There are several main spirit guides that are very important. These spirits include: nature spirits (the spirits of the rocks, trees, rivers, animals, etc.) elemental spirits (sasquatch, “little people,” trolls, fairies, leprechauns, etc.,) angels, deities, ascended masters, extraterrestrial spirits, and ancestors. (For more information on the different kinds of spirit guides, see the book The Seven Types of Spirit Guide by Yamile Yemoonyah.) I’m sure there are many more beyond my awareness, including hybrid and multi-dimensional species. But for the sake of this piece, I’d like to focus on ancestors.
Ancestors can be one’s own bloodline, or they can be ancestors of place, indigenous to your local region (For more on this, check out the work of Daniel Foor.) There is this idea of the last ancestor with a whole heart. Basically, this refers to the last ancestor that had an integrated relationship with Earth and all her Spirits…. That lived in harmony with the natural world, lived in reciprocity, and was generally in healthy and empowered relationship with self, environment, and community. The idea of the last ancestor with a whole heart implies that if we want a guiding relationship with an ancestor, sometimes we have to bypass our more recent ancestors and go waaaay back. The more dysfunctional a society is, the farther back one will go in order to find a healthy ancestor. For those of European descent who lost their umbilical connection with nature so long ago, we may have to go back to pagan, polytheistic, and animist times. For societies that have maintained their medicinal wisdom and traditional lifeways, this last ancestor with a whole heart may not be too far back.
In a time when so much of the library of the earth’s wisdom has been lost through ecocide, we need the ancestors more than ever. Contact with them can restore our consciousness of a coherent cosmology of Earth and our place in it.
The following piece was inspired by a mushroom journey I had where ancestors and human spirit guides featured in a big way. I am of full European descent and do not claim blood from any other culture. Yet as you will see, human spirits of different cultures came through. If we are going to have a mature conversation about spirit guides, I think we need to be honest that individuals have quite surprising and mysterious groupings of guides! These groupings often include beings of different cultural origins, and defy political correctness. There are three spirit guides that have been hugely influential forces in my life that are distinctly human spirits, and are not white. Why do they hang out around me? I don’t know. But our relationship is very intimate, and I treat them with honor, respect, and gratitude. Sometimes an understanding of why they are attached to you may percolate in. Other times, things are better left unscrutinized and simply enjoyed. When we get into these transcendent spiritual places as happens in psychedelics, what else can you do but acknowledge what is coming through and let the spirits speak for themselves? That being said, I want to be mindful of any way that I may inadvertently romanticize or appropriate other cultures that are not mine. I welcome feedback and discussion about this in the comments.
As often happens with psychedelics, as personal boundaries dissolve, our experience of self can become much more collective and universal. Psychedelics induce synesthesia, and you may experience other time periods, for example. You might feel like a pharaoh in ancient Egypt. You might become a snake. You might shape-shift into a mythological creature like a dragon. You might channel an entity with all of its cultural mannerisms! And sometimes, metaphor is truer to experience than the literal, in a surrealistic perception. I wrote my account true to my direct, sensory experience, because I feel like the truth is always the most interesting thing.
The ancestors aren’t gathered around the womb anymore,
Singing songs to the unborn,
painting the tummy with red clay.
They aren’t there to deliver messages into the young one’s ear,
and reify the spirit world.
They don’t surround us and whisper blessings under their breath,
Smear ash on our foreheads,
or oversee the pilgrimage into adulthood.
But they can still be found,
Coming in on the wings of old songs.
In unsuspecting moments,
When a book falls open to a conspicuous page…
Skeletons descend the scaffolding of my mind,
and dance playfully with my senses…
Picking up my etheric body like a marionette off the floor,
and stringing it.
Mocking death itself, with rickety, old joints,
Agile and ancient.
They can be felt in the way that,
from where you sit just now,
the portrait in her matronly Victorian collar,
happens to be looking right at you,
with knowing in her eye.
The ancestors shook their rattles,
And shook her awake.
Getting her up off her knees, so she could dance.
She had fallen to them,
Collapsed and defeated,
Impoverished of Spirit.
“Get up! Get up!” they cried,
And lit a fire under her butt.
That’s what the old ones do,
Breathe life into us when we’ve forgotten.
They slithered inconspicuously into her loins.
Found all the openings and made their way in.
With their primal pulse,
the rattles of her ovaries started shaking.
Rising, like a cobra from a basket.
Like a subterranean priestess, awakened.
“Have you forgotten, child?” they ask.
They are the only ones who can show us,
for we are of them,
their own flesh and blood.
They are inside us,
And it is only the within,
that can light the inner pipe.
Smoke rises from the central fire and so does she,
Their ephemeral shapes mutate in the flames.
They sing her Life Song into her ear,
They squat on the ground of her body,
Sit on the ledges of her organs.
Make mud patties with adept hands,
Play the water percussion.
“Arise young one!” like a phoenix from the flames.
She is stuck in the mire of her samsara,
weighed down by the weight of the world
Yet the older ones,
(not the immediately dead,
but the ones initiated into the ranks of elderhood,)
Reach down to her through the eons,
And reinforce her.
“Arise,” they say,
“…The world needs you.”
Death Dance by Nikita Abakumov
Cave drawings come alive in their movements
Fire shadows on the walls of her insides.
No stranger to the sensual,
They call the woman out of her.
“Where is your soul child??”
“Have you misplaced it?” like Peter Pan losing his shadow?
They know things our parents do not know.
Preceding the inquisition,
The sterilization of soul…
This is how we talk to them, in fact…
By a sensual remembering.
My body is a djembe drum…
That black men sing to with felt voices.
I am a shekere,
And I fulfill my life,
honor my forbearers,
by shaking emphatically in celebration of life.
For what squandering is an instrument that is never played?
The ancestors dwell in the underbelly of gospel songs and deep laughter,
Strong legs running barefoot like Neanderthals across the earth
… our distant ancestors.
They are no stranger to soul,
No stranger to power,
And in fact, this is their calling card.
It is in embodying our strength that we find them.
And stoking our inner fire, is their most potent gift.
To know our strength is to know them.
For whenever we inhabit our strength we find,
we are never alone.
But that we walk with a band of a thousand forces
All of the natural kingdom in toe.
Chief among them,
our ancestors.
Most intimately close, and there all along…
To answer the call of our destiny,
is to enliven them.
We feel them cheering us on,
their liberation tied up with ours…
Soul contracts, in motion.
They are realized by, and likewise feed,
our becoming more ourselves than we could ever imagine.
Original prophets,
Seers of our Name,
Guardians of our destiny,
The few who knew us our whole mortal life,
They blow prayers in to our frontanelles,
for the full realization of our life.
We help fulfill some lineage destiny in fulfilling our own.
And perhaps more than anything,
Their presence teaches us that we are one among many,
like a bird, flying in murmuration
to make up a much bigger, mythical Spirit Bird…
The iconographic Hawk,
That reigns in the sky.
They stand in the corridor,
Midwifing us back home to death…
The welcoming committee,
Familiar from the last time we took this passage,
Birth canal.
That we may touch the ground of our origins
the sprouting place of our belonging.
Unmistakable in their time and placestamp,
and unmistakably familiar, in their love.
They form a tributary back through generations.
They usher the natural flow of life-force,
back to our earliest origins,
Our singular source,
The light at the end of the tunnel,
At the beginning of time.
Jessie at Seeds of Spells
Family,
The first and foremost vestige of belonging.
All of us come through the loins of family,
A birth certificate to life.
The ancestors consecrate your citizenship to earth,
In case you’d forgotten.
You were no mistake, no accident,
Not isolated,
But deeply interconnected,
And overseen by a council of elders.
Your life ordained, and very deliberate.
Not forsaken, but closely invested in, even by the distant ones,
wearing Neolithic skins, and carrying a staff.
Far from being some
delicate old fossils,
Obsolete and antiquated,
geriatric and dribbling in wheel chairs…
Graduated in their wisdom,
they stand strong in their buckskins,
Dignified and sharp,
In peak form.
With an assimilation of Spirit,
that levels us.
Ageless,
And grounded in a primacy of relationship with Earth.
Even though they are “dead,”
They are too alive for our delicate sensibilities.
They are not afraid of death,
And instead frolic in its curtain!
They are the backbone of the family.
Bones and vertebrae,
assemble vertically with eons,
Homo erectus.
Archeology and old ruins,
Carbon dates and memory.
Connecting chakra centers,
Constructing a sacred vessel,
For the kundalini flow.
That sacred double helix,
That snake that wraps up your spine…
Holding your head up.
Don’t forget whose shoulders you stand on,
Don’t forget who gives you some spine!
And don’t forget the ones that have your back.
The umbilical cord that can’t be cut.
Latent in your own mineral composition,
your own flesh and bones,
Each time you carry yourself,
Hold that head up high, child.
Know thy name.
My communion with the ancestors, has always been forged by re-embodying my primal self. Because how do they live more potently within us than our very own flesh and bones? To really communicate with a disincarnate spirit, it is necessary to feel their humanity. They are not pitiful impressions of the past. They are not some curio of days gone by. In the other world, they exist with a vividness far more vital than even our own. Therefore, we feel them in coming into our own realness. This is the only way to do justice to how animate and dynamic they really are.
Unfortunately, in our contemporary day and age, there is a dismissal of the sacred, as if it is the stuff of silly fantasy. Fortunately, our ancestors knew better. I feel so validated, that I can reach farther back in my ancestral line and have the affirmation of the eldest elders, of the cogency of the spirit world, over the infantalization, reductionism, dehumanization, and sterilization of the colonial paradigm.
My contact with my ancestors has been empowering to know myself as a spiritual being, and get endorsement from within my own family for my spiritual proclivities. This was very meaningful to me as a white person who grew up in an upper-middle class, white, professionally and academically high-achieving suburb where spirituality was decidedly anti-intellectual and frivolous. For many white people in the United States, our remembered family drank the Kool-Aid of colonialism so completely, that there isn’t even any cognitive dissonance about it anymore. It can be very devastating to exist within these spiritually impoverished and desolate families and communities. Even amongst more religious white settlers, their spirituality is often about dominion and lacks gnosis. I think many white Americans like myself feel an estrangement from a living, breathing, and empowering spiritual ecosystem. It’s easy to feel like a spiritual orphan amongst the corporatism and spiritual vapidness of white “culture.” For that reason, contact with our ancestors can be a huge relief, and welcoming home to the spiritual dimension we know is in our bones.
No being is separate from family ties. Family is the very medium by which we enter into this life. It is our inextricable context. Familial fascia is intrinsic to our existence. No one exists outside or beyond the web of ancestry and family. We all belong. Whether we like it or not, there is cartilage holding us accountable to others, and our lives hold others accountable to us. Even if someone is estranged from their blood family, these ties are inevitable. These ties are never dead, but they may be dormant. And therefore, the opportunity for intergenerational healing is always available. If someone is motivated and making the gestures to connect with ancestors in spirit, its happening is imminent.
Ancestor contact also calls into question the problem of time. When we experience the presence of the ancestors in our bodies, time collapses and is proven illusory. If ancestors can be just as alive and present after death, it shifts our perspective from one of linear time to dimensionality. They are alive and well, just on a different frequency of perception. And engaging with them also opens up the world of animism, where spirits of various forms may come through in unsuspecting ways, transcending the dominant paradigm of reality, and breaking us free from the illusion of separation. Contact with ancestors rattles the foundation of colonial-based consensus reality. It enlivens a shamanic perspective.
Many white people seek outside their own lineage for an earth-based spirituality to heal, rekindle, remember, and validate their embodied connection with earth and spirit. This can be problematic because of the burden we place on people of color to educate and include us, and share something very sacred, which we might exploit, as we have done with so many other aspects of their culture. And indeed, we do often co-opt their spirituality. This trend emphasizes all the more, the importance of rediscovering the healthy and intact earth-based spiritual connection within our own European lineage. We are all indigenous to this earth. But for the most part, white people are a long way from home. But if we discover ancestors with a whole heart within our own lineage, it can restore a sense of belonging that can disarm our destructive tendencies.
Ancestor or spirit contact requires a reinhabiting of the body. This revitalizes us and consummates our lived experience as members of the animal kingdom, and earth citizens. It reinforces another way of being: one of organicity, body wisdom, direct perception, and agency.
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