The Ancestors Part 1: Who Are The Ancestors?

The Ancestors are a category of spirits that many people are confused on, or in some cases, feel are entirely unapproachable. There are many debates and arguments about the ancestors online, and even in person. Who, or what are they? How to do I engage with them? Why should I even do this? And many more questions circle around the topic. My goal with this little series is to demystify, clarify and hopefully open the ways for ancestor practices to come through for others.

To start, we need to define who and what we are talking about when we invoke The Ancestors. The answer to this may seem a little obvious, but there are layers to it.

First and foremost are, of course, the named ancestors, the people who we have record of having lived and died in this world. We can refer to them as individual ancestors, as people who we can directly call upon by name. Your great great grandfather João, your great aunt Lizzy. However, these are not always the ancestors discussed when we talk about The Ancestors.

Rather, the collective ancestors are usually being referred to. This is a category of great expanse, and includes more than just the dead who came before you on a family tree. This great collective is comprised of blood kin, family friends and other loved ones, pets and animals that aided your family, saints deities and heroes who were your families' patrons, various spirit guides and other helping spirits, and many more. This grand collective of spirits is invoked often when calling upon The Ancestors, and they may not always act as individuals.

There are some who will come forward and self-identify to serve a purpose towards you. They can be someone who comes forward to speak for the collective, as someone who wants to get closer to you to elevate and help you in this life, an ancestor who needs help to join the rest, and so on. Other times, individuals come forward to serve a particular need you have, and may leave after that need is gone.

This grand collective, and the individuals who make it up, are a powerful force in everyone's life because of how close they are to each of us. Everyone has ancestors. Anyone can all upon their ancestors to do anything. Someone somewhere down the ancestral line has dealt with, overcome and understood the same or similar struggles we have today. The ones that retain human identity understand us deeply, and those who are not so much human understand our other ancestors' needs, and now ours.

Next comes the question I'm sure is on many people's minds: What if I don't like my ancestors/What if my ancestors did terrible things? The hard answer is everyone has these. No one has a perfect, all good-doing, unbroken line of saintly ancestors. Everyone has bad ancestors, and everyone has family burdens. The truth of the matter is you can choose roads to go down: Just don't talk to racist uncle Louis, and go to ancestors older than him, or work to undo the harm those ancestors have done, and in turn bring them necessary elevation so they can move on. When we heal the ancestors, we heal ourselves.

It's not easy in any way shape or form to approach every ancestor with compassion. If you don't want to there is no one who can make you. However, I truly believe that by ignoring, repressing, and bypassing the work of undoing harm, that harm perpetuates. The Ancestors are a part of us, and we are a part of them. None of us are apart from each other. Little things from everyone passes down the line, and we learn to embrace and elevate the good qualities, and transform and remove the bad ones. This doesn't mean ignore what they did, this means pay attention to it, confront it, and undo it.

On the other side of this, you can simply engage with the elevated ancestors, the ones who have achieved a certain state of what one could call enlightenment, and have returned through your family line to aid you now.

I spoke briefly on non-human ancestors and want to quickly elaborate on that before discussing non-blood kin ancestors.

There are many spirits that walk with our ancestors and us, and many of them have been with us for a very long time. Many spirits take on new guises, gods become saints, ancestors become spirit guides, past pets come back as familiars or other aiding spirits, and all of these intermix. Some ancestors will come back as saints too, for example. There's a few ways to find out about this, first and foremost being simply engaging with The Ancestors. Second, ask family members about which saints or other elevated spirits they have honored for a long time. There may be many, there may be a few. You might already know this if you grew up in a particularly religious household. They might not have an answer, in which case you can research or ask The Ancestors yourself. Sometimes a spirit will be very clearly around, and when you speak to them you find out they're related to your ancestors in one way or another. Sometimes, after long periods of engagement, you discover a deity you worship was worshiped long ago by some of your kin. This can take time to discern, there's no rush with this.

Pay attention to dreams, especially dreams with symbols your ancestors would've known. This could be anything like deeply ingrained cultural symbols, or time period related objects like tools and clothing. When The Ancestors send a dream, it may reveal more of the various spirits that surround them.

There are many people in our lives who we love that aren't our family. Friends and partners are greatly important in forming who we are and who we will be. When we are younger, additional caretakers such as babysitters, family friends, neighbors and so on likely had an impact on us. Sometimes these people when they pass stay around us. I've found that close and dear friends do this often. The same is true for those who came before us and their friends. Sometimes those people will come forward, and not just our relatives. If your grandmother had a best friend who she was inseparable from since childhood, they both might come together.

Further, the families we are born into may not be the families we choose. Found family, chosen family, and adoption into family, either literally, through your friend's families, or through marriage provide ample access to ancestors. We ourselves can choose to adopt in ancestors, especially ancestors of practice, trade and craft.

Many people feel a sort of kinship with their icons and heroes of their life passions, such as various novelists for writers, classic drag artists for modern performers, and of course witches of old for the witches of new. This kinship, in my opinion, both draws in the person to our ancestral current, but also can be used to create that bridge.

The next blog post will go more in-depth on how to bring these ancestors in, as well as how to engage with those that are already present.

The Ancestors will always be around you, noticed or not. They're in the foods you make, the songs you listen to, the way you walk, the way you talk, how you see and think about the world, they are your blood, your bones, your dreams, your fears, the love you feel, the hate you harbor, they are beauty, they are terror, they are war and they are peace.

I've had an understanding of The Ancestors being part of everyone's life since a young age. We often say "Learn from history" or hold concepts such as "Sins of the Father" and other inherited benefits and curses. The farther we run from our ancestors, the farther we run from ourselves. Love them or hate them, They Are. Just like all people, they are a complex mess of good and bad qualities, that when mixed together are sometimes contradictory, but form the core identity of who and what they are, will be and could be. It is up to us to determine those last two for ourselves.

Not every ancestor is a being of love and joy, who will uplift and elevate us and make life better. Some people have particularly difficult ancestors for a variety reasons. This is why we offer them light and clarity, give them prayers to bring them out of confusion, and feed them with good foods. This is why we talk to them, to remind them that there is more than their selfish desires. We remediate the hardened and even malicious ancestors, even if just to improve our own lives. Making things better for the next generations. This work is particularly important to me, as many familial traumas were passed onto me.

The choice is ultimately up to us with who we engage with, spirit or otherwise. I always leave people with the open choice to engage or disengage, eschew or embrace the ancestors. For many, it is difficult to forgive those who are especially harmful and close to us in time. I will never tell anyone to do this. Forgive yourself first, and allow yourself to heal from the pains that scars in life before trying to heal and forgive those who hurt you.

The voice of The Ancestors speaks in many ways, it is a matter of tuning into them. Letting them come in, hearing them in the small things, and thereby hearing ourselves reflected in them becomes extremely valuable. The next blog post will discuss this more in-depth, and how to grow in connection to them.

I would be remiss to not shamelessly plug my spiritual framework readings, in which I go in and identify the various spirits that surround you, including The Ancestors. I see who they are, how to approach them, and so on. This can be done on its own during a 30 minute or hour long session, or during the full spiritual framework session (1hr+).

Plugging aside, these spirits are hard to ignore as they are in so much of who we are. We live with them, their choices, and the knife-twists of Fate that make us, us. May The Ancestors that walk with you only ever bring you blessed, and easy paths.