Ancestral love
love from the dead, love beyond the grave, interspecies love and other mysterious types of bonding
(Image descriptions: two fish, one bright red and the other one of a darker shade, are in a courting ritual, swimming around each other, entangling. Source: Wonderen van de voortplanting in de dierenwereld, Van Stuijvenberg W., Amsterdam Boek)
Maybe it’s not the right time to talk about love (even though it’s Valentine’s season), when there is so much trauma and sorrow in the world. But when I feel down, disempowered or alone, thinking about the love my ancestors might have for me (hopefully) and the mysterious ways in which all people are connected, helps me to get up again. In our culture we are pretty obsessed with romantic love between humans (for good reasons, because it’s beautiful), but I want to talk about a particular kind of love: the love you receive from people or beings who are not on this earthly plain (anymore), and how they show it to you. Let’s celebrate all the various and special kinds of love our earth has to offer us, instead of being sad to be single!
In which ways does the world love you?
It must be ‘a quirk of the trade’, but as an astrologer you become so hyperconscious of patterns and symbolic repetitions that you cannot fully listen to someone’s story without wondering about their Pars Fortuna, fixed stars, intergenerational patterning, synastry and so on. I can also not listen to someone’s story without noticing the colors they wear, the way in which they move, the symbolic events in their life and so on, and trying to imagine their birth chart through it. But I am often the most curious about how people are loved through their particular kind of universe, because every person wears a specific universe around them like they are wearing their clothes, and it changes their surroundings from yours. We all live in a pretty unique universe of our own.
It's just a fact that people have different life lessons, and that some people’s path is more difficult than others, but the difficulties and challenges are not saying anything about the quality of people’s worth or spiritual intelligence. There are so many harmful messages going around like ‘you attract or manifest what you think’. That's just such a simplistic way of looking at the current world, often propagated by privileged people. The nuances or ‘kernel of truth' spirituality can provide, can easily be appropriated to validate capitalist and fascist ideas we are carrying within and around.
The paradigm of capitalism is a form of spirituality, though. It has spiritual workings. Spirituality is neither good nor bad, it's just the sum of all the trauma or deeds of the souls contributing to it. We live in a society that is dominated by very profound, deep-rooted trauma. Our pain keeps us spell-binded, and it creates powerful illusions. We are dreaming while awake. That being said, there is also a lot of love in the world. Love always creates more love, and real love can make our mind very clear and awake. Love is stronger than desirability politics, stronger than capitalism, stronger than prejudices, love helps us look through veils. Love is, of course, more than the romantic love between lovers, even though I believe romantic love is one of the most exciting things on earth. Love is one of the essential resources to keep us alive. And even though love is so grand, so universal, it still manifests in very specific ways to us. You don’t love just anyone, you love this specific thing or person. I think that’s something very beautiful about love: it’s so universally shared and felt, and still it brings up very unique and singular feelings.
The yearning of our ancestors
There is a folk belief that the souls of our ancestors are waiting in the branches of trees for a pregnant person to pass by, so they can jump down and become the soul of the baby and reincarnate. This means that we are the revenants! We are the souls of our ancestors, almost literally, not just genetically. We have the same motivations, lost connections or loose threads that they (or we) left behind in a previous life. It also means that we are always partly ‘dead’, partly in another world, partly not being fully ourselves but moved by powerful underground forces.
Some time ago someone told me that she found out that she had a very flamboyant great-aunt who grew up in a specific suburb of Brussels. This great-aunt passed away before her birth. During her life, this great-aunt was sent to the countryside after a ‘scandal’ in which she became pregnant. She was very unhappy living hidden away, while she was an adventurous city-girl at heart. Her story, however, was forgotten because it wasn’t talked about in the family -it was such a taboo. After some generations, her descendants moved out of the country side back to that specific suburb in Brussels, without knowing they had ancestral connections there. This was the spirit of the aunt working through her descendants, her deep longing for a life she hadn’t lived.
Ancestors live through their descendants and try to finish things, or fulfill wishes, or mourn mistakes and trauma they never got the chance to solve in their life. Our ancestors live through us very forcefully. Very, very forcefully - so much that sometimes you are not living your own life, but one of your ancestors. Sometimes you are not even loving your own lovers, but the lovers of your ancestors.
I have a funny example from my own life: I found out that a friend with whom I had a very dramatic frenemy relationship, was the granddaughter of a woman my grandmother apparently was very resentful of. These patterns play out even if we don’t necessarily are looking for them or want anything to do with them, and they also show up in strange ‘side-quests’ in our lives. I think it’s very interesting to look at our lives from this perspective, because the type of people you fall for might be people who look a lot like the people your ancestors loved. You might also fall for people with whom you had a past life connection, good or bad.
Previous loves, previous lives
‘Amor Fati’ the Romans said, ‘love your fate’. But sometimes your fate is hard to love, when at some moments in life it seems that the universe and the gods are playing some joke on you. Patterns can give us this feeling of wanting to escape them but always ending up in the same place. Many psychologists explain it as trauma, but it’s not only traumatic events that repeat. We also repeat cycles of love.
Most of us know the feeling of meeting someone and having the sensation you just know this person, possibly from a previous life (or we might recognize someone telling this to us as a red flag, haha). Many of the couples I know have met through strange coincidences. I have a friend who met her partner in a dream before meeting him in reality. Another friend met her husband on the train. I know couples whose names are rhyming. Some people seem to be made for each other. These stories always invigorate me and make me praise the intelligence of the universe, but I also do admit that while being single, hearing those stories bring up a bit of melancholy in me. When you haven’t found your soulmate(s) (yet), witnessing love can be painful. I try to allow myself to be with that pain even though I feel ‘petty’ for feeling it. And I know I am not the only one. So many people long for love, it’s so human. It’s one of our most human, vulnerable qualities.
Creative loving
Recently I learned about the Otherkin Vampire community. I learned that some people need to feed on other people’s psychic or sexual energy to feel okay, and they ask consent to do that. Even the consensual consummation of blood might be involved. I was pretty touched by this. Lots of people feed on other people’s energy but are not as straightforward about it, staying unclear or unaware about their intentions, and don’t ask consent to do it. It made me marvel again about all the idiosyncratic ways people love each other, even though I personally would be pretty uncomfortable with such an exchange.
I have also read a lot about spirit marriage and people who have erotic or platonic relationships with spirits. It’s a subject that intrigues me, because it blurs the boundaries between human, non-human, material and immaterial. That is some fantastic queering of relationships!
It reminded me of an event from years ago. I woke up in the morning with a spirit sitting on the foot of my bed, and we kissed. It felt completely natural, like I knew this person, missed them, even though I had no recollection of them. It was just this small, sudden moment in my life, and I assume this was a person I probably know from a different life who came to say hi to me in this world. Maybe you have met someone like that, too. And even though we might have no active recollection of this, our feelings of love and familiarity are stronger, even stronger than our fright for the ‘supernatural’.
People often perceive spirits sitting at their bedside or at the foot of their bed, because it’s one of these moments in the day we are most receptive and ‘in between’ worlds. I used to think of this intrusion of privacy as a little bit ‘rude’ (many a well-meaning spirit has been scaring the shit out of me appearing at my bedside), but is there really a ‘right’ timing for them to visit? Would there be another moment in the day in which you are receptive to them? The symbol of the bed is also a symbol of love, a meeting place between souls.
The love between you and your Follower
In this text that is made of bits and pieces, I also want to mention your Follower. I want to talk about a very mysterious and rewarding form of relationship, and that’s the relationship with ‘yourself’. There is the love for your Follower. You are two (and probably even more).
We humans are also made of bits and pieces, and our soul separates from our body during sleep or deep meditation, to go wander in different worlds. I never fully experienced astral travel, but I do sometimes wake up next to my body for short moments- so I know that the multiple realities our ancestors and contemporary astral travellers talk about, are real. What always strikes me, is that my ‘dream body’ or astral body, for which I use the folkloric term ‘Follower’ (Claude Lecouteux talks about this in his marvelous book Witches, Werewolves and Fairies : Shapehifters and Astral Doubles in Middle Ages), has a different personality than I have, even if it’s ‘my’ spirit. My Follower is much more open-hearted, careless and direct than ‘I’ am, maybe because they are not burdened by earthly matters like me. Connecting with this mysterious person has been a very rewarding practice to me, and I believe it’s one of the most profound and curious relationships you can foster. It’s you and ‘not you’, it’s ‘another’, and still even more ‘you’ than you realise. It’s the love between the material and immaterial in our very self. It’s a synchronistic dance between Following each other, wherever you go, through every form and incarnation of you, where no one takes the lead.