The First Ancestor

Who are the First Ancestors? We’ve already seen the downside of not tending our ancestral lines  (see previous post), but the oldest cultures hold a special status for the First Ancestors, the first Humans who lived millennium-long lives (or were immortal), maintained incredible wisdom without written language, and taught the civilizing arts to those who came after.

Nearly all old religious texts contain stories of these Ancients. They lived hundreds or thousands of years (check out the Old Testament, stories of the Egyptian Shemsu Hor, or the really old Bodhisattvas who are supposed to still living in the hills or mountains somewhere). These Ancients taught skills for humanity to live in a good way and to explore/fulfill their capacities. And they are considered divine or semi-divine.

Isn’t it interesting that the glyphs in Egyptian pyramids and Mayan temples seem to have sprung fully formed onto the walls of these awesome monuments (monuments which modern machinery would have trouble reconstructing)? Unlike most civilizations after that time, there is no evidence of writing or glyph-work that evolved from cruder to more sophisticated forms. What about the fact that pyramids were erected in these two seemingly disparate civilizations, and in both cultures these pyramids symbolize a woman lying on her back? This begs two questions: where did it all come from, and how do I get plugged in?

Gustav Klimt - Tree of Life

Anthropologists (the good ones at least) recognize that indigenous thinking is inherently different to modern thinking. While we tend to think of things linearly (that old Hegelian model of steady advancement and progress), indigenous folks think of things circularly in that everything has a cycle and everything must be renewed by ritual. 

Some rituals, especially communal ones, in indigenous societies re-enact the events of that First Time (Egyptian: “Zep Tepi”) in order to renew and replenish aspects of their current world. They align themselves with the powerful compassionate Ancients, and thereby also re-enact the creation of their world—that is, they are re-birthing themselves, making themselves anew, replenishing the world, and re-affirming their divine or semi-divine origins. It’s no wonder that these societies cooked their creation stories into the bones of their youth, for these stories give their people strength and meaning throughout their lives (see my post: Myth, Meaning, Ritual and the Daily Grind). Joseph Campbell, Robert Bly (“What Stories Do We Need?”) and many others recognized this need for the mythopoetic dimension: the dimension where the Ancients dwell...and where we practitioners work.

Michael Harner once said that: while modern society tends to look toward the newest things as the apex of culture, shamanic cultures look to the oldest. Indeed the challenge for modern practitioners is, in addition to our defined roles as bridges between Ordinary and Non-ordinary Reality, we also have to bridge between a time-and-culture long forgotten and a time-and-culture that is trying to outdo itself in being totally unlike its predecessors. 

We modern folks often turn away from our predecessors because we don’t want to incur the same mistakes as our dowdy great-aunts or our workaholic parents—so we conscientiously attempt to fashion things anew. The results are all around us—good, bad and ineffectual. But what if each of us has an Ancestor, a First Ancestor (as we all must have originated somewhere), that carries unbounded wisdom, skill, compassion and power? And if we enlist such an Ancestor, then how insurmountable are our problems really?

If you haven’t already, you can sign up for Christina Pratt’s workshop which is coming up in a month to get started in this amazing aspect of shamanic work.