Being Pagan: Those Who Came Before
Ancestry and tradition are how we connect to the past, and without that connection we cannot understand the present or even really fully understand ourselves.
In over twenty years of being pagan, I’ve come across no matter more contentious than the matter of ancestors. There are several reasons for this. One of the thorniest of these, I think, is the way the idea of ancestry is used by conservative people to limit access to ideas, knowledge, and even spiritual practice. Especially in the United States, some pagan and heathen groups have made ancestry a qualifier for certain things: people of one ancestry are seen as having more claim to authenticity for some belief systems than people of other ancestries. Often times this use of ancestry can have racist undertones, especially when ancestry is used to prohibit people with other ancestors from joining religious groups.
A second reason why the matter of ancestors can be so divisive is related to this first one. In the Americas, in Australia, and many other recently colonized places, very few people can name many of their recent ancestors beyond a great-grandmother or great-grandfather. This is because so many of their ancestors actually did not live on that land, but were rather displaced peoples from Europe or enslaved peoples from the African continent. This leads to a sense of rootlessness and even confusion about what ancestry means, and that confusion is how some end up employing ancestry through the lens of race.
There’s a third reason that complicates all these discussions, again rooted in a confused understanding of what ancestry means. That reason, though, is a lot more emotional and direct for most people: we often don’t actually get along with our relatives or elders. Sometimes this is for personal reasons, especially if our parents have different political or social views from our own. Sometimes this is due to unresolved personal conflicts, like when a parent shows disapproval of their children’s life choices. And generally, especially in the United States, we often don’t live in the same places as our blood relatives or parents, and thus are not part of each others’ day-to-day lives.
Related to this is a recent political idea that became quite popular in the last decade, that people have a moral obligation to disassociate themselves from parents with political or social ideas that are seen as abhorrent (for example, voting for Trump, or being racist, etc). While it’s doubtful that many people actually cut off their entire family because of these differences, there is absolutely a sense that remaining in relationship to ‘problematic’ family members is not something to be proud of or even admit to.
All of this makes talk of ancestors from a pagan and animist perspective very difficult. It’s also what makes pagan approaches to ancestors and ancestry that much more important and transformative for modern people, because it helps put the matter of displacement, race, and personal conflict in a more grounded framework. It also helps us come to grips with the past in a way that can inform all of our decisions in the present.
The Meaning of Ancestors
The word ancestor comes from Latin and literally means “what (or who) was before,” with the sense of “coming” before (as in, “the person who came before me.”) At its very core meaning, then, is an idea of a past person who is relevant to a later person’s present existence.
In most modern societies, we don’t really think of ancestors being relevant to our existence except through the idea of genetic (1) or physical inheritance. That is, our great-grand mother’s existence is only relevant to who we are because of physical traits she passed down to us, or any financial legacy she might have created for her descendants.
These two ideas about ancestors also exist for many indigenous and pagan peoples, but the way moderns tend to look at these two ideas is much more negative than they did and still do. For instance, we often think of inherited traits as a negative, as when a doctor asks if there was a “history” of heart disease or mental illness in our families. Similarly, we tend to look at physical inheritances as something of a shameful thing when others have them, marking them as “privileged” for inheriting the house their grandfather built, for example.
On the other hand, for pagan and animist peoples—and actually for many, many people in general—ancestry is only seen as a negative thing when there was some sort of tragedy or debt that the descendants find themselves haunted by or trying to make amends for. For instance, if there was a violent and renowned criminal in the past whom people still remember, or if an ancestor caused some sort of harm to a community, then ancestry might be thought of as a thing of shame or misfortune. Otherwise, ancestry is considered a neutral or even beneficial part of who you are.
This goes equally for aristocratic societies where lineage is associated with authority as well as for tribal societies where ancestors are considered to still be “living” among the people even when long dead. In a pagan framework, whether your ancestors bequeathed you a castle or a run-down cabin, whether they left their children large land estates or a tiny tract of land for grazing, ancestors are considered part of the physical reality of a person’s life.
“The Democracy of the Dead”
There is a third dimension missing in this talk of ancestors, however, one that indigenous and animist peoples have found more important than the question of material or trait inheritance. That dimension is of “tradition,” of the countless stories, ways of thinking, the wisdom, and the social education that people inherit from their ancestors.
As young children, all of our worldview, our language, our way of thinking, and even our sense of our selves is first shaped by the adults who care for us. Our mothers, especially, because of their constant care taking of us as infants, become our first teachers about the world.
Yet, who was the first teacher of our mother? Her mother, of course, which is to say our grandmother. So, while we learned directly from our mother, we are also learning from our grandmother, because is was she who first shaped our mother’s understanding of the world and even shaped our mother’s idea of what mothering is. Our grandmother, by mothering our mother, taught her how to mother us. And she, in turn, was taught by her mother, our great grandmother.
In this simple chain of mothering is the key to the pagan and animist understanding of what ancestors are and what tradition means. Though we might never have met our great-great grandparents, because they shaped the worldview of our grand parents who in turned shaped the worldview of our parents, we are also being parented by them, not just by our mother and father.
This kind of transmission of worldview itself is what we call tradition, and it cannot be accounted for by genetic or physical inheritance. It isn’t something we are born with, but something passed along to us, a body of knowledge and wisdom comprised of many generations of people we never could have met.
Tradition, like ancestry, is also a thorny subject, especially since many people have politicized the idea. Political conservatives tend to be consider “traditionalists,” with the sense of preserving tradition against sudden social change. Political liberals, on the other hand, tend to be anti-traditionalists, seeing social change as an inherently good thing and tradition as a kind of intellectual backwardness.
With many such things, it’s best to strip away the political connotations of the term and look at the more radical (2) core of the idea. Tradition’s root in Latin means to “give across,” referring to something passed along. That is, tradition refers to the transmission of ideas, beliefs, worldviews, rituals, habits, and social frameworks across generations, from ancestors to descendants.
Stripping away the politicization of the idea of tradition, we can see that tradition doesn’t really mean “how it has always been done,” nor “how is should be done,” but rather “what was taught to me from those before.” There is no sense in the original meaning that tradition is against change, but rather that it is merely a simple fact of how we learned certain things.
Tradition, then, is a kind of knowledge and way of knowing, just as science is a kind of knowledge and way of knowing. And just as science can accurately answer some questions (for instance, how far away the Sun is from the Earth?) but cannot answer other things (how do I know I’m in love?), tradition is useful for many things in life but not so useful for others.
Tradition is how I learned not to put my hand on a hot stove, how not to get hit by automobiles when crossing a street, and how to cook a basic meal. It is also how I learned a basic moral framework, that telling the truth is usually easier than lying, that being kind to others causes a lot less conflict than being cruel, that acknowledging generosity in others and also being generous means life is a lot easier and more abundant.
Of course, there are many things I learned through tradition that I later questioned or rejected, such as certain beliefs about the way the world works that I decided were neither true nor useful. Tradition isn’t authority, but rather a body of wisdom and ideas that those who inherit also create and pass along. It’s a co-creative process.
The writer G.K. Chesterton, while himself a traditional Catholic, expressed this co-creative meaning of tradition in a remarkably pagan way (3):
“Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.”
Ancestral Traditions
In many neo-pagan groups, as well as in indigenous and post-colonial studies, there is often a focus on “ancestral tradition.” While they often mean different things by the term, the sense is often one of a kind of mystification. That is, ancestral tradition is treated as something both rare and located only in within indigenous cultures or ancient societies. This unfortunately leads us to miss the really-existing ancestral traditions that have already shaped our existence.
Both my aunt and one of my own sisters have a really profound affinity for animals. Both have homes filled with them: my aunt for decades worked as a world-renowned trainer for guide dogs for blind people, and my sister for years volunteered to foster rescue dogs and cats for a no-kill animal shelter. My grandfather himself had this sort of affinity, spending a lot of time feeding deer, raccoons, and birds who would wander into his back yard from a nearby forest.
Caretaking animals is a kind of ancestral tradition passed down through my grandfather, which came to him from his ancestors. They themselves were poor farmers, displaced peoples from the Breton coasts and Germanic lands, and they passed along another ancestral tradition, as well: thrift.
My grandfather walked to school on cold mornings with a hot baked potato in each pocket. They were there to keep his hands warm for the walk, and then to be eaten as lunch at school. That same kind of simplicity defined the rest of his life: he rarely spent money, always had his clothes repaired rather than replaced, and never invested in anything that entailed any kind of risk. This he learned from his parents and their parents, and passed along to his children and grandchildren.
These are both ancestral traditions in the same way that indigenous peoples have ancestral traditions. A way of seeing the world (take care of animals, use what is already available rather than spending money for something else) was passed on over generations and inherited by those of us who continue on after their deaths. In my own life, these two ancestral traditions have translated both into druidry and political leftism for me, which I see as my own manifestation of what my ancestors believed.
Where I live now in the Ardennes, ancestral traditions are a lot easier to see. This is mostly because many of the people who live here live in the same villages (and often in the very same houses) that their ancestors lived in. I live with my partner in the house where he was born, and his mother also lives here in a separate section of the house. She was also born here, as was her own mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother.
As with many small European villages, the children often held the same jobs or performed the same kind of work as their ancestors. My mother-in-law spent most of her life as a washing woman, as had her mother, grandmother, and great grandmother. In fact, the house itself was built from even older ruins of a washing house for the large landowner who owned most of this village and surrounding lands back into the middle ages. The descendants of the servants who performed the washing then were given the land when the land owner fell into poverty hundreds of years ago.
That is, there is a continuous matrilineal line of washing women who have lived in this spot for hundreds and hundreds of years all leading up to my mother-in-law. What they taught her, besides just how to make clothing look perfectly new no matter what the wearer did to it, was also how to be deeply resilient and deeply connected to others in poor circumstances in a way I have never seen before. While every family in this village has had some sort of feud with another family, my mother-in-law is renowned as the one woman who is always welcome at any door because of her refusal to let strife get in the way of the importance of the community life of the village.
Such ancestral traditions might be also called “family” traditions, but in the pagan understanding of ancestry, family is a much larger concept than just direct family members. Especially when people have lived for hundreds—even thousands—of years in the same general area, family relations are often spread through many, many villages. Those connections may be distant “genetically,” but they are not seen as distant to the people who are part of them.
So to speak about ancestry and ancestral traditions, we must first understand that the way these concepts are lived and experienced are much more real and present than the way scholars, academics, activists, and others speak about them. What is inherited from those who came before isn’t some abstract idea or material benefit, but rather a tapestry woven from still-living threads of memory, story, and ways of being in the world that cannot be contained in scientific or political categories.
A Collective Ancestral Wound
It’s at this point we can look at the matter of ancestry and the concept of “race,” an idea that is currently tearing apart much of the world and has come to replace these older ideas of ancestry.
Race doesn’t exist. Race is a scientific and legal fiction that was born in the 1600’s, created out of the need of colonial administrators to find a way to define displaced and enslaved peoples so they could be categorized and divided.
Before the early 1600’s, there were no black people, nor were there white people. Before there were black people, there were people ripped from their ancestral villages on the African continent and hauled across the ocean in the hulls of ships to do forced labor. Before there were white people, there were people pushed out of their ancestral villages through new “Enclosure” laws on the European continent and the British Isles, who often sold the very little they had (and even themselves, in the case of indentured servitude contracts) in order to survive.
The people who came from those villages on the African continent each had their own ancestral traditions, and their own ideas of themselves completely different from those had enslaved them. So, too, for the displaced poor from the European continent, each of whom had previously been connected to place and a sense of time through the tapestry of their own ancestral traditions.
It was the same, also, for those who were already living in the lands being colonized, to which those people were brought as prisoners or refugees. The Americas were populated by countless people groups, each with their own names for themselves, their own ways of seeing the world, their own ancestral stories, and their own ancestral traditions. Many of those people were destroyed or displaced, the tapestries of their own lives torn apart by the thirst of Empire.
This is why the idea of ancestry and tradition is so fraught now, as if each time those words are brought up an old wound is re-opened that we do not remember first experiencing. For almost everyone, sometime during the last few hundred years our ancestors were displaced from the lands they knew onto lands they did not know.
Even for those who were not displaced, all the traditional knowledge their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents had passed along to them no longer could make sense of the world around them. The old ways of doing work had changed—you couldn’t live off the land your ancestors had lived in. Suddenly you had to work in factories, and there were no factories before, so there was no ancestral tradition to describe what was happening.
In the absence of ancestral tradition, new concepts such as race were easier to force upon people then and also now. Race has come to replace ancestry as an identification, so much so that it is very difficult to even comprehend that no one before the 1600’s ever saw themselves or others as part of a race. (4)
Though ancestral traditions were wounded and often severed by capitalism, slavery, and imperialist policies, a second wounding was done to those of us who live down the line from this trauma. That wounding is in our confusion about what ancestry and tradition even mean, and more so our tendency to see such concepts as “backwards” and politically reactionary.
Especially when we mystify the idea of ancestry and tradition and see it as something that is either permanently lost or something that only a few isolated cultures still possess, we continue this wounding. Ancestry and tradition are how we connect to the past, and without that connection we cannot understand the present or even really fully understand ourselves.
The Dead Are Always With Us
On a shrine in a room in the house where I live sits a small bowl of water. It’s a handmade ceramic bowl, crafted by one of my sisters. It is always full of water, refilled twice a week. Every morning upon waking, and every night just before sleeping, I say some words while looking at the bowl, a prayer of thanks to specific people who are no longer living.
While so far I have written about the cultural and social aspects of ancestry and tradition, I’ve not yet spoken of the spiritual aspects. Though this is not quite true, for we must remember that pagan and animist people made no distinction between culture, the social, and the spiritual, any more than they made distinctions between themselves and their bodies.
Let’s return to a quote from Kadmus in his book True to the Earth, which we first looked at when speaking of bodies:
“Pagan animism understands everything that exists in terms of living bodies. The more common distinctions between living and dead are actually distinctions between types of bodies and the changes that occur to bodies, such that nothing is ever “dead” in an absolute sense but only dead to a certain type of life.”
The state of ancestors in a pagan, animist sense isn’t merely a state of having gone before, but also still being around. However, that “still being around” isn’t quite the modern fantasies about ghosts and hauntings, but neither is it just a poetic metaphor.
My grandfather is still around, though he died. I speak to him every morning and every evening, and sometimes he speaks to me in dreams both sleeping and sometimes waking. A few months ago, there was a fire in my home as myself and my partner slept. Neither of us woke as black smoke filled every room, nor did the fire alarms sound to alert us. Sometime in the night, I spoke to my grandfather. It was definitely a dream, but also not exactly a dream but rather something else entirely. (5)
“You’re dying,” he said to me.
“No, not tonight,” I answered.
And then my grandfather looked at me, shrugged, and said “okay.”
The next morning when my partner and I woke up, groggy and extremely confused from the smoke inhalation, we found that the fire had both started spontaneously but also put itself out “spontaneously.” Did my grandfather put it out? I don’t know, nor is that exactly the correct question. What mattered was that he was there, had informed me of what was happening, and that I hadn’t died.
Such encounters with ancestors are not only well-attested to in indigenous cultures today, but also in many modern accounts. Everyone I know has at some point mentioned the sense of encountering a dead relative, or having the sense that they were visited by them, or dreamed of talking to them. In my experience, it seems to be quite common for children to report such encounters, and while some adults might dismiss these stories as childish make-believe, I suspect they’d also admit having had similar experiences when children, too.
The ancestors I speak to every morning and every night, for whom I fill a bowl of water on a shrine, are not all ancestors “of blood.” One of them is a friend and fellow druid and writer, now no longer living but still, I’m sure, quite around.
She, Judith O’Grady, left us all an essay on this very subject, entitled “I’ll Be An Ancestor One Day.” Her own granddaughter had reported seeing a woman in her room at night many times, who Judith recognised by her description as her own grandmother. Then, after another death in the family, Judith recounts the conversation she had with her granddaughter about death:
“I will die one day,” I said, “and I don’t know about the hugs, but I’m sure I will often come and visit you. Do you know why I am so sure?...my Grannie comes and visits you already…”
Reading back on that essay, I smile, just as I feel somewhere a smile from her as I write about her. I also smile when I think how this kind of relation to the dead is hardly new, but is instead part of the traditions of many, many peoples. Ancestor altars and shrines can be seen in Hindu, Shinto, Buddhist, and even Catholic (6) homes, and even in the secular societies, national days of remembrance for fallen soldiers or leaders (for example, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in the United States) are distant continuations of ancestral rites. (7)
Ancestral veneration is perhaps the easiest of the animist traditions to return to for a modern, because it requires very little. You don’t even need to know the names of your ancestors or necessarily speak to them. One of the most common practices that can be found throughout the world is occasionally leaving something out for them, be that a small bowl of water, a small candle, or even a portion of a meal.
Many people already actually have shrines to their ancestors in their homes without realizing it. Often, there is a place in a home where photos or keepsakes of dead relatives are displayed, a place on a wall, above a fireplace mantle, or a shelf. These are all types of ancestor shrines, and you maybe already have one as well.
If not, or if you would like to create one with intention, the easiest way to do this is to set up a small dedicated place for them. In a later chapter I will discuss more about creating shrines, but for now just pick a spot that feels right and that will not be used for other things.
Then, put photographs, or memorabilia, or anything that might remind you of your favorite relatives who have passed. Or, you can do as I do, put a small bowl of water in the spot and remember to change the water and refill it regularly. A small candle you light on a particular day (the first of November is a traditional day in many northern countries, or you can pick an anniversary or birthday) is also just as appropriate as all the rest.
No prayers need to be said or statements made. Perhaps you might find yourself sometimes wanting to say something to a grandmother or a friend whose death separated you from them. Perhaps by speaking to them there you will find solace or comfort.
Perhaps you will also find you feel they maybe also speak back.
Rhyd Wildermuth
Rhyd is a druid, a theorist, and a writer. He lives in the Ardennes, and is the director of publishing for Gods&Radicals Press / Ritona a.s.b.l.
Notes
1 Though genetics is a very new science (either 150 or 100 years old, depending on where you decide it started), humans have always understood that traits in parents appear also in children, even if they didn’t understand the mechanism for that transmission.
2 Radical means “root” in latin.
3 As with much of his writing, actually.
4 This is the easiest response to people who try to limit ancient belief and cultural forms to specific racial identities. Those racial identities didn’t exist at the time those practices and beliefs arose, thus they cannot be said to have been ‘for whites only’ or ‘only for black people.’ For a much longer discussion of this as it relates to cultural appropriation, see my essay “A Plague of Gods.”
5 As Kadmus notes in True To the Earth: “This idea of sleep touching death is also well attested to in the ancient world....It was (and still is in many cultures) a common truth that the dead speak to us in our sleep. More potently, there is a longstanding tradition in both Greek and Roman culture that dreams come through two gates, a gate of truth and one of falsehood, and both gates are found in the Underworld land of the dead. In fact, sleep and dream are often identified with the gates to the Underworld.”
6 In many Catholic churches, masses are performed in memory of the dead. The official purpose of these masses is to speed the dead soul’s journey to heaven from purgatory, which actually mirrors many indigenous ancestral practices of speeding the dead’s transition from their previous life to their next life.
7 Even the American term “Founding Fathers” is a kind of state-sanctioned ancestral veneration.