otto Geiss - The Allegory of Genesis, 1995
https://www.ancient-origins.net/artifacts-other-artifacts/mysterious-fairy-flag-clan-macleod-and-its-legendary-protective-powers-020884 Godfred established himself as the King of Mann in 1079, and the MacLeods are said to claim descent from him.
https://jungiangenealogy.weebly.com/ancestral-gnosis.html
Nisargadatta: "Within the prison of your world appears a man who tells you that the world of painful contradictions, which you have created, is neither continuous nor permanent and is based on a misapprehension. He pleads with you to get out of it, by the same way by which you got into it. You got into it by forgetting what you are and you will get out of it by knowing yourself as you are."
When we join the Great Majority, we become part of the landscape around us.
******
http://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/game-changing-study-epigenetic-memories-are-passed-down-14-successive-generations
Epigenetic Memories are Passed Down 14 Successive Generations
The past of our ancestors lives on through us: Groundbreaking research illustrates how parental experience is not only epigenetically imprinted onto offspring, but onto an unprecedented number of future generations. Rather than occurring over the elongated time scale of millions of years, genetic change can transpire in real biological time through nanoparticles known as exosomes.
Until recently, it was believed that our genes dictate our destiny. That we are slated for the diseases that will ultimately beset us based upon the pre-wired indecipherable code written in stone in our genetic material. The burgeoning field of epigenetics, however, is overturning these tenets, and ushering in a school of thought where nurture, not nature, is seen to be the predominant influence when it comes to genetic expression and our freedom from or affliction by chronic disease.
THE FAMILY LONG BODY
Approaching the Ancestors
We begin our genealogy knowing there is an art of approaching. We may yearn for that which we cannot name; we may find unspeakable secrets. Jung spoke of it poetically, "Take pains to waken the dead. Dig deep mines and throw in sacrificial gifts, so that they reach the dead. Reflect in good heart upon evil, this is the way to the ascent. But before the ascent, everything is night and Hell." (Liber Novus, Page 244).
When you step into your own Hell, never think that you come like one suffering in beauty; or as a proud pariah, but you come like a stupid and curious fool and gaze in wonder at the scraps that have fallen from your table. (Liber Novus, Page 262).
But the deepest Hell is when you realize that Hell is also no Hell, but a cheerful Heaven, not a Heaven in itself, but in this respect a Heaven, and in that respect a Hell. (Liber Novus, Page 244).
Our approach is framed with emotionally dependent perspectives, psychophysical reactions, and perceptual filters.
We become absorbed by the emotions we are feeling. Shifts in neurohormone levels affect our consciousness. They may manifest as interference patterns, psychosomatics or what might be called soma-signficance. Sometimes we "carry on" the maladies of our parents or grandparents within ourselves long after their passing. More than genetic or epigenetic inheritance, perhaps that is one way of keeping them with us.
Soma-Significance
Our bodies are simply connected with an intuitive sense of meaning, in all its implications and possibilities. Our structure encodes the recent and deep past. The physical and its significance are in no way separate but two aspects of a non-dual reality. So, some arising emotions may 'belong' to us while others arise from an empathic identification with our ancestors, or even fusions of their energies. They may appear in the pre-sensory, sensory elements and images in our dreams.
Proprioception is how we perceive ourselves physically -- our own individual orientation, moment to moment. It is how we grasp or sense of the relative position of neighboring parts of the body and strength of effort being employed in movement. Sensory information contributes to the sense of position of self and movement.
Expressing emotions amplifies them. So we can also unlock significance by moving intuitively, by "letting go," and seeing how that feels and what it brings up. That movement itself is a primal image that communicates information not only to our senses but our entire being. It helps us sense stimuli arising within the body regarding position, motion, and equilibrium.
Contemplation of our family tree provokes reflection on our destiny. We look to the beginning to reveal the end, since like a hologram or fractal each part reveals the whole. The initial condition is archetypal. This alchemy of multigenerational marriage bridges has come down to us in the present -- as our unique embodied being. Jung cautions that, "Individuals who believe they are masters of their fate are as a rule the slaves of destiny." (Letters Vol. II, P. 520-523)
Connection to Source is the basis of creation, which manifests something unique from formless nothing. In our mundane existence we can lose sight of the wonder of life. Genealogy manifests the marriage of matter and psyche. Our family tree is a forest doubling in numbers each generation we go back.
Those who have passed are often passed over. Recognizing them, we recognize the reality of the psyche. We contain multitudes. By the medieval period, they number in the thousands, and tens and hundreds of thousands. They outnumber themselves, leading to the phenomenon of 'pedigree collapse,' when ancestors repeat in multiple lines of our descent. Collectively, they are nevertheless our particular way of descending into the cosmos and life and carrying it forward.
Increasing knowledge of self can come by knowing the Others within and renewing ruptured relationships. We can draw an analogy between the ascending and descending pathways of our psychobiology and genealogy. Emotions have bodily effects.
"Threshold events" occur when information that was formerly profoundly unconscious arises within our somatic, emotional, mental, or spiritual perceptions. Once we can locate sensations in the body, we can get a metaphor for what that experience is "like," engaging our imaginal faculty.
Multiple streams of consciousness can participate in one perspective that frees us of our amnesia. Somato-sensory pathways are information channels. The somatosensory system is the part of the sensory system concerned with the conscious perception of touch, pressure, pain, temperature, position, movement, and vibration, which arise from the muscles, joints, skin, and fascia. Self-organizing systems of mind-body communication across all levels from the cellular-genetic to the psychosocial and behavioral affect our psychobiology and natural or spontaneous healing.
It isn't about belief but directing our awareness to a different transderivational level of the system. Richness of interactions allows systems as a whole to undergo spontaneous self-organization and reorganization at all levels. We emphasize the need to deal with illness at formative levels, i.e., at the organism's initial conditions -- perinatal states, as suggested by Grof, Tart, and Mindell. At subtle levels outer structure is only a passing reflection of this continuing deep inner evolution.
An incoming communication we cannot make any sense of whatsoever is an integral part of processing language, and of attaching meaning to communication. How we ask the question determines the information we get. For example, we can create association rather than dissociation.
One approach is to drop into the body and get a sensation for where a feeling is, following it around, if necessary. Sensory responses are evoked potentials. When we detect a response we have a place to begin noticing, remembering, and processing. At the threshold level we have a 50-50 chance of detecting our response as attention or distraction. We may feel it weakly or even wonder if we felt it at all. This way we can reactivate pretty much any feeling we've ever had or that lives in us with a new level of sensation and connection in the present. We become aware of issues by their somatic, energetic, and emotional components.
https://jungiangenealogy.weebly.com/ancestral-gnosis.html
Nisargadatta: "Within the prison of your world appears a man who tells you that the world of painful contradictions, which you have created, is neither continuous nor permanent and is based on a misapprehension. He pleads with you to get out of it, by the same way by which you got into it. You got into it by forgetting what you are and you will get out of it by knowing yourself as you are."
When we join the Great Majority, we become part of the landscape around us.
******
http://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/game-changing-study-epigenetic-memories-are-passed-down-14-successive-generations
Epigenetic Memories are Passed Down 14 Successive Generations
The past of our ancestors lives on through us: Groundbreaking research illustrates how parental experience is not only epigenetically imprinted onto offspring, but onto an unprecedented number of future generations. Rather than occurring over the elongated time scale of millions of years, genetic change can transpire in real biological time through nanoparticles known as exosomes.
Until recently, it was believed that our genes dictate our destiny. That we are slated for the diseases that will ultimately beset us based upon the pre-wired indecipherable code written in stone in our genetic material. The burgeoning field of epigenetics, however, is overturning these tenets, and ushering in a school of thought where nurture, not nature, is seen to be the predominant influence when it comes to genetic expression and our freedom from or affliction by chronic disease.
THE FAMILY LONG BODY
Approaching the Ancestors
We begin our genealogy knowing there is an art of approaching. We may yearn for that which we cannot name; we may find unspeakable secrets. Jung spoke of it poetically, "Take pains to waken the dead. Dig deep mines and throw in sacrificial gifts, so that they reach the dead. Reflect in good heart upon evil, this is the way to the ascent. But before the ascent, everything is night and Hell." (Liber Novus, Page 244).
When you step into your own Hell, never think that you come like one suffering in beauty; or as a proud pariah, but you come like a stupid and curious fool and gaze in wonder at the scraps that have fallen from your table. (Liber Novus, Page 262).
But the deepest Hell is when you realize that Hell is also no Hell, but a cheerful Heaven, not a Heaven in itself, but in this respect a Heaven, and in that respect a Hell. (Liber Novus, Page 244).
Our approach is framed with emotionally dependent perspectives, psychophysical reactions, and perceptual filters.
We become absorbed by the emotions we are feeling. Shifts in neurohormone levels affect our consciousness. They may manifest as interference patterns, psychosomatics or what might be called soma-signficance. Sometimes we "carry on" the maladies of our parents or grandparents within ourselves long after their passing. More than genetic or epigenetic inheritance, perhaps that is one way of keeping them with us.
Soma-Significance
Our bodies are simply connected with an intuitive sense of meaning, in all its implications and possibilities. Our structure encodes the recent and deep past. The physical and its significance are in no way separate but two aspects of a non-dual reality. So, some arising emotions may 'belong' to us while others arise from an empathic identification with our ancestors, or even fusions of their energies. They may appear in the pre-sensory, sensory elements and images in our dreams.
Proprioception is how we perceive ourselves physically -- our own individual orientation, moment to moment. It is how we grasp or sense of the relative position of neighboring parts of the body and strength of effort being employed in movement. Sensory information contributes to the sense of position of self and movement.
Expressing emotions amplifies them. So we can also unlock significance by moving intuitively, by "letting go," and seeing how that feels and what it brings up. That movement itself is a primal image that communicates information not only to our senses but our entire being. It helps us sense stimuli arising within the body regarding position, motion, and equilibrium.
Contemplation of our family tree provokes reflection on our destiny. We look to the beginning to reveal the end, since like a hologram or fractal each part reveals the whole. The initial condition is archetypal. This alchemy of multigenerational marriage bridges has come down to us in the present -- as our unique embodied being. Jung cautions that, "Individuals who believe they are masters of their fate are as a rule the slaves of destiny." (Letters Vol. II, P. 520-523)
Connection to Source is the basis of creation, which manifests something unique from formless nothing. In our mundane existence we can lose sight of the wonder of life. Genealogy manifests the marriage of matter and psyche. Our family tree is a forest doubling in numbers each generation we go back.
Those who have passed are often passed over. Recognizing them, we recognize the reality of the psyche. We contain multitudes. By the medieval period, they number in the thousands, and tens and hundreds of thousands. They outnumber themselves, leading to the phenomenon of 'pedigree collapse,' when ancestors repeat in multiple lines of our descent. Collectively, they are nevertheless our particular way of descending into the cosmos and life and carrying it forward.
Increasing knowledge of self can come by knowing the Others within and renewing ruptured relationships. We can draw an analogy between the ascending and descending pathways of our psychobiology and genealogy. Emotions have bodily effects.
"Threshold events" occur when information that was formerly profoundly unconscious arises within our somatic, emotional, mental, or spiritual perceptions. Once we can locate sensations in the body, we can get a metaphor for what that experience is "like," engaging our imaginal faculty.
Multiple streams of consciousness can participate in one perspective that frees us of our amnesia. Somato-sensory pathways are information channels. The somatosensory system is the part of the sensory system concerned with the conscious perception of touch, pressure, pain, temperature, position, movement, and vibration, which arise from the muscles, joints, skin, and fascia. Self-organizing systems of mind-body communication across all levels from the cellular-genetic to the psychosocial and behavioral affect our psychobiology and natural or spontaneous healing.
It isn't about belief but directing our awareness to a different transderivational level of the system. Richness of interactions allows systems as a whole to undergo spontaneous self-organization and reorganization at all levels. We emphasize the need to deal with illness at formative levels, i.e., at the organism's initial conditions -- perinatal states, as suggested by Grof, Tart, and Mindell. At subtle levels outer structure is only a passing reflection of this continuing deep inner evolution.
An incoming communication we cannot make any sense of whatsoever is an integral part of processing language, and of attaching meaning to communication. How we ask the question determines the information we get. For example, we can create association rather than dissociation.
One approach is to drop into the body and get a sensation for where a feeling is, following it around, if necessary. Sensory responses are evoked potentials. When we detect a response we have a place to begin noticing, remembering, and processing. At the threshold level we have a 50-50 chance of detecting our response as attention or distraction. We may feel it weakly or even wonder if we felt it at all. This way we can reactivate pretty much any feeling we've ever had or that lives in us with a new level of sensation and connection in the present. We become aware of issues by their somatic, energetic, and emotional components.
https://jungiangenealogy.weebly.com/ancestral-gnosis.html
Consciousness does not mean individual awareness. The larger concept includes the personal unconscious and collective mind, conscious and unconscious -- the union of the serpent (subconscious) with the eagle (super conscious). Consciousness is the bottomless pit of the indivisible whole. It means the world. In the most inclusive sense it is cosmic consciousness. The mind's nature is primordial awareness, practiced by mystics and sages from time immemorial.
New archaeological finds have helped us discover human hybrid interbreeding among the archaic and extinct hominins. Genome analysis suggests there was cross-species interbreeding between modern humans, Neanderthals, Denisovans and additional unknown archaic populations, perhaps as far back as Homo Erectus.
We are in no way separate from Nature and our nature is archetypal. We discover how to orient ourselves in the tidal pathways of the unconscious. We see that our shadows and strengths fall into archetypal patterns -- the timeless parts of ourselves we act out unconsciously. Our genealogical maps help us find our way into the deep unconscious and our greatest possible treasure -- our inner gold.
Self-Awareness
We are always telling and remembering and forgetting our stories and those of our near and distant families. Primary in that telling is the tale of from whom we descend through archetypal process and relationship. The primary issues are ‘to be or not be’ and ‘to belong or not to belong.' Our inherent way of expressing is our flow state, our gift, and fulfillment of our personal myth.
We need to both identify and integrate our ancestral legacy in our trials of descent. Without it we may remain stuck in the wasteland of alienation, dissociation, and existential crisis rather than integrating our unconscious heritage and history. We can find our missing qualities in our genealogy.
To figure out what is happening in the present, we need to figure out something of the past. However, we imagine so many things to be true and so many to be false, we simply don't know what is 'real' or not. Life comes from your imagination and what you imagine to be real.
New archaeological finds have helped us discover human hybrid interbreeding among the archaic and extinct hominins. Genome analysis suggests there was cross-species interbreeding between modern humans, Neanderthals, Denisovans and additional unknown archaic populations, perhaps as far back as Homo Erectus.
We are in no way separate from Nature and our nature is archetypal. We discover how to orient ourselves in the tidal pathways of the unconscious. We see that our shadows and strengths fall into archetypal patterns -- the timeless parts of ourselves we act out unconsciously. Our genealogical maps help us find our way into the deep unconscious and our greatest possible treasure -- our inner gold.
Self-Awareness
We are always telling and remembering and forgetting our stories and those of our near and distant families. Primary in that telling is the tale of from whom we descend through archetypal process and relationship. The primary issues are ‘to be or not be’ and ‘to belong or not to belong.' Our inherent way of expressing is our flow state, our gift, and fulfillment of our personal myth.
We need to both identify and integrate our ancestral legacy in our trials of descent. Without it we may remain stuck in the wasteland of alienation, dissociation, and existential crisis rather than integrating our unconscious heritage and history. We can find our missing qualities in our genealogy.
To figure out what is happening in the present, we need to figure out something of the past. However, we imagine so many things to be true and so many to be false, we simply don't know what is 'real' or not. Life comes from your imagination and what you imagine to be real.
SOUL GENEALOGY
https://ionamillersubjects.weebly.com/soul-genealogy.html
The soul is an internal mirrror, but also a window on the world by which we see ourselves, Anima Mundi. The firm quality of innate knowledge inherent in people is received from heaven-this is "heaven." The original adaptable quality of innate capacity is received from earth-this is "earth."
https://ionamillersubjects.weebly.com/soul-genealogy.html
The soul is an internal mirrror, but also a window on the world by which we see ourselves, Anima Mundi. The firm quality of innate knowledge inherent in people is received from heaven-this is "heaven." The original adaptable quality of innate capacity is received from earth-this is "earth."
Transgenerational Legacies
FINDING NEW KINSHIP STRUCTURES & LOYALTIES
by Iona Miller, 2017
"For indeed our consciousness does not create itself it wells up from unknown depths. In childhood it awakens gradually, and all through life it wakes each morning out of the depths of sleep from an unconscious condition. It is like a child that is born daily out of the primordial womb of the unconscious." ~Carl Jung, CW 11, pp. 569 f.
Family is a commonality, of shared background, experience and needs. Our consciousness shapes our history as we negotiate our lives. With the power of deep learning, it arises from fathomless convoluted networks of intermingling ancestors, human and pre-human, for millions of years. A wise heart journeys past the layers of fears, memories of hurt, and projections to the most tender places of our being -- the still point of inner listening.
Our genealogy is our natural History. Our psychogenealogy is the natural history of our soul. There is another kind of primordial human in us that responds to a transgenerational approach to the family tree. Jung called it 'the two million year old man," the instinctive self, rooted in nature.
An integrated approach roots us in both past and present, as a common model for real life and consciousness that foster transgenerational bonds, transformation, and integration. Both Transgenerational Integration (TI) and genealogy are full of rich themes to explore, including family ties, legacies, parenting, matriarchy and patriarchy (Gaillard).
In The Undiscovered Self, Jung poses a challenge that is relevant to psychogenealogy in terms the urgency of recovering our ancestral heritage:
"We are living in what the Greeks called the right time for a “metamorphosis of the gods,” i.e. of the fundamental principles and symbols. This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious man within us who is changing. Coming generations will have to take account of this momentous transformation if humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science."
The Transgenerational Integration Movement is developing such awareness for both therapists and the general population. Part of that school of thought is an active psychological approach to genealogy and the ebb and flow of life itself, whether self-initiated or in the therapeutic relationship.
TI has its own genealogy rooted in the works of Freud, Jung, Fromm, and others. It also draws on established conceptual models from family therapy, including the genogram. It does not suggest a radical paradigm shift to different tenets or fundamental assumptions, say, about the nature of reality -- changing initial conditions and/or assumptions. It amplifies existing therapeutic channels. However, it helps account for errors and anomalies in the old or waning and competing paradigms and provides greater clarity and a higher information ratio.
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.)
"Therefore there are gates and walls, showing the aspiration is not to be dead and buried in the mandala, but to function through the mandala." (Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 265.)
Subject and psyche reflexively fold back upon one another fusing subject and object on the unus mundus or psychoid level. The family tree graphically represents this vast process, and merely hints at its complexity. At the psychoid (psychophysical) level the unconscious domain is the deep wisdom of nature -- our connective consciousness of nature and our nature.
In a way the collective unconscious is merely a mirage because unconscious, but it can be also just as real as the tangible world. (Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 40)
"As soon as one begins to watch one’s mind, one begins to observe the autonomous phenomena in which one exists as a spectator, or even as a victim." (Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 40.)
Genealogy is a reflexive discipline. Your family tree opens a vast inner realm of ancient, living symbols -- your ancestors. We yearn toward eternity, longing for connection. It begs the question, "are we comfortable in the presence of the disembodied?"
The Absence & the Presence
Genealogy is the domain of subtle bodies, neither this nor that. Now a presence it then eludes our grasp, shows itself and hides itself, reveals and conceals itself. Disembodied spirits are a conceptual category, rather than an ontological 'reality' or delusion from beliefs or religion. Ontology is a branch of metaphysics that deals with the nature of being, the essence of being. But ontology is only the study of anything under the aspect of its being, of what is involved in its existing.
In the psychological context, ontology itself is a mythologizing activity. It is not an ultimate but can have consequences: (1) Ontological security is achieved by routinizing relationships with significant others, and actors therefore become attached to those relationships. (2) Worldview implodes in Ontological Catastrophe. (3) Ontological anarchy insists no "state" can "exist" in chaos, that all ontological claims are spurious except the claim of chaos. In effect, chaos is life. All mess, all roiling energies, all protoplasmic urgency, all movement—is chaos.
Undecidability
What kinds of things actually exist? Meta-questions include: What is existence? and What is the nature of existence? We ask, "What is the nature of the universe?" or "Is there a god?" or "What happens to us when we die?" or "What principles govern the properties of matter?" The entangled nature of quantum entities provides a plausible theory for how our ancestors might 'appear' in our own very material psychophysiology.
Bateson names the connection between opposites with a paradoxical image borrowed from C. G. Jung, who in turn took it from ancient Gnosticism -- ''pleroma/creatura.'' This image implies the idea that the fundamental connection is not between two substances, mind and matter. Rather, mind is the pattern and fabric, texture and weave (pleroma) in all matter (creatura). This is the psychophysical essence of psyche, or soul.
We can try to ground our heuristics on firm metaphysical and epistemological foundations. The ontological argument claims to establish the real (as opposed to abstract) existence of some entity with some a priori 'proof.' In its general meaning, ontology is the study or concern about what kinds of things exist - what entities there are in the universe. Such questions are moot speaking of a dead or discarnate, and therefore, 'non-existent' being.
The basic question of ontology is “What exists?” The basic question of metaontology is: are there objective answers to the basic question of ontology? Here ontological realists say yes, and ontological anti-realists say no. (Chalmers) But we don't need to answer or have faith in any ontology to pursue psychogenealogy. We don't need to believe in 'ghosts' for an epistemology of the sacred.
Metaphor is the logic of psyche. We have countless metaphors of appearance and disappearance. It doesn't matter that our ancestral spirits are discarnate, because they 'matter' in terms of psyche, which is indistinguishable from matter -- our matter. One effect of this is psychophysical symptoms rooted in transgenerational issues.
Spirits are not ontological or metaphysical facts, but imaginal realities. The psychological or therapeutic approach does not require ontological speculation or meta-questions. We perceive them as epistemological metaphors, or 'how we know what we know' and what it's 'like,' which awakens their psychophysical aspects.
We can explore metaphors. They act as a bridge, imaginative propositions, even epistemic intuition. They use a story or illustration to see alternative ways of looking at something. Every culture and religion uses these types of stories, analogies, and parables to improve understanding, make a point more memorable, and help us make positive changes.
The internal/external metaphor is foundational. Metaphors assist transformation. A metaphorical scheme effects a reorganization. Interrelating conceptual, perceptual, and biological metaphors enables a cycle of transformation. They are inherently irrational but unconsciously 'make sense.'
Much of our thinking is a matrix or complex web of metaphors. Emotive metaphors are feelings transformed into a metaphorical equivalent. It is sustained throughout the work and functions as a controlling image. Metaphors deepen the information. The questions used to develop a metaphor develop space not time.
A metaphor awakens conceptions with more force and grace than 'common' language. An epistemological metaphor is personal and unique, translating a feeling or thought into a form that can travel through time to its original.
Zhuangzi metaphorically puts forth three meta-questions or fundamental questions in epistemology: 1) as an epistemic subject, do I know I myself? 2) Among epistemic subjects, do I know others? 3) What can I know about the world?
Virtual Agents
Epistemology is a knowledge creation metaphor. References to virtual agency are metaphorical, beyond body, death, and social identity. Epistemological metaphors are a gateway to the subconscious, as are dreams, symptoms, and our family tree.
Content-free therapy can be done through metaphor, rather than through directly reliving trauma thereby avoiding re-traumatizing. Metaphors act as a means for the psyche to represent experiences of personal significance in symbolic ways. Metaphoric expressions are tied to some unconscious or implicit aspect of our experience.
Metaphor does something in relation to our understanding. Beyond rhetoric, metaphor is rooted in some quality of the world as it is. Metaphor functions like a dream or symptom in the sense that it simultaneously expresses material from different psychic levels -- topographical, structural, and dynamic.
Metaphor use and exploration gives us a way of linking our experiences across diverse times and situations. In genealogy, history uses veils as epistemological metaphors, reflecting the conception of reality dominant in each respective epoch.
Social Presence in Sacred Space
In our transgenerational work we can extend that self-inquiry, asking ourselves 'where do I feel that in my body', and 'how do I know it's happening when it happens' to develop dynamic images and metaphors of 'what it is like' for process work. It's a functional approach that is used because it works as a tool for exploring personal meaning, fundamental to insight-oriented psychotherapy.
Disembodied Soul
Personifying is a way of making subjective experience, passionate identification, and indwelling images more tangible through conversation and relationship in symbolic form. Hillman (1975) called it “an epistemology of the heart, a thought-mode of feeling.” It imagines what’s inside, outside, and makes this content alive, personal, and even divine. Jung claimed that the inside is the outside, the outside is the inside; the claim is that psyche is matter and matter is psyche.
Theoretical Grounding
The scientific search for knowledge is the search for Truth and Beauty, appealing to both spirit and soul. To know facts is to survive; not to know, or to assess one's environment wrongly, is to lose the fight for survival. With the examination of the sources, nature, and accuracy of our knowledge, we begin to develop epistemic awareness, a more informed understanding of what we know and don't know.
We are faced with two serious epistemological problems: (1) How can we determine which facts are true? and, (2) How can we determine which facts are important? Our minds are the comparator and interface as we navigate through internal and external realities.
Denial is a complex “unconscious defense mechanism for coping with guilt, anxiety and other disturbing emotions aroused by reality.“ Even skepticism and solipsistic arguments – including epistemological relativism – about the existence of objective truth, are generally a social construction.
Rebirth is synonymous with restoring the true history of our origins and integrating our transgenerational inheritance, somewhere between the loss of what we thought we knew and true self-knowledge.
The soul generates images unceasingly. The soul lives on images and metaphor, especially epistemological metaphors--how we know what we know. These images form the basis of our consciousness. All we can know comes through images, through our multi-sensory perceptions. So, this soul always stays close to the body, close to corporeality, to what "matters."
Jung's basic ideas about the unity of knowledge and existence are in principle synonymous with the Platonic tradition, alchemy, Qabala and Gnosticism. Plato treated the end product of the evolution of mathematical concepts, (a fixed system of idealized objects), as an independent beginning point of the evolution of the "world of things." This concrete form of philosophy was determined by the nature of Greek mathematics.
These philosophies seek to reconcile the actual condition with a hypothetical distant ideal, which expansively incorporates both personal and universal dimensions. It is an inward-oriented epistemology. By intuitive perception we can consciously reiterate the laws of Nature and mind which are equivalent to the archetypes themselves.
Going back to the question of fantasizing, if once the resistance to free contact with the unconscious can be overcome, and one can develop the power of sticking to the fantasy, then the play of the images can be watched. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 38.
The Soul’s Code, James Hillman’s best-selling book, sets out a new theory based on an old idea: Plato’s understanding that the soul of each of us is given a unique daimon before we are born, and it has selected and image or pattern that we live on earth. Hillman’s acorn theory is about calling, about character, about innate image. To uncover our unique, innate image he urges us to set aside the psychological frames that are usually used and mostly used up. They do not reveal enough. Instead, the acorn theory dares us to envision biography in terms of beauty, mystery and myth. It challenges the prevalent paradigm that reduces biography to genetics and environment. It lifts the pall of victim mentality and posits a psychology of childhood that embraces pathology as well as imagination.
GENEALOGY
FAMILY OF ORIGIN
Here Be Dragons
Here Be Dragons
An Unconscious Pact Between the Dead & the Living
"The dead and the living, those awake and those sleeping, the young and the old are one and the same in us; the one moved from its place is the other, and the other returned to its place is one." --Heraclitus
"The dead and the living, those awake and those sleeping, the young and the old are one and the same in us; the one moved from its place is the other, and the other returned to its place is one." --Heraclitus
...“give your daughters difficult names. give your daughters names that command the full use of tongue. my name makes you want to tell me the truth. my name doesn’t allow me to trust anyone that cannot pronounce it right.”
― Warsan Shire
― Warsan Shire
PIECES OF YOURSELF
Genealogy As Primal Symbol
Ancestral Reality
“I believe we have been robbed of our true biography – that destiny written into the acorn – and we go to therapy to recover it. The innate image can’t be found, however, until we have a psychological theory that grants primary psychological reality to the call of fate."
--James Hillman
"How can I put the pieces of my life together in a coherent image? How can I trace the background to my story? To Discover the innate image, we must set aside the generally used psychological patterns - and for the most worn." --James Hillman
“In general, emotional ties are very important to human beings. But they still contain projections, and it is essential to withdraw these projections in order to attain to oneself and to objectivity. Emotional relationships are relationships of desire, tainted by coercion and constraint; something is expected from the other person, and that makes them and we unfree. Objective cognition lies hidden behind the attraction of the emotional relationship; it seems to be the central secret. Only through objective cognition is the real coniunctio possible.”
--C. G. Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections, pp. 296-297.
Aside from the symbols used within genealogy, the Family Tree itself is a foundational symbol of one's living connections to life, to history, and to transformation. It is the "prime symbol" of gestation and prima materia -- the archetypal human being. To mix metaphors, when it comes to our 'entangled branches,' we have to "read between the lines."
The symbolical names of the prima materia all point to the anima mundi, Plato's Primordial Man, the Anthropos, and mystic Adam. Adam Kadmon is the "man of light" and therefore identical with the alchemical filius philosophorum. Paracelsus says of this astral man, "the true man is the star in us...for heaven is man and man is heaven, and all men are one heaven, and heaven is only one man."
The ancient teachings about the Anthropos assert that God, or the world-creating principle, was manifested in the form of a "first-created" man, usually of cosmic size, such as Prajapati, Purusha, and Metatron.
The Primordial Man is the means for conquering darkness, and shares his role with a feminine being, Sophia, who coexisted with him in the Gnostic Pleroma. The Cosmic Man or archetypal man is both macrocosm and microcosm and contains the Feminine or anima within himself. Technically it is a hermaphroditic figure, recapitulating the entire evolutionary process.
The Anthropos originates in Manichaean doctrine. It is akin to the true man of Chinese alchemy, which like the Anthropos is akin to God. This inner man remains partly unconscious because consciousness is only part of a man and cannot comprehend the whole. But this whole man is always present.
Psychic content becomes conscious when it possesses a certain energy-charge, or it sinks back into unconsciousness. This "Man[Woman]" is an indescribable, intuitive or mystical experience which demonstrates the continuity of this idea over the millennia. In later centuries there was a relationship between Christ, the Son of Man and this cosmogonic Man.
In alchemical philosophy it corresponds to the homunculus and lapis, the product of the hieros gamos, Royal Marriage. According to Jungian, Edward Edinger, the anthropos has been likened in Gnostic texts to a corpse, "buried in the body like a mummy in a tomb."
The mummy is symbolically identical with the original man or anthropos, and is thus an image of the Self and the product of mortificatio--the incorruptible body that grows out of the death of the corruptible seed. It corresponds to the alchemical idea that death is the conception of the Philosopher's Stone.
From its death, the "child of the philosophers" is born--the Philosophical Stone. The regenerated king in alchemy corresponds to the cosmic Anthropos, the First Man. He is the inner, spiritual, psychic man created in the image of the Nous.
The alchemist experienced the Anthropos in a form that was imbued with a new vitality, freshness and immediacy--psychic totality. It has a complex Egyptian, Persian and Hellenistic background--Homo Maximus.
Primary Relations
It is an epic picture story book. It is a text, showing the relation between signs and the things to which they refer; their signified content, or meaning. It is a discourse on your specific and mythic ancestry -- your ground in pure and limitless space. Each ancestor is a sign deployed in space and time to produce "texts", whose meanings are construed by the mutually contextualizing relations among them. As a conceptual model it helps us conceive the whole.
The self-referential symbol fully represents the whole of which it is a part -- more than a romantic symbol or allegory. There are ordinary people and "giants" of history who felt an intense desire to achieve great deeds and heroic immortality.
"Let there be no doubt that I am the assemblage of our ancestors, the arena in which they exercise my moments. They are my cells and I am their body. This is the favrashi of which I speak, the soul, the collective unconscious, the source of archetypes, the repository of all trauma and joy. I am the choice of their awakening. My Samadhi is their Samadhi. Their experiences are mine! Their knowledge distilled is my inheritance. Those billions are my one." --Frank Herbert, The God-Emperor of Dune, p. 260.
The symbol is the middle way along which the opposites flow together in a new movement, like a watercourse bringing fertility after a long drought.
~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 443.
Childlikeness or lack of prior assumptions is of the very essence of the symbol and its function. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 442
Txema Yeste
"You are immortal; you’ve existed for billions of years in different manifestations, because you are Life, and Life cannot die. You are in the trees, the butterflies, the fish, the air, the moon, the sun. Wherever you go, you are there, waiting for yourself." ~Don Miguel Ruiz
Original Awareness
Our antic biophysical background has been easier to ascertain than the physics of the soul, though many have tried in transpersonal psychologies and the field of Consciousness Studies. Some suggest quantum and even subquantal descriptions of primordial consciousness, which could be described as identical with or inherent in matter.
Consciousness does not mean individual awareness. The larger concept includes the personal unconscious and collective mind, conscious and unconscious -- the union of the serpent (subconscious) with the eagle (super conscious). Consciousness is the bottomless pit of the indivisible whole. It means the world. In the most inclusive sense it is cosmic consciousness. The mind's nature is primordial awareness, practiced by mystics and sages from time immemorial.
New archaeological finds have helped us discover human hybrid interbreeding among the archaic and extinct hominins. Genome analysis suggests there was cross-species interbreeding between modern humans, Neanderthals, Denisovans and additional unknown archaic populations, perhaps as far back as Homo Erectus.
We are in no way separate from Nature and our nature is archetypal. We discover how to orient ourselves in the tidal pathways of the unconscious. We see that our shadows and strengths fall into archetypal patterns -- the timeless parts of ourselves we act out unconsciously. Our genealogical maps help us find our way into the deep unconscious and our greatest possible treasure -- our inner gold.
Self-Awareness
We are always telling and remembering and forgetting our stories and those of our near and distant families. Primary in that telling is the tale of from whom we descend through archetypal process and relationship. The primary issues are ‘to be or not be’ and ‘to belong or not to belong.' Our inherent way of expressing is our flow state, our gift, and fulfillment of our personal myth.
We need to both identify and integrate our ancestral legacy in our trials of descent. Without it we may remain stuck in the wasteland of alienation, dissociation, and existential crisis rather than integrating our unconscious heritage and history. We can find our missing qualities in our genealogy.
To figure out what is happening in the present, we need to figure out something of the past. However, we imagine so many things to be true and so many to be false, we simply don't know what is 'real' or not. Life comes from your imagination and what you imagine to be real.
Raising Cain
Those who have not done their own genealogies think some of the claims about conventional genealogical results are utterly fallacious. But if you draw your own lines past a certain era, you find the rumors are indeed 'true,' no matter what that means in terms of symbolic and psychological realities. Naturally, such fabled lines are not literally so.
Though you or I can "raise Cain" in our drop lines, there is no way to document such mythic descent. Yet, these are the ancestors of our souls, of our psyche, including Sumerian Kings, Egyptian Pharaohs, Trojan Lords, Jewish Kings, Viking Warriors, Merovingian Kings, Russian Tsars, Scottish Royalty, British Royalty, Moors, Habsburgs, etc.
Our society is oriented primarily around father and mother, patriarch and matriarch --the King or Queen archetype and basis of unconscious tensions and hidden value judgments. They give life to the archetypal Child, the new consciousness, creativity, and archetypal Seeker. When two people really unite, their inner and outer worlds merge, whether in gnosis or shared folly. 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 a numinous experience -- a naked encounter with the divine.
We come upon our ancestors unawares as we 'dig up' our connections with them. If we aren't forewarned we may be shocked to find royals in our lines. The King or Queen can bless us, knight us, and make us feel special and a valuable part of the whole as no other archetype can. This may change our sense of self-identity forever. It can bring new insight, understanding, and comprehension, but may also lead to emotional flooding and an invasion of the unconscious as ego inflation.
We proceed along quite normally, logging commoner and noble spouses and their ancestors, then suddenly the atmosphere changes. Geography moves to imaginal landscapes.
Genealogy is a place of exchange not only with ancestors, but between humans and a variety of supernatural creatures of mixed human and legendary lineage. Such creatures inherit different nature's from their parents, but they still draw their identity from the family unit.
Atavisms
The whole of evolution is within us and recapitulates in uterine life. Development of an organism (ontogeny) expresses all the intermediate forms of its ancestors throughout evolution (phylogeny). Atavism is the regressive tendency to revert to ancestral type -- an evolutionary throwback or reversal. The word atavism is derived from the Latin atavus -- a great-grandfather's grandfather -- or generally, an ancestor. An anatomical atavism is a vestigial structure, or morphological anomaly.
Atavism is the reappearance of a lost character specific to a remote evolutionary ancestor and not observed in the parents or recent ancestors. Left-over traits from a distant evolutionary ancestor can reappear long after they disappeared generations before. Perhaps inherited genetic mutations, deformities, and birth defects were confounded with mythic beings.
Supernatural tales have their liminal settings, mythical characters, inter-species romances, and close family connections. The otherworld and the ordinary intermingle. This is the gloss of imaginal vision that co-exists with ordinary reality -- our desires, phantasms, and projections.
But it is not the family ties nor the romantic fairy tale appeal of such inclusions but their psychic necessity that makes them a legitimate part of our pedigree -- even if disowned, repressed, or 'fictionalized' by modern genealogical corrective trends. We enter the underworld when we cross the threshold dividing the rational and historical from the irrational and legendary.
We find curious hybrids, from fairies to godforms with supernatural romances, curses, and royal marriages in liminal spaces beyond mortal ken. Sometimes such creatures with their disturbing transformations enter a lineage as the result of a familial curse.
It is transmitted to descendants in repeating cycles of suffering, heartbreak, betrayals, separation, mourning, and death. This raises the specter that such demonic behavior is related to medieval descriptions of mental illness and mood disorders, such as schizophrenia, bipolar, narcissism, or borderline issues.
Some genealogists want to expunge supernatural characters and liminal settings from the World Tree, but we do so at our peril -- cutting of psyche from its own imaginal roots. Naturally, to claim we literally descend from pixies, elves, fairies, dragons, serpents, gods or goddesses sounds preposterous, and must be contextualized as imaginal.
The irreconcilable dual nature of human and bestial ancestry demands we work that out for ourselves, so it not turn monstrous. Ours is a very complicated and nuanced family full of by-gone cultural dreams that still inhabit and inform our films and literature.
http://scholarlycommons.obu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1073&context=honors_theses
Family Wisdom
Our original awareness of ourselves is that of a family member, born of our ancestors through our parents into the House of our descent. We carry the First-Person perspective (self, body, self-reference) even though we may be the last of our line. But we can hardly claim self-knowledge if we remain unconscious of our unseen forebears from both a genealogical and symbolic approach. Along with our strengths we pass on our human weaknesses.
We may have different intentions as we begin our genealogical work, but despite our approach transgenerational EFFECTS will begin emerging spontaneously as a natural consequence of stirring the unconscious. Real time effects, seen and unforeseen always trump original intentions or will which has nothing to do with it.
Unconscious forces may amplify or draw attention to dynamics already in action -- chaotic relationships, addictive patterns, psychophysical symptoms, etc. as well as unconscious determinism and mythic dynamics. We may or may not notice similar patterns in our close ancestors, such as star-crossed lovers or maternal fusion/absent father.
How could we have something so life-changing, so valuable within and not even realize we have it? The persistent state of unconsciousness keeps them secret, keeps them hidden from us. These spontaneous effects contain elements of transgenerational family problems and its inherent wisdom and healing potential. They remain an integral part of our lives through their effects on our psychophysical being -- avoidance, repression, denial, stress, blame, discomfort. Are we stuck or just ancestrally challenged?
How You Came To Be
We each have a way we put together the fragments that make up our lives — their flotsam and jetsam, highs and lows, meaningful and slight details, shrieking and weeping, big and small news, reminders of the family's past, with events and how they impact us. Who welcomed death when it came? But linear time is a persistent illusion -- a cultural artifact.
We could imagine switching off the default mode network so the brain itself receives a denser spectrum of consciousness. The unconscious or ancestral field is actually just such a vast spectrum of information that we’re just not seeing, but it is always there. Each and every ancestor is there if we but tune into their essence, their nature, and their relationships -- not in a supernatural but an informational way.
The inner forms the outer, pulsating out in manifestation. Primordial awareness is an externalization of our existing internal patterns. The ancient Greeks perceived immersive time and linear perspective somewhat differently, seeing the past before them and the future behind. The past was ahead of them -- already manifested -- where they had eyes to see, not a by-gone event buried in the past. In symbol and myth the past is not the past.
So, through genealogy we can see and face the past head on. Without knowing who we are, we remain somewhat blind looking either forward or back. The ancients moved into the future facing the past, not the unknown future which cannot be seen. The future was behind, enveloping them, manifesting through them, stalking them relentlessly like death.
The anxieties of heredity mirror the fears and conflicts of society at any given time. Stains from the past raise questions about intergenerational or collective responsibility. Are we somehow marked by ancient violence, deprivation, or abundance? How does each generation shape and alter that story, hereditary character, and moral inheritance?
Transferred Guilt
Ancestral Fault? Original sin? Missing the mark? The concept of inherited guilt and delayed punishment is archaic, appearing in the Torah, Bible, and Greek tragedy. Divine punishment of innocent descendants is an interaction of human action and divine order. Deferred punishment implies its inevitability. The perverted family is doomed to pass on its toxic inheritance until or unless someone takes on the great work of raising the pattern to consciousness.
Are we liable for the personal errors and transgressions of our ancestors? Do the gods hold us accountable? They play a leading role in the sense that Jung mentions, that the gods have become diseases. Doesn't each generation suffer in succession with or without family misfortune? Does our past mean moral debt, culpability, menace, shame, dishonor, grief, and distress? What is the hereditary character of human unhappiness and in what way is it 'divine punishment'? How can we "face it"?
Legacy of Misfortune
How and where do we hold the pain of the old transgressions? That anguish of the past has a remarkable grip on contemporary society as systemic crisis and inherited liability. Are some houses accursed? Any family 'curse' -- originating in a prayer for vengeance -- is more likely to mean inherited guilt, genetic corruption, or persistent unexplained adversity. Disaster, calamity, and ruin can also strike blindly.
Ancestral fault is a core idea of Greek literature. 'The guiltless will pay for the deeds later: either the man's children, or his descendants thereafter', said Solon in the sixth century BC, a statement echoed throughout the rest of antiquity. This notion lies at the heart of ancient Greek thinking on theodicy, inheritance and privilege, the meaning of suffering, the links between wealth and morality, individual responsibility, the bonds that unite generations and the grand movements of history. From Homer to Proclus, it played a major role in some of the most critical and pressing reflections of Greek culture on divinity, society and knowledge. The burning modern preoccupation with collective responsibility across generations has a long, deep antecedent in classical Greek literature and its reception. (Gagne)
Why do we even endorse our belief in ancestral fault?
Probably because it appeals individually and collectively as an explanation for misfortune as punishment. Perhaps it gives meaning to adversity -- vague traces in distant historical records or dramatic tragedies. Besides its social functions, the cultural notion of ancestral fault also has its own coherent and inconsistent poetics -- how the idea is presented and what role it plays as we mine and reconstruct it.
As we write our genealogical story, we turn to the past even as the past returns to us. Facing it squarely, we are in the present, facing the past, while the unseen future, being unknown, is behind us. It depends if we are looking at event time or narrative time -- relative conceptualizations.
Physicist John Wheeler suggested reality grows out of the act of observation, and thus consciousness itself is "participatory." He also considered information the most fundamental building block of reality. He thought the universe should be seen as a self-synthesized information system: a self-excited circuit that is developing through a (closed loop) cycle.
His experiments led to the idea that human observers may not only determine the present, but also may influence the past. According to Wheeler, ultimate mutability is the central feature of physics, and the meaning of reality can only be established if there is a universal knowledge field, that transcends physical past, present and future.
("The Universe as a Cyclic Organized Information System:
John Wheeler’s World Revisited", Dirk K.F. Meijer)
Future Behind, Past In-Front
Time metaphor is a spatial (spatio-temporal) language. Marshall McLuhan said, "We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future." He reiterated the ancient Greek perspective. They stood in the present moment with the past receding away from them back toward the Golden Age as their point of reference, rather than the future. So, sequence is a relative position along a path -- a relationship of figure to Ground (the moment of utterance). Ego may play the role of Ground in directionality, but it is the directionless unconscious that is the primordial Ground.
What Is Unconscious Remains Timeless
In ancient Greece, Plato and Aristotle agreed that the past is eternal. Ancestral fault included inherited guilt and divine punishment. The Greek word for 'revealed' actually means 'reappear,' like rivers and streams that flow underground and spring forth again. The course remains invisible until it reappears to sight.
Only the ideology of progress flipped the magnetic poles of our psyches. The past is no reliable guide to a future that is the main locus of our attention. We need to rethink how we construct our stories of duration and how we conceive our relationship to it. Stories anchor the present and seem to give our preferred futures some substance and pull.
Time doesn't only belong to events, because psychological time is open and all events are real. In the epistemic modality, there is no past or future but possibility, necessity, and evidentiality. Only our expression of past tense creates evidential markers.
Temporality is a modality. What time we are present in depends on which world we are in. That is, in the genealogical domain our world is now as it was in 50 BCE, a product of linguistic relativity and tenseless language. In Kabbalah, “time” is a paradox and an illusion. Both the future and the past are recognized to be simultaneously present.
This purposefully fissured quality opens us to the heights and depths of our being, light and dark, accessible and opaque, concrete and abstract. Such stories may be drizzled in sadness and despair, while others remain profoundly unconscious until we find and walk through the threshold of our genealogy.
Our own family tree and our unique descent from the roots of mankind reveals the instinct, opinion, and knowledge of original thought. Rational comes from 'ratio' - from relationship. The bones of our mother are the stones of the Earth. The body of the Earth and her water is our water, our body, as primordial as it ever was.
"You are immortal; you’ve existed for billions of years in different manifestations, because you are Life, and Life cannot die. You are in the trees, the butterflies, the fish, the air, the moon, the sun. Wherever you go, you are there, waiting for yourself." ~Don Miguel Ruiz
Original Awareness
Our antic biophysical background has been easier to ascertain than the physics of the soul, though many have tried in transpersonal psychologies and the field of Consciousness Studies. Some suggest quantum and even subquantal descriptions of primordial consciousness, which could be described as identical with or inherent in matter.
Consciousness does not mean individual awareness. The larger concept includes the personal unconscious and collective mind, conscious and unconscious -- the union of the serpent (subconscious) with the eagle (super conscious). Consciousness is the bottomless pit of the indivisible whole. It means the world. In the most inclusive sense it is cosmic consciousness. The mind's nature is primordial awareness, practiced by mystics and sages from time immemorial.
New archaeological finds have helped us discover human hybrid interbreeding among the archaic and extinct hominins. Genome analysis suggests there was cross-species interbreeding between modern humans, Neanderthals, Denisovans and additional unknown archaic populations, perhaps as far back as Homo Erectus.
We are in no way separate from Nature and our nature is archetypal. We discover how to orient ourselves in the tidal pathways of the unconscious. We see that our shadows and strengths fall into archetypal patterns -- the timeless parts of ourselves we act out unconsciously. Our genealogical maps help us find our way into the deep unconscious and our greatest possible treasure -- our inner gold.
Self-Awareness
We are always telling and remembering and forgetting our stories and those of our near and distant families. Primary in that telling is the tale of from whom we descend through archetypal process and relationship. The primary issues are ‘to be or not be’ and ‘to belong or not to belong.' Our inherent way of expressing is our flow state, our gift, and fulfillment of our personal myth.
We need to both identify and integrate our ancestral legacy in our trials of descent. Without it we may remain stuck in the wasteland of alienation, dissociation, and existential crisis rather than integrating our unconscious heritage and history. We can find our missing qualities in our genealogy.
To figure out what is happening in the present, we need to figure out something of the past. However, we imagine so many things to be true and so many to be false, we simply don't know what is 'real' or not. Life comes from your imagination and what you imagine to be real.
Raising Cain
Those who have not done their own genealogies think some of the claims about conventional genealogical results are utterly fallacious. But if you draw your own lines past a certain era, you find the rumors are indeed 'true,' no matter what that means in terms of symbolic and psychological realities. Naturally, such fabled lines are not literally so.
Though you or I can "raise Cain" in our drop lines, there is no way to document such mythic descent. Yet, these are the ancestors of our souls, of our psyche, including Sumerian Kings, Egyptian Pharaohs, Trojan Lords, Jewish Kings, Viking Warriors, Merovingian Kings, Russian Tsars, Scottish Royalty, British Royalty, Moors, Habsburgs, etc.
Our society is oriented primarily around father and mother, patriarch and matriarch --the King or Queen archetype and basis of unconscious tensions and hidden value judgments. They give life to the archetypal Child, the new consciousness, creativity, and archetypal Seeker. When two people really unite, their inner and outer worlds merge, whether in gnosis or shared folly. 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 a numinous experience -- a naked encounter with the divine.
We come upon our ancestors unawares as we 'dig up' our connections with them. If we aren't forewarned we may be shocked to find royals in our lines. The King or Queen can bless us, knight us, and make us feel special and a valuable part of the whole as no other archetype can. This may change our sense of self-identity forever. It can bring new insight, understanding, and comprehension, but may also lead to emotional flooding and an invasion of the unconscious as ego inflation.
We proceed along quite normally, logging commoner and noble spouses and their ancestors, then suddenly the atmosphere changes. Geography moves to imaginal landscapes.
Genealogy is a place of exchange not only with ancestors, but between humans and a variety of supernatural creatures of mixed human and legendary lineage. Such creatures inherit different nature's from their parents, but they still draw their identity from the family unit.
Atavisms
The whole of evolution is within us and recapitulates in uterine life. Development of an organism (ontogeny) expresses all the intermediate forms of its ancestors throughout evolution (phylogeny). Atavism is the regressive tendency to revert to ancestral type -- an evolutionary throwback or reversal. The word atavism is derived from the Latin atavus -- a great-grandfather's grandfather -- or generally, an ancestor. An anatomical atavism is a vestigial structure, or morphological anomaly.
Atavism is the reappearance of a lost character specific to a remote evolutionary ancestor and not observed in the parents or recent ancestors. Left-over traits from a distant evolutionary ancestor can reappear long after they disappeared generations before. Perhaps inherited genetic mutations, deformities, and birth defects were confounded with mythic beings.
Supernatural tales have their liminal settings, mythical characters, inter-species romances, and close family connections. The otherworld and the ordinary intermingle. This is the gloss of imaginal vision that co-exists with ordinary reality -- our desires, phantasms, and projections.
But it is not the family ties nor the romantic fairy tale appeal of such inclusions but their psychic necessity that makes them a legitimate part of our pedigree -- even if disowned, repressed, or 'fictionalized' by modern genealogical corrective trends. We enter the underworld when we cross the threshold dividing the rational and historical from the irrational and legendary.
We find curious hybrids, from fairies to godforms with supernatural romances, curses, and royal marriages in liminal spaces beyond mortal ken. Sometimes such creatures with their disturbing transformations enter a lineage as the result of a familial curse.
It is transmitted to descendants in repeating cycles of suffering, heartbreak, betrayals, separation, mourning, and death. This raises the specter that such demonic behavior is related to medieval descriptions of mental illness and mood disorders, such as schizophrenia, bipolar, narcissism, or borderline issues.
Some genealogists want to expunge supernatural characters and liminal settings from the World Tree, but we do so at our peril -- cutting of psyche from its own imaginal roots. Naturally, to claim we literally descend from pixies, elves, fairies, dragons, serpents, gods or goddesses sounds preposterous, and must be contextualized as imaginal.
The irreconcilable dual nature of human and bestial ancestry demands we work that out for ourselves, so it not turn monstrous. Ours is a very complicated and nuanced family full of by-gone cultural dreams that still inhabit and inform our films and literature.
http://scholarlycommons.obu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1073&context=honors_theses
Family Wisdom
Our original awareness of ourselves is that of a family member, born of our ancestors through our parents into the House of our descent. We carry the First-Person perspective (self, body, self-reference) even though we may be the last of our line. But we can hardly claim self-knowledge if we remain unconscious of our unseen forebears from both a genealogical and symbolic approach. Along with our strengths we pass on our human weaknesses.
We may have different intentions as we begin our genealogical work, but despite our approach transgenerational EFFECTS will begin emerging spontaneously as a natural consequence of stirring the unconscious. Real time effects, seen and unforeseen always trump original intentions or will which has nothing to do with it.
Unconscious forces may amplify or draw attention to dynamics already in action -- chaotic relationships, addictive patterns, psychophysical symptoms, etc. as well as unconscious determinism and mythic dynamics. We may or may not notice similar patterns in our close ancestors, such as star-crossed lovers or maternal fusion/absent father.
How could we have something so life-changing, so valuable within and not even realize we have it? The persistent state of unconsciousness keeps them secret, keeps them hidden from us. These spontaneous effects contain elements of transgenerational family problems and its inherent wisdom and healing potential. They remain an integral part of our lives through their effects on our psychophysical being -- avoidance, repression, denial, stress, blame, discomfort. Are we stuck or just ancestrally challenged?
How You Came To Be
We each have a way we put together the fragments that make up our lives — their flotsam and jetsam, highs and lows, meaningful and slight details, shrieking and weeping, big and small news, reminders of the family's past, with events and how they impact us. Who welcomed death when it came? But linear time is a persistent illusion -- a cultural artifact.
We could imagine switching off the default mode network so the brain itself receives a denser spectrum of consciousness. The unconscious or ancestral field is actually just such a vast spectrum of information that we’re just not seeing, but it is always there. Each and every ancestor is there if we but tune into their essence, their nature, and their relationships -- not in a supernatural but an informational way.
The inner forms the outer, pulsating out in manifestation. Primordial awareness is an externalization of our existing internal patterns. The ancient Greeks perceived immersive time and linear perspective somewhat differently, seeing the past before them and the future behind. The past was ahead of them -- already manifested -- where they had eyes to see, not a by-gone event buried in the past. In symbol and myth the past is not the past.
So, through genealogy we can see and face the past head on. Without knowing who we are, we remain somewhat blind looking either forward or back. The ancients moved into the future facing the past, not the unknown future which cannot be seen. The future was behind, enveloping them, manifesting through them, stalking them relentlessly like death.
The anxieties of heredity mirror the fears and conflicts of society at any given time. Stains from the past raise questions about intergenerational or collective responsibility. Are we somehow marked by ancient violence, deprivation, or abundance? How does each generation shape and alter that story, hereditary character, and moral inheritance?
Transferred Guilt
Ancestral Fault? Original sin? Missing the mark? The concept of inherited guilt and delayed punishment is archaic, appearing in the Torah, Bible, and Greek tragedy. Divine punishment of innocent descendants is an interaction of human action and divine order. Deferred punishment implies its inevitability. The perverted family is doomed to pass on its toxic inheritance until or unless someone takes on the great work of raising the pattern to consciousness.
Are we liable for the personal errors and transgressions of our ancestors? Do the gods hold us accountable? They play a leading role in the sense that Jung mentions, that the gods have become diseases. Doesn't each generation suffer in succession with or without family misfortune? Does our past mean moral debt, culpability, menace, shame, dishonor, grief, and distress? What is the hereditary character of human unhappiness and in what way is it 'divine punishment'? How can we "face it"?
Legacy of Misfortune
How and where do we hold the pain of the old transgressions? That anguish of the past has a remarkable grip on contemporary society as systemic crisis and inherited liability. Are some houses accursed? Any family 'curse' -- originating in a prayer for vengeance -- is more likely to mean inherited guilt, genetic corruption, or persistent unexplained adversity. Disaster, calamity, and ruin can also strike blindly.
Ancestral fault is a core idea of Greek literature. 'The guiltless will pay for the deeds later: either the man's children, or his descendants thereafter', said Solon in the sixth century BC, a statement echoed throughout the rest of antiquity. This notion lies at the heart of ancient Greek thinking on theodicy, inheritance and privilege, the meaning of suffering, the links between wealth and morality, individual responsibility, the bonds that unite generations and the grand movements of history. From Homer to Proclus, it played a major role in some of the most critical and pressing reflections of Greek culture on divinity, society and knowledge. The burning modern preoccupation with collective responsibility across generations has a long, deep antecedent in classical Greek literature and its reception. (Gagne)
Why do we even endorse our belief in ancestral fault?
Probably because it appeals individually and collectively as an explanation for misfortune as punishment. Perhaps it gives meaning to adversity -- vague traces in distant historical records or dramatic tragedies. Besides its social functions, the cultural notion of ancestral fault also has its own coherent and inconsistent poetics -- how the idea is presented and what role it plays as we mine and reconstruct it.
As we write our genealogical story, we turn to the past even as the past returns to us. Facing it squarely, we are in the present, facing the past, while the unseen future, being unknown, is behind us. It depends if we are looking at event time or narrative time -- relative conceptualizations.
Physicist John Wheeler suggested reality grows out of the act of observation, and thus consciousness itself is "participatory." He also considered information the most fundamental building block of reality. He thought the universe should be seen as a self-synthesized information system: a self-excited circuit that is developing through a (closed loop) cycle.
His experiments led to the idea that human observers may not only determine the present, but also may influence the past. According to Wheeler, ultimate mutability is the central feature of physics, and the meaning of reality can only be established if there is a universal knowledge field, that transcends physical past, present and future.
("The Universe as a Cyclic Organized Information System:
John Wheeler’s World Revisited", Dirk K.F. Meijer)
Future Behind, Past In-Front
Time metaphor is a spatial (spatio-temporal) language. Marshall McLuhan said, "We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future." He reiterated the ancient Greek perspective. They stood in the present moment with the past receding away from them back toward the Golden Age as their point of reference, rather than the future. So, sequence is a relative position along a path -- a relationship of figure to Ground (the moment of utterance). Ego may play the role of Ground in directionality, but it is the directionless unconscious that is the primordial Ground.
What Is Unconscious Remains Timeless
In ancient Greece, Plato and Aristotle agreed that the past is eternal. Ancestral fault included inherited guilt and divine punishment. The Greek word for 'revealed' actually means 'reappear,' like rivers and streams that flow underground and spring forth again. The course remains invisible until it reappears to sight.
Only the ideology of progress flipped the magnetic poles of our psyches. The past is no reliable guide to a future that is the main locus of our attention. We need to rethink how we construct our stories of duration and how we conceive our relationship to it. Stories anchor the present and seem to give our preferred futures some substance and pull.
Time doesn't only belong to events, because psychological time is open and all events are real. In the epistemic modality, there is no past or future but possibility, necessity, and evidentiality. Only our expression of past tense creates evidential markers.
Temporality is a modality. What time we are present in depends on which world we are in. That is, in the genealogical domain our world is now as it was in 50 BCE, a product of linguistic relativity and tenseless language. In Kabbalah, “time” is a paradox and an illusion. Both the future and the past are recognized to be simultaneously present.
This purposefully fissured quality opens us to the heights and depths of our being, light and dark, accessible and opaque, concrete and abstract. Such stories may be drizzled in sadness and despair, while others remain profoundly unconscious until we find and walk through the threshold of our genealogy.
Our own family tree and our unique descent from the roots of mankind reveals the instinct, opinion, and knowledge of original thought. Rational comes from 'ratio' - from relationship. The bones of our mother are the stones of the Earth. The body of the Earth and her water is our water, our body, as primordial as it ever was.
tree of peace josephine wall
AN ECOLOGY OF SOULS
The Aesthetic Paradigm in Genealogy
“...it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world
are eternally justified...” --F. Nietzsche, 1872
"I am convinced that there is only one basic Order - which appears as logical or mathematical to our cognitive intuition, aesthetic to our emotional intuition, and moral to the volitional or conative. And it is essentially numinous."
--Sir Cyril Burt
"The Spirit speaks in a poetic way, but the man understands it literally. ...The richest understanding of the sacred becomes available when the metaphorical and the literal are brought together without denying either kind of truth..."
--Gregory Bateson
"The impact of an archetype, whether it takes the form of immediate experience or is expressed through the spoken word, stirs us because it summons up a voice that is stronger than our own. Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; he enthralls and overpowers, while at the same time he lifts the idea he is seeking to express out of the occasional and the transitory into the realm of the ever-enduring. He transmutes our personal destiny into the destiny of mankind, and evokes in us all those beneficent forces that ever and anon have enabled humanity to find a refuge from every peril and to outlive the longest night. That is the secret of great art, and its effect upon us."
(C. G. Jung, On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry; CW, Vol. 15)
The Aesthetic Paradigm in Genealogy
“...it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world
are eternally justified...” --F. Nietzsche, 1872
"I am convinced that there is only one basic Order - which appears as logical or mathematical to our cognitive intuition, aesthetic to our emotional intuition, and moral to the volitional or conative. And it is essentially numinous."
--Sir Cyril Burt
"The Spirit speaks in a poetic way, but the man understands it literally. ...The richest understanding of the sacred becomes available when the metaphorical and the literal are brought together without denying either kind of truth..."
--Gregory Bateson
"The impact of an archetype, whether it takes the form of immediate experience or is expressed through the spoken word, stirs us because it summons up a voice that is stronger than our own. Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; he enthralls and overpowers, while at the same time he lifts the idea he is seeking to express out of the occasional and the transitory into the realm of the ever-enduring. He transmutes our personal destiny into the destiny of mankind, and evokes in us all those beneficent forces that ever and anon have enabled humanity to find a refuge from every peril and to outlive the longest night. That is the secret of great art, and its effect upon us."
(C. G. Jung, On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry; CW, Vol. 15)
TRUEBORN
Archetypal Aesthetics in Genealogy
"I am. Lo, I am alive"
Symbols are the currency of consciousness.
Henry Stapp calls consciousness "the felt quality of the manipulating actions of these symbols upon one another." Symbols refer to reality, and the anthropomorphizing, personification and projection of aspects of ourselves onto reality. Misunderstood, symbols are abstract ideas that enslave our minds.
Symbolism comes from trying to relate ourselves to reality, self-knowledge, and nature to understand ourselves and reality. First is reality. Second is knowledge from perception. Third are symbols of that knowledge from reality.
General human symbols:
Father, mother, grandfather, grandmother, son, daughter, sister, brother, child, wise old man, magician, king, queen, prince, princess, knight, teacher; the human heart, the human hand, the eye, the egg. Birth, growth, marriage, death and rebirth, rejuvenation, or resurrection. The real purpose of religious ceremonial is to revivify.
"You may have, say, a religious attitude, which means an attitude of great totality, so that you receive the next leaf that falls from the tree as a message from God, and it works." (Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 919.)
"Good and bad must always be united first if the symbol is to be created.
The symbol can neither be thought up nor found; it becomes.
Its becoming is like the becoming of human life in the womb.
Pregnancy comes about through voluntary copulation.
It goes on through willing attention.
But if the depths have conceived, then the symbol grows out of itself
and is born from the mind, as befits a God."
~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 311.
Archetypal Aesthetics in Genealogy
"I am. Lo, I am alive"
Symbols are the currency of consciousness.
Henry Stapp calls consciousness "the felt quality of the manipulating actions of these symbols upon one another." Symbols refer to reality, and the anthropomorphizing, personification and projection of aspects of ourselves onto reality. Misunderstood, symbols are abstract ideas that enslave our minds.
Symbolism comes from trying to relate ourselves to reality, self-knowledge, and nature to understand ourselves and reality. First is reality. Second is knowledge from perception. Third are symbols of that knowledge from reality.
General human symbols:
Father, mother, grandfather, grandmother, son, daughter, sister, brother, child, wise old man, magician, king, queen, prince, princess, knight, teacher; the human heart, the human hand, the eye, the egg. Birth, growth, marriage, death and rebirth, rejuvenation, or resurrection. The real purpose of religious ceremonial is to revivify.
"You may have, say, a religious attitude, which means an attitude of great totality, so that you receive the next leaf that falls from the tree as a message from God, and it works." (Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 919.)
"Good and bad must always be united first if the symbol is to be created.
The symbol can neither be thought up nor found; it becomes.
Its becoming is like the becoming of human life in the womb.
Pregnancy comes about through voluntary copulation.
It goes on through willing attention.
But if the depths have conceived, then the symbol grows out of itself
and is born from the mind, as befits a God."
~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 311.
DEPTH GENEALOGY
"From a barren list of names we learn who were the fathers or mothers, or more distant progenitors, of the select few, who are able to trace what is called their descent from antiquity." (Smollett, Tobias (1798).)
"Hypothesis: in a sharp crisis, that bears in some way on species survival,
an individual may spontaneously merge with his ancestors AND descendants
and become, for a time, a single amplified entity." --Ken Thomas
"Go to bed. Think of your problem. See what you dream.
Perhaps the Great Man, the 2,000,000-year-old man, will speak...
If you are not interested in your own fate, the unconscious is.
There is a mountain of symbolism. ...
The Great Man is something that reacts.
Analysis is a long discussion with the Great Man--
an unintelligent attempt to understand him.
It, the Great Man, can at one stroke put an entirely different face
on the thing — or anything can happen.
In that way you learn about the peculiar intelligence of the background;
you learn the nature of the Great Man.
You learn about yourself against the Great Man—against his postulates.
This is the way through things, things that look desperate and unanswerable.
The unconscious gives you that peculiar twist that makes the way possible.
The way is ineffable.
One needs faith, courage, and no end of honesty and patience.
You have added things you didn't dream of--
a new aspect of yourself and of the world.
If you are dishonest, you are nothing for your unconscious.
This you cannot regulate, or it would be misused.
It is not a conviction, not an assumption.
It is a Presence. It is a fact. It is there. ...
You have got to accept what the unconscious produces,
and you have to understand its language.
It is Nature, and it has to be translated into human forms."
(Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 359-364)
Depth Perception
Today's world is complex. We may be disheartened by the current state of the world, including nasty politics, signs of eco-collapse, and relentless culture wars. Genealogy can be part of the re-enchantment of our world, an oasis or refuge honoring the heart and soul of our family's living emotional memory.
Genealogy is a natural and cultural artifact. A genealogy is a record of the descent of a person or group from an ancestor. Death fascinates us, and probably always has. It is a sniper that can strike anywhere, anytime and constantly informs us of our mortality. The oldest extant epic, Gilgamesh, directly addresses the question of why death exists and the yearning for immortality.
In our family tree our 'depth perception' refers to how many generations are known to us, and how keenly we perceive the essence of each of their lives (face recognition) in our family history. The self emerges from seed fulfilling character and calling in our identity -- the innate genius of creativity and sublimity.
Living in touch with what our ancestors symbolize in the emotional language of the unconscious roots us in a far greater whole. The ancestors are an untapped potential to illuminate the perceptual/cognitive processes that underlie archetypal aesthetic experiences and complexity.
In genealogy we engage the unconscious and tend the living image. Our hunger is for connection, not more food, money, or status. When we know our ancestors we live in unbroken continuity with the past. This is grounding down to the molecular level.
Ideally, depth connections throughout deep time might help us to overcome stumbling blocks, move through loss, find deeper meaning and interpersonal connection, and function at our optimal potential. We break through ancient walls, listening to the archaic hum of the ancestors, what their souls are saying, that reminds us of the collective buzzing of bees.
Joseph Cambray, Provost of Pacifica, said, “So much of human suffering is very intimately tied up with non-conscious levels that it’s hard to imagine we could ameliorate symptoms without a depth perspective.”
Jung's "Great Man" can also appear as the Great woman -- Anima Mundi, the ancient worldview. It is the hermaphroditic fusion of all our ancestry into an omnipotent archetypal figure of soul and spirit.
Throughout much of human history, ancestors were revered and frequently visited in caves and barrows. People sat in these natural resonant echo chambers, chanting and drumming hypnotically and opening their altered psyches to the possibility of communication with the Beyond – voices of eternity.
People died so young, this youthful population needed shamanic guidance, needed primal wisdom. We are learning to understand that our immature culture can benefit by rooting ourselves in deep time and the wisdom of eternity. We still dream at night of connecting somehow with our departed loved ones. We are unconsciously entangled with our ancestral soul, but psychically dissociated.
Chopping Wood & Carrying Cosmic Water
Water is the great symbol of the primordial unconscious. And we are its water-bearers. We carry the ancestral psyche much like the bloodline. The dragon or serpent is another symbol of the universal unconscious, the psychic field, and renewal. It impregnates itself by biting its own tail. The depths conceive.
A feminine symbol, water also signifies emotions or psychic energy, fertility, growth, creative potential, new life, or healing. An integrative approach includes memory reconsolidation to maintain, strengthen, modify and stabilize memories of the unconscious and long-term memory. Our ancestors remain amnesiac agents as long as we are unconscious of them as a kinship system.
Psychologically, water means spirit that has become unconscious. The way of the soul leads to the water, to the dark mirror, the world of invisible perception, that reposes at its bottom. This water is no figure of speech, but a living symbol of the dark psyche. We descend into our depths, into that well of souls and perhaps return with a bit of its healing bounty.
The Tree, watered by the unconscious roots, is the great symbol of humanity. In the tree metaphor, these root systems that lie far beneath the surface of the Earth, which are just as extensive as the trunks and branches we have growing in plain view. We don't just look at the tree superficially, but examine its entire structure — perhaps, a metaphorical "chopping wood" -- including belief systems and subconscious patterns of thinking formed from birth.
We all "carry water" for the divine in our manifest embodiment -- not only in the fluids of our bodies, but the fluidity of the psyche and our epigenetic memories. But how many of us incorporate the numinous realms of the psyche—meaning the unconscious, spiritual beliefs, dream life, the imagination, our connection to mystery, myth, archetype and the natural world?
How do we function in society, what bonds us to one another, what causes our psychoses and neuroses, and what helps us to individuate and become the people we were meant to be? The Depth Approach includes Dual Process Theory and The Frame Problem, and some consequences for our research.
Dual Process Theory recognizes that the human mind has two disparate modes of thinking - Subconscious Intuitive Understanding on one hand and Conscious Logical Reasoning on the other. The depth perspective "frame" in this case is provided by genealogy. There is an aesthetic harmony to the layout of our genealogical displays, or grids, which comes in a variety of forms.
Combined Perspectives
Psychological life is aesthetic life. Aesthetics is an artistic philosophy. It makes us permeable to the image, mobilizes us internally and enables imaginative activity through a form of observance.
Imagery evokes a perceptual response -- an aesthetic response, a participatory way of knowing, re-membering, and reconnecting with soul and identity. In the phenomenological aesthetic paradigm, Hillman asserts that images derive autonomy and operate according to their own will, similar to gods.
The nature of Beauty is an immediate revelation of things as they are: unity, line, rhythm, tension, elegance -- communion of the soul with the mysteries of inner and outer world -- the naked awareness of divine self-revelation in a community of living presence. Traces of ancient art and adornment show aesthetics -- the felt-sense of form and beauty -- is inherent in the primal mind.
For example, we can be so caught up by beauty that everything stops in aesthetic arrest -- a seizure by the tremendum. We reflexively gasp for air in awe and wonder that precedes any thoughts or cognitive framing. "I breath, therefore I perceive." Aesthetics is a method of externalizing something of the inner quality of life, fusing the transcendent with the immanent, the personal with the impersonal, the inner with the outer.
Genealogy is an aesthetic discipline. Our ancestral practice has an inherently aesthetic base; we perceive them through our aesthetic sensibilities. We instinctually long for beauty; it affects the soul and can heal or restore our psychological senses. Aesthetics reveals spiritual and psychological significance. The depths of something helps us feel and make sense of our experiences.
Deep Primal Engagement
Ancestors appear as self-presenting, expressive forms that speak to us. We imbibe and re-dignify the soul and spirit of our early ancestors across time and place. Their communion with us asserts the fundamental continuity of our primal consciousness, imbued with the natural force of the mythic by our faithful attention.
The image remains as the face of things as they are when all else perishes -- a psychological aesthetic with patterns of meaning. This isn't formal aesthetics but an opportunity to "see through" to greater significance, to distinguish something from the shifting quality of the vortex of morphing imagery.
James Hillman said, “Aesthetics in this primordial sense involves sensing the things of the world in their particularity and being affected by the many ways things present themselves.” Bioevolutionary aesthetics includes the cognitive spectrum of sensation, perception, conceptualization, and thought as well as the basic emotions, pain, and sexuality.
Aesthetic space makes way for the beauty that presents itself to us. We pause, take a moment to notice and appreciate the particulars of some thing, and enter aesthetic space, increasing our awareness of larger patterns of purpose. Our aesthetic response may express as transformation.
Conversely, aesthetic frustration or oppression affects our bodily feeling, our emotional well-being, and we must ward ourselves from their influence--the despair they produce, and the exhaustion, outrage, repulsion, insult, if not assault, and a heightened irritability.
We deny our aesthetic responses by closing down our senses, our perceptions; we anesthetize ourselves -- we just go numb as in anesthesia. But ugliness, pain, or disgust can also jar us awake with a conscious shock, calling our attention to soul.
"If the aesthetic is seen in contrast to the anaesthetic - or numbness, it can be understood more correctly as ‘enlivened being'. Reclaiming the aesthetic in this way enables us to understand the link between the aesthetic and responsibility: response-ability not as a moral imperative, but as the ability to respond." (Shelley Sacks, UN Summit on Culture and Development, Stockholm 1998)
We can cultivate a capacity to open ourselves to 'the other' in all its forms. We bring our own sense of deep aesthetics to ancestral relationships, knowing that each of our living cells carries the experience of billions of years of experimentation by its ancestors. We can have an aesthetic appreciation of each life.
About 1/3 - 1/2 of each of the psychological types seem to enjoy genealogy. The 'analysts' (Intuitive and Thinking) enjoy a rigorous, fact-based treasure hunt through their ancestry. The visionary 'diplomats' (intuitive and feeling) are curious, imaginative, on the lookout for secrets, hidden meanings and new possibilities.
Conservative 'sentinels' (observant and judging) like to preserve order and security, are often focus on the bonds of family and the importance of history. Goal-oriented 'explorers' (observing and prospecting) tend to stick to the facts and have practical applications in the future - the past and the present are prologue.
Genealogical Heritage
An ancestor or forebear is a parent or (recursively) the parent of an ancestor (i.e., a grandparent, great-grandparent, great-great-grandparent, and so forth). Ancestor is "any person from whom one is descended. In law the person from whom an estate has been inherited."
Direct-line research refers to genealogy research focused on one's direct-line ancestors. We follow both surnames at each generation (i.e. paternal and maternal lines), back as far as records allow. Family history, rather than just genealogy, includes extended families (biological marital, sociological) that often interact significantly with our own lines.
When our genealogy expresses more than one line of descent from a given ancestor, then it exhibits segmentation or branching. This is a "segmented genealogy." A segmented genealogy starts with a single parent and shows the relationship of children to each other. This kind of genealogy will have both a horizontal and vertical element to it.
If we go back 300 years, we have roughly 3,000 ancestors. Going back a thousand years results theoretically in billions of ancestors, more people than ever lived on the face of the earth! In reality, the same ancestors will show up in multiple places in your family tree as you have multiple lines of descent from many of these people.
"Linear genealogy" expresses only one line of descent, linking the genealogy to an older ancestor or group. Both segmented and linear genealogies exhibit depth (number of generations) and a sort of "cartography" of the unconscious. That map may lead us toward our greatest possible treasure–our inner gold -- the knowledge in our bones.
Maybe we also find a bit of fool's gold along the way. Family stories provide wonderful insights into the lives of our ancestors. However, not all family stories are true. Many such stories are fictional. Yet, even the stories that are either entirely or part fiction may contain clues to facts. Good genealogical practice requires that we admit the fiction to mine for its nuggets of truth.
In the domestic sphere, linear genealogy relates individuals to other individuals and kinship groups. They also function in the political and legal sphere to legitimate rulers, express progress, and support claims to recognition, status or power.
Some lines pass through or end (or begin) in legends or mythic figures. Already in the fifth century, the Macedonian kings claimed descent from Perdiccas, who descended from Temenos, a king of Argos; and he was great-grandchild of Hyllus, the son of Heracles.
Woden is consistently placed at nine removes from the founder of a dynasty. But is that the god, or Odin the man? In the 13th century, the Icelandic historian Snorri Sturluson wrote that Odin came to worshiped as a god, but he was originally a famous warrior who led his people out of Troy and into Scandinavia. Or was he?
In the 13th century, the Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus wrote that Odin was a sorcerer from Byzantium. The other gods there stripped Odin of his rank and power, then banished him. He fooled the people of Scandinavia into worshiping him as a god. The old kings of Wessex and Mercia claimed him as ancestor.
Paul Henri Mallet (1730-1807) might have been the first to formulate explicitly the idea that the historical Odin was a man named Sigge Fridulfsson. He says, "His true name was Sigge, son of Fridulph; but he assumed that of Odin, who was the Supreme God among the Scythians." Mallet's version claims, Sigge (also known as Odin) was an ally of Mithradates, a Persian king defeated by the Romans. (Mallet, Northern Antiquities, 1770, 1809).
On the other hand, as many as 3 million men worldwide may be descendants of the Irish warlord, Niall of the Nine Hostages, who was who was the Irish “High King” at Tara, the ancient center of Ireland from A.D. 379 to A.D. 405. A 2003 study found that 8 percent of all Mongolian males are the descendants of Genghis Khan, sharing his Y chromosome. The Khan family may have as many as 16 million descendants in Asia today.
Even metaphorically, the most prestigious of all possible ancestry is descent from divinity itself. Descent from antiquity (DFA) is the project of establishing a well-researched, generation-by-generation descent of living persons from people living in antiquity. It is an ultimate challenge in genealogy. No prospective DFA is accepted at this time.
Irish legends and subsequently Scottish lines, claim royal descent from Milesius, King of Spain, husband of Scota, Princess of Egypt. The Welsh also have legends, which claim descent from Noah, while Charlemagne, the father of all European nobility, claims descent from Adam. Sometimes totems represent descent from Dragons, Lions, Eagles, or Serpents.
Hellenistic dynasties, such as the Ptolemies, claimed descent from gods and legendary heroes. In the Middle Ages, major royal dynasties of Europe sponsored compilations claiming their descent from Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, in particular the rulers of Troy. As propaganda, these claims glorified a royal patron by trumpeting the antiquity and nobility of his ancestry.
These descent lines included both mythical figures and outright fiction, much of which is still widely perpetuated today. The odds of royal ancestry are overwhelming. Virtually all people with European ancestry are descended from the usual royal suspects of 1000+ years ago.
Seeing ourselves in our archetypal nature helps us recognize our timeless parts and own our gifts. Having a mythic sensibility about ourselves offers a clue to how we might be unconsciously acting out archetypal patterns.
Apparently conflicting genealogies with different functions (and often without kinship terms) emerge from the religious or cultic sphere. That is, genealogies become fluid in accuracy according to their function. No generalizations are possible for a historiographic value of such genealogies with fragmentations and gaps.
For example, Sumerian and Akkadian elements were fused into Hellenistic and biblical narrative with questionable linkages, significant differences, and background stories. Of the nine descendants of Adam, only Enoch is described with particulars from traditions now lost to us (Genesis Apocryphon) though we know they are related to Mesopotamian "fish-shaped sages" and kings lists.
The exact form of such ancient determinative lines in royal or religious genealogies is not known, but historically conflated, confabulated, and altered by compilers at various times for various reasons. Jung suggested we "think diligently" about the images the ancients have left us, as they also intimate what is to come.
Depth is the most important feature of linear genealogy. That depth expresses the memories of the people who preserve it in practice, relating us to deep time, distance, and transcendence.
But, true nobility springs from the soul and spirit, rather than any genetic trail.
"From a barren list of names we learn who were the fathers or mothers, or more distant progenitors, of the select few, who are able to trace what is called their descent from antiquity." (Smollett, Tobias (1798).)
"Hypothesis: in a sharp crisis, that bears in some way on species survival,
an individual may spontaneously merge with his ancestors AND descendants
and become, for a time, a single amplified entity." --Ken Thomas
"Go to bed. Think of your problem. See what you dream.
Perhaps the Great Man, the 2,000,000-year-old man, will speak...
If you are not interested in your own fate, the unconscious is.
There is a mountain of symbolism. ...
The Great Man is something that reacts.
Analysis is a long discussion with the Great Man--
an unintelligent attempt to understand him.
It, the Great Man, can at one stroke put an entirely different face
on the thing — or anything can happen.
In that way you learn about the peculiar intelligence of the background;
you learn the nature of the Great Man.
You learn about yourself against the Great Man—against his postulates.
This is the way through things, things that look desperate and unanswerable.
The unconscious gives you that peculiar twist that makes the way possible.
The way is ineffable.
One needs faith, courage, and no end of honesty and patience.
You have added things you didn't dream of--
a new aspect of yourself and of the world.
If you are dishonest, you are nothing for your unconscious.
This you cannot regulate, or it would be misused.
It is not a conviction, not an assumption.
It is a Presence. It is a fact. It is there. ...
You have got to accept what the unconscious produces,
and you have to understand its language.
It is Nature, and it has to be translated into human forms."
(Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters, Pages 359-364)
Depth Perception
Today's world is complex. We may be disheartened by the current state of the world, including nasty politics, signs of eco-collapse, and relentless culture wars. Genealogy can be part of the re-enchantment of our world, an oasis or refuge honoring the heart and soul of our family's living emotional memory.
Genealogy is a natural and cultural artifact. A genealogy is a record of the descent of a person or group from an ancestor. Death fascinates us, and probably always has. It is a sniper that can strike anywhere, anytime and constantly informs us of our mortality. The oldest extant epic, Gilgamesh, directly addresses the question of why death exists and the yearning for immortality.
In our family tree our 'depth perception' refers to how many generations are known to us, and how keenly we perceive the essence of each of their lives (face recognition) in our family history. The self emerges from seed fulfilling character and calling in our identity -- the innate genius of creativity and sublimity.
Living in touch with what our ancestors symbolize in the emotional language of the unconscious roots us in a far greater whole. The ancestors are an untapped potential to illuminate the perceptual/cognitive processes that underlie archetypal aesthetic experiences and complexity.
In genealogy we engage the unconscious and tend the living image. Our hunger is for connection, not more food, money, or status. When we know our ancestors we live in unbroken continuity with the past. This is grounding down to the molecular level.
Ideally, depth connections throughout deep time might help us to overcome stumbling blocks, move through loss, find deeper meaning and interpersonal connection, and function at our optimal potential. We break through ancient walls, listening to the archaic hum of the ancestors, what their souls are saying, that reminds us of the collective buzzing of bees.
Joseph Cambray, Provost of Pacifica, said, “So much of human suffering is very intimately tied up with non-conscious levels that it’s hard to imagine we could ameliorate symptoms without a depth perspective.”
Jung's "Great Man" can also appear as the Great woman -- Anima Mundi, the ancient worldview. It is the hermaphroditic fusion of all our ancestry into an omnipotent archetypal figure of soul and spirit.
Throughout much of human history, ancestors were revered and frequently visited in caves and barrows. People sat in these natural resonant echo chambers, chanting and drumming hypnotically and opening their altered psyches to the possibility of communication with the Beyond – voices of eternity.
People died so young, this youthful population needed shamanic guidance, needed primal wisdom. We are learning to understand that our immature culture can benefit by rooting ourselves in deep time and the wisdom of eternity. We still dream at night of connecting somehow with our departed loved ones. We are unconsciously entangled with our ancestral soul, but psychically dissociated.
Chopping Wood & Carrying Cosmic Water
Water is the great symbol of the primordial unconscious. And we are its water-bearers. We carry the ancestral psyche much like the bloodline. The dragon or serpent is another symbol of the universal unconscious, the psychic field, and renewal. It impregnates itself by biting its own tail. The depths conceive.
A feminine symbol, water also signifies emotions or psychic energy, fertility, growth, creative potential, new life, or healing. An integrative approach includes memory reconsolidation to maintain, strengthen, modify and stabilize memories of the unconscious and long-term memory. Our ancestors remain amnesiac agents as long as we are unconscious of them as a kinship system.
Psychologically, water means spirit that has become unconscious. The way of the soul leads to the water, to the dark mirror, the world of invisible perception, that reposes at its bottom. This water is no figure of speech, but a living symbol of the dark psyche. We descend into our depths, into that well of souls and perhaps return with a bit of its healing bounty.
The Tree, watered by the unconscious roots, is the great symbol of humanity. In the tree metaphor, these root systems that lie far beneath the surface of the Earth, which are just as extensive as the trunks and branches we have growing in plain view. We don't just look at the tree superficially, but examine its entire structure — perhaps, a metaphorical "chopping wood" -- including belief systems and subconscious patterns of thinking formed from birth.
We all "carry water" for the divine in our manifest embodiment -- not only in the fluids of our bodies, but the fluidity of the psyche and our epigenetic memories. But how many of us incorporate the numinous realms of the psyche—meaning the unconscious, spiritual beliefs, dream life, the imagination, our connection to mystery, myth, archetype and the natural world?
How do we function in society, what bonds us to one another, what causes our psychoses and neuroses, and what helps us to individuate and become the people we were meant to be? The Depth Approach includes Dual Process Theory and The Frame Problem, and some consequences for our research.
Dual Process Theory recognizes that the human mind has two disparate modes of thinking - Subconscious Intuitive Understanding on one hand and Conscious Logical Reasoning on the other. The depth perspective "frame" in this case is provided by genealogy. There is an aesthetic harmony to the layout of our genealogical displays, or grids, which comes in a variety of forms.
Combined Perspectives
Psychological life is aesthetic life. Aesthetics is an artistic philosophy. It makes us permeable to the image, mobilizes us internally and enables imaginative activity through a form of observance.
Imagery evokes a perceptual response -- an aesthetic response, a participatory way of knowing, re-membering, and reconnecting with soul and identity. In the phenomenological aesthetic paradigm, Hillman asserts that images derive autonomy and operate according to their own will, similar to gods.
The nature of Beauty is an immediate revelation of things as they are: unity, line, rhythm, tension, elegance -- communion of the soul with the mysteries of inner and outer world -- the naked awareness of divine self-revelation in a community of living presence. Traces of ancient art and adornment show aesthetics -- the felt-sense of form and beauty -- is inherent in the primal mind.
For example, we can be so caught up by beauty that everything stops in aesthetic arrest -- a seizure by the tremendum. We reflexively gasp for air in awe and wonder that precedes any thoughts or cognitive framing. "I breath, therefore I perceive." Aesthetics is a method of externalizing something of the inner quality of life, fusing the transcendent with the immanent, the personal with the impersonal, the inner with the outer.
Genealogy is an aesthetic discipline. Our ancestral practice has an inherently aesthetic base; we perceive them through our aesthetic sensibilities. We instinctually long for beauty; it affects the soul and can heal or restore our psychological senses. Aesthetics reveals spiritual and psychological significance. The depths of something helps us feel and make sense of our experiences.
Deep Primal Engagement
Ancestors appear as self-presenting, expressive forms that speak to us. We imbibe and re-dignify the soul and spirit of our early ancestors across time and place. Their communion with us asserts the fundamental continuity of our primal consciousness, imbued with the natural force of the mythic by our faithful attention.
The image remains as the face of things as they are when all else perishes -- a psychological aesthetic with patterns of meaning. This isn't formal aesthetics but an opportunity to "see through" to greater significance, to distinguish something from the shifting quality of the vortex of morphing imagery.
James Hillman said, “Aesthetics in this primordial sense involves sensing the things of the world in their particularity and being affected by the many ways things present themselves.” Bioevolutionary aesthetics includes the cognitive spectrum of sensation, perception, conceptualization, and thought as well as the basic emotions, pain, and sexuality.
Aesthetic space makes way for the beauty that presents itself to us. We pause, take a moment to notice and appreciate the particulars of some thing, and enter aesthetic space, increasing our awareness of larger patterns of purpose. Our aesthetic response may express as transformation.
Conversely, aesthetic frustration or oppression affects our bodily feeling, our emotional well-being, and we must ward ourselves from their influence--the despair they produce, and the exhaustion, outrage, repulsion, insult, if not assault, and a heightened irritability.
We deny our aesthetic responses by closing down our senses, our perceptions; we anesthetize ourselves -- we just go numb as in anesthesia. But ugliness, pain, or disgust can also jar us awake with a conscious shock, calling our attention to soul.
"If the aesthetic is seen in contrast to the anaesthetic - or numbness, it can be understood more correctly as ‘enlivened being'. Reclaiming the aesthetic in this way enables us to understand the link between the aesthetic and responsibility: response-ability not as a moral imperative, but as the ability to respond." (Shelley Sacks, UN Summit on Culture and Development, Stockholm 1998)
We can cultivate a capacity to open ourselves to 'the other' in all its forms. We bring our own sense of deep aesthetics to ancestral relationships, knowing that each of our living cells carries the experience of billions of years of experimentation by its ancestors. We can have an aesthetic appreciation of each life.
About 1/3 - 1/2 of each of the psychological types seem to enjoy genealogy. The 'analysts' (Intuitive and Thinking) enjoy a rigorous, fact-based treasure hunt through their ancestry. The visionary 'diplomats' (intuitive and feeling) are curious, imaginative, on the lookout for secrets, hidden meanings and new possibilities.
Conservative 'sentinels' (observant and judging) like to preserve order and security, are often focus on the bonds of family and the importance of history. Goal-oriented 'explorers' (observing and prospecting) tend to stick to the facts and have practical applications in the future - the past and the present are prologue.
Genealogical Heritage
An ancestor or forebear is a parent or (recursively) the parent of an ancestor (i.e., a grandparent, great-grandparent, great-great-grandparent, and so forth). Ancestor is "any person from whom one is descended. In law the person from whom an estate has been inherited."
Direct-line research refers to genealogy research focused on one's direct-line ancestors. We follow both surnames at each generation (i.e. paternal and maternal lines), back as far as records allow. Family history, rather than just genealogy, includes extended families (biological marital, sociological) that often interact significantly with our own lines.
When our genealogy expresses more than one line of descent from a given ancestor, then it exhibits segmentation or branching. This is a "segmented genealogy." A segmented genealogy starts with a single parent and shows the relationship of children to each other. This kind of genealogy will have both a horizontal and vertical element to it.
If we go back 300 years, we have roughly 3,000 ancestors. Going back a thousand years results theoretically in billions of ancestors, more people than ever lived on the face of the earth! In reality, the same ancestors will show up in multiple places in your family tree as you have multiple lines of descent from many of these people.
"Linear genealogy" expresses only one line of descent, linking the genealogy to an older ancestor or group. Both segmented and linear genealogies exhibit depth (number of generations) and a sort of "cartography" of the unconscious. That map may lead us toward our greatest possible treasure–our inner gold -- the knowledge in our bones.
Maybe we also find a bit of fool's gold along the way. Family stories provide wonderful insights into the lives of our ancestors. However, not all family stories are true. Many such stories are fictional. Yet, even the stories that are either entirely or part fiction may contain clues to facts. Good genealogical practice requires that we admit the fiction to mine for its nuggets of truth.
In the domestic sphere, linear genealogy relates individuals to other individuals and kinship groups. They also function in the political and legal sphere to legitimate rulers, express progress, and support claims to recognition, status or power.
Some lines pass through or end (or begin) in legends or mythic figures. Already in the fifth century, the Macedonian kings claimed descent from Perdiccas, who descended from Temenos, a king of Argos; and he was great-grandchild of Hyllus, the son of Heracles.
Woden is consistently placed at nine removes from the founder of a dynasty. But is that the god, or Odin the man? In the 13th century, the Icelandic historian Snorri Sturluson wrote that Odin came to worshiped as a god, but he was originally a famous warrior who led his people out of Troy and into Scandinavia. Or was he?
In the 13th century, the Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus wrote that Odin was a sorcerer from Byzantium. The other gods there stripped Odin of his rank and power, then banished him. He fooled the people of Scandinavia into worshiping him as a god. The old kings of Wessex and Mercia claimed him as ancestor.
Paul Henri Mallet (1730-1807) might have been the first to formulate explicitly the idea that the historical Odin was a man named Sigge Fridulfsson. He says, "His true name was Sigge, son of Fridulph; but he assumed that of Odin, who was the Supreme God among the Scythians." Mallet's version claims, Sigge (also known as Odin) was an ally of Mithradates, a Persian king defeated by the Romans. (Mallet, Northern Antiquities, 1770, 1809).
On the other hand, as many as 3 million men worldwide may be descendants of the Irish warlord, Niall of the Nine Hostages, who was who was the Irish “High King” at Tara, the ancient center of Ireland from A.D. 379 to A.D. 405. A 2003 study found that 8 percent of all Mongolian males are the descendants of Genghis Khan, sharing his Y chromosome. The Khan family may have as many as 16 million descendants in Asia today.
Even metaphorically, the most prestigious of all possible ancestry is descent from divinity itself. Descent from antiquity (DFA) is the project of establishing a well-researched, generation-by-generation descent of living persons from people living in antiquity. It is an ultimate challenge in genealogy. No prospective DFA is accepted at this time.
Irish legends and subsequently Scottish lines, claim royal descent from Milesius, King of Spain, husband of Scota, Princess of Egypt. The Welsh also have legends, which claim descent from Noah, while Charlemagne, the father of all European nobility, claims descent from Adam. Sometimes totems represent descent from Dragons, Lions, Eagles, or Serpents.
Hellenistic dynasties, such as the Ptolemies, claimed descent from gods and legendary heroes. In the Middle Ages, major royal dynasties of Europe sponsored compilations claiming their descent from Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, in particular the rulers of Troy. As propaganda, these claims glorified a royal patron by trumpeting the antiquity and nobility of his ancestry.
These descent lines included both mythical figures and outright fiction, much of which is still widely perpetuated today. The odds of royal ancestry are overwhelming. Virtually all people with European ancestry are descended from the usual royal suspects of 1000+ years ago.
Seeing ourselves in our archetypal nature helps us recognize our timeless parts and own our gifts. Having a mythic sensibility about ourselves offers a clue to how we might be unconsciously acting out archetypal patterns.
Apparently conflicting genealogies with different functions (and often without kinship terms) emerge from the religious or cultic sphere. That is, genealogies become fluid in accuracy according to their function. No generalizations are possible for a historiographic value of such genealogies with fragmentations and gaps.
For example, Sumerian and Akkadian elements were fused into Hellenistic and biblical narrative with questionable linkages, significant differences, and background stories. Of the nine descendants of Adam, only Enoch is described with particulars from traditions now lost to us (Genesis Apocryphon) though we know they are related to Mesopotamian "fish-shaped sages" and kings lists.
The exact form of such ancient determinative lines in royal or religious genealogies is not known, but historically conflated, confabulated, and altered by compilers at various times for various reasons. Jung suggested we "think diligently" about the images the ancients have left us, as they also intimate what is to come.
Depth is the most important feature of linear genealogy. That depth expresses the memories of the people who preserve it in practice, relating us to deep time, distance, and transcendence.
But, true nobility springs from the soul and spirit, rather than any genetic trail.
Manifest of Ship "Planter"