The evil ancestors

One of the things that made me want to look at the issue of ancestry, is the problem of how we deal with the difficult ones. I can’t think of a single family that I know well, where there isn’t a problem person tucked away in the not too distant history. Not necessarily entirely ‘evil’ people, but points in the family tree where bits have broken off and things have gone badly wrong. I have a few.

I never knew my maternal grandfather, even though he lived just a few miles away. It’s only in recent years that I’ve been able to make any connection with that side of my family. It feels odd. My grandmother has been dead for some time now but I still worry about whether she would have been hurt by my wanting to know, would have felt betrayed.

Go back far enough and we’re all going to have tricky ancestors, whether we know their names or not. Modern witches descended from the sorts of people who would, a few centuries back, have been very keen on hanging or burning. Sometimes it’s not that distant, either. The raping, pillaging, looting, land stealing and genocide is in our history, and we’ve all got a bit of it somewhere, odds are.

What do we do, as modern Druids, with the ancestors who would have hated everything we believe and feel, and who would have been ready to kill us for our own good? Where are they when we hail the blessed ancestors? What do we do with the more immediate ancestry? The tyrants and curmudgeons, the drunken, violent, angry, abusive, incestuous, mad and otherwise inevitable that seem to be hidden in so many skeleton closets. The legacies of fear, and victims, the ones who never dared to be true to themselves, and  who hammered that fear into later generations. The ones who failed, and expect everyone else to fail too. The ones who lived through a world war, and were changed, and could not speak of it. We all have them I think.

Ancestry can be a deeply uncomfortable topic. But this is where we came from, our genes and our heritage. This is the stuff we are made of. To carry a fear of turning into one of your parents, or becoming too much like the mad uncle no one likes to talk about, can make it that bit harder to figure out who we are in ourselves. How much of identity is unique to us, and how much is the replaying of genetic history, and exactly how many crazy people do I have in my family tree anyway?

It’s important to know, I think, and to face up to what we do know. Skeletons in closets are only useful to authors, because they make such wonderful plot devices. In real life they’re nothing but trouble. Best to get them out and name them, and give them a proper burial.

We choose who we are. This has been very much the underlying thought form in the last week of blogging. We can only do a good job of that choice when we know what we’re choosing. It’s very hard to avoid repeating a pattern you won’t admit exists. It’s much easier to change things after you’ve acknowledged them.

All families are a bit mad and a bit dysfunctional in places because all people are a bit mad and a bit dysfunctional too. Some hide it better than others. Some manage to channel it in good ways, and some, like one of my distant ancestors by the name of Octavia, lose the plot entirely and have to be taken away. Some lose the plot a little bit and just go to bed for the rest of their lives. Some pass as normal.

I have a fair idea where I’ve come from, and some of it is good, and some of it isn’t. I’m trying to replicate the good bits and step away from the things I don’t think are so good. Coming from three generations of women who did not hold the first marriage together, I’m conscious that many of my mistakes are not very original. But I think I can move beyond that. It’s got to be worth a try, at any rate.