The Ancestral Spirit
– 7 min read
By Naba Iritah Shenmira
It is clearly a sad reality that we face today. So many existential changes are imposed on the human race by our planet; yet religious ideologues and political scientists continue to mislead individuals by intensifying the hopes these individuals have placed in their leaders' ability to control the universe and its principles. At the same time that the followers of Christianity and Islam continue to kill each other in the name of the God of Abraham, the brave sons and daughters of the ancient land of Africa are expected, as always, to silently suffer the cruel atrocities and vandalism of the West. All of this while modern man is forced to believe the fairy tales of religions and of the destructive utopias of these masters of the world. What hypocrisy and barbarism around the world! The sacredness of the world tends to disappear in favour of the profane. Humanity has clearly begun its march toward agony in the name of the ignorance, vanity, lies and excessive ambitions of these modern doctrines. Existential values are violated, resulting in total confusion in the spiritual evolution of man.
To the man of today, whom I may consider modern man to be sufficiently intelligent and aware, now is the time for all of us to use our discernment and intellectual honesty to question the destiny of our race. I hope only that you too will conclude that this society has no purpose other than our desolation.
Where do we come from? Or where do we go once our soul tastes death? What did our predecessors become? These are the existential questions that, for the followers of new religions, no longer arise, as if these kinds of topics were taboo. The target subject of these words is so crucial and complex that we shall proceed gently to allow the individual to have a reason to explore the pages of history – and, of course, the history written by the authentic traditional culture of Kemet, which, for some 90,000 years, maintained humanity after having enlightened it.
From the time of its mystery schools, the oldest civilizations have always taught that all life is sacred. The perpetual preservation of life on Earth is the foundation principle of existence for the traditional man (the one considered primitive, savage or backward by today's man). The wisdom of the Kemetic cosmogony illustrates the first documentation of the creation of the world known to all mankind. In the first ever creation story known to humans, the wisdom of Kemetic cosmogony documents that when the Great God Ra became, he stated the following:
I am the becoming of the existence. When became, for me the becoming of the becomings, after my becoming I then established within my heart the becoming of the many becomings of my becomings in the becomings of children and the children of those children
It is from the words of this God that our human ancestors were able to uncover the mystery of existence and set the path that leads man from birth to death and from death back to his next birth (reincarnation). This path is known and is the foundation on which the individual must establish his life and his spiritual and material development. Because existence is the emanation of the energies of the words of the Great God RA, all that exists is a manifestation of the energetic dialogue that flows within the cosmos.
Today, what is the purpose of our existence? Is it to come and eat, to get rich, to wander and briefly name everything that happens around us? Life can be full of jokes; but this is no joking matter. In the culture into which I was born and which has kept my ancestors in perfect harmony with all life in the universe before the West came to show us the extent of its barbarism and ignorance, every child is educated when growing up to understand and live a life that is always predominated by the spirit of the sacred. The subject of our discussion, as suggested by the title, is a subject onto which followers of the Bible and the Koran do not venture. I am talking about reincarnation. The topic of reincarnation always brings with it the notion of the ancestral spirit. The M'TAM (the science of Earth energies) says that everything that preceded something will always be the ancestor of all that is or will be, and anyone who challenges or denigrates his ancestor directly or indirectly is set for self-destruction that we should not confuse with death.
One must realize that death, today, has become the tool for intimidation and mass enslavement by modern religious doctrines. Unfortunately through ignorance, the modern humans reject or deny the concept of the ancestor in their spiritual journeys. In short, the individual is continually misguided towards self-destruction by placing his existence in the same hands which destroyed his ancestors.
The death of our predecessors does not necessarily mean the end of their existence; rather, it represents a door that has opened to allow their souls to experience more lives. The traditional spirituality imparted in the camps of initiations in Kemet (the cradle of humanity) teaches that a spiritual journey, whatever its power and its beliefs, if it rejects or does not recognize the concept of the ancestor, is but the ruin of the soul. This is why we say that in the spiritual world, "the branch that will bloom must honour its roots." Now, just imagine how many generations of souls, because of their beliefs in these modern religious doctrines, have been ruined over the last two thousand years. The result is the current situation of the human race and most notably the abominable lives of "civilized" individuals.
Our fascination with the Divine World and the path to eternal life is blinding and narrow. So we were able to convince ourselves that the same people who gave us the opportunity to live, to experience this life (the life of the body) are no longer important in our approach to eternity. Remember that blood is sacred! The blood in our veins and the spirit which inhabits us have been transmitted to us by our parents and to our parents by their parents, etc.; same with the spirit of the history of the lineage of your ancestors from the dawn of time until your descendants. It is a river that never dried up. That's simply why we love and defend our children, why our parents love us and protect us. Because there is something in us that comes from them.
When a parent ceases to live by getting rid of his body, this thing we have in common with the deceased preserves its tangible and intangible dynamism and continues its existence in order to ensure the energetic harmony and continuity of the lineage, because it is the material manifestation of the energies in us and in the dead. When properly maintained by the living descendants, this dynamism? ensures or allows the rebirth of the deceased from the world of the dead (energetic state) into the world of the living (material state) in order to resume improving their qualities as humans on their journeys to access the Divine World for an eternal life.
So the concept of the ancestor is a very touchy subject. From the Latin word "ante-cedere", "before" as ante and "go or leave" as cedere, the ancestor is generally any person who directly or indirectly affected you in his or her life and who has physically or materially left the living world by giving up his or her body for the afterlife. This definition is physically quite correct, and no individual on this Earth can deny the reality that existence is a fact. Further, the realities of this teach that any element or entity on this Earth, in one way or another, respects and follows the same principle -- that of existence, a principle that seems to rise from death, grow, age and return, after all, to death. It is probably for this reason that Kemetic (Traditional) wisdom says that, "Death is the predecessor/ ancestor of life, for death is the only thing expected of all existence".
In contrast to the blinding vocation of modern doctrines such as Islam and Christianity and their ramifications that tend to deny or even denigrate the world of the dead, by choosing to believe that every soul that dies does so for good, the notion of the ancestral spirit has always been the bedrock of the oldest civilization and culture of humanity. Traditional spirituality of the legendary temples of Kemet, to this day, is the object of great research campaigns in the modern world. These temples teach that every person who dies is not necessarily an ancestor, for death in itself does not confer on the deceased the rank of an ancestor. Having left his physical body, the deceased, on the one hand, is an entity physically missing or reduced to nothing, and only his name, through his descendants, remains in the memory of the material world. The name is an integral part of the existence of all living things. The name, due to its abstract aspect, actually concretely identifies us in relation to the Earth and the universe.
Everything that is a part of the cosmos has in it a concentrated energy which is known by the common man as a soul. The vital principle of every living entity -- the soul -- is the energy force in all existence. It is the force that animates the body. The body and soul are two groups of intelligences that are interdependent in the sense that you need a material body as a manifestation of the soul and the soul as the dynamism of the body. The mystical schools of M'TAM maintain that the body of the living being is the only part that succumbs to the principle of time. Because of this, death has influence only on things that are tangible. If some individuals among us say that they dream and that the circumstances in which this dream takes place do not matter, we say that they are fortunate to have retained the most important part of their existence, namely, the spiritual or immaterial aspect of the self (Ka). This concept has never had any designation in the colonial languages of the Earth.
As Birago Diop affirmed in "Breath",
Those who are dead are not dead ... the dead are not under the ground. They are in the quivering shadow. They are in flowing water. They are in still waters. They are in the house; they are in the crowd. The dead are not dead.
