Sevenfold Silence

It's been a long-standing goal of mine to integrate my spiritual practice into something genuinely coherent; it's got ceremonial magick, pagan (with a strong heathen streak), and otherkin elements, but I tend to keep them strongly compartmentalized and don't mix them. I'm still in favor of not mixing my ceremonial magick with my paganism, though otherkin, I think, is the closest I come to a bridge between the two. I claim a fey current, which affects how I work my magick, and how I deal with my gods.

I'm receiving a strong push from my gods right now to start doing ancestral work. I did a little genealogy this summer--all of the explicitly human kind, natch. I've got a pretty big/impressive family tree going on right now, and I'm pleased--although this does approximately fuck-all for my otherkin work. What elucidates my human ancestry, in fact, seems to muddy my fey current. My identification with elves/the fae/the sidhe/whatever I am, primarily takes the form of an energetic, symbolic, or archetypal alignment. I've received some indication (from a medium, in trance) that there might be something genetic/in the blood/from the family in there, but I don't hold that to be unconditionally true.

But somehow assembling all of these names, fleshing out this tree, learning locations and dates, all of this seems to weaken (temporarily) my connection to that fey current. I'm not sure what it is--skeptics, I think, could say that I'm looking back and seeing that there's no big mark on my family tree that says GREAT-GRANDMOTHER WAS SEELIE SIDHE but that's not really true; my connection is non-literal, and if there's any genetic predilection to this non-literal connection of course it wouldn't show up on a family tree. (Maybe in family stories, though.) IF anything it piques the curiosity: it makes me want to go further and further back (as though I'd find the connection back there!)

In the process of doing this work I've found myself called to make an ancestral altar, which I've done. One of the most interesting things about having done this and sat with it is that it serves as a mirror for the fey current and reflects it back to me. It's much calmer and more dignified of a current than I'd given it credit for. I'll have to sit with it more, evaluate it, consider it. This should balance out the mitigating effect, I think, that more everyday genealogy has.