#troe2022

Mods' altar from 2022.

My trans rite altar for this year’s elevation. This is the first time I’ve had the energy, space, and time to go all out, which is a rare combo for me. My original plan for it was a bit more simple, but when I asked the spirits I was honoring if they needed anything else on it, the unanimous response was “more shiny things!”

Mods' altar from 2022.

[Please use this, along with any specific prayers to specific entities or individuals you may be working with, as part of your nightly ritual beginning tonight. This is a basic format and you can alter it as needed to accommodate your needs or practice. Please note that we’re using “transition” here to mean becoming an ancestor, not to put boundaries around who is and isn’t trans for the purposes of this work. –Rocket]

We call upon the ancestors of our line, the progenitors of our queer spirits,

those who came before and laid the path behind them, the mighty transgender dead.

We call upon the mighty line of our family stretching back to times none of us can imagine, sisters and brothers and siblings in every age of the earth,

who would not understand the words we use or the lives we lead but who would know us as their children,

who braided flowers into their hair as we braid flowers into our hair,

who touched flame to wick as we touch flame to wick,

who danced and howled under the stars as we dance and howl under the stars,

who lived in joy and died without fear as we seek to live and die.

Bright and well trans ancestors, known and unknown, named and unnamed,

you who transitioned in ancient times and you who transitioned within our lifetimes,

Honored helping spirits who have stepped up to tend the line of the transgender dead, and bright and well ancestors who know the practices, who bubble over with love and blessing to pour into the cupped hands of their troubled children,

You who led in life and lead in death, you who have offered the gifts of guidance and protection to the members of your family who have yet to find peace, to the troubled dead thirsting for care and to the weary living still battling each day, and you who have those gifts to offer, we call to you.

Marsha P. Johnson, we call to you. Hail and welcome. We offer you honor and remembrance. We offer you love and devotion. We offer you praise and proclamation among the living to bring your legacy to your descendants. We offer you cool water for your journey.

[Any other ancestral helping spirit, deity, or representatives that you are personally honoring or working with in your ritual], we call to you. Hail and welcome. We offer you honor and remembrance. We offer you love and devotion. We offer you praise and proclamation among the living to bring your legacy to your descendants. We offer you cool water for your journey. [Repeat as needed.]

Bright and well ancestors, hear us! Reach your hands out to meet us and be with us in this work! 

We ask you to bless us with your memory, with your guidance, with your strength. We ask you to bless us as the living faces of your mighty line, to be with us and let us know you.

We ask you to pour healing and protection down our line to bathe our troubled dead, to bathe us, in cool sacred water. We ask that you hold the trauma of our troubled dead with love and understanding, that it may be washed away, that it may trouble them and us no more.

We ask you to lay a blessing around our ancestral line, that you encompass every generation that stands between your lives and ours in it, that you pour it outwards into future generations, that every member of our family that has ever drawn breath and every member of our family that will ever draw breath may breathe in your blessing like air and be filled and surrounded by it. 

We ask that you guide our brothers and sisters and siblings who have come to join you in the last year, that you receive them with celebration, that you give them the peace and welcome that the living world would not. 

We ask that you give them honor and remembrance; that you give them love and devotion; that you give them a light to guide them to peace and music to dance them through the gates; that you give them cool water for their journey.

This year’s Ancestor Rite is coming up quick and we’ve finally gotten some solid information about what needs to change this year.

After seven years of conducting the Rite in its current form, this year’s divination with the relevant helping spirits has provided us with some new guidelines around ritual format that we have been hoping for for some time. Here’s how we’re thinking about it:

Assuming our past years’ work has been effective, there are now a good deal of trans ancestors, people who were alive both recently and longer ago, who feel themselves in connection with us, who have received the care and honor we offered through previous years’ elevations, who are bright and well and who can tend the line from the other side.

Most ancestral practices discourage interfacing directly with the troubled dead; instead, the ongoing practice of the living is to honor and connect with our bright and well ancestors. Practitioners then ask these bright ancestors to care for the troubled dead, to bring them into healing, and to place blessings around the familial line. So this year we are shifting to that model instead of trying, as living practitioners, to offer peace that we do not ourselves know to the recently passed. Therefore, here are some new ritual guidelines to try.

 1. We’re still preparing an altar and spending the nine nights leading up to the Trans Day of Remembrance with it. The altar should now celebrate and honor the bright and well trans ancestors and helping spirits that you honor in your work year round or that you wish to invite into your practice.

2. Instead of placing the altar on the ground, you should now put this altar in a place that you can sit with it every night. We won’t be physically elevating the altars this year. It can be a part of your existing altar setup if you have one, or it can be on a dresser, table, shelf, or wherever works for you.

3. Work the altar every night for nine nights, beginning on November 12th and ending on November 20th. We have some ideas for what working the altar will mean for us, but your ideas are also welcome and encouraged! We recommend that you still light a dedicated candle and offer a fresh glass of water. You can also offer them incense or other smoke, cut flowers, a drink or a meal, prayers, poems, music, dancing, whatever you feel called to offer. These offerings should be directed towards the bright and well trans ancestors that we have been working with for the last seven years, and any others that you are connected to – not to the recently passed.

4. We have a new base prayer that you can build around, with which we’ll be asking those bright and well ancestors to care for our troubled dead and to lay a blessing around the line, and we’ll be honoring and celebrating them for stepping up to do that work with us.

5. It’s fine to still read the list of names if that’s part of your annual practice, but instead of speaking directly to those family members who have passed in the last year, we are now identifying them by name to the bright and well ancestors and helping spirits and asking them to look after them.

6. Note: It’s still important not to put any images of living people on your ancestor altar!

 We’re glad to be stepping into this new phase of the Trans Ancestor Rite for a couple of reasons. We hope that this format will be less grueling on practitioners – we’ve definitely felt the weight of trying to allow the trauma of hundreds of troubled dead to process through our living bodies for nine days in a row, and we don’t want to be guiding our community through ritual practices that feel like torture! We’ve also felt less than awesome about using the elevation format – it’s not from a closed practice, but we are using it out of context and that’s not a great way to operate. (Also the individual that we directly learned this from has gone vocally fascist over the last few years and we are glad to no longer feel like we have to be using her work!)

We welcome any questions or feedback! Have you been getting other information from your divination? Do you have practices that you have been finding effective for connecting with the bright and well trans ancestors? What are you thinking about for this year?

Let us know if you’re participating this year! Please share photos of your altars, or what offerings you’re making! If you tag posts #TROE2022, we’ll feature them on the blog!

In solidarity,

En la lucha,

Mir veln zey iberlebn,

Mods' altar (Alder & Rocket), night 1.

[Image description: a photo in a dark room of an altar laid out on a white bandana. Contents include a round frame drum in back with a Celtic pattern painted on it, a blue goblet of water surrounded by silk flowers, assorted candles, an image of a person's face in a frame, and a smoke bundle and small offerings in the foreground.]

A little understated, due to family staying over, but very lovely to test out the new format.

We got encouraging divination responses that we'll share in more depth soon, but the upshot is that Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P Johnson, and Leslie Feinberg will all help tend the ancestral line this year and can be invoked by name as ancestral spirits. (Agdistis, a mythological figure that both of us work with in a related capacity, may also be involved if they fit into your practice - not to worry if not.)

Thank you for joining us, we will be checking the #troe2022 tag for anyone else who's participating this year. 🤍🌱🕯️💐🍶

Hi comrades! We did our closing divination yesterday and wanted to share some of our results. We asked the Ancestral Helping Spirits that we’ve been working with whether they thought the new format was effective, and they all were in agreement that it was! We asked if there were any changes that they wanted us to make for future years, and we got responses that were a little hard to understand. They all seemed to think there were some changes we should make with regards to the timing — how many nights we do the rite, or when in the year, whether the nights are sequential or more spread out — and so we’ll be doing more work with them before next year to figure out the best plan, but they are happy with this year’s work and believe it was effective, so that’s great news!

If you did the rite with us this year, how did it go? Did you notice anything different from previous years? We would love if you shared your reflections with us!