One of the recurrent challenges of supporting others in the foundations of ancestor work is that most of us who were raised in the United States or other Western, industrialized nations totally lack a framework for relating with dead. I was not raised with an awareness of my blood ancestors or anything more than a passing awareness of ghosts, and I spent over five years actively involved with diverse European pagan, shamanic, and magical traditions, before greeting my own lineage ancestors. Had my first teachers in shamanic practice not guided me to reach out to my blood lineage ancestors, I could have easily continued to overlook what I now understand to be one core element of earth spirituality and indigenous wisdom.
So what is ancestor work? To begin to hone in on this question, it’s necessary to clarify who are the ancestors. In the broadest sense the ancestors include our pre-human animal kin, unicellular organisms, and the stars. Depending on your worldview and understanding of earlier times, they may also include deities, angels, demigods, giants, bigfeet, and other magical beings or elemental powers from which humans in general or your lineage in particular were formed. For the sake of simplicity and under the working assumption that what is proximal in time has the greatest influence on our lives, I’m mostly focused on our species-level ancestors or, in more mundane terms, the recent human dead.
My Grandma Foor, her sister, and Great Gpa Conner
To further narrow the focus, I’m going to sidestep the topic of past lives and gloss over two other important types of ancestor work, the first being work with ancestors of place. For example, I have lived on the San Francisco Peninsula for nearly a decade and the ancestors of place here are Ohlone-speaking California Indians, early Spanish missionaries and a few Russian traders, Anglo colonizers, and subsequent waves of migrants who, like me, have arrived over the past century and a half of California statehood. The nourishing remains of my recent dead are pushing up daisies elsewhere in places like Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and more distantly in England, Ireland, and Germany. Relating with ancestors of place and ancestors of blood historically often overlapped, and when I stand at the graves of my people, I am in ancestral places of power; however, in these times of modern mobility, relating with ancestors of bone and blood often become distinct and complementary domains of ancestral practice.
Another important type of ancestral engagement for many people involves the beloved dead along one’s spiritual lineage. To cite but a few mainstream examples, Christians may relate with patron saints, Muslims with the silsila or chain of teachers back to Muhammad, Zen Buddhists with a dharma lineage of revered ancestors, and Ifa/Orisha priests in the Americas with a lineage of initiation winding through the United States, Cuba, or Brazil back to Nigeria. In most cases, spiritual lineage ancestors are neither genetic, blood relations nor ancestors of place whose bones reside in the Earth near one’s home and everyday life. In traditional cultures one could easily descend from a family line of healers or priests, all of whom are buried nearby (thereby blending all three domains of ancestral practice); however, more commonly in modern times, the lineage ancestors of one’s spiritual tradition constitute a third domain or flavor of ancestral engagement.
Ancestor (egungun) dancer, Yorubaland, Nigeria
So, when I’m guiding others in ancestor work, most of the time this involves relating with one’s biological ancestors, both those remembered by name and others of the last seven generations as well as older lineage guides who may wish to assist in the ancestral elevation and repair process. Individuals who are adopted seem to carry what is variably a double blessing or curse in the form of significant influence by two family lineages or sets of family karma, and I encourage adoptees to work with both biological and adoptive ancestors, as moved by intuition and necessity. This topic raises a question beyond the scope of this essay regarding how our blood itself can change; however, my experience to date leads me to believe that even in cases of adoption, religious conversion, blood transfusion, weighty initiation into a specific lineage, and otherwise complex ancestral ongoings, that it’s still entirely worthwhile to do a cycle of work with the spirits of one’s recently deceased blood ancestors.
The essence of the process that I facilitate with the family ancestors is to help individuals to first make connection with vibrant, loving ancestral guides (some of whom walked the Earth quite a long time ago) along one’s respective bloodlines and then to partner with those guides for the elevation and healing of those among the recent dead who are in need of support. This process of systematically clearing the lineages of energetic funkiness and assisting any troubled dead in becoming well-off ancestors serves to restore the spiritual roots or energetic integrity of the family system to a level of coherence that would have likely been the norm during historical periods when ancestor reverence and more effective funerals/death rites of passage were commonplace. After completing this repair process, the nature of one’s ancestral engagements can then transition from often unconscious crisis management with the family ghosts to maintenance of conscious relationships with now vibrant and supportive ancestors. If having to do all this seems somewhat unfair and like it should have been taken care of by previous generations, that’s an entirely understandable and also largely unhelpful stance considering that it’s our lives and the lives of our children that are currently at the bottom of the ancestral dog pile.
Lanterns for the dead from Buddhist Obon festival
The negative incentive for doing some kind of repair process with the spirits of your recent biological ancestors is that troubled ghosts can actively or passively be the source of a whole host of ills including addiction, depression, ongoing cycles of abuse, health problems, and premature death. Ghosts in our world are needy or at the very least out of place by nature and they therefore constitute a situation that could benefit from more or less acute attention. We can think of them as the not-yet-ancestors and when I say they need addressed, it’s not an absolute moral judgment, just a commentary on the effects of ghosts (distinct from ancestors) on living humans. Think of them like plutonium; naturally occurring and bad to sleep with. Also, I’m not saying that all of our recent family dead are ghosts; however, I’d estimate that at least third of the recent family ancestors of people I know didn’t quite make it to the ancestral end zone after their death. Now, if you have the good fortune to come from a particularly well-off family, this whole stage of ancestral repairs may go quickly or even be relatively superfluous. If on the other hand, your recent family history has been a slow, inter-generational train wreck then you may find that more than a third of your family dead could use some elevation and love. Even if you as the bastard child of dead dictators and a lineage of hateful women, the situation can entirely transform for the better as the dead are more mutable and receptive to change than the more entrenched among us living humans.
The positive incentive for engaging your recent blood ancestors is that those who are already well (and those who become well in the process) deeply and truly want to you be happy and fulfilled, and they actually have the means to assist in bringing this about. The ancestors can be a source of guidance, wisdom, energetic and emotional support, magical companionship, family healing, personal empowerment, and all other manner of goodness and joy. If you are in the habit of taking care of your family, they can actively assist in this process and relieve some of the burden. If you don’t love feeling the weight of generations of avoiding personal growth issues then having active ancestral support for transforming these patterns can make all the difference. When you or other family members die, having the recent ancestors in good shape makes this transition a lot smoother as there is actually a reception committee on the other side. Also, the ancestors are particularly helpful at reminding us of the gifts and blessings that we have inherited along the bloodlines and the role these gifts play in fulfilling our potential here on Earth. Finally, I’ve found that personally knowing and loving my family ancestors is great medicine for the cultural wound of disconnection from indigenous, tribal culture and is helpful in healing the modern tendency to focus only on the future in dangerous and ungrounded ways.
Megalith tomb from Sligo County, Ireland
Although truly challenging to summarize in just a few pages, hopefully this gives some context on why I emphasize the inclusion of ancestor work in an overall earth-honoring path and why I encourage people to start their ancestor work with a repair process focused on one’s blood ancestors. Despite the challenges of unearthing all the skeletons that previous generations have at times worked so hard to bury (often without even trying), when approached in partnership with the loving ancestral guidance and with a solid grounding in ritual, ancestor work can be basically safe and thoroughly helpful for embodying physical vitality, life purpose, and healthy families.
For more info on weekend ancestor trainings see the calendar of events (link here) or the Ancestor Work section of my website (link here). I’m happy to travel to teach the work if you have folks in your area who would be into hosting a weekend. Otherwise, I’m available for individual sessions that can certainly include very specific and relevant to your situation ancestor work (link here). In the meantime I’m working on writing a book that lays out all this material in much greater depth. Thanks for your interest in and support of the work!
