Ancestor Work: Ritual to Initiate Contact with Your Ancestors
Connecting with your ancestors can be a rewarding and mutually beneficial experience. You can heal, learn from, and empower one another. I have had wonderful opportunities to converse with dead ancestors in dream and have been led to long-lost family members irl. This is a little guide for those who would like to get started with an ancestor practice of their own.
I base my practice largely off of Daniel Foor’s Ancestral Medicine, a book which I highly recommend. I also cannot recommend Duchess Bune highly enough for this work. Hail Bune!!
The ritual below is taken directly from Ancestral Medicine. It is but one of many in Foor’s book. I am explicitly quoting him in parts.
Step One: Ritual Intent
Set your intention to initiate conscious contact with loving and supportive family ancestors, or renewing relations and inviting their ongoing support and guidance.
Step Two: Sacred Space
Create sacred space in accordance with your own practice- but be mindful. The pious dead of your recent ancestral lineages may not be very responsive to diabolical rituals and satanic spaces. That being said, my old school Christian great-great-grandmother was happy to make dream contact through Duchess Bune. As was a whole “clan” of my paternal-paternal ancestors.
Psychopompic and necromantic entities such as Azrael, Hekate, Hermes, and St. Cyprian could be brought in here.
Step Three: Commune
Directly address your loving and supportive ancestors. You do not need any props or physical links, but they may help facilitate contact. You can sing, chant, pray, play music; make sure it comes from your heart. Continue until you feel you have made contact.
Step Four: Offerings
Make thoughtful offerings, such as incense, flowers, fruits, beverages, artwork, etc. Alcohol is traditional (and expected) in many ancestral practices. I personally don’t offer alcohol, because I believe spirits get drunk too, and my family is full of alcoholics. My ancestors get cold clean water, juice, and tea.
Step Five: Hollow Out
Listen and receive. You may want to keep something nearby to records notes and impressions, or a tarot deck / divination medium.
Step Six: Closing
Bring the ritual to a close with a simple prayer, thanks, or acknowledgement that you are done for now. Stay open to further communication from your ancestors through dreams, synchronicities, and other kinds of contact. Sometimes a ritual can be relatively simple but sets in motion forces that play out in our lives for years to come.
