Make Space for the Dead in Your Life
(A Year of Living with the Dead: Day 2)
[the wall of the ancestors in Perdita’s dining room]
As I have written in Take Back the Magic, my mother was not religious or even spiritual. Still towards the end of her life she began positioning photos of her departed loved ones on the book case across from her bed. There were photos of her mother and father, old grandmothers in uncomfortable corsets, friends who had left too soon, and many beloved pets.
My own formal practice of collaborating with the dead began the night I realized she was always talking to them…and that they were listening and really there.
Many of us have ancestor altars…that we don’t know are ancestor altars. The desire to make space for the dead in our lives is so primal, so old, so urgent, that we do it even if we don’t know what we are doing. Of course, once it becomes conscious…we can start having a lot of fun with it and that’s what I’ll be writing about for the whole next week.
My own altar (see photo above) began as a shelf with a few photos. Then I bought the hutch but it kept growing. I ordered shelves, I got another book case, I added a corner table, I hung photos….and this is just the ancestor altar in my dining room! I also have a wall of the ancestral mothers guiding my next book!
Do you have a place for the dead to gather in your home? What does it look like? How do you tend it? Where is it? What questions do you have about Ancestor Altars? I’ll be writing about how to Summon the Dead over the whole next month….and this is the beginning.
Perdita Finn is the author of Take Back the Magic: Conversations with the Unseen World and the forthcoming Mothers of Magic: Recovering the Love at the Heart of the World. She teaches popular workshops on collaborating with the dead. With her husband Clark Strand she is the founder of the feral fellowship The Way of the Rose and the book by the same name.
Dear Perdita,
Some suggestions would be appreciated about starting to create an ancestors altar. I just have 2 pictures, but only names for the rest of ancestors... and of some of them I don't even have the name.
Thank you for this series of A Year of Living With the Dead. It would be wonderful if some more days would be added when possible 🌼
Sometimes I think that my whole apartment is an ancestor altar! They are everywhere. Their tools, their pictures, the glass bottles my grandmother used to feed Daddy as a baby, his camera that he carried always everywhere and took so many pictures of us camping and at cookouts (me always putting food in my mouth -when I berated him about that he just laughed), my mother’s favorite ceramic birds, the one picture (in a rustic frame of a bird) that was the one thing (so the family story goes) that my great, great grandmother was allowed to bring to this country from Ireland as a child . . . “Every picture has a story” is so true in my small space. I had to winnow down when I moved here, so everything here is, well, sacred to me. (The rest is in a storage unit that I hope is emptied before I die.)