CONNECTED BY MYTHOLOGY
A defense against forces of the blind, dead, power known as Titanism. Preceding the Olympian cosmos, the Titans were giants, massive, undifferentiated, brutal. Defeating them meant that archetypal principles could begin to stir in the alive, conflicting, mutually implicated, endlessly procreative, and creative, goddesses and gods. Personality in all its unpredictable complexity succeeded unfeeling force; energy of animal embodiment; animal Io of cow-formed taurine energy.
Zeus fell in love with her and, to protect her from the wrath of Hera, changed her into a white heifer. Hera then sent a gadfly to torment Io, who therefore wandered all over the earth, crossed the Ionian Sea, swam the strait that was thereafter known as the Bosporus (meaning Ox-Ford), and at last reached Egypt, where she was restored to her original form and gave birth to Epaphus.
Myth identified Io with the Egyptian goddess Isis, and Epaphus with Apis, the sacred bull. Epaphus was said to have been carried off by order of Hera to Byblos in Syria, where he was found again by Io. This part of the legend connects Io with the Syrian goddess Astarte. Both the Egyptian and the Syrian parts, in fact, reflect interchange with the East and the identification of foreign with Greek gods.
She is wild also in her primary allegiance to nature; wild in her embodied psychic energy that is kinship with animals and wilderness; a way to the animal within us as vitally (as in vitality), animated. We need animation as a defense against Titanic blind, dead, power.
The Eurasian aurochs (B. p. primigenius) once ranged across the steppes and taigas of Europe, Siberia and Central Asia, and East Asia. ... The Eurasian aurochs were domesticated into modern taurine cattle breeds around the sixth millennium BCE in the Middle East, and possibly also at about the same time in the Far East. https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-015-0793-z
The agricultural transition that accompanied the Neolithic Revolution represented a turning point in our evolutionary history. By domesticating plants and animals, humans no longer depended on foraging and hunting for their subsistence and could, for the first time, produce their own resources, sustaining larger sedentary populations, and ultimately civilizations
.
The domestication of cattle from the now-extinct wild aurochs (Bos primigenius) was essential in this process. Cattle livestock provided us with meat, leather, milk and other dairy products, but also enabled the transportation of goods and people in carts, and considerably helped the cultivation of soils by pulling ploughs. The first archaeological evidence for wild aurochs domestication appears in the Anatolian Fertile Crescent around 10,500 years ago, where cattle breeding developed for the next two millennia, before reaching Greece and further spreading into Europe
TAURIDS. Taurus (constellation); Oct 20 – Dec 10; Peak, Nov 12. The Taurids are an annual meteor shower, meteor debris of comet Encke. Radiant point in constellation Taurus. Comet Encke orbits the sun, leaving a thick trail of comet debris; gadfly = meteor swarm; fireballs. Most comets have small particles, but the Taurids may include larger asteroid sized pieces. ARISTOTLE, KING DAVID, KING ZHOU
AND PHARAOH THUTMOSIS III HAVE SEEN COMET ENCKE Göran Henriksson.
Zeus fell in love with her and, to protect her from the wrath of Hera, changed her into a white heifer. Hera then sent a gadfly to torment Io, who therefore wandered all over the earth, crossed the Ionian Sea, swam the strait that was thereafter known as the Bosporus (meaning Ox-Ford), and at last reached Egypt, where she was restored to her original form and gave birth to Epaphus.
Myth identified Io with the Egyptian goddess Isis, and Epaphus with Apis, the sacred bull. Epaphus was said to have been carried off by order of Hera to Byblos in Syria, where he was found again by Io. This part of the legend connects Io with the Syrian goddess Astarte. Both the Egyptian and the Syrian parts, in fact, reflect interchange with the East and the identification of foreign with Greek gods.
She is wild also in her primary allegiance to nature; wild in her embodied psychic energy that is kinship with animals and wilderness; a way to the animal within us as vitally (as in vitality), animated. We need animation as a defense against Titanic blind, dead, power.
The Eurasian aurochs (B. p. primigenius) once ranged across the steppes and taigas of Europe, Siberia and Central Asia, and East Asia. ... The Eurasian aurochs were domesticated into modern taurine cattle breeds around the sixth millennium BCE in the Middle East, and possibly also at about the same time in the Far East. https://genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13059-015-0793-z
The agricultural transition that accompanied the Neolithic Revolution represented a turning point in our evolutionary history. By domesticating plants and animals, humans no longer depended on foraging and hunting for their subsistence and could, for the first time, produce their own resources, sustaining larger sedentary populations, and ultimately civilizations
.
The domestication of cattle from the now-extinct wild aurochs (Bos primigenius) was essential in this process. Cattle livestock provided us with meat, leather, milk and other dairy products, but also enabled the transportation of goods and people in carts, and considerably helped the cultivation of soils by pulling ploughs. The first archaeological evidence for wild aurochs domestication appears in the Anatolian Fertile Crescent around 10,500 years ago, where cattle breeding developed for the next two millennia, before reaching Greece and further spreading into Europe
TAURIDS. Taurus (constellation); Oct 20 – Dec 10; Peak, Nov 12. The Taurids are an annual meteor shower, meteor debris of comet Encke. Radiant point in constellation Taurus. Comet Encke orbits the sun, leaving a thick trail of comet debris; gadfly = meteor swarm; fireballs. Most comets have small particles, but the Taurids may include larger asteroid sized pieces. ARISTOTLE, KING DAVID, KING ZHOU
AND PHARAOH THUTMOSIS III HAVE SEEN COMET ENCKE Göran Henriksson.
http://maajournal.com/Issues/2020/Vol20-1/4_Henriksson%2020(1).pdf
ABSTRACT. Aristotle saw a great winter comet with a tail reaching up to Orion. It was Comet Encke on 31 December in 372 BC. When it became visible in the morning, after 9 January 371 BC, Ephoros saw its nucleus split up in two parts.
The sword of the Angel of the Lord seen above Jerusalem, as punishment for the sins by King David, was Comet Encke in 964 BC. The sword was redrawn at Ornan‟s threshing floor on 8 June 964 BC. David bought this place and built an altar that later became the Altar of Salomon‟s Temple in Jerusalem. A second century BC text contains a unique record of a bright comet observed at the end of the Shang Dynasty:‟When King Wu [of Zhou] attacked King Zhou [of Shang], a comet appeared and tendered its handle to Yin‟. This was Comet Encke on 22 June 1060 BC and 17 days later on 9 July in 1060 BC, Encke seems to have been depicted on a rock carving in Sweden.
A stele at the temple of Amon at Gebel Barkal in Nubia, mentions first the important victories at Megiddo, in year 33, and Mittani, in year 23 of the reign of Pharaoh Thutmosis III. However, the text also mentions an important celestial phenomenon during his 47th year of reign. The description fits very well with the bright appearance of Comet Encke at the end of January in 1460 BC. This supports the High Chronology for Egypt with 1506 BC as the first year of reign of Thutmosis III, the sixth Pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty in Egypt.
ABSTRACT. Aristotle saw a great winter comet with a tail reaching up to Orion. It was Comet Encke on 31 December in 372 BC. When it became visible in the morning, after 9 January 371 BC, Ephoros saw its nucleus split up in two parts.
The sword of the Angel of the Lord seen above Jerusalem, as punishment for the sins by King David, was Comet Encke in 964 BC. The sword was redrawn at Ornan‟s threshing floor on 8 June 964 BC. David bought this place and built an altar that later became the Altar of Salomon‟s Temple in Jerusalem. A second century BC text contains a unique record of a bright comet observed at the end of the Shang Dynasty:‟When King Wu [of Zhou] attacked King Zhou [of Shang], a comet appeared and tendered its handle to Yin‟. This was Comet Encke on 22 June 1060 BC and 17 days later on 9 July in 1060 BC, Encke seems to have been depicted on a rock carving in Sweden.
A stele at the temple of Amon at Gebel Barkal in Nubia, mentions first the important victories at Megiddo, in year 33, and Mittani, in year 23 of the reign of Pharaoh Thutmosis III. However, the text also mentions an important celestial phenomenon during his 47th year of reign. The description fits very well with the bright appearance of Comet Encke at the end of January in 1460 BC. This supports the High Chronology for Egypt with 1506 BC as the first year of reign of Thutmosis III, the sixth Pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty in Egypt.
Comets and The Bronze Age Collapse By Bob Kobres
Mirrored from The Cosmic Tusk. The original page is here.
. . . and from heaven a great star shall fall on the dread ocean and burn up the deep sea, with Babylon itself and the land of Italy, by reason of which many of the Hebrews perished,
. . . Be afraid, ye Indians and high-hearted Ethiopians: for when the fiery wheel of the ecliptic(?) . . . and Capricorn . . . and Taurus among the Twins encircles the mid-heaven, when the Virgin ascending and the Sun fastening the girdle round his forehead dominates the whole firmament; there shall be a great conflagration from the sky, falling on the earth; Are these lines from Book V of the SIBYLLINE ORACLES eschatological nonsense? Contemporary astronomical evidence suggests a historic basis for words describing cosmic calamity. British astronomers, Victor Clube and Bill Napier, in THE COSMIC WINTER (1990) and other recent works, provide students of the past with newly discovered celestial clues which indicate that Earth has been periodically pelted with comet fragments throughout the Holocene period. The evidence for the break-up of a large (> 50 km), short period (approximately 3.3 years), Earth-orbit-crossing comet is substantial and should be considered as hard as anything a trowel might turn up. What astronomical information cannot convey is the actual effect these periodic bombardment episodes had on human culture; only further digging and sifting will illuminate that aspect.
Some of what can be uncovered has been buried by prior premise and so can be brought to light by review of literature published over the years. For instance, the oracles quoted above are from a 1918 translation of the "Sibylline" by H.N. Bate. Further into Book V these lines appear:
And then in his anger the immortal God who dwells on high shall hurl from the sky a fiery bolt on the head of the unholy: and SUMMER SHALL CHANGE TO WINTER IN THAT DAY.
Bate notes that Book VIII contains a parallel passage with winter being changed to summer–fortunately he did not feel compelled to "correct" the lines above as others have. For example:
And then the imperishable God who dwells in the sky in anger will cast a lightning bolt from heaven against the power of the impious. INSTEAD OF WINTER THERE WILL BE SUMMER ON THAT DAY.
With astronomical evidence in mind a simplified, but testable, hypothesis of Bronze Age collapse would involve accepting the legend of Phaethon as an event inspired myth, as Plato contended it was, and also giving credence to stories of protracted winter in the aftermath of celestial "battles," such as the Ragnarok.
During a close approach to a massive object like our planet a comet would be gravitationally disrupted (Phaethon’s disintegrating chariot) independent fragments would then further break to pieces as they entered Earth’s atmosphere. This debris, of various shapes and sizes, would scatter widely along the path of the fall, each piece harboring energy in proportion to its mass. The "footprint" of this event could have included some of: southern Europe, the Mediterranean, the Near East, and Northern Africa. Damage, however, would not be uniform throughout this area. If the disintegrating objects were traveling south of east, as the Phaethon story implies, the more massive fragments would travel farther and release their greater energy, explosively, lower in the atmosphere toward the southeast end of the elliptical area directly affected by the fall. In other words, the Near East would be more heavily damaged than southern Europe. A survey scaling intensity of site destruction might reflect this aspect, i.e., vitrification of soil and building materials might occur below lower altitude multi-megaton blasts.
Certainly there have been many damaging falls witnessed by people during the 15,000, or more, year period of the comet’s fragmentation history. The terminal Bronze Age event was probably just one of several very energetic impacts which likely occurred in this time span.
Mirrored from The Cosmic Tusk. The original page is here.
. . . and from heaven a great star shall fall on the dread ocean and burn up the deep sea, with Babylon itself and the land of Italy, by reason of which many of the Hebrews perished,
. . . Be afraid, ye Indians and high-hearted Ethiopians: for when the fiery wheel of the ecliptic(?) . . . and Capricorn . . . and Taurus among the Twins encircles the mid-heaven, when the Virgin ascending and the Sun fastening the girdle round his forehead dominates the whole firmament; there shall be a great conflagration from the sky, falling on the earth; Are these lines from Book V of the SIBYLLINE ORACLES eschatological nonsense? Contemporary astronomical evidence suggests a historic basis for words describing cosmic calamity. British astronomers, Victor Clube and Bill Napier, in THE COSMIC WINTER (1990) and other recent works, provide students of the past with newly discovered celestial clues which indicate that Earth has been periodically pelted with comet fragments throughout the Holocene period. The evidence for the break-up of a large (> 50 km), short period (approximately 3.3 years), Earth-orbit-crossing comet is substantial and should be considered as hard as anything a trowel might turn up. What astronomical information cannot convey is the actual effect these periodic bombardment episodes had on human culture; only further digging and sifting will illuminate that aspect.
Some of what can be uncovered has been buried by prior premise and so can be brought to light by review of literature published over the years. For instance, the oracles quoted above are from a 1918 translation of the "Sibylline" by H.N. Bate. Further into Book V these lines appear:
And then in his anger the immortal God who dwells on high shall hurl from the sky a fiery bolt on the head of the unholy: and SUMMER SHALL CHANGE TO WINTER IN THAT DAY.
Bate notes that Book VIII contains a parallel passage with winter being changed to summer–fortunately he did not feel compelled to "correct" the lines above as others have. For example:
And then the imperishable God who dwells in the sky in anger will cast a lightning bolt from heaven against the power of the impious. INSTEAD OF WINTER THERE WILL BE SUMMER ON THAT DAY.
With astronomical evidence in mind a simplified, but testable, hypothesis of Bronze Age collapse would involve accepting the legend of Phaethon as an event inspired myth, as Plato contended it was, and also giving credence to stories of protracted winter in the aftermath of celestial "battles," such as the Ragnarok.
During a close approach to a massive object like our planet a comet would be gravitationally disrupted (Phaethon’s disintegrating chariot) independent fragments would then further break to pieces as they entered Earth’s atmosphere. This debris, of various shapes and sizes, would scatter widely along the path of the fall, each piece harboring energy in proportion to its mass. The "footprint" of this event could have included some of: southern Europe, the Mediterranean, the Near East, and Northern Africa. Damage, however, would not be uniform throughout this area. If the disintegrating objects were traveling south of east, as the Phaethon story implies, the more massive fragments would travel farther and release their greater energy, explosively, lower in the atmosphere toward the southeast end of the elliptical area directly affected by the fall. In other words, the Near East would be more heavily damaged than southern Europe. A survey scaling intensity of site destruction might reflect this aspect, i.e., vitrification of soil and building materials might occur below lower altitude multi-megaton blasts.
Certainly there have been many damaging falls witnessed by people during the 15,000, or more, year period of the comet’s fragmentation history. The terminal Bronze Age event was probably just one of several very energetic impacts which likely occurred in this time span.
“If you live with the myths in your mind, you will find yourself
always in mythological situations. They cover everything that can
happen to you. And that enables you to interpret the myth in relation
to life, as well as life in relation to myth.” –Joseph Campbell
"Only that which is the Other gives us fully unto ourselves."
-Sri Yogananda
“We are continually overflowing toward those who preceded us, toward our origin, and toward those who seemingly come after us. ... It is our task to imprint this temporary, perishable earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again “invisibly,” inside us. We are the bees of the invisible. We wildly collect the honey of the visible, to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible.” "It is fortunate if something of the ancestors lives on in it and continues to be loved and protected; only then does the past become fruitful and effective." --Rilke, Early Journals
always in mythological situations. They cover everything that can
happen to you. And that enables you to interpret the myth in relation
to life, as well as life in relation to myth.” –Joseph Campbell
"Only that which is the Other gives us fully unto ourselves."
-Sri Yogananda
“We are continually overflowing toward those who preceded us, toward our origin, and toward those who seemingly come after us. ... It is our task to imprint this temporary, perishable earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again “invisibly,” inside us. We are the bees of the invisible. We wildly collect the honey of the visible, to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible.” "It is fortunate if something of the ancestors lives on in it and continues to be loved and protected; only then does the past become fruitful and effective." --Rilke, Early Journals
Zeus and Io
SUMMARY
Among Satyrs and Nymphs
Descent from Oceanus and Io
A Genealogical Ritual Exploration
Iona Miller, 2021
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.
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.
Myth reveals old and new patterns of thinking and self-reflection and while
there is continuity between old and new, they can be experienced as wholly
different in character and the transition between them is tantamount to
dialoguing with the Other. As mediator of ego consciousness and the
transcendent, myth is in liminal space and is symbolic in status. Myth is a
conscious interpretation of unconscious communication and as such its
nature is both rational and non-rational, archetypal image and ineffable,
numinous `content'. As symbols, myths are clothed with finite images that
are subjectively designed by the ego according to its response to the transcendent
and its own conscious attitude or orientation (Jung 1951c: 355).
The image has a subjective power and can therefore be experienced as a
symbol for one person and an ineffective sign for another.
--Huskinson, Dreaming the Myth Onwards
Descent from Oceanus and Io
A Genealogical Ritual Exploration
Iona Miller, 2021
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.
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.
Myth reveals old and new patterns of thinking and self-reflection and while
there is continuity between old and new, they can be experienced as wholly
different in character and the transition between them is tantamount to
dialoguing with the Other. As mediator of ego consciousness and the
transcendent, myth is in liminal space and is symbolic in status. Myth is a
conscious interpretation of unconscious communication and as such its
nature is both rational and non-rational, archetypal image and ineffable,
numinous `content'. As symbols, myths are clothed with finite images that
are subjectively designed by the ego according to its response to the transcendent
and its own conscious attitude or orientation (Jung 1951c: 355).
The image has a subjective power and can therefore be experienced as a
symbol for one person and an ineffective sign for another.
--Huskinson, Dreaming the Myth Onwards
nature spirits
Descent from Oceanus and Io
MYTH is the DNA of the Human Psyche
Are we not children of the Gods?
The ancestors suggest we "Just remember to follow Nature."
"Do you think that somewhere we are not in nature, that we are different from nature? No, we are in nature and we think exactly like nature." —Carl Jung, 'Zarathustra Seminar," Page 1277
"God sleeps in minerals, awakens in plants, walks in animals, and thinks in man." —Sanskrit saying
"Only that which is the Other gives us fully unto ourselves"
—Sri Yogananda
"To give birth to the ancient in a new time is creation."
—Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 311
At the psychoid (psychophysical) level the unconscious domain is the deep wisdom of nature -- our connective consciousness of nature and our nature. Consciousness is the bottomless pit of the indivisible whole. It means the world. In the most inclusive sense it is cosmic consciousness. To be engaged with the psyche, inevitably means to be engaged with the ancestors.
"Genealogy reveals the importance of ancestry to soul. The weight of human history is in the voices of the dead, in opening the mouth of the dead and hearing what they have to say. It's the actual living presence of history in the soul, the past in the soul, not just the deeply repressed or forgotten." ~James Hillman
Genealogy is a reflexive discipline. Your family tree opens a vast inner realm of ancient, living symbols -- your ancestors. We yearn toward eternity, longing for connection. It begs the question, "are we comfortable in the presence of the disembodied?" Disembodied spirits are a conceptual category, rather than an ontological 'reality' or delusion from beliefs or religion. Ontology is a branch of metaphysics that deals with the nature of being, the essence of being.
Spirits are not ontological or metaphysical facts, but imaginal realities. We can explore metaphors. They act as a bridge, imaginative propositions, even epistemic intuition. They use a story or illustration to see alternative ways of looking at something.
Metaphors act as a means for the psyche to represent experiences of personal significance in symbolic ways. Metaphoric expressions are tied to some unconscious or implicit aspect of our experience.
...the acorn theory dares us to envision biography in terms of beauty, mystery and myth. It challenges the prevalent paradigm that reduces biography to genetics and environment. It lifts the pall of victim mentality and posits a psychology of childhood that embraces pathology as well as imagination.
Archetypal Genealogy
"Psychologically, the central point of a human personality
is the place where the ancestors are reincarnated."
~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis, Page 304
Jung contended we can make no progress with ourselves until we become "very much more acquainted" with nature, our own nature, and that of the Other. Genealogy is one opportunity to do so, to envision biography in terms of beauty, mystery and myth, not just genetics and environment.
Genealogy is a soul science. That the reality of the soul is capable of expressing "intelligible" statements does not mean they are "understandable".
In The Undiscovered Self, Jung poses a challenge that is relevant to psychogenealogy in terms the urgency of recovering our ancestral heritage: "We are living in what the Greeks called the right time for a “metamorphosis of the gods,” i.e. of the fundamental principles and symbols. This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious man within us who is changing."
Understanding is the virtual place where the infinite hermeneutics come into play and interface. The image instead characterizes the nature of the soul, (the image is Soul). It is already intelligible in itself because of the language with which the soul weaves the web of existence, welcomes it and expresses itself. James Hillman tells us that the images are not "ours"; instead we belong to them.
Depth Genealogy is an approach with its own roots in Jungian and archetypal psychology, Transgenerational Integration, phenomenology, genetic genealogy, the arts, and other relevant areas. It is a soulful approach, attuned to the Earth, Nature, and Feminine with an eye for the imaginal, the ecological, the embodied, and mythological.
We cannot describe symptoms without acknowledging the human origins of the ecological crisis. Our way of understanding human life and activity has gone awry, to the serious detriment of the world around us.
Jung thought, "There is one ego in the conscious and another made up of unconscious ancestral elements, by the force of which a man who has been fairly himself over a period of years suddenly falls under the sway of an ancestor." (Jung, 1925 Seminar, pg 38.)
Beliefs organize our experience and condition our experience and interpretation of sensed presence. You can't unperceive a perception once perceived, but you can erroneously project, interpret, or concretize it. However we attribute 'sensed presence' or 'liminal entities' we know that they are evoked potentials, rather than literal beings, but they exhibit phenomenological qualities that carry meaning.
In the genealogical journey our lineage descent becomes an initiatory experience of the depths of the human psyche and collective unconscious. Genealogy is a firm foundation for self-knowledge and any spiritual practice. Our ancestors become living presences informing our lives and being -- our relationship with the past, present, and future and the great cycle of life -- birth, death, and rebirth.
"To give birth to the ancient in a new time is creation."
~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 311
The soul path is often associated with the setting sun (and thus the direction of west), the descent to our earthy roots, into the wildness of the soil and the soul, a journey into the underworld, a voyage into darkness or shadow.
"If we surrendered to earth’s intelligence we could root down ascendant, like trees." Our spiritual growth is meant to go toward the fertile darkness and the glorious light, each of us having the opportunity to bridge earth and heaven—the underworld and the upper world—through the trunks of our middle world lives."
Rilke saw the intrinsic value of darkness: "You darkness from which I come, I love you more than all the fires that fence out the world, for the fire makes a circle for everyone so that no one sees you anymore."
In soul retrieval, power is restored to the individual who has experienced soul loss. Soul loss is a shamanic term used to describe the loss of vital life force experienced in trauma, often linked to family of origin trauma. Lack of conscious connection to this source cuts us off from that which births and sustains us. We become detached and dissociated, losing our soul connection to the Sacred Feminine.
Such complexes are usually deeply unconscious, alienating, and distorted. Our legacy conditions us. The conscious and unconscious minds don't speak to one another; they don't even speak the same language. So, we tend to reenact experiences our families have not integrated.
We must do the re-membering in order for the ancestors to inform our lives and to drink from the deep well within. Our approach includes many disciplines: archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, genetics, history, mythology, comparative religions, psychology, poetry, and the visual arts.
Ancestor retrieval is information retrieval. Like alchemists of old, we become miners of data, trying to turn raw information and literature narratives into meaningful 'gold'. Extraction of characteristics from text is one of the main tasks in text mining. Family relationships help link people across different genealogical documents and sources.
I write to express what I think, feel, and believe about something -- to engage and deepen it. Writing is an invitation from the soul. I write for myself because it’s an artful mode of trying to figure things out. We attempt to grasp the hidden forces in our lives. And other people can join in the journey…
It is much the same for genealogy and descent from antiquity. People come and go but Life remains. We are spiritualized by the numinous energy of the living myth. Jung considered ritual, (including contact with nature and creativity, movement, music, drama, myth), as a means of transformation and rebirth.
The mythic perspective means we live lives with purpose, when we see the meaning we bring to our lives and to the lives of others. In living our personal myth, we discover that purpose and understand our personal story. Those myths, stories, legends reveal the beauty in living life as a human being.
Our story is what matters. Trauma treatment shows we've all been personally traumatized with inherited unconscious psycho-biological effects of personal and collective traumas of our ancestors; trauma tends to repeat. We can inherit memories of trauma, and generations later this can still be manifesting in our current lives.
"The ancestral part is given to us by our body, we take over the life of our ancestors in that way. It is the terrace of life because it is here that life renews itself." --Carl Jung, ETH Lecture, 12 July 1935, Page 240.
Trauma has its own transgenerational life carried down the family chain. It may skip generations. Focus is on family systems and ancestral networks. Healing, remembrance, family research, and devotion often go hand in hand with the adaptive, resilient, and self-healing nature of the psyche.
The dreamlike nature of reality is more of an exploration and aesthetic arc than self-improvement, or a developmental spiritual quest. We study ourselves by means of the functions and metaphors of objectivity. Soul is a primary metaphor. As we relate to our ancestors, we relate to myths. Myth affects us on a personal level.
Our ancestral journey is an epic tale, a transformation story rooted in deep time, a continuous recapitulation of the universal story, now fused with our personal myth and communion with Beauty. "The role of myth... is to open the questions of life to transpersonal and culturally imaginative reflection." (Hillman) Vico said, "metaphor is a myth (fabula) in brief."
Like a dream, personal mythology may be acted upon or act upon you. It happens to you and happens from you. Soul takes its trouble to the trees, to the riverbank, to an animal companion, on an aimless nature walk, a long watch of the night sky.
Suffering is transformed into devotion through our myth. Myth has no dogma. Most myths have wounding after wounding at their core. Myths are the greatest stories, a sort of psychic DNA that illuminates and sustains us and allows us to endure. This mythic intelligence is the persistent base note of our mythopoetic life song.
To explore myths, we access the secret opening where our
personal experience meets the archetypal patterns of the psyche. Myth embodies the complex in imaginal form. The complex is compulsive; the psychic image facilitates awareness of and transformation of the complex.
It follows specific channels shaped and dissolved by our unique succession of personal experiences and responses, rooted in inherent temperament. This centers us in the deep principles that the psyche needs for its well-being and transformation.
We must rely on our intuitive instincts and our extended understanding of the forces that operate within the collective energy field of human nature, such as archetypes. "Archetypes are forms of different aspects expressing the creative psychic background. They are and always have been numinous and therefore "divine." (C.G. Jung, Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 605-606)
An archetype is a universal principle or force that affects--impels, structures, permeates--the human psyche and human behavior on many levels. We can imagine them as primordial instincts, as Freud did, or as transcendent first principles as Plato did, or as gods of the psyche as post-Jungian James Hillman did. In the Platonic tradition archetypes were psychological, cosmic and objective, as primordial forms of a Universal Mind that transcended the human psyche.
We detect footprints on the path as we learn the stories of those who have gone before us which may lighten our load. We reconnect with the roots of our being using our instinctual nature to dialogue with the unconscious. Myths aren't literal reality, but they teach us literal, philosophical, and metaphorical things, based in reality and spirituality.
Jung stressed 'the importance of the unconscious rather than of consciousness, the mysterious rather than the known, the mystical rather than the scientific, the creative rather than the productive, and the religious rather than the profane.'
(Singer 1994)
Eliade (1969:57) tells us:
"Myth is an account of events which took place in principio, that is "in the beginning," in a primordial and non-temporal instant, a moment of sacred time. The mythic or sacred time is qualitatively different from profane time, from continuous and irreversible time of our everyday de- sacralized existence. In narrating a myth one reactualizes in some sort the sacred time in which the events narrated took place.
"Myth, therefore is a way of bringing the numinous to the common man without involving him in an altered state of consciousness. Its sacramental character veils an inner numinous truth which is explicated by the ritual which the myth demands, and which action reaffirms the relationship between the present which is in time, and the numinous which is out of time."
Myth bursts through, opening the pathways to the past, the future, and the cosmic, opening the heart through the viscera. We actively rethink and engage our primal story with all our ways of seeing. Life is the enactment of mythical or imaginal scenarios. The soul of our actions emerges.
In The Soul's Code, James Hillman explains that, according to (Plotinus 205-270 ACE), "we elected the body, the parents, the place, and the circumstances that suited the soul and that, as the myth says, belong to its necessity. This suggests that the circumstances, including my body and my parents whom I may curse, are my soul's own choice -- and I do not understand this because I have forgotten."
He adds, "so that we do not forget, Plato tells the myth, and in the very last passage, says that by preserving the myth we may better preserve ourselves and prosper. In other words, the myth has a redemptive psychological function, and a psychology derived from it can inspire a life founded on it."
Hillman points out that we can remember, associating backward and downward into the fragmented, forgotten and repressed. To the degree that we understand a religious fact (myth, ritual, symbol, divine figure, etc.) we change, we are modified -- and this change is equivalent to a step forward in the process of self-liberation. And in psychic reality we find a multiplicity of relative answers to all sorts of archetypal questions.
Each archetypal perspective has its way of self-knowing, touching all points of the soul, resonating as timelessness images. "They don't need to come back literally in the form of voices and visions, because they are already palpable in anything tends to jump down, on any occasion we are not up to. They are the gravity force of the psyche." jh
Hillman links body and speech: "The murder of speech is the self-murder of the human animal, a suicidal evisceration of our species' specific endowment. Like tigers losing their stripes, like beached whales and blind eagles are we without our rhetoric. Speech is our body, speech is our shape, speech is our beauty."
In 'Culture and the Animal Soul' he concludes, "the return to the animal means a return to the poetic urge in any citizen, an urge symbolized by the actual poet who, like an alpha animal, leads the herd with the power of display."
We have to engage, to go in that direction, to bring forth hidden reality with an indomitable sense of self and mission. The daimon in the heart seems quietly pleased. It’s in touch. The recovery of enchantment through our ancestors is our journey to the invisibles. Hillman says, "The long-lasting and ever-renewing vitality of myths has nothing factual behind it.”
“‘Ancestry’ in our culture implies chromosomal connection; ancestors are those humans from whom I have inherited my body tissues. Biogenetics replaces the spirit world. In other societies an ancestor could be a tree, [a cow], a bear, a salmon, a member of the dead, a spirit in a dream, a special spooky place. These may be addressed as ‘Ancestor’ and an altar home built for them, away from the home you inhabit.
"Ancestors are not bound to human bodies and certainly not confined to physical antecedents whose descent into your sphere was allowed only via your natural family. ...To be an ancestor you do not need to be dead, but you do need to know the dead—that is, the invisible world and how and where it touches the living.
“‘Honor thy father and thy mother,’ ...the fifth Commandment, along with the ones preceding it, aims to eliminate all traces of pagan polytheism, in which ancestor worship is essential. These ‘parents’ are not just human...They have huge powers and are to be honored as guarantors of fate, ‘that thy days may be prolonged, and that it may go well with thee, upon the land which the Lord thy God hath given thee.’ (Deut. 5:16)
"Like ancestor spirits, they are protective guardians of a long life, bearers of good fortune, and nature spirits inhabiting the land itself. ...
“The primordial spirit world has been reduced to the all-too-human concrete statues of personal figures. ...do not confuse them with creator-destroyer gods, or with ancestors....It requires a step backward into the old connection with invisibilities and a trusting step out and over the threshold into the rich profusion of influences afforded by the world." (Hillman, Parental Fallacy)
“If you live with the myths in your mind, you will find yourself
always in mythological situations. They cover everything that can
happen to you. And that enables you to interpret the myth in relation
to life, as well as life in relation to myth.” –Joseph Campbell
"Only that which is the Other gives us fully unto ourselves"
Sri Yogananda
“We are continually overflowing toward those who preceded us, toward our origin, and toward those who seemingly come after us. ... It is our task to imprint this temporary, perishable earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again “invisibly,” inside us. We are the bees of the invisible. We wildly collect the honey of the visible, to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible.” "It is fortunate if something of the ancestors lives on in it and continues to be loved and protected; only then does the past become fruitful and effective." --Rilke, Early Journals
"Unfinished business cannot be resolved by going back in time. Indeed, our business with the dead will always feel unfinished if we try to meet them in a past which they no longer inhabit. From the imaginal point of view the dead are not in history. On the contrary, it is history which is in the dead." Greg Mogenson, Greeting the Angels: An Imaginal View of the Mourning Process, p. 29
It is much the same for genealogy and descent from antiquity. People come and go but Life remains. We are spiritualized by the numinous energy of the living myth. Jung considered ritual, (including contact with nature and creativity, movement, music, drama, myth), as a means of transformation and rebirth.
The mythic perspective means we live lives with purpose, when we see the meaning we bring to our lives and to the lives of others. In living our personal myth, we discover that purpose and understand our personal story. Those myths, stories, legends reveal the beauty in living life as a human being.
Our story is what matters. Trauma treatment shows we've all been personally traumatized with inherited unconscious psycho-biological effects of personal and collective traumas of our ancestors; trauma tends to repeat. We can inherit memories of trauma, and generations later this can still be manifesting in our current lives.
"The ancestral part is given to us by our body, we take over the life of our ancestors in that way. It is the terrace of life because it is here that life renews itself." --Carl Jung, ETH Lecture, 12 July 1935, Page 240.
Trauma has its own transgenerational life carried down the family chain. It may skip generations. Focus is on family systems and ancestral networks. Healing, remembrance, family research, and devotion often go hand in hand with the adaptive, resilient, and self-healing nature of the psyche.
The dreamlike nature of reality is more of an exploration and aesthetic arc than self-improvement, or a developmental spiritual quest. We study ourselves by means of the functions and metaphors of objectivity. Soul is a primary metaphor. As we relate to our ancestors, we relate to myths. Myth affects us on a personal level.
Our ancestral journey is an epic tale, a transformation story rooted in deep time, a continuous recapitulation of the universal story, now fused with our personal myth and communion with Beauty. "The role of myth... is to open the questions of life to transpersonal and culturally imaginative reflection." (Hillman) Vico said, "metaphor is a myth (fabula) in brief."
Like a dream, personal mythology may be acted upon or act upon you. It happens to you and happens from you. Soul takes its trouble to the trees, to the riverbank, to an animal companion, on an aimless nature walk, a long watch of the night sky.
Suffering is transformed into devotion through our myth. Myth has no dogma. Most myths have wounding after wounding at their core. Myths are the greatest stories, a sort of psychic DNA that illuminates and sustains us and allows us to endure. This mythic intelligence is the persistent base note of our mythopoetic life song.
To explore myths, we access the secret opening where our
personal experience meets the archetypal patterns of the psyche. Myth embodies the complex in imaginal form. The complex is compulsive; the psychic image facilitates awareness of and transformation of the complex.
It follows specific channels shaped and dissolved by our unique succession of personal experiences and responses, rooted in inherent temperament. This centers us in the deep principles that the psyche needs for its well-being and transformation.
We must rely on our intuitive instincts and our extended understanding of the forces that operate within the collective energy field of human nature, such as archetypes. "Archetypes are forms of different aspects expressing the creative psychic background. They are and always have been numinous and therefore "divine." (C.G. Jung, Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 605-606)
An archetype is a universal principle or force that affects--impels, structures, permeates--the human psyche and human behavior on many levels. We can imagine them as primordial instincts, as Freud did, or as transcendent first principles as Plato did, or as gods of the psyche as post-Jungian James Hillman did. In the Platonic tradition archetypes were psychological, cosmic and objective, as primordial forms of a Universal Mind that transcended the human psyche.
We detect footprints on the path as we learn the stories of those who have gone before us which may lighten our load. We reconnect with the roots of our being using our instinctual nature to dialogue with the unconscious. Myths aren't literal reality, but they teach us literal, philosophical, and metaphorical things, based in reality and spirituality.
Jung stressed 'the importance of the unconscious rather than of consciousness, the mysterious rather than the known, the mystical rather than the scientific, the creative rather than the productive, and the religious rather than the profane.'
(Singer 1994)
Eliade (1969:57) tells us:
"Myth is an account of events which took place in principio, that is "in the beginning," in a primordial and non-temporal instant, a moment of sacred time. The mythic or sacred time is qualitatively different from profane time, from continuous and irreversible time of our everyday de- sacralized existence. In narrating a myth one reactualizes in some sort the sacred time in which the events narrated took place.
"Myth, therefore is a way of bringing the numinous to the common man without involving him in an altered state of consciousness. Its sacramental character veils an inner numinous truth which is explicated by the ritual which the myth demands, and which action reaffirms the relationship between the present which is in time, and the numinous which is out of time."
Myth bursts through, opening the pathways to the past, the future, and the cosmic, opening the heart through the viscera. We actively rethink and engage our primal story with all our ways of seeing. Life is the enactment of mythical or imaginal scenarios. The soul of our actions emerges.
In The Soul's Code, James Hillman explains that, according to (Plotinus 205-270 ACE), "we elected the body, the parents, the place, and the circumstances that suited the soul and that, as the myth says, belong to its necessity. This suggests that the circumstances, including my body and my parents whom I may curse, are my soul's own choice -- and I do not understand this because I have forgotten."
He adds, "so that we do not forget, Plato tells the myth, and in the very last passage, says that by preserving the myth we may better preserve ourselves and prosper. In other words, the myth has a redemptive psychological function, and a psychology derived from it can inspire a life founded on it."
Hillman points out that we can remember, associating backward and downward into the fragmented, forgotten and repressed. To the degree that we understand a religious fact (myth, ritual, symbol, divine figure, etc.) we change, we are modified -- and this change is equivalent to a step forward in the process of self-liberation. And in psychic reality we find a multiplicity of relative answers to all sorts of archetypal questions.
Each archetypal perspective has its way of self-knowing, touching all points of the soul, resonating as timelessness images. "They don't need to come back literally in the form of voices and visions, because they are already palpable in anything tends to jump down, on any occasion we are not up to. They are the gravity force of the psyche." jh
Hillman links body and speech: "The murder of speech is the self-murder of the human animal, a suicidal evisceration of our species' specific endowment. Like tigers losing their stripes, like beached whales and blind eagles are we without our rhetoric. Speech is our body, speech is our shape, speech is our beauty."
In 'Culture and the Animal Soul' he concludes, "the return to the animal means a return to the poetic urge in any citizen, an urge symbolized by the actual poet who, like an alpha animal, leads the herd with the power of display."
We have to engage, to go in that direction, to bring forth hidden reality with an indomitable sense of self and mission. The daimon in the heart seems quietly pleased. It’s in touch. The recovery of enchantment through our ancestors is our journey to the invisibles. Hillman says, "The long-lasting and ever-renewing vitality of myths has nothing factual behind it.”
“‘Ancestry’ in our culture implies chromosomal connection; ancestors are those humans from whom I have inherited my body tissues. Biogenetics replaces the spirit world. In other societies an ancestor could be a tree, [a cow], a bear, a salmon, a member of the dead, a spirit in a dream, a special spooky place. These may be addressed as ‘Ancestor’ and an altar home built for them, away from the home you inhabit.
"Ancestors are not bound to human bodies and certainly not confined to physical antecedents whose descent into your sphere was allowed only via your natural family. ...To be an ancestor you do not need to be dead, but you do need to know the dead—that is, the invisible world and how and where it touches the living.
“‘Honor thy father and thy mother,’ ...the fifth Commandment, along with the ones preceding it, aims to eliminate all traces of pagan polytheism, in which ancestor worship is essential. These ‘parents’ are not just human...They have huge powers and are to be honored as guarantors of fate, ‘that thy days may be prolonged, and that it may go well with thee, upon the land which the Lord thy God hath given thee.’ (Deut. 5:16)
"Like ancestor spirits, they are protective guardians of a long life, bearers of good fortune, and nature spirits inhabiting the land itself. ...
“The primordial spirit world has been reduced to the all-too-human concrete statues of personal figures. ...do not confuse them with creator-destroyer gods, or with ancestors....It requires a step backward into the old connection with invisibilities and a trusting step out and over the threshold into the rich profusion of influences afforded by the world." (Hillman, Parental Fallacy)
“If you live with the myths in your mind, you will find yourself
always in mythological situations. They cover everything that can
happen to you. And that enables you to interpret the myth in relation
to life, as well as life in relation to myth.” –Joseph Campbell
"Only that which is the Other gives us fully unto ourselves"
Sri Yogananda
“We are continually overflowing toward those who preceded us, toward our origin, and toward those who seemingly come after us. ... It is our task to imprint this temporary, perishable earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again “invisibly,” inside us. We are the bees of the invisible. We wildly collect the honey of the visible, to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible.” "It is fortunate if something of the ancestors lives on in it and continues to be loved and protected; only then does the past become fruitful and effective." --Rilke, Early Journals
"Unfinished business cannot be resolved by going back in time. Indeed, our business with the dead will always feel unfinished if we try to meet them in a past which they no longer inhabit. From the imaginal point of view the dead are not in history. On the contrary, it is history which is in the dead." Greg Mogenson, Greeting the Angels: An Imaginal View of the Mourning Process, p. 29
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"I did not know that I was living a myth, and even if I had known it, I would not have known what sort of myth was ordering my life without my knowledge. So, in the most natural way, I took it upon myself to get to know “my” myth, and I regarded this as the task of tasks..."
-Carl Jung
"I did not know that I was living a myth, and even if I had known it, I would not have known what sort of myth was ordering my life without my knowledge. So, in the most natural way, I took it upon myself to get to know “my” myth, and I regarded this as the task of tasks..."
-Carl Jung