Oh could you please expand on “washing the dead”?

ioqayin:

Of course. 

What I mean by “washing the dead” is giving the dead a bowl of clean water to wash themselves in, and to cleanse away their sins. The water is charmed in a certain way for this purification. There should also be a lot of light on the altar. Kind of like drawing a healing/cleansing bath for ones own self, but instead this is for the Dead to use. 

The dead carry demons with them, and sometimes those demons affect their descendants. We must deal with these demons as well if we are ever going to come to a place of Wholeness. This is difficult and deep work, and we must be careful as the dead are powerful (sometimes they do not realise how powerful they are) and can cause problems for us if we do not do this work from a place of respect and purity in our own souls. 

There will be ancestors that simply refuse to do this work with the worker, and that is fine. Just take them off your altar. They may come back to you when they see how well you are treating your other spirits. Or they may wander lost forever. 

Sometimes, past lives and past ancestors have “split off” and become a dangerous follower who becomes obsessed with the living. These followers especially must be healed and brought back into “alignment”. 

Martin Coleman’s book Communing With Spirits talks about this work a little bit. 

For me, one of the parts of our souls contains all of our ancestral memories, and it is there that some memories exist which knot up our life force. If we are to come into Wholeness with all of Nature, we must unbind those pieces of life force, and sometimes that has to do with dealing with ancestral trauma. And, hopefully, this can be applied to the whole of the world.