What is the difference between an ancestor and an Ancestor?

What is the difference between an ancestor and an Ancestor? #

The capital letter marks the difference between an individual and a whole branch of Human. The ancestors, with a small ‘a’, are our individual biological ancestors who are no longer living, our great-grandparents and so on. The Ancestors are something bigger: “They are not a single twig but a whole branch.”¹ Trace any tribe’s Ancestors back far enough and “they all converge into one branch: Human.” See How does Therapeutic Shamanism understand death and what happens when we die?

What are Ancestors with a capital A? #

Different tribal versions of Human, and through them the Human Oversoul. “The Ancestors are different branches of Human. Human in different versions, if you like. Different tribal styles of Human.”² The Lower-World is “home to the Ancestors, the wise humans who live shamanically and in accordance with Great SpiritGreat Mystery (Great Spirit). The unknowable from which everything comes. Better rendered ‘the Great Mystery’: animism has no interventionist creator-god, and the truly infinite cannot be prayed to, bargained with or journeyed to. More about this.”³ Our Human Lower-World Guides, and the Lower-World Tribe, our Ancestral Kin, come from them: “They are not ancestors, but Ancestors.”⁴ See What are Human Guides?

What are ancestors in Therapeutic Shamanism? #

All the people we come from, most of them hunter-gatherers. Counting back two hundred thousand years gives “ten thousand generations of ancestors”, and “a staggering ninety-nine percent of your human ancestors lived and breathed shamanism.”⁵ Our more recent ancestors can also hand down burdens. See What are ancestral burdens and how are they passed down?

Do we become Ancestors when we die? #

Possibly, if we have grown into Soul. Cultivating Soul in life gives us the best chance of our awareness following it into the Lower-World, and over months or years an ancestor with a small ‘a’ becomes simply one of the Ancestors with a capital ‘A’, part of the Human Oversoul: “It’s immortality, but not of ourselves as an individual, but as becoming part of something much greater.” See How does Therapeutic Shamanism understand death and what happens when we die?

Are ancestors automatically wise? #

No. Wisdom belongs to the Ancestors, because they are far greater than individuals: it is the Ancestors, and not our individual ancestors, who are wise and transcendent beings.⁶ The dead who have not moved on “are as much of a mixed bag as the living are.”⁷ In his own experience, Paul Francis learnt far more from his main Human Lower-World Guide than from guides who had once been individual people.⁸ “All hunter-gatherer tribes looked to the Ancestors for guidance.”⁹

Can a relative who has died be one of our Guides? #

Not a Lower-World GuideGuides. The Lower-World and Upper-World beings a practitioner works with and learns from, of whom the Power Animal is the first and foremost. True Guides are ethical to their core; the shaman’s power comes from the depth of these bonds, not from the shaman. More about this. When someone’s guide is “their kindly aunty Edna who died a few years earlier”, that guide is a middle-worldMiddle-world. Ordinary physical reality together with its energetic layers: the realm of individuality, separation and mixed intentions, and the only realm where harm is possible. “If there is a hell, then it is the middle-world.” Read the full answer being, not a Lower-World Guide. There is “nothing necessarily wrong with working with middle-world guides”, but they bring “all the limitations and potential problems of the middle-world.”¹⁰ As for the unquiet deadUnquiet dead. The middle-world self become ghost: the ego that, having no body left to anchor it, lingers among the living instead of moving on to the Land of the Dead. Unhealthy for the living, and moved on by psychopomping. More about this, shamans “do not see the dead as helpful spirits to work with. They are not taken on as guides and teachers.”¹¹

What are attached and unattached burdens? #

Terms used in student teaching, in more than one sense. They are explained in the student sections. A related distinction appears in the published books, between what is truly part of us and what has come in from outside, such as intrusions and unhealthy thought-formsThought-form. A human-created living being: an ideology, religion, corporation, conspiracy theory or platform that has taken on a life of its own. Genuinely alive, but soul-less in the deep sense: natural things alone are full of Soul. More about this. See What is shamanic healing? and What are the different parts of the self in Therapeutic Shamanism?

How can we become good ancestors ourselves? #

By how we live. Even if a group will not change, if we model our own lives on the healthy Patterns, “We will have tried to live an honourable Human life. And when death comes, we will be an honourable ancestor.”¹² That is “the only good thing that, in the end, anyone can do.”

The same question gives its title to an anthology, What Kind of Ancestor Do You Want to Be? (2021), edited by John Hausdoerffer, Brooke Parry Hecht, Melissa K. Nelson and Katherine Kassouf Cummings, in which some fifty contributors, many of them Indigenous, answer it in their own ways. The editors start from the idea that all of us are already ancestors, whether or not we have children and whether or not we are remembered, because the values we advance and the systems we shape carry on long after we die. One conversation in the book takes the state of the land as the measure of how well we are living as ancestors. The ancestors in it are those of this world, such as family, forebears, the land and its seeds, not the Ancestors of the Lower-World.¹³