The Cult Of The Ancestor

I’ve recently had a very interesting experience. My mum has had to move into an aged care facility due to crippling arthritis and unfortunately, in order to afford it, we’ve had to sell up and divide the spoils of our collective childhood and take what mum said we had to take. Being a bit of a history nut, I scored all the old photos.

Personally, I didn’t think that cameras had been around that long, but on further investigation, I proved myself wrong. It seems that the first permanent image was created by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1826. The first wet plates were invented in 1850 and dry plates not until 1855, but it was the gelatine dry plate in 1871 that did the trick. No more tricky emulsions, just grab one off the shelf. Marvellous.

Anyway, I digress. The folk who’s piccies I found myself hanging were mostly born between 1840 and 1875, which means I now have a photographical record going all the way back to my great-great grandparents and to the very beginnings of photography itself. I’ve even got one that’s a framed glass plate negative. Brilliant! My kids share a sense of history, if not an active interest in it and were seriously impressed when I told them that “those two on the end there are some of your great-great-great grandparents - paternal.” Wide eyes indeed…:)

Anyway, as I began to hang the lads and lasses on my beautiful wall, I noticed a couple of things. Firstly, great-great ma-ma (paternal), Elizabeth Kay, was an absolute stunner! Secondly, I began to feel some sort of affinity with these people and that was a bit strange to me. I’d seen these guys on the wall every time I’d visited mum over the years and it had never happened before. I’d felt an affinity with certain bits of history before, but not the actual people themselves. Strange…

By the time I’d finished, I had an amazing sense of pride. Not in the job I’d done hanging them (that was crap and needs to be revisited), but simply in the fact that they were there, presiding over my entry way. I almost felt that these guys should somehow be revered. The idea of putting them high on the wall where they can peer down with their stern authority on those passing beneath seemed, all of a sudden, to be the right one. All this made me wonder a little, as you can probably imagine. So, for what it’s worth, here’s my little theory on why.

My ancestry is entirely British. No, I don’t mean just English. My father’s history is entirely Scottish (Pictish if you want to be pedantic), whilst my mothers is a mixture of Celtic, Anglo Saxon and Gaelic. That means that somewhere in the deep distant past in my family, there is a very rich history of pagan belief.

One thing among many that all the pagan religions of the isles had in common, was “The Cult Of The Ancestor”, or Ancestor Worship. Another thing they all have in common is that they are unimaginably old. We’ll never know exactly how old places like the various henges we find about the place are, or how far back the religions go, all the records were destroyed or lost when Christianity came, but that’s a different story. It’s presumed however, that the cult of the ancestor was in practice thousands of years prior to the advent of Christianity, which at a mere 2000 years is just an upstart by comparison. My theory revolves around the age of the older pagan religions however, and the length of time that they were practiced.

Could it be that the want to revere, or at least afford my antecedents a respected place in my house may be a genetic thing? How long does that take and was ancestor worship practiced long enough for it to happen? I don’t know, but if you read my blog regularly you’d have recently read about a genetically programmed belief in supernatural beings, so why not?

Well, probably because they are my great (+) grandparents and it’s just that I have an exaggerated sense of history where these guys are concerned, simply because of the various legacies they’ve left me.

I caught my son gazing at them earlier too. All of a sudden it seems, they’re not just photos anymore. He had to know who fit in where and who begat whom and he kept me at it until he’d memorised them all, all the way down to himself. Now, if only we can get him to apply that sort of dedication to his school work...:)