ISIS
GEN-ISIS
The Goddess in the Roots of Your Family Tree
Iona Miller, July 2017
Prepared for Summer 2017 Issue of Isis-Seshat Journal
https://ionamiller2017.weebly.com/gen-isis.html
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.
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.
