Ancestral Spirits Quotes

And so they are ever returning to us, the dead.

I've always loved the idea of mythologies linked to or underlying everyday life, like the kami gods of Shintoism, where every rock, tree and stream has its own little god associated with it.

In a typical desperation for quick answers, easily understood, people had turned to primitive worship as the solution. With less than success. Not only had they died as quickly as the rest of the people, but they had died with terror in their hearts, with a mortal dread flowing in their very veins.

Without sounding like a New Age crystal worshipper, you can feel something there, in these old dilapidated colonial farms and hidden graveyards in the middle of a pine forest. I certainly did as a kid.

Nothing is stronger than the position of the dead among the living.

I don't know about Heaven or Hell, but I do know that we are visited all the time by the spirits of those who affected us in life.

People need a sacred narrative. They must have a sense of larger purpose, in one form or another, however intellectualized. They will find a way to keep ancestral spirits alive.

Voodoo is a very interesting religion for the whole family, even those members of it who are dead.

All I'm trying to do is not join my ancestral spirits just yet.

Tribal man is not an individual in the western sense. Psychologically and emotionally, he is the present living personification of a number of forces, among the most important of which are the ancestral dead.

Grandfather, Great Spirit, once more behold me on earth and lean to hear my feeble voice.

I feel that the ancestors are that covering that will cover me. I feel like I can only be enveloped in them spiritually and physically.

. . . it is difficult for Europeans to appreciate the sentiment. Other nations kill animals by wholesale and kill one another; they exist in a sea of blood. A European said that the reason why in India animals were not killed was because it was supposed that they contained the spirits of ancestors. This reason was worthy of a savage nation who are not many steps from the brute.

To .. all the dispossessed youth of Africa: for perpetuation of communion with ancestral spirits through the fight for African freedom, and in the firm faith that the dead, the living, and the unborn will unite to rebuild the destroyed shrines.

I know that whenever a group of women are gathered together, the grandmother always makes a phantom appearance, hovering above them.

If you remember your ancestors, they can cross over and be with you again.

It's said that All Hallows' Eve is one of the nights when the veil between the worlds is thin - and whether you believe in such things or not, those roaming spirits probably believe in you, or at least acknowledge your existence, considering that it used to be their own. Even the air feels different on Halloween, autumn-crisp and bright.

In the common words we use every day, souls of past races, the thoughts and feelings of individual men stand around us, not dead, but frozen into their attitudes like the courtiers in the garden of the Sleeping Beauty.

She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening. from "The Lady of the Haunted House

There's a rich legend of this in other cultures, this speaking with ancestors. The Christian mystics communicated with angels.

The ancestors will turn their backs against you and you will have bad luck forever if you leave the ANC unhappy

If you don't believe in ghosts, you've never been to a family reunion.

I think of some of my friends who have passed to the spirit world but are who here with me when I go to events and when I walk in my own community. My sisters, Ingred, my sister Marsha, and my sister Nielock. All cofounders of the Indigenous Women's Network with me. All long time women activists in the native community.

Japanese feel an intimacy with the dead, at least for people up to my generation.

it is not good to repudiate the dead because then they do not leave you alone, they are like dogs that bark intermittently at night.