I often think about and talk of these various issues of growing old and what industrialization and centralization in general did to the family and elder. Alienation and loss of our sense of connectedness to our history, those who went before us. Without that, we have no idea who we are. Then, the competition in commercial culture perverts us.
The concept of ancestor veneration is one I was never able to square with, but it's such a common part of pagan traditions that I can't really imagine being able to fall in completely with the belief system. Who even *are* my ancestors--a bunch of fairly average Central Europeans? A couple Jews, scattered around? Some good people, some abusive, some alcoholics, some very gifted craftsmen. A hundred years' worth of unfamiliar faces in black-and-white, in a shoebox; and then history spools too far back, and everything which can't be revealed on a 23 and Me test is lost.
My grandfather was a good guy, overall. Kind of racist about The Mexicans, and apparently he had a moderate drinking problem in the 70s. I remember him as a generally playful, active old man who used too many herbicides even though his property was on a major watershed, and tended to think that society was better back when people just didn't spend so much time thinking about how many problems it had. He died in the house where he'd lived for 60 years, surrounded by his family, and the last words he spoke were repeated "I love you"s to anyone sitting at his bedside.
That life just seems too normal, too human, to be something I could venerate in any religious sense. I imagine that if he were to somehow find out that one of his grandchildren had put out Samhain offerings to him, or even asked for a mass to be performed on his behalf, he would just think it was weird. There's no point in history at which I feel like I start to have *ancestors*--only ever greater- and greater-grandparents, all flawed in their own particular ways. Since I don't buy into any fantasies of being in the bloodline of a wild-woman Black Forest hedge-witch, or a Native American chief--what could there be back there which is worth elevating to greater-than-human status?
Not looking for an answer. Just thinking out loud.
I think the key in all this is the line towards the end, the 'greater-than-human status.' By which I mean that's not what ancestors are at all nor is that how they are really thought about in such traditions. Just humans who have passed over into another category, rather than ascended or what not.
As someone who ran as far away in the continental United States from his family as he could, and then crossed an ocean after that, I can relate to people not really seeing the point of even caring about ancestors. This is only a recent thing for me, in the last three years. It started when the one older relative of mine that I deeply loved and never had any problems with died, and next thing I knew I was talking to her as part of my daily pagan rites (mostly just talking to gods by candle light).
She wasn't greater than human, nor really much different from anyone else, except she meant a lot to me and always showed me a deep kindness I never understood. Her death changed me a lot, and changed the way I understood how families shape who we are for better or for (very often) worse.
Of course, there's always a kind of greater-than-human attribution for some ancestors. I like to joke about this, but it's actually rather serious: listen to a Marxist talk about Marx or an anarchist about Proudhon and you start to see their devotion is deeply religious, despite all the trappings of atheism. Once you catch on to this, you start to see it isn't much different from the way a Jew or a Muslim thinks of Moses or Mohamed...
If nothing else, I'm pretty darn sure most of my ancestors for the last several hundred years were Christians of some stripe or another--how would they feel about posthumously being made objects of idolatry? That's the problem with being so far culturally removed from your ancestors, and why so many pagans (in my limited experience) cling to the idea that they themselves the descendants of rebellious witches, who endeavored to practice secret arts in a hostile, dogmatic world. Outside of that narrative framework, the act of dragging your devoutly Catholic 16th-century great-grandmother into a Wheel Of The Year ceremony seems pretty disrespectful. I'm not sure how to reconcile that.
I am more concerned these days with the cultism/tribalism emerging from commercial IDpol culture. Sometimes, for some reason, it takes me back somehow to a book called EARTH ABIDES. Dunno why I see some parallels, sort of if you cut it with Brave New World. Sounds insane. Some day I will sort it out.
I don't know the book, but one thing I have noticed is that there is a IDPOL push to paint all white people who do ancestor work as inherently racist or fascist. Ancestors, according to such people, are only for dark skinned people...
Hmm. I suspect they'd feel about the same way as my grandmother would feel knowing her grandson is a pagan leftist faggot. :)
Less flippantly, though, I'm not sure the dead have religion any more than they have politics. And the dead don't really get to choose how and by whom they are remembered, yeah? I mean, "great men" spend millions before their deaths to shape the way future generations see them, but all most people know about Rockefeller and Carnegie is that they were rich.
In my experience, though, some ancestors are a lot less apt to communicate than others. Same with trees and living humans. Some will talk your ear off, some would rather everyone just left them alone.
I am always talking to the dead these days. Belva died, the Fred, then Lorraine, and with them my heart and soul. Sometimes I just want to desperately be with them again. I still have so many questions for my mom and dad, and the others. I am forced to fantasize that someday soon I will join them, just so that painful emptiness inside can find hope.
LMAO. Thank you, but for me you just demonstrated it is important to know where you came from. I listened to the stories my great grandma, grandma, mom and dad had to tell, as I did many other others, like my friend Lorraine who was born in 1918 and a die hard FDR democrat. My paternal family was more from the Teddy Roosevelt clan. I ran away from home at age 6, 16, and 17. Sadly, it ended up out of the frying pan into the fire situation. Wish I had time for the longer story, but over all, in the end, I forgave them and was able to honor them.
My grandfather was a hardcore democrat who joked about wanting to be the doctor who shoved the catheter up Reagan's urethra when Ronnie had to have surgery. My grandmother, on the other hand, once said she wanted to live long enough to see Sarah Palin become president and then die because her social security wasn't enough to live on...
I often think about and talk of these various issues of growing old and what industrialization and centralization in general did to the family and elder. Alienation and loss of our sense of connectedness to our history, those who went before us. Without that, we have no idea who we are. Then, the competition in commercial culture perverts us.
The concept of ancestor veneration is one I was never able to square with, but it's such a common part of pagan traditions that I can't really imagine being able to fall in completely with the belief system. Who even *are* my ancestors--a bunch of fairly average Central Europeans? A couple Jews, scattered around? Some good people, some abusive, some alcoholics, some very gifted craftsmen. A hundred years' worth of unfamiliar faces in black-and-white, in a shoebox; and then history spools too far back, and everything which can't be revealed on a 23 and Me test is lost.
My grandfather was a good guy, overall. Kind of racist about The Mexicans, and apparently he had a moderate drinking problem in the 70s. I remember him as a generally playful, active old man who used too many herbicides even though his property was on a major watershed, and tended to think that society was better back when people just didn't spend so much time thinking about how many problems it had. He died in the house where he'd lived for 60 years, surrounded by his family, and the last words he spoke were repeated "I love you"s to anyone sitting at his bedside.
That life just seems too normal, too human, to be something I could venerate in any religious sense. I imagine that if he were to somehow find out that one of his grandchildren had put out Samhain offerings to him, or even asked for a mass to be performed on his behalf, he would just think it was weird. There's no point in history at which I feel like I start to have *ancestors*--only ever greater- and greater-grandparents, all flawed in their own particular ways. Since I don't buy into any fantasies of being in the bloodline of a wild-woman Black Forest hedge-witch, or a Native American chief--what could there be back there which is worth elevating to greater-than-human status?
Not looking for an answer. Just thinking out loud.
I think the key in all this is the line towards the end, the 'greater-than-human status.' By which I mean that's not what ancestors are at all nor is that how they are really thought about in such traditions. Just humans who have passed over into another category, rather than ascended or what not.
As someone who ran as far away in the continental United States from his family as he could, and then crossed an ocean after that, I can relate to people not really seeing the point of even caring about ancestors. This is only a recent thing for me, in the last three years. It started when the one older relative of mine that I deeply loved and never had any problems with died, and next thing I knew I was talking to her as part of my daily pagan rites (mostly just talking to gods by candle light).
She wasn't greater than human, nor really much different from anyone else, except she meant a lot to me and always showed me a deep kindness I never understood. Her death changed me a lot, and changed the way I understood how families shape who we are for better or for (very often) worse.
Of course, there's always a kind of greater-than-human attribution for some ancestors. I like to joke about this, but it's actually rather serious: listen to a Marxist talk about Marx or an anarchist about Proudhon and you start to see their devotion is deeply religious, despite all the trappings of atheism. Once you catch on to this, you start to see it isn't much different from the way a Jew or a Muslim thinks of Moses or Mohamed...
If nothing else, I'm pretty darn sure most of my ancestors for the last several hundred years were Christians of some stripe or another--how would they feel about posthumously being made objects of idolatry? That's the problem with being so far culturally removed from your ancestors, and why so many pagans (in my limited experience) cling to the idea that they themselves the descendants of rebellious witches, who endeavored to practice secret arts in a hostile, dogmatic world. Outside of that narrative framework, the act of dragging your devoutly Catholic 16th-century great-grandmother into a Wheel Of The Year ceremony seems pretty disrespectful. I'm not sure how to reconcile that.
I am more concerned these days with the cultism/tribalism emerging from commercial IDpol culture. Sometimes, for some reason, it takes me back somehow to a book called EARTH ABIDES. Dunno why I see some parallels, sort of if you cut it with Brave New World. Sounds insane. Some day I will sort it out.
I don't know the book, but one thing I have noticed is that there is a IDPOL push to paint all white people who do ancestor work as inherently racist or fascist. Ancestors, according to such people, are only for dark skinned people...
Hmm. I suspect they'd feel about the same way as my grandmother would feel knowing her grandson is a pagan leftist faggot. :)
Less flippantly, though, I'm not sure the dead have religion any more than they have politics. And the dead don't really get to choose how and by whom they are remembered, yeah? I mean, "great men" spend millions before their deaths to shape the way future generations see them, but all most people know about Rockefeller and Carnegie is that they were rich.
In my experience, though, some ancestors are a lot less apt to communicate than others. Same with trees and living humans. Some will talk your ear off, some would rather everyone just left them alone.
I am always talking to the dead these days. Belva died, the Fred, then Lorraine, and with them my heart and soul. Sometimes I just want to desperately be with them again. I still have so many questions for my mom and dad, and the others. I am forced to fantasize that someday soon I will join them, just so that painful emptiness inside can find hope.
LMAO. Thank you, but for me you just demonstrated it is important to know where you came from. I listened to the stories my great grandma, grandma, mom and dad had to tell, as I did many other others, like my friend Lorraine who was born in 1918 and a die hard FDR democrat. My paternal family was more from the Teddy Roosevelt clan. I ran away from home at age 6, 16, and 17. Sadly, it ended up out of the frying pan into the fire situation. Wish I had time for the longer story, but over all, in the end, I forgave them and was able to honor them.
My grandfather was a hardcore democrat who joked about wanting to be the doctor who shoved the catheter up Reagan's urethra when Ronnie had to have surgery. My grandmother, on the other hand, once said she wanted to live long enough to see Sarah Palin become president and then die because her social security wasn't enough to live on...
Palin. That is a bad one.