Monday, May 11, 2009

Ancestor World

Hey everybody, I’ve been wanting to discuss some of the Fairy World insights that came up in the May 3rd session at Triple Goddess, but end-of-semester stuff has kept me from my blog. So, in the upcoming days I’ll turn my attention to various things related to the Froud Faery Oracle and such, but for starters, I want to provide that reference on ancestors. We were talking about how Fairy World energies can be experienced in different parts of our lives, as in relation to Nature, healing, the Dream World, domestic routines, craftsmanship, and more, including through relationship to the Ancestor World. Traditionally there has been a great deal of overlap between the elfin folk and the dead, because in many different ethnic traditions, the dead can become nature spirits or fairy folk; also, there are many stories about fairies who attached themselves to particular families and their descendants. That led to a discussion of our ancestral interrelatedness, and I cited some facts, but couldn’t remember the author.

So, the book I was citing is “Mapping Human History: Genes, Race, and Our Common Origins” by Steve Olson, [pp.46-47]. Olson himself was citing the work of Yale statistician Joseph Chang, whose computations revealed that just about anyone who lived before a certain date and was successful in having a line of descendants is likely an ancestor to everybody else in the world. The quote I had referred to was this: “If a historical figure who lived more than 1,600 years ago [i.e. before 400 A.D.] had children who themselves had children, that person is almost certainly among our ancestors. Everyone in the world today is likely descended from Nefertiti … from Confucius … and from Julius Caesar …” This crosses racial boundaries, because there was so much travel and interchange among widely different peoples in the ancient world, due to the Silk Road, the expansion of the Roman and other empires, etc. Olson states, “… if 800 years ago our ancestors included even a single European, African, or Asian, then 1,600 years ago our ancestors included most of the adult population of all three continents.”

Of course, if we admit past lives, then we are also ancestors to ourselves.

For the greater part of human history, our ancestors have believed in fairies and other types of Nature spirits, house spirits, etc., and have tried to cultivate good relationships with them. Among them, a number of those ancestors will have had a special rapport with different fairies, including individual fairies and tribes of fairies. Consequently, when certain fairies come up when divining with the Froud Oracle, the Fairy Ring, or any other decks that represent fairy types, we might consider, as an additional level to the interpretation, whether we are reactivating an ancient relationship—whether through ancestral or past life connections—and how that might also pertain to ancestral and past life issues that might be making themselves felt in the present.

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