Descended from the Abruzzo
How to reach back to an ancestral land and a lost spiritual lineage
My great-grandmother was a Strega, a healer and herbalist from the Abruzzo region of Italy. She died before I was born. My aunt held a lot of the memories of my great-grandmother, the Strega. She told me that when she immigrated to New Hampshire it was difficult for my great -grandmother to carry on the herbal remedies and practice of the Strega tradition because the herbs were different in New England than in the Abruzzo. I was awakened to a reality I had not before considered.
All the movement of humans, both voluntary and forced, has caused a lot of disconnect around the ancient, inherited wisdom of plants. My great-grandmother and other herbalists, medicine people, went on to learn the plants in their new, local ecosystems but how much was lost, for both the humans that left their ecosystems of birth and the plants that remained there? When medicine people move away or are displaced, do the plants miss them? I suspect yes.
We often talk about how we miss places. Do places miss us?
Tapping in to the the past lives of places
I do not know which birds my great-grandmother interacted with, which trees she sat under. I do not currently live in either of the ecosystems where my great-grandmother lived and worked.
I do not know the stories she told over and over. I do not know the curve of her hand as she added an ingredient to a remedy. I do not know her smile and her smell. What I do have are teachings and recalled memories of the spiritual capacities of some of the plants she worked with. I have the word of mouth, passed down stories that I received, and I have some of her recipes. Through this I have found my way back to some of my great-grandmother’s plant and tree allies.
I have returned to her village and taken in the smell, the lines of the hills on the landscape, the same ones she must have looked at, visited the groves of trees, said hello to the water. I will return again soon, to do more.
How do we find our past and our history, and indeed even spiritual medicine lineages, that have been left behind? How do we make ourselves remembered by the land that was left behind?
My grandparents were amazing gardeners. My father is as well. They made their own wine, grew their own food, but they were not herbalists. This was lost with my great-grandmother. For my novel, The Strega and the Dreamer, I created remedies based on what I could find in books for common remedies of the Italians, comparing them to what I could find in traditional herbal manuals. With a lot of research and sleuthing, I pieced things together. In my research I found the books that included the folk traditions to be most reliable.
Through consistent divinations, ritual and continued research I have developed a deep connection to the land of the Abruzzo, the land of my ancestors and my spiritual medicine lineage. If you are committed, you can develop a deep connection to the land of your ancestors as well. I wish to tell you, however, to be consistent, and patient. It takes a bit of time. Things re-open slowly, as I suppose they should. There are many ways to do this, both energetic and physical. I will share some of these with you here.
Ritual to connect to ancestral land through the network of trees
If you have established a strong relationship with the land where you live and, most especially, a tree in that location, you can go to the tree, sit at its base for a time before calling upon the land of your ancestors. Be as specific as you can get, name the village or county. If you don’t have information on either of those, simply name the country. “I am calling on the place in ______ where my ancestors lived.” If you have specific names of ancestors, it is good to use the full names as well. “I call on the land in _______ where my ancestors, ________ and ________ lived. I would like to get to know you again, for you are the land of my ancestors.” Then pour water at the base of the tree, asking it to carry the message to the land of your ancestors.
After this, wait a while and see if you receive a message back. You can do this a few times. This ritual is creating an opening for communication.
Gathering research
As you do research, you begin to learn details. I recommend deeper reading than articles on the internet, if you can find it. Books written as close to the time period that your ancestors lived there are extremely helpful for you to get the feel for the place in that time. Even if they are anthropological, it can be helpful. Use your public library. You may be surprised to see what you can acquire through interlibrary loan. It’s good to read and then let it sink in, and see if other information wants to arise from what you read in your dreams, visions or received intuitive information.
Depending on how big a ritualist you are, you may choose to sleep with a book under your pillow, asking for dreams from your ancestors, perhaps offering them a bit of food when you ask. (If you do not have any specific names of ancestors, that is ok, call upon the well and good ancestors of the lineage you are seeking.)
You can also try what I call “book divination,” where you ask an ancestor to guide you to information on a certain page and then open the book and see where you land. Let this be fun and easy. Don’t take yourself too seriously. You are trying to open memories that are in your DNA and in your bones. You are opening yourself to allowing the ancestors and the land itself to talk to you. Making sure your mind is not in a place of expectation and rigidity will help this all go more smoothly.
As your research proceeds, you begin to learn place names on the local landscape, dates of important events in your ancestors’ lifetimes, general concepts and beliefs and even folk customs of the area where your ancestors are from. This is all incredibly valuable.
One of the books that was helpful to me was, In the Abruzzi* by Anne MacDonnell, first published 1908.
My great-grandmother Domenica left her village in 1899. My great-grandfather left before her around 1892. 1908 isn’t that long after. This was relatively close to their time period, especially considering that a book is published at least a few years after research is completed.
The following passage about the story of the Abruzzo and its people has some potent energy I could sink into and so I put it in my notes to refer back to:
“That story is but an aggravation of the history of every mountain people that love their mountains and are not aggressive, or greedy, for the riches of the plains. There have flourished the hardy virtues and the love of local independence. Tradition has been a great power. The home arts have flourished. The strong religious instinct has given the church a special hold. Feudalism had an easy growth and died hard. Isolation forced their culture to be largely home-made; and civilization, save as the church brought it, penetrated very slowly.
This is not an altogether unhappy picture. The frugal, self-contained community, forced to labour in the open air, and with aptitude for the manual arts, is perhaps the happiest the world has ever known. And so far as this primitive happiness depended on themselves the Abruzzesi long enjoyed it” (370).
MacDonnell reports that in 1908 or earlier in the Abruzzo, there were three types of people: shepherds, contadini (peasants) and bourgeois. There had been brigand but they were gone by the mid 1800s (many before that). Then she offered this stunning fact:
by 1919 most of the forests were cleared.
Though most had been converted to Catholicism, she describes the Virgin Mary as a variation of the Roman Goddess Ceres: Goddess of agriculture, crops, fertility and the love a mother toward her child, corresponding to Greek Demeter. Greek Demeter and Persephone are Roman Ceres and Prosperina.
We cannot be sure the Abruzzesi did not have a different name for this Goddess, as they were Romanized quite late, but she is a general Earth Goddess.
The mountains are the Apennines, with the Maiella and Gran Sasso as standouts on the landscape which were known to all. There were wolves and werewolves and where there are wolves and werewolves there are also shepherds. There were and are still a lot of shepherds. Their transhumanza or migration pathways snake through these mountains still.
Do you see how much information is gathered here and how many more pathways of research can open from it? Naturally I followed all of these leads. And there was so much more.
You can find the results of my research and ongoing connection on my website and in my books. The reason for bringing it here is to pass to you some of the things that worked for me. Finding books like MacDonnell’s were treasures from which I gleaned much.
General ritual to feed and connect to your ancestors
Once you begin to have a general feel for your ancestors, their place and some of their traditions, even better if you have been able to discover some of the foods that are local to that place or specific to your family, it is a good time to cook them a feast. The spirits love to be fed. And one way to feed them is to literally cook for them. You can eat some of this yourself and you can even invite others to celebrate in feasting with your ancestors but you want to be sure to make the feast with the intention of cooking for them in mind the whole time and you want to serve them first.
Dish them out a hearty portion of each item. They may not have been fed for a while and may be very hungry. You can be as formal or casual as you want with this. Place the meal out on your counter with a candle and a glass of wine, or whatever beverage they prefer, or make a gorgeous table setting and feed them to table. Whatever you choose to do, when you offer it to them, state that with intention. Say whatever else you want to say to them. Cry if you need to. Let them know your heart.
If there are troublesome ancestors always revert to invoking the well and good ancestors. But even unwell ancestors can receive a lot of healing through being fed and offered the chance to heal in the ancestral realm. Use your own discretion. The next day, feel free to compost the food you have offered them.
The above information and rituals are a good place to start to reconnect with the land of your ancestors and your ancestors in general. Stay tuned for future posts about connecting to your ancestors and ancestral land and spiritual medicine lineage through goddess and gods of place, visiting the land of your ancestors, and more.
Have fun and good luck!
© Theresa C. Dintino 2024
*The Abruzzo was formerly called the Abruzzi
Works Cited
MacDonnell, Anne. In the Abruzzi. London, Chatto & Windus (1908).
