Craig Chalquist, MS PhD

To identify myself after the fashion of my ancestors:

My name is Craig (“outcropping of stone”) Steven (“crowned”) Chalquist (“vocation” and “small branch”), of Anglo-Celtic ethnicity. My adoptive father, Curtis, is of Swedish-American lineage, my adoptive mother, Beverly, of German and Scottish ethnicity. Through my birth mother Lorna my maternal ancestors go back to England (and to Mary, Queen of Scots) and Scotland; I am a descendant of Clan Murdoch of Galloway, whose bow-bearing sons helped Robert the Bruce against the English invaders of his time. Through my birth father Ernest I am Irish, Welsh, French, Germanic, and Scandinavian. One of my paternal ancestors, James Pyland, arrived at Virginia Colony and held membership in the House of Burgesses, a post from which he was relieved for disagreeing with his fellows.

On a map the travel route of my ancestors from East Africa into Europe roughly 50,000 years ago resembles a giant question mark. DNA research reveals that I am also directly related to the prehistoric artists who painted the sacred images at Lascaux, France. The two dominant trends of my ethnicity mingled most forcibly in Anglo-Saxon England around the time of Artorius Castus and the departure of the Roman Empire.

I was born in San Diego under a sun and moon in maximum opposition. I have lived in coastal California all my life, usually near or in one of the Mission cities reaching from the border to Sonoma along the King’s Highway. I love to travel, but my home is here. California is part of me, but more importantly, I am part of California.

One of my passions is exploring ongoing transformations—particularly in lore and myth—of the indigenous, land-based sources of my spirituality, especially the Norse, Celtic, Germanic, Greek, Hebrew, Gnostic, alchemical, animistic, and Native Californian. C. G. Jung put it well in what I take to be a core project of depth psychology: “The most we can do is dream the myth onward and give it a modern dress.”