The difficult ancestors
(Nimue)
If you’ve thought about honouring the ancestors for a few minutes it has probably crossed your mind that they weren’t all good. It would be fair to assume that our ancestors represent the full range of human capability both for good and for evil. That recognition is easy. Deciding what to do with it is a good deal more complicated.
Most humans are a mix of things, and whether they seem good or terrible may come down to your relationship with them, or your perspective. The warrior who fights for your people is a hero, the warrior who fights against your people is a monster. How we might judge the actions of our ancestors will not be how they judged themselves, or each other.
Mostly for this post I want to think about ancestors in the more distant and unknown sense. I should mention though that if you have personal distress involving recent ancestors you absolutely do not have to include them in your Druidry, forgive what they did or anything like that. You can just ignore them and focus on the breadth and depth of your ancestry in a less personal way.
When it comes to those more distant ancestors, I think acceptance is a good place to start. Recognising their flawed and complicated humanity is a compassionate thing to be able to do. It also counts as compassion towards ourselves. We all have ancestors who did terrible things – even if we don’t know them by name. That legacy is in each of us, but we also have the power to respond to that with kindness and to do better. Where the legacy of harm is known to us, we have the power to break ancestral patterns, break family stories, change legacies of trauma and heal our family lines.
Sometimes people do terrible things by accident. Sometimes they do terrible things with really good intentions – war is full of that kind of tragedy. We all make bad choices, or act on the wrong information. We hurt each other when we don’t mean to. Honouring the ancestors calls for recognising all of this and acknowledging it.
We are here because of them. Our lives are shaped and informed by their lives. However, it’s not a simple progress narrative. I like to honour the ancestors who did not bring us to where we are today – ancestors of radical politics who strived for fairness and equality that we still don’t have. Ancestors who resisted the industrial revolution, objected to war, fought slavery, demanded the vote – many of whom never saw their work make changes in their own lives. We’re still a long way from getting much of this right.
When you visit an ancient monument you do not know that the people who raised it were good. Even while you love the site, are inspired by it and feel connected to the ancestors who created it, you don’t know them. I’m not someone who feels you can separate the art from the artists, but what do we do when we can only know the artist through their art? As with cave paintings. We get to see what is good, and enduring, and meaningful. We can honour that.
I think that working with our ancestors, in all their complexity, has a lot to teach us about how we deal with each other here and now. What we choose to focus on. What we need. What we refuse to accept. There are many ways of approaching this, what matters is the integrity and the care that you bring to the issue.
(This post was prompted by Babs in the comments, I’m always open to suggestions about topics to tackle).
