A prevailing view in the western world is to see ancestors as only related to us by blood, and sometimes by lineage. I think this worldview can create challenges for those embarking on ancestor work in alternative spirituality communities and creates unnecessary barriers of connection. Over the past few years, ancestor work has been such an important part of my life. As I dove into writing my book Ancestral Whispers: A Guide to Developing Ancestral Veneration Practices, I started noticing how limiting the current conception of the definition of ancestor is when compared with other cultures. Even in older versions of our own cultures, the conception of the family and community was more expansive. In this article, I would like to challenge readers to explore the identity of ancestor not solely through the biological relationship of kin, but as potentially a much broader continuum of relationships that somehow has contributed to you are.

Continuum of Ancestry
If we define ancestry as formed on the grounds of relationships that contribute to who we are, then the possibility of who and what fits into ancestral work suddenly expands dramatically. One of the major issues people have with ancestral connection is only defining it through biological terms, which leads to the inevitable question, "What if I was adopted and don't know my biological family?" When I sat with this question of who my ancestors are, I started to realize that is not only my family, but mentors, the land I come from, deities and spirits, forebears in my professional life, and even fictional characters who I have looked up to. Who we all are is defined by so many variable types of relationships, and in this way all of those individuals who impact us in a way are ancestral to who we are.

In Ancestral Whispers, I list various categories of ancestral types to consider. Blood relatives are those from we are biologically descended. Affinity ancestors are those individuals to whom we are connected through our identity or affiliations. Conceptual ancestors become more difficult to define, but expands the definition of ancestor to include the non-human. I also would challenge us to consider those non-human ancestors in terms of mythology and story. In this way, the continuum of ancestor spans the binaries of human to non-human, blood to non-blood, and "real" to fictional. All aspects of my personality and experience are interrelated with others, many of them not related by blood. As a queer person I am connected through shared experience to a myriad of community members, many of them who fought for the rights I live with now. Our queer ancestors form a collective related to our shared attributes and through that we share a connection. As a therapist, I learned and honed my skills through learning from those who came before me, and when I engage in the professional act I am related to those teachers. As a Welsh person, I share a cultural and social bond with others from that country, and our shared relationship to the country makes it ancestral to us all. These relationships might on the outset not seem ancestral but look closer and the way we relate to the stories of these affinity and conceptual ancestors do contribute to who we are.

I started researching other cultures and noticed that so many of them around the world have such a variety of concepts of what defines family and community. The ties that bind in most cultures are not just the biological, and indeed in many languages it is a widespread honorific to call a neighour "aunty" or "uncle." This highlights for me how much our conceptions of the spiritual and relationships to the spiritual are based on underlying worldview. This realization opened up for me a whole new world of potential.

A Robust Ancestor Veneration Practice
I became aware of Harry Potter when the first book came out, and being 11 myself at the time I really connected with the little wizard. At around that time, I had been living in Canada for two years, having emigrated from the UK myself. I was often (and still often) taunted because I looked a bit like Harry… dark hair, glasses, British accent...and I was obsessed with reading. At the time I didn't realize how important Harry would become in my life (a tragedy considering the later problematic issues that JK Rowling presented). When I think back to him, I see him much the same way as ancestral to who I later became. In my life, and I suspect for all those reading this, there are fictional characters who stand out as being wholly relatable. There is something about these figures that become special to us, inspire us, and eventually contribute to who we are. For me, whether it is Harry Potter, Avatar Aang, Lestat de Lioncourt, Raistlin Majere, or a slew of others, the relationships are much the same.

These relationships bear similarities to the biological ancestors I look up to in whose stories I have been taught and where I find parts of myself. As soon as I began to see this dynamic, ancestor work ceased being entirely about a narrowly defined set of others and it became about myself. I found the connector of my story in ancestral work, and that insight opened this work to include a robust pantheon of ancestral figures. As I looked deeper, I started to form nuanced approaches to each category of ancestral figure. The way I honour a fictional character is very different from how I honour the personification of the land of Wales, or one of my affinity ancestors of my queer identity, to how I respect and honour my grandparents. I also began to understand how much crossover ancestor work can have with spirit work and deity work. I tend to work with folkloric figures like folk-heroes as affinity ancestors, and in this way, this has direct crossover with other forms of spiritual work.

I think one of the major issues westerners have with ancestor work is not really knowing how to work with ancestors. With spirits and gods, we have religious traditions on which to fall back to inform us on what to do, but with our ancestors we often don't know how to start outside of the mourning traditions of the culture. Western culture has an uncomfortable relationship to death, and so we have an uncomfortable relationship with ancestors. Yet, when we bring it down to relationship and we challenge the limited concept of what an ancestor can only be to what it could include, that shift in worldview can bring with it inspiration on what relationship can be.

Exercise to Expand Your Definition of Ancestor
Here is a little exercise to start you out with expanding the concept of ancestor for yourself.

1. Create a list of individuals to whom you relate through the following categories, keeping in mind that these are individuals who you see as having contributed to your being:
   • Blood relatives
   • Friends
   • Figures connected to your work, culture, spirituality, and community
   • Gods
   • Mythological figures
   • Fictional Characters
2. For each of these figures, journal about your relationship to them and what they contributed to your life. Consider some of the following questions:
   • Do you have any vivid memories or feelings attached to each?
   • If you were to honour each of them, how might you do that?
   • What do you think the difference between them all are?
   • In what ways are these figures ancestral to you, in what ways are they not?
3. Take some time away from your list and come back to it with fresh eyes. Reread some of your journaling and ask yourself what this tells you about how you define ancestor, and what that definition impacts how you work with these individuals.