When Accountability Becomes Erasure
I keep following rabbits into the past, and lately one of them keeps leading me back to an uncomfortable question: what happens when a community decides that part of its own history has become inconvenient?
We have already talked about Pagan memory, inheritance, archives, traditions, founders, community ancestors, sacred places, and what future generations may inherit from the Pagan communities that exist today. Somewhere in all of that, another word kept hovering around the edges of the conversation.
Cancel culture.
I hesitate to use the phrase because it has become so politically loaded that sometimes simply saying it ends the conversation before the conversation can begin. People hear the words and immediately choose a side.
But strip away the politics for a moment.
There is something very real underneath the phrase that deserves attention.
A person becomes unacceptable.
A relationship collapses.
A community fractures.
Someone leaves, is removed, or simply becomes someone nobody particularly wants to talk about anymore.
And then something curious starts happening.
Their present unacceptability begins reaching backward into the past.
Their contribution becomes uncomfortable to acknowledge. Their name is mentioned less often. The things they helped build remain, but the story of how those things came into existence begins changing. Photographs disappear from circulation. Stories become shorter. New people arrive and receive an increasingly simplified version of what happened before them.
Nobody has to formally announce that someone has been erased.
Eventually silence does the work.
That is where cancel culture and selective memory begin to overlap.
And I think Pagan communities need to be very careful about it.
This is not an argument against accountability.
People sometimes need to leave communities. Leaders sometimes need to lose authority. Relationships sometimes become unhealthy enough that they need to end. Someone who contributed greatly yesterday can behave terribly tomorrow.
Community does not require endless tolerance.
But there is an enormous difference between saying:
You should no longer hold this position.
and saying:
You were never important here.
Those are not the same judgment.
History does not require us to choose between sainthood and oblivion.
Someone can have done something valuable and later done something harmful.
Someone can have helped build a community and later become unwelcome in it.
Someone can have created a ritual, organized a gathering, built infrastructure, taught people, written material, solved problems, hauled garbage, cooked meals, tended fires, fixed broken equipment, welcomed newcomers, and contributed years of labour—and still eventually have a serious falling out with the people around them.
The ending does not erase everything that came before it.
Neither does everything good that came before excuse whatever happened at the end.
Both things can be true.
That should not be a radical position.
Unfortunately, human beings seem to have trouble holding complicated people in memory.
We like saints.
We understand villains.
Someone who was generous on Monday, difficult on Tuesday, brilliant on Wednesday, selfish on Thursday and absolutely indispensable on Friday is much harder to fit into a story.
But that is what people are actually like.
Pagan history was made by people.
Therefore Pagan history is going to be complicated.
The Old Tractor
I think of something as ordinary as an old tractor.
At one time it may simply be part of community life. It hauls the garbage scow. It pulls a parade float. It carries people from one side of a gathering to another. Somebody drives it. People climb aboard. Somebody tells a joke. Someone takes a photograph.
Nobody stops and thinks, We are creating historical evidence.
They’re just trying to move the garbage.
Then people change.
Relationships change.
The community changes.
Eventually the tractor sits.
A newcomer sees an old machine.
What they cannot see is the web of human relationships that once surrounded it.
They cannot hear the laughter.
They do not know who drove it.
They do not know why somebody gave it a name.
They do not know what it carried.
They do not know why photographs of it might make someone smile—or make someone hurt.
The tractor remains.
The provenance disappears.
And provenance matters.
Where did this come from?
Who created it?
Who maintained it?
Who changed it?
Why did it change?
Why do we do things this way now?
Communities are full of these invisible histories.
An old song nobody sings.
A ritual whose author is no longer mentioned.
A policy created because of an argument nobody remembers.
A tradition credited vaguely to “the community” even though someone actually invented it.
A building somebody spent years maintaining.
A trail somebody cleared.
An annual event that began with three people sitting around a kitchen table.
A photograph filled with people whose names nobody bothered writing down.
An empty space where something once happened.
Some of those things disappear naturally.
Memory fades.
People die.
Records get lost.
Hard drives fail.
Websites disappear.
Stories mutate each time they are told.
That is simply history doing what history does.
But sometimes forgetting is encouraged.
That is different.
When Forgetting Becomes Selective
Sometimes remembering someone becomes socially uncomfortable.
People learn that mentioning a particular person creates tension, so they mention them less.
The next retelling leaves out a detail.
The version after that leaves out a name.
Eventually the story works perfectly well without the inconvenient person.
Then another generation arrives.
For them, nothing has been erased because they never knew anything was missing.
That may be one of the most effective forms of cancellation.
You don’t destroy the history.
You simply stop transmitting it.
This should bother Pagans especially because we spend so much time complaining about exactly this problem in ancient history.
We desperately want to know what people actually believed.
Who performed the rituals?
Why was something done a particular way?
What did a symbol mean?
Which practices were widespread and which were local?
What changed after political upheaval?
What was written by outsiders?
What disappeared because nobody recorded it?
We sift fragments trying to reconstruct worlds whose context has vanished.
And then we create new Pagan communities surrounded by cameras, computers, websites, email archives, social media, newsletters, books, photographs and people capable of writing things down—and still manage to lose our own history.
There is something absurd about that.
Future Pagans should not have to reconstruct us archaeologically.
They should not have to discover an old festival program and suddenly realize that people existed whom nobody ever mentioned.
They should not have to reverse-engineer why a ritual changed.
They should not have to compare old photographs to current stories and wonder why the two seem to describe different communities.
They should not have to recreate solutions because nobody bothered preserving the fact that someone already solved the problem.
And they certainly should not inherit a mythology pretending everything moved smoothly from one generation to another.
It didn’t.
Nothing human does.
Memory Should Not Become a Weapon
But there is another side to this.
Preserving memory cannot mean preserving every grievance forever.
That becomes its own poison.
An archive should not become an ammunition dump.
History should not become a courtroom where people keep retrying conflicts decades after everyone involved has either moved on or died.
There has to be room for healing.
There has to be room for people to change.
There has to be room for communities to say, “We dealt with this, learned from it, and moved forward.”
The difference is that moving forward does not require pretending nothing happened.
We should be capable of saying:
Something happened.
People were hurt.
People disagree about what happened.
Relationships changed.
The community changed because of it.
Different people remember it differently.
We learned what we could.
And we moved on.
That is not keeping a wound open.
That is putting a marker beside the trail.
Something happened here.
Future travellers do not necessarily need every detail.
But they deserve to know the ground shifted.
Remembering Is Not Endorsing
That distinction becomes particularly important when people themselves become controversial.
Remembering somebody is not honouring them.
Documenting somebody is not endorsing them.
Acknowledging a contribution is not absolution.
History is not a hall of fame.
We should be perfectly capable of saying:
This person helped create something important.
This person later behaved in ways the community could not accept.
Both statements belong in the record.
Anything less turns history into public relations.
And that is where selective memory becomes dangerous.
Once communities become comfortable removing inconvenient people from their histories, the surviving story inevitably begins favouring whoever remains.
The people still holding authority become the natural inheritors.
The people who left become footnotes.
The people who were removed become warnings.
The people who died become whatever the survivors say they were.
The people nobody likes become increasingly unnecessary to the official story.
Eventually history stops asking:
What happened?
and begins answering:
Why the people currently in charge deserve to be here.
That is not memory.
That is mythology.
And mythology about ourselves is especially dangerous because it usually feels like history while we are creating it.
Who Owns Pagan Memory?
This is why I keep coming back to the idea that nobody owns Pagan memory.
Not founders.
Not leaders.
Not landowners.
Not boards.
Not priests or priestesses.
Not elders.
Not the person who stayed.
Not the person who left.
Not the person who was hurt.
Not even the person doing the remembering.
We each possess pieces of the story.
Those pieces may contradict one another.
That’s fine.
In fact, contradiction may sometimes be evidence that we are preserving real history rather than manufacturing an official version.
“This is what I remember.”
“This is what you remember.”
“Here is what the surviving documentation shows.”
“Here is where neither of us actually knows.”
That is intellectually messy.
Good.
History is messy.
Paganism is messy.
Human beings around fires are exceptionally messy.
I would much rather future Pagans inherit three conflicting accounts than one beautifully polished lie.
Because they can investigate conflicting accounts.
They cannot investigate something nobody told them existed.
Does Accountability Rewrite the Past?
And this brings us back to cancel culture.
The greatest danger may not be someone being removed from a social media platform or excluded from a gathering. Those are contemporary decisions made by contemporary people and they can be debated on their own merits.
The historical danger comes afterward.
Does removing someone from the present also give us permission to remove them from the past?
I don’t think it does.
Accountability concerns what we do now.
History concerns what happened then.
They interact, but they are not interchangeable.
A community mature enough to practise accountability should also be mature enough to preserve uncomfortable history.
Maybe especially uncomfortable history.
Because the uncomfortable pieces often explain the present better than the comfortable ones.
Why does that rule exist?
Why did this ritual change?
Why is that tradition important?
Why does nobody use that space anymore?
Why is this person missing from the photographs?
Why did everyone suddenly start doing something differently?
Why does that old tractor have a name?
Those questions contain history.
And answering them does not mean we have to go backward.
Quite the opposite.
Evolution Is Not Amnesia
I want Paganism to evolve.
I want people to change things.
I want future generations to look at something we considered indispensable and decide they have a better idea.
Good.
Change it.
Build something better.
Follow another rabbit.
But know what you are changing.
Evolution and amnesia are not the same thing.
Evolution takes what came before, understands it, alters it and moves onward.
Amnesia keeps rebuilding the same road because nobody remembers that somebody already built it.
That wastes experience.
It wastes labour.
It wastes knowledge.
And sometimes it causes people to repeat injuries that somebody else already learned how to avoid.
We should want future Pagans to begin where we ended.
Not where we began.
Leave the Trail
For that to happen, we have to leave them the trail.
Not an official trail scrubbed clean of everyone who became inconvenient.
Not a monument to the winners.
Not an endless catalogue of grudges.
The real trail.
Here is what we built.
Here is who helped.
Here is what worked.
Here is what failed.
Here is where relationships broke.
Here is what changed afterward.
Here is where memories disagree.
Here is what we know.
Here is what we don’t.
Here is where someone got hurt.
Here is where something beautiful happened.
Here is where both happened at once.
Then let the next generation decide what any of it means.
That may be the part of memory we have the hardest time accepting.
Eventually we lose control of it.
People after us will judge us differently than we judge ourselves.
They will probably admire people we disliked.
They may criticize people we revered.
They will discover mistakes we normalized.
They may rehabilitate ideas we discarded.
They may throw away things we considered sacred.
They may look at some enormous community argument and wonder why anyone cared.
Good.
That means the history survived long enough for them to argue with it.
Maybe that is what we should be aiming for.
Not immortality.
Not vindication.
Not an official version in which our side won.
Just enough honest memory that the people following us do not have to start again.
Cancel someone from leadership if accountability requires it.
End a relationship if it needs to end.
Change the ritual.
Change the organization.
Change the gathering.
Move the fire.
But don’t pretend the old fire never burned.
Don’t erase the hands that once tended it simply because those hands later became difficult to remember.
We do not have to worship the ashes.
We do not have to keep the wounds bleeding.
But we should stop sweeping away the footprints.
Leave the trail.
Leave the uncomfortable parts too.
Then let the people who come after us go farther.