Ancestor
Ancestors are those gone before, at once benevolent custodians of a lineage's vitality and fierce presences that haunt, possess and shame their neglectful descendants.
Our paraphrase of what the sources say it carries.
At a glance
- Type
- Image
- Group
- Spirit World / Soul and Psyche
- Borne by
- 3 figures
- Traditions
- Germanic folklore (1)Philippine folklore (1)Turkic mythology (1)
Figures that bear it
A model judged each figure against its own description, one term at a time. Is: the figure is a kind of this thing. Bears: it carries the thing or is marked by it. What a figure does is filed under motifs and powers. Open "why" for the sentence the judgement rests on.
- Anito is Philippine folklore
why
Ancestors form a substantial part of the category: the recently dead remain involved in the affairs of their descendants and are addressed as such.
- Asena is Turkic mythology
why
She is a mythical ancestor, giving birth to a lineage of warriors.
- Tuisto is Germanic folklore
why
That is a reception rather than a tradition — a Renaissance habit of reading every ancestral figure as one of the giants of Genesis — and the card keeps the two apart: earth-born ancestor in Tacitus, giant in the later books, with nothing in the earlier source supporting the promotion.