Who are the Living? Who are the Dead?

(A Year of Living with the Dead, Day 3)

[the extraordinary art of Tino Rodriquez]

Often when people begin making their first ancestor altars they wonder about putting photos up of their departed loved ones that include images of those not yet dead. The unvoiced superstition is that in situating someone in an ancestral location who is still alive we are hastening their passge to the other side. Are we?

I don’t think so and I would trust your own intuitions about what feels right. The dead don’t play “gotcha” and they don’t want to hurt us (none of them, every, really, more on this as we traverse the year together) and it’s really hard to make mistakes when working with them. They want us to feel empowered and connected to our hearts. So…what feels right TO YOU? What do YOU want to do? They are just so happy that you are making any place at all for them to gather.

Nevertheless I do not put the living on my ancestor altar. Not because I am frightened of what might happen if I did but because the ritual of putting the photo of someone on that altar is very powerful indeed and I don’t want to lose that moment when someone goes from the land of the living to the land of the dead. It is a way for me of acknowledging our changing relationship and situating them in a new dynamic with me. The choice of photo matters, the situating it next to other photos, the special fram—all of these moments give me intimacy with the soul that has passed and will inform our work together.

But there is also a photo of “me” on my ancestor altar. You could come over to my house and look at all of the old daguerrotypes and pictures of family members and friends and not recognize it. Because it is a photo of someone who died nine months before I was born and with whom I feel certain echos and resonances. This photo reminds me that we are all on each other’s ancestor altars but not always in the incarnations we remember.

One woman I know put a small mirror on her ancestor altar to remind her that she, too, dwells in the land of the dead. When we call on the dead, someone living often answers our prayer. Because we are all the dead, we are all the living, we are all coning and going and returning to this life again and again and again.

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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.

A Year of Living with the Dead is an ongoing Substack series. Perdita also has a paid substack that includes excerpts from the book she is currently working on and a monthly Zoom discussion on our adventures with the other side.