Reclaiming Ancestral Wisdom -

This is the first post in a series I will be doing around reclaiming Womanhood, Birth and Birthwork traditions through connection to ancestral wisdom.

I am a Woman indigenous to the lands of the Germanic and Celtic people. In my blood I carry the wisdom and traditional knowing of my ancestors and through spending over four years in Germany I have reawaken and relearnt much of this wisdom.

I acknowledge and pay my respects to the Indigenous people of the lands from which I write this post, the Kaurna people. I may never know the extent of suppression faced by the Indigenous peoples of this land but I endeavour to consciously play my role in decolonising this countries systems and supporting the sovereignty and reclamation of First Nations peoples.

So how did my journey begin...

Growing up in suburban Australia with parents and grandparents also born here I grew up not only disconnected but largely unaware of my roots all together. I grasped to the strands of information I had as well as the "culture" in which I did grow up in which involved, for the most part, dismembered celebrations such as easter and christmas that focused on capitalist profit and perpetuation of patriarchal systems and ways of thinking and living.

If you can relate to this upbringing somehow, this series is for you. This series will be a remembrance. I will be incorporating words and rituals from across the Celtic lands and traditions, from modern day Germany, England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland as well as essences from the Scandinavian lands.

Lets go back a few years...

I had been feeling the calling for a long time. Since having filled out a somewhat wonky and incomplete family tree using ancestry.com as a fourteen year old I discovered a long, LONG line of Germanic women from my paternal side and a long line of Celtic women on my maternal side. I carried this knowing tucked away deep inside me but with no guide or elder to turn to it just became knowledge and never evolved into embodied wisdom.

At the beginning of 2020 I travelled to the Netherlands to study a course in Positive Psychology. Never before had I felt connected to the lands upon which my feet rest. It felt like the first understanding of what colonisation had really meant for me. In my time in the Netherlands I visited Germany for the first time and the feeling of homecoming was even larger. On that very same trip I visited Ireland and England.

I remember bawling my eyes out on the phone to my family that I just did not want to leave but I couldn't truly grasp why I was so distraught to go given that I could just come back anytime. Which was, in hindsight, some very good foreshadowing for what was actually to come as corona entered the picture and I could not return to my ancestral lands for almost two years during the strict lockdowns.

Then on the eve of Samhain 2021 I moved to Germany.

Moving to Germany sculpted my inner landscape. It transformed me in ways that words cannot begin to describe because living and Bleeding on the lands of my ancestors recalibrated my bodily essence.

The first step of remembering was learning German. I thirstily absorbed the language, quite literally refusing to speak English with anyone, even when my German failed me.

The German language is the root of the English language which belongs to the west Germanic languages.

Germanic languages are the root of many of the lands from which my ancestors stem.

Reclaiming language is reclaiming culture.

Once I had woven my German into my everyday and began interacting with wise women and attending circles I realised that there was a small but intact culture living with the old ways. The "old ways" is a very broad term to encapture the Pagan and Celtic traditions which include certain gods, goddesses or other deity figures as well as seasonal celebrations honouring Mother Earth.

Each year this number grows as we collectively remember. I see more Beltaine fires being lit, more ritual around Yule and the "wild nights" and more Women returning their Blood to the Earth. This movement is deeply rooted in connection to the Earth and community. The recognition that we are tightly interwoven in a deep web with all that is and honouring the life cycles, seasons and changes that occur within that.

Some Altars from Women's Circles I held on Yule, Ostara, Mabon and Beltane.

I had felt lost for so long, culturally displaced and disconnected.

Now finding these living traditions in Germany something reawakened in me.

It was a deep remembering.

It did not feel foreign or strange. I did not feel the need to read books or do courses on these traditions, and honestly I still haven't. Rather I simply oriented myself to nature, to the women especially the elders and to the deep inner knowing.

It was doing by being.

So many of the traditions I grew up with felt laced with falseness - bright colours, fake trees, plastic decorations, present giving pressure, houses laden with bright LED lights, endless food, lies about a man in red and a bunny rabbit bringing eggs and pressured family meetings...

And it is because these traditions for the most part fake.

They are christian takes on pagan rituals.

They removed the Mother Earth and replaced it with an almighty god.

Then they removed the god and replaced it with santa.

They removed nature and made it plastic. They removed the meaning and made it about presents.

(Note: I am not anti-Christianity or anti-Christmas. These are simply my reflections of what these celebrations meant to me growing up in a non-religious family where Christmas was disconnected from its roots. If you prescribe to the story of Christ and celebrate that, I think that is great).

These traditions feel empty and often leave us completely overwhelmed.

And so many of us grow up believing that is all there is to our culture.

I want to let you know if you have grown up similarly and resonate with this post; you are not alone and there is more.

In nature based religion, under which Paganism falls, we honour the cycles of nature.

Which also means honouring that Summer is the time of doing and gathering and Winter a time of retreat and gift giving from the harvests.

Living in tune with the cycles of Nature lead me to deeper awareness of what it truly means to be human, not separate to but part of Nature. I understood how my actions impact the Earth and how I am a custodian to the land upon which I reside. I understood that we are dependent upon one another, upon each and every living thing.

In this awareness and with a new Mother tongue I finally felt the missing pieces fall into place. Then the Motherhood spectrum became a centre piece of my work as I began supporting women through Pregnancy, Birth and Postpartum.

It only made sense to weave in my ancestral wisdom into my support.

Whether I am working with traditional herbs or healing modalities, bringing language and song or rituals and honouring to my sessions with Women, I am in deep reclamation of my culture. And because I am deeply interconnected with the culture I have learnt a new respect and awe for cultures outside of my own. This deepens my work with Women further as I can truly honour the unique path they are walking with the intersections of cultural background and language, even if they do not share the same heritage as me.

When we reclaim our cultural heritage and ground into the traditions, herbs and rituals of those lands we decolonise our minds and begin to root into collective healing.

So many Birthworkers turn to other cultures to source their rituals not even knowing they have abundance of their own.

SO

this series is an honouring of and a reclamation of Culture in the Motherhood continuum.

Because it has brought me so much

and I wish that it can give you the same so you too may weave ritual, language and ancestral ways of being into your work or journey into Motherhood.

With Mother Love,

Scout