Excerpt of From Elder to Ancestor – Nature Kinship for All Seasons of Life

Our Cultural Relationship to Animistic Elderhood

Image reads: Folx on unbroken paths don’t have to approach their death rituals the same way. Those on broken paths must do more.

American European diaspora often forgets that our Ancestors’ removal from European sacred lands was the first colonization. In From Elder to Ancestor, I talk a great deal about the slow encroachment of Roman xtian forces into indigenous lands across Europe, and how that separation from ancestral land was the separation from generations of Nature Spirit relationship and rituals. 

In my book From Elder to Ancestor I describe this break from the land in terms of trauma and ritual.

When human persons aren’t engaging in their rituals to reconcile their pain, that pain becomes trauma. And if trauma is not reconciled, the dead can’t move on from the earthly realm. They remain here, as do their wounds, to be felt and played out repeatedly by the living.

Thus, disrupting the intimate relationship with the land also affects the spirit world. When the dead aren’t given rites that effectively move them out of the human domain, reconcile their personal life and ancestral trauma, and position them to freely and confidently move on to What Comes Next, aspects of sacred order are disrupted. Folx who don’t move on don’t become well Ancestors, and without them, we lose support on the human level to generate necessary change. As with all in relationship—even the unquiet dead—a destructive cycle is set up that affects all of life when they don’t move on.The glaring truth behind all of this is that once our European Ancestors were colonized, they turned that trauma into colonizing other cultures. They set a trauma pattern into motion that not only denied and compounded their indigeneity and experience of colonization but also created additional trauma for themselves and others by doing to others what was done to them. In the same way that early ancestral laws of displacement formed the basis of institutional othering that biases our socioeconomic and political systems today, the behavioral responses of our Ancestors formed the attitudes, fear, and hatred that currently empower othering. This destructive part of our past isn’t separate from our culture of hatred now. It is not separate from our collective and personal perceptions of being broken from Nature.

We have carried those traumatic roots of land separation into our death rituals now. How do we engage functional death rites now, when we are not on ancestral land? How do we ensure quiet death when we live on stolen sacred lands of other peoples?

Join me 3 November for In the Danger of Death to learn how you can engage ethical, functional deathwalking skills that tend your unquiet dead and begin healing those traumatized Ancestors. This experiential session is both coursework and ritual that I facilitate every Autumn to reconcile our unquiet dead. In this session learn psychopomp work, or deathwalking, in season with the natural elements of Autumn that facilitate us helping our unquiet dead to move on.

In this gathering you will learn:

• The difference between animism and soul tending
• What deathwalking is
• What The Broken Path is
• Why we don’t deathwalk
• Why we must deathwalk our dead
• Why the dead are unquiet
• A group ritual of deathwalking

Gain animistic insight into the runes, learn to elder well with ancient wisdom, and cultivate a strong spiritual path

by joining the Runes for Change community.

#beyourcommunity

#youareyourecosystem

S. Kelley Harrell, M. Div.

Kelley Harrell is an animist, author, deathwalker, and death doula held by Tuscarora, Woccon, and Sissipihaw land. For the last 30 years, through Soul Intent Arts she’s helped others ethically build thriving spiritual paths. Her work is Nature-based, and centers soul tending through the Elder Futhark runes, animism, ancestral tending, and deathwork. She hosts the podcast, What in the Wyrd, and also writes The Weekly Rune as a celebration of the Elder Futhark in season. Work with her in the Runes for Change community or in her intensive soul tending training, The Spirited Path.  Full bio.

#beyourcommunity ~ #youareecosystem

elder well, die well, ancestor well

@kelleysoularts