The Pathways in our Bones
Routes of Ancestral Reconnection
On October 11th I’m heading to Ireland on a one-way ticket. I have a night booked in Dublin at an outrageously priced hotel (welcome to Dublin,) a friend from West Cork who suggested I check out a small artist town in his area, and a handful of loose connections I hope to track down once I land.
But really, I have no idea where I’m going, and I am quite ok with that.
A long peregrination, a good old wander, seems to be the only thing that makes sense right now. I feel like I need to purge myself of the accumulated toxicity of living in the United States in our current era. Somehow, stepping into the unknown feels like the only right move, and like jumping into a body of cold water, my hope is that it wakes up something in me that has become numb, asleep, and terribly comfortable.
Every shred of my intuition is telling me that this island will take care of me. That something remarkable might be waiting for me in the bottom of a well, in the coals of a peat fire, or in the gale of an Atlantic rainstorm.
After all, for many of my ancestors, this place was all they knew until just 3 generations ago. And unlike the land that I have called home for my entire life, something far older than “me” knows this land better than I know myself.
I know that Americans going back to Ireland to “discover their roots” has become a cringy cliché that modern Irish people have to deal with on a regular basis. I’ve witnessed the “Plastic Paddy” phenomenon, where Irishness is commodified and sold back to earnest Americans in Red Socks hats who fetishize Irish culture, seeking a pot of gold rather than a living relationship to complicated and imperfect land. I’m aware of how American tech companies have used Ireland as a tax haven, essentially destroying Dublin’s urban culture, leaving a trail of well-earned resentment in their wake.
And yet, the move towards ancestry to me feels like an essential element in this long work of “culture making,” or cultural repair, which to me seems like the most sane thing to do in a world where sanity is increasingly hard to come by.
Anthropology was one of my first loves. I discovered it in high school, when I was lucky enough to have a teacher who understood that encountering world cultures was essential for young minds. While Bush’s renewed war in Iraq was grinding its way into its third year, the United States still had yet to fall into the abyss of hatred and insanity which it now finds itself in. It was a different time.
Growing up in a place like Portland, culture and art was highly valued and I was exposed to it constantly. I went to a Spanish-immersion grade school, where half the students spoke another language, and where we learned to play in a Brazilian samba band at 10 years old. In high school, I learned to play drums with the legendary Ghanaian drum master Obo Addy, met traveling Iraqi oud players, and went to the 100th anniversary memorial pow-wow to commemorate the flooding of the legendary Celilo falls.
Eventually, I would commit to studying anthropology and religion at the University of Vermont, which deepened my hunger for cultural exploration. At 20 years old, I travelled to Aboriginal Australia to try my hand at ethnographic research. Several years later, I found myself in the Middle East and Africa. Travel and cultural exploration became a central element to my life, as it eventually became something of a career, allowing me to spend time in Indigenous communities in New Zealand, Peru, Burma, Ecuador, Fiji, and beyond.
I’ve always held a deep fascination for other cultures. We make the world an undeniably more hospitable place when we not only value, but cultivate a familiarity with people different from ourselves.
And yet recently I’ve wondered if my life-long fascination with “other” or “exotic” cultures and peoples has just been a grand detour from diving into my own ancestry?
I say ancestry because what 21st century America offers as culture is really just blind consumerism wrapped in a red, white, and blue shroud. So for many of us, “ancestry” is all we have. “Ancestry” has become a doorway for cultural repair and reclamation, and one that I believe can hold the keys to dismantling our own internalized tendencies to extract and consume.
Since my early adolescence, I had the sneaking suspicion that something was frighteningly wrong, and that something was painfully absent in what I would come to understand as my “culture.” Something was rotten in the state of Denmark. I knew this from an early age. In some deep yet indescribable way, a part of me always felt as if I didn’t belong.
The question of culture in the modern West is always one of belonging. Go deep enough, and you’ll discover that belonging is always a question of ancestry. And ancestry is always a question of place.
Today, people easily recount their ancestry with percentages and facts. According to a popular DNA test, I am a Northern European mutt with a hefty portion of Ashkenazi comfort food. I’m 15% Irish, 8% Swedish, 7% Finnish, 20% German, 49% Ashkenazi Jew, and (very proud of this,) 1% Icelandic.
And yet, none of these figures describe what it means to have a living connection to these peoples and places.
These percentages are known in the Native world as a “blood quantum,” and usually determine whether someone is granted or denied tribal membership. And yet today in Native America, blood quantum has become a hotly contested issue because of the way it is used to reduce someone’s Indigenous identity, or “Indianness.” Many argue that at its root, the blood quantum is a racist tool that was implemented through colonization, and is used for continued, albeit more subtle forms of marginalization and oppression.
In New Zealand, for instance, they’ve done away with the idea of a percentage dictating whether or not someone qualifies as being “Maori enough.” If someone has a drop of Maori blood, and wants to identify with and participate in their Maori heritage, then they’re Maori. No questions asked.
I find it interesting that white Americans, myself included, still cling to these percentages as viable ways of explaining who we are and where we come from. We cling to a self-imposed blood quantum, which limits our belonging to percentages and measurements. We blood quantum ourselves out of ancestral connection and therefore healing, using the tools of science to fool us into thinking that being 33% Ghanaian means that only a third of you is entitled to feel connected to Ghana.
49% of me speaks Yiddish and knows about poverty and pogroms. 15% of me survived the Irish famine, the penal laws, and the cannonfire from Cromwell’s ships. And sometime in the dark ages, 1% of me boarded a Viking ship and sailed toward an island made of ice and fire.
According to my DNA test, these are the facts. And yet, I can’t help but feel how entirely irrational our modern notions of ancestry really are.
We are stuck trying to solve a problem that is ultimately psychological, cultural, and spiritual with materialistic and scientific means.
Perhaps it reveals just how disconnected we actually are from a living understanding of what it means to be of a people or a place.
I find it less and less useful to adhere to these sterilizing boundaries of blood quantums and percentage points. Because to speak of ancestry is to speak of the dead. And anytime the dead are involved, we are outside the realm of rationality entirely. Any time we are speaking of the dead, we are in conversation with the underworld.
The underworld lies firmly outside the boundaries of rationality, and opens us to the realms of imagination and soul.
Connecting with ancestral traditions are pathways back into our deep imagination and indigenous soul.
Without a connection to our ancestry, we run the risk of constantly grasping for traditions that we believe might fill the void created by the fractured state of our modern culture and communities. New Age and neo-shamanic spirituality are two rather extreme expressions of this desire. The entire discussion of “cultural appropriation” could be solved if a serious study of ancestry was placed at its heart.
I don’t want to veer into expertise or authority here. I’m a beginner on this path. Others have been walking this in far deeper ways than myself. Some of these people I’m excited to start learning from in an upcoming course called Scoil Scairta, hosted by the wonderful Kathy Scott and Manchán Magan.
But for me, my journey of ancestral reconnection often finds itself unfolding along at least one of these five pathways: food, music, myth, language, and landscape.
Food. Martín Prechtel tells us that, in the court of Kublai Khan, grandson to the great Genghis Khan, there was a man named Bolad Aga, who was his chef. Bolad was no ordinary chef, but rather a high-level administrator for the court whose job was to be the living encyclopedia of over 30 different tribes, all of whom composed this amorphous mass of nomads history would eventually come to know as “the Mongols.”
Prechtel writes, “the main places where any living vestiges of ancient cultures survive in our own era, after thousands of years of imperial squashing, are inside people’s food and music.”
Food retains the stories of those who raise, grow, and prepare it. Something as humble as a loaf of bread can contain a culture's mythologized understanding of seasonal cycles, agricultural lore and practices, and folkways or customs for how to bake the bread itself. A simple staple crop like corn or barley might have a creation mythology that stretches far back into ancestral memory.
Food is not simply the stuff that fills our bellies. It is a vehicle through which living culture travels from the past to the future.
Music also offers us a sensory, embodied pathway into the flowing lifeblood of ancestral cultures. The rhythms, tones, moods, and meanings of traditional music can carry information that bypasses our logical mind and goes straight into our bodies. Without even knowing why, we want to sing, to cry, to dance.
Just like food, music is encoded with ancestral knowledge and is a vehicle for cultural preservation and vitality. Music often has a sacred component to it as well, carrying spiritual knowledge that may have extinguished by the colonial machine, or simply lost to time
Music was the start of my own journey into culture, and has always been the most reliable way I can steep myself in the energy of a place I might have never known, yet a place I also remember.
Myth for me is one of the deepest doorways into ancestral memory. The stories are both documents of an ancient past, and living beings that can emerge shockingly into our lives today.
These stories speak to our bones in ways that bypass our rational mind. When I read an Irish myth, for instance, something within me resonates with the landscape from which the tale emerged, opening a doorway to a place of deep remembrance that I am still finding the words for.
The stories themselves contain layers of cultural knowledge, spiritual information, and symbolic information that people felt were important enough to pass on to future generations, sometimes across thousands of years. Myths are instructional, mysterious, and oftentimes invite us into an imaginary landscape that we already know how to navigate.
Language is another potent gateway into ancestral memory. Anthropologist Wade Davis says, “Every language is an old growth forest of the mind.”
The bending tones and sharp consonants of an ancestral mother tongue are expressions of the unique landscape from which a people came. The rough lichen rocks or vast desert horizons are instilled in the ancient languages that are still spoken around the world by people close to their traditions. When we get closer to an ancestral tongue, we can begin to enter the psyche of those who spoke it long before us.
Language is also political, as many Indigenous languages were banned and persecuted by colonial powers. Reclaiming ancestral languages is an act of cultural revitalization and remembrance, and is an active piece of cultural revitalization movements across the world.
In the Indigenous world, language remains one of the most important elements of tribal cultures, and a central element of cultural preservation. Language is essential to culture because it contains and transmits a culture’s way of seeing the world.
When we learn a language, we are learning an entirely new way of being in reality.
Landscape is perhaps the most powerful way of all to connect with an ancestral tradition, because myth, language, food, and song all emerge from the land itself. One way we can understand culture is as a unique expression of a people from a particular place. These days, place is often an afterthought. But for every traditional culture I know of, place is the center of the wheel from which everything else revolves.
In his celebrated book, Thirty-Two Words for Field: Lost Words of the Irish Landscape, Manchán Magan describes how the Irish language is intimately connected to the landscape upon which it is spoken.
A Navajo elder I have studied with says the same for his native language, or “Diné Bizaad.” He shared how certain words can be understood as the elements or the land speaking, and that the language is merely transmitting what the landscape says.
Food grows out of land, according to the climate and seasonal cycles of a unique place on the planet.
Music is the living pulse of a people in relationship to a particular piece of earth, and the human-made rhythms and moods of that very place.
And mythology, according to Karl Kerenyi, is “the world telling its own story to itself.”
So culture, and ancestry, we could say, are ways that human beings relate to our environment and each other, passed down and preserved through time.
This isn’t about romanticizing the ancient past, but rather about radically redefining the present. When ancestry becomes part of the way to see the world, we are invited to completely re-vision our understanding of who we are.
In just 2 weeks I am hosting The Art of Ceremony, a retreat designed for psychedelic facilitators and therapists interested in immersing themselves in group ceremonial work. There are still a few spaces available for qualified applicants. Visit https://www.simonyugler.com/retreat to learn more and apply.
Also, this January I am running my online course on Mythopoetic Integration! Last time we had over 60 folks join, and I’m looking forward to diving in again. Learn more and sign up here: https://www.simonyugler.com/courses
As always, thank you for reading, and please like, share, and comment to your heart’s content.