Most ancestor guides assume a family you would want in the room. Set up an altar, put out photographs, invite them in.
For a lot of people that instruction stops the practice dead. If the recent dead in your line include someone who hurt you, "invite the ancestors" is not a warm suggestion — it is the opposite of what you have spent years building.
So let us be clear at the outset: nobody is required to venerate anyone who harmed them. Not for healing, not for lineage, not for completeness. Any practice telling you otherwise is not one we recognise, and forgiveness is not a prerequisite for anything here.
Your ancestors are not only your family
The word gets read as parents and grandparents. That is the smallest part of it.
Your line goes back tens of thousands of years. The people who harmed you are a handful of recent names on something enormous, and most traditions that practise this seriously distinguish between the recent dead and the elevated or ancient dead precisely because not everyone who died is someone you want to work with.
This is not a modern accommodation. It is standard. In several traditions the recently dead are considered not yet settled, and work is directed further back deliberately.
You can address "my people, from before the ones I knew." That is a complete and traditional address.
Nobody gets a seat by default
The most useful principle we can give you: an ancestor altar is a guest list, not an open door.
When you open the practice, say plainly who is welcome — the elevated dead, those who wish me well, those who would recognise me. And say plainly who is not, by name if you need to.
Saying a name in order to exclude it is not inviting it. It is the opposite, and it is clearer than hoping they understand.
If wording that exclusion is the part you are stuck on, our live chat can help you write it. You do not have to explain anything about what happened in order to ask.
Some people find they cannot say the name at all, which is fine. "Anyone who harmed me in life is not welcome here" does the same work.
Building it
Small. A shelf, a windowsill, a box you open when you use it and close when you do not — that last one suits people who do not want a permanent visible altar.
No photographs are required. A single white candle, a glass of clean water, and something from the earth is a complete ancestor altar in several traditions. If photographs are the barrier, leave them out entirely.
Clean water, changed regularly, is the most widespread offering in the world for this. Start there.
Represent the line, not the individuals. A stone. Soil from a place that matters. A bowl of grain. Something you made. These represent continuity without putting a face in front of you.
If you do not know your ancestry
Adoption, displacement, records that do not exist, a family that will not speak about it. This is extremely common and it is not an obstacle.
The unnamed dead. You do not need names. "Those whose names I do not know" is a complete address and it is how a great deal of this work has always been done.
Lineage of practice. The people who carried the craft you are learning are a line too. So are the practitioners of the tradition you work in.
Chosen family. The people who raised you, whatever the biology. In practice this is often the strongest connection of all.
The land. Where you live now has dead in it. Approached respectfully, that is a real relationship.
If something arrives that you did not invite
It happens, and it is the fear that keeps people out of this entirely.
The response is the same one you would use for any uninvited presence: say out loud that they are not welcome, close the practice, remove the offerings from the house, cleanse the space and yourself. Do not negotiate, and do not feel you owe anyone a hearing because they are related to you.
If it recurs, stop the practice and get help with it rather than continuing alone.
One thing this is not
Ancestor work is not treatment for what was done to you.
There is a fashion for framing trauma as inherited or ancestral, and for selling its clearing. We are not going to tell you your anxiety is a curse handed down a bloodline that we can lift for a fee. What happened to you happened to you, in your life, and it deserves real support — a therapist, a group, a person who knows your history.
Ancestral work can sit alongside that and be genuinely sustaining. It is not a substitute for it and anyone selling it as one is taking advantage.
Set it up with us
The exclusion piece is where people get stuck — how to word it, whether naming someone invites them, what to do if you cannot say the name at all.
Open the live chat at the bottom of this page and tell us as much or as little as you want to. We will help you word the opening, decide who you are actually addressing, and build something that stays firmly shut to the people it needs to stay shut to.
You do not have to explain what happened. You only have to say who is not welcome.
Or browse our deity and ancestral work.