Our Friends, The Dead

How might our ancestors live on in us? And what does it mean to carry their psychic DNA?

Image: ‘Dance of the Nine Maidens’ Ithell Colquhoun.

A few Winters ago, while visiting the Bronze Age stone circle that crowns a windswept hill near the farm where my husband grew up, I happened across a druid ceremony. We had gone there to watch the dawn break over the valley and it was still dark when the three women druids invited us to join their ritual. 

Led by the beat of a drum and the cry of the rooks in the woods below, we walked the outer circle of megaliths, shadows coming to life in the thin blades of light falling between the dark shapes of the stones. Once we had completed a round, we processed one by one in silence through the threshold of the two largest rocks, brushing our fingers against the rough skin of lichen as we passed.

In the centre of the circle, the druids made a fire with sacred wood - elder for wisdom, holly for protection and ash for healing – as the silvery early morning air filled with the sound of their chants and prayers. At the end of the ceremony, I went forward to be blessed. A pair of druids took me between them. One burnt sage at my back and the other pressed the wing of a red kite to my chest.

As the wind tugged my hair and the jagged edges of the stones caught fire in the sun, I felt myself fleetingly drop into the body of the four-thousand-year-old woman who lives on in my bones. The field momentarily seemed to tilt, smoke filled my eyes and then she was gone.

According to Jungian psychoanalysis, it’s from our ancient ancestors that we inherit the psychic DNA of the collective unconscious and the archetypal images that constellate the patterns which give our lives meaning and shape. Far from believing the ancestors belong to the past, Jung suggested that they are continuously being reincarnated as the centre of our personalities and that, in this way, they are very much alive in the present. So, we might think of our physical bodies as the porous carriers of an ephemeral body that connects us to the wisdom, imagination, intuition and animal instincts that taught our ancestors how to survive.

Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious was, in part, inspired by a dream in which he found himself in a house whose contents became increasingly older with each floor he descended until, finally, he arrived in a cellar filled with the disintegrating artefacts of early man. This cellar, Jung took to be the root of the psyche and the ancestral vestiges, the ancient, embodied knowledge that lives on inside our ‘house’ now.

To support his deep investigation into the collective unconscious, Jung built a tower based on a medieval design with no electricity or running water on the edge of the woods in Bollingen, near Lake Zurich. He would take up residence in this tower for months on end as a way to commune with ‘a silent, greater family stretching down the centuries… peopling the house (where) I see life in the round, as something forever coming into being and passing on.’

A couple of years after my own encounter with this silent greater family at the stone circle, I found myself back there again. We were in Ireland in Winter once more, this time driving along a narrow, winding lane at nightfall listening to the Dublin band Lankum and their hypnotic rendition of ‘The Wild Rover’ – the traditional Irish temperance song made famous by The Dubliners - transformed in Lankum’s hands into a luminous lament held together by a single spectral note.

As we tunnelled through the night with the volume turned up, I felt the ghostly fiddle of the song as a needle piercing the veins of the old, old woman who is forever coming into being and passing through me.

Listen to The Wild Rover by Lankum

Just as Jung withdrew to his tower at Bollingen, so Lankum took themselves off to Martello Tower on Dublin’s east coast to spin new webs from old songs retrieved from lands near and far, the sea an ever-present reminder of what ebbs and flows across invisible borders. The result was their critically acclaimed 2023 album ‘False Lankum’ (named Guardian album of the year).

The first folk band to be nominated for a Mercury prize in over a decade, I wonder if Lankum’s popularity speaks to the way our fragmented and fast-paced lives have left us with a collective yearning to reach back into the past in order to make sense of ourselves in the present. The Burkina Faso writer and teacher, Malidoma Somé, who dedicated his lifework to bringing the lessons of African spiritual practices to the West, viewed the ancestors as friends and guides whom we might call upon for help. He says,

‘The ancestors are constantly on a standby not only to listen to us but also to intervene in our lives for the better. They escort us along in those moments when the going is difficult. Like great grandparents, they want the best of us.’

Having lived out their physical lives on earth, the ancestors - as Somé conceptualises them - are not somewhere over ‘there’ in the past, they are here, now, everywhere, all at once. From this cosmological perspective, the ancestors offer a view of a larger reality that we can only ever otherwise glimpse and it’s from this place that they can teach and guide.  

But if we benefit from our ancestors’ wisdom, we also inherit their problems – as the work of Gabor Maté (featured in the last post), amongst others, into inter-generational trauma evidences. To this end, Jung pointed out that our healing is dependent not only on tending to our own wounds but also of those who came before us.

When I think about what this looks like for me, I think of my Granny. The eldest of a large working-class family, Granny was bright enough to pass the eleven plus and get a place at grammar school. However, the story goes that on her first day at school, my Great Grandad stormed into the classroom, pulled Granny out by the ear and sent her to work. I loved my Granny very much and I know she loved me. But I also know she wasn’t happy with her lot and that she got through her days with a drop of whiskey at the beginning and a gin at the end.

The last thing Granny bought me before she died, the year I turned nineteen, was a suitcase.

More than anything, she wanted me to travel, to have an education, to live a life that simply wasn’t available to her. A life that wasn’t just unavailable to Granny but unavailable to all the women down the centuries who were kept at home or sent to work instead of school.

Granny was born and died in the month of May. May was also her name. Each year when May rolls around, I see her blossom everywhere.

In the same way that the coming of spring completes the unfinished business of winter, it’s my hope that, in some way, I’m completing the unfinished business of Granny. As it seems to me that Lankum, through the elegaic warp and weft of their songs, are also tending to the old wounds and stitching together what has been torn.

Creative Experiments

1.     Write an obituary or an elegy for a personal ancestor – perhaps someone you knew directly or someone more distant whose life you are intrigued by. What’s their story? What defined their lives? If you don’t have all the details, let your imagination fill in the gaps.

2.     Reflect - what do you know about your personal ancestors? What unanswered questions about their lives do you have? In what ways might they be continuing to live through you? How might you be completing their unfinished business?

3.     Write in detail about a place – either real or imagined – where you might go to ‘meet’ an ancestor – personal or ancient. What does this place look like, feel like, sound like, smell like? How does this ancestor appear? Start a conversation with them. What wisdom does this ancestor have to impart? What do you want help with? What do they want help with? What needs to be tended?

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News - Depth Writing Monthly Workshops - coming soon

Busy lives means it’s often a challenge to make the time and space to write, much as we might like to. With this in mind, I’m launching a 60 minute online Depth Writing Monthly Workshop starting in March. It will be a friendly, supportive space for us to meet, do some depth writing together and discuss some of the ideas from the monthly post. The workshop will run on the second Monday of every month 7-8pm GMT (2-3pm EST/11-12pm PST), starting on March 11th. If this sounds up your street, let me know in the comments below.