Can Ghosts Become Ancestors?
By Thea Wirsching
Many spiritual and cultural traditions across the world honor the darkening days of fall as a time when the veil between the worlds is thin and we may commune with our ancestors. Neo-Pagans celebrate the cross-quarter day of Samhain, a holiday occurring halfway between the Fall Equinox and the Winter Solstice that falls around our modern Halloween. The Mexican tradition of Dia de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, has become so mainstream that it spawned a high-grossing Disney cartoon, 2017’s Coco, depicting the practice of ancestor veneration. In Northern latitudes, the fall has historically represented the dying of the old year, which is reborn at the Winter Solstice, when the Sun appears to stand still before reversing its trajectory in the sky. This period of inner and outer darkness, when the implements of agriculture are laid to rest and the bitter weather forces us indoors, is highly conducive to the internal work of communicating with our beloved dead.
And yet in the United States, ancestor work is not a particularly popular practice. The chest-thumping rhetoric of a “nation of immigrants” has contributed to the idea that we should leave our ancestors behind once we set foot in America. Americans are defined by our potential to be “self-made,” which means that we should not be limited by the class status of our forefathers, or so the ideology goes...
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And yet in the United States, ancestor work is not a particularly popular practice. The chest-thumping rhetoric of a “nation of immigrants” has contributed to the idea that we should leave our ancestors behind once we set foot in America. Americans are defined by our potential to be “self-made,” which means that we should not be limited by the class status of our forefathers, or so the ideology goes...
Subscribe to the New PRS Journal to read on...
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