Sometimes the rabbit does not lead us farther into the forest. Sometimes it finds a hole beneath the roots and asks us to look at what has been growing underground all along.
This particular rabbit began with a simple question: What is The Heathen Underground, and does it exist anywhere beyond Facebook?
At first glance, the answer appears straightforward. The Heathen Underground is a large Facebook presence devoted to Heathen beliefs, history and practice. It has a public Facebook Page followed by nearly forty-eight thousand people, along with a separate discussion space called The Heathen Underground Community.
The Page is the publication. The group is the gathering place.
But rabbits are rarely satisfied with the first answer.
Two Doors Bearing the Same Name
The public Page operates less like a congregation and more like a Heathen newspaper, library and community bulletin board rolled together. It shares archaeology, anthropology, folklore, medieval history, books, art, music, ritual practices and discussions about what Heathenry means in the modern world. Some of the material is original, but much of it is carefully selected from researchers, historians, artists and other Heathen or Pagan creators.
The accompanying Community group is where people are invited to discuss those subjects with one another. One door distributes information; the other invites conversation.
The name “underground” may suggest secrecy, but very little about the project is hidden. Its positions are public, its administrators sign their posts, and its community standards are unusually direct. The Heathen Underground describes itself as inclusive, states that marginalized people are active and valued members of the community, and warns that discrimination will result in removal.
It is also openly opposed to folkish Heathenry, racial gatekeeping, white nationalism and attempts to use Germanic religion as a vehicle for far-right politics. The Page is listed among the online supporters of Declaration 127, the Heathen declaration opposing the normalization of racism and white supremacy within Heathen spaces.
This means The Heathen Underground is not pretending to be politically neutral. Its administrators appear to believe that deciding who may stand around the community fire is itself a religious and ethical question. The gods, the ancestors and the old stories may be central, but so is the treatment of the living person standing beside you.
The Roots Beneath the Page
The project has also changed hands over time.
The available public record identifies Heather O’Brien as its founder. In late summer 2017, when the original Page was apparently in danger of being deleted, responsibility for it was passed to Nicole Butler. More recent posts identify Nicole, Æsc and Sophia as the people tending it.
That history matters. Online communities often look permanent because the name and profile picture remain the same. Behind the screen, however, stewardship changes. Founders leave. New caretakers arrive. Editorial priorities evolve. A Page can retain its name while becoming a different expression of the community that inherited it.
That does not necessarily make the later version false or illegitimate. It makes the Page a living tradition rather than a frozen artifact.
There is an interesting parallel here with Pagan land and Pagan gatherings. A place may keep its old name while the people maintaining it change. A festival may continue while its purpose gradually shifts. A community may speak of continuity even though the hands carrying the work are no longer the hands that began it.
The name survives, but the meaning is continually being renewed by whoever holds responsibility for it.
The Trail Returns to Raven’s Knoll
Then the rabbit crossed a trail we have followed before.
A 2023 academic article in Nova Religio, “Inclusive Heathens Practice Ancestor Veneration, But Not Pride in Ancestry,” identifies Nicole Butler as the host of The Heathen Underground and as a gythia active within the Heathen community of Raven’s Knoll. Æsc Adams is also identified in related research as her partner and cohost.
That places The Heathen Underground within a recognizable Ontario Heathen network involving religious practice, online education, community gatherings and Raven’s Knoll.
This is where we have to resist turning an ordinary network into an extraordinary theory.
Shared people, places and projects do not prove common ownership, hidden control or secret coordination. Small religious communities naturally develop overlapping networks. The same person may help organize a ritual, administer a Facebook group, contribute to a gathering, write a book and sit for an academic interview. That is not evidence of a conspiracy. It is often simply what community labour looks like when the community is small and the number of people willing to perform that labour is smaller still.
What the connection does show is that The Heathen Underground is not merely an anonymous content farm passing around Viking pictures. It is connected to people engaged in lived Heathen practice and to one of the better-documented Heathen environments in Canada.
For those who know the history of Raven’s Knoll, this should not be surprising. The land has long been a meeting point where different paths overlap: Pagan, Heathen, Druidic, polytheist, festival, academic and increasingly nonreligious. People arrive through different gates, but many of their paths eventually cross beneath the same trees.
Who Keeps the Memory?
This is where the rabbit became more interesting.
The Heathen Underground is not simply sharing information. It is helping decide what contemporary Heathens encounter, what stories remain visible, which sources are treated as credible and what behaviour is publicly rejected. When it shares an archaeological discovery, it contributes to religious education. When it promotes a book, it helps determine which voices are heard. When it denounces racism or abuse, it helps establish the boundaries of acceptable community conduct.
That makes it part of Heathen memory.
Not the whole memory. Not an unquestionable memory. But one of the places where memory is collected, sorted and passed forward.
We often imagine community memory as stories told beside a fire. Today, some of those fires are digital. The storytellers are Page administrators, the audience is counted in followers, and the circle is governed partly by an algorithm belonging to a corporation with no particular obligation to Heathenry, Paganism or the preservation of either.
That creates an uncomfortable question. What happens when a substantial portion of a religious community’s public memory lives on a platform that can change its rules, hide old material or delete the entire archive?
The Heathen Underground has a confirmed account on X under the name @OriginalHU, although its publicly indexed activity appears old. There is also a small YouTube channel bearing the same name, but I could not conclusively establish that it belongs to the same administrators. A 2017 book by Æsc Adams was published through Hart’s Horn Press, described by its Amazon listing as a subsidiary of The Heathen Underground.
Beyond those tracks, there does not appear to be an active independent website, public archive or substantial presence on newer social platforms. Facebook is not simply one branch of The Heathen Underground. Facebook is effectively where The Heathen Underground lives.
Its influence beyond Facebook is visible mainly through other people referring back to it. The Longship recommends it as a Heathen resource. The Wild Hunt reported on its role in publicly confronting racist and threatening behaviour in 2021. Academic researchers have interviewed its hosts and treated the Page as a recognizable part of modern inclusive Heathenry.
Its roots extend beyond Facebook, but its trunk remains planted firmly inside it.
What the Rabbit Found
The rabbit did not uncover a secret organization beneath the forest floor. It found something both simpler and more important: roots.
The Heathen Underground is a public-facing expression of an interconnected Heathen community. It is part educational resource, part editorial platform, part political boundary marker and part community gathering place. Its history reaches from its original American founder to later Canadian stewardship, and from an online Page into the lived Heathen landscape surrounding Raven’s Knoll.
That does not mean every person at Raven’s Knoll speaks through it. It does not mean every inclusive Heathen agrees with it. It does not make the Page the official voice of Canadian Heathenry. It means only that it has become one of the more visible places where certain strands of modern Heathen identity, scholarship, politics and community memory meet.
Perhaps that is what an underground really is.
Not a hidden room where plans are made, but the unseen network beneath the forest: roots touching roots, carrying nourishment, memory and warning from one part of the community to another.
The Page is what we see above the soil. The relationships are what keep it alive beneath.
There goes the rabbit again. Godspeed.
A note on scope: This post follows publicly available sources and documented relationships. Shared people, venues, terminology or projects demonstrate connection, but they do not by themselves establish common ownership, control, wrongdoing or secret coordination.