I mentioned a few weeks back that my two Nanas have been helping Brigid get me through some difficulties with guilt. What I didn’t say at the time is how odd people’s reactions to that tend to be, once you actually sit with them. I mean ancestor work in Irish spirituality is inherent, but people still get a bit freaked out by it.
Here’s the thing that gets me. People are entirely grand with me talking about the Tuatha Dé Danann popping in to say hello. Nobody blinks. But mention a conversation with your dead grandmother and suddenly people get concerned, genuinely concerned, like I’ve said something worrying rather than something ordinary. My Nanas, my Grandads, my dead aunts, uncles, other relations – most of them, the ones who knew me anyway – loved me. That doesn’t stop being true because they’re dead. I don’t know why one kind of ancestral contact reads as folklore and the other reads as a cry for help, but it does, and it shouldn’t.
The Stories We Actually Tell
In Ireland we tell stories about the people who’ve gone on ahead of us. Sometimes funny, sometimes sad, sometimes with that particular look in the teller’s eye that says “yeah, dodgy one, but honestly, great craic all the same.”
One of my Nanas accidentally scared the bejaysus out of the neighbours wearing a white coat in a graveyard in November – purely by existing in the wrong outfit in the wrong place at the wrong time. The other had a story about a friend wearing red shoes that her father couldn’t find out about, cos they weren’t respectable. I never did figure out if the “friend” was actually Nana or not. She won’t tell me now, either.
The smell of Sweet Afton cigarettes, or an ash burn on a shirt, brings one Grandad to mind straight away. The smell of pipe smoke brings the other. Not confusing at all, that second one, given my darling husband went through his own pipe-smoking phase at one point…
What I Actually Have Left of Them
Beyond the stories, I have objects too. My great-grandmother on my dad’s side gave him a small statue of St Thérèse of Lisieux when he went away to school. He gave it to me when I went away to school in turn. It’s a small thing, cheap tin or some other metal, and it’s carried three generations of leaving home in it.
And this is before we get into the mass cards, the photos, the buildings…
When Your Family Doesn’t Tell the Stories
For anyone interested in Brigid or Irish spirituality, I’d strongly recommend working with your ancestors. But I know not everyone has a Nana with a graveyard story or a Grandad linked to a particular smell. Plenty of people’s families just don’t talk, or the stories got lost somewhere, or there’s nobody left who remembers.
So what do you do? Well, do your best. There are loads of ways to find out births and deaths online these days. Learn actual history of the times your ancestors lived in – you might be surprised what you find. Learn the actual history of the countries your ancestors lived in, not the populist views, the facts. Try to learn from natives, rather than colonisers, as difficult as that might be in some places (side eye to the British Empire).
Ancestor work doesn’t require a family full of characters and heirlooms to be real. It requires you showing up and doing the digging, even when nobody handed you the stories to begin with.
Where This Fits Into Kindling Brigid’s Flame
This is one of the areas Kindling Brigid’s Flame actually spends real time on – ancestor work and building your own sacred space, as part of the physical preparation for your Imbolc ritual. It’s built for people who want a proper framework for this rather than guessing, whether or not they’ve got a Nana with a good graveyard story to start from.
The one story I hold on to is about an Irish cousin who was a Bone Setter. I only know two facts about him. One is that he was the 7th son, and the other is that he never married but drank himself to death. The story also said he traveled the world setting bones for people. None of the family mentioned this to me until after my mother’s death, but she told us about how, when our grandmother was working in the yard one day, she broke her wrist just before one of my Irish great-uncles came over to visit. She took her to the doctors to be treated, and the doctor asked them, who had set her wrist.
Years later, I broke my arm and hand when I tripped over a curb, and feeling the breaks, I set the bones on my own. This was before Brigit came to me asking me to have my head washed for her. Since then, both Brigit and Morrigan have called me one of Brigit’s daughters during rituals.
Elne Clare
know to the world as Ellen C Montgomery