What is ancestral magic, anyway?
+ doll making, väki and the river beneath the river.
Let me try out an idea: time is like water. It moves, shapeshifts. It is adaptive in nature, as well as extremely powerful. It gathers up, carries along, deposits elsewhere, responds to gravity and rhythm, receives support from the root logic of solids while simultaneously carving these out. It can solidify or vapourise.
In the folklore of Finland, there is a concept called väki that refers to the properties and powers intrinsic to specific landscape elements. For example, different ecosystems, soils and particular plants, animals, and minerals (e.g. birch, bear, iron) all have their own väki, which can also be networked or nested - for example, bears are strong in forest väki due to their habitation of that ecosystem, or a house built from a particular wood can have the väki of the living tree as well as the forest it was sourced from.
I’ve heard it said that water väki is among the most potent manifestations of this force, being capable of topping the väki of other elements. I wonder about time väki. It it a thing? Can something as seemingly intangible and abstract as time have an indwelling flavour that colours its contact with beings in the material world?
Further: is time transparent and fluidly formed like water? Or is it an overarching structure within which all other landscape elements are nested and woven together? Can it be both of these? Time, after all, is not identical to water and has its own unique properties and potentialities.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés has referred to ‘the river beneath the river’, which can be accessed through creative acts such as dancing, crafting, writing, and making music, driven by yearning. I don’t want to say that time is the river beneath the river - certainly not in a ‘mystery solved’ kind of way - but perhaps there is some resonance there, a thread to pick up on.
Ancestry is a property of time that is highly material, embodied in the form of DNA and enacted in the form of culture. A simple example: I learned the craft of doll making from my late maternal grandmother (incidentally, of my Finnish blood line), and whenever I make a doll I’m materialising ancestral knowledge. In that way, I’m dipping into time väki, and maybe the river beneath the river.
I made the doll pictured for my late paternal Oma, and so you might say that it carries a double dose of grandmother-ancestor vibes. This is further strengthened by the symbolic form of the doll, which nests inside a pouch on a larger ‘mother’:
Was I thinking about these layers of meaning when I made it? Nope. I barely thought of anything aside from threading the needle and watching it go in and out of the fabric, until this pair of creatures introduced themselves into my hands.
Maybe the creaturely attitude expressed in these dolls is from the river beneath the river. Maybe that river flows through daily life in the act of needlework. Maybe that’s all there is to it, and in saying that I don’t mean to sound unromantic.
This is what I mean when I refer to ancestral magic. There is a practicality, simplicity and immediacy to it that soothes the impulse to rationalise, and just is.
In curiosity,
The Campfire is tended on the lands of the Wurundjeri people. Across this giant island continent, traditional custodians never ceded their sovereignty to the colonialist construct of Australia, and I support the unfolding process of giving voice to this.