Ancestral Grimoire: Connect with the Wisdom of the Ancestors through Tarot, Oracles, and Magic

By Nancy Hendrickson and Benebell Wen

“Hendrickson takes readers on a magical journey where they learn how to construct a personal Book of Shadows filled with ancestral wisdom.” —Theresa Reed, author of Twist Your Fate
 
Most of us know our immediate family and maybe even a generation or two beyond, but few of us are attuned to those who lived earlier. Many of us have forgotten how to keep our own stories alive. This is where the ancestors come in and where this book begins.

Ancestral Grimoire is a guide to reconnecting with your ancestors. It will show you how to access their unique wisdom—their magic!—and create your own personal ancestral grimoire, a spell book or Book of Shadows, unique to you and your heritage. Through divination, intuition, and sometimes a little luck, you will learn the magic of each ancestor and how you can use their gifts to make your life richer and more fulfilling.

As you go through this book, you’ll save your ancestral work in a journal or loose-leaf binder that will become the place to store the stories, spells, rituals, and everyday life, lore, and legend of twelve of your ancestors. At the end of a year, you will hold a personal Book of Shadows with every bit of ancestral knowledge within its pages unique to you. No two will ever be alike. In an age when family storytelling has been lost, you will have created a legacy—and a life—that the ancestors could only dream of.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Red Wheel Weiser
• Release date: Sep 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781633412620

Book preview

GETTING STARTED

And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don't believe in magic will never find it.

—ROALD DAHL

Settling into the Ancestral Realm

Things happen. You see a wisp out of the corner of your eye, you feel a strange tug when a song plays, what was lost has miraculously reappeared. As twilight turns to dusk and the sky fades to deep blue, something shifts in your vision, then fades. Again, just as dawn is peeking over the eastern horizon and the world is quiet, the feeling returns.

Depending on your background, you may attribute the odd feelings or the unexplained noise to the neighbors, fairy magic, happenstance, or a restless spirit seeking its home. But when the feeling persists—the sense of the unknown about to become known—you've traveled not to the Twilight Zone, but to the Ancestral Realm.

Perhaps you summoned the ancestors without realizing that your heartbeats were broadcasting out across time. There, they landed at the feet of the ones who love you. Although they live beyond your normal sensibilities, they can hear your wishes and feel your sorrows. They work for your happiness and help heal your pains. If you think life is a crapshoot, you don't know the tenth of the ancestral hands that pull you up, dust you off, and point the way forward.

One ancestor can be with you for a lifetime, another for just a moment. Ask for someone to show you the way out of darkness and they will hand you a blueprint no architect could even conceive.

Want to know your own most potent form of magic? Ask.

Your ancestors lived life across the spectrum of magic: the wise woman who knew which herb to prescribe, the bone-casting seer, the one who knew to place a fowl's feather inside a snakebite, the storyteller, and the story-saver. Regardless of the family in which you were raised, go far enough back in time and you'll find those ancestors who lived so close to nature that they instinctively knew how to work with energy.

And energy, my dear friend, is the key to magic.

In its simplest form, magic occurs when intent is combined with energy. Although it may not seem like real magic, it is. Imagine you're walking on a brisk fall afternoon. As you go, your mind is chewing over a work problem that feels unsolvable. You're hoping the walk will clear your mind (intent). As you walk, you feel drawn to reach down and pick up a red leaf (energy). Looking carefully at the veins running through the leaf, you have a flash of insight (intent + energy) on how to solve the problem (magic).

I know, this sounds supersimple, but it works. And if you merge your intent and energy with the energy of another object—the leaf, a candle, a tarot card, a coin, a tree, an ocean wave, a saint—everyday magic can become extraordinary magic.

The ancestors have been working with divination, omens, and natural energies for as long as we have records. The Aztecs threw dice, knucklebones were cast in ancient Asia Minor, priests communed with Apollo via the Oracle at Delphi, and in China the cracks in heated bone were interpreted as early as the 4th century BCE.

In the pages of this book, you're going to time travel across seas and continents. Your journey to ancestral magic will include both the common and the exotic. If you're ready for the adventure, your passport has been checked, and the gate is open.

Now We Begin

If you had a diary when you were eight years old, you may have written about your latest crush, your fight with your bestie, or the restrictions mom or dad put on your online time.

You may still keep a diary of sorts, but yours might be in the form of a grimoire (grim-wohr)—or a Book of Shadows. This is where you'll detail your personal magical experiences throughout this journey.

If you're already tracking the cycles of the moon or drawing a daily tarot card, then you have a journal started. But even if you do, I'm going to ask you to create a new one: an Ancestral Book of Shadows. This is where you'll save the magical knowledge that relates directly to your