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

“You are a collection of ancestral spirits, and the psychological problem is how to find yourself in a crowd. Somewhere you are also a spirit—somewhere you have the secret of your particular pattern.”

The less we understand of what our fathers and forefathers sought, the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle in the mass, ruled only by what Nietzsche called the spirit of gravity.53

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

“primeval ancestors.”

Fate is more like an intention that is woven into the fabric of our being. Michael

The souls of the dead “know” only what they knew at the moment of death, and nothing beyond that. Hence their endeavor to penetrate into life in order to share in the knowledge of men. I frequently have a feeling that they are standing directly behind us, waiting to hear what answer we will give to them, and what answer to destiny. It seems to me a

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