Belonging Without Blood: Ancestry, Indigeneity, and the Work of Pagan Practice
In contemporary occult and esoteric spaces, claims of blood, lineage, and indigeneity have become increasingly common, and increasingly careless. There is a persistent temptation to ground spiritual legitimacy in ancestry, to assert that one is entitled to certain gods, rites, symbols, or cosmologies by virtue of descent. This temptation is often framed as reverence for tradition, but in practice it collapses into a shallow essentialism that mistakes genetics for inheritance and history for permission. Blood becomes a proxy for authority, and ancestry is treated as a form of spiritual ownership. This is not only historically unsound, it is ethically corrosive.
The idea that spiritual validity is inherited biologically is a modern construction. Pre-modern religious worlds did not operate on the assumption that belief, ritual competence, or sacred relationship were transmitted through blood alone. They were transmitted through dwelling, labour, initiation, participation, memory, and obligation. A person belonged to a cult, a shrine, a land, or a god because they showed up, because they were shaped by place and practice, not because a distant ancestor might once have stood on the same soil. When bloodline mattered, it mattered within living social structures, not as a mythic claim reaching back into prehistory.
In occult spaces today, however, ancestry is often treated as a trump card. To claim indigenous status, or proximity to an ancient people, is to claim authenticity by default. This is particularly fraught in Europe, where the archaeological and genetic record shows again and again that there is no unbroken continuity of population in any given place. Europe is a palimpsest of movement, admixture, collapse, survival, and reconfiguration. To claim indigeneity here is almost always to misunderstand the term, or to quietly redefine it until it simply means old, familiar, or emotionally resonant.
Almost nobody, when the term is used in its strictest and most meaningful sense, is indigenous to anywhere. True indigeneity requires uninterrupted presence before major population replacement, continuity of culture tied to that land, and the absence of historic migration as the basis of settlement. By that definition, Europe has almost no indigenous populations at all. The continent has been shaped by repeated waves of movement since deep prehistory, with farming, metallurgy, language, and political structures arriving again and again from elsewhere. To claim indigeneity here is usually to mistake long residence for original presence, or to compress thousands of years of complex demographic change into a single imagined continuity. This does not diminish European histories, but it does demand honesty about them.
There is also a more troubling edge to this rhetoric. Blood claims in occult spaces often mirror nationalist or ethnocentric thinking, even when those making them would strongly reject such associations. The language may be poetic rather than political, but the underlying logic is the same. It draws boundaries around who may speak, who may practise, who may belong. It replaces relationship with pedigree, and in doing so it hollows out the very traditions it claims to protect.
I have had to confront this myself, not as an abstract concern, but as a personal reckoning. Like many people drawn to land-based spirituality, I felt the pull to understand where I came from, not just culturally but genealogically. I wanted to know what stories my body carried, what histories lay beneath the surface. I pursued this not to claim entitlement, but to gain context. What I found was not a tidy lineage that anchored me neatly to a place, but something far more instructive.
My maternal line traces back through a mitochondrial haplogroup that enters Europe with early Neolithic populations. It is a lineage shaped by movement, by the slow spread of farming communities out of the Near East and into the Balkans and beyond. It does not root itself in a single territory. It does not sit comfortably within modern national boundaries. It persists precisely because it adapts, because it is absorbed into new contexts rather than remaining fixed. It carries with it not a particular culture or pantheon, but a pattern of survival through continuity of practice rather than continuity of place.
My paternal line tells a similar story, though with a different emphasis. It stabilises early in the Balkan region and remains there for millennia, surviving waves of cultural change and demographic upheaval. It is deeply European, but it is not indigenous in the strict sense. It arrives with Neolithic populations and persists through Bronze Age and Iron Age transformations, not as a dominant or expansionist force, but as a quiet continuity. It does not grant me an ancestral claim to any single culture or religious system. What it does offer is evidence of long participation in the shifting religious architectures of Europe.
Neither of these lines originates in Britain. Both arrive here late, likely through historical movement rather than deep prehistory. There is no honest way for me to claim that I am indigenous to this land, or that I inherit Iron Age British spirituality by blood. Accepting this was not a loss. It was a clarification. It stripped away a narrative I had never fully trusted and replaced it with something more solid.
The point at which my ancestral story genuinely begins in Britain is therefore not in deep time, but in history. It most likely starts somewhere between the Roman period and the early medieval centuries, when people moved into Britain through administration, military service, trade, settlement, and marriage. One person, at one point, arrives and stays. From there, generations follow, not as migrants but as inhabitants. That is where my British story begins, not in prehistory, but in the long, quiet work of living in a place.
What became clear is that ancestry does not confer spiritual entitlement, but it does provide perspective. My lines have passed through animistic worlds, agrarian cosmologies, household cults, seasonal rites, and syncretic religious systems. They have been shaped by land, labour, and survival, not by abstract belief. They have belonged to places because people lived and died there, not because those places were named or claimed. This is not a lesser inheritance. It is a more honest one.
My relationship to Britain, then, is not one of blood entitlement but of lived belonging. My ancestors worked this land, buried their dead here, adapted to its rhythms, and passed on its memory. That is not indigeneity, but it is inheritance. It is the kind of inheritance that most human beings throughout history have known. To belong to a place because you are shaped by it, rather than because you can trace an unbroken line to its distant past, is not a modern compromise. It is the older way.
As a modern pagan, this understanding has sharpened rather than diminished my practice. It has freed me from the need to justify myself through imagined continuity. I do not need to claim ancient gods as my own by right of blood. I can approach them, or the spirits of place, through relationship and humility. I can honour the forms of spirituality that have shaped Europe without pretending that they belong to me exclusively. I can stand in the landscape where I live and build a devotional life that is responsive rather than possessive.
What makes this valid is not ancestry but accountability. A relationship with the land is maintained through care, reciprocity, and responsibility. Blood does not guarantee any of these things. In fact, it often obscures them. When ancestry becomes the primary claim, practice becomes secondary, and the living relationship is replaced by a static identity.
There is a quiet irony here. The more one insists on blood and indigeneity, the further one moves from the religious worlds one claims to honour. Those worlds were not concerned with abstract purity or distant origin. They were concerned with weather, crops, birth, death, boundaries, obligations, and the presence of the unseen in daily life. They were relational, situational, and local. To approach them honestly now requires a similar posture.
My story is not exceptional. It is, in fact, deeply ordinary. Most people in Europe and its diasporas are not indigenous to anywhere in the strict sense. We are the descendants of movement, adaptation, and survival. Recognising this does not sever us from the past. It places us within it properly. It reminds us that tradition is not something we own, but something we participate in, and that participation is always provisional, always earned, and always relational.
Rejecting blood claims and false indigeneity is not an act of loss, but of integrity. It clears space for a spirituality that is grounded rather than grasping, responsive rather than possessive. It allows us to honour the deep religious architectures that have shaped our ancestors without turning them into props for identity. It affirms that belonging is something we do, not something we inherit. For those of us committed to serious occult or pagan work, this is not a limitation. It is the condition that makes the work real.
