The veneration of the Ancestors was a central element of the Norse religion as we can see in the Edda’s and Sagas. Ancestor worship is and always has been an essential part of animistic practices all around the world and while the Norse system was not a purely animistic one anymore at the time when most of the available sources were recorded it retained this aspect of its original roots. For the Germanic Peoples in general, the past was something of great importance. The actions of your Ancestors determined your starting point in life as well as your actions would determine from where your offspring and later generations would start off. If the Ancestors had not settled or conquered and afterwards defended the land of your tribe, you would not have the land that you inhabited, which was so essential in order to make a living at the time. They had shed their blood to defend it and had been buried or cremated on it and therefore literally become a part of the land your tribe now lived on. This was something that had to be honored and it also explains the deep connection that tribal societies feel to their homeland and why they often view it as sacred, which is once more a global phenomenon.
Something that seems rather alien to us when we start to dive into the Norse Myths is the discovery that neither the Norse Gods nor the Wights (Svartafar and Ljosalfar) have an innate interest in human beings. While it was believed to be possible to establish a relationship with a specific God, Goddess or Wight this required some convincing as they had their own problems to deal with. The one exception were the Ancestors as they were indeed interested in helping their descendants in order to keep the family and the clan healthy and strong. By honoring the Ancestors and giving them sacrifice at certain times people hoped to secure their support, which was thought to be of a very practical nature. It was hoped that they would watch over the respective family or clan, protect them from harm, keep them healthy, ensure good harvests and lots of healthy offspring and grant them victory in conflicts, no matter if they were of a legal or martial nature.
These days worshipping our Ancestors is a way of finding our roots and can take many forms. Maybe we want to learn about the generations that came before us and start to visit public libraries and national archives to find out more about them. Maybe we’re interested in the more distant past and do a genetic test in order to see where our roots may lead. In practical terms we might start to pay regular visits to our grandmother that has been parked in an old people’s home and to inquire about her life and how it was to grow up at the time when she was young while at the same time brightening her days simply by spending time with her. A more spiritual approach would be to build a shrine and give regular sacrifice to our Ancestors (in the Gild we use mead even though it would be more traditional to sacrifice a horse or at least a chicken). There are many more approaches but learning about the past and the obstacles that our Ancestors had to overcome will provide valuable results and grant us their help and protection, just like in the days of old.
Scientists have tried to calculate the chance of a specific individual being born taking into account things like the chance of our parents meeting and their parents before them, that specific sperm merging with that specific egg, all our ancestors surviving their childhood, having exactly the children that they had and so forth. The number they came up with was 1:400 quintillion, that’s 1:400’000’000’000’000’000’000! This number is truly humbling and instills a sense of gratefulness for the deeds of our Ancestors and the many obstacles they had to overcome as well as a general feeling of joy to have been born as the person that we are. This is what lies at the heart of Ancestor worship. Another effect of this practice is the development of a growing feeling of being just one small link in a long chain that reaches from the deepest past hopefully far into the future. This results in a fundamental shift of perception. Pure materialism and a sole focus on self-fulfillment suddenly seem stale and hollow as we start to feel a deep urge to honor the ones that came before us and to enable the ones that will come after us to live a good live and feel pride for our own deeds. It makes us more aware of our responsibility towards the planet and our fellow humans and motivates us to work on ourselves and to spend our time on worthy endeavors in order to become a person that our future relatives will remember, thinking: This is an Ancestor of mine that I can be truly proud of…
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D. L., Switzerland