Ancestral – Anthology
You live inasmuch as these Mendelian units are living. They have souls, are endowed with psychic life, the psychic life of that ancestor; or you can call it part of an ancestral soul. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 1401.
Thus we remain ignorant of whether our ancestral components find an elementary gratification in our lives, or whether they are repelled. Inner peace and contentment depend in large measure upon whether or not the historical family which is inherent in the individual can be harmonized with the ephemeral conditions of the present. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 237.
This image is fundamentally unconscious, an hereditary factor of primordial origin engraved in the living organic system of the man, an imprint or ‘archetype’ [q.v.] of all the ancestral experiences of the female, a deposit, as it were, of all the impressions ever made by woman . . . Since this image is unconscious, it is always unconsciously projected upon the person of the beloved, and is one of the chief reasons for passionate attraction or aversion.” ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Page 391.
Psychologically this means that the souls of the ancestors (potential factors, qualities, talents, possibilities, and so on, which we have inherited from all the lines of our ancestry) are waiting in the unconscious, and are ready at any time to begin a new growth. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 230.
The ancestral part is given to us by our body, we take over the life of our ancestors in that way. It is the terrace of life because it is here that life renews itself. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 12July1935, Pages 240.
If we became aware of the ancestral lives in us, we might disintegrate. An ancestor might take possession of us and ride us to death. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 139
There is one ego in the conscious and another made up of unconscious ancestral elements, by the force of which a man who has been fairly himself over a period of years suddenly falls under the sway of an ancestor. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, page 38.
In the redemption of the individual, the whole past will be redeemed, and that includes all the inferior things as well, the animals, and all the ancestral souls, everything that has not been completed; all creation will be redeemed in the apokatastasis [at the time of the Last Judgement], there will be a complete restoration of things as they have been. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1280
The deposit of man’s whole ancestral experience—so rich in emotional imagery—of father, mother, child, husband and wife, of the magic personality, of dangers to body and soul, has exalted this group of archetypes into the supreme regulating principles of religious and even of political life, in unconscious recognition of their tremendous psychic power. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 337
These constituents of the personality—which one may call functions, or Mendelian units, or the primitives would call them remnants of ancestral souls—these constituents don’t always fit. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis, Page 453
Carl Jung on the Ancestral Elements of our Soul
“Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements which were all already present in the ranks of our ancestors.
The “newness” in the individual psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components.
Body and soul therefore have an intensely historical character and find no proper place in what is new, in things that have just come into being.
That is to say, our ancestral components are only partly at home in such things.
We are very far from having finished completely with the Middle Ages, classical antiquity, and primitivity, as our modern psyches pretend.
Nevertheless, we have plunged down a cataract of progress which sweeps us on into the future with ever wilder violence the farther it takes us from our roots.
Once the past has been breached, it is usually annihilated, and there is no stopping the forward motion.
But it is precisely the loss of connection with the past, our uprootedness, which has given rise to the “discontents” of civilization and to such a flurry and haste that we live more in the future and its chimerical promises of a golden age than in the present, with which our whole evolutionary background has not yet caught up. We rush impetuously into novelty, driven by a mounting sense of insufficiency, dissatisfaction, and restlessness.” ~Carl G. Jung – Memories, Dreams, Reflections
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