A couple weeks ago I found myself with a good problem: I had a week’s worth of vacation time that I needed to “spend” or it would disappear by the next pay cycle. I considered staying home to save money, but I had been meaning to take a trip out to Seattle for a long time. I called up a friend living in the area, and she was kind enough to offer her couch. My trip to this city was in part to visit her — and in part to visit the memory of my grandfather.
Ancestors of Blood
This year marks about a decade since my grandfather passed. We had a complicated, distant relationship in his final years. In my years of atheism, it was easiest to hide those uncomfortable feelings away and ignore them. After all, what did it matter? He was dead; his spark of life has dissipated with the powering-down of his heart and brain, and the scattering of his cremated remains confirmed that everything about him was gone.
But things get a little more complicated once you’re a polytheist. Now I’m not so sure that he’s gone forever.
I don’t know what his religious beliefs were. His funeral was secular, but that may have simply been a result of my family’s awkwardness around religion. If I had to guess, I’d say he was an atheist, or an agnostic of apathy. He was an engineer who excelled at numbers and figures but sometimes struggled with the social sciences. Religion is something we never discussed in that household, whether due to disgust or disinterest I’ll never know.
Still, he was in general supportive of my strange interests as a child, and polytheism would definitely qualify.
My grandfather grew up in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle, known for its rich Scandinavian heritage. (I highly recommend checking out the Nordic Museum, if you’re in the area. His ancestors hailed from Scotland, so I’m not actually sure what drew them to this area.) I don’t know his exact childhood address, so I had to decide where to go to honor his spirit, my grandfather the Akh. He was born sometime in the early 1930s, so I found one place that certainly existed during that time: the Ballard Locks.
The Ballard Locks are a marvel of engineering that allow ships to move from the water level of Lakes Washington and Union to the water level of Puget Sound. The Locks were completed in 1917, so I think it’s fairly safe to assume that my grandfather would’ve visited them at least once in his lifetime, given that they were in walking distance from his neighborhood (and his interest in engineering).
I arrived at the Locks in the early afternoon and wandered around for a while. It was a proper Seattle day — grey, windy, damp and cold — and I was one of the only tourists. After meandering through the dormant botanical gardens, I found a bench overlooking the Locks and pulled out three pieces of bread: one for the Akh of my grandfather, one for Nehalennia, and one for the Ancestors of Place.
Feeding the Ancestors
First, I fed the Akh. Akh (or Akhu in the plural) is a complex term, but in this case I am using it to refer to the “transfigured dead,” the spirits of the dead who live on in the afterlife. They are often viewed as stars in the nighttime sky, held in the belly of Nut (the goddess of the nighttime sky). Traditionally, the Akhu would have been given offerings in their tombs, but since my grandfather was cremated and I honestly don’t know where his ashes were scattered, I figured that visiting somewhere he grew up would work well. (Honoring the ancestors at home is perfectly acceptable too, of course; it just felt special to go somewhere he had lived, given that he had never visited where I live now.)
In Kemetic thought, the Ancestors benefit from the assistance of the living.
“Although the akhu had reached the afterlife existence, they still needed the living, since it was the latter who performed rituals, carried out the embalming and funerary requirements, and provided their dead ancestors with offerings […] Sustaining the needs of the akhu is attested by a ceremony called “the feeding the akh” with the glorified deceased depicted in front of food offerings in the 4th and 5th Dynasty tombs at Giza.”
Janák, J. (2013). Akh. In Dieleman, J. & Wendrich, W. (Eds.), UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology. Los Angeles, CA: UCLA. Retrieved here.
Nearly every polytheist tradition and many Pagan [1] traditions have some form of ancestor veneration. My ADF practices, for example, fit right in with my Kemetic practices. ADF’s Dedicant Manual explains:
“The Mighty Dead have vision and magic beyond those of mortals, and can have great influence over the lives of their descendants. So it is proper for us to give love, reverence and offerings to the spirits of our own Beloved Dead.”
Ar nDraiocht Fein: A Druid Fellowship. (2009). Dedicant Manual. Tucson, AZ: ADF Publishing. Kindle Edition.
For the Ancient Egyptians, common offerings to the Akhu included what they would have commonly consumed in life: bread, beer, meat, etc. I chose to bring bread for two main reasons. First, its symbolic importance: “the offering of bread in [funerary] scenes represents an offering which played the main role in the mortuary cults, not only shown in the relief of stelae and offering tables, but also in the temples.” [2] Second: my grandfather and I really like bread. Bread is hands-down my favorite food, and one of my fondest memories of my grandfather is the way he made “Grandpa’s famous toast” for me and my cousin: wheatberry bread, lightly toasted, crusts cut off, soaked liberally in butter. It was great.
At the Locks, I unwrapped the sourdough I brought with me and said offering prayers, and then sat in silence to think of him. I thought of all the great memories we shared together: exploring the wharf, hiking, talking politics. And I also sat with the pangs of guilt I felt at not talking to him much in his final years. Knowing, as a polytheist, that he might be looking out at me now was both comforting and uncomfortable at the same time. What would he think of me now, I wondered?
I gave him most of the bread, and I took a little to share. I can’t remember how it tasted.
In theory I could have just verbally offered bread to his Akh. (I did vocally offer “a thousand of all good and pure things,” in addition to the physical bread itself.) Teeter explains further:
“Food offerings could also be supplied by merely saying prayers that referred to provisions. The offerings were actualized by the recitation that magically produced or consecrated the “bread, beer, oxen, alabaster, incense and every good and pure thing” for the deceased. These offerings were originally referred to as “voice offerings” (peret kherw), literally, “what goes forth at the voice,” because the act of pronouncing the names of the offerings along with the name of the deceased brought them into being in the afterlife – another example of the efficiency and economy of Egyptian rituals.”
Teeter, E. (2011). Religion and Ritual in Ancient Egypt. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.
However, I think there’s additional heka in offering the physical object as well. Plus, this is where my practice with ADF has started to impact my general practice as well.
Offerings to the Steerswoman
In ADF rites, the bulk of our offerings tend to be physical: foodstuffs, libations, flowers, etc. (“Praise offerings” of song, poetry, etc. are also common, but fulfill a different function than the peret kherw, I’d argue.) For full ADF-style Druidic rituals, “as a bare minimum, clean water can be used for all offerings, but it is best if every power is given a specific gift,” with ale in particular suggested for the Ancestors. [3]
Since I was at a major shipping hub (the Ballard Locks are the busiest in the US), it seemed natural to offer to Nehalennia as well. Nehalennia is a goddess of seafarers and merchants, among other attributes. Her devotees (Romans, Celts, Germanic peoples — She was popular!) had “professions [that] varied from sea-captain to merchants dealing in wine, salt, and fish-sauce,” [4] but shipping was a common theme. Since I work in the logistics field, this is one of the aspects of Nehalennia that drew me strongly to this goddess.
As I watched the ships slowly sail in and out of the locks into Puget Sound, I offered Her bread as well, thanking Her for watching over the movement of goods across the world. Our modern supply chain has caused a lot of ills (looking into the billions of gallons of fossil fuels my industry alone consumes is depressing) but it has some positives as well.
And there was one more very important offering I had to make before I left.
Ancestors of Place
The United States has a brutal, bloody history of colonialism, the effects of which are still painfully present today. As with many other cities, the land on which the present-day city of Seattle was built was violently stolen from the Native American tribes (such as the Tulalip Tribes: Snohomish, Snoqualmie, Skykomish; and many others) who inhabited that area.
At the Ballard Locks, I said prayers and gave offerings to these people, the “Ancestors of Place,” to use ADF’s terminology, and their descendants. I also donated to Tulalip Tribe’s cultural center and to the Suquamish Tribe, as many years ago I spent a lot of time in the adjacent Kitsap County. Prayers aren’t enough, in this case. I don’t have a lot of money, but I do think we polytheists in particular (especially in the US and Canada) need to be cognizant of the history of this land and what we can do to help; even small actions are better than nothing.
Final Thoughts
After it got too cold to stay on the bench any longer, I safely disposed of the bread offerings and recited the ADF Hearth Keeper offering disposal prayer:
“Offerings I have made, and offerings you have received. I dispose of these offerings now, knowing that you have taken your fill of them. May they be removed from human use so that they may be fully yours. So be it.”
The Hearth Keeper’s Way: An ADF Hearth Keepers Guide. PDF text available here: https://www.adf.org/system/files/public/training/the_hearth_keepers_way.pdf
To be completely transparent, I’m terrible with ancestor veneration. It’s ironic, considering my patron deity Wepwawet and my hearth deity Nehalennia are psychopomps with strong ties to the dead. My Akhu shrine is bare, save for a statuette of Wesir (Osiris) and stars made by a friend that represent the three dead relatives I knew in life. I still get feelings of guilt in the pit of my stomach when I think of them — could I have done more for them, when they were alive? Are they even comfortable with veneration, considering two of the three were at least nominally Catholic? And shouldn’t I be doing more for the ancestors I never knew? And shouldn’t I be focusing more on venerating them at home, rather than trekking out to entirely different states to do so?
I’ll keep trying. One day I hope that ancestor veneration is as easy and joyful for me as honoring the gods. For now, I’ll keep thinking of my grandpa every time I have toast (though it’s never as good as his toast), and looking for my Akhu every time I see the night sky.
References
[1] I consider myself a polytheist, but I don’t mind the term “Pagan.” I know some devotional polytheists prefer not to use the term “Pagan,” so I included both here.
[2] Abdalaal, A. M. (2006). A Late Middle Kingdom offering table, Cairo Temp. No. 25.10.17.1. Sonderdruck aus den Mitteilingen des Deutschen Archäologischen Institutsabteliung Kairo, 62. Berlin, Germany: Walter de Gruyter GmbH. Full text available here: https://www.academia.edu/2638804/A_Late_Middle_Kingdom_Offering_Table_MDAIK_62_2006_1-6
[3] Ar nDraiocht Fein: A Druid Fellowship. (2009). Dedicant Manual. Tucson, AZ: ADF Publishing. Kindle Edition.
Note: As a member of ADF, I have access to the digital version of this document. I believe the physical copy of the book is also available on Amazon.
[4] Green, M. (2004). Symbol & Image in Celtic Religious Art. London, UK: Routledge.
Roving the Two Lands 