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

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

What the ancients did for their dead! You seem to believe that you can absolve yourself from the care of the dead, and from the work that they so greatly demand, since what is dead is past. . . . Do you think that the dead do not exist because you have devised the impossibility of immortality? . . . The dead produce effects, that is sufficient.1 —

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.”

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

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

Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements which were already present in the ranks of our ancestors. . . . Body and soul therefore have an intensely historical character. . . .We have plunged down a cataract of progress which sweeps us on into the future with ever wider violence the farther it takes us from our roots . . .

Jung concludes, “are uninformed too, and need man, or contact with consciousness, in order to attain knowledge.”

The psyche might be that existence in which the hereafter or the land of the dead is located.