By the time I was initiated as a Sangoma in Zululand, I had already been sitting with Ayahuasca for several years. Most people see these as two separate worlds. The African ancestral tradition on one side. The Amazonian plant medicine tradition on the other. Different continents, different cosmologies, different languages for the invisible.
What I discovered, sitting in both worlds over many years, is that they are pointing at exactly the same thing. The ancestors do not care which door you use. They will come through whichever one is open.
But there is something worth understanding before we go further, because it is something that took me years to see clearly myself.
The ancestors are not the same as the spiritual world. They are related, but they are not the same thing.
A doorway of light
The ancestors are your bloodline. They are the specific thread of people who carried your life forward through time, back beyond memory, back beyond history, back to the beginning of the human story. They are not abstract or symbolic. They are the actual people whose bodies and choices and prayers made your existence possible. That lineage has its own weight, its own intelligence, and its own unfinished business. When you work with your ancestors, you are working with something that is yours in a way that nothing else is.
The spiritual world is something different. It is the world that human consciousness has been building for as long as there have been humans. Every deity, every spirit, every sacred figure that has ever been named and called upon and believed in, Ganesha, Yemanjá, the spirits of the forest, the beings of light, all of them exist in this world. It is vast. It is real. And much of it was created, shaped, and populated by ancestors, yours and everyone else’s, across thousands of years of ceremony and prayer and vision.
Both are significant. Neither is better than the other. They are simply different rooms in the same house.
Ayahuasca moves through both.
She will take you to the spiritual world with a force and a clarity that is impossible to ignore. She will show you Ganesha and Yemanjá and the great anaconda of the forest and beings that have no name in any language you know. That is real, and it is important, and it will change you.
But she will also take you to the ancestral line. And that is a different kind of encounter entirely.
Ancient ceremony
When the ancestors appear in ceremony, they do not always announce themselves. Sometimes they come as presences you recognise without knowing how. Sometimes they come as faces from very far back, people you have never met in this life but who feel more familiar than anyone you have ever known. Sometimes they come with unfinished business, with grief, with gifts, with instructions. And sometimes they come simply to let you know they are there, that they have always been there, that the line has never been broken.
A Sangoma is trained to open a specific channel to this lineage. The work of initiation is to learn how to open the door, how to listen to what comes through, and how to live by what you receive. It is not belief. It is practice. Direct experience, repeated over many years, until the channel becomes reliable.
Ayahuasca does not replace that work. She deepens it. She takes you through a different door into the same territory, and sometimes she shows you things there that the Sangoma training points toward but cannot always reach directly.
What she has shown me, again and again across thirty years of ceremony, is that the ancestral thread runs through everything. It runs through the plant medicine work. It runs through the instruments. It runs through the songs. It runs through the ceremonies I have held for others. The ancestors are not separate from this journey. In many ways, they are the reason for it.
The full story of how these two traditions met in my life, and what Ayahuasca showed me about the bloodline, is coming.
If you have sat in ceremony yourself and felt something that might have been an ancestor, this story is for you.