Jungian Genealogy, by Iona Miller
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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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Wounded Fisher King

10/21/2014

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The Wounded Fisher King


Jung and the Ancestors

The long-awaited release in the 21st century of Jung's RED BOOK (2009) reveals just how much of a role his ancestors and inner figures played in his own psychic life. They led directly to the formation of many of his theories of psychic dynamics.


Historically, in Western societies the focus of genealogy was on the kinship and descent of rulers and nobles, often arguing or demonstrating the legitimacy of claims to wealth and power. The term often overlapped with heraldry, in which the ancestry of royalty was reflected in their coats of arms. Modern scholars consider many claimed noble ancestries to be fabrications, such as the Anglo-Saxon chronicles that traced the ancestry of several English kings to the god Woden.

But Jung healed and transformed his own fragmentation by taking up imaginal relationships with his inner figures. He developed what might be called a Dialogical Gnosis -- a Way of Knowing informed by the wisdom of the Collective Unconscious, the plenum of inherent knowledge and experience.
Jung was engaged in the process of individuation.

One does not choose the path of individuation, but rather is chosen by it. Individuation seems to be the innate urge of life to realize itself consciously.
The transpersonal life energy, in the process of self-unfolding, uses human consciousness, a product of itself, as an instrument for its own self-realization.

New discoveries must not only be made, but assimilated with concurrent experience and meaningful psychological insight.  The individual meaningfulness of an experience is what creates unique personality.  The instinctive feeling of significance is expanded by rooting experiences in their mythical patterns.


If the ego can withstand the irrational temptations, ordeals, and peril at the hands of the unknown, it is eventually rewarded with an expanded experience of self and a rejuvenation, or rebirth. In his essay on the "Relationship between the Ego and the Unconscious," Jung has stated that,

It is impossible to achieve individuation by conscious intention, because conscious intention invariably leads to a typical attitude that excludes whatever does not fit in with it.  This assimilation of the unconscious contents leads, on the contrary to a condition in which the conscious intention is excluded and supplanted by a process of development that seems irrational.  This process alone signifies individuation, and its product is individuality as we have defined it;  particular and universal at once....Only when the unconscious is assimilated does the individuality emerge more clearly, together with the psychological phenomenon which links the ego with the non-ego and is designated by the word attitude. 
But this time it is no longer a typical attitude but an individual one.

What the conscious ego can do in regard to individuation is make the commitment to work in harmony with the unfolding subconscious process, to give it constant attention, and to place proper value on the experience.  This creates a resonance, the experience of "being in harmony with the cosmos", reflecting the Hermetic Axiom, "As Above, So Below." The Secret Garden of the Rose

Cult of the Archetypal Feminine

The Mother of us all is also the Earth, as the light of the divine womb (primal source) and the mystery of divine light that informs and transforms into matter. The Sangreal is a cult of bloodline. Many who are of it are unaware or unawakened to that genealogical and gnostic awareness.


Many who think they are 'awake' are merely enthralled with the fugue state or  eruption of symbolic material which is actually a form of dissociation. Dissociative disorders are typically experienced as startling, autonomous intrusions into the person's usual ways of responding or functioning. Due to their unexpected and largely inexplicable nature, they tend to be quite unsettling. Jung theorized that theorized that dissociation is a natural necessity for consciousness to operate in one faculty unhampered by the demands of its opposite.

Much of the magic and mystery enters our lines through our grandmothers, from the distaff side of our physical inheritance. It is carried in the mitochondrial DNA, inherited only from the mother on the x chromosome. It is very persistent through generations in both men and women, which helps us determine the relationship of populations.

The fact that mitochondrial DNA is maternally inherited enables genealogical researchers to trace maternal lineage far back in time. The concept of the Mitochondrial Eve is based on the same type of analysis, attempting to discover the origin of humanity by tracking the lineage back in time.

In the medieval era, a cult of the Feminine arose with a persistent theme of gender reunion in the Great Rite of the ancient bloodline, mystical eroticism known as the Mysterium Coniunctionis or Royal Marriage, in the underground Church of Love. Jung wrote a large book with that title describing "the separation and synthesis of psychic opposites in alchemy".

The opposites to be reconciled were Venus and Mars. It's about healing sexual woundedness, the pathless Wasteland of male-female relationships (literal and psychic), with a mystical inner marriage.  Like Isis and Horus, when the Madonna holds the infant Jesus, he represents the Future, and he continues to do so as the future is always coming.

The Sacred Heart and Mary Magdalene are twin symbols of the Grail. She has been used to symbolize the hidden teachings of Jesus. The cult of Mary Magdalene and the Cult of the Black Virgin survive in many forms to this day. The meeting of the sun-god and the earth-mother brings forth the miracle of birth, death, and rebirth from her dark creative womb. The god comes through the goddess.


We find that balance in Individuation, after facing the Shadow and connecting with inner wisdom. Through his relationship with the feminine a man gains access to his own soul, to the deeper layers of his "heart". His sensitive quest for his "queen" makes him wiser, more sensitive, more scrupulous as a person. AMOR is a spiritual development. The courage to persist is the hallmark of loyalty.


The Rosy Cross is a symbol of the human process of reproduction elevated to the spiritual: The fundamental symbols are the female rose and the male cross. As generation is the key to material existence, those symbols exemplify the reproductive processes. As regeneration is the key to spiritual existence, the symbolism of the rose and the cross typifies redemption  through the union of our lower temporal nature with our higher eternal nature.

The Rosy Cross is equivalent to the Philosopher's Stone or Holy Grail, and refined Gold. All represent the Grail of Self-Realization.  As an image The Grail was a symbol of not just spiritual transcendence but also the Divine Immanence in creation. In Jewish mysticism, every woman is an earthly embodiment of the celestial Shekinah. The Grail Temple is the body, our sacred vessel.  We need to learn again that the family is a being, a goddess.

There are many icons of Mary that show black faces and hands. In France, these are called Vierge Noires—Black Virgins. Elsewhere, they may be called Black Madonnas or the "other Mary." Jung called her Isis, while others claim she is the symbolic remains of a prehistoric worship of the Earth Mother. She is generally connected with Cybele, Diana, Isis, and Venus, as well as with Kali, Inanna, and Lilith. Historically she is connected with the Crusades, the Islamic occupation of Spain, the Conquistadors, the Kabbala, as well as the Merovingians and Knights Templar, who viewed her as Mary Magdalene.


Courtly Love (courtezia) and Troubadours were institutions that compensated the misogyny of medieval times. The contemplation of beauty in its feminine incarnation opens the Middle Way between debauchery and self-abnegation. Transcendent beauty is reflected in a beautiful face or body. Contact with the beautiful is a sacrament. The culture of l'amour courtois flourished in Anjou and the Languedoc. The House of Anjou remains the senior Grail family.

The Crusades, the so-called 'holy war', filled the need for collective Shadow projection. In this scenario, Venus and the cult of the Feminine played counterpoint to the Martian cult of warrior-knighthood, with its chivalric code of honor. This Quest for a lost sacred object, the Holy Grail, appears out of a deep and urgent need to counteract the brutality of the rapacious crusading, murderous military oppression.  AMOR was a gnostic and esoteric doctrine of the divinity of the Mother and the higher meaning of the chivalric quest.

The persecuted became persecutors in a collective defensive strategy known as identification with the aggressor and the splitting-off of the victim. Whether personal or collective the consequence is the same. A need arises to find and project the shadow onto an external victim who opposes the newly found power of the aggressor. The real problem was and remains how to reconcile the two warring extremes of human nature: spirituality and sexuality. Men met the challenge by becoming more rigid and investing women and the Grail with the powers of generation and regeneration.

The historical origin for the collective resurgence of the sacred feminine is most likely derived from ancient cults of the Great Goddess—the mysteries of Isis, of Diana of Ephesus or Cybele, and especially the Sophia of the Gnostics. They were carried to Europe through the artistic contacts of troubadours who had been to the East.

Above all, the Cathars revered a version of Isis-Sophia and ordained women as priestesses equally with men. However, their Gnosticism also vilified the flesh and therefore all matter. Their archetypes, The Archons, were likewise demonized, being stunted by duality.

It is likely that the troubadour aubades or songs to the lady in spring ultimately derive from remnants of the old cults of Demeter, the Mother Goddess and her daughter Persephone. The Greeks brought this worship to Provence when they colonized Marseille and the south of Gaul in early times.

In the ancient Basilica of St. Victor in Marseille, on the 2nd of February each year  thousand of candles are lit to attend the raising of the famous Black Madonna from the infernal darkness of  the crypt up into the upper air. Persephone returned to the upper world every spring in Greek times, with masses of torches, to re-unite with her mother Demeter.
 
So in many of the noble courts of the South of France in the 11th-12th centuries there is a kind of revival of the pagan substrate that has been buried, but not entirely, by Christianity. What re-emerges is Christianity’s pagan shadow, to use Jung’s terms. What we see is the upsurge from the unconscious of the repressed pagan archetypal energies of the Dionysian-­Venusian. Ecstatic use of art, music, and the body led to communion with the godhead within the body. (Woolger)
http://www.deepmemoryprocess.com/page33.html The Grail hero discovers a castle in the midst of a Wasteland of self-alienation

The Fisher King is the wounded father principle, the weakened, unproductive and spiritually desolate father-world of medieval times. The waters of life have dried up both within and without laving a damaged consciousness, cut off from Mother Earth.

Jung said that today "the Gods have become diseases," and Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD) describes not only the psychological victims of war and brutality but says something about our own "hostage" culture. It is a kind of stuckness where the trauma seems to be continuously recurring, a torturous victimization without relief. The war comes home in chaos, flashbacks, dark futures, and suicidal impulses. We can imagine that the old warrior-knights were not immune from such human frailties. http://ptsdpolitics.iwarp.com/

“Peace for veterans is not an ‘absence of war’ but its living ghost in the bedroom, at the lunch counter, on the highway. The trauma is not ‘post’ but acutely present, and the ‘syndrome’ is not in the veteran but in the dictionary, in the amnesiac’s idea of peace that colludes with an unlivable life.” “The return from the killing fields is more than a debriefing; it is a slow ascent from hell. …The veteran needs a rite de sortie that belongs to every initiation as its normal conclusion, making possible an intact return.” (James Hillman)

In contrast, the passion of the troubadours was earthy, bodily and sensual no matter how sentimentalists would later portray it. Dali quipped, "The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot." There is no longer any excuse to see the ladies of the troubadours through rose-tinted spectacles of the early Romantic poets and the Pre-Raphaelite painters, as purely ethereal disembodied “spiritual” anima figures.

The troubadours celebrated the incarnation of the feminine every bit as much as its spiritualization. Some say fins amor, or pure love of a woman as a form of spiritual initiation through a forbidden but transcendent love affair, was practiced not for  procreation but contemplation. http://www.deepmemoryprocess.com/page209.html
Woolger, Roger, The Holy Grail: Healing the Sexual Wound in the Western Psyche (1983/2010)
Karena Karras "The Bath"

Rose Line Descent

The Da Vinci Code made much of the so-called Roseline marking sacred sites in the European landscape. But the real Rose Lines are revealed in the royal genealogies with which it is interwoven.
The Grail is the source of life, of generativity, of the primordial Eros. The Grail belongs to all that is soft, yielding, yin, of the body, of the earth, of the Mother: full, rich, gentle, and infinitely abundant.

Certain images, such as the Garden of the Rose, the Fountain, the Loathly Bride, the Damsel in distress, and above all the Holy Grail recur in all kinds of variations. The symbol of the Rose, for example, finds its way from the Sufis to the Roman de la Rose, to Dante's Paradiso, to the windows of Chartres Cathedral, and eventually to the mystical Brotherhood of the Rosicrucians.  The underground tradition of alchemy and esoteric arts kept the spiritual Mysteries and Great Goddess discipline alive in the Underground Stream.
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You Get the Genealogy You Deserve

10/21/2014

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You Get the Genealogy You Deserve

Life and consciousness are the ultimate emergent phenomena, but we still don't know their real origin, which remains veiled in Mystery. We are Cosmic psychophysical beings with a core reaching down into the microcosm of quantum dynamics and the still center of Zero-Point.


In the split second moment of conception, the two streams of genetic information from your parents, handed on from generation to generation over literally hundreds of millennia, combined in one single cell embodying your unique potential. It ensured that you became an unequaled living record of the lives and ways of your ancestors.

All of your ancient ancestors had one thing in common -- they were survivors who overcame daunting obstacles and hardships in their natural world. Your DNA is a legacy passed down to you from thousands of generations of fittest individuals. You have the best of their collective genes, all meticulously spelled out within the DNA of your genome.

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.

In genealogy the term direct line refers to a relationship of one person to another in a direct line. A direct-line ancestor is someone from whom you descend in a direct line, parent to child, grandparent, great-grandparent, etc. Direct-line research refers to genealogy research focused on one's direct-line ancestors. Blood relations refer to the underground stream, the Red River of Memories that flows within us. The Blood is real and it's fresh; it flows in your veins.

By contrast, collateral line is a term used to describe family relationships not in the direct line of descent such as siblings, spouses and children of siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, etc.  Researching direct-line ancestry is a common focus of genealogists and family history researchers. Proving a direct line of descent is generally required for membership in heritage societies. A mere seven generations back we have over 200 people in just our immediate, or father-mother, grandfather-grandmother line.

We are not just talking about the way you look, but about your ancestral memories, the complete set of instincts and response patterns that were responsible for the survival of those two genetic streams in the first place. The instincts and response patterns that you were actually born with are what Jung called the Collective Unconscious. Science calls it epigenetics. Genealogy functions as a therapeutic portal, much like dreams or symptoms allow us to enter the imaginal dimension.

Quo Vadis?


Fundamentally, genealogy is a search for Self. Some are armchair genealogists, while others hit the genealogy trail, making their life a perpetual pilgrimage and search by visiting family domiciles and sacred sites. Many search for relics or novel solutions to riddles they pose to themselves. It is a way of connecting the psychological dots into a seemingly coherent story, one that keeps the narrative moving forward while it looks back.

Some write novels that filter information and scenes through the consciousness of their characters. There are battles and leaders, matriarchs, partriarchs and malefactors. Others create esoteric organizations, usually with themselves set up as authority figures. They hook those who are susceptible to the promise of Mystery. Most such groups devolve into banal cults of personality, which all seem to share the same squabbles and organizational problems.

Some are convinced only they know the real truth of the matter. Yet most exposés of the knowledge of the underground stream are materialistic interpretations of it.  They claim to empower you while lining their pockets. Some of this may be compensatory to lack of power in other areas of life. Claims to shift world vision may be more a perception than a reality.  Perhaps the biggest value of questionable literature is that people now search elsewhere for their own half-remembered origins.

Many who claim to guard the history actually prey on their vulnerable kinsmen. So one must look at the effects of such behavior rather than relying on proclamations. There have been many blatant hoaxes. It begs the question, "Where is this leading?". In many cases, the answer is nowhere. Reinterpreting sacred sites with idiosyncratic tropes doesn't make it so.
Nor does finding out what the Templars or Cathars were doing substitute for one's own individuation and may work against it, fitting a modern person into an obsolete mold.

Many of these overwrought works simply regurgitate the symbolic understanding developed more completely in depth psychologies, applying skewed versions to the selected symbols, often from New Age thought, another faddish collective movement which mostly rehashes theosophical notions. There isn't much "new" about it. If such critique sounds like tough love it is because it comes from close observation of the effects of such subcultures. Schisms and tragedy have been the result, not illumination unless you count disillusionment as such.

Following pilgrimage routes, such as "the Camino" may be stimulating but will likely never be illuminating. It doesn't substitute for the work of self-discovery in the cave of the heart. Overlaying such sites with new age gloss doesn't improve the clarity of the situation and may just add irrelevant data.

In some cases, pilgrimage is another form of what is termed the geographic escape. There are many writers eager to host such trips for their own benefit. It has become a thriving cottage industry whether the goal is ancient aliens or earth chakras. That doesn't mean there is no value in such travel or mystery centers, but it doesn't supersede the inner work and may lead to flooding and inflation. Sentience is not the same as sentimentality. But people will do what they are going to do. All things seek their own level.

Ultimately, individuation is a solitary pursuit. To  Edward Edinger (1972), individuation means not having to continually repeat the cycle, but to develop conscious dialogues between I and Self. Without a displaced religious obsession there is little reason to pursue the lies, theories or directives of others over one's own creative genius. Ultimately, the real issue with the bloodline has always been about the concept of "sovereignty".

It isn't merely our royal genealogy that makes us who we are. After all, we share most of it with millions of people. What is unique is our personal reaction to such knowledge and how our relationship with it evolves as we assimilate and integrate that expanded awareness -- the Mystery of the whole matter.

The rich variety of psycho-physical hierogamic themes are illustrated in many alchemical works, illustrating simultaneous humanity and divinity. The hierosgamos union of opposites between human and divine is mediated by Mercurius, the Hermetic method, or hermeneutics. It requires interpretation of experiential material. For example, originally, the dove was a symbolic attribute of ancient female divinities of Mesopotamia.

We need To Know genealogy much like we need to know physics and psychology to comprehend what matter is, as well as what makes us matter. We have thousands of ancestors whose lines are not preserved, making the small slice of royal descent largely archetypal as well as material. The part stands for the Whole - the cosmic process.

Union of Opposites


The body is the alchemical laboratory that generates the subtle body or astral vehicle and the Body of Light or Diamond Body as the highest vehicle. Consciousness is drawn up with sublimation. The elixir of life transforms body and consciousness.  In alchemy the resurrection stands not for transcendence of the body, but its glorification and perfection.

We are affected not only by things that happen to us personally, but also by things that have happened in our lineage, to our parents, grandparents and ancestors. Epigenetics shows that the traumas that happened within our culture affect us. Ironically, this is more so when they have been forgotten, relegated to the unconscious realm, where they can cause physical symptoms, phobias, depression, nightmares and other unexplained things.

The Quest for wholeness is the search for meaning, orientation, renewal, and transformation. By making the trauma in our lineage and in our culture more conscious, we can loosen its hold. This helps us to restore a sense of our own self and our own freedom of choice, and allows what is not ours to rest in peace. Thus, genealogy is a kind of healing ritual, which retrieves the lost and disowned parts of the soul, what we've buried in the earth and forgotten.


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.

Nature is playful and terrible. Some see the playful side and dally with it and let it sparkle. Others see the horror and cover their heads and are more dead than alive. The way does not lead between both, but embraces both. It is both cheerful play and cold horror.
(Jung, Red Book)


Genealogy is like organic gardening. We till the soil, until things break through the surface where we tend and fertilize them with creative expression and contemplation.
Living branches of our Tree become knotted together generating many leaves. Entwined with roses and thorns they represent the complexities of life, including the union of opposites. At the microcosmic level they may represent quantum entanglement. All macroscopic parts of the world are entangled quantum mechanically.

Jung pointed out that procreative power is only a special instance of the ‘procreative nature of the Whole', as illustrated in alchemical works such as the Rosarium Philosophorum, which depicts a symbolic hieros gamos, combining the powers of the upper and lower worlds, leading out the gold. We acquire an experiential understanding of the ontological wholeness of the cosmos and know we are in no way separate from that. Such non-duality that closes the gap between spirit and body was the magnificent obsession of the alchemists as it is of the mystics.

As Eliade wrote, "The Sun and the Moon must be made one. . .above all, prajna, wisdom, must be joined with upaya, the means of attaining it. . .all this amounts to saying we are dealing with the coincidentia oppositorum achieved on every level of Life and Consciousness."

Chaos becomes cosmos; the profane becomes sacred; potential is actualized. Alchemical tracts bookend the entire alchemical process between an initial and final image -- opening and closing illustrations that frame the psycho-physical transformation. Like dreams, the fruits of personal insight and practical guidance affect us physiologically, emotionally, psychologically, and/or spiritually, and become part of our being.

They change us regardless of whether we make any logical waking connections or not. Even when we spot such connections, it can be limiting to assume that this was the sole ‘point’ of the discovery, and therefore drop further exploration or creative expression for an "Aha" moment. Carrying away golden coins, we may miss the priceless and treasured jewel fashioned or concealed within the chest itself.

Genealogy is an Art, a quest for the truth within. Harvesting the fruits of the Tree of Life
mobilizes  the soul for creative self-expression, self-discovery and self-healing. Much benefit and fulfillment comes simply by remembering, writing, tape-recording, sharing, painting, enacting or otherwise birthing them into the physical world.

Genealogy takes tremendous effort, like the Great Work. It affects the psyche with both historical and imaginal, known and unknown elements. It has its own magic, alchemy, and synchronicities. Some attempt to garner social status through their genealogies when other avenues elude them. Some in search of their identity wind up finding the Shadow.

Genealogy is about Identity. Some people who come to this practice use it to build a persona that becomes their main way of connecting in the world, an excessive commitment to a rather false image. Jung identified the persona as a social mask or psychological armor. Recovery, the aim of individuation, "is not only achieved by work on the inside figures but also, as conditio sine qua non, by a re-adaptation in outer life," according to Jung.  We live in the present moment.

The path of Individuation is the psychological equivalent of self-initiation. The goal of individuation is self-realization through increasing conscious relationship with the Self, archetype of wholeness. This Self includes both positive and negative traits of an individual which, in the beginning of analysis, are generally projected out, or attributed to, the environment.


As the ego continues its heroic journey through the labyrinthine psyche, it comes into confrontation with personifications of various archetypal and ancestral characters. During the maturing process, these characters emerge from the undifferentiated mass of unconscious contents. Though their presence in the psyche was implied from the beginning, they begin to unfold in unique patterns in the life of the individual.

Jung called the persona the "conformity archetype." As part of its positive function, it protects the ego and the psyche from the varied social forces. Thus one goal for individuation is for people to "develop a more realistic, flexible persona that helps them navigate in society but does not collide with nor hide their true self". Eventually, "in the best case, the persona is appropriate and tasteful, a true reflection of our inner individuality and our outward sense of self."

Jung also cautioned, "It would indeed be the height of absurdity if a man tried to have a conversation with his persona, which he recognized merely as a psychological means of relationship." So, the purpose of genealogy is not to over-identify but distinguish ourselves from our ancestral lines. It is especially true for an adopted fantasy-based social role which functions like an actor's mask. A mask is what individuals wear to hide their real self.

A person unfamiliar with psychic dynamics may not recognize that these are processes that Jung described and for which he developed now time-tested therapies to circumvent the pitfalls of alienation, dissociation, projection, and inflation. It's as if unconscious contents lack genealogical links to consciousness proper.

A Jungian genealogy permits a cultural study of the unconscious and a psychological study of culture that facilitates an understanding of the emotional impact culture provides, the unconscious elements of group creation, and the multiple individual perspectives in each historical moment. Formal structures help us understand the significance of mythical discourse.

Theories and ideas also have 'genealogies' that trace how they transform over time as they are inherited through culture. This is particularly true of faith-based ideas. They can be used instead of historical analysis or traditional explanations that are more magical than effective to follow the transformation of notions without drawing conclusions on their origin.


Even without knowing the cause we can describe the transformations themselves, their strengths, weaknesses, ideology and competing arguments, mechanisms of coercion and contents of knowledge. A genealogy is an open system of relationships, the effect of making a process intelligible and describes cultural elaboration.

“Cultural complexes structure emotional experience and operate in the personal and collective psyche in much the same way as individual complexes, although their content might be quite different. Like individual complexes, cultural complexes tend to be repetitive, autonomous, resist consciousness, and collect experience that confirms their historical point of view”
. (Thomas Singer and Samuel L. Kimbles define cultural complex in their book The Cultural Complex: Contemporary Jungian Perspectives on Psyche and Society).

Using an archaeology and genealogy of analysis of process reveals multiple strategies, conditions of acceptability, and a field of possibilities, and possible dislocations . We can look at socio-historical data as an event that allows us to describe ways of experiencing that are unique to particular sets of people -- a group's way of perceiving itself. Repetitive group experiences take root in the cultural unconscious of the group.

Genealogy is the thread that connects. It stimulates the imaginal faculty and can induce strong identifications, projections, activated archetypes, ego inflations, and even possessions. Identification means being fused to an unconscious content. Projection is a kind of unconscious identification with the object. A complex is an entity within the unconscious that holds intense resonance around an emotion or way of being. Cultural complexes change over time.

The freed surplus of libido (psychological energy) causes inflation because an archetype has lost its container and becomes identified with the conscious mind. This activates various -isms, utopian fantasies, psychic infections, and a longing for collective ideals. In possession, the archetype hijacks and overwhelms the conscious personality utterly, appearing as distinctly "other".

Doing your genealogy can induce a process Jung called Individuation, by which an individual self emerges from the undifferentiated unconscious. He said, "Evolution is the line of least resistance whereas individuation is the line of most resistance."

A person who enters this experiential dimension has gone beyond that of hobby genealogist, but without a consciousness map or a guide it may seem overwhelming. Even Jung complained of emotional flooding at the onset of his inner journey. Flooding is your physiological reaction to a perceived threat. The threat can be real, it can be an old tape replaying a pattern, or it can be imagined. Automatic, instinctive, reactive emotional processes rush in to numb and  protect you from being overwhelmed.


Individuation helps us fulfill our conscious relationships with the ancestors and archetypes of the collective unconscious (ancestral memory). They come in dreams, in revere, in ritual, with the gentle assist of an "angel" or other surprise clues, and they inform our being,  literally and figuratively. They carry mystery in their wake, often with cryptic messages or information that can later be verified or found in the physical world. Dynamic archetypes like The Quest or Hero's Journey inform and modulate our behavior.

They inspire our spiritual studies and humanitarian efforts, our self-expression, proclivities and desires. They compel our loves and help create our children, perpetuating the line. We are theirs and they are ours. We are family; we are Blood. We feel their experience from their point of view. As we collect them in name, we collect their experiences, integrating them into our own meaning.

We cultivate our own rows or lines of ancestors through genealogy, the pedigree of our origins. 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.

Even today, grandiose speculation often passes for science. 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. Identifying SNPs from deep common ancestry, or rare SNPs related to shared characteristics helps us recognize one another as kin.

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 ourselves, 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, the mystagogue who reveals divine mysteries.


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 Men Who Would Be King

Your truth lies beyond any media controversies over bloodlines, false ideologies, erroneous claims, hoaxes, works of fiction, spin-doctored history, genetic superiority, occultism, vanity courts, ancient aliens, subcultures, cults, gnostic, pseudo-masonic or templar revivals, idiosyncratic philosophies, or other ways people come together around their shared beliefs, real or self-delusional.

There is no end to the pretentious claims of "royal" wannabees, phony personae, delusional fantasists, and obsessional megalomaniacs to be this or that reincarnation, usually to sell their "celebrity" brand. Let the buyer beware of self-styled experts with little or no traction. They are modern claimants to the mantles of Jesus, Mary Magdalene, St. Germain or any number of other illustrious figures.


By Soul, Jung is not defining something religious. He speaks of a return to the Soul of the World, the source of knowledge. Our instincts begin to grow sharper, our emotions more radical, the signs of life are of greater importance than logic, our perception of reality is no longer so rigid. We begin to deal with things we are not used to, and to react in ways that not even we ourselves would expect.

Than we discover that if we can only manage to channel all this surge of energy, we can organize it in a very solid center, which Jung calls the Wise Old Man for men, or the Great Mother for women. It’s quite dangerous to allow this to manifest itself. Generally speaking, whoever reaches that point tends to consider himself holy, a tamer of spirits, a prophet.

So you find you come from royalty -- get over it. The Pyramid Theory, a doubling of ancestors each generation back, claims you have 2048 ancestors by the 12th generation in your past, and possibly 60,000 direct ancestors going back to the Crusades. By Generation #40, you would have more than one trillion ancestors!

We are at the end of a long and winding genetic journey that continues after and through us. We are probably all connected by the 25th gr-grandparents, if you do the math. There is a great possibility that we are descendants (or are related) from almost everyone alive some seven hundred years ago. With our parents' generation as Nº 1, the number of persons is 33,554,432.

That number is the theoretical result of (x2) progression, since many of those ancestors are the same persons. The genealogical evidence shows that many of the families intermarried for generations, producing a rich genealogical heritage. Yet, somehow a determined gen can survive intact through all those descendants and become a particle of memory that will give you a dejá vu once in a while. Ancestral memories may not be of actual events - it is not to be confused with the idea of past life or reincarnation - but of reactive response patterns and emotional states brought about by environment.


The past has gone and the future has yet to come. All you have is the present.
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House of Our Flesh

10/21/2014

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The House of Our Flesh

Each generation has added to the historical account of our progenitors. The story drifts back into the mythos of pre-history -- the neolithic era of the Goddess, legends of Atlantis and other lost civilizations, catastrophe theories, cryptozoological fantasies, and displaced scifi themes. Paranormal powers lurk just behind the mystic veil separating the Known from deep Mystery.

What we think we knew gets profoundly revisioned. The great symbols of mankind, the iconic symbols, are mostly attached to ancient royalty in some way or another, so we encounter and activate them in our generational viewing. They include animal, vegetable, and mineral images, as well as personifications. 

Marriage is a psychological relationship. The Hieros Gamos is the Holy Grail of sexual rites. Jung addressed the symbolism of cross-cousin marriages, lived out in the bloodline, which tended to overlook the taboos of incest. There was ritualized brother/sister pairing prior to the days of Sumeria, where the priest-king of the country marries “the land” – in the form of a high priestess – to rejuvenate it.
The Great Rite is blessed by the gods who participate in it as a sacred act -- a sexual sacrament uniting the Sun and the Moon.

This mystic marriage or union stands for conjunction of conscious and unconscious. The joining together of conscious ego and shadow is the end result of the penetration of the conscious mind by the unconscious and/or the penetration of the unconscious by consciousness.

Symbolically - in myths and in dreams - consciousness is usually represented as male, the unconscious as female; and the sexual penetration of female by male is therefore a common symbol of the descent of consciousness into the dark cave-like depths of the unconscious.

Cross-cousin marriage, designed to keep power and assets in the family, is based on the archetype of the quaternio. This early form of mating that ensured that endogenous (kinship) libido--incest--held the family together but didn't overpower exogamous libido. The endogamous side wants a sister, the exogamous a stranger, so marrying a cousin balances the two. Marriage of a man's sister to his brother's wife is a relic of the "sister-exchange marriage" of many primitive tribes.

Today's pure exogamy leaves the kinship-libido demands largely unsatisfied and increases their power, which expresses itself in the formation of religions and sects and nations--but only individuation will contain the still-rising force. The incest prohibition, with help from the urge to individuate, created the self-conscious individual, who previously had been mindlessly one with the tribe.


Prepare to be astonished, amazed, and repulsed by the overwhelming burdonsome knowledge of history experienced as the behavior of one's great-grandparents. You will be confronted with unbridled power, pathologizing, perversions, and mental illness (narcissism, sociopathy, sadism, bipolarity, schizophrenia, etc.) that spreads through some lines like a virus.

There are some real monsters in there, as well as marriages made in hell, not above sacrifice and murder within as well as without the family. If you know the histories of these regions it may provide some orientation, but the story reads differently from the inside out. You have entered the panoply of history. Everything you ever imagined or feared you might be is there, somewhere in time. You may also find the physiological disorders and illnesses that have plagued the bloodline from earliest recorded times.

Even as an imaginal exercise -- an "as-if" reality -- such revisioning helps us reown the shadow of mankind by making a place for it within our own being. This is much easier said than done, but forewarned is fore-armed.
Marriage is a psychological relationship. The Hieros Gamos is the Holy Grail of sexual rites. Jung addressed the symbolism of cross-cousin marriages, lived out in the bloodline, which tended to overlook the taboos of incest. There was ritualized brother/sister pairing prior to the days of Sumeria, where the priest-king marries “the land” – in the form of a high priestess – to rejuvenate it. The Great Rite is blessed by the gods who participate in the sacred act -- a sexual sacrament uniting the Sun and the Moon.

This marriage symbolizes the joining together of conscious ego and shadow, which is the end result of the penetration of the conscious mind by the unconscious and/or the penetration of the unconscious by consciousness. Symbolically - in myths and in dreams - consciousness is usually represented as male, the unconscious as female; and the sexual penetration of female by male is therefore a common symbol of the descent of consciousness into the dark cave-like depths of the unconscious
.

Cross-cousin marriage, designed to keep power and assets in the family, is based on the archetype of the quaternio. It subconsciously recognizes that the anima and animus of both parties are involved in the archetypal relationship dynamic.

This early form of mating that ensured that endogenous (kinship) libido--incest--held the family together but didn't overpower exogamous libido. The endogamous side wants a sister, the exogamous a stranger, so marrying a cousin balances the two. Marriage of a man's sister to his brother's wife is a relic of the "sister-exchange marriage" of many primitive tribes.

Today's pure exogamy leaves the kinship-libido demands largely unsatisfied and increases their power, which expresses itself in the formation of religions and sects and nations--but only individuation will contain the still-rising force. The incest prohibition, with help from the urge to individuate, created the self-conscious individual, who previously had been mindlessly one with the tribe.


Prepare to be astonished, amazed, and repulsed by the overwhelming burdonsome knowledge of history experienced as the behavior of one's gr-grandparents. You will be confronted with unbridled power, pathologizing, perversions, and mental illness (narcissism, sociopathy, sadism, bipolarity, schizophrenia, etc.) that spreads through some lines like a virus. You may also find the physiological disorders and illnesses that have plagued the bloodline from earliest recorded times.

Even as an imaginal exercise -- an "as-if" reality -- such revisioning helps us re-own the shadow of mankind by making a place for it within our own being. This is much easier said than done, but forewarned is fore-armed. Louis XV Savonnerie Carpet
But Is It Real?

The bloodline as real as the psyche.  Some say genealogy without proofs is meaningless, but that is certainly not true in the Jungian context which is happy to continue exploration within the mythic and imaginal realms, understanding them as such. There is a psychic if not historical truth to including archetypes in the lines, usually at the root. It is also possible that real culture heroes became ennobled as divinities over the eons.


Monks in the the Middle Ages constructed royal genealogies from Bardic tales that linked rulers not only to the dawn of time but to the legendary heroes and gods that inhabit that mystical realm. We all have an unconscious and conscious relationship to this world of the hyperdimensional imagination. How we choose to interact with it and what we call those processes characterizes our experience of it -- and how toxic, haphazard or sophisticated it is.

At first, genealogy served a purely serious purpose in determining the legal rights of related individuals to land and goods.
Genealogy was cultivated since at least the start of the early Irish historic era. Upon inauguration, Bards and poets are believed to have recited the ancestry of an inaugurated king to emphasize his hereditary right to rule. With the transition to written culture, oral history was preserved in the monastic settlements. Over time, genealogy was pursued for its own merits.

Today, genealogy is second only to the topic of sex online. Humanity is re-discovering its roots and creating a BIG TREE in the Sky -- in the Cloud that describes our interconnections. Genetic Genealogy adds information to that big story -- filling in the migration patterns and tribal affiliations with molecular certainties. But it cannot provide the connective list of names -- the royal lines of descent -- that come from the pedigree. Both are equally important, but genetic genealogy may or may not add to what you already know. Genealogies always add new information.

Amateurs are demystifying the process by using rapid technological aids and open-source genealogical sites to help plug them into the "Motherboards".
Experts continue their scholarly efforts within the crowd-sourced material to analyze and correct the public record.  Thus, most ancestors have Master Profiles which have been vetted by experts, though the stubs and dead ends of amateurs can also be found. Be very careful to prove undocumented conclusions because many blind alleys have been created and deserted. Sometimes mistakes remain and get repeated.

The trend now is to disconnect lines from their legendary and mythic roots, and start a discussion with the last reliably known ancestor.
Therefore, you may not be able to imagine how you ever connected with these mythic figures. Surely, this has psychological overtones perhaps as grave as literally believing in the descents created by the medieval Church after repeated efforts to suppress the Bloodline with genocidal crusades and witchhunts in Europe.

Even without erroneous digressions, our genealogical lines constitute a labyrinth of our soul.
We can become lost within our ancestral lines, with an uncanny felt-sense of time travel as the time dimension seemingly collapses. The labyrinth is the Collective Unconscious and genealogy is but one method of entry into it. 

The Internet is another labyrinth full of genealogical information colored by the beliefs of the writers. Often lies are hidden between two truths, so you have to exercise great discretion in separating the informational wheat from the chaff of fallacious material claiming to be truth. "Spin" or even popular memes are no substitute for objective scholarship.

The Red Thread Bloodline (Lost Tribes) of our ancestral lines keeps us from losing our way. Throughout the Bible 'scarlet' speaks of sacrifice made on the behalf of the believer, and it is seen in the vestments of the tabernacle and in the priestly garments in Exodus" (ibid., note on Joshua 2:18-21).

The scarlet thread running through the Bible is a picture of the Blood of Jesus. "For it is not possible that the blood of bulls and of goats should take away sins" (Hebrews 10:4). "Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus" (Hebrews 10:19). "For it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul" (Leviticus 17:11).
http://the-red-thread.net/
http://israelect.com/ChurchOfTrueIsrael/emahiser/emirishscott.html
Prepare to be A-Mazed
The early maze was a figurative vortex; a tornado or whirlpool. The Chartres Maze is associated with Melusine and Sheba and their vortex, source of life and life's blood. The Maze is associated with the root word from which we derive the adjective "to amaze".

The maze represented the shamanic "Spiral Dance of the Vortex" (sacrificial sword dance), and on another level "The Quest for the Holy Grail".  It can be associated with the name Mazda or Ormuzd, the principle of light, suggesting that whatever was at the center of a Maze rendered enlightenment and that ecstatic amazement, or wonder, accompanied it.

A labyrinth is an ancient symbol that relates to wholeness. It combines the imagery of the circle and the spiral into a meandering but purposeful path. It represents a journey or Quest  to our own center and back again out into the world. Labyrinths have long been used as meditation and prayer tools. A living labyrinth is an archetype with which we can have a direct experience. Walking the labyrinth can be considered an initiation in which you awaken the knowledge encoded within your DNA.

A labyrinth contains embedded geometric and numerological prompts that create a multi-dimensional holographic field. These unseen patterns are referred to as sacred geometry. They allegedly reveal the presence of a cosmic order as they interface the world of material form and the subtler realms of higher consciousness.


The contemporary resurgence of labyrinths in the west  stems from our deeply rooted urge to honor again the Sacredness of All Life. A labyrinth can be experienced as the birthing womb of the Great Goddess. Thus, the labyrinth experience is a potent practice of Self-Integration as it encapsulates the spiraling journey in and out of incarnation. On the journey in, towards the center, one cleanses the dirt from the road. On the journey out, one is born anew to consciously dwell in a human body, made holy by having got a taste of the Infinite Center.
The Grail Effect

Sovereignty: It is the individual's task to differentiate himself from all the others and stand on his own feet. All collective identities . . . interfere with the fulfillment of this task. Such collective identities are crutches for the lame, shields for the timid, beds for the lazy, nurseries for the irresponsible. . . .--Carl Jung (1875 - 1961)

We can call anyone of Sangreal blood who has yet to discover or prove their dynastic heritage, a "crypto-grail carrier." Over and over the phenomenon and transformative reaction repeats itself.  We call it "the Grail Effect," which kindles an archaic revival and a recursive cycle of self-amplification -- a virtual awakening to a new order of reality, deep time, and sense of self-identity.

We are endowed with a genetic lust for life. Each new birth reminds us that life is a miracle. Genealogy is a Gnosis, a divine revelation, a Way of Knowing that only comes with the names that carry one's lineage back into the mists of pre-history. Our lines contain sacred mysteries.


Genealogy is a hermeneutic requiring interpretation and discretion between the literal, mythic, and symbolic. Gnosis is divine revelation not just philosophical reasoning. It is instantaneous spiritual understanding of the nature of man -- primordial awareness, the space of the mind itself where mental events arise and dissolve -- a direct experience of enlightenment -- luminous, empty, nonduality.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama described the Great Perfection:


“Any given state of consciousness is permeated by the clear light of primordial awareness. However solid ice may be, it never loses its true nature, which is water. In the same way, even very obvious concepts are such that their ‘place’, as it were, their final resting place, does not fall outside the expanse of primordial awareness. They arise within the expanse of primordial awareness and that is where they dissolve.”

The Dalai Lama is saying that the absolute ground state awareness is primordial awareness, the fundamental ground from which everything, space-time, massenergy, mind-matter, all arise and into which they eventually dissolve. (Wallace)

Hermetics and Gnosticism differed in cosmology and their use of philosophy and myth. Imagination was important to both, playing a central role in their religious experience and practice, bridging the micro- and macrocosm, as well as the function of the imagination in meditative, magical and alchemical praxis and in the emergence of metaphorical and dynamic images. Imaginal reality is a way of clarifying depth and substance not usually associated with the merely imaginary.

Imagination facilitates access to deeper levels of reality than ordinary experience. It bridges the microcosm and macrocosm, using the faculty of imagination as a method of gnosis. It enable more intimate knowledge of the object of religious yearning through body, soul and mind. Corbin describes the imaginal world as the 'mundus imaginalis ', 'supersensible world of the Soul', or sacred center.

The things of this world are vessels, entrances for stories; when we touch them or tumble into them, we fall into their labyrinthine resonances. The world is no longer divided, then,into those inconvenient categories of subject and object, and the world becomes religiously apprehended.
(Sexson, Ordinarily Sacred)

Hermetics had techniques for penetrating and discerning the order of the cosmos. Gnosticism was only philosophical when describing God's absolute transcendence. It used the language of myth to describe the divine world of self-realization. Hermetics never labels the cosmos as bad or evil.

Hermetics had a positive view of the cosmos and man; while the Gnostic view was negative, the body was a prison of the soul. The Hermetic way included initiation and instructions in the nature of the cosmos and man. They were paradoxical complementary ways to arrive at the same Mystery.

The Grail Effect


We are involved in a pioneering project in the overlap of arts, sciences, humanities, network research, data science, and information design to log and archive our research. That which rings true, resonates. Imagination is a way of engaging reality. The flow of images creates thinking and the thinker -- the "seen" and the "seer". The wholeness of the Self is more than the sum of psyche's components. What was once only imagined is being proven with genetic genealogy. Dreams and philosophy make up myths.

It all begins when a seemingly ordinary person somehow develops an interest in their family genealogy, finds a historical Gateway Ancestor, whose pedigree leads them back to medieval times where they find they descend from multinational nobility and royalty. Because of intensive intermarriage among nobles in past eras, finding one royal usually means tapping into several blueblood lines.

Much like in dreamwork, where we are all parts of the dream, we are literally all of our ancestors incarnate -- male and female -- only this is a dream dreamt aloud in the manifest world, birth after noble birth. We are all the Fisher King. We go fishing for our ancestral legacies and voices in the deep lake of the unconscious, bringing them to the surface. We "fish" with our ancestral "lines", which tie us directly to our deep past.

When the Lady of the Lake responds spontaneously with the treasure of the magic sword, our intellects are sharpened and steeled, as well as our intuition. The 'fishing' is drawing these things up from the unconscious, but the 'fishing lines' are our progenitors, you might say -- the Fisher Kings and queens. And, the King and the land are one - that is, our divinity and our materiality are synonymous. We exist and in that sense we are 'divine' to the extent that we realize and actualize that blessing of our deepest Nature, balancing symbolic and material.

"It is the duty of one who goes his own way to inform society of what he finds on his voyage of discovery, be it cooling water for the thirsty or the sandy wastes of unfruitful error. The one helps, the other warns. Not the criticism of individual contemporaries will decide the truth or falsity of his discoveries, but future generations. There are things that are not yet true today, perhaps we dare not find them true, but tomorrow they may be. So every man whose fate it is to go his individual way must proceed with hopefulness and watchfulness, ever conscious of his loneliness and its dangers."  (
C.G. Jung)

At first we are struck with the richness of our personal family story, but soon come to realize many of our noble lines are intimately crossed with those already well-aware of their Sangreal heritage today. We learn to understand our lineage is that of the ancient dynastic houses, who are already deeply involved in their own historical reclamation and heritage projects. We begin to see that this is, indeed, our true extended family.

As the seeker's online search widens, sooner or later they come across some material on the Sangreal legend, legacy, or its many subcultures. Given a few hints on where and who to look for, suddenly they are faced with the mind-blowing distinction that they descend arguably from the oldest royal line on the planet, and that there is a deeper 'reality' to the mythic stories -- a living reality we each embody.

The God-Kings are rooted in mythic prehistory and extended their rule well into the Classical Period, before they were deposed and separated from their divine-rights by socio-political machinations. Looking to their own family lines and/or genetic genealogy reports, modern  Grail-carriers come face to face with the revelation of their true being.

Thus awakened, they draw new energy from the collective unconscious and their Sangreal companions on the same journey to pursue the depths of their being and connection to Cosmos. So it has been, from the dawn of time. Suddenly their 'differences' make sense, possibly for the first time. They may experience an infusion of wisdom or Knowledge welling up from the Plenum within, which had formerly been experienced as a Void. The Void is not devoid.

Genetic Genealogy


Genealogists now use molecular genealogy, comparing and matching people by matrilineal DNA lineages -- matrilineal mtDNA or patrilineal Y-chromosome ancestry, SNP, and/or autosomal tests. People interested in ancestry now look at genetic markers to trace the migrations of the human species. You can trace your genealogy by DNA from your grandparents back 10,000 or more years.

Anyone can be interested in DNA for ancestry research, learning how different populations from a mosaic of communities reached their current locations. From whom are you descended? What markers shed light on your deepest ancestry? You can study DNA for medical reasons or to discover the geographic travels and dwelling places of some of your ancestors. DNA does not target specific ancestors by name but does reveal rare genetic markers. Specifically, you can interpret your DNA test and/or genealogy for family history.

Particular genetic markers are called ancestry informative markers (AIM). They correlate with populations of specific geographical areas. Autosomal DNA shows the "genetic percentages" of a person's ancestry from particular continents/regions or identify the countries and "tribes" of origin. SNPs are locations on DNA where nucleotides have "mutated" or "switched" to a different nucleotide. Tests listing geographical places of origin use alleles. Individual and family variations on various chromosomes across the genome are analyzed with the aid of population databases.

Initiation opens a communication link between the aspirant and divine guiding principle -- our inner genius -- fostering balance in the personality as the firm foundation for spiritual development. Maat or 'Balance' was the prime expression of the Egyptian Mystery Schools, because it gave order and meaning to life.


In the East, it is called the Tao, a dynamic blending of yin and yang. In Kabbalah, it is the Middle Way. Balance helps us to achieve the goals we want in life and to manifest our dreams. You can easily integrate this wisdom tradition in your own householder life. Empowerment comes through grounding and centering

Such knowledge transforms and activates a new level of Being, internally and in the world, at large. The Grail has come calling and collected its own, informing our sparks of consciousness with a connection to hyperdimensional depth, with a sense of mission and purpose, with a commitment to the recovery of our self-awareness and inherent potential of genius for clarity. This is the Path of Return.


We've had glimpses of a way of being human that embodies rare integrity, freedom, wholeness and beauty--and we dream of the life and world that could result from sustaining that ideal. Most of us are held back from our greater potential by a deep-rooted undertow pulling us down from the heights we could achieve. This persistent barrier to our optimal growth is the ancient, hardwired programming of our evolutionary past, the "software" of our primitive ancestry.
 
We operate (often unconsciously) from "inherited" instincts, assumptions, and responses that have been encoded into humankind for millennia--vestiges of an ancient animal past.


These unproductive patterns form an invisible ceiling preventing us from reaching our true potential. In fact, this innate and primitive "conditioning" is the key reason that most of our efforts at change fail--whether as individuals or as a society.

The key to breaking this "sound barrier" in consciousness is learning how to awaken and activate a latent spiritual capacity. It lives within each of us, but often remains dormant, just beneath the surface of our awareness. This often hidden dimension of our being is a boundless source of inspiration, passion, creativity and clarity--and when we learn how to tap into it, we rapidly find ourselves on the other side of everything that previously stood in our way.


"Grail Carriers" Today

We have reclaimed our voice on the world stage. We are speaking out, in part, because of the needful state of the world and because whole industries and memes are based on misapprehensions, out-right lies, and exploitation of our ancestral legacy. We are awakened.

We are engaged in a transpersonal, metaphysical method of knowing Truth. Namely, that Necessity binds us to our destiny, which is not to be confused with linear pre-ordination. The Underground Stream honors the Feminine. Cultural Transformation can only come through the cultural evolution toward partnership. We are here to set the record straight and define ourselves with our own narratives in today's world, as the stewards we rightfully claim to be. "Jung found further that the mandala does not only mirror an inner state of order, but that its harmony or disharmony encompasses also the surroundings of the individual. Thus a mandala needs a symbol in which the outer and inner world merge. There is for Jung a ultimate reality beyond matter and psyche which he called the unus mundus, its empirical manifestation is the principle of synchronicity because in synchronistic events the inner world behaves as if it were outside and the outer world as if it were inside. As the mandala symbolism expresses the holistic order of matter and psyche it should have been investigated by physicists as well as psychologists because the mandala reappears in their hypothetical models of the atomic world. The atomic model of Niels Bohr is already a cosmic mandala and the models which the physicists construct nowadays to visualize the quarks are also mandalas." (M-L von Franz)

Imagine for a moment that the fate of the entire human race rested on your shoulders alone. That humanity's evolution out of brute self-interest depended entirely on your willingness to transform your consciousness.


What if you knew that the human race could advance past its smallness and negative conditioning --if you only became an exemplar of humanity's highest potential for the world? Imagine that for you, evolving beyond ego became an evolutionary imperative. Would you approach your path any differently?

Would the energy you bring to your spiritual practice intensify? Would the quality of awareness and care with which you approached your interactions with others become more profound? Would you find yourself reaching with inner muscles you didn't even know you had to actually stay awake to the depth you've tasted in your most profound spiritual moments? If you knew it all rested on you, would you have any choice but to change?

The Indian sage Ramana Maharshi once said that the spiritual aspirant must want liberation like a drowning person wants air. Why? Because the challenges of authentic spiritual growth and transformation are so great that most of us will choose to continue suffering in our smallness, rather than feel the pain of allowing that smallness to die forever.

Modern science has in recent decades been verifying what the ancient traditions intuited long ago: that, in both tangible and mysterious ways, we are all interconnected. Any one of us can have a profound effect on the whole. Add to that the reality that we are evolving beings living in an evolving universe. We are all part of a grand, cosmic evolutionary process. Then the question of our obligation to the whole starts to cut close to the bone.

To reframe the earlier question: What if you realized that the entire human endeavor, the evolution of consciousness itself, depended on your willingness to evolve your own consciousness? How would it affect the choices you make every day if you knew that in a very real sense, those choices were either contributing to the evolution of the whole--or holding it back?


At this time when it seems that our very future depends on our willingness to evolve as a species, would you have any choice but to act in alignment with the greatest evolutionary good? The point is that when we take a closer look at what spiritual work and growth is actually for, it quickly becomes clear that the path of awakening is not primarily about freeing ourselves from suffering or securing our own happiness. Sure, that's a nice by-product. But, as long as that's all we're seeking, we probably won't get very far.

Where the spiritual path really begins to get interesting is when we recognize that transforming ourselves in the deepest possible way is in fact an evolutionary imperative, with profound consequences far beyond ourselves.


If we begin to embrace the fact that our lives are not simply our own to do with as we please--that in everything we do, we are in fact accountable to the Whole--something truly miraculous begins to happen. Faced with the palpable responsibility to evolve for a greater good, we find that we suddenly have access to a seemingly infinite source of energy, intention, passion and courage to confront whatever challenges present themselves on our path.

What's more, all of the personal issues and problems--all of the fears and doubts and resistances that once seemed so insurmountable--begin to seem a lot less significant. Why? Because our attention is now captivated by something much bigger than ourselves. This is the power of context.


We see our individual concerns, the worries we fret over day to day, from a different vantage point. Held up against this larger picture and greater purpose, those concerns suddenly seem very small indeed. Realizing "it's not all about me," and ignited by a noble calling to participate in the grand adventure of conscious evolution, we find we no longer even want to give those worries the time of day.

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/

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/
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Ch. 1 - Jungian Genealogy

10/21/2014

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Chapter 1
On February 29, 1919, Jung wrote a letter to Joan Corrie and commented on the
Seven Sermons of the Dead, with particular reference to the last one:

"The primordial creator of the world, the blind creative libido, becomes transformed in man through individuation & out of this process, which is like pregnancy, arises a divine child, a reborn God, no more (longer) dispersed into the millions of creatures, but being one & this individual, and at the same time all individuals, the same in you as in me.

Dr. L[ong] has a little book: VII sermones ad mortuous. There you find the description of the Creator dispersed into his creatures, & in the last sermon you find the beginning of individuation, out of which, the divine child arises ... The child is a new God, actually born in many individuals, but they don't know it. He is a spiritual God.
A spirit in many people, yet one and the same everywhere. Keep to your time and you will experience His qualities" (Copied in Constance Long's diary, Countway Library of
Medicine, pp. 21-22) ~The Red Book, Footnote 123.


Birth is an act of physical and psychological separation – the first decisive and abrupt,the latter more gradual. We learn to think of ourselves as discrete, separate individuals. We have our bodies, distinct from other bodies, with its boundary of skin,and a separate and unique mind, also separated from other minds, with which we think our own private thoughts and hold internal conversations. Neuroscience is beginning to track the location of some of these thoughts in the brain, and to help those without speech to turn images, ideas and preverbal signals into language. If we are spiritually minded we may also envisage a unique individual soul or spirit. The soul may be conceived of as pre-existent and capable of surviving the death of the physical body. It may retain some aspects of its individuality outside the physical realm, and even carry experiences and characteristics through successive incarnations.This unique, separate experience of embodied human existence constitutes the Self. We may be in relation to other selves, share many of their genes, and be mutually interdependent, but even in the case of identical twins, each Self is bounded and grounded in an individual body, mind and spirit. The sensation of not being so grounded and separate is commonly treated in Western medical terms as a pathology...

--Fiona Bowie
Approaches to Genealogy

Your own BOOK OF THE DEAD is written in your DNA.
Deciphering its inherent meaning is a Quest for the Grail and the journey of psychological transformation. We instinctively engage in semi-conscious conversations with these ephemeral figures from our past that feed our conceptions of the ineffable and our own extended self.

We find, perhaps to our surprise, that upon reflection they inform us with a hitherto unknown wisdom or perplex us with unsolvable riddles. The intangible world interacts with the tangible one through their effects on us.  Ancestral spirits have their own histories, motivations, and social interactions and are traditionally viewed as agents in a rich network of social trajectories, not symbols.

A pedigree is a symbolic hologram of our intertwined histories and structure -- interacting waves upon waves of generations in the ocean of humanity. Because the ancestors number literally in the thousands, we come to understand the transformation is within the unfolding therapeutic practice, rather than contained only in each of the historical or fictional figures.

Genealogical research is a complex process that uses historical records and sometimes genetic analysis to demonstrate kinship. Reliable conclusions are based on the quality of sources, ideally original records, the information within those sources. Ideally evidence is drawn, directly or indirectly from primary or firsthand information.


Genealogy forces you to move through history in steps of 20-30 years, generation after generation, filling in every step. Whereas history often compresses or "telescopes" time, so that two hundred years in the medieval period is covered in far less space than two hundred years in the modern period. We know very well that we need a lot of generations to get from 1720 to 1950. Genealogy reminds us that we need exactly the same number of generations to get from 1220 to 1450. It forces us to pick our way step by step through those long unchanging medieval years.
http://humphrysfamilytree.com/meaning.html

In many instances, genealogists must skillfully assemble indirect or circumstantial evidence to build a case for identity and kinship. All evidence and conclusions, together with the documentation that supports them, is then assembled to create a cohesive genealogy or family history. Overall patterns contains meaning.

Genealogist Mark Humphreys says, "Your ancestors were the same mix of bullies, fools, bigots, incompetents, cowards, and occasional smart and admirable people that always make up society. You exist because of many people who you would despise if you met them. Genealogy is about finding out who they were, it should have no interest in whether they were admirable or not.

Indeed, it's more fun when they murder each other, marry descendants of their ancestors' bitter enemies, conceive your ancestor as a result of sordid and regretted affairs, die before their child is born, and so on. It makes us realize how precarious our existence is, and how messy and unlikely our genetic inheritance. Anyone who believes they belong to one race, or that their ancestors were fine people, hasn't done enough genealogy.

This is especially true when applied to the nobility and royalty, who are often the only ancestors you are left with in the more distant past. Why should you admire some noble, or take their side, just because you descend from them? The nobility of the past were often no more than the most successful robbers, stealing other people's land, and living off other people's work. They weren't Appointed By God, but were the survivors of a long process of selection among the most aggressive and best-organized Strong Men, aided by the greatest thieves of them all, the Royal family.

No, the desire for a Royal Descent is quite different. It's because most of us exist in little islands of peasants and farmers, interconnected to each other but to no one else, and for all we know we would still exist no matter what had happened in mainstream history in the big world outside.


And the only way to break out of this island is to find a connection to one of these Strong Men, after which things explode and history becomes full of events on which our existence provably depends. The peer, the heiress, the gent, the precious link to the World Family Tree, is your goal, but to expect to actually like him or her, or be proud of them, is to rather miss the point." http://humphrysfamilytree.com/meaning.html

Genealogists begin their research by collecting family documents and stories. This creates a foundation for documentary research, which involves examining and evaluating historical records for evidence about ancestors and other relatives, their kinship ties, and the events that occurred in their lives. As a rule, genealogists begin with the present and work backward in time.

  • Rational
  • Spiritual
  • Psychological
  • Psychic
  • Legendary
  • Mythological
  • Irrational
  • Delusional
Some approaches are overtly Christian, or they may have religious overtones even for a non-religious person. Others will come to the subject with a pagan background or an affinity for the ancient ways. Paradoxically, we find ancestors listed from other ethnicities and religions.

The Prophet Mohammad often appears in Western royal lines, as do the emperors of the Han Dynasty, Attila the Hun, Turks, Khazars, and Xiongnu shamans of Siberia. We share roots with the Basque, Moors, Turks, Pashtun, and sub-Saharan Africa. A balanced approach to the heritage will not obsess on particular areas of the lineage to the exclusion of others, nor veer off into cos-play like fantasies of legendary beings. Genealogy shows your multi-ethnic heritage as well as a range of spiritual beliefs.


'Messianic complex' describes the phenomenon where individuals claim self-awareness of their proclaimed role as a 'savior'.
Like those who claim to be Jesus, non-religious "Magdalene addicts" are prone to channeling her, or even claiming to be her. But most of these channelings are highly idealized and full of truisms.

The phenomenon is a complicated psychological problematic developed within a cultural group. In Jungian psychology a complex is a cluster of psychological energy that centers around a particular element that has developed partly through the disposition of a personality and partly through life experience (Jacobi). These energy clusters act as partial personalities within the psyche and are often unconscious and somewhat autonomous.

They don't reflect the deeply Gnostic belief in the evil of matter, the drive to perfection, or the demonic dominion of the Archons. Or, if they do embrace such ideas, they likely heard it on some internet show from a highly idiosyncratic speaker, invariably trying to sell his or her book. Somehow they all have a theory.  But no one has made good on such claims yet.

They may be the victims of misguided inner authority. We can pick up misconceptions and self-delusions in the search for the soul. The faddish appearance of such identifications (a lived trance-state) is a social trend, and the meme-like nature of the Feminine proclamations reveal that this is a collective phenomena, not true individuation. It shows the collective influence of pop culture and the archetype on the psyche, no matter what you call "Her".

A relationship with the archetype can be primitive or sophisticated. James Hillman expands the concept of complex by adding a concept called personification to individual complexes, treating complexes as characters or entities within the psyche, with the proviso that it is not meant to be literal.


Jung’s complexes and James Hillman’s concept of personification permit the unconscious images to converse with the individual psyche in 'imaginal dialogue'. They manage to incorporate feelings, imagination, and metaphor, which other sciences reject. Imagination can alter our actual perceptions.

Sociological identification, including intense physical reactions, and relationships between the body and the psyche, can be independent of linear historical inheritance in a culture that is a product of ideas rather than location or blood inheritance and also experimental. Emergent imaginal content is metaphor for thinking about experience, including experiences tied to intense belief structures.

When you don't know what a symbol is, it appears split-off, as 'other'. It attempts to enter consciousness in the expressive arts. Collectively, spiritual conflict is worldview warfare -- irreconcilable differences in belief, including the structure of the Cosmos. But only creative emotional and cognitive comprehension of the inherent meaning of experience leads to individuation and self-realization -- the Grail.


Jung spoke of such creativity:


"The creative process has feminine quality, and the creative work arises from unconscious depths--we might say, from the realm of the mothers. Whenever the creative force predominates, human life is ruled and molded by the unconscious as against the active will, and the conscious ego is swept along on a subterranean current, being nothing more than a helpless observer of events.

The work in process becomes the poet's fate and determines his psychic development. It is not Goethe who creates Faust, but Faust which creates Goethe....The archetypal image of the wise man, the savior or redeemer, lies buried and dormant in man's unconscious since the dawn of culture; it is awakened whenever the times are out of joint and a human society is committed to a serious error.

When people go astray they feel the need of a guide or teacher or even of the physician. These primordial images are numerous, but do not appear in the dreams of individuals or in works of art until they are called into being by the waywardness of the general outlook.

When conscious life is characterized by one-sidedness and by a false attitude, then they are activated--one might say, 'instinctively'--and come to light in the dreams of individuals and the visions of artists and seers, thus restoring the psychic equilibrium of the epoch.
" (Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul
).

"Every creative person is a duality or a synthesis of contradictory aptitudes. On the one side he is a human being with a personal life, while on the other side he is an impersonal, creative process...The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is 'man' in a higher sense--he is 'collective man'--one who carries and shapes the unconscious, psychic life of mankind. To perform this difficult office it is sometimes necessary for him to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being."

Worldview


Emotionally appealing truths are sandwiched into idiosyncratic notions ranging from the speculative to the fantastical, and trap many individuals like flypaper, because our minds love a good story. The brain feeds on stories, but the wrong stories just lead us down the garden path into ancient worlds that never happened, and mythic scenarios that were never meant to be taken literally. Accepting such beliefs uncritically is precisely the opposite of what Jung recommended as individuation.

Such false beliefs tend to cluster around an individual's personal issues and complexes, but are mistaken for and confounded with historical, philosophical and scientific 'reality'. Much of the "self-delusion" can be linked to exposure to memes functioning as emotional strange attractors or cultural artifacts or fallout,, as well as pre- and pseudo-scientific notions of by-gone centuries, and lack of understanding of standards and discernment. 

The self-narrative may not match the reality. It's a truism that mediocrity (gaps and gaffs in awareness) boasts the loudest. Through hysteria, lack of critical judgment, and naive enthusiasm, a false idea can be hyped by the mainstream media to the point of not only looking entirely plausible, but even certain.

A world view is a set of presuppositions (or assumptions) which we hold (consciously or subconsciously) about the basic makeup of our world. Everyone has a world view, whether he can explain it or not. It can be likened to a pair of glasses through which one views the world. It is important to have the right prescription, or reality will be distorted. Modem man is faced with a supermarket of world views; all of them claim to represent reality, but they are points of view about reality -- mental constructs, beliefs.

To construct our own worldview we are still confronted with the old formula - the cosmological creative and destructive cycles of time. Cosmology is the study of the origin and nature of the universe.  Ontology studies the nature of being as being and existence.
  We have to fit the pieces together from epistemologies and psychodynamics into some sort of cumulative understanding. Some basic epistemological agreement about the phenomena under examination is needed. Metaphysics abstracts universal conceptions. Some of these grand narratives are more fanciful than others.

We can be sincerely convinced of the utterly wrong. Why do we continue to accommodate the irrelevant and easily falsifiable? Are we conscientious about our own self-delusions or simply unconsciously immersed in them due to a delusional perspective on our own misguided "gnosis" and obsessions with misguided theoretical perspectives? Even conscience is no ineffable guide to inner authority. There is no shortage of new myths to capture our attention. Dreams tell us who we are, collectively and individually.

If Inner Authority is linked to authentic power and wisdom, we need to examine our personal interaction with inner wisdom figures (archetypes) and values in order to create lives of positive action that arise from deep inner wisdom. Most of us shirk such important inner work, substituting a fantasy of transformation and mindfulness. Delusional self-improvement projects are aimed at adorning the ego.

People claim to hear messages that ring in their hearts as truth, or 'resonate' with material that confirms their own tacit or recognized beliefs, but most it originates in cultural conditioning and memetic patterning. All we hold is a piece of the Mystery. Buzzwords such as True Nature, intentionality, and mis-identified integrity compound the situation. Premature spiritual fixation can just as readily be a form of transcendental escapism.

Both the strategies of "transcendence" and "reduction" are expressions of bad faith — i.e., forms of self-deception and escapism that seek to deny the realities of the human existential situation. Self-delusion may be self-evident but few give themselves a reality check on it and doing so is compounded by our own psychological blindspots. This is a form of escapism or neo-mythology.

The depth psychological approach is about psyche, which brings with it a sense of the sacred. It is a way of incorporation that assimilates what has been considered the "Not-I" into the core of being. It is informed by the Hero's Journey and many of the iconic tropes of the royal genealogical lines. Archetypal psychology has experience dealing with parental images and ego development, as well as life passages that might intertwine with genealogical interest and the predictable crises such as childbearing, mid-life, aging and confronting mortality.

Jungians claim that, "A psychologically-oriented approach to spirituality and a new God-image are emerging alongside the Judeo-Christian tradition. This form of spirituality expresses itself from the depths of the psyche, and stresses personal experience rather than belief or sacred texts. Depth psychology gives us a contemporary way to express this evolving step in the history of religious consciousness. Sometimes a new language enables things to be said that have yet to be articulated, and depth psychology is providing this voice."

Traditional ideas about God and religion do not always express the individual’s personal spirituality, because one may experience the sacred in ways that are not fully articulated in the traditional teachings. For people who are committed to a traditional religious practice, depth psychology can deepen their relationship to the tradition and their understanding of its archetypal underpinning. (Corbett)



Surviving in the wilderness


The Grail Quest took place in the vast Wasteland of the alienated soul.


In his book Deep Survival, Laurence Gonzales describes what it’s like to be lost in a wilderness, and how to survive the experience. Here are the stages he identifies in his description of the process:

1.     You’re lost, but persist in thinking that everything will work out just fine if you continue along the same path.
2.     You realize you’re lost, but you don’t have a clue what to do, so you continue on the wrong path, hoping against hope that home will be just over the next hill—even though somewhere within you, you know it’s not.
3.     The knowledge that you are finally, irredeemably and undeniably lost causes makes you to panic—you run desperately through scrub and trees, burning yourself up, getting even more lost.
4.     Exhausted by panic, you stop. You realize that wherever you are, you’re somewhere. You sit down where you are and take stock, making wherever you are your temporary home. What you do here is the key to whether or not you survive.
5.     You rest, and take stock of the resources you have, and the information the landscape offers. With this, you begin to make a plan for the continuation of your life.


more -
http://sangreality.weebly.com/index.html
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Rose Line Descent

10/21/2014

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Rose Line Descent

The Da Vinci Code made much of the so-called Roseline marking sacred sites in the European landscape. But the real Rose Lines are revealed in the royal genealogies with which it is interwoven.
The Grail is the source of life, of generativity, of the primordial Eros. The Grail belongs to all that is soft, yielding, yin, of the body, of the earth, of the Mother: full, rich, gentle, and infinitely abundant.

Certain images, such as the Garden of the Rose, the Fountain, the Loathly Bride, the Damsel in distress, and above all the Holy Grail recur in all kinds of variations. The symbol of the Rose, for example, finds its way from the Sufis to the Roman de la Rose, to Dante's Paradiso, to the windows of Chartres Cathedral, and eventually to the mystical Brotherhood of the Rosicrucians.  The underground tradition of alchemy and esoteric arts kept the spiritual Mysteries and Great Goddess discipline alive in the Underground Stream.
Great Rite
1180 and 1230 AD. This is the same prolific and fertile time period that saw the peak of the great cathedral building era; the rise to power of the Templar Knights; the rise and fall of Catharism in southern France; the formation of Kabbalistic and mystical schools in Spain. The Grail symbol first emerges in history in a series of remarkable writings that appear in France over a span of about half a century between the years 1180 and 1230 AD. This is the same prolific and fertile time period that saw the peak of the great cathedral building era; the rise to power of the Templar Knights; the rise and fall of Catharism in southern France; the formation of Kabbalistic and mystical schools in Spain in which Jews, Christians and Muslims all participated in relative harmony; the emergence of the Troubadours as channels for the diffusion and circulation of sacred knowledge; the rise of Sufism and the transmission of Hermetic knowledge to Europe via Islamic scholars and mystics.

Self-Reflection:

Mental activity that concentrates on a particular content of consciousness, an instinct encompassing religion and the search for meaning.

Ordinarily we do not think of "reflection" as ever having been instinctive, but associate it with a conscious state of mind. Reflexio means "bending back" and, used psychologically, would denote the fact that the reflex which carries the stimulus over into its instinctive discharge is interfered with by psychization. . . . Thus in place of the compulsive act there appears a certain degree of freedom, and in place of predictability a relative unpredictability as to the effect of the impulse.
["Psychological Factors in Human Behaviour," CW 8, par. 241.]

In Jung’s view, the richness of the human psyche and its essential character are determined by the reflective instinct.

Reflection is the cultural instinct par excellence, and its strength is shown in the power of culture to maintain itself in the face of untamed nature.[Ibid., par. 243.]

Self-reflection, or – what comes to the same thing – the urge to individuation, gathers together what is scattered and multifarious and exalts it to the original of the One, the Primordial Man.

In this way our existence as separate beings, our former ego nature, is abolished, the circle of consciousness is widened, and because the paradoxes have been made conscious, the sources of conflict are dried up.
~Carl Jung; Collected Works 11; Transformation Symbolism in the Mass; par. 401

To concern ourselves with dreams is a way of reflecting on ourselves-a way of self-reflection. It is not our ego-consciousness reflecting on itself; rather, it turns its attention to the objective actuality of the dream as a communication or message from the unconscious, unitary soul of humanity. It reflects not on the ego but on the self; it recollects that strange self, alien to the ego, which was ours from the beginning, the trunk from which the ego grew. It is alien to us because we have estranged ourselves from it through the aberrations of the conscious mind.
~"The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man" (1933). In CW 10: Civilization in Transition. pg. 318

If we do not fashion for ourselves a picture of the world, we do not see ourselves either, who are the faithful reflections of that world. Only when mirrored in our picture of the world can we see ourselves in the round? Only in our creative acts do we step forth into the light and see ourselves whole and complete. Never shall we put any face on the world other than our own, and we have to do this precisely in order to find ourselves. For higher than science or art as an end in itself stands man, the creator of his instruments. ~"Analytical Psychology and Weltanschauung"
(1928). In CW 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche. P.737
Chapter 1
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Rosa Mundi

10/21/2014

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ROSA MUNDI
http://www.clanoftubalcain.org.uk/rosamundi.html


"Take the fayer Roses, white and red / And joyne them well in won bed. /
So betwixt these Roses mylde / Thou shalt bring forth a Gloriuse chylde."
(Joseph Campbell, The Mythic Image, Bollingen C, Princeton University Press, 1974, p. 254)
Cult of the Archetypal Feminine

The Mother of us all is also the Earth, as the light of the divine womb (primal source) and the mystery of divine light that informs and transforms into matter. The Sangreal is a cult of bloodline. Many who are of it are unaware or unawakened to that genealogical and gnostic awareness.


Many who think they are 'awake' are merely enthralled with the fugue state or  eruption of symbolic material which is actually a form of dissociation. Dissociative disorders are typically experienced as startling, autonomous intrusions into the person's usual ways of responding or functioning. Due to their unexpected and largely inexplicable nature, they tend to be quite unsettling. Jung theorized that theorized that dissociation is a natural necessity for consciousness to operate in one faculty unhampered by the demands of its opposite.

Much of the magic and mystery enters our lines through our grandmothers, from the distaff side of our physical inheritance. It is carried in the mitochondrial DNA, inherited only from the mother on the x chromosome. It is very persistent through generations in both men and women, which helps us determine the relationship of populations.

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.


The fact that mitochondrial DNA is maternally inherited enables genealogical researchers to trace maternal lineage far back in time. The concept of the Mitochondrial Eve is based on the same type of analysis, attempting to discover the origin of humanity by tracking the lineage back in time.

In the medieval era, a cult of the Feminine arose with a persistent theme of gender reunion in the Great Rite of the ancient bloodline, mystical eroticism known as the Mysterium Coniunctionis or Royal Marriage, in the underground Church of Love. Jung wrote a large book with that title describing "the separation and synthesis of psychic opposites in alchemy".

The opposites to be reconciled were Venus and Mars. It's about healing sexual woundedness, the pathless Wasteland of male-female relationships (literal and psychic), with a mystical inner marriage.  Like Isis and Horus, when the Madonna holds the infant Jesus, he represents the Future, and he continues to do so as the future is always coming.

The Sacred Heart and Mary Magdalene are twin symbols of the Grail. She has been used to symbolize the hidden teachings of Jesus. The cult of Mary Magdalene and the Cult of the Black Virgin survive in many forms to this day. The meeting of the sun-god and the earth-mother brings forth the miracle of birth, death, and rebirth from her dark creative womb. The god comes through the goddess.


We find that balance in Individuation, after facing the Shadow and connecting with inner wisdom. Through his relationship with the feminine a man gains access to his own soul, to the deeper layers of his "heart". His sensitive quest for his "queen" makes him wiser, more sensitive, more scrupulous as a person. AMOR is a spiritual development. The courage to persist is the hallmark of loyalty.
The Rosy Cross is a symbol of the human process of reproduction elevated to the spiritual: The fundamental symbols are the female rose and the male cross. As generation is the key to material existence, those symbols exemplify the reproductive processes. As regeneration is the key to spiritual existence, the symbolism of the rose and the cross typifies redemption  through the union of our lower temporal nature with our higher eternal nature.

The Rosy Cross is equivalent to the Philosopher's Stone or Holy Grail, and refined Gold. All represent the Grail of Self-Realization.  As an image The Grail was a symbol of not just spiritual transcendence but also the Divine Immanence in creation. In Jewish mysticism, every woman is an earthly embodiment of the celestial Shekinah. The Grail Temple is the body, our sacred vessel.  We need to learn again that the family is a being, a goddess.

There are many icons of Mary that show black faces and hands. In France, these are called Vierge Noires—Black Virgins. Elsewhere, they may be called Black Madonnas or the "other Mary." Jung called her Isis, while others claim she is the symbolic remains of a prehistoric worship of the Earth Mother. She is generally connected with Cybele, Diana, Isis, and Venus, as well as with Kali, Inanna, and Lilith. Historically she is connected with the Crusades, the Islamic occupation of Spain, the Conquistadors, the Kabbala, as well as the Merovingians and Knights Templar, who viewed her as Mary Magdalene.


Courtly Love (courtezia) and Troubadours were institutions that compensated the misogyny of medieval times. The contemplation of beauty in its feminine incarnation opens the Middle Way between debauchery and self-abnegation. Transcendent beauty is reflected in a beautiful face or body. Contact with the beautiful is a sacrament. The culture of l'amour courtois flourished in Anjou and the Languedoc. The House of Anjou remains the senior Grail family.

The Crusades, the so-called 'holy war', filled the need for collective Shadow projection. In this scenario, Venus and the cult of the Feminine played counterpoint to the Martian cult of warrior-knighthood, with its chivalric code of honor. This Quest for a lost sacred object, the Holy Grail, appears out of a deep and urgent need to counteract the brutality of the rapacious crusading, murderous military oppression.  AMOR was a gnostic and esoteric doctrine of the divinity of the Mother and the higher meaning of the chivalric quest.

The persecuted became persecutors in a collective defensive strategy known as identification with the aggressor and the splitting-off of the victim. Whether personal or collective the consequence is the same. A need arises to find and project the shadow onto an external victim who opposes the newly found power of the aggressor. The real problem was and remains how to reconcile the two warring extremes of human nature: spirituality and sexuality. Men met the challenge by becoming more rigid and investing women and the Grail with the powers of generation and regeneration.

The historical origin for the collective resurgence of the sacred feminine is most likely derived from ancient cults of the Great Goddess—the mysteries of Isis, of Diana of Ephesus or Cybele, and especially the Sophia of the Gnostics. They were carried to Europe through the artistic contacts of troubadours who had been to the East.

Above all, the Cathars revered a version of Isis-Sophia and ordained women as priestesses equally with men. However, their Gnosticism also vilified the flesh and therefore all matter. Their archetypes, The Archons, were likewise demonized, being stunted by duality.

The Gnosticism of the second-century sects involves a coherent series of characteristics that can be summarized in the idea of a divine spark in man, deriving from the divine realm, fallen into this world of fate, birth, and death, and needing to be awakened by the divine counterpart of the self in order to be finally reintegrated (into the divine realm). (Filoramo, 1990, p. 143)

It is likely that the troubadour aubades or songs to the lady in spring ultimately derive from remnants of the old cults of Demeter, the Mother Goddess and her daughter Persephone. The Greeks brought this worship to Provence when they colonized Marseille and the south of Gaul in early times.

In the ancient Basilica of St. Victor in Marseille, on the 2nd of February each year  thousand of candles are lit to attend the raising of the famous Black Madonna from the infernal darkness of  the crypt up into the upper air. Persephone returned to the upper world every spring in Greek times, with masses of torches, to re-unite with her mother Demeter.
 
So in many of the noble courts of the South of France in the 11th-12th centuries there is a kind of revival of the pagan substrate that has been buried, but not entirely, by Christianity. What re-emerges is Christianity’s pagan shadow, to use Jung’s terms. What we see is the upsurge from the unconscious of the repressed pagan archetypal energies of the Dionysian-­Venusian. Ecstatic use of art, music, and the body led to communion with the godhead within the body. (Woolger)
http://www.deepmemoryprocess.com/page33.html ''Queen Eleanor & Fair Rosamund'' by Evelyn De Morgan The Grail hero discovers a castle in the midst of a Wasteland of self-alienation
The Fisher King is the wounded father principle, the weakened, unproductive and spiritually desolate father-world of medieval times. The waters of life have dried up both within and without laving a damaged consciousness, cut off from Mother Earth.

Jung said that today "the Gods have become diseases," and Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD) describes not only the psychological victims of war and brutality but says something about our own "hostage" culture. It is a kind of stuckness where the trauma seems to be continuously recurring, a torturous victimization without relief. The war comes home in chaos, flashbacks, dark futures, and suicidal impulses. We can imagine that the old warrior-knights were not immune from such human frailties. http://ptsdpolitics.iwarp.com/

“Peace for veterans is not an ‘absence of war’ but its living ghost in the bedroom, at the lunch counter, on the highway. The trauma is not ‘post’ but acutely present, and the ‘syndrome’ is not in the veteran but in the dictionary, in the amnesiac’s idea of peace that colludes with an unlivable life.” “The return from the killing fields is more than a debriefing; it is a slow ascent from hell. …The veteran needs a rite de sortie that belongs to every initiation as its normal conclusion, making possible an intact return.” (James Hillman)

In contrast, the passion of the troubadours was earthy, bodily and sensual no matter how sentimentalists would later portray it. Dali quipped, "The first man to compare the cheeks of a young woman to a rose was obviously a poet; the first to repeat it was possibly an idiot." There is no longer any excuse to see the ladies of the troubadours through rose-tinted spectacles of the early Romantic poets and the Pre-Raphaelite painters, as purely ethereal disembodied “spiritual” anima figures.

The troubadours celebrated the incarnation of the feminine every bit as much as its spiritualization. Some say fins amor, or pure love of a woman as a form of spiritual initiation through a forbidden but transcendent love affair, was practiced not for  procreation but contemplation. http://www.deepmemoryprocess.com/page209.html
Woolger, Roger, The Holy Grail: Healing the Sexual Wound in the Western Psyche (1983/2010)
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Genealogy of the Soul

10/21/2014

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'Every one of those unfortunates during the process of existence should constantly sense and be cognizant of the inevitability of his own death as well as of the death of everyone upon whom his eyes or attention rests'. --Gurdjieff
Genealogy of the Soul
Longing for the Lost Other
Here is the book of thy descent,
Here is the book of the Sangreal,
Here begin the terrors,
Here begin the miracles.
The History of the Grail – 12th Century, Anonymous


"Everywhere the virgin earth causes at least the unconscious of the conqueror to sink to the level of its indigenous inhabitants. Thus, in the American, there is a discrepancy between conscious and unconscious that is not found in the European, a tension between an extremely high conscious level of culture and an unconscious primitivity. This tension forms a psychic potential which endows the American with an indomitable spirit of enterprise and an enviable enthusiasm which we in Europe do not know. The very fact that we still have our ancestral spirits, and that for us everything is steeped in history, keeps us in contact with our unconscious, but we are so caught in this contact and held so fast in the historical vice that the greatest catastrophes are needed in order to wrench us loose and to change our political behavior from what it was five hundred years ago. Our contact with the unconscious chains us to the earth and makes it hard for us to move, and this is certainly no advantage when it comes to progressiveness... . [...] Plurimi pertransibunt- but he who is rooted in the soil endures. Alienation from the unconscious and from its historical conditions spells rootlessness. That is the danger that lies in wait for the conqueror of foreign lands, and for every individual who, through one-sided allegiance to any kind of -ism, loses touch with the dark, maternal, earthly ground of his being." -Jung, 'Mind and Earth', 1931
The Quest for Transcendence

Jung describes Individuation as a process of transformation that incorporates the personal and collective unconscious into consciousness (by means of dreams, active imagination, or free association) to be assimilated into the whole personality. This natural process facilitates the integration of the psyche.  The pursuit of self-knowledge is a pilgrimage to our deep center with its divine inner spark or Light.

We seek to remember what our soul has always known. When the psyche heals it produces mandala-type images, balancing dark and light, male and female, yin and yang aspects of nature. The genealogical image is more than a metaphor: you are the center of multiple radiant lines of descent, all of which converge in your unique manifestation.

It can be combined with transpersonal techniques, including hypnotherapy, regressions, shamanic healing, vison quest, mystic arts, seasonal celebrations, spirit journeying, psychodrama, bodywork, trauma release, meditation, soul retrieval, kin contact, and personal mythology. We consider using healing therapies on our ancestors in special cases. Woolger's Deep Memory Process suggests you can use such therapies to:

     • clearly recognize the core issues or complexes running your life

      • journey in time to resolve childhood and other traumas
     • vividly relive and resolve emotional conflicts through a healing psychodrama
     • develop somatic awareness of deep memories to release them from your body
     • let go of old unwanted ancestral patterns and influences
     • integrate wounded soul fragments (“past lives”)
     • clear your energy field of negative influences
     • open up with love to higher spiritual resources within yourself


We have to find and heal the Grail King within, reowning the projections and meaning we have conveniently let others carry for us, for good and evil. In that process we may glimpse and lose the Grail many times over. Genetic descent is amplified creatively by a recursive psychological descent into the unconscious to retrieve our lost soul and lost ancestors. It establishes an intergenerational feedback loop.

Individuation has a holistic healing effect on the person, both mentally and physically. Individuation is a self analysis, a self discovery, analyzing your own psyche. It serves as the guide or goal of a quest—the Holy Grail, the Elixir of Immortality, the Philosopher's Stone.

Like genealogy, individuation is the story of you as the unique individual you are. Genealogy, like a dragon's hoard, is a treasure hard to attain, yet priceless to the person who holds it. This most collective situation becomes the most individual experience because no two individuals incorporate it in exactly the same way.

We all search for something. In genealogy we narrow that search for the Holy Grail and the Precious Blood.
In this case, in genealogy the blood is precious because it is our own lifegiving blood. Legend tells us the Blood and the Grail are united. In medieval literature the Grail is often associated with a feast -- it is, indeed, a great feast of metaphors attached to the primary icon.

Legend has it there is a fellowship or underground Family of the Grail that furthers and protects its interests in all worlds. The "underground stream" is yet another symbol of the Grail. The Grail appears in many forms, including radiant light and the sangreal of the Holy Bloodline that flows from the Davidic line, including the Desposyni descendants of the Holy Family, perhaps including offspring of Jesus and Mary Magdalene -- or so they say.

Genealogies bring revelations, which may belong to millions of descendants but feel extremely important because they are part of our own personal heritage. It comes with strong spiritual and mythic overtones from the elder god-kings, the royal Davidic/Solomonic line, the family of Jesus, the Merovingians, Gnostics, Grail Kings, Camelot, and crusading Templars. Internal conflict may arise when loyalties are torn between opposing forces, each of which are ancestral lines.

In fact, the symbolic treasure of genealogy is that it encodes the entire transformational process from the war of opposites to the reconciling royal marriage. Genealogy show s graphically just how intimately our very existence is through those who gave us faces. This knowledge, more than a pedigree on paper, is the treasure hard to attain that nourishes and sustains us in our intergenerational Being. This is, in fact, The Grail, which serves the divine spark within.

Phillip Stephen Lansky concludes, “Interestingly, the “chymical wedding” of alchemy was a symbol for the simultaneous constellation of psychic opposites, which we have already suggested concurs with a state of physiological paradox. Might not the contents of the two archetypal flasks represent two amines, serotonin and noradrenalin, being poured simultaneously into a marriage bath in the hypothalamus?”


The Grail symbolizes life, spirituality, youth, health, joy, purity, creativity, the unconscious, and generativity [Jung and von Franz 1970, 114]. Spirituality means the perception of transcendent meaning and participation in a higher purpose and numinous experiences. It harmonizes the conflicting opposites of male-female, rationality and emotion, dark and light, good and evil, etc. [Jung and von Franz 1970, 194]. Wholeness requires a coniunctio oppositorum (conjunction of opposites).

William Blake describes it paradoxically: "Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence. From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy. Good and evil is Heaven just as evil and good is Hell."


The conflict of opposites in Parsifal's psyche needed to be discovered for him to get back into the Grail Castle. He needs to expand his consciousness and travel, psychologically speaking, far beyond the naive fool, to find the Grail Castle and discover himself, to be conscious of and reconcile the opposites in his psyche. 

The Fisher King, or the Grail King, represents a limited consciousness, one who is too rational and is incapable of solving the real problem his kingdom faces [Jung and von Franz 1970, 212]. The successor who will free him was prophesied to be a wholly innocent fool who would ask a specific question. "The myth is telling us that it is the naive part of a man that will heal him and cure his Fisher King wound. It suggests that if a man is to be cured he must find something in himself about the same age and about the same mentality as he was when he was wounded" [Johnson 1989, 11].

Jung himself experienced this woundedness after his break with Freud that opened his deep unconscious, flooding him with imagery that took a lifetime to assimilate and analyze.
He speaks of his soul-loss and efforts to retrieve it in his visionary tome, The Red Book, which has only recently been published, many years after his death.

The Red Book illuminates all of his theories of unconscious dynamics. As in dreams, we are all of the characters in mythological tales, and their stories hold deep meaning for us when they are activated by our own life experiences. They call us into the hero's adventure and one of their ways of doing so is the call to trace our genealogical roots.
The Wounded Fisher King
Jung and the Ancestors

The long-awaited release in the 21st century of Jung's RED BOOK (2009) reveals just how much of a role his ancestors and inner figures played in his own psychic life. They led directly to the formation of many of his theories of psychic dynamics.


Historically, in Western societies the focus of genealogy was on the kinship and descent of rulers and nobles, often arguing or demonstrating the legitimacy of claims to wealth and power. The term often overlapped with heraldry, in which the ancestry of royalty was reflected in their coats of arms. Modern scholars consider many claimed noble ancestries to be fabrications, such as the Anglo-Saxon chronicles that traced the ancestry of several English kings to the god Woden.

But Jung healed and transformed his own fragmentation by taking up imaginal relationships with his inner figures. He developed what might be called a Dialogical Gnosis -- a Way of Knowing informed by the wisdom of the Collective Unconscious, the plenum of inherent knowledge and experience.


Jung was engaged in the process of individuation -- cognitive, empathic engagement with the living and discarnate.Engagement implies committment, rather than participation, per se. Respect for the freedom of others and the intention toallow their personhood expression is a basic tenet of engagement

One does not choose the path of individuation, but rather is chosen by it. Individuation seems to be the innate urge of life to realize itself consciously. The transpersonal life energy, in the process of self-unfolding, uses human consciousness, a product of itself, as an instrument for its own self-realization.

New discoveries must not only be made, but assimilated with concurrent experience and meaningful psychological insight.  The individual meaningfulness of an experience is what creates unique personality.  The instinctive feeling of significance is expanded by rooting experiences in their mythical patterns.


If the ego can withstand the irrational temptations, ordeals, and peril at the hands of the unknown, it is eventually rewarded with an expanded experience of self and a rejuvenation, or rebirth. In his essay on the "Relationship between the Ego and the Unconscious," Jung has stated that,

It is impossible to achieve individuation by conscious intention, because conscious intention invariably leads to a typical attitude that excludes whatever does not fit in with it.  This assimilation of the unconscious contents leads, on the contrary to a condition in which the conscious intention is excluded and supplanted by a process of development that seems irrational.  This process alone signifies individuation, and its product is individuality as we have defined it;  particular and universal at once....Only when the unconscious is assimilated does the individuality emerge more clearly, together with the psychological phenomenon which links the ego with the non-ego and is designated by the word attitude. 
But this time it is no longer a typical attitude but an individual one.

What the conscious ego can do in regard to individuation is make the commitment to work in harmony with the unfolding subconscious process, to give it constant attention, and to place proper value on the experience.  This creates a resonance, the experience of "being in harmony with the cosmos", reflecting the Hermetic Axiom, "As Above, So Below." The Secret Garden of the Rose
The Rose in mysticism and Hermetic Philosophies is a profound symbol of consciousness and the soul personality. It symbolizes consciousness projected into the material form. Consciousness is symbolized  in a very apt and beautiful way as a flowering process and an unfolding manifestation. This flowering , blooming and unfolding of its petals in a perfect
mandalic symmetry, represents man's divine inner consciousness being revealed as layers of his being open up to reveal its ever becoming center, the Inner Self. To the Rosicrucians the symbol of the Rosy Cross is sacred. The Rose crucified on the cross is the symbol of the true divinity of humanity. The cross represents the four cardinal points of being in a
balanced state. The crossing of the vertical and the horizontal lines represent the conjunction of the opposites. The vertical, being the positive and active, conjuncts the horizontal, the negative and passive. It is at this conjunction point, representing balance nd harmony, that the rose flowers and unfolds itself. The cross also represents the body of man with
outstretched arms as his whole earthly plane and his heart being again at a conjunction between the superiors and inferiors, head or heaven, feet or earth, and also between left and right as opposition between the forces of light and darkness, life and death .

To the initiates this symbol of divine consciousness crucified or infused upon and in his physical body is a most profound and sacred mystery of the incarnation of the soul.

A beautiful Hermetic saying of the Rosicrucians is,
"Ad Rosam per crucem, ad crucem per Rosam."

-Steve Kalec

More and legends and myths of the rose:

http://www.whitedragon.org.uk/articles/rose.htm

ROSA MUNDI

http://www.clanoftubalcain.org.uk/rosamundi.html

"Take the fayer Roses, white and red / And joyne them well in won bed. /
So betwixt these Roses mylde / Thou shalt bring forth a Gloriuse chylde."
(Joseph Campbell, The Mythic Image, Bollingen C, Princeton University Press, 1974, p. 254)
Cult of the Archetypal Feminine

The Mother of us all is also the Earth, as the light of the divine womb (primal source) and the mystery of divine light that informs and transforms into matter. The Sangreal is a cult of bloodline. Many who are of it are unaware or unawakened to that genealogical and gnostic awareness.


Many who think they are 'awake' are merely enthralled with the fugue state or  eruption of symbolic material which is actually a form of dissociation. Dissociative disorders are typically experienced as startling, autonomous i
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Individuation, a Way

10/21/2014

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Individuation, Iona Miller

Doing your genealogy can induce a process Jung called Individuation, by which an individual self emerges from the undifferentiated unconscious. A natural process, Individuation is the innate urge to wholeness -- self-actualization or self-realization. He said, "Evolution is the line of least resistance whereas individuation is the line of most resistance."

A person who enters this experiential dimension has gone beyond that of hobby genealogist, but without a consciousness map or a guide it may seem overwhelming. Even Jung complained of emotional flooding at the onset of his inner journey. Flooding is your physiological reaction to a perceived threat. The threat can be real, it can be an old tape replaying a pattern, or it can be imagined. Automatic, instinctive, reactive emotional processes rush in to numb and  protect you from being overwhelmed.


Individuation helps us fulfill our conscious relationships with the ancestors and archetypes of the collective unconscious (ancestral memory). They come in dreams, in revere, in ritual, with the gentle assist of an "angel" or other surprise clues, and they inform our being,  literally and figuratively. They carry mystery in their wake, often with cryptic messages or information that can later be verified or found in the physical world. Dynamic archetypes like The Quest or Hero's Journey inform and modulate our behavior.

They inspire our spiritual studies and humanitarian efforts, our self-expression, proclivities and desires. They compel our loves and help create our children, perpetuating the line. We are theirs and they are ours. We are family; we are Blood. We feel their experience from their point of view. As we collect them in name, we collect their experiences, integrating them into our own meaning.

We cultivate our own rows or lines of ancestors through genealogy, the pedigree of our origins. 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.

Even today, grandiose speculation often passes for science. 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. Identifying SNPs from deep common ancestry, or rare SNPs related to shared characteristics helps us recognize one another as kin.


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 ourselves, 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 archetypal and 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, the mystagogue who reveals divine mysteries.


Hermes was believed to play tricks on those he was supposed to give messages to, often changing the messages and influencing the their interpretation. The Greek word 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. We decode it by living our lives deeply.

The Men Who Would Be King


Your truth lies beyond any media controversies over bloodlines, false ideologies, erroneous claims, hoaxes, works of fiction, spin-doctored history, genetic superiority, occultism, vanity courts, ancient aliens, subcultures, cults, gnostic, pseudo-masonic or templar revivals, idioyncratic philosophies, or other ways people come together around their shared beliefs, real or self-delusional. Without conversation, philosophy is dogma.

There is no end to the pretentious claims of "royal" wannabees, phony personae, delusional fantasists, and obsessional megalomaniacs to be this or that reincarnation, usually to sell their "celebrity" brand. Let the buyer beware of self-styled experts with little or no traction. They are modern claimants to the mantles of Jesus, Mary Magdalene, St. Germain or any number of other illustrious figures.


By Soul, Jung is not defining something religious. He speaks of a return to the Soul of the World, the source of knowledge. Our instincts begin to grow sharper, our emotions more radical, the signs of life are of greater importance than logic, our perception of reality is no longer so rigid. We begin to deal with things we are not used to, and to react in ways that not even we ourselves would expect. Hillman speaks of soul or psyche as "a perspective rather than a substance, a viewpoint toward things rather than a thing itself."


Then we discover that if we can only manage to channel this surge of energy, it self-organizes as a very solid center, which Jung calls the Wise Old Man for men, or the Great Mother for women. It’s quite dangerous to allow this to manifest itself. Generally speaking, whoever reaches that point tends to consider himself holy, a tamer of spirits, a prophet. It's time for a reality check.


In the US, the 'New England family' - probably 100 million contemporary Americans descended from 5000 - 8000 Great Migration immigrants of 1620-50. If you have 50 or more sets (husbands and wives) of Great Migration immigrant forebears, you are probably related to almost all of the 100 million, within the range of 8th-12th cousins. The probability of kinship to notables is fully 100 percent, and the number of such 'household name' distant kin probably surpasses 500, possibly 1000."
http://humphrysfamilytree.com/famous.descents.html

"Divine Pride" & Ego Inflation


So you find you come from royalty -- get over it! Many who make this discovery of ancestry become ego inflated, self-proclaiming pretentious titles to which they have no claim. Lying or confabulating does not make it so. The over-identification is the opposite of the right psychological move. At the very least, it puts the cart before the horse.

Jung describes his remedy: assimilation of contents of the collective unconscious, not through identification, but through confrontation, avoiding equation with either the lowest or highest aspects of one’s own psyche.

Jung’s warning that inflation necessarily attends identifying oneself with an archetypal motif would seem completely applicable to self-styled "royal" claimants. To do so means one is in the very first stage of initiation, utterly unconscious that the Persona or social mask is confounded with your Shadow self. It is a fallacious attempt to prop up a weak ego, not the claim of a "noble" ego or a valid claim of anything. As psychologists well know, the moral conflict is not to be settled merely by a declaration of superiority bordering on inhumanity, nor a declaration one is better than or fit to rule others in any way.


Afflicted pride is a version of ego-inflation which Jung sought to avoid by advising against identifying with assimilated contents. But people will defend their self-delusion self image to the grave, even when profoundly misconceived. It is an assurance of later problems and is an avoidance of the work of individuation. Jung's cautions are profound and serve to highlight the enormity of the task we are attempting. Jung frequently warns against the inflation attendant upon assimilation of autonomous complexes and identification with their content, as, for instance, when he says:

It will be remembered that in the analysis of the personal unconscious the first things to be added to consciousness are the personal contents and I suggested that these contents which have been repressed, but are capable of becoming conscious, should be called the personal unconscious. I also showed that to annex the deeper layers of the unconscious, which I have called the collective unconscious, produces an extension of the personality leading to the state of inflation. (Jung 1953, 7:243 )

Such misperception and misapplication of genealogy leads to positive and negative inflation and all their attendant ills:


In projection, he vacillates between an extravagant and pathological deification of the doctor, and a contempt bristling with hatred.


In introjection, he gets involved in a ridiculous self-deification, or else a moral self-laceration. The mistake he makes in both cases comes from attributing to a person the contents of the collective unconscious. In this way he makes himself or his partner either god or devil. Here we see the characteristic effect of the archetype: it seizes hold of the psyche with a kind of primeval force and compels it to transgress the bounds of humanity. It causes exaggeration, a puffed-up attitude (inflation), loss of free will, delusion, and enthusiasm in good and evil alike (Jung 1953, 7:110).


Positive inflation of the religious or megalomaniacal sort can lead to assumptions of grandeur, viewing oneself as having the universal panacea:

The second possible mode of reaction is identification with the collective psyche. This would be equivalent to acceptance of the inflation, but now exalted into a system. In other words, one would be the fortunate possessor of the great truth that was only waiting to be discovered, of the eschatological knowledge that means the healing of the nations. This attitude does not necessarily signify megalomania in direct form,
but megalomania in the milder and more familiar form it takes in the reformer, the prophet, and the martyr. (Jung 1953, 7:260)


The prophet is convinced that he/she has the final truth but is merely inflated through identification with the forces of deep contents. The humble disciple affects the posture of only
following the master’s dictums:


But besides the possibility of becoming a prophet, there is another alluring joy, subtler and apparently more legitimate: the joy of becoming a prophet’s disciple.…
The disciple is unworthy; modestly he sits at the Master’s feet and guards against having ideas of his own. Mental laziness becomes a virtue; one can at least bask in the sun of a semidivine being.…Naturally the disciples always stick together, not out of love, but for the very understandable purpose of effortlessly confirming their own convictions by engendering an air of collective agreement.…[J]ust as the prophet is a primordial image from the collective psyche, so also is the disciple of the prophet.

(Jung 1953, 7:263-265)


In both cases inflation is brought about by the collective unconscious, and the independence of the individuality suffers injury. In a similar vein:

These few examples may suffice to show what kind of spirit animated these movements. They were made up of people who identified themselves (or were identified) with God, who deemed themselves supermen, had a critical approach to the gospels, followed the promptings of the inner man, and understood the kingdom of heaven to be within. In a sense, therefore, they were modern in their outlook, but they had a religious inflation instead of the rationalistic and political psychosis that is the affliction of our day.
(Jung 1969, 9:140)


Jung advises against identifying with offices and titles since such excludes the richness of our situation:


A very common instance is the humourless way in which many men identify
themselves with their business or their titles. The office I hold is certainly my special
activity; but it is also a collective factor that has come into existence historically
through the cooperation of many people and whose dignity rests solely on collective
approval. When, therefore, I identify myself with my office or title, I behave as though
I myself were the whole complex of social factors of which that office consists, or
as though I were not only the bearer of the office, but also and at the same time
the approval of society. I have made an extraordinary extension of myself and have
usurped qualities which are not in me but outside me.
(Jung 1953, 7:227)


And:

There is, however, yet another thing to be learnt from this example, namely that these
transpersonal contents are not just inert or dead matter that can be annexed at will.
Rather they are living entities which exert an attractive force upon the conscious
mind. Identification with one’s office or one’s title is very attractive indeed, which
is precisely why so many men are nothing more than the decorum accorded to them
by society. In vain would one look for a personality behind the husk. Underneath all
the padding one would find a very pitiable little creature. That is why the office—or
whatever their outer husk may be—is so attractive: it offers easy compensation for
personal deficiencies.
(Jung 1953, 7:230)


The basic problem is that one has lost a healthy respect for the need to mediate between the
conscious and the unconscious, thereby (in one version) inflating the importance of the ego.

More on this subject here - http://jungiangenealogy.weebly.com/royal-ego-trips.html

Understanding the Numbers


The Pyramid Theory, a doubling of ancestors each generation back, claims you have 2048 ancestors by the 12th generation in your past, and possibly 60,000 direct ancestors going back to the Crusades. By Generation #40, you would have more than one trillion ancestors.

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.

We are at the end of a long and winding genetic journey that continues after and through us. We are probably all connected by the 25th gr-grandparents, if you do the math. There is a great possibility that we are descendants (or are related) from almost everyone alive some seven hundred years ago. With our parents' generation as Nº 1, the number of persons is 33,554,432.

That number is the theoretical result of (x2) progression, since many of those ancestors are the same persons. The genealogical evidence shows that many of the families intermarried for generations, producing a rich genealogical matrix.


Yet, somehow a determined gen can survive intact through all those descendants and become a particle of memory that will give you a dejá vu once in a while. Ancestral memories may not be of actual events.  They should not to be confused with the idea of past life or reincarnation as they are reactive response patterns and emotional states brought about by environment.

The past has gone and the future has yet to come. All you have is the present.
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    Iona Miller is a writer, researcher, and hynotherapist.

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