Ancestral Work: a Core Shamanism Perspective

By Robbie Priestley

Ancestral work generally refers to spiritual practices involving the spirits of deceased ancestors in a family line or cultural group. People sometimes ask if Core Shamanism has methods of doing ancestral work. When anthropologist Michael Harner was developing the methodology of Core Shamanism, he did not specify ancestral work as one of the “universal, near-universal, and common features of shamanism.” [1] This is because the practices of ancestral work vary too significantly between different cultural groups to be considered universal. [2]

However, Core Shamanism is very versatile. In its own unique way, it does have methods of doing ancestral work and dealing with ancestral issues. In this article, I will discuss various aspects of ancestral work as viewed from a Core Shamanism perspective. This article is written for shamanic practitioners who are already familiar with the principles of Core Shamanism. [3]

Repeating patterns of unwellness often occur in successive generations of the same family. In modern psychology, this is called intergenerational trauma. [4] Scientific studies show that trauma can be transmitted from one generation to the next not only through parental behavior, but even through genetics. [5] Counter-intuitively, even maladaptive and harmful behaviors such as alcoholism [6] and abuse [7] can be transmitted intergenerationally. These are largely unconscious processes. People experiencing the effects of intergenerational trauma, while lacking awareness of the cause, may feel powerless to change the situation. Some people may even come to believe they have something like a family curse, which is a very self-limiting belief that makes the situation even worse.

Spiritually aware people may seek a way to directly heal their family line using spiritual methods. However, even if there was an obvious way to do this, there could be serious ethical implications. A family line contains many individual persons both living and deceased. Any one of those persons could be affected by healing the family line, and so permission would need to be obtained from all of them. This is not practical, or even possible.

Why is permission needed? Permission is needed because, in the practice of Core Shamanism, there are strong ethical considerations. We recognize that every person, living or deceased, is spiritually independent. Every person has the right to decide for themselves what is best in matters affecting their soul or spirit. Spiritual healing is therefore not a compassionate act unless permission is obtained from each person being healed. In Core Shamanism, fully compassionate helping spirits are the source of spiritual power being utilized for spiritual healing. [8] These spirits will not provide healing power in circumstances that are not compassionate, and such circumstances can become problematic and make the situation even worse. [9]

From the perspective of Core Shamanism, we wouldn’t even consider attempting to directly heal the family line itself. Nor would we attempt to remove any sort of family curse. Instead, we would focus on empowering and healing the individual client.

In the practice of Core Shamanism, the approach to ancestral healing is to focus on the individual rather than the family, and to “fix forward.” Individuals who are able to successfully heal from intergenerational trauma become empowered, and they are far less likely to pass the trauma on to the next generation. These people become new trailblazers within a family, working to break the chain of intergenerational trauma by healing themselves, and setting a strong example. When one person heals, it also often inspires others to heal.

Healing from intergenerational trauma is not easy. It takes a great deal of time, effort, courage, and spiritual power. The healing methods of Core Shamanism can be used to help a client more quickly and effectively heal from this kind of trauma. For example, the spiritual effects of intergenerational trauma often include some degree of soul loss. [10] Soul loss commonly occurs in response to trauma, and it manifests as a disempowered and dispirited condition. [11] The shamanic healing method used to address soul loss is soul retrieval. [12] A practitioner of Core Shamanism would also likely use power animal retrieval and other empowerment methods to help the client stay strong and resilient during the healing process. [13]

Healing is an interactive process. Shamanic healing creates the spiritual conditions under which the client can better heal. Thus, it is also beneficial for people who are healing from the effects of intergenerational trauma to have strong personal boundaries, to make supportive lifestyle changes, to actively engage in spiritual empowerment practices, and to seek complementary healing methods such as counseling or psychotherapy.

Sometimes when a person dies, their soul has trouble letting go of a living relative. Similarly, a living person can have trouble letting go of the soul of a deceased relative. While these situations are understandable, they are not healthy. A deceased person’s soul can be prevented from transitioning out of the Middle World due to attachments to the living. Lost souls such as this remain in a state of confusion and suffering, [14] and they can have adverse effects on the spiritual wellbeing of surviving relatives. [15]

In the practice of Core Shamanism, the approach to dealing with the problem of lost souls is a shamanic healing method called “psychopomp.” Psychopomp literally means “conductor of souls,” and in the context of deceased relatives, it can be considered a form of ancestral healing. If a client is being affected by the soul of a deceased relative who is not at rest, a shamanic practitioner can help the deceased person’s soul to transition out of the Middle World. When done with full permission from both the client and the deceased person’s soul, psychopomp enables both to begin healing. Psychopomp involving the souls of deceased family members is not always straightforward. A few examples of advanced cases include: a) An inability to obtain permission from the deceased person’s soul for psychopomp; b) The client is not actually prepared to let go of the deceased person’s soul; and c) The deceased person’s soul is also affecting, or being affected by, other surviving relatives. Advanced cases such as this can present challenges for the shamanic practitioner, who must be well-trained and experienced to deal with them ethically and effectively.

The term “ancestor reverence” refers to spiritual practices intended to honor the spirits of deceased ancestors. Ancestors feature prominently in the spiritual traditions of many cultures, but the methods of ancestor reverence vary so widely that a common or universal method cannot easily be identified. Thus, Core Shamanism does not specifically describe a method of ancestor reverence.

However, Core Shamanism does describe how to make contact with the spirits of transcended ancestors for the purposes of obtaining knowledge and power. In Core Shamanism’s uniquely “individualistic way,” [16] this is probably the closest we come to ancestor reverence. [17] Michael Harner wrote how the existence of “sacred ancestors in the Upper World” is universally recognized in shamanic cultures of all kinds. [18] He was specifically referring to “transcended compassionate spirits” that have transitioned beyond the Middle World. [19] These spirits often present themselves in human form and are essentially the same as what are called “teacher” spirits of the Upper or Lower Worlds. [20]

It is important to note that transcended ancestor spirits found in the Upper or Lower Worlds do not require healing—they become fully healed and fully compassionate when they transcend out of the confusion and suffering of the Middle World. It is for this reason that transcended ancestor spirits can become powerful and reliable helping spirits for shamanic practitioners. They are excellent sources of knowledge, power, guidance, support, and healing. However, reliably contacting Upper and Lower World spirits requires disciplined shamanic journeying and shamanic divination methods.

Initiation is probably not the first thing that comes to mind when modern spiritual practitioners think about ancestral work. However, the majority of the cultural practices relating to ancestors described by scholar Mircea Eliade and anthropologist Michael Harner in their ethnographic writings about shamanism seem to fall into this category. [21] While these initiatory practices are very diverse, there is a clear theme of ancestral spirits participating in the formative experiences of shamanic initiates. For example, Eliade describes how Siberian shamanic initiates routinely underwent initiation by ancestral spirits who spiritually dismembered the initiates as a form of spiritual renewal. [22] Individual practitioners of Core Shamanism report a wide variety of different initiatory experiences, which may or may not involve the spirits of ancestors in some capacity.

In Core Shamanism, deceased human ancestor spirits are described as existing in one of three different forms. I have already discussed two of these forms: 1) Lost souls that remain stuck in the confusion and suffering of the Middle World, and 2) Fully compassionate ancestor spirits of the Upper and Lower Worlds who have transcended beyond the Middle World.

The third form is what Michael Harner called “quasi-compassionate ethnocentric spirits.” These are the souls of deceased humans, but unlike lost souls, ethnocentrics have purposefully chosen to remain in the Middle World. One of the reasons why they do this is to “look after their surviving family members.” [23] This is what makes them ethnocentric—they belong to a cultural group. Furthermore, unlike lost souls, ethnocentrics retain a formidable amount of spiritual power. Quasi-compassionate means that ethnocentrics are compassionate or friendly to their own descendants, but they may “undertake hostile action against outsiders who seem to threaten their descendants, their sacred places and objects, and their interests.” [24]

Generally speaking, Core Shamanism does not have practices for dealing with ethnocentric spirits. This is because Core Shamanism places emphasis on working with fully compassionate helping spirits such as transcended ancestor spirits. Ordinarily, the protocol for dealing with ethnocentrics is to leave them alone and avoid interfering with their purposes. They will typically not be a problem unless provoked. If an ethnocentric spirit presents itself in association with a client, maintaining respect for the ethnocentric is paramount. It may be necessary to explain to the client what the situation is, and encourage the client to seek training in shamanism so as to better understand how to manage these ethnocentric spirit relationships.

Core Shamanism does not have specific practices described as ancestral work, but a shamanic practitioner can readily adapt the established methods of Core Shamanism to do ancestral work and deal with ancestral issues. As always in the practice of Core Shamanism, the emphasis of the work is on empowerment and healing. It is also necessary to consistently maintain a clear understanding of the ethical considerations and implications of any kind of shamanic work.

1. Harner 2013:2
2. Mircea Eliade (Eliade 1964) and Michael Harner (Harner 2013) do not provide a definition for “ancestral work.” While they do provide many examples of cultural practices relating to ancestors, these practices are very diverse and cannot be consistently or universally mapped into the modern concept of “ancestral work.” The exception here is perhaps in the category of shamanic initiatory experiences, as briefly described later in this article.
3. The principles of Core Shamanism are outlined by Michael Harner in his book Cave and Cosmos (Harner 2013), and they are also taught in the various training workshops offered by the Foundation for Shamanic Studies.
4. Psychology Today 2026
5. Yehuda 2022
6. Krishnamoorthi 2019:16,18
7. Ciydem et al 2025
8. Examples of fully-compassionate helping spirits include power animals and, transcended ancestor spirits of the Upper World. See also Harner 2013:67.
9. Mokelke 2025
10. Soul loss is the loss of a portion of the soul. Harner 2013:257
11. Harner 2013:258
12. Harner 2013:264
13. Harner 2013:266
14. In many cases, the souls are so confused that they are not even aware they are deceased. Harner 2013:257.
15. These “troubles of a spirit nature” can have “serious repercussions in a person’s health and community life,” (Harner 2013:65) and can contribute to the person experiencing conditions such as unresolved grief or chronic depression.
16. Harner 2013:136
17. In fact, we would probably avoid the word “reverence” because it might imply “worship.” In the practice of Core Shamanism, we do not worship any spirits. Worship is more of a religious practice, and shamanism is not a religion—it is an independent spirituality. In shamanism we are not subservient to any spirits but are in direct partnership and cooperation with them.
18. Harner 2013:135
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid. Note that teacher spirits are most commonly associated with the Upper World, but they may also be found in the Lower World. See Harner 2013:211
21. See Eliade 1964 and Harner 2013
22. Eliade 1964:43-44
23. Harner 2013:59
24. Ibid.

Ciydem, Emre & Demirbilek, Zeynep Sude
2025 Understanding Intergenerational Transmission of Physical and Emotional Abuse Through the Experiences and Perceptions of Abuse Victims
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10926771.2025.2491767

Eliade, Mircea
1964 Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Harner, Michael
1980 The Way of the Shaman. San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row.
2013 Cave and Cosmos: Shamanic Encounters with Another Reality. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books.

Krishnamoorthi, Mahima
2019 The Dilemma of Disempowerment: How Generational Trauma Impacts Alcohol Abuse Rates in the Australian Aboriginal Community
https://ojs.stanford.edu/ojs/index.php/surj/article/view/1346

Mokelke, Susan
2025 Ethical Considerations in Shamanic Healing
https://www.shamanism.org/articles/ethical-considerations-in-shamanic-healing/

Psychology Today
2026 Intergenerational Trauma
https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/basics/intergenerational-trauma

Yehuda, Rachel
2022 How Parents’ Trauma Leaves Biological Traces in Children
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-parents-rsquo-trauma-leaves-biological-traces-in-children/

Copyright ©2026 The Foundation for Shamanic Studies. All rights reserved.

Edited by Susan Mokelke. Thanks to Narrye Caldwell and Robbie Staufer, who provided editorial review.

The author of this article, Robbie Priestley, is a faculty member of the Foundation for Shamanic Studies. He has a background in computer science and business, and has extensive outdoor adventure and solitary wilderness experience.