• 22 Dec, 2025 *

I started this piece almost a month ago and I keep writing and re-writing it as I try to figure out what I’m trying to say. There’s been a lot of staring into the middle distance. I’m not sure if I’ve successfully transferred the jumble in my head into words, but here it is. For context, I have been a practicing witch for about six years.

I recently wrapped up Althaea Sebastiani’s A Witch’s Guide to Ancestor Work course, which I have been working through for the last two months. This is my second time working through the course and it has me reflecting on the way ancestor veneration has become a cornerstone of my spiritual practice.

Now, if you go looking for an opinion on the Internet, you’re going to find more Discourse than you know what to do with and the online witchcraft scene is no different. Ancestor work felt like the first concrete place I found to start beyond the shifting sands of "beginner witchcraft" resources. It appealed to me as a way to find connection with some form of family while the relationships with my living relatives were (and continue to be) fraught and difficult.

The shrine I maintain with offerings of water, wine, and food that I’ve made provides a seat for my ancestors in my home. However, it’s not the only place where I sense their presence. I often feel them in the kitchen while I cook dinner or knead bread. Sometimes, when I’m out with friends, I feel them smiling over my shoulder. When I was in the darkest part of my grief at the death of my grandmother, I felt my grandfather’s steady hand on my shoulder and received reassurance that he was there for me while her ancestors were caring for her.

I’m trying to get better at welcoming the Ancestors into those moments of casual connection. If I peeled potatoes while talking to my grandmother while she was alive, there’s no reason why I can’t tell her about my day as I knead bread now that she’s on the other side.

In a way that feels less like chance and more like an ancestor’s influence, I’ve noticed that recipes have sometimes found their way to me in unexpected ways. A few years ago, my sister asked me for the family lebkuchen recipe and offered to send me the family Boilo recipe in exchange. Both of these recipes are from my mom’s side of the family–my grandfather being born in Germany and immigrating to the US as a small child, my grandmother being raised by Lithuanian parents in a largely Lithuanian immigrant community in the Pennsylvania Coal Region. These are recipes I now make every year in the winter. I make apple sauce the way my paternal grandmother taught me. Her cream puff recipe is safely tucked away in my recipe book until I have a stove that’s reliable enough to make the pastry (I tried it once in my current kitchen, and I’m never attempting choux pastry on this stove again).

Whenever I make one of these recipes, I feel my hands joining the hands that came before me and the ones that will come after me as we cut Macintosh apples and roll out honey-sticky cookie dough. Maybe that’s what this Work is: joining hands with past, present, and future to nurture each other. Over a meal at the kitchen table. Dancing at a bar during pride month. With a candle and a glass of water in quiet moments.

#ancestor-work #witchcraft