VISION TREE
The daimon of spirituality descends into our soul as the white bird...the serpent is an earthly soul, half daimonic, a spirit, and akin to the spirits of the dead.
--Jung, Red Book
GENEALOGICAL DRAMA
CONTEMPLATING EXISTENCE
Vision Tree
Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements
which were all already present in the ranks of our ancestors.
~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections, Page 235.
In visions, on the one side we have the complex fact of the unconscious, but on the other side we have the conscious. The impact of the two, the clash of the two, brings about the fantasy. ~Carl Jung, The Visions Seminar, Page 248.
What Jungians call the “Collective Unconscious” and physicists call “matter” in alchemy were always one – the Psyche. ~Marie Louise Von Franz.
Bonding Our Souls
When we enter our family tree we give ourselves to something greater than we are in actively contemplating [and memorializing] our existence. We were originally arboreal creatures and the jungle remains within our unconscious.
The vast existential drama of genealogy is only one of many ways to satisfy a deep-seated yearning for truth, mystery, and the soul at the heart of the world -- the vital sense of meaning surrounding love and death.
However, the Family Tree is perhaps the most primordial way to connect with our roots. Our family tree is our soul history. It deepens and refines our thinking. Here comes death, ending our forever.
Our tree is not a choice but a biological given of our existence -- the living mystery of life and being -- the mystery of the eternity of life. Death is at the heart of the sacred and knowledge of it loads life with meaning.
James Hillman describes the nature of the soul in ways that support a therapeutic value in genealogy: the soul (1) makes all meaning possible, (2) turns events into experiences, (3) involves a deepening of experience, (4) is communicated in love, and (5) has a special relation with death (1977, p. xvi, Hillman, 1976, pp. 44-47).
The Tree of Souls is a fundamental mytheme, a metaphor of organic cohesion. In Jewish mythology, the Tree of Souls blossoms to produce new souls, which fall into the Treasury of Souls. Gabriel takes out the first soul that comes into his hand. Then Lailah, the Angel of Conception, watches over the embryo until it is born. The Tree of Souls produces all the souls that have ever existed, or will ever exist.
The Tree is arguably among the oldest shamanic practices and tropes, and therefore the foundation of magic. The conjoint heartbeats of the ancestors is the core rhythm, the drumbeat of time on the stretched canvas of flesh. The drum made from the World Tree calls the helping spirits. That song is our prayer.
Rumi tells us, "Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it." To be satisfied in life we must combine inner and outer, the deep inner wisdom with focused activity in the world. Tracing our own genealogy, climbing up and down our Tree of Life, gives us potential for both.
Osiris is associated with one of the earliest versions of the Tree of Life. Our uncharted tree is like the dismembered Osiris, waiting for his limbs, the interlaced branches, to be put back together as the sacred tree grows around him. In the Mysteries an initiate discovered that their individual Daemon was actually the Universal Daemon, which they imagined was torn into fragments and distributed. Epictetus teaches: "You are a fragment torn from God. You have a portion of him within you."
Osiris-Dionysus represents this Universal Daemon, the Mind of God conscious in all living things. The goddess Isis collects together all of Osiris' limbs and reconstitutes him. In our genelaogical work, we may or may not collect all the limbs try as we might.
There is a Merlin tree, an Odin tree, and more trapped in or on a tree. They are all in the traditional genealogies where the mythic descents enter history. Myth enters our modern lives through the family tree. This is our inheritance.
"The Middle Plane, between the Upper & Lower World , that the Celts call the “Thin Place” is where the center of gravity shifts away from the Ego and its functions into an interim position...to attending to the hints of the self." (M.-L. von Franz, Psychotherapy). We live by extending our sensibilities into the world and understanding it in that way, and the same is true in the inner world.
History abhors a vacuum and fills it with a multitude of stories, both factual and imaginal. One secret of the tree is that we symbolically descend from gods, demigods, supermen of antiquity, and a variety of legendary creatures, allegedly our kith and kin. The god in the tree is immanent in the natural world and a source of inspiration and illumination.
Norse lore describes a spring at the root of the World Tree where water bubbles up from the underworld, carrying the dissolved memories of the dead. Odin drank from it once, costing him an eye. But, he was empowered to bestow inspiration on worthy poets. What are we to make of such statements in the traditional context of our descent?
Grasp Your Legacy
We must seek out our family tree to learn its hidden secrets, find its dead ends, and recast the contents of our personal and collective unconscious. Many stories run invisibly, concurrently in our unconscious, especially unresolved family issues. Like dreams, we can 'experience' our ancestors in their living, embodied reality.
Jung noted in his own process that, "The mystery showed me in images what I should afterward live. I did not possess any of those boons that the mystery showed me, for I still had to earn all of them." (Liber Novus, Page 254).
Your genealogy project can bring the past to life in ways you could not have imagined. In Jung's Red Book, the dead complain they are real not symbols. "You may call us symbols….But we are just as real as your fellow men. You invalidate nothing and solve nothing by calling us symbols." (Red Book, 249) Also, "This I learned in the Mysterium: to take seriously every unknown wanderer who personally inhabits the inner world, since they are real because they are effectual." (Red Book, 260)
Can a family tree give meaning to your life? Only if you infuse it with intention, value, and love. We invest in the message and are very involved and left with powerful residual impact. We may take the divine steps back for our own souls with corresponding results for our own well-being. But we may find in the process we become family stewards, bards, genwriters, or storytellers.
Well of Souls
Genealogy is a means of achieving empathy, of digging our own well of souls. Our undifferentiated 'well of souls' in the secret chambers of our hearts becomes more and more specific. We detect the current below, realizing the presence of something. The content is a resonance between the stimuli and the stored and storied material in our psychobiology.
Voices of the Transcendent
'The many voices of the psyche' is a transcendent ordering principle and aspirational or integrative position that may have a healing, pluralistic or unified agenda -- different ways to understand one's life within the chaos/order paradox.
Both the regressive and progressive perspective have their own type of wholeness, even if the mytheme differs. As Jung notes, "We have no way of knowing whether the world is Cosmos or Chaos, for, as we know the world, all the order is put into it by ourselves." (1925 Seminar, Page 134)
Joseph Campbell said, "What is it we are questing for? It is the fulfillment of that which is potential in each of us. Questing for it is not an ego trip; it is an adventure to bring into fulfillment your gift to the world, which is yourself. There is nothing you can do that's more important than being fulfilled. You become a sign, you become a signal, transparent to transcendence; in this way you will find, live, become a realization of your own personal myth."
Existential Drama
Genealogy as a mythic image functions to connect the ego and the transcendent Other. Subjective images are powerful because they can be experienced symbolically and unlock ancestral mysteries.
We enter the cave below the rock of reality to the reality of psychic manifestations. "We are standing in between two worlds, a visible tangible world, and the other invisible world, which somehow has a peculiar quality of substantiality; but very subtle, a sort of matter that is not obvious and is not visible, that penetrates bodies and apparently exists outside of time and space.
"It is here and everywhere at the same time, and yet nowhere because it has no extension; it is a complete annihilation of space and time, which makes it a very different thing from our conception of an obvious world." (Jung, Visions Seminars, Vol. 1 Page 206)
As Meister Eckhart said, "When the soul wishes to experience something she throws an image of the experience out before her and enters into her own Image." We go internal but come out with new information based on our experience. Personality widens with unconscious supplementation. Resilience builds throughout life, and close relationships are key.
"We are standing in between two worlds, a visible tangible world, and the other invisible world, which somehow has a peculiar quality of substantiality; but very subtle, a sort of matter that is not obvious and is not visible, that penetrates bodies and apparently exists outside of time and space.
It is here and everywhere at the same time, and yet nowhere because it has no extension; it is a complete annihilation of space and time, which makes it a very different thing from our conception of an obvious world." (Jung, Visions Seminars, Vol. 1, Page 206)
We can reclaim this most ancient genealogical practice and non-visible environment that allows us to gaze at a thing without seeing it. With each generation we enter a new level of interaction. Some branches of our tree clearly announce themselves as living forces of myth, which shows the nature of our life journey. Figures of the gods carry the idea of immortality, the image of immortality.
Enhancing our self-awareness, genealogy makes alienation obsolete by retrieving lost unconscious energy. What has haunted us now informs us, activated both by initiating and responding to joint attention The mythic impulse is contained in allegory and symbolism that are clearly not literal.
The subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place diminishes. Instead of a single answer there are many tacit replies. As a structured metaphor and technology, genealogy amplifies or intensifies our faculties increasing the value and quality of our inner life. Are you willing to enter the Tree?
Passing Through
Genealogy opens an inner space, and can be an immersive experience, a virtual reality where we suspend certain disbeliefs and entertain other hypotheses. Jung implies that what is not material now is 'spiritual,' and we find those explicit spiritual roots in our family tree. "Experience of the inner world has for its object the phenomena of the psychic background, which in itself is so indefinite or so multifaceted that it can be expressed in an infinite variety of forms."
At the dawn of mankind the Dragon constellation Draco was at the northern center of the heavens, overhanging the stellar system of the zodiac and its vast Precession drama. Jung tells us how family images spontaneously come back to us: "[The] dragon comes into the category of the great animals in the background who seem to regulate the world. Hence the mainly theriomorphic symbols for the signs of the zodiac as dominants of the psychic process.
"Naturally the phenomena observed in the background are not always archetypes; they can also be personal complexes which have acquired excessive importance. Father and mother are not only personal entities but also have a suprapersonal meaning and are frequently used as symbols for the deity.
In this way the religious view of the world, thrown out at the front door, creeps in again by the back, albeit in strangely altered form-so altered that nobody has yet noticed it." (Letters Vol. II, Pages 604-605)
As we enliven our tree it enlivens our depths. Here the lands of the dead and the living intersect. Here, in a dimension of existential and psychological truths that underlie mythic process, we come to grips with perennial questions and mystery. Perhaps the most important way of connecting with the ancestors is the act of tracing the genesis oneself so that each part of the discovery process has a chance to work in us and on us imaginally over time.
Time means a past and a future, and so the individual is only complete when we add his actual structure as the result of past events, and at the same time the actual structure taken as the starting point of new tendencies. (Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 137)
Jung links "the discontent of civilization" with distancing ourselves from our historical roots, and loss of connection with our past. He felt that crucial connection fostered individuality which counteracts mass-mindedness. Knowing the historical family via the collective unconscious [and genealogy] is crucial to psychological health and self-knowledge, in Jung's theory.
“The less we understand of what our fathers and forefathers sought,” he comments, “the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle in the mass [...]” (Jung, MDR).
It is in humanity’s best interest, then, to reconnect to this past, as the “ancestral psyches” within each of us can shed light on contemporary circumstances and situations (Jung, MDR, p.237). It is equally important, however, not to become lost in these past images, not to be “imprisoned in these memories” (MDR, p.320). http://jungiansociety.org/images/e-journal/Volume-8/Lu-2012.pdf
Representational Demands
The family tree is a nexus of historical and underlying mythological narratives which give birth to additional interconnecting narratives. Science offers some alternatives to supernatural appearances in dialogic inner speech. The brain's conversations with itself can now be mapped, but may be more than that.
Just because some people experience pathological auditory hallucinations doesn't mean all audialization is pathological.
We naturally can form a mental concept of a sound impression without 'external' agency. Some people can imagine whole symphonies. Information is made more comprehensible by perspective switching and rendering it as sound.
Trans-Sensual Imagery
Findings show that forms of inner speech exist which can be both phenomenologically and neurologically distinguished from the silent commentary of a single inner voice. Contributions of inner speech and forms of mental imagery create vivid inner dialogues. Even Genesis describes a creation of spoken words rather than acts. http://scan.oxfordjournals.org/content/11/1/110.full
"Inner speech has been implicated in important aspects of normal and atypical cognition, including the development of auditory hallucinations. neural activation for inner speech involves conversations (‘dialogic inner speech’) with single-speaker scenarios (‘monologic inner speech’). Generation of dialogic (compared with monologic) scenarios was associated with a widespread bilateral network including left and right superior temporal gyri, precuneus, posterior cingulate and left inferior and medial frontal gyri. Activation associated with cognitive and dialogic scenarios overlapped in areas of right posterior temporal cortex previously linked to mental state representation."
"Inner speech is a complex and varied phenomenon. In behavioral studies, everyday inner speech is often reported to be involved in self-awareness, past and future thinking and emotional reflection, while in cognitive research, inner speech appears to fulfill a variety of mnemonic and regulatory functions. Inner speech may reflect the endpoint of a developmental process in which social dialogues, mediated by language, are internalized as verbal thought. Following from this view, the subjective experience of inner speech will mirror the external experience of communication and often have a dialogic structure, involving the co-articulation of differing perspectives on reality and, in some cases, representation of others’ voices."
Time alters us and our perceptions. Many experience the bittersweet feeling of arriving in the future without being able to tell our past self how things turned out among the hypothetical conversations that play out in our heads. Perhaps all our ancestors are 'talking' but nobody is listening. And even if we do, we may be frustrated others are unable to relate to the experience.
Family Plots
On the other hand, the plot of our life, flaws, and anxieties may begin to make more sense with our relational roots. Awareness of our perspective enlarges, personally and historically. We realize each ancestor has a life as vivid and complex as our own, and that it takes a long time to forge a deep relationship.
Family Battlecry
Genealogy is a feeling and a challenge, a lost art of ancestors returning with a vengeance. The mottoes on heraldic arms are actually battlecries. Just as the Scots shouted their clan genealogies before battle, our family tree is a declaration of our intention to 'continue to be' and to continue in our traditional ways venerating our forebears. They recited their clan genealogies in Gaelic, shouted their war cries, then attacked.
Clans are family groups and their sept branches are all blood relatives. Highland families had a traditional seannachaidh, who could recite the descent of that particular family and state its relationship to other families in the larger clan.
Consanguinity
For 2000 years in Alba, the Senchai, Seannachaidh, or Sennachie [sen-uh-kee] have woven the clan's present members with the history, honor, deeds and lineage of those who have gone before them. These loyal and respected clansmen are appointed by the clan chief as professional storytellers of family genealogy, history, and legend.
Both a Pict and Gael tradition, this ancient position is a Genealogist, Historian, Bard, Orator, and tribal Herald.
The office of Ri-seannachie had supreme jurisdiction in matters of genealogy, and the duty of preserving the Royal pedigree. Each clan had its own Druid priests and judges under the chief Druid of the Pictish High King.
Disembodied Information
In the 'Cult of the Severed Head' in Provance, a head carved in stone was the repository of the soul and could live on and continue to speak to the living and make prophecies. Such heads represented a medium for communication with the Other World, hinting at an older Celtic mythos and tradition -- cult of relics, cult of the head.
Bran's severed head continued to speak to his followers who returned it to Britain. King Arthur dug up the head, declaring the country would be protected only by his great strength. Brân the Blessed was like the Arthurian Fisher King, the keeper of the Holy Grail. He has a mortal wound in the leg (Brân's wound was in his foot) but stays alive in his mystical castle due to the effects of the Grail, waiting to be healed by Percival. In the Welsh version of Perceval, Peredur son of Efrawg visits a mysterious castle, but finds only a severed human head, not the Grail. Some said the Grail had the power to restore the fallen, like Brân's cauldron.
In Norse myth, Mímir (Old Norse, "The rememberer, the wise one") is renowned for his knowledge and wisdom but is beheaded during the Æsir-Vanir War. Odin embalms the head of Mímir with herbs so that it would not rot, and spoke charms over it, which gave it the power to speak to him and reveal secrets to him. He keeps Mímir's head with him because it divulges information from other worlds. It recites secret knowledge and counsel to him.
But cults of Southern France may not correlate with those of Britain or the Neolithic era and elsewhere as a coherent practice. Skull relics are still worshiped there with candles. The medieval town Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume has a basilica and crypt dedicated to Mary Magdalene said to contain the blackened relic of her skull.
Neolithic Jericho practiced burial of loved ones under their houses. Sometimes the severed head was removed and the skull buried after defleshing. Faces were reconstructed with plaster to retain the identity of the family member. Individual facial features were made with red and black paint. Some eye orbits were inlaid with shells and the skulls were decorated with hair and mustaches.
The notion of a 'cult of the head' remains controversial, but it is a fact we imagine it was so. This powerful trope brings to mind cults of martyred saints who carry their immortalized heads. The Templars allegedly worshiped of the severed head of John the Baptist they called Baphomet, who talked to them and possessed “divine wisdom." Personifications of disembodied metaphysical entities are an ancient equivalent of media 'talking heads' as culture leaders.
Soul-Talk
What we can take from this practice is the primacy of the psyche for personification of the unconscious -- the multiple personifications or perspectives of psyche. We spontaneously personify psyche all the time, without effort since it is a psychological necessity. Personifying allows the image to work on us -- a potential way of knowing what is hidden in the heart. A grounded ego uses personification for growth.
To personify something from the unconscious is to treat it like a person with a sort of inherent autonomy motivated by purposes and intentions. We even lend it a voice and bond with it. Personifying in archetypal psychology is “the spontaneous experiencing, envisioning and speaking of the configurations of existence as psychic presences.” (Re-Visioning, 12)
Personifying is a way of making subjective experience, passionate identification, and indwelling images more tangible through conversation and relationship in symbolic form. Hillman (1975) called it "an epistemology of the heart, a thought-mode of feeling." It imagines what's inside, outside, and makes this content alive, personal, and even divine.
We personify that which we love. This is the natural expression of mythic consciousness to mythic consciousness. Illustrious ancestors aren't just statues of greatness. Through this spontaneous activity of psyche we enter myth "as if" it were real.
Such non-directive thinking or "soul-talk" is the key to understanding archetypes as both guides and different parts of ourselves. “Loving is a way of knowing, and for loving to know, it must personify. Personifying is thus a way of knowing, especially knowing what is invisible, hidden in the heart,” Hillman says in Re-Visioning.
"Personifying is a way of being in the world and experiencing the world as a psychological field, where persons are given with events, so that events are experiences that touch us, move us, appeal to us." "...all the figures and feelings of the psyche are wholly 'mine,' while at the same time recognizing that these figures and feelings are free of my control and identity, not 'mine' at all." (Hillman)
"By means of personifications my sense of person becomes more vivid for I carry with me at all times the protection of my daimones: the images of dead people who mattered to me, of ancestral figures of my stock, cultural and historical persons of renown and people of fable who provide exemplary images--a wealth of guardians. They guard my fate, guide it, probably are it. "Perhaps--who knows," writes Jung, "these eternal images are what men mean by fate." We need this help, for who can carry his fate alone?" (Hillman)
Hillman notes that personifying is a creative function. Whether it is done pathologically or intentionally, it functions to “save the diversity and autonomy of the psyche from domination by any single power, whether this domination be by a figure of archetypal awe in one’s surroundings or by one’s own egomania. ‘ (Re-Visioning, 32)
In the family tree we don't require the physical relic to honor the deceased, including the heads of the household. "To keep the light alive in the darkness, that's the point, and only there your candle makes sense." (Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pp. 133-138)
Jung stated, "It was as if my tools were activated by my libido. But there must be tools there to be activated, that is, animated images, images with libido in them; then the additional libido that one supplies brings them up to the surface.
If I had not given this additional libido with which to bring them to the surface, the activity would have gone on just the same, but would have sucked my energy down into the unconscious. By putting libido into it, one can increase the speaking power of the unconscious." (Jung, 1925 Seminar, Lecture 5, Pages 37-45).
The Big Tree
Doing one's own genealogy, even if it has been done before, is the best way to integrate and digest it. The ancestors do not really live today but are not fully dead either as living images. We can ensoul our growing branches best in the context in which they arise.
Relying on the work of others removes us a step from the core of the process; it might stimulate imagery, but it's more like reading about a journey than making it oneself. Much of the nuance and functional relations are lost -- the chaos, the struggle, the blind alleys. The healing work requires direct engagement for familiarity with the holistic image as well as the details of each family encountered.
Arguably, the family tree is the necessary foundation to psychological integration. We begin a long, slow circulation among the many branches of our tree. Jung says, "The circulation is not merely movement in a circle, but means on the one hand the marking off of the sacred precinct, and on the other, the fixation and concentration." (CW 13, Alchemical Studies, Pg 25).
The circulation of blood in the arteries mirrors the circulation of sap in the tree, and the circularity of cosmological or metaphysical thought -- analogical thinking that links the macrocosm and microcosm, above and below. The ancestral field has an immediate effect, both healing and challenging, on our whole lives.
Ouroboric Cycle
Repeating the circuit of all aspects of our being generates a transpersonal current that unites conflicting opposites. We repeat the distillation process, again and again, but always on another level -- a new and deeper level of understanding. Cycles of rising and falling echo the ascent and descent in our ancestral lines. This is no disembodied Ascensionism, but a fully embodied, fully grounded soul retrieval, without recourse to 'metaphysical certainties'.
We continually return with a cyclic pattern to our own beginning. This adventure never ends. We are each our own paths. Genealogy is a sacred narrative of origins that forever marks our place in time with a true quest for the fountain of life and retrieval of lost parts of the soul. Jung adds, "So when you relieve the unconscious of non-realized contents, you release it for its own special functioning, and it will go ahead like an animal." (1925 Seminar, Page 115)
Ancient shamanic stories describe a previous World Age in which a colossal tree dominated the celestial landscape, joining heaven to earth. This master-narrative is the origin of the World Tree, and the Family Tree. The sacred tree is the navel of the world, always potentially present everywhere.
Shamans journeyed through visions, climbing the World Tree, much like we climb through the branches of our family tree, tracing and retracing them. Jung's collective unconscious overlaps with shamanic experience of nonordinary reality.
They descended the trees roots to the land of the dead to retrieve the souls of the living who strayed there. They journeyed in vision to the upper world to consult with spiritual ancestors, for healing or wisdom. A mythic boon emerges from interaction with the archetypal tree where the physical and the sacred are united.
In this sense the family tree is a redemptive tree linking us back to source. In the Neolithic and Bronze ages the world tree was the world axis, a nexus where pairs of opposites come together. Originally, the tree was a universal whole: male and female, dark and light, knowledge and mystery, etc.
The Biblical version dissociates or deconstructs this unity. Eve eats the fruit and humanity was separated into dualities, male and female, good and evil. Humanity was thrown into time and space, aware of imminent mortality. The Precession functions as the great cosmic timekeeper, marking off the Ages.
That tree fails to unite heaven, earth, and underworld. The temporal end remains unfulfilled unless the disparity of the tree can be transcended in some manner in this particular mythos.
Only the universal archetype, the World Tree unites the world of temporal matter, death, and the paradise myth regained after the completion of life's journey. Not just a diagram, the spirit of the family tree is a reconciling and redemptive symbol linking us to the origin, but we have to pluck its fruit -- the links and loops of kinship.
Tree of Visions
The World Tree is an integral part of the shamanic cosmos and links the world of humanity with the world of the spirits. Spirits pass from one world to another on the Tree. There are Siberian stories of climbing the World Tree to attend a school for shamans run in heaven by the ancestors. Without living links to the spirit world, there is no longer a Tree.
Only mythic dissociation -- the split of sensibility of body and spirit, female and male -- separates the Tree of knowledge from the Tree of immortal life. The body and psyche both derive from the ancestors. In the unus mundus, they are one integrated tree -- the creative source of becoming. We unite them when we resume a dialogue with our souls. We recognize truths in the mysteries of myth.
This Tree of Life or mother-tree has its roots in heaven and its branches growing downward through genealogical descent, bringing life-giving function to the possibilities of life. It is an icon of the unus mundus, an underlying unified reality from which everything emerges and to which everything returns.
Branch Out
The family tree is a system of interactive complexity and emergence. We grow its branches, and sometimes merge with lines compiled by others. Our own tree is a canopy of growth that connects us all the way to the stars and our aspirations while grounding us in our roots.
Our family tree branches out each time we deviate from our direct Y-DNA or mtDNA lines of our father and mother. New family branches potentially enter the tree with each ancestral wife and her lineage, which in many cases is longer than that of the husband. Some royal descents come through the mothers; there is a legend that claims all the 'magic' in the family lines is through the distaff side.
Women are often the hidden half of the family because of old social and legal customs. Often we don't know and cannot find their maiden names, so they become dead ends in our search, until or unless new data is found.
Yet wives and natural partners form vital links in our chains of ascent back to well-known ancestors, even if little or nothing is known of them, beyond a name, or N.N. (invisible women). Elusive women can sometimes be found through naming patterns or in a census search, especially if there is a photo of the listing and its additional notations.
Other invisibles include missing fathers, and natural children. The phrase “natural son” in a will meant the testator acknowledged a child had been born out of wedlock. The only legal meaning in that context back then was “a bastard; a child born out of lawful wedlock.”
Finding a maiden name is almost always essential to further research on a particular line. Naturally, the best place to locate a maiden name is on a marriage record. If that is not available, other vital records may have the information, although this is usually the case only with more modern records, not those over 100 years old. These include birth certificates of her children, her death certificate, her husband's death certificate, or the marriage or death certificates of her children. This is by no means standard and is only a possibility. Baptismal records may also contain the mother's maiden name, even in older church records.Another possible source is her obituary, which might mention surviving brothers. Also look for obituaries of sisters or men you believe are her brothers. If you have found a person that you think might be one of her parents, it is worthwhile to check the death certificates because a family member, perhaps your ancestress, usually provided the information on the death certificate and sometimes her relationship was given. Also look for wills from likely candidates -- a woman may be mentioned in her father's or mother's will.
Without direct information, you sometimes have to resort to indirect clues. Look for the repetition of certain given names in the family. If she named her son Hezekiah, Rudyard or some other uncommon name and there was an older man of that same name in the vicinity, that may be her father. Look also for surnames being used as second names for her children. A woman often gave her child her own maiden name as a middle name. In the census, look for older people living in the same household or nearby. They may well be the woman's parents. http://www.genealogy.com/articles/research/50_donna.html
Searching for Female Ancestors
https://www.loc.gov/rr/genealogy/bib_guid/female.pdf
Dead Reckoning
Our family tree is our map of the undifferentiated unconscious -- maps of relationships in the Land of the Dead, the co-existent underworld of shades. In the beginning, it is like drawing a map of the world on a sheet of paper with as little concept of our ancestors as the unknown seas and continents where they lived. New maps help us navigate the terrain.
Over and over, we plot our course through the maternal and paternal lines of ascent that predispose our responses. The scintillae are soul-sparks of partial or emergent consciousness. Insight in the ancestral field stirs the imagination. What we don't deal with remains buried. The dormant, lifeless, and withered awaken, expanding consciousness and renewing psyche, from deadness to life-force energy.
Jung called these "scintilla, or soul sparks, the innermost divine essence of man…symbols which express a God image, namely the image of Deity unfolding in the world, in nature, and in man." (Jung, Archetypes of the Unconscious pp.389)
At least symbolically, God climbs down to mortality. Some tribes deified their ancestors. And these divine archetypes -- gods and goddesses -- are just what we find at the far reaches of our royal and legendary genealogical lines. Our mortal descent is a fractal reiteration of their divine essence, our own images and conflicts. Jung named this quintessence the Self, bridging from the physical and instinctual to the spiritually transcendent psyche.
Scintillae or sparks of light in the dark emerge through consistent interaction, our persistent interest, and curiosity. Metaphorically, we love them back to life. These points of light, iridescent eyes, mimic the starry heavens or reflective surface of the sea with spontaneous amplification.
Representing the multiple consciousness of the psyche, they connect us with the animated soul of the world. As we focus, their virtual presence, numinosity and luminosity draws us toward pervasive meaning. The noumen is healing. Philosophers say that solar consciousness must inseminate lunar unconscious. This act gives birth to a third aspect of consciousness in our being, the luminous subjective self as the inner divine child.
Our 'dead reckoning' navigation means charting a new course of relationship and conscious attachment through successive immersions. Native Americans say we are affected by the seven generations that came before us and affect the seven generations to follow. We may actually include all our emotionally-charged generations -- the redeemed and unredeemed Trees.
Milky Way; Mother's Milk
Once we embark on our mission, we find that like the heavenly constellations, we have family constellations to guide us toward innate healing. Hidden dynamics in a family can be worked with and healed through a process that has the power to shift generations of suffering and unhappiness. Our most pressing challenges are reflected in those of our ancestors and the genetic relationships and patterns among them.
This relatively brief therapy helps us develop intuition and insight while exhuming hidden solutions that restore the flow of love. As Rumi suggested, "Love is the bridge between you and everything." We conceive a new perspective and circumambulate a variety of associative and interpretive treatments, clearing the emotional body with the balm of tears.
Over and over we ask what does this feel like? How does it continue to feel, or how do the feelings change and amplify over time, and what is it asking of you? Redemption of the psychophysical body lies in this direction -- redeeming spirit and soul, conscience and consciousness. To do so, we have to metaphorically dig up graveyards and excavate cities.
The unconscious belongs to no time in particular, being seemingly eternal. We consciously realized that as a peculiar feeling of timelessness. The "time" in which the ancestors lived and still live is a "time when there was no time," -- an ancestral world of thought-forms, beyond which is the sense of indefiniteness, timelessness, oneness.
Inherited Issues
We gain a unique perspective to make new choices or follow unforeseen pathways. Emotional resolution of systemic entanglement can help overcome patterns of behavior repeated in related families for generations, by bringing up the family images held in the unconscious mind. Such work on where we are stuck or feel pain is built around inclusion: the reconciliation among all parts of the self, our family, and our history.
In time, the stream of ancestors comes forward in a flood of imagery -- prevailing, enduring, haunting, mapping out hidden truths. We cannot escape the spirit of the depths who forces us toward the mysteries. Jung described not only 'possession' by the ego, shadow and anima/animus but by the transgenerational family history. "If we became aware of the ancestral lives in us, we might disintegrate. An ancestor might take possession of us and ride us to death." (1925 Seminar, Page 139).
We can only find our right way with an eye fixed on the far horizon. Perhaps such 'dead reckoning' -- our own confrontation with the unconscious -- helps us navigate our imaginative journey. We calculate our current position from a previously unconscious position, to fix, and advance that position to the far horizons. Our attention flows toward an unforeseen destiny where meaning beckons beyond the bounds of consciousness.
Jung describes the horizon as a whole as the quaternity (four quarters of heaven)..."There are always four elements, four prime qualities, four colors, four castes, four ways of spiritual development, etc. So, too, there are four aspects of psychological orientation...The ideal of completeness is the circle or sphere, but its natural minimal division is a quaternity." (Psychology and Religion: West and East,)
Natural Order
We have unconsciously sacrificed our ancestors and disheartened ourselves. We've set them adrift in the unconscious without mooring to the living. Over time we integrate this imaginal world as we trace our family tree through the islands and continents of the unconscious. This reality is mediated by information patterns which in turn are constantly evolving.
The tree is the record of the multigenerational courses from the known starting point, and the known or estimated 'drift.' Along the way we find many lines -- grand dynasties that have gone extinct, “beginnings without continuations.” But, somehow, despite all odds our own line has passed through or culminated in ourselves and our own 'pioneering' work.
Digging for Ancestors
Paraphrasing Jung, we stumble through unknown regions, are lead astray by analogies, forever losing the Ariadne thread. We are overwhelmed by new impressions and new possibilities, and the worst disadvantage of all is that the pioneer only knows afterwards what he or she should have known before.
When we encounter the second and subsequent generations we may have the advantage of a clearer, if still incomplete, picture. Certain landmarks on the frontiers of the essential have grown familiar. We now know what must be known if we are to explore the newly discovered territory.
Does our attention 'condition' the ancestral field? We learn to spot the most distant connections. We can unravel problems and give a coherent account of the whole field of ancestors, whose full extent we can only survey and 'know' at the end of our life’s work.
Thin Red Line
The ancestral map is a beginning, a framework in which later discoveries can be placed. What is confusing at first is clarified in a later stage of the journey. The family tree helps us establish a connection between the natural and sacred figures and our own psyche. Or, as von Franz notes, "Only if you look from afar, from a certain objective distance, do you realize that there is a pattern of wholeness in it." (Interpretation of Fairy Tales, Pages 6-7)
Family Dynamics
This special perspective or psychic viewpoint is a revelation of the soul, nothing short of the Holy Grail, whether as myth, bloodline, relic, or spiritual quest. We acquire depth in our attempts to heal ourselves. In 1949, Jung said, "Ultimate truth, if there be such a thing, demands the concert of many voices."
Family dynamics appear in individual therapy as well as in engagement with the family tree. They include repetitive patterns of interactions and significant events in the family history. Some suggest unconscious loyalties to previous generations leads to synchronistic repetition and unwitting reenactments of ancestral events and dates. The group functions ritualistically. Plurality becomes mimetic flow not just dissociative rupture. Intergenerational family identity is positively related to well-being.
Genealogy Gives & Genealogy Takes Away
We may find that our research uncovers more than we could ever imagine. We may break through persistent research blocks after years of trying, yet we may also be faced with grave errors in our charts we must correct, discarding certain figures from our droplines we may have warmly embraced. We come to crossroads where we must choose by instinct to merge or not to merge. Eminent lines may be cut unceremoniously or replaced by others we must now integrate.
Thus, the genealogical environment remains somewhat fluid. In some sense, "not knowing" can be as important as knowing. Some people might tentatively add ancestors to a line, realizing there is little or no documented evidence, but they know where the 'potholes' in their tree are.
Professional genealogy sites are constantly correcting errors and updating. On public trees, incorrect entries are repeatedly re-added, as people repeat the mistakes of others they find, over and over. Paths to the illustrious can evaporate over night. Adopting the wrong wife for an unknown can create an entirely fictional line of her relatives, but not our own. Another common error is making a sister or cousin of the same name into a spouse.
Thus, we may have a felt-sense of 'losing' ancestors or lines of descent we never actually 'had.' Everyone makes mistakes in genealogy, so it is part of the practice. Joys, sorrows, and confusions go with that territory.
The family tree operates as an alembic, a sacred vessel or temple of transparent walls that contains our pain, suffering, and confusion without judgment or analysis. Instead it offers us a rich array of stories. We can act out, play with, identify with and allow ourselves to be carried away by these ancestral stories – within a contained, ritual setting.
All of shamanism comes from one root -- the unseen world of gods, demons, and ancestral spirits, responsive only to shamans. The ancestors and the pathos of their epic restore our soul. "The sin to be repented, of course, is unconsciousness." (Jung, Aion, Pp. 191-192.) We construct a unique history of the evolution of our own consciousness with the bodies of our ancestors and the body of myths as the phenomenology of this same evolution.
Our Tree returns us to the lived experience of events, imaginal connections, and metaphorical reality. Primarily through afflictions, symptoms, and phenomenology, imaginal mythology seeks the movement of the soul to a fuller awareness of itself. We return to the origins, through memory, of our life story that goes beyond simple succession and co-existence. In our narrative arc, we may lie even to ourselves to reveal a more profound truth.
Without hypostatizing the idea to some otherworldly plane, Jung suggested our primordial behavior is informed by archetypal images. This is the difference between a psychological and a metaphysical, "spiritual," or religious approach and worldview.
Jung implied "Sooner or later all the dead become what we also are," but that we know little or nothing about that mode of being, and "what shall we still know of this earth after death?" Still, he felt, "The dissolution of our time-bound form in eternity brings no loss of meaning."
Reification, concretism, or hypostatization is the fallacy of ambiguity or misplaced concreteness. Abstraction (abstract belief, metaphysical or hypothetical construct) is treated as if it were a concrete, real event, or physical entity. The issues of reification are usually philosophical or ideological. This is the error of treating something which is not concrete, such as an idea, as a concrete thing. Reification confuses a model with reality: "the map is not the territory." Reification can also be an "as if" figure of speech, and actually understood as such, rather than literalized.
Even a genuine and original inner life has a tendency to succumb again and again to the sensualism and rationalism of consciousness, i.e., to literal-mindedness.
The result is that one tries to repeat a spontaneous, irrational event by a deliberate, imitative arrangement of the analogous circumstances which had apparently led to the original event.
The immense hope, the liberating ekstasis of the primordial experience, soon turns into the pertinacity of an intellectual pursuit which tries, through the application of a method, to attain the effect of the primordial experience, namely, a kind of spiritual transformation.
The depth and intensity of the original emotion become a passionate longing, an enduring effort that may last for hundreds of years, to restore the original situation.
Curiously enough, one does not realize that this was a state of spontaneous, natural emotion or ekstasis, and thus the complete opposite of a methodically construed imitation. (Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 600-603)
Jung saw consciousness as "essentially the psyche's organ of perception, it is the eye and ear of the psyche." Even the scientific view is still infused with unconscious myths and symbols, as "all that comes into our heads proceeds from the unconscious." (ETH Lecture II, April 27, 1934, pg. 98). Jung identified 'Psyche' as the unknown that we simply name 'Psyche,' therefore ambiguity has to be enough for us.
We can't concretize our ancestors into mythical metaphors, metaphysical statements or entities, etiologies, causal explanations, cookie-cutter archetypes, or name tags. But we can free them of unconscious 'dead weight' that affects our lives profoundly.
Peronified ancestors speak through the masks of image and symbol. Our felt experiences of them are real events but they are perspectives toward events which shift our attitudes and experience of events."The unconscious can move in every possible direction, even in time it can go forward and backward, because it knows no space." (Jung, Visions Seminar, Vol. I.)
We also discover ourselves as imaginal beings through rich intuitive resonances, metaphor, and personification, without over-identification with our subject ancestors, without insisting the subjective must be objective, without egoic, foolish, idiosyncratic, or superstitious interpretations. The irrepresentable has an immediate, subjective power of conviction because it demonstrates its own existence.
"For the understanding of the unconscious we must see our thoughts as events, as phenomena. We must have perfect objectivity." (Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 103) Otherwise, "One can even come to clairvoyance; but when such a gift as the latter is developed, it makes the person permeable to all sorts of atmospheric conditions that may result in his misery." (Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 115)
Our ancestors may make what happens intelligible, but they don't 'happen' themselves. They reveal archetypal themes in history and the myth in the mess of ordinary lives. The mythic stories we embody in our own wounds are informed by all the figures in our Tree, not only the ones we believe most represent us.
Life is Short; Death is Sure
In the last analysis every life is the realization of a whole, that is, of a self, for which reason this realization can also be called "individuation." All life is bound to individual carriers who realize it, and it is simply inconceivable without them.
But every carrier is charged with an individual destiny and destination, and the realization of these alone makes sense of life. (Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 222)
It is the mourning of the dead in me, which precedes burial and rebirth. The rain is the fructifying of the earth, it begets the new wheat, the young, germinating God. (Jung, Liber Novus, Page 243.)
Our poetic approach is echoed by Csikszentmihalyi: “the poet’s responsibility to be a witness, a recorder of experience, is part of the broader responsibility we all have for keeping the universe ordered through our consciousness.”
“Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed. Having once experienced the mystery, plenitude, contradiction, and composure of a work of art, we afterward have a built-in resistance to the slogans and propaganda of oversimplification that have often contributed to the destruction of human life. Poetry is a verbal means to a nonverbal source. It is a motion to no-motion, to the still point of contemplation and deep realization.” ―A.R. Ammons
This is the burden everybody has to carry:
to live the life we have got to live.
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 515-516
--Jung, Red Book
GENEALOGICAL DRAMA
CONTEMPLATING EXISTENCE
Vision Tree
Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements
which were all already present in the ranks of our ancestors.
~Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections, Page 235.
In visions, on the one side we have the complex fact of the unconscious, but on the other side we have the conscious. The impact of the two, the clash of the two, brings about the fantasy. ~Carl Jung, The Visions Seminar, Page 248.
What Jungians call the “Collective Unconscious” and physicists call “matter” in alchemy were always one – the Psyche. ~Marie Louise Von Franz.
Bonding Our Souls
When we enter our family tree we give ourselves to something greater than we are in actively contemplating [and memorializing] our existence. We were originally arboreal creatures and the jungle remains within our unconscious.
The vast existential drama of genealogy is only one of many ways to satisfy a deep-seated yearning for truth, mystery, and the soul at the heart of the world -- the vital sense of meaning surrounding love and death.
However, the Family Tree is perhaps the most primordial way to connect with our roots. Our family tree is our soul history. It deepens and refines our thinking. Here comes death, ending our forever.
Our tree is not a choice but a biological given of our existence -- the living mystery of life and being -- the mystery of the eternity of life. Death is at the heart of the sacred and knowledge of it loads life with meaning.
James Hillman describes the nature of the soul in ways that support a therapeutic value in genealogy: the soul (1) makes all meaning possible, (2) turns events into experiences, (3) involves a deepening of experience, (4) is communicated in love, and (5) has a special relation with death (1977, p. xvi, Hillman, 1976, pp. 44-47).
The Tree of Souls is a fundamental mytheme, a metaphor of organic cohesion. In Jewish mythology, the Tree of Souls blossoms to produce new souls, which fall into the Treasury of Souls. Gabriel takes out the first soul that comes into his hand. Then Lailah, the Angel of Conception, watches over the embryo until it is born. The Tree of Souls produces all the souls that have ever existed, or will ever exist.
The Tree is arguably among the oldest shamanic practices and tropes, and therefore the foundation of magic. The conjoint heartbeats of the ancestors is the core rhythm, the drumbeat of time on the stretched canvas of flesh. The drum made from the World Tree calls the helping spirits. That song is our prayer.
Rumi tells us, "Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it." To be satisfied in life we must combine inner and outer, the deep inner wisdom with focused activity in the world. Tracing our own genealogy, climbing up and down our Tree of Life, gives us potential for both.
Osiris is associated with one of the earliest versions of the Tree of Life. Our uncharted tree is like the dismembered Osiris, waiting for his limbs, the interlaced branches, to be put back together as the sacred tree grows around him. In the Mysteries an initiate discovered that their individual Daemon was actually the Universal Daemon, which they imagined was torn into fragments and distributed. Epictetus teaches: "You are a fragment torn from God. You have a portion of him within you."
Osiris-Dionysus represents this Universal Daemon, the Mind of God conscious in all living things. The goddess Isis collects together all of Osiris' limbs and reconstitutes him. In our genelaogical work, we may or may not collect all the limbs try as we might.
There is a Merlin tree, an Odin tree, and more trapped in or on a tree. They are all in the traditional genealogies where the mythic descents enter history. Myth enters our modern lives through the family tree. This is our inheritance.
"The Middle Plane, between the Upper & Lower World , that the Celts call the “Thin Place” is where the center of gravity shifts away from the Ego and its functions into an interim position...to attending to the hints of the self." (M.-L. von Franz, Psychotherapy). We live by extending our sensibilities into the world and understanding it in that way, and the same is true in the inner world.
History abhors a vacuum and fills it with a multitude of stories, both factual and imaginal. One secret of the tree is that we symbolically descend from gods, demigods, supermen of antiquity, and a variety of legendary creatures, allegedly our kith and kin. The god in the tree is immanent in the natural world and a source of inspiration and illumination.
Norse lore describes a spring at the root of the World Tree where water bubbles up from the underworld, carrying the dissolved memories of the dead. Odin drank from it once, costing him an eye. But, he was empowered to bestow inspiration on worthy poets. What are we to make of such statements in the traditional context of our descent?
Grasp Your Legacy
We must seek out our family tree to learn its hidden secrets, find its dead ends, and recast the contents of our personal and collective unconscious. Many stories run invisibly, concurrently in our unconscious, especially unresolved family issues. Like dreams, we can 'experience' our ancestors in their living, embodied reality.
Jung noted in his own process that, "The mystery showed me in images what I should afterward live. I did not possess any of those boons that the mystery showed me, for I still had to earn all of them." (Liber Novus, Page 254).
Your genealogy project can bring the past to life in ways you could not have imagined. In Jung's Red Book, the dead complain they are real not symbols. "You may call us symbols….But we are just as real as your fellow men. You invalidate nothing and solve nothing by calling us symbols." (Red Book, 249) Also, "This I learned in the Mysterium: to take seriously every unknown wanderer who personally inhabits the inner world, since they are real because they are effectual." (Red Book, 260)
Can a family tree give meaning to your life? Only if you infuse it with intention, value, and love. We invest in the message and are very involved and left with powerful residual impact. We may take the divine steps back for our own souls with corresponding results for our own well-being. But we may find in the process we become family stewards, bards, genwriters, or storytellers.
Well of Souls
Genealogy is a means of achieving empathy, of digging our own well of souls. Our undifferentiated 'well of souls' in the secret chambers of our hearts becomes more and more specific. We detect the current below, realizing the presence of something. The content is a resonance between the stimuli and the stored and storied material in our psychobiology.
Voices of the Transcendent
'The many voices of the psyche' is a transcendent ordering principle and aspirational or integrative position that may have a healing, pluralistic or unified agenda -- different ways to understand one's life within the chaos/order paradox.
Both the regressive and progressive perspective have their own type of wholeness, even if the mytheme differs. As Jung notes, "We have no way of knowing whether the world is Cosmos or Chaos, for, as we know the world, all the order is put into it by ourselves." (1925 Seminar, Page 134)
Joseph Campbell said, "What is it we are questing for? It is the fulfillment of that which is potential in each of us. Questing for it is not an ego trip; it is an adventure to bring into fulfillment your gift to the world, which is yourself. There is nothing you can do that's more important than being fulfilled. You become a sign, you become a signal, transparent to transcendence; in this way you will find, live, become a realization of your own personal myth."
Existential Drama
Genealogy as a mythic image functions to connect the ego and the transcendent Other. Subjective images are powerful because they can be experienced symbolically and unlock ancestral mysteries.
We enter the cave below the rock of reality to the reality of psychic manifestations. "We are standing in between two worlds, a visible tangible world, and the other invisible world, which somehow has a peculiar quality of substantiality; but very subtle, a sort of matter that is not obvious and is not visible, that penetrates bodies and apparently exists outside of time and space.
"It is here and everywhere at the same time, and yet nowhere because it has no extension; it is a complete annihilation of space and time, which makes it a very different thing from our conception of an obvious world." (Jung, Visions Seminars, Vol. 1 Page 206)
As Meister Eckhart said, "When the soul wishes to experience something she throws an image of the experience out before her and enters into her own Image." We go internal but come out with new information based on our experience. Personality widens with unconscious supplementation. Resilience builds throughout life, and close relationships are key.
"We are standing in between two worlds, a visible tangible world, and the other invisible world, which somehow has a peculiar quality of substantiality; but very subtle, a sort of matter that is not obvious and is not visible, that penetrates bodies and apparently exists outside of time and space.
It is here and everywhere at the same time, and yet nowhere because it has no extension; it is a complete annihilation of space and time, which makes it a very different thing from our conception of an obvious world." (Jung, Visions Seminars, Vol. 1, Page 206)
We can reclaim this most ancient genealogical practice and non-visible environment that allows us to gaze at a thing without seeing it. With each generation we enter a new level of interaction. Some branches of our tree clearly announce themselves as living forces of myth, which shows the nature of our life journey. Figures of the gods carry the idea of immortality, the image of immortality.
Enhancing our self-awareness, genealogy makes alienation obsolete by retrieving lost unconscious energy. What has haunted us now informs us, activated both by initiating and responding to joint attention The mythic impulse is contained in allegory and symbolism that are clearly not literal.
The subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place diminishes. Instead of a single answer there are many tacit replies. As a structured metaphor and technology, genealogy amplifies or intensifies our faculties increasing the value and quality of our inner life. Are you willing to enter the Tree?
Passing Through
Genealogy opens an inner space, and can be an immersive experience, a virtual reality where we suspend certain disbeliefs and entertain other hypotheses. Jung implies that what is not material now is 'spiritual,' and we find those explicit spiritual roots in our family tree. "Experience of the inner world has for its object the phenomena of the psychic background, which in itself is so indefinite or so multifaceted that it can be expressed in an infinite variety of forms."
At the dawn of mankind the Dragon constellation Draco was at the northern center of the heavens, overhanging the stellar system of the zodiac and its vast Precession drama. Jung tells us how family images spontaneously come back to us: "[The] dragon comes into the category of the great animals in the background who seem to regulate the world. Hence the mainly theriomorphic symbols for the signs of the zodiac as dominants of the psychic process.
"Naturally the phenomena observed in the background are not always archetypes; they can also be personal complexes which have acquired excessive importance. Father and mother are not only personal entities but also have a suprapersonal meaning and are frequently used as symbols for the deity.
In this way the religious view of the world, thrown out at the front door, creeps in again by the back, albeit in strangely altered form-so altered that nobody has yet noticed it." (Letters Vol. II, Pages 604-605)
As we enliven our tree it enlivens our depths. Here the lands of the dead and the living intersect. Here, in a dimension of existential and psychological truths that underlie mythic process, we come to grips with perennial questions and mystery. Perhaps the most important way of connecting with the ancestors is the act of tracing the genesis oneself so that each part of the discovery process has a chance to work in us and on us imaginally over time.
Time means a past and a future, and so the individual is only complete when we add his actual structure as the result of past events, and at the same time the actual structure taken as the starting point of new tendencies. (Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 137)
Jung links "the discontent of civilization" with distancing ourselves from our historical roots, and loss of connection with our past. He felt that crucial connection fostered individuality which counteracts mass-mindedness. Knowing the historical family via the collective unconscious [and genealogy] is crucial to psychological health and self-knowledge, in Jung's theory.
“The less we understand of what our fathers and forefathers sought,” he comments, “the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle in the mass [...]” (Jung, MDR).
It is in humanity’s best interest, then, to reconnect to this past, as the “ancestral psyches” within each of us can shed light on contemporary circumstances and situations (Jung, MDR, p.237). It is equally important, however, not to become lost in these past images, not to be “imprisoned in these memories” (MDR, p.320). http://jungiansociety.org/images/e-journal/Volume-8/Lu-2012.pdf
Representational Demands
The family tree is a nexus of historical and underlying mythological narratives which give birth to additional interconnecting narratives. Science offers some alternatives to supernatural appearances in dialogic inner speech. The brain's conversations with itself can now be mapped, but may be more than that.
Just because some people experience pathological auditory hallucinations doesn't mean all audialization is pathological.
We naturally can form a mental concept of a sound impression without 'external' agency. Some people can imagine whole symphonies. Information is made more comprehensible by perspective switching and rendering it as sound.
Trans-Sensual Imagery
Findings show that forms of inner speech exist which can be both phenomenologically and neurologically distinguished from the silent commentary of a single inner voice. Contributions of inner speech and forms of mental imagery create vivid inner dialogues. Even Genesis describes a creation of spoken words rather than acts. http://scan.oxfordjournals.org/content/11/1/110.full
"Inner speech has been implicated in important aspects of normal and atypical cognition, including the development of auditory hallucinations. neural activation for inner speech involves conversations (‘dialogic inner speech’) with single-speaker scenarios (‘monologic inner speech’). Generation of dialogic (compared with monologic) scenarios was associated with a widespread bilateral network including left and right superior temporal gyri, precuneus, posterior cingulate and left inferior and medial frontal gyri. Activation associated with cognitive and dialogic scenarios overlapped in areas of right posterior temporal cortex previously linked to mental state representation."
"Inner speech is a complex and varied phenomenon. In behavioral studies, everyday inner speech is often reported to be involved in self-awareness, past and future thinking and emotional reflection, while in cognitive research, inner speech appears to fulfill a variety of mnemonic and regulatory functions. Inner speech may reflect the endpoint of a developmental process in which social dialogues, mediated by language, are internalized as verbal thought. Following from this view, the subjective experience of inner speech will mirror the external experience of communication and often have a dialogic structure, involving the co-articulation of differing perspectives on reality and, in some cases, representation of others’ voices."
Time alters us and our perceptions. Many experience the bittersweet feeling of arriving in the future without being able to tell our past self how things turned out among the hypothetical conversations that play out in our heads. Perhaps all our ancestors are 'talking' but nobody is listening. And even if we do, we may be frustrated others are unable to relate to the experience.
Family Plots
On the other hand, the plot of our life, flaws, and anxieties may begin to make more sense with our relational roots. Awareness of our perspective enlarges, personally and historically. We realize each ancestor has a life as vivid and complex as our own, and that it takes a long time to forge a deep relationship.
Family Battlecry
Genealogy is a feeling and a challenge, a lost art of ancestors returning with a vengeance. The mottoes on heraldic arms are actually battlecries. Just as the Scots shouted their clan genealogies before battle, our family tree is a declaration of our intention to 'continue to be' and to continue in our traditional ways venerating our forebears. They recited their clan genealogies in Gaelic, shouted their war cries, then attacked.
Clans are family groups and their sept branches are all blood relatives. Highland families had a traditional seannachaidh, who could recite the descent of that particular family and state its relationship to other families in the larger clan.
Consanguinity
For 2000 years in Alba, the Senchai, Seannachaidh, or Sennachie [sen-uh-kee] have woven the clan's present members with the history, honor, deeds and lineage of those who have gone before them. These loyal and respected clansmen are appointed by the clan chief as professional storytellers of family genealogy, history, and legend.
Both a Pict and Gael tradition, this ancient position is a Genealogist, Historian, Bard, Orator, and tribal Herald.
The office of Ri-seannachie had supreme jurisdiction in matters of genealogy, and the duty of preserving the Royal pedigree. Each clan had its own Druid priests and judges under the chief Druid of the Pictish High King.
Disembodied Information
In the 'Cult of the Severed Head' in Provance, a head carved in stone was the repository of the soul and could live on and continue to speak to the living and make prophecies. Such heads represented a medium for communication with the Other World, hinting at an older Celtic mythos and tradition -- cult of relics, cult of the head.
Bran's severed head continued to speak to his followers who returned it to Britain. King Arthur dug up the head, declaring the country would be protected only by his great strength. Brân the Blessed was like the Arthurian Fisher King, the keeper of the Holy Grail. He has a mortal wound in the leg (Brân's wound was in his foot) but stays alive in his mystical castle due to the effects of the Grail, waiting to be healed by Percival. In the Welsh version of Perceval, Peredur son of Efrawg visits a mysterious castle, but finds only a severed human head, not the Grail. Some said the Grail had the power to restore the fallen, like Brân's cauldron.
In Norse myth, Mímir (Old Norse, "The rememberer, the wise one") is renowned for his knowledge and wisdom but is beheaded during the Æsir-Vanir War. Odin embalms the head of Mímir with herbs so that it would not rot, and spoke charms over it, which gave it the power to speak to him and reveal secrets to him. He keeps Mímir's head with him because it divulges information from other worlds. It recites secret knowledge and counsel to him.
But cults of Southern France may not correlate with those of Britain or the Neolithic era and elsewhere as a coherent practice. Skull relics are still worshiped there with candles. The medieval town Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume has a basilica and crypt dedicated to Mary Magdalene said to contain the blackened relic of her skull.
Neolithic Jericho practiced burial of loved ones under their houses. Sometimes the severed head was removed and the skull buried after defleshing. Faces were reconstructed with plaster to retain the identity of the family member. Individual facial features were made with red and black paint. Some eye orbits were inlaid with shells and the skulls were decorated with hair and mustaches.
The notion of a 'cult of the head' remains controversial, but it is a fact we imagine it was so. This powerful trope brings to mind cults of martyred saints who carry their immortalized heads. The Templars allegedly worshiped of the severed head of John the Baptist they called Baphomet, who talked to them and possessed “divine wisdom." Personifications of disembodied metaphysical entities are an ancient equivalent of media 'talking heads' as culture leaders.
Soul-Talk
What we can take from this practice is the primacy of the psyche for personification of the unconscious -- the multiple personifications or perspectives of psyche. We spontaneously personify psyche all the time, without effort since it is a psychological necessity. Personifying allows the image to work on us -- a potential way of knowing what is hidden in the heart. A grounded ego uses personification for growth.
To personify something from the unconscious is to treat it like a person with a sort of inherent autonomy motivated by purposes and intentions. We even lend it a voice and bond with it. Personifying in archetypal psychology is “the spontaneous experiencing, envisioning and speaking of the configurations of existence as psychic presences.” (Re-Visioning, 12)
Personifying is a way of making subjective experience, passionate identification, and indwelling images more tangible through conversation and relationship in symbolic form. Hillman (1975) called it "an epistemology of the heart, a thought-mode of feeling." It imagines what's inside, outside, and makes this content alive, personal, and even divine.
We personify that which we love. This is the natural expression of mythic consciousness to mythic consciousness. Illustrious ancestors aren't just statues of greatness. Through this spontaneous activity of psyche we enter myth "as if" it were real.
Such non-directive thinking or "soul-talk" is the key to understanding archetypes as both guides and different parts of ourselves. “Loving is a way of knowing, and for loving to know, it must personify. Personifying is thus a way of knowing, especially knowing what is invisible, hidden in the heart,” Hillman says in Re-Visioning.
"Personifying is a way of being in the world and experiencing the world as a psychological field, where persons are given with events, so that events are experiences that touch us, move us, appeal to us." "...all the figures and feelings of the psyche are wholly 'mine,' while at the same time recognizing that these figures and feelings are free of my control and identity, not 'mine' at all." (Hillman)
"By means of personifications my sense of person becomes more vivid for I carry with me at all times the protection of my daimones: the images of dead people who mattered to me, of ancestral figures of my stock, cultural and historical persons of renown and people of fable who provide exemplary images--a wealth of guardians. They guard my fate, guide it, probably are it. "Perhaps--who knows," writes Jung, "these eternal images are what men mean by fate." We need this help, for who can carry his fate alone?" (Hillman)
Hillman notes that personifying is a creative function. Whether it is done pathologically or intentionally, it functions to “save the diversity and autonomy of the psyche from domination by any single power, whether this domination be by a figure of archetypal awe in one’s surroundings or by one’s own egomania. ‘ (Re-Visioning, 32)
In the family tree we don't require the physical relic to honor the deceased, including the heads of the household. "To keep the light alive in the darkness, that's the point, and only there your candle makes sense." (Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pp. 133-138)
Jung stated, "It was as if my tools were activated by my libido. But there must be tools there to be activated, that is, animated images, images with libido in them; then the additional libido that one supplies brings them up to the surface.
If I had not given this additional libido with which to bring them to the surface, the activity would have gone on just the same, but would have sucked my energy down into the unconscious. By putting libido into it, one can increase the speaking power of the unconscious." (Jung, 1925 Seminar, Lecture 5, Pages 37-45).
The Big Tree
Doing one's own genealogy, even if it has been done before, is the best way to integrate and digest it. The ancestors do not really live today but are not fully dead either as living images. We can ensoul our growing branches best in the context in which they arise.
Relying on the work of others removes us a step from the core of the process; it might stimulate imagery, but it's more like reading about a journey than making it oneself. Much of the nuance and functional relations are lost -- the chaos, the struggle, the blind alleys. The healing work requires direct engagement for familiarity with the holistic image as well as the details of each family encountered.
Arguably, the family tree is the necessary foundation to psychological integration. We begin a long, slow circulation among the many branches of our tree. Jung says, "The circulation is not merely movement in a circle, but means on the one hand the marking off of the sacred precinct, and on the other, the fixation and concentration." (CW 13, Alchemical Studies, Pg 25).
The circulation of blood in the arteries mirrors the circulation of sap in the tree, and the circularity of cosmological or metaphysical thought -- analogical thinking that links the macrocosm and microcosm, above and below. The ancestral field has an immediate effect, both healing and challenging, on our whole lives.
Ouroboric Cycle
Repeating the circuit of all aspects of our being generates a transpersonal current that unites conflicting opposites. We repeat the distillation process, again and again, but always on another level -- a new and deeper level of understanding. Cycles of rising and falling echo the ascent and descent in our ancestral lines. This is no disembodied Ascensionism, but a fully embodied, fully grounded soul retrieval, without recourse to 'metaphysical certainties'.
We continually return with a cyclic pattern to our own beginning. This adventure never ends. We are each our own paths. Genealogy is a sacred narrative of origins that forever marks our place in time with a true quest for the fountain of life and retrieval of lost parts of the soul. Jung adds, "So when you relieve the unconscious of non-realized contents, you release it for its own special functioning, and it will go ahead like an animal." (1925 Seminar, Page 115)
Ancient shamanic stories describe a previous World Age in which a colossal tree dominated the celestial landscape, joining heaven to earth. This master-narrative is the origin of the World Tree, and the Family Tree. The sacred tree is the navel of the world, always potentially present everywhere.
Shamans journeyed through visions, climbing the World Tree, much like we climb through the branches of our family tree, tracing and retracing them. Jung's collective unconscious overlaps with shamanic experience of nonordinary reality.
They descended the trees roots to the land of the dead to retrieve the souls of the living who strayed there. They journeyed in vision to the upper world to consult with spiritual ancestors, for healing or wisdom. A mythic boon emerges from interaction with the archetypal tree where the physical and the sacred are united.
In this sense the family tree is a redemptive tree linking us back to source. In the Neolithic and Bronze ages the world tree was the world axis, a nexus where pairs of opposites come together. Originally, the tree was a universal whole: male and female, dark and light, knowledge and mystery, etc.
The Biblical version dissociates or deconstructs this unity. Eve eats the fruit and humanity was separated into dualities, male and female, good and evil. Humanity was thrown into time and space, aware of imminent mortality. The Precession functions as the great cosmic timekeeper, marking off the Ages.
That tree fails to unite heaven, earth, and underworld. The temporal end remains unfulfilled unless the disparity of the tree can be transcended in some manner in this particular mythos.
Only the universal archetype, the World Tree unites the world of temporal matter, death, and the paradise myth regained after the completion of life's journey. Not just a diagram, the spirit of the family tree is a reconciling and redemptive symbol linking us to the origin, but we have to pluck its fruit -- the links and loops of kinship.
Tree of Visions
The World Tree is an integral part of the shamanic cosmos and links the world of humanity with the world of the spirits. Spirits pass from one world to another on the Tree. There are Siberian stories of climbing the World Tree to attend a school for shamans run in heaven by the ancestors. Without living links to the spirit world, there is no longer a Tree.
Only mythic dissociation -- the split of sensibility of body and spirit, female and male -- separates the Tree of knowledge from the Tree of immortal life. The body and psyche both derive from the ancestors. In the unus mundus, they are one integrated tree -- the creative source of becoming. We unite them when we resume a dialogue with our souls. We recognize truths in the mysteries of myth.
This Tree of Life or mother-tree has its roots in heaven and its branches growing downward through genealogical descent, bringing life-giving function to the possibilities of life. It is an icon of the unus mundus, an underlying unified reality from which everything emerges and to which everything returns.
Branch Out
The family tree is a system of interactive complexity and emergence. We grow its branches, and sometimes merge with lines compiled by others. Our own tree is a canopy of growth that connects us all the way to the stars and our aspirations while grounding us in our roots.
Our family tree branches out each time we deviate from our direct Y-DNA or mtDNA lines of our father and mother. New family branches potentially enter the tree with each ancestral wife and her lineage, which in many cases is longer than that of the husband. Some royal descents come through the mothers; there is a legend that claims all the 'magic' in the family lines is through the distaff side.
Women are often the hidden half of the family because of old social and legal customs. Often we don't know and cannot find their maiden names, so they become dead ends in our search, until or unless new data is found.
Yet wives and natural partners form vital links in our chains of ascent back to well-known ancestors, even if little or nothing is known of them, beyond a name, or N.N. (invisible women). Elusive women can sometimes be found through naming patterns or in a census search, especially if there is a photo of the listing and its additional notations.
Other invisibles include missing fathers, and natural children. The phrase “natural son” in a will meant the testator acknowledged a child had been born out of wedlock. The only legal meaning in that context back then was “a bastard; a child born out of lawful wedlock.”
Finding a maiden name is almost always essential to further research on a particular line. Naturally, the best place to locate a maiden name is on a marriage record. If that is not available, other vital records may have the information, although this is usually the case only with more modern records, not those over 100 years old. These include birth certificates of her children, her death certificate, her husband's death certificate, or the marriage or death certificates of her children. This is by no means standard and is only a possibility. Baptismal records may also contain the mother's maiden name, even in older church records.Another possible source is her obituary, which might mention surviving brothers. Also look for obituaries of sisters or men you believe are her brothers. If you have found a person that you think might be one of her parents, it is worthwhile to check the death certificates because a family member, perhaps your ancestress, usually provided the information on the death certificate and sometimes her relationship was given. Also look for wills from likely candidates -- a woman may be mentioned in her father's or mother's will.
Without direct information, you sometimes have to resort to indirect clues. Look for the repetition of certain given names in the family. If she named her son Hezekiah, Rudyard or some other uncommon name and there was an older man of that same name in the vicinity, that may be her father. Look also for surnames being used as second names for her children. A woman often gave her child her own maiden name as a middle name. In the census, look for older people living in the same household or nearby. They may well be the woman's parents. http://www.genealogy.com/articles/research/50_donna.html
Searching for Female Ancestors
https://www.loc.gov/rr/genealogy/bib_guid/female.pdf
Dead Reckoning
Our family tree is our map of the undifferentiated unconscious -- maps of relationships in the Land of the Dead, the co-existent underworld of shades. In the beginning, it is like drawing a map of the world on a sheet of paper with as little concept of our ancestors as the unknown seas and continents where they lived. New maps help us navigate the terrain.
Over and over, we plot our course through the maternal and paternal lines of ascent that predispose our responses. The scintillae are soul-sparks of partial or emergent consciousness. Insight in the ancestral field stirs the imagination. What we don't deal with remains buried. The dormant, lifeless, and withered awaken, expanding consciousness and renewing psyche, from deadness to life-force energy.
Jung called these "scintilla, or soul sparks, the innermost divine essence of man…symbols which express a God image, namely the image of Deity unfolding in the world, in nature, and in man." (Jung, Archetypes of the Unconscious pp.389)
At least symbolically, God climbs down to mortality. Some tribes deified their ancestors. And these divine archetypes -- gods and goddesses -- are just what we find at the far reaches of our royal and legendary genealogical lines. Our mortal descent is a fractal reiteration of their divine essence, our own images and conflicts. Jung named this quintessence the Self, bridging from the physical and instinctual to the spiritually transcendent psyche.
Scintillae or sparks of light in the dark emerge through consistent interaction, our persistent interest, and curiosity. Metaphorically, we love them back to life. These points of light, iridescent eyes, mimic the starry heavens or reflective surface of the sea with spontaneous amplification.
Representing the multiple consciousness of the psyche, they connect us with the animated soul of the world. As we focus, their virtual presence, numinosity and luminosity draws us toward pervasive meaning. The noumen is healing. Philosophers say that solar consciousness must inseminate lunar unconscious. This act gives birth to a third aspect of consciousness in our being, the luminous subjective self as the inner divine child.
Our 'dead reckoning' navigation means charting a new course of relationship and conscious attachment through successive immersions. Native Americans say we are affected by the seven generations that came before us and affect the seven generations to follow. We may actually include all our emotionally-charged generations -- the redeemed and unredeemed Trees.
Milky Way; Mother's Milk
Once we embark on our mission, we find that like the heavenly constellations, we have family constellations to guide us toward innate healing. Hidden dynamics in a family can be worked with and healed through a process that has the power to shift generations of suffering and unhappiness. Our most pressing challenges are reflected in those of our ancestors and the genetic relationships and patterns among them.
This relatively brief therapy helps us develop intuition and insight while exhuming hidden solutions that restore the flow of love. As Rumi suggested, "Love is the bridge between you and everything." We conceive a new perspective and circumambulate a variety of associative and interpretive treatments, clearing the emotional body with the balm of tears.
Over and over we ask what does this feel like? How does it continue to feel, or how do the feelings change and amplify over time, and what is it asking of you? Redemption of the psychophysical body lies in this direction -- redeeming spirit and soul, conscience and consciousness. To do so, we have to metaphorically dig up graveyards and excavate cities.
The unconscious belongs to no time in particular, being seemingly eternal. We consciously realized that as a peculiar feeling of timelessness. The "time" in which the ancestors lived and still live is a "time when there was no time," -- an ancestral world of thought-forms, beyond which is the sense of indefiniteness, timelessness, oneness.
Inherited Issues
We gain a unique perspective to make new choices or follow unforeseen pathways. Emotional resolution of systemic entanglement can help overcome patterns of behavior repeated in related families for generations, by bringing up the family images held in the unconscious mind. Such work on where we are stuck or feel pain is built around inclusion: the reconciliation among all parts of the self, our family, and our history.
In time, the stream of ancestors comes forward in a flood of imagery -- prevailing, enduring, haunting, mapping out hidden truths. We cannot escape the spirit of the depths who forces us toward the mysteries. Jung described not only 'possession' by the ego, shadow and anima/animus but by the transgenerational family history. "If we became aware of the ancestral lives in us, we might disintegrate. An ancestor might take possession of us and ride us to death." (1925 Seminar, Page 139).
We can only find our right way with an eye fixed on the far horizon. Perhaps such 'dead reckoning' -- our own confrontation with the unconscious -- helps us navigate our imaginative journey. We calculate our current position from a previously unconscious position, to fix, and advance that position to the far horizons. Our attention flows toward an unforeseen destiny where meaning beckons beyond the bounds of consciousness.
Jung describes the horizon as a whole as the quaternity (four quarters of heaven)..."There are always four elements, four prime qualities, four colors, four castes, four ways of spiritual development, etc. So, too, there are four aspects of psychological orientation...The ideal of completeness is the circle or sphere, but its natural minimal division is a quaternity." (Psychology and Religion: West and East,)
Natural Order
We have unconsciously sacrificed our ancestors and disheartened ourselves. We've set them adrift in the unconscious without mooring to the living. Over time we integrate this imaginal world as we trace our family tree through the islands and continents of the unconscious. This reality is mediated by information patterns which in turn are constantly evolving.
The tree is the record of the multigenerational courses from the known starting point, and the known or estimated 'drift.' Along the way we find many lines -- grand dynasties that have gone extinct, “beginnings without continuations.” But, somehow, despite all odds our own line has passed through or culminated in ourselves and our own 'pioneering' work.
Digging for Ancestors
Paraphrasing Jung, we stumble through unknown regions, are lead astray by analogies, forever losing the Ariadne thread. We are overwhelmed by new impressions and new possibilities, and the worst disadvantage of all is that the pioneer only knows afterwards what he or she should have known before.
When we encounter the second and subsequent generations we may have the advantage of a clearer, if still incomplete, picture. Certain landmarks on the frontiers of the essential have grown familiar. We now know what must be known if we are to explore the newly discovered territory.
Does our attention 'condition' the ancestral field? We learn to spot the most distant connections. We can unravel problems and give a coherent account of the whole field of ancestors, whose full extent we can only survey and 'know' at the end of our life’s work.
Thin Red Line
The ancestral map is a beginning, a framework in which later discoveries can be placed. What is confusing at first is clarified in a later stage of the journey. The family tree helps us establish a connection between the natural and sacred figures and our own psyche. Or, as von Franz notes, "Only if you look from afar, from a certain objective distance, do you realize that there is a pattern of wholeness in it." (Interpretation of Fairy Tales, Pages 6-7)
Family Dynamics
This special perspective or psychic viewpoint is a revelation of the soul, nothing short of the Holy Grail, whether as myth, bloodline, relic, or spiritual quest. We acquire depth in our attempts to heal ourselves. In 1949, Jung said, "Ultimate truth, if there be such a thing, demands the concert of many voices."
Family dynamics appear in individual therapy as well as in engagement with the family tree. They include repetitive patterns of interactions and significant events in the family history. Some suggest unconscious loyalties to previous generations leads to synchronistic repetition and unwitting reenactments of ancestral events and dates. The group functions ritualistically. Plurality becomes mimetic flow not just dissociative rupture. Intergenerational family identity is positively related to well-being.
Genealogy Gives & Genealogy Takes Away
We may find that our research uncovers more than we could ever imagine. We may break through persistent research blocks after years of trying, yet we may also be faced with grave errors in our charts we must correct, discarding certain figures from our droplines we may have warmly embraced. We come to crossroads where we must choose by instinct to merge or not to merge. Eminent lines may be cut unceremoniously or replaced by others we must now integrate.
Thus, the genealogical environment remains somewhat fluid. In some sense, "not knowing" can be as important as knowing. Some people might tentatively add ancestors to a line, realizing there is little or no documented evidence, but they know where the 'potholes' in their tree are.
Professional genealogy sites are constantly correcting errors and updating. On public trees, incorrect entries are repeatedly re-added, as people repeat the mistakes of others they find, over and over. Paths to the illustrious can evaporate over night. Adopting the wrong wife for an unknown can create an entirely fictional line of her relatives, but not our own. Another common error is making a sister or cousin of the same name into a spouse.
Thus, we may have a felt-sense of 'losing' ancestors or lines of descent we never actually 'had.' Everyone makes mistakes in genealogy, so it is part of the practice. Joys, sorrows, and confusions go with that territory.
The family tree operates as an alembic, a sacred vessel or temple of transparent walls that contains our pain, suffering, and confusion without judgment or analysis. Instead it offers us a rich array of stories. We can act out, play with, identify with and allow ourselves to be carried away by these ancestral stories – within a contained, ritual setting.
All of shamanism comes from one root -- the unseen world of gods, demons, and ancestral spirits, responsive only to shamans. The ancestors and the pathos of their epic restore our soul. "The sin to be repented, of course, is unconsciousness." (Jung, Aion, Pp. 191-192.) We construct a unique history of the evolution of our own consciousness with the bodies of our ancestors and the body of myths as the phenomenology of this same evolution.
Our Tree returns us to the lived experience of events, imaginal connections, and metaphorical reality. Primarily through afflictions, symptoms, and phenomenology, imaginal mythology seeks the movement of the soul to a fuller awareness of itself. We return to the origins, through memory, of our life story that goes beyond simple succession and co-existence. In our narrative arc, we may lie even to ourselves to reveal a more profound truth.
Without hypostatizing the idea to some otherworldly plane, Jung suggested our primordial behavior is informed by archetypal images. This is the difference between a psychological and a metaphysical, "spiritual," or religious approach and worldview.
Jung implied "Sooner or later all the dead become what we also are," but that we know little or nothing about that mode of being, and "what shall we still know of this earth after death?" Still, he felt, "The dissolution of our time-bound form in eternity brings no loss of meaning."
Reification, concretism, or hypostatization is the fallacy of ambiguity or misplaced concreteness. Abstraction (abstract belief, metaphysical or hypothetical construct) is treated as if it were a concrete, real event, or physical entity. The issues of reification are usually philosophical or ideological. This is the error of treating something which is not concrete, such as an idea, as a concrete thing. Reification confuses a model with reality: "the map is not the territory." Reification can also be an "as if" figure of speech, and actually understood as such, rather than literalized.
Even a genuine and original inner life has a tendency to succumb again and again to the sensualism and rationalism of consciousness, i.e., to literal-mindedness.
The result is that one tries to repeat a spontaneous, irrational event by a deliberate, imitative arrangement of the analogous circumstances which had apparently led to the original event.
The immense hope, the liberating ekstasis of the primordial experience, soon turns into the pertinacity of an intellectual pursuit which tries, through the application of a method, to attain the effect of the primordial experience, namely, a kind of spiritual transformation.
The depth and intensity of the original emotion become a passionate longing, an enduring effort that may last for hundreds of years, to restore the original situation.
Curiously enough, one does not realize that this was a state of spontaneous, natural emotion or ekstasis, and thus the complete opposite of a methodically construed imitation. (Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 600-603)
Jung saw consciousness as "essentially the psyche's organ of perception, it is the eye and ear of the psyche." Even the scientific view is still infused with unconscious myths and symbols, as "all that comes into our heads proceeds from the unconscious." (ETH Lecture II, April 27, 1934, pg. 98). Jung identified 'Psyche' as the unknown that we simply name 'Psyche,' therefore ambiguity has to be enough for us.
We can't concretize our ancestors into mythical metaphors, metaphysical statements or entities, etiologies, causal explanations, cookie-cutter archetypes, or name tags. But we can free them of unconscious 'dead weight' that affects our lives profoundly.
Peronified ancestors speak through the masks of image and symbol. Our felt experiences of them are real events but they are perspectives toward events which shift our attitudes and experience of events."The unconscious can move in every possible direction, even in time it can go forward and backward, because it knows no space." (Jung, Visions Seminar, Vol. I.)
We also discover ourselves as imaginal beings through rich intuitive resonances, metaphor, and personification, without over-identification with our subject ancestors, without insisting the subjective must be objective, without egoic, foolish, idiosyncratic, or superstitious interpretations. The irrepresentable has an immediate, subjective power of conviction because it demonstrates its own existence.
"For the understanding of the unconscious we must see our thoughts as events, as phenomena. We must have perfect objectivity." (Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 103) Otherwise, "One can even come to clairvoyance; but when such a gift as the latter is developed, it makes the person permeable to all sorts of atmospheric conditions that may result in his misery." (Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 115)
Our ancestors may make what happens intelligible, but they don't 'happen' themselves. They reveal archetypal themes in history and the myth in the mess of ordinary lives. The mythic stories we embody in our own wounds are informed by all the figures in our Tree, not only the ones we believe most represent us.
Life is Short; Death is Sure
In the last analysis every life is the realization of a whole, that is, of a self, for which reason this realization can also be called "individuation." All life is bound to individual carriers who realize it, and it is simply inconceivable without them.
But every carrier is charged with an individual destiny and destination, and the realization of these alone makes sense of life. (Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 222)
It is the mourning of the dead in me, which precedes burial and rebirth. The rain is the fructifying of the earth, it begets the new wheat, the young, germinating God. (Jung, Liber Novus, Page 243.)
Our poetic approach is echoed by Csikszentmihalyi: “the poet’s responsibility to be a witness, a recorder of experience, is part of the broader responsibility we all have for keeping the universe ordered through our consciousness.”
“Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed. Having once experienced the mystery, plenitude, contradiction, and composure of a work of art, we afterward have a built-in resistance to the slogans and propaganda of oversimplification that have often contributed to the destruction of human life. Poetry is a verbal means to a nonverbal source. It is a motion to no-motion, to the still point of contemplation and deep realization.” ―A.R. Ammons
This is the burden everybody has to carry:
to live the life we have got to live.
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 515-516
(c)2013-2016; All Rights Reserved, Iona Miller, Sangreality Trust
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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.