Working With Ancestors?

[kaleidoscope.woman]

Do you honor your ancestors? In what ways? What experiences have you had with them? I have so many questions...

Okay, first off, I come from a very small and broken family. I am an only child, and I have very few extended relatives that I'm on speaking terms with (not of my own doing; but that's a story for another time). My entire life I have longed so deeply for a sense of belonging heritage-wise. I've been a passionate user of Ancestry.com... I've attributed this to my very small family, lack of any familial tradition and the brokenness of my extended relatives. I've always wanted to feel like I knew where I came from, and what kind of people my ancestors were. I'll bet this a common concern among many people... but for me it can truly feel like a gaping void sometimes.

I've recently felt a powerful urge to honor my ancestors with a daily candle-lighting ritual. It feels very good to do that. I would love to know more about how anyone else has deepened their relationship with their ancestors.

[Dynes Hysbys]

I've recently felt a powerful urge to honor my ancestors with a daily candle-lighting ritual. It feels very good to do that. I would love to know more about how anyone else has deepened their relationship with their ancestors.

Ancestral work is a big part of my practice but I deliberately don't work with known passed relatives. I offer food and water regularly and invoke their assistance. They are invited to attend most of the work I do and often show up fairly spontaneously. There is one individual in particular who acts as a conduit to the ancestral hordes for me.

[kaleidoscope.woman]

Ancestral work is a big part of my practice but I deliberately don't work with known passed relatives. I offer food and water regularly and invoke their assistance. They are invited to attend most of the work I do and often show up fairly spontaneously. There is one individual in particular who acts as a conduit to the ancestral hordes for me.

That is what I'm very interested in! Communicating with ancestors that aren't known passed relatives. If you don't mind me asking, how do you address those ancestors?

[Jenett]

Do you honor your ancestors? In what ways? What experiences have you had with them? I have so many questions...

First, I'd encourage you to check out some past threads (not because you won't also get some good comments here, but because I know there have been some great comments on the topic in the past, too - you can started with the related threads at the bottom of the page, and also search.)

My tradition of religious witchcraft invites ancestors/includes them in all rituals as part of our standard practice (the way we invite/include deity), so we talk a lot about different kinds of connections.

1) Kin: the people we're actually related to, whether we knew them directly or not. (Three of my four grandparents died before I was born, but they're still relevant to me, etc.)

2) Kith: Friends. Chosen family. People where there's some other kind of connection.

3) Kind: People we're connected to in other ways - shared interests, backgrounds, etc.

Thinking about it these ways helps broaden out the options (and, I've found, often gives you new directions for some of the stuff where you might get stuck on kinship ancestor relationships.)

Another useful term is 'beloved dead' which is basically 'people who are part of our communities but no longer living' - can be blood kin, can be friends, can be people who shaped communities you're part of now, etc.)

What does this mean for my practice?

I honour someone as an ancestor of profession (Hypatia of Alexandria, who is popularly and inaccurately considered to be the last librarian at the Great Library, but who was accurately an awesome researcher, teacher, and sharer of information.) She has space on my usual routine shrine, plus I sometimes do some other specific things, depending.

Ancestors in ritual: When I do formal ritual, I invite ancestors appropriate to the ritual. For group rituals, this was often general and relevant to the ritual (we are doing a harvest ritual, so farmer of old. We are doing a thing around teaching, so teachers, we are doing big magical things, so witches and workers of magic.) For personal rituals, it's more likely to be specific people from among my beloved dead.

Periodically I've done more involved work around specific issues or goals or whatever - basically, consulting ancestors with specific experiences or expertise. That's relatively rare, though.

Ancestor altar: I don't always have one up (right now, the stuff that would be on one is scattered in my apartment) but this is a common thing people do: items related to or from their beloved dead (including things like pets) on a space where they can be remembered and honoured as part of regular practice. Photos, books, objects, etc. can all work.

If you want a space to do offerings/etc. this is a good place for it. (Though you want to think through kinds of offerings, potential damage to irreplaceable items, etc. Incense is lovely, but can be damaging over time, ditto heat from a candle flame, etc.)

[Altair]

Ancestral work is a big part of my practice but I deliberately don't work with known passed relatives.

I, on the other hand, have fallen into a practice of finding my known passed relatives in different aspects of nature.

It started when my grandmother died, with whom I was very close; I still place mental "phone calls" to her like the real ones I made when she was alive, and since I'm almost always outdoors when I do this, I tend to read her reactions to our mental conversation in the wind--which makes perfect sense, because my grandmother was one of a kind, a force of nature.

When my mom died a year ago, I "invested" my thoughts of her in the butterflies that come to my garden, because she was beautiful but fragile, and she couldn't tolerate winter in the slightest. (And only now writing this, I realize it fits with my grandma, her mother, who helped keep her aloft as the wind does for a butterfly.)

My dad is still with us, but he's getting on, and I already know once he's gone he'll be in every red-tailed hawk I see. (He said flat-out if he ever came back as anything, it would be as a hawk to soar...since he flew glider planes until he got too old to manage it anymore. And as an African American with an obsession with flying and pilots, he has an affinity for the famous Red-tail squadron of black fighter pilots in WWII.)

I didn't plan this, and I don't know if nature will eventually get too crowded with my departed family, but right now it works for me.

In a more formal way, in some of my meditations, I connect with my ancestors both known, unknown, and related by affinity rather than blood--the same as Jenett's well-put "kin, kith, and kind". It's become part of my extended version of calling the quarters, and I find it tremendously valuable.

[Ashmire]

I've recently felt a powerful urge to honor my ancestors with a daily candle-lighting ritual. It feels very good to do that. I would love to know more about how anyone else has deepened their relationship with their ancestors.

I have been working (very slowly, because I also have to do some smaller projects to teach myself the skills I need) on a replica of the Oseberg chair, which I intend to add as close as I can come to the original art that was lost from it, as well as to make it entirely with hand tools and real hardwood.  That honors not only my heavily Scandinavian ancestry, but also the many hardworking common craftspeople (as well as frontier folk who built things just because there was no one else around to do it for them) I know I am descended from.   

Recently I had a sense of a minor epiphany when watching the advanced students at a martial arts class I have recently joined, that I want to get up to the higher levels and learn proper staff fighting skills in honor of another ancestor I have heard of, who, when out for his morning walk at the age of 90, was attacked by a neighbor's longhorn bull.  He successfully killed the bull with only his walking stick.  Apparently it was a thing for older people in Appalachia at that time to carry what the SCA would call a quarterstaff in lieu of a cane, and evidently to know how to use it.

[JupiterSkies]

I've recently felt a powerful urge to honor my ancestors with a daily candle-lighting ritual. It feels very good to do that. I would love to know more about how anyone else has deepened their relationship with their ancestors.

I've been working on cleaning up my grandmother's autobiography for the family.  I'm named after her and we were close, but it's also surprisingly drawing me closer to the energy of my grandfather, who passed when I was about seven, but never got a chance to really know because by the time I have memories of him, he was already pretty deep into Alzheimer's. He kind of, for lack of a better term, freaked me out, but I've got a better understanding of him, the good and bad, through Granny's recollections.

I am the youngest grandkid on that side of the family, so my mom asked Granny if she'd write down the story of her life in lieu of the fact that I was never going to get summers on the family farm with her as a teenager, both due to distance and her age.  I thought it'd be a nice project for the family to tidy up what she wrote, add in a few extra letters and poems she had written, and a few comments from her classmates in her junior year autograph book where they encourage her to go on to become a great writer from the class of 1937 yet.  Granny dropped out of high school after junior year because she was married and already pregnant, and if she ever wrote any books, I don't know where they are. 

Anyways, I've gone through and cleaned up the tenses to make it more readable, and had to reorganize some of the middle chapters when the kids come along.  She jumped around with stories, leading to confusion as she had different amounts of kids every paragraph there for a while.  It's all in the best chronological order I can get it in now, so it reads much more clearly.

I have the final proof, and am working my way through edits.  Having read it over a million times by now, the proofread is going slowly, but I hope to have things good by April when I go see my mom. I'm going to grab a whole bunch of copies and bring them down for her to get out to the rest of the family.

Probably a very specific example of ancestor work here, but considering I write, finding that autograph book in particular, with those comments in there... Granny never let on she wanted to write seriously.  She spent her writing energy in thousands of letters, her fantastic handwriting which won her state recognition in 8th grade.  It just all clicked as an excellent way to honor her memory and feel her energies.  She was such a good storyteller, both in writing and orally, and I see all my writing as a way to honor and feel closer to her.

[Louisvillian]

Ancestral work is a big part of my practice but I deliberately don't work with known passed relatives.

I am mostly the same way; the ones I do honor specifically are my grandparents, who are interred in a cemetery just down the street. But it's usually on specific days-- the Parentalia, All Hallow's, their birth or death days, etc. On most days or on the three key monthly dates (kalends, nones, ides), I make offerings to the ancestors in a general sense, usually as a first step to honoring the gods of my ancient forebears.

It's difficult sometimes because while my grandpa was an excellent grandfather, he apparently was a terrible and abusive father and husband. It's hard to reconcile what someone was with who you knew them to be; but in the end, it's what they meant to you that matters.

[Jainarayan]

Do you honor your ancestors? In what ways? What experiences have you had with them? I have so many questions...

...

 I would love to know more about how anyone else has deepened their relationship with their ancestors.

I'm not big into ancestor worship. I tried when I practiced Heathenry. I had a rocky relationship with my parents, didn't really know my grandparents, and only know a few details of my great-grandparents. I am interested in my deep ancestry, however. I had a DNA test done to find out genetically where I am from. I was surprised, and not surprised. Not surprised in that it confirmed some things I suspected (not distressing, but interesting), surprised in the degree of the confirmation. My parents, grandparents and great-grandparents were born in the mid-late 1800s and early 1900s. They were worlds away from the world I live in. I don't think they could possibly comprehend that one of their descendants is a gay male who abandoned Roman Catholicism for Hinduism. If they weren't dead already, it would probably kill them. I have a feeling I would be disowned. So no, no point in dealing with my ancestors.