Following the Threads of Paganism

Yesterday we slipped, almost without noticing, down another rabbit hole. Though if I am honest, looking back over Unplugged Pagan lately, it feels less like a single descent and more like a habit of wandering—one rabbit hole braided into another, like roots under old forest ground. One question gives birth to the next, one name opens into a lineage of names, one festival dissolves into a constellation of other gatherings, and before long we are tracing people, organizations, traditions and ideas not just across years, but across the slow weathering of decades.

Eventually I find myself with far too many browser tabs open, as if each one is a small unresolved thought refusing to be closed, and I am left wondering—not just how we got here, but what it means that we can get here at all.

It puts me in mind of White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane. Not because I am trying to dress this up as a psychedelic detour through the 1960s, but because the rabbit has become something like a quiet companion in this work. A flicker at the edge of perception. Something half-seen in the underbrush of culture. Curiosity stirs, and we follow—not because we are certain there is a destination, but because not following would feel like refusing a question that has already been asked of us.

Sometimes the rabbit leads nowhere at all. Sometimes it simply leads to another rabbit, and then another, as if the point was never arrival but attentiveness. And every so often—rarely, but enough to matter—it leads somewhere that subtly rearranges the landscape in which we thought we were standing.

What Does Any of This Have to Do With Paganism?

That question has been sitting with me through much of this recent work, not as a problem to solve but as a kind of quiet pressure. What does the Rainbow Family have to do with Paganism? What does Bhakti Bliss have to do with Paganism? What does an electronic music festival, pulsing with bass and light and bodies in motion, have to do with anything we might call religion?

And then the question widens until it becomes almost unmanageable: what do yoga teachers, kirtan musicians, ecstatic dancers, academics, festival organizers, Wiccans, Heathens, Druids, witches, animists, and the solitary person tending a small fire in the dark all have to do with one another?

Maybe nothing. Or maybe something so subtle it resists being named directly. That uncertainty is not a flaw in the inquiry—it is the condition that makes the inquiry necessary.

Because the real question is probably not whether all of these people are Pagan. Most of them are not, and do not need to be. The more interesting question is what currents of influence, imagination, borrowing, resistance, memory, and encounter shape the way modern Pagans come to understand Paganism at all.

And that is where the rabbit hole deepens in a different way—not as distraction, but as method.

First, Paganism Is Not One Religion

I have said this before, but it becomes more important the longer you sit with it: Paganism is not a single religion. It is not even a single thing that behaves like a religion. It is more like a field of overlapping practices, revivals, reconstructions, inventions, inheritances, and lived experiments in meaning.

Wicca can be a religion. Heathenry can be a religion. Ásatrú can be a religion. Druidry can be a religion, or a philosophy, or a poetic orientation toward land and memory. Hellenic, Roman, Kemetic, Celtic, animist, polytheist, reconstructionist and eclectic paths all sit beneath the same loose umbrella, though they do not always agree on what the umbrella is for.

There is no single Pagan church. No shared scripture. No central authority that can declare, once and for all, what counts and what does not. No pope of the old gods. No final doctrinal word that settles the matter.

Even the word itself does not begin as a name for a unified tradition. It comes through the Latin paganus, a word that once meant something closer to “country dweller” or “civilian,” and only later gathered religious meaning as a label for those outside the expanding boundaries of Christianity.

So the idea that there was once a single ancient thing called Paganism, coherent and unified, waiting to be rediscovered intact, is more comforting than it is accurate. The historical reality is messier, more local, more plural. Many gods, many rites, many households, many landscapes, many ways of being in relationship with the unseen.

What we call Paganism now is, in many ways, a modern act of gathering—an attempt to hold diversity under a single word without erasing the fact that it is still diverse.

So Who Teaches Us What Paganism Is?

If there is no central authority, then the question shifts: where does the meaning come from?

It comes from books and teachers, yes, but also from festivals, conversations, disagreements, online forums, academic papers, ritual spaces, music, storytelling, and the slow accumulation of shared experience. It comes from people who identify as Pagan, people who reject the label, and people who never think about the label at all but still shape the world in which it is used.

In that sense, Paganism is not transmitted only through institutions. It moves through networks. Through contact. Through encounter. Through repetition and reinterpretation. Through the simple fact of people showing up in the same places and influencing one another without always naming it as influence.

Once you see that, the rabbit hole stops looking like a detour and starts looking like the structure itself.

What Have the Scholars Been Telling Us?

Over the last while, we have been drawing on scholars who do not treat Paganism as an abstract definition to be imposed from above, but as something lived, negotiated, and continually re-formed from within.

Marion Bowman’s work on nature, the natural, and Pagan identity is useful precisely because it complicates what seems simple. “Nature religion” sounds straightforward until you ask actual practitioners what nature means to them, and you discover not one answer but many layered relationships—emotional, symbolic, ethical, embodied, and sometimes contradictory (Bowman, 2000).

Marisol Charbonneau’s research takes us directly into Pagan communities themselves, where identity is not a fixed category but something shaped through interaction, diversity, and local history. Her work on Montreal’s Pagan revival shows that what we call a tradition is often the outcome of people meeting, exchanging ideas, forming groups, breaking apart, and forming again in new configurations (Charbonneau, 2007, 2008).

Martin Lepage’s work adds another dimension: ritual as lived negotiation. Not performance in the sense of pretending, but performance in the sense of actively making meaning together—where identity, authority, gender, belonging, and community are not assumed but continually worked out in real time (Lepage, 2017).

Shelley Rabinovitch’s encyclopedic documentation preserves the texture of modern Witchcraft and Neo-Paganism as it actually developed—names, organizations, movements, and the human networks behind them (Rabinovitch, 2011). Dodie Graham McKay’s writing on festival culture shows how gatherings themselves become part of the religious ecosystem, not just reflections of it but engines within it (McKay, 2014).

Taken together, these works suggest something quietly radical: Paganism is not only a set of beliefs. It is a lived ecology of people, places, practices, and relationships that continuously generate meaning through contact.

Which Brings Us Back to Kaleidoscope

Our exploration of the Kaleidoscope Gathering made this especially visible. What began as a local festival history opened into a web of people, transitions, and overlapping communities—Gina Ellis, MiniFest, Pamela Fletcher, and the gradual emergence of Kaleidoscope as something larger than its origins.

We also saw how academic researchers moved through these spaces, not as distant observers but as participants in a living field of relationships, encountering people and practices that would not have been accessible through formal channels alone.

The festival, in that sense, was not just an event. It was a meeting point where trajectories crossed. Where something was transmitted without being formally taught. Where influence happened not through doctrine, but through presence.

And that is important: not because it implies control, but because it reveals how culture actually moves when no one is in charge of it.

And Then We Arrive at Yesterday’s Rabbit Hole

Our recent investigation traced connections across Ontario’s Rainbow environment, Bhakti in the Woods, Bhakti Bliss, GAIAFEST, Raven’s Knoll, KN¿WHERE, and a shifting constellation of performers, facilitators, and organizers.

What became most important was not what we could prove, but what we could not responsibly claim. We could not reduce this to a single organizing force. We could not turn shared participation into shared ideology. We could not mistake proximity for membership, or repetition for origin.

And yet, something undeniable remained: movement. People moving between spaces. Ideas moving with them. Practices appearing in new contexts. Relationships forming, dissolving, re-forming elsewhere. A kind of cultural weather system, constantly in motion.

Not conspiracy. Not design. Something more ordinary—and therefore more interesting.

Circles of Influence Are Not Conspiracies

Most influence does not announce itself. It does not need a centre. It does not require coordination. It happens in the small, repeated acts of exchange that rarely feel significant in the moment.

I attend your ritual. You attend my workshop. Someone shares a chant. Someone recommends a book. A festival adopts a practice that worked elsewhere. A teacher becomes a student somewhere else. A student becomes a teacher. Ideas drift, settle, mutate.

Years later, patterns appear, and we are tempted to imagine intention where there was only accumulation.

But culture does not require a conductor to become music.

So Who Influences What We Think Paganism Is?

Perhaps this is the question that keeps opening itself in different forms.

Who told us a symbol was ancient? Who decided a ritual was traditional? Who shaped the stories we now repeat without remembering their origin?

Was it archaeology? Medieval manuscripts? Victorian occultism? Gardnerian Wicca? Reconstructionist scholarship? A workshop in a field in 1997? A blog post? A meme? A grandmother’s story told by firelight?

Or was it simply repetition—something said often enough, by enough people, that it began to feel like it had always been true?

These are not idle questions. They are ways of distinguishing between history, tradition, interpretation, and meaning—without collapsing them into one another.

And What Does My Own Work Tell Me?

At some point, the inquiry turns back inward.

I have written about Brigid and Skadi. About frith, reciprocity, honour, obligation. About land, memory, and relationship. About festivals, symbols, leadership, and the fragile architecture of community. About fire, ancestors, belonging, betrayal, and the uneasy meeting point between spiritual language and everyday life.

And beneath all of it, a single question keeps returning, in different clothing:

What does any of this mean when it has to be lived, not just described?

That may be the real rabbit I keep following.

Not certainty. Not authority. But understanding—of where ideas come from, what sustains them, what distorts them, and what remains when they are carried out of ritual space and into ordinary days.

Maybe That Is Why We Chase the Rabbit

Rabbit holes are often treated as distractions, as if clarity should always move in straight lines. But the history of Pagan traditions—and the cultures around them—rarely moves in straight lines either.

Religions meet. Stories travel. Gods change names. Practices shift. What is lost is sometimes reconstructed, sometimes reimagined, sometimes replaced. The past is not simply recovered; it is negotiated with.

And the present, especially in the age of the internet, accelerates all of this until the boundaries between origin and influence become even more porous.

So perhaps the rabbit is not a distraction from the work. Perhaps it is the work—if we are willing to follow carefully, and honestly, and without pretending the trail is simpler than it is.

The Rabbit Hole Has Rules

And still, there are limits that matter.

Following connections is not the same as believing every connection is meaningful. Curiosity is not the same as credulity. Pattern-seeking is not the same as proof.

Association is not membership. Overlap is not control. Similarity is not origin. Tradition is not automatically history. And personal meaning is not automatically ancient meaning.

These distinctions do not diminish the mystery. They protect it from collapsing into fantasy.

Between blind acceptance and reflexive dismissal, there is a more difficult path: attention held with discipline.

Follow the rabbit. But also learn when the trail ends.

That, it seems, is part of the practice here.

Thanks, and Godspeed.