We Are Products of the Ancestral Imagination

The paradoxes of ancestry and the metaphors we use to understand them

This year the ‘festive period’ (ugh) has conspired to place the topic of ancestry front and centre. Members of our family bought each other Ancestry DNA kits which, allegedly, will cause a few skeletons to come tumbling out of the closet. And I discovered that my father has been secretly building out our family tree, tracing it back to the 1500s and revealing some interesting geographic markers that speak to my personal predilections (solid Suffolk and Somerset lineages.)

With time on my hands, I’ve been thinking about the various paradoxes of ancestry: that we can barely know our ancestors, beyond a few generations at most, but they are us; that we are individuated consciousnesses, but we inhabit bodies made of composite DNA.

It is a miracle that any of us are here. We are the sum total of the sweat and effort, the willpower, ingenuity, deceit, tenacity, faith, coercion, love, lust, resistance, and luck assembled by our ancestors; we are here despite disease, illness, poverty, hunger, war, violence, prejudice and persecution; despite all the myriad threats to our existence that could so easily have snuffed a forbear out, the vast majority probably very prosaic: a decision to not eat the sour-tasting beef; a step to the left, rather than the right, on the icy slope. Our ancestors somehow managed to navigate these countless privations and hazards, and collectively they brought us forth into the world. If the imagination is the point of inception for all human-created things, we are all products of the ancestral imagination.

My maternal grandmother was engaged to a certain man until, one night in London during a blackout in WWII, she stepped off a train, tripped and fell backwards in the darkness. She was caught by a man who she ultimately married, and he became by maternal grandfather. Without the myriad of unfathomable micro-events culminating in that fateful encounter, neither my mother nor I would exist.

Yet, on the other hand, none of this is miraculous at all. Our existence is a brute fact. Humans will procreate; life will find a way; if not us, then someone else. We are here now because of violence, poverty, disease etc; as a direct consequence of the millions of micro-decisions and events that conspired to birth us into the world. This is the ‘web of wyrd’ – the subtle strings of fibres at birth that, through their twisting and weave, create not just the pattern of our life but also its pattern of intertwining with all life; a cosmic tapestry of which we are all part, and where our destiny is not fixed, but rather connected to, and influenced by, the destiny of all things. It's a metaphor that describes better than any other the subtle, ever-changing mesh of cause-and-effect within which ancestry operates, enshrined in the Old English terms gewæf, which translates as ‘spinning’ or ‘weaving’, and the cognate term gewif, meaning ‘fate, fortune’.

It’s all too easy to consider ‘the ancestors’ as an amorphous blob; a vague, distant and unknowable thing to which we are somehow loosely tethered. To do so is another consequence of the western materialistic worldview, with its absolute focus on an ahistorical-liberal-capitalist paradigm, rampant individualism and short-term gratification. We no longer possess the tools to understand ourselves as ancestral beings and, as a result, have become myopic.

Nigel Pennick shines a light on the mysteries of ancestry better than I ever could, so I quote him below in full – from Secrets of East Anglian Magic:

Anybody living now is the direct, unbroken, continuation of his or her mother and father, and, through them, their ancestors. Life does not begin at conception, for the cells from which a new person comes are part of the mother and father, being at the beginning part of their living physical bodies. Furthermore, even the concept of generations is flawed. The second generation is within the womb of the pregnant mother, for viable eggs are present within the ovaries of every female foetus. Our origin as individuals was within our grandmother’s womb. Thus, in a real way, each of us was present not only within our mother and father, but also our maternal grandmother. Therefore, in no way are we separate physically from our forebears. We are part of a living continuum of which they too were a part. This recognition, absent from modern belief systems, is present in ancestor worship and the recognition that we can be a reincarnation of one of our ancestors.

Of course, depending on your worldview, culture, customs and beliefs, the ancestors may well still be present: active participants in daily life; sources of wisdom and advice. This can be understood even in a very literal, materialistic way, in the marks they left on the world during their corporeal life that persist postmortem: letters, books, artefacts, inherited items. Or in the ways they interacted with the world; the habits they formed; the belief systems they adhered to, that affect our behaviour now. Widen this concept out from your own family heirlooms and traditions, and what becomes clear is that, as a species, the ways in which we live now are largely determined by the persistent legacies of our collective ancestors. And ‘collective’ is key because, ultimately, we are all most likely consanguineous.

Therefore, granting the ancestors a small portion of attention is sensible, whether through ritual, commemoration, prayer or simple reflection. Even though our existence is a brute fact, we still exist right now and it is (at least partly) down to our ancestors’ efforts. They aren’t entitled to anything, but if you consider being alive a positive state of affairs, then giving thanks to the ancestors as much as to anyone else is a worthwhile act.

A simple exercise. Get comfortable, still the mind, and go back. Imagine the smell of milk and hay, the grime under the nails, the knots of muscle, the limp and the scars, the sound of laughter. Imagine the letters written, the flints knapped, the nameless pet dogs, the daisies picked, the loaves baked, the offerings made, the midsummer sunsets, the animals butchered. Imagine the graves – the locations of which you do not know; the meadow seething with birds and insects, the taste of weak ale, the ecstasy of possession, the bare earth floors. Imagine your entire extended family living in the same place, for as long as anyone can remember. Imagine being in close proximity to the remains of your many forebears. Imagine a place exerting itself on a bloodline over generations, shaping its human denizens more and more. Imagine how the environment and the humans are one and the same. Imagine the consciousness, the dialect, the character, the spirituality emerging from that symbiosis.

So not only genetics shape us, but environment too. And other factors, such as pacts, blessings and curses; spiritual epigenetics, if you like. I’ll discuss that next because, for the generations yet to come, it’s not looking good.