Biological Gnosis
Embodied Meaning & Knowledge
Everything is already dead and yet unborn.
Psyche is the essence of bodily life.
Outside the body, all events are in the Always Now so in a sense all events are happening right now. You are being born right now and you are drawing your last breath right now.
'...the mystery of the structure of the universe, was in themselves, in their own bodies and in that part of the personality which we call the unconscious, but they would say in the life of their own material existence. ...They thought that instead of taking outer materials you could just as well look inside and get information directly from that mystery because you were it. After all, you too were a part of the mystery of cosmic existence, so you could just as well watch it directly. Even further, you could ask matter, the mystery of which you consist, to tell you what it is, to reveal itself to you.' -- M.-L. vonFranz
QBL describes the Creation from Nothing to Everything in one fell swoop. It is an analogue model of the Absolute. The experienced qabalist gains an understanding of his limitations and perceptions of reality, enabling his consciousness to contemplate the Truth of Existence, an expansive vision. If it is God's Will and Grace, he becomes an exemplar among men, a role model for realization of both human potential and mystical attainment. The Jews called such a person a Zaddik, or Saint. The Qabala answers visible problems. It affirms the practicability of personal spiritual development. Without the transformation of individual consciousness through self-understanding, we are left to witness the breakdown of culture and society in chronic degeneration.
The Saddik finds that which has been lost since birth and restores it to men. It is the same conception as Plato’s philosophical doctrine of the prenatal vision of ideas and their remembrance. The original knowledge of one who is still enfolded in the perfect state is very evident in the psychology of the child. For this reason many primitive peoples treat children with particular marks of respect. In the child the great images and archetypes of the collective unconscious are living reality, and very close to him; indeed, many of his sayings and reactions, questions and answers, dreams and images, express this knowledge which still derives from his prenatal existence. It is transpersonal experience not personally acquired, a possession acquired from “over there.” Such knowledge is rightly regarded as ancestral knowledge, and the child as a reborn forebear.
The theory of heredity, proving that the child has the ancestral heritage biologically in himself, and to a large extent actually “is” this heritage, also has a psychological justification. Jung therefore defines the transpersonal - or the archetypes and instincts of the collective unconscious - as “the deposit of ancestral experience.” Hence the child, whose life as a prepersonal entity is largely determined by the collective unconscious, actually is the living carrier of this ancestral experience."
--Erich Neuman, Origins & History of Consciousness
"To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion, entirely in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own understanding, and with deep humility and patience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is born: this alone is what it means to live as an artist: in understanding as in creating."
--Rainer Maria Rilke
Both disciplines [physics/psychology] have, for all their diametrical opposition, one most important point in common, namely the fact that they both approach the hitherto "transcendental" region of the Invisible and Intangible, the world of merely analogous thought. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 306-310.
How psychic energy can transform itself into physically sound phenomena is a problem in itself. I don't know how it is done. We only know that it is done.
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 321-322
Coming now to cosmogony, we can assert nothing except that the body of the world and its psyche are a reflection of the God we imagine. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 341-343.
We can only project a conception of him that corresponds to our own constitution: a body perceived by the senses and a spirit (= psyche) directly conscious of itself. After this model we build our God-image. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 341-343.
There are, for instance, spring births and autumn births, which play an especially important role in the animal world.
Then, besides the seasonal influences there are also the fluctuations of proton radiation, which have been proved to exert a considerable influence on human life.
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 428-430.
It [Synchronicity] is not meant as anything substantive, for what the psyche is, or what matter is, eludes our understanding. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 445-449
QBL describes the Creation from Nothing to Everything in one fell swoop. It is an analogue model of the Absolute. The experienced qabalist gains an understanding of his limitations and perceptions of reality, enabling his consciousness to contemplate the Truth of Existence, an expansive vision. If it is God's Will and Grace, he becomes an exemplar among men, a role model for realization of both human potential and mystical attainment. The Jews called such a person a Zaddik, or Saint. The Qabala answers visible problems. It affirms the practicability of personal spiritual development. Without the transformation of individual consciousness through self-understanding, we are left to witness the breakdown of culture and society in chronic degeneration.
The Saddik finds that which has been lost since birth and restores it to men. It is the same conception as Plato’s philosophical doctrine of the prenatal vision of ideas and their remembrance. The original knowledge of one who is still enfolded in the perfect state is very evident in the psychology of the child. For this reason many primitive peoples treat children with particular marks of respect. In the child the great images and archetypes of the collective unconscious are living reality, and very close to him; indeed, many of his sayings and reactions, questions and answers, dreams and images, express this knowledge which still derives from his prenatal existence. It is transpersonal experience not personally acquired, a possession acquired from “over there.” Such knowledge is rightly regarded as ancestral knowledge, and the child as a reborn forebear.
The theory of heredity, proving that the child has the ancestral heritage biologically in himself, and to a large extent actually “is” this heritage, also has a psychological justification. Jung therefore defines the transpersonal - or the archetypes and instincts of the collective unconscious - as “the deposit of ancestral experience.” Hence the child, whose life as a prepersonal entity is largely determined by the collective unconscious, actually is the living carrier of this ancestral experience."
--Erich Neuman, Origins & History of Consciousness
"To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion, entirely in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own understanding, and with deep humility and patience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is born: this alone is what it means to live as an artist: in understanding as in creating."
--Rainer Maria Rilke
Both disciplines [physics/psychology] have, for all their diametrical opposition, one most important point in common, namely the fact that they both approach the hitherto "transcendental" region of the Invisible and Intangible, the world of merely analogous thought. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 306-310.
How psychic energy can transform itself into physically sound phenomena is a problem in itself. I don't know how it is done. We only know that it is done.
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 321-322
Coming now to cosmogony, we can assert nothing except that the body of the world and its psyche are a reflection of the God we imagine. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 341-343.
We can only project a conception of him that corresponds to our own constitution: a body perceived by the senses and a spirit (= psyche) directly conscious of itself. After this model we build our God-image. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 341-343.
There are, for instance, spring births and autumn births, which play an especially important role in the animal world.
Then, besides the seasonal influences there are also the fluctuations of proton radiation, which have been proved to exert a considerable influence on human life.
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 428-430.
It [Synchronicity] is not meant as anything substantive, for what the psyche is, or what matter is, eludes our understanding. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 445-449
Matter is an hypothesis. When you say “matter,” you are really creating a symbol for something unknown, which may just as well be “spirit” or anything else; it may even be God. Religious faith, on the other hand, refuses to give up its pre-Weltanschauung, in contradiction to the saying of Christ, the faithful try to remain children instead of becoming as children. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Page 477, Para 762.
And when you observe the stream of images within, you observe an aspect of the world, of the world within, because the psyche, if you understand it as a phenomenon that takes place in so-called living bodies, is a quality of matter, as our bodies consist of matter. ~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 22.
Inasmuch as karma means either a personal or at least an individual inherited determinant of character and fate, it represents the individually differentiated manifestation of the instinctual behaviour pattern, i.e., the general archetypal disposition. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 287-289.
This living being appears outwardly as the material body, but inwardly as a series of images of the vital activities taking place within it. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Page 325, Para 619.
A life of ease and security has convinced everyone of all the material joys, and has even compelled the spirit to devise new and better ways to material welfare, but it has never produced spirit. Probably only suffering, disillusion, and self-denial do that. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1346.
There is physically transmitted (outer world) experience and inner (spiritual) experience.
The one is as valid as the other. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 4-5.
I may say that I know what is infinite and eternal; I may even assert that I have experienced it; but that one could actually know it is impossible because man is neither an infinite nor an eternal being. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 375-379.
The realm of the psyche is immeasurably great and filled with living reality. At its brink lies the secret of matter and of spirit. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 69-71
I am personally convinced that our mind corresponds with the physiological life of the body, but the way in which it is connected with the body is for obvious reasons unintelligible.
To speculate about such unknowable things is mere waste of time. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 159-161.
I had to recognize that I am only the expression and symbol of the soul.
~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 234.
We distinguish an organic and an inorganic world, for example. The one is alive, the other is dead; the one has psyche, the other not. But who can guarantee that the same vital principle which is at work in the organic body is not active in the crystal? ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 341-343.
And when you observe the stream of images within, you observe an aspect of the world, of the world within, because the psyche, if you understand it as a phenomenon that takes place in so-called living bodies, is a quality of matter, as our bodies consist of matter. ~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 22.
Inasmuch as karma means either a personal or at least an individual inherited determinant of character and fate, it represents the individually differentiated manifestation of the instinctual behaviour pattern, i.e., the general archetypal disposition. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 287-289.
This living being appears outwardly as the material body, but inwardly as a series of images of the vital activities taking place within it. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Page 325, Para 619.
A life of ease and security has convinced everyone of all the material joys, and has even compelled the spirit to devise new and better ways to material welfare, but it has never produced spirit. Probably only suffering, disillusion, and self-denial do that. ~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 1346.
There is physically transmitted (outer world) experience and inner (spiritual) experience.
The one is as valid as the other. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 4-5.
I may say that I know what is infinite and eternal; I may even assert that I have experienced it; but that one could actually know it is impossible because man is neither an infinite nor an eternal being. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 375-379.
The realm of the psyche is immeasurably great and filled with living reality. At its brink lies the secret of matter and of spirit. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 69-71
I am personally convinced that our mind corresponds with the physiological life of the body, but the way in which it is connected with the body is for obvious reasons unintelligible.
To speculate about such unknowable things is mere waste of time. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 159-161.
I had to recognize that I am only the expression and symbol of the soul.
~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 234.
We distinguish an organic and an inorganic world, for example. The one is alive, the other is dead; the one has psyche, the other not. But who can guarantee that the same vital principle which is at work in the organic body is not active in the crystal? ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 341-343.
The body as a whole, so it seems to me, is a pattern of behavior, and man as a whole is an Archetype. ~Carl Jung, Letter to Medard Boss, 27 June 1947.
If one can stay in the middle, know one is human, relate to both the god and the animal of the god, one is all right. One must remember, over the animal is the god, with the god is the god's animal. ~Carl Jung, J.E.T., Page 112.
The psyche has two conditions, two important conditions. The one is environmental influence and the other is the given fact of the psyche as it is born. ~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 22.
And when you observe the stream of images within, you observe an aspect of the world, of the world within, because the psyche, if you understand it as a phenomenon that takes place in so-called living bodies, is a quality of matter, as our bodies consist of matter. ~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 22.
We discover that this matter has another aspect, namely, a psychic aspect. And so it is simply the world from within, seen from within. It is just as though you were seeing into another aspect of matter. ~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 22.
The psyche is nothing different from the living being. It is the psychical aspect of the living being. It is even the psychical aspect of matter. It is a quality. ~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 27.
There are historical reasons for the qualities of the psyche and there is such a thing as the history of man's evolution in past eons, which as a combination show that real understanding of the psyche must consist in the elucidation of the history of the human race—history of the mind, for instance, as in the biological data. ~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 36.
'The subtlest secret of the Tao is human nature and life.'
~Hui Ming Ching, Cited Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 94.
Anyone who penetrates into the unconscious with purely biological assumptions will become stuck in the instinctual sphere and be unable to advance beyond it, for he will be pulled back again and again into physical existence. ~Carl Jung; The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Psychological commentary; CW 11; Psychology and Religion: West and East; Page 843.
Anyone who overlooks the instincts will be ambuscaded by them. ~Carl Jung,CW 9, Para 620.
An alchemical text says: "The mind should learn compassionate love for the body." ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 25.
If one can stay in the middle, know one is human, relate to both the god and the animal of the god, one is all right. One must remember, over the animal is the god, with the god is the god's animal. ~Carl Jung, J.E.T., Page 112.
The psyche has two conditions, two important conditions. The one is environmental influence and the other is the given fact of the psyche as it is born. ~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 22.
And when you observe the stream of images within, you observe an aspect of the world, of the world within, because the psyche, if you understand it as a phenomenon that takes place in so-called living bodies, is a quality of matter, as our bodies consist of matter. ~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 22.
We discover that this matter has another aspect, namely, a psychic aspect. And so it is simply the world from within, seen from within. It is just as though you were seeing into another aspect of matter. ~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 22.
The psyche is nothing different from the living being. It is the psychical aspect of the living being. It is even the psychical aspect of matter. It is a quality. ~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 27.
There are historical reasons for the qualities of the psyche and there is such a thing as the history of man's evolution in past eons, which as a combination show that real understanding of the psyche must consist in the elucidation of the history of the human race—history of the mind, for instance, as in the biological data. ~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 36.
'The subtlest secret of the Tao is human nature and life.'
~Hui Ming Ching, Cited Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 94.
Anyone who penetrates into the unconscious with purely biological assumptions will become stuck in the instinctual sphere and be unable to advance beyond it, for he will be pulled back again and again into physical existence. ~Carl Jung; The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Psychological commentary; CW 11; Psychology and Religion: West and East; Page 843.
Anyone who overlooks the instincts will be ambuscaded by them. ~Carl Jung,CW 9, Para 620.
An alchemical text says: "The mind should learn compassionate love for the body." ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 25.
The first volume of An Encyclopedia of Archetypal Symbolism was a stunning collection of color images and text organized around mythic themes that follow the solar calendar from cosmos and creation to death, transformation, and rebirth. In this second volume, the focus is the human body as a carrier of deep psychological insights and sacred meanings.
Whether idolized or abused, the body is the object of much fascinated attention, even obsessive preoccupation, in the contemporary Western world. What has been missing from our culture's preoccupation is an appreciation of the body's organs as symbols of the deepest contents of the human psyche. This book surveys the richness of meaning found in a wide range of beautiful sacred images from the world's traditions and explains what the symbolism of our physical form teaches us about the inner realities of our consciousness, spirit, and divine essence.
Whether idolized or abused, the body is the object of much fascinated attention, even obsessive preoccupation, in the contemporary Western world. What has been missing from our culture's preoccupation is an appreciation of the body's organs as symbols of the deepest contents of the human psyche. This book surveys the richness of meaning found in a wide range of beautiful sacred images from the world's traditions and explains what the symbolism of our physical form teaches us about the inner realities of our consciousness, spirit, and divine essence.
It is in our own body that we must search, not outside, but today everyone is convinced that it is outside. ~ Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Page 21.
The alchemists think of the Redeemer as lying hidden or sleeping in the materia, he does not only descend from heaven but comes also from the depths of matter. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 189.
At last I discovered that they [The East] call the unconscious consciousness, indeed enlightenment. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 204
And matter [which was alive and had psychical qualities for him) contained a secret intention, a kind of wish, as if it wanted to be transformed. -Jung, Modern Psychology, Lecture 7
The earth, in the alchemistic sense, means the body and in a double sense: chemical bodies (substances), minerals etc., and the human body. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 101.
Emotion is the chief source of all becoming-conscious. There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion. --Carl Jung (Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype, 1938)
If thou wouldst complete the diamond body with no outflowing, Diligently heat the roots of consciousness and life. ~Hui Ming Ching, Cited Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 95.
But there is something which can be proved from everyday experience, not body becoming spirit, but body becoming conscious, man becomes conscious of his body. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture IX, Page 221.
We must have a psychic image of the body, in order to become conscious of it, we must translate the physical fact of the body into a psychic experience.
~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture IX, Page 221.
How I experience the body from within is a totally different question. I am inside the body as a psyche. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture X, Page 225.
We must say here that the body has nothing to do with matter. Matter is an abstraction, nowadays it has become a philosophical and scientific concept, whereas body is the direct psychic experience of the body. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture X, Page 225.
There is another possibility, that of the subtle body, a fine material veil of the soul, which cannot exist so to speak without a body. This is the "corpus glorificationis" (glorified body), the transfigured body, which is our future portion. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture XIV, Page 115.
If it arose from outside, it became a deeply subjective experience; if it arose from within, it became an outer event. ~Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 89.
If you want to know how the body can be experienced psychically you must turn to eastern Yoga; medieval philosophy also knew something of the matter. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture X, Page 225.
Anatomical knowledge does not tell us how we fill our own bodies but psychic experience does give us information on this point. We fill our bodies as if through inner streams. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture X, Page 225.
The body, therefore, is also a psychological condition, a peculiar form of consciousness. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture X, Page 226.
If you contemplate the body from the point of view of the psyche, you will be able to locate a mental sphere of consciousness in the head, another centre of consciousness in the heart and one in the abdomen. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture X, Page 225
We can experience the body psychically, a prana-body, a subtle body, and there are certain exalted and ecstatic conditions in which we can experience spirit. So what we experience of spirit and body are really psychic modalities. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture X, Page 226.
So when we say body, we really mean our psychic experience of the body. This has only a distant relationship to the anatomical and physiological structure of the body and nothing whatever to do with matter. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture X, Page 226.
But the fact is that the approach to the numinous is the real therapy and inasmuch as you attain to the numinous experiences you are released from the curse of pathology. Even the very disease takes on a numinous character. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 377.
You are quite right, the main interest of my work is not concerned with the treatment of neurosis but rather with the approach to the numinous. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 377.
When all the archetypal images are properly placed in a hierarchy, when that which must be below is below, and that which must be above is above, our final condition can recapture our original blissful state. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 21.
Archetypes are images in the soul that represent the course of one's life. One part of the archetypal content is of material and the other of spiritual origin. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 21.
The archetype signifies that particular spiritual reality which cannot be attained unless life is lived in consciousness. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 21
At all events, a body with a speed higher than that of light vanishes from sight and one may have all sorts of doubts about what would happen to such a body otherwise. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 43-47.
On the other hand one might ask the question whether we can as hitherto go on thinking in terms of space and time, while modern physics begins to relinquish these terms in favour of a time-space continuum, in which space is no more space and time no more time. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 43-47.
I submit that the factor of time proves to be equally "elastic" as space under ESP conditions. If this is the case, we are confronted with two four-dimensional systems in a contingent contiguity. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 43-47.
At all events the assumption of a perceptual body postulates a corresponding perceptual space that separates the mind from physical space in the same way as the subtle body causes the gap between the mind and the physical body. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 43-47.
Your view is rather confirmed, as it seems to me, by the peculiar fact that on the one hand consciousness has so exceedingly little direct information of the body from within, and that on the other hand the unconscious ( i.e., dreams and other products of the "unconscious") refers very rarely to the body and, if it does, it is always in the most roundabout way, i.e., through highly "symbolized" images. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 43-47.
The alchemists think of the Redeemer as lying hidden or sleeping in the materia, he does not only descend from heaven but comes also from the depths of matter. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 189.
At last I discovered that they [The East] call the unconscious consciousness, indeed enlightenment. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 204
And matter [which was alive and had psychical qualities for him) contained a secret intention, a kind of wish, as if it wanted to be transformed. -Jung, Modern Psychology, Lecture 7
The earth, in the alchemistic sense, means the body and in a double sense: chemical bodies (substances), minerals etc., and the human body. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 101.
Emotion is the chief source of all becoming-conscious. There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion. --Carl Jung (Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype, 1938)
If thou wouldst complete the diamond body with no outflowing, Diligently heat the roots of consciousness and life. ~Hui Ming Ching, Cited Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 95.
But there is something which can be proved from everyday experience, not body becoming spirit, but body becoming conscious, man becomes conscious of his body. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture IX, Page 221.
We must have a psychic image of the body, in order to become conscious of it, we must translate the physical fact of the body into a psychic experience.
~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture IX, Page 221.
How I experience the body from within is a totally different question. I am inside the body as a psyche. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture X, Page 225.
We must say here that the body has nothing to do with matter. Matter is an abstraction, nowadays it has become a philosophical and scientific concept, whereas body is the direct psychic experience of the body. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture X, Page 225.
There is another possibility, that of the subtle body, a fine material veil of the soul, which cannot exist so to speak without a body. This is the "corpus glorificationis" (glorified body), the transfigured body, which is our future portion. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture XIV, Page 115.
If it arose from outside, it became a deeply subjective experience; if it arose from within, it became an outer event. ~Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 89.
If you want to know how the body can be experienced psychically you must turn to eastern Yoga; medieval philosophy also knew something of the matter. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture X, Page 225.
Anatomical knowledge does not tell us how we fill our own bodies but psychic experience does give us information on this point. We fill our bodies as if through inner streams. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture X, Page 225.
The body, therefore, is also a psychological condition, a peculiar form of consciousness. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture X, Page 226.
If you contemplate the body from the point of view of the psyche, you will be able to locate a mental sphere of consciousness in the head, another centre of consciousness in the heart and one in the abdomen. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture X, Page 225
We can experience the body psychically, a prana-body, a subtle body, and there are certain exalted and ecstatic conditions in which we can experience spirit. So what we experience of spirit and body are really psychic modalities. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture X, Page 226.
So when we say body, we really mean our psychic experience of the body. This has only a distant relationship to the anatomical and physiological structure of the body and nothing whatever to do with matter. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture X, Page 226.
But the fact is that the approach to the numinous is the real therapy and inasmuch as you attain to the numinous experiences you are released from the curse of pathology. Even the very disease takes on a numinous character. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 377.
You are quite right, the main interest of my work is not concerned with the treatment of neurosis but rather with the approach to the numinous. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 377.
When all the archetypal images are properly placed in a hierarchy, when that which must be below is below, and that which must be above is above, our final condition can recapture our original blissful state. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 21.
Archetypes are images in the soul that represent the course of one's life. One part of the archetypal content is of material and the other of spiritual origin. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 21.
The archetype signifies that particular spiritual reality which cannot be attained unless life is lived in consciousness. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 21
At all events, a body with a speed higher than that of light vanishes from sight and one may have all sorts of doubts about what would happen to such a body otherwise. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 43-47.
On the other hand one might ask the question whether we can as hitherto go on thinking in terms of space and time, while modern physics begins to relinquish these terms in favour of a time-space continuum, in which space is no more space and time no more time. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 43-47.
I submit that the factor of time proves to be equally "elastic" as space under ESP conditions. If this is the case, we are confronted with two four-dimensional systems in a contingent contiguity. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 43-47.
At all events the assumption of a perceptual body postulates a corresponding perceptual space that separates the mind from physical space in the same way as the subtle body causes the gap between the mind and the physical body. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 43-47.
Your view is rather confirmed, as it seems to me, by the peculiar fact that on the one hand consciousness has so exceedingly little direct information of the body from within, and that on the other hand the unconscious ( i.e., dreams and other products of the "unconscious") refers very rarely to the body and, if it does, it is always in the most roundabout way, i.e., through highly "symbolized" images. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 43-47.
So we see that what we call spirit and body are psychic conditions, limited psychic functions, and the body tells us as little about what matter really is, as the spirit about the thing in itself which is behind the spiritual condition. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture X, Page 226.
…it must be pointed out that just as the human body shows a common anatomy over and above all racial differences, so, too, the psyche possesses a common substratum transcending all differences in culture and consciousness. ~Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 84.
We could say that the universe only exists in order that this fruit may ripen; in order that the Self may come into being and reach its own place, which is simply a psychic process of becoming. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture IX, Page 220.
Since the Western mind is based wholly on the standpoint of consciousness, it must define anima in the way I have done, but the East, based as it is on the standpoint of the unconscious, sees consciousness as an effect of the anima! ~Carl Jung, Secret of the Golden Flower, Page118.
Consciousness is produced from a quite specific unconsciousness, which anticipates things that consciousness will only later recognise and understand.
~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 213.
"The theory of the human body is always part of a picture of the world...
It is always a part of a fantasy." --James Hillman, The Myth of Analysis
So the identity with the body is one of the first things which makes an ego; it is the spatial separateness that induces, apparently, the concept of an ego. ~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 15.
One might assume the psyche gradually rising from minute extensity to infinite intensity, transcending for instance the velocity of light and thus irrealizing the body. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 43-47.
It might be that psyche should be understood as unextended intensity and not as a body moving with time. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 43-47.
The question is, in short: shouldn't we give up the time-space categories altogether when we are dealing with psychic existence? ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 43-47.
…it must be pointed out that just as the human body shows a common anatomy over and above all racial differences, so, too, the psyche possesses a common substratum transcending all differences in culture and consciousness. ~Carl Jung, The Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 84.
We could say that the universe only exists in order that this fruit may ripen; in order that the Self may come into being and reach its own place, which is simply a psychic process of becoming. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture IX, Page 220.
Since the Western mind is based wholly on the standpoint of consciousness, it must define anima in the way I have done, but the East, based as it is on the standpoint of the unconscious, sees consciousness as an effect of the anima! ~Carl Jung, Secret of the Golden Flower, Page118.
Consciousness is produced from a quite specific unconsciousness, which anticipates things that consciousness will only later recognise and understand.
~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 213.
"The theory of the human body is always part of a picture of the world...
It is always a part of a fantasy." --James Hillman, The Myth of Analysis
So the identity with the body is one of the first things which makes an ego; it is the spatial separateness that induces, apparently, the concept of an ego. ~Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 15.
One might assume the psyche gradually rising from minute extensity to infinite intensity, transcending for instance the velocity of light and thus irrealizing the body. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 43-47.
It might be that psyche should be understood as unextended intensity and not as a body moving with time. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 43-47.
The question is, in short: shouldn't we give up the time-space categories altogether when we are dealing with psychic existence? ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 43-47.
COMPLEMENTARITIES
Jung (1875-1961) and Pauli (1900-1958) met in 1930 when, Pauli, in life distress and psychic despair, sought out Jung for direction in attending to his emotional and psychological pain. While never Pauli's analyst, Jung reviewed thirteen hundred of Pauli's dreams and studied a selection from the first four hundred of these. Over years of contact, the younger man's knowledge penetrated and influenced Jung's thought.
In 1952 Jung, and Pauli published a juxtaposition of their ideas in The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche. In their work, they crossed paths on complementary vectors.
As the phenomenal world is an aggregate of the processes of atomic magnitude, it is naturally of the greatest importance to find out whether, and if so how, the photons (shall we say) enable us to gain a definite knowledge of the reality underlying the mediative energy processes Light and matter both behave like separate particles and also like waves. This . . . obliged us to abandon, on the plane of atomic magnitudes, a causal description of nature in the ordinary space-time system, and in its place to set up invisible fields of probability in multidimensional spaces.2
Pauli? No, Jung.
Division and reduction of symmetry, this then the kernel of the brute! The former is an ancient attribute of the devil If only the two divine contenders--Christ and the devil--could notice that they have grown so much more symmetrical!3
Jung? No, Pauli, in a letter written a year before his death to Werner Heisenberg, a lifelong friend and colleague. --Jung, Atom & Archetype
There are certain disturbances of the unconscious, in the sympathetic system, which produce symptoms exactly like organic disturbances. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 177.
We can therefore assume, psychologically speaking, that the object which is to be transformed in alchemy is connected with the human body: it is a mystery of the body. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 177.
Living matter is a mystery which is beyond our understanding, if only for the reason that we ourselves consist of living matter. We cannot climb above our own heads, a fact which should be a warning to all those people who try to explain the nature of God. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 216.
One could say, in a certain sense, that the unconscious was the invisible, psychical part of the tangible and visible nervous system, just as one might say consciousness was the invisible part of the brain. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 216.
The elements are of an earthly nature, the physical and chemical constituents of our bodies. These are the earth in us, so to speak, and the stars represent the beginning of psychical life, the influence of the stars in the condition of the chaos. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 229.
Natural science holds that man has developed, through long generations of pre-human ancestors. This is, of course, a process of nature, not a human activity. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 212
Consciousness is produced from a quite specific unconsciousness, which anticipates things that consciousness will only later recognize and understand. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 213.
We are beset by an all-too-human fear that consciousness - our Promethean conquest - may in the end not be able to serve us as well as nature. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Par 750.
It is a general truth that the earth is depreciated and misunderstood…For quite long enough we have been taught that this life is not the real thing…and that we live only for heaven. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 193.
The word ‘matter’ remains a dry, inhuman, and purely intellectual concept… How different was the former image of matter—the Great Mother—that could encompass and express the profound emotional meaning of the Great Mother.
~Carl Jung, Man & His Symbols, pages 94-5.
The anima, on the other hand, is the 'energy of the heavy and the turbid'; it clings to the bodily, fleshly heart. 'Desires and impulses to anger' are its effects. 'Whoever is sombre and moody on waking ... is fettered by the anima.' ~Carl Jung, Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 114.
The spirit shows its effective power only in the reshaping of matter.
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 59-63.
Just as, in its lower reaches, the psyche loses itself in the organic-material substrate, so in its upper reaches it resolves itself into a "spiritual" form about which we know as little as we do about the functional basis of instinct. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Pages 178-181, Paras 371-381.
What affects the body has its influence on the soul, and vice versa. In a very difficult case of illness psycho-therapy is always called in. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Page 236.
The soul and the body are indeed one, so, at any rate theoretically, any illness can be approached from either side; for even if an illness has not a psychic cause it still has a psychic side. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Page 235.
It is the drive of the instinct which makes life worth living; without it life is merely momentary and fragmentary, it is this drive which gives life form and meaning. But, unless we understand them in a deep sense, the spiritual instincts just worry at us, we try to explain them in the wrong way and can see no use in them. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Page 216.
All this means that in time and space I am only here in my body, I cannot be identical with Buddha, but if I can rid myself of all my personal contents, if I can distribute them as Devatas all over the universe, I can sit in the heaven of the gods and reach eternal peace. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 20Jan1939, Page 62.
Disintegration is consciously undertaken in our text with the purpose of emptying the ego consciousness and integrating a central consciousness, the totality of the personality; it is undertaken because the problem of the body has come up. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 20Jan1939, Page62.
If we seek our connection with the snake we come to the spinal cord and that points to the animal soul of man which leads him down into the darkness of the body, into the instinct which one meets in animal form in the outer world. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 8March1935, Pages 199-200.
The discovery of the value of human personality is reserved for a riper age.
For young people the search for personality values is very often a pretext for evading their biological duty.
Conversely, the exaggerated longing of an older person for the sexual values of youth is a short-sighted and often cowardly evasion of a duty which demands recognition of the value of personality and submission to the hierarchy of cultural values.
The young neurotic shrinks back in terror from the expansion of life’s duties, the old one from the dwindling of the treasures he has attained. ~Carl Jung, CW 4, Page 664.
Jung (1875-1961) and Pauli (1900-1958) met in 1930 when, Pauli, in life distress and psychic despair, sought out Jung for direction in attending to his emotional and psychological pain. While never Pauli's analyst, Jung reviewed thirteen hundred of Pauli's dreams and studied a selection from the first four hundred of these. Over years of contact, the younger man's knowledge penetrated and influenced Jung's thought.
In 1952 Jung, and Pauli published a juxtaposition of their ideas in The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche. In their work, they crossed paths on complementary vectors.
As the phenomenal world is an aggregate of the processes of atomic magnitude, it is naturally of the greatest importance to find out whether, and if so how, the photons (shall we say) enable us to gain a definite knowledge of the reality underlying the mediative energy processes Light and matter both behave like separate particles and also like waves. This . . . obliged us to abandon, on the plane of atomic magnitudes, a causal description of nature in the ordinary space-time system, and in its place to set up invisible fields of probability in multidimensional spaces.2
Pauli? No, Jung.
Division and reduction of symmetry, this then the kernel of the brute! The former is an ancient attribute of the devil If only the two divine contenders--Christ and the devil--could notice that they have grown so much more symmetrical!3
Jung? No, Pauli, in a letter written a year before his death to Werner Heisenberg, a lifelong friend and colleague. --Jung, Atom & Archetype
There are certain disturbances of the unconscious, in the sympathetic system, which produce symptoms exactly like organic disturbances. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 177.
We can therefore assume, psychologically speaking, that the object which is to be transformed in alchemy is connected with the human body: it is a mystery of the body. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 177.
Living matter is a mystery which is beyond our understanding, if only for the reason that we ourselves consist of living matter. We cannot climb above our own heads, a fact which should be a warning to all those people who try to explain the nature of God. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 216.
One could say, in a certain sense, that the unconscious was the invisible, psychical part of the tangible and visible nervous system, just as one might say consciousness was the invisible part of the brain. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 216.
The elements are of an earthly nature, the physical and chemical constituents of our bodies. These are the earth in us, so to speak, and the stars represent the beginning of psychical life, the influence of the stars in the condition of the chaos. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 229.
Natural science holds that man has developed, through long generations of pre-human ancestors. This is, of course, a process of nature, not a human activity. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 212
Consciousness is produced from a quite specific unconsciousness, which anticipates things that consciousness will only later recognize and understand. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 213.
We are beset by an all-too-human fear that consciousness - our Promethean conquest - may in the end not be able to serve us as well as nature. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Par 750.
It is a general truth that the earth is depreciated and misunderstood…For quite long enough we have been taught that this life is not the real thing…and that we live only for heaven. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 193.
The word ‘matter’ remains a dry, inhuman, and purely intellectual concept… How different was the former image of matter—the Great Mother—that could encompass and express the profound emotional meaning of the Great Mother.
~Carl Jung, Man & His Symbols, pages 94-5.
The anima, on the other hand, is the 'energy of the heavy and the turbid'; it clings to the bodily, fleshly heart. 'Desires and impulses to anger' are its effects. 'Whoever is sombre and moody on waking ... is fettered by the anima.' ~Carl Jung, Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 114.
The spirit shows its effective power only in the reshaping of matter.
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 59-63.
Just as, in its lower reaches, the psyche loses itself in the organic-material substrate, so in its upper reaches it resolves itself into a "spiritual" form about which we know as little as we do about the functional basis of instinct. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Pages 178-181, Paras 371-381.
What affects the body has its influence on the soul, and vice versa. In a very difficult case of illness psycho-therapy is always called in. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Page 236.
The soul and the body are indeed one, so, at any rate theoretically, any illness can be approached from either side; for even if an illness has not a psychic cause it still has a psychic side. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Page 235.
It is the drive of the instinct which makes life worth living; without it life is merely momentary and fragmentary, it is this drive which gives life form and meaning. But, unless we understand them in a deep sense, the spiritual instincts just worry at us, we try to explain them in the wrong way and can see no use in them. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Page 216.
All this means that in time and space I am only here in my body, I cannot be identical with Buddha, but if I can rid myself of all my personal contents, if I can distribute them as Devatas all over the universe, I can sit in the heaven of the gods and reach eternal peace. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 20Jan1939, Page 62.
Disintegration is consciously undertaken in our text with the purpose of emptying the ego consciousness and integrating a central consciousness, the totality of the personality; it is undertaken because the problem of the body has come up. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 20Jan1939, Page62.
If we seek our connection with the snake we come to the spinal cord and that points to the animal soul of man which leads him down into the darkness of the body, into the instinct which one meets in animal form in the outer world. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 8March1935, Pages 199-200.
The discovery of the value of human personality is reserved for a riper age.
For young people the search for personality values is very often a pretext for evading their biological duty.
Conversely, the exaggerated longing of an older person for the sexual values of youth is a short-sighted and often cowardly evasion of a duty which demands recognition of the value of personality and submission to the hierarchy of cultural values.
The young neurotic shrinks back in terror from the expansion of life’s duties, the old one from the dwindling of the treasures he has attained. ~Carl Jung, CW 4, Page 664.
And this being has body, soul and spirit, and is, therefore, the
principle of life itself, as well as the principle of individuation. Its
nature is spiritual, it cannot be seen, and it contains an invisible
image. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 221.
The psyche as such cannot be explained in terms of physiological chemistry, if only because, together with "life" itself, it is the only "natural factor" capable of converting statistical organizations which are subject to natural law into "higher" or "unnatural" states, in opposition to the rule of entropy that runs throughout the inorganic realm. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Pages 178-181, Paras 371-381
How life produces complex organic systems from the inorganic we do not know, though we have direct experience of how the psyche does it. Life therefore has a specific law of its own which cannot be deduced from the known physical laws of nature. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Pages 178-181, Paras 371-381
The East tries to avoid abstraction, so that the enormously valuable body shall not be lost. The whole meditation originates in the body, not in the spirit. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Page 21.
The body seems to be understood as a materialization of the life principle, which latter is an abstraction of the sum total of bodily existence. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Page 21
One source is the unconscious, which spontaneously produces such fantasies; the other source is life, which, if lived with complete devotion, brings an intuition of the self, the individual being. ~Carl Jung, Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 99.
What is Matter, Spirit and the Human Body
Lecture X 26th January 1940
In the last lecture we began to speak of Przywara's meditation on the first word of the Fundamentum: "homo". We came up against the word "spirit" and I expressed a doubt as to whether spirit could be called intellect or consciousness.
Consciousness is becoming aware of, making an image or concept of something, and intellect is the ability to think. Neither of these things is spirit. So we came to the question what is spirit?
Or rather what psychic experience can be identified with or expressed by it? In order to approach this question I spoke of the etymology of spirit, of the Greek words "pneuma" and "anemos", the Latin word "spiritus" and so on.
Today we will examine the German word "Geist", it corresponds to the English word ghost and is derived from the old Nordic word "geisa", that is "wiiten", (to rage, to be furious).
This brings in a new idea, by no means identical with the soft breath of spiritus and pneuma.
It indicates passion, fire, etc. It is related to the Germanic word "us-gaisjan", to induce an emotional condition, to get someone out of himself.
And we say in Swiss German "'s isch zum Ufgeischte", meaning that a situation or person has become intolerable. This corresponds to the English word aghast. This peculiar quality is also visible in the metaphors which are used in connection with spirit: flame, fire, sparks, light, etc.
All these separate ideas, as you will remember, come together in the miracle of Pentecost.
A "rushing mighty wind" filled the house and "cloven tongues like as of fire" descended on each of the Apostles and "they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance".
The multitude outside were amazed and some said: "These men are full of new wine."This shows that they were in a condition which could be compared to drunkenness.In every language alcohol is called spirit. It is a spirit of a certain kind but evanescent in its effect.
The wine in the communion is called the spiritual blood and is a symbol of both blood and spirit, so that here also we find qualities of the spirit described.As we saw, the words for spirit in the Latin, Greek and Semitic languages were connected with moving air.
So it is said that the Holy Ghost breathes between Father and Son. He is the principle of life. This is the origin of the primitive idea that the soul leaves the body with the last breath. The quality of moving air is also to be found in "wiiten ", (to rage) , we speak of a raging wind, for instance.
If we consider this aspect of " Geist", we shall see that it is a peculiar condition of man. That which is moved, as if blown away by the wind, that which is made alive, is called spirit. It is, therefore, an increase of life. The phenomenon of the spirit is always a sort of possession, primitive man can only describe it as a different soul, a spirit, which comes to my soul and possesses it. The primitive wears a neck amulet in order to shelter the back of his neck, which is unconscious, in order to prevent the spirit sitting on him there and speaking through him.
This spirit can also enter by the fontanel. People with an open fontanel are always regarded as somewhat peculiar, because the old channel of the soul is open and souls can get in and out. In Tibet the soul is said to leave the body by the fontanel so, in the last prayer said over the dying, the Lama produces a high tone which causes the skull to open and allows the soul to leave the body.
We see, therefore, that possession by a breath-like being is a primeval conception of a spiritual condition. The man who unexpectedly speaks from an exalted or peculiar state is mana or taboo, if he speaks paradoxically then he is surely a sorcerer. All this shows us that the psychological phenomenon of the spirit is an exalted condition of life, or at least an unusual one, or, to formulate it still more carefully, it is a change
in the personality.
You see it is something very different to the modern use of the word "Geist", and I am convinced that these original forms are far nearer to its real nature. We can only speak of it as a human condition; what it is in and for itself is a question which cannot be answered, we can only know how it is experienced.This is equally true of the concept of matter or body.
We must say here that the body has nothing to do with matter.
Matter is an abstraction, nowadays it has become a philosophical and scientific concept, whereas body is the direct psychic experience of the body. Here again there is danger of a misunderstanding. If we ask modern man what is body, he describes the anatomical structure which he can see with his eyes. But that is no psychic experience, it is scientific experience of the body.
Psychic experiences is the image of the body which is reflected in the psyche. How I experience the body from within is a totally different question. I am inside the body as a psyche. If we investigate carefully what that means we come on a lot of extremely peculiar experiences which have given rise to many of the strangest symbols.
If you want to know how the body can be experienced psychically you must turn to eastern Yoga; medieval philosophy also knew something of the matter. If you contemplate the body from the point of view of the psyche, you will be able to locate a mental sphere of consciousness in the head, another centre of consciousness in the heart
and one in the abdomen.
Our medieval philosophers discovered these, and such centres are highly differentiated in India. Anatomical knowledge does not tell us how we fill our own bodies but psychic experience does give us information on this point. We fill our bodies as if through inner streams.
The Indian teaching of Prana formulates this, it makes people aware that they can, so to speak, stream into certain limbs and, if one experiments on these lines, one finds it is possible to achieve very peculiar results. One can, for instance, warm cold limbs in this way and enervate certain muscles.
Yogins have many stunts of this kind which are based on psychological Prana experience and have nothing to do with mysticism. It is by such paths that a psychic image of the body is obtained. Prana conceives of the body as a sort of system of pipes, going into the limbs and connecting the centres.
These centres are not mystical but psychical centres of experience. It is no wonder that eastern and western doctors cannot understand each other's language. Our modern doctors are beginning to understand that these centres are not anatomical but are psychological centres of activity.
We say that certain things take our breath away, others feel like a pressure on the breast or heart, and other things lie heavy on our stomach. So when we say body, we really mean our psychic experience of the body.
This has only a distant relationship to the anatomical and physiological structure of the body and nothing whatever to do with matter. One cannot prove a Prana pipe scientifically, so we say in the West that it is ridiculous. But this simply means that we are ridiculous not to be able to understand such things. The body, therefore, is also a psychological condition, a peculiar form of consciousness.
So when we think - we could just as well say function psychically - in the head, it is something quite different to doing the same thing with the heart. These two things are so different that it is a tremendous discovery for a lot of people when they find they can understand something with the heart, for most people only function in the brain box.
The old Greeks, on the contrary, lived in the diaphragm. So we see that what we call spirit and body are psychic conditions, limited psychic functions, and the body tells us as little about what matter really is, as the spirit about the thing in itself which
is behind the spiritual condition.
We only have our experiences of the spirit, we do not know what is behind these, what spirit is or whether it is a divine being, and we only have our own experiences of the body. We perceive both with our consciousness.
We can really say, therefore, that Przywara's meditation is incomplete, it goes no further than the conceptions of spirit and body. There is not such a conflict in the soul itself, in a sense we make this conflict when we say: here above is the spirit, here below is the body, with a tremendous tension between them.
It is not eo ipso like that in us. We can experience the body psychically, a prana-body, a subtle body, and there are certain exalted and ecstatic conditions in which we can experience spirit. So what we experience of spirit and body are really psychic modalities.
But when Przywara says that man is a "medium formale materiale", that is, a mediator between a formal and a material nature, we can again assent. Man is a peculiar psychic unity of experience of body and spirit, torn in two pieces by the intellect. We think that experience of the spirit is something of a totally different nature to experience of the body and then the rent is already there.
This does not mean that the split should not have occurred, to assert that would be to deny the whole mental development of man. This contradiction had to occur, this chasm had to be torn open, or we should never have understood. When black and white are together, one and the same thing, we cannot distinguish anything. So Przywara says that man, as "medium formale materiale", shows forth God who is the unity of everything in creation which has been torn into the opposites.
He says:
"If he (man ) as centre is the objective image of God, and subjectively there for the purpose of making God known as the absolute centre, he is only in so far effective as he, incapable of remaining fixed in himself, hangs wholly in God."
He takes the expression "hanging in God" from the annotations of Ignatius himself: "adhaerere, inhaerere, cohaerere Deo" (hanging on, hanging in and hanging together with God). Przywara continues:
"He is man in as far as he is in God. He is the centre of body-spirit in as far as he is in God, Who in His essence is the adequate absolute centre : In Himself as the All-pervading."
He says here that the unity, the coincidentia oppositorum, in the soul of man is an image, an allegory, so to speak, of God, because all opposites are reconciled in God. Man is there in order (through the unity which is in him) to show forth the unity of God.
And in what condition does man find himself? He has this likeness to the unity of God but, as a created being, he can do nothing out of · himself but depends entirely on God. God is not only his pattern but his causa efficiens, his effective cause. Man is entirely contained in God and this condition is described by Przywara as hanging in God. To anticipate, this hanging means hanging on the cross. There is no freedom, it is a condition in which man does not depend on himself but entirely on God, for God is absolute.
Przywara continues:
"Body and spirit are 'right' with one another in so far as man is 'right' in God." Body and spirit, thought of as two poles, combine correctly with each other if man depends correctly upon God, because they are reconciled through His unity.
This unity is guaranteed by Him because Przywara says:
God is the only "in sich selbst sein" (one who is in himself.) This means that God is the Self and, in so far as man is a unity, he is an image of this Self. We have here the teaching of "Atman" in a purely Catholic form.
God is the efficient cause, he IS.
He is the essential reason of existence and its guarantee, there is no existence outside him. This is really exactly the same idea as the Indian: I am Atman, I am the world. It is a Platonic idea that man is the image of God. The Indians express it as the thumbling in man's heart that is also the Atman which covers the whole earth and which contains everything.
So far there is complete harmony between the two, but whereas the Indian conceives of man as a free, natural, plant-like image of God, Przywara represents him as being in a condition of compulsion and torture; man is nailed up, so to speak, as an image of God.
Curiously enough, there was an antique mystery cult in which this idea was carried out concretely. A pine tree was felled during the yearly festival of the cult of Attis and was carried into the cave of Cybele. A picture of the God was fixed to the tree: the tree represented the God.
The tree was thus made the child of Cybele who is nature. If we think in the Indian way, Attis is the pine tree and stands in the womb of nature and is nature, he is a pure expression or image of nature. But when the image of Attis is fixed to the tree, then it is an expression of the "suspensio", of the painful death of Attis who was, so to speak, given back to the mother as a corpse for re-birth, resurrection.
The symbol of the cave is naturally the symbol of the grave and life is buried like a grain of wheat in the womb of the earth and grows up again. This is the mystical idea behind the mysteries of Eleusis, Attis, etc. Przywara makes it even clearer when he says that man, as the reconciliation of the opposites, spirit and body, is a "Kreuzung" (intersection, crossing).
He uses the word "Kreuzung", and this means that two different tendencies, the somatic and pneumatic, cross, so to speak, in man. This is a condition of tension, the god is killed between the opposites. We see this also in pictures where Mithras sits on the bull and, as matador, runs the sword into its throat.
The scene is flanked by torch bearers with torches held aloft and sunk to the ground. This is the rising of the sun, Helios driving his horses up into the Heavens, and Luna driving down on the other side: day and night. This represents the sacrifice as taking place at midday, between the opposites.
And you find exactly the same idea in the crucifixion, Christ was crucified between the two thieves, one went up to Paradise and the other down to Hell. Man also is between these opposites, which is why Przywara calls him a "Kreuzung", and the tension between the opposites he calls a "Riss" (rent) which is simply a conflict between the opposites.
This is something which you do not find in India, the conflict is called illusion in Buddhism and lies outside. The Buddhist aims at Nirdvandva, freedom from the opposites, they are merely the concupiscentia.
When man sees that the world is illusion, he ceases to desire it and, when his knowledge is sufficient to recognise everything as illusion, the whole Nidana chain ceases to exist, for it only leads to death and suffering. The Buddhist, to a great extent, refuses the conflict whereas it is all important in the West. This expresses the western attitude which is extraverted.
The world seems beautiful and desirable to us; we grumble sometimes but are exceedingly optimistic about it and are always sure tomorrow will be better. But the Indian says: it will never be different and has long given up the conflict about it, because it is outside him. It is an inner conflict with us, and we also have long ceased to do anything about it as such, and so naturally we have to meet it outside, in other people.
And it gives us the greatest satisfaction to be able to locate it elsewhere. We read, for instance, of a crime in the newspaper and feel delighted to think: "he has it, not I . "
~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Pages 224-228.
I have made a great effort to explain what I mean by "psychic.” I call those biological phenomena "psychic" which show at least traces of a will that interferes with the regular and automatic functioning of instincts. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 457-458.
The psyche as such cannot be explained in terms of physiological chemistry, if only because, together with "life" itself, it is the only "natural factor" capable of converting statistical organizations which are subject to natural law into "higher" or "unnatural" states, in opposition to the rule of entropy that runs throughout the inorganic realm. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Pages 178-181, Paras 371-381
How life produces complex organic systems from the inorganic we do not know, though we have direct experience of how the psyche does it. Life therefore has a specific law of its own which cannot be deduced from the known physical laws of nature. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Pages 178-181, Paras 371-381
The East tries to avoid abstraction, so that the enormously valuable body shall not be lost. The whole meditation originates in the body, not in the spirit. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Page 21.
The body seems to be understood as a materialization of the life principle, which latter is an abstraction of the sum total of bodily existence. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Page 21
One source is the unconscious, which spontaneously produces such fantasies; the other source is life, which, if lived with complete devotion, brings an intuition of the self, the individual being. ~Carl Jung, Secret of the Golden Flower, Page 99.
What is Matter, Spirit and the Human Body
Lecture X 26th January 1940
In the last lecture we began to speak of Przywara's meditation on the first word of the Fundamentum: "homo". We came up against the word "spirit" and I expressed a doubt as to whether spirit could be called intellect or consciousness.
Consciousness is becoming aware of, making an image or concept of something, and intellect is the ability to think. Neither of these things is spirit. So we came to the question what is spirit?
Or rather what psychic experience can be identified with or expressed by it? In order to approach this question I spoke of the etymology of spirit, of the Greek words "pneuma" and "anemos", the Latin word "spiritus" and so on.
Today we will examine the German word "Geist", it corresponds to the English word ghost and is derived from the old Nordic word "geisa", that is "wiiten", (to rage, to be furious).
This brings in a new idea, by no means identical with the soft breath of spiritus and pneuma.
It indicates passion, fire, etc. It is related to the Germanic word "us-gaisjan", to induce an emotional condition, to get someone out of himself.
And we say in Swiss German "'s isch zum Ufgeischte", meaning that a situation or person has become intolerable. This corresponds to the English word aghast. This peculiar quality is also visible in the metaphors which are used in connection with spirit: flame, fire, sparks, light, etc.
All these separate ideas, as you will remember, come together in the miracle of Pentecost.
A "rushing mighty wind" filled the house and "cloven tongues like as of fire" descended on each of the Apostles and "they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance".
The multitude outside were amazed and some said: "These men are full of new wine."This shows that they were in a condition which could be compared to drunkenness.In every language alcohol is called spirit. It is a spirit of a certain kind but evanescent in its effect.
The wine in the communion is called the spiritual blood and is a symbol of both blood and spirit, so that here also we find qualities of the spirit described.As we saw, the words for spirit in the Latin, Greek and Semitic languages were connected with moving air.
So it is said that the Holy Ghost breathes between Father and Son. He is the principle of life. This is the origin of the primitive idea that the soul leaves the body with the last breath. The quality of moving air is also to be found in "wiiten ", (to rage) , we speak of a raging wind, for instance.
If we consider this aspect of " Geist", we shall see that it is a peculiar condition of man. That which is moved, as if blown away by the wind, that which is made alive, is called spirit. It is, therefore, an increase of life. The phenomenon of the spirit is always a sort of possession, primitive man can only describe it as a different soul, a spirit, which comes to my soul and possesses it. The primitive wears a neck amulet in order to shelter the back of his neck, which is unconscious, in order to prevent the spirit sitting on him there and speaking through him.
This spirit can also enter by the fontanel. People with an open fontanel are always regarded as somewhat peculiar, because the old channel of the soul is open and souls can get in and out. In Tibet the soul is said to leave the body by the fontanel so, in the last prayer said over the dying, the Lama produces a high tone which causes the skull to open and allows the soul to leave the body.
We see, therefore, that possession by a breath-like being is a primeval conception of a spiritual condition. The man who unexpectedly speaks from an exalted or peculiar state is mana or taboo, if he speaks paradoxically then he is surely a sorcerer. All this shows us that the psychological phenomenon of the spirit is an exalted condition of life, or at least an unusual one, or, to formulate it still more carefully, it is a change
in the personality.
You see it is something very different to the modern use of the word "Geist", and I am convinced that these original forms are far nearer to its real nature. We can only speak of it as a human condition; what it is in and for itself is a question which cannot be answered, we can only know how it is experienced.This is equally true of the concept of matter or body.
We must say here that the body has nothing to do with matter.
Matter is an abstraction, nowadays it has become a philosophical and scientific concept, whereas body is the direct psychic experience of the body. Here again there is danger of a misunderstanding. If we ask modern man what is body, he describes the anatomical structure which he can see with his eyes. But that is no psychic experience, it is scientific experience of the body.
Psychic experiences is the image of the body which is reflected in the psyche. How I experience the body from within is a totally different question. I am inside the body as a psyche. If we investigate carefully what that means we come on a lot of extremely peculiar experiences which have given rise to many of the strangest symbols.
If you want to know how the body can be experienced psychically you must turn to eastern Yoga; medieval philosophy also knew something of the matter. If you contemplate the body from the point of view of the psyche, you will be able to locate a mental sphere of consciousness in the head, another centre of consciousness in the heart
and one in the abdomen.
Our medieval philosophers discovered these, and such centres are highly differentiated in India. Anatomical knowledge does not tell us how we fill our own bodies but psychic experience does give us information on this point. We fill our bodies as if through inner streams.
The Indian teaching of Prana formulates this, it makes people aware that they can, so to speak, stream into certain limbs and, if one experiments on these lines, one finds it is possible to achieve very peculiar results. One can, for instance, warm cold limbs in this way and enervate certain muscles.
Yogins have many stunts of this kind which are based on psychological Prana experience and have nothing to do with mysticism. It is by such paths that a psychic image of the body is obtained. Prana conceives of the body as a sort of system of pipes, going into the limbs and connecting the centres.
These centres are not mystical but psychical centres of experience. It is no wonder that eastern and western doctors cannot understand each other's language. Our modern doctors are beginning to understand that these centres are not anatomical but are psychological centres of activity.
We say that certain things take our breath away, others feel like a pressure on the breast or heart, and other things lie heavy on our stomach. So when we say body, we really mean our psychic experience of the body.
This has only a distant relationship to the anatomical and physiological structure of the body and nothing whatever to do with matter. One cannot prove a Prana pipe scientifically, so we say in the West that it is ridiculous. But this simply means that we are ridiculous not to be able to understand such things. The body, therefore, is also a psychological condition, a peculiar form of consciousness.
So when we think - we could just as well say function psychically - in the head, it is something quite different to doing the same thing with the heart. These two things are so different that it is a tremendous discovery for a lot of people when they find they can understand something with the heart, for most people only function in the brain box.
The old Greeks, on the contrary, lived in the diaphragm. So we see that what we call spirit and body are psychic conditions, limited psychic functions, and the body tells us as little about what matter really is, as the spirit about the thing in itself which
is behind the spiritual condition.
We only have our experiences of the spirit, we do not know what is behind these, what spirit is or whether it is a divine being, and we only have our own experiences of the body. We perceive both with our consciousness.
We can really say, therefore, that Przywara's meditation is incomplete, it goes no further than the conceptions of spirit and body. There is not such a conflict in the soul itself, in a sense we make this conflict when we say: here above is the spirit, here below is the body, with a tremendous tension between them.
It is not eo ipso like that in us. We can experience the body psychically, a prana-body, a subtle body, and there are certain exalted and ecstatic conditions in which we can experience spirit. So what we experience of spirit and body are really psychic modalities.
But when Przywara says that man is a "medium formale materiale", that is, a mediator between a formal and a material nature, we can again assent. Man is a peculiar psychic unity of experience of body and spirit, torn in two pieces by the intellect. We think that experience of the spirit is something of a totally different nature to experience of the body and then the rent is already there.
This does not mean that the split should not have occurred, to assert that would be to deny the whole mental development of man. This contradiction had to occur, this chasm had to be torn open, or we should never have understood. When black and white are together, one and the same thing, we cannot distinguish anything. So Przywara says that man, as "medium formale materiale", shows forth God who is the unity of everything in creation which has been torn into the opposites.
He says:
"If he (man ) as centre is the objective image of God, and subjectively there for the purpose of making God known as the absolute centre, he is only in so far effective as he, incapable of remaining fixed in himself, hangs wholly in God."
He takes the expression "hanging in God" from the annotations of Ignatius himself: "adhaerere, inhaerere, cohaerere Deo" (hanging on, hanging in and hanging together with God). Przywara continues:
"He is man in as far as he is in God. He is the centre of body-spirit in as far as he is in God, Who in His essence is the adequate absolute centre : In Himself as the All-pervading."
He says here that the unity, the coincidentia oppositorum, in the soul of man is an image, an allegory, so to speak, of God, because all opposites are reconciled in God. Man is there in order (through the unity which is in him) to show forth the unity of God.
And in what condition does man find himself? He has this likeness to the unity of God but, as a created being, he can do nothing out of · himself but depends entirely on God. God is not only his pattern but his causa efficiens, his effective cause. Man is entirely contained in God and this condition is described by Przywara as hanging in God. To anticipate, this hanging means hanging on the cross. There is no freedom, it is a condition in which man does not depend on himself but entirely on God, for God is absolute.
Przywara continues:
"Body and spirit are 'right' with one another in so far as man is 'right' in God." Body and spirit, thought of as two poles, combine correctly with each other if man depends correctly upon God, because they are reconciled through His unity.
This unity is guaranteed by Him because Przywara says:
God is the only "in sich selbst sein" (one who is in himself.) This means that God is the Self and, in so far as man is a unity, he is an image of this Self. We have here the teaching of "Atman" in a purely Catholic form.
God is the efficient cause, he IS.
He is the essential reason of existence and its guarantee, there is no existence outside him. This is really exactly the same idea as the Indian: I am Atman, I am the world. It is a Platonic idea that man is the image of God. The Indians express it as the thumbling in man's heart that is also the Atman which covers the whole earth and which contains everything.
So far there is complete harmony between the two, but whereas the Indian conceives of man as a free, natural, plant-like image of God, Przywara represents him as being in a condition of compulsion and torture; man is nailed up, so to speak, as an image of God.
Curiously enough, there was an antique mystery cult in which this idea was carried out concretely. A pine tree was felled during the yearly festival of the cult of Attis and was carried into the cave of Cybele. A picture of the God was fixed to the tree: the tree represented the God.
The tree was thus made the child of Cybele who is nature. If we think in the Indian way, Attis is the pine tree and stands in the womb of nature and is nature, he is a pure expression or image of nature. But when the image of Attis is fixed to the tree, then it is an expression of the "suspensio", of the painful death of Attis who was, so to speak, given back to the mother as a corpse for re-birth, resurrection.
The symbol of the cave is naturally the symbol of the grave and life is buried like a grain of wheat in the womb of the earth and grows up again. This is the mystical idea behind the mysteries of Eleusis, Attis, etc. Przywara makes it even clearer when he says that man, as the reconciliation of the opposites, spirit and body, is a "Kreuzung" (intersection, crossing).
He uses the word "Kreuzung", and this means that two different tendencies, the somatic and pneumatic, cross, so to speak, in man. This is a condition of tension, the god is killed between the opposites. We see this also in pictures where Mithras sits on the bull and, as matador, runs the sword into its throat.
The scene is flanked by torch bearers with torches held aloft and sunk to the ground. This is the rising of the sun, Helios driving his horses up into the Heavens, and Luna driving down on the other side: day and night. This represents the sacrifice as taking place at midday, between the opposites.
And you find exactly the same idea in the crucifixion, Christ was crucified between the two thieves, one went up to Paradise and the other down to Hell. Man also is between these opposites, which is why Przywara calls him a "Kreuzung", and the tension between the opposites he calls a "Riss" (rent) which is simply a conflict between the opposites.
This is something which you do not find in India, the conflict is called illusion in Buddhism and lies outside. The Buddhist aims at Nirdvandva, freedom from the opposites, they are merely the concupiscentia.
When man sees that the world is illusion, he ceases to desire it and, when his knowledge is sufficient to recognise everything as illusion, the whole Nidana chain ceases to exist, for it only leads to death and suffering. The Buddhist, to a great extent, refuses the conflict whereas it is all important in the West. This expresses the western attitude which is extraverted.
The world seems beautiful and desirable to us; we grumble sometimes but are exceedingly optimistic about it and are always sure tomorrow will be better. But the Indian says: it will never be different and has long given up the conflict about it, because it is outside him. It is an inner conflict with us, and we also have long ceased to do anything about it as such, and so naturally we have to meet it outside, in other people.
And it gives us the greatest satisfaction to be able to locate it elsewhere. We read, for instance, of a crime in the newspaper and feel delighted to think: "he has it, not I . "
~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Pages 224-228.
I have made a great effort to explain what I mean by "psychic.” I call those biological phenomena "psychic" which show at least traces of a will that interferes with the regular and automatic functioning of instincts. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 457-458.
But it is the lower man that keeps on living with the body and who is nothing else but the life of the body. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, p. 435-437.
We are used to thinking of matter and spirit as of two wholly different and opposite principles. But to the alchemist, the materia was filled with a spiritus, and the two were inseparably one. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Alchemy, Lecture VII, Page 67.
Inasmuch as they cannot be influenced by consciousness, the functioning of the intestines, the heart, the glands, the whole world of the cerebro-spinal reflexes, and so on, all belong to the vegetative psyche, and lie in the dark, in the unconscious.
The vegetative processes in our bodies, in their normal functioning, cannot be reached by our consciousness or influenced by our will. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Alchemy, Lecture VII, Page 68.
There must be a psychical equivalent of matter preformed in man, and this is our own matter, our physical world: the body, for the body is matter. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Alchemy, Lecture VII, Page 67.
Man is a peculiar psychic unity of experience of body and spirit, torn in two pieces by the intellect. We think that experience of the spirit is something of a totally different
nature to experience of the body and then the rent is already there.
This does not mean that the split should not have occurred, to assert that would be to deny the whole mental development of man. This contradiction had to occur, this chasm had to be torn open, or we should never have understood. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 226.
The body, therefore, is also a psychological condition, a peculiar form of consciousness. So when we think - we could just as well say function psychically - in the head, it is something quite different to doing the same thing with the heart.
These two things are so different that it is a tremendous discovery for a lot of people when they find they can understand something with the heart, for most people only function in the brain box. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 226.
We are used to thinking of matter and spirit as of two wholly different and opposite principles. But to the alchemist, the materia was filled with a spiritus, and the two were inseparably one. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Alchemy, Lecture VII, Page 67.
Inasmuch as they cannot be influenced by consciousness, the functioning of the intestines, the heart, the glands, the whole world of the cerebro-spinal reflexes, and so on, all belong to the vegetative psyche, and lie in the dark, in the unconscious.
The vegetative processes in our bodies, in their normal functioning, cannot be reached by our consciousness or influenced by our will. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Alchemy, Lecture VII, Page 68.
There must be a psychical equivalent of matter preformed in man, and this is our own matter, our physical world: the body, for the body is matter. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Alchemy, Lecture VII, Page 67.
Man is a peculiar psychic unity of experience of body and spirit, torn in two pieces by the intellect. We think that experience of the spirit is something of a totally different
nature to experience of the body and then the rent is already there.
This does not mean that the split should not have occurred, to assert that would be to deny the whole mental development of man. This contradiction had to occur, this chasm had to be torn open, or we should never have understood. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 226.
The body, therefore, is also a psychological condition, a peculiar form of consciousness. So when we think - we could just as well say function psychically - in the head, it is something quite different to doing the same thing with the heart.
These two things are so different that it is a tremendous discovery for a lot of people when they find they can understand something with the heart, for most people only function in the brain box. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 226.
The purified and nourished serpent in alchemy is the mercurial serpent, the Ouroboros, which is connected with the round thing.
It is one of the basic symbols in alchemy and refers to Mercury, not as ordinary mercury or quicksilver, but to the god or spirit Mercury.
The serpent is a Gnostic symbol for the spinal cord and the basal ganglia, because a snake is mainly backbone.
Snakes are weird and strange, and on account of this they have been used as a symbol for the unconscious since olden times.
If the unconscious can be localized anywhere it is in the basal ganglia, and it has the same uncanny character.
The snake really represents the vegetative psyche, the basis of the instincts, if one may express it in that way.
It is here (and in this place in the human being) that the greatest secret is to be found, the panacea, the universal medicine; and, according to the text, fortunate indeed is the man who finds it.
~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture XI, Page 97.
It is one of the basic symbols in alchemy and refers to Mercury, not as ordinary mercury or quicksilver, but to the god or spirit Mercury.
The serpent is a Gnostic symbol for the spinal cord and the basal ganglia, because a snake is mainly backbone.
Snakes are weird and strange, and on account of this they have been used as a symbol for the unconscious since olden times.
If the unconscious can be localized anywhere it is in the basal ganglia, and it has the same uncanny character.
The snake really represents the vegetative psyche, the basis of the instincts, if one may express it in that way.
It is here (and in this place in the human being) that the greatest secret is to be found, the panacea, the universal medicine; and, according to the text, fortunate indeed is the man who finds it.
~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture XI, Page 97.
The human brain is the result of a long process of evolution, as is also the collective unconscious. The individual experience is woven in to this tissue, so it is of vital importance, where we come from, who our parents are, and what our early surroundings were. ~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Vol. 2, Page 179.
"The symbols of the self arise in the depths of the body." --Jung
But if we can reconcile ourselves with the mysterious truth that spirit is the living body seen from within, and the body the outer manifestation of the living spirit --
the two being really one-then we can understand why it is that the attempt
to transcend the present level of consciousness must give its due to the body.
--Jung, Modern, 220
We shall also see that belief in the body cannot tolerate an outlook that denies the body in the name of the spirit.
~Carl Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Pages 218-220.
But every archetype before it is integrated consciously wants to manifest itself physically since it forces the subject into its own form. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 335-337.
The unconscious is largely identical with the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems, which are the physiological counterparts of the polarity of unconscious contents. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 278.
Therefore intuitives develop all sorts of physical trouble, intestinal disturbances for instance, ulcers of the stomach or other really grave physical troubles. Because they overleap the body, it reacts against them. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 1391-1392.
Occasionally we must also inquire whether something that wants to go upwards has not taken a false route downwards into the body. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 403.
It is certainly desirable to liberate oneself from the operation of opposites but one can only do it to a certain extent, because no sooner do you get out of the conflict than you get out of life altogether. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 247-248.
But if we can reconcile ourselves with the mysterious truth that spirit is the living body seen from within, and the body the outer manifestation of the living spirit--the two being really one-then we can understand why it is that the attempt to transcend the present level of consciousness must give its due to the body.
We shall also see that belief in the body cannot tolerate an outlook that denies the body in the name of the spirit. ~Carl Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Pages 218-220.
Indeed, I do not forget that my voice is but one voice, my experience a mere drop in the sea, my knowledge no greater than the visual field in a microscope, my mind's eye a mirror that reflects a small corner of the world, and my ideas-a subjective confession. ~Carl Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Page 221.
Even though spirit is regarded as essentially alive and enlivening, one cannot really feel nature as unspiritual and dead.
We must therefore be dealing here with the (Christian) postulate of a spirit whose life is so vastly superior to the life of nature that in comparison with it the latter is no better than death. ~Carl Jung; CW 9i; Para 390.
Psychology did not exist in earlier days, people thought naively, and when they sank into themselves they saw the inside of their own body.
~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Page 224.
But if we can reconcile ourselves with the mysterious truth that spirit is the living body seen from within, and the body the outer manifestation of the living spirit --
the two being really one-then we can understand why it is that the attempt
to transcend the present level of consciousness must give its due to the body.
--Jung, Modern, 220
We shall also see that belief in the body cannot tolerate an outlook that denies the body in the name of the spirit.
~Carl Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Pages 218-220.
But every archetype before it is integrated consciously wants to manifest itself physically since it forces the subject into its own form. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 335-337.
The unconscious is largely identical with the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems, which are the physiological counterparts of the polarity of unconscious contents. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 278.
Therefore intuitives develop all sorts of physical trouble, intestinal disturbances for instance, ulcers of the stomach or other really grave physical troubles. Because they overleap the body, it reacts against them. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 1391-1392.
Occasionally we must also inquire whether something that wants to go upwards has not taken a false route downwards into the body. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 403.
It is certainly desirable to liberate oneself from the operation of opposites but one can only do it to a certain extent, because no sooner do you get out of the conflict than you get out of life altogether. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 247-248.
But if we can reconcile ourselves with the mysterious truth that spirit is the living body seen from within, and the body the outer manifestation of the living spirit--the two being really one-then we can understand why it is that the attempt to transcend the present level of consciousness must give its due to the body.
We shall also see that belief in the body cannot tolerate an outlook that denies the body in the name of the spirit. ~Carl Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Pages 218-220.
Indeed, I do not forget that my voice is but one voice, my experience a mere drop in the sea, my knowledge no greater than the visual field in a microscope, my mind's eye a mirror that reflects a small corner of the world, and my ideas-a subjective confession. ~Carl Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Page 221.
Even though spirit is regarded as essentially alive and enlivening, one cannot really feel nature as unspiritual and dead.
We must therefore be dealing here with the (Christian) postulate of a spirit whose life is so vastly superior to the life of nature that in comparison with it the latter is no better than death. ~Carl Jung; CW 9i; Para 390.
Psychology did not exist in earlier days, people thought naively, and when they sank into themselves they saw the inside of their own body.
~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Page 224.
For just as a man has a body which is no different in principle from that of an animal, so also his psychology has a whole series of lower storeys in which the specters from humanity's past epochs still dwell, then the animal souls from the age of Pithecanthropus and the hominids, then the "psyche" of the cold-blooded saurians, and, deepest down of all, the transcendental mystery and paradox of the sympathetic and parasympathetic psychoid processes.
~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 212.
Carl Jung on the Symbolism of the Living Body
Now, what the living body represents is a great problem.
Of course the historical symbolism, as far as we know it, refers to the animal.
The life of the body is animal life.
There is no difference in principle between the physiology of the monkey and our own physiology; we have the physiology of an animal with warm blood.
Another analogy is with the plant and so with the tree.
Therefore the cross of Christ is also called the tree; Christ was crucified upon the tree.
And an old legend says that the wood for the cross was taken from the tree of paradise which was cut down and made into the two pillars, Aachim and Boas, in front of Solomon's temple.
Then these were thrown away, and discovered again, and made into the cross. So Christ was sacrificed on the original tree of life, and in the transitus he carried it.
The plant or the tree always refers to a non-animal growth or development and this would be spiritual development.
The life of the body is animal life: it is instinctive, contains warm blood, and is able to move about.
Then within the body is spiritual or mental development, and that is always expressed as the growth of a flower or a miraculous plant or an extraordinary tree, like the tree that grows from above, the roots in heaven and the branches down toward the earth.
That is Western as well as Eastern symbolism.
The famous tree of Yoga grows from above, and Ruysbroek, the Flemish mystic, uses the same symbol for the spiritual development within the Christian mysticism.
So in the one case the body or the corpse would mean the animal-we have to carry the sacrificed animal-and another aspect is that we have to carry our spiritual development which is also a part of nature, which has to do with nature just as much.
Then there is a further point to consider. Occasionally in my experience with patients-not only in that legend of Vikram-it is less a matter of a corpse than of the dead thing generally, a sort of preoccupation with the dead.
This hangs together with the fact that the body is a sort of conglomeration of ancestral units called Mendelian units.
Your face, for instance, obviously consists of certain units inherited from your family; your nose comes from an ancestor in the 18th century, and your eyes are perhaps from a relative in the 17th century.
The characteristic protruding lower lip of the Spanish Habsburgs dates from the time of Maximilian; that is a Mendelian unit which occasionally appears in a very pronounced way in certain individuals.
There is also an insane streak in the Spanish Habsburgs, which appeared in the 15th century and then disappeared, and then, according to the Mendelian law, it appeared again after two hundred years.
Then there is an English family named Whitelock, which is characterized by the fact that most of the members, particularly the male members, have a tuft of white hair in the center of the skull; therefore they are called Whitelock. That is again a unit of a particular tenacity.
So our whole body consists of inherited units from our father's or mother's side, from our particular clan or tribe for centuries past.
Now, each unit has also a psychical aspect, because the psyche represents the life or the living essence of the body.
So the psyche of man contains all these units too in a way, a psychological representation; a certain trait of character is peculiar to the grandfather, another one to a great-great-grandfather, and so on. Just as much as the body derives from the ancestors, the psyche derives from them.
It is like a sort-of puzzle, somewhat disjointed, not properly welded together to begin with, and then the mental development of the character, the development of the personality, consists in putting the puzzle together.
The puzzle is represented in dreams sometimes by the motif of a swarm of small particles, little animals or flies or small fishes or particles of minerals, and those disjointed and disparate elements have to be brought together again by means of a peculiar process.
This is the main theme of alchemy.
It begins with the idea of totality, which is depicted as a circle.
This is called "chaos," or the massa confusa, and it consists of all sorts of elements, an archaic collection, but all in one mass.
The task of the alchemist begins there.
These particles are to be arranged by means of the squaring of the circle.
The symbolic idea is to arrange the particles in a sort of crystal-like axis, which is called the quaternity, or the quaternion, or the quadrangulum, the four, and to each point a particular quality is given.
That is what we would call the differentiation of the psychological functions.
You see, it is a fact that certain people start with an intuitive gift, for instance, which will become their main function, the function by means of which they adapt.
A man who is born with a good brain will naturally use his intelligence to adapt; he will not use his feelings which are not then developed.
And a man who is very musical will surely use his musical gift in making his career and not his philosophical faculty, which is practically non-existent.
So one will use his feeling, another one his sense of reality, and so on, and each time there will be a one-sided product.
The study of these one-sided human products led me to the idea of the four functions, and nowadays we think that we should have not only one differentiated function but should take into consideration that there are others, and that a real adaptation to the world needs four functions-or at least more than one.
And this is something like the ideas of those old alchemists who wanted to produce out of chaos a symmetrical arrangement of the quaternity.
The four quarters of the circle indicate the fire, the air, the water, and the earth regions, and when they are arranged they will make in the center the quinta essentia, the fifth essence; the four essences are in the corners and in the center is the fifth.
That is the famous concept of the quinta essentia, a new unit which is also called the rotundum, the roundness, or the round complete thing.
It is again that circle of the beginning but this circle has now the anima mundi, the soul of the world, which was hidden in chaos.
At first all the elements were completely mixed in that round chaos, and the center was hidden; then the alchemist disentangles these elements and arranges them in a regular figure, like a crystal.
That is the idea of the philosopher's stone in which the original round thing appears again, and this time it is the spiritual body, the ethereal thing, the anima mundi, the redeemed microcosmos.
The motif of the swarm of little fishes or other little objects is also found in alchemy, representing the disjointed elements.
And it is often in children's dreams: I have dealt with such a case in one of my dream seminars at the E.T.H., a child who died unexpectedly about a year after she had produced a series of the most extraordinary dreams, practically all containing the swarm motif.
There was a cosmological dream where it was clearly visible how the swarm comes into existence, or how it is synthesized, and how it is dissolved into the swarm.
The Mendelian units join together physiologically as well as psychically and then disintegrate again.
That anticipated her death: her psyche was loosely connected, and when something adverse happened it dissolved into these units.
Now, each of those particles is a Mendelian unit inasmuch as it is living; for instance, your nose is living.
You live inasmuch as these Mendelian units are living.
They have souls, are endowed with psychic life, the psychic life of that ancestor; or you can call it part of an ancestral soul.
So inasmuch as you are like your nose, or can concentrate upon your nose, you become at once identical with the grandfather who had your nose.
If your brain happens to be exactly like that of the great-grandfather, you are identical with him, and nothing can help you there-you have to function as if you were entirely possessed by him.
It is difficult, or quite impossible, to indicate the size of Mendelian units; some are bigger, some are smaller, and so you have either large areas or small areas of ancestral souls included within you.
At all events, you are a collection of ancestral spirits, and the psychological problem is how to find yourself in that crowd.
Somewhere you are also a spirit-somewhere you have the secret of your particular pattern.
Now, that is in this circle of chaos but you don't know where, and then you have to go through that whole procedure of the squaring of the circle in order to find out the quinta essentia which is the self.
The alchemists said it was of a celestial blue color because it was heaven, and since it was round, globular, they called it "heaven in ourselves."
That is their idea of the self.
As we are contained in the heaven, so we are contained in the self, and the self is the quinta essentia.
Now, when someone is threatened with dissolution, it is just as if these particles could not be united, as if the ancestral souls would not come together. I am telling you all this in order to explain that other aspect of the dead: it is not only the dead body, but the spirits of the dead.
So if a primitive wants to become a medicine man, a superior man, he must be able to talk to the dead, must be able to reconcile them.
For the dead are the makers of illnesses, causing all the trouble to the tribe; and then the medicine man is called upon because he is supposed to be able to talk to the ancestral spirits and make a compromise with them, to lay them or to integrate them properly.
That is necessary for everybody in order to develop mentally and spiritually.
He has to collect these spirits and make them into a whole, integrate them; and that difficult task, the integration process, is called the carrying of the corpse of the ancestors, or the burden of the ancestors. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 1398-1402.
~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 212.
Carl Jung on the Symbolism of the Living Body
Now, what the living body represents is a great problem.
Of course the historical symbolism, as far as we know it, refers to the animal.
The life of the body is animal life.
There is no difference in principle between the physiology of the monkey and our own physiology; we have the physiology of an animal with warm blood.
Another analogy is with the plant and so with the tree.
Therefore the cross of Christ is also called the tree; Christ was crucified upon the tree.
And an old legend says that the wood for the cross was taken from the tree of paradise which was cut down and made into the two pillars, Aachim and Boas, in front of Solomon's temple.
Then these were thrown away, and discovered again, and made into the cross. So Christ was sacrificed on the original tree of life, and in the transitus he carried it.
The plant or the tree always refers to a non-animal growth or development and this would be spiritual development.
The life of the body is animal life: it is instinctive, contains warm blood, and is able to move about.
Then within the body is spiritual or mental development, and that is always expressed as the growth of a flower or a miraculous plant or an extraordinary tree, like the tree that grows from above, the roots in heaven and the branches down toward the earth.
That is Western as well as Eastern symbolism.
The famous tree of Yoga grows from above, and Ruysbroek, the Flemish mystic, uses the same symbol for the spiritual development within the Christian mysticism.
So in the one case the body or the corpse would mean the animal-we have to carry the sacrificed animal-and another aspect is that we have to carry our spiritual development which is also a part of nature, which has to do with nature just as much.
Then there is a further point to consider. Occasionally in my experience with patients-not only in that legend of Vikram-it is less a matter of a corpse than of the dead thing generally, a sort of preoccupation with the dead.
This hangs together with the fact that the body is a sort of conglomeration of ancestral units called Mendelian units.
Your face, for instance, obviously consists of certain units inherited from your family; your nose comes from an ancestor in the 18th century, and your eyes are perhaps from a relative in the 17th century.
The characteristic protruding lower lip of the Spanish Habsburgs dates from the time of Maximilian; that is a Mendelian unit which occasionally appears in a very pronounced way in certain individuals.
There is also an insane streak in the Spanish Habsburgs, which appeared in the 15th century and then disappeared, and then, according to the Mendelian law, it appeared again after two hundred years.
Then there is an English family named Whitelock, which is characterized by the fact that most of the members, particularly the male members, have a tuft of white hair in the center of the skull; therefore they are called Whitelock. That is again a unit of a particular tenacity.
So our whole body consists of inherited units from our father's or mother's side, from our particular clan or tribe for centuries past.
Now, each unit has also a psychical aspect, because the psyche represents the life or the living essence of the body.
So the psyche of man contains all these units too in a way, a psychological representation; a certain trait of character is peculiar to the grandfather, another one to a great-great-grandfather, and so on. Just as much as the body derives from the ancestors, the psyche derives from them.
It is like a sort-of puzzle, somewhat disjointed, not properly welded together to begin with, and then the mental development of the character, the development of the personality, consists in putting the puzzle together.
The puzzle is represented in dreams sometimes by the motif of a swarm of small particles, little animals or flies or small fishes or particles of minerals, and those disjointed and disparate elements have to be brought together again by means of a peculiar process.
This is the main theme of alchemy.
It begins with the idea of totality, which is depicted as a circle.
This is called "chaos," or the massa confusa, and it consists of all sorts of elements, an archaic collection, but all in one mass.
The task of the alchemist begins there.
These particles are to be arranged by means of the squaring of the circle.
The symbolic idea is to arrange the particles in a sort of crystal-like axis, which is called the quaternity, or the quaternion, or the quadrangulum, the four, and to each point a particular quality is given.
That is what we would call the differentiation of the psychological functions.
You see, it is a fact that certain people start with an intuitive gift, for instance, which will become their main function, the function by means of which they adapt.
A man who is born with a good brain will naturally use his intelligence to adapt; he will not use his feelings which are not then developed.
And a man who is very musical will surely use his musical gift in making his career and not his philosophical faculty, which is practically non-existent.
So one will use his feeling, another one his sense of reality, and so on, and each time there will be a one-sided product.
The study of these one-sided human products led me to the idea of the four functions, and nowadays we think that we should have not only one differentiated function but should take into consideration that there are others, and that a real adaptation to the world needs four functions-or at least more than one.
And this is something like the ideas of those old alchemists who wanted to produce out of chaos a symmetrical arrangement of the quaternity.
The four quarters of the circle indicate the fire, the air, the water, and the earth regions, and when they are arranged they will make in the center the quinta essentia, the fifth essence; the four essences are in the corners and in the center is the fifth.
That is the famous concept of the quinta essentia, a new unit which is also called the rotundum, the roundness, or the round complete thing.
It is again that circle of the beginning but this circle has now the anima mundi, the soul of the world, which was hidden in chaos.
At first all the elements were completely mixed in that round chaos, and the center was hidden; then the alchemist disentangles these elements and arranges them in a regular figure, like a crystal.
That is the idea of the philosopher's stone in which the original round thing appears again, and this time it is the spiritual body, the ethereal thing, the anima mundi, the redeemed microcosmos.
The motif of the swarm of little fishes or other little objects is also found in alchemy, representing the disjointed elements.
And it is often in children's dreams: I have dealt with such a case in one of my dream seminars at the E.T.H., a child who died unexpectedly about a year after she had produced a series of the most extraordinary dreams, practically all containing the swarm motif.
There was a cosmological dream where it was clearly visible how the swarm comes into existence, or how it is synthesized, and how it is dissolved into the swarm.
The Mendelian units join together physiologically as well as psychically and then disintegrate again.
That anticipated her death: her psyche was loosely connected, and when something adverse happened it dissolved into these units.
Now, each of those particles is a Mendelian unit inasmuch as it is living; for instance, your nose is living.
You live inasmuch as these Mendelian units are living.
They have souls, are endowed with psychic life, the psychic life of that ancestor; or you can call it part of an ancestral soul.
So inasmuch as you are like your nose, or can concentrate upon your nose, you become at once identical with the grandfather who had your nose.
If your brain happens to be exactly like that of the great-grandfather, you are identical with him, and nothing can help you there-you have to function as if you were entirely possessed by him.
It is difficult, or quite impossible, to indicate the size of Mendelian units; some are bigger, some are smaller, and so you have either large areas or small areas of ancestral souls included within you.
At all events, you are a collection of ancestral spirits, and the psychological problem is how to find yourself in that crowd.
Somewhere you are also a spirit-somewhere you have the secret of your particular pattern.
Now, that is in this circle of chaos but you don't know where, and then you have to go through that whole procedure of the squaring of the circle in order to find out the quinta essentia which is the self.
The alchemists said it was of a celestial blue color because it was heaven, and since it was round, globular, they called it "heaven in ourselves."
That is their idea of the self.
As we are contained in the heaven, so we are contained in the self, and the self is the quinta essentia.
Now, when someone is threatened with dissolution, it is just as if these particles could not be united, as if the ancestral souls would not come together. I am telling you all this in order to explain that other aspect of the dead: it is not only the dead body, but the spirits of the dead.
So if a primitive wants to become a medicine man, a superior man, he must be able to talk to the dead, must be able to reconcile them.
For the dead are the makers of illnesses, causing all the trouble to the tribe; and then the medicine man is called upon because he is supposed to be able to talk to the ancestral spirits and make a compromise with them, to lay them or to integrate them properly.
That is necessary for everybody in order to develop mentally and spiritually.
He has to collect these spirits and make them into a whole, integrate them; and that difficult task, the integration process, is called the carrying of the corpse of the ancestors, or the burden of the ancestors. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 1398-1402.
The average human has approximately 100 trillion cells and each cell is made of approximately 100 trillion atoms, each of which were originally created in the center of a star. The atoms that are in your hands may have been created in a different star than the atoms in your feet, so by definition, we are galactic beings because the very structures that make up our bodies come from across the galaxy...
“The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.” ~Alan Watts...
Our unconscious is surely located in the body, and you mustn't think this a contradiction to the statement I usually make, that the collective unconscious is everywhere; for if you could put yourself into your sympathetic system, you would know what sympathy is-you would understand why the nervous system is called sympathetic. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 749-751.
Since the soul animates the body, just as the soul is animated by the spirit, she tends to favour the body and everything bodily, sensuous, and emotional. She lies caught in "the chains" of Physis, and she desires "beyond physical necessity." She must be called back by the "counsel of the spirit" from her lostness in matter and the world. ~Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, Page 472.
“The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.” ~Alan Watts...
Our unconscious is surely located in the body, and you mustn't think this a contradiction to the statement I usually make, that the collective unconscious is everywhere; for if you could put yourself into your sympathetic system, you would know what sympathy is-you would understand why the nervous system is called sympathetic. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Pages 749-751.
Since the soul animates the body, just as the soul is animated by the spirit, she tends to favour the body and everything bodily, sensuous, and emotional. She lies caught in "the chains" of Physis, and she desires "beyond physical necessity." She must be called back by the "counsel of the spirit" from her lostness in matter and the world. ~Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, Page 472.
Paths of Individuation in Literature and Film: A Jungian Approach By Phyllis B. Kenevan
When the field of consciousness is narrow, the body plays an important
role.
Such people connect their complexes with the body; psychological disturbances appear to them in the form of physical illness.
They are ego-centric and feel inferior, but dwelling so much on themselves may at least give them some idea of their shadow and their field of consciousness thus tends to become less restricted. - Jung, Modern Pychology I, pg. 58
When the field of consciousness is narrow, the body plays an important
role.
Such people connect their complexes with the body; psychological disturbances appear to them in the form of physical illness.
They are ego-centric and feel inferior, but dwelling so much on themselves may at least give them some idea of their shadow and their field of consciousness thus tends to become less restricted. - Jung, Modern Pychology I, pg. 58
Spirit and matter may well be forms of one and the same transcendental being.
~Jung; CW 9i; ¶ 392.
You see, somewhere our unconscious becomes material, because the body is the living unit, and our conscious and our unconscious are embedded in it: the contact the body. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 441.
For what is the body?
The body is merely the visibility of the soul, the psyche;
and the soul is the psychological experience of the body.
So it is really one and the same thing.
~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 355.
While the living body is always striving against decomposition, it is in the highest degree synthetic; from simple chemical bodies in the foodstuff, it builds up extremely complicated synthetic substances ,which are kept on that level without being destroyed by oxidation.
So there is an additional secret in the living albumen which science does not know,
and it is that living body which produces something like a psyche.
~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminars, Page 360.
“Do you think that somewhere we are not Nature, that we are different from Nature? No, we are in Nature and think exactly like Nature.” - C.G. Jung The Earth Has a Soul
We cannot say the side of the spirit is twice as good as the other side; we must bring the pairs of opposites together in an altogether different way, where the rights of the body are just as much recognized as the rights of the spirit. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 235.
Man doesn't only grow from within himself for he is also creative from within himself The God becomes revealed in him. Human nature is little skilled in divinity; and therefore man fluctuates between too much and too little. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 253.
Galen, the great physician of Pergamum, argued that studying the various functions and parts of the body had a specific activity comparable to a philosophical and spiritual initiation mystery. Taking Hillman we could say that any theory that we made about the human body, both ancient and modern, "is always part of a fantasy. It's the mystery of ourselves, of our nature, as it is imagined by the' memory ', and its modes of imagination are governed by archetypal patterns. "
. . . the spirit is the life of the body seen from within, and the body the outward manifestation of the life of the spirit - the two being really one. ~Carl Jung; The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man; CW 10: 195
Archetypes are "inherited", and that they "have existed since remotest times". Yet even "remotest times" can still be located temporally. Such times may have occured an enormously long time ago, but they are still temporal. Plato and his successors would never speak of the Ideas or Archetypes or Spiritual Prototypes coming into being in some primordial past; for they saw these as spiritual realities, and therefore eternal; beyond time altogether. For Jung then, the Collective Unconscious is not, as many of his popularizers claim, a kind of "Universal Mind" or metaphysical reality, like the Platonic World of Forms, but rather an ultimately biological reality. The Spiritual concepts of Platonism are not seen as metaphysical, but biological, or rather, psycho-biological.
The facts are not the truth and only suggest where the truth might lie.
Evans: So you think the psychic development is in many ways like the biological development.
Jung: The psychic development is out of the world; it is something else, or maybe an opinion. It is a fact that people develop in their psychical development on the same principle as they develop in the body. Why should we assume that it is a different principle? It is really the same kind of evolutionary behavior as the body shows. Consider for instance, those animals that have specially differentiated anatomical characteristics, those of the teeth or something like that. Well, they have a mental behavior which is in accordance with those organs. ~Conversations with Carl Jung and Richard L. Evans
Sensation must be strictly differentiated from feeling, since the latter is an entirely different process, although it may associate itself with sensation as "feeling-tone." Sensation is related not only to external stimuli but to inner ones, i.e., to changes in the internal organic processes. ~Carl Jung
BIOLOGY & GENEALOGY
~Jung; CW 9i; ¶ 392.
You see, somewhere our unconscious becomes material, because the body is the living unit, and our conscious and our unconscious are embedded in it: the contact the body. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 441.
For what is the body?
The body is merely the visibility of the soul, the psyche;
and the soul is the psychological experience of the body.
So it is really one and the same thing.
~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 355.
While the living body is always striving against decomposition, it is in the highest degree synthetic; from simple chemical bodies in the foodstuff, it builds up extremely complicated synthetic substances ,which are kept on that level without being destroyed by oxidation.
So there is an additional secret in the living albumen which science does not know,
and it is that living body which produces something like a psyche.
~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminars, Page 360.
“Do you think that somewhere we are not Nature, that we are different from Nature? No, we are in Nature and think exactly like Nature.” - C.G. Jung The Earth Has a Soul
We cannot say the side of the spirit is twice as good as the other side; we must bring the pairs of opposites together in an altogether different way, where the rights of the body are just as much recognized as the rights of the spirit. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 235.
Man doesn't only grow from within himself for he is also creative from within himself The God becomes revealed in him. Human nature is little skilled in divinity; and therefore man fluctuates between too much and too little. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 253.
Galen, the great physician of Pergamum, argued that studying the various functions and parts of the body had a specific activity comparable to a philosophical and spiritual initiation mystery. Taking Hillman we could say that any theory that we made about the human body, both ancient and modern, "is always part of a fantasy. It's the mystery of ourselves, of our nature, as it is imagined by the' memory ', and its modes of imagination are governed by archetypal patterns. "
. . . the spirit is the life of the body seen from within, and the body the outward manifestation of the life of the spirit - the two being really one. ~Carl Jung; The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man; CW 10: 195
Archetypes are "inherited", and that they "have existed since remotest times". Yet even "remotest times" can still be located temporally. Such times may have occured an enormously long time ago, but they are still temporal. Plato and his successors would never speak of the Ideas or Archetypes or Spiritual Prototypes coming into being in some primordial past; for they saw these as spiritual realities, and therefore eternal; beyond time altogether. For Jung then, the Collective Unconscious is not, as many of his popularizers claim, a kind of "Universal Mind" or metaphysical reality, like the Platonic World of Forms, but rather an ultimately biological reality. The Spiritual concepts of Platonism are not seen as metaphysical, but biological, or rather, psycho-biological.
The facts are not the truth and only suggest where the truth might lie.
Evans: So you think the psychic development is in many ways like the biological development.
Jung: The psychic development is out of the world; it is something else, or maybe an opinion. It is a fact that people develop in their psychical development on the same principle as they develop in the body. Why should we assume that it is a different principle? It is really the same kind of evolutionary behavior as the body shows. Consider for instance, those animals that have specially differentiated anatomical characteristics, those of the teeth or something like that. Well, they have a mental behavior which is in accordance with those organs. ~Conversations with Carl Jung and Richard L. Evans
Sensation must be strictly differentiated from feeling, since the latter is an entirely different process, although it may associate itself with sensation as "feeling-tone." Sensation is related not only to external stimuli but to inner ones, i.e., to changes in the internal organic processes. ~Carl Jung
BIOLOGY & GENEALOGY
All psychic processes whose energies are not under conscious control are instinctive.
Instinct is anything but a blind and indefinite impulse, since it proves to be attuned and adapted to a definite external situation. This latter circumstance gives it its specific and irreducible form. Just as instinct is original and hereditary, so too, its form is age-old, that is to say, archetypal. It is even older and more conservative than the body's form. ~Carl Jung.
"Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements which were all already present in the ranks of our ancestors. The "newness" in the individual psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components. Body and soul therefore have an intensely historical character and find no proper place in what is new, in things that have just come into being. That is to say, our ancestral components are only partly at home in such things.
We are very far from having finished completely with the Middle Ages, classical antiquity, and primitivity, as our modern psyches pretend. Nevertheless, we have plunged down a cataract of progress which sweeps us on into the future with ever wilder violence the farther it takes us from our roots. Once the past has been breached, it is usually annihilated, and there is no stopping the forward motion.
But it is precisely the loss of connection with the past, our uprootedness, which has given rise to the "discontents" of civilization and to such a flurry and haste that we live more in the future and its chimerical promises of a golden age than in the present, with which our whole evolutionary background has not yet caught up. We rush impetuously into novelty, driven by a mounting sense of insufficiency, dissatisfaction, and restlessness.”
~Carl G. Jung - Memories, Dreams, Reflections
BIOPHYSICS
Less appreciated than the democracy of all frames of reference is the freedom of the observer to enter into any possible frame of reference. This freedom is a key aspect of the holographic principle. As we'll see when we discuss the implications of horizon complementarity, the observer always has the freedom to enter into a freely falling frame of reference. In a metaphorical sense, an observer that is "attached" to an accelerated frame of reference only has to "let go" in order to enter into a freely falling frame of reference. --James Kowall, Non-commutative Geometry & the Holographic Principle, SGJ, Vol 5(4)
Instinct is anything but a blind and indefinite impulse, since it proves to be attuned and adapted to a definite external situation. This latter circumstance gives it its specific and irreducible form. Just as instinct is original and hereditary, so too, its form is age-old, that is to say, archetypal. It is even older and more conservative than the body's form. ~Carl Jung.
"Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements which were all already present in the ranks of our ancestors. The "newness" in the individual psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components. Body and soul therefore have an intensely historical character and find no proper place in what is new, in things that have just come into being. That is to say, our ancestral components are only partly at home in such things.
We are very far from having finished completely with the Middle Ages, classical antiquity, and primitivity, as our modern psyches pretend. Nevertheless, we have plunged down a cataract of progress which sweeps us on into the future with ever wilder violence the farther it takes us from our roots. Once the past has been breached, it is usually annihilated, and there is no stopping the forward motion.
But it is precisely the loss of connection with the past, our uprootedness, which has given rise to the "discontents" of civilization and to such a flurry and haste that we live more in the future and its chimerical promises of a golden age than in the present, with which our whole evolutionary background has not yet caught up. We rush impetuously into novelty, driven by a mounting sense of insufficiency, dissatisfaction, and restlessness.”
~Carl G. Jung - Memories, Dreams, Reflections
BIOPHYSICS
Less appreciated than the democracy of all frames of reference is the freedom of the observer to enter into any possible frame of reference. This freedom is a key aspect of the holographic principle. As we'll see when we discuss the implications of horizon complementarity, the observer always has the freedom to enter into a freely falling frame of reference. In a metaphorical sense, an observer that is "attached" to an accelerated frame of reference only has to "let go" in order to enter into a freely falling frame of reference. --James Kowall, Non-commutative Geometry & the Holographic Principle, SGJ, Vol 5(4)
Because a child is . . . small and its conscious thoughts scarce and simple, we do not realize the far-reaching complications of the infantile mind that are based on its original identity with the prehistoric psyche. That original mind is just as much present and still functioning in the child as the evolutionary stages of mankind are in its embryonic body. ~Carl Jung.
An Rh neg person has both their copies of the gene deleted.
Rh- blood probably arose millions of years ago rather than tens of thousands. Keep in mind this is the common European form. This is just one of lots of ways of being Rh-. This means there wasn’t some single event of outbreeding that explains all forms of Rh- blood. Lots of individual specific events have happened over our history. And even if we do focus just on the form common in Europe, the 35,000 number still doesn’t work. This form predates Neanderthals and modern humans settling down in Europe.
As for the evolution of Rh factor, Blancher and Apoil (2000) attribute the high level of sequence similarity (92%) of the two RH locus genes, RHD and RHCE to a gene duplication event in the common ancestor of human, chimps, and gorillas. Their analysis of the cDNA from these genes revealed "complex recombination events" after the lineages split.
Basically the most recent common ancestor of apes had the "human" RH genes, which then differentiated after the lineages diverged. Duplicate and differentiate is a common theme in evolution. As for why it's called rhesus antigen, that's just as experimental artifact.
Rh- blood probably arose millions of years ago rather than tens of thousands. Keep in mind this is the common European form. This is just one of lots of ways of being Rh-. This means there wasn’t some single event of outbreeding that explains all forms of Rh- blood. Lots of individual specific events have happened over our history. And even if we do focus just on the form common in Europe, the 35,000 number still doesn’t work. This form predates Neanderthals and modern humans settling down in Europe.
As for the evolution of Rh factor, Blancher and Apoil (2000) attribute the high level of sequence similarity (92%) of the two RH locus genes, RHD and RHCE to a gene duplication event in the common ancestor of human, chimps, and gorillas. Their analysis of the cDNA from these genes revealed "complex recombination events" after the lineages split.
Basically the most recent common ancestor of apes had the "human" RH genes, which then differentiated after the lineages diverged. Duplicate and differentiate is a common theme in evolution. As for why it's called rhesus antigen, that's just as experimental artifact.
A dangerous rumor has been spreading across the web that people with Rh negative blood are resistant or even immune to getting AIDS. They’re not. This is the “everyone is an expert” ethos of the web at its worst.
I was clued into this rumor through my Ask a Geneticist website. A few months ago I started to get a few questions about whether or not having Rh negative blood protects people from getting infected by HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. I get occasional, random questions like these which I answer and then don’t give a second thought.
But then I started to get more of these questions. And then I got one where someone asked me if being Rh negative was the same as having a CCR5 delta-32 mutation. That woke me up.
Having two copies of the delta-32 version of the CCR5 gene does give some protection from HIV infection. But it has nothing to do with being Rh negative.
Being Rh negative has to do with red blood cells and CCR5 delta-32 with white blood cells. Not only that, but CCR5 and RhD are separate genes on separate chromosomes. (The RhD gene is the gene involved in being Rh negative.)
Clearly the questioner had put two and two together and came up with the answer that CCR5 delta-32 and being Rh negative were the same thing. Which is not the case. I decided to set out and try to find out where this rumor was coming from.
As I talk about here in a previous post about Rh negative blood, I traced it down to a couple of things. One was the supposed mystique associated with being Rh negative. The other had to do with a misunderstanding or misinterpretation of four separate bits of science.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/gv/rbc/xslcgi.fcgi?cmd=bgmut/systems_info&system=rh
Gene recombinations between the RHD and RHCE alleles, as well as other mutations at the RHCE/D locus are responsible for the origin of a large number of rare alleles whose expression is apparent from serological studies. The opposite orientation of the two genes would suggest that gene recombinations occur predominantly through gene conversion rather than crossings-over; however this still is an open question. In the RHCE/D locus, gene conversion has been implicated in both large- and small-scale transfers of genetic material from donor to the recipient; they are defined as macroconversions or microconversion events, respectively. Unequal homologous recombination occurring within these "Rhesus Boxes" flanking the RHD gene may be responsible for its deletion (Wagner and Flegel, Blood 95:3662, 2000). Other molecular mechanisms include missense changes, nonsense mutations and small in-frame and out-of-frame deletions.
The most common phenotypic alteration includes the absence of expression of the D antigen (RhD-negative, gene frequency in Caucasian population is 45%). This may be due to deletion of the entire gene, gene rearrangements, or mutations, as well as deletions or insertions resulting in frameshifts. In all these instances the D epitope is absent or unavailable.
To date, three types of mutations have been shown to cause the Rh null phenotype: missense changes, small exonic deletions or splice site mutations. Missense mutations result in single amino acid replacements, whereas the other two types eventually lead to frameshift and premature chain terminations. In the amorph type of Rh null, a homozygous mutation in the RHCE gene generally occurs on the genetic background of RHD gene deletion. In the regulator type Rh null, the location of mutations appears to be clustered in the RHAG gene. In one subject, the Rh mod phenotype has been shown to result from a defective translation initiation, together with alternative use of downstream ATG codons in the Rh50 mutant.
I was clued into this rumor through my Ask a Geneticist website. A few months ago I started to get a few questions about whether or not having Rh negative blood protects people from getting infected by HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. I get occasional, random questions like these which I answer and then don’t give a second thought.
But then I started to get more of these questions. And then I got one where someone asked me if being Rh negative was the same as having a CCR5 delta-32 mutation. That woke me up.
Having two copies of the delta-32 version of the CCR5 gene does give some protection from HIV infection. But it has nothing to do with being Rh negative.
Being Rh negative has to do with red blood cells and CCR5 delta-32 with white blood cells. Not only that, but CCR5 and RhD are separate genes on separate chromosomes. (The RhD gene is the gene involved in being Rh negative.)
Clearly the questioner had put two and two together and came up with the answer that CCR5 delta-32 and being Rh negative were the same thing. Which is not the case. I decided to set out and try to find out where this rumor was coming from.
As I talk about here in a previous post about Rh negative blood, I traced it down to a couple of things. One was the supposed mystique associated with being Rh negative. The other had to do with a misunderstanding or misinterpretation of four separate bits of science.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/gv/rbc/xslcgi.fcgi?cmd=bgmut/systems_info&system=rh
Gene recombinations between the RHD and RHCE alleles, as well as other mutations at the RHCE/D locus are responsible for the origin of a large number of rare alleles whose expression is apparent from serological studies. The opposite orientation of the two genes would suggest that gene recombinations occur predominantly through gene conversion rather than crossings-over; however this still is an open question. In the RHCE/D locus, gene conversion has been implicated in both large- and small-scale transfers of genetic material from donor to the recipient; they are defined as macroconversions or microconversion events, respectively. Unequal homologous recombination occurring within these "Rhesus Boxes" flanking the RHD gene may be responsible for its deletion (Wagner and Flegel, Blood 95:3662, 2000). Other molecular mechanisms include missense changes, nonsense mutations and small in-frame and out-of-frame deletions.
The most common phenotypic alteration includes the absence of expression of the D antigen (RhD-negative, gene frequency in Caucasian population is 45%). This may be due to deletion of the entire gene, gene rearrangements, or mutations, as well as deletions or insertions resulting in frameshifts. In all these instances the D epitope is absent or unavailable.
To date, three types of mutations have been shown to cause the Rh null phenotype: missense changes, small exonic deletions or splice site mutations. Missense mutations result in single amino acid replacements, whereas the other two types eventually lead to frameshift and premature chain terminations. In the amorph type of Rh null, a homozygous mutation in the RHCE gene generally occurs on the genetic background of RHD gene deletion. In the regulator type Rh null, the location of mutations appears to be clustered in the RHAG gene. In one subject, the Rh mod phenotype has been shown to result from a defective translation initiation, together with alternative use of downstream ATG codons in the Rh50 mutant.
GENERATIVITY
Old Roots; New Soil
The deeper layers of the psyche lose their individual uniqueness as they retreat farther and farther into darkness. Lower down; that is to say as they approach the autonomous functional systems, they become increasingly collective until they are universalized and extinguished in the body's materiality, i.e., in chemical substances. The body's carbon is simply carbon. Hence *at bottom' the psyche is simply “world.” ~Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections.
“Every Mother contains her daughter in herself and every daughter her mother and every mother extends backwards into her mother and forwards into her daughter.” ― C.G. Jung
Old Roots; New Soil
The deeper layers of the psyche lose their individual uniqueness as they retreat farther and farther into darkness. Lower down; that is to say as they approach the autonomous functional systems, they become increasingly collective until they are universalized and extinguished in the body's materiality, i.e., in chemical substances. The body's carbon is simply carbon. Hence *at bottom' the psyche is simply “world.” ~Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections.
“Every Mother contains her daughter in herself and every daughter her mother and every mother extends backwards into her mother and forwards into her daughter.” ― C.G. Jung
Imgrid Silva
Soul enters only via symptoms, via outcast phenomena like the imagination of artists or alchemy or “primitives,” or of course, disguised as psychopathology. That’s what Jung meant when he said the Gods have become diseases: the only way back for them in a Christian world is via the outcast. --James Hillman
Soul enters only via symptoms, via outcast phenomena like the imagination of artists or alchemy or “primitives,” or of course, disguised as psychopathology. That’s what Jung meant when he said the Gods have become diseases: the only way back for them in a Christian world is via the outcast. --James Hillman
SECRETS OF THE DEAD
ANCIENT ANCESTORS
http://www.ancient-origins.net/news-general-human-origins/what-we-discovered-about-ancient-human-origins-year-and-what-still#.UsJ8UoZ1GIU.facebook
ANCIENT ANCESTORS
http://www.ancient-origins.net/news-general-human-origins/what-we-discovered-about-ancient-human-origins-year-and-what-still#.UsJ8UoZ1GIU.facebook
SENSATION FUNCTION
The psychological function that perceives immediate reality through the physical senses.
An attitude that seeks to do justice to the unconscious as well as to one’s fellow human beings cannot possibly rest on knowledge alone, in so far as this consists merely of thinking and intuition. It would lack the function that perceives values, i.e., feeling, as well as the fonction du réel, i.e., sensation, the sensible perception of reality. ["The Psychology of the Transference," CW 16, par.486.]
In Jung’s model of typology, sensation, like intuition, is an irrational function. It perceives concrete facts, with no judgment of what they mean or what they are worth.
Sensation must be strictly differentiated from feeling, since the latter is an entirely different process, although it may associate itself with sensation as "feeling-tone." Sensation is related not only to external stimuli but to inner ones, i.e., to changes in the internal organic processes.["Definitions," CW 6, par. 792.]
Jung also distinguished between sensuous or concrete sensation and abstract sensation.
Concrete sensation never appears in "pure" form, but is always mix-ed up with ideas, feelings, thoughts. . . . The concrete sensation of a flower . . . conveys a perception not only of the flower as such, but also of the stem, leaves, habitat, and so on. It is also instantly mingled with feeling of pleasure or dislike which the sight of the flower evokes, or with simultaneous olfactory perceptions, or with thoughts about its botanical classification, etc. But abstract sensation immediately picks out the most salient sensuous attribute of the flower, its brilliant redness, for instance, and makes this the sole or at least the principle content of consciousness, entirely detached from all other admixtures. Abstract sensation is found chiefly among artists. Like every abstraction, it is a product of functional differentiation.[Ibid., par. 794.]
The psychological function that perceives immediate reality through the physical senses.
An attitude that seeks to do justice to the unconscious as well as to one’s fellow human beings cannot possibly rest on knowledge alone, in so far as this consists merely of thinking and intuition. It would lack the function that perceives values, i.e., feeling, as well as the fonction du réel, i.e., sensation, the sensible perception of reality. ["The Psychology of the Transference," CW 16, par.486.]
In Jung’s model of typology, sensation, like intuition, is an irrational function. It perceives concrete facts, with no judgment of what they mean or what they are worth.
Sensation must be strictly differentiated from feeling, since the latter is an entirely different process, although it may associate itself with sensation as "feeling-tone." Sensation is related not only to external stimuli but to inner ones, i.e., to changes in the internal organic processes.["Definitions," CW 6, par. 792.]
Jung also distinguished between sensuous or concrete sensation and abstract sensation.
Concrete sensation never appears in "pure" form, but is always mix-ed up with ideas, feelings, thoughts. . . . The concrete sensation of a flower . . . conveys a perception not only of the flower as such, but also of the stem, leaves, habitat, and so on. It is also instantly mingled with feeling of pleasure or dislike which the sight of the flower evokes, or with simultaneous olfactory perceptions, or with thoughts about its botanical classification, etc. But abstract sensation immediately picks out the most salient sensuous attribute of the flower, its brilliant redness, for instance, and makes this the sole or at least the principle content of consciousness, entirely detached from all other admixtures. Abstract sensation is found chiefly among artists. Like every abstraction, it is a product of functional differentiation.[Ibid., par. 794.]
The Significance of Constitution and Heredity in Psychology
In the opinion of scientists today, there is no doubt that the individual psyche is in large measure dependent on the physiological constitution; indeed, there are not a few who consider this dependence absolute.
I would not like to go as far as that myself, but would regard it as more appropriate in the circumstances to grant the psyche a relative independence of the physiological constitution.
It is true that there are no rigorous proofs of this, but then there is no proof of the psyche's total dependence on the constitution either.
We should never forget that if the psyche is the X, constitution is its complementary Y. Both, at bottom, are unknown factors, which have only recently begun to take on clearer form. But we are still far from having anything approaching a real understanding of their nature.
Although it is impossible to determine, in individual cases, the relations between constitution and psyche, such attempts have frequently been made, but the results are nothing more than unproven opinions.
The only method that could lead to fairly reliable results at present is the typological method, applied by Kretschmer to the constitution and by me to the psychological attitude.
In both cases the method is based on a large amount of empirical material, and though the individual variations cancel one another out to a large extent, certain typical basic features emerge all the more clearly and enable us to construct a number of ideal types.
These ideal types, of course, never occur in reality in their pure form, but only as individual variations of the principle underlying them, just as crystals are usually individual variations of the same isometric system.
Physiological typology endeavors first and foremost to ascertain the outward physical features by means of which individuals can be classified and their residual qualities examined. Kretschmer's researches have shown that the physiological peculiarities may determine the psychic conditions.
Psychological typology proceeds in exactly the same way in principle, but its starting point is not, so to speak, outside, but inside. It does not try to enumerate the outward characteristics; it seeks, rather, to discover the inner principles governing typical psychological attitudes.
While physiological typology is bound to employ essentially scientific methods in order to obtain results, the invisible and non-measurable nature of psychic processes compels us to employ methods derived from the humane sciences, above all an analytical critique.
There is, as I have said, no difference of principle but only of the nuance given by the different point of departure. The present state of research justifies us in hoping that the results obtained on both sides will show a substantial measure of agreement with regard to certain basic facts.
I personally have the impression that some of Kretschmer's main types are not so far removed from certain of the basic psychological types I have enumerated. It is conceivable that at these points a bridge might be established between the physiological constitution and the psychological attitude.
That this has not been done already may well be due to the fact that the physiological findings are still very recent" while on the other hand investigation from the psychological side is very much more difficult and therefore less easy to understand.
We can readily agree that physiological characteristics are something that can be seen, touched, measured. But in psychology not even the meanings of words are fixed. There are hardly two psychologies that could agree, for instance, about the concept of "feeling." Yet the verb "to feel" and the noun "feeling" refer to psychic facts, otherwise a word for them would never have been invented.
In psychology we have to do with facts which are definite enough in themselves but have not been defined scientifically. The state of our knowledge might be compared with natural philosophy in the Middle Ages-that is to say, everybody in psychology knows better than everybody else.
There are only opinions about unknown facts. Hence the psychologist has an almost invincible tendency to cling to the physiological facts, because there he feels safe, in the security of things that appear to be known and defined.
As science is dependent on the definiteness of verbal concepts, it is incumbent upon the psychologist to make conceptual distinctions and to attach definite names to certain groups of psychic facts, regardless of whether somebody else has a different conception of the meaning of this term or not.
The only thing he has to consider is whether the name he uses agrees, in its ordinary usage, with the psychic facts designated by it. At the same time he must rid himself of the common notion that the name explains the psychic fact it denotes.
The name should mean to him no more than a mere cipher, and his whole conceptual system should be to him no more than a trigonometrical survey of a certain geographical area, in which the fixed points of reference are indispensable in practice but irrelevant in theory.
Psychology has still to invent its own specific language. When I first started giving names to the attitude-types I had discovered empirically, I found this question of language the greatest obstacle. I was driven, whether I would or no, to fix definite boundaries to my concepts and give these areas names which were taken, as far as possible, from common usage. In so doing, I inevitably exposed myself to the danger I have already mentioned-the common prejudice that the name explains the thing.
Although this is an undoubted survival left over from the old belief in the magic of words, it does not prevent misunderstandings, and I have repeatedly heard the objection, "But
feeling is something quite different."
I mention this apparently trivial fact only because its very triviality is one of the greatest obstacles to psychological research. Psychology, being the youngest of all the sciences, is still afflicted with a medieval mentality in which no distinction is made between words and things.
I must lay stress on these difficulties in order to explain to a wider scientific public unacquainted with it the apparent inadequacies as well as the peculiar nature of psychological research.
The typological method sets up what it is pleased to call "natural" classifications-no classification is natura1!-which are of the greatest heuristic value because they bring together individuals who have outward features in common, or common psychic attitudes, and enable us to submit them to a closer and more accurate scrutiny.
Research into constitution gives the psychologist an extremely valuable criterion with which he can either eliminate the organic factor when investigating the psychic context,
or take it into his calculations.
This is one of the most important points at which pure psychology comes into collision with the X represented by the organic disposition. But it is not the only point where this happens.
There is still another factor, of which those who are engaged in investigating the constitution take no account at present. This is the fact that the psychic process does not start from scratch with the individual consciousness, but is rather a repetition of functions which have been ages in the making and which are inherited with the brain structure.
Psychic processes antedate, accompany, and outlive consciousness. Consciousness is an interval in a continuous psychic process; it is probably a climax requiring a special physiological effort, therefore it disappears again for a period each day.
The psychic process underlying consciousness is, so far as we are concerned, automatic and its coming and going are unknown to us. We only know that the nervous system, and particularly its centers, condition and express the psychic function, and that these inherited structures start functioning in every new individual exactly as they have always done.
Only the climaxes of this activity appear in our consciousness, which is periodically extinguished. However infinitely varied individual consciousnesses may be, the basic substrate of the unconscious psyche remains uniform.
So far as it is possible to understand the nature of unconscious processes, they manifest themselves everywhere in astonishingly identical forms, although their expressions, filtered through the individual consciousness, may assume a diversity that is just as great.
It is only because of this fundamental uniformity of the unconscious psyche that human beings are able to communicate with one another and to transcend the differences of individual consciousness.
There is nothing strange about these observations, at least to begin with; they become perplexing only when we discover how far even the individual consciousness is infected by this uniformity.
Astounding cases of mental similarity can be found in families. Fiirst published a case of a mother and daughter with a concordance of associations amounting to thirty per cent.
A large measure of psychic concordance between peoples and races separated from one another in space and time is generally regarded as flatly impossible.
In actual fact, however, the most astonishing concordances can be found in the realm of so-called fantastic ideas.
Every endeavor has been made to explain the concordance of myth-motifs and -symbols as due to migration and tradition; Goblet d'Almellas' Migration of Symbols is an excellent example of this.
But this explanation, which naturally has some value, is contradicted by the fact that a mythologem can arise anywhere, at any time, without there being the slightest possibility of any such transmission.
For instance, I once had under my observation an insane patient who produced, almost word for word, a long symbolic passage which can be read in a papyrus published by Dieterich a few years later.
I have frequently been accused of a superstitious belief in After I had seen a sufficient number of such cases my original idea that such things could only happen to people belonging to the same race was shattered, and I accordingly investigated the dreams of purebred Negroes living in the southern United States.
I found in these dreams, among other things, motifs from Greek mythology, and this dispelled any doubt I had that it might be a question of racial inheritance.
"inherited ideas"-quite unjustly, because I have expressly emphasized that these concordances are not produced by "ideas" but rather by the inherited disposition to react in the same way as people have always reacted. Again, the concordance has been denied on the ground that the redeemer-figure is in one case a hare, in another a bird, and in another a human being.
But this is to forget something which so much impressed a pious Hindu visiting an English church that, when he got home, he told the story that the Christians worshipped animals, because he had seen so many lambs about.
The names matter little; everything depends on the connection between them. Thus it does not matter if the "treasure" is in one case a golden ring, in another a crown, in a third a pearl, and in a fourth a hidden hoard.
The essential thing is the idea of an exceedingly precious treasure hard to attain, no matter what it is called locally. And the essential thing, psychologically, is that in dreams, fantasies, and other exceptional states of mind the most far-fetched mythological motifs and symbols can appear autochthonously at any time, often, apparently, as the result of particular influences, traditions, and excitations working on the individual, but more often without any sign of them.
These "primordial images," or "archetypes," as I have called them, belong to the basic stock of the unconscious psyche and cannot be explained as personal acquisitions. Together they make up that psychic stratum which I have called the collective unconscious. The existence of the collective unconscious means that individual consciousness is anything but a tabula rasa and is not immune to predetermining influences.
On the contrary, it is in the highest degree influenced by inherited presuppositions, quite apart from the unavoidable influences exerted upon it by the environment. The collective unconscious comprises in itself the psychic life of our ancestors right back to the earliest beginnings.
It is the matrix of all conscious psychic occurrences, and hence it exerts an influence that compromises the freedom of consciousness in the highest degree, since it is continually striving to lead all conscious processes back into the old paths.
This positive danger explains the extraordinary resistance which the conscious puts up against the unconscious. It is not a question here of resistance to sexuality, but of something far more general-the instinctive fear of losing one's freedom of consciousness and of succumbing to the automatism of the unconscious psyche.
For certain types of people the danger seems to lie in sex, because it is there that they are afraid of losing their freedom. For others it lies in very different regions, but it is always where a certain weakness is felt, and where, therefore, a high threshold cannot be opposed to the unconscious.
The collective unconscious is another of those points at which pure psychology comes up against organic factors, where it has, in all probability, to recognize a non-psychological fact resting on a physiological foundation.
Just as the most inveterate psychologist will never succeed in reducing the physiological constitution to the common denominator of individual psychic causation, so it will not be possible to dismiss the physiologically necessary postulate of the collective unconscious as an individual acquisition.
The constitutional type and the collective unconscious are both factors which are outside the control of the conscious mind.
The constitutional conditions and the immaterial forms in the collective unconscious are thus realities, and this, in the case of the unconscious, means nothing less than that its symbols and motifs are factors quite as real as the constitution, which can be neither dismissed nor denied.
Neglect of the constitution leads to pathological disturbances, and disregard of the collective unconscious does the same. In my therapeutic work I therefore direct my attention chiefly to the patient's relation to occurrences in the collective unconscious, for ample experience has taught me that it is just as important for him to live in harmony with the unconscious as with his individual disposition. ~Carl Jung, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche.
In the opinion of scientists today, there is no doubt that the individual psyche is in large measure dependent on the physiological constitution; indeed, there are not a few who consider this dependence absolute.
I would not like to go as far as that myself, but would regard it as more appropriate in the circumstances to grant the psyche a relative independence of the physiological constitution.
It is true that there are no rigorous proofs of this, but then there is no proof of the psyche's total dependence on the constitution either.
We should never forget that if the psyche is the X, constitution is its complementary Y. Both, at bottom, are unknown factors, which have only recently begun to take on clearer form. But we are still far from having anything approaching a real understanding of their nature.
Although it is impossible to determine, in individual cases, the relations between constitution and psyche, such attempts have frequently been made, but the results are nothing more than unproven opinions.
The only method that could lead to fairly reliable results at present is the typological method, applied by Kretschmer to the constitution and by me to the psychological attitude.
In both cases the method is based on a large amount of empirical material, and though the individual variations cancel one another out to a large extent, certain typical basic features emerge all the more clearly and enable us to construct a number of ideal types.
These ideal types, of course, never occur in reality in their pure form, but only as individual variations of the principle underlying them, just as crystals are usually individual variations of the same isometric system.
Physiological typology endeavors first and foremost to ascertain the outward physical features by means of which individuals can be classified and their residual qualities examined. Kretschmer's researches have shown that the physiological peculiarities may determine the psychic conditions.
Psychological typology proceeds in exactly the same way in principle, but its starting point is not, so to speak, outside, but inside. It does not try to enumerate the outward characteristics; it seeks, rather, to discover the inner principles governing typical psychological attitudes.
While physiological typology is bound to employ essentially scientific methods in order to obtain results, the invisible and non-measurable nature of psychic processes compels us to employ methods derived from the humane sciences, above all an analytical critique.
There is, as I have said, no difference of principle but only of the nuance given by the different point of departure. The present state of research justifies us in hoping that the results obtained on both sides will show a substantial measure of agreement with regard to certain basic facts.
I personally have the impression that some of Kretschmer's main types are not so far removed from certain of the basic psychological types I have enumerated. It is conceivable that at these points a bridge might be established between the physiological constitution and the psychological attitude.
That this has not been done already may well be due to the fact that the physiological findings are still very recent" while on the other hand investigation from the psychological side is very much more difficult and therefore less easy to understand.
We can readily agree that physiological characteristics are something that can be seen, touched, measured. But in psychology not even the meanings of words are fixed. There are hardly two psychologies that could agree, for instance, about the concept of "feeling." Yet the verb "to feel" and the noun "feeling" refer to psychic facts, otherwise a word for them would never have been invented.
In psychology we have to do with facts which are definite enough in themselves but have not been defined scientifically. The state of our knowledge might be compared with natural philosophy in the Middle Ages-that is to say, everybody in psychology knows better than everybody else.
There are only opinions about unknown facts. Hence the psychologist has an almost invincible tendency to cling to the physiological facts, because there he feels safe, in the security of things that appear to be known and defined.
As science is dependent on the definiteness of verbal concepts, it is incumbent upon the psychologist to make conceptual distinctions and to attach definite names to certain groups of psychic facts, regardless of whether somebody else has a different conception of the meaning of this term or not.
The only thing he has to consider is whether the name he uses agrees, in its ordinary usage, with the psychic facts designated by it. At the same time he must rid himself of the common notion that the name explains the psychic fact it denotes.
The name should mean to him no more than a mere cipher, and his whole conceptual system should be to him no more than a trigonometrical survey of a certain geographical area, in which the fixed points of reference are indispensable in practice but irrelevant in theory.
Psychology has still to invent its own specific language. When I first started giving names to the attitude-types I had discovered empirically, I found this question of language the greatest obstacle. I was driven, whether I would or no, to fix definite boundaries to my concepts and give these areas names which were taken, as far as possible, from common usage. In so doing, I inevitably exposed myself to the danger I have already mentioned-the common prejudice that the name explains the thing.
Although this is an undoubted survival left over from the old belief in the magic of words, it does not prevent misunderstandings, and I have repeatedly heard the objection, "But
feeling is something quite different."
I mention this apparently trivial fact only because its very triviality is one of the greatest obstacles to psychological research. Psychology, being the youngest of all the sciences, is still afflicted with a medieval mentality in which no distinction is made between words and things.
I must lay stress on these difficulties in order to explain to a wider scientific public unacquainted with it the apparent inadequacies as well as the peculiar nature of psychological research.
The typological method sets up what it is pleased to call "natural" classifications-no classification is natura1!-which are of the greatest heuristic value because they bring together individuals who have outward features in common, or common psychic attitudes, and enable us to submit them to a closer and more accurate scrutiny.
Research into constitution gives the psychologist an extremely valuable criterion with which he can either eliminate the organic factor when investigating the psychic context,
or take it into his calculations.
This is one of the most important points at which pure psychology comes into collision with the X represented by the organic disposition. But it is not the only point where this happens.
There is still another factor, of which those who are engaged in investigating the constitution take no account at present. This is the fact that the psychic process does not start from scratch with the individual consciousness, but is rather a repetition of functions which have been ages in the making and which are inherited with the brain structure.
Psychic processes antedate, accompany, and outlive consciousness. Consciousness is an interval in a continuous psychic process; it is probably a climax requiring a special physiological effort, therefore it disappears again for a period each day.
The psychic process underlying consciousness is, so far as we are concerned, automatic and its coming and going are unknown to us. We only know that the nervous system, and particularly its centers, condition and express the psychic function, and that these inherited structures start functioning in every new individual exactly as they have always done.
Only the climaxes of this activity appear in our consciousness, which is periodically extinguished. However infinitely varied individual consciousnesses may be, the basic substrate of the unconscious psyche remains uniform.
So far as it is possible to understand the nature of unconscious processes, they manifest themselves everywhere in astonishingly identical forms, although their expressions, filtered through the individual consciousness, may assume a diversity that is just as great.
It is only because of this fundamental uniformity of the unconscious psyche that human beings are able to communicate with one another and to transcend the differences of individual consciousness.
There is nothing strange about these observations, at least to begin with; they become perplexing only when we discover how far even the individual consciousness is infected by this uniformity.
Astounding cases of mental similarity can be found in families. Fiirst published a case of a mother and daughter with a concordance of associations amounting to thirty per cent.
A large measure of psychic concordance between peoples and races separated from one another in space and time is generally regarded as flatly impossible.
In actual fact, however, the most astonishing concordances can be found in the realm of so-called fantastic ideas.
Every endeavor has been made to explain the concordance of myth-motifs and -symbols as due to migration and tradition; Goblet d'Almellas' Migration of Symbols is an excellent example of this.
But this explanation, which naturally has some value, is contradicted by the fact that a mythologem can arise anywhere, at any time, without there being the slightest possibility of any such transmission.
For instance, I once had under my observation an insane patient who produced, almost word for word, a long symbolic passage which can be read in a papyrus published by Dieterich a few years later.
I have frequently been accused of a superstitious belief in After I had seen a sufficient number of such cases my original idea that such things could only happen to people belonging to the same race was shattered, and I accordingly investigated the dreams of purebred Negroes living in the southern United States.
I found in these dreams, among other things, motifs from Greek mythology, and this dispelled any doubt I had that it might be a question of racial inheritance.
"inherited ideas"-quite unjustly, because I have expressly emphasized that these concordances are not produced by "ideas" but rather by the inherited disposition to react in the same way as people have always reacted. Again, the concordance has been denied on the ground that the redeemer-figure is in one case a hare, in another a bird, and in another a human being.
But this is to forget something which so much impressed a pious Hindu visiting an English church that, when he got home, he told the story that the Christians worshipped animals, because he had seen so many lambs about.
The names matter little; everything depends on the connection between them. Thus it does not matter if the "treasure" is in one case a golden ring, in another a crown, in a third a pearl, and in a fourth a hidden hoard.
The essential thing is the idea of an exceedingly precious treasure hard to attain, no matter what it is called locally. And the essential thing, psychologically, is that in dreams, fantasies, and other exceptional states of mind the most far-fetched mythological motifs and symbols can appear autochthonously at any time, often, apparently, as the result of particular influences, traditions, and excitations working on the individual, but more often without any sign of them.
These "primordial images," or "archetypes," as I have called them, belong to the basic stock of the unconscious psyche and cannot be explained as personal acquisitions. Together they make up that psychic stratum which I have called the collective unconscious. The existence of the collective unconscious means that individual consciousness is anything but a tabula rasa and is not immune to predetermining influences.
On the contrary, it is in the highest degree influenced by inherited presuppositions, quite apart from the unavoidable influences exerted upon it by the environment. The collective unconscious comprises in itself the psychic life of our ancestors right back to the earliest beginnings.
It is the matrix of all conscious psychic occurrences, and hence it exerts an influence that compromises the freedom of consciousness in the highest degree, since it is continually striving to lead all conscious processes back into the old paths.
This positive danger explains the extraordinary resistance which the conscious puts up against the unconscious. It is not a question here of resistance to sexuality, but of something far more general-the instinctive fear of losing one's freedom of consciousness and of succumbing to the automatism of the unconscious psyche.
For certain types of people the danger seems to lie in sex, because it is there that they are afraid of losing their freedom. For others it lies in very different regions, but it is always where a certain weakness is felt, and where, therefore, a high threshold cannot be opposed to the unconscious.
The collective unconscious is another of those points at which pure psychology comes up against organic factors, where it has, in all probability, to recognize a non-psychological fact resting on a physiological foundation.
Just as the most inveterate psychologist will never succeed in reducing the physiological constitution to the common denominator of individual psychic causation, so it will not be possible to dismiss the physiologically necessary postulate of the collective unconscious as an individual acquisition.
The constitutional type and the collective unconscious are both factors which are outside the control of the conscious mind.
The constitutional conditions and the immaterial forms in the collective unconscious are thus realities, and this, in the case of the unconscious, means nothing less than that its symbols and motifs are factors quite as real as the constitution, which can be neither dismissed nor denied.
Neglect of the constitution leads to pathological disturbances, and disregard of the collective unconscious does the same. In my therapeutic work I therefore direct my attention chiefly to the patient's relation to occurrences in the collective unconscious, for ample experience has taught me that it is just as important for him to live in harmony with the unconscious as with his individual disposition. ~Carl Jung, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche.
Biofields, Io
BLOOD QUANTUM
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. ~Carl Jung, "The Psychology of Eastern Meditation" (1943). In CW 11: Psychology and Religion: West and East. P.935
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. ~Carl Jung, "The Psychology of Eastern Meditation" (1943). In CW 11: Psychology and Religion: West and East. P.935
"Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that called Body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age".
--William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Carl Jung: “It Shakes Off the Mortal Husk That I Am and Awakens to a Life of Its Own.”
The alchemists saw it in the transformation of the chemical substance.
So if one of them sought transformation, he discovered it outside in matter, whose transformation cried out to him, as it were, “I am the transformation!”
But some were clever enough to know, “It is my own transformation-not a personal transformation, but the transformation of what is mortal in me into what is immortal.
It shakes off the mortal husk that I am and awakens to a life of its own.”
~Carl Jung, Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious; Paragraph 238.
“According to [Jung's] way of thinking, all the organs of our bodies—not only those of sex and aggression—have their purposes and motives, some being subject to conscious control, others, however, not. Our outward-oriented consciousness, addressed to the demands of the day, may lose touch with these inward forces; and the myths, states Jung, when correctly read, are the means to bring us back in touch. They are telling us in picture language of powers of the psyche to be recognized and integrated in our lives, powers that have been common to the human spirit forever, and which represent that wisdom of the species by which man has weathered the millenniums. Thus they have not been, and can never be, displaced by the findings of science, which relate rather to the outside world than to the depths that we enter in sleep. Through a dialogue conducted with these inward forces through our dreams and through a study of myths, we can learn to know and come to terms with the greater horizon of our own deeper and wiser, inward self. And analogously, the society that cherishes and keeps its myths alive will be nourished from the soundest, richest strata of the human spirit.” --Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live By
In summary, there is an unfathomable absolute and an evolving but discoverable road map guide of contingent truth in our ongoing mesoscopic existential reality journey through life....today and tomorrow, trans generationally. It is called biological life and its expression called consciousness. --Angell
Without consciousness there would, practically speaking, be no world, for the world exists for us only in so far as it is consciously reflected by a psyche. Consciousness is a precondition of being. Thus the psyche is endowed with the dignity of a cosmic principle, which philosophically and in fact gives it a position co-equal with the principle of physical being. The carrier of this consciousness is the individual, who does not produce the psyche of his own volition but is, on the contrary, performed by it and nourished by the gradual awakening of consciousness during childhood. If therefore the psyche is of overriding empirical importance, so also is the individual, who is the only immediate manifestation of the psyche. ~"The Undiscovered Self" (1957). In CW 10: Civilization in Transition. P. 528
--William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Carl Jung: “It Shakes Off the Mortal Husk That I Am and Awakens to a Life of Its Own.”
The alchemists saw it in the transformation of the chemical substance.
So if one of them sought transformation, he discovered it outside in matter, whose transformation cried out to him, as it were, “I am the transformation!”
But some were clever enough to know, “It is my own transformation-not a personal transformation, but the transformation of what is mortal in me into what is immortal.
It shakes off the mortal husk that I am and awakens to a life of its own.”
~Carl Jung, Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious; Paragraph 238.
“According to [Jung's] way of thinking, all the organs of our bodies—not only those of sex and aggression—have their purposes and motives, some being subject to conscious control, others, however, not. Our outward-oriented consciousness, addressed to the demands of the day, may lose touch with these inward forces; and the myths, states Jung, when correctly read, are the means to bring us back in touch. They are telling us in picture language of powers of the psyche to be recognized and integrated in our lives, powers that have been common to the human spirit forever, and which represent that wisdom of the species by which man has weathered the millenniums. Thus they have not been, and can never be, displaced by the findings of science, which relate rather to the outside world than to the depths that we enter in sleep. Through a dialogue conducted with these inward forces through our dreams and through a study of myths, we can learn to know and come to terms with the greater horizon of our own deeper and wiser, inward self. And analogously, the society that cherishes and keeps its myths alive will be nourished from the soundest, richest strata of the human spirit.” --Joseph Campbell, Myths to Live By
In summary, there is an unfathomable absolute and an evolving but discoverable road map guide of contingent truth in our ongoing mesoscopic existential reality journey through life....today and tomorrow, trans generationally. It is called biological life and its expression called consciousness. --Angell
Without consciousness there would, practically speaking, be no world, for the world exists for us only in so far as it is consciously reflected by a psyche. Consciousness is a precondition of being. Thus the psyche is endowed with the dignity of a cosmic principle, which philosophically and in fact gives it a position co-equal with the principle of physical being. The carrier of this consciousness is the individual, who does not produce the psyche of his own volition but is, on the contrary, performed by it and nourished by the gradual awakening of consciousness during childhood. If therefore the psyche is of overriding empirical importance, so also is the individual, who is the only immediate manifestation of the psyche. ~"The Undiscovered Self" (1957). In CW 10: Civilization in Transition. P. 528
TRANSGENES
Mobile Genetic Elements
Alu insertion polymorphisms and human evolution: evidence for a larger population size in Africa.Stoneking M1, Fontius JJ, Clifford SL, Soodyall H, Arcot SS, Saha N, Jenkins T, Tahir MA, Deininger PL, Batzer MA.Author information
Abstract: Alu insertion polymorphisms (polymorphisms consisting of the presence/absence of an Alu element at a particular chromosomal location) offer several advantages over other nuclear DNA polymorphisms for human evolution studies. First, they are typed by rapid, simple, PCR-based assays; second, they are stable polymorphisms-newly inserted Alu elements rarely undergo deletion; third, the presence of an Alu element represents identity by descent-the probability that different Alu elements would independently insert into the exact same chromosomal location is negligible; and fourth, the ancestral state is known with certainty to be the absence of an Alu element. We report here a study of 8 loci in 1500 individuals from 34 worldwide populations. African populations exhibit the most between-population differentiation, and the population tree is rooted in Africa; moreover, the estimated effective time of separation of African versus non-African populations is 137,000 +/- 15,000 years ago, in accordance with other genetic data. However, a principal coordinates analysis indicates that populations from Sahul (Australia and New Guinea) are nearly as close to the hypothetical ancestor as are African populations, suggesting that there was an early expansion of tropical populations of our species. An analysis of heterozygosity versus genetic distance suggests that African populations have had a larger effective population size than non-African populations. Overall, these results support the African origin of modern humans in that an earlier expansion of the ancestors of African populations is indicated. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9371742
Genomic database mining has been a very useful aid in the identification and retrieval of recently integrated Alu elements from the human genome. We analyzed Alu elements retrieved from the GenBank database and identified two new Alu subfamilies, Alu Yb9 and Alu Yc2, and further characterized Yc1 subfamily members. Some members of each of the three subfamilies have inserted in the human genome so recently that about a one-third of the analyzed elements are polymorphic for the presence/absence of the Alu repeat in diverse human populations. These newly identified Alu insertion polymorphisms will serve as identical-by-descent genetic markers for the study of human evolution and forensics. Three previously classified Alu Y elements linked with disease belong to the Yc1 subfamily, supporting the retroposition potential of this subfamily and demonstrating that the Alu Y subfamily currently has a very low amplification rate in the human genome.
ALU elements have been accumulating in the human genome throughout primate evolution, reaching a copy number of over a million per genome. However, most of these Alu copies are not identical and can be classified into several subfamilies (reviewed in Deininger and Batzer 1993). These different subfamilies of Alu elements were generated once mutations occurred within the “master” or “source” gene that actively retroposed at different rates and time periods of primate evolution (Deiningeret al. 1992). Currently, the Alu retroposition rate is reduced by 100-fold from its peak early in primate evolution (Shenet al. 1991). The vast majority of the Alu elements present in the human genome inserted before the radiation of extant humans and are therefore observed in all individuals in the human population. However, almost all of the recently integrated Alu elements in the human genome are restricted to several closely related “young” subfamilies, with the majority being Ya5 and Yb8 subfamily members (Batzer et al. 1994, 1995). Several of these new subfamilies appear to originate from an Alu element that fortuitously inserted into a favorable region of the genome capable of supporting Alu retroposition. Subsequent or concurrent mutations in the new source element(s) result in groups of elements that are identifiable as new subfamilies. http://www.genetics.org/content/159/1/279.full
Some of the human Alu elements have retroposed so recently that their insertion at a specific location within the human genome remains polymorphic. These polymorphic insertions have been used as genetic markers in human evolution studies due to their particular properties: they are rapid and easy to type, are apparently selectively neutral, and have known ancestral states. The insertion of an Alu element into the human genome is almost certainly a unique event, making any pair of Alu insertion alleles identical by descent and free of homoplasy. The use of these polymorphisms in a worldwide survey of human populations has confirmed the African origin of modern humans. http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/18/1/85.full
An Alu element is a short stretch of DNA originally characterized by the action of the Alu (Arthrobacter luteus) restriction endonuclease. Alu elements of different kinds occur in large numbers in primate genomes. In fact, Alu elements are the most abundant transposable elements in the human genome. They are derived from the small cytoplasmic 7SL RNA, a component of the signal recognition particle. The event, when a copy of the 7SL RNA became a precursor of the Alu elements, took place in the genome of an ancestor of Supraprimates.
Alu insertions have been implicated in several inherited human diseases and in various forms of cancer.
The study of Alu elements has also been important in elucidating human population genetics and the evolution of primates, including the evolution of humans.
The Alu family is a family of repetitive elements in the human genome. Modern Alu elements are about 300 base pairs long and are therefore classified as short interspersed elements (SINEs) among the class of repetitive DNA elements. The typical structure is 5'Part A- A5TACA6 -Part B - PolyA Tail - 3', where Part A and Part B are similar nucleotide sequences, but of opposite direction. Expressed another way, it is believed modern Alu elements emerged from a head to tail fusion of two distinct FAMs (fossil antique monomers) over 100 mkya, hence its dimeric structure of two similar, but distinct monomers (left and right arms, and in opposite directions) joined by an A-rich linker.[3] The length of the polyA tail varies between Alu families.
There are over one million Alu elements interspersed throughout the human genome, and it is estimated that about 10.7% of the human genome consists of Alu sequences. However, less than 0.5% are polymorphic (i.e. they occur in more than one form or morph).[4] In 1988, Jerzy Jurka and Temple Smith discovered that Alu elements were split in two major subfamilies known as AluJ and AluS, and other Alu subfamilies were also independently discovered by several groups.[5] Later on, a sub-subfamily of AluS which included active Alu elements was given the separate name AluY. The discovery of Alu subfamilies led to the hypothesis of master/source genes, and provided the definitive link between transposable elements (active elements) and interspersed repetitive DNA (mutated copies of active elements). --Wikipedia
Alu elements are classified as SINEs, or Short INterspersed Elements. All Alus are approximately 300 bp in length and derive their name from a single recognition site for the restriction enzyme AluI located near the middle of the Alu element. Human chromosomes contain about 1,000,000 Alu copies, which equal 10% of the total genome. Alu elements probably arose from a gene that encodes the RNA component of the signal recognition particle, which labels proteins for export from the cell.
Alu is an example of a so-called "jumping gene" – a transposable DNA sequence that "reproduces" by copying itself and inserting into new chromosome locations. Alu is classified as a retroposon, because it is thought to require the retrovirus enzyme reverse transcriptase (rt) enzyme to make a mobile copy of itself. Here is a simple scheme to explain how an Alu element transposes:
First, the inserted Alu is transcribed into messenger RNA by the cellular RNA polymerase.
Then, the mRNA is converted to a double-stranded DNA molecule by reverse transcriptase.
Finally, the DNA copy of Alu is integrated into a new chromosomal locus at the site of a single- or double-stranded break.
Each Alu element has an internal promoter for RNA polymerase III needed to independently initiate transcription of itself. However, Alu is a "defective" transposon, in that it lacks the enzyme functions to produce a DNA copy of itself and to integrate into a new chromosome position. However, Alu can obtain these functions from another transposon, called L1, a Long INterspersed Element (LINE). LINEs are essentially defective retroviruses that retain a functional rt gene. Interestingly, in addition to reverse transcribing RNA to DNA, the L1 rt also produces single-stranded nicks in DNA. In the current model, the rt enzyme produces a nick at a chromosomal locus containing the sequence AATTTT. The polyadenylated "tail" of the Alu transcript (-AAAA) then hydrogen bonds to the TTTT sequence at the nick site, creating a primer for reverse transcription. The L1 rt makes a staggered nick in the opposite DNA strand of the host chromosome, allowing the DNA copy to integrate. This method of insertion also accounts for the identical sequences (direct repeats) found at the ends of all Alu elements. So it appears that LI can provide the necessary functions for Alu transposition. In this sense, Alu is a parasite of L1, which, in turn, is a relic of a retrovirus ancestor.
Some scientists regard Alu as an example of "selfish DNA" – it encodes no protein and appears to exist only for its own replication. If one reduces the definition of life to "the perpetuation and amplification of a DNA sequence through time," then Alu is an extremely successful life form. However, other scientists believe that transposable elements have played an important role in evolution by creating new mutations and gene combinations. Nobel laureate Barbara McClintock hypothesized that transposable elements provide a mechanism to rapidly reorganize the genome in response to environmental stress. Like Alu, the Ds transposable element discovered in corn by McClintock is a defective transposon and requires the help of a second element called Ac (activator).
Alu elements are found only in primates – the "monkey" branch of the evolutionary tree, which includes humans. So, all of the hundreds of thousands of Alu copies have accumulated in primates since their separation from other vertebrate groups about 65 million years ago. Once an Alu integrates into a new site, it accumulates new mutations at the same rate as surrounding DNA loci. Alu elements can be sorted into distinct lineages, or families, according to inherited patterns of new mutations. These studies suggest that the rate of Alu transposition has changed over time – from about one new jump in every live birth, early in primate evolution, to about one in every 200 newborns today. Taken together, this pattern suggests that, at any point in time, only one or several Alu "masters" are capable of transposing.
Once an Alu inserts at a chromosome locus, it can copy itself for transposition, but there is no evidence that it is ever excised or lost from a chromosome locus. So, each Alu insertion is stable through evolutionary time. Each is the "fossil" of a unique transposition event that occurred only once in primate evolution. Like genes, Alu insertions are inherited in a Mendelian fashion from parents to children. Thus, all primates showing an Alu insertion at a particular locus have inherited it from a common ancestor. This is called identity by descent.
An estimated 500-2,000 Alu elements are restricted to the human genome. The vast majority of Alu insertions occur in non-coding regions and are thought to be evolutionarily neutral. However, an Alu insertion in the NF-1 gene is responsible for neurofibromatosis I, Alu insertions in introns of genes for tissue plasminogen activator (TPA) and angiotensin converter enzyme (ACE) are associated with heart disease. Alu insertions are analogous to the insertion of a provirus in viral diseases and certain cancers.
Most Alu mutations are "fixed," meaning that both of the paired chromosomes have an insertion at the same locus (position). However, a number of human-specific Alus are dimorphic – an insertion may be present or absent on each of the paired chromosomes of different people. These dimorphic Alus inserted within the last million years, during the evolution and dispersion of modern humans. These dimorphisms show differences in allele and genotype frequencies between modern populations and are tools for reconstructing human prehistory.
Alu elements are classified as SINEs, or Short INterspersed Elements. All Alus are approximately 300 bp in length and derive their name from a single recognition site for the restriction enzyme AluI located near the middle of the Alu element. Human chromosomes contain about 1,000,000 Alu copies, which equal 10% of the total genome. Alu elements probably arose from a gene that encodes the RNA component of the signal recognition particle, which labels proteins for export from the cell.
Alu is an example of a so-called "jumping gene" – a transposable DNA sequence that "reproduces" by copying itself and inserting into new chromosome locations. Alu is classified as a retroposon, because it is thought to require the retrovirus enzyme reverse transcriptase (rt) enzyme to make a mobile copy of itself. Here is a simple scheme to explain how an Alu element transposes:
First, the inserted Alu is transcribed into messenger RNA by the cellular RNA polymerase.
Then, the mRNA is converted to a double-stranded DNA molecule by reverse transcriptase.
Finally, the DNA copy of Alu is integrated into a new chromosomal locus at the site of a single- or double-stranded break.
Each Alu element has an internal promoter for RNA polymerase III needed to independently initiate transcription of itself. However, Alu is a "defective" transposon, in that it lacks the enzyme functions to produce a DNA copy of itself and to integrate into a new chromosome position. However, Alu can obtain these functions from another transposon, called L1, a Long INterspersed Element (LINE). LINEs are essentially defective retroviruses that retain a functional rt gene. Interestingly, in addition to reverse transcribing RNA to DNA, the L1 rt also produces single-stranded nicks in DNA. In the current model, the rt enzyme produces a nick at a chromosomal locus containing the sequence AATTTT. The polyadenylated "tail" of the Alu transcript (-AAAA) then hydrogen bonds to the TTTT sequence at the nick site, creating a primer for reverse transcription. The L1 rt makes a staggered nick in the opposite DNA strand of the host chromosome, allowing the DNA copy to integrate. This method of insertion also accounts for the identical sequences (direct repeats) found at the ends of all Alu elements. So it appears that LI can provide the necessary functions for Alu transposition. In this sense, Alu is a parasite of L1, which, in turn, is a relic of a retrovirus ancestor.
Some scientists regard Alu as an example of "selfish DNA" – it encodes no protein and appears to exist only for its own replication. If one reduces the definition of life to "the perpetuation and amplification of a DNA sequence through time," then Alu is an extremely successful life form. However, other scientists believe that transposable elements have played an important role in evolution by creating new mutations and gene combinations. Nobel laureate Barbara McClintock hypothesized that transposable elements provide a mechanism to rapidly reorganize the genome in response to environmental stress. Like Alu, the Ds transposable element discovered in corn by McClintock is a defective transposon and requires the help of a second element called Ac (activator).
Alu elements are found only in primates – the "monkey" branch of the evolutionary tree, which includes humans. So, all of the hundreds of thousands of Alu copies have accumulated in primates since their separation from other vertebrate groups about 65 million years ago. Once an Alu integrates into a new site, it accumulates new mutations at the same rate as surrounding DNA loci. Alu elements can be sorted into distinct lineages, or families, according to inherited patterns of new mutations. These studies suggest that the rate of Alu transposition has changed over time – from about one new jump in every live birth, early in primate evolution, to about one in every 200 newborns today. Taken together, this pattern suggests that, at any point in time, only one or several Alu "masters" are capable of transposing.
Once an Alu inserts at a chromosome locus, it can copy itself for transposition, but there is no evidence that it is ever excised or lost from a chromosome locus. So, each Alu insertion is stable through evolutionary time. Each is the "fossil" of a unique transposition event that occurred only once in primate evolution. Like genes, Alu insertions are inherited in a Mendelian fashion from parents to children. Thus, all primates showing an Alu insertion at a particular locus have inherited it from a common ancestor. This is called identity by descent.
An estimated 500-2,000 Alu elements are restricted to the human genome. The vast majority of Alu insertions occur in non-coding regions and are thought to be evolutionarily neutral. However, an Alu insertion in the NF-1 gene is responsible for neurofibromatosis I, Alu insertions in introns of genes for tissue plasminogen activator (TPA) and angiotensin converter enzyme (ACE) are associated with heart disease. Alu insertions are analogous to the insertion of a provirus in viral diseases and certain cancers.
Most Alu mutations are "fixed," meaning that both of the paired chromosomes have an insertion at the same locus (position). However, a number of human-specific Alus are dimorphic – an insertion may be present or absent on each of the paired chromosomes of different people. These dimorphic Alus inserted within the last million years, during the evolution and dispersion of modern humans. These dimorphisms show differences in allele and genotype frequencies between modern populations and are tools for reconstructing human prehistory.
http://www.geneticorigins.org/pv92/aluframeset.htm
Mobile Genetic Elements
Alu insertion polymorphisms and human evolution: evidence for a larger population size in Africa.Stoneking M1, Fontius JJ, Clifford SL, Soodyall H, Arcot SS, Saha N, Jenkins T, Tahir MA, Deininger PL, Batzer MA.Author information
Abstract: Alu insertion polymorphisms (polymorphisms consisting of the presence/absence of an Alu element at a particular chromosomal location) offer several advantages over other nuclear DNA polymorphisms for human evolution studies. First, they are typed by rapid, simple, PCR-based assays; second, they are stable polymorphisms-newly inserted Alu elements rarely undergo deletion; third, the presence of an Alu element represents identity by descent-the probability that different Alu elements would independently insert into the exact same chromosomal location is negligible; and fourth, the ancestral state is known with certainty to be the absence of an Alu element. We report here a study of 8 loci in 1500 individuals from 34 worldwide populations. African populations exhibit the most between-population differentiation, and the population tree is rooted in Africa; moreover, the estimated effective time of separation of African versus non-African populations is 137,000 +/- 15,000 years ago, in accordance with other genetic data. However, a principal coordinates analysis indicates that populations from Sahul (Australia and New Guinea) are nearly as close to the hypothetical ancestor as are African populations, suggesting that there was an early expansion of tropical populations of our species. An analysis of heterozygosity versus genetic distance suggests that African populations have had a larger effective population size than non-African populations. Overall, these results support the African origin of modern humans in that an earlier expansion of the ancestors of African populations is indicated. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9371742
Genomic database mining has been a very useful aid in the identification and retrieval of recently integrated Alu elements from the human genome. We analyzed Alu elements retrieved from the GenBank database and identified two new Alu subfamilies, Alu Yb9 and Alu Yc2, and further characterized Yc1 subfamily members. Some members of each of the three subfamilies have inserted in the human genome so recently that about a one-third of the analyzed elements are polymorphic for the presence/absence of the Alu repeat in diverse human populations. These newly identified Alu insertion polymorphisms will serve as identical-by-descent genetic markers for the study of human evolution and forensics. Three previously classified Alu Y elements linked with disease belong to the Yc1 subfamily, supporting the retroposition potential of this subfamily and demonstrating that the Alu Y subfamily currently has a very low amplification rate in the human genome.
ALU elements have been accumulating in the human genome throughout primate evolution, reaching a copy number of over a million per genome. However, most of these Alu copies are not identical and can be classified into several subfamilies (reviewed in Deininger and Batzer 1993). These different subfamilies of Alu elements were generated once mutations occurred within the “master” or “source” gene that actively retroposed at different rates and time periods of primate evolution (Deiningeret al. 1992). Currently, the Alu retroposition rate is reduced by 100-fold from its peak early in primate evolution (Shenet al. 1991). The vast majority of the Alu elements present in the human genome inserted before the radiation of extant humans and are therefore observed in all individuals in the human population. However, almost all of the recently integrated Alu elements in the human genome are restricted to several closely related “young” subfamilies, with the majority being Ya5 and Yb8 subfamily members (Batzer et al. 1994, 1995). Several of these new subfamilies appear to originate from an Alu element that fortuitously inserted into a favorable region of the genome capable of supporting Alu retroposition. Subsequent or concurrent mutations in the new source element(s) result in groups of elements that are identifiable as new subfamilies. http://www.genetics.org/content/159/1/279.full
Some of the human Alu elements have retroposed so recently that their insertion at a specific location within the human genome remains polymorphic. These polymorphic insertions have been used as genetic markers in human evolution studies due to their particular properties: they are rapid and easy to type, are apparently selectively neutral, and have known ancestral states. The insertion of an Alu element into the human genome is almost certainly a unique event, making any pair of Alu insertion alleles identical by descent and free of homoplasy. The use of these polymorphisms in a worldwide survey of human populations has confirmed the African origin of modern humans. http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/18/1/85.full
An Alu element is a short stretch of DNA originally characterized by the action of the Alu (Arthrobacter luteus) restriction endonuclease. Alu elements of different kinds occur in large numbers in primate genomes. In fact, Alu elements are the most abundant transposable elements in the human genome. They are derived from the small cytoplasmic 7SL RNA, a component of the signal recognition particle. The event, when a copy of the 7SL RNA became a precursor of the Alu elements, took place in the genome of an ancestor of Supraprimates.
Alu insertions have been implicated in several inherited human diseases and in various forms of cancer.
The study of Alu elements has also been important in elucidating human population genetics and the evolution of primates, including the evolution of humans.
The Alu family is a family of repetitive elements in the human genome. Modern Alu elements are about 300 base pairs long and are therefore classified as short interspersed elements (SINEs) among the class of repetitive DNA elements. The typical structure is 5'Part A- A5TACA6 -Part B - PolyA Tail - 3', where Part A and Part B are similar nucleotide sequences, but of opposite direction. Expressed another way, it is believed modern Alu elements emerged from a head to tail fusion of two distinct FAMs (fossil antique monomers) over 100 mkya, hence its dimeric structure of two similar, but distinct monomers (left and right arms, and in opposite directions) joined by an A-rich linker.[3] The length of the polyA tail varies between Alu families.
There are over one million Alu elements interspersed throughout the human genome, and it is estimated that about 10.7% of the human genome consists of Alu sequences. However, less than 0.5% are polymorphic (i.e. they occur in more than one form or morph).[4] In 1988, Jerzy Jurka and Temple Smith discovered that Alu elements were split in two major subfamilies known as AluJ and AluS, and other Alu subfamilies were also independently discovered by several groups.[5] Later on, a sub-subfamily of AluS which included active Alu elements was given the separate name AluY. The discovery of Alu subfamilies led to the hypothesis of master/source genes, and provided the definitive link between transposable elements (active elements) and interspersed repetitive DNA (mutated copies of active elements). --Wikipedia
Alu elements are classified as SINEs, or Short INterspersed Elements. All Alus are approximately 300 bp in length and derive their name from a single recognition site for the restriction enzyme AluI located near the middle of the Alu element. Human chromosomes contain about 1,000,000 Alu copies, which equal 10% of the total genome. Alu elements probably arose from a gene that encodes the RNA component of the signal recognition particle, which labels proteins for export from the cell.
Alu is an example of a so-called "jumping gene" – a transposable DNA sequence that "reproduces" by copying itself and inserting into new chromosome locations. Alu is classified as a retroposon, because it is thought to require the retrovirus enzyme reverse transcriptase (rt) enzyme to make a mobile copy of itself. Here is a simple scheme to explain how an Alu element transposes:
First, the inserted Alu is transcribed into messenger RNA by the cellular RNA polymerase.
Then, the mRNA is converted to a double-stranded DNA molecule by reverse transcriptase.
Finally, the DNA copy of Alu is integrated into a new chromosomal locus at the site of a single- or double-stranded break.
Each Alu element has an internal promoter for RNA polymerase III needed to independently initiate transcription of itself. However, Alu is a "defective" transposon, in that it lacks the enzyme functions to produce a DNA copy of itself and to integrate into a new chromosome position. However, Alu can obtain these functions from another transposon, called L1, a Long INterspersed Element (LINE). LINEs are essentially defective retroviruses that retain a functional rt gene. Interestingly, in addition to reverse transcribing RNA to DNA, the L1 rt also produces single-stranded nicks in DNA. In the current model, the rt enzyme produces a nick at a chromosomal locus containing the sequence AATTTT. The polyadenylated "tail" of the Alu transcript (-AAAA) then hydrogen bonds to the TTTT sequence at the nick site, creating a primer for reverse transcription. The L1 rt makes a staggered nick in the opposite DNA strand of the host chromosome, allowing the DNA copy to integrate. This method of insertion also accounts for the identical sequences (direct repeats) found at the ends of all Alu elements. So it appears that LI can provide the necessary functions for Alu transposition. In this sense, Alu is a parasite of L1, which, in turn, is a relic of a retrovirus ancestor.
Some scientists regard Alu as an example of "selfish DNA" – it encodes no protein and appears to exist only for its own replication. If one reduces the definition of life to "the perpetuation and amplification of a DNA sequence through time," then Alu is an extremely successful life form. However, other scientists believe that transposable elements have played an important role in evolution by creating new mutations and gene combinations. Nobel laureate Barbara McClintock hypothesized that transposable elements provide a mechanism to rapidly reorganize the genome in response to environmental stress. Like Alu, the Ds transposable element discovered in corn by McClintock is a defective transposon and requires the help of a second element called Ac (activator).
Alu elements are found only in primates – the "monkey" branch of the evolutionary tree, which includes humans. So, all of the hundreds of thousands of Alu copies have accumulated in primates since their separation from other vertebrate groups about 65 million years ago. Once an Alu integrates into a new site, it accumulates new mutations at the same rate as surrounding DNA loci. Alu elements can be sorted into distinct lineages, or families, according to inherited patterns of new mutations. These studies suggest that the rate of Alu transposition has changed over time – from about one new jump in every live birth, early in primate evolution, to about one in every 200 newborns today. Taken together, this pattern suggests that, at any point in time, only one or several Alu "masters" are capable of transposing.
Once an Alu inserts at a chromosome locus, it can copy itself for transposition, but there is no evidence that it is ever excised or lost from a chromosome locus. So, each Alu insertion is stable through evolutionary time. Each is the "fossil" of a unique transposition event that occurred only once in primate evolution. Like genes, Alu insertions are inherited in a Mendelian fashion from parents to children. Thus, all primates showing an Alu insertion at a particular locus have inherited it from a common ancestor. This is called identity by descent.
An estimated 500-2,000 Alu elements are restricted to the human genome. The vast majority of Alu insertions occur in non-coding regions and are thought to be evolutionarily neutral. However, an Alu insertion in the NF-1 gene is responsible for neurofibromatosis I, Alu insertions in introns of genes for tissue plasminogen activator (TPA) and angiotensin converter enzyme (ACE) are associated with heart disease. Alu insertions are analogous to the insertion of a provirus in viral diseases and certain cancers.
Most Alu mutations are "fixed," meaning that both of the paired chromosomes have an insertion at the same locus (position). However, a number of human-specific Alus are dimorphic – an insertion may be present or absent on each of the paired chromosomes of different people. These dimorphic Alus inserted within the last million years, during the evolution and dispersion of modern humans. These dimorphisms show differences in allele and genotype frequencies between modern populations and are tools for reconstructing human prehistory.
Alu elements are classified as SINEs, or Short INterspersed Elements. All Alus are approximately 300 bp in length and derive their name from a single recognition site for the restriction enzyme AluI located near the middle of the Alu element. Human chromosomes contain about 1,000,000 Alu copies, which equal 10% of the total genome. Alu elements probably arose from a gene that encodes the RNA component of the signal recognition particle, which labels proteins for export from the cell.
Alu is an example of a so-called "jumping gene" – a transposable DNA sequence that "reproduces" by copying itself and inserting into new chromosome locations. Alu is classified as a retroposon, because it is thought to require the retrovirus enzyme reverse transcriptase (rt) enzyme to make a mobile copy of itself. Here is a simple scheme to explain how an Alu element transposes:
First, the inserted Alu is transcribed into messenger RNA by the cellular RNA polymerase.
Then, the mRNA is converted to a double-stranded DNA molecule by reverse transcriptase.
Finally, the DNA copy of Alu is integrated into a new chromosomal locus at the site of a single- or double-stranded break.
Each Alu element has an internal promoter for RNA polymerase III needed to independently initiate transcription of itself. However, Alu is a "defective" transposon, in that it lacks the enzyme functions to produce a DNA copy of itself and to integrate into a new chromosome position. However, Alu can obtain these functions from another transposon, called L1, a Long INterspersed Element (LINE). LINEs are essentially defective retroviruses that retain a functional rt gene. Interestingly, in addition to reverse transcribing RNA to DNA, the L1 rt also produces single-stranded nicks in DNA. In the current model, the rt enzyme produces a nick at a chromosomal locus containing the sequence AATTTT. The polyadenylated "tail" of the Alu transcript (-AAAA) then hydrogen bonds to the TTTT sequence at the nick site, creating a primer for reverse transcription. The L1 rt makes a staggered nick in the opposite DNA strand of the host chromosome, allowing the DNA copy to integrate. This method of insertion also accounts for the identical sequences (direct repeats) found at the ends of all Alu elements. So it appears that LI can provide the necessary functions for Alu transposition. In this sense, Alu is a parasite of L1, which, in turn, is a relic of a retrovirus ancestor.
Some scientists regard Alu as an example of "selfish DNA" – it encodes no protein and appears to exist only for its own replication. If one reduces the definition of life to "the perpetuation and amplification of a DNA sequence through time," then Alu is an extremely successful life form. However, other scientists believe that transposable elements have played an important role in evolution by creating new mutations and gene combinations. Nobel laureate Barbara McClintock hypothesized that transposable elements provide a mechanism to rapidly reorganize the genome in response to environmental stress. Like Alu, the Ds transposable element discovered in corn by McClintock is a defective transposon and requires the help of a second element called Ac (activator).
Alu elements are found only in primates – the "monkey" branch of the evolutionary tree, which includes humans. So, all of the hundreds of thousands of Alu copies have accumulated in primates since their separation from other vertebrate groups about 65 million years ago. Once an Alu integrates into a new site, it accumulates new mutations at the same rate as surrounding DNA loci. Alu elements can be sorted into distinct lineages, or families, according to inherited patterns of new mutations. These studies suggest that the rate of Alu transposition has changed over time – from about one new jump in every live birth, early in primate evolution, to about one in every 200 newborns today. Taken together, this pattern suggests that, at any point in time, only one or several Alu "masters" are capable of transposing.
Once an Alu inserts at a chromosome locus, it can copy itself for transposition, but there is no evidence that it is ever excised or lost from a chromosome locus. So, each Alu insertion is stable through evolutionary time. Each is the "fossil" of a unique transposition event that occurred only once in primate evolution. Like genes, Alu insertions are inherited in a Mendelian fashion from parents to children. Thus, all primates showing an Alu insertion at a particular locus have inherited it from a common ancestor. This is called identity by descent.
An estimated 500-2,000 Alu elements are restricted to the human genome. The vast majority of Alu insertions occur in non-coding regions and are thought to be evolutionarily neutral. However, an Alu insertion in the NF-1 gene is responsible for neurofibromatosis I, Alu insertions in introns of genes for tissue plasminogen activator (TPA) and angiotensin converter enzyme (ACE) are associated with heart disease. Alu insertions are analogous to the insertion of a provirus in viral diseases and certain cancers.
Most Alu mutations are "fixed," meaning that both of the paired chromosomes have an insertion at the same locus (position). However, a number of human-specific Alus are dimorphic – an insertion may be present or absent on each of the paired chromosomes of different people. These dimorphic Alus inserted within the last million years, during the evolution and dispersion of modern humans. These dimorphisms show differences in allele and genotype frequencies between modern populations and are tools for reconstructing human prehistory.
http://www.geneticorigins.org/pv92/aluframeset.htm
Psyche as the Subtle Body
Jung believed that the subtle body was a good metaphor for the human psyche. He said, “I have often felt tempted to advise my patients to conceive of the psyche as a subtle body” (1938, p. 25). Now we call it the energy body which is treated and balanced with yogas and complementary mindbody medicine.
The subtle body is a concept which represents the idea of a non-material body which coexists with the material body. Ideas concerning the subtle body have persisted thoughtout the ages in many different religions. According to David Tansley “the ancient Egyptians, Chinese and Greeks, the Indians of North America, the Polynesians Kahunas, the Incas, the early Christians, the Vedic seers of India and the medieval alchemists and the mystics of Europe” all had a concept of a non-material body.
The subtle body can be seen as a bridge between the divine world and the human world. David Gordon White calls it a link between the divine macrocosm and the human microcosm (p.15). Knowledge of the subtle body is often known though a hieroglyphic spiritual language, such as in expressed in dreams and imagination. It has been said that it is only through spiritual development that we begin to understand the hieroglyphic language of the subtle body. And it is the liminality of the subtle body which provides the opportunity for this interaction with a “hierarchy of demigods, angels, avatars, and discarnate teachers and guides” (Lockhart, p.1). From the Jungian point of view this interaction takes place primarily though the active imaginative and dreaming process.
Jung believed that the subtle body was a good metaphor for the human psyche. He said, “I have often felt tempted to advise my patients to conceive of the psyche as a subtle body” (1938, p. 25). Now we call it the energy body which is treated and balanced with yogas and complementary mindbody medicine.
The subtle body is a concept which represents the idea of a non-material body which coexists with the material body. Ideas concerning the subtle body have persisted thoughtout the ages in many different religions. According to David Tansley “the ancient Egyptians, Chinese and Greeks, the Indians of North America, the Polynesians Kahunas, the Incas, the early Christians, the Vedic seers of India and the medieval alchemists and the mystics of Europe” all had a concept of a non-material body.
The subtle body can be seen as a bridge between the divine world and the human world. David Gordon White calls it a link between the divine macrocosm and the human microcosm (p.15). Knowledge of the subtle body is often known though a hieroglyphic spiritual language, such as in expressed in dreams and imagination. It has been said that it is only through spiritual development that we begin to understand the hieroglyphic language of the subtle body. And it is the liminality of the subtle body which provides the opportunity for this interaction with a “hierarchy of demigods, angels, avatars, and discarnate teachers and guides” (Lockhart, p.1). From the Jungian point of view this interaction takes place primarily though the active imaginative and dreaming process.
Geneticist Mae-Won Ho says the memory of our body, inhering in the liquid crystalline continuum, exists in a quantum holographic form, distributed over the entire liquid crystalline medium -- the whole body. This brain-supported wave is specific to the past, i.e., to a composite of past "states" of the field taken at a certain scale of time. It is simultaneously a specification of the subset of the field relatable to the body’s action. Memory is delocalized not only across the entire brain, but throughout the entire body.
Man is fundamentally unborn. Despite his literal biological birth, he has logically never left the in-ness in a womb. In being biologically born, he only exchanged the biological womb for another, a metaphysical womb, the womb of Meaning. Personalistically expressed, man managed to in fact take the logical sting away from birth (birth where is thy sting?),16 the logical (not emotional, not empirical) trauma of the radical and irrevocable rupture that birth meant for the animal in that birth ruthlessly expelled it from in-ness in a uterus into naked exposure to the environment. Man managed to logically defeat birth in its literal biological dimension and use it for a purpose not intended, contra naturam. With respect to its intended purpose (naked exposure to the world, expulsion into adulthood) birth was forced to miscarry. It was forced to simply lead into another state of unbornness, another childhood.
So when man is born in the literal sense, he is not really born at all. He merely exchanges the biological womb of the mother for a second womb, the spiritual womb, the amniotic sac of the mind, images, and meanings. Man is not born directly into the environment. He is “born” into his being mind and soul. Much as astronauts do not really venture into outer space but stay in their spaceships or spacesuits that protect them from outer space, so man, even when literally, biologically born into the environment, is logically not directly exposed to the environment like an animal, but enters the environment only safely encapsulated in the space-suit, or should we say environment-suit, of his images, ideas, concepts, words.
--Giegerich, http://www.junginstitute.org/pdf_files/JungV6N1p1-66.pdf
Man is fundamentally unborn. Despite his literal biological birth, he has logically never left the in-ness in a womb. In being biologically born, he only exchanged the biological womb for another, a metaphysical womb, the womb of Meaning. Personalistically expressed, man managed to in fact take the logical sting away from birth (birth where is thy sting?),16 the logical (not emotional, not empirical) trauma of the radical and irrevocable rupture that birth meant for the animal in that birth ruthlessly expelled it from in-ness in a uterus into naked exposure to the environment. Man managed to logically defeat birth in its literal biological dimension and use it for a purpose not intended, contra naturam. With respect to its intended purpose (naked exposure to the world, expulsion into adulthood) birth was forced to miscarry. It was forced to simply lead into another state of unbornness, another childhood.
So when man is born in the literal sense, he is not really born at all. He merely exchanges the biological womb of the mother for a second womb, the spiritual womb, the amniotic sac of the mind, images, and meanings. Man is not born directly into the environment. He is “born” into his being mind and soul. Much as astronauts do not really venture into outer space but stay in their spaceships or spacesuits that protect them from outer space, so man, even when literally, biologically born into the environment, is logically not directly exposed to the environment like an animal, but enters the environment only safely encapsulated in the space-suit, or should we say environment-suit, of his images, ideas, concepts, words.
--Giegerich, http://www.junginstitute.org/pdf_files/JungV6N1p1-66.pdf
Archetypes are structural pattern-forming elements in the unconscious psyche, which produce out of themselves mythological components, motifs or primordial images (“archetypal images” when translated by a particular culture). They represent certain regularities, consistently recurring types of situations and types of figures. They are forms existing a priori, or biological norms of psychic activity.
Carl Jung’s theories have shown me that the psyche can be both biological and mystical. These ideas are not necessarily contradictory, but more like two sides of the same coin. Maybe this is what the alchemist sought to discover: an integration between science and the sacred; a realization that nature opens to the infinite; and an understanding that the human mind is home to the great mystery.
Fantasy and imagination is a product of the body. The energies that bring forth the fantasies derive from the organs of the body. The organs of the body are the source of our life, and of our intentions for life, and they conflict with each other. Among these organs, of course, is the brain. And then you must think of the various impulses that dominate our life system—the erotic impulse; the impulse to conquer, conquest and all that; self preservation; and then certain thoughts that have to do with ideals and things that are held up before us as aims worth living for and giving life its value and so forth. All of these different forces come into conflict within us. And the function of mythological imagery is to harmonize them, coordinate the energies of our body, so that we will live a harmonious and fruitful life in accord with our society, and with the new mystery that emerges with every new human being—namely, what are the possibilities of this particular human life? And mythology has to do with guiding us—first, in relation to the society and the whole world of nature, which is outside of us but also within us, because the organs of our body are of nature; and then also, the guiding of the individual through the inevitable stages of life, from childhood to maturity, and then on to the last gate. --Joseph Campbell
Carl Jung’s theories have shown me that the psyche can be both biological and mystical. These ideas are not necessarily contradictory, but more like two sides of the same coin. Maybe this is what the alchemist sought to discover: an integration between science and the sacred; a realization that nature opens to the infinite; and an understanding that the human mind is home to the great mystery.
Fantasy and imagination is a product of the body. The energies that bring forth the fantasies derive from the organs of the body. The organs of the body are the source of our life, and of our intentions for life, and they conflict with each other. Among these organs, of course, is the brain. And then you must think of the various impulses that dominate our life system—the erotic impulse; the impulse to conquer, conquest and all that; self preservation; and then certain thoughts that have to do with ideals and things that are held up before us as aims worth living for and giving life its value and so forth. All of these different forces come into conflict within us. And the function of mythological imagery is to harmonize them, coordinate the energies of our body, so that we will live a harmonious and fruitful life in accord with our society, and with the new mystery that emerges with every new human being—namely, what are the possibilities of this particular human life? And mythology has to do with guiding us—first, in relation to the society and the whole world of nature, which is outside of us but also within us, because the organs of our body are of nature; and then also, the guiding of the individual through the inevitable stages of life, from childhood to maturity, and then on to the last gate. --Joseph Campbell
That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one's own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilized form of autobiography, as it deals not with the events, but with the thoughts of one's life; not with life's physical accidents of deed or circumstance, but with the spiritual moods and imaginative passions of the mind.... ---Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist
Have you yet considered what it means that you yourself are a symbol of your soul?
"I had to recognize that I am only the expression and symbol of the soul. In the sense of the spirit of the depths, I am as I am in this visible world a symbol of my soul, and I am thoroughly a serf completely subjugated, utterly obedient. The spirit of the depths taught me to say: "I am the servant of a child." Through this dictum I learn above all the most extreme humility, as what I most need." ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 234.
“The symbols of the self arise in the depths of the body and they express its materiality every bit as much as the structure of the perceiving consciousness. The symbol is thus a living body, corpus et anima.” (Carl Jung, Collected Works Volume 9i, para 291)
"I had to recognize that I am only the expression and symbol of the soul. In the sense of the spirit of the depths, I am as I am in this visible world a symbol of my soul, and I am thoroughly a serf completely subjugated, utterly obedient. The spirit of the depths taught me to say: "I am the servant of a child." Through this dictum I learn above all the most extreme humility, as what I most need." ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 234.
“The symbols of the self arise in the depths of the body and they express its materiality every bit as much as the structure of the perceiving consciousness. The symbol is thus a living body, corpus et anima.” (Carl Jung, Collected Works Volume 9i, para 291)
The Ionian Dance - Edward John Poynter
To give birth to the ancient in a new time is creation.
But what is the resolution?
It is always something ancient and precisely because of this something new, for when something long since passed away comes back again in a changed world, it is new.
To give birth to the ancient in a new time is creation.
This is the creation of the new, and that redeems me.
Salvation is the resolution of the task. The task is to give birth to the old in a new time.
The soul of humanity is like the great wheel of the zodiac that rolls along the way:
Everything that comes up in a constant movement from below to the heights was already there.
There is no part of the wheel that does not come around again.
Hence everything that has been streams upward there, and what has been will be again.
For these are all things which are the inborn properties of human nature. It belongs to the essence of forward movement that what was returns. [260]
Only the ignorant can marvel at this.
Yet the meaning does not lie in the eternal recurrence of the same.
~Carl Jung, The Red Book, The Way of the Cross, Page 311.
But what is the resolution?
It is always something ancient and precisely because of this something new, for when something long since passed away comes back again in a changed world, it is new.
To give birth to the ancient in a new time is creation.
This is the creation of the new, and that redeems me.
Salvation is the resolution of the task. The task is to give birth to the old in a new time.
The soul of humanity is like the great wheel of the zodiac that rolls along the way:
Everything that comes up in a constant movement from below to the heights was already there.
There is no part of the wheel that does not come around again.
Hence everything that has been streams upward there, and what has been will be again.
For these are all things which are the inborn properties of human nature. It belongs to the essence of forward movement that what was returns. [260]
Only the ignorant can marvel at this.
Yet the meaning does not lie in the eternal recurrence of the same.
~Carl Jung, The Red Book, The Way of the Cross, Page 311.
Gene expression takes place in two stages. First, in transcription, an enzyme constructs messenger RNA (mRNA), which is a strand of RNA with a copy of the base sequence of one strand in the DNA helix. A molecular machine known as a ribosome, itself made of RNA and protein, carries out the second stage, translation of the mRNA into the protein coded by the gene. Antisense agents interfere with translation by binding to the mRNA. These compounds are typically small, chemically modified RNA or DNA molecules, designed with the appropriate sequence to identify their mRNA target by Watson-Crick base-pairing. By binding to its mRNA, the agent may trigger enzymes to degrade the RNA or may simply interfere physically with the mRNA’s functioning. Cells make use of proteins called transcription factors that recognize specific sequences in double-stranded DNA to control gene expression at the transcription stage. These proteins can repress a gene by obstructing the RNA
polymerase enzyme that would otherwise transcribe the DNA’s sequence into mRNA, or they can activate a gene by helping the RNA polymerase to attach to the DNA and start transcription.
http://home.sou.edu/~rchristi/courses/genbi/RC/101NewsArticles/Triple%20Helix%20-%20Designing%20a%20New%20Molecule%20of%20Life.pdf
polymerase enzyme that would otherwise transcribe the DNA’s sequence into mRNA, or they can activate a gene by helping the RNA polymerase to attach to the DNA and start transcription.
http://home.sou.edu/~rchristi/courses/genbi/RC/101NewsArticles/Triple%20Helix%20-%20Designing%20a%20New%20Molecule%20of%20Life.pdf
DNA is randomly passed down from generation to generation. A parent does not pass on their entire genetic makeup to a child; as a result, bits and pieces of DNA are lost in each generation.
Cousins will only share DNA if they happen to have randomly inherited that DNA from their shared ancestors. With each generation that separates the cousins, the probability that they share DNA decreases, because with every generation it is more likely that they will not inherit DNA from their ever-more-remote shared ancestors.
Third cousins, for example, share only 2 of their 16 ancestors at 4 generations. In this example, it appears that those two ancestors did not contribute an identical segment to both you and your third cousin. Interestingly, it is possible that both you and your cousin have segments of DNA from these ancestors, but they wouldn’t show up as a match in Family Inheritance or Relative Finder unless they were the same segment of DNA.
Also keep in mind that a 23andMe test is only comparing those sections of the DNA that are examined by the test; a whole-genome test, currently not available to consumers (at least at an affordable price), is the only test that can compare an individual’s entire DNA makeup to another’s.
Two Family Trees
In reality, everyone has two family trees. The first is a Genealogical Tree, which is every ancestor in history that had a child who had a child who had a child that ultimately led to you. Every decision made by every person in that tree contributed to who and what you are today.
However, not every person in that tree contributed a segment of your DNA sequence (because of random inheritance, as discussed above). As a result, we have a second family tree - a Genetic Tree – which is a tree that contains only those ancestors who contributed to our DNA. No one has yet been able to construct their Genetic Tree, but soon it will be a reality thanks to advances in genetic sequencing and comparison such Relative Finder. These tools are using relatedness between people living today to deduce the inheritance of DNA from people who have been dead for centuries.
I have many questions about Genetic Trees that I’m looking forward to answering with new tools in the future, including the following:
EDIT (22 September 2013): I’m adding the figures below to further help people understand the concept of a Genealogical Family Tree versus the Genetic Family Tree. Note that the Genetic Family Tree illustrates a concept rather than an exact representation of someone’s actual genetic family tree. The Genealogical Family Tree contains ALL of your biological ancestors:
Cousins will only share DNA if they happen to have randomly inherited that DNA from their shared ancestors. With each generation that separates the cousins, the probability that they share DNA decreases, because with every generation it is more likely that they will not inherit DNA from their ever-more-remote shared ancestors.
Third cousins, for example, share only 2 of their 16 ancestors at 4 generations. In this example, it appears that those two ancestors did not contribute an identical segment to both you and your third cousin. Interestingly, it is possible that both you and your cousin have segments of DNA from these ancestors, but they wouldn’t show up as a match in Family Inheritance or Relative Finder unless they were the same segment of DNA.
Also keep in mind that a 23andMe test is only comparing those sections of the DNA that are examined by the test; a whole-genome test, currently not available to consumers (at least at an affordable price), is the only test that can compare an individual’s entire DNA makeup to another’s.
Two Family Trees
In reality, everyone has two family trees. The first is a Genealogical Tree, which is every ancestor in history that had a child who had a child who had a child that ultimately led to you. Every decision made by every person in that tree contributed to who and what you are today.
However, not every person in that tree contributed a segment of your DNA sequence (because of random inheritance, as discussed above). As a result, we have a second family tree - a Genetic Tree – which is a tree that contains only those ancestors who contributed to our DNA. No one has yet been able to construct their Genetic Tree, but soon it will be a reality thanks to advances in genetic sequencing and comparison such Relative Finder. These tools are using relatedness between people living today to deduce the inheritance of DNA from people who have been dead for centuries.
I have many questions about Genetic Trees that I’m looking forward to answering with new tools in the future, including the following:
- At 10 generations, I have approximately 1024 ancestors (although I know there is some overlap). How many of these ancestors are part of my Genetic Tree? Is it a very small number? A surprisingly large number?
- What percentage, on average, of an individual’s genealogical tree at X generations is part of their genetic tree?
EDIT (22 September 2013): I’m adding the figures below to further help people understand the concept of a Genealogical Family Tree versus the Genetic Family Tree. Note that the Genetic Family Tree illustrates a concept rather than an exact representation of someone’s actual genetic family tree. The Genealogical Family Tree contains ALL of your biological ancestors:
The Genetic Family Tree contains a small subset of your biological ancestors: Due to the nature of the Genealogical versus the Genetic Family Tree, entire populations, ancestors, and ethnicities are regularly lost entirely from your DNA! For example, in the following example of a Genetic Family Tree, the ethnicity in blue below is NOT part of the tree, and therefore would not be detected by a DNA test.
Jung made the strong statement that "the gods [archetypes] have become diseases" due to their relativization in society. The fundamentally psychosomatic nature of disease manifests in both the psyche (mind) and soma (body). Jung's idea of spiritual authority rests on individual experience, on the need for cultural transformation, and unorthodox ways of achieving unity with the Cosmos.
“We think we can congratulate ourselves on having already reached such a pinnacle of clarity, imagining that we have left all these phantasmal gods far behind. But what we have left behind are only verbal spectres, not the psychic facts that were responsible for the birth of the gods. We are still as much possessed by autonomous psychic contents as if they were Olympians. Today they are called phobias, obsessions, and so forth; in a word, neurotic symptoms. The gods have become diseases; Zeus no longer rules Olympus but rather the solar plexus, and produces curious specimens for the doctor’s consulting room, or disorders of the brains of politicians and journalists who unwillingly let loose psychic epidemics on the world.” (Jung, Cw 13, par. 54)
A physical or psychological breakdown allows us to leave the track of production and social obligation to focus on healing. Hillman clarified by suggesting, "Soul enters only via symptoms, via outcast phenomena like the imagination of artists or alchemy or “primitives,” or of course, disguised as psychopathology. That’s what Jung meant when he said the Gods have become diseases: the only way back for them in a Christian world is via the outcast." Do we have to be broken before we heed the call of our spiritual center, the holistic field of the imaginal?
“We think we can congratulate ourselves on having already reached such a pinnacle of clarity, imagining that we have left all these phantasmal gods far behind. But what we have left behind are only verbal spectres, not the psychic facts that were responsible for the birth of the gods. We are still as much possessed by autonomous psychic contents as if they were Olympians. Today they are called phobias, obsessions, and so forth; in a word, neurotic symptoms. The gods have become diseases; Zeus no longer rules Olympus but rather the solar plexus, and produces curious specimens for the doctor’s consulting room, or disorders of the brains of politicians and journalists who unwillingly let loose psychic epidemics on the world.” (Jung, Cw 13, par. 54)
A physical or psychological breakdown allows us to leave the track of production and social obligation to focus on healing. Hillman clarified by suggesting, "Soul enters only via symptoms, via outcast phenomena like the imagination of artists or alchemy or “primitives,” or of course, disguised as psychopathology. That’s what Jung meant when he said the Gods have become diseases: the only way back for them in a Christian world is via the outcast." Do we have to be broken before we heed the call of our spiritual center, the holistic field of the imaginal?
The biological basis of "escalation" is the simple logic of “escalation.”: over numberless generations, offensive and defensive strategies sharpen each other, drawing both into remarkable intricacy and precisely interlocking interdependence.
These are basic, archetypal modes, deep structure in the associative embodied metaphorical basis of thought. The linear march of progress, the circular endless now of myth; the angular agendas of masculinity and the curvaceous feeling-being of the feminine, symbolized by sword and chalice, tower and moat; the figure- and individual-focused Occidental seeing, and the ground- and context-Way of the Orient. Marshall McLuhan tied this basic binary distinction to the radical shift from the embedded self of oral cultures to the distanced self of print – the move from the sound of storytellers round a fire to the image of a lone scholar in his study. It is a change reflecting our transition from the huddled tribe attuned to the living acoustic space to “the ivory tower,” the myth of self-authoring agency, the dissociation of academic magisterial and countless lonely suburbs transfixed by their TVs.
http://www.realitysandwich.com/evolution_surveillance_part_2_red_queens_evil_eyes
These are basic, archetypal modes, deep structure in the associative embodied metaphorical basis of thought. The linear march of progress, the circular endless now of myth; the angular agendas of masculinity and the curvaceous feeling-being of the feminine, symbolized by sword and chalice, tower and moat; the figure- and individual-focused Occidental seeing, and the ground- and context-Way of the Orient. Marshall McLuhan tied this basic binary distinction to the radical shift from the embedded self of oral cultures to the distanced self of print – the move from the sound of storytellers round a fire to the image of a lone scholar in his study. It is a change reflecting our transition from the huddled tribe attuned to the living acoustic space to “the ivory tower,” the myth of self-authoring agency, the dissociation of academic magisterial and countless lonely suburbs transfixed by their TVs.
http://www.realitysandwich.com/evolution_surveillance_part_2_red_queens_evil_eyes
"Thus your soul is your own self in the spiritual world. As the abode of the spirits, however, the spiritual world is also an outer world. Just as you are also not alone in the visible world, but are surrounded by objects that belong to you and obey only you, you also have thoughts that belong to you and obey only you. But just as you are surrounded in the visible world by things and beings that neither belong to you nor obey you, you are also surrounded in the spiritual world by thoughts and beings of thought that neither obey you nor belong to you. Just as you engender or bear your physical children, and just as they grow up and separate themselves from you to live their own fate, you also produce or give birth to beings of thought which separate themselves from you and live their own lives. Just as we leave our children when we grow old and give our body back to the earth, I separate myself from my God, the sun, and sink into the emptiness of matter and obliterate the image of my child in me. This happens in that I accept the nature of matter and allow the force of my form to flow into emptiness. Just as I gave birth anew to the sick God through my engendering force, I henceforth animate the emptiness of matter from which the formation of evil grows."
~Carl Jung, Red Book, Page 288
~Carl Jung, Red Book, Page 288
EMBRYOGENESIS
The pattern that cells use to divide in biology perfectly matches the fundamental structure of the fabric of the space that it is dividing in. It had better, or else we probably wouldn't be able to coordinate the estimated 100-200 TRILLION chemical reactions that happen per SECOND on a cellular level inside the human body!
The pattern that cells use to divide in biology perfectly matches the fundamental structure of the fabric of the space that it is dividing in. It had better, or else we probably wouldn't be able to coordinate the estimated 100-200 TRILLION chemical reactions that happen per SECOND on a cellular level inside the human body!
Heartmath
“Just as the earth is moved by the universe, you, me, every human, every life form, and every thing is moved by the universe as well. This movement feeling, the sense of the universe’s gravity field or what Einstein called space–time, is not just felt by astronauts. All of us feel moved by gravity all the time.”... “When you are moved in this way, you are showing the ‘dance of the ancient one,’ and are in contact with the space between us, with the subtle experience of being moved by what I shall explain is a system mind—possibly the most powerful system mind available to us.” --Arnold Mindell
Brain Battle of the Sexes
12/16/2013 Rachael Moeller Gorman
A new study finds that gene expression and splicing in female brains differs from male brains. Does this matter, and why? Find out...
The clichéd and controversial idea that male and female brains differ fundamentally has enjoyed mounting support in recent years. Research shows gender-based variation in brain structure and neurochemistry, as well as differences in overall behavior and susceptibility to neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric diseases, such as autism (more likely in males) and multiple sclerosis (more likely in females). But the molecular basis of this gender variation is unknown, and whether these differences mean brains are differently capable is unclear.
A new paper in the journal Nature Communications is the first large-scale study to investigate the genetic underpinnings of sex-based brain variation, reporting significant gender differences in expression and RNA splicing of genes in certain brain regions.
“The differences in gene expression between the sexes is much more widespread, both in terms of the number of genes involved and number of brain regions involved, than we had necessarily guessed,” said study co-author Mina Ryten of University College London. “The most interesting part is whether that gives any insight into neurological disorders, particularly because there are very well-known sex differences in many neurological diseases. Might some existing treatments be more effective in men or women?”
Previous studies have looked at fewer than 20 brains and in most cases only a handful of different brain regions. Here, investigators examined 12 regions (such as the frontal cortex, occipital cortex, thalamus, hippocampus) from each of 137 healthy brain samples (101 male, 36 female) derived from the UK Brain Expression Consortium. The team isolated total RNA from the brain tissues and analyzed it using Affymetrix Exon Arrays.
Ryten and her group found 448 genes that were expressed differently by gender (2.6% of all genes expressed in the CNS). All major brain regions showed some gender variation, and 85% of these variations were due to RNA splicing differences in male and female brains. Interestingly, “What’s key here is that there are an awful lot of autosomal genes that are involved in generating sex-biased expression patterns,” said Ryten.
Many of these genes play a role in disease. For example, the study identified expression differences in NRXN3, a gene linked to autism. NRXN3 has two major isoforms produced by alternate RNA splicing: one, alpha-neurexins, was expressed similarly in men and women, but the other, beta-neurexins, was expressed significantly less in women, but only in the thalamus. The authors speculate that this could help explain the higher incidence of autism in males, though to confirm this they would need to examine whether this difference in splicing occurs in young people as well.
Casting a wider net, the team next looked at entire gene networks using gene set enrichment analysis. They tested 71 CNS-related gene sets and found significant differences between the sexes. In one example, females had enhanced expression of two immune-related pathways in their white matter, perhaps providing a clue to why multiple sclerosis, an immune-related white matter disease, is more prevalent in women.
So, do these gender-based genetic differences have any greater meaning? “My perspective is not so much to make social commentary about these issues, but more whether it gives us insight into disease or not,” said Ryten.
Ryten hopes this work will improve basic neurological research. “This is a problem generally in neuroscience,” she said. “It’s not necessarily the case that people report sex differences in their studies, or whether they’ve analyzed, for example, male or female rodents, or whether they’ve cultured male or female cells, or even whether male or female skin cells are used as the starting point for developing induced pluripotent stem cells to make neurons.” With this work, she said, “sex should be a greater consideration in the design and analysis of neurological experiments.”
Reference
Trabzuni D, Ramasamy A, Imran S, Walker R, Smith C, Weale ME, Hardy J, Ryten M; North American Brain Expression Consortium. Widespread sex differences in gene expression and splicing in the adult human brain. Nat Commun. 2013 Nov 22;4:2771.
12/16/2013 Rachael Moeller Gorman
A new study finds that gene expression and splicing in female brains differs from male brains. Does this matter, and why? Find out...
The clichéd and controversial idea that male and female brains differ fundamentally has enjoyed mounting support in recent years. Research shows gender-based variation in brain structure and neurochemistry, as well as differences in overall behavior and susceptibility to neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric diseases, such as autism (more likely in males) and multiple sclerosis (more likely in females). But the molecular basis of this gender variation is unknown, and whether these differences mean brains are differently capable is unclear.
A new paper in the journal Nature Communications is the first large-scale study to investigate the genetic underpinnings of sex-based brain variation, reporting significant gender differences in expression and RNA splicing of genes in certain brain regions.
“The differences in gene expression between the sexes is much more widespread, both in terms of the number of genes involved and number of brain regions involved, than we had necessarily guessed,” said study co-author Mina Ryten of University College London. “The most interesting part is whether that gives any insight into neurological disorders, particularly because there are very well-known sex differences in many neurological diseases. Might some existing treatments be more effective in men or women?”
Previous studies have looked at fewer than 20 brains and in most cases only a handful of different brain regions. Here, investigators examined 12 regions (such as the frontal cortex, occipital cortex, thalamus, hippocampus) from each of 137 healthy brain samples (101 male, 36 female) derived from the UK Brain Expression Consortium. The team isolated total RNA from the brain tissues and analyzed it using Affymetrix Exon Arrays.
Ryten and her group found 448 genes that were expressed differently by gender (2.6% of all genes expressed in the CNS). All major brain regions showed some gender variation, and 85% of these variations were due to RNA splicing differences in male and female brains. Interestingly, “What’s key here is that there are an awful lot of autosomal genes that are involved in generating sex-biased expression patterns,” said Ryten.
Many of these genes play a role in disease. For example, the study identified expression differences in NRXN3, a gene linked to autism. NRXN3 has two major isoforms produced by alternate RNA splicing: one, alpha-neurexins, was expressed similarly in men and women, but the other, beta-neurexins, was expressed significantly less in women, but only in the thalamus. The authors speculate that this could help explain the higher incidence of autism in males, though to confirm this they would need to examine whether this difference in splicing occurs in young people as well.
Casting a wider net, the team next looked at entire gene networks using gene set enrichment analysis. They tested 71 CNS-related gene sets and found significant differences between the sexes. In one example, females had enhanced expression of two immune-related pathways in their white matter, perhaps providing a clue to why multiple sclerosis, an immune-related white matter disease, is more prevalent in women.
So, do these gender-based genetic differences have any greater meaning? “My perspective is not so much to make social commentary about these issues, but more whether it gives us insight into disease or not,” said Ryten.
Ryten hopes this work will improve basic neurological research. “This is a problem generally in neuroscience,” she said. “It’s not necessarily the case that people report sex differences in their studies, or whether they’ve analyzed, for example, male or female rodents, or whether they’ve cultured male or female cells, or even whether male or female skin cells are used as the starting point for developing induced pluripotent stem cells to make neurons.” With this work, she said, “sex should be a greater consideration in the design and analysis of neurological experiments.”
Reference
Trabzuni D, Ramasamy A, Imran S, Walker R, Smith C, Weale ME, Hardy J, Ryten M; North American Brain Expression Consortium. Widespread sex differences in gene expression and splicing in the adult human brain. Nat Commun. 2013 Nov 22;4:2771.
WHAT IS KINSHIP
http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/anthro/faculty/read/PDF_Files/Papers/Read_WhatIsKinship.PDF
http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/anthro/faculty/read/PDF_Files/Papers/Read_WhatIsKinship.PDF
We are Nothing but Memory
The entire structure of the psychophysical self is memory.
The entire structure of the psychophysical self is memory.
Mitochondrial DNA, (mtDNA) is of great importance in tracing recent human migrations and paths of species evolution. Unlike nuclear DNA, this circular molecule is present in our cells not only in one, but in a number of copies (there are usually 100 to 1000 mitochondria in each eukaryotic cell), which enables detection of much lower amount of the sequence of interest, especially that from fossil material. Due to the fact that only an egg contributes its mitochondria to the developing embryo with only rare exceptions, all human mtDNA is inherited maternally [GILES et al. 1980, CUMMINS 2000]. Because it doesn't recombine, it carries traits for many generations.
THE DNA BRIDGE: Paternal & Mitochondrial Dragon DNA explains the importance of the female decent. Mitochondrial DNA is passed only through the female line. Mitochondria is a living sentient and separate life form from ourselves. The mitochondria are dependent on us for life; we live in a symbiotic relationship. Mitochondrial DNA can live 15 generations. 15 generations of living mitochondria live inside you. Your 15 generation grandparents living cells are in you. A mutant mtDNA will drift to fixation in a human matriline in 15 generations. Recently an attempt was made to estimate the age of the human race using mitochondrial DNA. This material is inherited always from mother to children only.
By measuring the difference in mitochondrial DNA among many individuals, the age of the common maternal ancestor of humanity was estimated at about 200,000 years. It remains implausible to explain the known geographic distribution of mtDNA sequence variation by human migration that occurred only in the last ~6,500 years. Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) (by virtue of its maternal, nonrecombining mode of inheritance, rapid pace of evolution, and extensive intraspecific polymorphism) permits and even demands an extension of phylogenetic thinking to the microevolutionary level. Many species exhibit a deep and geographically structured mtDNA phylogenetic history. Study of the relationship between genealogy and geography constitutes a discipline.
THE DNA BRIDGE: Paternal & Mitochondrial Dragon DNA explains the importance of the female decent. Mitochondrial DNA is passed only through the female line. Mitochondria is a living sentient and separate life form from ourselves. The mitochondria are dependent on us for life; we live in a symbiotic relationship. Mitochondrial DNA can live 15 generations. 15 generations of living mitochondria live inside you. Your 15 generation grandparents living cells are in you. A mutant mtDNA will drift to fixation in a human matriline in 15 generations. Recently an attempt was made to estimate the age of the human race using mitochondrial DNA. This material is inherited always from mother to children only.
By measuring the difference in mitochondrial DNA among many individuals, the age of the common maternal ancestor of humanity was estimated at about 200,000 years. It remains implausible to explain the known geographic distribution of mtDNA sequence variation by human migration that occurred only in the last ~6,500 years. Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) (by virtue of its maternal, nonrecombining mode of inheritance, rapid pace of evolution, and extensive intraspecific polymorphism) permits and even demands an extension of phylogenetic thinking to the microevolutionary level. Many species exhibit a deep and geographically structured mtDNA phylogenetic history. Study of the relationship between genealogy and geography constitutes a discipline.
DNA "eats" vacuum instabilities; enough active DNA could stabilize the universe;
DNA uses and stores vacuum microfluctuations. -KT
DNA uses and stores vacuum microfluctuations. -KT
Reconciling Genealogy & Genetic Genealogy
Genealogy and even genetic genealogy are pursuits that require interpretation of assembled data, not literal interpretation, due to hidden variables and a variety of other factors, including the interpretive bias of the researcher. Thus, they are essentially Hermetic pursuits and should be approached as such, seeking both their wisdom and their subtle misdirection, outright lies of the past and present, misrepresentations, and other Trickster elements. Those unfamiliar with either subject are most likely to misinterpret their own family's functional relation to others, and likewise to misinterpret the evidence of their alleles in relation to antic origins and their meaning.
Genetic genealogy is the application of genetics to traditional genealogy. Genetic genealogy involves the use of genealogical DNA testing to determine the level of genetic relationship between individuals. Genetic genealogy is a science in great flux. In April 2000, Family Tree DNA began offering the first genetic genealogy tests to the public. This offering marked the first time that a personal theory on the Y chromosome could be tested outside of an academic study. Additionally, Sykes’ concept of a surname study, which by this time had been adopted by several other academic researchers outside of Oxford, was expanded into online Surname Projects (an early form of social network) and the effort helped spread knowledge gained through testing to interested genealogists worldwide.
In 2001, Sykes went on to write the popular book The Seven Daughters of Eve, which described the seven major haplogroups of European ancestors. In the wake of the book's success, and with the growing availability and affordability of genealogical DNA testing, genetic genealogy as a field began growing rapidly. By 2003, the field of DNA testing of surnames was declared officially to have “arrived” in an article by Jobling and Tyler-Smith in Nature Reviews Genetics. The number of firms offering tests, and the number of consumers ordering them, had risen dramatically.
Another milestone in the acceptance of genetic genealogy is the Genographic Project. The Genographic Project is a five-year research study launched in 2005 by the National Geographic Society and IBM, in partnership with the University of Arizona and Family Tree DNA. Although its goals are primarily anthropological, not genealogical, the project's sale by April 2010 of more than 350,000 of its public participation testing kits, which test the general public for either twelve STR markers on the Y chromosome or mutations on the HVR1 region of the mtDNA, has helped increase the visibility of genetic genealogy. Such tests show biogeographical and ethnic origins and revealed vast patterns of human migration.
Even with scientific linkage to specific ancestral groups, self-discovery should not be confounded with personal mythology though both necessarily overlap. There is what the evidence shows or suggests, then the narrative which we construct from that limited evidence, which suggests certain things about our families, current and former cultures, and the future of society.
Hermeneutics is the study of theories and methods of the interpretation of systems of meaning, including interpretations of experience, or human behavior generally, including language and patterns of speech, social institutions, and ritual behaviors. It is a specific method or theory of interpretation, such as Freud or Jung's depth psychologies, for example. The word hermeneutics is a term derived from 'Ερμηνεýς, the Greek word for interpreter.
This is related to the name of the Greek god Hermes in his role as the interpreter of the messages of the gods. Hermes was believed to play tricks on those he was supposed to give messages to, often changing the messages and influencing the interpretation thereof. The Greek word thus has the basic meaning of one who makes the meaning clear. A DECODER. DNA still manages to preserve its deepest secrets about who and what we are. The bounds of fact and fancy blur in an incoherent reading -- creative misreading of SNP mutations, much like a dream interpretation.
Most people with a lot of New England ancestry descend from one or more ‘gateway’ ancestors – i.e., early colonists who descend, themselves, from English kings, primarily the Plantagenets. The latter, in turn, have their own gateway ancestors, through whom we derive our longest possible ‘ancestral lines’ – into the Dark Ages (roughly A.D. 450-750),
and perhaps (though far more conjecturally) even the Classical (Greco-Roman) and Ancient (Egyptian, Babylonian, and Persian) worlds.
ALL such descents are hypothetical – that is, all entail many filiative links that are not, in fact, attested in writing, but postulated by scholars on the basis of an assessment of the known chronology, ethno-political situation, and onomastic patterns of the relevant era, locale, and race. In short, ‘ancient’ pedigrees have many ‘dotted lines,’ which are plausible, even likely, but NOT susceptible to proof.
Unfortunately, popular American genealogical literature is rife with supposed ‘ancient’ pedigrees which are neither likely nor plausible, and in some cases provably bogus, passing, as they do, through long chains of supposed personages who never existed. How, short of acquiring a comprehensive knowledge of many phases of world and national history, half a dozen ancient and modern languages, the various branches of philology, and an immense (and highly specialized) research literature (surely a job for several lifetimes!), is the ‘lay’ reader to tell the plausible from the preposterous, the reasonable from the ridiculous?
We can identify the major geographic areas, ethnicities, and pre-Plantagenet ‘gateway’ ancestors through whom we MIGHT descend from Dark Age, Classical, or Ancient kings, warlords, consuls, emperors, and pharaohs, and can outline the major sources of data and forms of reasoning upon which such descents are predicated. It will also draw your attention to proposed ‘ancient’ descents which are known to be false, or have been seriously questioned, and identify the absolute historical limits beyond which it will never be possible to go.
About 360 years, or just short of 15 generations mtDNA peters out. At 15 generations, an individual living today would carry only three thousands of 1% (00.003052%) of the DNA of an ancestor who was “pure” anything 15 generations ago. So even if one ancestor was indeed Mediterranean or whatever 15 generations ago, unless they continuously intermarried within a pure Mediterranean population, the amount would drop by 50% with each generation to the miniscule amount that would be found in today’s current generation. With today’s technology, this is simply untraceable in autosomal DNA.
Joseph Campbell: "What is it we are questing for? It is the fulfillment of that which is potential in each of us. Questing for it is not an ego trip; it is an adventure to bring into fulfillment your gift to the world, which is yourself. There is nothing you can do that's more important than being fulfilled. You become a sign, you become a signal, transparent to transcendence; in this way you will find, live, become a realization of your own personal myth."
Genetic genealogy is the application of genetics to traditional genealogy. Genetic genealogy involves the use of genealogical DNA testing to determine the level of genetic relationship between individuals. Genetic genealogy is a science in great flux. In April 2000, Family Tree DNA began offering the first genetic genealogy tests to the public. This offering marked the first time that a personal theory on the Y chromosome could be tested outside of an academic study. Additionally, Sykes’ concept of a surname study, which by this time had been adopted by several other academic researchers outside of Oxford, was expanded into online Surname Projects (an early form of social network) and the effort helped spread knowledge gained through testing to interested genealogists worldwide.
In 2001, Sykes went on to write the popular book The Seven Daughters of Eve, which described the seven major haplogroups of European ancestors. In the wake of the book's success, and with the growing availability and affordability of genealogical DNA testing, genetic genealogy as a field began growing rapidly. By 2003, the field of DNA testing of surnames was declared officially to have “arrived” in an article by Jobling and Tyler-Smith in Nature Reviews Genetics. The number of firms offering tests, and the number of consumers ordering them, had risen dramatically.
Another milestone in the acceptance of genetic genealogy is the Genographic Project. The Genographic Project is a five-year research study launched in 2005 by the National Geographic Society and IBM, in partnership with the University of Arizona and Family Tree DNA. Although its goals are primarily anthropological, not genealogical, the project's sale by April 2010 of more than 350,000 of its public participation testing kits, which test the general public for either twelve STR markers on the Y chromosome or mutations on the HVR1 region of the mtDNA, has helped increase the visibility of genetic genealogy. Such tests show biogeographical and ethnic origins and revealed vast patterns of human migration.
Even with scientific linkage to specific ancestral groups, self-discovery should not be confounded with personal mythology though both necessarily overlap. There is what the evidence shows or suggests, then the narrative which we construct from that limited evidence, which suggests certain things about our families, current and former cultures, and the future of society.
Hermeneutics is the study of theories and methods of the interpretation of systems of meaning, including interpretations of experience, or human behavior generally, including language and patterns of speech, social institutions, and ritual behaviors. It is a specific method or theory of interpretation, such as Freud or Jung's depth psychologies, for example. The word hermeneutics is a term derived from 'Ερμηνεýς, the Greek word for interpreter.
This is related to the name of the Greek god Hermes in his role as the interpreter of the messages of the gods. Hermes was believed to play tricks on those he was supposed to give messages to, often changing the messages and influencing the interpretation thereof. The Greek word thus has the basic meaning of one who makes the meaning clear. A DECODER. DNA still manages to preserve its deepest secrets about who and what we are. The bounds of fact and fancy blur in an incoherent reading -- creative misreading of SNP mutations, much like a dream interpretation.
Most people with a lot of New England ancestry descend from one or more ‘gateway’ ancestors – i.e., early colonists who descend, themselves, from English kings, primarily the Plantagenets. The latter, in turn, have their own gateway ancestors, through whom we derive our longest possible ‘ancestral lines’ – into the Dark Ages (roughly A.D. 450-750),
and perhaps (though far more conjecturally) even the Classical (Greco-Roman) and Ancient (Egyptian, Babylonian, and Persian) worlds.
ALL such descents are hypothetical – that is, all entail many filiative links that are not, in fact, attested in writing, but postulated by scholars on the basis of an assessment of the known chronology, ethno-political situation, and onomastic patterns of the relevant era, locale, and race. In short, ‘ancient’ pedigrees have many ‘dotted lines,’ which are plausible, even likely, but NOT susceptible to proof.
Unfortunately, popular American genealogical literature is rife with supposed ‘ancient’ pedigrees which are neither likely nor plausible, and in some cases provably bogus, passing, as they do, through long chains of supposed personages who never existed. How, short of acquiring a comprehensive knowledge of many phases of world and national history, half a dozen ancient and modern languages, the various branches of philology, and an immense (and highly specialized) research literature (surely a job for several lifetimes!), is the ‘lay’ reader to tell the plausible from the preposterous, the reasonable from the ridiculous?
We can identify the major geographic areas, ethnicities, and pre-Plantagenet ‘gateway’ ancestors through whom we MIGHT descend from Dark Age, Classical, or Ancient kings, warlords, consuls, emperors, and pharaohs, and can outline the major sources of data and forms of reasoning upon which such descents are predicated. It will also draw your attention to proposed ‘ancient’ descents which are known to be false, or have been seriously questioned, and identify the absolute historical limits beyond which it will never be possible to go.
About 360 years, or just short of 15 generations mtDNA peters out. At 15 generations, an individual living today would carry only three thousands of 1% (00.003052%) of the DNA of an ancestor who was “pure” anything 15 generations ago. So even if one ancestor was indeed Mediterranean or whatever 15 generations ago, unless they continuously intermarried within a pure Mediterranean population, the amount would drop by 50% with each generation to the miniscule amount that would be found in today’s current generation. With today’s technology, this is simply untraceable in autosomal DNA.
Joseph Campbell: "What is it we are questing for? It is the fulfillment of that which is potential in each of us. Questing for it is not an ego trip; it is an adventure to bring into fulfillment your gift to the world, which is yourself. There is nothing you can do that's more important than being fulfilled. You become a sign, you become a signal, transparent to transcendence; in this way you will find, live, become a realization of your own personal myth."
COMMON ANCESTORS OF ALL HUMAN BEINGS
http://humphrysfamilytree.com/ca.html
USING GENETICS:
http://humphrysfamilytree.com/ca.genetic.html
By following only the female-female or male-male paths, we ignore the billions of other ancestral paths we could follow, thus pushing the common ancestor much further back into the past. The MRCA in any line will be much more recent than Mitochondrial Eve or Y chromosome Adam. DNA studies have a problem in telling us about the MRCA. As [Chang, 1999] notes, the MRCA will be much more recent than any MRCA that could ever be found in DNA studies, even if one were to study the ancestry of every single gene. The reason being that we are considering people who are simply ancestors, through any route, whether or not any of their genes actually survived the journey.
Conclusion - Within historical times, you have ancestors from whom you have no DNA. All Common Ancestors in DNA studies will be much older than the Most Recent Common Ancestor, MRCA. Archaeology is also of limited use in telling us about the MRCA. For instance, even the MRCAs found in DNA studies will exist much more recently than the paleontologists might imagine looking at the fossil evidence - for the simple reason that they are merely "statistical artefacts" of no real importance to the overall story of human evolution. It would be totally wrong, for example, to imagine that the CA lived in an important or influential place or culture.
Genealogy, like my Royal Descents page, has the problem of only focusing on the ancestors for whom records survived, not all your ancestors. However, despite the sketchy records, it still provides strong support for the suggestions above from mathematical models and computer simulations of an MRCA in historical times. The huge number of proven descents of people from common European royal ancestry in historical times, when considered with the vastly greater number of descents that must exist but are not among the rare few that can be proven, suggest strongly that everyone, in the West at least, is descended from an MRCA in historical times.
Research suggests, for example, that everyone in the West is descended from Charlemagne, c. 800 AD. Quite likely the entire world is descended from the Ancient Egyptian royal house, c. 1600 BC. Quite likely almost everyone in the world descends from Confucius, c. 500 BC. These findings do not necessarily have any implications for our DNA. To descend from someone does not mean you necessarily inherit any DNA from them.
Probably sixty percent or more of the American people are descended from kings. These findings do not conflict with the idea that most or all of your DNA is inherited from your local area. Even if you do descend from the Ancient Egyptian Pharaohs, that does not mean this can be detected in your DNA. In fact, there may be no evidence at all of these findings in humanity's DNA. And yet the findings can still be true. The MRCA of the West is in historical times, quite possibly as recent as 1000 AD. We pick him as an example because he is the proven ancestor of some people alive today (for example, he is a proven ancestor of my children). Hence probably the ancestor of all people alive today. By the same reasoning, as well as from Continental/pre-Norman figures like Charlemagne, quite likely everyone in the West descends from figures like:
- The English/Saxon/pre-Royal Cerdic, c. 500 AD.
- The Irish/Celtic Niall of the Nine Hostages, c. 450 AD.
All humanity is interrelated many times over (contrary to what an endless procession of racists and tribalists throughout history have claimed). For any two humans in history or today, it is not a question of do they have a common ancestor, it is only a question of when was the most recent one. If we had full genealogical records for all history, then any 2 living people on earth could identify their closest relationship to each other. Or indeed any 2 living organisms on earth, since DNA probably did not evolve twice. One could also pick any famous person, alive or dead, and show your closest relationship to them. For they are all related. See pre-historical estimates for Common ancestors of all humans.
Showing descents from successive English monarchs is probably the most convenient way of tying the West together. Of course, later monarchs are descended many times over from earlier ones. So it allows us show short descents from the most recent monarch (rather than every descent needing a long tail going up to some very remote common ancestor). Some continental descents, though, may have to go all the way up to Charlemagne, from whom all English monarchs since William the Conqueror descend. Anthropologists claim everyone on earth is a 40th cousin" (i.e. any pair of 2 people can find at least 1 common ancestor since about 800 AD).
http://drakenberg.weebly.com/
Royal Descents of famous people - Common ancestors of all humans
Biofields 4, Io
European Origins Laid bare by DNA
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24475342
Ancient DNA Reveals Key Stages in the Formation of Central European Mitochondrial Genetic Diversity
The processes that shaped modern European mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) variation remain unclear. The initial peopling by Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers ~42,000 years ago and the immigration of Neolithic farmers into Europe ~8000 years ago appear to have played important roles but do not explain present-day mtDNA diversity. We generated mtDNA profiles of 364 individuals from prehistoric cultures in Central Europe to perform a chronological study, spanning the Early Neolithic to the Early Bronze Age (5500 to 1550 calibrated years before the common era). We used this transect through time to identify four marked shifts in genetic composition during the Neolithic period, revealing a key role for Late Neolithic cultures in shaping modern Central European genetic diversity.
Science 11 October 2013:
Vol. 342 no. 6155 pp. 257-261DOI:10.1126/science.1241844
The emergence of the Corded Ware Culture involved the spread of people as well as ideas Continue reading the main story
The study appears to refute the picture of Europeans as a simple mixture of indigenous hunters and Near Eastern farmers who arrived 7,000 years ago.
The findings by an international team have been published in Science journal.
DNA was analysed from 364 skeletons unearthed in Germany - an important crossroads for prehistoric cultures.
"This is the largest and most detailed genetic time series of Europe yet created, allowing us to establish a complete genetic chronology," said co-author Dr Wolfgang Haak of the Australian Centre for DNA (ACAD) in Adelaide.
"Focusing on this small but highly important geographic region meant we could generate a gapless record, and directly observe genetic changes in 'real-time' from 7,500 to 3,500 years ago, from the earliest farmers to the early Bronze Age."
Dr Haak and his colleagues analysed DNA extracted from the teeth and bones of well-preserved remains from the Mittelelbe-Saale region of Germany. They focused on mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) - the genetic information in the cell's "batteries".
When you look at today's populations, what you are seeing is a hazy palimpsest of what actually went on to create present-day patterns” Dr Spencer Wells Director, Genographic Project
MtDNA is passed down from a mother to her children, allowing geneticists to probe the maternal histories of populations. Geneticists recognise a variety of mitochondrial DNA "clans", or lineages, in human populations. And each of these lineages has its own distinct history.
The team's results show that indigenous hunter-gatherers in Central Europe were edged out by incomers from Anatolia (modern Turkey) some 7,500 years ago. A majority of the hunters belonged to the maternal clan known as haplogroup U, whilst the farmers carried a selection of genetic lineages characteristic of the Near East.
Around 6,100 years ago, farming was introduced to Scandinavia, which coincided with the appearance of Neolithic mtDNA lineages in that region too.
"In some ways agriculture was an obvious and easy way to go in the Fertile Crescent. But once you take it out of there, it involves an abrupt shift in lifestyle," said Dr Spencer Wells, director of the Genographic Project and an Explorer-in-Residence at National Geographic, adding that early agricultural groups were living "on the edge".
"They were basically taking crops that had evolved over millions of years in the Middle East and were adapted to that dry-wet pattern of seasonality and moving them into an area that was recently de-glaciated.
The Bell Beaker folk seem to represent a migration from south-west Europe "It was no trivial thing to transfer crops such as barley and rye to the northern fringes of Europe."
Dr Wells thinks this precarious existence may be reflected in the spread of the lactase persistence gene, which enables people to digest milk into adulthood. Scandinavian populations have some of the highest frequencies of this gene variant in Europe, and it appears to have undergone strong natural selection in the last few thousand years - suggesting milk had a key nutritional role and the ability to drink it conferred an enormous advantage.
"What it implies is that the underlying farming culture is not stable. They are literally teetering on the brink of dying out," said Dr Wells.
Indeed, something does seem to have happened to the descendents of the first farmers in Central Europe. The DNA evidence shows that about a millennium later, genetic lineages associated with these Near Eastern pioneers decline, and those of the hunter-gatherers bounce back. Climate change and disease are both possibilities, but the causes are a matter for further investigation.
A second study, also published in Science by Ruth Bollongino at the University of Mainz, Germany and colleagues, implies that hunter-gatherer cultures persisted alongside farming cultures for 2,000 years after the introduction of agriculture to the region - with very little interbreeding between the two.
From 4,800 years ago, novel maternal lineages spread into the region, associated with the emergence of the Corded Ware people - who take their name from the inscribed patterns on their pottery.
The study suggests this culture was brought by groups moving in from the East. Scientists compared the mtDNA types found in Corded Ware people with modern populations and found distinct affinities with present-day groups in Eastern Europe, the Baltic region and the Caucasus.
A few hundred years later, a counterpart of this society swept in from the West. This ancient group, known as the Bell Beaker Culture, was in part responsible for the spread of a mtDNA lineage called Haplogroup H.
Scientists take many precautions to avoid ancient samples being contaminated with modern DNA Largely absent from Central European hunters and scarce in early Neolithic farmers, H remains the dominant maternal lineage in Europe today and comparisons between the Bell Beaker people and modern populations suggest they came from Iberia - modern Spain and Portugal.
"Our study shows that a simple mix of indigenous hunter-gatherers and the incoming Near Eastern farmers cannot explain the modern-day diversity alone," said co-author Guido Brandt, from the University of Mainz.
"The genetic results are much more complex than that. Instead, we found that two particular cultures at the brink of the Bronze Age 4,200 years ago had a marked role in the formation of Central Europe's genetic makeup."
Spencer Wells explained: "When you look at today's populations, what you are seeing is a hazy palimpsest of what actually went on to create present-day patterns."
Dr Haak concurs: "None of the dynamic changes we observed could have been inferred from modern-day genetic data alone, highlighting the potential power of combining ancient DNA studies with archaeology to reconstruct human evolutionary history."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24475342
Ancient DNA Reveals Key Stages in the Formation of Central European Mitochondrial Genetic Diversity
The processes that shaped modern European mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) variation remain unclear. The initial peopling by Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers ~42,000 years ago and the immigration of Neolithic farmers into Europe ~8000 years ago appear to have played important roles but do not explain present-day mtDNA diversity. We generated mtDNA profiles of 364 individuals from prehistoric cultures in Central Europe to perform a chronological study, spanning the Early Neolithic to the Early Bronze Age (5500 to 1550 calibrated years before the common era). We used this transect through time to identify four marked shifts in genetic composition during the Neolithic period, revealing a key role for Late Neolithic cultures in shaping modern Central European genetic diversity.
Science 11 October 2013:
Vol. 342 no. 6155 pp. 257-261DOI:10.1126/science.1241844
The emergence of the Corded Ware Culture involved the spread of people as well as ideas Continue reading the main story
- Making of Europe unlocked by DNA
- DNA reveals origin of Minoan culture
- Farming 'spread by migrant wave'
The study appears to refute the picture of Europeans as a simple mixture of indigenous hunters and Near Eastern farmers who arrived 7,000 years ago.
The findings by an international team have been published in Science journal.
DNA was analysed from 364 skeletons unearthed in Germany - an important crossroads for prehistoric cultures.
"This is the largest and most detailed genetic time series of Europe yet created, allowing us to establish a complete genetic chronology," said co-author Dr Wolfgang Haak of the Australian Centre for DNA (ACAD) in Adelaide.
"Focusing on this small but highly important geographic region meant we could generate a gapless record, and directly observe genetic changes in 'real-time' from 7,500 to 3,500 years ago, from the earliest farmers to the early Bronze Age."
Dr Haak and his colleagues analysed DNA extracted from the teeth and bones of well-preserved remains from the Mittelelbe-Saale region of Germany. They focused on mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) - the genetic information in the cell's "batteries".
When you look at today's populations, what you are seeing is a hazy palimpsest of what actually went on to create present-day patterns” Dr Spencer Wells Director, Genographic Project
MtDNA is passed down from a mother to her children, allowing geneticists to probe the maternal histories of populations. Geneticists recognise a variety of mitochondrial DNA "clans", or lineages, in human populations. And each of these lineages has its own distinct history.
The team's results show that indigenous hunter-gatherers in Central Europe were edged out by incomers from Anatolia (modern Turkey) some 7,500 years ago. A majority of the hunters belonged to the maternal clan known as haplogroup U, whilst the farmers carried a selection of genetic lineages characteristic of the Near East.
Around 6,100 years ago, farming was introduced to Scandinavia, which coincided with the appearance of Neolithic mtDNA lineages in that region too.
"In some ways agriculture was an obvious and easy way to go in the Fertile Crescent. But once you take it out of there, it involves an abrupt shift in lifestyle," said Dr Spencer Wells, director of the Genographic Project and an Explorer-in-Residence at National Geographic, adding that early agricultural groups were living "on the edge".
"They were basically taking crops that had evolved over millions of years in the Middle East and were adapted to that dry-wet pattern of seasonality and moving them into an area that was recently de-glaciated.
The Bell Beaker folk seem to represent a migration from south-west Europe "It was no trivial thing to transfer crops such as barley and rye to the northern fringes of Europe."
Dr Wells thinks this precarious existence may be reflected in the spread of the lactase persistence gene, which enables people to digest milk into adulthood. Scandinavian populations have some of the highest frequencies of this gene variant in Europe, and it appears to have undergone strong natural selection in the last few thousand years - suggesting milk had a key nutritional role and the ability to drink it conferred an enormous advantage.
"What it implies is that the underlying farming culture is not stable. They are literally teetering on the brink of dying out," said Dr Wells.
Indeed, something does seem to have happened to the descendents of the first farmers in Central Europe. The DNA evidence shows that about a millennium later, genetic lineages associated with these Near Eastern pioneers decline, and those of the hunter-gatherers bounce back. Climate change and disease are both possibilities, but the causes are a matter for further investigation.
A second study, also published in Science by Ruth Bollongino at the University of Mainz, Germany and colleagues, implies that hunter-gatherer cultures persisted alongside farming cultures for 2,000 years after the introduction of agriculture to the region - with very little interbreeding between the two.
From 4,800 years ago, novel maternal lineages spread into the region, associated with the emergence of the Corded Ware people - who take their name from the inscribed patterns on their pottery.
The study suggests this culture was brought by groups moving in from the East. Scientists compared the mtDNA types found in Corded Ware people with modern populations and found distinct affinities with present-day groups in Eastern Europe, the Baltic region and the Caucasus.
A few hundred years later, a counterpart of this society swept in from the West. This ancient group, known as the Bell Beaker Culture, was in part responsible for the spread of a mtDNA lineage called Haplogroup H.
Scientists take many precautions to avoid ancient samples being contaminated with modern DNA Largely absent from Central European hunters and scarce in early Neolithic farmers, H remains the dominant maternal lineage in Europe today and comparisons between the Bell Beaker people and modern populations suggest they came from Iberia - modern Spain and Portugal.
"Our study shows that a simple mix of indigenous hunter-gatherers and the incoming Near Eastern farmers cannot explain the modern-day diversity alone," said co-author Guido Brandt, from the University of Mainz.
"The genetic results are much more complex than that. Instead, we found that two particular cultures at the brink of the Bronze Age 4,200 years ago had a marked role in the formation of Central Europe's genetic makeup."
Spencer Wells explained: "When you look at today's populations, what you are seeing is a hazy palimpsest of what actually went on to create present-day patterns."
Dr Haak concurs: "None of the dynamic changes we observed could have been inferred from modern-day genetic data alone, highlighting the potential power of combining ancient DNA studies with archaeology to reconstruct human evolutionary history."
Ashkenazi Jewish women descended mostly from Italian converts, new study asserts
Jon Entine | October 8, 2013 | Genetic Literacy Project http://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2013/10/08/ashkenazi-jewish-women-descended-mostly-from-italian-converts-new-study-asserts/#.UlzsXXdvDTp
Are most modern Jews primarily of European or Middle and Near Eastern ancestry? That controversial subject—at the heart of the debate over the historical ‘right of return’ claimed by many religious Jews—is back in the headlines with the release of a massive new study published in Nature Communications challenging some established views of the origins of European Jewry.
The total Ashkenazi population is estimated at around 8 million people. The estimated world Jewish population is about 13 million.
Before the advent of advanced DNA research, it had been thought by some historians that European Jewry traced to the largely pagan population of ancient Khazaria in the Caucuses, whose leadership was believed to have converted to Judaism beginning around 700 AD. But that theory—known as the Khazarian hypothesis—has been largely discredited by DNA research, although one geneticist, Eran Elhaik, has recently attempted to revive the theory, but his research has been sharply challenged.
A groundbreaking paper published in 2000 by Harry Ostrer, a professor of genetics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and University of Arizona geneticist Michael Hammer showed that most modern Jews are descended on their male side from a core population of approximately 20,000 Jews who migrated from Italy over the first millennium and eventually settled in Eastern Europe.
“All European [Ashkenazi] Jews seem connected on the order of fourth or fifth cousins,” Ostrer has said.
Known as the so-called “Rhineland hypothesis,” the consensus research holds that most Ashkenazi Jews, as well as many Jews tracing their lineage to Italy, North Africa, Iraq, Iran, Kurdish regions and Yemen, share common paternal haplotypes also found among many Arabs from Palestine, Lebanon and Syria. Only a small percentage of the Y-DNA of Ashkenazi Jews—less than 25 percent—originated outside of the Near East, presumably as converts.
This historical and genetic mosaic has provided support for the controversial concept of a “Jewish people.” The Law of Return, the Israeli law that established the right of Jews around the world to settle in Israel and which remains in force today, was a central tenet of Zionism. It is invoked by some religious Jews to support territorial claims (even though, based on this research, many Arabs, including Palestinians, where therefore also have a genetic ‘right of return’).
But what about the female lineage? That history is more obscure and contentiously debated. Duke University’s David Goldstein and Mark Thomas of the Center for Genetic Anthropology in London reported in 2002 that much of the mitochondrial DNA of women in Jewish communities around the world that they examined did not seem to be of Middle or Near Eastern origin, and indeed each community had its own genetic pattern. This suggested that migrating Jewish men might have taken on local wives, who converted to Judaism. The estimates of the percentage of Ashkenazi women of European image was probably more than 50 percent, they estimated, but the data was too murky to come up with a firm estimate.
But a subsequent and more extensive study in 2006 by a team based at Technion and Ramban Medical Center in Haifa suggested that Ashkenazi women—40 percent or more—may indeed have had ancient Near and Middle Eastern roots, and may have accompanied their husbands as part of families migrating together.
The new study published in Nature Communications aligns itself more closely with the 2002 hypothesis, although there are differences. Professor Martin Richards, who heads the University of Huddersfield’s Archaeogenetics Research Group (and who participated in the 2002 study), and colleagues sequenced 74 mitochondrial genomes and analyzed more than 3,500 mitochondrial genomes – far more data than the 2006 survey, which reviewed only a short length of the mitochondrial DNA, containing just 1,000 or so of its 16,600 DNA units, in all their subjects.
Richards and his team claim that maternal lineages did not originate in the Near or Middle East or the Khazarian Caucasus but rather, for the most part, within Mediterranean Europe. Another twist in the findings: Jewish women may have been assimilated in Europe as far back as 2,000 years ago—earlier than most other studies have projected. The researchers believe the DNA could trace back to the early Roman Empire, when as much as 10 percent of the population practiced Judaism, many of them converts. Overall, they claim, at least 80 percent of Ashkenazi maternal ancestry comes from women indigenous to Europe while 8 percent originated in the Near East, with the rest uncertain.
According to Nicholas Wade of the New York Times, Doron Behar, one of the key authors of the 2006 analysis, said he disagreed with the conclusions, but has provided no detailed critique as yet.
Wade also talked to David Goldstein, who said he believed the estimate that 80 percent of Ashkenazi Jewry originated in Europe was too high considering the unpredictability of mitochondrial DNA data.
The new research underscores an emerging consensus that wandering Jewish men, from the Near East, established a mosaic of small Jewish communities—first in Italy and then scattered throughout Europe, often taking on local gentile wives and raising their children as Jews.
Jon Entine, executive director of the Genetic Literacy Project, is a senior fellow at the Center for Health & Risk Communication and STATS (Statistical Assessment Service) at George Mason University.
Jon Entine | October 8, 2013 | Genetic Literacy Project http://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2013/10/08/ashkenazi-jewish-women-descended-mostly-from-italian-converts-new-study-asserts/#.UlzsXXdvDTp
Are most modern Jews primarily of European or Middle and Near Eastern ancestry? That controversial subject—at the heart of the debate over the historical ‘right of return’ claimed by many religious Jews—is back in the headlines with the release of a massive new study published in Nature Communications challenging some established views of the origins of European Jewry.
The total Ashkenazi population is estimated at around 8 million people. The estimated world Jewish population is about 13 million.
Before the advent of advanced DNA research, it had been thought by some historians that European Jewry traced to the largely pagan population of ancient Khazaria in the Caucuses, whose leadership was believed to have converted to Judaism beginning around 700 AD. But that theory—known as the Khazarian hypothesis—has been largely discredited by DNA research, although one geneticist, Eran Elhaik, has recently attempted to revive the theory, but his research has been sharply challenged.
A groundbreaking paper published in 2000 by Harry Ostrer, a professor of genetics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and University of Arizona geneticist Michael Hammer showed that most modern Jews are descended on their male side from a core population of approximately 20,000 Jews who migrated from Italy over the first millennium and eventually settled in Eastern Europe.
“All European [Ashkenazi] Jews seem connected on the order of fourth or fifth cousins,” Ostrer has said.
Known as the so-called “Rhineland hypothesis,” the consensus research holds that most Ashkenazi Jews, as well as many Jews tracing their lineage to Italy, North Africa, Iraq, Iran, Kurdish regions and Yemen, share common paternal haplotypes also found among many Arabs from Palestine, Lebanon and Syria. Only a small percentage of the Y-DNA of Ashkenazi Jews—less than 25 percent—originated outside of the Near East, presumably as converts.
This historical and genetic mosaic has provided support for the controversial concept of a “Jewish people.” The Law of Return, the Israeli law that established the right of Jews around the world to settle in Israel and which remains in force today, was a central tenet of Zionism. It is invoked by some religious Jews to support territorial claims (even though, based on this research, many Arabs, including Palestinians, where therefore also have a genetic ‘right of return’).
But what about the female lineage? That history is more obscure and contentiously debated. Duke University’s David Goldstein and Mark Thomas of the Center for Genetic Anthropology in London reported in 2002 that much of the mitochondrial DNA of women in Jewish communities around the world that they examined did not seem to be of Middle or Near Eastern origin, and indeed each community had its own genetic pattern. This suggested that migrating Jewish men might have taken on local wives, who converted to Judaism. The estimates of the percentage of Ashkenazi women of European image was probably more than 50 percent, they estimated, but the data was too murky to come up with a firm estimate.
But a subsequent and more extensive study in 2006 by a team based at Technion and Ramban Medical Center in Haifa suggested that Ashkenazi women—40 percent or more—may indeed have had ancient Near and Middle Eastern roots, and may have accompanied their husbands as part of families migrating together.
The new study published in Nature Communications aligns itself more closely with the 2002 hypothesis, although there are differences. Professor Martin Richards, who heads the University of Huddersfield’s Archaeogenetics Research Group (and who participated in the 2002 study), and colleagues sequenced 74 mitochondrial genomes and analyzed more than 3,500 mitochondrial genomes – far more data than the 2006 survey, which reviewed only a short length of the mitochondrial DNA, containing just 1,000 or so of its 16,600 DNA units, in all their subjects.
Richards and his team claim that maternal lineages did not originate in the Near or Middle East or the Khazarian Caucasus but rather, for the most part, within Mediterranean Europe. Another twist in the findings: Jewish women may have been assimilated in Europe as far back as 2,000 years ago—earlier than most other studies have projected. The researchers believe the DNA could trace back to the early Roman Empire, when as much as 10 percent of the population practiced Judaism, many of them converts. Overall, they claim, at least 80 percent of Ashkenazi maternal ancestry comes from women indigenous to Europe while 8 percent originated in the Near East, with the rest uncertain.
According to Nicholas Wade of the New York Times, Doron Behar, one of the key authors of the 2006 analysis, said he disagreed with the conclusions, but has provided no detailed critique as yet.
Wade also talked to David Goldstein, who said he believed the estimate that 80 percent of Ashkenazi Jewry originated in Europe was too high considering the unpredictability of mitochondrial DNA data.
The new research underscores an emerging consensus that wandering Jewish men, from the Near East, established a mosaic of small Jewish communities—first in Italy and then scattered throughout Europe, often taking on local gentile wives and raising their children as Jews.
Jon Entine, executive director of the Genetic Literacy Project, is a senior fellow at the Center for Health & Risk Communication and STATS (Statistical Assessment Service) at George Mason University.
Das Heilige Feuer (The Sacred Fire), 1921, by Ludwig Fahrenkrog
Apart from Elijah and Salome I found the serpent as a third principle. It is a stranger to both principles although it is associated with both. The serpent taught me the unconditional difference in essence between the two principles in me. If I look across from forethinking to pleasure, I first see the deterrent poisonous serpent. If I feel from pleasure across to forethinking, likewise I feel first the cold cruel serpent.
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 earthly (numen loci) separates forethinking and pleasure in man, but not in itself The serpent has the weight of the earth in itself but also its changeability and germination from which everything that becomes emerges. It is always the serpent that causes man to become enslaved now to one, now to the other principle, so that it becomes error. One cannot live with forethinking alone, or with pleasure alone. You need both. But you cannot be in forethinking and in pleasure at the same time, you must take turns being in forethinking and pleasure, obeying the prevailing law, unfaithful to the other so to speak. But men prefer one or the other.
Some love thinking and establish the art of life on it. They practice their thinking and their circumspection, so they lose their pleasure. Therefore they are old and have a sharp face. The others love pleasure, they practice their feeling and living. Thus they forget thinking. Therefore they are young and blind. Those who think base the world on thought, those who feel, on feeling. You find truth and error in both.
The way of life writhes like the serpent from right to left and from left to right, from thinking to pleasure and from pleasure to thinking. Thus the serpent is an adversary and a symbol of enmity, but also a wise bridge that connects right and left through longing, much needed by our life. ~Carl Jung, Red Book, Mysterium Encounter, Page 247
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 earthly (numen loci) separates forethinking and pleasure in man, but not in itself The serpent has the weight of the earth in itself but also its changeability and germination from which everything that becomes emerges. It is always the serpent that causes man to become enslaved now to one, now to the other principle, so that it becomes error. One cannot live with forethinking alone, or with pleasure alone. You need both. But you cannot be in forethinking and in pleasure at the same time, you must take turns being in forethinking and pleasure, obeying the prevailing law, unfaithful to the other so to speak. But men prefer one or the other.
Some love thinking and establish the art of life on it. They practice their thinking and their circumspection, so they lose their pleasure. Therefore they are old and have a sharp face. The others love pleasure, they practice their feeling and living. Thus they forget thinking. Therefore they are young and blind. Those who think base the world on thought, those who feel, on feeling. You find truth and error in both.
The way of life writhes like the serpent from right to left and from left to right, from thinking to pleasure and from pleasure to thinking. Thus the serpent is an adversary and a symbol of enmity, but also a wise bridge that connects right and left through longing, much needed by our life. ~Carl Jung, Red Book, Mysterium Encounter, Page 247
Ahnentafel von Herzog Ludwig (1568-1593)
Holzschnitt
Württembergisches Landesmuseum, Stuttgart, 1585
Holzschnitt
Württembergisches Landesmuseum, Stuttgart, 1585
Y-chromosome and mtDNA of Henri IV A recent paper had determined the Y-chromosome haplotype of Louis XVI of France from a handkerchief preserving his blood after his execution. A new study looks at the mummified head of Henri IV, the first Bourbon King of France. Even though only a limited number of Y-STRs were successfully typed, they match those of Louis XVI, who belonged to the not-so-frequent-anymore haplogroup G2a. So, while we cannot be entirely sure that the two Y-chromosomes were related in a genealogical time frame, the evidence is consistent with their known genealogical relationship and with the attribution of the two samples (mummified head/blood) to the respective kings.
Also of interest, Henri IV's mtDNA haplotype:
The majority of the clones generated show an U5b* mtDNA haplotype defined by three nucleotide changes at positions 16239T 16270T 16311C (see Supplementary material). The three HVR1 diagnostic positions were confirmed in two different amplifications of the L16185-H16378 HVR1 fragment, proving that the results are reproducible. This mtDNA haplotype is present so far in one single individual from France (originally published in [10]) in an in-house database of 22,807 published European sequences, and it is absent in all people involved in the laboratory analysis. If I followed the trail of ancestry correctly, this matrilineage leads all the way to a Tochter von Egisheim in the 11th century.
Forensic Science International Available online 30 December 2012
Genetic comparison of the head of Henri IV and the presumptive blood from Louis XVI (both Kings of France)
Philippe Charlier et al.
A mummified head was identified in 2010 as belonging to Henri IV, King of France. A putative blood sample from the King Louis XVI preserved into a pyrographically decorated gourd was analyzed in 2011. Both kings are in a direct male-line descent, separated by seven generations. We have retrieved the hypervariable region 1 of the mitochondrial DNA as well as a partial Y-chromosome profile from Henri IV. Five STR loci match the alleles found in Louis XVI, while another locus shows an allele that is just one mutation step apart.
Taking into consideration that the partial Y-chromosome profile is extremely rare in modern human databases, we concluded that both males could be paternally related. The likelihood ratio of the two samples belonging to males separated by seven generations (as opposed to unrelated males) was estimated as 246.3, with a 95% confidence interval between 44.2 and 9729. Historically speaking, this forensic DNA data would confirm the identity of the previous Louis XVI sample, and give another positive argument for the authenticity of the head of Henri IV.
http://dienekes.blogspot.ca/2013/01/y-chromosome-and-mtdna-of-henri-iv.html
Also of interest, Henri IV's mtDNA haplotype:
The majority of the clones generated show an U5b* mtDNA haplotype defined by three nucleotide changes at positions 16239T 16270T 16311C (see Supplementary material). The three HVR1 diagnostic positions were confirmed in two different amplifications of the L16185-H16378 HVR1 fragment, proving that the results are reproducible. This mtDNA haplotype is present so far in one single individual from France (originally published in [10]) in an in-house database of 22,807 published European sequences, and it is absent in all people involved in the laboratory analysis. If I followed the trail of ancestry correctly, this matrilineage leads all the way to a Tochter von Egisheim in the 11th century.
Forensic Science International Available online 30 December 2012
Genetic comparison of the head of Henri IV and the presumptive blood from Louis XVI (both Kings of France)
Philippe Charlier et al.
A mummified head was identified in 2010 as belonging to Henri IV, King of France. A putative blood sample from the King Louis XVI preserved into a pyrographically decorated gourd was analyzed in 2011. Both kings are in a direct male-line descent, separated by seven generations. We have retrieved the hypervariable region 1 of the mitochondrial DNA as well as a partial Y-chromosome profile from Henri IV. Five STR loci match the alleles found in Louis XVI, while another locus shows an allele that is just one mutation step apart.
Taking into consideration that the partial Y-chromosome profile is extremely rare in modern human databases, we concluded that both males could be paternally related. The likelihood ratio of the two samples belonging to males separated by seven generations (as opposed to unrelated males) was estimated as 246.3, with a 95% confidence interval between 44.2 and 9729. Historically speaking, this forensic DNA data would confirm the identity of the previous Louis XVI sample, and give another positive argument for the authenticity of the head of Henri IV.
http://dienekes.blogspot.ca/2013/01/y-chromosome-and-mtdna-of-henri-iv.html
Genetic genealogy reveals true Y haplogroup of House of Bourbon contradicting recent identification of the presumed remains of two French Kings Maarten HD Larmuseau*,1,2,3, Philippe Delorme4, Patrick Germain5, Nancy Vanderheyden1, Anja Gilissen1, Anneleen Van Geystelen1,6, Jean-Jacques Cassiman1 and Ronny Decorte1,2 Genetic analysis strongly increases the opportunity to identify skeletal remains or other biological samples from historical figures.
However, validation of this identification is essential and should be done by DNA typing of living relatives. Based on the similarity of a limited set of Y-STRs, a blood sample and a head were recently identified as those belonging respectively to King Louis XVI and his paternal ancestor King Henry IV. Here, we collected DNA samples from three living males of the House of Bourbon to validate the since then controversial identification of these remains. The three living relatives revealed the Bourbon’s Y-chromosomal variant on a high phylogenetic resolution for several members of the lineage between Henry IV and Louis XVI. This ‘true’ Bourbon’s variant is different from the published Y-STR profiles of the blood as well as of the head. The earlier identifications of these samples can therefore not be validated.
Moreover, matrilineal genealogical data revealed that the published mtDNA sequence of the head was also different from the one of a series of relatives. This therefore leads to the conclusion that the analyzed samples were not from the French kings. Our study once again demonstrated that in order to realize an accurate genetic identification of historical remains DNA typing of living persons, who are paternally or maternally related with the presumed donor of the samples, is required. European Journal of Human Genetics advance online publication, 25 September 2013; doi:10.1038/ejhg.2013.211 Keywords: genetic identification; ancient DNA; Y-chromosome; mitochondrial DNA; Louis XVI; Henri IV
INTRODUCTION
As all individuals are genetically different, modern DNA technology has increased the ability to perform human identity testing. Individual genetic identification is important in the determination of perpetrators of violent crimes, resolving uncertain paternity or maternity and identifying remains of missing persons or victims of mass disasters.1 Next to forensic cases, genetic identification also strongly increases the opportunity to identify skeletal remains or other biological samples associated with historical figure.2
In this way, the genetic analysis can give insight in several historical and archaeological research questions. The genetic approach was successful, for example, to check the verity of the death of the legendary outlaw Jesse James3 or Louis XVII, the son of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, who died during the French Revolution.4,5 It also gave certainty about remains found at the burial place of the Romanov family members,6,7 about the biological relationship within the family of Austria’s patron Saint Leopold III8 and about the reliability and commercial value of religious relics during the Middle Ages.9,10
The main drawback of the genetic identification of presumptive remains from historical figures is that the DNA within these samples is often degraded and that DNA contamination can mask the original DNA of the person.11,12 When the person and his or her close relatives died a long time ago, good quality DNA as reference material is usually not available, whereas this is rarely the case in forensic cases.
Nevertheless, validation of the data remains essential to confirm the results of the genetic identification. For many of these studies, due to a lack of samples of relatives, only ‘sub-optimal’ validations can be performed, which can be very valuable but which are insufficient to confirm the identity. Sub-optimal validations can also be used to exclude identification and are feasible by several methods. One method is genetic sexing of the remains as done for the wrongly assumed remains of the Polish renaissance poet Jan Kochanowski.13
Another method is comparing genetic markers for several parts of the remains, because sometimes relics of several persons are mixed; this was found in the remains assumed to belong to the Italian poet Francesco Petrarca.14 Comparing the familial relationship between skeletons based on historical records is a third method that was successfully applied for Prince Branciforte Barresi and his family.15
The last method consists of determining the geographic region of origin of an individual based on the mtDNA and/or Y-chromosome (Y-chr) haplogroup as performed for the relics of Evangelist Luke.16 Optimal validations that guarantee the identification of historical remains are possible using different approaches. One such approach consists of performing genetic tests on different authenticated objects or samples from the same individual or from a direct relative but with 1Laboratory of Forensic Genetics and Molecular Archaeology, UZ Leuven, Leuven, Belgium; 2Forensic Biomedical Sciences, Department of Imaging and Pathology, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium; 3Laboratory of Biodiversity and Evolutionary Genomics, Department of Biology, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium; 4Independent researcher, Versailles, France; 5Independent researcher; Saint-Lary, France; 6Laboratory of Socioecology and Social Evolution, Department of Biology, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium *Correspondence: Dr MHD Larmuseau, Laboratory of Forensic Genetics and Molecular Archaeology, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Forensic Medicine, Kapucijnenvoer 33, B–3000, Leuven, 3000 Belgium. August 2013 European Journal of Human Genetics (2013), 1–7 & 2013 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reserved 1018-4813/13 www.nature.com/ejhg a completely independent origin of the samples.
This was done successfully for the identification of the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus.17 The most convincing validation to identify the donor of particular remains is the analysis of the DNA of living relatives of the presumptive donor. This will also detect DNA contamination.
Because these relatives are often several generations away from the individual in question, only markers on the mtDNA or Y-chr may be studied, thanks to their haploid mode of inheritance.2 This haploid mode means that any living maternal or paternal relative of the individual in question should have an identical mtDNA or Y-chromosomal type with the sample to be identified.18 This has been successfully realized in the identification of the grave of the Nazi foreman, Martin Bormann.19 A recent study reported the genetic identification of the remains of two kings of France by comparing their Y-STR profiles.
One of these samples is a presumptive blood sample of King Louis XVI (1754–1793), who died on the guillotine during the French Revolu- tion. After the execution, many spectators apparently soaked their handkerchief in the blood of the king. One of the many handkerchiefs so collected was apparently kept in a pyrographically decorated gourd, which is now in the possession of an Italian family.
Careful examination confirmed that the gourd indeed contained a hand- kerchief with traces of human blood powder.20 DNA analyses revealed a 17 Y-STR profile and the confirmation of the Y-chromosomal haplogroup G(xG1,G2).20 The other sample is a mummified head attributed to King Henri IV (1553–1610), the first king of France from the House of Bourbon and a direct paternal ancestor of Louis XVI (Figure 1).
During the French Revolution, the mummified body of Henri IV was excavated from its burial place in the Basilique St Denis in Paris. Unconfirmed accounts mention that it was decapi- tated. This ‘mummified head’ of Henri IV then would have followed a complex route over the years and came finally in the hands of collectors of royal relics and antiquaries. Based on 22 scientific and historical arguments, the head was recently identified as belonging to the French King Henri IV.21 Nevertheless, this identification remains controversial as several historical counter-arguments have been formulated.22,23 Recently, after an initial failure to find DNA, a second effort to genotype the ancient DNA of the head was more successful. An mtDNA and a Y-chromosomal profile were obtained.24
The similarity between the six Y-STRs of a sample of the head, whereby only three alleles could be reproduced in a second PCR analysis, with the Y-STR profile of the blood sample presumably of Louis XVI was an indication for the attribution of both samples to the two Bourbon kings of France.24
The genetic identifications of both putative samples of two kings of France were only validated by the similarity of a limited number of Figure 1 Overview of the patrilineal relationships between the three selected living members of the House of Bourbon and the French Kings Henri IV and Louis XVI. These five individuals are given in grey. The English names (if they are used in English literature) and titles of the members of the House of Bourbon are given in the genealogical tree together with their year of birth and death. Genetic genealogy reveals Bourbon Y haplogroup MHD Larmuseau et al 2 European Journal of Human Genetics Y-STRs based on clearly degraded DNA.
The aim of our study was to attempt to reconstruct the true Y-chromosomal variant of the genealogical lineage of the House of Bourbon from which these French kings originated. DNA samples of three living male relatives of the kings were analyzed. In addition, historical evidence was obtained that the mother of Henri IV was related in an uninterrupted female line to the Habsburgs.25,26 Their mtDNA was available from our previous investigations regarding Louis XVII.4,5 The results of the Y-chr and mtDNA analysis will show that the published genetic identification of the presumptive blood sample of Louis XVI and the presumed head of Henry IV cannot be confirmed.
MATERIALS AND METHODS
Three living male relatives of Henri IV and Louis XVI were selected for this study. Their official genealogical relationships with the two kings are given in Figure 1. They were Axel Prince of Bourbon-Parma (sample A), Sixte Henri Prince of Bourbon-Parma (sample SH) and Joa ˜o Henrique Prince of Orle ´ans- Braganza (Sample JH). Buccal swab samples from the three DNA donors were collected with informed consent. DNA extraction was done by using the Maxwell 16 System (Promega, Madison, WI, USA) followed by real-time PCR quantification (Quantifiler Human DNA kit, Applied Biosystems, Foster City, CA, USA).
In total, 38 Y-STR loci were genotyped for all samples as described in a previous study.27 Alleles were assigned according to the nomenclature rules as used in the YHRD databank.28 All haplotypes were submitted to the Whit Athey’s Haplogroup Predictor29 to obtain probabilities for the inferred haplogroups. Based on these results, the samples were assigned to a specific Y-SNP assay to confirm the haplogroup and to assign the sub-haplogroup to the most accurate level of the latest Y-chromosomal tree, according to the updated tree version 1.2 of AMY-tree.30,31 The Y-SNPs were genotyped using SNaPshot mini-sequencing assays (Applied Biosystems) according to previously published protocols.32,33 All primer sequences and concentrations for the analysis of the Y-SNPs are available as Supplementary Materials (Supplementary Table S1) or in van Oven et al.34
RESULTS
The three Bourbon males were correctly assigned to the main Y-chromosomal haplogroup R1b (R-M343) using the Whit Athey’s Haplogroup Predictor as it was confirmed by Y-SNP typing. The individuals were further assigned to sub-haplogroup R1b1b2a1a1b* (R-Z381*) based on the latest update of the Y-chromosomal phyloge- netic tree of AMY 1.2. 31 The 38 Y-STR haplotypes of the living donors were compared to each other (Table 1). A maximum of four mutational differences out of 38 Y-STRs was found between the living donors, namely between samples A and JH (Table 2). Next, these haplotypes were also compared with the haplotypes from the blood sample and the head (Table 1).
There were 25–26 mutational differences between the 17 common genotyped Y-STRs of the living donors and the blood sample, assuming that each mutation leads to a gain or loss of one repeat unit on a Y-STR. There were eight mutational differences between the six common Y-STRs of the living donors and the head sample and even five out of the three confirmed STRs (Table 2).
Based on the calculated mean mutation rate for each set of Y-STRs using the individual mutation rates measured in Ballantyne et al35 and based on the formulas of Walsh,36 the 95% confidence interval for the number of meioses between both individuals of each sample pair was calculated (Table 2). Finally, the mitochondrial DNA analysis of the head also did not support the attribution of the sample to Henri IV. According to Charlier et al,24 the donor of the head belongs to mtDNA haplogroup U5b*.
Our previous study of a series of living and deceased maternally related relatives of Louis XVII showed that the mtDNA haplogroup of the Habsburgs belonged to haplogroup H.4,5 DISCUSSION Detailed Y-chr haplotypes and haplogroups were obtained for three living relatives of the House of Bourbon from which the French kings originated from 1589 (Henri IV became King of Navarre in 1572 by his mother’s rights, and King of France in 1589 at the death of Henri III, as the eldest descendant of Louis IX (1214–1270)) till the end of the monarchy. Based on these results, it is clear that their genealogical common ancestor (GCA) based on the official genealogy, namely King Louis XIII, was also their biological ancestor.
First, the sub- haplogroups at the finest level of the Y-chromosomal phylogenetic tree were identical for all three relatives, namely R-Z381*. As there are no known recurrent mutations observed for SNP Z381 and as it is not lying in a Y-SNP conversion hotspot on the Y- chr,31 male individuals who share this Y-SNP must also share a common male lineal ancestor at the point of the SNP’s first appearance.37 Y-chromosomal sub- haplogroup R-Z381* is a subgroup of R-U106, which has been found in Western Europe with the highest frequency of around 35% in the north of the Netherlands and in Denmark but with a steep frequency fall to the south as the frequency of R-U106 is only 7% in France.38–40
The frequency of sub-haplogroup R-Z381* within Europe itself is not yet well known, except in Flanders where the frequency is around 9% within the autochthonous population.41 Second, also the 38 Y-STR haplotypes of the three individuals were highly similar. Differences were found only on four Y-STRs. These Y-STRs have a high mutation rate in comparison with all the other genotyped Y-STRs (Supplementary Table S2, Supplementary Materials).
Moreover, the 17 Y-STR haplotype of the three individuals according to the AmpFlSTR Yfiler kit (Applied Biosystems), which is a part of the genotyped 38 Y-STR haplotype, is compared with the other haplo- types in the YHRD database release 43 (www.yhrd.org). The 17 Y-STR haplotype of the three living donors was found in only 3 out of 53576 individuals in the total database, with 1 individual from Poland, 1 from Italy and 1 European American.
Based on earlier studies, it is common that individuals with a matching 17 Y-STR haplotype (identical by state) are not genealogically related with each other (identical by descent) within the radiation of sub-haplogroup R-M269*, in contrast to individuals with an (almost) matching 38 Y-STR haplotype.39,42 Based on the calculated mean mutation rate for all 38 genotyped Y-STRs and the formulas of Walsh,36 the GCA is indeed most likely their true biological ancestor as well (Table 2).
This means that no non-paternity event happened along the three studied in-depth paternal lineages although some rumors that the branch of Bourbon Orleans would be illegitimate (more details in Supplementary Materials). Therefore, the genetic analysis of the three DNA donors in this study revealed the Y-chromosomal variant of the Bourbon lineage, including King Louis XIII, King Louis XIV and Louis, le Grand Dauphin (Figure 1). No paternal relationship was found between the living DNA donors and the donors of the blood sample of Louis XVI or the head of Henri IV. First, the Y-chr of the donor of the blood sample belongs to haplogroup G(xG1,G2) while the living Bourbon members belong to R-Z381*.
Based on the time calibration of the Y-chromosomal phylogeny, the time of the most recent common ancestor (tMRCA) between individuals belonging to haplogroup G and R will be some 10000 years ago.43,44 Second, the strong differentiation on the 17 Y-STR haplotypes between the living donors with the blood donor also suggests at least 260 meioses between them (Table 2). Although a low number of Y-STR results were obtained for the presumptive head of Henry IV, even the six Y-STRs and the three confirmed Y-STR haplotypes showed high differences with the living Bourbon donors, suggesting at least 4110 meioses between them (Table 2).
Moreover, Genetic genealogy reveals Bourbon Y haplogroup MHD Larmuseau et al 3 European Journal of Human Genetics the genetic identifications of the presumptive head of Henri IV and the presumptive blood sample of Louis XVI were only based on a similar partial Y-STR profile of both samples.24 Nevertheless, no evidence for a genealogical relationship between the DNA donors of the head and the blood sample could be found based on the calculations of the tMRCA due to the low number of analyzed Y-STRs and the mutational difference observed on one Y-STR (Table 2).36
Therefore, the similarity between the partial Y-STR profiles of both samples as indicated by Charlier et al24 could have been just the result of coincidence. Finally, if the samples were indeed of both kings of France this would mean that there were at least two non-paternity events within the royal lineage of the House of Bourbon, namely that Henri IV was not the biological father of Louis XIII, next to another non-paternity between Louis, le Grand Dauphin and King Louis XVI (Figure 1). Non-paternity events— whether a man is not the biological father of his legal children— mainly occurs when the mother had sexual intercourse with a man other than the legal father or when an unreported adoption occurred.
Nevertheless, the frequency of paternal discrepancy in the Western European populations is at most 3% and is probably o1% of human births.45,46 Moreover, while there has been speculation about non-paternity cases in the family, the written records do not contain evidence for such events within this lineage of the House of Bourbon.47–49
Next to the Y-chr, the mitochondrial DNA analysis of the head of Henri IV also does not support the presumed identification of the head sample. According to Charlier et al,24 the donor of the head belongs to mtDNA haplogroup U5b* defined by three nucleotide changes at positions m.16239C4T m.16270C4T m.16311T4C (nucleotides are numbered according to the revision of the Cambridge Reference Sequence50) of the mitochondrial hypervariable region 1 (HVR1).
These three diagnostic positions were confirmed in two different amplifications of the L16185-H16378 (numbered also according to the revision of the Cambridge Reference Sequence50) HVR1 fragment, proving that the results were reproducible. Henry IV was maternally related with Louis XVII—through his mother Jeanne III d’ Albret, over Anna of Habsburg to Marie-Antoinette25,26 (Figure 2)—but this mtDNA Table 1 Y-chromosomal haplogroups and Y-STR profiles of the three analyzed members of the Bourbon family, the presumed blood sample of Louis XVI20 and the presumed head of Henri IV24 Sample Axel, Prince of Bourbon-Parma (sample A) Sixte-Henri, Prince of Bourbon-Parma (sample SH) Joa ˜o Henrique, Prince of Orle ´ans- Braganza (sample JH) Presumed blood sample of Louis XVI
Presumed head of Henri IV Y-chromosomal haplogroup R1b1b2a1a1* /R-Z381* R1b1b2a1a1* /R-Z381* R1b1b2a1a1* /R-Z381* G (xG1,G2) /G (xM285,P287) — DYS393 13 13 13 14 14 DYS390 23 23 23 22 — DYS19 14 14 14 15 — DYS391 10 10 10 10 10 DYS385 11,14 11,14 11,14 13,18 —,18 DYS426 12 12 12 ND ND DYS388 12 12 12 ND ND DYS439 12 12 12 12 — DYS389I 13 13 14 12 13 DYS392 13 13 13 11 — DYS389b 16 16 16 18 — DYS458 18 18 18 21 — DYS459 9,10 9,10 9,10 ND ND DYS455 11 11 11 ND ND DYS454 11 11 11 ND ND DYS447 25 25 25 ND ND DYS437 15 15 15 15 15 DYS448 19 19 19 21 21 DYS449 28 28 29 ND ND DYS464 15,15,16,16 15,15,16,16 15,15,16,16 ND ND DYS460 12 12 12 ND ND GATA H4 12 12 12 12 — YCAII 19,23 19,23 19,23 ND ND DYS456 17 17 17 15 — DYS607 19 19 19 ND ND DYS576 16 16 16 ND ND DYS570 16 17 17 ND ND DYS724 35,38 35,39 35,40 ND ND DYS442 18 18 18 ND ND DYS438 12 12 12 10 — DYS635 23 23 23 21 — Abbreviation: ND, not determined.
The alleles given in italics are those that were not confirmed in a second PCR reaction in the study of Lalueza-Fox et al.20 DYS389b shows the number of repeats present in the second part of DYS389II (DYS389II minus DYS389I). Genetic genealogy reveals Bourbon Y haplogroup MHD Larmuseau et al 4 European Journal of Human Genetics haplogroup belongs to haplogroup H and did not show the three nucleotide changes as seen for the head sample. According to the latest mtDNA phylogenetic tree51 and its most recent update on www. phylotree.com, the MRCA of the head donor and Louis XVII lived more than several tens of thousands years ago.
If the head sample was indeed attributed to Henri IV, this would mean that a non-maternity event happened somewhere between Henri IV and Marie-Antoinette, an event which is known to occur very exceptionally but without any indication in written records.52 Finally, there is also the other (genetic) data that conflict with the attribution of the presumptive blood sample of Louis XVI. The chance that the donor of the blood sample was a non-blue-eyed person is 84.2% because of the heterozygote SNP rs12913832 on the HERC2 gene.
As King Louis XVI was blue-eyed, Lalueza-Fox et al20 already mentioned that the HERC2 gene result provided controversial evidence for the physical appearance of the donor of the blood sample. Moreover, the blood sample was part of a relic of the execution of the king, an object which was very popular at that time. As one of the purposes of this relic was economic (for financial gain), it is very likely that the donor of the blood sample was not really the king himself.20
CONCLUSION
By using in-depth genealogical trees of living members of the House of Bourbon, the ‘true’ Y-chromosomal variant of Bourbon males of the French dynasty lineage was reconstructed. This Y-chromosomal variant was different from the ones of the presumptive head of Henry IVand of the presumptive blood sample of Louis XVI. As the genetic identifications of these samples were only based on the similarity between the partial Y-STR profiles of both samples, these identifica- tions can no longer be accepted.
Moreover, matrilineal genealogical Table 2 Comparison between the Y-STR profiles of the three analyzed members of the Bourbon family and the partial Y-STR profiles of the presumed blood sample of Louis XVI and the presumed head of Henri IV Sample pairs NY-STR N mutations Mutation rate (mutions/generation) Nexp meioses Ncalc meioses (95% CI) A vs SH 38 2 5.91E-03 5 3–33 A vs JH 38 4 5.91E-03 23 5–41 SH vs JH 38 3 5.91E-03 22 8–48 A vs Blood 17 25 3.23E-03 14 260–830 SH vs lood 17 25 3.23E-03 13 260–830 JH vs Blood 17 26 3.23E-03 17 330–1050 A vs Head 6 7 2.82E-03 13 90–755 SH vs Head 6 7 2.82E-03 12 90–755 JH vs Head 6 8 2.82E-03 12 160–1110 Blood vs Head 6 1 2.82E-03 7 16–362 A vs Head 3 4 3.73E-03 13 30–630 SH vs Head 3 4 3.73E-03 12 30–630 JH vs Head 3 5 3.73E-03 12 100–1280
Blood vs Head
3 1 3.73E-03 7 30–630 A difference has been made between the six Y-STR profiles and the three verified Y-STR profiles for the presumed head of Henri IV as only three out of six Y-STR alleles were reproduced in a second PCR. Sample A: Axel, Prince of Bourbon-Parma; Sample SH: Sixte- Henri, Prince of Bourbon-Parma; Sample JH: Joa ˜o Henrique, Prince of Orle ´ans-Braganza. NY-STRs: number of commonly genotyped Y-STRs for each pair of samples. Nmutations: number of mutations assuming that each mutation leads to a gain or loss of one repeat unit on the commonly genotyped Y-STRs for each pair of samples.
Mutation rate: estimated averaged mutation rate for the set of commonly genotyped Y-STRs based on the individual mutation rates measured in Ballantyne et al.35 Nexp meioses: number of expected meioses between the two samples based on the official genealogy; Ncalc meioses: number of meioses based on the Walsh formulae36 with a 95% confidence interval (CI). Figure 2 Overview of the matrilineal relationship between the French King Henri IV and Louis XVII, both given in grey.
The English names and titles of the maternal ancestors are given in the genealogical tree together with their year of birth and death. Genetic genealogy reveals Bourbon Y haplogroup MHD Larmuseau et al 5 European Journal of Human Genetics data revealed that the observed mtDNA variant for the head sample was not the one that could be expected. These discrepancies might indicate that the samples analyzed were actually contaminated with non-authentic DNA.
As contamination is indeed always possible when dealing with samples with high DNA degradation,11,12,53 contamination cannot be excluded here, especially for the head as the first attempt to collect DNA from the sample was not successful.21 Alternatively, they would support the hypothesis that the French kings were not the donors of these biological samples. Y-chromosomal analysis on the already identified heart of Louis XVII, the son of Louis XVI,4 might further remove all doubts about the identification of the blood sample considered to be of Louis XVI and might also solve any controversy about the paternity of Louis XVI of this child.
As was already stressed in earlier studies,5 DNA typing of living relatives who are paternally or maternally related should be a requisite to solve historical cases with ancient DNA. This is an essential extra quality control for DNA contamination as well as a guarantee for a more objective identification, as illustrated here by this study of the Bourbon family.
CONFLICT OF INTEREST The authors declare no conflict of interest.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The contribution of Philippe Delorme and Patrick Germain, French historians, in making this investigation possible by acting as contact with the Royal families and by providing historical background is gratefully acknowledged. We thank the three living paternal relatives of the House of Bourbon for their donation of DNA samples. We also thank the three anonymous referees for their valuable comments on an earlier version of their manuscript. MHDL is a postdoctoral fellow of the FWO-Vlaanderen (Research Foundation-Flanders).
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European Journal of Human Genetics www.nature.comThe European Journal of Human Genetics is the official Journal of the European Society of Human Genetics, publishing high-quality, original research papers, short
However, validation of this identification is essential and should be done by DNA typing of living relatives. Based on the similarity of a limited set of Y-STRs, a blood sample and a head were recently identified as those belonging respectively to King Louis XVI and his paternal ancestor King Henry IV. Here, we collected DNA samples from three living males of the House of Bourbon to validate the since then controversial identification of these remains. The three living relatives revealed the Bourbon’s Y-chromosomal variant on a high phylogenetic resolution for several members of the lineage between Henry IV and Louis XVI. This ‘true’ Bourbon’s variant is different from the published Y-STR profiles of the blood as well as of the head. The earlier identifications of these samples can therefore not be validated.
Moreover, matrilineal genealogical data revealed that the published mtDNA sequence of the head was also different from the one of a series of relatives. This therefore leads to the conclusion that the analyzed samples were not from the French kings. Our study once again demonstrated that in order to realize an accurate genetic identification of historical remains DNA typing of living persons, who are paternally or maternally related with the presumed donor of the samples, is required. European Journal of Human Genetics advance online publication, 25 September 2013; doi:10.1038/ejhg.2013.211 Keywords: genetic identification; ancient DNA; Y-chromosome; mitochondrial DNA; Louis XVI; Henri IV
INTRODUCTION
As all individuals are genetically different, modern DNA technology has increased the ability to perform human identity testing. Individual genetic identification is important in the determination of perpetrators of violent crimes, resolving uncertain paternity or maternity and identifying remains of missing persons or victims of mass disasters.1 Next to forensic cases, genetic identification also strongly increases the opportunity to identify skeletal remains or other biological samples associated with historical figure.2
In this way, the genetic analysis can give insight in several historical and archaeological research questions. The genetic approach was successful, for example, to check the verity of the death of the legendary outlaw Jesse James3 or Louis XVII, the son of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, who died during the French Revolution.4,5 It also gave certainty about remains found at the burial place of the Romanov family members,6,7 about the biological relationship within the family of Austria’s patron Saint Leopold III8 and about the reliability and commercial value of religious relics during the Middle Ages.9,10
The main drawback of the genetic identification of presumptive remains from historical figures is that the DNA within these samples is often degraded and that DNA contamination can mask the original DNA of the person.11,12 When the person and his or her close relatives died a long time ago, good quality DNA as reference material is usually not available, whereas this is rarely the case in forensic cases.
Nevertheless, validation of the data remains essential to confirm the results of the genetic identification. For many of these studies, due to a lack of samples of relatives, only ‘sub-optimal’ validations can be performed, which can be very valuable but which are insufficient to confirm the identity. Sub-optimal validations can also be used to exclude identification and are feasible by several methods. One method is genetic sexing of the remains as done for the wrongly assumed remains of the Polish renaissance poet Jan Kochanowski.13
Another method is comparing genetic markers for several parts of the remains, because sometimes relics of several persons are mixed; this was found in the remains assumed to belong to the Italian poet Francesco Petrarca.14 Comparing the familial relationship between skeletons based on historical records is a third method that was successfully applied for Prince Branciforte Barresi and his family.15
The last method consists of determining the geographic region of origin of an individual based on the mtDNA and/or Y-chromosome (Y-chr) haplogroup as performed for the relics of Evangelist Luke.16 Optimal validations that guarantee the identification of historical remains are possible using different approaches. One such approach consists of performing genetic tests on different authenticated objects or samples from the same individual or from a direct relative but with 1Laboratory of Forensic Genetics and Molecular Archaeology, UZ Leuven, Leuven, Belgium; 2Forensic Biomedical Sciences, Department of Imaging and Pathology, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium; 3Laboratory of Biodiversity and Evolutionary Genomics, Department of Biology, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium; 4Independent researcher, Versailles, France; 5Independent researcher; Saint-Lary, France; 6Laboratory of Socioecology and Social Evolution, Department of Biology, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium *Correspondence: Dr MHD Larmuseau, Laboratory of Forensic Genetics and Molecular Archaeology, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Forensic Medicine, Kapucijnenvoer 33, B–3000, Leuven, 3000 Belgium. August 2013 European Journal of Human Genetics (2013), 1–7 & 2013 Macmillan Publishers Limited All rights reserved 1018-4813/13 www.nature.com/ejhg a completely independent origin of the samples.
This was done successfully for the identification of the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus.17 The most convincing validation to identify the donor of particular remains is the analysis of the DNA of living relatives of the presumptive donor. This will also detect DNA contamination.
Because these relatives are often several generations away from the individual in question, only markers on the mtDNA or Y-chr may be studied, thanks to their haploid mode of inheritance.2 This haploid mode means that any living maternal or paternal relative of the individual in question should have an identical mtDNA or Y-chromosomal type with the sample to be identified.18 This has been successfully realized in the identification of the grave of the Nazi foreman, Martin Bormann.19 A recent study reported the genetic identification of the remains of two kings of France by comparing their Y-STR profiles.
One of these samples is a presumptive blood sample of King Louis XVI (1754–1793), who died on the guillotine during the French Revolu- tion. After the execution, many spectators apparently soaked their handkerchief in the blood of the king. One of the many handkerchiefs so collected was apparently kept in a pyrographically decorated gourd, which is now in the possession of an Italian family.
Careful examination confirmed that the gourd indeed contained a hand- kerchief with traces of human blood powder.20 DNA analyses revealed a 17 Y-STR profile and the confirmation of the Y-chromosomal haplogroup G(xG1,G2).20 The other sample is a mummified head attributed to King Henri IV (1553–1610), the first king of France from the House of Bourbon and a direct paternal ancestor of Louis XVI (Figure 1).
During the French Revolution, the mummified body of Henri IV was excavated from its burial place in the Basilique St Denis in Paris. Unconfirmed accounts mention that it was decapi- tated. This ‘mummified head’ of Henri IV then would have followed a complex route over the years and came finally in the hands of collectors of royal relics and antiquaries. Based on 22 scientific and historical arguments, the head was recently identified as belonging to the French King Henri IV.21 Nevertheless, this identification remains controversial as several historical counter-arguments have been formulated.22,23 Recently, after an initial failure to find DNA, a second effort to genotype the ancient DNA of the head was more successful. An mtDNA and a Y-chromosomal profile were obtained.24
The similarity between the six Y-STRs of a sample of the head, whereby only three alleles could be reproduced in a second PCR analysis, with the Y-STR profile of the blood sample presumably of Louis XVI was an indication for the attribution of both samples to the two Bourbon kings of France.24
The genetic identifications of both putative samples of two kings of France were only validated by the similarity of a limited number of Figure 1 Overview of the patrilineal relationships between the three selected living members of the House of Bourbon and the French Kings Henri IV and Louis XVI. These five individuals are given in grey. The English names (if they are used in English literature) and titles of the members of the House of Bourbon are given in the genealogical tree together with their year of birth and death. Genetic genealogy reveals Bourbon Y haplogroup MHD Larmuseau et al 2 European Journal of Human Genetics Y-STRs based on clearly degraded DNA.
The aim of our study was to attempt to reconstruct the true Y-chromosomal variant of the genealogical lineage of the House of Bourbon from which these French kings originated. DNA samples of three living male relatives of the kings were analyzed. In addition, historical evidence was obtained that the mother of Henri IV was related in an uninterrupted female line to the Habsburgs.25,26 Their mtDNA was available from our previous investigations regarding Louis XVII.4,5 The results of the Y-chr and mtDNA analysis will show that the published genetic identification of the presumptive blood sample of Louis XVI and the presumed head of Henry IV cannot be confirmed.
MATERIALS AND METHODS
Three living male relatives of Henri IV and Louis XVI were selected for this study. Their official genealogical relationships with the two kings are given in Figure 1. They were Axel Prince of Bourbon-Parma (sample A), Sixte Henri Prince of Bourbon-Parma (sample SH) and Joa ˜o Henrique Prince of Orle ´ans- Braganza (Sample JH). Buccal swab samples from the three DNA donors were collected with informed consent. DNA extraction was done by using the Maxwell 16 System (Promega, Madison, WI, USA) followed by real-time PCR quantification (Quantifiler Human DNA kit, Applied Biosystems, Foster City, CA, USA).
In total, 38 Y-STR loci were genotyped for all samples as described in a previous study.27 Alleles were assigned according to the nomenclature rules as used in the YHRD databank.28 All haplotypes were submitted to the Whit Athey’s Haplogroup Predictor29 to obtain probabilities for the inferred haplogroups. Based on these results, the samples were assigned to a specific Y-SNP assay to confirm the haplogroup and to assign the sub-haplogroup to the most accurate level of the latest Y-chromosomal tree, according to the updated tree version 1.2 of AMY-tree.30,31 The Y-SNPs were genotyped using SNaPshot mini-sequencing assays (Applied Biosystems) according to previously published protocols.32,33 All primer sequences and concentrations for the analysis of the Y-SNPs are available as Supplementary Materials (Supplementary Table S1) or in van Oven et al.34
RESULTS
The three Bourbon males were correctly assigned to the main Y-chromosomal haplogroup R1b (R-M343) using the Whit Athey’s Haplogroup Predictor as it was confirmed by Y-SNP typing. The individuals were further assigned to sub-haplogroup R1b1b2a1a1b* (R-Z381*) based on the latest update of the Y-chromosomal phyloge- netic tree of AMY 1.2. 31 The 38 Y-STR haplotypes of the living donors were compared to each other (Table 1). A maximum of four mutational differences out of 38 Y-STRs was found between the living donors, namely between samples A and JH (Table 2). Next, these haplotypes were also compared with the haplotypes from the blood sample and the head (Table 1).
There were 25–26 mutational differences between the 17 common genotyped Y-STRs of the living donors and the blood sample, assuming that each mutation leads to a gain or loss of one repeat unit on a Y-STR. There were eight mutational differences between the six common Y-STRs of the living donors and the head sample and even five out of the three confirmed STRs (Table 2).
Based on the calculated mean mutation rate for each set of Y-STRs using the individual mutation rates measured in Ballantyne et al35 and based on the formulas of Walsh,36 the 95% confidence interval for the number of meioses between both individuals of each sample pair was calculated (Table 2). Finally, the mitochondrial DNA analysis of the head also did not support the attribution of the sample to Henri IV. According to Charlier et al,24 the donor of the head belongs to mtDNA haplogroup U5b*.
Our previous study of a series of living and deceased maternally related relatives of Louis XVII showed that the mtDNA haplogroup of the Habsburgs belonged to haplogroup H.4,5 DISCUSSION Detailed Y-chr haplotypes and haplogroups were obtained for three living relatives of the House of Bourbon from which the French kings originated from 1589 (Henri IV became King of Navarre in 1572 by his mother’s rights, and King of France in 1589 at the death of Henri III, as the eldest descendant of Louis IX (1214–1270)) till the end of the monarchy. Based on these results, it is clear that their genealogical common ancestor (GCA) based on the official genealogy, namely King Louis XIII, was also their biological ancestor.
First, the sub- haplogroups at the finest level of the Y-chromosomal phylogenetic tree were identical for all three relatives, namely R-Z381*. As there are no known recurrent mutations observed for SNP Z381 and as it is not lying in a Y-SNP conversion hotspot on the Y- chr,31 male individuals who share this Y-SNP must also share a common male lineal ancestor at the point of the SNP’s first appearance.37 Y-chromosomal sub- haplogroup R-Z381* is a subgroup of R-U106, which has been found in Western Europe with the highest frequency of around 35% in the north of the Netherlands and in Denmark but with a steep frequency fall to the south as the frequency of R-U106 is only 7% in France.38–40
The frequency of sub-haplogroup R-Z381* within Europe itself is not yet well known, except in Flanders where the frequency is around 9% within the autochthonous population.41 Second, also the 38 Y-STR haplotypes of the three individuals were highly similar. Differences were found only on four Y-STRs. These Y-STRs have a high mutation rate in comparison with all the other genotyped Y-STRs (Supplementary Table S2, Supplementary Materials).
Moreover, the 17 Y-STR haplotype of the three individuals according to the AmpFlSTR Yfiler kit (Applied Biosystems), which is a part of the genotyped 38 Y-STR haplotype, is compared with the other haplo- types in the YHRD database release 43 (www.yhrd.org). The 17 Y-STR haplotype of the three living donors was found in only 3 out of 53576 individuals in the total database, with 1 individual from Poland, 1 from Italy and 1 European American.
Based on earlier studies, it is common that individuals with a matching 17 Y-STR haplotype (identical by state) are not genealogically related with each other (identical by descent) within the radiation of sub-haplogroup R-M269*, in contrast to individuals with an (almost) matching 38 Y-STR haplotype.39,42 Based on the calculated mean mutation rate for all 38 genotyped Y-STRs and the formulas of Walsh,36 the GCA is indeed most likely their true biological ancestor as well (Table 2).
This means that no non-paternity event happened along the three studied in-depth paternal lineages although some rumors that the branch of Bourbon Orleans would be illegitimate (more details in Supplementary Materials). Therefore, the genetic analysis of the three DNA donors in this study revealed the Y-chromosomal variant of the Bourbon lineage, including King Louis XIII, King Louis XIV and Louis, le Grand Dauphin (Figure 1). No paternal relationship was found between the living DNA donors and the donors of the blood sample of Louis XVI or the head of Henri IV. First, the Y-chr of the donor of the blood sample belongs to haplogroup G(xG1,G2) while the living Bourbon members belong to R-Z381*.
Based on the time calibration of the Y-chromosomal phylogeny, the time of the most recent common ancestor (tMRCA) between individuals belonging to haplogroup G and R will be some 10000 years ago.43,44 Second, the strong differentiation on the 17 Y-STR haplotypes between the living donors with the blood donor also suggests at least 260 meioses between them (Table 2). Although a low number of Y-STR results were obtained for the presumptive head of Henry IV, even the six Y-STRs and the three confirmed Y-STR haplotypes showed high differences with the living Bourbon donors, suggesting at least 4110 meioses between them (Table 2).
Moreover, Genetic genealogy reveals Bourbon Y haplogroup MHD Larmuseau et al 3 European Journal of Human Genetics the genetic identifications of the presumptive head of Henri IV and the presumptive blood sample of Louis XVI were only based on a similar partial Y-STR profile of both samples.24 Nevertheless, no evidence for a genealogical relationship between the DNA donors of the head and the blood sample could be found based on the calculations of the tMRCA due to the low number of analyzed Y-STRs and the mutational difference observed on one Y-STR (Table 2).36
Therefore, the similarity between the partial Y-STR profiles of both samples as indicated by Charlier et al24 could have been just the result of coincidence. Finally, if the samples were indeed of both kings of France this would mean that there were at least two non-paternity events within the royal lineage of the House of Bourbon, namely that Henri IV was not the biological father of Louis XIII, next to another non-paternity between Louis, le Grand Dauphin and King Louis XVI (Figure 1). Non-paternity events— whether a man is not the biological father of his legal children— mainly occurs when the mother had sexual intercourse with a man other than the legal father or when an unreported adoption occurred.
Nevertheless, the frequency of paternal discrepancy in the Western European populations is at most 3% and is probably o1% of human births.45,46 Moreover, while there has been speculation about non-paternity cases in the family, the written records do not contain evidence for such events within this lineage of the House of Bourbon.47–49
Next to the Y-chr, the mitochondrial DNA analysis of the head of Henri IV also does not support the presumed identification of the head sample. According to Charlier et al,24 the donor of the head belongs to mtDNA haplogroup U5b* defined by three nucleotide changes at positions m.16239C4T m.16270C4T m.16311T4C (nucleotides are numbered according to the revision of the Cambridge Reference Sequence50) of the mitochondrial hypervariable region 1 (HVR1).
These three diagnostic positions were confirmed in two different amplifications of the L16185-H16378 (numbered also according to the revision of the Cambridge Reference Sequence50) HVR1 fragment, proving that the results were reproducible. Henry IV was maternally related with Louis XVII—through his mother Jeanne III d’ Albret, over Anna of Habsburg to Marie-Antoinette25,26 (Figure 2)—but this mtDNA Table 1 Y-chromosomal haplogroups and Y-STR profiles of the three analyzed members of the Bourbon family, the presumed blood sample of Louis XVI20 and the presumed head of Henri IV24 Sample Axel, Prince of Bourbon-Parma (sample A) Sixte-Henri, Prince of Bourbon-Parma (sample SH) Joa ˜o Henrique, Prince of Orle ´ans- Braganza (sample JH) Presumed blood sample of Louis XVI
Presumed head of Henri IV Y-chromosomal haplogroup R1b1b2a1a1* /R-Z381* R1b1b2a1a1* /R-Z381* R1b1b2a1a1* /R-Z381* G (xG1,G2) /G (xM285,P287) — DYS393 13 13 13 14 14 DYS390 23 23 23 22 — DYS19 14 14 14 15 — DYS391 10 10 10 10 10 DYS385 11,14 11,14 11,14 13,18 —,18 DYS426 12 12 12 ND ND DYS388 12 12 12 ND ND DYS439 12 12 12 12 — DYS389I 13 13 14 12 13 DYS392 13 13 13 11 — DYS389b 16 16 16 18 — DYS458 18 18 18 21 — DYS459 9,10 9,10 9,10 ND ND DYS455 11 11 11 ND ND DYS454 11 11 11 ND ND DYS447 25 25 25 ND ND DYS437 15 15 15 15 15 DYS448 19 19 19 21 21 DYS449 28 28 29 ND ND DYS464 15,15,16,16 15,15,16,16 15,15,16,16 ND ND DYS460 12 12 12 ND ND GATA H4 12 12 12 12 — YCAII 19,23 19,23 19,23 ND ND DYS456 17 17 17 15 — DYS607 19 19 19 ND ND DYS576 16 16 16 ND ND DYS570 16 17 17 ND ND DYS724 35,38 35,39 35,40 ND ND DYS442 18 18 18 ND ND DYS438 12 12 12 10 — DYS635 23 23 23 21 — Abbreviation: ND, not determined.
The alleles given in italics are those that were not confirmed in a second PCR reaction in the study of Lalueza-Fox et al.20 DYS389b shows the number of repeats present in the second part of DYS389II (DYS389II minus DYS389I). Genetic genealogy reveals Bourbon Y haplogroup MHD Larmuseau et al 4 European Journal of Human Genetics haplogroup belongs to haplogroup H and did not show the three nucleotide changes as seen for the head sample. According to the latest mtDNA phylogenetic tree51 and its most recent update on www. phylotree.com, the MRCA of the head donor and Louis XVII lived more than several tens of thousands years ago.
If the head sample was indeed attributed to Henri IV, this would mean that a non-maternity event happened somewhere between Henri IV and Marie-Antoinette, an event which is known to occur very exceptionally but without any indication in written records.52 Finally, there is also the other (genetic) data that conflict with the attribution of the presumptive blood sample of Louis XVI. The chance that the donor of the blood sample was a non-blue-eyed person is 84.2% because of the heterozygote SNP rs12913832 on the HERC2 gene.
As King Louis XVI was blue-eyed, Lalueza-Fox et al20 already mentioned that the HERC2 gene result provided controversial evidence for the physical appearance of the donor of the blood sample. Moreover, the blood sample was part of a relic of the execution of the king, an object which was very popular at that time. As one of the purposes of this relic was economic (for financial gain), it is very likely that the donor of the blood sample was not really the king himself.20
CONCLUSION
By using in-depth genealogical trees of living members of the House of Bourbon, the ‘true’ Y-chromosomal variant of Bourbon males of the French dynasty lineage was reconstructed. This Y-chromosomal variant was different from the ones of the presumptive head of Henry IVand of the presumptive blood sample of Louis XVI. As the genetic identifications of these samples were only based on the similarity between the partial Y-STR profiles of both samples, these identifica- tions can no longer be accepted.
Moreover, matrilineal genealogical Table 2 Comparison between the Y-STR profiles of the three analyzed members of the Bourbon family and the partial Y-STR profiles of the presumed blood sample of Louis XVI and the presumed head of Henri IV Sample pairs NY-STR N mutations Mutation rate (mutions/generation) Nexp meioses Ncalc meioses (95% CI) A vs SH 38 2 5.91E-03 5 3–33 A vs JH 38 4 5.91E-03 23 5–41 SH vs JH 38 3 5.91E-03 22 8–48 A vs Blood 17 25 3.23E-03 14 260–830 SH vs lood 17 25 3.23E-03 13 260–830 JH vs Blood 17 26 3.23E-03 17 330–1050 A vs Head 6 7 2.82E-03 13 90–755 SH vs Head 6 7 2.82E-03 12 90–755 JH vs Head 6 8 2.82E-03 12 160–1110 Blood vs Head 6 1 2.82E-03 7 16–362 A vs Head 3 4 3.73E-03 13 30–630 SH vs Head 3 4 3.73E-03 12 30–630 JH vs Head 3 5 3.73E-03 12 100–1280
Blood vs Head
3 1 3.73E-03 7 30–630 A difference has been made between the six Y-STR profiles and the three verified Y-STR profiles for the presumed head of Henri IV as only three out of six Y-STR alleles were reproduced in a second PCR. Sample A: Axel, Prince of Bourbon-Parma; Sample SH: Sixte- Henri, Prince of Bourbon-Parma; Sample JH: Joa ˜o Henrique, Prince of Orle ´ans-Braganza. NY-STRs: number of commonly genotyped Y-STRs for each pair of samples. Nmutations: number of mutations assuming that each mutation leads to a gain or loss of one repeat unit on the commonly genotyped Y-STRs for each pair of samples.
Mutation rate: estimated averaged mutation rate for the set of commonly genotyped Y-STRs based on the individual mutation rates measured in Ballantyne et al.35 Nexp meioses: number of expected meioses between the two samples based on the official genealogy; Ncalc meioses: number of meioses based on the Walsh formulae36 with a 95% confidence interval (CI). Figure 2 Overview of the matrilineal relationship between the French King Henri IV and Louis XVII, both given in grey.
The English names and titles of the maternal ancestors are given in the genealogical tree together with their year of birth and death. Genetic genealogy reveals Bourbon Y haplogroup MHD Larmuseau et al 5 European Journal of Human Genetics data revealed that the observed mtDNA variant for the head sample was not the one that could be expected. These discrepancies might indicate that the samples analyzed were actually contaminated with non-authentic DNA.
As contamination is indeed always possible when dealing with samples with high DNA degradation,11,12,53 contamination cannot be excluded here, especially for the head as the first attempt to collect DNA from the sample was not successful.21 Alternatively, they would support the hypothesis that the French kings were not the donors of these biological samples. Y-chromosomal analysis on the already identified heart of Louis XVII, the son of Louis XVI,4 might further remove all doubts about the identification of the blood sample considered to be of Louis XVI and might also solve any controversy about the paternity of Louis XVI of this child.
As was already stressed in earlier studies,5 DNA typing of living relatives who are paternally or maternally related should be a requisite to solve historical cases with ancient DNA. This is an essential extra quality control for DNA contamination as well as a guarantee for a more objective identification, as illustrated here by this study of the Bourbon family.
CONFLICT OF INTEREST The authors declare no conflict of interest.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The contribution of Philippe Delorme and Patrick Germain, French historians, in making this investigation possible by acting as contact with the Royal families and by providing historical background is gratefully acknowledged. We thank the three living paternal relatives of the House of Bourbon for their donation of DNA samples. We also thank the three anonymous referees for their valuable comments on an earlier version of their manuscript. MHDL is a postdoctoral fellow of the FWO-Vlaanderen (Research Foundation-Flanders).
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Winged Bee Goddess
The Earth has a Soul: C.G. Jung on Nature, Technology & Modern Life
Restoring Nature's Divinity:
“Matter in the wrong place is dirt. People get dirty through too much civilization. Whenever we touch nature, we get clean.”
You may not associate such bold, earthy sentiments with Swiss psychiatrist C.G. Jung, but he was, in fact, deeply concerned over the loss of connection with nature. He considered natural life to be the “nourishing soil of the soul.” Who has time for a natural life these days? What would it look like if we did? Those of us destined to live through this turbulent period of history, the declining phase of Western civilization, could perhaps use a wise elder who stands slightly outside the modern world yet knows it well enough to offer guidance.
Jung shows the knowledge of an historian who understands how the dissociation from nature came about; he reaches out with the empathy of a healer who shares our plight; and he advises with the common sense of a country doctor how to live “in modest harmony with nature.”
Jung addresses not only the individual but also our culture as a whole, as an entity that itself is suffering and in need of help. The title of the book, The Earth Has A Soul, is taken from a 1958 letter in which Jung refers to "the old idea that every country or people has its own angel, just as the earth has a soul." (Letters II, p432)
We find that Jung uses the words soul, spirit and psyche somewhat interchangeably. “Psyche” is Greek for soul, life, and breath; so psyche is Nature itself. In the Visions Seminars that he gave in the early 1930s, Jung remarked that “the earth has a spirit of her own, a beauty of her own." (Interpretation of Visions, pp133-4) Spirit is the inside of things and matter is their visible outer aspect. Jung’s main contribution is restoring to Nature its original wholeness by reminding us that “nature is not matter only, she is also spirit.” (Collected Works,13, par 229) A brief anecdote illustrates Jung’s apperception of the living spirit within Nature:
“I once experienced a violent earthquake, and my first, immediate feeling was that I no longer stood on solid familiar earth, but on the skin of a gigantic animal that was heaving under my feet. It was this image that impressed itself on me, not the physical fact.” (Collected Works,8, par 331)
Historical eras oscillate between an orientation toward matter or spirit. We are living in a period when the material aspect of Nature is emphasized; it is often said that we are materialistic. But this is not quite the case, since matter actually receives very little respect due to its having been robbed, as Jung notes, of its spirit -
“The word ‘matter’ remains a dry, inhuman, and purely intellectual concept… How different was the former image of matter—the Great Mother—that could encompass and express the profound emotional meaning of the Great Mother.”(Man & His Symbols, Pages 94-5)
In a 1923 seminar, Jung identified four elements that have undergone the most severe repression in the Judeo-Christian world: nature, animals, creative fantasy, and the “inferior” or primitive side of humans, which tends to be mistakenly conflated with instinct or sexuality.
“It is a general truth that the earth is depreciated and misunderstood…For quite long enough we have been taught that this life is not the real thing…and that we live only for heaven.” (Interpretation of Visions, Page 193)
Our loss of connection with Nature is thus neither a practical nor a psychological problem but a religious one, as this statement by Joseph Henderson emphasizes:
“Nature has lost her divinity, yet the spirit is unsure and unsatisfied. Hence any true cure for the neurosis…would have to awaken both spirit and nature to a new life. The relevance of this theme for us today may be that it is a problem we are still trying to solve on too personal, psychological a level, or on a purely cultural level without fully realizing it is at bottom a religious problem and not psychological or social at all.” (Henderson, Shadow and Self, Page 279)
Jung grew up (b.1875) in conditions largely unchanged since the Middle Ages and lived to see the emergence of the techno-industrial age (d.1961)... Although there are others today who offer clarity about how our ruptured relationship with Nature could be repaired, I believe that only Jung speaks in both the discursive voice of a modern doctor who is able to explain, and the mythic or poetic voice of a tribal healer, who is able to enchant. By incorporating wisdom from the depths of the psyche, Jung reaches not only our modern mind but also the aspect of our being that he termed archaic, natural, primordial, or original.
This unusual capacity to span both the archaic and the modern arose from his actual background with its deep roots in his ancestral lineage and certain significant experiences such as his seminal dream at age 34 about our species’ phylogenetic history. It concerned a multi-storied house in which the furnishings and construction style of each level represented different historical periods. The top floor was the present, the level below the 16th century, the first floor below ground the Roman era, and in the deepest level was a dusty cave containing bones, shards and tools from a neolithic culture. He came to view the dream as an objective picture not only of European history but of the historic composition of the human psyche, the stories signifying successive layers of consciousness. This interior opening... provided Jung with access to the various stages of consciousness, including what he came to call “the primitive within myself”.
Consciousness: the blessing and curse of humankind:
"We are beset by an all-too-human fear that consciousness - our Promethean conquest - may in the end not be able to serve us as well as nature." (Collected Works,8, Paragraph 750)
Jung contended that Nature herself deigned to produce consciousness because without it things go less well. Though we tend to prize it as a fine achievement, Jung impolitely reminds us that consciousness is also our own worst devil because it helps us invent "every thinkable reason and way to disobey the divine will." (Letters I, Page 486)
Jung sets the loss of connection with Nature in the overall context of the development of consciousness over the millenia. To describe how it evolved, he drew on the analogy of the multi-storied house from his 1909 dream. The floors above ground represent recent historical periods; its foundations, the phylogeny of our species. To the latter he applied the awkward term the collective unconscious. He observed that people today often leave the whole of their lives to the direction of consciousness, thereby forgetting that it is merely the visible surface over the immense living foundation below. The analogy of a multi-storied house is very useful in understanding how it is that we can go against Nature if we forget that we are also part of Natures Answer.
In 1952, Jung was interviewed by Ira Progoff, who asked if individuation didn't always involve consciousness. Jung replied, “Oh, that is an overvaluation of consciousness” and explained that individuation is the natural process by which a tree becomes a tree and a human a human; he said that consciousness can just as well interfere with the natural growth process as aid it. Jung felt that Western consciousness was seriously one-sided in that it has expanded in the spatial dimension but not in the temporal, for we do not have a sense of living history. Consciousness is a very recent acquisition, still quite fragile and easily disrupted. Jung pointed out that, in the West, consciousness has been developed mainly through science and technology—not through art, social interaction, cultural development, or spirituality. The unconscious has been left behind, and is thus in a defensive position.(Letters II, Page 81)
“We in the West have come to be highly disciplined, organized, and rational. On the other hand, having allowed our unconscious personality to be suppressed, we are excluded from understanding primitive man’s civilization… The more successful we become in science and technology, the more diabolical are the uses to which we put our inventions and discoveries.” (C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews & Encounters, Page 397)
The cloning of life forms, the development of nuclear and laser weaponry, the surgical alteration of genders, and the genetic modification of food are some of the most recent “diabolical” discoveries we have come up with—without adequate consideration of their moral or psychosocial repercussions. By focusing almost singularly on developments in the outer physical world, what we have neglected is ourselves, our own inner nature. As Jung poignantly put it, “Nobody would give credit to the idea that the psychic processes of the ordinary man have any importance whatsoever.” (C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews & Encounters, Page 304)
We now witness increasingly unfortunate accidents that illustrate all too well the points Jung made about the dire consequences neglecting our own unconscious foundation can have: Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and the Valdez spill were caused by individuals suffering from sleep deprivation—i.e., going against Nature. When Jung warns that the unconscious may rebel suicidally if it is put in an inhuman position, we need only think of these instances and the devastating consequences they have had.
Consciousness is a gift and could be used to go along with Nature, were we to align it in that direction. Jung’s concern was that, as a very young species, we have an inflated idea of our own importance... His conclusion was that we have reached the limit of our evolution and can go no further until we attend not to the development of more consciousness, but to an unbiased understanding of all that we are:
“Discovery of the unconscious means an enormous spiritual task, which must be accomplished if we wish to preserve our civilization.” (Letters, I, Page 537)
Restoring Nature's Divinity:
“Matter in the wrong place is dirt. People get dirty through too much civilization. Whenever we touch nature, we get clean.”
You may not associate such bold, earthy sentiments with Swiss psychiatrist C.G. Jung, but he was, in fact, deeply concerned over the loss of connection with nature. He considered natural life to be the “nourishing soil of the soul.” Who has time for a natural life these days? What would it look like if we did? Those of us destined to live through this turbulent period of history, the declining phase of Western civilization, could perhaps use a wise elder who stands slightly outside the modern world yet knows it well enough to offer guidance.
Jung shows the knowledge of an historian who understands how the dissociation from nature came about; he reaches out with the empathy of a healer who shares our plight; and he advises with the common sense of a country doctor how to live “in modest harmony with nature.”
Jung addresses not only the individual but also our culture as a whole, as an entity that itself is suffering and in need of help. The title of the book, The Earth Has A Soul, is taken from a 1958 letter in which Jung refers to "the old idea that every country or people has its own angel, just as the earth has a soul." (Letters II, p432)
We find that Jung uses the words soul, spirit and psyche somewhat interchangeably. “Psyche” is Greek for soul, life, and breath; so psyche is Nature itself. In the Visions Seminars that he gave in the early 1930s, Jung remarked that “the earth has a spirit of her own, a beauty of her own." (Interpretation of Visions, pp133-4) Spirit is the inside of things and matter is their visible outer aspect. Jung’s main contribution is restoring to Nature its original wholeness by reminding us that “nature is not matter only, she is also spirit.” (Collected Works,13, par 229) A brief anecdote illustrates Jung’s apperception of the living spirit within Nature:
“I once experienced a violent earthquake, and my first, immediate feeling was that I no longer stood on solid familiar earth, but on the skin of a gigantic animal that was heaving under my feet. It was this image that impressed itself on me, not the physical fact.” (Collected Works,8, par 331)
Historical eras oscillate between an orientation toward matter or spirit. We are living in a period when the material aspect of Nature is emphasized; it is often said that we are materialistic. But this is not quite the case, since matter actually receives very little respect due to its having been robbed, as Jung notes, of its spirit -
“The word ‘matter’ remains a dry, inhuman, and purely intellectual concept… How different was the former image of matter—the Great Mother—that could encompass and express the profound emotional meaning of the Great Mother.”(Man & His Symbols, Pages 94-5)
In a 1923 seminar, Jung identified four elements that have undergone the most severe repression in the Judeo-Christian world: nature, animals, creative fantasy, and the “inferior” or primitive side of humans, which tends to be mistakenly conflated with instinct or sexuality.
“It is a general truth that the earth is depreciated and misunderstood…For quite long enough we have been taught that this life is not the real thing…and that we live only for heaven.” (Interpretation of Visions, Page 193)
Our loss of connection with Nature is thus neither a practical nor a psychological problem but a religious one, as this statement by Joseph Henderson emphasizes:
“Nature has lost her divinity, yet the spirit is unsure and unsatisfied. Hence any true cure for the neurosis…would have to awaken both spirit and nature to a new life. The relevance of this theme for us today may be that it is a problem we are still trying to solve on too personal, psychological a level, or on a purely cultural level without fully realizing it is at bottom a religious problem and not psychological or social at all.” (Henderson, Shadow and Self, Page 279)
Jung grew up (b.1875) in conditions largely unchanged since the Middle Ages and lived to see the emergence of the techno-industrial age (d.1961)... Although there are others today who offer clarity about how our ruptured relationship with Nature could be repaired, I believe that only Jung speaks in both the discursive voice of a modern doctor who is able to explain, and the mythic or poetic voice of a tribal healer, who is able to enchant. By incorporating wisdom from the depths of the psyche, Jung reaches not only our modern mind but also the aspect of our being that he termed archaic, natural, primordial, or original.
This unusual capacity to span both the archaic and the modern arose from his actual background with its deep roots in his ancestral lineage and certain significant experiences such as his seminal dream at age 34 about our species’ phylogenetic history. It concerned a multi-storied house in which the furnishings and construction style of each level represented different historical periods. The top floor was the present, the level below the 16th century, the first floor below ground the Roman era, and in the deepest level was a dusty cave containing bones, shards and tools from a neolithic culture. He came to view the dream as an objective picture not only of European history but of the historic composition of the human psyche, the stories signifying successive layers of consciousness. This interior opening... provided Jung with access to the various stages of consciousness, including what he came to call “the primitive within myself”.
Consciousness: the blessing and curse of humankind:
"We are beset by an all-too-human fear that consciousness - our Promethean conquest - may in the end not be able to serve us as well as nature." (Collected Works,8, Paragraph 750)
Jung contended that Nature herself deigned to produce consciousness because without it things go less well. Though we tend to prize it as a fine achievement, Jung impolitely reminds us that consciousness is also our own worst devil because it helps us invent "every thinkable reason and way to disobey the divine will." (Letters I, Page 486)
Jung sets the loss of connection with Nature in the overall context of the development of consciousness over the millenia. To describe how it evolved, he drew on the analogy of the multi-storied house from his 1909 dream. The floors above ground represent recent historical periods; its foundations, the phylogeny of our species. To the latter he applied the awkward term the collective unconscious. He observed that people today often leave the whole of their lives to the direction of consciousness, thereby forgetting that it is merely the visible surface over the immense living foundation below. The analogy of a multi-storied house is very useful in understanding how it is that we can go against Nature if we forget that we are also part of Natures Answer.
In 1952, Jung was interviewed by Ira Progoff, who asked if individuation didn't always involve consciousness. Jung replied, “Oh, that is an overvaluation of consciousness” and explained that individuation is the natural process by which a tree becomes a tree and a human a human; he said that consciousness can just as well interfere with the natural growth process as aid it. Jung felt that Western consciousness was seriously one-sided in that it has expanded in the spatial dimension but not in the temporal, for we do not have a sense of living history. Consciousness is a very recent acquisition, still quite fragile and easily disrupted. Jung pointed out that, in the West, consciousness has been developed mainly through science and technology—not through art, social interaction, cultural development, or spirituality. The unconscious has been left behind, and is thus in a defensive position.(Letters II, Page 81)
“We in the West have come to be highly disciplined, organized, and rational. On the other hand, having allowed our unconscious personality to be suppressed, we are excluded from understanding primitive man’s civilization… The more successful we become in science and technology, the more diabolical are the uses to which we put our inventions and discoveries.” (C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews & Encounters, Page 397)
The cloning of life forms, the development of nuclear and laser weaponry, the surgical alteration of genders, and the genetic modification of food are some of the most recent “diabolical” discoveries we have come up with—without adequate consideration of their moral or psychosocial repercussions. By focusing almost singularly on developments in the outer physical world, what we have neglected is ourselves, our own inner nature. As Jung poignantly put it, “Nobody would give credit to the idea that the psychic processes of the ordinary man have any importance whatsoever.” (C.G. Jung Speaking: Interviews & Encounters, Page 304)
We now witness increasingly unfortunate accidents that illustrate all too well the points Jung made about the dire consequences neglecting our own unconscious foundation can have: Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and the Valdez spill were caused by individuals suffering from sleep deprivation—i.e., going against Nature. When Jung warns that the unconscious may rebel suicidally if it is put in an inhuman position, we need only think of these instances and the devastating consequences they have had.
Consciousness is a gift and could be used to go along with Nature, were we to align it in that direction. Jung’s concern was that, as a very young species, we have an inflated idea of our own importance... His conclusion was that we have reached the limit of our evolution and can go no further until we attend not to the development of more consciousness, but to an unbiased understanding of all that we are:
“Discovery of the unconscious means an enormous spiritual task, which must be accomplished if we wish to preserve our civilization.” (Letters, I, Page 537)
QUEST FOR THE HOLY GRAIL Bloodline of Self-Knowledge & Self-Realization
Our DNA is like a history encyclopedia. It tells us the stories of our forebearers from the first human who walked on the earth to YOU. Different DNA regions can tell us whether our ancestors interbred with Neanderthals, while other regions tell us about the path our ancestors took out of Africa. It all depends on what you want to know and your ability to interpret the genetic code. No scientific definitions for genetic ethnicity are universally accepted.
Differences in DNA sequences from person to person reflect the cumulative effects of human history. The patterns of genetic variation in the world today therefore carry a record of that history. They record the existence, sometime between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago, of a small group of people who are the ancestors of every person alive today. They chronicle the origins of “races” and “ethnic groups” and describe how those groups have both blended and separated over time.
Who Are We?
The best way to determine the genetic relationships among people is to compare the sequences of the nucleotides in their DNA. We perform a service just following the DNA trail and accepting new findings in our family trees when they come in, instead of clinging to an a priori theory/belief/wish or prejudice. Even with both a pedigree and genetic genealogy tests, the results require interpretation, and even different members of the same family can embody and display different features.
So far, there is no exclusive nor conclusive DNA signature for the Grail lineage, and there are gaps in the legends, the histories, and the pedigrees which require interpretation, if not leaps of imagination. This is as true for those of unbroken dynastic Houses as it is for those of mixed blood. Grail houses can have different Y haplogroups as well as different mtDNA signatures. While the “red gene” is significant, it may or may not distinguish noble ancestors. Typical medical problems of a line will not all present in one individual.
For example, Rh negative blood, being recessive, will only reveal itself when 2 recessive genes from the parents come together. Conceivably, only one sibling in a dozen might be Rh negative, descended from Rh positive parents. Even siblings get varied genetic packages and may not have genes from all the ethnicities or ancestors of their genealogical lines. There are different ethnic signatures.
Genetic Archaeology of ancient groups and individuals is a new research area. Genetic Archaeology is the study of genetic ancestry using modern forensic techniques to collect and blueprint ancient human remains, and rarely identify living descendants.
DNA can be used to understand the evolution of modern humans, trace migrations of people, identify individuals, and determine the origins of domestic plants and animals. DNA analysis, as one scholar put it, is “the greatest archaeological excavation of all time.” Because ancient DNA molecules are normally so few and fragmented, and preserved soft tissues so rare, scientists had little hope of finding and analyzing it. But two breakthroughs have made this possible: the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a method for copying any fragment of DNA, and the successful recovery of DNA from preserved hard tissues, bones and teeth, that are durable and relatively abundant. http://www.archaeology.org/9609/abstracts/dna.html
Your individual DNA fingerprint depends on how the chromosomes line up at conception. Some traits from both parents’ potentials will be there, while others get excluded. So, some siblings can be redheads, others not; some can have family medical problems, others not, some may be Rh neg., others not. Extensive historical knowledge of cultural practices and human migratory patterns helps us piece each story together. We may find things we never imagined and find no evidence for traits known within our lineage.
Genetic reconstructions of historical events can always be interpreted in somewhat different ways, observes Peter Underhill, the geneticist in Cavalli-Sforza’s lab who first detected variations in Y chromosomes. DNA is such a long and complex molecule that every act of human procreation produces at least some unique mutations. These mutations spill across the generations like an unusually shaped jaw or distinctively colored eyes. The result is an elaborate human genealogy, an intricately branching tree of genetic alterations.
Where Do We Come From?
By analyzing the genetic variation of modern Europeans, Cavalli-Sforza and Ammerman decided that Europeans are descended largely from populations of farmers who started migrating out of the Middle East 9,000 years ago. As the sons and daughters of farming families left their parents’ farms and moved into new territory, they interbred with the existing hunter-gatherer populations, which produced gradients of genetic change radiating from the Middle East. Only in mountainous areas unattractive to farmers—the Pyrenees homelands of the Basques, for example—were the genes of the indigenous peoples comparatively intact. Other historical events, too, appeared to have influenced the European gene pool. For example, a genetic trail leads from the area north of the Black and Caspian Seas into the rest of Europe. Cavalli-Sforza linked this trail to the spread of the descendants of nomadic warriors and herders who first domesticated the horse, about 4,000 B.C.
Evidence clearly indicates that sometime in the period 100,000 to 200,000 years ago our ancestors went through a severe genetic bottleneck. Perhaps an environmental change drove ancient people to the brink of extinction. A more likely scenario, however, is that a relatively small group, numbering fewer than 20,000 at times and probably living in eastern Africa, was isolated for many thousands of years from the many groups of archaic human beings scattered throughout Africa, Europe, and Asia.
The people who emerged from this genetic bottleneck had traits never before seen in human beings. They had lighter builds, new ways of interacting among themselves, and perhaps a greater facility with language. Eventually the descendants of these people spread throughout Africa and beyond. They reached Australia at least 60,000 years ago, probably traveling from the Horn of Africa and then along the South Asia shoreline. They arrived in the Middle East a bit more than 40,000 years ago. By 35,000 years ago anatomically modern people had spread into Europe from the Middle East and into East Asia from Southeast Asia. Sometime more than 12,000 years ago they entered the Americas.
Fewer than 10,000 generations separate everyone alive today from the small group of Africans who are our common ancestors. That’s much more than the twenty or so generations mentioned in Genesis, but it’s the blink of an eye in evolutionary terms. Even over thousands of generations human groups have not differentiated in any substantial way. Rather, the genetic evidence indicates that modern human beings have expanded as a single, relatively well mixed population without subsequent genetic bottlenecks (bottlenecks tend to erase the evidence of previous bottlenecks, which is how geneticists know that the bottleneck in Africa was the most recent one). Our comparative youth as a species accounts for our extreme genetic homogeneity. The chimpanzees living on a single hillside in Africa have twice as much variety in their DNA as do the six billion people scattered across the globe.
There’s another reason for our biological homogeneity. Modern human beings have never been able to resist for long what Noël Coward called “the urge to merge.” A person traveling due east from Madrid to Beijing (both at about 40°N latitude) would pass Italians, Greeks, Turks, Armenians, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Kyrgyz, Uighurs, Mongolians, and Han Chinese, among others. All these groups resemble their immediate neighbors more than they do groups farther away because of the continual exchange of mates across group boundaries.
There’s a simple way of describing our genetic relatedness. Not only do all people have the same set of genes, but all groups of people also share the major variants of those genes. Geneticists have never found a genetic marker that is of one type in all the members of one large group and of a different type in all the members of another large group. That’s why ethnically targeted biological weapons would never work. Every group overlaps genetically with every other. We have cultural differences masquerading as race problems.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/04/the-genetic-archaeology-of-race/2180/
Where Are We Going?
There is no singular gene, mutation, allele, STR or SNP that tells the whole story. There are clusters of mutations that show deep relationship patterns of regional origin in some individuals. There is no DNA report that is 100% conclusive. They use the statistical mathematics of the educated guess. Statistical and sampling flaws can lead to misinterpretations, based on too small of samplings and comparison studies. So, our own conclusions about our own DNA tests are, in part, interpretations of an interpretation. We can only draw inferences about the past based on the patterns observed in human DNA. And this is what keeps our quest alive. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/04/the-genetic-archaeology-of-race/2180/
allele /al·lele/ (ah-lēl´) one of two or more alternative forms of a gene at corresponding sites (loci) on homologous chromosomes, which determine alternative characters in inheritance.allel´ic
A single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP, pronounced snip) is a DNA sequence variation occurring when a single nucleotide — A, T, C or G — in the genome (or other shared sequence) differs between members of a biological species or paired chromosomes in an individual.
A surname DNA project is a genetic genealogy project which uses genealogical DNA tests to trace male lineage. Because (patrilineal) surnames are passed down from father to son in many cultures, and Y-chromosomes (Y-DNA) are passed from father to son with a predictable rate of mutation, people with the same surname can use genealogical DNA testing to determine if they share a common ancestor within recent history. A genealogical DNA test looks at a person’s genetic code at specific locations. Results give information about genealogy or personal ancestry. Generally, these tests compare the results of an individual to others from the same lineage or to current and historic ethnic groups. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genealogical_DNA_test
Our DNA is like a history encyclopedia. It tells us the stories of our forebearers from the first human who walked on the earth to YOU. Different DNA regions can tell us whether our ancestors interbred with Neanderthals, while other regions tell us about the path our ancestors took out of Africa. It all depends on what you want to know and your ability to interpret the genetic code. No scientific definitions for genetic ethnicity are universally accepted.
Differences in DNA sequences from person to person reflect the cumulative effects of human history. The patterns of genetic variation in the world today therefore carry a record of that history. They record the existence, sometime between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago, of a small group of people who are the ancestors of every person alive today. They chronicle the origins of “races” and “ethnic groups” and describe how those groups have both blended and separated over time.
Who Are We?
The best way to determine the genetic relationships among people is to compare the sequences of the nucleotides in their DNA. We perform a service just following the DNA trail and accepting new findings in our family trees when they come in, instead of clinging to an a priori theory/belief/wish or prejudice. Even with both a pedigree and genetic genealogy tests, the results require interpretation, and even different members of the same family can embody and display different features.
So far, there is no exclusive nor conclusive DNA signature for the Grail lineage, and there are gaps in the legends, the histories, and the pedigrees which require interpretation, if not leaps of imagination. This is as true for those of unbroken dynastic Houses as it is for those of mixed blood. Grail houses can have different Y haplogroups as well as different mtDNA signatures. While the “red gene” is significant, it may or may not distinguish noble ancestors. Typical medical problems of a line will not all present in one individual.
For example, Rh negative blood, being recessive, will only reveal itself when 2 recessive genes from the parents come together. Conceivably, only one sibling in a dozen might be Rh negative, descended from Rh positive parents. Even siblings get varied genetic packages and may not have genes from all the ethnicities or ancestors of their genealogical lines. There are different ethnic signatures.
Genetic Archaeology of ancient groups and individuals is a new research area. Genetic Archaeology is the study of genetic ancestry using modern forensic techniques to collect and blueprint ancient human remains, and rarely identify living descendants.
DNA can be used to understand the evolution of modern humans, trace migrations of people, identify individuals, and determine the origins of domestic plants and animals. DNA analysis, as one scholar put it, is “the greatest archaeological excavation of all time.” Because ancient DNA molecules are normally so few and fragmented, and preserved soft tissues so rare, scientists had little hope of finding and analyzing it. But two breakthroughs have made this possible: the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a method for copying any fragment of DNA, and the successful recovery of DNA from preserved hard tissues, bones and teeth, that are durable and relatively abundant. http://www.archaeology.org/9609/abstracts/dna.html
Your individual DNA fingerprint depends on how the chromosomes line up at conception. Some traits from both parents’ potentials will be there, while others get excluded. So, some siblings can be redheads, others not; some can have family medical problems, others not, some may be Rh neg., others not. Extensive historical knowledge of cultural practices and human migratory patterns helps us piece each story together. We may find things we never imagined and find no evidence for traits known within our lineage.
Genetic reconstructions of historical events can always be interpreted in somewhat different ways, observes Peter Underhill, the geneticist in Cavalli-Sforza’s lab who first detected variations in Y chromosomes. DNA is such a long and complex molecule that every act of human procreation produces at least some unique mutations. These mutations spill across the generations like an unusually shaped jaw or distinctively colored eyes. The result is an elaborate human genealogy, an intricately branching tree of genetic alterations.
Where Do We Come From?
By analyzing the genetic variation of modern Europeans, Cavalli-Sforza and Ammerman decided that Europeans are descended largely from populations of farmers who started migrating out of the Middle East 9,000 years ago. As the sons and daughters of farming families left their parents’ farms and moved into new territory, they interbred with the existing hunter-gatherer populations, which produced gradients of genetic change radiating from the Middle East. Only in mountainous areas unattractive to farmers—the Pyrenees homelands of the Basques, for example—were the genes of the indigenous peoples comparatively intact. Other historical events, too, appeared to have influenced the European gene pool. For example, a genetic trail leads from the area north of the Black and Caspian Seas into the rest of Europe. Cavalli-Sforza linked this trail to the spread of the descendants of nomadic warriors and herders who first domesticated the horse, about 4,000 B.C.
Evidence clearly indicates that sometime in the period 100,000 to 200,000 years ago our ancestors went through a severe genetic bottleneck. Perhaps an environmental change drove ancient people to the brink of extinction. A more likely scenario, however, is that a relatively small group, numbering fewer than 20,000 at times and probably living in eastern Africa, was isolated for many thousands of years from the many groups of archaic human beings scattered throughout Africa, Europe, and Asia.
The people who emerged from this genetic bottleneck had traits never before seen in human beings. They had lighter builds, new ways of interacting among themselves, and perhaps a greater facility with language. Eventually the descendants of these people spread throughout Africa and beyond. They reached Australia at least 60,000 years ago, probably traveling from the Horn of Africa and then along the South Asia shoreline. They arrived in the Middle East a bit more than 40,000 years ago. By 35,000 years ago anatomically modern people had spread into Europe from the Middle East and into East Asia from Southeast Asia. Sometime more than 12,000 years ago they entered the Americas.
Fewer than 10,000 generations separate everyone alive today from the small group of Africans who are our common ancestors. That’s much more than the twenty or so generations mentioned in Genesis, but it’s the blink of an eye in evolutionary terms. Even over thousands of generations human groups have not differentiated in any substantial way. Rather, the genetic evidence indicates that modern human beings have expanded as a single, relatively well mixed population without subsequent genetic bottlenecks (bottlenecks tend to erase the evidence of previous bottlenecks, which is how geneticists know that the bottleneck in Africa was the most recent one). Our comparative youth as a species accounts for our extreme genetic homogeneity. The chimpanzees living on a single hillside in Africa have twice as much variety in their DNA as do the six billion people scattered across the globe.
There’s another reason for our biological homogeneity. Modern human beings have never been able to resist for long what Noël Coward called “the urge to merge.” A person traveling due east from Madrid to Beijing (both at about 40°N latitude) would pass Italians, Greeks, Turks, Armenians, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Kyrgyz, Uighurs, Mongolians, and Han Chinese, among others. All these groups resemble their immediate neighbors more than they do groups farther away because of the continual exchange of mates across group boundaries.
There’s a simple way of describing our genetic relatedness. Not only do all people have the same set of genes, but all groups of people also share the major variants of those genes. Geneticists have never found a genetic marker that is of one type in all the members of one large group and of a different type in all the members of another large group. That’s why ethnically targeted biological weapons would never work. Every group overlaps genetically with every other. We have cultural differences masquerading as race problems.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/04/the-genetic-archaeology-of-race/2180/
Where Are We Going?
There is no singular gene, mutation, allele, STR or SNP that tells the whole story. There are clusters of mutations that show deep relationship patterns of regional origin in some individuals. There is no DNA report that is 100% conclusive. They use the statistical mathematics of the educated guess. Statistical and sampling flaws can lead to misinterpretations, based on too small of samplings and comparison studies. So, our own conclusions about our own DNA tests are, in part, interpretations of an interpretation. We can only draw inferences about the past based on the patterns observed in human DNA. And this is what keeps our quest alive. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/04/the-genetic-archaeology-of-race/2180/
allele /al·lele/ (ah-lēl´) one of two or more alternative forms of a gene at corresponding sites (loci) on homologous chromosomes, which determine alternative characters in inheritance.allel´ic
A single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP, pronounced snip) is a DNA sequence variation occurring when a single nucleotide — A, T, C or G — in the genome (or other shared sequence) differs between members of a biological species or paired chromosomes in an individual.
A surname DNA project is a genetic genealogy project which uses genealogical DNA tests to trace male lineage. Because (patrilineal) surnames are passed down from father to son in many cultures, and Y-chromosomes (Y-DNA) are passed from father to son with a predictable rate of mutation, people with the same surname can use genealogical DNA testing to determine if they share a common ancestor within recent history. A genealogical DNA test looks at a person’s genetic code at specific locations. Results give information about genealogy or personal ancestry. Generally, these tests compare the results of an individual to others from the same lineage or to current and historic ethnic groups. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genealogical_DNA_test
Myths of British ancestry
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/mythsofbritishancestry/#.UmRehXcvY_O
by Stephen Oppenheimer / October 21, 2006
Read Stephen Oppenheimer’s follow-up to this article here, in the June 2007 edition of Prospect, as he answers some of the many comments and queries readers have sent in response to his analysis. You can also find out more about his work here, at the Bradshaw Foundation website.
The fact that the British and the Irish both live on islands gives them a misleading sense of security about their unique historical identities. But do we really know who we are, where we come from and what defines the nature of our genetic and cultural heritage? Who are and were the Scots, the Welsh, the Irish and the English? And did the English really crush a glorious Celtic heritage?
Everyone has heard of Celts, Anglo-Saxons and Vikings. And most of us are familiar with the idea that the English are descended from Anglo-Saxons, who invaded eastern England after the Romans left, while most of the people in the rest of the British Isles derive from indigenous Celtic ancestors with a sprinkling of Viking blood around the fringes.
Yet there is no agreement among historians or archaeologists on the meaning of the words “Celtic” or “Anglo-Saxon.” What is more, new evidence from genetic analysis (see note below) indicates that the Anglo-Saxons and Celts, to the extent that they can be defined genetically, were both small immigrant minorities. Neither group had much more impact on the British Isles gene pool than the Vikings, the Normans or, indeed, immigrants of the past 50 years.
The genetic evidence shows that three quarters of our ancestors came to this corner of Europe as hunter-gatherers, between 15,000 and 7,500 years ago, after the melting of the ice caps but before the land broke away from the mainland and divided into islands. Our subsequent separation from Europe has preserved a genetic time capsule of southwestern Europe during the ice age, which we share most closely with the former ice-age refuge in the Basque country. The first settlers were unlikely to have spoken a Celtic language but possibly a tongue related to the unique Basque language.
Another wave of immigration arrived during the Neolithic period, when farming developed about 6,500 years ago. But the English still derive most of their current gene pool from the same early Basque source as the Irish, Welsh and Scots. These figures are at odds with the modern perceptions of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon ethnicity based on more recent invasions. There were many later invasions, as well as less violent immigrations, and each left a genetic signal, but no individual event contributed much more than 5 per cent to our modern genetic mix.
Many myths about the Celts
Celtic languages and the people who brought them probably first arrived during the Neolithic period. The regions we now regard as Celtic heartlands actually had less immigration from the continent during this time than England. Ireland, being to the west, has changed least since the hunter-gatherer period and received fewer subsequent migrants (about 12 per cent of the population) than anywhere else. Wales and Cornwall have received about 20 per cent, Scotland and its associated islands 30 per cent, while eastern and southern England, being nearer the continent, has received one third of its population from outside over the past 6,500 years. These estimates, set out in my book The Origins of the British, come from tracing individual male gene lines from continental Europe to the British Isles and dating each one.
If the Celts were not our main aboriginal stock, how do we explain the wide historical distribution and influence of Celtic languages? There are many examples of language change without significant population replacement; even so, some people must have brought Celtic languages to our isles. So where did they come from, and when?
The orthodox view of the origins of the Celts turns out to be an archaeological myth left over from the 19th century. Over the past 200 years, a myth has grown up of the Celts as a vast, culturally sophisticated but warlike people from central Europe, north of the Alps and the Danube, who invaded most of Europe, including the British Isles, during the iron age, around 300 BC.
Central Europe during the last millennium BC certainly was the time and place of the exotic and fierce Hallstatt culture and, later, the La Tène culture, with their prestigious, iron-age metal jewellery wrought with intricately woven swirls. Hoards of such jewellery and weapons, some fashioned in gold, have been dug up in Ireland, seeming to confirm central Europe as the source of migration. The swirling style of decoration is immortalised in such cultural icons as the Book of Kells, the illuminated Irish manuscript (Trinity College, Dublin), and the bronze Battersea shield (British Museum), evoking the western British Isles as a surviving remnant of past Celtic glory. But unfortunately for this orthodoxy, these artistic styles spread generally in Europe as cultural fashions, often made locally. There is no evidence they came to Britain and Ireland as part of an invasion.
Many archaeologists still hold this view of a grand iron-age Celtic culture in the centre of the continent, which shrank to a western rump after Roman times. It is also the basis of a strong sense of ethnic identity that millions of members of the so-called Celtic diaspora hold. But there is absolutely no evidence, linguistic, archaeological or genetic, that identifies the Hallstatt or La Tène regions or cultures as Celtic homelands. The notion derives from a mistake made by the historian Herodotus 2,500 years ago when, in a passing remark about the “Keltoi,” he placed them at the source of the Danube, which he thought was near the Pyrenees. Everything else about his description located the Keltoi in the region of Iberia.
The late 19th-century French historian Marie Henri d’Arbois de Jubainville decided that Herodotus had meant to place the Celtic homeland in southern Germany. His idea has remained in the books ever since, despite a mountain of other evidence that Celts derived from southwestern Europe. For the idea of the south German “Empire of the Celts” to survive as the orthodoxy for so long has required determined misreading of texts by Caesar, Strabo, Livy and others. And the well-recorded Celtic invasions of Italy across the French Alps from the west in the 1st millennium BC have been systematically reinterpreted as coming from Germany, across the Austrian Alps.
De Jubainville’s Celtic myth has been deconstructed in two recent sceptical publications: The Atlantic Celts: Ancient People or Modern Invention by Simon James (1999), and The Celts: Origins, Myths and Inventions by John Collis (2003). Nevertheless, the story lingers on in standard texts and notably in The Celts, a Channel 4 documentary broadcast in February. “Celt” is now a term that sceptics consider so corrupted in the archaeological and popular literature that it is worthless.
This is too drastic a view. It is only the central European homeland theory that is false. The connection between modern Celtic languages and those spoken in southwest Europe during Roman times is clear and valid. Caesar wrote that the Gauls living south of the Seine called themselves Celts. That region, in particular Normandy, has the highest density of ancient Celtic place-names and Celtic inscriptions in Europe. They are common in the rest of southern France (excluding the formerly Basque region of Gascony), Spain, Portugal and the British Isles. Conversely, Celtic place-names are hard to find east of the Rhine in central Europe.
Given the distribution of Celtic languages in southwest Europe, it is most likely that they were spread by a wave of agriculturalists who dispersed 7,000 years ago from Anatolia, travelling along the north coast of the Mediterranean to Italy, France, Spain and then up the Atlantic coast to the British Isles. There is a dated archaeological trail for this. My genetic analysis shows exact counterparts for this trail both in the male Y chromosome and the maternally transmitted mitochondrial DNA right up to Cornwall, Wales, Ireland and the English south coast.
Further evidence for the Mediterranean origins of Celtic invaders is preserved in medieval Gaelic literature. According to the orthodox academic view of “iron-age Celtic invasions” from central Europe, Celtic cultural history should start in the British Isles no earlier than 300 BC. Yet Irish legend tells us that all six of the cycles of invasion came from the Mediterranean via Spain, during the late Neolithic to bronze age, and were completed 3,700 years ago.
Anglo-Saxon ethnic cleansing?
The other myth I was taught at school, one which persists to this day, is that the English are almost all descended from 5th-century invaders, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, from the Danish peninsula, who wiped out the indigenous Celtic population of England.
The story originates with the clerical historians of the early dark ages. Gildas (6th century AD) and Bede (7th century) tell of Saxons and Angles invading over the 5th and 6th centuries. Gildas, in particular, sprinkles his tale with “rivers of blood” descriptions of Saxon massacres. And then there is the well-documented history of Anglian and Saxon kingdoms covering England for 500 years before the Norman invasion.
But who were those Ancient Britons left in England to be slaughtered when the legions left? The idea that the Celts were eradicated—culturally, linguistically and genetically—by invading Angles and Saxons derives from the idea of a previously uniformly Celtic English landscape. But the presence in Roman England of some Celtic personal and place-names doesn’t mean that all ancient Britons were Celts or Celtic-speaking.
The genocidal view was generated, like the Celtic myth, by historians and archaeologists over the last 200 years. With the swing in academic fashion against “migrationism” (seeing the spread of cultural influence as dependent on significant migrations) over the past couple of decades, archaeologists are now downplaying this story, although it remains a strong underlying perspective in history books.
Some geneticists still cling to the genocide story. Research by several genetics teams associated with University College London has concentrated in recent years on proving the wipeout view on the basis of similarities of male Y chromosome gene group frequency between Frisia/north Germany and England. One of the London groups attracted press attention in July by claiming that the close similarities were the result of genocide followed by a social-sexual apartheid that enhanced Anglo-Saxon reproductive success over Celtic.
The problem is that the English resemble in this way all the other countries of northwest Europe as well as the Frisians and Germans. Using the same method (principal components analysis, see note below), I have found greater similarities of this kind between the southern English and Belgians than the supposedly Anglo-Saxon homelands at the base of the Danish peninsula. These different regions could not all have been waiting their turn to commit genocide on the former Celtic population of England. The most likely reason for the genetic similarities between these neighbouring countries and England is that they all had similar prehistoric settlement histories.
When I looked at exact gene type matches between the British Isles and the continent, there were indeed specific matches between the continental Anglo-Saxon homelands and England, but these amounted to only 5 per cent of modern English male lines, rising to 15 per cent in parts of Norfolk where the Angles first settled. There were no such matches with Frisia, which tends to confirm a specific Anglo-Saxon event since Frisia is closer to England, so would be expected to have more matches.
When I examined dates of intrusive male gene lines to look for those coming in from northwest Europe during the past 3,000 years, there was a similarly low rate of immigration, by far the majority arriving in the Neolithic period. The English maternal genetic record (mtDNA) is consistent with this and contradicts the Anglo-Saxon wipeout story. English females almost completely lack the characteristic Saxon mtDNA marker type still found in the homeland of the Angles and Saxons. The conclusion is that there was an Anglo-Saxon invasion, but of a minority elite type, with no evidence of subsequent “sexual apartheid.”
The orthodox view is that the entire population of the British Isles, including England, was Celtic-speaking when Caesar invaded. But if that were the case, a modest Anglo-Saxon invasion is unlikely to have swept away all traces of Celtic language from the pre-existing population of England. Yet there are only half a dozen Celtic words in English, the rest being mainly Germanic, Norman or medieval Latin. One explanation is that England was not mainly Celtic-speaking before the Anglo-Saxons. Consider, for example, the near-total absence of Celtic inscriptions in England (outside Cornwall), although they are abundant in Ireland, Wales, Scotland and Brittany.
Who was here when the Romans came?
So who were the Britons inhabiting England at the time of the Roman invasion? The history of pre-Roman coins in southern Britain reveals an influence from Belgic Gaul. The tribes of England south of the Thames and along the south coast during Caesar’s time all had Belgic names or affiliations. Caesar tells us that these large intrusive settlements had replaced an earlier British population, which had retreated to the hinterland of southeast England. The latter may have been the large Celtic tribe, the Catuvellauni, situated in the home counties north of the Thames. Tacitus reported that between Britain and Gaul “the language differs but little.”
The common language referred to by Tacitus was probably not Celtic, but was similar to that spoken by the Belgae, who may have been a Germanic people, as implied by Caesar. In other words, a Germanic-type language could already have been indigenous to England at the time of the Roman invasion. In support of this inference, there is some recent lexical (vocabulary) evidence analysed by Cambridge geneticist Peter Forster and continental colleagues. They found that the date of the split between old English and continental Germanic languages goes much further back than the dark ages, and that English may have been a separate, fourth branch of the Germanic language before the Roman invasion.
Apart from the Belgian connection in the south, my analysis of the genetic evidence also shows that there were major Scandinavian incursions into northern and eastern Britain, from Shetland to Anglia, during the Neolithic period and before the Romans. These are consistent with the intense cultural interchanges across the North sea during the Neolithic and bronze age. Early Anglian dialects, such as found in the old English saga Beowulf, owe much of their vocabulary to Scandinavian languages. This is consistent with the fact that Beowulf was set in Denmark and Sweden and that the cultural affiliations of the early Anglian kingdoms, such as found in the Sutton Hoo boat burial, derive from Scandinavia.
A picture thus emerges of the dark-ages invasions of England and northeastern Britain as less like replacements than minority elite additions, akin to earlier and larger Neolithic intrusions from the same places. There were battles for dominance between chieftains, all of Germanic origin, each invader sharing much culturally with their newly conquered indigenous subjects.
So, based on the overall genetic perspective of the British, it seems that Celts, Belgians, Angles, Jutes, Saxons, Vikings and Normans were all immigrant minorities compared with the Basque pioneers, who first ventured into the empty, chilly lands so recently vacated by the great ice sheets.
Note: How does genetic tracking work?
The greatest advances in genetic tracing and measuring migrations over the past two decades have used samples from living populations to reconstruct the past. Such research goes back to the discovery of blood groups, but our Y-chromosomes and mitochondrial DNA are the most fruitful markers to study since they do not get mixed up at each generation. Study of mitochondrial DNA in the British goes back over a decade, and from 2000 to 2003 London-based researchers established a database of the geographically informative Y-chromosomes by systematic sampling throughout the British Isles. Most of these samples were collected from people living in small, long-established towns, whose grandparents had also lived there.
Two alternative methods of analysis are used. In the British Y-chromosome studies, the traditional approach of principal components analysis was used to compare similarities between whole sample populations. This method reduces complexity of genetic analysis by averaging the variation in frequencies of numerous genetic markers into a smaller number of parcels—the principal components—of decreasing statistical importance. The newer approach that I use, the phylogeographic method, follows individual genes rather than whole populations. The geographical distribution of individual gene lines is analysed with respect to their position on a gene tree, to reconstruct their origins, dates and routes of movement.
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/mythsofbritishancestry/#.UmRehXcvY_O
by Stephen Oppenheimer / October 21, 2006
Read Stephen Oppenheimer’s follow-up to this article here, in the June 2007 edition of Prospect, as he answers some of the many comments and queries readers have sent in response to his analysis. You can also find out more about his work here, at the Bradshaw Foundation website.
The fact that the British and the Irish both live on islands gives them a misleading sense of security about their unique historical identities. But do we really know who we are, where we come from and what defines the nature of our genetic and cultural heritage? Who are and were the Scots, the Welsh, the Irish and the English? And did the English really crush a glorious Celtic heritage?
Everyone has heard of Celts, Anglo-Saxons and Vikings. And most of us are familiar with the idea that the English are descended from Anglo-Saxons, who invaded eastern England after the Romans left, while most of the people in the rest of the British Isles derive from indigenous Celtic ancestors with a sprinkling of Viking blood around the fringes.
Yet there is no agreement among historians or archaeologists on the meaning of the words “Celtic” or “Anglo-Saxon.” What is more, new evidence from genetic analysis (see note below) indicates that the Anglo-Saxons and Celts, to the extent that they can be defined genetically, were both small immigrant minorities. Neither group had much more impact on the British Isles gene pool than the Vikings, the Normans or, indeed, immigrants of the past 50 years.
The genetic evidence shows that three quarters of our ancestors came to this corner of Europe as hunter-gatherers, between 15,000 and 7,500 years ago, after the melting of the ice caps but before the land broke away from the mainland and divided into islands. Our subsequent separation from Europe has preserved a genetic time capsule of southwestern Europe during the ice age, which we share most closely with the former ice-age refuge in the Basque country. The first settlers were unlikely to have spoken a Celtic language but possibly a tongue related to the unique Basque language.
Another wave of immigration arrived during the Neolithic period, when farming developed about 6,500 years ago. But the English still derive most of their current gene pool from the same early Basque source as the Irish, Welsh and Scots. These figures are at odds with the modern perceptions of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon ethnicity based on more recent invasions. There were many later invasions, as well as less violent immigrations, and each left a genetic signal, but no individual event contributed much more than 5 per cent to our modern genetic mix.
Many myths about the Celts
Celtic languages and the people who brought them probably first arrived during the Neolithic period. The regions we now regard as Celtic heartlands actually had less immigration from the continent during this time than England. Ireland, being to the west, has changed least since the hunter-gatherer period and received fewer subsequent migrants (about 12 per cent of the population) than anywhere else. Wales and Cornwall have received about 20 per cent, Scotland and its associated islands 30 per cent, while eastern and southern England, being nearer the continent, has received one third of its population from outside over the past 6,500 years. These estimates, set out in my book The Origins of the British, come from tracing individual male gene lines from continental Europe to the British Isles and dating each one.
If the Celts were not our main aboriginal stock, how do we explain the wide historical distribution and influence of Celtic languages? There are many examples of language change without significant population replacement; even so, some people must have brought Celtic languages to our isles. So where did they come from, and when?
The orthodox view of the origins of the Celts turns out to be an archaeological myth left over from the 19th century. Over the past 200 years, a myth has grown up of the Celts as a vast, culturally sophisticated but warlike people from central Europe, north of the Alps and the Danube, who invaded most of Europe, including the British Isles, during the iron age, around 300 BC.
Central Europe during the last millennium BC certainly was the time and place of the exotic and fierce Hallstatt culture and, later, the La Tène culture, with their prestigious, iron-age metal jewellery wrought with intricately woven swirls. Hoards of such jewellery and weapons, some fashioned in gold, have been dug up in Ireland, seeming to confirm central Europe as the source of migration. The swirling style of decoration is immortalised in such cultural icons as the Book of Kells, the illuminated Irish manuscript (Trinity College, Dublin), and the bronze Battersea shield (British Museum), evoking the western British Isles as a surviving remnant of past Celtic glory. But unfortunately for this orthodoxy, these artistic styles spread generally in Europe as cultural fashions, often made locally. There is no evidence they came to Britain and Ireland as part of an invasion.
Many archaeologists still hold this view of a grand iron-age Celtic culture in the centre of the continent, which shrank to a western rump after Roman times. It is also the basis of a strong sense of ethnic identity that millions of members of the so-called Celtic diaspora hold. But there is absolutely no evidence, linguistic, archaeological or genetic, that identifies the Hallstatt or La Tène regions or cultures as Celtic homelands. The notion derives from a mistake made by the historian Herodotus 2,500 years ago when, in a passing remark about the “Keltoi,” he placed them at the source of the Danube, which he thought was near the Pyrenees. Everything else about his description located the Keltoi in the region of Iberia.
The late 19th-century French historian Marie Henri d’Arbois de Jubainville decided that Herodotus had meant to place the Celtic homeland in southern Germany. His idea has remained in the books ever since, despite a mountain of other evidence that Celts derived from southwestern Europe. For the idea of the south German “Empire of the Celts” to survive as the orthodoxy for so long has required determined misreading of texts by Caesar, Strabo, Livy and others. And the well-recorded Celtic invasions of Italy across the French Alps from the west in the 1st millennium BC have been systematically reinterpreted as coming from Germany, across the Austrian Alps.
De Jubainville’s Celtic myth has been deconstructed in two recent sceptical publications: The Atlantic Celts: Ancient People or Modern Invention by Simon James (1999), and The Celts: Origins, Myths and Inventions by John Collis (2003). Nevertheless, the story lingers on in standard texts and notably in The Celts, a Channel 4 documentary broadcast in February. “Celt” is now a term that sceptics consider so corrupted in the archaeological and popular literature that it is worthless.
This is too drastic a view. It is only the central European homeland theory that is false. The connection between modern Celtic languages and those spoken in southwest Europe during Roman times is clear and valid. Caesar wrote that the Gauls living south of the Seine called themselves Celts. That region, in particular Normandy, has the highest density of ancient Celtic place-names and Celtic inscriptions in Europe. They are common in the rest of southern France (excluding the formerly Basque region of Gascony), Spain, Portugal and the British Isles. Conversely, Celtic place-names are hard to find east of the Rhine in central Europe.
Given the distribution of Celtic languages in southwest Europe, it is most likely that they were spread by a wave of agriculturalists who dispersed 7,000 years ago from Anatolia, travelling along the north coast of the Mediterranean to Italy, France, Spain and then up the Atlantic coast to the British Isles. There is a dated archaeological trail for this. My genetic analysis shows exact counterparts for this trail both in the male Y chromosome and the maternally transmitted mitochondrial DNA right up to Cornwall, Wales, Ireland and the English south coast.
Further evidence for the Mediterranean origins of Celtic invaders is preserved in medieval Gaelic literature. According to the orthodox academic view of “iron-age Celtic invasions” from central Europe, Celtic cultural history should start in the British Isles no earlier than 300 BC. Yet Irish legend tells us that all six of the cycles of invasion came from the Mediterranean via Spain, during the late Neolithic to bronze age, and were completed 3,700 years ago.
Anglo-Saxon ethnic cleansing?
The other myth I was taught at school, one which persists to this day, is that the English are almost all descended from 5th-century invaders, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, from the Danish peninsula, who wiped out the indigenous Celtic population of England.
The story originates with the clerical historians of the early dark ages. Gildas (6th century AD) and Bede (7th century) tell of Saxons and Angles invading over the 5th and 6th centuries. Gildas, in particular, sprinkles his tale with “rivers of blood” descriptions of Saxon massacres. And then there is the well-documented history of Anglian and Saxon kingdoms covering England for 500 years before the Norman invasion.
But who were those Ancient Britons left in England to be slaughtered when the legions left? The idea that the Celts were eradicated—culturally, linguistically and genetically—by invading Angles and Saxons derives from the idea of a previously uniformly Celtic English landscape. But the presence in Roman England of some Celtic personal and place-names doesn’t mean that all ancient Britons were Celts or Celtic-speaking.
The genocidal view was generated, like the Celtic myth, by historians and archaeologists over the last 200 years. With the swing in academic fashion against “migrationism” (seeing the spread of cultural influence as dependent on significant migrations) over the past couple of decades, archaeologists are now downplaying this story, although it remains a strong underlying perspective in history books.
Some geneticists still cling to the genocide story. Research by several genetics teams associated with University College London has concentrated in recent years on proving the wipeout view on the basis of similarities of male Y chromosome gene group frequency between Frisia/north Germany and England. One of the London groups attracted press attention in July by claiming that the close similarities were the result of genocide followed by a social-sexual apartheid that enhanced Anglo-Saxon reproductive success over Celtic.
The problem is that the English resemble in this way all the other countries of northwest Europe as well as the Frisians and Germans. Using the same method (principal components analysis, see note below), I have found greater similarities of this kind between the southern English and Belgians than the supposedly Anglo-Saxon homelands at the base of the Danish peninsula. These different regions could not all have been waiting their turn to commit genocide on the former Celtic population of England. The most likely reason for the genetic similarities between these neighbouring countries and England is that they all had similar prehistoric settlement histories.
When I looked at exact gene type matches between the British Isles and the continent, there were indeed specific matches between the continental Anglo-Saxon homelands and England, but these amounted to only 5 per cent of modern English male lines, rising to 15 per cent in parts of Norfolk where the Angles first settled. There were no such matches with Frisia, which tends to confirm a specific Anglo-Saxon event since Frisia is closer to England, so would be expected to have more matches.
When I examined dates of intrusive male gene lines to look for those coming in from northwest Europe during the past 3,000 years, there was a similarly low rate of immigration, by far the majority arriving in the Neolithic period. The English maternal genetic record (mtDNA) is consistent with this and contradicts the Anglo-Saxon wipeout story. English females almost completely lack the characteristic Saxon mtDNA marker type still found in the homeland of the Angles and Saxons. The conclusion is that there was an Anglo-Saxon invasion, but of a minority elite type, with no evidence of subsequent “sexual apartheid.”
The orthodox view is that the entire population of the British Isles, including England, was Celtic-speaking when Caesar invaded. But if that were the case, a modest Anglo-Saxon invasion is unlikely to have swept away all traces of Celtic language from the pre-existing population of England. Yet there are only half a dozen Celtic words in English, the rest being mainly Germanic, Norman or medieval Latin. One explanation is that England was not mainly Celtic-speaking before the Anglo-Saxons. Consider, for example, the near-total absence of Celtic inscriptions in England (outside Cornwall), although they are abundant in Ireland, Wales, Scotland and Brittany.
Who was here when the Romans came?
So who were the Britons inhabiting England at the time of the Roman invasion? The history of pre-Roman coins in southern Britain reveals an influence from Belgic Gaul. The tribes of England south of the Thames and along the south coast during Caesar’s time all had Belgic names or affiliations. Caesar tells us that these large intrusive settlements had replaced an earlier British population, which had retreated to the hinterland of southeast England. The latter may have been the large Celtic tribe, the Catuvellauni, situated in the home counties north of the Thames. Tacitus reported that between Britain and Gaul “the language differs but little.”
The common language referred to by Tacitus was probably not Celtic, but was similar to that spoken by the Belgae, who may have been a Germanic people, as implied by Caesar. In other words, a Germanic-type language could already have been indigenous to England at the time of the Roman invasion. In support of this inference, there is some recent lexical (vocabulary) evidence analysed by Cambridge geneticist Peter Forster and continental colleagues. They found that the date of the split between old English and continental Germanic languages goes much further back than the dark ages, and that English may have been a separate, fourth branch of the Germanic language before the Roman invasion.
Apart from the Belgian connection in the south, my analysis of the genetic evidence also shows that there were major Scandinavian incursions into northern and eastern Britain, from Shetland to Anglia, during the Neolithic period and before the Romans. These are consistent with the intense cultural interchanges across the North sea during the Neolithic and bronze age. Early Anglian dialects, such as found in the old English saga Beowulf, owe much of their vocabulary to Scandinavian languages. This is consistent with the fact that Beowulf was set in Denmark and Sweden and that the cultural affiliations of the early Anglian kingdoms, such as found in the Sutton Hoo boat burial, derive from Scandinavia.
A picture thus emerges of the dark-ages invasions of England and northeastern Britain as less like replacements than minority elite additions, akin to earlier and larger Neolithic intrusions from the same places. There were battles for dominance between chieftains, all of Germanic origin, each invader sharing much culturally with their newly conquered indigenous subjects.
So, based on the overall genetic perspective of the British, it seems that Celts, Belgians, Angles, Jutes, Saxons, Vikings and Normans were all immigrant minorities compared with the Basque pioneers, who first ventured into the empty, chilly lands so recently vacated by the great ice sheets.
Note: How does genetic tracking work?
The greatest advances in genetic tracing and measuring migrations over the past two decades have used samples from living populations to reconstruct the past. Such research goes back to the discovery of blood groups, but our Y-chromosomes and mitochondrial DNA are the most fruitful markers to study since they do not get mixed up at each generation. Study of mitochondrial DNA in the British goes back over a decade, and from 2000 to 2003 London-based researchers established a database of the geographically informative Y-chromosomes by systematic sampling throughout the British Isles. Most of these samples were collected from people living in small, long-established towns, whose grandparents had also lived there.
Two alternative methods of analysis are used. In the British Y-chromosome studies, the traditional approach of principal components analysis was used to compare similarities between whole sample populations. This method reduces complexity of genetic analysis by averaging the variation in frequencies of numerous genetic markers into a smaller number of parcels—the principal components—of decreasing statistical importance. The newer approach that I use, the phylogeographic method, follows individual genes rather than whole populations. The geographical distribution of individual gene lines is analysed with respect to their position on a gene tree, to reconstruct their origins, dates and routes of movement.
http://www.genomenewsnetwork.org/articles/07_03/myths_art.shtml
If it weren't for the nucleosome, most eukaryotic cells would not be able to actually hold the huge amounts of long, stringy DNA in their cells. The storage efficiency achieved by nucleosomes is analogous to the construction of a baseball, in which almost 300 m of yarn are wrapped tightly around a cork core to yield a ball with a diameter of only 230 mm.
Nucleosomes themselves then join together and coil together into larger structures called supercoils, to which more supporting proteins are added to yield a final compact chromosome.
Nucleosomes themselves then join together and coil together into larger structures called supercoils, to which more supporting proteins are added to yield a final compact chromosome.
Eleanor of Aquitaine and Rosamund de Clifford, wife and mistress of King Henry II
MATERNAL ANCESTRY:
http://www.oxfordancestors.com/content/view/35/55/
A person’s maternal ancestry is traced by mitochondrial DNA or mtDNA for short. Both men and women possess mtDNA, but only women pass it on to their children..
So we all inherit our mtDNAs from our mothers, but not from our fathers. Your mother inherited it from her mother, who inherited it from hers, and so on back through time. Therefore, mtDNA traces an unbroken maternal line back through time for generation upon generation far further back than any written record.
Research at Oxford University and elsewhere over many years has shown that all of our maternal lines are connected at some time in the past and that these connections can be traced by reading mtDNA. One striking finding was that people tended to cluster into a small number of groups, which could be defined by the precise sequence of their mtDNA. In native Europeans, for example, there were seven such groups, among Native Americans there were four, among Japanese people there were nine, and so on. Each of these groups, by an astounding yet inescapable logic, traced back to just one woman, the common maternal ancestor of everyone in her group, or clan.
For our MatriLine™ service, we read a section of your mtDNA, about 400 base pairs long, and compare its precise sequence to the many thousands of others from all over the world that we have in our database. That way we can not only give you an exact readout of your DNA sequence, but also discover to which of the clans you belong, and from which ancestral mother you are descended. For many of the ancestral mothers, and there are about 36 world-wide, we know whereabouts they lived and how many ten of thousands of years ago. DNA changes very slowly over time and this is what we use to calculate how long ago the clan mothers lived. By studying features of the geographical distribution of their present-day descendants, we can work out where they lived as well. To emphasise that they were real individuals, we have given them all names and, using archaeological and other evidence, we have reconstructed their imagined lives.
Everyone in the same clan is a direct maternal descendant of one of these clan mothers and carries her DNA within every cell of their body. Your mtDNA actually helps cells use oxygen – so you are using your clan mother’s mtDNA every time you breathe. However, not everyone in the same clan has exactly the same mtDNA, because DNA changes gradually over the generations. From your precise DNA result, we are able to assign you a place within the genealogy of the clan, which will be shown on your “Seven Daughters of Eve” or “World Clans” certificate.
The clan mothers were not the only people alive at the time, of course, but they were the only ones to have direct maternal descendants living right through to the present day. The other women around, or their descendants, either had no children at all or had only sons, who could not pass on their mtDNA. And, of course, the clan mothers had ancestors themselves. Amazingly, their genealogies have also been discovered. They show how everyone alive on the planet today can trace their maternal ancestry back to just one woman. By all accounts, she lived in Africa about 150,000 – 200,000 years ago and is known as “Mitochondrial Eve”. On your “World Clans” certificate you will see how you and your clan mother relate to all the others in the human family and to “Mitochondrial Eve” herself.
THE EUROPEAN CLANS – The Seven Daughters of Eve
The clan of Ursula
(Latin for she-bear)
is the oldest of the seven native European clans. It was founded around 45,000 years ago by the first modern humans, Homo sapiens, as they established themselves in Europe. Today, about 11% of modern Europeans are the direct maternal descendants of Ursula. They come from all parts of Europe, but the clan is particularly well represented in western Britain and Scandinavia.
The clan of Xenia
(Greek for hospitable)
is the second oldest of the seven native European clans. It was founded 25,000 years ago by the second wave of modern humans, Homo sapiens, who established themselves in Europe, just prior to the coldest part of the last Ice Age. Today around 7% of native Europeans are in the clan of Xenia. Within the clan, three distinct branches fan out over Europe. One is still largely confined to Eastern Europe while the other two have spread further to the West into central Europe and as far as France and Britain. About 1% of Native Americans are also in the clan of Xenia.
The clan of Helena
(Greek for light)
is by far the largest and most successful of the seven native clans with 41% of Europeans belonging to one of its many branches. It began 20,000 years ago with the birth of Helena somewhere in the valleys of the Dordogne and the Vezere, in south-central France. The clan is widespread throughout all parts of Europe, but reaches its highest frequency among the Basque people of northern Spain and southern France.
The clan of Velda
(Scandinavian for ruler)
is the smallest of the seven clans containing only about 4% of native Europeans. Velda lived 17,000 years ago in the limestone hills of Cantabria in northwest Spain. Her descendants are found nowadays mainly in western and northern Europe and are surprisingly frequent among the Saami people of Finland and Northern Norway.
The clan of Tara
(Gaelic for rocky hill)
includes slightly fewer than 10% of modern Europeans. Its many branches are widely distributed throughout southern and western Europe with particularly high concentrations in Ireland and the west of Britain. Tara herself lived 17,000 years ago in the northwest of Italy among the hills of Tuscany and along the estuary of the river Arno.
The clan of Katrine
(Greek for pure)
is a medium sized clan with 10% of Europeans among its membership. Katrine herself lived 15,000 years ago in the wooded plains of northeast Italy, now flooded by the Adriatic, and among the southern foothills of the Alps. Her descendants are still there in numbers, but have also spread throughout central and northern Europe.
The clan of Jasmine
(Persian for flower)
is the second largest of the seven European clans after Helena and is the only one to have its origins outside Europe. Jasmine and her descendants, who now make up 12% of Europeans, were among the first farmers and brought the agricultural revolution to Europe from the Middle East around 8,500 years ago.
The clan of Ulrike
(German for Mistress of All)
is not among the original “Seven Daughters of Eve” clans, but with just under 2% of Europeans among its members, it has a claim to being included among the numerically important clans. Ulrike lived about 18,000 years ago in the cold refuges of the Ukraine at the northern limits of human habitation. Though Ulrike’s descendants are nowhere common, the clan is found today mainly in the east and north of Europe with particularly high concentrations in Scandinavia and the Baltic states.
http://www.oxfordancestors.com/content/view/35/55/
A person’s maternal ancestry is traced by mitochondrial DNA or mtDNA for short. Both men and women possess mtDNA, but only women pass it on to their children..
So we all inherit our mtDNAs from our mothers, but not from our fathers. Your mother inherited it from her mother, who inherited it from hers, and so on back through time. Therefore, mtDNA traces an unbroken maternal line back through time for generation upon generation far further back than any written record.
Research at Oxford University and elsewhere over many years has shown that all of our maternal lines are connected at some time in the past and that these connections can be traced by reading mtDNA. One striking finding was that people tended to cluster into a small number of groups, which could be defined by the precise sequence of their mtDNA. In native Europeans, for example, there were seven such groups, among Native Americans there were four, among Japanese people there were nine, and so on. Each of these groups, by an astounding yet inescapable logic, traced back to just one woman, the common maternal ancestor of everyone in her group, or clan.
For our MatriLine™ service, we read a section of your mtDNA, about 400 base pairs long, and compare its precise sequence to the many thousands of others from all over the world that we have in our database. That way we can not only give you an exact readout of your DNA sequence, but also discover to which of the clans you belong, and from which ancestral mother you are descended. For many of the ancestral mothers, and there are about 36 world-wide, we know whereabouts they lived and how many ten of thousands of years ago. DNA changes very slowly over time and this is what we use to calculate how long ago the clan mothers lived. By studying features of the geographical distribution of their present-day descendants, we can work out where they lived as well. To emphasise that they were real individuals, we have given them all names and, using archaeological and other evidence, we have reconstructed their imagined lives.
Everyone in the same clan is a direct maternal descendant of one of these clan mothers and carries her DNA within every cell of their body. Your mtDNA actually helps cells use oxygen – so you are using your clan mother’s mtDNA every time you breathe. However, not everyone in the same clan has exactly the same mtDNA, because DNA changes gradually over the generations. From your precise DNA result, we are able to assign you a place within the genealogy of the clan, which will be shown on your “Seven Daughters of Eve” or “World Clans” certificate.
The clan mothers were not the only people alive at the time, of course, but they were the only ones to have direct maternal descendants living right through to the present day. The other women around, or their descendants, either had no children at all or had only sons, who could not pass on their mtDNA. And, of course, the clan mothers had ancestors themselves. Amazingly, their genealogies have also been discovered. They show how everyone alive on the planet today can trace their maternal ancestry back to just one woman. By all accounts, she lived in Africa about 150,000 – 200,000 years ago and is known as “Mitochondrial Eve”. On your “World Clans” certificate you will see how you and your clan mother relate to all the others in the human family and to “Mitochondrial Eve” herself.
THE EUROPEAN CLANS – The Seven Daughters of Eve
The clan of Ursula
(Latin for she-bear)
is the oldest of the seven native European clans. It was founded around 45,000 years ago by the first modern humans, Homo sapiens, as they established themselves in Europe. Today, about 11% of modern Europeans are the direct maternal descendants of Ursula. They come from all parts of Europe, but the clan is particularly well represented in western Britain and Scandinavia.
The clan of Xenia
(Greek for hospitable)
is the second oldest of the seven native European clans. It was founded 25,000 years ago by the second wave of modern humans, Homo sapiens, who established themselves in Europe, just prior to the coldest part of the last Ice Age. Today around 7% of native Europeans are in the clan of Xenia. Within the clan, three distinct branches fan out over Europe. One is still largely confined to Eastern Europe while the other two have spread further to the West into central Europe and as far as France and Britain. About 1% of Native Americans are also in the clan of Xenia.
The clan of Helena
(Greek for light)
is by far the largest and most successful of the seven native clans with 41% of Europeans belonging to one of its many branches. It began 20,000 years ago with the birth of Helena somewhere in the valleys of the Dordogne and the Vezere, in south-central France. The clan is widespread throughout all parts of Europe, but reaches its highest frequency among the Basque people of northern Spain and southern France.
The clan of Velda
(Scandinavian for ruler)
is the smallest of the seven clans containing only about 4% of native Europeans. Velda lived 17,000 years ago in the limestone hills of Cantabria in northwest Spain. Her descendants are found nowadays mainly in western and northern Europe and are surprisingly frequent among the Saami people of Finland and Northern Norway.
The clan of Tara
(Gaelic for rocky hill)
includes slightly fewer than 10% of modern Europeans. Its many branches are widely distributed throughout southern and western Europe with particularly high concentrations in Ireland and the west of Britain. Tara herself lived 17,000 years ago in the northwest of Italy among the hills of Tuscany and along the estuary of the river Arno.
The clan of Katrine
(Greek for pure)
is a medium sized clan with 10% of Europeans among its membership. Katrine herself lived 15,000 years ago in the wooded plains of northeast Italy, now flooded by the Adriatic, and among the southern foothills of the Alps. Her descendants are still there in numbers, but have also spread throughout central and northern Europe.
The clan of Jasmine
(Persian for flower)
is the second largest of the seven European clans after Helena and is the only one to have its origins outside Europe. Jasmine and her descendants, who now make up 12% of Europeans, were among the first farmers and brought the agricultural revolution to Europe from the Middle East around 8,500 years ago.
The clan of Ulrike
(German for Mistress of All)
is not among the original “Seven Daughters of Eve” clans, but with just under 2% of Europeans among its members, it has a claim to being included among the numerically important clans. Ulrike lived about 18,000 years ago in the cold refuges of the Ukraine at the northern limits of human habitation. Though Ulrike’s descendants are nowhere common, the clan is found today mainly in the east and north of Europe with particularly high concentrations in Scandinavia and the Baltic states.
Do you have the "Celtic Curse"
Are you Irish!? Scottish? Celtic ancestry?
New research finds high frequency of HH gene mutations in the Irish community!
If you have a Celtic heritage, ancestors from Ireland, Wales, Scotland, or Great Britain, then you are at high risk for carrying the HFE mutations for hereditary hemochromatosis (HH), also known as iron overload disease or iron storage disease according to researchers on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.
Hereditary hemochromatosis (HH) has been dubbed the "Celtic Curse" by Sandra Thomas, President and Founder of the American Hemochromatosis Society (AHS), based in Lake Mary, Florida. HH is the most common genetic disease in the USA according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia. HH is also the most common genetic disease in Ireland where a great deal of research and studies of this disease are being conducted.
Sandra's mother, Josephine Bogie Thomas, died on May 13, 1999 of primary liver cancer/hepatocellular carcinoma due to cirrhosis of the liver caused by hereditary hemochromatosis in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where she had gone for liver cancer treatments. Josephine Thomas had strong Irish, Scottish and British lines in her family tree and she carried the two major HH mutations known as cys282 gene mutations. Her daughter, Sandra, is a "silent carrier" of the same mutation. The family tree contains such names as Cooper, Bogie, Ball, Kavanaugh, and Tandy. Little did she know when she visited Ireland that she was visiting the area of the world where hemochromatosis is thought to have originated.
Researchers believe that HH originated at least 40,000 years ago in the area we now know as Ireland with a single ancestor whose genes mutated to over-absorb iron from what was then a very poor iron diet and famine conditions. This was nature's way of over-compensating for the lack of iron in the diet at that time. Today, the descendants of these ancient Celtic persons have iron fortified foods as well as an easy trip to the grocery for a steak, but their bodies still carry these ancient "survival" gene mutations which don't know when to stop absorbing iron from a normal diet. Therefore, those people who descended from this ancestor carry the mutations which absorb too much iron until it reaches toxic levels. Excess iron has no way to leave the body but by bleeding.
Unlike our ancestors, we have a plentiful supply of iron, enriched breakfast cereals, enriched breads, and iron pills which you can buy over the counter (OTC). Iron, therefore, is potentially dangerous to the unsuspecting person who carries these mutations and even though one in eight people of Northern European ancestry have this mutation (that's 32 million Americans), most of them do not know it. They may not know it, but they easily could know it through a simple genetic/DNA test that has been commercially available since 1997.
Geoffrey Block, MD, a hepatologist (liver specialist) and former director of the Hemochromatosis Center at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, states, "the appearance of the HFE gene mutation occurred somewhere from 40,000-60,000 years ago. Human DNA goes back to somewhere between 120,000-200,000 years ago. The ethnogenetic source for the C282Y (HFE) mutation arose in the Celtic 'empire'. Most people think that Celtic means Ireland, however, the Celts of 40-60,000 years ago covered Ireland to just west of Moscow, north to the upper reaches of Scandinavia, south into Spain and Portugal, and south east across the Italian peninsula and north of Greece and Turkey/Iraq."
In 1996, the gene mutations for HH were identified and a simple test developed to analyze the DNA of a person to see if they might have these mutations. People of other ethnic backgrounds may also have these mutations if their ancestors had children with carriers of the HH mutations. DNA test kits which can be used at home are now available and are fast, no pain, no blood, no needles, and are relatively inexpensive at $205 for the first family member and $150 for each additional family member being tested (available through www.healthcheckusa.com).
Other ethnic groups can also have the mutations but it is much more infrequent (i.e. Asian or Jewish). People with northern European ancestry are highest at risk with family bloodlines that go to France, Germany, and the Scandinavian countries.
In Ireland the prevalence of hereditary haemochromatosis is greater than that of cystic fibrosis, phenylketonuria and muscular dystrophy combined, writes Dr Valerie Byrnes* Haemochromatosis, an hereditary Celtic disease Hereditary haemochromatosis (HH) is a condition where intestinal iron absorption is increased leading to excessive iron accumulation in tissue and resultant organ damage. It is inherited in an autososmal recessive manner and represents one of the most common inherited diseases among individuals of Northern European descent. In Ireland its prevalence is greater than that of cystic fibrosis, phenylketonuria and muscular dystrophy combined.
It is estimated that the mutation occurred about 55,000 years ago and that it was beneficial to individuals living on an iron poor diet. This mutation may have occurred in Ireland and spread with the Irish diaspora; initially to Scandinavia with the Vikings and much later to England, the United States and Australia.
The following abstract from Dublin, Ireland discusses hereditary hemochromatosis:
(note: In Ireland, England, and Australia, hemochromatosis is spelled haemochromatosis)
HAEMOCHROMATOSIS - AN IRISH DISEASE
E. Ryan, V. Byrnes, A-M Flanagan, J. Crowe
Department of Hepatology, Mater Misericordiae Hospital, Dublin Ireland
(Hepatology Vol. 28, No.4, pt.2, October 1998; page 527A, abstract nr.1459; this is a special edition!)
It has been hypothesized that the genetic mutation leading to iron overload occurred in a race of Celtic origin and that the HLA-A3 allele might represent a marker of their migratory patterns (1) This hypothesis has recently been substantiated by the observation that individuals of British/Irish ancestry may be at particular risk of developing genetic haemochromatosis (HG) (2).
Furthermore, preliminary data on the global prevalence of the C282Y
mutation found the highest allele frequency in the Irish (45 Individuals) (3).
Are you Irish!? Scottish? Celtic ancestry?
New research finds high frequency of HH gene mutations in the Irish community!
If you have a Celtic heritage, ancestors from Ireland, Wales, Scotland, or Great Britain, then you are at high risk for carrying the HFE mutations for hereditary hemochromatosis (HH), also known as iron overload disease or iron storage disease according to researchers on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.
Hereditary hemochromatosis (HH) has been dubbed the "Celtic Curse" by Sandra Thomas, President and Founder of the American Hemochromatosis Society (AHS), based in Lake Mary, Florida. HH is the most common genetic disease in the USA according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia. HH is also the most common genetic disease in Ireland where a great deal of research and studies of this disease are being conducted.
Sandra's mother, Josephine Bogie Thomas, died on May 13, 1999 of primary liver cancer/hepatocellular carcinoma due to cirrhosis of the liver caused by hereditary hemochromatosis in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where she had gone for liver cancer treatments. Josephine Thomas had strong Irish, Scottish and British lines in her family tree and she carried the two major HH mutations known as cys282 gene mutations. Her daughter, Sandra, is a "silent carrier" of the same mutation. The family tree contains such names as Cooper, Bogie, Ball, Kavanaugh, and Tandy. Little did she know when she visited Ireland that she was visiting the area of the world where hemochromatosis is thought to have originated.
Researchers believe that HH originated at least 40,000 years ago in the area we now know as Ireland with a single ancestor whose genes mutated to over-absorb iron from what was then a very poor iron diet and famine conditions. This was nature's way of over-compensating for the lack of iron in the diet at that time. Today, the descendants of these ancient Celtic persons have iron fortified foods as well as an easy trip to the grocery for a steak, but their bodies still carry these ancient "survival" gene mutations which don't know when to stop absorbing iron from a normal diet. Therefore, those people who descended from this ancestor carry the mutations which absorb too much iron until it reaches toxic levels. Excess iron has no way to leave the body but by bleeding.
Unlike our ancestors, we have a plentiful supply of iron, enriched breakfast cereals, enriched breads, and iron pills which you can buy over the counter (OTC). Iron, therefore, is potentially dangerous to the unsuspecting person who carries these mutations and even though one in eight people of Northern European ancestry have this mutation (that's 32 million Americans), most of them do not know it. They may not know it, but they easily could know it through a simple genetic/DNA test that has been commercially available since 1997.
Geoffrey Block, MD, a hepatologist (liver specialist) and former director of the Hemochromatosis Center at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, states, "the appearance of the HFE gene mutation occurred somewhere from 40,000-60,000 years ago. Human DNA goes back to somewhere between 120,000-200,000 years ago. The ethnogenetic source for the C282Y (HFE) mutation arose in the Celtic 'empire'. Most people think that Celtic means Ireland, however, the Celts of 40-60,000 years ago covered Ireland to just west of Moscow, north to the upper reaches of Scandinavia, south into Spain and Portugal, and south east across the Italian peninsula and north of Greece and Turkey/Iraq."
In 1996, the gene mutations for HH were identified and a simple test developed to analyze the DNA of a person to see if they might have these mutations. People of other ethnic backgrounds may also have these mutations if their ancestors had children with carriers of the HH mutations. DNA test kits which can be used at home are now available and are fast, no pain, no blood, no needles, and are relatively inexpensive at $205 for the first family member and $150 for each additional family member being tested (available through www.healthcheckusa.com).
Other ethnic groups can also have the mutations but it is much more infrequent (i.e. Asian or Jewish). People with northern European ancestry are highest at risk with family bloodlines that go to France, Germany, and the Scandinavian countries.
In Ireland the prevalence of hereditary haemochromatosis is greater than that of cystic fibrosis, phenylketonuria and muscular dystrophy combined, writes Dr Valerie Byrnes* Haemochromatosis, an hereditary Celtic disease Hereditary haemochromatosis (HH) is a condition where intestinal iron absorption is increased leading to excessive iron accumulation in tissue and resultant organ damage. It is inherited in an autososmal recessive manner and represents one of the most common inherited diseases among individuals of Northern European descent. In Ireland its prevalence is greater than that of cystic fibrosis, phenylketonuria and muscular dystrophy combined.
It is estimated that the mutation occurred about 55,000 years ago and that it was beneficial to individuals living on an iron poor diet. This mutation may have occurred in Ireland and spread with the Irish diaspora; initially to Scandinavia with the Vikings and much later to England, the United States and Australia.
The following abstract from Dublin, Ireland discusses hereditary hemochromatosis:
(note: In Ireland, England, and Australia, hemochromatosis is spelled haemochromatosis)
HAEMOCHROMATOSIS - AN IRISH DISEASE
E. Ryan, V. Byrnes, A-M Flanagan, J. Crowe
Department of Hepatology, Mater Misericordiae Hospital, Dublin Ireland
(Hepatology Vol. 28, No.4, pt.2, October 1998; page 527A, abstract nr.1459; this is a special edition!)
It has been hypothesized that the genetic mutation leading to iron overload occurred in a race of Celtic origin and that the HLA-A3 allele might represent a marker of their migratory patterns (1) This hypothesis has recently been substantiated by the observation that individuals of British/Irish ancestry may be at particular risk of developing genetic haemochromatosis (HG) (2).
Furthermore, preliminary data on the global prevalence of the C282Y
mutation found the highest allele frequency in the Irish (45 Individuals) (3).
Mind and consciousness deal with experience by the first person singular (are subjective).
Science by its own rules forbids that. It only deals with the third person singular (is totally objective).
The objective world has no will (intentionality is not possible).
Only the subjective world can intend things.
Only philosophy can deal with subjectivity.
Once again,
Subjectivity is personal knowledge (Michael Polanyi)
http://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/ Michael_Polanyi
All knowing is personal
Science by its own rules forbids that. It only deals with the third person singular (is totally objective).
The objective world has no will (intentionality is not possible).
Only the subjective world can intend things.
Only philosophy can deal with subjectivity.
Once again,
Subjectivity is personal knowledge (Michael Polanyi)
http://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/ Michael_Polanyi
All knowing is personal
The Healing Power of Menstrual Blood
Modern medical research is now proving what ancient cultures have known for thousands of years: menstrual blood has incredible healing properties - including the power to regrow damaged parts of our body previously deemed to be impossible. The first successful FDA-approved trials in the US are beginning this year in the realms of heart disease and blocked blood vessels. This extremely common condition, known as 'atherosclerosis', affects almost every modern human, and responsible for nearly half of all deaths.
In animals, stem cells derived from menstrual blood have already proven to be extremely successful in clearing blocked arteries, even in the most extreme circumstances that would otherwise result in a loss of limb. This is due to the powerful ability of menstrual blood stem cells to grow new blood vessels, as they do every month in menstruating women in preparation for the possibility of pregnancy.
"Menstrual blood stem cells (also called ERC) are unique amongst clinical grade stem cells in that the cell is derived from the endometrium (lining of the uterus). Every month new blood vessels are formed in the endometrium, which subsequently are sloughed off during menstruation. We believe they play a critical role in forming new blood vessels, which is supported by numerous experiments we have conducted," said Thomas Ichim, CEO of Medistem. "Since the biological role of the ERC's is to produce new blood vessels, it is our desire to use these cells to produce new blood vessels in the legs of patients with critical [blockage]." Clinical trials are also beginning for men and women with congestive heart failure, as the stem cells have been proven effective in animals with heart failure. http://www.translational-medicine.com/content/11/1/56
Perhaps the most amazing implication of the research is that the number of menstrual stem cells released by a single woman in one menstrual cycle could potentially be used to heal thousands of people. We have truly entered a new era of medicine. As remarkable as it is, the current medical research is only the tip of the iceberg. The medical establishment fails to understand the whole story; it does not connect the dots that link this modern research to the long history of the womb religions and ancient knowledge of the powers of renewal held within the feminine womb. This biological womb power for time immemorial has been known as the Fountain of Life, or the Fountain of Youth. As we begin to remember these ancient powers let us hope that it helps to restore the true honor and respect that the womb and the feminine deserve. ~ Azra Bertrand, MD, www.thefountainoflife.org
Modern medical research is now proving what ancient cultures have known for thousands of years: menstrual blood has incredible healing properties - including the power to regrow damaged parts of our body previously deemed to be impossible. The first successful FDA-approved trials in the US are beginning this year in the realms of heart disease and blocked blood vessels. This extremely common condition, known as 'atherosclerosis', affects almost every modern human, and responsible for nearly half of all deaths.
In animals, stem cells derived from menstrual blood have already proven to be extremely successful in clearing blocked arteries, even in the most extreme circumstances that would otherwise result in a loss of limb. This is due to the powerful ability of menstrual blood stem cells to grow new blood vessels, as they do every month in menstruating women in preparation for the possibility of pregnancy.
"Menstrual blood stem cells (also called ERC) are unique amongst clinical grade stem cells in that the cell is derived from the endometrium (lining of the uterus). Every month new blood vessels are formed in the endometrium, which subsequently are sloughed off during menstruation. We believe they play a critical role in forming new blood vessels, which is supported by numerous experiments we have conducted," said Thomas Ichim, CEO of Medistem. "Since the biological role of the ERC's is to produce new blood vessels, it is our desire to use these cells to produce new blood vessels in the legs of patients with critical [blockage]." Clinical trials are also beginning for men and women with congestive heart failure, as the stem cells have been proven effective in animals with heart failure. http://www.translational-medicine.com/content/11/1/56
Perhaps the most amazing implication of the research is that the number of menstrual stem cells released by a single woman in one menstrual cycle could potentially be used to heal thousands of people. We have truly entered a new era of medicine. As remarkable as it is, the current medical research is only the tip of the iceberg. The medical establishment fails to understand the whole story; it does not connect the dots that link this modern research to the long history of the womb religions and ancient knowledge of the powers of renewal held within the feminine womb. This biological womb power for time immemorial has been known as the Fountain of Life, or the Fountain of Youth. As we begin to remember these ancient powers let us hope that it helps to restore the true honor and respect that the womb and the feminine deserve. ~ Azra Bertrand, MD, www.thefountainoflife.org
(c)2013-2015; All Rights Reserved, Iona Miller, Sangreality Trust
[email protected]
Fair Use Notice
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
[email protected]
Fair Use Notice
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
Living Roots, Io, 2015