Editor’s note: Today, we welcome back Bart Everson, who previously wrote about Gaianism for us. Everson is the author of Spinning in Place: A Secular Humanist Embraces the Neo-Pagan Wheel of the Year. With M. Macha NightMare, he established the Earth-Based Spirituality Action Team of Citizens’ Climate Lobby. Find more at BartEverson.com.
One lucky mother.
I’m lucky to be here.
Granted, I don’t feel so fortunate when I’m stepping in dog poop right outside my front door, or when I’m contemplating the trajectory of our national politics, but the truth is that I’m lucky to exist at all, as the particular person that I am, this particular constellation of complex organic systems, this particular ecology of microorganisms and cells, this particular combination of genes and biochemistry. The odds are against it. In fact, I’m only here because of a mindbogglingly long chain of fortuitous events.
To lapse into the vernacular, I am one lucky mother — and so are you, because every one of us carries the fortune of countless generations who made our lives possible. We’ll come back to you later. Let’s talk about me, or rather, my ancestors. I wouldn’t be here without them. I remind myself of that fact every day.
My direct biological ancestors comprise a unique set of distinct, discrete, individual human beings. This set begins with my two parents and continues with my four grandparents, my eight great-grandparents, my sixteen double-greats, doubling every generation, just like most people. Each of us has a unique set of ancestors, shared only with our siblings.
I have thirty-one triple-great grandparents. If you’re mathematically inclined, that may be surprising. You probably expected thirty-two. It comes down to a quirk of family history, in that my mother’s grandmother’s grandmother is also my mother’s grandfather’s grandmother. Please don’t be alarmed: it’s not as incestuous as it sounds. And it’s actually not that quirky after all, as we shall see.
How shall I characterize these people? Well, for one thing, they all have European heritage. I’ve been particularly fascinated by my immigrant ancestors, and I can verify that I am descended from 21 people who immigrated to the United States in the 19th century: a bunch of Germans who came before the American Civil War, and some Norwegians and Czechs who came after.
All of my quadruple-great-grandparents were born in Europe, and most of them died there. The picture on the other side of the Atlantic is hazier to me, but the math remains the same, basically doubling every generation, with the occasional exception for double relations, like the one noted previously. Double relations become much more common, indeed inevitable, the further back we go.
Fan Chart Courtesy: Bart Everson
I visualize an expanding family tree rising up above me, each generation spreading branches twice as wide as the generation before. That expansion can’t continue indefinitely, of course, or by the law of doubling, we’d quickly end up with more people than ever existed. Somewhere around the 15th generation, it begins to contract because the same individuals show up in multiple family lines. The phenomenon is known as pedigree collapse. It’s universal and inevitable.
I promised I’d come back to you, dear reader. If you have European heritage, many of your ancestors from 500 years ago are also mine, in all likelihood. Go back a thousand years, and that likelihood approaches a certainty. But let’s not be so Eurocentric. In fact, an Afrocentric approach is more appropriate. The prevailing Out of Africa theory posits that anatomically modern humans developed on the continent of Africa and spread across the globe from there. Exactly when our family trees join together depends on those migration patterns. If you’re Native American, you might find some common ancestors with me as recently as twenty thousand years ago. If you’re Asian, it’s more like forty thousand years. If you’re an Indigenous Australian, we’ll have common ancestors some sixty thousand years ago. If your people are strictly from Sub-Saharan Africa, our common ancestors will have lived seventy thousand years ago. In fact, we can say with some confidence that at that point, seventy thousand years ago, we all have common ancestors in Africa, which is truly the Motherland for all of humanity.
But why stop there? Go back 155,000 years, and all our family trees converge on one woman, the Lucky Mother. Yes, the current prevailing scientific opinion is that all human beings walking around today are descended from a singular woman living in Africa many years ago. Some people call this the “Mitochondrial Eve” hypothesis, but that label is problematic and misleading. She wasn’t the first woman. Far from it! Allan Wilson, one of the progenitors of the idea, preferred the term “Lucky Mother,” and so do I. She was surrounded by other women who were also bearing children, but those other family lines petered out in time. Only her direct descendants survived to the current day.
What’s Luck Got to Do with It?
One thing unites all our ancestors with the Lucky Mother: they all managed to reproduce, to transmit their genes to another generation. That means they all survived at least long enough to reach sexual maturity. More than that, they all found mates. More than that, the female in that union gave birth to a living baby. More than that, the baby survived at least long enough to reach sexual maturity, and so on. And this pattern continued generation after generation for thousands and thousands of years, through all manner of challenging circumstances, through an unbroken series that ultimately leads to you, me, and all the other eight billion plus people on the planet today.
Each one of us is the product of a chain of what I can only regard as good luck. Think of all the things that could have gone wrong, and did go wrong, extinguishing the lives of many who weren’t so lucky. Over the course of 150 millennia, there have been untold numbers of natural disasters and deadly diseases, to say nothing of violent conflicts between tribes and nations and empires.
Fitness is a factor too, playing a role in Darwinian evolution that becomes more relevant over longer time periods. We can expand our scope beyond the Lucky Mother.
Yet further back in time — 600,000 years, a million years, 2.5 million years ago — we find ancestors who were not fully human but who were very close, represented by such skeletal remains as Boxgrove Man, Turkana Boy, and Twiggy. 15 million years ago, we find our ancestors in the great apes. About 60 million years ago, we find Purgatorius, a little tree-dwelling mammal, the probable ancestor of all primates. Before that, we have the first mammals coming from the cynodonts, who in turn came from the earliest mammal-like reptiles, the synapsids, some 250-odd million years ago. And we can continue back 390 million years ago to the appearance of four-limbed vertebrates, the tetrapods, the earliest of which were probably aquatic. 530 million years ago, we find Pikaia gracilens, a leaf-shaped creature swimming in the waters of the Precambrian period, which may well have been the ancestor of all modern vertebrates. Further still: acorn worms, flatworms, sponges, back to one single-celled organism that lived 3.5 billion years ago — a single simple cell from which we are all descended.[1]
These are my ancestors. These are your ancestors. All of them were at least fit enough to reproduce. All of them were lucky, too.
Veneration
This expansive view evokes feelings of awe and wonder and gratitude for me. I like that feeling. It seems to arise spontaneously. I’ve come to regard any living being from long ago as an ancestor, whether or not I’m a direct biological descendant.
I think I first noticed this tendency when I was a young man, 25 years of age, living in Bloomington, Indiana. One spring evening in a drunken stupor, I made my way to the local cemetery. I didn’t have any relatives buried there, but nevertheless, I had it in mind to “spend some time with the ancestors.” I took some candles, and I lit them there among the gravestones, and I contemplated the state of the world. I was struck by the fact that we live in an artificial world, a constructed world. I was struck by the extent to which human things make up the substance of our lives. And so there in the graveyard, I contemplated those who have made this world, that is, the humans who’ve come before me, and I tried to understand.
I’m not sure I gained any insight on that night. “The ancestors were obscure,” I noted in my journal, “as always.”
I considered that little ritualistic adventure as an October ritual performed in May. It foreshadowed my interest in Neo-Pagan practice. Some twenty years later, I connected with the eclectic Lamplight Circle, and I began to follow the Wheel of the Year. My annual observation of the fall cross-quarter led me into a deeper engagement with the ancestors. I began researching my family history, orchestrating an annual Ancestor’s Night dinner in honor of various departed grandparents, and frequenting the local cemeteries on a mission to fill photo requests for Find a Grave.
By that time, I was living in New Orleans, a city where ancestor veneration is still a visible part of civic life. It didn’t take long for me to conclude that such practices shouldn’t be confined only to autumn. That particular revelation hit me on the return trip to Bloomington in the summer of 2013. I visited the Covenanter Cemetery on East Moores Pike. It was there, amongst the headstones memorializing people I never knew, that I realized how the ancestors are with us always and should be honored always.
Headstones. Courtesy: Bart Everson
My perspective expanded from there, and my practice has shifted over time, as I clarified my identity as a Gaian and found community in the emerging tradition known as the Gaian Way. I’m more cognizant of how our very human sphere is embedded within, interpenetrated by, and inseparable from the more-than-human. The world we live in today was created by our ancient ancestors, but more than that: in a very real and material way, the ancestors actually are that world.
Gaia recycles everything. Gaia is the very process of recycling. Everything that’s around us and everything that’s inside us was all part of our ancient ancestors at some point. They may not persist as individuals, but they are with us all the same. Just as they live in us, we live in them.
I have that in mind during my little daily rituals. At sunrise, I give voice to my participatory reverence with Gaia, and the ancestors, and the teachers. At sunset, I give voice to my gratitude. Without them, I would not be here — but here I am. I don’t always feel it, but I make a point to say it.
As alluded to at the beginning of this essay, I don’t always feel lucky or fortunate. When I contemplate the state of the world, I’m often discouraged and angry. My feelings toward my ancestors are not universally positive. I tend to be especially critical of those I know best, my immediate forebears. Sometimes, I’m very critical of what they’ve done, how they lived, what they’ve done to the world. If the world’s a mess, isn’t it their fault?
But then I remember that, for the most part, they were just people like me, trying to get through this thing we call life, as best they could. And now that I have a child of my own, someone who can regard me as an ancestor, I’m more aware than ever how little control I have over the existence she’s in some sense inheriting from me.
And so I try to emphasize the positive. I breathe. Does it feel good to breathe? Yes, generally it does. And so I thank my ancestors, who have passed this breath down to me through uncounted, unbroken generations. I’ve passed this breath on to my daughter. She may do the same, someday, or not. Not everyone has to become an ancestor. There are plenty of reasons not to do so, but we all have them.
We all inherit breath from our ancestors. How we live it is how we honor them.
Footnotes
- Do I need to cite sources when I’m quoting myself? This entire paragraph is lifted verbatim from “Flowers to Flame,” a chapter in my 2016 book, Spinning in Place.
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