Ancestors of Affinity
I am so excited to announce that I will be co-hosting an ancestor work class with my friend and colleague, Trece Spalten. Trece brings many years of working actively in the Ancestral Medicine tradition as a facilitator and guide. What we have envisioned for you is a four-week class geared toward helping you connect to “ancestors of affinity” across your several family lines. An “ancestor of affinity” is someone to whom you are blood-related and whose life reflects your own, someone with whom you share a distinct trait, talent, or common experience.
I was drawn to ancestor work despite having very negative experiences with my family of origin. Or, perhaps, because of that. My own ancestor work practice has been a joyful reclamation of traits that I never imagined people in “old times” would carry: my feminism, sexuality, spirituality, intellectual gifts, etc. Rather than feeling like fantasy land, or a forced reverence for distant relatives with whom I have nothing in common, my ancestral practice has resulted in a deeper appreciation of my own unique selfhood.
The truth is, we won’t “gel” with all our ancestors. Not everyone within a given family line will resonate to you as an ally. What this workshop is designed to do is facilitate contact with a kindred spirit from each of your four major family lines over the four-week duration of the class. While Trece’s tradition tends to reach farther out, to pre-colonial ancestors more likely to be supported by healthy spiritual traditions, my Tarot and genealogy work tends to focus on more recent ancestors, about whom we may have verifiable data. Trece and I are excited to bridge our different backgrounds and systems to help you connect to your ancestors of affinity, wherever they may land in time.
Part of the inspiration for this class is the retrograde of Venus that will be active in March. I often teach a Venus workshop during Venus retrograde, because I find that the slow movement of Venus fosters deeper connection to what we love about ourselves, or what we love to do. But given that Saturn and Neptune will be moving close together in Pisces that month, it’s a potent time to do work that reaches across to that “undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.” I often think of the spirit-work aspect of Pisces in these terms: of navigating the great, unfathomable ocean that separates us from the other realms. Ancestor work is also the perfect way to use March’s Mercury retrograde productively, with Hermes serving as psychopomps into the past.
The four class meetings will take place on four Sundays in March, the 9th, 16th, 23rd, and 30th. We will meet for two hours over Zoom starting at 10am Pacific/ 1pm Eastern time. We strongly encourage you to attend the sessions to get the most out of the class, though we will also make recordings available if you need to miss a session. Trece’s extensive experience as professional intuitive, practicing ritualist, witch, and ancestral facilitator will be an invaluable resource to you as you navigate the unfamiliar waters of ancestral journeying. He will lead us in grounding and intuitive work in the first half of class. In the second hour, I will demonstrate original Tarot practices for bringing your ancestor of affinity into focus. It can be so challenging to trust our intuitive impressions, and I find that Tarot is a marvelous aid for both confirming our hunches, while also yielding surprising information.
For the class, we are asking that you use your four grandparents as “portals” to all the ancestors in that particular line. In other words, you may not have a strong connection to Grandma Bertha, but the journeying exercise might bring through Grandma Bertha’s great-uncle Mike, with whom you share an affinity. Alternately, journeying to meet an ancestor from Grandma Bertha’s line might connect you with a Phrygian silversmith who lived 3,000 years ago! I’ve found that our ancestors of affinity don’t fall into neat categories like “mother’s mother’s mother,” and so we’ll be invoking your four grandparents more as directions on a map pointing to your various lineages, than as representations of gendered ancestral themes.
If you don’t have communication with one or both birth parents, don’t despair! You have options. If you were adopted, you can use the lineages of your adoptive parents or primary caretakers, if you feel a connection there. Alternatively, this type of intuitive journeying practice is ideal for folks who want to forge a connection to an unknown birth parent’s lineage, even if you’re starting with zero information. You can work with one birth parent and one step-parent’s lineage, if you want. This technique is very flexible.
Some of us, like myself, have had violent and devastating experiences with our families of origins. Perhaps the one requirement of the class is that you must imagine that not everyone from a violent family member’s lineage will be violent, or flawed in the same way that they are. We are actively searching for the “good eggs,” the ancestors of affinity, to bolster our connection to our four major lineages.
The cost of the course is $150, and you will receive the benefit of Trece’s intuitive coaching skills and my long immersion in Tarot. While some of the exercises in class can be performed with an oracle deck, we are asking everyone in the class to have a traditional 78-card Tarot deck on hand, so that we are all speaking a common symbolic language. You are not required to know anything about Tarot to enroll in the course. We will interpret the meanings of the cards that you pull as a collective exercise in class, so there will be lots of space to ask questions. I am the author of a Tarot deck about 19th century American literature, the American Renaissance Tarot, and this deck is recommended since it hearkens back to the era of our 3rd-great grandparents.
Sign up for the course with the PayPal button below!
Learn more about Trece Spalten:
Intuitive teacher, healer, speaker, and spiritual advisor, Trece has been connecting people with their inner compass for over 20 years. Bridging spiritual insight with practical guidance, and magic with the everyday, Trece is passionate about helping people open the door to a rich and meaningful life. He is also the host of That 90’s Witch, a podcast that looks at how the 90’s deeply shaped modern Witchcraft and esoteric spirituality through the lenses of popular media, politics, technology, magical practice, and personal stories from trailblazing icons.
A little bit about Thea Wirsching:
Thea Wirsching is an Evolutionary Astrologer, scholar, and Mom. She approaches the natal chart as a source of healing and highest potential, and specializes in addressing trauma with the lens of astrology. Thea trained with Steven Forrest and has been a counseling astrologer for the last two decades. She's also an academic, and adapted her PhD thesis about esoteric literature into the award-winning Tarot deck, the American Renaissance Tarot. Thea taught at the college level for five years and currently teaches classes in astrology, Tarot, esoteric literature, and any other topic that strikes her fancy.