Heritage Quest for Buried Secrets
& The Holy Grail of the Unconscious
"Where Your Loyalty Lies"
CHAIN OF GENERATIONS
Infinite Regress
Only a Jungian approach to traditional genealogy keeps the historic/mythic gestalt of The World Tree alive as a symbol of wholeness -- a holistic resonant field pattern. According to Jung, trees are a symbolic reference to the self, so family tree is self-defining. As well as our lineage, our ancestors also form a vast symbol chain.
The symbolic function is beyond innate impulse and ideological bias. Through introversion, we are fertilized, inspired, regenerated, and reborn. Self-incubation, self-castigation, and introversion are closely related ideas. Immersion in oneself (introversion) is a penetration into the unconscious, the imaginal world of psyche.
The World Tree is the Axis Mundi of genealogy, a worldwide database of genealogical connectivity. At this point travel and correspondence is made between higher and lower realms. Communication from lower realms may ascend to higher ones and blessings from higher realms may descend to lower ones and be disseminated to all. The spot functions as the omphalos (navel), the world's point of beginning.
The earliest mythologies are of the World-Tree, or Tree of Life. Aspects of the same image, sacred trees are the most common motif from the ancient world. The Tree connects our psychophysical aspects from sub-nuclear to macrocosmic scales. The trunk is the axis of psychic growth that unites Heaven and Earth, spirit and matter.
The major branch points on our shared paternal lineage trace back through genealogy, history, antiquity, and ancient anthropology through myth to reach our early hominid ancestors. The branches on the paternal tree are haplogroups. SNP markers on the Y-Chromosome define them. Deep ancestry research depends on recognizing and analyzing patterns in Y-STR marker values for discovering Y-SNPs.
The serpents of our family lines are entwined like Celtic knots in and around the World Tree. Celtic snakes symbolize the notion of rebirth. They still promise us primordial Knowledge -- unverified personal gnosis. Jung said, "the serpent is the earthly essence of man of which he is not conscious. Its character changes according to peoples and lands, since it is the mystery that flows to him from the nourishing earth-mother."
The healer traversing the axis mundi to bring back knowledge from the other world is a common shamanic concept. Anyone or anything suspended on the axis between heaven and earth becomes a repository of potential knowledge. The Tree is the means of communication with spiritual realms. It is our Tree of Voices -- Tree of Souls. Remembering is a noble and necessary act. The call of memory, the call to memory, reaches us from the very dawn of history.
On the global-level, spiritual experiences have been shown to buffer against the negative effects of stress on well-being for older adults. Spiritual experience potentially moderates the deleterious impact of a given day’s perceived stress on that day’s positive and negative affect. Thus, it relates to self-care, well being, and healing. Sometimes physical pain is a substitute for psychic pain. Healing is not always physical: it can occur in the emotional, mental and spiritual life, moderating immunity and neurochemistry.
Genealogy contains a spiritual healing potential, the living sap of the Tree, a manifestation of the sacred. It is a Grail banquet of cultures, customs and symbolism. We see in many manuscripts that wings are used to mark progress or advancement of an alchemical solution toward perfection. Crowns mark the final stage of a spirit or solution: perfection, completion, ascension. The spirit, by death or enlightenment, will produce the pure, perfected, incorruptible spirit. In alchemical terms, the incorruptible body is the potential of the philosopher's stone
Some branches of the World Tree are pruned (extinct). Others still thrive. Data entry is not fun, but it makes information analysis and pattern recognition much easier. By engaging in genealogy we create a sacred space, a sacred center. There is a deep ecology to the flow of relationships. Our return to the womb of the Mothers is a creative regression. Experientially it manifests within us as a spiritualizing instinct, a recursive "bending back" toward the primordial and divine.
We link backward to the bond that transcends the limitations of the physical form. Consciousness turns back on itself, reiterating each level of organization, de-structuring each strata as it dives deeper toward the unconditioned, formless beginning, or "unborn" state -- the Void of the Cosmic Womb. In essence, we re-enter the womb as we are initiated in the mysteries of the psyche. We re-conceive our primal self image, healed by communion with the creative Source - - our own Royal Wedding.
Religious myths give us the security and inner strength not to be crushed by the monstrousness of the universe. "Belief is no adequate substitute for inner experience, and where this is absent even a strong faith which came miraculously as a gift of grace may depart equally miraculously. People call faith the true religious experience, but they do not stop to consider that actually it is a secondary phenomenon arising form the fact that something happened to us in the first place which instilled pistis into us — that is, trust and loyalty." --Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self," CW vol. 10, par. 521
In the Red Book, Jung said this is the way:
“An opus is needed, that one can squander decades on, and do it out of necessity. I must catch up with a piece of the Middle Ages-within myself. We have only finished the Middle Ages of-others. I must begin early, in that period when the hermits died out. Asceticism, inquisition, torture are close at hand and impose themselves. The barbarian requires barbaric means of education. My I, you are a barbarian. I want to live with you, therefore I will carry you through an utterly medieval Hell, until you are capable of making living with you bearable. You should be the vessel and womb of life, therefore I shall purify you.
The touchstone is being alone with oneself."
Genealogy can be seen as a way of honoring the ancestors with a ritual from ancient times when lists of god-kings described the natural order of things. The only way to revision and interact with it as a gestalt matrix includes the fictional, legendary, and mythological lines of this traditional World Tree. It is but one way to acknowledge our divinity, nobility, and humanity. Genealogy is a sure path to the heart. We can "gather our ancestors" before we are gathered unto them.
Mythology lost its role of explaining the forces of nature. But its role of delivering insights into the hidden, deep endeavors and fears of any human seems more alive than ever. It is a Mystery how our ancestors pass memories to us across the generations. They relate us to our ontological questions about space, time, and eternity, the deep structure of the human mind and perception, life and death -- what exists and what doesn't. Time concerns the existential nature of things -- temporal relationships.
The mythology of our ancestors is as important as their cosmology. We can explore the mystic in ourselves and in our ancestors. Our worldview is the root of our identity and relationship to Nature and our own deep nature. Researching the cosmologies of our direct ancestors in the historical era provides a quick path into dream shamanism, as these ways are still half-remembered. Our common destiny lies beyond any worldview.
"You could study the ancestors, but without a deep feeling of communication with them it would be surface learning and surface talking. Once you have gone into yourself and have learned very deeply, appreciate it, and relate to it very well, everything will come very easily." (Ellen White, Nanaimo)
Psyche creates reality every day. We have a mystical connection with our primitive ancestors. The primordial ancestors are still alive within the depths of our psyches and reach out to us with their ancient wisdom. We instinctively behave and feel the same ways as generations of our ancestors have in their lives.
This is also a relationship to the collectivity of the dead; for the unconscious corresponds to the mythic land of the dead, the land of the ancestors. Jung was the first to link the concept of ancestors to unconscious thinking. We learn to remember what our soul already knows. Our personality is literally expressed through our ancestors.
The gods and goddesses have 'gone to seed', and we are that -- their seed, their progeny. As James Hillman says, their minds and powers are living us in poetic moments of fantasy, insight and intuition. Nature, psyche and life are unfolding divinity. We are only cut off from the dead by what we have buried and forgotten. Working with our ancestral connection means connecting to everything around us and how we are placed in the world.
Jung said transpersonal psychic life "is the mind of our ancient ancestors, the way in which they thought and felt, the way in which they conceived of life and the world, of gods and humans beings. The existence of these historical layers is presumably the source of belief in reincarnation and in memories of past lives” (Jung, 1939, p.24).
In 'Extending the Family' (1985), Hillman says, "With the passing of time a sense of its power grows within one's psyche, like the movements of its skeleton inside one's flesh, which keeps one in servitude to patterns entombed in our closest attitudes and habits. From this interior family we are never free. This service keeps us bonded to the ancestors." Some report a sort of
"calling illness" until they respond to the ancestors calling them to do the work.
Genealogy is the science and art of what is emerging into the collective consciousness in one of the biggest hobbies of our era. It is a vast reclamation and reconstruction of our holographic connections, and certain emotionally toned experiences and images inherited from our ancestors, our spiritual guides. We translate meaning into life.
The entire gestalt of the World Tree is an iconic image -- a multidimensional symbol requiring hermeneutics as much as history for best practice. Genealogy has the problem of only focusing on the ancestors with surviving records, not all your ancestors. Of course, all the expansive aspects of the ancestors leave their shadow traces. With the light comes darkness. Ancestral blessings are not unaccompanied by ancestral curses.
The shadow is transmitted in a million subtle gestures and intonations. As you become aware of them in yourself, you can look back over your shoulder at your ancestors and see where these patterns came from. The family shadow is not the sole answer, but it's a place to do some work. It's a realm that is within our means to influence. When we stop passing the shadow on to the next generation, we spare them and break the chain. They don't pass it on either.
We can cut through the Fog of Lore to the mythic core. Clan ancestors are more than euphemisms. They may well be more than legends, being actual progenitors or composites of the ancient lineage. Some myths may have developed after the destruction of powerful lineages, displays of majesty, culture heroes, and ancestral temples. Royal family ancestor cults probably drew on a number of ancestral lineages. “If I accept the lowest in me, I lower a seed into the ground of Hell. The seed is invisibly small, but the tree of my life grows from it and conjoins the Below with the Above. At both ends there is fire and blazing embers. The Above is fiery and the Below is fiery. Between the unbearable fires grows your life. You hang between these two poles. In an immeasurably frightening movement the stretched hanging welters up and down." ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 300. Lament of the Dead
Differences in ancestral worldviews highlight the problem of synthesis. Conceptual and symbolic frameworks arise in different periods of history. The classical vision is not absent from the modern world; we can argue both transcendence and immanence. Much depends on which century your soul inhabits, metaphorically. The dead are given greater reality by the memory that the living keep alive of them. But they are invoked to participate on important occasions such as births, naming, and marriages.
Our deep polytheistic background has been buried with the ancestors, along with their voices which we can talk to and imagine in posthumous reality. When thinking stops, words slip in. Within our subconscious mind is a history of our ancestors which includes their experiences and emotions. Do the dead cry that they are misunderstood? They are The Watchers. We are always being watched by the ancestral spirits. To be cut off from relationships with one's ancestors is to cease being a whole person. Unconsciously we still think like our distant ancestors.
The symbol is the word that goes out of the mouth, that one does not simply speak, but that rises out of the depths of the self as a word of power and great need and places itself unexpectedly on the tongue. It is an astonishing and perhaps seemingly irrational word, but one recognizes it as a symbol since it is alien to the conscious mind.
If one accepts the symbol, it is as if a door opens leading into a new room whose existence one previously did not know. But if one does not accept the symbol, it is as if one carelessly went past this door; and since this was the only door leading to the inner chambers, one must pass outside into the streets again, exposed to everything external. But the soul suffers great need, since outer freedom is of no use to it. Salvation is a long road that leads through many gates. These gates are symbols. Each new gate is at first invisible; indeed, it seems at first that / it must be created, for it exists only if one has dug up the spring's root, the symbol.
Multigenerational Matrix
Genealogy is a place to pay homage and commune with our ancestors. But if you think you 'know' what a symbol represents because you read it online, think again. Such knowledge must be won through individual work, not collective gleaning. We are called to these encounters by our complexes, that when 'faced' lead to our vocation and bliss. The Ennead were the nine great Osirian gods: Atum, Shu, Tefnut, Geb, Nut, Osiris, Isis, Set, and Nephthys. Our genealogies represent a great psycho-physical Mystery, represented by the gods from the beginning. The realm of the ancestors is the realm of the gods.
Hillman suggests we aspire to be an Ancestor instead of fantasizing about eternal youth. But don't confuse Ancestors with genetic connections or biological offspring, he warns. They might be spiritual ancestors. Ancestors sit at the edge of the tribe and protect us from evil spirits: injustice, sham, hypocrisy, exploitation, destruction of the planet. Ancestors come in many forms, including individuals and ideas that help the tribe continue for seven generations.
"Become an Ancestor", Hillman urges, reminding us that does NOT require biological offsprings or genetic connections. He gives examples of a wide variety of Ancestors, from books to dream figures. He speaks to the dilemma of our society which doesn't know how to handle the misfits in a monoculture dedicated to competitive capitalism. Spirits of the ancestors help us bring individual character out from within ourselves. Soul has its own ancestors, which may not be your own actual, physical ancestors. They are the honorable ancestors in other cultures that we may not recognize in our own society.
Our experiences are added to all the collected experiences of our ancient ancestors. What is eternal is essentially unchanging -- a transcendent kingdom. In Jung's view, our pagan ancestors had a more direct access to this kingdom, which we now reach through dreams, vision, and hermeneutics. Our lines radiate from our center like a primordial sun, reconditioning our perception of time and eternity -- a place from which the psyche is born. Experience ceases as all is One. That Nature of Existence reflects our NOWstalgia.
Regress, Reclaim, Rejuvenate
Your own genealogy contains both personal and collective elements. Infinite Regress is a causal relationship transmitted through an indefinite number of terms in a series, with no term that begins the causal chain. Our ancestral lines fade off into the mists of pre-history. Integration through regression, in the service of transcendence, is a well-tested technique that opens us to the deep unconscious. It hopefully addresses some of the incomplete and unanswered questions left by parents and grandparents and more distant ancestors. Dreams were messages for our ancestors, and can be messages from them for us.
Ancestral revelations often come at synchronous times forming the connective tissue of meaning. We only notice ancestral memories and ideas when they are expressed as instincts, ideas, images and memories, in dreams and imagination. The ancient ancestors are still alive within the deepest ranges of our psyches and reach out to us with their ancient wisdom.
We inherit a sort of knowledge acquired from from our ancestors. We still keep our 'eyes to the skies' as the ancestors did for perhaps more than 50,000 years of pre-history. We experience the circle of life, just like our ancestors did. Like our ancestors we try to understand the world, our position in it, the process of life and death, ad the meaning of relationships. We still acknowledge the great cycles of time and the seasons as our ancestors did. But, that doesn't mean we have to believe everything they did. Many stories are cautionary tales.
We are a collage—a remix—of our ancestors. Jung suggested the idea of "ancestor possession". Certain hereditary fractals become activated under certain current circumstances, allowing the spirit of an ancestor to then "take over" one's actions. We can also project and re-own projections not only to other humans in the present but also to our ancestors from the past. The hero's journey represents the primitive struggle of our ancestors in entering an unknown world of danger, but overcoming the danger and bringing back to the tribe or group some discovery or treasure that benefits everyone.
We go back to move forward. We work backward in time, in order to preserve the Red Thread bloodline. As we do each ancestor becomes younger until they join with their parental lines, and so forth. Like fractals, we are self-similar to a given larger or smaller part of our heritage, even if some lines are broken or uneven. Fractal genealogy can be unravelled and rebuilt, producing an artistic view of the process. You can easily lose hours on 'walkabout' in a by-gone era within your labyrinthine lines. The lines of a labyrinth guide us, as do the experiences of our lives.
& The Holy Grail of the Unconscious
"Where Your Loyalty Lies"
CHAIN OF GENERATIONS
Infinite Regress
Only a Jungian approach to traditional genealogy keeps the historic/mythic gestalt of The World Tree alive as a symbol of wholeness -- a holistic resonant field pattern. According to Jung, trees are a symbolic reference to the self, so family tree is self-defining. As well as our lineage, our ancestors also form a vast symbol chain.
The symbolic function is beyond innate impulse and ideological bias. Through introversion, we are fertilized, inspired, regenerated, and reborn. Self-incubation, self-castigation, and introversion are closely related ideas. Immersion in oneself (introversion) is a penetration into the unconscious, the imaginal world of psyche.
The World Tree is the Axis Mundi of genealogy, a worldwide database of genealogical connectivity. At this point travel and correspondence is made between higher and lower realms. Communication from lower realms may ascend to higher ones and blessings from higher realms may descend to lower ones and be disseminated to all. The spot functions as the omphalos (navel), the world's point of beginning.
The earliest mythologies are of the World-Tree, or Tree of Life. Aspects of the same image, sacred trees are the most common motif from the ancient world. The Tree connects our psychophysical aspects from sub-nuclear to macrocosmic scales. The trunk is the axis of psychic growth that unites Heaven and Earth, spirit and matter.
The major branch points on our shared paternal lineage trace back through genealogy, history, antiquity, and ancient anthropology through myth to reach our early hominid ancestors. The branches on the paternal tree are haplogroups. SNP markers on the Y-Chromosome define them. Deep ancestry research depends on recognizing and analyzing patterns in Y-STR marker values for discovering Y-SNPs.
The serpents of our family lines are entwined like Celtic knots in and around the World Tree. Celtic snakes symbolize the notion of rebirth. They still promise us primordial Knowledge -- unverified personal gnosis. Jung said, "the serpent is the earthly essence of man of which he is not conscious. Its character changes according to peoples and lands, since it is the mystery that flows to him from the nourishing earth-mother."
The healer traversing the axis mundi to bring back knowledge from the other world is a common shamanic concept. Anyone or anything suspended on the axis between heaven and earth becomes a repository of potential knowledge. The Tree is the means of communication with spiritual realms. It is our Tree of Voices -- Tree of Souls. Remembering is a noble and necessary act. The call of memory, the call to memory, reaches us from the very dawn of history.
On the global-level, spiritual experiences have been shown to buffer against the negative effects of stress on well-being for older adults. Spiritual experience potentially moderates the deleterious impact of a given day’s perceived stress on that day’s positive and negative affect. Thus, it relates to self-care, well being, and healing. Sometimes physical pain is a substitute for psychic pain. Healing is not always physical: it can occur in the emotional, mental and spiritual life, moderating immunity and neurochemistry.
Genealogy contains a spiritual healing potential, the living sap of the Tree, a manifestation of the sacred. It is a Grail banquet of cultures, customs and symbolism. We see in many manuscripts that wings are used to mark progress or advancement of an alchemical solution toward perfection. Crowns mark the final stage of a spirit or solution: perfection, completion, ascension. The spirit, by death or enlightenment, will produce the pure, perfected, incorruptible spirit. In alchemical terms, the incorruptible body is the potential of the philosopher's stone
Some branches of the World Tree are pruned (extinct). Others still thrive. Data entry is not fun, but it makes information analysis and pattern recognition much easier. By engaging in genealogy we create a sacred space, a sacred center. There is a deep ecology to the flow of relationships. Our return to the womb of the Mothers is a creative regression. Experientially it manifests within us as a spiritualizing instinct, a recursive "bending back" toward the primordial and divine.
We link backward to the bond that transcends the limitations of the physical form. Consciousness turns back on itself, reiterating each level of organization, de-structuring each strata as it dives deeper toward the unconditioned, formless beginning, or "unborn" state -- the Void of the Cosmic Womb. In essence, we re-enter the womb as we are initiated in the mysteries of the psyche. We re-conceive our primal self image, healed by communion with the creative Source - - our own Royal Wedding.
Religious myths give us the security and inner strength not to be crushed by the monstrousness of the universe. "Belief is no adequate substitute for inner experience, and where this is absent even a strong faith which came miraculously as a gift of grace may depart equally miraculously. People call faith the true religious experience, but they do not stop to consider that actually it is a secondary phenomenon arising form the fact that something happened to us in the first place which instilled pistis into us — that is, trust and loyalty." --Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self," CW vol. 10, par. 521
In the Red Book, Jung said this is the way:
“An opus is needed, that one can squander decades on, and do it out of necessity. I must catch up with a piece of the Middle Ages-within myself. We have only finished the Middle Ages of-others. I must begin early, in that period when the hermits died out. Asceticism, inquisition, torture are close at hand and impose themselves. The barbarian requires barbaric means of education. My I, you are a barbarian. I want to live with you, therefore I will carry you through an utterly medieval Hell, until you are capable of making living with you bearable. You should be the vessel and womb of life, therefore I shall purify you.
The touchstone is being alone with oneself."
Genealogy can be seen as a way of honoring the ancestors with a ritual from ancient times when lists of god-kings described the natural order of things. The only way to revision and interact with it as a gestalt matrix includes the fictional, legendary, and mythological lines of this traditional World Tree. It is but one way to acknowledge our divinity, nobility, and humanity. Genealogy is a sure path to the heart. We can "gather our ancestors" before we are gathered unto them.
Mythology lost its role of explaining the forces of nature. But its role of delivering insights into the hidden, deep endeavors and fears of any human seems more alive than ever. It is a Mystery how our ancestors pass memories to us across the generations. They relate us to our ontological questions about space, time, and eternity, the deep structure of the human mind and perception, life and death -- what exists and what doesn't. Time concerns the existential nature of things -- temporal relationships.
The mythology of our ancestors is as important as their cosmology. We can explore the mystic in ourselves and in our ancestors. Our worldview is the root of our identity and relationship to Nature and our own deep nature. Researching the cosmologies of our direct ancestors in the historical era provides a quick path into dream shamanism, as these ways are still half-remembered. Our common destiny lies beyond any worldview.
"You could study the ancestors, but without a deep feeling of communication with them it would be surface learning and surface talking. Once you have gone into yourself and have learned very deeply, appreciate it, and relate to it very well, everything will come very easily." (Ellen White, Nanaimo)
Psyche creates reality every day. We have a mystical connection with our primitive ancestors. The primordial ancestors are still alive within the depths of our psyches and reach out to us with their ancient wisdom. We instinctively behave and feel the same ways as generations of our ancestors have in their lives.
This is also a relationship to the collectivity of the dead; for the unconscious corresponds to the mythic land of the dead, the land of the ancestors. Jung was the first to link the concept of ancestors to unconscious thinking. We learn to remember what our soul already knows. Our personality is literally expressed through our ancestors.
The gods and goddesses have 'gone to seed', and we are that -- their seed, their progeny. As James Hillman says, their minds and powers are living us in poetic moments of fantasy, insight and intuition. Nature, psyche and life are unfolding divinity. We are only cut off from the dead by what we have buried and forgotten. Working with our ancestral connection means connecting to everything around us and how we are placed in the world.
Jung said transpersonal psychic life "is the mind of our ancient ancestors, the way in which they thought and felt, the way in which they conceived of life and the world, of gods and humans beings. The existence of these historical layers is presumably the source of belief in reincarnation and in memories of past lives” (Jung, 1939, p.24).
In 'Extending the Family' (1985), Hillman says, "With the passing of time a sense of its power grows within one's psyche, like the movements of its skeleton inside one's flesh, which keeps one in servitude to patterns entombed in our closest attitudes and habits. From this interior family we are never free. This service keeps us bonded to the ancestors." Some report a sort of
"calling illness" until they respond to the ancestors calling them to do the work.
Genealogy is the science and art of what is emerging into the collective consciousness in one of the biggest hobbies of our era. It is a vast reclamation and reconstruction of our holographic connections, and certain emotionally toned experiences and images inherited from our ancestors, our spiritual guides. We translate meaning into life.
The entire gestalt of the World Tree is an iconic image -- a multidimensional symbol requiring hermeneutics as much as history for best practice. Genealogy has the problem of only focusing on the ancestors with surviving records, not all your ancestors. Of course, all the expansive aspects of the ancestors leave their shadow traces. With the light comes darkness. Ancestral blessings are not unaccompanied by ancestral curses.
The shadow is transmitted in a million subtle gestures and intonations. As you become aware of them in yourself, you can look back over your shoulder at your ancestors and see where these patterns came from. The family shadow is not the sole answer, but it's a place to do some work. It's a realm that is within our means to influence. When we stop passing the shadow on to the next generation, we spare them and break the chain. They don't pass it on either.
We can cut through the Fog of Lore to the mythic core. Clan ancestors are more than euphemisms. They may well be more than legends, being actual progenitors or composites of the ancient lineage. Some myths may have developed after the destruction of powerful lineages, displays of majesty, culture heroes, and ancestral temples. Royal family ancestor cults probably drew on a number of ancestral lineages. “If I accept the lowest in me, I lower a seed into the ground of Hell. The seed is invisibly small, but the tree of my life grows from it and conjoins the Below with the Above. At both ends there is fire and blazing embers. The Above is fiery and the Below is fiery. Between the unbearable fires grows your life. You hang between these two poles. In an immeasurably frightening movement the stretched hanging welters up and down." ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 300. Lament of the Dead
Differences in ancestral worldviews highlight the problem of synthesis. Conceptual and symbolic frameworks arise in different periods of history. The classical vision is not absent from the modern world; we can argue both transcendence and immanence. Much depends on which century your soul inhabits, metaphorically. The dead are given greater reality by the memory that the living keep alive of them. But they are invoked to participate on important occasions such as births, naming, and marriages.
Our deep polytheistic background has been buried with the ancestors, along with their voices which we can talk to and imagine in posthumous reality. When thinking stops, words slip in. Within our subconscious mind is a history of our ancestors which includes their experiences and emotions. Do the dead cry that they are misunderstood? They are The Watchers. We are always being watched by the ancestral spirits. To be cut off from relationships with one's ancestors is to cease being a whole person. Unconsciously we still think like our distant ancestors.
The symbol is the word that goes out of the mouth, that one does not simply speak, but that rises out of the depths of the self as a word of power and great need and places itself unexpectedly on the tongue. It is an astonishing and perhaps seemingly irrational word, but one recognizes it as a symbol since it is alien to the conscious mind.
If one accepts the symbol, it is as if a door opens leading into a new room whose existence one previously did not know. But if one does not accept the symbol, it is as if one carelessly went past this door; and since this was the only door leading to the inner chambers, one must pass outside into the streets again, exposed to everything external. But the soul suffers great need, since outer freedom is of no use to it. Salvation is a long road that leads through many gates. These gates are symbols. Each new gate is at first invisible; indeed, it seems at first that / it must be created, for it exists only if one has dug up the spring's root, the symbol.
Multigenerational Matrix
Genealogy is a place to pay homage and commune with our ancestors. But if you think you 'know' what a symbol represents because you read it online, think again. Such knowledge must be won through individual work, not collective gleaning. We are called to these encounters by our complexes, that when 'faced' lead to our vocation and bliss. The Ennead were the nine great Osirian gods: Atum, Shu, Tefnut, Geb, Nut, Osiris, Isis, Set, and Nephthys. Our genealogies represent a great psycho-physical Mystery, represented by the gods from the beginning. The realm of the ancestors is the realm of the gods.
Hillman suggests we aspire to be an Ancestor instead of fantasizing about eternal youth. But don't confuse Ancestors with genetic connections or biological offspring, he warns. They might be spiritual ancestors. Ancestors sit at the edge of the tribe and protect us from evil spirits: injustice, sham, hypocrisy, exploitation, destruction of the planet. Ancestors come in many forms, including individuals and ideas that help the tribe continue for seven generations.
"Become an Ancestor", Hillman urges, reminding us that does NOT require biological offsprings or genetic connections. He gives examples of a wide variety of Ancestors, from books to dream figures. He speaks to the dilemma of our society which doesn't know how to handle the misfits in a monoculture dedicated to competitive capitalism. Spirits of the ancestors help us bring individual character out from within ourselves. Soul has its own ancestors, which may not be your own actual, physical ancestors. They are the honorable ancestors in other cultures that we may not recognize in our own society.
Our experiences are added to all the collected experiences of our ancient ancestors. What is eternal is essentially unchanging -- a transcendent kingdom. In Jung's view, our pagan ancestors had a more direct access to this kingdom, which we now reach through dreams, vision, and hermeneutics. Our lines radiate from our center like a primordial sun, reconditioning our perception of time and eternity -- a place from which the psyche is born. Experience ceases as all is One. That Nature of Existence reflects our NOWstalgia.
Regress, Reclaim, Rejuvenate
Your own genealogy contains both personal and collective elements. Infinite Regress is a causal relationship transmitted through an indefinite number of terms in a series, with no term that begins the causal chain. Our ancestral lines fade off into the mists of pre-history. Integration through regression, in the service of transcendence, is a well-tested technique that opens us to the deep unconscious. It hopefully addresses some of the incomplete and unanswered questions left by parents and grandparents and more distant ancestors. Dreams were messages for our ancestors, and can be messages from them for us.
Ancestral revelations often come at synchronous times forming the connective tissue of meaning. We only notice ancestral memories and ideas when they are expressed as instincts, ideas, images and memories, in dreams and imagination. The ancient ancestors are still alive within the deepest ranges of our psyches and reach out to us with their ancient wisdom.
We inherit a sort of knowledge acquired from from our ancestors. We still keep our 'eyes to the skies' as the ancestors did for perhaps more than 50,000 years of pre-history. We experience the circle of life, just like our ancestors did. Like our ancestors we try to understand the world, our position in it, the process of life and death, ad the meaning of relationships. We still acknowledge the great cycles of time and the seasons as our ancestors did. But, that doesn't mean we have to believe everything they did. Many stories are cautionary tales.
We are a collage—a remix—of our ancestors. Jung suggested the idea of "ancestor possession". Certain hereditary fractals become activated under certain current circumstances, allowing the spirit of an ancestor to then "take over" one's actions. We can also project and re-own projections not only to other humans in the present but also to our ancestors from the past. The hero's journey represents the primitive struggle of our ancestors in entering an unknown world of danger, but overcoming the danger and bringing back to the tribe or group some discovery or treasure that benefits everyone.
We go back to move forward. We work backward in time, in order to preserve the Red Thread bloodline. As we do each ancestor becomes younger until they join with their parental lines, and so forth. Like fractals, we are self-similar to a given larger or smaller part of our heritage, even if some lines are broken or uneven. Fractal genealogy can be unravelled and rebuilt, producing an artistic view of the process. You can easily lose hours on 'walkabout' in a by-gone era within your labyrinthine lines. The lines of a labyrinth guide us, as do the experiences of our lives.