Ancestors, the Foundation of Our Spirituality

In our spiritualities, everything begins with the ancestors. Before the deities, before the rituals, there are those who came before us. We don't keep them as memories. We live with them.

Ancestors first

The ancestors are not one part of our spirituality. They are its foundation.

In Yoruba Ifá, in Vodun, in Haitian Vodou, no one reaches the invisible forces without going through them. Some deities were ancestors first. Before he was thunder, Shango was a king of Oyo.

Why them first? Zora Freda puts it her own way in The Black Girl's Book of Spells: you don't confide in someone who knows nothing about your life. The ancestors have been there. The chains, the exile, the humiliation, but also the feasts and the full tables. They understand us.

We don't just pray to them. We ask them.

To pray is to speak. To ask is to wait for an answer.

We consult Fâ before an important choice. We listen to our dreams. The Dagara writer Malidoma Patrice Somé puts it this way: "Our night is the day of the Spirit and of the ancestors, who come to tell us what lies on our life paths."

Maryse Condé tells it too. In I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, Tituba speaks with her ancestors: her mother and the woman who raised her. Even taken far from her land, she keeps calling them. The bond grows rarer, but it never breaks.

A glass of water, a candle, a name

The bond doesn't ask for ceremony. It asks for constancy.

Libation is the first gesture. We wrote about it in September: a few drops poured on the ground, before drinking, for those who are no longer here. Then come the simplest gestures: a glass of water you change, a candle, a name you say out loud.

The name matters more than we think. Kenyan theologian John Mbiti called the dead who are still remembered the "living-dead." As long as someone who knew them remembers them, they remain among us. Only forgetting makes them truly leave.

These gestures are not symbols. They are ways of speaking to them.

And if you don't know your lineage? You honor the ones we share. All those who held on before us. Ubuntu¹ says it in one sentence: I am because we are.

Why we write this

Even when we imagine the future, we don't do it without them. In Black Panther, an Afrofuturist² work, the king of the most advanced nation on earth still goes to ask his ancestors for advice, on the ancestral plane.

The future isn't built by forgetting. It's built by carrying your people with you.

This series is about the invisible: what we can't see, but what is there. Before anything else, we had to talk about the ancestors, because everything starts with them.

¹ Ubuntu: a philosophy from Southern Africa, from the Zulu and Xhosa languages. It says that no one exists alone, but through others: a person is a person through other people.

² Afrofuturist: describes a work that imagines the future from Black cultures, blending science fiction, history and spirituality.