When Revival Becomes Something You Inherit
So here is the rabbit that started this particular warren: third-generation Pagans.
I know they must exist. Modern Pagan communities have been around long enough for them to exist, and I know second-generation Pagans who are now old enough to have children themselves. Yet I cannot remember often sitting around a fire with someone who introduced themselves by saying, in effect, “My grandparents were Pagan, my parents were Pagan, and I grew up Pagan.”
That will change.
And when it does, I think something important happens.
Imagine three generations.
The first generation discovers Paganism sometime in adulthood. Maybe they begin reading. Maybe they find Wicca, Druidry, Heathenry, reconstructionism, witchcraft, or something that refuses to fit neatly into any category. Maybe they attend a festival, join a group, construct rituals, and gradually develop household traditions.
Their child grows up with those traditions.
For the child, much of the mystery is already gone. The gods are not discoveries in an old book. The altar has always been sitting there. Going to a gathering is not stepping into a strange new world. It is what the family does every summer.
Then that child has a child.
Now we reach the third generation.
Suppose the grandparent created a particular Yule tradition decades earlier. Maybe some of it came from historical sources. Some came from a book. Some came from something another Pagan taught them. Some was invented because it felt appropriate at the time.
The grandchild may know none of that.
The grandchild simply knows: this is what our family does at Yule.
There is the transformation.
The grandparent reconstructed something.
The parent participated in something.
The grandchild inherited something.
At what point does it stop mattering that a family practice began in 1987 rather than 987?
I am not suggesting that invented history should suddenly be passed off as ancient history. Quite the opposite. We should know where practices come from whenever possible. Historical honesty matters.
But traditions have to begin somewhere.
Every old tradition was once new. Someone sang the song first. Someone told the story first. Someone decided that a particular place was where the community would gather. Someone established the feast. Someone carved the first object. Someone lit the first fire.
We often judge authenticity in Paganism by asking how old something is. Perhaps another question is whether people cared enough to keep doing it.
If three generations gather around the same fire, does the third generation need archaeological evidence proving that people a thousand years ago did exactly the same thing before that fire can mean something?
I do not think so.
Historical honesty and lived history can exist together.
That might be one of the most interesting developments modern Paganism is approaching. Many people involved in Pagan revival spent enormous energy looking backward. They tried to recover old gods, old stories, old seasonal practices, folklore, archaeology, magical systems, and forgotten ways of understanding the world.
The third generation may have the luxury of looking backward only as far as Grandma or Grandpa.
That does not connect them directly to the Iron Age. It does not magically create an unbroken ancient lineage.
But it gives them something the first generation often did not have: a Pagan childhood.
They may have family stories involving Pagan elders. Photographs of their parents as children at gatherings. Places where grandparents performed rituals. Objects made by Pagan relatives who are now ancestors themselves.
That last point fascinates me.
Ancestor veneration changes when some of the ancestors being honoured were themselves Pagan.
The first generation may have had to negotiate relationships with ancestors whose religious beliefs were completely different from their own. A third-generation Pagan may pour a drink for a grandmother who once poured an offering to the same gods.
That is not reconstruction.
That is continuity.
Not ancient continuity. Not an unbroken line back into pre-Christian Europe. Something much more modest, much more honest, and perhaps much more important.
Family continuity.
Community continuity.
Lived continuity.
This is where the language of “new religious movement” starts becoming awkward. How long can something remain new? One generation? Two? Five? A century?
At some point the children of the people who revived or created a tradition stop thinking of it as something revived or created. It becomes the world they inherited.
And that creates responsibilities.
The first generation had the luxury of improvisation because there often was no local precedent.
The third generation may want to know why the precedent exists.
Why do we do this?
Who started it?
Was it based on historical evidence?
Was it borrowed from another tradition?
Did someone invent it around a campfire thirty years ago?
Was it originally a joke that became serious?
If nobody remembers, the answer eventually becomes, “We have always done it this way.”
That is how living traditions are born.
It is also how historical nonsense is born.
The difference between the two is memory.
Which means if Paganism really is reaching a third generation, someone needs to preserve more than the rituals.
Someone needs to preserve the story of how those rituals came to exist.
And that brings us to the next rabbit.
Who keeps the Pagan memory?