I saw two moments this week that seemed, on the surface, to be saying very different things.
The first was a Reddit post, raw and furious. The writer asked whether he could curse his forebears. He felt humiliated by his ancestry. His people, he claimed, left no poetry, no laws, no temples, no texts. Compared to cultures with millennia of written history and monumental remains—Iran, Egypt, Rome, Greece, China—his Celtic-Germanic lineage felt empty and inadequate. He longed to practise as a Heathen, but when he looked to his ancestors, all he felt was embarrassment. They had failed him.
The second was a conversation with an older white Australian woman reflecting on her First Fleet ancestry. She assumed her forebears must have been complicit in violence and dispossession. She carried guilt about it, alongside gratitude for the life she has here now. She was Catholic, influenced by Theosophy, and though she was not seeking to venerate her ancestors, she felt their presence as a weight. She did not feel deprived of heritage, but burdened by it.
One story grieves ancestors who were not impressive enough. The other wrestles with ancestors who may have done too much harm. Yet beneath both is the same question: how do we relate to ancestors when that relationship feels broken, inadequate, or morally unbearable?
When ancestors become obstacles
Both are about ancestry, but neither is really about ancestors. They are about us—our longing for cultural grounding, moral clarity, and spiritual legitimacy. And for Pagans and Witches, where ancestor veneration is often framed as foundational, these questions are not abstract. They cut straight to practice.
Many Pagan traditions assume that relationship with ancestors is possible and desirable: build an altar, make offerings, receive blessing, tend the line. But what happens when the relationship feels compromised before it begins? When you resent your ancestors for what they did not preserve, or feel implicated by what they did? What happens when practice assumes intimacy, but all you feel is shame or guilt?
These two stories circle the same problem from opposite sides. Both turn ancestors into obstacles. Both involve inheritance without intimacy.
The empire standard
The Redditor’s anguish rests on a comparison that collapses under scrutiny. He is measuring decentralised, oral, pre-literate cultures against empires with stone architecture, institutional priesthoods, and writing systems that were often borrowed, imposed, or maintained through conquest. He is comparing peoples who were colonised and Christianised, whose sacred sites were destroyed and whose practices were outlawed, with civilisations that became empires themselves and had the power to preserve and transmit their records.
Celtic and Germanic cultures were not empty. They had complex legal systems, sophisticated poetic traditions, and cosmologies rich enough that fragments still surface in medieval manuscripts written by Christian monks attempting to suppress them. What they lacked was empire, widespread literacy, or the political and climatic conditions that preserve stone monuments for millennia. The absence of temples is not evidence of spiritual poverty. It is evidence of what survives conquest, climate, and time.
More importantly, culture has never been primarily what gets written down or built in stone. Much of human culture lives in domestic, seasonal, oral, and embodied practices: how bread is baked, how the dead are mourned, how agreements are made, how the year turns. These things do not fossilise easily. The fact that some civilisations left vast records has as much to do with power and historical accident as with inherent worth.
But there is a deeper problem here. If you approach your ancestors with contempt, if you stand at their graves and say, ‘you embarrassed me, you should have been more like the Greeks’, you cannot build relationship with them. Ancestor veneration requires, at minimum, respect. Not uncritical reverence or denial of harm, but respect for people who lived, struggled, and survived within constraints we can barely imagine.
The work is not to wish you had different ancestors. It is to see the ones you have clearly: not as failures measured against imperial standards, but as people who carried knowledge, raised children, tended land, honoured their dead, and passed life forward. Life, not monuments, is the inheritance.
If that feels insufficient, it is worth remembering that bloodline is only one doorway into Pagan practice. You can work with ancestors of tradition—those who carried, reconstructed, or revived the practices you walk today. You can work directly with gods and spirits. You can work with ancestors of place and with teachers and predecessors in Craft. Ancestry is not a locked gate; it is a starting point.
Guilt isn’t a practice
The Australian woman’s burden reveals a different distortion. Her awareness of colonial violence is necessary, but she is carrying it through inherited guilt, a framework deeply shaped by Christianity and reinforced by Theosophical ideas of collective karmic debt. In this view, bloodline becomes moral contamination that you must atone for, endlessly, without resolution.
You are not responsible for what your ancestors did. You did not commit those acts. You cannot retroactively prevent them. Guilt about events that occurred before you were born is a feeling, not an ethic. It centres your emotional discomfort rather than the actual harm done or the repair needed now.
Ancestor veneration does not require absolving the dead, nor does it require carrying their moral weight as your own. You can acknowledge that someone gave you life without honouring everything they did with theirs. The ethical question is not ‘what did my ancestors do?’ but ‘what do I do now, with the life and place I have been given?’
For those living on colonised land, responsibility looks like action rather than self-reproach: learning whose Country you are on and naming it; supporting Indigenous-led movements when asked; changing the language you use about settlement and belonging; listening without defensiveness; understanding yourself as a guest rather than an inheritor with unquestioned rights. Guilt loops inward. Responsibility moves outward, towards repair.
Discernment is part of ancestor work
In both stories, ancestors have been turned into symbols rather than people. One judges them for not being impressive enough. The other condemns them for complicity in harm. Neither leaves room for complexity, limitation, or historical reality. But ancestors were not moral abstractions or spiritual trophies. They were human: constrained, flawed, shaped by forces they did not always choose, capable of care and cruelty in the same breath.
Real ancestor work, whether spiritual or psychological, requires seeing them that way. You cannot venerate what you despise. You cannot heal what you have reduced to a verdict. And you cannot be in relationship with people you have turned into symbols of cultural failure or inherited guilt.
This matters in practice because not all ancestors are well, and not all are safe or beneficial to work with. Discernment is part of ancestor veneration. Some practitioners acknowledge difficult ancestors at a distance, maintaining clear boundaries between honouring the fact of life received and refusing to venerate the lives lived. Others work with the lineage collectively, tending patterns rather than personalities. Some prioritise ancestors of place, practice, or affinity over blood entirely. Others engage in careful healing work with wounded ancestors, recognising that such work is neither obligatory nor appropriate for everyone. And some simply accept that not all ancestors are theirs to work with.
What matters is that ancestor work is not about obligation or moral purity. It is about relationship, boundaries, and responsibility.
What we owe the dead
There is a deeper question underneath all of this: what do we owe our ancestors, and what do they owe us?
The answer may be less than we think. Ancestors are not guarantors of identity. They are not responsible for handing us intact traditions, moral clarity, or spiritual legitimacy. What they offer is existence. Meaning, culture, and ethics are the work of the living.
For those who feel culturally bereft, this means letting go of the fantasy of a pure, intact ancestral tradition waiting to be recovered. It means approaching the past with humility, scholarship, and imagination, while accepting that continuity always involves gaps. Tradition is not only something you receive; it is something you tend and co-create.
For those burdened by settler ancestry, it means shifting from inherited guilt to lived ethics. The actions of your ancestors are not your actions, but their consequences are part of your inheritance. That inheritance calls for accountability, not endless self-flagellation.
We often ask the past to resolve the present. But ancestry is not a courtroom where we summon the dead to stand trial. It is a relationship—imperfect, asymmetrical, unfinished.
We are already becoming ancestors, in how we treat land, in whether we learn whose Country we stand on and speak it with respect, in the patterns we break or perpetuate, in how we handle power, inheritance, and responsibility. Those who come after us—biological or spiritual, literal or metaphorical—will live with what we leave behind.
Make it worth inheriting.