Dead Languages - First Steps in Communicating with the Ancestors

Part 1 - Why work with your Ancestors?

So, as I am starting to type this, it is Friday the 13th of October. I’ve been meaning to start this for a while, but today seems the perfect day to begin a short series of ancestral veneration posts in the run up to Hallowe’en (or Samhain, if you must…ahem).

I want to start by saying I am not a scholar or an authority on this, I am talking about my personal practice as a witch, and this is ever evolving. This personal practice is heavily influenced by Dr Daniel Foor, Dr Alexander Cummins, as well as the work of Sophie Strand and Sara Mastros - I thank each of them for their wisdom. All works will be credited at the end of this short series.

A note on models of the spirit world

I follow a spirit model approach to magic - a belief that the spirits are as real as you and I - and I talk about them as such below. There is nothing stopping someone operating within the psychological model of magic (i.e. the spirits are all in your head / aspects of your personality), working the below and still getting a lot from it. To be honest I think the truth is a little of both - certainly spirits are able to alter our perceptions, but I’ve personally seen too much to think they live purely in the mind. This magic works, whether you believe in it or not, and that is what matters.

What does ‘Why’ mean here?

Often, when I talk about ancestral practices, people respond with ‘Why?’ - and this simple word can hold many different meanings - everything from ‘what will I get from this?’ to ‘How can I even do this when my family were so fucked up?’ I’m going to try and address the as many of the why questions as I can before I come back in another post with the ‘Who’ and the ‘How'.’

Family relationships are rarely easy, and this does keep many people away from this kind of work. Just as getting along with your living family can be complicated and stressful, so can ancestral work - especially at first - especially if you go in unprepared, as I did. However it can also be the key to healing yourself, the rest of your living family and those yet to come.

If you believe in spirits, in there being a spiritual ecology in the world around us, then logically the spirits of the dead and in particular the spirits of your bloodline are those closest to us. They are quite literally linked to us and carried within us. So whether we choose to work with them or not, they are there and influencing our lives in both positive and negative ways. Why wouldn’t you want to try to move those odds in your favour?

The longer I do magic for, the more convinced I am that all magic is spirit magic of a kind - yes even sigils. I believe that that the work we do is easiest managed when treating magic as a chain of intermediaries. As humans we are both flesh and spirit - walking liminal spaces. Our ancestors are our closest spirit intermediaries, they used to be made up of this mix of flesh and spirit themselves and retain that memory, and thusly are the easiest spirit beings for us to connect to and communicate with. They in turn can link us to other parts of that great spirit ecology. This intermediary model is something we see in grimoire work - from the PGM through to the Grimorium Verum - where Scirlin acts as the intemediary or ‘fixer’ spirit in a sense - the gateway to speaking with the head honchos at the end of the line. A vast oversimplification, I know, but I think valid.

This work is really rooted in reciprocity - just like any relationship there has to be give and take. Like with family life itself we give and we receive with the goal, the hope, that we enrich and improve each others existence. By working with our ancestors we enrich their existence and in return they will enrich ours. Many of the problems that plague our human lives can be traced back to what is often called ‘generational curses’ - what this really means is things handed down the family line - this can be anything from illness like alcoholism or drug addiction, learned and ingrained bigoted beliefs like homophobia or racism and personal trauma through poverty, violence or other abuse.

This work can also help with healing deeper ancestral trauma. Studies have shown that a person’s life experience can affect their biology. War, displacement, genocide, slavery and natural disasters can actually affect our genetic make up and these changes are then passed down the family line. Trauma, from the personal to global, can leave a chemical mark in a person’s genes. This is not a genetic mutation, but an alteration in how that gene is expressed - not genetic but epigenetic.

I’m no scientist, so I would advise you to read up on this yourself if you are interested, however my reading has indicated an increasing number of studies in both animals and humans which demonstrate that cortisol levels in parents can affect their offspring, impacting such things as brain development, weight and behaviour in later life. A fairly recent example being significantly smaller birth weights of babies born to pregnant women caught up in the World Trade Center collapse in 2001.

This sounds terrifying - however just as trauma can be recorded in our genetics, so can healing. Mice can be reconditioned to lose inherited fears, for example. Similar results are starting to be seen in studies in veterans with PTSD who have benefited from therapy. This is a new field but things look hopeful.

As a witch, I believe in the maxim ‘as within, so without’ - we carry the DNA of our ancestors within us and by healing the dead in our ancestral line I believe we heal ourselves and future generations too. With problematic ancestors - those who actively contributed to the creation of personal or even global trauma - it can sometimes be the case that healing them is the most beneficial work we can do. It can quite literally feel like a breath of fresh air through the family line. Having problematic ancestors is absolutely no barrier to this work. It really is a case of everyone wins, if this is done with care and kindness.

This isn’t something to rush into, so don’t go setting up altars yet. Have a think though, about where ancestral trauma might result in your family line. Consider your grandparents, and their grandparents, and what local circumstances or global events might have affected them. I’ll come back in a couple of days to talk about different kinds of ancestor you can work with and will follow that with a post about my methods and my experiences.