Archive for the ‘ancestors’ Tag
The green world burgeons all around me, though I fall silent. I don’t grow up like these eager stems, leaves and blossoms that surround this house of self in a blaze of green glory. So early this year, summer already launched in the heart of spring. Not up. No. I grow down.
The word itself brings the action. D o o o w w w n n n. Without thought, something bones and skin and gut do. Are doing. I shudder in a moment of vertigo. One world spins and collapses around me. Then I’m touching another, walls that shape the passage-way around my descent. Something deepens, I sense roots like fingers, fingers like roots, reaching into darkness, into cool earth and colder stone.
I feel them ever so subtly at first, their branching shapes, the strength of this bark-skin, root and claw, fingertip and tendril, things that are somehow both my hands and also the tree roots I find myself grasping.
Then all at once, that subterranean tug of ancestors, my roots their roots, reaching and twining into the dream earth I crawl into each night and pull over me. I shiver, bone-deep. All that they were, I am. All that they feared and love, I too fear and love. In the darkness, a space opens. Water pools at my feet, a faint glow illuminating it, silvering the surface. Ripples die away and all lies still. My own breathing deafens me, too loud. The dark silver still shines with its own light, waiting … for what?
I’m jerked upright, to my feet. Want to meet your ancestors? asks an insistent whisper. Look, the whisper says. Look, Pilgrim, in the mirror. The silver surface of the water steams, mist swirls up from it, the fog thickens, then furls back and away. I kneel down to look …
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Singing. I hear singing.
Three awens for the dead, who live again. Three awens for the living, who will die in turn. Three awens for those yet unborn, who know both worlds, who await a third.
O Walker between the worlds, do you wish to remember all you have forgotten? Then stand ready. The nine awens of change wash over you.
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Are you ready?
It’s not a question. Oh, it has the form of one, but it’s not. It’s a choice. I show I’m ready, or not, by what I choose. And by how. Not by thinking of an answer.
It’s a fair choice. It’s always a fair choice, I hear. Because it’s yours. But if I don’t know it’s a choice, if I listen to fear, or doubt, or judgment, or anything else but what I was born listening to, what shaped me while I was a mere thumbling in my mother’s womb, I miss the choice, and think it’s merely a question to answer, one that already has an answer, not one I answer in this moment, right now, by choosing. What will I choose? That’s the real question.
I gift you with a grail, the chalice of your desire, says the short powerful figure before me. I try to make out a face, but nothing other than an outline in this dimness. And the voice.
What will fill it? Where will you pour it? The gift cannot be given to you until you give it away.
How? I hear myself shouting, how in the name of the Nine Druids do I give away a gift I don’t even have?
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I’m coming back. Ascending, though that’s not exactly it either. One world fades, another gains strength.
A final whisper. Wanderer, you have no other home. Home is where you serve.
Images: greenworld; sheila-na-gig; lake at night; grail.
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Sunrise, are you waiting for that sliver of moon to invite you? This time of year I’m up before you, and waiting in the perfect frozen peace of January pre-dawn.
Slowly our snow-covered fields flower from purple to gray to white, and then bloom golden with light. A cardinal with pinfeathers puffed against the cold ignites the snow when he lands beneath the bird-feeder, all impossible red. Ah, day at last, over the eastern hill you come, and here we are, in the eye of the sun, loving the light though we may forget to say so. I will say so now, while I remember. All praise for light inside and out!
Yes, I can be a Druid in the life of a day. But bring on night and darkness and my Druidry can suffer a sea-change. You know you’re a Druid when death moves you not at all, says a tendril of awareness. When you may not even notice you’ve changed realms. Well, but I’m not there yet, I reply. I have no trouble with death. I drop into darkness each time I fall asleep. It’s dying that troubles me. And others’ deaths that are hard to take, though with the gift of Sight we may know them after and visit them still. It’s the body comfort I miss, voice and touch and the daily-ness of a life lived next door to my own. I know you’re around, Ancestors without your skins on, but I miss you here.
I light this flame to gift the darkness, not contend with it. Each has its place, here in Abred*. “Know all things, be all things, experience all things”: some say this is our destiny, as we move through the circles of existence. Maybe. Not sure yet. Don’t need to be. This circle right now, right here, keeps me plenty occupied.
Nine awens for the day
for the day’s choices
and gifts easy and difficult.
Nine awens for the gods
unknown and known who grace us
with the Breath of Asu,
sound and light both.
Nine awens for you, little soul,
beast, bird or human, watching
at the gates of Abred*
for the flower of destiny
to unfold its next petal
as you become.
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Images: sunrise.
*Abred. The great Revival Druid and brilliant forger, Iolo Morganwg, wrote in his compendium of wisdom and fabrication the Barddas that all beings move slowly from Annwn, the unformed, to Abred, the first world, our present circle, “probation,” and from there to Gwynvyd, the “white world” of the next advance and “perfect freedom,” and on from there to Ceugant, “infinity.” And the way there is long and full of experiences until, ripe with knowing all things each circle has to teach us, we take a step to the next.
Do I “believe” it? That’s not the important question to me, or to many Druids. How well does it explain things? What can I learn from it? Those are the important questions. Whether it’s “true” or not is quite beside the point. I’m not interested in creedal religion; that’s one reason I’m a Druid, after all. I don’t have a statement of faith; I have a practice that includes various beliefs that evolve as I do. I don’t want to sit in the restaurant and wait to be served from another’s choice, to use Philip Carr-Gomm’s image (go to 4th paragraph). I want to work in the kitchen, help it come together for myself. This is Abred, the world of probation, after all — of proving and testing and trying out. So I’m game — I try it out, try it on for size.
Updated 4 August 2015
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I’ve mentioned my obsession with Indo-European (IE) in previous posts, and given samples of a conlang I derived from IE and use in ritual. One of the many fascinations of this reconstructed language that’s the ancestral tongue of 3 billion people — half the people on the planet alive today — is the glimpses into the culture we can reconstruct along with the language. (Here’s a visual of the IE “family” and many of its members.) How, you thoughtfully ask, can we really know anything about a culture dating from some 6000 years ago – the very approximate time period when the speakers of the IE proto-language flourished? A good question — I’m glad you asked! – and one hotly contested by some with agendas to push – usually a nationalist or religious agenda intent on serving a worldview that excludes some group, worldview or idea. Hey kids, let’s define our club du jour by those we don’t let in!
But the most reasonable and also plausible answer to the question of IE language and culture is also simpler and less theatrical. Indo-European is the best and most thoroughly reconstructed proto-language on the planet — and it’s true there’s much still to learn. But after over two hundred years of steady increases in knowledge about human origins and of thoroughly debated and patient linguistic reconstruction, the techniques have been endlessly proven to work. And if a series of words that converge on a cultural point or practice can be reconstructed for IE, then the cultural practice or form itself is also pretty likely. Notice I don’t say merely a single word. Yes, to give a modest example, IE has the reconstructed word *snoighwos “snow” (the * indicates a reconstruction from surviving descendants — see footnote 1 below for a sample) – and that possibly suggests a region for an IE “homeland” that is temperate enough to get snow. After all, why have a word for a thing that’s not part of your world in any way? But wait — there’s more!
Here’s an uncontested (note 2) series of reconstructions – *pater, *mater, *sunu, *dukter, *bhrater and *swesor – all pointing to an immediate family unit roughly similar to our “nuclear family,” with father, mother, son, daughter, brother and sister all in place. It’s fairly safe on the basis of this cluster of reconstructed words – and others, if you still doubt, can be provided in painfully elaborate detail – that with a high degree of probability, an IE family existed all those millennia ago that would also be recognizable in modern times and terms.
[Side note: almost every reconstructed IE word listed in this post has a descendant alive in modern English. Want proof? Post a comment and I’ll be happy to provide a list!]
Things understandably get touchier and more contentious when we move on to words and ideas like *deiwos “god”; *nmrtya “immortality”; *dapnos “potlatch, ritual gift-exchange”; *dyeu + *pater “chief of the gods” (and Latin Jupiter); *sepelyo– “perform the burial rites for a corpse”; and a few whole phrases like *wekwom tekson, literally “weaver of words, poet” and *pa- wiro-peku, part of a prayer meaning something like “protect people and cattle.”
What else can we conclude with considerable confidence about the IE peoples? Many lived in small economic-political units governed by a *reg– “king, chieftain” and lived in *dom– “houses.” Women *guna, *esor left their families at marriage and moved to live with their husbands *potis, *ner, *snubhos. A good name *nomen mattered then just as it does today – even with social media both exalting and trashing names with sometimes dizzying speed – though small-town gossip always filled and fills that role quite well, too. Heroes dominated the tales people told round household and ceremonial fires *pur, *ogni in the village *woikos, *koimos at night *nokwti. The most powerful and famous *klewes– heroes succeeded in slaying the serpent or monster of chaos: *oghwim eghwent “he slew the serpent” and thereby earned *klewos ndhghwitom “undying fame” (note 3). Special rites called for an *asa altar and offerings *spond-, because the universe was a place of an ongoing re-balancing of forces where the cosmic harmony *rti, *rta needed human effort to continue.
With Thanksgiving in the wings, it’s a good time for reflection (is it ever not?). Ways of being human have not changed as much as we might think or fear or be led to believe. Family, relationships, good food and drink, a home, meaningful work, self-respect – these still form the core of the good life that remains our ideal, though its surface forms and fashions will continue to shift, ebb and flow. Hand round the *potlom cup and the *dholis, the portion each person shares with others, so that all may live, and we can still do as our ancestors did: give thanks *gwrat– and praise for the gift *donom of life *gwita.
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1. Linguistic reconstruction involves comparing forms in existing and recorded languages to see whether they’re related. When you gather words that have a strong family resemblance and also share similar or related meanings, they help with reconstructing the ancestral word that stands behind them, like an old oil portrait of great-great-great grandma in the hallway. Some descendant or other probably still walks around with her characteristic nose or brow or eyes, even if other details have shifted with time, marriage — or cosmetic surgery.
For *snoighwos, a sample of the evidence includes English snow, Russian snegu, Latin nix, niv-, Sanskrit sneha-, and so on. The more numerous the survivals in daughter languages, the more confident the reconstruction usually is. After a while you see that fairly consistent patterns of vowels and consonants begin to repeat from word to word and language to language, and help predict the form a new reconstruction could take.
A handful of reconstructed words have descendants in all twelve (depending on who does the counting) of the main IE family groups like Italic (Latin, Oscan, Umbrian, all the Romance languages, and others), Celtic (Irish, Welsh, Breton, Manx, etc.), Germanic (German, English, Dutch, Icelandic, Norwegian, Frisian, Swedish, Gothic, etc.), Baltic (Latvian, Lithuanian, Prussian), Slavic (Russian, Serbian, Polish, Czech, Ukrainian, Slovene, Polabian, Old Church Slavonic, etc.), Greek (Doric, Macedonian, Attic, etc.), Tocharian (A and B), and Indo-Iranian (Sanskrit, Pali, Avestan, Bengali, Hindi, Urdu, Sindhi, Kashmiri, Dari, Pashto, Farsi, Baluchi, Gujerati, etc.) and so on, to name roughly half of the families, but nowhere near all the members, which number well over 100, not counting dialects and other variants.
2. “Uncontested” means that words with approximately these forms and meanings are agreed on by the overwhelming majority of scholars. If you dip into Indo-European linguistics journals and textbooks, you’ll often see algebraic-looking reconstructions that include details I exclude here — ones having to do with showing laryngeals, stress, vowel length and quality, etc. indicated by diacritics, superscripts and subscripts.
3. Even without the details mentioned in note 2 above, some reconstructions can still look formidably unpronounceable: I challenge any linguist to give three consecutive oral renderings of the second element in the reconstructed phrase *klewos ndhghwitom! The point to remember is that these are usually cautious reconstructions. They generally “show what we know.” Vowels tend to be much more slippery and fickle than consonants in most languages, and so they’re also less often completely clear for IE than the consonantal skeleton is. Several people, me among them, have worked on versions of “Indo-European for daily use”!
Images: Mallory; Indiana Jones the linguist.
Corrected 18 Dec. 2014
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[Updated 26 July 2020]
[A Celtic Conlang |Invoke for a Tongue 1 – 2 | Druid Ritual Language 1–2–3 ]
I’m sitting here in nerd rapture with an interlibrary loan copy of Ranko Matasovic’s Etymological Dictionary of Proto-Celtic. There — I may just possibly have driven away 99% of my readership with a single sentence.
On the off-chance you’re still with me, let me explain. In “Talking Old” I tried to convey my delight in the sounds and shapes of our ancestral language — I say “our” because over half the planet speaks an Indo-European language, itself a pretty remarkable fact. Proto-Celtic is a daughter of Indo-European and mother of the six modern Celtic tongues: Manx, Breton, Cornish, Welsh, Irish, and Scottish Gaelic. So Indo-European is our “grandmother tongue,” or maybe great-grandmother. Beyond the nerd appeal that only Celticists, conlangers and a few other assorted dweebish types can comprehend, Proto-Celtic is a window into Celtic history and culture, a fragment of our human past — and a potential source for a ritual-liturgical-magical language in the Celtic tradition.
The Celtic languages today are struggling. Manx has been brought back from the last edges of extinction — with the last native speaker of Manx, Ned Maddrell (image to the right) passing in 1974. Take a look-listen at this short video of Manx children and a couple of teachers talking in and about the language. Cornish died out about 200 years ago, but has been revived and has, depending on your source, a few thousand speakers, and along with the other Celtic languages, a cultural fire banked under it to keep it alive. Scottish Gaelic is threatened but has speakers in the tens of thousands, and Welsh and Irish are also at risk, but have active communities of speakers. Breton struggles against an official French-only policy, and retreats annually, as older speakers die, and younger people turn to French to get ahead. If you’re interested, check out these links to some short clips of speech in these languages.*
The Etymological Dictionary I’m currently drooling over, confirming everyone’s worst impressions and stereotypes of nerds, provides linguistic reconstructions of Proto-Celtic words — something like a museum restoring missing portions of an old painting or piece of furniture. As the restoration proceeds, the face of one of your ancestors takes shape before your eyes, and you hear a whisper on the wind of a voice speaking a language gone for over a thousand years. That’s the closest I can come to the sensation of reading and pronouncing slowly to myself the restored words.
But while you shake your head at one more poor fool taken in by cultural seances and linguistic necromancy, I’m wandering mist-covered hills and listening to ghosts reincarnate in dream, as long as I hold the book open. I make my very own Samhain-on-the-spot, the veil between the worlds thins, and I converse with the dead, with the Otherworld, with the generations stored in my DNA and blood and bone. Perhaps you could call it racism in the best sense of the word — a celebration of all who have gone before me and who, by living, have delivered me to this moment of my own life, as I write these words. It doesn’t last, but it also endures forever.
As a linguist and conlanger it wouldn’t be hard for me to reconstruct a couple of different usable versions of a Celtic language. One version could be a somewhat simplified Proto-Celtic, another a sister tongue to Welsh, Breton and Cornish, ieth gelteg, a Celtic language. Would it be “authentic”? About as authentic as I am, descendant of so many bloodlines that like everyone else on the planet, I’m a mongrel. Who would want to speak such a mongrel tongue? That’s not my concern — I’d restore it for some of the same reasons a museum sets about a restoration: for what it can tell us about our past, and about ourselves as preservers of our past, and for its “thingliness,” its solidity and existence in our world. These are potent magical reasons on their own.
Why not learn a living and threatened Celtic language instead? Do something more practical! I can hear the critics and naysayers. Can’t you best connect with your supposed past through those alive today, speaking a descendant tongue just as you are a descendant person? Well, I have. I know a fair bit about the Celtic languages, as I do about some other endangered and dying languages. And I look at them as I look at the branch of my own ancestral line, destined to die out because my wife and I have no children. Half of all our current languages are destined to die before the end of this century, along with a comparable number of plant and animal species. Some have seen a reflection of one in the other. Given how closely tied human rights, tribal survival and environmental degradation are, it’s not a stretch to see human languages and ecosystems as mirrors for each other. “What we do to the web, we do to ourselves.”
The analogies of blood and speech start to break down, the Samhain door of linguistic reconstruction begins to shudder shut, and I’m back in my diminutive study, holding the hardbound book, more than an inch thick, and shivering a little. I stand up and step into the living room to stoke the fire in our soapstone woodstove which has subsided to embers during my extended reverie. And I wonder and remember and plan and dream again. Celtic twilight is not the same as Celtic dawn, though at any point the light level might look the same.
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Images: Welsh flag; Ned Mandrell; dictionary.
*Here are short Youtube clips of Irish (a 2-minute weather report), Welsh (a Welsh teenager talking in both languages), Cornish (a story in English and two varieties of Cornish, with a strong English accent), Irish again (4 minutes, this time showing how Manx and Irish speakers can understand each other), Scottish Gaelic (2:14; also a weather report) and Breton (2:10 — short interviews, subtitled in French, that you might mistake at first for French, so strong is the French influence on Breton pronunciation).
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[Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9]
“The Blood of Veen is a key to new insights for you,” said Aithne. “Your ancestors reach you through the body — your body. You carry them with you wherever you go, in your cell memory, your DNA, your genetic coding, and the energy signatures scientists are just on the edges of discovering, which are part of the bonds that link the physical body to the other worlds.”
“So how does the Blood of Veen connect with me personally?”
“If you visit a place where your ancestors lived, you may have a dream or vision that teaches you something you need to know.” Aithne stood gazing a little above my left shoulder, or head, as if she was watching something move there. “Veen is in the province of Brabant.” She paused, apparently studying empty air. “And some of your mother’s ancestors came from that region,” she added. Aithne’s knowledge startled me. One of my mother’s aunts had traced much of the family line back to medieval France and Belgium. Some of her ancestors came from Brabant, including a noble named Joscelyn de Louvain, when Brabant was a Duchy. (Don’t get the wrong idea here. I have my full share of black sheep in the family, too!) And Louvain is a city in Brabant — its capital, in fact.
“But I can’t just pick up and visit Brabant or anywhere else in the world at the drop of a hat! Most people don’t have the time or money to track down their ancestors in other countries or take some sort of reincarnation tour.”
“You don’t need to,” said Aithne, ignoring my flash of irritation. “Pictures can help. And there are online forums where you can ask questions and find out detailed information about almost anything you want to know. Let your curiosity work for you. After all, how much time do you waste online as it is?!” Her sudden smile was teasing. “Make the first move, and the ancestors will respond. You’ll have a dream, find a book, ‘happen’ to meet someone, make a connection. They will guide you.”
Somehow it surprised me that Aithne knew these things. While I’ve come to expect my inner experiences to bring me general insights and hints and nudges on occasion, whenever I receive specific information it still surprises me. A few years ago in a dream I got the name of a small British town in Devon where some of my father’s family originated. I’d never heard of it before, and it no longer exists today. For that reason I know that no one in my family had ever mentioned it. But there are archaeological records and mentions of the town in chronicles and censuses of the period showing that it once did exist.
That was the outer confirmation of an inner experience. Such validation doesn’t always come, but when it does, I feel a shiver of awe and wonder. These things are real. The worlds link however briefly, and lives change as a result. I know this, I’ve experienced it before enough time to silence any doubt, but my inner doubter doesn’t care. He’s achieved pro status by this point, and just goes about pointing out sly new possibilities of self-deception. I guess my ancestors have to be pretty patient with me to get through at all. I often think they must find other descendants more worth their time. Then I remember they’re working outside of time — at least outside of my time. They can afford a little patience with the stubborn and half-deaf ones like me.
Aithne seemed to be following my thought. She was nodding slightly, and then she said, “Sometimes the act of inquiring leads you to new people and experiences that are beneficial for everyone involved. You know this,” she said.
“I’ll return one more time,” she said. “We have a few more things to discuss.”
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Updated 23 April 2015
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This post is self-indulgent, so if you’re not feeling mellow enough to tolerate such things, best move on and come back another time. OK, you’ve been warned.
Beside me as I write this lies a thick paperback copy of J. P. Mallory’s cumbersomely titled The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World. Since it’s a week-end day like today, and nothing presses me to get up and pretend to accomplish anything, I pull it from the nightstand and lie abed thumbing through it. Yes, I’ll say it first: “Nerds ‘R’ Us.”
I confess to abject weakness for books like this one about Proto-Indo-European, the reconstructed mother tongue of everyone who speaks one of the approximately 100 languages descended from it — roughly half the planet, three billion people, give or take a few million. I open the book and pause at a list of less well-known extinct language names — Illyrian, Dacian, Thracian, Macedonian, Phrygian — that evoke salad dressings, or obscure vintages, or mysterious bloodlines of characters in an occult novel. To anyone wired just a little differently, the whole thing must just scream B O R I N G. Though if you’re such a person, you’ve probably stopped reading this already.
My addiction occasions sighs from my wife, because my corridor of facing bookcases dominates a little-used hallway which has now transformed into a single-file passage to the front door of our house. Language books fill one whole bookcase. No, not for the most part languages I speak or know in any worldly useful way, but languages I drink from, for their beauty and architecture and sound (and ideas for my own conlangs*). I know things about them not even their native speakers know, but I couldn’t speak most of them to save my life. So this is language as first morning coffee, as comfort food, as fix. Even the abbreviation PIE, for Proto-Indo-European, is comforting. Pie. Whipped cream. Dessert. Maybe for breakfast. Flaky crust and steaming freshly baked fruit. Ah.
The underlying draw of such things (beyond the sensuous indulgence I confess to above) seems quest-like. After a long climb I crest a hilltop, the mist clears, and there before me are the ruins, thousands of years old. Only instead of fallen pillars, abandoned steps, doorways opening on empty air, the ruins are words. Ancient words, weathered, yet often still bearing a family likeness. Wiros, gwena, brater, swesor. Man, woman, brother, sister. Mus, gwous, deiwos. Mouse, cow, god. Sedo, bhero. I sit, I bear. Oinos, dwou, treyes, kwetwor, penkwe. One, two, three, four, five. The likenesses grow if you know even a little Latin or a Romance language, or one of their cousins in India.
Some of the same fascination with this proto-language stirred in the first linguists who considered the verbal ruins they were painstakingly excavating and reconstructing. Word by word, through comparisons of living languages and their structures and patterns, the older ancestral language was and is rebuilt. See where the stones are notched, worn, and smudged with soot, and reassemble the fireplace they once made. And there’s part of a wheel, an urn, a head-dress. August Schleicher, who flourished in the first half of the 1800s, “sifted through the reconstructed Indo-European of his day for enough usable words to compose a short narrative tale … published in 1868” (Mallory, 45). His colleagues caught something of the same fever, kept tweaking Schleicher’s story over the ensuing decades, and here’s a contemporary “version of their version” of the first sentence that I’ve made somewhat more pronounceable for English speakers by taking a few small liberties. Linguists will see the changes at once and cluck their tongues at me, and no one else will care:
Gurei owis, kwesyo ulna ne est, ekwons speket, oinom ge gurum wogom wegontem, oinom-kwe megam borom, oinom-kwe gumenem oku berontem.
“A sheep that had no wool saw [some] horses, one pulling a heavy wagon, one a heavy load, and another swiftly bearing a man” (ibid).
Maybe it comes down to this: through such reconstructions we can come closer to talking with the ancestors — and maybe join them in their drinking songs, rather than expecting them just to sing along with ours.
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*My most developed conlang or constructed language is called Thosk. (The name is cognate with Old English theod “people,” Oscan teuta “people,” Latin teutonicus, and German Deutsch.) Its word-stock and grammar are very Indo-European, and so it’s a sibling of English, Spanish, Latin, Hindi, Armenian, Greek, Pashto, French, Latvian, Swedish, Russian, Bengali, Serbian, Danish, Romanian, Ukrainian, Sanskrit, Farsi, Albanian, Dutch, Gujerati … you get the idea. Here’s a simple sentence in Thosk: Men ta tha moi urht bev ahi sumbend no meve klase. “I give more work to anyone sleeping in my classes.”
Mallory, J. P. and D. Q. Adams. The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
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Some teachings run you through their rituals.
Find your own way – individuals
know what works beyond the shown way:
try out drinking with the Ancestors.
Chat ‘em up — don’t merely greet ‘em;
such rites are chummy: do more than meet ’em.
(Spend your weekends with a mummy?)
But I like drinking with my Ancestors.
Another round of pints and glasses
will have us falling on our asses.
Leave off ritual when they’re calling —
you’ll be drinking with your Ancestors.
By and with the spirits near us —
“Don’t invoke us if you fear us” —
good advice: if you lose focus
though you’re drinking with your Ancestors,
in the morning you’ll be uncertain
if you just dreamed or drew the curtain
on some world where it more than seemed
that you were drinking with your Ancestors.
Alcohol works its own magic,
and not all good – it’s downright tragic
if you’re just hung over from what could
have been you drinking with your Ancestors.
They come in all shapes, and in all sizes:
some are heroes, some no prizes
(they’re like us in all our guises).
Listen: they are singing, they are cussing,
they can advise us if we’re fussing
over where our lives might go
or put on a ghostly show.
We’re the upshot, on the down low.
We’re the payoff, crown and fruit
(we got their genetic trash, and loot),
we’re their future – “build to suit.”
So start drinking with your ancestors.
* * *
Ancestor “worship” is sometimes a misnomer, though not always — some cultures do in fact pray to, propitiate and appease the spirits of the ancestral dead in ways indistinguishable from worship. But others acknowledge what is simply fact — an awful lot (the simple fact that we’re here means our ancestors for the most part aren’t literally “an awful lot”) of people stand in line behind us. Their lives lead directly to our own. With the advent of photography it’s become possible to see images beyond the three- or four-generation remove that usually binds us to our immediate forebears. I’m lucky to have a Civil War photo of my great-great grandfather, taken when he was about my age, in his early fifties. In the way of generations past, he looks older than that, face seamed and thinned and worn.
The faces of our ancestral dead are often rightfully spooky. We carry their genetics, of course, and often enough a distant echo of their family traditions, rhythms, expectations, and stories in our own lives — a composite of “stuff,” of excellences and limitations, that can qualify as karma in its most literal sense: both the action and the results of doing. But more than that, in the peculiar way of images, the light frozen there on the photograph in patches of bright and dark is some of the purest magic we have. My great-great-grandfather James looks out toward some indeterminate distance — and in the moment of the photo, time — and that moment is now oddly immortal. Who knows if it was one of his better days? He posed for a photo, and no doubt had other things on his mind at the time, as we all do. We are rarely completely present for whatever we’re doing, instead always on to the next thing, or caught up in the past, wondering why that dog keeps barking somewhere in the background, wondering what’s for dinner, what tomorrow will bring, whether any of our hopes and ambitions and worries justify the energy we pour into them so recklessly.
And I sit here gazing at that photo, or summoning his image from what is now visual memory of the photo, as if I met him, which in some way I now have. Time stamps our lives onto our faces and here is his face. No Botox for him. Every line and crease is his from simply living. And around him in my imagination I can pose him with his spouse and children (among them my great-grandfather William) and parents, and so on, back as far — almost unimaginably far — as we are human. Fifty thousand years? Two hundred thousand? A million? Yes, by the time that strain reaches me it’s a ridiculously thin trickle. But then, if we look back far enough for the connection, it’s the same trickle, so we’re told, that flows in the veins of millions of others around us. If we can trust the work of evolutionary biologists and geneticists, a very large number of people alive on the planet today descend from a relative handful of ultimate ancestors. Which seems at first glance to fly in the face of our instinct and of simple mathematics, for that spreading tree of ancestors which, by the time it reaches my great-great-grandfather’s generation, includes thirty people directly responsible for my existence (two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents and sixteen great-great grandparents). Someone called evolution the “ultimate game of survivor.” And now I break off one line, stalling forever this one particular evolutionary parade, because my wife and I have no children.
The poem of mine that opened this entry, “Drinking with the Ancestors,” suggests we can indeed meet and take counsel with members of this immense throng through the exercise of inhibition-lowering and imagination-freeing imbibing of alcohol. Of course there are also visualization exercises and still other techniques that are suitably alcohol-free — more decorous and tame. Depending on who you want to talk to among your clan, you can have an experience as real as most face-to-face talks with people who have skin on. The difference between us in-carnate and ex-carnate folks is indeed the carne. No sudden dispensation of wisdom automatically accrues to us just because we croak. A living idiot becomes a dead idiot. Likewise a wise soul is wise, in or out of flesh.
It seems fitting to end with an experience of the ancestors. Not mine, this time — I keep such things close, because often when we experience them, they are for us alone, and retain their significance and power only if we do not diminish them by laying them out for others who may know nothing of our circumstances and experiences. Wisdom is not a majority vote. Even my wife and I may not share certain inner discoveries. We’ve both learned the hard way that some experiences are for ourselves alone. But it’s a judgment call. Some things I share.
So in my place I give you Mary Stewart’s Merlin, in her novel The Hollow Hills*, recounting his quest for Excalibur, and an ancestor dream-vision that slides into waking. The flavor of it captures one way such an ancestral encounter can go, the opposite end of the easy beery camaraderie that can issue from making the libations that welcome ancestral spirits to a festival or party, as in my poem. Note the transition to daytime consciousness, the thin edge of difference between dream and waking.
I said “Father? Sir?” but, as sometimes happens in dreams, I could make no sound. But he looked up. There were no eyes under the peak of the helmet. The hands that held the sword were the hands of a skeleton … He held the sword out to me. A voice that was not my father’s said, “Take it.” It was not a ghost’s voice, or the voice of bidding that comes with vision. I have heard these, and there is no blood in them; it is as if the wind breathed through an empty horn. This was a man’s voice, deep and abrupt and accustomed to command, with a rough edge to it, such as comes from anger, or sometimes from drunkenness; or sometimes, as now, from fatigue.
I tried to move, but I could not, any more than I could speak. I have never feared a spirit, but I feared this man. From the blank of shadow below the helmet came the voice again, grim, and with a faint amusement, that crept along my skin like the brush of a wolf’s pelt felt in the dark. My breath stopped and my skin shivered. He said, and I now clearly heard the weariness in the voice: “You need not fear me. Nor should you fear the sword. I am not your father, but you are my seed. Take it, Merlinus Ambrosius. You will find no rest until you do.”
I approached him. The fire had dwindled, and it was almost dark. I put my hands out for the sword and he reached to lay it across them … As the sword left his grip it fell, through his hands and through mine, and between us to the ground. I knelt, groping in the darkness, but my hand met nothing. I could feel his breath above me, warm as a living man’s, and his cloak brushed my cheek. I heard him say: “Find it. There is no one else who can find it.” Then my eyes were open and it was full noon, and the strawberry mare was nuzzling at me where I lay, with her mane brushing my face (226-7).
/|\ /|\ /|\
*Stewart, Mary. The Hollow Hills. New York: Fawcett Crest Books, 1974.
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The green world burgeons all around me, though I fall silent. I don’t grow up like these eager stems, leaves and blossoms that surround this house of self in a blaze of green glory. So early this year, summer already launched in the heart of spring. Not up. No. I grow down.
I gift you with a grail, the chalice of your desire, says the short powerful figure before me. I try to make out a face, but nothing other than an outline in this dimness. And the voice.
A Druid Way 
