How to Work with Ancestors in Witchcraft
Today I wanted to dive into working with ancestors. Who the ancestors are, what their jobs are, what they bring to magic, how to create spells that they can help you with, a lot of the common questions that come up, and what they need in order to stay connected. I find ancestors very helpful to work with. And I work with them year-round. In fact, many cultures do.
Why Work with Ancestors in Witchcraft?
Ancestors have a lot of different magical abilities, but I feel like their main job is to make sure their descendants survive and thrive. They help the descendants do well physically and emotionally. At least they do that if they were good people in life. In the spirit world, ancestors are the ones who best understand what it’s like to deal with the struggles of daily life. So they are often helpful to call in when you are doing spells around finances, housing, health, or any kind of stability. I’ll talk more about crafting a spell later in this article.
Deities can sometimes feel too abstract or distant to work with, especially for day-to-day issues. It’s one of the reasons people work with saints in folk magic traditions. Like ancestors, they understand what it is to be human and face challenges.
Problematic Ancestors
I often get asked, “What if my family was really problematic?” First, you don’t ever have to work with ancestors if you don’t want to. You can skip a particular side of your family or a particular individual; you can skip back a few generations to someone who you feel was a good person. You can go way, way back and find someone through trance or divination, and you can work with many different types of ancestors who are not blood-related to you at all. More on that later.
I do have a caveat on the “good people in life” idea. I have a whole group of ancestors that were not good people because their land was overrun by war for hundreds of years. However, they did what they had to do to feed their families, and if I or my younger family members need serious protection, they are who I’m going to call. But working with ancestors is a personal choice, and if you don't want to, you absolutely don't have to work with them.
What If I Was Adopted?
You can absolutely work with the ancestors of your adopted family if they were good to you and you like them. In some earlier European cultures, fostering was often seen as merging family lines and bringing more strength and support to everyone involved. Adopted or chosen family is still family!
Focusing on the Helpful Ancestors
You can also direct your magic and call only on the whole and healthy ancestors, known and unknown, when you call them into your circle. Or the whole and healthy ancestors of your lineage if you don't know any of them at all. You can also call them in by geographical area. That might look like saying something like, "I call and honor the whole and healthy ancestors from my background, from the land of blank," and then fill in that blank.
Cultural Ancestors
Another type of ancestor is the cultural ancestor. These are ancestors who do the kind of work that we do or are in some ways related to who we are in life. That might look like calling on the witches, the queer ancestors, the trans ancestors, the musicians, the artists, the poets, the activists, any category that relates to who you are in this life and what you do. You can also create a list of people who aren't related to you at all but who have passed over and inspired you, and who worked to bring equity, balance, and beauty into the world.
We Have Many Kinds of Ancestors
Partially burned forest and mountain in Oregon
I also honor the ancestors who weren't Homo sapiens, those primates who left their unique gifts in my body and in my mind. Some types of non-Homo sapiens lived and thrived successfully in one region for far longer than Homo sapiens existed. They are the old ones, and they bring the qualities of endurance to our blood. I also honor those ancestors who were prehuman, like rocks, trees, mountains, and animals. They are literally what make up our bodies, in addition to being related to us through DNA. And I think of the stars as our oldest ancestors. The physical material of our bodies is stardust.
Ancestors and Spellwork
Calling the ancestors into your magic can be simple or very elaborate. The easiest way to do that is to just invite the whole and healthy ancestors in when you first start your ritual or your piece of magic. I always add the caveat of including a phrase like "those ancestors or spirits who have my best interests at heart." Then I just ask them to support me in the work that I do, in the spell or the ritual that I'm about to perform. And usually, I light a candle or make an offering.
Sometimes I try to use actual folkloric abundance spells with imagery and symbols that would have been important to my ancestors. For example, it’s not uncommon for older “abundance spells” to focus on things like a good harvest or health for livestock. If you can find those kinds of spells, use them and add a line stating that what you are hoping for is similar to what they hoped for.
In fact, a very old pattern in spells is the custom of saying something like: just as (insert name of hero, Deity, or saint) achieved (the task), so may it be for me. A specific abundance spell might look like finding an old prayer or charm for a successful harvest and saying something like, “Just as my ancestors, known and unknown, brought home the abundant grain of the fields for food to abundantly feed them, may I bring home the wealth to do so as well.” There are many old spells and prayers out there around harvesting abundance. You might have to de-Christianize them, though.
Specific Ancestors for Specific Spells
You can call on ancestors from a certain period in time, like a migratory period when your ancestors were moving from one area to another. That might be when my ancestors moved out of Africa, or when humans started moving onto the northern continents as the Ice Age ended. They might be really helpful if you are moving or looking for better opportunities.
You can call on the pre-Christian ancestors to support you in understanding magic and getting better at it. That could look like you running across helpful info seemingly coincidentally. You can ask them to give you dreams or intuitive visions about magic that has been forgotten. I think it’s easiest to get info about magical holidays that we celebrate that our ancestors would also have celebrated.
If you're trying to succeed in a certain endeavor, you can call on ancestors who may have done that kind of work. For example, if you're a musician, you can call on the whole and healthy ancestors, known and unknown, who were musicians.
In some traditions, the oldest known ancestor is considered a God, or maybe all the people of that culture see themselves as descended from a specific God. Even in modern times, I have seen lineage charts of Nordic and Germanic people that elaborately trace their ancestors back to Thor or Odin or some other Deity.
Offerings for Ancestors
I like to keep things reciprocal. So what do the ancestors need from us? First of all, they just like to be remembered. That can look like creating an altar to them with some pictures, if you have any, or maybe pictures or maps of the land they came from. I like to decorate old maps with dried leaves and flower petals and sometimes slips of paper with any known last names from that region.
I also like to give them offerings: water, homemade cordials created in magical space, and flowers. You can also find their names, or at least their surnames, research them, make a list of them, and read them out, especially at Samhain.
I have a few incense blends that I make that I burn when I honor my ancestors. One that I really like contains cinnamon for sweetness, mugwort for divination, rosemary for remembrance and protection, and marjoram for honoring the ancestors and the dead. Again, you really don't have to honor those who were problematic in any way if you don't want to.
Violet flower cordial as an offering.
Finding Your Ancestors
It's totally possible to honor your ancestors without knowing their names, but a little bit of research might be helpful. If you're calling on ancestors of a culture, like queer ancestors, you can do a quick online search to find the names of some who have passed over. Just call in the forgotten whole and healthy ancestors.
If you're calling on blood ancestors or foster ancestors but you don't know specific names, you can try Googling the last names that you do know and seeing what areas those last names come from. Then do a little research about those areas, finding out how people lived, a little bit about their lives, and what kind of foods they ate. If you're lucky, you might even find some folk magic from that region.
You can do traditional research online with paper records. This can be really difficult because often genealogy is heavily geared toward white European backgrounds, although that's slowly starting to change, but it's not there yet. You never know what you're going to find, good or bad, so be prepared. As the ancient Greek poet Sappho once said, "If you're squeamish, don't prod the beach rubble."
If you're more advanced and have the skills, you can take yourself on a daydream visualization or an actual trance journey and see yourself moving up the path of your DNA, back through time, and stopping every once in a while just to see what ancestors might present themselves and who is there. Or maybe that’s something you do with witch friends.
Blessings on your Path
Colette Gardiner
© Copyright ~ Colette Gardiner Golden Web LLC 2026