What if I don’t get along with my ancestors?

Ancestral veneration is really the only part of my practice that I openly talk about. And when it comes up, I almost always get someone saying “that sounds really nice but my family sucks.” Or even “I’d like to get into something like that but I don’t have any ancestors who I want to talk to.”

I very much get it. Luckily for me, I have enough ancestors that I was on good terms with to get started. But I’m a queer witch from a family of extremely conservative fundamentalist Christians. There’s plenty of living family members I don’t talk to, and I figure there’s plenty of dead ones who wouldn’t cross my doorstep if they met me in life.

But here’s the thing, death changes people. One of my Christian friends thinks when we die, we go to heaven and God reveals to us the entire truth. Obviously, I don’t know what happens, and I’m dubious about heaven and all that, but I do think death probably changes a person. Something tells me that you have to let a lot of shit go once you’ve gone through the great beyond. This might heal a lot of wounds between yourself and the dead, but what about when that person was just nasty?

One strategy that I’ve heard is to pray for that ancestor because you want them to be released to a better place. Think about Catholics who pray for souls in purgatory, or the opposite of those movies where someone’s dying and everyone goes “don’t go into the light!” I like to think that we go to some sort of paradise after death where we chill out until we’re ready to get thrown back into the primordial soup. Maybe by venerating your ancestor, they can come to peace with what they did on earth, surrendering whatever influence they had on the living. I’ve never tried this particular approach but it sounds like it might be useful in certain situations.

Sometimes, though, that person was just such a problem that it’s hard to even imagine wishing them well. In these cases, maybe it’s best to not even think of them as being an ancestor, but as a part of the wandering dead. These are your ghosts and ghouls, the spooks in horror movies, the Wild Hunt. You don’t want to invite them to an altar in your home, but you can still remember them. I leave out an offering to the wandering spirits on the nights when the Wild Hunt is said to be active (All Saint’s, Christmas, a few more I can’t remember at the moment). This is mostly an offering for them to stay away from me and to make it to the proper afterlife where they can’t do any more damage. These spirits are a reminder that past actions can still cause issues in our lives, even after the people responsible are long gone. Getting them to leave earth means getting rid of the trauma they’ve caused. Or you can just see it as a punishment for all the shit they did and be satisfied knowing the Wild Hunt will never catch what they’re hunting.

This still leaves the question of how to do ancestor veneration without ancestors to properly venerate. I have a couple suggestions. For one thing, you have a near infinite number of ancestors. I’ve been helping my mom with genealogy and it gets out of hand so fast. While you might not know them, they’re still people who have experienced life and might’ve been in similar situations. Sometimes, I meditate on the statistical fact that at least some of my ancestors must’ve been queer (obligatory note: yes I know that the notion of being queer hasn’t always existed. But you get what I mean). I look to them for wisdom on how to have courage in an unfriendly world.

You also don’t have to venerate people who are directly blood related. To me, an ancestor is someone who has shaped my life. I’ve definitely prayed to Stormé Delarverie and Virginia Woolf and Oscar Wilde. I would even say the veneration of saints is basically ancestor veneration. A saint is an important dead person who usually has something in common with you: the biggest difference between St. Francis and my great-grandmother is that more people have heard of the saint.

Ok... actually that’s a lie, my great-grandmother was kind of a bitch (God rest her soul). But I guess who’s to say St. Francis wasn’t either.

All of this is to say, don’t let a couple nasty people get in the way of your spiritual practice, especially if it’s something you’re interested in. I’d even argue there’s something to be said about learning to appreciate how an unpleasant person is still just as human as you are.