At some point, every rabbit warren needs an exit.
Not because there are no more tunnels.
There are always more tunnels.
Another question.
Another book.
Another scholar.
Another old festival program.
Another half-forgotten ritual.
Another story somebody swears happened exactly one way while somebody else remembers it entirely differently.
We could probably chase rabbits forever.
But this particular warren began with a fairly simple question: if we put the work of Shelley Rabinovitch, Dodie Graham McKay, Martin Lepage, Marisol Charbonneau, Marion Bowman and Barbara Jane Davy beside one another, is there some common thread running through what they have observed about Paganism?
That question led us somewhere much larger than I expected.
Relationship.
Responsibility.
Ethics.
Broken relationship.
Frith.
Repair.
Sacredness.
Ownership.
Stewardship.
Legacy.
And eventually we arrived here.
What kind of ancestors are we becoming?
That may be the question that gathers all the others together.
We Usually Imagine Ancestors Behind Us
When we speak about ancestors, we usually look backward.
Parents.
Grandparents.
Great-grandparents.
People whose names survive in family records.
People whose names have been lost.
People connected to places.
People connected through tradition, affinity, struggle, craft or spiritual inheritance.
Barbara Jane Davy’s work with inclusive Heathens helped complicate the idea of ancestry by showing that ancestry need not be understood only through blood.
There can be ancestors of affinity.
Ancestors of place.
People whose lives shaped paths that others later walked.
Once we accept that possibility, something interesting happens.
We stop being merely descendants.
We begin realizing that someday we will occupy the other side of that relationship.
We are future ancestors.
Maybe not biologically.
Maybe nobody will ever pour a drink in our name.
Maybe nobody will remember us personally at all.
But the world we are making will still become somebody else’s inheritance.
That makes ancestorhood less a condition of death than a condition of consequence.
We Are Building Somebody Else’s Past
That thought has been following me around since yesterday.
We are building somebody else’s past right now.
The things we consider ordinary will someday be history.
The festivals happening now will become old festivals.
The arguments happening now will become the conflicts somebody tries to reconstruct from surviving fragments.
The websites will disappear.
The photos will age.
The people who know why something happened will gradually become fewer.
Today will eventually become one of those strange historical periods where somebody says:
Surely someone wrote this down.
Maybe we did.
Maybe we didn’t.
Either way, people in the future will inherit the result.
Future Pagans Will Inherit More Than Rituals
It is tempting to think of Pagan legacy in terms of practices.
Which rituals survive?
Which books remain in print?
Which festivals continue?
Which sacred places are preserved?
Those things matter.
But future Pagans will inherit much more than ceremonies.
They will inherit our habits.
Our assumptions.
Our language.
Our organizational structures.
Our conflicts.
Our unresolved wounds.
Our approaches to leadership.
Our attitudes toward land.
Our relationship with history.
Our ideas about who belongs.
Our ideas about who gets to speak.
Our ways of dealing with disagreement.
Our willingness—or unwillingness—to admit when we were wrong.
Those things become tradition too.
Sometimes without anyone consciously choosing them.
A Tradition Can Inherit a Wound
Families know this.
A hurt happens.
Nobody talks about it.
Years pass.
The original event becomes fuzzy, but the behaviour created by it remains.
People learn not to mention certain things.
They learn who may be challenged and who may not.
They learn which emotions are permitted.
They learn which family member gets blamed.
Eventually nobody remembers exactly how the pattern started.
They simply call it normal.
Communities can do the same thing.
A conflict happens.
A person leaves.
A leader is never questioned.
A complaint is quietly buried to protect the group.
A bad decision becomes custom.
A temporary rule becomes tradition.
Ten years later newcomers inherit the behaviour without inheriting the explanation.
That is legacy too.
Perhaps one of the responsibilities of becoming a good ancestor is asking which wounds we are preparing to hand forward merely because we never dealt with them ourselves.
Not Everything Old Deserves Reverence
We Pagans can be particularly vulnerable to the romance of age.
Ancient.
Old ways.
Traditional.
Passed down.
Ancestor wisdom.
Those words carry weight.
Sometimes deservedly.
But age is evidence of survival.
It is not proof of goodness.
Some old things are wise.
Some old things are simply old.
Some survived because they served people well.
Others survived because nobody had enough power to challenge them.
If we are serious about honouring ancestors, then perhaps we should honour them as human beings rather than turning them into saints.
They made mistakes.
So will we.
The question is what we do once we recognize them.
Maybe a Good Ancestor Leaves Fewer Burdens
We often imagine legacy as something added.
Build something.
Create something.
Write something.
Start something.
Leave something behind.
But perhaps legacy can also be subtraction.
Remove something harmful.
Correct something false.
End a destructive pattern.
Repair damaged land.
Retire a ritual that no longer serves.
Stop using a story we know is historically untrue.
Build accountability into leadership where previously there was none.
Create boundaries that prevent old harms from becoming inherited customs.
A future generation may never know we did any of those things.
Good.
Maybe that is exactly the point.
If they never have to carry the burden, why should they remember the person who removed it?
The Best Ancestors May Be the Ones Nobody Knows
Somebody planted the tree.
You sit beneath it.
You do not know their name.
Somebody built the road.
Somebody preserved the manuscript.
Somebody fought to save a piece of land.
Somebody taught someone who later taught someone who eventually taught you.
Most of civilization rests upon the work of people whose names disappeared.
Perhaps Pagan traditions are no different.
The person who organized the first gathering.
The volunteer who stored the archives.
The person who kept showing up with a hammer during work weekends.
The one who remembered the old ritual accurately enough that someone could write it down.
The person who challenged a harmful practice even though doing so made them unpopular.
The person who welcomed someone standing alone at the edge of the circle.
Those people may never become celebrated ancestors.
But they shaped what somebody else inherited.
Maybe ancestorhood is not about being remembered.
Maybe it is about having mattered.
What Would We Want From Our Ancestors?
Perhaps one way to answer what future people need from us is to ask what we wish our own predecessors had left.
I wish they had written more down.
I wish they had labelled the photographs.
I wish they had recorded why certain decisions were made.
I wish they had distinguished what they knew from what they believed.
I wish they had told us when something was reconstructed rather than pretending it had always existed.
I wish more ordinary people had recorded their experiences rather than leaving history entirely to leaders.
I wish conflicts had more than one surviving account.
I wish people had documented why communities changed.
I wish they had admitted mistakes more often.
I wish they had preserved more voices from the edges rather than only from the centre.
Those wishes tell us something.
Future people may wish the same things of us.
This Is Why Scholarship Matters Again
We have returned repeatedly to Shelley Rabinovitch, Marion Bowman, Marisol Charbonneau, Martin Lepage, Dodie Graham McKay and Barbara Jane Davy throughout this warren.
There is a reason.
They preserved voices.
They observed communities.
They recorded rituals.
They examined identity.
They asked questions about nature, ethnicity, gender, ancestry, place, gifting, ecology and belonging.
They did not merely interpret Paganism.
They preserved parts of it.
That distinction may become more important with time.
A doctoral dissertation that seems very contemporary today may become primary historical evidence fifty years from now.
An academic article about a festival may someday be one of the few surviving descriptions of what that gathering felt like when it was alive.
An interview conducted now may preserve the voice of someone nobody can interview later.
Scholarship becomes memory.
Memory becomes inheritance.
Inheritance becomes legacy.
We Also Need Ordinary Voices
But scholarship cannot carry everything.
Scholars ask particular questions.
Archives preserve particular things.
Institutions make choices about what deserves attention.
That leaves enormous pieces of lived religion undocumented.
What did the fire smell like?
Who always arrived late?
Which ritual made everybody laugh because something went completely wrong?
What was it like bringing your child to their first gathering?
Who made coffee every morning?
Which elder quietly helped everyone without ever appearing in a program?
What happened after the official ritual ended?
What did ordinary people actually believe?
Those things matter too.
Perhaps journals matter.
Blogs matter.
Photographs matter.
Festival programs matter.
Personal recollections matter.
Old newsletters matter.
Even social media posts may someday become strange little archaeological fragments of early twenty-first-century religion.
We are making sources whether we realize it or not.
But We Should Leave Honest Sources
That brings us back to truth.
Future generations deserve more than propaganda.
They do not need us to make ourselves look perfect.
They need enough honesty to understand us.
Tell them what worked.
Tell them what failed.
Tell them why the community split.
Tell them why the ritual changed.
Tell them where the story came from.
Tell them when nobody really knows.
Tell them when memory conflicts.
Leave room for uncertainty.
One of the greatest gifts we can offer the future may simply be refusing to make their research harder by lying to make ourselves look better.
What Are We Teaching Without Realizing It?
Future generations will not inherit only our records.
They will inherit our example.
What does leadership look like?
Do leaders explain decisions?
Can leaders be challenged?
What happens when somebody makes a mistake?
What happens when someone is harmed?
Does community protect reputation or people?
Do elders mentor successors or guard territory?
Do scholars get respected when their findings challenge cherished stories?
Do newcomers get treated as future contributors or permanent outsiders?
Do we honour land only in ritual, or in the decisions we make about it?
Do we talk about reciprocity while expecting volunteers to carry everything?
Do we talk about sacredness while treating sacred spaces as endlessly exploitable?
Do we talk about frith while punishing people who name breaches of trust?
Someone is watching.
Someone is learning what Pagan community means from how we behave right now.
Future Ancestors Should Probably Learn to Say “I Was Wrong”
There may be no more useful inheritance than a culture capable of correction.
We are going to get things wrong.
That is not pessimism.
It is arithmetic.
Thousands of people making thousands of decisions across decades will eventually make bad ones.
The dangerous community is not the one that makes mistakes.
It is the one that cannot admit them.
Imagine leaving future Pagans a tradition in which saying:
I was wrong.
We misunderstood this.
New evidence changed what we know.
This practice caused harm.
We need to do this differently.
is considered evidence of maturity rather than weakness.
That might be a legacy worth leaving.
We Should Leave Them Questions Too
Maybe we should resist giving future Pagans all our answers.
Answers become brittle.
Questions travel remarkably well.
What do I owe because I am connected?
What relationships does this practice create?
Who benefits?
Who carries the cost?
What are we preserving?
Why?
What are we changing?
Why?
What did we receive?
What are we handing forward?
Who has power here?
What responsibilities come with it?
What are we calling sacred?
Does our conduct show that we actually believe it?
Those questions could survive many different Pagan traditions.
They do not require everyone to share theology.
They require attention.
Maybe This Is the Common Thread After All
We have wandered a long way from where we began.
Or perhaps we have finally come back to it.
We originally asked what common thread might run through these very different scholarly examinations of Paganism.
We found relationship.
After all these rabbit holes, I still think that holds.
But perhaps now we can see more of what relationship means.
Relationship is not merely connection.
It is responsibility.
Relationship creates memory.
Relationship can create sacredness.
Relationship can be broken.
Broken relationship creates questions of accountability and repair.
Sacred relationship creates questions of stewardship.
Stewardship extended through time becomes legacy.
And legacy eventually turns us into ancestors.
It is one long thread.
Maybe Paganism becomes visible in how we tend it.
We Are Not the End of the Story
That may be the thought I want to leave this rabbit warren with.
We are not the culmination of Paganism.
We are not the generation that finally gets everything right.
We are not standing at the end of the road looking backward at everyone who came before.
We are somewhere in the middle.
People came before us.
People will come after.
We inherited fragments.
We reconstructed some things.
We invented others.
We revived.
We misunderstood.
We researched.
We argued.
We built.
We broke things.
Sometimes we repaired them.
And eventually all of it passes onward.
That is humbling.
It should be.
The Firekeeper Has One Final Job
We have used the firekeeper throughout this series.
It seems right to end there.
The firekeeper tends the flame.
Protects it.
Feeds it.
Keeps it from escaping.
Makes sure people are warm.
Teaches others how to tend it.
And then eventually there is one final responsibility.
Move aside.
Let someone else take the chair.
That may be the hardest act of stewardship.
To accept that the fire will burn without us.
That people will tell different stories beside it.
That someone will arrange the wood differently.
Someone may move the stones.
Someone may decide a ritual we loved no longer belongs there.
Someone may find a better way.
That does not erase what we did.
It completes it.
A firekeeper who refuses to hand over the fire was never really preparing the next keeper.
So What Kind of Ancestors Are We Becoming?
I do not know.
We probably cannot know.
Future generations will answer that for themselves.
They will decide what we preserved well.
What we misunderstood.
What we should have changed sooner.
What we should never have abandoned.
They will have the benefit of hindsight.
We do not.
All we can do is try to leave them good material.
Honest history.
Living traditions.
Healthy questions.
Sacred places treated with care.
Communities capable of accountability.
Leadership understood as service.
Enough humility to admit uncertainty.
Enough courage to end harmful inheritances.
Enough generosity to teach somebody else how to tend the fire.
And perhaps enough wisdom not to demand that they become us.
The Rabbit Warren Ends Here
At least this one does.
We started with six scholars.
We ended with ancestors who have not been born yet.
That seems about right for a rabbit hole.
Rabinovitch.
Bowman.
Charbonneau.
Lepage.
Graham McKay.
Davy.
Different people mapping different parts of the forest.
Their work gave us places to stand.
From there we followed the paths a little farther.
And perhaps what we found was not a definition of Paganism at all.
Perhaps it was a question of posture.
How do we stand in relationship with gods, land, ancestors, community, memory, history and one another?
Do we possess?
Or tend?
Do we consume?
Or reciprocate?
Do we preserve everything?
Or learn what should continue?
Do we demand harmony?
Or practice accountability?
Do we inherit blindly?
Or inherit consciously?
Do we build monuments to ourselves?
Or plant trees beneath which somebody else may someday sit?
Maybe Paganism does not need one universal answer to those questions.
Maybe asking them seriously is part of the practice.
For a little while, we have the fire.
For a little while, we have the land beneath our feet.
For a little while, we hold stories other people handed us.
For a little while, somebody younger is watching what we do.
Then the chair belongs to someone else.
Perhaps legacy is nothing more complicated than making sure that when we stand up, we have not left them nothing but ash.
Leave some wood.
Leave some truth.
Leave some room.
And if we are very fortunate, leave the fire a little healthier than we found it.
That will do.
Godspeed.
Scholarly Trail Markers
This final reflection is a synthesis of the rabbit warren explored across this series. It does not claim that the scholars below collectively proposed a single theory of Paganism, legacy or ancestorhood. Their work provided different pieces of the landscape from which these questions developed.
Bowman, M. (2000). Nature, the natural and Pagan identity. DISKUS, 6.
Charbonneau, M. (2007). The melting cauldron: Ethnicity, diversity, and identity in a contemporary Pagan subculture. The Pomegranate, 9(1), 5–21.
Davy, B. J. (2023). Inclusive Heathens practice ancestor veneration, but not pride in ancestry. Nova Religio, 26(3), 30–51.
Davy, B. J. (2025). Wyrd ecology: Heathen ritual and gifting relations. Oxford University Press.
Graham McKay, D. (2014, June 20). Pagan festival season in Ontario. The Wild Hunt.
Graham McKay, D. (2017, April 25). Community experience at Raven’s Knoll documented in new book. The Wild Hunt.
Lepage, M. (2017). “Why be king? I’m already a queen!”: Performances rituelles et négociations queer dans la communauté néo-païenne de Montréal [Doctoral dissertation, Université du Québec à Montréal].
Rabinovitch, S. T., & Macdonald, M. (Eds.). (2004). An ye harm none: Magical morality and modern ethics. Citadel Press.