With the arrival of fall, there is a lot of talk about the ancestors, ghosts, spirits, graveyards, and so on. However, there is a question that I’ve asked myself sometimes and that I haven’t had an answer to for a long time: why should I work with the ancestors? What do I get from working with the ancestors? From all the spirits and all the entities that I could work with – the deities, the fae, spirits of the land, egregores – why should I work with the departed specifically?
Why, indeed?
I started thinking about it, asking myself what is it that I felt when I worked with them in the past, and how I’ve changed since I started working with them around five years ago. It made me realize that, even if it’s more subtle, there is a significant change that has been happening, slowly, oh so slowly, but in a definite way.
For me, I think that everyone should try to work with the departed when they feel comfortable and if they feel the need and the connection to do it. I believe that every Witch should try to connect with their ancestors at some point, to see how they feel about the practice. Based on that and how ready they feel, they can decide if they want to keep working with them or not.
A cemetery [FiezFotos, Pixabay]
I wouldn’t say there’s something wrong with not working with ancestors. Not everyone has the same needs and desires. However, there is a list of benefits that I found since I started working with them. My skills have improved; I can connect faster and more easily with my divination tools; and my healing practice has also growth into a solid part of my craft.
Grounding: When I work with the ancestors, I feel more connected to the Earth, with my feet on the ground. Besides being an honoring and a devotional practice, it is also something that calms me down. As someone with autism, I have many moments when I feel anxious, stressed, depressed, and that grounding is what helps me stay in the present and focus on what I have at hand, what is happening right here right now.
Experience: One of the things that I like the most is that I am not working with any kind of spirit, but a spirit that was once a human being. It’s a spirit that understands what being human is like, a spirit that can talk not only from experience but also understand in a closer way to what is it that I experience as a human.
Identity: By working with different kinds of ancestors, I’ve also come to understand different aspects of my identity and who I am, who I want to be, what is it that I represent, what is it that I want to represent in the future, who I am becoming, who is it that I want to become. It allows me to explore, understand, and transform different aspects of what makes me “me.” This doesn’t only apply to ancestors of blood, my relatives, but also ancestors that share the same path, the same passions, the same skills, the same ideas. I can understand what is it that I feel and what is it that I think and explore them through a different point of view.
Transgenerational trauma: Now, something that is specific about working with my blood ancestors is that it helps to work with, heal, and repair any kind of transgenerational trauma. The way that I understand this idea is: bad experiences or secrets or cycles that happen in one generation and start repeating themselves in the next ones. By working with my ancestors, I am able to see what is it that caused this in the first place, how it is manifesting in the new generations, how is it manifesting in my life, so I can prevent it from affecting my life, heal that trauma, and prevent it from happening again in the generations that come after me.
As-Suwayda, Syria, a city where the author’s family comes from [Shadi Alashkar, Flickr, CC 2.0]
Heritage: This ties up with the previous point, because it also allows me to explore different aspects of my heritage, my DNA, what kind of stories flow through my blood, and how to have a better relationship with it. When I was a kid, I didn’t want to have anything to do with Arab culture or the Middle East, and I didn’t care about Syria, where my family is from. I was curious when some relatives went there and came back with pictures, videos, gifts, and stories, but that was just plain, tourist-kind-of curiosity. Now, I’m able to see what my heritage represents, what it says about my identity, about me as a person, and how to connect with the land that my ancestors came from.
My Own Magic: In the end, all of this allows me to develop a different kind of magic, something that feels more personal, more viscera, and unique. It’s a type of magic that no one else can have, not even my own relatives, my cousins, my uncles, my aunts, parents, grandparents, or anyone else, because the genetic heritage that I got, my experience with my ancestors, with my family, that’s mine. No one can replicate that. By tapping into that, it allows me another source of magic, of energy, that I can use in my craft. This gives a more personal, direct connection with what I’m working with and what I’m doing.
Final Thoughts
At the end of the day, everyone is free to decide what they want to do and what they don’t want to do. Everyone has the right to feel comfortable or uncomfortable with this or that kind of practice and ancestor working is not the exception to the rule. Any decision is as valid as the others.
Rows of candles [kropekk_pl, Pixabay]
As I said, I believe that everyone should try working with their ancestors at some point. I believe that everyone should try to feel that connection to some degree, try to heal if there’s anything to heal, explore if there’s anything to explore, but only if there’s the honest desire to do it. If it feels more forced than natural, then it’s better to stop and try at a different point.
For me, it has enhanced my practice, but my relationship with them is not the same as other Witches’ with theirs. Each experience is unique and personal. For those who are not sure about it, my two cents are: I’ve been consistently practicing journaling for a long time, and this has helped me to bring to the surface different unconscious ideas and biases I had regarding ancestor working.
The Wild Hunt is not responsible for links to external content.
To join a conversation on this post:
Visit our The Wild Hunt subreddit! Point your favorite browser to https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Wild_Hunt_News/, then click “JOIN”. Make sure to click the bell, too, to be notified of new articles posted to our subreddit.