Ancestral Reverence: Some Scattered Thoughts

This is an oldie I wrote a year or two ago, but a goodie. Much of this still applies to revering those who went before us. Enjoy!

My ancestors and spirit guides have been heavy on my mind as of late. So have some of my close family members who have passed away in recent years. In fact, around my birthday date in August, I suddenly got this strong urge to get a Mets baseball cap. Why? Because growing up, when I was a little boy, I used to spend a lot of time with my grandpa watching Mets games on TV. I actually dreamed someday of taking a trip with him to Shea Stadium and seeing a game live.

We never got to do that before he died. He died suddenly after a minor surgical procedure, months later, while I was in college. But he was a major force in my childhood. When my parents divorced, it was devastating to my mom on several levels, especially financially. She struggled for at least the first ten years of my life to stabilize our lives and rebuild her life. My grandparents were KEY to that process. They often picked me up from school while Mom worked late. They would feed me dinner. 

The cool thing is I never felt a sense of lack. I knew what my Mom was doing, getting her education and then her very busy job as a guidance counselor. She was doing the work with poor families to get them stable like she had done for her and I. And she drew on the community around the school to help her do that, just like she did with grandma and grandpa.

Fast forward to grandpa’s death. I got asked to speak at the funeral. By now I was a student leader in the Protestant church at college, so everybody in the family saw me as a preacher-man-in-training. The night before the funeral, I was typing away on my word processor.

All of a sudden, I felt a spirit hovering over and to one side of me. In my mind’s eye, the spirit showed itself enough that I knew it was Grandpa Chuck. I simply said “Grandpa?!” No sooner had I said that, he passed on and away, like Superman. I later learned that this was a thing in the Black community—that our deceased ancestors will sometimes pass over loved ones to let them know they are okay.

It would be even more later that I would learn that my grandpa continues to be with me in a special way, and is a guiding force in my life. You can then imagine that, when the signals started coming through that it was time to get a Mets cap and honor my Grandpa, I did not hesitate!

Alright, so here’s the thing. The reason I am writing about this is because sometimes people are saying and doing weird shit around ancestor reverence. I hear stories of people saying someone reached out to them about their ancestors to tell them what their own ancestors want them to do. It just doesn’t work that way, periodt. The only thing somewhat similar to that is a misa or a séance that is focused on you and “pulling” your ancestral spirits, to assist in your development. But no ATR person is going to just randomly go around telling people about their ancestors. 

You already have your ancestors with you. The connection is also already there, but sometimes it needs some work to make it so that you can perceive them. Also, yes, some of us have so-called bad ancestors. Some people want to write ancestors off completely because of those rotten apples. I say that’s a huge mistake. Your ancestral line is old, really old. It goes back to the ancestors we all share, which even science confirms. I do believe it is possible to reach back to those, what I call Primal Ancestors. Do I have a specific way of doing that? No. But from all the stuff I see in occultism and how far out it gets, I wonder why people would balk at trying to reach back ancestrally, but have no qualms conjuring the Devil and every demon of the Goetia? Them spirits you have to work to even have the connection to begin with. With your ancestors, it is already there.

Another critique I hear of ancestral veneration is that people talking about it don’t really show a clear-cut method with concrete results. That’s a fair one. Some of us don’t. But the ability to connect to ancestors and spirit guides just is not a cookie-cutter thing. It’s not like Solomonic magic, for example, where if you do all the steps correctly, you will experience SOMETHING. 

No, because our ancestors are first and foremost carried in our bodies, it means our individual ability to connect to them will have variance. For people like me, I can sit at my White Table and connect to them without a problem. For others that never works. Maybe they need to have a ground altar. Maybe they need to take a walk in nature and take off their shoes and learn to hear the ancestral voices guiding them.

Or maybe it’s as simple as buying a Mets cap and letting the connection with that person come through the memories, sensations and joy they inspired in your life. 

Perhaps this is why people are so critical of ancestral reverence, because it’s not easily reproducible like scientific research. Spiritists and Spiritualists have been doing this work for a long time, and those I know who are good at it ALL seek first and foremost to determine how a new person to the Art connects. A lot of that is experimentation. What’s challenging, though, is that some of it only happens well in the context of community. There are things I learned about my family line ancestrally that would have taken me many years of work to perceive, but with the assistance of espiritistas in my spiritual house, I made much faster progress.

All of this is to say to you that if you feel any draw to your ancestors, I want you to not be afraid to experiment and try different things. They are already guiding and running your development as a spirit and human being, so they will also guide you around this. There will be things you try that you connect with immediately, while others not so much. Sometimes that is one of your ancestral spirits letting you know that this interest in, let’s say calligraphy is because you have a Japanese spirit guide who was a Buddhist monk and practiced writing. But we don’t have an understanding of that until we do the doing.

You don’t have to have a fancy white table.

You don’t have to give expensive liquors.

You don’t have to cook massive feasts of ancestor food.

You don’t really need anything to connect with your ancestors.

They are already in your body, blood, bones and DNA. 

You can call out to them right where you stand, right now.

Then just be still

And they will come.