So this should make some people crazy. I venerate my ancestors. It sounds a lot more formal than it is. Oh, I tried incantations when I first started. I called the four corners, welcomed spirits and entities that have guided me through my spiritual existence, and ancestors known and unknown to me. I cast a wide net. Yes, I am keenly aware that there are spirits that are malevolent or naughty. There are living people who are malevolent and naughty. You have to learn to navigate them. How? Well, trial and error, just like people.
I remember the first time I used a pendulum. It was a monocle that a Quaker faith healer gave to me. He practiced a healing magic that was passed down to him through a family line of English Quakers. He taught me a little, but I wasn't very serious about learning to keen my way forward and set my intentions. He gave me a gris-gris that I never used. They hung on my walls in my home for years, with no purpose other than decoration.
So then one day I decided to set up my ancestor altar. On it I put pictures of my deceased grandparents great great grandparents, great aunts and uncles, my late partner, bone dice, candles (and later a hurricane lantern) incense burner, my great grandfather's hunting rifle, Russell's glasses and hair, and a wooden idea human statue doll thing that Russell kept at work at Center Stage and for which he made a crown of thorns out of paper clips. He was creative that way.
Then I read online how to use a pendulum. Imagine my surprise when the thing moved to my questions! It answered yes or no to questions only I knew the answers to. I tested it. Always important to test things. Then I started asking questions about my recovery, about spirituality, about being a Quaker, a Christian, a pagan, a Christopagan. I wanted advice, keenly aware that questions of should or ought should be avoided. I firmly believed this was explainable by science; that the muscles in my fingers were moving the pendulum.
Sometimes the pendulum worked with obvious answers. Sometimes it didn't work at all. However, when I started asking lines of questions the answers to which I did not know, but only a friend knew, and I shared with him what I learned about him, his family and deceased great aunt and friend, we both were blown away.
I also got myself into some hot kimchi both at work and personally during this time. I was worried for my job and reputation. I wanted counsel from my ancestors. Would there be ramifications? Would I be ok? My big mouth. My stupid past choices caught up to me. Dumb. Dumb me. My ancestors told me all would be ok each time. All was ok. Each time.
When I learned that my job might be on the chopping block due to low enrollment, I needed some reassuring that what would come would be ok. And I got it. And it was.
Now the skeptic can say that this is my subconscious speaking. Could very well be. I don't know how my subconscious knows things only my friend would know, or how my subconscious would know the truth of the future, but sure why not.
I can tell you, though, that I don't use the pendulum much anymore. I have gone to it when feeling the urge to get an answer right away, but it hasn't been working lately. So, I just put it down and enter into silent waiting at the altar. It is there where it came to me that I can just sit in silence with my ancestors, that I'm not alone, and that if this is all hocus pocus and it's really my inner voice speaking, or even the Still Small Voice speaking, that I need to practice going there.
It does occur to me that these outward practices are similar to Christian rites and rituals; there is no power in and of themselves, but they can create a situation in which we experience the divine. Perhaps these aren't spirits of my ancestors speaking to me, perhaps it's the divine speaking to me. I honestly don't know, but I have found that spending time with my ancestors has yielded spiritual growth. At the very least, divination aside, and I have mostly put it aside, honoring them for all they have done for me, all that they did for my family, the hard work and troubles, the love and care, I honor them for it.
No harm in that.
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