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In other societies an ancestor could be a tree, a bear, a salmon, a member of the dead, a spirit in a dream, a special spooky place. These may be addressed as “Ancestor” and an altar home built for them, away from the home you inhabit. Ancestors are not bound to
human bodies and certainly not confined to physical antecedents whose descent into your sphere allowed only via your natural family. Only if a member of the natural family (itself not always determinable), say a grandparent or an uncle or an aunt, is worthy enough, powerful enough, knowledgeable enough, may he or she become an ancestor in the sense of a guardian spirit. To be an ancestor you do not need to be dead, but you do need to know the dead—that is, the invisible world and how and where it touches the living.
The devil may act like a trickster, show wit, play the clown, dance a jig, and be a jokester, but the humus and humility of humor—never! Humor as the word also implies, moistens and softens, giving life a common touch; it is anathema to grandiosity, fostering self-reflection and distancing us from self-importance.
The laughing recognition of one’s own absurdity in the human comedy bans the devil as effectively as garlic and the cross. Chaplin’s The Great Dictator did more than mock Hitler; it revealed the absurdity, the triviality, and the tragedy of demonic inflation.
God created time so that everything wouldn’t happen at once. Time slows; events unfold one by one, and we, committed to time-bound consciousness, believe that each one causes the next. But for the daimon, time can’t cause anything that is not already present in the whole image. Time only slows and holds back realization, thereby furthering “growing down.”
We make soul with our behavior, for soul doesn’t come already made in heaven. It is only imaged there, an unfulfilled project trying to grow down.
Habit is character, and becomes fate.
