Written by Ancestor work begins, for most people, in a spirit of reverence.
The candle is lit. The photograph is placed. The altar is arranged with care. The practice is framed around healing and connection and the receiving of wisdom from those who came before. And all of that is real, and it matters, and it is a genuine and important part of what this work is for.
But then, somewhere in the process, you find yourself face to face with an ancestor who was not a wise elder. Who was not a source of healing or a carrier of gifts. Who was, in the simplest terms, someone whose actions caused harm, to the people around them, to the children they raised, to the lineage they passed forward.
Most lineages contain at least one of them. Many lineages contain several.
What do you do with an ancestor who was unkind? Who was violent? Who held beliefs that you find abhorrent? Who did things that caused real damage that you can still trace, in the family and in yourself, several generations later?
This is not a hypothetical question. It is one that every practitioner who works seriously with the ancestral field will eventually encounter. And the available frameworks for answering it are, in many traditions, either unsatisfyingly vague or actively misleading.
The Problem with Unconditional Reverence
Some ancestor work traditions hold that all ancestors are to be honoured without qualification. That the dead, by virtue of death, have moved beyond the categories of good and bad. That your obligation to your lineage is total and prior to any moral evaluation.
There is something real in this position. The dead are not available to be confronted, changed, or held accountable in the ways the living can be. The relationship you have with an ancestor is, necessarily, a different kind of relationship than the one you would have with a living person who had done the same things. And there is genuine wisdom in the recognition that ancestral work operates across a wider frame than individual moral judgment.
But unconditional reverence is also, in many cases, another form of the family silence. Another way of not looking directly at what is there. The lineage that cannot be examined honestly cannot be healed honestly. And healing, not performance of ancestral connection, is what this work is ultimately for.
The ancestor who caused harm did not stop causing harm when they died. The harm exists in the lineage, in the patterns, in the nervous systems and behaviours of every person who came after them. Treating the harm as sacred because the person who caused it is now dead does not address the harm. It perpetuates it.
What the Difficult Ancestor Actually Needs
Here is something that the older traditions understood and that contemporary framings of ancestor work sometimes lose: the difficult ancestor is not helped by being placed on a pedestal.
In many traditional frameworks – particularly in West African and African diasporic traditions that form the backbone of so much contemporary ancestor practice – there is a distinction between the elevated dead and the unelevated dead. The elevated ancestor has processed what they carried in life. They have, in whatever form post-death development takes, worked through the consequences of who they were and what they did. They have the clarity and the orientation toward the living’s wellbeing that makes them genuinely good allies to work with.
The unelevated ancestor has not done this work. They remain caught in what they were in life. The same patterns, the same unprocessed wounds, the same unresolved impulses. They are not elevated. And they cannot function as the kind of wise ancestor the practitioner wants to cultivate relationship with.
The work with the difficult ancestor is not reverence. It is something more like: acknowledgement of the harm caused, prayer or intention directed toward their elevation, and the clear maintenance of your own boundary about what you will and won’t receive from them.
This is not punishment. It is the recognition that what we want from ancestor work – genuine wisdom, healing transmission, the support of those who have gone before – can only come from ancestors who have actually arrived at a place where they have something of that quality to offer. The difficult ancestor who remains stuck is not in that place. Treating them as though they are does not serve the ancestor, the lineage, or you.
Holding the Complexity
The difficult ancestor is rarely only difficult. This is one of the genuinely complicated things about this work.
The grandfather who was cruel was also the grandfather who survived something genuinely unsurvivable and passed you the resilience of that survival. The great-great-grandmother whose worldview was shaped by a system of thought you find deeply wrong was also the great-great-grandmother whose specific physical gifts are the gifts you are working with now. The ancestor who caused harm in their family life may have been, in another domain, someone who did good in the world. Or someone who themselves carried inherited damage that they never had the conditions to address.
None of this excuses the harm. But it does mean that the difficult ancestor cannot usually be cleanly set aside as purely negative. They exist in the same ambiguity that all human beings exist in. They are the product of their time and conditions as well as of their choices. And they are part of you. Which means some of what they were is also part of you, and some of what they were is in need of the same honest examination.
Do not perform a relationship you do not feel. The ancestor altar is not a social occasion where politeness is required. If you feel anger at an ancestor, that anger is information. Honour it. You may, in time, develop something more complex – a holding of both the harm they caused and the conditions that shaped them – but you do not have to start there, and you do not have to pretend to have arrived there before you have.
Distinguish between acknowledgement and welcome. You can acknowledge that an ancestor existed without welcoming their energy into your sacred space. You can name them and recognise their place in the lineage without inviting their influence. This distinction matters. It allows you to do the work of honest ancestral reckoning without opening yourself to the transmission of exactly what you are trying to heal.
The lineage itself can be a resource. Even in lineages that contain very difficult figures, there are usually also ancestors who were different. Who resisted the dominant pattern, who chose differently, who held what was good. These are the ancestors to actively cultivate. The more you develop relationship with the elevated, the clearer the perspective on the unelevated becomes, and the less power the difficult ancestors’ patterns have over you.
Working Toward Elevation
In many traditions, it is understood that the living can actively support the elevation of difficult ancestors. This is not about excusing what they did. It is about directing genuine intention toward their healing, because their healing is also, in a real sense, the lineage’s healing.
Prayer, in whatever form you use it, directed toward an ancestor’s wellbeing and growth, rather than toward their continued influence, is one of the most powerful things you can do in this work. Not prayer that denies what they were. Prayer that acknowledges it, holds it honestly, and then directs intention toward something beyond it.
I know what you were. I know what you did. I am not asking you into my space as an adviser. But I am holding intention toward your growth, toward your healing, toward whatever process of reckoning the dead undertake. May that process be real and thorough. May your descendants be freed, through your honest reckoning with yourself, from what you could not heal in life.
This is not a small thing to offer. And it is not unconditional reverence. It is something more honest and more useful: the recognition that the harm in your lineage has to be worked through somewhere, by someone, and that this work is yours to begin.
🪄 A Practice: Writing the Honest Account
This practice is for working with a specific difficult ancestor. One you know enough about to name what they did and who they were.
You will need: a journal, a candle, and some time when you will not be interrupted.
Light the candle. Sit for a moment in deliberate stillness.
Then write – not to the ancestor, not yet, but for yourself – an honest account of this person and the harm they caused. Not a catalogue of grievances, but a clear-eyed description of who they were, what they did, and how you understand the effects to have moved through the lineage since. Write until you feel you have said what is true, without either dramatic condemnation or softening that isn’t earned.
When the account is written, sit with it. Notice what you feel. Let what you feel be what it is.
Then, separately, write a second section:
~ What I can also see in this person, beyond the harm, is…
~ The conditions they were formed by that I can see clearly include…
~ What in myself might be a distorted or unprocessed version of something they carried is…
~ The prayer I am holding for their elevation, honestly, is…
~ What I am choosing not to receive from them is…
~ What I am choosing to actively develop in myself, in place of what they transmitted, is…
Burn or bury the first section if you choose. Keep the second.
The difficult ancestor is part of you. The honest account of them is also an honest account of something in yourself. This is not comfortable. It is one of the most genuinely transformative things that ancestor work makes possible.