Good Yule Day #8: Contemplating Ancestral Orlog

Coal wagon. Credit: InstagramFOTOGRAFIN/Pixabay

I began this day intent on honoring the ancestors during Yule. I still am, but my preparations reminded me of an excellent article by Ben Waggoner in The Troth's magazine, Idunna: A Journal of Northern Tradition, Issue 120, Summer 2019. But let me backtrack.

I begin, as I stated in my Yule #1 post, with my most recent departed relatives as I believe they are our closest ties to the deep ancestors from whom we all descend. Here's where we get to the reason for my posting a picture of a coal wagon above. Both of my grandmas were coal miner's daughters, one from the North and one from the South in the USA. They were children during the Great Depression. I saw their love for handicrafts and frugality but also learned of some of their fears and paranoia at change. They loved and fought each other like sisters and their influence on both of my families I feel imprinted on my soul. I started with prayers written by Ceisiwr Serith to the ancestors in his, "A Pagan Ritual Prayer Book." I didn't bring whatever judgment I might have about coal mining to my ritual time with the ancestors because I try to understand the time they lived. 

This got me thinking about my grandfather's heritage of being the grandson of a Confederate soldier during the American Civil War. How could I not come to that without judgment? In Ben's article, he discusses the orlog of his ancestors, orlog being he states "what has been laid down primally." As far as I know, Ben is a southerner and I was born and raised in the North. Yet, I could relate to much of what he said he feels about his Confederate ancestor. He goes on to remind us that we can't fix the past that has been laid down, but our future orlog isn't set in stone. We are part of what our ancestors have put down but we also create our own paths and patterns of wyrd.

I've seen discussions and articles about what to do about ancestor veneration when our ancestors weren't honorable. If you know anything about the culture surrounding Confederate "heritage," you know there's a warped sense of honor around it. Even as a northerner separated two generations from living in the South, I glommed onto this. It's hard not to living in our culture even if you don't have this heritage. The Lost Cause mythos permeates our national consciousness.

An irony is that my northern grandmother was arrested in the 1950s after speaking out against segregation. Where did she speak out? Her own church! When the leaders started talking to the unsupportive congregation about 'possibly' integrating the church, she spoke up saying that God doesn't see color, and the police were called. She, however, was 100% Christian evangelical in regard to other religions. Everybody else was going to Hell and that was that. If you were any color of the rainbow and her kind of Christian, she loved the bejeezus out of you. And don't get her started about "the gays."

Which brought me back to my southern grandmother who once said that she and her friends and family walked on the other side of the street from black people in Kentucky because "well, that's the way it was." She later came to understand how wrong it was.

Where am I going with all this? I'm not sure. I know openly talking about this topic is only a beginning, but I believe it's an important one, now more than ever. There are those who will use our religion to prop up hate, and I want to weave better wyrd than that in my lifetime. And if you want to go beyond an offering here and there to the ancestors and a polite, "thanks for my existence," this might be where this kind of meditation on your place in your family line takes you. My only answer for the "what if my ancestors are assholes" question is that you don't owe reverence to those whose behavior you find dishonorable. At least I didn't get that memo. You may want to thank even them or whatever power you feel compelled to for teaching you how not to behave and for strengthening your resolve to do better by the human race. Or wash your hands of them. It's up to you. As the daughter of an abuser, I'm still working on that one.

But this is all my contemplation on the ancestors. Take what you will from my approach and leave what you need to. This is what I've done with books, articles, and websites that I've read.

Good Yule and Hail the Ancestors (that you're willing to)!

© Trish Deneen