ROOTS & BRANCHES
by Iona Miller, (c)2016
by Iona Miller, (c)2016
Archai (Greek, noun, plural)
Universal principles, original forms; the fundamental essences and primordial forces that animate the cosmos. Archai derives from the Greek word, arkhe, meaning beginning. In archetypal psychology, the root metaphors of psychological function.
We, each and all of us, contain within us the entire history of the world, and just as our body records Man's genealogy as far back as the fish and then some, so our soul encompasses everything that has ever existed in human souls. All gods and devils that have ever existed are within us as possibilities, as desires, as solutions.
--Hermann Hesse, Reflections
ROOTS & BRANCHES
YOUR CREATION STORY
Genealogy Facts & Fictions
But no matter how much parents and grandparents may have sinned against the child, the man who is really adult will accept these sins as his own condition which has to be reckoned with. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 117.
Most people are nothing special, except perhaps to those close to them. Descent is one of the Mysteries of everyday life. What 'matters' about our past is more than only the biology of our descent, though this is the premise of genealogy. We are not only related to each other in family and in social relationships, but are related to all nature -- that inccludes all human or prehuman animal ancestors.
Among genealogists the battle still rages, whether to cut off once and for all disputed, fictitious, and legendary lineage, or to allow its traditional use to remain, even though some may be misled in their own minds by mythological material. Their issue, on shared trees, is having to repeat the same corrections over and again, especially in the medieval era. Fake lines to royalty that arose in the 1800's are also common, so they get re-added as often as they are removed. The same mistakes are copied over and over.
Who's Genealogy Is It?
In the medieval and ancient lines the whole research landscape changes. Monks in the early Christian era invented genealogies taking the lines of kings back to Adam. If the kings were no longer descended from the indigenous gods, then they needed to descend from figures from the Bible, Troy, and Rome.
Then, starting in the 1200s and reaching a peak in the 1600s, royal propagandists were competing to collect every old tradition and invent new ones if necessary to enhance the prestige of royal and noble families.
The French kings, for example, produced the Grandes Chroniques de France that claimed to show they were the heirs of a small band of Trojan refugees who established the Frankish people. Not to be outdone, Habsburgs followed a conscious policy for centuries of creating propaganda to show they were the heirs of the Trojan hero Aeneas through Julius Caesar. The idea that Julius Caesar was descended from Aeneas is just a much earlier, Roman example of the same kind of propaganda.
Still, radical amputation is a non-issue in Jungian work, which always approaches mythic material with an "as if." No one in transpersonal therapies is confused about the imaginal nature or depictions of mythic material and narrative. In many genealogy sites, such lines questioned by 'realists' are clearly marked as such. Also, there will always be fantasy-prone individuals who will believe what they wish to believe about such subjects.
Know It By Being It
Genealogy is a systems concept of emergence -- our emergence. It is a creative process within a formal system -- an ecology of ancestors we curate, foster and conserve, not merely a causal chain of linear descent. Family systems theory suggests that individuals cannot be understood in isolation from one another, but rather as a part of their family -- an emotional unit. Families are systems of interconnected and interdependent individuals, none of whom can be understood in isolation from the system.
Each member had a role to play and rules to respect. Members of the system are expected to respond to each other in a certain way according to their role, which is determined by relationship agreements and established patterns which may lead to balance in the family system, but also to dysfunction.
We create most of what we think of as reality through the stories we tell. Even profiles that contain only names and dates are still story telling. The names matter, but moreso the connections between them. They say, "I come from people who lived here and went there."
They connect into history. And history can be scholarly history, which depends on evaluation of sources and the creation of logical arguments, or it can be family history, which depends on the stories being passed down through the generations, or it can be even older oral history, which existed before writing, and eventually made it into manuscripts and then into print.
Though the lines often blur, a generic distinction is the source of such stories. Biases in story telling needs arise in relation to genealogy and the World Tree:
we need to see how we might be connected to history, or we need to know that we are special somehow, or we need to be able to see a path that connects us to our gods. All such stories are "real," since they are valued and retold, giving people a picture of who they think or imagine they are.
"Imagined" Family
But, none of them are "real," in that even with as much good evidence as we can muster, good solid scholarly sources have their own biases, and will have included some things and left others out. The self-narrative of individuals is notoriously unreliable, and second- or third-hand evaluations moreso, despite well-meaning research. In genealogy as in life we mostly relate to our illusions of family, rather than a fixed reality, at best based on skimpy information. There are our self-narrative stories, then the archetypal stories we actually live, noticed or not.
With any sort of balance or psychological perspective it is easy enough to recognize when we step from the ordinary world into that imaginal world, which is more than illusion or fiction, if less than or merely different from hard fact. Some of our heritage comes from specific places and people while the deeper parts come from the Far Country. By "traveling" in such foreign territory we learn other kinds of things about ourselves and our origins.
"Foreign Countries"
For example, in Masonry “Foreign Countries” do not mean the various geographical and political divisions of the Old World, nor a realm of external feats. “Foreign Countries” is used as a symbol. Like all symbols, it has more than one interpretation; but, unlike many, none of these is very difficult to trace or understand.
Through such travels we gain a new perspective on our origins, life, love, and ourselves. When we visit such 'foreign lands' we must use the laws of that land as well as customs and traditions - deciding what is right and what is wrong. In this regard a Jungian approach offers the most leeway without succumbing to literalisms or fantasy-based illusions.
Like genealogy, Freemasonry itself is a “foreign country” in which the initiate will travel; a world as different from the familiar workaday world as France is different from England, or Belgium from Greece. The standards are different. Surely such a land is a “foreign country” to the stranger within its borders; and the visitor must study it, learn its language and its customs, in order to enjoy and explore it.
Professional genealogists trying to revision traditional practice need not shepherd the public like over-protective parents. The fantasy of professional genealogy as some sort of factual reality is erroneous in itself. It remains an aid to learning, discovery, or problem-solving by experiment and trial-and-error methods.
Reconciling Pedigrees
Sure, we can rely on the data, but only to a certain limited extent. A quick review of more recent census data shows it is riddled with multiple incorrect spellings and data recording, just for starters. If you can get a line back to the early-1800s you have a good chance of connecting to extant research, especially American colonial lines.
Further back, most family lines disappear by 1500 or so, and there are no proven lines from before around 700. Statistically, our descent from Charlemagne is (virtually) certain, but the details of who, how, where, etc. could be laughably wrong or contain gaps.
All family trees go back as far as anyone else's whether you know it or not. You are real and so are your ancestors, even if they are hiding. Hidden ancestors are as real as you are in this process of "Hide and Seek." Our job is to effectively release the hidden information and forms, even where 'inaccurate' information proliferates as much as reliable data. Cliches, such as "Like father, like son" are necessarily abbreviated 'truths' that stand up to scrutiny in some instances and utterly fail in others.
Genealogy's Shadow
Genealogists and Curators need to realize they are always and only dealing with a symbolic landscape, even though some factual hook is available. To imagine otherwise is psychological naivete. They need to realize that no matter how they approach it or annotate the lines, or discuss the medieval flaws in the system people come to genealogy for their own reasons -- no longer the legal issues of legitimacy, inheritance, or succession. We all risk inaccuracy together.
People are inclined to believe what they want to believe in terms of literalisms and metaphors for their own psychic needs. Whatever impressions we form, including those about our parents, remain mostly that. Psychological pay offs feed into self-narrative, the stories we tell ourselves, a social construct much like Jung's persona archetype.
Most of us understand the notion that history is written by 'the winners' and is riddled with propaganda and deliberate falsehood or retrofitted 'spin'. Historical accuracy outside the story is likely unattainable, much less something genealogy is capable of re/producing. Can we not logically discern, for example, that we all descend from archetypal evil, whether we find the Mark of Cain in our pedigree or not?
Archetypal Assumptions
We approach the family tree in full comprehension this is an archetypal phenomenon. The only certainty in genealogy is the archetypal imagination. Archetypal images harness spiritual energy, redirecting psychic energy into new pathways. Our pedigree is way to help us imagine our origins. Genealogy is a template; in the beginning a tabula rasa upon which we construct a family "history." Often even the timeline is weak or ignored.
Like a Big Dream genealogy requires heuristics, any approach to problem solving, learning, or discovery that employs a practical method not guaranteed to be optimal or perfect, but sufficient for the immediate goals. Heuristics is a discovery process of gaining knowledge or some desired result by intelligent guesswork rather than by following some preestablished formula -- "trial-and-error" learning or using "a rule-of-thumb." In other words, we interpret all the data.
Follow Your Uncertainty
In certain situations it is not enough to simply cross that threshold; we must wait for the image to penetrate, work in the depths, gestate, and emerge from its own path. Such phenomena can be treated the same as all psychic phenomena. A big dream is one that has the potential to become a transformative image. The transformative image offers a pattern for arranging psychic energy along specific lines.
Our genealogical challenge is to build transformative relationships with transformative images. A transformative image, something carried over from the other side, can redirect the flow of psychic energy, changing its specific form of manifestation.
Liminal entities are neither here nor there, but betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial. They are structurally "invisible" so hard to grasp rationally like clearly-defined objects.
Kinship Libido
Ancestral images, deeply engaged and related to over a period of time, can draw consciousness powerfully and have transformative effects -- personal encounters with the collective unconscious. We have to let ourselves be temporarily affected by those images without remaining identified with them.
It relates to the instinctual needs of the individual constellating balance and wholeness or repressing aspects of human nature, resulting in one-sidedness and distortion. A side effect of genealogy happens with exposure to the cultural and religious archive of primordial transformative images from the past. Experiencing such images deeply can have a profound effect upon consciousness, priming transformative leaps.
The family tree is a transformative image that channels psychic energy and will into specific attitudes, activities, and goals. This potential image must have roots deep and broad in the psyche as a whole. It is an archetypal image that like a transforming dream captures the element of wholeness in an individual's life and gives it specific shape and direction.
People's capacity to tell the difference between fantasy and reality varies to the degree to which they use accurate 'reality testing', plausible interpretations, or are being sucked into the stories they are telling themselves about their family. Genealogy can be a way of denying pain in the nuclear family. Some people brag about their genealogy, hiding the parental alcoholism, verbal, and physical abuse in their own youth, for example.
These include religious beliefs, 'royal' pay offs, romanticizing, feeling superior, self-delusion, and identity issues and needs. Rather than redacting the traditional lines, such issues are better dealt with individually in Transgenerational Integration.
After all, we really can think, even if not with an absolute independence from nature; but it is the duty of the psychologist to make the double statement, and while admitting man’s power of thought, to insist also on the fact that he is trapped in his own skin, and therefore always has his thinking influenced by nature in a way he cannot wholly control. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 83
Universal principles, original forms; the fundamental essences and primordial forces that animate the cosmos. Archai derives from the Greek word, arkhe, meaning beginning. In archetypal psychology, the root metaphors of psychological function.
We, each and all of us, contain within us the entire history of the world, and just as our body records Man's genealogy as far back as the fish and then some, so our soul encompasses everything that has ever existed in human souls. All gods and devils that have ever existed are within us as possibilities, as desires, as solutions.
--Hermann Hesse, Reflections
ROOTS & BRANCHES
YOUR CREATION STORY
Genealogy Facts & Fictions
But no matter how much parents and grandparents may have sinned against the child, the man who is really adult will accept these sins as his own condition which has to be reckoned with. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 117.
Most people are nothing special, except perhaps to those close to them. Descent is one of the Mysteries of everyday life. What 'matters' about our past is more than only the biology of our descent, though this is the premise of genealogy. We are not only related to each other in family and in social relationships, but are related to all nature -- that inccludes all human or prehuman animal ancestors.
Among genealogists the battle still rages, whether to cut off once and for all disputed, fictitious, and legendary lineage, or to allow its traditional use to remain, even though some may be misled in their own minds by mythological material. Their issue, on shared trees, is having to repeat the same corrections over and again, especially in the medieval era. Fake lines to royalty that arose in the 1800's are also common, so they get re-added as often as they are removed. The same mistakes are copied over and over.
Who's Genealogy Is It?
In the medieval and ancient lines the whole research landscape changes. Monks in the early Christian era invented genealogies taking the lines of kings back to Adam. If the kings were no longer descended from the indigenous gods, then they needed to descend from figures from the Bible, Troy, and Rome.
Then, starting in the 1200s and reaching a peak in the 1600s, royal propagandists were competing to collect every old tradition and invent new ones if necessary to enhance the prestige of royal and noble families.
The French kings, for example, produced the Grandes Chroniques de France that claimed to show they were the heirs of a small band of Trojan refugees who established the Frankish people. Not to be outdone, Habsburgs followed a conscious policy for centuries of creating propaganda to show they were the heirs of the Trojan hero Aeneas through Julius Caesar. The idea that Julius Caesar was descended from Aeneas is just a much earlier, Roman example of the same kind of propaganda.
Still, radical amputation is a non-issue in Jungian work, which always approaches mythic material with an "as if." No one in transpersonal therapies is confused about the imaginal nature or depictions of mythic material and narrative. In many genealogy sites, such lines questioned by 'realists' are clearly marked as such. Also, there will always be fantasy-prone individuals who will believe what they wish to believe about such subjects.
Know It By Being It
Genealogy is a systems concept of emergence -- our emergence. It is a creative process within a formal system -- an ecology of ancestors we curate, foster and conserve, not merely a causal chain of linear descent. Family systems theory suggests that individuals cannot be understood in isolation from one another, but rather as a part of their family -- an emotional unit. Families are systems of interconnected and interdependent individuals, none of whom can be understood in isolation from the system.
Each member had a role to play and rules to respect. Members of the system are expected to respond to each other in a certain way according to their role, which is determined by relationship agreements and established patterns which may lead to balance in the family system, but also to dysfunction.
We create most of what we think of as reality through the stories we tell. Even profiles that contain only names and dates are still story telling. The names matter, but moreso the connections between them. They say, "I come from people who lived here and went there."
They connect into history. And history can be scholarly history, which depends on evaluation of sources and the creation of logical arguments, or it can be family history, which depends on the stories being passed down through the generations, or it can be even older oral history, which existed before writing, and eventually made it into manuscripts and then into print.
Though the lines often blur, a generic distinction is the source of such stories. Biases in story telling needs arise in relation to genealogy and the World Tree:
we need to see how we might be connected to history, or we need to know that we are special somehow, or we need to be able to see a path that connects us to our gods. All such stories are "real," since they are valued and retold, giving people a picture of who they think or imagine they are.
"Imagined" Family
But, none of them are "real," in that even with as much good evidence as we can muster, good solid scholarly sources have their own biases, and will have included some things and left others out. The self-narrative of individuals is notoriously unreliable, and second- or third-hand evaluations moreso, despite well-meaning research. In genealogy as in life we mostly relate to our illusions of family, rather than a fixed reality, at best based on skimpy information. There are our self-narrative stories, then the archetypal stories we actually live, noticed or not.
With any sort of balance or psychological perspective it is easy enough to recognize when we step from the ordinary world into that imaginal world, which is more than illusion or fiction, if less than or merely different from hard fact. Some of our heritage comes from specific places and people while the deeper parts come from the Far Country. By "traveling" in such foreign territory we learn other kinds of things about ourselves and our origins.
"Foreign Countries"
For example, in Masonry “Foreign Countries” do not mean the various geographical and political divisions of the Old World, nor a realm of external feats. “Foreign Countries” is used as a symbol. Like all symbols, it has more than one interpretation; but, unlike many, none of these is very difficult to trace or understand.
Through such travels we gain a new perspective on our origins, life, love, and ourselves. When we visit such 'foreign lands' we must use the laws of that land as well as customs and traditions - deciding what is right and what is wrong. In this regard a Jungian approach offers the most leeway without succumbing to literalisms or fantasy-based illusions.
Like genealogy, Freemasonry itself is a “foreign country” in which the initiate will travel; a world as different from the familiar workaday world as France is different from England, or Belgium from Greece. The standards are different. Surely such a land is a “foreign country” to the stranger within its borders; and the visitor must study it, learn its language and its customs, in order to enjoy and explore it.
Professional genealogists trying to revision traditional practice need not shepherd the public like over-protective parents. The fantasy of professional genealogy as some sort of factual reality is erroneous in itself. It remains an aid to learning, discovery, or problem-solving by experiment and trial-and-error methods.
Reconciling Pedigrees
Sure, we can rely on the data, but only to a certain limited extent. A quick review of more recent census data shows it is riddled with multiple incorrect spellings and data recording, just for starters. If you can get a line back to the early-1800s you have a good chance of connecting to extant research, especially American colonial lines.
Further back, most family lines disappear by 1500 or so, and there are no proven lines from before around 700. Statistically, our descent from Charlemagne is (virtually) certain, but the details of who, how, where, etc. could be laughably wrong or contain gaps.
All family trees go back as far as anyone else's whether you know it or not. You are real and so are your ancestors, even if they are hiding. Hidden ancestors are as real as you are in this process of "Hide and Seek." Our job is to effectively release the hidden information and forms, even where 'inaccurate' information proliferates as much as reliable data. Cliches, such as "Like father, like son" are necessarily abbreviated 'truths' that stand up to scrutiny in some instances and utterly fail in others.
Genealogy's Shadow
Genealogists and Curators need to realize they are always and only dealing with a symbolic landscape, even though some factual hook is available. To imagine otherwise is psychological naivete. They need to realize that no matter how they approach it or annotate the lines, or discuss the medieval flaws in the system people come to genealogy for their own reasons -- no longer the legal issues of legitimacy, inheritance, or succession. We all risk inaccuracy together.
People are inclined to believe what they want to believe in terms of literalisms and metaphors for their own psychic needs. Whatever impressions we form, including those about our parents, remain mostly that. Psychological pay offs feed into self-narrative, the stories we tell ourselves, a social construct much like Jung's persona archetype.
Most of us understand the notion that history is written by 'the winners' and is riddled with propaganda and deliberate falsehood or retrofitted 'spin'. Historical accuracy outside the story is likely unattainable, much less something genealogy is capable of re/producing. Can we not logically discern, for example, that we all descend from archetypal evil, whether we find the Mark of Cain in our pedigree or not?
Archetypal Assumptions
We approach the family tree in full comprehension this is an archetypal phenomenon. The only certainty in genealogy is the archetypal imagination. Archetypal images harness spiritual energy, redirecting psychic energy into new pathways. Our pedigree is way to help us imagine our origins. Genealogy is a template; in the beginning a tabula rasa upon which we construct a family "history." Often even the timeline is weak or ignored.
Like a Big Dream genealogy requires heuristics, any approach to problem solving, learning, or discovery that employs a practical method not guaranteed to be optimal or perfect, but sufficient for the immediate goals. Heuristics is a discovery process of gaining knowledge or some desired result by intelligent guesswork rather than by following some preestablished formula -- "trial-and-error" learning or using "a rule-of-thumb." In other words, we interpret all the data.
Follow Your Uncertainty
In certain situations it is not enough to simply cross that threshold; we must wait for the image to penetrate, work in the depths, gestate, and emerge from its own path. Such phenomena can be treated the same as all psychic phenomena. A big dream is one that has the potential to become a transformative image. The transformative image offers a pattern for arranging psychic energy along specific lines.
Our genealogical challenge is to build transformative relationships with transformative images. A transformative image, something carried over from the other side, can redirect the flow of psychic energy, changing its specific form of manifestation.
Liminal entities are neither here nor there, but betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial. They are structurally "invisible" so hard to grasp rationally like clearly-defined objects.
Kinship Libido
Ancestral images, deeply engaged and related to over a period of time, can draw consciousness powerfully and have transformative effects -- personal encounters with the collective unconscious. We have to let ourselves be temporarily affected by those images without remaining identified with them.
It relates to the instinctual needs of the individual constellating balance and wholeness or repressing aspects of human nature, resulting in one-sidedness and distortion. A side effect of genealogy happens with exposure to the cultural and religious archive of primordial transformative images from the past. Experiencing such images deeply can have a profound effect upon consciousness, priming transformative leaps.
The family tree is a transformative image that channels psychic energy and will into specific attitudes, activities, and goals. This potential image must have roots deep and broad in the psyche as a whole. It is an archetypal image that like a transforming dream captures the element of wholeness in an individual's life and gives it specific shape and direction.
People's capacity to tell the difference between fantasy and reality varies to the degree to which they use accurate 'reality testing', plausible interpretations, or are being sucked into the stories they are telling themselves about their family. Genealogy can be a way of denying pain in the nuclear family. Some people brag about their genealogy, hiding the parental alcoholism, verbal, and physical abuse in their own youth, for example.
These include religious beliefs, 'royal' pay offs, romanticizing, feeling superior, self-delusion, and identity issues and needs. Rather than redacting the traditional lines, such issues are better dealt with individually in Transgenerational Integration.
After all, we really can think, even if not with an absolute independence from nature; but it is the duty of the psychologist to make the double statement, and while admitting man’s power of thought, to insist also on the fact that he is trapped in his own skin, and therefore always has his thinking influenced by nature in a way he cannot wholly control. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 83
(c)2013-2016; All Rights Reserved, Iona Miller, Sangreality Trust
[email protected]
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This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
[email protected]
Fair Use Notice
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.