I have a confession. I struggle with the word patriarchy. Patriarchy is not merely an approximation, a synonymic architecture for hierarchy; it is a particular arrangement of the world, one that gathers power around maleness and teaches family, faith, economy, and governance to orbit its gravity. But no world built around this particular supremacy leaves anyone untouched. It asks men to forget parts of themselves to wear the mask of dominance. It teaches women to cultivate lives within its weather. It renders those beyond the binary unspeakable, for their presence unsettles the fiction that this order is inevitable. The wound begins somewhere particular, yet it does not stay there. It slips into bloodlines, gestures, prayers, institutions, and memory. It lives in the bodies that first learned to carry it, and in the bodies still rehearsing its inheritance, often without knowing the story they have been asked to keep telling.

The question I find most of us wracking our hands over, losing sleep, or hair, or both, and what we collectively reach for first is how do we dismantle patriarchy. It is such a reasonable question. It is also, more recently, I have found, too capitulating to match the gravity of what we are actually facing. A more interesting, if not provocative, question, I think, one that moves the work out of the underpinnings of the news cycle (what it is not saying and should be, but I digress), and into the marrow, is this:

I ask it that way because patriarchy does not arrive fresh in each generation. What we are watching unfold in this political moment is not a rupture in an otherwise healthy pattern. It is another flowering of something ancient, something that has been blooming and going to seed for a very, very, long time, scattering itself forward through bodies that do not consent to carry it. Consent matters.

This is part of why the current moment has felt so uncanny to me, like deja vu wearing a new coat. We recognize it in our bones before we recognize it in the headlines, because our bones have been holding this pattern for generations. We’ve learned to accommodate it, to assimilate it, and even protect it because to do otherwise would mean losing something that feels like the only safety on offer at the time patriarchy sends its eporvescent trigger.

Patriarchy is not merely the rule of men and the fear of it by rabid feminists. I once got called as an expert witness in a domestic violence trial where the defence attorney tried to have me discredited as, of all scary things, a man-hating feminist!

I want us to consider patriarchy as an old cosmology that teaches the world to forget its own aliveness. It enters slowly, like a drought beneath the soil, persuading rivers to behave like pipelines for commerce, forests to become inventory, bodies to become property, ancestors to become monuments, and mystery to submit itself to certainty.

It is a grammar of separation that drifts through bloodlines until it feels ancestral, though it is only familiar. It asks us to believe that life arranges itself into ladders instead of watersheds, into dominion instead of reciprocity, into ownership instead of kinship. Over generations, these arrangements root themselves beneath language, beneath memory, beneath the ordinary rituals of family life, until they flower as common sense. It survives because it is relational, passed hand to hand and body to body, through fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, churches and schools, workplaces and the quiet architecture of what gets said and what gets swallowed. Silence is one of its most efficient transmission systems.

When words are weighed for survival rather than offered in trust, domination has already taken root.

We inherit this unevenly. Men are often handed scripts of domination alongside emotional exile, the two arriving as a package, so that control over others comes bundled with estrangement from the interior of one’s own body and psyche. Productivity becomes a stand-in for aliveness. Women often inherit accommodation and hypervigilance, the felt sense of a nervous system trained to scan a room before it is permitted to rest in one, along with the unpaid labor of holding relationships together when everyone else has been taught not to reach. And everyone, across every gendered inheritance, receives some form of fragmentation, because a system built on domination has to narrow what it means to be human to function at all. It cannot afford a wholeness when wholeness does not acquiesce.

This is where I bring you to the praxis of Ancestral Reverence, where ancestral practice becomes a form of cultural work.

The dead are often more complex than the roles history assigned them. Given enough silence, they sometimes reveal longings that could not find expression in the lives they lived. What reaches us is not only their wounds. Something else continues to travel through the bloodline, waiting for conditions that might finally allow it to emerge.

This is what so many people are sensing beneath the unrest of our time, attributing it all of it to their own anxieties, when in fact it is much more nuanced. These are their invitations, having less to do with us resisting what is happening around us and more of us becoming intimate with the inheritances through which these patterns continue to find a home.

These are old agreements living inside families that have quietly become culturally embedded agreements. These are gestures passed from parent to child that have eventually become laws. These are silences that began around a single table and somehow have echoed across generations until they are mistaken for reality itself.

The work has been slow and insidious enough that it rarely manifests dissent.

And here is where the ancestor question becomes useful rather than abstract. We tend to think of ancestors as the ones who handed the pattern down, the ones who taught the silence or enforced the scan or modeled the exile.

That is true, and it is not the whole truth.

Ancestors are also the ones still waiting. Waiting in the marrow, waiting in the dream field, waiting in the mycelial tangle of lineage that runs underneath the visible family tree, for someone descended from them to finally interrupt what they themselves could not put down. Grandmothers who accommodated because there was no ground safe enough to do otherwise. Grandfathers who went emotionally feral in isolation because tenderness had nowhere to land. They did not fail us so much as run out of room. The room is what we are being asked to make now.

This is what ritual is for. I have always found that a well-grounded ritual does not argue with a pattern but yields itself, making a clearing where the pattern can be seen, felt in the body, and set down without needing to be intellectually defeated first. In that clearing, lineage gets a chance to reorganize itself. Inherited roles loosen their grip just enough for older, more feral forms of kinship, the kind that existed before domination became the organizing principle of relationship, to find their way back into memory. Kinship that moves in circles and returns on itself rather than marching forward in a straight line from oppressor to oppressed. Kinship contaminated and complex, intimate with the harm that runs through it, and still capable of tenderness.

So the invitation is not to exile the ancestors who carried these patterns to us, for this rejection keeps us in the same linear story patriarchy prefers, the clean break, the disowned relative, the family history amputated rather than metabolized. The invitation is to become available to the unfinished wisdom that those ancestors could not fully embody in their own lifetimes. Their longing did not die with them. It is still moving through the mycelium, still looking for a body willing to let it land, and it may in fact be looking for yours.

What kind of ancestor does patriarchy ask us to become? Sit with that question the way you would sit with a body of water at dusk, not solving it, just letting your own reflection surface in it.

Every Generation inherits a grammar of belonging. Every generation has the opportunity to speak it differently.

Perhaps patriarchy is not only a structure to dismantle. Perhaps it is a forgetting to be composted.

Ancestral reverence and repair becomes the slow turning of that compost. We descend into the layered humus of lineage, where grief and devotion, conquest and tenderness, fear and longing have all been folded together by time. This is where we set about our ever-fixed devotion, not in an attempt to purify the past but to trace its micellium, the roots still drinking from these waters, where every generation is given an opportunity to alter the soil from which the future will grow into a learning body to not repeat the folly of those who came before.

About Shannon:

Shannon Willis is a ritual guide and founder of Red Earth Healing. Her work lives at the meeting place of ancestral reverence, dreams, mythology, and the living world, exploring how inherited patterns move through families, cultures, and the body, and how ritual can restore relationships that have long been fractured.

Through courses, seasonal ceremonies, and community practice, she invites people into a deeper conversation with ancestors, place, and the unseen threads that shape our lives. Her upcoming course, Bloodlines & Boundaries: Ancestral Liberation amidst the Fall of Patriarchy, offers an immersive exploration of patriarchal inheritance, family systems, and the liberatory possibilities of ancestral relationships.