Before Seeking the Gods, Look Behind You

I have always been interested in philosophies, religions and spiritual traditions

I observe them, study them, move through their symbols and try to understand their language

And yet one question keeps returning

Why do we human beings feel such a profound need to search outside ourselves for something to worship?

Why do we entrust our prayers, our requests for protection, love and hope to an icon, a spirit, an entity, a messiah, a deity or an archetype that may belong to an ancient tradition, but whose energy we have never personally known?

I may know its nameI may know its storyI may study its symbols

But I do not know that presence

So lately I have been asking myself a different question

What if, before searching so far away, we simply turned around?

Behind you stands a multitude

For a moment, let us make this purely mathematical

You have 2 parents4 grandparents8 great-grandparents16 great-great-grandparents

Keep doubling

If we theoretically trace our ancestry back through 11 generations, we reach 4,094 ancestral positions before us

The actual number of distinct individuals may be smaller because family trees intersect and the same ancestor can appear in several branches

But the exact number is not what interests me

It is the vertigo of it

Thousands of lives

Thousands of encounters, bodies, pregnancies, separations, journeys, desires, mistakes, illnesses, survivals and coincidences

Had only one of those stories taken an entirely different direction, I probably would not be here

That changes my understanding of protection

Not because I need to believe that thousands of spirits are literally standing behind me directing my life

I do not need to know that

Something much more concrete is enough:

life managed to reach me

When I think about my ancestors, I don't think only about love

When I think about those who came before me, I feel roots

Structure

Safety

The feeling of being supported

But I also feel pain

So much pain

A pain that I have somehow always experienced as inherited

As a child, I would experience moments of profound crying

I remember the sadness, but above all I remember being unable to explain to my parents where it came from

I didn't have the words for it

During adolescence, that feeling took another form

I felt my family's suffering intensely, together with a sense of helplessness: the desire to alleviate what I saw and the impossibility of doing so

Then another need emerged

To be seen

To be ambitiousto achieveto prove myselfto become somebody

As though existence itself had to be earned

As though receiving attention required creating something important enough to justify my place in the world

Today I can look at that girl from another perspective

And wonder how much of what we consider entirely "ours" truly begins with us

I don't need to turn this question into an absolute truth

I would rather leave it open

I don't want to heal my dead

There is a phrase we hear constantly in contemporary spirituality:

healing your ancestors

Here I need to make a distinction

I don't know whether we came into this world to heal those who lived before us

Perhaps we don't even have that power

And perhaps there is something strangely presumptuous about imagining that we can retroactively repair thousands of lives we barely know

I don't want to turn my ancestors into yet another spiritual project that needs fixing

I prefer another image

To continue

To receive something and carry it a little further

Not to erase their pain, but to refuse to let pain be the only thing that continues through me

Not to atone

Not to save

Not to repay invisible debts

To live

Perhaps this is one of the most radical forms of gratitude towards those who could not do everything they wished to do

So why do we search so far away?

This question is not an attack on religion

Nor on spirituality

I am not interested in deciding whether it is right to pray to Mary, Buddha, a Hindu deity, a saint, a goddess, an archetype or any other figure through which someone encounters the sacred

Something else interests me

Why do we often know the names of gods better than the names of our great-grandparents?

Why are we able to build altars to figures belonging to cultures thousands of kilometres away, yet find it so difficult to turn towards our own history?

Perhaps because gods are easier

Archetypes did not abandon usthey did not make our parents' mistakesthey did not struggle with addictionsthey did not fail at marriagesthey did not remain silentthey did not hurt us

Our ancestors, however, were human beings

And that is precisely what makes them interesting to me

I don't want to idealise them

Among those thousands of people there must have been wonderful people and terrible people

People capable of loving and people incapable of it

Victims and perpetrators

I don't need to turn them into saints to recognise something elementary:

without that imperfect chain, I would not be here

October, 31 October and the remembrance of the dead

Perhaps this is also why this thought arrives in October

We are approaching the period of the year when different cultures and traditions have placed rituals connected with the dead, ancestors and the relationship between the visible and invisible worlds

For many, 31 October has become Halloween

Behind the contemporary imagery, however, lie older seasonal traditions concerned with death, remembrance and the transition into the darker part of the year

What interests me most is one simple act:

remembering

Not necessarily summoning

Not necessarily invoking

Remembering

Perhaps this year my altar doesn't need a deity

Perhaps a photograph is enough

A name

A candle

Or even an empty space dedicated to all those whose names have disappeared

Because I will never know who most of the people who contributed to my existence were

And yet they were here

I don't feel alone in front of life

When I try to describe what I feel towards those who came before me, I always return to the same image

I feel supported

Held

As though behind me there were a silent crowd cheering me on

Not an army demanding something from me

Not thousands of dead people handing me debts to repay

Quite the opposite

It is almost as though they were saying:

Go

You can take it one step further

One small piece of what they did not have the time, possibility, freedom or tools to accomplish

And perhaps this is where everything changes

I do not have to earn my existence through what I achieve

I already exist because thousands of lives, willingly or unwillingly, passed the possibility of being here down to me

What I do with that possibility comes afterwards

It is not the price of my existence

It is its continuation

So perhaps, before raising our eyes to the sky searching for someone to protect us, we could do something much simpler

Turn around

Look symbolically at the multitude behind us

And remember that we are the latest visible point of a story that began long before us

Perhaps we don't have to choose between gods and ancestors

But every now and then, it is worth remembering where we came from

Because before deciding what to believe, there is a much simpler truth:

someone survived long enough for you to be born

And someone before them did the same

And someone before them

Until you

Perhaps the gods we keep searching for so far awayhave always been much closer than we thought