Substack of the Dead: Can I Honor my Ancestors even When They Weren't Honorable? Part I
My story of family frustrations that extended beyond the grave
I recommend ancestor work a lot these days. Have an ancestral curse? You need to talk to your ancestors about how it happened. Do you need some backup and don't feel a pull to a particular pantheon? Ancestors. Need to address someone with whom you have a blood tie who has used baneful magick on you? Ask great-grandma. She'll know how to unknot you.
The idea of connecting with our forebears wasn't unknown when I first came into witchcraft just before the first Craft Movie came out. However, that connection was usually not framed as direct ancestry: most people thought the Craft was Celtic, so the Celtic view was adopted. Other times, people felt a call to another practice - Norse, Voudon, Santeria, most commonly in my circles - and while it usually aligned with the person's heritage, sometimes it just didn't. Often, the person called to the "I don't look like these people" practice was just as puzzled as the people they didn't look like who handled the initiations. Much of the time, they eventually found out about a hidden ancestor, complete with a story about passing. It was there in the blood, just not visible on the face.
Around 2003, ancestor veneration started entering mainstream US American Paganism. If I dug in, it probably related to something one of the Druid orders had implemented that their Wiccan spouses picked up on. Perhaps the Druids picked up the practice from exposure to Shintoism or their cultural crossovers with Hoodoo and Conjure.
I had remained skeptical of the practice and disinclined to engage. While my ancestors are collectively pretty badass and inclined towards anti-oppression - revolutionaries, freedom fighters, teachers, engineers, spiritual leaders - when it comes down to the way they treated their loved ones, they sucked. Given the current life damage, I am going to spend the rest of my life healing (some stuff doesn't stop until you're dead, sorry). I was disinclined to invite the source of the harm I had already been handed.
Looking back, rejecting my ancestors at all was pretty clearly a trauma signal. It takes around 4000 people to make one living person. (4000 is roughly the number before pedigree collapse sets in.) If I'd gotten through my cloud of hurt and resentment, I would have recognized that statistically, they couldn't all be a—-s.
My view of my paternal ancestors softened when I moved to San Francisco. The Holocaust and the Warsaw Uprising survival are big mitigating factors. Once or twice, I experienced ancestors intervening on my behalf, and they identified themselves clearly when they did. I even noticed that ancestral resonance feels wildly different from how ghosts vibrate. It's still cold, but you feel every one of the 4000 people who made that ancestor standing in front of you, and every one of the 4000 people who made YOU.
My brain can barely handle a hockey stadium with one person on either side of me. There's no way I can easily handle the 4000+. But before I get there, I must get past the ancestors that could be better remembered.
In 2017 and 2018, I veered into a total personal crisis. I wouldn't call it a shadow death, but there were days I did feel as though I were fighting off a spiritual assassination.
I was shaken awake at night over and over just as I started to drift off, I was walking out to my kitchen to get a drink of water and finding a bain sidhe chained to my counter, and at one point, some asshole had opened up a portal directly underneath my bedroom. A fog kept cropping up in my bedroom as soon as the sun set, one that even my agnostic non-psychic wife could see. To her credit, she usually shrugged it off, along with many of the somewhat physics-defying things that can happen when someone lives with someone like me.
For those raising eyebrows, there's a reason my book Hex Twisting exists.
I had paranormal and physical pains while trying to write a book and find some semblance of groundedness. Most of the time, it wasn't working. I felt as though all my support had failed me, and the various deities and spirits I had cultivated at that time might help me temporarily, but then the tide would turn, and protection failed. While I know exactly what was happening now, at the time, I didn't understand the cause of the things working against me, let alone why they were happening simultaneously. I was dealing with more paranormal issues in a single week than professional ghost hunters, and demonologists deal with in a lifetime.
I could pick one problem at a time, try to solve it, and hope that tackling situations individually would eventually lead to peace. It did not; the problems were stacked, so removing one allowed a new problem to fall in. Despite my best efforts, it was a considerable pile when I got to Michigan.
One day, I decided to address the fog. I had some friends in the Emperor Norton Pagan social that I ran who also attended mediumship and channeling sessions at the Unity Church in the Castro. I had helped her with an inappropriate priest at a local Diocese; she was happy to help me with one intransigent haunting type of spirit unknown.
She picked up on the fog right away. It wasn't Karl, the San Francisco fog. It was something associated with Great Britain. The conversation emerged: I had an English ancestor who was very angry with me. First, in my past life, I was a Roman soldier who had tromped through her garden and ruined it. Back then, a ruined garden meant starvation for at least two years. Then, I had in this lifetime disavowed my mother's side of the family due to emotional abuse but continued to reconnect with my Polish ancestry. (I am told by Synty that past lives and ancestry often intersect. We can't get empirical data on such things.)
I have a talent for herb growing and herbalism. My love for gardening comes from time spent with my maternal grandfather. Some of my fondest memories are helping him weed the garden, asking him questions about how he defined “weed,” and teaching me the wonders of mint and lavender.
I had attributed my ancestral knowledge of how to apply European-origin herbs to the Slavic shared memory that I did, to some degree, inherited from my father. But my paternal grandmother never showed me a garden, and while my father could get things to grow, it wasn't his passion the way it was his father-in-law’s. Gramps harbored her love and talent and had passed it on to me. She was furious because I was engaging her talent without attribution and fogged up my bedroom every night until she got my attention.
My maternal grandmother intervened, as did her mother, to heal a rift that had formed between us just before she died. The ancestor herbalist laid it out: I was to bring her herbs, bundled with pink and yellow ribbons, to make amends.
When I went home that night, there was still fog. I still needed to bring the herbs. The next day, I stopped by a farmer's market and bought the ubiquitous-to-the-Bay sage and a few other fresh herbs. I bundled them in ribbons bought from Daiso (a local Japanese-style dollar store) and placed them on the living room mantle. The fog in my bedroom stopped immediately.
Over time, I began bringing herbs originating in North America as offerings to the ancestors. I explained them and their benefits and drawbacks, and a small sense of connection began to form. Often, she seemed quite pleased to have something to add to her herbarium wherever ancestors keep such things.
That evening, the fog disappeared from my bedroom; my ex was willing to sleep there.
I had wronged my ancestor, and my ancestor allowed me to make repairs.
Here is the spiritual and spirit worker takeaway from the experience of an ancestor haunting:
My ancestors sucking included my behavior in very much this present-day life. I was also at fault, and she had reason to feel deeply hurt and offended. She hadn’t contributed to my trauma! Our past lives are sometimes our ancestors (not always; not everyone is necessarily reincarnated). I likely shortened my haunting by skipping the "it's not fair" and "you don't understand" wails that are a natural response to such situations.
By offering reparation to my ancestor, I wasn't engaging in veneration or worship. I was demonstrating respect and a willingness to make amends.
Discernment is the trickiest and most necessary skill in all spirit work. In this case, I needed to discern the difference between wholesale rejecting my ancestors and a toxic this-life situation where I needed to go no contact with my maternal half of the family. I also needed to add a little bit of reasoning with my trauma: all-or-nothing thinking only begets more problems, and yet it is so part of many trauma responses. There were good people among my maternal ancestors who deserved my attention just as much as the good people on my father's side did.
Ancestral healing is healing you do on yourself. I often joke—but I'm not joking—about how I am closer to my father now that he's dead. I could do my father's ancestral repair for him, which might benefit me. But what seems to be working is for him to make repairs by supporting me. The ancestors supporting me in my healing are part of the healing process, but not all heal themselves.
There are some ancestors you won't want to work with, and some you will.
The black-and-white, all-good-all-bad approach doesn't work when you're trying to address ancestral wounds.
I haven't attended any classes on ancestral work; I started doing it one day. Some experts have a much deeper understanding than I do. As with every other aspect of spirit work and witchcraft I practice, I am merely showing up and having the conversation.
I don't want people to be afraid to start working with their ancestors just because some are not good people - you can choose whom you work with, and yes, you may need to consider their perspectives. Just because someone says something you don't like doesn't automatically mean they're in the wrong, which is true even of those who have gone before. It also doesn't automatically mean they're right, even if their DNA built ours. Discernment is called for in all things.
If you've gotten this far, thank you! I have a part 2 on the whole "but my ancestors were terrible people" conundrum next week. The story includes a Yuma shamanic practitioner, my shamanic and psychiatric diagnosis as a profound empath, and how my Gramps shows up for me in every way he can.
Thanks for hanging out and reading!
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