Jung and the Ancestors: Beyond Biography, Mending the Ancestral Web

The communications of “spirits” are statements about the unconscious psyche, provided that they are really spontaneous and are not cooked up by the conscious mind.35

must be able to talk to the dead, must be able to reconcile them. For the dead are the makers of illnesses, causing all the trouble to the tribe . . . [the medicine man] is supposed to be able to . . . make a compromise with them, to lay them or to integrate them properly. He has to collect these spirits and make them into a whole, integrate them;

By the time Jung writes his autobiography, his observations have led him to conclude that the figures of the unconscious are often indistinguishable from the “spirits of the departed.”

my forefathers, and which had not yet been answered, or as if I had to complete, or perhaps continue, things which previous ages had left unfinished.16

It often seems as if there was an impersonal karma within a family, which is passed on from parents to children. It always seemed to me that I had to answer questions which fate had posed to

Koan, the archetypal pattern an enigma of each soul; it is the puzzling question that one’s life secretly desires to answer.”

The unconscious is a universal aspect of the psyche shared by all of us. It connects us with the origins of our being and intimately binds us together in our families, nations, and with all of creation.

Meade, in his book Fate and Destiny: The Two Agreements of the Soul, writes, “Fate is the inner

The psychogenesis of the spirits of the dead seems to me to be more or less as follows. When a person dies, the feelings and emotions that bound his relatives to him lose their application to reality and sink into the unconscious, where they activate a collective content that has a deleterious effect on consciousness.