The Ancestral Veneration of Authors

Ambience of the Uncanny #7

Reminders:

Thresholds, my signature decolonial divination course, is open for enrollment and begins Sept. 11. Enroll here

My September consultations are open for scheduling. Get your cards &/ or chart red here

---

Welcome dear reader,

I write you as Mercury has just stationed direct in Leo. Release your bated breathe. Begin again. Let your tongue loll out.

La Caminante

In the local chart of the moment, Mercury moves forward in the house of philosophy and publishing, the accuracy of prophetic insight, dreams and dharmic direction. In my own natal chart, the fourth and fifth houses are being revisioned. Foundations must be fortified, for they are forever.

The angle under the earth is the dwelling place of the dead. Ancestors are our anchor. Upon your altars, set out fresh offerings for them, for the dead and dying. Authors are ancestors too, of course.

Anyone who understands authors as ancestors who nourish the soil in which our writing bears fruit would also write against a white notion that spirituality and liberation are of a novel intersection.

I have been dismayed though unsurprised to see white noise drown out subaltern voices and histories of writers who draw from indigenous and esoteric traditions to enact an epistemological (knowing) and ontological (being) decolonization employed in service of revolutionary social change.

All white writers have to do to get platformed and published is play around with the ideas of spirituality and liberation, making it evident their craft is appropriating as it is ignorant. I wonder why I am still so viscerally struck by how spiritually hollow Gringolandia is. Maybe it’s because of the confidences exchanged with other femme authors of color that embolden me to be so blunt, because the cacausity I’ve been hearing about from my fellow authors provokes the most ancient disdain.

I take this to mean I must feed my soul. Another glass, another plate of bread put forth before the ancestors. My divination this day tells me Spirit is reciprocating everything I feel. And so I exhale and browse my bookcases for something that will excite, incite gratitude, awe, deference.

My red writing is ever an ancestral veneration practice. Elder Cherríe Moraga told me that we (w)rite to remember. To circle backward in memory we progress forward in imagination and in living practice. The spirit of our corporeality is as a codex, inscribing an evolving political and spiritual awareness and activism.

Mercury’s retrograde reminds me that memory can alter consciousness. It has healing power. Memory implores a living critical consciência about our land-based history. Evidently this history is undocumented, undervalued or ignored by mainstream white-washed queer, feminist, ‘spiritual’ communities. But a red consciousness can interrupt institutionalized cultural genocide predicated upon self-loathing.

La Jornada

“We had been here before. A leaf, a trout, a quail. Woman. Indígena. We had been here before. These visions, primordial ways of knowing, are all ours since forever: those sudden moments of consciousness that remind us that our time is short here on this planet and that our precious ‘I’ can so easily dissolve into the ancient original world around us—the redwood forest, the darkening sky, the silencing of birds for the night.” - Xeríe Moraga¹

If memory is an intimate grief reaching toward the dead, then I think about the psychopomp moving from the house where our dead are buried to the house where life succeeds, that is in the birth of children, as the cyclical motion of memory. Over and over we return to the departed’s remnant sites of living to conjure as much as we can of the love we’ve lost. And like the birth of a new-born baby, may it be celebratory.

Memory is a home. Scribes tell our stories from that mouth in the mountain. And then I question, as does Xeríe Moraga, “How do you teach a child the word genocide and still give him reason to love beyond his front door?”

But further, how does a child survive genocide? How do they survive a school shooting or being kept in a cage cut across a border from their parents? How we will ever be able to answer them or deserve their mercy while we ignore their cries?

Writers write so their children will inherit their memory and become rigorous abolitionists championing a counter-culture of courage. But the children must live to succeed us.

So these young souls will rest in sanctuary, safe with our sorrowing Mother till they are to rise again I light candle after candle on my altar. I pray fervently in the vast black silence that screams a disquiet deep inside of me.

“The Black Madonna calls us to Grieve. The Black Madonna is the sorrowful mother, the mother who weeps tears for the suffering in the universe, the suffering in the world, the brokenness of our very vulnerable hearts. In the Christian tradition she holds the dying Christ in her lap but this Christ represents all beings—it is the cosmic Christ and not just the historical Jesus that she is embracing, for all beings suffer and the Black Madonna, the Great Mother, know this and emphathizes with us in our pain.” - Dr. Matthew Fox

I wonder if I’ll ever have children. Maybe I’ll be lucky enough to adopt one day. Maybe the love I could give to a child would resurrect my broken heart.

As an author, I’d consider myself the child of many, many queer writers of color, but without the ancestral motherhood of Gloria Anzaldúa, my own book baby, Red Tarot, could never have been conceived.

I believe that the beautiful reception I’ve had from readers is because, at least in my humble estimation, my work extends Anzaldúa’s theories of critical spiritualities. While she is most lauded for The Bridge Called My Back, it was Luz En Lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality that was absolutely vital to my own trajectory. I can’t believe that I would be able to publish a book of my own conocimiento, autohistoria-theoria, exploring aesthetics, metaphysics, decolonization, and ethics not even a full 10 years after Light In the Dark.

Writers like her made realize that real words move inside the reader’s bodies to transform them from within. This impact is achieved with intent. I was taught to attend to cadence, musicality, nuanced meaning and metaphoric complexity. I believe this makes a manuscript lush. My divinatory writing aspires to sustain the soul of my readers, as it urges them to respond with the technologies of a radical activism. This amalgam is the spiritual activism we have inherited from our ancestors, our elder authors. Anzaldúa says that:

“Conocimiento comes from opening all your senses, consciously inhabiting your body and decoding its symptoms—that persistent itch in your scalp, not caused by lice or dry skin, may be a thought trying to snare your attention. Attention is multileveled and includes your surroundings, bodily sensations and responses, intuitive takes, emotional reactions to other people and theirs to you, and, most important, the images your imagination creates—images connecting all tiers of information and their data. Breaking out of your mental and emotional prison and deepening the range of perception enables you to link inner reflection and vision—the mental, emotional, instinctive, imaginal, spiritual, and subtle bodily awareness—with social, political action and lived experiences to generate subversive knowledges. These conocimientos challenge official and conventional ways of looking at the world, ways set up by those who benefit from such conventions.”²

Writing is a form of spiritual inquiry whereby we refuse to devalue spirituality as a form of knowledge. As I sit in meditation, I sit to write. As intuitively as I sat in silence as a child, I know that in that stillness we can hear how God talks back.

I invite you to sit me with before your altar, before your ancestors, before the authors who wrote you (us) into being:

The Authors Altar

1. Make sure your altar is clean. Any space can be repurposed for ceremonial, devotional sitting. It can be as intricate or simple as your circumstances and your preferences allow. What matter most is intention.

   1. Gather offerings for the ancestors. Candle(s), mirrors, portraits, a pencil, a glass of water, a pack of cigarettes, citrus fruits, flowers, a dictionary, etc. To invoke the guidance of a particular author I recommend making space for one of their books to be left and read on the altar.

   2. To vivify, cleanse and activate your altar and offerings prepare a white fire limpia. For this you will need: 2 cups of Epsom salt, a pot that’s only used for white fires, a splash of rubbing alcohol, wooden stick matches, and whatever dry plant calls to you. Gently place the sacred alter items over the orange flames of the fire, while saying a prayer. You can carefully pull some of the orange flames over your head or just be present for this rite.

2. Write a petition / prayer to your ancestor on parchment paper using the no. 2 pencil. Think about conocimiento, about creative flourishing, about the medicine your words are meant to make. Place the unlit candle on top of this petition / prayer. If you have a picture of your author-ancestor place this in front of the candle.

3. Light incense. These are further offerings to feed the altar and commune with the spirits above.

4. Light the candle with 3 matches (one for past, present & future). Let the candle burn continuously (my recommendation) or if you are fire-wary, light it as you sit at your altar daily. Never blow out the candle, use a snuffer, pinch out the flame or use a fan to wipe the flame free.

5. While the candle burns and the smoke rises, recite your prayer, your invocation aloud. Give space for silence, attend the flame. Let your imaginal eye burn bright.

6. Perform bibliomancy with your ancestor-author’s chosen work. Breathe deeply, place yourself in a receptive state, turn to a page, a paragraph, a sentence at random. This is how your ancestor is answering you. Read slowly to listen.

7. Write back in the margins. It’s a method of muerte. It’s a muerteando micropractice. It becomes a chronicle of speculation. Marks in the margins are how we make conversation with the dead. As Carlos Ulises Decena writes of what a young Babala who told him in Havana, los muertos son ideas.

Tell me dear reader, whose writing you read when you’re most in need. And also know that ancestral veneration makes no apology for the troubles these ancestors represent. It does not claim they were perfect or without flaw or shortcoming, but it accounts the valuable contributions that enabled our own, that requires our critique and critical engagement.

Write it all. Read what stirs your soul. Mobilize with all the courageous fervor your faith fortifies.

x,

Christopher

p.s. If you would like to revitalize your ritual life, Thresholds, is a class where we will establish, invigorate and encourage ritual space, and together will transgress and commune with the ambient dead, learning what it means to transform in community.  I am grateful for my students feedback, for by it I am able to measure the efficacy of this work. Thank you Madalena for this testimony:

“I’m so grateful to Chris for holding this space every week, & for everyone who made up our weekly circle. This was the first time I was able to find a safe, discursive, and expansive community in this way. I found this course life-changing. It is a threshold in recovering lost parts of your soul. I feel like I am emerging out of this course the Fool, fresh with purpose, wonder, & faith. The cards emerge as keys for reading & integrating personal & collective wounds, patterns, & shifts. They create a threshold for illuminating invisible structures, imaging new possibilities, & creating a collective truth towards the Wheel’s turning. My tarot wisdom broadened not only in my understanding of the cards, but in my ability to apply them beyond myself, & to understand the two are not separable. Our collective readings created the space for the recovery of parts of myself I was struggling to find on my own. Moreover, finding space in a community was extremely healing for me personally. As someone who struggles with visibility, the decision to undertake this course was a huge challenge, & it taught me the gift in choosing to be seen, & choosing to be in community.”

1. Cherríe L. Moraga, A Xicana Codex of Changing Consciousness, Writings, 2000-2010, Duke University Press, 2011, 80.

2. Gloria Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark = Luz En Lo Oscuro : Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality. Edited by AnaLouise Keating. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. 2015, 120.