Ancestral Wounds and Blessings

"When a person experiences terrible trauma—devastating loss or unspeakable violence, things like that—the wound is too painful, too raw for that individual to transmute. It’s like if you get a cut, it must first scab over before the real healing can take place. And so the wounding is passed on to future generations to process the grief and transmute the pain. It is not a punishment or a shirking of responsibility, but a product of the fact that lineages are collective entities. At least, this is the way it's supposed to work. But for the last five hundreds years or more, the knowledge of healing the wounding of the fathers has been lost. So the wounds have collected and collected in each subsequent generation until now it is not sustainable. The time is now. You must heal the wounding of your lineages, you must transmute the pain that runs through your blood, for the future cannot function if you don't. The knowledge of how to heal the wounding of the fathers must be reclaimed and passed on so we don’t get to this point again.”--Caitriona of the Wolf Clan

In this Reliquiae: An Ancestral Reclamations universe, the ancestral wounds are healed by first witnessing and/or remembering them and then calling in the Wise Ones to do the actual healing.
Once wounds have been healed, there is a space left behind that can then be filled by an ancestral blessing. Ancestral blessings come in many, many forms. These can be a knowing of a forgotten way of life; or they can be character traits or physical traits; or less tangible things like good luck and good fortune.

Ancestral Wounds and Blessings in Jane's Story

Jane's Scottish Ancestors:
Wounds--Witnessing the massacre of the clan and the destruction of their village; enslavement; the forced forgetting of their clan ways.
Blessings--The ability to see the web of interconnection among all things; to understand the bigger picture.

Jane's Amorite Ancestors:
Wounds--a terrible time of famine forced them from their traditional, nomadic, ways of life into the cities where their traditional ways were forgotten.
Blessings--The perception of control over chaos through civilization; through ordering things.

Jane's Norse Ancestors:
Wounds--the execution of the last of the seidr practitioners of Jane's lineage at the hands of those who forced Christianity onto the people.
Blessings--the remaining knowledge of a tiny bit of seidr magic; and the strength to not hide one's true self.

Jane's Spanish Ancestors:
Wounds--the guilt and ramifications of subjecting others to domination.
Blessings--an awareness of the ways in which one sees themself as superior to others; and the knowing that the Divine is ever present no matter how far from home one might go.