Jungian Genealogy, by Iona Miller
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Primordial Cousins

10/25/2014

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Red-Headed Neanderthals: No Gene Flow to Humans
Though Neanderthals had red hair,
their specific mutation is not shared with red-headed humans.

Ancient DNA has been used to show aspects of Neanderthal appearance. A fragment of the gene for the melanocortin 1 receptor (MRC1) was sequenced using DNA from two Neanderthal specimens from Spain and Italy, El Sidrón 1252 and Monte Lessini (Lalueza-Fox et al. 2007). Neanderthals had a mutation in this receptor gene that has not been found in modern humans. The mutation changes an amino acid, making the resulting protein less efficient. Modern humans have other MCR1 variants that are also less active resulting in red hair and pale skin. The less active Neanderthal mutation probably also resulted in red hair and pale skin, as in modern humans.

The specific MCR1 mutation in Neanderthals has not been found in modern humans (or occurs extremely rarely in modern humans). This indicates that the two mutations for red hair and pale skin occurred independently and does not support the idea of gene flow between Neanderthals and modern humans. Pale skin may have been advantageous to Neanderthals living in Europe because of the ability to synthesize vitamin D. 

Ancient Humans Bred with Completely Unknown Species

A new study presented to the Royal Society meeting on ancient DNA in London last week has revealed a dramatic finding – the genome of one of our ancient ancestors, the Denisovans, contains a segment of DNA that seems to have come from another species that is currently unknown to science. The discovery suggests that there was rampant interbreeding between ancient human species in Europe and Asia more than 30,000 years ago. But, far more significant was the finding that they also mated with a mystery species from Asia – one that is neither human nor Neanderthal. 

Scientists launched into a flurry of discussion and debate upon hearing the study results and immediately began speculating about what this unknown species could be.  Some have suggested that a group may have branched off to Asia from the Homo heidelbernensis, who resided in Africa about half a million years ago. They are believed to be the ancestors of Europe's Neanderthals. 


However others, such as Chris Stringer, a paleoanthropologist at the London Natural History Museum, admitted that they “don’t have the faintest idea” what the mystery species could be.

Traces of the unknown new genome were detected in two teeth and a finger bone of a Denisovan, which was discovered in a Siberian cave. There is not much data available about the appearance of Denisovans due to lack of their fossils' availability, but the geneticists and researchers succeeded in arranging their entire genome very precisely.

"What it begins to suggest is that we're looking at a 'Lord of the Rings'-type world - that there were many hominid populations," Mark Thomas, an evolutionary geneticist at University College London.

The question is now: who were these mystery people that the Denisovans were breeding with?

By April Holloway
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Most Recent Common Ancestor

10/25/2014

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The idea that virtually anyone with a European ancestor descends from English royalty seems bizarre, but it accords perfectly with some recent research done by Joseph Chang, a statistician at Yale University. The mathematics of our ancestry is exceedingly complex, because the number of our ancestors increases exponentially, not linearly. These numbers are manageable in the first few generations—two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents—but they quickly spiral out of control. Go back forty generations, or about a thousand years, and each of us theoretically has more than a trillion direct ancestors—a figure that far exceeds the total number of human beings who have ever lived.

In a 1999 paper titled "Recent Common Ancestors of All Present-Day Individuals," Chang showed how to reconcile the potentially huge number of our ancestors with the quantities of people who actually lived in the past. His model is a mathematical proof that relies on such abstractions as Poisson distributions and Markov chains, but it can readily be applied to the real world. Under the conditions laid out in his paper, the most recent common ancestor of every European today (except for recent immigrants to the Continent) was someone who lived in Europe in the surprisingly recent past—only about 600 years ago.


In other words, all Europeans alive today have among their ancestors the same man or woman who lived around 1400. Before that date, according to Chang's model, the number of ancestors common to all Europeans today increased, until, about a thousand years ago, a peculiar situation prevailed: 20 percent of the adult Europeans alive in 1000 would turn out to be the ancestors of no one living today (that is, they had no children or all their descendants eventually died childless); each of the remaining 80 percent would turn out to be a direct ancestor of every European living today. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/05/the-royal-we/302497/
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Shared Ancestry

10/25/2014

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Ubiquitous shared ancestry:
We found that even people living on opposite sides of Europe are genealogically closely related to each other over the past thousand years. Even pairs of people as far apart as the UK and Turkey share a chunk of genomic material 20% of the time. Since the chance that two people inherit genetic material from any one shared ancestor from 1,000 years ago is incredibly unlikely (<10-10), to explain such sharing we need these pairs of individuals to share many ancestors. In fact, they need to share a number of ancestors that is far larger than the size of European population, indicating that any pair of individuals share as ancestors all of the individuals alive back at the time in Europe, each many times over.

This strange idea that everyone is everyone’s ancestor was actually predicted about ten years ago by Joseph Chang (and collaborators) using maths and simulations. In hindsight this is intuitively clear, due to the rapidly expanding number of ancestors you have as you go back further and further in time. You have 2 parents, 4 grand-parents, 8 great-grandparents, and so on doubling every generation. After k generations you have 2^k ancestors, and this number grows so quickly that just a thousand years back (~30 generations) you have roughly 1 billion ancestors, which is far larger than the population size of the Earth (let alone Europe) back then. The consequence is that anyone alive 1,000 years ago who left any descendants will be an ancestor of every European. While the world population is larger than the European population, the rate of growth of number of ancestors quickly dwarfs this difference, and so every human is likely related genealogically to every other human over only a slightly longer time period.
http://gcbias.org/european-genealogy-faq/

You can be related to the same ancestor multiple times. For instance, someone could be your great, great, great, great, great grandfather on your mother’s side and also on your father’s side. Because of this, you and I can share the same ancestral individual as a common ancestor many times over. People who share more common ancestors have more overlap this degree of relatedness. We can measure this difference through degree of shared genome, since even when everyone is a common genealogical ancestor, not everyone is a common genetic ancestor.

Also keep this in mind, once you get back to a certain point, the only records kept were for the upper classes, which usually meant the nobility. It is just a matter of numbers. We all have 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great grandparents, 16 great-great grandparents, 32 great-great-great grandparents, etc.

Charlemagne comes up as my 36th great grandfather. In theory,  he is just one of my 274,877,906,944 36th great grandparents. Now, since there were not 274.8 billion people in the world in 775 (there are only 7 billion now), there are a lot of places where the family tree does not split. There is no doubt if you will, if you haven't already, find a lot of cousins, even first cousins, marrying.

If you are a direct descendant from some of the first settlers from England, many were members of noble families who where in positions where they would not inherit land because of their birth order or they were fleeing for religious or political reasons. Even if your tree is filled with indentured servants in the beginning, within a few generations in the new world, those distinctions of class mattered less and less and the grandchildren of indentured servants became wealthy in their own rights.

This is not an excuse to be sloppy or lazy in your own research, but it should ease your mind when you come across famous ancestors whose descendants now number in the 10s of millions.
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Steiner's Occult Properties of Blood

10/25/2014

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In those early times the recollection of ancestral experiences was inherited, and, along with this, good or evil tendencies. In the blood of the descendants were to be traced the effects of the ancestors' tendencies. But, when the blood was mixed through exogamy, this close connection with ancestors was severed, and man began to live his own personal life. He began to regulate his moral tendencies according to what he experienced in his own personal life. Thus, in an unmixed blood is expressed the power of the ancestral life, and in a mixed blood the power of personal experience.... -Steiner, Occult Properties of Blood

At such times of suppressed consciousness he senses his ancestors within him, even as during his waking consciousness he senses the pictures of the outer world; that is to say, his forbears are active in his blood, and at such a time he dimly takes part in their remote life.... Everything, therefore, of which he has been the recipient as the result of sense-experience, lives and is active in his blood; his memory is stored with these experiences of his senses. Yet, on the other hand, the man of to-day is no longer conscious of what he possesses in his inward bodily life by inheritance from his ancestors. He knows naught concerning the forms of his inner organs; but in earlier times this was otherwise....
Such a man sensed what was within him, and as this inner experience was the result of heredity, he passed through the experiences of his ancestors by means of his inner faculty. He remembered not only his own childhood, but also the experiences of his ancestors. This life of his ancestors was, in fact, ever present in the pictures which his blood received, for, incredible as it may seem to the materialistic ideas of the present day, there was at one time a form of consciousness by means of which men considered not only their own sense-perceptions as their own experiences, but also the experiences of their forefathers...
--Rudolph Steiner, Occult Properties of Blood

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Rh- Pole Flip

10/25/2014

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Genetic mapping helps to show that a mutation from RH positive to RH negative occurred somewhere in the Basque area of Europe maybe as much as 40,000 years ago. So what happened then? Ice Age Polarity Reversal Was Global Event: Extremely Brief Reversal of Geomagnetic Field, Climate Variability, and Super Volcano
ScienceDaily — Some 41,000 years ago, a complete and rapid reversal of the geomagnetic field occurred. Magnetic studies of the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences on sediment cores from the Black Sea show that during this period, during the last ice age, a compass at the Black Sea would have pointed to the south instead of north. Moreover, data obtained by the research team formed around GFZ researchers Dr. Norbert Nowaczyk and Prof. Helge Arz, together with additional data from other studies in the North Atlantic, the South Pacific and Hawaii, prove that this polarity reversal was a global event. Their results are published in the latest issue of the scientific journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters. What is remarkable is the speed of the reversal: "The field geometry of reversed polarity, with field lines pointing into the opposite direction when compared to today's configuration, lasted for only about 440 years, and it was associated with a field strength that was only one quarter of today's field," explains Norbert Nowaczyk. "The actual polarity changes lasted only 250 years. In terms of geological time scales, that is very fast." During this period, the field was even weaker, with only 5% of today's field strength. As a consequence, Earth nearly completely lost its protection shield against hard cosmic rays, leading to a significantly increased radiation exposure.
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1/2 the US Descended from Kings

10/25/2014

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The grand revelation is that probably sixty percent or more of the American people are descended from kings.

Such descent, shared by a majority of Americans with a sizable quantity of colonial ancestry, is usually derived through roughly 350 royally descended immigrants of the 17th and 18th centuries
who have been well studied by various American scholars. They include David Faris (Plantagenet Ancestry of Seventeenth-Century Colonists, 2nd ed., NEHGS, 1999), myself (The Royal Descents of 500 Immigrants, GPC, 1993, 2nd ed. scheduled for 2002), Douglas Richardson, Paul C. Reed, Neil D. Thompson, Brice McAdoo Clagett, etc. A large number of these royal descents are adjusted every decade.

King Edward III has over 100 million living descendants. There are more than 30 million Americans with Royal or Noble ancestors, about one in ten, although most don't know it.  Almost all of us have at least one ancestral line to Charlemagne or Charles Martel, and most of us have multiple lines.  There are about the same number of Americans with documented Mayflower ancestors, and again, most don't know it.

Royal descent occurs, of course, because the younger sons and daughters of kings become or marry nobles; the younger sons and daughters of nobles become or marry landed gentry; the younger sons and daughters of landed gentry become bureaucrats or professionals (clerics, university fellows, lawyers, soldiers, etc.); and the younger sons and daughters of professional elites have become the middle-class citizenry of the Anglo-American and British-derived world, in the U.S., Canada, Australia, India, South Africa, etc. And kings and royal families, of course, were derived from barbarian chieftains who led the tribes that successfully invaded, and intermarried with the patriciate of, the late Roman Empire.

Most middle-class Americans with sizable colonial ancestry and many middle-class Europeans descend from a cluster of High Medieval kings - Plantagenets from England; Capetians from France; and Hohenstaufens from Germany. Because of various intermarriages with the families of Byzantine emperors, a large number of westerners can also trace kinship to the Safavid shahs of Persia and various Mughal princes of India. Speculative descents from many ancient world cultures have been the subject of much study in the last generation and are ably summarized by Don C. Stone in Ancient and Medieval Descents Project.
Eleventh cousins share on average 60-parts-per-billion of DNA, or about 180bp (although with wide variation due to the spotty nature of meiotic recombination: in fact, 99.5% of 11th cousins will share no stretches of DNA through recent descent at all, while the remaining 0.5% will typically share tens of thousands of bases). A study of inbreeding in European populations found that couples from the UK are, on average, as genetically related as 6th cousins. The study looked at inbreeding in Scots, and in children of one Orkadian and one non-Orkadian.
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Curate Your Genealogy

10/23/2014

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Curate Your Genealogy

Curate and archive your family's history and records. One of the many roles we have as family historians.

Genealogy without sources is Mythology
Meaningful Lies
Here, myth as opposed to history is not meant to imply "falsehood" or "lie" but  is used in the sense of narratives that reflect and advance specific ways of representing the world and,
along with it, one's place in it No science will ever replace myth, and a myth cannot be made out of any science. For it is not that "God" is a myth, but that myth is the revelation of a divine life in man.

It is not we who invent myth, rather it speaks to us as a Word of God.

The Word of God comes to us, and we have no way of distinguishing whether and to what extent it is different from God.

There is nothing about this Word that could not be considered known and human, except for the manner in which it confronts us spontaneously and places obligations upon us. It is not affected by the arbitrary operation of our will. We cannot explain an inspiration.

Our chief feeling about it is that it is not the result of our own ratiocinations, but that it came to us from elsewhere. And if we happen to have a precognitive dream, how can we possibly ascribe it to our own powers? ~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections.

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Genealogy Without Proof is Mythology

10/23/2014

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Genealogy Without Proof is Mythology

Myths are original revelations of the preconscious psyche, involuntary statements about unconscious psychic happenings… But religion is a vital link with psychic processes independent of and beyond consciousness, in the dark hinterland of the psyche.” (Carl Jung CW 9i, para. 261)

Our fearsome gods have only changed their names: they now rhyme with—ism. ~Carl Jung; "The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious", 1928.

Myths are miracle tales . . . In the everyday world of consciousness such things hardly exist; that is to say, until 1933. Only lunatics would have been found in possession of living fragments of mythology. After this date the world of heroes and monsters spread like a devastating fire over whole nations, proving that the strange world of myth had suffered no loss of vitality during the centuries of reason and enlightenment. If metaphysical ideas no longer have . . . a fascinating effect . . ., this is certainly . . . simply and solely (due) to the fact that (some symbols) express what is now welling up from the unconscious as the end-result of the development of Christian consciousness through the centuries . . . a false spirit of arrogance, hysteria, . . ., criminal amorality, and . . . a purveyor of shoddy spiritual goods, . . . philosophical stutterings, and Utopian humbug . . . That is what the post-Christian spirit looks like.
- Aion (1951) CW 9, Part II: P.66

I was driven to ask myself in all seriousness: ‘What is the myth you are living? ‘I found no answer to the question, and had to admit that I was not living a myth, or even in a myth, but rather in an uncertain cloud of theoretical possibilities which I was beginning to regard with increasing distrust…. So in the most natural way, I took it upon myself to get to know ‘my’ myth, and I regarded this as the task of tasks — for — so I told myself — how could I when treating my patients, make due allowance for the personal factor, for my personal equation, which is yet so necessary for a knowledge of the other person if I was unconscious of it. (Jung, Quoted by Shamdasani, 2009, p. 197)
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Seeking the Grail

10/23/2014

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 Our ancestors used traditional tales as vehicles for transmitting ancient wisdom accumulated over millennia to inform, instruct, and to heal. Myths, for example, are stories that have stayed alive in human imagination over long periods of time because there is a ring of truth in them about shared human experience. According to Joseph Campbell, myths, guide us in the “experience of being alive.” They are told to enlighten us about our origins, our inner realities, and what it means to be human.

Wisdom Tales:
 Traditional folk tales and multicultural myths can be used as powerful tools because they are repositories of ancient wisdom about the human condition and because they teach the language of symbolism, imagery, and metaphor. These wisdom tales can help us gain insight into behavior and can function as effective catalysts for bringing about change.  Through storytelling, we can learn the language of metaphor, which can help us intuit the existence of deeper meanings and truths.

Accessing the Truth Within
According to Marion Woodman, Jungian analyst and author, the healing power of metaphor lies in its ability to provide us with images that can transform unconscious material into conscious awareness. She believes storytelling and the use of metaphor have more of an immediate impact than abstract analysis. “So long as it’s theory, it’s removed from the actual feeling…if I put it in a story form or use images, the mind may not hear it, but the body responds. And if it’s reverberating in the body, sooner or later it’s going to get through to consciousness.”

...if I put it in a story form or use images, the mind may not hear it, but the body responds.
- Marion Woodman

Our mind is the scene upon which the gods perform their plays, and we don't know the beginning and we don't know the end. ~Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1306.

On a parallel track, beginners to genealogy often ask if it is indeed possible to trace their pedigree or lineage back to Adam. To answer this question, I always quote from The Ensign, February 1984, an article by Robert C. Gunderson, senior royalty research specialist at the Family History Library. “The simplest answer to this question is no,” he said.

“In my 35 years of genealogical research, I have yet to see a pedigree back to Adam that can be documented. I have reviewed hundreds of pedigrees over the years, and I have not found one where each connection on the pedigree can be justified by evidence from contemporary documents. In my opinion, it is not even possible to verify historically a connected European pedigree earlier than the time of the Merovingian Kings (circa 450 AD to 752 AD). Every pedigree I have seen which attempts to bridge the gap between that time and the biblical pedigree appears to be based on questionable tradition, or at worst, plain fabrication. Generally these pedigrees offer no evidence as to the origin of the information, or they cite a vague source.”


Ancient genealogy suffers from four marked defects: it can hardly be disentangled from mythology; it is fragmentary, frequently unreliable and contradictory; it confuses tribal origins with individual names; it is artificial in that often its main purpose is to offer a descent that would allow a person to qualify for office, priestly or secular.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; Conversations with Carl Jung and Richard L. Evans

Because much of genealogical best-practice includes mythic and fictional characters, the process is best approached with a Jungian orientation, rather than as hard historical fact. In terms of the collective unconscious it has psychic reality, and Jungian and post-Jungian practices allow us to interact with such material in a deeply meaningful way that enhances integration.

Once one withdraws projections and 'sees through' things, then virtually everything becomes myth. This may make the world seem meaningless but that is only so if one only believes in personal and cultural ego power. If one views the human as potentially creative within the context of a mythical world then one can engage with myth and narrative and experience the connection to one's ancestry, to one's physical, intellectual, spiritual roots.
Art is rooted in participation mystique.

"Participation mystique." is fusion or merger, the illusion necessary to maintain our unconscious lives in the external world. It is experienced due to "Our knowledge that we are in a fictional world [which] lets us mark off the experience. We know we are reading; we know we will not act. This knowledge allows us to sink into the fiction, to connect to less conscious experience, to reach back into less differentiated or undifferentiated levels of psychic life. We never lose our connection with reality (unless one is psychotic): we know we are reading. In one part of psyche, we are in a state of fusion and, in another part; we maintain our state of ego integrity: in that state, we can link up with the unconscious fantasies that are the ground from which the text emerged."

 In the Orient, the realms of the gods and demons, the heavens, purgatories, and hells, are assigned to this sphere and are of subtle matter. They are the macro cosmic counterpart of the microcosmic images of dream. But since we do not encounter on this level the sort of clear distinction between A and not-A that is proper to the field of waking consciousness, micro- and macrocosm on this level are not as different as they seem, and all the gods, therefore, all the powers of heaven and hell, are within us.
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Spirit Thread

10/21/2014

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THE GREAT UNBROKEN CHAIN
Depth Psychology & Genealogy

SPIRIT THREAD
Genealogy is Fractal Ontology

There is no pure individual; the group is inside the individual.

Nature (genetics) and nurture (epigenetics) encompass the biological,
relational, and environmental aspects of life.

Environment * Relationships * Biological Capabilities * Stress * Dynamics * Problem Solving * Patterns
The universe is steadily giving birth to itself, producing new information. Metaphorically, it is a self-unfolding story. Individual events are the ‘letters’ and ‘words’ of the evolutionary opus. Events do not pass away into non-existence but remain forever as an indelible part of the whole.

The Tree of Nature includes the evolutionary phylogenetic system of the various forms of life. The very base of everything that exists includes space and time, the laws of Nature, the material particles and the forces acting between them. The vacuum of absolute space, which exists within and without us, is the groundstate.

Death is the completion of a lifetime. An information cycle incorporates all events in which the respective person (the ‘Self’) has acted as an information processing entity. Death is not the end of it all, as we erroneously believe.


The universe as a whole continues to live and grow; not only directed outwardly (in the dimensions of space and time), but also inwardly. In some way, the lifetime of each individual remains part of this ‘story of the universe’- forever, in all eternity. The so-called "vacuum" has a memory. Our psychophysical being is nothing but memory. The body is the unconscious.

"The fantasy we call 'current events,' that which is taking place outside the historical field, is a reflection of an eternal mythological experience... Nothing can be revealed by a newspaper, by the world's chronique scandaleuse, unless the essence is described from within through an archetypal pattern. The archetype provides the basis for uniting those incommensurables, fact and meaning." --James Hillman, "An Aspect of the Psychological & Historical Present"


As the most advanced mental structure, the Self resists ordinary articulation so completely that, according to Jung, it is the primary object of mysticism. Indeed, an experience of the Self also constitutes one of Reality, because the two reflect each other, providing (again, according to Jung) para-psychological knowledge of and influence over Reality. Jung considers the Self as a repository of all archetypes, which is, among other things, a way of saying that someone advanced in Stage Seven has experienced all the preceding ones, and, as part of a final dialectic between conscious and unconscious, is likely to refine mastery over the preceding ones. (Whitlark, 2006)
http://www.goertzel.org/dynapsyc/2005/Whitlark.htm

Fields of Meaning

Telling ancestral stories was the way that the tellers came to understand their own being. And the same is true today.
Campbell speaks of the similar stories that our ancestors shared -- universal ways of telling tales. Such myths allow us to resonate with some greater emotional connection with our world.

In genealogy, we put together our personal and mythic history in a way that reflects nature. The pedigree provides a vast historical panorama for pattern recognition -- the big picture. It is a way of consciously recovering and reclaiming one's deep past via the ancestral field. Putting things together in a meaningful way is one of the basic features of nature,’ according to Albert Szent-Gyorgyi*, 1977.

Potential information is indeterminate latent information that yields factual information once it is taken up and understood, in some way. It is charged with meaning. All kinds of interpretations of a given situation depend upon the receiver of the information and the corresponding context. The ‘real effect’ on the receiver can be regarded as the most important aspect of an information cycle. Genealogy is one such method of accruing new information about oneself and family. It can have a transformative effect.

Depth psychology has ancient roots. Though its antecedents stretch backward toward  antiquity, depth psychology begins with Sigmund Freud and C.G. Jung, two visionaries who called attention to the importance of what lies below the surface of conscious awareness. There are Jungian, post-Jungian, archetypal, and developmental lineages of depth psychology. The study of myth and depth psychology opens the full range of the human senses and psyche.

This dimension of psychic reality is revealed in literature, the expressive arts of different cultures, dreams, and in the collective symptoms suffered by individuals and societies. Concepts at the core of depth psychology are central to genealogy. Ideas such as the importance of image, metaphor, and psyche in personal and cultural expression, and the interplay between the aesthetics of the natural world and the human experience, are deeply ingrained.
Depth psychology is a long process of exploration and listening at the margins of all collective thought.

Jung revealed his 'gnostic' orientation his Red Book, but it was not limited to medieval gnostic doctrine. Rather it expressed his direct experience -- the self-knowledge of raw psychic elements, which included his ancestors. Psyche is a dynamic spiritual function.

 Jung realized that the ancient practice of alchemy contained a rich symbolic language which mirrored the process of transformation inherent to individuation. He called it "a momentous discovery" -- a process of psychophysical transformation and healing.

The central dynamic in Jungian psychology is the individuation process, psyche's journey toward wholeness, an embodiment of the archetype of the Self. In Jungian psychology, this is done in large part by balancing or uniting the opposites within the psyche, including the feminine and masculine principles, known as the anima and animus.

Archetypal psychology is one of the central strands of post-Jungian theory. James Hillman, (its main proponent), emphasized the development of a mythic sensibility in confronting the complexity and multiplicity of psychological life. Through symbols,  the unconscious speaks to us and through us with its visual language for conveying the deep mysteries of life.

In "A Review of the Complex Theory," Jung calls complexes the via regia, or royal road, to the personal and collective unconscious. We explore complexes on multiple levels— personal, familial, group, cultural, and political — looking at their phenomenology, their autonomy, and their biology.


James Hillman wrote, "Psychology shows myths in modern dress and myths show our depth psychology in ancient dress."  Understanding the connection between mythology and psychology, Jung argued that it is important to our psychological health to know the myth we are living.  There are archetypal motifs in fairy tales and myths that appear in our personal and collective psychological lives.

Jung pioneered working with unconscious material in the psyche via Active Imagination. We work with an image or dialogue with an inner figure in the course of doing our genealogy, too. The Red Book contains 16 years of Jung's active imagination, and helps us explore this powerful technique and its relationship to psychic creativity and consciousness. Romantic relationships are often laden with psychological expectations of mythic proportions.

Jung wrote, "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 really being one." We explore the interrelationship between psyche and soma. Topics include the body as shadow; the body as a site of trauma, healing, and contact with the divine. Bodywork practices like dance, authentic movement, yoga, and breathwork embody the process. Healing traditions facilitate the relationship of the body with the collective unconscious, including concepts like cellular memory, deep fields, and archetypes as bodily-based inherited images.

As Jung saw it, "Natural life is the nourishing soil of the soul." Many of us feel split off from that nourishment today, living within a worldview which divides the inner from the outer, spirit from matter, and humans from nature. An ecopsychological perspective remedies this malaise by considering individuation as rooted not only in our relationship to self and human others, but to the natural world as well. The importance of place to the psyche includes observation of the natural world as it appears in our dreamscapes.


"There is nothing that the madness of men invents which is not either nature made manifest or nature restored
." --Michel Foucault.  Madness and Civilization (283).


"Myth expresses in terms of the world - that is, of the other world or the second world - the understanding that man has of himself in relation to the foundation and the limit of his existence." - Paul Ricœur
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    Iona Miller is a writer, researcher, and hynotherapist.

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