New Generations of ancestors

all our ancestors are forever present

It is nearly three years since Samhain took on a different meaning in our household. I was soon to be a mother, and so my ancestors and my partner’s ancestors find blood in common in our son. Two family lines joined in a new life. We celebrated with a red meal.

The red meal, or housle, is the rite of including your ancestors at the table for a meal. Their names are remembered and stories about them shared. A fire or candles lit while smoke or incense helps your offerings of worldly delights and fine words reach them in the hereafter. Favourite or traditional foods and drink are toasted to them as they are invited to join you at your table. It is not unusual for the evening or succeeding days to contain strange phenomena that mark their presence.

While I was pregnant, I could not really do more than this. It is something of a taboo to participate in magics that attract spirit activity. Much of Samhain involves, among other things, the welcoming of the wild hunt who sweep up souls of the departed, occasionally taking those who have only one foot in this world – my unborn child might count among the later.

As a friend once told me, once you have children you become a living ancestor. The future generation is one that perhaps one day will outlive you and remember you when you are gone. I never used to think that being ‘remembered’ was all that important and had no interest in producing offspring to replace my existence. But practicing the craft made me aware that the ancestors are still reachable and still hold connection with us after death.

We are but a single point in a timeline, and a link in a chain that stretches not only backwards through our family tree but forwards through our children. Children are our ancestors of the future.

Once he entered this world, through the blood and bone gate of my pelvis, a new link in the chain was forged, a new ancestor born. We are all fated to die and become the dead from the moment of our birth. May the journey be bright and full of wonder.

This Samhain my son will be sitting with us at the table, a place across from him set for our ancestors as we sit and tell stories and memories of our families, saying their names and inviting them to be present with us. He is too young to understand, but the dead will be pleased as though we had put him on their knee.

The Veil is thin, people say; but what do we mean? at this end of the year it is thin between the living and the dead. All of time is now, we are all here now, all those before us and all those after. Somewhere in ‘the future,’ someone is sharing a red meal for Rebecca and her husband and son, their great great great…and my great-great-grandmother is just lighting a candle and sitting down at the table.