Ancestral Materials and Past Lives
Excerpted from "Awakening the Below" by Oholomo, available now from Aeon Press!
As we deepen into the Below, we continue to peel back successive layers of the onion. Thus far, the aspects we have discussed have mostly pertained to one’s individual life — one’s own lexicon of imaginal symbols, energies, and spirits; one’s own body and sexual energies; one’s own personal traumas, hangups, and issues. Sooner or later, however, the trajectory descends down beyond the individual biographical material, into the deep past. Here, we are getting down into levels that are structural, the scaffolding that lies underneath our own personal stories.
Once again, this material can come forth either in the form of impersonal energies and forces, or as discrete entities. For example, ancestral material is often experienced as a thicket of intergenerational trauma, racial trauma, or issues related to culture and heritage that need to be untangled. Alternatively, it can be experienced as visitation from the spirits or ghosts of specific ancestors. In the case of past life material, the journeyer may experience feelings, memories, emotions, or other phenomena that seem to come from previous incarnations; or, they may be visited by a previous self, or experience becoming that previous self for a time, seeing through those eyes.
For me, a major part of my experience of the Below was what I would call ancestral trauma. My late grandfather had a difficult upbringing in Colombia, and we were never allowed to speak to him about his family or background. But, late in life he revealed to a family member that he was half indigenous. That’s about all I knew about that side of my family heritage, and to be honest, I hadn’t thought about it in much detail or looked into any information about indigenous Colombian people.
But, when I had that Kundalini event where the serpentine body deva revealed herself, one of the things I did to try to understand what was happening to me was to research serpent goddesses. Naturally, I started with Asian goddesses in order to see if I could find an image that matched the description of the one I was experiencing in my visions. I had a clear image in my mind’s eye of what I was looking for. I found a few images online of Kundalini, Nagkanyas, and other Asian serpent spirits, and Echidna from Greek mythology, but nothing was fitting perfectly.
Then, one day, I had a visionary experience where again I saw this goddess, but also some other imaginal symbols — a jaguar, an Indigenous person’s face, a waterfall in a jungle. This made me think to look for a serpent goddess associated with indigenous South American cultures. A fraction of a second after typing a few Spanish keywords into Google, I found myself breathlessly staring at the exact image I had been seeing in my mind, a statue called “Bachué, diosa generatriz de los chibchas” (i.e., “Bachué, Mother Goddess of the Chibchas”) sculpted by the Colombian artist Rómulo Rozo in 1925 (see Fig. 3).
FIG. 3. Bachué, diosa generatriz de los chibchas, Rómulo Rozo, 1925.
(Source: Wikimedia.)
This image of Bachué would become the single most powerful symbol in my journey through the Below, the organizing image of my entire imaginal world, and my principal spiritual teacher. I already mentioned that this goddess is none other than my body deva. What’s significant to emphasize here in this section about ancestors is that, although you might expect that such a tremendously impactful image would have arisen from one of the Asian religions I had spent such a huge amount of my life studying and practicing, it arose out of my ancestral heritage, even though I knew next to nothing about that culture.
Once I knew that this image was coming from my Indigenous roots, this part of my heritage opened up for me a great deal. In the succeeding months, I began to experience more and more imaginal phenomena related to South America. Over those same months, through a series of really astonishing synchronicities, I also came into possession of photos, ID cards, and other memorabilia from my Colombian grandfather’s parents and grandparents — people whose very existence was never allowed to be mentioned in my family. My heritage was coming alive, and was intervening as an autonomous force into my life!
However, as my indigenous ancestry came more into focus, the portion of my DNA that comes from European settlers in South America did as well. Catholic imagery became much more pronounced in my imaginal world, introduced both by my maternal and paternal side. Now, I found myself imaginally reckoning with what felt to be a conflict between two different sides of my own genetic code. I experienced visions of the genocide of one side of my ancestry perpetrated by the warfare and violence of the other. The details of how those visions played out and how they came into resolution are a story for another time. For now, I just want to reiterate yet again how important it is to engage with the imaginal symbols or images. The more interest you take in them, the more you allow them to unfold and reveal deeper and deeper resonances.
Another type of experience that I want to draw out here is how individual ancestors can allow you to see through their eyes or inhabit their bodies in a kind of time-bending experience. I’ll turn it over to Jack again for a story about this kind of interaction with one of his ancestors:
I was in Marseilles traveling with my partner at the time and we went on a small boat to go to one of the islands off the coast. It’s the first time since I’d started to awaken that I was on the Mediterranean Sea. My grandfather, my mother’s father, was in the British Navy, a commander of a destroyer during the Second World War, and his ship was sunk by German U boats in the Mediterranean, and he spent three years as a prisoner of war.
And, when I was on the sea, I suddenly started getting these images flashing into my mind from the bridge of a warship. It was like I was looking through my grandfather’s eyes, and feeling what he was feeling.
And through his eyes I saw this little speck on the horizon on the sea. And then I saw a flash and I realized he had just seen the guns go off on an enemy warship. And it was his first time that happened and he froze and was so afraid, because he realized this isn’t a simulation anymore; this is real. That’s actual artillery fire from a warship firing at my ship, and I’m responsible for the lives of all of these men. And I remember the fear, and the shock and disbelief.
But what it’s done is helped me understand him and what he went through and the way that his experiences, the fear that he had, have been a part of my own life. And through connecting with him I’ve been more able to release that fear. It’s good; it’s cathartic for me.
The kind of catharsis Jack is describing can also come through experiencing past lives. In Above-based spirituality, the emphasis is normally on releasing the trauma or karmic burdens of past lives so that the individual soul can become lighter or more spiritually evolved. In the Below version of past life recall, as always, the emphasis is not to transcend or release but to welcome and fully embody the past, so that it can become liberated to express itself in the here and now.
Here’s my friend Kini describing her encounters with one of her past lives, who emerged as a guide in her shamanic journeying and soul-retrieval practice:
The only way I can describe it is that it was like a spontaneous download. I got this full packet of information about this past life of mine as an African shaman who was very stocky, and strong, and kind of low to the ground, and powerful, very grounded. And I got his name, Umkumbe, his history, and even how he died.
This was just spontaneous. I didn’t reach out, I wasn’t looking, but it just came as a download. I knew he was a guide, but I also knew he was me in a past life. There was a sense of support and grounding, in part because he was so solid. He also had white ash on his body, which was like he was shielded or protected in some way.
Umkumbe has been with me ever since. He’s my shamanic guide, and when I go to do work in the underworld, for myself or for clients, he’s there and supports me and whatever work I need to do, and he’ll heal or guide. I’ll go down into the underworld through a hole in a tree at a specific place where I grew up, go down the tree trunk into the earth, and come out in the underworld. And he’s always there with his cloth laid out and implements, and I’ll sit down with him. And he’ll present me with objects or situations that I must navigate in order to learn a lesson.
Whatever way ancestral and past life materials manifest, what is wanted is a full accounting of all the ways that our being has been shaped by deep history. It turns out that the ego, which has always thought of itself as the master of its own destiny, has been wrong all along. As we learn to welcome, communicate with, and remonstrate with ancestors and past lives, we come to see how little of our present lives have ever been under our control. We come to realize how events long past continue to shape our present experiences in ways that have been invisible, unappreciated, or even denied by the ego. We find out that our genetic and karmic inheritances have given us both blessings and burdens, and realize the steps that need to be taken in order to receive the former and rectify the latter.
Working to unearth, appreciate, and fully embody all of these structural influences allows us to walk through life with a confidence and self-composure that is liberating. A sense of completeness that can only come from thoroughly knowing and understanding the makeup of our being. There are no hidden skeletons in the closets, no shameful secrets we hide from ourselves or the world, no historical wrongs or injustices that we aren’t fully owning and inhabiting.
We will also likely experience our work in the Below being deeply beneficial for the whole chain of ancestors and past lives stretching out into the past, as well as for living family members and children yet to be born. While I was working with my ancestral material, for example, I saw visions of an infinite web of relations, stretched out and interconnected with one another like a vast fishing net. And I saw me stitching and mending this net, retying its frayed ends and washing it clean to restore it to its original vibrant colors, revitalizing this network of ancestral support and connection for all my relations across time and space.