The Search for Roots & Gnosis
Finding Deeper Meaning in Genealogy
Ancestors, Legends, & Myths
Iona Miller, 2014
The ancestors are, of course, the archetypes — they are the psychological ancestors. In a really dangerous situation they may be quite real. --Jung
Hypothesis: in a sharp crisis, that bears in some way on species survival,
an individual may spontaneously merge with his ancestors AND descendents
and become, for a time, a single amplified entity. --KT
Today we have great difficulty with ancestors. We do not know what they are or how to enable them. Yet establishing a harmonious relation with these ancestors is crucial to our symbolic life. These figures came long before us and will outlive us. Giving the ancestors that people our psyche the recognition they need is the only way their blessings can flow.
We can participate with the same living unconscious that was revered by our ancestors. Genealogy offers a way to connect with the deep, imaginal spirituality of our ancestors without appropriating from other cultures or crafting a new spirituality. We can reconnect to ancestors that trace their roots through our bloodlines.
The co-creative process of soul-making takes us out of our “only personal” ancestry and empowers the Ancestors. We break through the boundaries that separate our inner and outer lives. They create synchronistic fields around us that continually generate and store symbolic awareness. The seed of life conceals the geometry of creation. Imagination has its own way of knowing.
Two deficits of the imagination inhibit our understanding. We are oriented toward the world which appears to be ahistorical. We remain mostly unconscious of the biasing effect of our cultural ancestry. This lack of historical sense reinforces many of our biases, including our internal conflicts -- a sensitivity to our habits of thought and dispositions of mind. The effects of our history and constitution bias or blind our view about ourselves. No single philosophical theory bridges the gap between self-transcendence and our roots as "children of nature."
Experience of Ancestors as opposed to ancestry is central to the symbolic life and the transformation of cultural images, ideals and institutions. Genealogy helps us free ourselves from our primitive ancestors' psychological enmeshment by giving form to their countless typical experiences. Our world is 'haunted' by the absence-presence of the ancestors. Rituals of our ancestors paid homage to the afterlife. Our ancestors also rest in the sacred landscapes of the psyche, not only in specific geographies. Psyche is not of today, but extends back many millions of years.
My Generation
In psychology, an archetype is the innate knowledge, images, or ways of thinking that are inherited from ancestors. During significant events (birth, death, disaster) human behavior takes on a typical form. In the archetype concept we mirror the emotions of our remote ancestors in how we act and react in these significant situations. These architects of dreams and symptom speak through divination, myth and ritual enactment, offering a hidden language suffused with a sort of pre-rational verbal therapy that produces real and effective changes within us.
Descent From Antiquity
Our ancient Pagan ancestors had their pantheons of Gods & Goddesses. The gods are transpersonal or spiritual ancestors, as our traditional lines of descent show. Many claimed ancestries are considered by modern scholars to be fabrications, especially the claims of kings and emperors who trace their ancestry to gods or the founders of their civilization. Some genealogists now cut off what are labeled as fictious or legendary roots. Genealogy, legend and political prophecies played a crucial role in constructing the past in the service of royal power. Many royals traced their lineage not only to the pagan gods but also to the priest-kings of the Old Testament.
Genealogy has an evolutionary history of its own. What scholars term a "defect" in such lines may not be so psychologically. There is no harm and maybe psychological benefit to maintaining such ties, so long as they are not taken literally. They are part of our personal origin myth. Royal descents from mythical heroes include, Odin, Titans, Aphrodite, Zeus, Hercules, Isis, Adam and Eve, Mary Magdalene and Jesus, Muhammad, Tamar Tephi, Scota, Beli Mawr. King Arthur, and more.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_from_antiquity
Archetypes, ancestors and allies form our mythic self. The knowledge, but also the sins and wounds of our ancestors live within us. There is a deep longing inside each of us for something our ancestors received, but that is missing now -- the information that connects us to the whole -- a creative relation to the figures of the deep psyche that people our imagination. Genealogy helps us enter that symbolic life.
We forget that the soul has its own ancestors. Archetypes are directly knowable as a product of the shared experiences of our ancestors. We relive the soul of the ancestors as primordial psyche, inherited from common ancestors in the distant human past. We can receive guidance in the dreamtime from archetypal ancestors. We do not only carry the genes of our ancestors; we also carry their memories. Jung said, underneath the modern surface of the mind lurks the original primitive mentality of our ancestors, complete with vivid stories and symbols that have a natural appeal to us and seem to appear unbidden in our dreams and fantasies.
To conduct our own personal research and to find out for ourselves, maybe all we need to do is listen to our inner DNA. The unconscious comprises in itself the psychic life of our ancestors right back to the earliest beginnings. We can listen to the voices, feelings, sights and experiences of our ancestors. The land of the dead is the country of our ancestors and the images who walk in on us are our ancestors. They can be associated with the elements of nature. They exert their claim on us, and power over us -- a sense of our internal fate -- as psychic representations of our geographical, historical and cultural contexts.
We are under the influence of ancestors, archetypes, family and collective consequences. The achievement of consciousness by our distant ancestors is reflected in the hero or heroine's journey. Active imagination isn't new; our ancestors staring into the fire were exercising just this. 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 will benefit everyone.
Legacy of the Ancestors
Ancestors brings together genealogy, common mythological roots and psychology.
Our ancestors often use metaphors in order to make the issue clear. The "living serpents" of our descent lines can be used to invoke the ancestors. Genealogy is a form of veneration. The study of our ancestors is the study of the Tree of Life. An altar, for example, can honor your biological ancestors, the universal archetypal ancestors, or both.
The purpose of the totem meal, grail, or eucharist is to reunite the participants with the life of their ancestors. Their lives, joys and fears are within us. In this way, they are with us always. Our ancestors revered nature, but were also irrational and superstitious about it. We can still turn to nature for insight as our ancestors did for millennia. Most of us have lost touch with religious traditions of our ancestors; we no longer connect with their sacred myths and metaphors. Genealogy is more direct, more personal.
Healing shifts occur through the conscious Feminine, Sophia, Wisdom, the divine feminine embodied in the world. The exploits and mode of being of the great ancestors resonate, to a lesser degree, with our experience of dreaming. The concealed and mysterious are as important as the revealed and understood. The ancestors are jealous; they want to be remembered. Remembering them is not just an empty custom, but imbued with meaning. The deeper meaning of much traditional healing centers on ancestor reverence.
Working your lines can be meditative, in and of itself. Concentration is an art. When performing an ancestor meditation, people experience different things. You may find yourself meeting a specific person that you are aware of in your family history. Some people, however, meet their ancestors as archetypes. In other words, it may not be a specific individual you meet, but rather a symbol. Either way, understand that meeting these individuals is a gift. Pay attention to what they say and do -- it may be that they're trying to give you a message.
When properly respected, they are benevolent guardians. Our search is answered by initiation: the blessing of the elders. We need our specific stories heard, in the context of the universal, by someone who speaks both linear and symbolic languages. Great assistance comes from the lineage of elders who have passed it on, and from the “hard wiring” of archetypal patterns inside us all. The ancestors are eagerly waiting to help us, if we ask.
Many old stories talk about how the teachings are lost, again and again, and must be rediscovered by each generation, and reshaped into the words that can be heard in the world that generation inhabits. In honoring them, we honor the principles and values they represent. Thus we find the heavenly city inhabited by the mythic forefathers, the ancestors who constitute a genealogy of current names. These "genealogies" are not strictly historical, but mythic and symbolic. There is no reason, however, why they should be seen as standing in opposition to history. These "genealogical" names are steeped in a numerical, linguistic, astronomical, rhythmical, cyclic, and magical meaning.
The tomb is a symbol of the unconscious as well as an alchemical vessel in which transformation occurs. Jung related it to the womb, suggesting the tomb is a place of the past that connects us with our deceased ancestors, a place from which the psyche is born, a connector to our psychic background. The tomb also represents the completion of circle as a place where we will ultimately rejoin the ancestors once more.
An exploration of the ways in which the ancestors, from the archetypal to the personal, influence us in the present and implicate us in lives of subsequent generations.
Finding Deeper Meaning in Genealogy
Ancestors, Legends, & Myths
Iona Miller, 2014
The ancestors are, of course, the archetypes — they are the psychological ancestors. In a really dangerous situation they may be quite real. --Jung
Hypothesis: in a sharp crisis, that bears in some way on species survival,
an individual may spontaneously merge with his ancestors AND descendents
and become, for a time, a single amplified entity. --KT
Today we have great difficulty with ancestors. We do not know what they are or how to enable them. Yet establishing a harmonious relation with these ancestors is crucial to our symbolic life. These figures came long before us and will outlive us. Giving the ancestors that people our psyche the recognition they need is the only way their blessings can flow.
We can participate with the same living unconscious that was revered by our ancestors. Genealogy offers a way to connect with the deep, imaginal spirituality of our ancestors without appropriating from other cultures or crafting a new spirituality. We can reconnect to ancestors that trace their roots through our bloodlines.
The co-creative process of soul-making takes us out of our “only personal” ancestry and empowers the Ancestors. We break through the boundaries that separate our inner and outer lives. They create synchronistic fields around us that continually generate and store symbolic awareness. The seed of life conceals the geometry of creation. Imagination has its own way of knowing.
Two deficits of the imagination inhibit our understanding. We are oriented toward the world which appears to be ahistorical. We remain mostly unconscious of the biasing effect of our cultural ancestry. This lack of historical sense reinforces many of our biases, including our internal conflicts -- a sensitivity to our habits of thought and dispositions of mind. The effects of our history and constitution bias or blind our view about ourselves. No single philosophical theory bridges the gap between self-transcendence and our roots as "children of nature."
Experience of Ancestors as opposed to ancestry is central to the symbolic life and the transformation of cultural images, ideals and institutions. Genealogy helps us free ourselves from our primitive ancestors' psychological enmeshment by giving form to their countless typical experiences. Our world is 'haunted' by the absence-presence of the ancestors. Rituals of our ancestors paid homage to the afterlife. Our ancestors also rest in the sacred landscapes of the psyche, not only in specific geographies. Psyche is not of today, but extends back many millions of years.
My Generation
In psychology, an archetype is the innate knowledge, images, or ways of thinking that are inherited from ancestors. During significant events (birth, death, disaster) human behavior takes on a typical form. In the archetype concept we mirror the emotions of our remote ancestors in how we act and react in these significant situations. These architects of dreams and symptom speak through divination, myth and ritual enactment, offering a hidden language suffused with a sort of pre-rational verbal therapy that produces real and effective changes within us.
Descent From Antiquity
Our ancient Pagan ancestors had their pantheons of Gods & Goddesses. The gods are transpersonal or spiritual ancestors, as our traditional lines of descent show. Many claimed ancestries are considered by modern scholars to be fabrications, especially the claims of kings and emperors who trace their ancestry to gods or the founders of their civilization. Some genealogists now cut off what are labeled as fictious or legendary roots. Genealogy, legend and political prophecies played a crucial role in constructing the past in the service of royal power. Many royals traced their lineage not only to the pagan gods but also to the priest-kings of the Old Testament.
Genealogy has an evolutionary history of its own. What scholars term a "defect" in such lines may not be so psychologically. There is no harm and maybe psychological benefit to maintaining such ties, so long as they are not taken literally. They are part of our personal origin myth. Royal descents from mythical heroes include, Odin, Titans, Aphrodite, Zeus, Hercules, Isis, Adam and Eve, Mary Magdalene and Jesus, Muhammad, Tamar Tephi, Scota, Beli Mawr. King Arthur, and more.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_from_antiquity
Archetypes, ancestors and allies form our mythic self. The knowledge, but also the sins and wounds of our ancestors live within us. There is a deep longing inside each of us for something our ancestors received, but that is missing now -- the information that connects us to the whole -- a creative relation to the figures of the deep psyche that people our imagination. Genealogy helps us enter that symbolic life.
We forget that the soul has its own ancestors. Archetypes are directly knowable as a product of the shared experiences of our ancestors. We relive the soul of the ancestors as primordial psyche, inherited from common ancestors in the distant human past. We can receive guidance in the dreamtime from archetypal ancestors. We do not only carry the genes of our ancestors; we also carry their memories. Jung said, underneath the modern surface of the mind lurks the original primitive mentality of our ancestors, complete with vivid stories and symbols that have a natural appeal to us and seem to appear unbidden in our dreams and fantasies.
To conduct our own personal research and to find out for ourselves, maybe all we need to do is listen to our inner DNA. The unconscious comprises in itself the psychic life of our ancestors right back to the earliest beginnings. We can listen to the voices, feelings, sights and experiences of our ancestors. The land of the dead is the country of our ancestors and the images who walk in on us are our ancestors. They can be associated with the elements of nature. They exert their claim on us, and power over us -- a sense of our internal fate -- as psychic representations of our geographical, historical and cultural contexts.
We are under the influence of ancestors, archetypes, family and collective consequences. The achievement of consciousness by our distant ancestors is reflected in the hero or heroine's journey. Active imagination isn't new; our ancestors staring into the fire were exercising just this. 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 will benefit everyone.
Legacy of the Ancestors
Ancestors brings together genealogy, common mythological roots and psychology.
Our ancestors often use metaphors in order to make the issue clear. The "living serpents" of our descent lines can be used to invoke the ancestors. Genealogy is a form of veneration. The study of our ancestors is the study of the Tree of Life. An altar, for example, can honor your biological ancestors, the universal archetypal ancestors, or both.
The purpose of the totem meal, grail, or eucharist is to reunite the participants with the life of their ancestors. Their lives, joys and fears are within us. In this way, they are with us always. Our ancestors revered nature, but were also irrational and superstitious about it. We can still turn to nature for insight as our ancestors did for millennia. Most of us have lost touch with religious traditions of our ancestors; we no longer connect with their sacred myths and metaphors. Genealogy is more direct, more personal.
Healing shifts occur through the conscious Feminine, Sophia, Wisdom, the divine feminine embodied in the world. The exploits and mode of being of the great ancestors resonate, to a lesser degree, with our experience of dreaming. The concealed and mysterious are as important as the revealed and understood. The ancestors are jealous; they want to be remembered. Remembering them is not just an empty custom, but imbued with meaning. The deeper meaning of much traditional healing centers on ancestor reverence.
Working your lines can be meditative, in and of itself. Concentration is an art. When performing an ancestor meditation, people experience different things. You may find yourself meeting a specific person that you are aware of in your family history. Some people, however, meet their ancestors as archetypes. In other words, it may not be a specific individual you meet, but rather a symbol. Either way, understand that meeting these individuals is a gift. Pay attention to what they say and do -- it may be that they're trying to give you a message.
When properly respected, they are benevolent guardians. Our search is answered by initiation: the blessing of the elders. We need our specific stories heard, in the context of the universal, by someone who speaks both linear and symbolic languages. Great assistance comes from the lineage of elders who have passed it on, and from the “hard wiring” of archetypal patterns inside us all. The ancestors are eagerly waiting to help us, if we ask.
Many old stories talk about how the teachings are lost, again and again, and must be rediscovered by each generation, and reshaped into the words that can be heard in the world that generation inhabits. In honoring them, we honor the principles and values they represent. Thus we find the heavenly city inhabited by the mythic forefathers, the ancestors who constitute a genealogy of current names. These "genealogies" are not strictly historical, but mythic and symbolic. There is no reason, however, why they should be seen as standing in opposition to history. These "genealogical" names are steeped in a numerical, linguistic, astronomical, rhythmical, cyclic, and magical meaning.
The tomb is a symbol of the unconscious as well as an alchemical vessel in which transformation occurs. Jung related it to the womb, suggesting the tomb is a place of the past that connects us with our deceased ancestors, a place from which the psyche is born, a connector to our psychic background. The tomb also represents the completion of circle as a place where we will ultimately rejoin the ancestors once more.
An exploration of the ways in which the ancestors, from the archetypal to the personal, influence us in the present and implicate us in lives of subsequent generations.