This book draws from a range of sources so I’ve included some quotes and additional links to other books relative to the subject matter.
‘The ancestors still speak through the DNA in each cell of your body. They are reflected in your physical features, your health and many of your predispositions’.
‘I really believe in us having ancestral memory in our bones, and being in sacred space will help birth that reconnection to your ancient self. You’re an ancestor... we should have all the wisdoms inside of us, if we’re the vessel for our ancestral lineage then it's all inside of us. It's not gone, it just needs to be reawakened and remembered.’ -Hua Anwa
‘epigenetics... the pain of our ancestors can endure through generations. In a landmark 2013 study on the biological transmission of trauma, a team of researchers in Jerusalem showed that the children, as well as grandchildren and further descendants, of Holocaust survivors are especially prone to depression, anxiety and nightmares. This tendency is tied to a biological marker of their chromosomes that is absent from those not descended from Holocaust survivors. This transgenerational transmission of trauma is a new field of study.’
‘The average Western person is grieving about being isolated. Western men in particular are grieving about the dead they didn't grieve properly because they were told men don’t cry... Grief is not only expressed in tears but in anger, rage, frustration and sadness. An angry person is a person on the road to tears, the softer version of grief.’ -Malidoma Somé
Martin Prechtel details how in the T’zutujil Maya tradition, the soul of someone recently deceased who doesn't join the ancestors may turn back to the world, where ‘scared and invisible it takes up residence in the body of the tenderest and most familiar person it can find’. From that point the ghost eats the life of the person. ‘Alcoholism, substance addiction, most depression, homicide, suicide, untimely death, accidents and the addiction to arguments were caused by the endless hunger of such ghosts.’
‘In Judaism, the Yiddish word dybbuk refers to one among the restful or troubled dead who interferes with a living person’
The 13th century saga of Eric the Red, set in Greenland describes... a ritual involving a seeress or oracle (Norse spákona) who served her community as a mouthpiece for the ancestors... she entered into a state of direct contact with the ancestors and proceeded to answer questions from the ancestors.’
‘Full or complete possession refers to the flooding or displacement of the ego or personal self and it may be accompanied by loss of personal choice and memory of events while possessed. One is taken over, ‘ridden’ and subject to whims of the possessing spirits or forces.’
‘Living in the same place as one’s ancestors establishes a multi dimensional bond to that place...the tremendous pool of intergenerational knowledge from which to draw is a blessing and a gift. In general, each of us is deeply dependent on the trials and accomplishments of many generations of humans before us’ -M.Kat Anderson
[This reminded me of a passage from the book ‘Nature for Sale Commons versus Commodities’, in which Giovanna Ricoveri elaborates on how ‘common resource knowledge based innovations have been passed on over centuries to new generations and adapted for newer uses and these innovations have, over time been absorbed into the common pool of knowledge about the resource. This common pool of knowledge has contributed immeasurably to the vast agricultural and medicinal plant diversity that exists today’. However, ‘the concept of individual ‘property’ rights to either resource or to the knowledge remains alien to the local communities. This undoubtedly exacerbates the usurpation of the knowledge of indigenous people with serious consequences for them and for biodiversity conservation’]
‘the older your ancestral claim is to a place and the more generations of your people who have lived and died there, the more likely you are to feel that you belong to that place. If your one of the rare persons whose recent ancestors lived near where you live now, then your probably aware that relocation would have an impact, because you would then be outside the immediate field of energy and blessings that accompany your ancestral homeland’
[With this in mind, I was reminded of how, in the book, Manufacturing Consent by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Samuel Huntington a US government advisor is quoted as saying: 'the answer to "wars of national liberation", namely, "forced draft urbanization and mobilization"...to "produce a massive migration from the countryside to the city" thus undercut[s] the...strategy of organising the peasant population’, which would have obvious implications to that sense of ‘belonging’and access to the ‘energy and blessings’ of the ancestral homeland.]