I’ve been chasing another rabbit, although I suspect this one has been following me around for quite some time and I simply hadn’t noticed it.
We’ve been talking about legacy, memory, and what it means to have participated in something even when your name isn’t necessarily attached to it forever. In the last rabbit, I went back to some of my happier memories of Raven’s Knoll: helping create the Vé, working on the Shrine Trail, putting in bridges, digging the firepit, tending fires, and simply being one of the many hands that helped build something.
That brought me to another realization: maybe legacy isn’t being remembered. Maybe legacy is having participated.
But there is another part to that. Someone has to record it. Otherwise, eventually, all those little stories disappear.
Some People Already Tried to Do This
There are two books connected with Raven’s Knoll that tried to preserve exactly this sort of history, and if you’re interested in the history of the place or the communities that gathered there, they’re worth knowing about.
The first is Rites of Raven’s Knoll. It brings together essays, poetry, rituals, songs, recollections, and experiences from people connected with Raven’s Knoll. What makes a book like this valuable isn’t simply that it tells us what Raven’s Knoll was. It allows people who were actually there to tell us what the place and the community meant to them.
You can find it here:
Rites of Raven’s Knoll – Amazon Canada
The second book is Bragafull, published in connection with the Hail and Horn Gathering community. The title itself refers to the “best-cup” or “Bragi’s-cup,” which is wonderfully appropriate for a book built around remembrance, story, Heathen experience, and the voices of the people who gathered together.
Bragafull commemorates the Hail and Horn Gathering through stories, poems, art, retellings, ritual material, and recollections from the people who participated in that community.
And somewhere inside Bragafull is one of my own stories: my recollection of the creation of the Vé.
You can find Bragafull here:
Bragafull – Amazon Canada
Looking at those books now, years later, I understand their importance differently than I probably did when they were created. Somebody stopped and said, in effect, these stories are worth recording.
I think they were right.
Most Pagan History Doesn’t Happen in Books
Here’s the problem with Pagan history: most of it doesn’t happen in books.
It happens around fires. It happens in campsites. It happens while somebody is helping someone else put up a tent in the rain. It happens in somebody’s living room with six people sitting in a circle wondering whether they’re doing the ritual correctly. It happens at festivals, moots, covens, groves, kindreds, temples, kitchen tables, workshops, drum circles, potlucks, online groups, and tiny gatherings that may never appear in any official historical record.
It happens when somebody attends their first Pagan gathering and suddenly realizes, Oh. There are other people like me.
It happens when an older Pagan teaches a younger Pagan something without even realizing they’re teaching them. It happens when somebody builds a shrine, keeps a fire, writes a ritual, sings a song nobody thought to record, or tells a story at three o’clock in the morning that everybody around the fire remembers for twenty years before suddenly realizing nobody can remember who originally told it.
That’s history too.
And a great deal of it disappears.
The famous people usually survive history. Organizations leave paperwork. Authors leave books. Festivals leave programs. Websites sometimes survive in archives. But ordinary Pagans disappear surprisingly easily.
The person who hauled the lumber. The person who cooked breakfast for fifty people. The person who quietly tended the shrine every morning. The person who welcomed the terrified newcomer and said, “Come sit with us.” The firekeeper. The bridge builder. The volunteer who showed up every year without ever needing their name on anything.
Without those people, there wouldn’t have been much of a community to write a history about in the first place.
So Tell Me Your Story
Maybe we need to start recording some of this.
Not just Raven’s Knoll. Not just Kaleidoscope. Not just Hail and Horn. Not just Ontario. Not just Canada.
Pagan community.
Your Pagan community, wherever that happened to be.
I want to hear your stories.
Maybe you were there in the early days of a festival. Maybe you belonged to a coven that hasn’t existed for thirty years. Maybe there was a Pagan shop that became the centre of your little community. Maybe your first experience was five people sitting around someone’s kitchen table. Maybe you remember your first ritual, your first bonfire, your first Pagan Pride Day, your first moot, your first blót, or the first time you stood in a circle and realized the strange spiritual road you had been walking alone wasn’t quite as lonely as you thought.
Maybe you have a funny story.
Actually, please send me the funny stories.
History has enough solemn people standing around looking important. I want the ritual that went completely sideways, the tent that collapsed, the raccoon that stole dinner, the person who forgot their lines, the storm that arrived halfway through the ceremony, and the night somebody said something so absurd around the fire that decades later your entire group can still make one another laugh simply by repeating three words.
I want the beautiful memories too: the ritual that worked, the friendship that lasted, the teacher you never forgot, the place that felt like home, or the moment something clicked and you realized that this strange collection of beliefs, practices, gods, spirits, ancestors, stories, people, trees, fires, drums, and rabbit holes had somehow become part of who you were.
And yes, there can be difficult memories. Pagan community has never been perfect because people aren’t perfect, communities aren’t perfect, and memory certainly isn’t perfect. I’m not interested in manufacturing some imaginary golden age where everybody loved everybody else and we all danced happily around bonfires while woodland creatures applauded.
That never existed.
But neither should our failures become the only things we preserve.
There was joy. There was discovery. There was friendship. There was ridiculousness. There was belonging. There were moments when something extraordinary happened among very ordinary people.
Those deserve remembering too.
Chasing Rabbits: A Pagan Journey
Which brings me to another project I’ve been working on: a book with the working title Chasing Rabbits: A Pagan Journey.
Originally, I thought that journey was mostly mine.
I’m beginning to wonder whether that’s entirely true.
My journey crossed other people’s journeys. Their stories influenced mine. People taught me things. Places shaped me. Communities shaped me. People I barely remember may have said something decades ago that quietly changed the direction of my life.
That’s how communities work.
So perhaps Chasing Rabbits needs some other voices wandering through the warren.
If you have a Pagan memory you think deserves to survive, I’d like to hear it. It does not have to involve Raven’s Knoll. It doesn’t have to involve anybody famous. It doesn’t have to be something you think historians would consider important.
Actually, don’t worry about deciding whether it’s historically important.
Tell the story. Let history decide that later.
Tell me roughly when it happened. Tell me where, if you’re comfortable doing so. Tell me what happened and what you remember. Most importantly, tell me why you still remember it, because that’s usually where the interesting part lives.
For written submissions that may become part of the project, there will be a simple contributor agreement. You will retain ownership of your own writing while granting permission for material that is accepted to be edited and published as part of the project. Nobody is being asked to surrender ownership of their own history simply because they choose to share it.
I’m not promising that everything submitted will necessarily appear in Chasing Rabbits. There are privacy considerations, permissions, editing, space, and about a thousand other practical rabbits hiding down that particular hole. Some stories might inspire future Unplugged Pagan pieces. Some may fit the book. Maybe eventually enough material develops for something else entirely.
I don’t know.
That’s the wonderful thing about rabbits.
You don’t always know where they’re going when you start following them.
You Were There Too
What I do know is that Pagan history shouldn’t consist entirely of the people whose names ended up on book covers.
A community is the sum of the people who showed up: the people who built things, worshipped, argued, laughed, cooked, sang, taught, learned, tended fires, cleaned up afterward, came for one weekend and disappeared again, or kept returning for decades.
You were there too.
And maybe somebody fifty years from now should know that.
Rites of Raven’s Knoll and Bragafull already preserved pieces of one community’s story. I’m glad somebody thought to do it.
Maybe it’s time we preserved a few more.
So tell me your story.
Let’s leave them something to find.
Let’s build a history book.