Ancestry Work Isn't About Purity

Let's talk about something that comes up constantly in witchcraft spaces online, usually in the form of an argument: who gets to practice what, and who gets to decide.

I want to approach this differently. Not as a debate but as an actual exploration, because the anthropology here is genuinely fascinating, and it reframes the whole conversation (some people get out of hand with gatekeeping).

What ancestry work actually is

Ancestor veneration isn't a witchcraft thing. It isn't a Wicca thing, a WitchTok thing, or even a specific cultural thing. It's a human thing.

We have archaeological evidence of ancestor skull veneration from Jericho dating to around 7,000 BCE. Skulls were plastered to recreate the faces of the dead and kept in dedicated rooms. In China, collective ancestor rituals were documented as early as 4,500 BCE and became central to the Shang dynasty state religion by 1,600 BCE. Indigenous communities across every continent developed their own forms. West African traditions built elaborate, living relationships with ancestral spirits. Rome kept Lararium shrines in family homes.

These traditions didn't copy each other. They emerged from the same human impulse, the understanding that the people who came before us are still somehow present, still part of us, still worth speaking to.

That's your starting point for ancestry work. Not a tradition you borrow. A human practice you step into.

Understanding a culture is not the same as claiming you live in it

This is really important to tease apart, because online conversations collapse distinctions that actually matter.

Cultural appropriation happens in a specific context: a currently existing cultural group that is marginalized, has experienced historical erasure of their identity through systemic power, and someone is misinforming or misusing that cultural identity and perpetuating that erasure. That's a real thing. It causes real harm. No, venerating Greek deities while misunderstanding their mythos is NOT cultural appropriation, Becky, and you need to sit down. 

Cultural appreciation is respectfully learning and engaging with traditions and practices of a culture you've been invited into. Watching a dance, eating the food, and supporting the trades within the culture. Wearing turquoise is NOT cultural appropriation. 

Ancestry work is something else entirely. It's learning your connection to your ancient cultures while understanding that your context is fundamentally different from your ancestors'. This is especially important to tease out in America, where a lot of us have roots in living cultures we were removed from through "Americanization." Getting in touch with your ancestry and living that culture are two very different things, and that line matters, particularly for Indigenous Americans. Having a great great-grandparent with a tribal association does NOT make you a First Nations, indigenous person. It means you have indigenous ancestry, it means you can be a reconnecting indigenous person, but you do not get to claim it as your cultural identity- you weren’t raised in the culture!

Your bloodline doesn't make you an authority or a member. It makes you connected. That connection is real and worth honoring, just with honesty about what it is and what it isn't.

Nobody gets to tell you what to believe or how to build your spiritual practice. That's between you and whatever you're in a relationship with. What we can ask of each other is to be honest about where things come from, who they belong to in a living cultural sense, and what it means to engage with them.

Currently, living cultural practices that communities have explicitly said are closed deserve to be respected as closed. Full stop. That's not purity politics. That's just listening to people when they speak.

But that's a specific thing. It's not a blanket rule that says all spiritual knowledge is owned, static, and off-limits.

THEN THERE IS ANCIET CIVILIATIONS

This is where it gets really interesting and where a lot of people get confused, because the rules genuinely are different.

There's a term for practicing the religion of a civilization that no longer exists: Reconstructionism. People who practice ancient Greek polytheism today are called Hellenists. Ancient Egyptian practice is called Kemetism. Norse practice is called Ásatrú. These are legitimate modern religious and spiritual movements built around reviving practices from civilizations whose religious traditions are no longer living in a continuous cultural community.

The reason this is different from appropriation is pretty straightforward. There is no living community being harmed. Nobody's grandmother is a practicing ancient Egyptian priestess. The culture isn't being erased because it already transformed into something else centuries ago. What we have now are historical records, archaeology, texts, and the modern descendants of those geographic regions that have their own completely separate contemporary identities and religions.

Does it get complicated? Yeah, sometimes. Some Greek and Egyptian descendants do have feelings about this, and those perspectives are worth knowing exist. And there are real scholarly conversations about whether Reconstructionism sometimes oversimplifies or romanticizes ancient practices. But that's a different conversation from cultural harm.

Practicing Kemetism isn't the same as appropriating from a living Egyptian community. Drawing on Greek mythology in your practice isn't the same as claiming to be Greek. Understanding that distinction matters.

Humans have always shared culture and beliefs

Here's what history actually shows us.

Knowledge has moved with people since the first trade routes opened. The evil eye is a perfect example of documented cultural transmission. Evidence of the belief appears in Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets from around 3,000 BCE, and by 1,500 BCE glass eye bead amulets were traveling with Phoenicians, Persians, Greeks and Romans through Mediterranean trade. Same concept, adapted by every culture that touched it, belonging fully to all of them.

Hoodoo, Brujeria, Curanderismo. These are all fusion traditions that developed when different cultural streams collided under brutal circumstances. African, Native American, and European folk practices woven together by people surviving the unsurvivable, building something new that honored all of what came before it. These aren't examples of theft. They're examples of resilience and synthesis.

Tarot is a fascinating case that cuts against its own mythology. Scholars have confirmed it originated as a card game for Italian nobility around 1440. Its later connections to Kabbalah, Egyptian mystery schools, and esoteric traditions were added by occultists over the following centuries, people drawing connections across knowledge systems, layering meaning onto something that traveled. That process of layering and synthesis isn't corruption. It's how living traditions actually work.

Calling all of that appropriation flattens human cultural evolution. 

And then there's something even stranger-parallel development

Anthropologists have documented cultures developing nearly identical spiritual practices with zero known contact between them.

Egg cleansing as spiritual purification appears in Mesoamerican limpia traditions, in Scottish folk practice, and across the Mediterranean independently. Nobody copied anybody. Humans in completely different parts of the world looked at an egg and understood it the same way.

Ancestor shrines. Sacred fire. Dream interpretation as divination. Offerings of food and drink to the dead. These appear across cultures that had no documented contact with each other.

This is magick in its truest form to me. When humans across cultures and continents arrive at the same practice independently, something revealed itself to our human ancestors. Something was accessible to all of us regardless of where we were born. That doesn't belong to any one tradition. It belongs to being human.

So, where does that leave ancestry work?

It leaves it as something worth doing thoughtfully. Learn where your practices come from. Understand what you're engaging with and why. Respect what living communities have said about their closed traditions. Don't claim identities that aren't yours.

And then practice. Explore. Ask the questions. Follow the thread of your own lineage, even if colonization, migration, or assimilation made that thread hard to find. It's still there.

That's what we're here to do.

Come explore this with us. The Coven is a space for exactly these conversations.