The Ancestors

Ancestor veneration — the acknowledgement, reverence, and ongoing relationship with the deceased members of one's family, community, and lineage — is one of the most widely-attested spiritual practices in human history. It is central to traditional religion across sub-Saharan Africa (particularly the Yoruba Egungun tradition, Bantu ancestor-honouring practices, and West African diaspora traditions such as Vodou, Santería, and Candomblé); across East Asia (Confucian jing zǔ, Japanese sosen sūhai, Vietnamese ancestor altars); across the Americas (Mesoamerican Día de los Muertos, Andean ayllus, most North American indigenous nations); across Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime traditions; and, in earlier eras, across all of Europe.

Most ancestral traditions distinguish between recent ancestors (parents, grandparents, personally known relatives) and older, mythic ancestors (the founding figures of the lineage, the culture-heroes, the primordial First Ones). Both are held to remain participants in the living community — able to be addressed, consulted, propitiated, and thanked, and (in most traditions) able to answer.

In ceremonial contexts across the entheogenic traditions of the Americas, ancestral encounters are one of the most consistently reported categories of experience. Ayahuasca ceremonies commonly bring visitors face-to-face with deceased grandparents or parents; peyote ceremonies of the Native American Church often function partly as ancestor-communion events; iboga ceremonies in the Bwiti tradition of Gabon are explicitly framed as journeys to meet one's ancestors and receive their guidance. In modern psychedelic reports, encounters with the ancestral dead recur across cultures and beliefs, sometimes as visual apparitions of specific deceased loved ones, sometimes as a diffuse felt presence of 'the old ones' watching, teaching, or blessing.

Whether these encounters are metaphysical events, autonomous complexes arising from the psyche, culturally-shaped hallucinations, or something the current vocabulary cannot yet describe, remains — as always — the codex's open question. What is unambiguous is that they matter deeply to the people who report them, and that they are among the most-durably-positive kinds of encounter experiencers describe having.

Sources:
Wikipedia — Veneration of the dead
Wikipedia — Ancestor worship in Africa