Articles #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.