Articles #genealogy

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.

https://ionamiller2017.weebly.com/ares.html We are born into a family which we share with more and more contemporary people as we look further back in time. But when we are gathered to the ancestors are we met by the gods? Shall we move Ares from our archetypal altar to the family shrine? Perhaps some of us can. We know there is power in naming. What is it to name something, to name someone, to name someone an ancestor, or even name a god as direct ancestor? It all comes down to our own name. Genealogy is a heritage-led regeneration. Tracing our lines back from our parents, we move deeper into the realm of the ancestors who gave us the substance of life and soul's self-expression. A sense of soul gives us a sense of history. Our sacred and mythic roots inform our primordial human behavior and the timeless soul-world. They act on us through meaning as well as the world stage. This natural unconscious process doesn't need to be driven by a therapeutic or self-development agenda. In a complex and fragmented world, genealogy helps us revision the present. We look back for a context of meaning using our most personal history of being. We also recognize cultural ancestors, collective ancestors, ancestors of our land, and animal ancestors. We don't carry ancestral DNA from all our direct ancestors. But we remain entangled with them in the ancestral field, consciously, or unconsciously. In real, imaginary, and symbolic ways they are meaningful to our wholeness. We reflect as we find our way back. The inner life exerts its manifest influence. Emotions shape our sense of self and relationships. Ares aggression, might and energy have controlled all of history from behind the scenes. History is written by the competitive winners who then self-describe their glorious descent from the gods, insuring their renown and divine right to rule with genealogical propaganda. It is enforced with constant wars and worldview warfare, a battle for minds. The dragon or serpent guards the treasures of the deep unconscious, the unwritten history of mankind, and its myth-spinning capacity. The serpentine path, which is an image for our descent and return, is a way to find our instinct that has no conflicts, because conflicts belong to the discriminating conscious mind.