Ritual to Honor the Ancestors

 This was asked for by listeners of the Psychic Switch! I gave this ritual out tonight on the Honoring Your Ancestors Episode! Enjoy it!

• Color: Black and grey
• Element: Earth
• Altar: Spread a black cloth, and lay it with photographs, paintings, and other depictions of our ancestors. Add also symbols of their old tools, and statues of ancestral deities, a bowl of seeds for the future garden, pots of soil, a pitcher of water, and many candles of black and white and grey.
• Offerings: Things they would have liked to eat, drink, smoke, or smell. Tend a cemetery and clean up the graves.
• Daily Meal: Food from an earlier era, using authentic recipes.

Invocation to the Ancestors:

Our ancestors got up at dawn, 
Slaved in the dirt, 
Sweated in the sun, 
Chilled in the cold, 
Numbed in the snow, 
Scattering each seed with a prayer: 
Pray that there be enough, 
That no one starve this winter. 
Pray that no bird nor beast 
Steal the food I have struggled for. 
And most of all, 
Pray that each seed I save 
Of this harvest 
Shall next year 
Bring forth a hundred more. 
We live today 
Because they worked 
Because they sowed 
Because they harvested 
Because they prayed. 

Chant: 

Those who came before 
We are your children 
Those who came before 
We honor your names

(Each person takes seeds from the bowl and plants them in the pots of soil, speaking the name of one of their ancestors as they do so, as in: "In honor of _______." The pots are watered, and the candles put out one by one.)

Found in The Pagan Book of Hours - Breviary