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.
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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