CAN YOU HAVE ANCESTRAL SPIRITS OF A DIFFERENT RACE FROM YOU?
So, this is a thorny subject! So, let me be up front where I stand on some things before I give my two cents. Race, for me, like other socially contrived constructs, is not actually real. When speaking of humanity, we do not have more than one human race walking the earth at this time. You can argue that we have in the prehistoric past, when homo sapiens were evolving from our shared Neanderthal ancestors. And honestly even our knowledge of Neanderthals has been profoundly challenged in the last decade or so as new scientific and archaeological evidence has surfaced. But my assumption in writing this post is that race is a social construct.
That said, race FUNCTIONS in a very real way in our daily lives. Whether you are from a so-called racial group that has been historically privileged or one that has been historically underprivileged, when we take the time to become aware, we can see how race has functioned in powerful ways in our individual and collective lives.
Onto spirits! Since the inception of mediumship in the more organized fashions of Spiritism and Spiritualism, race was front and center. On one hand, Spiritism expressed a universality and equality in the spirit realm and our own, challenging the (Catholic) Church’s doctrines that only clergy and consecrated religious had that deep dial-up access to God. This one premise alone was revolutionary and deeply heretical for that time. Yet the Good Spirits made themselves known and began to deprogram humanity away from its divisiveness.
Like other spirit-inspired books and religions, however, the message has to come through the medium (pun intended!) of our humanity, warts and all. As I have said in previous posts, this meant even founders like Allan Kardec believed there was no nobler spirit than the white European. Spirits of color were second fiddle at best, and if you were African, you were not a spirit capable of doing the work of espiritismo. This continued into the New World, including America, which allowed itself to divide the then Spiritualist good news into racial terms along the same lines. There were white Spiritualist churches and Black ones.
In places of the Caribbean, however, a different strand arose that did not get as warped by racism. In places like Cuba, the espiritistas began to hear the voices of massacred indigenous islanders, who made it clear that not only were they elevated, but they were willing and able to assist in the good work that began in Europe. Another interesting thing happened as well, and espiritistas of color discovered that they had spirits of all so-called races in their spiritual court. And so did the white Cubans! They began to see that the spirit world is not preoccupied with the same desire for codifying human beings like we still fixate over. You could be the whitest white person on the planet and have spirits from all times, places, and cultures. You could be the blackity black blackest person and have Vikings, English gentry, and a Congo spirit all walking with you.
Further baking our noodles was a theory I have heard a few times in different places that all the spirits of a person’s spiritual court are not separate disembodied spirits but manifestations of a person’s prior incarnations all coming forth to assist that person in THIS life.
This brings me back to my titular question: Can you have spirits that are a different race from you walking with you? Yes, you can. That’s just how God deemed it to be. And when I say God, I am not exactly talking about the Abrahamic God. Spiritism speaks of God as Light and Intelligence. Not a white dude with a beard. Not really any kind of body. A better analogy would be the Sun or Moon because they radiate light down upon us. That radiance is the spirits. Our spirits are agents of the divine who reflect God’s love to us, and we then reflect that love to our world and back to the spirit world in our mediumship work. This is a core idea in Spiritism, in a nutshell.
Modern iterations of spiritism that reject oppressive social constructs in their practice are much more interested in the question of WHY do I have the spirits I have? Why is this Congo walking with me? Why does Dr. Juan Gregorio want to assist me in my healing work? The answer to the why is the quest the spiritist enjoys embarking on.
I am writing this today because, now and then, I get clients and seekers who come to me with guilt and fear that some ancestral spirit they have doesn’t belong to them. After all, they don’t share the same phenotype and culture. Nine times out of ten, when we take a closer look at what that spirit is doing in their life, it is very consistent with what said spirit is known for doing. I point out that the relationship they have is evidence that they ARE meant to be together.
There’s a lot of gatekeeping out here, a lot of judgment. People who have not studied or practiced these traditions going on their internalized prejudices, assumptions and unexamined issues insisting what is and is not possible. To that, all I can say is when you KNOW the love of a spirit guide who walks with you but doesn’t look like you, you will see how little sense something like racism makes.
The spirits who walk with you throughout this life are your ancestral birthright. No one can take that from you, even if they try. Ask them why they are with you, and be prepared for an adventure unlike any other!
