I haven’t written here for a while, mostly because I’ve been traveling. I’m in the Bay Area as I’m typing this. Last weekend, I attended Pantheacon, a yearly pagan conference. Being there reignited my fire for writing, especially non-fiction essays and commentary. There’s a lot that I want to share about the conference and related transformations, but let me start by focusing on one area.
One of the workshops I participated in was “Rekindling the Ancestral Hearth” presented by Caitlín Matthews. She led us on a trance journey in which we walked back, between the lines of our ancestors, and returned to a great fire–our ancestral hearth. Around my ancestral hearth, my ancestors were drumming and singing and dancing in very much the same way that current day pagans and hippies do. I felt a clear sense of joy and approval from my ancestors, that I was rejuvenating and returning to the family traditions of ecstatic ritual, earth-based spirituality, and tribal community. It was such a relief and blessing to know that these parts of my life, which most of my current family does not know about or understand or participate in, are actually a part of my heritage. Deeper than the centuries of Christianity, the stiff-backed Lutheran repression, the gin-soaked Irish Catholicism, my ancestors were pagan. They lived in small tribal groups, revering the land and sea, knowing intimately, in their daily lives, that their survival depended upon the Web of Life, but more than this, knowing the deep love poured out by the Earth, celebrating life as they danced and sang around the fire.
And this is true for everyone’s ancestors. White people are often drawn to and end up appropriating from Native American cultures because we feel cut off from the earth-based, close-knit tribal communities which humans have lived in for the vast majority of our history. We don’t have to steal from cultures from which we have already stolen so much to find what we are looking for–we can find it in the roots of our own family trees if we look deeply enough. All our ancestors were indigenous peoples, once upon a time. Following our roots back to that time and place, where the bonfire still burns and the old ones dance and sing, can be a profoundly healing homecoming to not only our human families but also our greater families of rocks and rivers, trees and mountains, fish and geese and wolves and flowers.
(If you’re interested in learning more about these concepts, I would recommend reading The Mist-Filled Path: Celtic Wisdom for Exiles, Wanderers, and Seekers by Frank MacEowen and Tom Cowan or My Name is Chellis and I’m in Recovery from Western Civilization by Chellis Glendinning. Also, my next post will be about how you can begin working with your own ancestors.)
