Gen-Isis Descent
GEN-ISIS
The Goddess in the Roots of Your Family Tree
Iona Miller, July 2017
Prepared for Summer 2017 Issue of Isis-Seshat Journal
“Man is in need of a symbolic life . . . we don’t have it . . . we have no time no place . . .
only symbolic life can express the need of the soul--the daily need of the soul.”
--Jung, 1939, The Symbolic Life
http://www.depthinsights.com/pdfs/On_Depth_Psychology.pdf
"...symbolic life in any form is a fundamental prerequisite for psychic health".
--Edward Edinger, Ego and archetype
There is possibly no older tradition than that of honoring our ancestors. Genealogy is both a traditional and modern way to see how the gods fit into our personal existence. The metadata hidden in our genealogy can supply information hidden in the cognitive and emotional unconscious as structure, embodied memory, and lineage. It can inform our neo-traditional practice, rooted in the present.
Few forces are as strong in the psyche as genetics, sex and death. We don't have to take the ancient ancestral lines as literally accurate. But we can appreciate how they directly connect us to the gods and goddesses as our ancestors. Genealogy mediates their voices, helping us live a full complete life, including alternative modes of structuring human experience and ways of inhabiting space. Creativity means discovering something new.
In this regard, Isis (Aset) is one of the most ancient goddesses. She still bestows her gifts to humanity in a wide variety of cultural forms, including non-conceptual experience, and magic skills to move through darkness and light. The collective unconscious is the universal template of meaning and experience, while the personal unconscious is specifically what it means to you.
Tracing our family tree back to descent from antiquity is a way to actively tap the mythic dimension and the archetypal field of the ancestors. Myth, as Homer noted, includes speech, conversation, advice, opinion, and promise. If myth is the maker of the psyche, soul-making is our return to the poetic and imaginal root of consciousness. If we want to know about psyche, we have to go to psyche, that other realm which is just as real and dangerous as this one.
Psychoretrocausality
Only a world of soul offers intimacy and coherent resonance to help us see and know the thought of the heart, as if in a mirror. Genealogy is a mythic journey through the intergenerational labyrinth, and there are many ways to make it experiential and interactive. We may discover that selfhood is a multiplicity of incompatible selves, a paradoxical psycho-biology.
But woe unto you, who replace this incompatible multiplicity with a single God.
~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 351.
Happy am I who can recognize the multiplicity and diversity of the Gods.
~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 351.
We can suggest poetically that archetypes function nonlocally. Their anchored position as super-ancestors means they permeate our lines with psycho-retrocausality, as interpenetrating mazes of psycho-energetic fields. We're entangled. We can actively engage our ancestors by knowing them with our individual consciousness. We've missed each other in our dreams. Our primal self can get lost in the complexity of modern life.
As we turn and 'face' ourselves and our forebears, we move back naturally through history to the timeless root of our inception, our mythological and spiritual origins. Each of our lines of descent is a valuable vein to mine for insight. Psyche moves indirectly in circular reasonings. Imagination is the foundational process of psyche.
The nature of the pre-phenomenal remains a mystery. Ultimately, it is The Feminine root we wish to reveal, the all-pervading essence of anima mundi. Awareness itself is beyond thought. In other words, she is constantly present, if we are present with Her in our constantly unfolding lives, open to permeability, and circular movement of regress.
In Dream and the Underworld, Hillman reminds that, "the repetitiveness of those circular states, which is in the turns of our contradictions, forces us to admit that these conditions are precisely our essence and that the circular motion of the soul [...] cannot be distinguished by blind fate. It's like the soul is free from blindness, but for its continuous turn into it."
Breathing Life Into Our Ancestors
The ancient Egyptian mystery school, the Per Ankh (House of Life, Wisdom, Art, Healing, and Knowledge) is the inspiration for a hermeneutic and healing approach to genealogy. It is a transgenerational vision. We share spiritual and energetic universal aspects of our personalities. What we share in common includes mother, father, and self. The Ankh symbol harmonizes the male/female life-force giving and receiving in the non-gendered ascending soul.
Every hermeneutical perspective constructs and reconstructs more or less coherent and meaningful pictures of the past. They are based on the particular spiritual needs and expectations of their real or imagined audiences. The founder of each line is the convergence of all those ancestral images, our connection to something bigger.
This soulful approach to psyche and our forebears reveals the mysteries of death, transformation, and spiritual rebirth, honoring soul and body. We give life to the ancestors within as a loving practice. Resuscitating powers continuously arouse the life force. This is our deep memory. The living one awakens the dead.
The one blood transferred from generation to generation forms one life of great complexity and depth -- a unity of action and time. This voice that is not a voice, the "stream of consciousness" is poetically called the "Heart of The River of Created Forms." It flows out along the great curve of consciousness.
The frame drum was the trance-inducing heartbeat. The drum beat marks the rhythm of life. A frame drum from the Ptolemaic period has a skin head painted with a woman playing a frame drum in front of the goddess Isis. The inscription on the drum reads, “Isis, Lady of the Sky, Mistress of the Goddesses.”
The psychophysical approach is rooted in our being, land, water, and air. This includes our very first to our final breath -- the fire of the breath of life, the divine spark. Along the way, we are learning to live and learning to die with wisdom and meaning. Wisdom is not as concerned with a particular kind of thought as a wisdom about thinking. An analysis of what it means to think is an inquiry into the nature of the ultimate ground of thought.
Ancient Egypt and its cosmology is part of our shared collective mythology. Our family tree is rooted in narrative and history which traces back to ancient Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Biblical traditions, spanning continents and regional conflicts. The gods are still here even if the path to worship is blocked to all but the poetic spirit that allows us to move from outer to inner worlds. As poets, we conserve and witness nature and our own nature.
We study the psychological and metaphysical meanings of the mythologies that anchor our longest lines of lineage. It is possible to 'relate' to such content. It includes mental activities, spiritual dimensions, methods, attitudes, practices, or even behavioral and ritual patterns that give us image and form. M.-L. von Franz suggests an imaginal approach: "the conscious self allows unconscious content to enter the field of consciousness as a fantasy, as objectively as possible, and so it faces them as before an independent interlocutor."
What Is-Is
One of the best documented connections to Isis are the traditional lines of royal descent. Often royal descent is claimed through a female line. Branches can be found from the ancient King Lists to many modern families. We want to connect with the goddess Isis, to be related in deeply meaningful and tangible ways -- to rise with her on the Phoenix wings. We find her in our own family by reversing our lines of descent as we ascend the Tree.
We all want to know at some level Who Am I? If you have royal medieval lines, you are likely to have traceable ancient ones, including Egyptian. Naturally, such deities will never show up in any DNA test, but that doesn't mean they cannot inform our entire descent through their spirit and our embodiment -- our puzzle of flesh. Genealogy isn't two-dimensional but has hundreds of interconnected dimensions.
DNA science reveals that our biased ideas about race and heredity are antiquated superstitions rather than genetic reality. If we do the ancestral math, we are all cousins, closer than we ever imagined. 80 percent of all marriages in history have been between second cousins or closer. Some geneticists believe we're all at least 50th cousins to everyone else.
"But when we get to 40 generations ago, in the time of Charlemagne, we arrive at a trillion ancestors and that is a problem because we now have more ancestors than there were people. Thus one can deduce that a lot of those ancestors must be the same person."
(Peter Ralph) Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2013-08-dna-earth.html#jCp
Soul work resurrects the lost or dormant gods at our ancestral roots. No one is left out. The mathematical study of genealogy indicates that everyone in the world is descended from super-ancestors. Nefertiti, Genghis Khan, and Confucius, and everyone of European ancestry is descended from Muhammad and Charlemagne. "Scientific Adam" lived only 60,000 years ago and passed his Y chromosome to every man alive.
At this level we can presume anyone who shares a sense of kinship with Isis or other founder divinities has one and can foster a bond of love, like any extended family. We need her to quicken our dead earth, our dead ancestors. Her myths are central and cosmological. Because archetypes are universal, even without a known genetic link we can be called by certain divinities.
We remain primordially connected whether we are orphans, in vitro, illegitimate, adopted, indigenous, or unrelated ethnicities, etc. We feel them in our flesh and bones, and it is not to be denied, as a call to belonging, worship, practice, or service.
The Hidden God
Gods are difficult to destroy or conceal, though materialist genealogists want to sequester them from the historical parts of the World Tree. We can't understand the genealogical process by stopping it or cutting it short. Fantasy-thinking and imagination cannot be institutionally or personally shut out. Even an illusion of control and order is just an ego-based 'control-fantasy.'
They want to cut the lines, cutoff and cut out the gods -- to isolate them within the ancestral field. The effect of such fragmentation is an attempted dismemberment and de-spiritualizing of what has always been a deeply meaningful engagement with one's primal source. Most of our so-called thinking is unconscious like our deep ancestral past. The dead void disappears once you connect with the fertile void of the dynamic ground, the formless state of pure potential.
Self is an emergent property of everything. Human permeability to visionary, ideational, auditory, symptomatic, and personified incursions is a psychic fact, the essential nature of the human mind. Anyone called to the long Journey naturally awakens deep structures in the psyche. Marie-Louise von Franz notices that, "whenever consciousness produces something, even two words, there are always four, because the unconscious is always present."
Unconscious memory is flashback, regression, or useless nostalgia. Conscious remembering with intention and integration is healing and leads to wholeness. Remembering makes the connection between heaven and earth. Vision with conscious integration is is a creative expression of inspiration, of spirit, of creative expression made real. Unconscious vision is fantasy and distraction.
When we have a vision, we have to integrate and actively realize it, to make it part of our own self history. It's not enough to just have a fantasy of doing it. We have to do something with it using spiritual intelligence for guidance. Knowledge and memory are not just remembrance but recollection. This is re-membering, re-connecting. Rather than striving in vain to cut the ties to our origins, we need to progressively integrate them.
Cutting the gods and goddesses up and cutting them off, like some metaphor of Osiris, attempts to reduce them to scattered bits of legendary detritus. It seems these rationalist genealogists have lost the feeling of the rooted sensation of a living spiritual parentage. They would banish the irrational. But consciousness of the individual life and fate as well as of the deity is the transformative idea, according to Carl Jung.
We contend that the "best practice" of genealogy must include legendary, mythic, and divine predecessors in order to serve psyche or soul. They are an intrinsic part of our regeneration and rebirth Mysteries. We imagine visions of great streams of writhing bodies that have perpetuated the archetype of Life itself. They help us perceive things as they really are throughout ordinary and deep time back to Zep Tepi. Just a whisper from Isis across Aeons allows us to flow into that space. Love brings an explosion of emotion.
Traditional genealogy is an archetypal activity, recapitulating and extending humanity's oldest activities, including the imaginal root. When we begin our journey back into the unknown we only know what, not who, we are. Genealogical work stimulates our dreams to plunge us into the depths of millennia. We learn about other cultures from the inside out. And they look different from inside than outside one's family.
The aesthetic response is an ethical response -- a response of the heart -- that values the ancestors and the genealogical history. Genealogy amplifies and tunes our ancestral channels, showing us historical events of our own grandfathers and grandmothers. It gives equal representation to the patriarchal and matriarchal views. It is the Feminine that introduces new currents of wisdom and life into patriarchal lines. And Isis is our common mother, whether we can trace our specific descent, or not.
Transgenerational Integration
I have used this transgenerational technique in combination with integrative therapies, magick, and Hermetic practices for healing and gnosis. Gnosis is a Mystery because its revealed truth can only emerge from direct experience. Therefore, it remains a secret that cannot be told, because it is numinous -- a naked encounter with the divine.
An integral or inclusive approach roots us in both past and present. It is a common model for real life and consciousness that fosters transgenerational bonds, transformation, and integration. Both Transgenerational Integration (TI) and genealogy are full of rich themes to explore. Intergenerational connections are mostly unconscious; the term 'transgenerational' evokes awareness, healing, and therapeutics. The family lines become paths to self-knowledge and wisdom as well as creative ways of tending the ancestors.
There are several branches in my family tree connecting with various pantheons. At least four of my branches descend directly from Isis through various paths, countries, and ethnicities. Thus, my own genealogy shows how the Egyptian goddess spread through royal houses to the Middle East, ancient Greece and Italy, Iberia, and the British Isles. There was even a Temple of Isis in Roman London. The Isis bloodline was the source of pharaonic and Graeco-Roman legitimacy as 'divine' hereditary rulers.
The Path of Souls
When we recognize the Great and Terrible Mother Isis as our common ancestor we also recognize our multi-ethnic roots. There are undoubtedly more lines than I have found in my descents. Most of them, like the line where Isis is my 99th Great-Grandmother place her about 100 generations ago. Divine kings were descendants of gods. My offspring of Isis include:
1. One line proceeds through Horus to the Scorpion King, Narmer, and Semiramis to Nimrod, and a "Pure Arab Descent" into Moorish and Spanish royalty, where the World Tree gives way to individual family descents.
2. Another line leads again from Horus to the Scorpion King and Narmer, but after Semiramis it migrates to the Kings of Argos and Mycenae through Hercules to King Phillip of Macedonia...to the Ptolomies...and Julian Romans.
3. Yet a different line follows the same immediate descent, including Snofru, Kheops and Pepi, but wends down to the Egyptian Priest Prince Ankhfn-Khonsu, a priest of the Egyptian god Mentu of Thebes (25th-26th dynasty; c. 725 BCE), a prominent character in Thelema for the Stele of Revealing.
4. The Gaelic version has the classic descent and continues through all the pharaohs of Egypt down to the Eighteenth dynasty royal daughter Princess Meritaten. Evans believes that Scota was Meritaten, oldest daughter of Akhenaten and Nefertiti. She is also known as the legendary Queen Scota, who ruled the domains of ancient Ireland and Dalriada. There is new archaeological evidence of ancient Egyptians in Ireland.
Nothing highlights our own hidden or unconscious genetic diversity better than our descent from antiquity. DNA tests can show where we come from but not who we come from. It shows the oneness in diversity that ultimately is rooted in our symbolic descent from the gods. The tree of life or World Tree is a meta-symbol.
Not everyone will be able to find royal lines. Even those who do have them have mostly unrecorded ancestors who were 'ordinary people', who are every bit as important in our make-up. The royal lines are just the ones that were best preserved. But if you find such lines you can determine the alleged path of your genetics through history back to ancient eras. Historical records do at least exist for royal and noble families.
The downside of inbred "noble blood" in Europe's royal houses was false beliefs and insane, pain-wracked monarchs plagued by seizures, delusions, and violent outbursts, and finally impotence. Even the average pharaoh only ruled 10 years. As for the gods, family betrayal was always possible.
Dismembering Osiris?
Modern genealogists want to cut off the traditional mythic roots of genealogy. But I contend retaining them upholds the tradition, even if we don't take it literally, in our dayworld sense. How can we simply lop off our roots? We know that the life we don't live -- unlived life, could have been life -- accumulates in the unconscious personal shadow hidden in our psyches. Isis can be a part of that unclaimed potential. As she resurrected Osiris, we can resurrect her in our lives.
We can reclaim the energy of the lost self, this parallel life, by intentionally reconnecting. By midlife, whatever has been unlived calls to be integrated. What has been denied must be recognized and its silent voice heard. There is psychic value in maintaining this acknowledged link to our psychophysical origins -- to the lifeforce itself. This is the natural history of our soul.
All knowledge has gaps, and our self-knowledge is no exception. Climbing our family tree helps us fill in some of those gaps with myth, symbol, history, and immediate experiences of the power of presence and healing transformation. An occurrence can appear and be understood as a material event or a psychological experience, depending on the attitude, faith, and worldview of the observer.
We can take a liminal stance and engage in imaginal conversations with our ancestors. Psychology is a 'study of the soul,' so a psychological approach to our family tree means working that tree with a focus toward its effect on our soul, and honoring the 'transgenerational laws' that have been neglected in modern culture. The object of the psychological approach is the inside subject engaged with psyche.
To be engaged with the psyche, inevitably means to be engaged with the ancestors:
"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.)
This is a depth psychological approach to Ancestry -- mythic, symbolic and metaphorical, not metaphysical, religious, or literal. Our genealogy is that Tree and cosmic center that keeps us connected and balanced. We can ascend and descend the World Tree in a way that keeps deep time, the transcendent, and our family of flesh alive within us. Genetic testing is revealing suppressed identity formerly hidden in the shadows, though unlived life and unrealized dreams remain an inescapable presence.
Infinite Regress
A post-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 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. The serpents of our family lines are entwined like Celtic 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 [s]he is not conscious. Its character changes according to peoples and lands, since it is the mystery that flows to him [or her] 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 oral history.
On the global-level, spiritual experiences have been shown to buffer against the negative effects of stress on well-being for older adults. Spiritual experience potentially moderates the deleterious impact of a given day’s perceived stress on that day’s positive and negative affect. Thus, it relates to self-care, well being, and healing. Sometimes physical pain is a substitute for psychic pain. Healing is not always physical: it can occur in the emotional, mental and spiritual life, moderating immunity and neurochemistry.
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. We see in many manuscripts that wings are used to mark progress or advancement of an alchemical solution toward perfection.
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.
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. Lists of god-kings describe the natural order of things rooted in mythic and 'divine' ancestors. The only way to revision and interact with this 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.
"You could study the ancestors, but without a deep feeling of communication with them it would be surface learning and surface talking. Once you have gone into yourself and have learned very deeply, appreciate it, and relate to it very well, everything will come very easily." (Ellen White, Nanaimo)
Psyche creates reality every day. 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, including Isis.
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.
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.
Genealogy is the science and art of what is emerging into the collective consciousness in one of the biggest hobbies of our era. It is a vast reclamation and reconstruction of our holographic connections, and certain emotionally toned experiences and images inherited from our ancestors, our spiritual guides. We translate meaning into life.
The entire gestalt of the World Tree is an iconic image -- a multidimensional symbol requiring hermeneutics as much as history for best practice. Genealogy has the problem of only focusing on the ancestors with surviving records, not all your ancestors. Of course, all the expansive aspects of the ancestors leave their shadow traces. With the light comes darkness. Ancestral blessings are not unaccompanied by ancestral curses.
The shadow is transmitted in a million subtle gestures and intonations. As you become aware of them in yourself, you can look back over your shoulder at your ancestors and see where these patterns came from. The family shadow is not the sole answer, but it's a place to do some work. It's a realm that is within our means to influence. When we stop passing the shadow on to the next generation, we spare them and break the chain. They don't pass it on either.
Genealogy is the narrative of a pre-modern world. It has traditional roots in the ancient theogeny of gods and goddesses, divine-king lists and The Bible. 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. The medieval period filled the gap with tales of the Holy Grail. The pagan content of mythology was codified in the mid-fourteenth century in Boccassio's Genealogy. Later, the Carolingians used such works to justify their right to rule, also citing the spurious Donation of Constantine, which the Church used to justify the appointment of rulers.
Traditional genealogy considered these mythological inclusions best-practice, yet it may be more of a psychic than historical "fact" -- the product of a collision between pagan and Christian societies and their reconciliation. Historical time required a linear descent, even if it masked pagan roots at the theological fringe. Our ancient genealogies still retain certain psychic values that are part of the archaeology of the collective unconscious.
We seek, not only ancestors, but signs, symbols, and symbolic meaning -- our origin in the One foundation of being -- with an eye to restoring sacred harmony and transformative connection to Cosmos, an indissoluble unity of potentiality and act, darkness and light. Systems of archetypal symbolism come from the mysteries of death, transformation, and spiritual rebirth, and related cosmogonical theories.
Many of these ideas had their roots in Egyptian philosophy. Philosophy is a rite of rebirth, the very essence of which is participation in divine reality and, therefore, its activities are primarily those of inner vision rather than mere logic. The Tree of Life is a logically coherent meta-structure of metaphysical knowledge -- its own body of wisdom.
REFERENCES
Boccaccio, Giovanni, trans. Jon Solomon, (2011) Genealogy of the Pagan Gods, Harvard Univ. Press, 2011.
Guillard, Thierry, (2016) Shamanism, Ancestors, and Transgenerational Integration, Ecodition
Hillman, James, (1985), “Extending the Family: From Entrapment to Embrace”, The Texas Humanist 7/4, 1985, p. 6-11.
Miller, Iona, "Ancestors & Archetypes", http://ancestorsandarchetypes.weebly.com/
Miller, Iona, "Jungian Genealogy", http://jungiangenealogy.weebly.com/
