A world view is a set of presuppositions (or assumptions) which we hold (consciously or subconsciously) about the basic makeup of our world. We all have a world view, whether we can explain it or not. It is like a pair of glasses through which we view the world. We need the right prescription or reality will be distorted. We are faced with a supermarket of world views; all of them claim to represent reality, but they are points of view about reality -- mental constructs, beliefs, personal myths.
′Many of us are haunted by the weight of an unresolved family, mythical, or historical past... Whether we are surviving genocide or heir to a family secret, traumas of the past often survive in us. Are we free beings or does the past of our ancestors determine us?" asks Linn Levy.
Myth is the DNA of the Human Psyche
Are we not children of the Gods?
They call me Io, for short. I can name my predecessors back into the mists of pre-history. I am named after my dad's favorite cousin and the mystic Scottish isle Iona of Druids, Kings, and Culdees. I was born in a year of the Earth Ox. 2021 is a year of the Ox/Cow. That led me into genealogy, where we can squander decades on such an Opus, out of calling or necessity.
But I also always resonated with the Hellenic world, and the Ionian coast, with Ephesus. Greek mythology captured my interests for a lifetime, as a mythologist and archetypal psychology practitioner. I learned the transpersonal forms of personal mythology, magick, and polytheistic celebration of the godforms.
Naturally, Io the nymph (with paramour Zeus) is a favorite figure, so imagine my surprise when she turned up with other Greek gods in my genealogy, in grandmother Hopkins royal gateway line, also related to Oceanus Hopkins, born on the "Mayflower." What! you may say? How can such things be so, that the world of mortals descends from the gods?
Take it with a grain of imaginal salt, but that is conventional best practice in genealogy from its inception. Kings and Queens were invested in promoting their divine origins, so they kept track or made up the gaps with myth, imagination, and plausibilty suited to ancient beliefs.
Chthonic Primordials
The Titanes were six elder gods named Kronos, Koios, Krios, Iapetos, Hyperion and Okeanos, sons of Ouranos (Sky) and Gaia (Earth), who ruled the cosmos before the Olympians came to power. The Odyssey locates a "land of dreams" past the streams of Okeanos, close to Asphodel Meadows, where the spirits of the dead reside. (Homer) It seems we are on the right track.
So I traced her line back to its root source in mighty Okeanos, "the primordial Titan god of the great, earth-encircling River Okeanos, font of all of the earth's fresh-water: rivers, wells, springs and rain-clouds. He was also the god who regulated the heavenly bodies which rose from and set into his waters." (Wiki).
If myth is the DNA of the psyche, are we not children of the gods? Through lines of descent, we can see how gods traveled among cultures and lands across centuries, rooting us in deep time, able to recite the noble line. Many people are aware of these family connections while others cannot find their 'mything link." We can learn to 'read between the lines.' I have more than one line and so may you.
The lineage from Okeanos (issue of Ouranos and Gaia) descends through Sangarius, "God of the River," to Eunoe the Nymph, Queen of Phrygia, through Hecuba and Creusa, to Ascanius, King of Alba Longa (Etruscan). The myth and cult migrated with people from Anatolia to ancient Italy.
From there it goes through a long cascade of Julian Roman Emperors, to a line of Spanish nobles, to Sancha Blount, Lady de Ayala, who married into a British family of the Knight, Sir Thomas Blount, and down into my Hopkins colonial ancestors.
Now you will know where to look for yourselves. Somewhere a "most recent common ancestor" (MRCA) will mark us as cousins. Such lines are like rivers of bloodlines that connect and feed us. They run from the mythic Source through the ancient sacred mountains and historical rapids until they meander into the world of the ordinary. The descendants of Io take a slightly different course than Okeanos through the World Tree.
Io is my 95th gr-grandmother, so I like to believe she informs my deepest self. Her parents are listed as Melia, a Nymph Theoi, and Inachus, King of Argos, located in the Peloponnese in southern Greece. A major Mycenaean settlement in the Late Bronze Age (1700-1100 BCE), it was inhabited from prehistoric times (3000 BCE).
As a river nymph, Io likely was associated with the rivers that watered the fertile Argive plain. The Naiads were the nymphs of rivers, streams, lakes, marshes, fountains and springs. They protected young girls as the River Gods protected boys.
Since they married kings they became prominent in royal genealogies and were loved by the gods. They were the goddess-protectors of major water supplies such as a spring, fountain, or well, so they were worshiped. The Naiades were depicted as beautiful young women, usually seated, standing or reclining beside a spring, and holding a water-jug (hydria) or a frond of lush foliage.
An Argive princess, Io was an ancestor of many kings and heroes, such as Perseus, Cadmus, Heracles, and Minos. In Greek mythology, this priestess of Hera in Argos, was the nymph seduced by Zeus, who changed her into a heifer to escape detection. His wife Hera retaliated driving her to Egypt with a maddening gad-fly.
Her son was Epaphos, King of Egypt, who sired Libya, Queen of Egypt. Then the line goes back to Greece, Laconia, and Sparta in a marriage bridge. The line jumps from Greece to Alba Longa (Central Italy), and the ubiquitous Julians and Caesars of Rome. It then proceeds through Cartegena, Coimbra and Toledo, Spain... repeating my Okeanos descent from Sir Thomas Blount in Britain with several historical luminaries in between.
Infinite Regress
Genealogy is a prolonged ritual to the gods and ancestors. There are few rituals older than recitation of ancestral names. Only a Jungian approach to traditional genealogy keeps the historic/mythic gestalt of The World Tree alive as a symbol of wholeness -- a holistic resonant field pattern.
According to Jung, trees are a symbolic reference to the self, so family tree is self-defining. As well as our lineage, our ancestors also form a vast symbol chain, rooted in the mythic unconscious and pre-history.
The symbolic function is beyond innate impulse and ideological bias. Through introversion, we are fertilized, inspired, regenerated, and reborn. Self-incubation, self-castigation, and introversion are closely related ideas. Immersion in oneself (introversion) is a penetration into the unconscious, the imaginal world of psyche.
The World Tree is the Axis Mundi of genealogy, a worldwide database of genealogical connectivity. At this point travel and correspondence is made between higher and lower realms. Communication from lower realms may ascend to higher ones and blessings from higher realms may descend to lower ones and be disseminated to all. The spot functions as the omphalos (navel), the world's point of beginning.
The earliest mythologies are of the World-Tree, or Tree of Life. Aspects of the same image, sacred trees are the most common motif from the ancient world. The Tree connects our psychophysical aspects from sub-nuclear to macrocosmic scales. The trunk is the axis of psychic growth that unites Heaven and Earth, spirit and matter.
Archaic Greece worshiped serpents. The serpents of our family lines are entwined like knots in and around the World Tree. Celtic snakes symbolize the notion of rebirth. They still promise us primordial Knowledge -- unverified personal gnosis.
Jung said, "the serpent is the earthly essence of man of which he is not conscious. Its character changes according to peoples and lands, since it is the mystery that flows to him from the nourishing earth-mother."
The healer traversing the axis mundi to bring back knowledge from the other world is a common shamanic concept. Anyone or anything suspended on the axis between heaven and earth becomes a repository of potential knowledge. The Tree is the means of communication with spiritual realms. It is our Tree of Voices -- Tree of Souls. Remembering is a noble and necessary act.
The call of memory, the call to memory, reaches us from the very dawn of history. Genealogy contains a spiritual healing potential, the living sap of the Tree, a manifestation of the sacred. It is a Grail banquet of cultures, customs and symbolism.
Crowns mark the final stage of a spirit or solution: perfection, completion, ascension. The spirit, by death or enlightenment, will produce the pure, perfected, incorruptible spirit. In alchemical terms, the incorruptible body is the potential of the philosopher's stone.
The gods and goddesses have 'gone to seed', and we are that -- their seed, their progeny. As James Hillman says, their minds and powers are living us in poetic moments of fantasy, insight and intuition. Nature, psyche and life are unfolding divinity. We are only cut off from the dead by what we have buried and forgotten.
Working with our ancestral connection means connecting to everything around us and how we are placed in the world. Seedlines codify ancient ethnic identity and empires. Later, royals added them to their lines to bolster their claims to divine rule and the founding of thrones. Though not factual, traditional genealogy was a geographical and spiritual compass.
Some branches of the World Tree are pruned (extinct). Others still thrive. By engaging in genealogy we create a sacred space, a sacred center. There is a deep ecology to the flow of relationships. Our return to the womb of the Mothers is a creative regression. Experientially it manifests within us as a spiritualizing instinct, a recursive "bending back" toward the primordial and divine.
We link backward to the bond that transcends the limitations of the physical form. Consciousness turns back on itself, reiterating each level of organization, de-structuring each strata as it dives deeper toward the unconditioned, formless beginning, or "unborn" state -- the Void of the Cosmic Womb. In essence, we re-enter the womb as we are initiated in the mysteries of the psyche. We re-conceive our primal self image, healed by communion with the creative Source -- our own Royal Wedding.
Genealogy can be seen as a way of honoring the ancestors with a ritual from ancient times when lists of god-kings described the natural order of things rooted in mythic and 'divine' ancestors. The only way to revision and interact with it as a gestalt matrix includes the fictional, legendary, and mythological lines of this traditional World Tree. It is but one way to acknowledge our divinity, nobility, and humanity.
Genealogy is a sure path to the heart. We can "gather our ancestors" before we are gathered unto them. Mythology lost its role of explaining the forces of nature. But its role of delivering insights into the hidden, deep endeavors and fears of any human seems more alive than ever.
It is a Mystery how our ancestors pass memories to us across the generations. They relate us to our ontological questions about space, time, and eternity, the deep structure of the human mind and perception, life and death -- what exists and what doesn't. Time concerns the existential nature of things -- temporal relationships.
The mythology of our ancestors is as important as their cosmology. We can explore the mystic in ourselves and in our ancestors. Our worldview is the root of our identity and relationship to Nature and our own deep nature. Researching the cosmologies of our direct ancestors in the historical era provides a quick path into dream shamanism, as these ways are still half-remembered.
Our common destiny lies beyond any worldview. We have a mystical connection with our primitive ancestors. The primordial ancestors are still alive within the depths of our psyches and reach out to us with their ancient wisdom. We instinctively behave and feel the same ways as generations of our ancestors have in their lives.
This is also a relationship to the collectivity of the dead; for the unconscious corresponds to the mythic land of the dead, the land of the ancestors. Jung was the first to link the concept of ancestors to unconscious thinking. We learn to remember what our soul already knows. Our personality is literally expressed through our ancestors.
Jung said transpersonal psychic life "is the mind of our ancient ancestors, the way in which they thought and felt, the way in which they conceived of life and the world, of gods and humans beings. The existence of these historical layers is presumably the source of belief in reincarnation and in memories of past lives” (Jung, 1939, p.24).
In 'Extending the Family' (1985), Hillman says, "With the passing of time a sense of its power grows within one's psyche, like the movements of its skeleton inside one's flesh, which keeps one in servitude to patterns entombed in our closest attitudes and habits. From this interior family we are never free. This service keeps us bonded to the ancestors."
Some report a sort of "calling illness" until they respond to the ancestors calling them to do the work. We translate meaning into life. Genealogy is the narrative of a pre-modern world. It has traditional roots in the ancient theogeny of gods and goddesses.
Ancestral gods and ancestral religions developed over eons and are as old as particular branches of mankind -- gods of the blood. Astrologically determined gods and goddesses can often be found at the roots of dynastic houses. Royal houses claimed power through descent from ancestral gods.
When Rome Christianized in the fourth century, it cut off the mythic corpus, and demoted gods to human status and allegories. At root, traditional genealogy is an archetypal activity, recapitulating and extending humanity's oldest activities, including the imaginal root.
The aesthetic response is an ethical response -- a response of the heart -- that values the ancestors and the genealogical history. Genealogy is thus an archetypal order, an aesthetic construction. This virtual map of the personal and collective unconscious, reflects a principle of totality and primordial origins. Historical time required a linear descent, even if it masked pagan roots. Jung concluded we cannot get by without myth.
′Many of us are haunted by the weight of an unresolved family, mythical, or historical past... Whether we are surviving genocide or heir to a family secret, traumas of the past often survive in us. Are we free beings or does the past of our ancestors determine us?" asks Linn Levy.
Myth is the DNA of the Human Psyche
Are we not children of the Gods?
They call me Io, for short. I can name my predecessors back into the mists of pre-history. I am named after my dad's favorite cousin and the mystic Scottish isle Iona of Druids, Kings, and Culdees. I was born in a year of the Earth Ox. 2021 is a year of the Ox/Cow. That led me into genealogy, where we can squander decades on such an Opus, out of calling or necessity.
But I also always resonated with the Hellenic world, and the Ionian coast, with Ephesus. Greek mythology captured my interests for a lifetime, as a mythologist and archetypal psychology practitioner. I learned the transpersonal forms of personal mythology, magick, and polytheistic celebration of the godforms.
Naturally, Io the nymph (with paramour Zeus) is a favorite figure, so imagine my surprise when she turned up with other Greek gods in my genealogy, in grandmother Hopkins royal gateway line, also related to Oceanus Hopkins, born on the "Mayflower." What! you may say? How can such things be so, that the world of mortals descends from the gods?
Take it with a grain of imaginal salt, but that is conventional best practice in genealogy from its inception. Kings and Queens were invested in promoting their divine origins, so they kept track or made up the gaps with myth, imagination, and plausibilty suited to ancient beliefs.
Chthonic Primordials
The Titanes were six elder gods named Kronos, Koios, Krios, Iapetos, Hyperion and Okeanos, sons of Ouranos (Sky) and Gaia (Earth), who ruled the cosmos before the Olympians came to power. The Odyssey locates a "land of dreams" past the streams of Okeanos, close to Asphodel Meadows, where the spirits of the dead reside. (Homer) It seems we are on the right track.
So I traced her line back to its root source in mighty Okeanos, "the primordial Titan god of the great, earth-encircling River Okeanos, font of all of the earth's fresh-water: rivers, wells, springs and rain-clouds. He was also the god who regulated the heavenly bodies which rose from and set into his waters." (Wiki).
If myth is the DNA of the psyche, are we not children of the gods? Through lines of descent, we can see how gods traveled among cultures and lands across centuries, rooting us in deep time, able to recite the noble line. Many people are aware of these family connections while others cannot find their 'mything link." We can learn to 'read between the lines.' I have more than one line and so may you.
The lineage from Okeanos (issue of Ouranos and Gaia) descends through Sangarius, "God of the River," to Eunoe the Nymph, Queen of Phrygia, through Hecuba and Creusa, to Ascanius, King of Alba Longa (Etruscan). The myth and cult migrated with people from Anatolia to ancient Italy.
From there it goes through a long cascade of Julian Roman Emperors, to a line of Spanish nobles, to Sancha Blount, Lady de Ayala, who married into a British family of the Knight, Sir Thomas Blount, and down into my Hopkins colonial ancestors.
Now you will know where to look for yourselves. Somewhere a "most recent common ancestor" (MRCA) will mark us as cousins. Such lines are like rivers of bloodlines that connect and feed us. They run from the mythic Source through the ancient sacred mountains and historical rapids until they meander into the world of the ordinary. The descendants of Io take a slightly different course than Okeanos through the World Tree.
Io is my 95th gr-grandmother, so I like to believe she informs my deepest self. Her parents are listed as Melia, a Nymph Theoi, and Inachus, King of Argos, located in the Peloponnese in southern Greece. A major Mycenaean settlement in the Late Bronze Age (1700-1100 BCE), it was inhabited from prehistoric times (3000 BCE).
As a river nymph, Io likely was associated with the rivers that watered the fertile Argive plain. The Naiads were the nymphs of rivers, streams, lakes, marshes, fountains and springs. They protected young girls as the River Gods protected boys.
Since they married kings they became prominent in royal genealogies and were loved by the gods. They were the goddess-protectors of major water supplies such as a spring, fountain, or well, so they were worshiped. The Naiades were depicted as beautiful young women, usually seated, standing or reclining beside a spring, and holding a water-jug (hydria) or a frond of lush foliage.
An Argive princess, Io was an ancestor of many kings and heroes, such as Perseus, Cadmus, Heracles, and Minos. In Greek mythology, this priestess of Hera in Argos, was the nymph seduced by Zeus, who changed her into a heifer to escape detection. His wife Hera retaliated driving her to Egypt with a maddening gad-fly.
Her son was Epaphos, King of Egypt, who sired Libya, Queen of Egypt. Then the line goes back to Greece, Laconia, and Sparta in a marriage bridge. The line jumps from Greece to Alba Longa (Central Italy), and the ubiquitous Julians and Caesars of Rome. It then proceeds through Cartegena, Coimbra and Toledo, Spain... repeating my Okeanos descent from Sir Thomas Blount in Britain with several historical luminaries in between.
Infinite Regress
Genealogy is a prolonged ritual to the gods and ancestors. There are few rituals older than recitation of ancestral names. Only a Jungian approach to traditional genealogy keeps the historic/mythic gestalt of The World Tree alive as a symbol of wholeness -- a holistic resonant field pattern.
According to Jung, trees are a symbolic reference to the self, so family tree is self-defining. As well as our lineage, our ancestors also form a vast symbol chain, rooted in the mythic unconscious and pre-history.
The symbolic function is beyond innate impulse and ideological bias. Through introversion, we are fertilized, inspired, regenerated, and reborn. Self-incubation, self-castigation, and introversion are closely related ideas. Immersion in oneself (introversion) is a penetration into the unconscious, the imaginal world of psyche.
The World Tree is the Axis Mundi of genealogy, a worldwide database of genealogical connectivity. At this point travel and correspondence is made between higher and lower realms. Communication from lower realms may ascend to higher ones and blessings from higher realms may descend to lower ones and be disseminated to all. The spot functions as the omphalos (navel), the world's point of beginning.
The earliest mythologies are of the World-Tree, or Tree of Life. Aspects of the same image, sacred trees are the most common motif from the ancient world. The Tree connects our psychophysical aspects from sub-nuclear to macrocosmic scales. The trunk is the axis of psychic growth that unites Heaven and Earth, spirit and matter.
Archaic Greece worshiped serpents. The serpents of our family lines are entwined like knots in and around the World Tree. Celtic snakes symbolize the notion of rebirth. They still promise us primordial Knowledge -- unverified personal gnosis.
Jung said, "the serpent is the earthly essence of man of which he is not conscious. Its character changes according to peoples and lands, since it is the mystery that flows to him from the nourishing earth-mother."
The healer traversing the axis mundi to bring back knowledge from the other world is a common shamanic concept. Anyone or anything suspended on the axis between heaven and earth becomes a repository of potential knowledge. The Tree is the means of communication with spiritual realms. It is our Tree of Voices -- Tree of Souls. Remembering is a noble and necessary act.
The call of memory, the call to memory, reaches us from the very dawn of history. Genealogy contains a spiritual healing potential, the living sap of the Tree, a manifestation of the sacred. It is a Grail banquet of cultures, customs and symbolism.
Crowns mark the final stage of a spirit or solution: perfection, completion, ascension. The spirit, by death or enlightenment, will produce the pure, perfected, incorruptible spirit. In alchemical terms, the incorruptible body is the potential of the philosopher's stone.
The gods and goddesses have 'gone to seed', and we are that -- their seed, their progeny. As James Hillman says, their minds and powers are living us in poetic moments of fantasy, insight and intuition. Nature, psyche and life are unfolding divinity. We are only cut off from the dead by what we have buried and forgotten.
Working with our ancestral connection means connecting to everything around us and how we are placed in the world. Seedlines codify ancient ethnic identity and empires. Later, royals added them to their lines to bolster their claims to divine rule and the founding of thrones. Though not factual, traditional genealogy was a geographical and spiritual compass.
Some branches of the World Tree are pruned (extinct). Others still thrive. By engaging in genealogy we create a sacred space, a sacred center. There is a deep ecology to the flow of relationships. Our return to the womb of the Mothers is a creative regression. Experientially it manifests within us as a spiritualizing instinct, a recursive "bending back" toward the primordial and divine.
We link backward to the bond that transcends the limitations of the physical form. Consciousness turns back on itself, reiterating each level of organization, de-structuring each strata as it dives deeper toward the unconditioned, formless beginning, or "unborn" state -- the Void of the Cosmic Womb. In essence, we re-enter the womb as we are initiated in the mysteries of the psyche. We re-conceive our primal self image, healed by communion with the creative Source -- our own Royal Wedding.
Genealogy can be seen as a way of honoring the ancestors with a ritual from ancient times when lists of god-kings described the natural order of things rooted in mythic and 'divine' ancestors. The only way to revision and interact with it as a gestalt matrix includes the fictional, legendary, and mythological lines of this traditional World Tree. It is but one way to acknowledge our divinity, nobility, and humanity.
Genealogy is a sure path to the heart. We can "gather our ancestors" before we are gathered unto them. Mythology lost its role of explaining the forces of nature. But its role of delivering insights into the hidden, deep endeavors and fears of any human seems more alive than ever.
It is a Mystery how our ancestors pass memories to us across the generations. They relate us to our ontological questions about space, time, and eternity, the deep structure of the human mind and perception, life and death -- what exists and what doesn't. Time concerns the existential nature of things -- temporal relationships.
The mythology of our ancestors is as important as their cosmology. We can explore the mystic in ourselves and in our ancestors. Our worldview is the root of our identity and relationship to Nature and our own deep nature. Researching the cosmologies of our direct ancestors in the historical era provides a quick path into dream shamanism, as these ways are still half-remembered.
Our common destiny lies beyond any worldview. We have a mystical connection with our primitive ancestors. The primordial ancestors are still alive within the depths of our psyches and reach out to us with their ancient wisdom. We instinctively behave and feel the same ways as generations of our ancestors have in their lives.
This is also a relationship to the collectivity of the dead; for the unconscious corresponds to the mythic land of the dead, the land of the ancestors. Jung was the first to link the concept of ancestors to unconscious thinking. We learn to remember what our soul already knows. Our personality is literally expressed through our ancestors.
Jung said transpersonal psychic life "is the mind of our ancient ancestors, the way in which they thought and felt, the way in which they conceived of life and the world, of gods and humans beings. The existence of these historical layers is presumably the source of belief in reincarnation and in memories of past lives” (Jung, 1939, p.24).
In 'Extending the Family' (1985), Hillman says, "With the passing of time a sense of its power grows within one's psyche, like the movements of its skeleton inside one's flesh, which keeps one in servitude to patterns entombed in our closest attitudes and habits. From this interior family we are never free. This service keeps us bonded to the ancestors."
Some report a sort of "calling illness" until they respond to the ancestors calling them to do the work. We translate meaning into life. Genealogy is the narrative of a pre-modern world. It has traditional roots in the ancient theogeny of gods and goddesses.
Ancestral gods and ancestral religions developed over eons and are as old as particular branches of mankind -- gods of the blood. Astrologically determined gods and goddesses can often be found at the roots of dynastic houses. Royal houses claimed power through descent from ancestral gods.
When Rome Christianized in the fourth century, it cut off the mythic corpus, and demoted gods to human status and allegories. At root, traditional genealogy is an archetypal activity, recapitulating and extending humanity's oldest activities, including the imaginal root.
The aesthetic response is an ethical response -- a response of the heart -- that values the ancestors and the genealogical history. Genealogy is thus an archetypal order, an aesthetic construction. This virtual map of the personal and collective unconscious, reflects a principle of totality and primordial origins. Historical time required a linear descent, even if it masked pagan roots. Jung concluded we cannot get by without myth.