The human brain coevolved with the emergent faculties of language and storytelling. Memory and narrative are not merely byproducts of cognition; they are fundamental to how we organize experience across time.
For humans, the physical body does not precede the story we tell. We are the only species that biologically and metabolically emerged alongside the very language used to describe our biology and metabolism. Our story dictates our biology.
If biology and myth-making capacities evolved together, then the inverse must also be true: changing the story changes the body.
This raises an unfamiliar possibility. If we introduce a new story, perhaps we could be physically different in this world.
To be different in this world—to locate the narrative that makes our words beautiful flesh—we need not look beyond ourselves.
That is, precisely, because we exist in tandem with the narratives of our past.
Our conception of self resides in a sacred cosmos of knowledge. Hidden behind a cursed veil, kept safe by our predecessors.
Nevertheless, Ancestral Intelligence is not just knowledge; it is the inheritance of meaning, the withheld and secreted stories that have shaped our way of being since the beginning of time.
These narratives do not merely live in our minds—they live through us, encoded in ritual, in language, in the way we touch, move, and dream.
This inheritance has been fractured, seized by a racial order entrenched in the afterlife of slavery, but never lost.
We are born into stories that long predate us—ancestral narratives crafted in meaning, memory, survival, love, ritual, and resistance.
Yet, through an unparalleled catastrophe, many of these stories were disfigured or silenced, replaced by descriptive statements that taught us to see ourselves through the gaze of the other.
But what if the stories of our past—told about us, by us—were the very scripts we needed to adopt? What if Ancestral Intelligence held not just history, but instruction?
The stories of our past—told about us, by us—still remain.
They hold the truths we were meant to perform, the self-knowledge we were meant to embody, the archives of our lineage, the myths, the proverbs, the ways of knowing that existed before we were told what was possible, what was true.
Our physical bodies do not exist in isolation but instead perform and enact the narratives that surround us. If story has the power to shape our biology, then ancestral wisdom has the power to reshape our world.