Our spiritual practices often feel like gateways to our ancestry. They help us feel connected to our past, whether that past is concrete or abstract.

There isn’t often a clear cut path to an ancestral practice. The further back in history one delves, the blurrier the picture becomes of what such a practice looked like. I have struggled for most of my post-Christian life (over 20 years) to find my home in a spiritual practice. The problem isn’t discovering my ancestry, but instead digging back far enough to find people who were not Christians. My maternal genealogy is meticulously researched and documented, and the first of my ancestors arrived with the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630. They, in fact, ditched the place well before the Salem Witch Trials and went south to New York and then New Jersey, in part because they were Anabaptists and not Puritans and didn’t get along well. I don’t have any stories of the Old Country. Scotland is my ancestral home, but my people have been Americans for nearly 400 years. My ancestral legacy is Christianity and colonization. I know of a few ancestors who were enslavers, but I am sure there are many more than documentation suggests.

I crept further and further down the Celtic spiritual family tree over the years, starting in modernity, which is the easiest to find out about. Modern druidry, both American and British, in my youth, then to reconstructionists in my twenties, and in recent years, proto-indo-european religion. But I went too far. I lost the connection to real people. At a point, I think you begin to worship research and archaeology, and wait with bated breath for research that validates the things you do.

In the last few months I have reoriented myself to modernity. I am a real alive person in the hellish year 2020 — I need real alive workings that make a difference in my life. This need has brought me to the Appalachian mountains and the New Jersey Pine Barrens, the folklore and magic working of which I am beginning to study.

That direction of study propels me directly into some extremely well known syncretic faith ways, like Hoodoo, Voodoo, and Santeria. These practices are all results of colonialism and slavery, coming about as ways for black and indigenous people to maintain their cultural practices somewhat safely under the pressure of white Christian oppressors. They are cultural traditions that I, a white woman, have no right to borrow from. Further than that, it is my duty as a white person to steward other white people away from appropriative practice and take the burden of that emotional labor off the shoulders of black and brown witches.

Where does that leave me? Reading, mostly, these days.