The motif of birth in a cave is . . . very ancient. This symbol is associated particularly with the winter solstice, when the sun has traveled to its farthest point away from the tilted earth and the light is in the nadir of the abyss. That is the date of the birth of the god Mithra, who is lord of light. --Joseph Campbell, Thou Art That, p. 65
What is more, medical experience shows that it is advisable to take numinous experiences seriously, as they have a great deal to do with the fate of the individual. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 249-251.
An "object" (as you put it), i.e., a human being who does not know that he has enkindled love in you does not feel loved but humiliated because he is simply subjected or exposed to your own psychic state in which he himself has no part. ~ Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 235-238.
Man's understanding and will are challenged and can help, but they can never pretend to have plumbed the depths of the spirit and to have quenched the fire raging within it. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 235-238.
What is more, medical experience shows that it is advisable to take numinous experiences seriously, as they have a great deal to do with the fate of the individual. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 249-251.
An "object" (as you put it), i.e., a human being who does not know that he has enkindled love in you does not feel loved but humiliated because he is simply subjected or exposed to your own psychic state in which he himself has no part. ~ Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 235-238.
Man's understanding and will are challenged and can help, but they can never pretend to have plumbed the depths of the spirit and to have quenched the fire raging within it. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 235-238.
Birth, Randy Mack
genealogy (n.) early 14c., "line of descent, pedigree, descent," from Old French genealogie (12c.), from Late Latin genealogia "tracing of a family," from Greek genealogia, from genea "generation, descent" (see genus) + -logia (see -logy). An Old English word for it was folctalu, literally "folk tale." Meaning "study of family trees" is from 1768.
Chapter 1
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.
But to be young was very Heaven!
-- William Wordsworth
“Spiritual life is like living water that springs up from the very depths of our own spiritual experience. In spiritual life everyone has to drink from his or her own well.”
--St Bernard of Clairvaux
A Secret Unrest Gnaws at the Roots of Our Being.
Our unconscious, on the other hand, hides living water, spirit that has become nature, and that is why it is disturbed. Heaven has become for us the cosmic space of the physicists, and the divine empyrean a fair memory of things that once were. But ‘the heart glows,’ and a secret unrest gnaws at the roots of our being.Dealing with the Unconscious has become a question of life for us. ~C.G. Jung, Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, Paragraph 50.
"I am astonished, disappointed, pleased with myself. I am distressed, depressed, and rapturous. I am all these things at once, and cannot add up the sum. I am incapable of determining ultimate worth or worthlessness; I have no judgment about myself and my life. There is nothing I am quite sure about. I have no definite convictions - not about anything, really. I know only that I was born and exist, and it seems to me that I have been carried along. I exist on the foundation or something I do not know. In spite of all uncertainties, I feel a solidity underlying all existence and a continuity in my mode of being. "
— Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections.
But to be young was very Heaven!
-- William Wordsworth
“Spiritual life is like living water that springs up from the very depths of our own spiritual experience. In spiritual life everyone has to drink from his or her own well.”
--St Bernard of Clairvaux
A Secret Unrest Gnaws at the Roots of Our Being.
Our unconscious, on the other hand, hides living water, spirit that has become nature, and that is why it is disturbed. Heaven has become for us the cosmic space of the physicists, and the divine empyrean a fair memory of things that once were. But ‘the heart glows,’ and a secret unrest gnaws at the roots of our being.Dealing with the Unconscious has become a question of life for us. ~C.G. Jung, Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, Paragraph 50.
"I am astonished, disappointed, pleased with myself. I am distressed, depressed, and rapturous. I am all these things at once, and cannot add up the sum. I am incapable of determining ultimate worth or worthlessness; I have no judgment about myself and my life. There is nothing I am quite sure about. I have no definite convictions - not about anything, really. I know only that I was born and exist, and it seems to me that I have been carried along. I exist on the foundation or something I do not know. In spite of all uncertainties, I feel a solidity underlying all existence and a continuity in my mode of being. "
— Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections.
What Psyche Knows
Approaches to Genealogy
As we recite our ancestors' names,
our soul recites a new poetic image.
The Ultimate Family Reunion
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 and find, perhaps to our surprise, that they inform us with a hitherto unknown wisdom or perplex us with unsolvable riddles. Genealogy is the never-ending story our emerging humanity.
Organizational Strategy
All practices have variables that reflect different forces and intrinsic meanings. Our lineage influences us individually. Our inherited unconscious interacts with our personal unconscious. The genealogical approach confronts ideas or practices that present themselves as universal -- who we are and why we do what we do.
Genealogy combines historical facts with local memory to establish historical knowledge and a felt-sense of the joys and challenges of our ancestors. Our whole bodies are actually our ancestral memory, but we carry such DNA genetic and epigenetic memories (genetic expression patterns) in a profoundly unconscious, corporeal way. Traits, behavior patterns, good and bad characters can be transmitted 'through the blood' of parents to their children.
Epigenetics is cellular memory of our ancestors' experiences such as depression, blocked feelings, and anxiety. We can awaken this somatic memory with soulful genealogy that enlivens our lineage and heritage. Our ancestors exist as the natural consequences of our genes and energetic patterns of thought, emotions, fate, and mental and physical illnesses. If we cannot truly know the other, we can know the phenomenon of our own experience and the common ground of being. We can find a way in our wasteland to drink from the healing waters for generational healing.
Attempts by professional genealogists to 'prune' legendary and mythic material from traditional genealogy reveals a narrower approach. Standard and revisionist, accepted and acceptable history is necessarily fictional, but different than fiction. That problem is confounded by real and deliberate genealogical fictions (rogue events, people, and places) or non- existent 'ghosts' inserted over time into real lines of descent for profit or position.
The magic mirror of the past includes fantasy and history, metaphor, and bodily reactions. In some sense, all genealogy is fictional while presenting as historical. To some extent we have to 'believe' in it, somewhat like James Hillman's notion of 'healing fiction.' This poetics of the soul is a mythic method -- an intergenerational memoir built on psychological fantasies and subjective perceptions. The unconscious responds to dramatic, metaphorical and poetic gestures -- symbolic acts. The actual pedigree is the ground of this process -- the ancestral field or living matrix.
While Mircea Eliade spoke of the terrors of history, James Hillman encouraged empowering narratives -- ensouling historical events with something more metaphysically important than raw events, plain facts, and blunt data. The grand themes of death/rebirth, transformation, and restitution come into play. Imaginal life is fundamental, rather than an artifact of trying to describe our experience. We tend to orient with experiential metaphors. Our ancestors can block or enhance our destinies.
Ancestral Continuum
The family unit remains our ultimate truth and primordial antecedent. We exist solely because they were. In genealogy, we get to study history from the inside out -- triumphs and failures. Ancient memories as well as ancestors are buried in our subconscious, affecting our life, health, and relationships. The future calls us to this work as much as the past.
Self-knowledge is intrinsic to self-actualization or self-realization. This orientation requires a cross-disciplinary approach to wrestle the collective family treasure from the dragon of the unconscious. We can break through the barrier of ancestral amnesia to new life force potential. We are a ripple in the ocean of our extended family, living, dead and as-yet-unborn.
If we live only for our own time, we live a shallow life which can be extended into deep time simply by accessing what can be found. It isn't that we desert the present for the past, but enlarge our present with a powerful sense of presence. The search alone enriches our spirit. Finding enriches soul. Knowing unites them in the royal marriage of opposites. This legacy belongs to each and every one of us but we must answer the call to this adventure and heed the synchronicities and signs that invariably arise. We are motivated by desire and intention.
We bring our own values, morals, and aesthetics to the process of inquiry. Our past is deeply encoded in clusters of epistemological metaphors - how we 'know' what we know and what it's 'like'. They appear in our psychosomatic symptoms. Each of these metaphors, like each of our ancestors is a portal to deeper knowledge -- gateways to the subconscious. The soul lives on metaphors and images. This is how we describe our subjective experiences to ourselves, in a sensory-based language.
Soulful Genealogy
Indeed, if we need bigger stories, genealogy with its personal and transpersonal elements is about the biggest story and context we can concoct for ourselves. Even the absence of a genealogy or adoption is a story -- part real, part fiction, and part therapy that reveals psychic reality. Depending on which of our lines we follow we can reverse the roles of historical winners and losers. But we must unlock the doors that hold the secrets of our ancestral archives. Ancestral figures 'shadow' us until we build relationships with them.
We must know our corporeal legacy to know ourselves. The stories take on different flavors for different ethnicities, regions, cultures, . Some choose to combine their paper trail with genetic genealogy, having DNA tested for ancestral root groups. Genetic ancestry analysis of autosomal STRs inherited from both maternal and paternal ancestors target lands of origin and the combination of percentages from revealed areas and tribal ethnicities.
Healing the Family Tree
Restorative journeys back through time are possible vehicles for self-transformation. We can make history but we can also escape from it in a digestive process of soul-making. We compensate tragic events: unresolved trauma, mass suffering, bondage, narcissism, pain, loss, famine, incest, betrayal, abuse, alienation, abandonment, persecution, heartbreak, genocide, untimely or unresolved deaths, quarreling parents, acting out, family psychodrama and other unusual intergenerational family patterns.
We can ensoul them for the sake of insight and self-giving love. Such blessings are healing and break generational bondage. Time alone doesn't heal all wounds of family trauma, shame and disgrace, violence, addiction, painful mistakes, interrupted love, brokenness, gender wars, psychopathy, disabilities, guilt, or unresolved death. If we've buried our grief over such things we need to dig it back up. Digging into our ancestors is part of that process.
There are many ways to heal -- physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. We heal our family tree by fully embracing our nature, by reclaiming and transforming that which was formerly lost but now found. Our extended family reaches all the way back to our cosmic origins. We can appeal to the compassion of the archetypal Father and Mother, freeing our spiritual/emotional systems. Ultimately, family tree healing extends to all of humanity and the earth itself as our home.
We return to the Well or fount of our existence to get and be 'well' -- to connect with nurture and spirit that may not be available in our mundane lives that helps heal and reconcile the family spiritual disturbance. We can heal our family system by extending our work beyond the nuclear family to our ancestors. Any detrimental problems or intergenerational dysfunctions can be helped by ancestral healing. The ancestors help guide us in this process. This is another way, besides generativity, to be fruitful.
History Repeating
Epigenetics shows shared destructive behavioral patterns, compulsions, or generational 'curses' and triggers are not coincidences. Unresolved family situations, including family secrets, broken relationships, frustrations, illusions, deception, manipulation, sexual excess, tyranny, poverty, war, and unresolved grief from unborn children or infertility, miscarriages, still birth, or infant mortality, can leaves scars on the heart. Besides talents and accomplishments, we can learn to identify deeply ingrained shared beliefs, judgements, fears, and multigenerational neuroses, such as low self-esteem that leads to self-defeating patterns.
When we trace our family tree we should make notes of recurring patterns and traumas. Sometimes they are also passed on through religious or political groups. Even the family surnames may provide clues to origins, status, and occupations. We've carried these energies, anyway, and can learn to carry them more gracefully by making them conscious. Mere 'willingness to forgive' can open ancestral conversations that can free you of torment and foster emotional freedom from such burdens as jealousy, hatreds, mutual anger, and resentment.
'Finding the Treasure' means restoring and maintaining your own self-esteem. We can pray to heal every possible negative effect transmitted through all past generations, but we also need to do the psychological and spiritual work to restore our joy, which is essential to healing. Ancestors' life stories fuse with our own life story. The Tree that once trapped us can also set us free -- a combination of cosmos and consanguinity.
We must confront the energetic patterning, not just living family members. Chaotic, violent, unhappy ancestors are most likely to affect following generations. They live in our guts, our nervous system, limbic system, and our dreams. Their wounds are our wounds. They impel us toward a misdirected loyalty by living that negative pattern forward. Emotional entanglement is the human equivalent of quantum entanglement.
Ancestral Complex
If we imagine we can 'take care' of the unfinished business of thousands of ancestors, we need to realize that is a fiction, and that we are fortunate if we can even take care of part of our own. In other words, we should not just accept palliative self-deceptions, 'healing memes' or cliche therapies, but fully inhabit the ancestral field in all sorts of novel ways. Still, one of the best ways of 'honoring' the ancestors is to ferret them out yourself and re-establish their names and specific place in the golden braid of centuries that culminates in own lifetime and moves forward with the family offspring.
We can only heal their pain that is in us. We may discover very unpleasant things about the recent family. The further back in time we go the more barbaric life becomes. The royal lines are in almost constant conflict with their relatives, vying for power. We have to do more than pick from recent relations, asking them what they need or left undone. Arguably, the best meditational part of the work is to do your own lines and spend contemplative time in them. No single formula, like the now cliche shamanism is the ticket, anymore than substituting drugs for therapy.
Material and physical inheritance is beyond our free will. But we can untangle ourselves from these deeply neurotic patterns and move beyond the Groundhog Day repetition of unconscious compulsion. Healing changes our primordial self-image and worldview, and in some metaphorical way helps 'heal' our family oversoul. In our therapeutic efforts we pray for the dead and their peaceful repose. Implementing our own healing processes funds our compassion. We heal our dysfunctions so our children and grandchildren don't have to suffer them as core issues. We can reclaim some personal sovereignty -- our true nobility.
Nexus Events
We can identify nexus events in the family lineage which became turning points for the whole family. We can take symbolic refuge among our rightful progenitors. Traversing back through the history of mankind, we reclaim and integrate much of what belongs to us -- "self-completion," not "perfection." We learn to drink from our own well of ancestral wisdom. This helps us 'cook' our raw personality in the alchemical sense, so our ascents and descents of the soul are not premature transcendental escapes, that mimic geographical escapes.
Many of us seek stories for healing. Images remain the central reality in the telling of a lifestory. And we can work with these images like our own imaginal material, in a provisional, nonliteral way. At the same time, genealogy demystifies and ignites the family field. The unconscious or even the ancestors themselves seem to call us to such work. We need them to feel complete. Then the healing forces of the unconscious come into play. We find that the gods and goddesses themselves lie at the root of some of our oldest traceable lines.
Cosmos & Kairos
We have to trust the genealogical discovery process as it evolves from chaos to self-organization. We need it to be functionally accurate, so we should check and recheck our lines periodically. But we can never trace ourselves to a momentous singular origin. We can never know the whole truth and context of what has transpired, but we build up our perception and consciousness, bit by bit, as best we can. Sometimes we have to sacrifice our sacred cows -- family stories that prove less than provable. They may remain plausible even without evidence.
A Jungian approach emphasizes the preeminent role of language, myth and dream and other practices to establish and construct and the identities of the subjects, events, and historical meaning. The constituting role of these practices applies also to us: we are simultaneously the vehicles and the products of our narrative, discursive and nondiscursive genealogical practice and synthesis.
The effect of the soulful approach is kairos -- opening the moment when change is possible, when every moment is an opportunity. It is a passing instant when an opening appears that we must drive through with force to achieve success. It can be the moment in which proof is delivered and suggests possibilities -- a time when the cosmos may interact at our intersection with eternity -- the appointed or crucial time.
Some approach genealogy as a hobby, game, or puzzle to be solved. Others take a more meditational or depth approach with an intent to drive their ancestry back as far it can be taken. We may systemically find and record our ancestry, but at the same time we are obliged to react emotionally to what we find there with our own personal values. Inevitably, we are changed in the process, transformed by a deeper knowledge of our essential being and the chain of life in the great web of being.
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. The pedigree is more of a multilayered structure than merely a chart of lineal descent. As in the therapeutic process, we work from the parts to the whole for the blessings of a thousand generations.
************************************************
Structure Your Content
First we document to genealogical standards and complete our informational content. The first step is to work from yourself to your "Big 8" gr-grandparents. We can then move on to our "Big 16" great-great grandparents, and begin merging with the World Tree, while still carefully annotating each step to the best-practice standard with documentation.
We can emphasize simplicity, proof, or indexing at each stage. We can plot migrations and the stories that go with them. Some ancestors will have more available biographies than others. We may revisit old material with fresh eyes. Investigating for new data may require field trips or searches of civil records.
Our 32 great-great-great grandparents begin revealing broader strokes of our family history and direct lines. We may find new pride, but it may be mingled with stories of shame and regret. All these revelations need digesting to take their rightful place in our self-image.
The question of what to do with the results arises. We may publish or post the results for our family, share with other genealogists, or keep them as a close secret. Rather than mere droplines, you can create special categories to feature, using time periods, dynasties, ruling houses, nations, historical events, social or religious groups, even well-known legends and myths that we find where history fades into the mists.
We will share immigrant patriarchs and gateway ancestors with many others of colonial descent. Their lives and connections have been well-documented by professionals. Some colonials are still being added or subtracted as bearers of noble descent. Gateway ancestors left their homelands and ancestral populations and immigrated to a new lifestyle. But many have illustrious ancestors in their noble or royal lineage. The Great Migration provides many with tangible links to the medieval world.
Surname or family books are great, but online or interactive genealogy websites can be easily updated, annotated, or corrected, since typically all pedigrees contain mistakes of recording or disinformation from other sources. We can make overviews or summaries of certain important elements. We combine, consolidate, integrate, and extract meaning in a sort of alchemical process to articulate our vision of the historical panoply.
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.
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.
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.
Approaches to Genealogy
As we recite our ancestors' names,
our soul recites a new poetic image.
The Ultimate Family Reunion
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 and find, perhaps to our surprise, that they inform us with a hitherto unknown wisdom or perplex us with unsolvable riddles. Genealogy is the never-ending story our emerging humanity.
Organizational Strategy
All practices have variables that reflect different forces and intrinsic meanings. Our lineage influences us individually. Our inherited unconscious interacts with our personal unconscious. The genealogical approach confronts ideas or practices that present themselves as universal -- who we are and why we do what we do.
Genealogy combines historical facts with local memory to establish historical knowledge and a felt-sense of the joys and challenges of our ancestors. Our whole bodies are actually our ancestral memory, but we carry such DNA genetic and epigenetic memories (genetic expression patterns) in a profoundly unconscious, corporeal way. Traits, behavior patterns, good and bad characters can be transmitted 'through the blood' of parents to their children.
Epigenetics is cellular memory of our ancestors' experiences such as depression, blocked feelings, and anxiety. We can awaken this somatic memory with soulful genealogy that enlivens our lineage and heritage. Our ancestors exist as the natural consequences of our genes and energetic patterns of thought, emotions, fate, and mental and physical illnesses. If we cannot truly know the other, we can know the phenomenon of our own experience and the common ground of being. We can find a way in our wasteland to drink from the healing waters for generational healing.
Attempts by professional genealogists to 'prune' legendary and mythic material from traditional genealogy reveals a narrower approach. Standard and revisionist, accepted and acceptable history is necessarily fictional, but different than fiction. That problem is confounded by real and deliberate genealogical fictions (rogue events, people, and places) or non- existent 'ghosts' inserted over time into real lines of descent for profit or position.
The magic mirror of the past includes fantasy and history, metaphor, and bodily reactions. In some sense, all genealogy is fictional while presenting as historical. To some extent we have to 'believe' in it, somewhat like James Hillman's notion of 'healing fiction.' This poetics of the soul is a mythic method -- an intergenerational memoir built on psychological fantasies and subjective perceptions. The unconscious responds to dramatic, metaphorical and poetic gestures -- symbolic acts. The actual pedigree is the ground of this process -- the ancestral field or living matrix.
While Mircea Eliade spoke of the terrors of history, James Hillman encouraged empowering narratives -- ensouling historical events with something more metaphysically important than raw events, plain facts, and blunt data. The grand themes of death/rebirth, transformation, and restitution come into play. Imaginal life is fundamental, rather than an artifact of trying to describe our experience. We tend to orient with experiential metaphors. Our ancestors can block or enhance our destinies.
Ancestral Continuum
The family unit remains our ultimate truth and primordial antecedent. We exist solely because they were. In genealogy, we get to study history from the inside out -- triumphs and failures. Ancient memories as well as ancestors are buried in our subconscious, affecting our life, health, and relationships. The future calls us to this work as much as the past.
Self-knowledge is intrinsic to self-actualization or self-realization. This orientation requires a cross-disciplinary approach to wrestle the collective family treasure from the dragon of the unconscious. We can break through the barrier of ancestral amnesia to new life force potential. We are a ripple in the ocean of our extended family, living, dead and as-yet-unborn.
If we live only for our own time, we live a shallow life which can be extended into deep time simply by accessing what can be found. It isn't that we desert the present for the past, but enlarge our present with a powerful sense of presence. The search alone enriches our spirit. Finding enriches soul. Knowing unites them in the royal marriage of opposites. This legacy belongs to each and every one of us but we must answer the call to this adventure and heed the synchronicities and signs that invariably arise. We are motivated by desire and intention.
We bring our own values, morals, and aesthetics to the process of inquiry. Our past is deeply encoded in clusters of epistemological metaphors - how we 'know' what we know and what it's 'like'. They appear in our psychosomatic symptoms. Each of these metaphors, like each of our ancestors is a portal to deeper knowledge -- gateways to the subconscious. The soul lives on metaphors and images. This is how we describe our subjective experiences to ourselves, in a sensory-based language.
Soulful Genealogy
Indeed, if we need bigger stories, genealogy with its personal and transpersonal elements is about the biggest story and context we can concoct for ourselves. Even the absence of a genealogy or adoption is a story -- part real, part fiction, and part therapy that reveals psychic reality. Depending on which of our lines we follow we can reverse the roles of historical winners and losers. But we must unlock the doors that hold the secrets of our ancestral archives. Ancestral figures 'shadow' us until we build relationships with them.
We must know our corporeal legacy to know ourselves. The stories take on different flavors for different ethnicities, regions, cultures, . Some choose to combine their paper trail with genetic genealogy, having DNA tested for ancestral root groups. Genetic ancestry analysis of autosomal STRs inherited from both maternal and paternal ancestors target lands of origin and the combination of percentages from revealed areas and tribal ethnicities.
Healing the Family Tree
Restorative journeys back through time are possible vehicles for self-transformation. We can make history but we can also escape from it in a digestive process of soul-making. We compensate tragic events: unresolved trauma, mass suffering, bondage, narcissism, pain, loss, famine, incest, betrayal, abuse, alienation, abandonment, persecution, heartbreak, genocide, untimely or unresolved deaths, quarreling parents, acting out, family psychodrama and other unusual intergenerational family patterns.
We can ensoul them for the sake of insight and self-giving love. Such blessings are healing and break generational bondage. Time alone doesn't heal all wounds of family trauma, shame and disgrace, violence, addiction, painful mistakes, interrupted love, brokenness, gender wars, psychopathy, disabilities, guilt, or unresolved death. If we've buried our grief over such things we need to dig it back up. Digging into our ancestors is part of that process.
There are many ways to heal -- physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. We heal our family tree by fully embracing our nature, by reclaiming and transforming that which was formerly lost but now found. Our extended family reaches all the way back to our cosmic origins. We can appeal to the compassion of the archetypal Father and Mother, freeing our spiritual/emotional systems. Ultimately, family tree healing extends to all of humanity and the earth itself as our home.
We return to the Well or fount of our existence to get and be 'well' -- to connect with nurture and spirit that may not be available in our mundane lives that helps heal and reconcile the family spiritual disturbance. We can heal our family system by extending our work beyond the nuclear family to our ancestors. Any detrimental problems or intergenerational dysfunctions can be helped by ancestral healing. The ancestors help guide us in this process. This is another way, besides generativity, to be fruitful.
History Repeating
Epigenetics shows shared destructive behavioral patterns, compulsions, or generational 'curses' and triggers are not coincidences. Unresolved family situations, including family secrets, broken relationships, frustrations, illusions, deception, manipulation, sexual excess, tyranny, poverty, war, and unresolved grief from unborn children or infertility, miscarriages, still birth, or infant mortality, can leaves scars on the heart. Besides talents and accomplishments, we can learn to identify deeply ingrained shared beliefs, judgements, fears, and multigenerational neuroses, such as low self-esteem that leads to self-defeating patterns.
When we trace our family tree we should make notes of recurring patterns and traumas. Sometimes they are also passed on through religious or political groups. Even the family surnames may provide clues to origins, status, and occupations. We've carried these energies, anyway, and can learn to carry them more gracefully by making them conscious. Mere 'willingness to forgive' can open ancestral conversations that can free you of torment and foster emotional freedom from such burdens as jealousy, hatreds, mutual anger, and resentment.
'Finding the Treasure' means restoring and maintaining your own self-esteem. We can pray to heal every possible negative effect transmitted through all past generations, but we also need to do the psychological and spiritual work to restore our joy, which is essential to healing. Ancestors' life stories fuse with our own life story. The Tree that once trapped us can also set us free -- a combination of cosmos and consanguinity.
We must confront the energetic patterning, not just living family members. Chaotic, violent, unhappy ancestors are most likely to affect following generations. They live in our guts, our nervous system, limbic system, and our dreams. Their wounds are our wounds. They impel us toward a misdirected loyalty by living that negative pattern forward. Emotional entanglement is the human equivalent of quantum entanglement.
Ancestral Complex
If we imagine we can 'take care' of the unfinished business of thousands of ancestors, we need to realize that is a fiction, and that we are fortunate if we can even take care of part of our own. In other words, we should not just accept palliative self-deceptions, 'healing memes' or cliche therapies, but fully inhabit the ancestral field in all sorts of novel ways. Still, one of the best ways of 'honoring' the ancestors is to ferret them out yourself and re-establish their names and specific place in the golden braid of centuries that culminates in own lifetime and moves forward with the family offspring.
We can only heal their pain that is in us. We may discover very unpleasant things about the recent family. The further back in time we go the more barbaric life becomes. The royal lines are in almost constant conflict with their relatives, vying for power. We have to do more than pick from recent relations, asking them what they need or left undone. Arguably, the best meditational part of the work is to do your own lines and spend contemplative time in them. No single formula, like the now cliche shamanism is the ticket, anymore than substituting drugs for therapy.
Material and physical inheritance is beyond our free will. But we can untangle ourselves from these deeply neurotic patterns and move beyond the Groundhog Day repetition of unconscious compulsion. Healing changes our primordial self-image and worldview, and in some metaphorical way helps 'heal' our family oversoul. In our therapeutic efforts we pray for the dead and their peaceful repose. Implementing our own healing processes funds our compassion. We heal our dysfunctions so our children and grandchildren don't have to suffer them as core issues. We can reclaim some personal sovereignty -- our true nobility.
Nexus Events
We can identify nexus events in the family lineage which became turning points for the whole family. We can take symbolic refuge among our rightful progenitors. Traversing back through the history of mankind, we reclaim and integrate much of what belongs to us -- "self-completion," not "perfection." We learn to drink from our own well of ancestral wisdom. This helps us 'cook' our raw personality in the alchemical sense, so our ascents and descents of the soul are not premature transcendental escapes, that mimic geographical escapes.
Many of us seek stories for healing. Images remain the central reality in the telling of a lifestory. And we can work with these images like our own imaginal material, in a provisional, nonliteral way. At the same time, genealogy demystifies and ignites the family field. The unconscious or even the ancestors themselves seem to call us to such work. We need them to feel complete. Then the healing forces of the unconscious come into play. We find that the gods and goddesses themselves lie at the root of some of our oldest traceable lines.
Cosmos & Kairos
We have to trust the genealogical discovery process as it evolves from chaos to self-organization. We need it to be functionally accurate, so we should check and recheck our lines periodically. But we can never trace ourselves to a momentous singular origin. We can never know the whole truth and context of what has transpired, but we build up our perception and consciousness, bit by bit, as best we can. Sometimes we have to sacrifice our sacred cows -- family stories that prove less than provable. They may remain plausible even without evidence.
A Jungian approach emphasizes the preeminent role of language, myth and dream and other practices to establish and construct and the identities of the subjects, events, and historical meaning. The constituting role of these practices applies also to us: we are simultaneously the vehicles and the products of our narrative, discursive and nondiscursive genealogical practice and synthesis.
The effect of the soulful approach is kairos -- opening the moment when change is possible, when every moment is an opportunity. It is a passing instant when an opening appears that we must drive through with force to achieve success. It can be the moment in which proof is delivered and suggests possibilities -- a time when the cosmos may interact at our intersection with eternity -- the appointed or crucial time.
Some approach genealogy as a hobby, game, or puzzle to be solved. Others take a more meditational or depth approach with an intent to drive their ancestry back as far it can be taken. We may systemically find and record our ancestry, but at the same time we are obliged to react emotionally to what we find there with our own personal values. Inevitably, we are changed in the process, transformed by a deeper knowledge of our essential being and the chain of life in the great web of being.
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. The pedigree is more of a multilayered structure than merely a chart of lineal descent. As in the therapeutic process, we work from the parts to the whole for the blessings of a thousand generations.
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Structure Your Content
First we document to genealogical standards and complete our informational content. The first step is to work from yourself to your "Big 8" gr-grandparents. We can then move on to our "Big 16" great-great grandparents, and begin merging with the World Tree, while still carefully annotating each step to the best-practice standard with documentation.
We can emphasize simplicity, proof, or indexing at each stage. We can plot migrations and the stories that go with them. Some ancestors will have more available biographies than others. We may revisit old material with fresh eyes. Investigating for new data may require field trips or searches of civil records.
Our 32 great-great-great grandparents begin revealing broader strokes of our family history and direct lines. We may find new pride, but it may be mingled with stories of shame and regret. All these revelations need digesting to take their rightful place in our self-image.
The question of what to do with the results arises. We may publish or post the results for our family, share with other genealogists, or keep them as a close secret. Rather than mere droplines, you can create special categories to feature, using time periods, dynasties, ruling houses, nations, historical events, social or religious groups, even well-known legends and myths that we find where history fades into the mists.
We will share immigrant patriarchs and gateway ancestors with many others of colonial descent. Their lives and connections have been well-documented by professionals. Some colonials are still being added or subtracted as bearers of noble descent. Gateway ancestors left their homelands and ancestral populations and immigrated to a new lifestyle. But many have illustrious ancestors in their noble or royal lineage. The Great Migration provides many with tangible links to the medieval world.
Surname or family books are great, but online or interactive genealogy websites can be easily updated, annotated, or corrected, since typically all pedigrees contain mistakes of recording or disinformation from other sources. We can make overviews or summaries of certain important elements. We combine, consolidate, integrate, and extract meaning in a sort of alchemical process to articulate our vision of the historical panoply.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The goal of psychological, as of biological, development is self-realization, or individuation. But since man knows himself only as an ego, and the self, as a totality, is indescribable and indistinguishable from a God-image, self-realization-to put it in religious or metaphysical terms-amounts to God’s incarnation.
That is already expressed in the fact that Christ is the son of God. And because individuation is an heroic and often tragic task, the most difficult of all, it involves suffering, a passion of the ego: the ordinary, empirical man we once were is burdened with the fate of losing himself in a greater dimension and being robbed of his fancied freedom of will. He suffers, so to speak, from the violence done to him by the self.
The analogous passion of Christ signifies God’s suffering on account of the injustice of the world and the darkness of man. The human and the divine suffering set up a relationship of complementarity with compensating effects. Through the Christ-symbol, man can get to know the real meaning of his suffering: he is on the way towards realizing his wholeness.
As a result of the integration of conscious and unconscious, his ego enters the “divine” realm, where it participates in “God’s suffering.” The cause of the suffering is in both cases the same, namely “incarnation,” which on the human level appears as “individuation.”
The divine hero born of man is already threatened with murder, he has nowhere to lay his head, and his death is a gruesome tragedy. The self is no mere concept or logical postulate; it is a psychic reality, only part of it is conscious, while for the rest it embraces the life of the unconscious and is therefore inconceivable except in the form of symbols.
The drama of the archetypal life of Christ describes in symbolic images the events in the conscious-life-as well as the life that transcends consciousness-of a man who has been transformed by his higher destiny. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, A Psychological Approach to the Trinity, Paragraph 233.
That is already expressed in the fact that Christ is the son of God. And because individuation is an heroic and often tragic task, the most difficult of all, it involves suffering, a passion of the ego: the ordinary, empirical man we once were is burdened with the fate of losing himself in a greater dimension and being robbed of his fancied freedom of will. He suffers, so to speak, from the violence done to him by the self.
The analogous passion of Christ signifies God’s suffering on account of the injustice of the world and the darkness of man. The human and the divine suffering set up a relationship of complementarity with compensating effects. Through the Christ-symbol, man can get to know the real meaning of his suffering: he is on the way towards realizing his wholeness.
As a result of the integration of conscious and unconscious, his ego enters the “divine” realm, where it participates in “God’s suffering.” The cause of the suffering is in both cases the same, namely “incarnation,” which on the human level appears as “individuation.”
The divine hero born of man is already threatened with murder, he has nowhere to lay his head, and his death is a gruesome tragedy. The self is no mere concept or logical postulate; it is a psychic reality, only part of it is conscious, while for the rest it embraces the life of the unconscious and is therefore inconceivable except in the form of symbols.
The drama of the archetypal life of Christ describes in symbolic images the events in the conscious-life-as well as the life that transcends consciousness-of a man who has been transformed by his higher destiny. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, A Psychological Approach to the Trinity, Paragraph 233.
The factors which come together in the coniunctio are conceived as opposites, either confronting one another in enmity or attracting one another in love. To begin with they form a dualism; for instance the opposites are humidum (moist) / sicum (dry), frigidum (cold) / calidum (warm), superiora (upper, higher) / inferiora (lower), spiritus-anima (spirit-soul) / corpus (body), coelum (heaven) / terra (earth), ignis (fire) / aqua (water), bright / dark, agens (active) / patiens (passive), volatile (volatile, gaseous) / fixum (solid), pretiosum (precious, costly; also carum, dear) / vile (cheap, common), bonum (good) / malum (evil), manifestum (open) / occultum (occult; also celatum, hidden), oriens (East) / occidens (West), vivum (living) / mortuum (dead, inert), masculus (masculine) / foemina (feminine)., Sol / Luna. Often the polarity is arranged as a quaternio (quaternity), with the two opposites crossing one another, as for instance the four elements or the four qualities (moist, dry, cold, warm), or the four directions and seasons, thus producting the cross as an emblem of the four elements and symbol of the sublunary physical world. This fourfold Physis, the cross, also appears in the signs for earth, Venus, Mercury, Saturn and Jupiter. (Carl Jung Mysterium Coniunctionis, page 1, paragraph 3.)
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 and find, perhaps to our surprise, that they inform us with a hitherto unknown wisdom or perplex us with unsolvable riddles.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 saviour 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. 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. Youhave 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 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. 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 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 -- a direct experience of enlightenment. Hermetics had techniques for penetrating and discerning the order of the cosmos. Gnosticism was only philosophical when describing God's absolute transcendence. The mythic world described
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.
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/
A sample of Red Thread Lines of Descent
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 and find, perhaps to our surprise, that they inform us with a hitherto unknown wisdom or perplex us with unsolvable riddles.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 saviour 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. 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. Youhave 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 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. 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 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 -- a direct experience of enlightenment. Hermetics had techniques for penetrating and discerning the order of the cosmos. Gnosticism was only philosophical when describing God's absolute transcendence. The mythic world described
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.
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/
A sample of Red Thread Lines of Descent
The family tree of Sigmund Christoph von Waldburg-Zeil-Trauchburg
References
Begg, Deike, In Search of the Holy Grail and the Precious Blood: A Travellers' Guide.
Begg, Ean, The Cult of the Black Virgin
Campbell, Joseph. Myths to Live By. New York: Bantam, 1973.
-----. The Masks of God: Creative Mythology. New York: Penguin, 1976.
Colander, David, and Arjo Klamer. The Making of an Economist. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1990.
Economic Journal, January 1991; special 100th anniversary edition.
Johnson, Robert A. He: Understanding Masculine Psychology, Revised Edition. New York: Harper & Row, 1989.
-----. Transformation: Understanding the Three Levels of Masculine Consciousness. New York: Harper & Row, 1991.
-----. The Fisher King and the Handless Maiden. New York: Harper & Row, 1993.
Jung, Carl, THE RED BOOK,
Jung, Emma, and Marie-Louise von Franz. The Grail Legend. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1970.
Loomis, Laura Hibbard, and Roger Sherman Loomis. Medieval Romances. New York: Modern Library, 1957.
Wisman, Jon D. "The Excessive Formalism Charge in Economics." Paper presented at the annual meetings of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics, 1993.
The Tree of Life and the Holy Grail: Ancient and Modern Spiritual Paths and ... By Sylvia Francke
Gnosis and Hermeticism from Antiquity to Modern Times edited by R. van den Broek, Wouter J. Hanegraaff 1998, State Universityof New York Press, -
Karen-Claire Voss, "Spiritual Alchemy" http://books.google.com/books?id=0zfCrnqj_FUC&pg=PA174&lpg=PA174&dq=karen+voss,+mysterium&source=bl&ots=GA2X9sGrA2&sig=UveOue1pCUjWpXFSXGP6fR7Uc9k&hl=en&sa=X&ei=EdM9Uo9-h-mKApWqgJAI&ved=0CFYQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=karen%20voss%2C%2
- ARTICLE - Voss, Karen-Claire. The Hierosgamos Theme in the Images of the Rosarium Philosophorum. In Alchemy Revisited: Proceedings of the International Conference on the History of Alchemy at the University of Groningen, 17-19 April 1989, ed. by Z.R.W.M. von Martels. E.J. Brill: Leiden, 1990.
- ARTICLE - Voss, Karen-Claire. Spiritual Alchemy: Interpreting Representative Texts and Images. Presented to the Amsterdam Summer University: "Gnosis and Hermeticism from Antiquity to Modern Times." August 15-August 19, 1994. This is a slightly revised and augmented version of what appeared in Gnosis and Hermeticism from Antiquity to Modern Times, ed. by R. van den Broek and W.J. Hanegraaff. State University of New York Press: New York, 1998.
- ARTICLE - Voss, Karen-Claire. A Response to Dan Merkurs "Methodology and the Study of Western Spiritual Alchemy". Theosophical History VIII No. 9, July 2002.
- ARTICLE - Voss, Karen-Claire. Imagination in Mysticism and Esotericism: Marsilio Ficino, Ignatius de Loyola, and Alchemy. Studies in Spirituality No. 6, 1996, 106-130.
- ARTICLE - Voss, Karen-Claire. The Tabula Smaragdina Revisited. A paper presented at Inscriptions in the Sand, an Arts and Culture Conference and Festival. The Sixth International Literature and Humanities Conference at Eastern Mediterranean Uuniversity, Famagusta, Northern Cyprus, June 4-6, 2003.
Gnostic and Hermetic cosmologies differed. Hermetics never labels the cosmos as bad or evil.
(c)2013; All Rights Reserved, Iona Miller, Sangreality Trust
iona_m@yahoo.com
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