No One Has to Order Us into the Cities

It began with a question that sounded simple enough: is the government slowly trying to move people out of rural communities and into cities, where we will become more dependent upon commercial systems for the necessities of life?

It is the sort of question that can be answered too quickly from either direction. One person hears it and immediately declares a conspiracy. Another hears it and dismisses the whole concern as paranoia. Neither answer requires much investigation, and neither one does justice to what rural people can see happening around them.

So I followed the rabbit.

What I found was not evidence of one secret Canadian plan whose stated purpose is to empty the countryside and manufacture obedient consumers. What I found was something less dramatic, more ordinary and, in some ways, more difficult to confront. Governments, banks, utilities, retailers and service providers do not need to sit around the same table. They only need to follow the same arithmetic: concentrate services where there are more people, withdraw them where there are fewer, and transfer the cost of distance to whoever remains.

The result can resemble a relocation policy even when nobody publishes one.

The long road toward the centre

Canada has been urbanizing for generations. Statistics Canada reports that in 1851, roughly 84 percent of the population lived in rural areas. By 2011, fewer than one Canadian in five did. That enormous change was connected to industrialization, mechanized agriculture, wage employment, education and the concentration of services. It cannot reasonably be blamed on a single modern government or policy.

We should not pretend, however, that Canadian governments have never deliberately encouraged people to leave small communities. Newfoundland and Labrador’s resettlement programs provide a documented example. Between 1965 and 1970 alone, 16,114 people from 119 communities were resettled. The reasoning was recognizable: concentrating the population would make public services and economic development easier and less expensive to provide.

Those memories did not disappear when the formal programs ended. A later Newfoundland and Labrador public consultation recorded residents describing the gradual removal of teachers, medical professionals, grants and other services as “resettlement by stealth”. That phrase matters. It describes a process in which nobody is physically ordered from a home, but the supports required to remain there are removed one by one.

The evidence that complicates the claim

If there were one unified contemporary plan to depopulate rural Canada, we would have to explain the policies moving in the opposite direction. The federal government maintains a Rural Economic Development Strategy, funds rural infrastructure and operates a Rural Community Immigration Pilot intended to attract workers and permanent residents to rural and remote communities.

The population numbers are not a simple story of everyone being funnelled toward Toronto, Ottawa or Vancouver either. Statistics Canada’s recent estimates show that from 2021 to 2025, rural and small-town populations increased in ten of the thirteen provinces and territories. Between July 2024 and July 2025, Ontario recorded a net movement of more than 15,000 people from functional urban areas into rural areas and small towns. The countryside is not emptying in one uniform national march. The movement runs in both directions.

Government housing policy also needs to be read accurately. Programs such as the Housing Accelerator Fund openly encourage denser housing, mixed-use neighbourhoods and development near transit. Those are real urban-concentration policies, but their stated objectives are to increase housing supply, use infrastructure efficiently and reduce transportation pressures—not to order existing rural residents into cities. Some of the same funding also reaches smaller communities.

This counter-evidence is important because a rabbit trail should lead where the ground goes, not where we had already decided it must end. There is no persuasive evidence here of one coordinated master plan. But that does not make the broader pattern imaginary.

The institutions are leaving before the people do

A community does not cease to be viable only when its last resident leaves. It begins to weaken when the ordinary institutions that make daily life possible decide that the community is no longer worth serving.

Consider banking. According to the Canadian Bankers Association, Canada had 6,205 bank branches in 2012 and 5,656 in 2022, a decline of nine percent. Measured per 100,000 adults, the reduction was about fifteen percent between 2012 and 2021. Urban branches close too, but an urban customer may have several alternatives within a short distance. When a rural community loses its only branch, banking itself leaves town.

Federal rules recognize that difference. Where a rural branch has no other deposit-taking branch within ten kilometres, the bank must provide six months’ notice, notify the local government and publish notice locally. Those rules may give residents time to prepare, but they generally manage the closure rather than prevent it.

The bank saves the expense of a building and its employees. The resident acquires the expense of reliable internet, a suitable device, digital competence and transportation to the next town whenever an in-person service is unavoidable. A private cost has not vanished. It has merely been moved from the institution to the customer.

Health care follows a similar geography. A Statistics Canada proximity study found that approximately 97 percent of people in large metropolitan areas lived within a three-kilometre drive of a health-care facility. In rural areas, only about half did. That measurement does not tell us whether a doctor is available or how long the wait will be, but it captures the first barrier: the service is physically farther away.

Now add schools, government counters, repair shops, grocery stores and public transportation. Each closure is announced as a separate decision. Each one may be justified by its own budget. Yet rural residents do not experience them separately. They experience the accumulated distance.

The rural access penalty

Distance has a price, and rural people often pay it more than once.

Natural Resources Canada identifies transportation costs, local competition, consumer choice and sales volume among the reasons gasoline prices differ between communities. Remote stations generally pay more to bring fuel from the refinery or terminal. Smaller markets may have fewer stations competing for customers and lower sales volumes over which to spread fixed costs.

The rural resident can therefore face a higher price per litre while also needing more litres. The bank is farther away. The hospital is farther away. The job, school and large grocery store may all be farther away. In a city, transit, walking or a short drive may provide alternatives. Across much of rural Canada, the vehicle is not a luxury. It is the admission price for participating in ordinary life.

Electricity reveals the same density calculation. In Ontario, the commodity price of electricity may be standardized under a chosen price plan, but delivery costs depend upon the infrastructure required to reach the customer. Hydro One openly classifies customers by urban, medium and low density, and Ontario maintains Distribution Rate Protection and Rural or Remote Electricity Rate Protection because rural delivery is intrinsically more expensive.

The difference is especially clear for small businesses. In Hydro One’s 2026 schedule, a general-service customer using less than 50 kilowatts faced a distribution charge of 3.26 cents per kilowatt-hour in an urban area and 7.33 cents in a non-urban area. The non-urban monthly service charge was also higher. The published rates show that a rural business can pay more than twice the urban distribution charge before it sells a single product to a neighbour.

That cost eventually appears somewhere. It appears in the price on the shelf, in the wage that cannot be offered, in the repair that is postponed or in the decision that the business can no longer remain open. The closure then reduces local competition and forces residents to travel farther, returning us to the gasoline pump once again.

Efficiency is not the same as independence

The strongest part of this rabbit trail may not be about what rural residents are charged. It may be about what urban residents lose the practical ability to do for themselves.

Cities are efficient at the scale of systems. One water main can serve hundreds of homes. One transit route can move thousands of people. A hospital can draw specialists and equipment into one place. That efficiency is real, and it can improve lives. But efficiency for the system is not the same thing as autonomy for the household.

A rural property may provide enough land for a serious garden, an orchard, chickens, a greenhouse, food storage, rain collection, a workshop or a woodlot. None of those things guarantees self-sufficiency. Land requires knowledge, health, time, tools and money, and rural living should never be romanticized as effortless independence. What the land preserves is the possibility of producing at least part of what the household needs.

Urban residents can and do grow food on balconies, indoors and in community gardens. Their ingenuity deserves respect. The limits are nevertheless visible in the data. Statistics Canada found that in 2023, 66 percent of owner households grew fruit, herbs, vegetables or flowers for personal use, compared with 38 percent of renter households. Most growers used a yard; only a small minority used a community garden. Tenure and housing form shape the opportunity to grow.

A few pots of herbs can restore relationship and teach a great deal, but they ordinarily cannot supply a household with potatoes, squash, beans, fruit and preserved food through an Ontario winter. When land access disappears, food becomes something almost entirely purchased rather than partly produced.

Heating follows the same distinction. A rural homeowner may be able to install a wood stove, maintain a woodlot, store fuel or keep more than one source of heat available. An apartment resident normally uses whatever system the landlord, utility or condominium corporation has selected. That does not automatically make urban heating dirtier. Ontario’s electrical grid draws heavily upon nuclear and hydroelectric generation, alongside natural gas, wind, solar and bioenergy. Electric heat can therefore be relatively low-carbon even though not every generation source is renewable. The deeper issue is that the resident usually cannot choose, repair or replace the system independently.

Nor does rural freedom of choice guarantee low energy costs. Ontario’s own Electrification and Energy Transition Panel observed that rural households have much higher overall home-energy costs than urban households, largely because many do not have access to pipeline natural gas and instead rely upon electricity, propane, oil or wood. The ability to choose among imperfect alternatives is still not the same thing as having an affordable alternative.

In the city, food, heat, water, shelter and waste removal arrive through managed networks. Those networks can be remarkably reliable—until access depends upon employment, rent, a functioning account and the ability to keep paying. The household becomes efficient because it has outsourced much of its survival.

Naming the pattern without inventing the conspiracy

Two thinkers helped me understand what this rabbit had uncovered.

In Seeing Like a State, political scientist James C. Scott examined how large administrative systems simplify complicated local realities into forms that can be measured and managed from the centre. Scott was not writing specifically about present-day rural Ontario, and it would be unfair to claim that he proved this argument for us. His work nevertheless gives us a useful lens: dense, standardized populations are easier for institutions to see, serve and administer than scattered households with different local practices.

Ivan Illich offered another useful idea in Tools for Conviviality: the “radical monopoly.” This is larger than one company controlling a market. It occurs when one kind of system becomes so dominant that meaningful alternatives become difficult or impossible. A person may theoretically remain free to walk, grow food, heat with local fuel or bank in person, while the world around them is reorganized in ways that make those choices increasingly impractical.

That, I believe, is closer to what we are seeing.

There does not need to be a secret meeting between Ottawa, the banks, Hydro One, grocery chains and municipal planners. Each institution can follow its own incentives. Governments often seek administrative efficiency. Banks seek lower operating costs. Retailers seek volume. Utilities price the cost of distance. Developers seek profitable density. Environmental policy favours shorter trips and shared infrastructure. None of those motives, examined alone, proves an intention to manufacture dependence.

Put them together, however, and they produce a recognizable direction of travel. Rural residents pay more to reach fewer services. Urban residents receive closer services but lose land, choice and the capacity to provide more of life’s necessities directly. One side is penalized for distance; the other is rewarded for surrendering autonomy to centralized networks.

A Pagan question of relationship and place

This is where the subject belongs on Unplugged Pagan.

Paganism is not made authentic by a postal code. A person living in a high-rise can maintain profound relationships with the seasons, the ancestors, the local watershed and the other-than-human world. A person surrounded by a hundred rural acres can remain completely disconnected from the land beneath their feet. City Paganism is no contradiction, and rural residence is no spiritual credential.

But land access matters. The ability to plant, harvest, compost, preserve, mend, build and gather fuel changes our relationship with necessity. Food is no longer only a product appearing beneath fluorescent lights. Heat is no longer merely a number on a bill. Water does not begin at the tap, and waste does not cease to exist when the truck carries it away.

Those acts teach reciprocity because the consequences remain near us. The soil answers what we put into it. The woodpile remembers whether we prepared in summer. The pantry records both abundance and neglect. Self-sufficiency is never complete—we have always depended upon neighbours, craftspeople, trade and community—but local competence gives us something different from commercial isolation. It allows dependence to become visible, chosen and reciprocal rather than distant, mandatory and anonymous.

That is not nostalgia for some imaginary past in which everyone lived alone in a cabin. It is an argument for preserving human-scale choices: the right to grow meaningful amounts of food, to use safe local heating alternatives, to maintain local businesses, to reach essential services without surrendering an entire day, and to remain in a rural community without being charged repeatedly for the privilege.

The difference between intended and accepted

I cannot honestly conclude that the Canadian government is operating one concealed program to force rural people into cities for the purpose of increasing commercial dependence. The evidence does not establish that claim, and some evidence directly complicates it.

I can conclude that governments and corporations repeatedly make decisions that privilege density, centralization and institutional scale. I can conclude that these decisions progressively remove services and productive choices from rural communities. I can conclude that the resulting costs are transferred to rural residents, while urban residents are made increasingly dependent upon landlords, utilities, retailers and managed systems for basic necessities.

Most importantly, I can conclude that these outcomes are foreseeable.

Once an outcome is understood and the same decisions continue, the question changes. We are no longer arguing only about whether dependence was the original intention. We must also ask why it remains an acceptable consequence.

A serious rural policy would measure more than population growth and infrastructure cost. It would measure how much practical choice remains. Can residents still obtain cash and speak to a banker? Can an older person reach health care? Can a household grow food or maintain a safe backup source of heat? Can a small business survive its delivery charges? Can young people build a life locally rather than being told that opportunity lives somewhere else?

The rabbit did not lead me to a hidden room where powerful people were drawing arrows from every farmhouse toward the city. It led somewhere far more familiar: to the locked door of a former bank, the long drive to a medical appointment, the higher number at the gasoline pump, the delivery line on a hydro bill and the small balcony expected to take the place of a garden.

No one has to order us into the cities if remaining outside them is made steadily more expensive, more inconvenient and less possible.

There it goes again.

Godspeed.

Sources and further reading

The Work Must Outlive Its Founder

Hands pass firekeeping tools beside a communal woodland fire

A rabbit has emerged from the undergrowth between our look at The Heathen Underground and our return to Declaration 127. It is not another rabbit about folkism, Facebook or declarations. It is carrying a ring of old keys in its mouth and appears to be wondering who will open the doors when the person who built the house is no longer standing there.

The Heathen Underground began under Heather O’Brien. In 2017, responsibility for it passed to Nicole Butler, who publicly thanked Heather for trusting her with what she described as the torch. Declaration 127 followed a different path. It was created by a team, maintained by a committee and then left without an active home after that committee burned out and its website disappeared. In 2024, Rob Schreiwer transferred stewardship of Declaration 127 and its associated assets to The Troth.

These are separate projects with separate histories. Their leadership changes do not demonstrate shared ownership, coordination or some hidden organizational structure. What they share is a much more ordinary—and much more important—problem faced by nearly every volunteer Pagan undertaking.

How does the work continue after the people who began it can no longer carry it?

The Founder and the Work

Founders matter. Someone has to be the first person to strike the match, register the domain, create the group, write the declaration, rent the field, call the meeting or place the first stone. Without that first stubborn person, many of the things we later call community would never exist.

The difficulty begins when the founder and the work become indistinguishable. The project becomes known as one person’s group, one person’s festival, one person’s ritual or one person’s vision. Every decision returns to the same hands. Knowledge stays in one head. Passwords remain in one notebook. Other people may help, but they are never given enough knowledge or authority to continue without the founder.

That arrangement can survive for years. It may even look efficient because everyone knows who makes the decisions. Then the founder becomes tired, ill, overwhelmed, disillusioned or simply ready to walk another path. Suddenly the community discovers that it was not standing around a shared hearth. It was standing around someone else’s campfire.

When that person leaves, the flame goes with them.

This is not necessarily the result of selfishness. Founders often keep doing everything because no one else volunteers, because explaining a task takes longer than doing it, or because previous attempts to share responsibility ended badly. A person may carry something alone for so long that they stop noticing how much of its structure exists only inside their own memory.

Eventually, however, a community project must become larger than its founder if it is going to become an inheritance.

Legacy Begins Where Control Ends

We often confuse legacy with control. We imagine preserving someone’s legacy means freezing their creation at the moment they last touched it. Nothing may be moved, questioned, repaired or reinterpreted because “that is how the founder wanted it.” The founder’s name becomes a kind of permanent veto held over people who must live with circumstances the founder never encountered.

That is not legacy. That is embalming.

A living tradition cannot remain exactly as it was. New people arrive. Language changes. Problems emerge. Communities learn things that their founders did not know. A project that cannot respond to any of this may preserve its original shape, but it will do so in the manner of an abandoned building. The walls remain while the life inside them disappears.

Real legacy is what remains after control has been released. It is found in the people who learned how to carry the work, the records that allow its history to be remembered and the values strong enough to survive examination. It is also found in the freedom of later stewards to repair what no longer works.

The successor’s responsibility is not to impersonate the founder. It is to understand what was entrusted to them, preserve what remains valuable and make the changes necessary for the work to continue. That may mean taking it in directions the founder never imagined.

The original log does not remain forever in the hearth. It gives its heat to the next piece of wood.

When the Torch Is Passed

The Heathen Underground provides one version of succession. A founder trusted another person to take responsibility for an existing public project. The name continued, the audience remained and the work developed under different stewardship. Whatever private conversations or practical arrangements accompanied that transition are not ours to invent. What is visible is that there was a handoff and that the project continued afterward.

Declaration 127 shows the more difficult version. The declaration survived as an idea even when the structure maintaining it did not. Its committee burned out. Its website disappeared. The words continued to circulate, but there was no longer an active body maintaining the signatories, answering questions or deciding how the declaration should evolve.

That gap matters. A document may be copied indefinitely, but stewardship involves more than keeping a page online. Someone must maintain the archive, answer for changes, examine whether signatories still live by the principles they endorsed and decide what happens when the community outgrows the original wording.

The Troth accepted that responsibility in 2024. That does not make The Troth the owner of inclusive Heathenry or the final authority over every person who invokes Hávamál 127. It means the organization accepted responsibility for carrying one particular piece of modern Heathen history forward. The declaration gained a home, a visible steward and the possibility of continued development.

The important word here is not ownership. It is responsibility.

The Unseen Structure of Community

Pagan communities are often uncomfortable with structure. Many of us arrived here after leaving institutions that had too much authority, too many rules or too little room for individual experience. Informality can feel like freedom. We gather around a fire, share the work and tell ourselves that no one is really in charge.

Yet someone still owns the account. Someone controls the mailing list. Someone knows where the records are stored. Someone decides who may post, who receives a key, who handles the money and whose version of the story becomes the official memory.

Undefined authority does not disappear. It merely becomes harder to see and more difficult to challenge.

A project does not necessarily need a corporation, a board or a shelf full of bylaws. Its structure should fit its size and purpose. It does, however, need to know who is responsible for what and what happens if that person can no longer do it. Even a small group can keep shared records, provide more than one trusted person with access, document recurring tasks and teach others how the work is done.

That is not bureaucracy for its own sake. It is care for the people who would otherwise inherit confusion.

The Cost of Having No Successor

When no one has been prepared to continue the work, the burden often falls upon whoever happens to be standing closest when the founder leaves. That person receives the public expectations without the knowledge, resources or authority required to meet them. They may not know which bills must be paid, who owns the photographs, where agreements were stored or why certain decisions were made.

The community may then blame the successor for failing to reproduce work that previously depended upon years of invisible knowledge. Alternatively, the project may simply disappear. Its social-media page becomes quiet, its website expires and its history survives as fragments in search results and personal recollections.

This is where volunteer exhaustion becomes more than an administrative problem. It becomes an ethical one. If a community continually depends upon people sacrificing themselves to keep it alive, then it is consuming its caretakers as fuel.

We are usually very good at thanking the person tending the fire. We are less skilled at noticing when they have been standing there alone for twelve hours and no one has brought them water.

Preparing the Next Firekeeper

Succession begins long before someone announces that they are leaving. It begins when knowledge is shared instead of guarded. It begins when another person is allowed to perform the task imperfectly and learn from doing it. It begins when records are kept, decisions are explained and authority is made visible.

It also requires founders to accept that their successors will not do everything the same way. If every difference is treated as betrayal, then no successor can ever truly assume stewardship. They can only serve as a caretaker under the permanent shadow of someone who is no longer carrying the daily burden.

Successors have obligations as well. Taking responsibility for an existing project does not grant permission to erase the people who built it. Change should not require pretending that the earlier work never happened. The names, labour, mistakes and contributions of those who came before remain part of the story.

Healthy succession holds both truths at once: the founder deserves to be remembered, and the successor must be allowed to lead.

There should also be permission for an honourable ending. Not every project must survive forever. Sometimes the responsible choice is to preserve its records, explain why the work is ending and close the door carefully. An honest ending protects more memory than leaving an abandoned page to slowly disappear without explanation.

What Are We Actually Building?

This rabbit reaches beyond The Heathen Underground and Declaration 127. It reaches every Pagan gathering, archive, teaching circle, festival, grove, kindred, website and piece of community land. It reaches anything built by people who quietly assume there will always be someone available to carry it tomorrow.

If a project cannot continue without one particular person, then it has not yet become a community inheritance. It remains a personal undertaking supported by a community. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, provided everyone understands the distinction.

But if we say we are building something for the generations that follow, then we must build doors that other hands can open. We must leave maps, records, tools and room for those who come next to add something of their own.

Founding is an act of creation. Stewardship is an act of endurance. Succession is an act of trust.

The work outlives its founder when the founder is no longer required to stand at its centre, when the successor does not need to erase the founder to find their own place and when the community understands that responsibility belongs to more than the person currently holding the keys.

Somewhere beyond the gate, a new firekeeper is adding wood to a flame they did not start. They are not stealing the fire. They are fulfilling the reason it was lit.

There goes the rabbit again. Godspeed.

Sources and Further Reading

A Gate Is Not a Village: What Comes After Declaration 127

Wooden gate opening onto a forest campfire gathering with people and rabbit

Some rabbit trails bring us back to a place we have already visited, but they do not always bring us back for the same reason. Sometimes the old gate is still standing, but something has changed on the other side.

Unplugged Pagan has already spent considerable time with Declaration 127. We have looked at its origins, its relationship to Hávamál 127, its opposition to folkism, its expansion into Declaration 127 2.0, and what its teaching about frith means when the problem is not a stranger outside the hall but someone already sitting near the fire. Those earlier posts asked where the line should be drawn and why silence should not be confused with peace.

This is not another walk through the same history. The rabbit has moved past the sign at the gate and is now looking at what stands behind it. Declaration 127 helped Inclusive Heathens identify what they would no longer tolerate, but a community cannot live forever on a list of things it opposes. Once the gate has been built, someone still has to build the village.

The Gate Was Necessary

The original Declaration 127 appeared in 2016 as a direct response to the Ásatrú Folk Assembly and its exclusionary claims about race, sexuality and gender. Its purpose was narrow but important: the signatories would not promote, associate with or conduct business with the AFA while those policies remained in place. They would not offer the silent approval of frið to people using Heathen traditions to justify prejudice.

That first declaration was a gate. It said that not every ideology using Heathen names, symbols and gods would automatically receive recognition as an equally legitimate form of Heathenry. It rejected the idea that hospitality required giving racial exclusion an honoured seat in the hall.

Declaration 127 2.0 widened that gate in 2021. Instead of concentrating on one named organization, it addressed discrimination more broadly and included age, ability, health, race, ethnicity, ancestry, veteran status, gender, gender identity, sexuality and socioeconomic class. The Declaration of Deeds, which emerged around the same period, added a particularly Heathen answer: the circumstances of birth do not establish a person’s worth. Deeds do.

Those were necessary developments. A village with no gate cannot protect the people inside it. Hospitality without boundaries is not hospitality for long, because eventually the person who wants to control the hall will make everyone else unsafe. The gate matters, and the people who insisted on building it were not wrong.

But a gate is still not a village.

A gate cannot feed the hungry, teach the inexperienced, conduct ritual, preserve memory, care for the grieving or settle a dispute fairly. It can tell us who should not be permitted to poison the well, but it cannot by itself tell us how the well will be maintained, who will carry the water or what happens when the keeper of the well is the person causing harm.

When a Declaration Becomes a Rule

This is where something genuinely new has happened. In January 2026, The Troth adopted formal codes of conduct for its members and leaders. These standards prohibit discrimination, harassment, retaliation, misuse of authority and institutional bullying. They also protect good-faith reporting and begin laying out reporting processes, safeguards against conflicts of interest, due process and avenues of appeal.

One provision deserves particular attention from an Unplugged Pagan perspective: leaders are specifically forbidden from weaponizing frith to pressure harmed people into silence, forced reconciliation or simply “being nice.”

That is a significant step beyond placing a declaration on a website. It recognizes that sacred language can itself be used as a tool of control. Words such as frith, hospitality, kinship, loyalty and community can describe worthy obligations, but they can also be turned against the injured person. A leader can invoke peace while protecting the person who broke it. A community can demand reconciliation before truth has been established. A hall can preserve its reputation by convincing the wounded person that speaking publicly would be the greater betrayal.

Unplugged Pagan has called that false peace. The Troth has now given that problem an organizational name and placed it inside a leadership standard. Frith is not protected by silencing the person who reports harm. Frith was already damaged by the act that made the report necessary.

This is the movement from moral language to accountable structure. A declaration says, “We oppose harm.” A code of conduct asks what happens when harm occurs, who receives the complaint, what protects the complainant from retaliation, how evidence is considered, how conflicts of interest are handled and whether the person making the decision can also be questioned.

That may sound administrative rather than spiritual, but healthy structure is one of the ways a community practices care. When authority is left informal and undefined, authority does not disappear. It simply becomes harder to see, harder to challenge and easier to misuse.

The People Carrying the Declaration

There is another lesson in what happened to Declaration 127 after version 2.0 was released. By the end of 2021, its volunteer committee had burned out and the original website eventually became inaccessible. The declaration survived in archives and through organizations that had signed it, but the structure responsible for maintaining the document, vetting signatories and answering questions largely disappeared.

This was not proof that the declaration had failed. It was proof that good intentions still require sustainable labour. Pagan communities repeatedly build important things on the backs of a few volunteers, celebrate the result and then quietly expect those same people to carry it indefinitely. When those people become exhausted, the disappearance of the work is often treated as a personal failure rather than the predictable result of an unsupported structure.

A village cannot be maintained by praising the firekeeper while leaving that person alone to gather every piece of wood.

In April 2024, responsibility for Declaration 127 and its associated assets was transferred to The Troth. The organization created a Declaration 127 subcommittee within its Community Relations Committee, giving the document a more permanent institutional home. That does not make The Troth the owner of Inclusive Heathenry, nor does it make the organization beyond criticism. It does, however, create identifiable responsibility for preserving the declaration and continuing its development.

In February 2026, The Troth announced an Inclusive Heathen coalition involving The Asatru Community, Fellowship of Fire and Ice, Heathens Against Hate and Urglaawe International. The coalition began working on a new shared position statement addressing the future of Declaration 127. A month later, The Troth reported that a new working draft was nearing release and would be opened to community comment and further revision.

At the time of writing, I have not found that draft publicly available. That means the work should not be treated as finished. The coalition is evidence of movement, not proof of completion. What ultimately matters will be the wording of the new document, the process used to revise it, the way signatories are vetted and what participating organizations are actually expected to do when those principles are violated.

Can Opposition Hold a Community Together?

A new Canadian academic study adds another important question. In his 2026 University of Ottawa thesis, Inclusive Heathenry: The Use of German Pagan Rhetoric in the Construction of a Progressive Contemporary Religion, David Gerald Joseph O’Reilly treats Declaration 127 as a turning point. It helped move Heathenry beyond the older language of “universalism” and toward an Inclusive Heathen identity that actively confronts racism and celebrates racial, sexual and gender diversity.

O’Reilly also raises a difficult criticism. Since 2016, much of Inclusive Heathenry’s energy has been directed toward separating itself from racist or otherwise harmful forms of Heathenry. That separation was necessary, but opposition can become an incomplete foundation. If the loudest shared conversation is always about who must be removed, the community may never develop a sufficiently strong answer to why everyone else should remain.

This does not mean anti-racism has become unnecessary or that the gate should be taken down. A village that forgets why the gate was built will eventually invite the same danger back inside. The question is whether defending the boundary has become the community’s entire identity.

People do not join a religious community only because it has expelled the correct people. They remain because they find ritual, meaning, relationship, obligation, teaching, care, memory and a place where their presence matters. They need more than safety from exclusion. They need belonging.

That distinction is important. Inclusion says that you may enter. Belonging says that your presence changes the shape of the village. Inclusion gives you a seat beside the fire. Belonging means someone notices when you are missing, listens when you speak, values what you contribute and helps carry you when your own strength fails.

What Must Be Built Inside the Gate?

If Declaration 127 marks the boundary, the next stage of Inclusive Heathenry must be measured by what it builds within that boundary. That includes rituals people can share without surrendering the diversity of their individual paths. It includes education grounded in responsible scholarship rather than fantasy history, clergy and community leaders trained to recognize harm, processes that allow complaints without retaliation, and archives that preserve community memory beyond the lifespan of one website or administrator.

It also includes ordinary forms of reciprocity. Visiting the sick. Helping someone through grief. Teaching a newcomer how to make an offering without making them feel foolish. Sharing food. Maintaining sacred places. Supporting people in recovery. Making gatherings accessible. Remembering the volunteers after the event posters come down. Allowing someone to leave without treating departure as betrayal.

None of those things is as dramatic as publishing a declaration. They are also the things that determine whether the declaration means anything.

The Declaration of Deeds gave us the simplest version of this lesson: we are known by what we do. An organization may describe itself as inclusive, but the word must eventually be visible in budgets, policies, accessibility, leadership choices, disciplinary processes, rituals and daily relationships. Otherwise, “inclusive” becomes another decorative label placed over the door.

The same is true of frith. If frith exists only when nobody complains, it is not frith. If hospitality exists only for people who never challenge authority, it is not hospitality. If belonging lasts only while a person remains useful, agreeable and silent, it is not belonging.

The Work After the Declaration

Our earlier UP posts concluded that declarations are not wards. They do not banish harm through correct wording, and they do not replace the courage required to act when the problem arrives at the hearth. The developments of 2026 do not invalidate that conclusion. They show what must come next.

The conduct codes give the boundary practical form. The coalition distributes some of the responsibility across multiple organizations. The proposed revision opens the possibility of community participation. The new scholarship asks whether Inclusive Heathenry can build a religious culture strong enough to offer more than opposition.

None of this guarantees success. Policies can be ignored. Committees can become closed circles. Reporting systems can protect institutions instead of people. Coalitions can produce statements nobody enforces. A beautiful village plan can remain rolled up on a table while the roof continues to leak.

Still, there is something important in recognizing that the gate was never supposed to be the finished work. Declaration 127 was a necessary refusal. It said that racial exclusion, white supremacy and other forms of dehumanizing discrimination would not be granted silence in the name of peace. The task now is to build a community in which that refusal is expressed through protection, accountability, shared practice and meaningful belonging.

A gate tells us where the village begins. Deeds tell us whether a village actually exists.

The rabbit has passed beneath the sign and found plans spread across a table under the trees. The walls are not complete, the new declaration has not yet arrived, and some of the old work still needs repair. But the question is finally moving in the right direction. It is no longer only, “What are we standing against?” It is becoming, “What are we responsible for building together?”

There goes the rabbit again. Godspeed.

Sources and Further Reading

The Rabbit Finds the Heathen Underground

Rabbit sitting beneath enormous tree roots in a forest with a distant campfire

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.

Embracing the Full Moon: A Personal Reflection

Candlelit stone circle surrounded by flowers in a moonlit forest

I thought the full moon was last night.

Turns out I was a little early.

Tonight, August 27 into the early hours of August 28, the Moon is not only full, it is passing almost completely into the shadow of the Earth.

Here in Ontario, the penumbral eclipse begins this evening, the obvious partial eclipse begins around 10:33 p.m., and maximum eclipse arrives shortly after midnight. According to NASA, at the deepest point of the eclipse, about 96.3 percent of the Moon’s disk will be inside the Earth’s umbra.

Almost total.

But not quite.

And somehow I think that makes it more interesting.

Maybe understanding the machinery does not remove the mystery.

We know what is happening. The Earth is passing between the Sun and the Moon. The Earth blocks the sunlight that normally illuminates the Moon. Some of that sunlight filters through our atmosphere, which can give the shadowed Moon that familiar copper or reddish appearance.

No dragon is eating it.

No deity has stolen it.

The Moon has not died.

There is no cosmic battle taking place above us.

And yet, if you walk outside tonight and actually look up, knowing all of that does not make the sight any less extraordinary.

That got me thinking about something larger.

Where exactly does the sacred come from?

The Moon Does Not Need Our Mythology

Modern Paganism has developed an enormous collection of lunar correspondences. Full moons have names, colours, herbs, crystals, intentions, gods, goddesses, rituals and recommended magical workings attached to them.

Some come from old traditions. Some come from particular cultures. Some are modern constructions. Some appear to have originated approximately fifteen minutes before somebody turned them into an infographic.

That does not automatically make every modern practice meaningless. Religions have always developed, borrowed, adapted and changed.

But occasionally I wonder whether we become so busy assigning meaning to nature that we forget to experience nature.

The Moon tonight does not require me to assign a correspondence to it.

I do not need a particular coloured candle.

I do not need the correct crystal.

I do not need to know which herbs supposedly correspond with an August lunar eclipse.

I can simply walk outside.

Look up.

And watch the shadow of the planet I am standing on slowly move across another world.

That alone is pretty damned magical.

And Apparently Humans Have Been Doing This for a Very Long Time

Interestingly enough, while I was looking around the Pagan web for something worth discussing tonight, The Wild Hunt published a story about archaeological research in the Czech Republic.

Researchers studying a prehistoric enclosure near Chleby believe people living there more than 6,500 years ago constructed a large ritual space whose entrances were deliberately oriented toward movements of the Sun and Moon.

The site predates the major prehistoric construction at Stonehenge by more than a thousand years.

The enclosure is enormous, roughly 230 metres across, surrounded by a deep ditch and broken by a dozen entrances. Researchers studying the geometry of those entrances have identified alignments associated with important solar and lunar cycles, including the solstices and extreme positions in the Moon’s long cycle across the horizon.

There is also evidence suggesting that the place was more than an astronomical measuring device. Animal remains, including cattle skulls and horns, were found around portions of the enclosure, and the site appears to have been used for ritual and communal purposes.

We should be careful here.

These people were not Wiccans.

They were not Druids in the modern sense.

They were not Heathens.

We cannot simply reach six thousand years into the past, grab whatever looks vaguely familiar and declare, “See? Pagans.”

We do not know exactly what they believed.

But we can see what they did.

They watched the sky.

They watched the seasons.

They noticed patterns.

They gathered.

They built.

And apparently the movements of the Sun and Moon mattered enough that generations of human beings invested significant labour into physically marking those movements on the landscape.

That interests me far more than trying to claim them as members of some modern Pagan tradition.

Thousands of years later, I can walk outside in Ontario and look at the same Moon.

Different culture. Different language. Different religion. Different understanding of the universe.

Same sky.

Then We Invented the Internet

Which brings us to another recent piece from The Wild Hunt.

A guest essay published earlier this month argued for the importance of in-person connection within Pagan and occult communities. The author described an online environment increasingly shaped by echo chambers, manufactured outrage and division, and suggested that physical gatherings can build relationships capable of surviving disagreement in ways that online interaction often does not.

This one struck a nerve with me.

Because those of us who remember Pagan community before social media remember something that is very easy to forget.

You sometimes had to deal with people you disagreed with.

In person.

Imagine that.

You could disagree with somebody about theology in the afternoon and still need their help putting up a dining shelter before the rain arrived.

You could think somebody’s interpretation of a tradition was completely backwards and still sit beside them at the fire that night.

The person who irritated the living hell out of you might also be the person holding the other end of the tent pole.

Or carrying water.

Or cooking dinner.

Or watching the fire.

Or helping when something went wrong.

That changes relationships.

It does not eliminate conflict. Pagan communities have never lacked conflict, politics, personality clashes or spectacular explosions of human stupidity.

But physical community forces us to encounter the whole human being.

Social media often reduces that same person to the one sentence we disagree with.

Then the algorithm discovers that our anger keeps us scrolling.

And suddenly disagreement becomes entertainment.

So Pagans Are Trying to Reinvent the Village

Another curious thing I stumbled across is a relatively new social platform called FolkRealms.

It describes itself as a human-powered community for people interested in Paganism, Heathenry, mythology, folk traditions and related subjects. What caught my attention was not simply that somebody built another Pagan social network.

We’ve seen Pagan forums, email lists, message boards, social networks and communities come and go before.

What interested me was what FolkRealms says it does not want.

No advertising.

No algorithm deciding what keeps you sufficiently angry to remain on the platform.

No bots.

No AI-generated content.

The stated intention is real people talking to real people.

Whether that particular experiment succeeds in the long term remains to be seen. Creating a platform is easy compared with creating a healthy community. Eventually every community has to answer the difficult questions: who belongs, who decides, how disagreement is handled, what behaviour is acceptable, and what happens when two people’s definitions of community collide.

Those problems existed around fires long before broadband.

Technology simply changes the size and speed of the argument.

Still, the fact that people are deliberately looking for online spaces without algorithms, bots and artificial content tells us something.

Maybe people are getting tired of being processed.

Which Brings Us to AI Writing Pagan Books

This is where tonight’s little journey through the Pagan web becomes particularly strange.

The Wild Hunt also reported this week on an investigation into potentially AI-generated religious books being sold through Amazon.

The investigation examined 2,034 books in Amazon’s Religion & Spirituality category, mostly published during the first half of 2026.

The researchers estimated that 63 percent of the books examined were likely AI-generated.

Among books categorized around Witchcraft, the estimate was 78 percent.

Seventy-eight percent.

Now, there is a very important qualification here.

AI detectors are not infallible.

They can produce false positives. Different writing styles can trigger them. Researchers themselves acknowledge limitations in using detection tools.

So we should absolutely not turn that number into the claim that “78 percent of Witchcraft books are definitely written by AI.”

That is not what the research establishes.

But even with that caution, the findings raise a rather uncomfortable question.

What happens when Paganism starts being taught by authors who may never have practised Paganism at all?

That concerns me more than the existence of artificial intelligence itself.

Because there is an important distinction that tends to disappear whenever we discuss AI.

A human being can use a tool.

A writer can bring decades of experience, memories, research, arguments, mistakes, conversations and lived practice to a piece of writing and use technology to organize information, check grammar, compare sources or help shape material.

The experience is still coming from somewhere.

That is very different from typing:

“Write me a complete book about ancient Celtic full moon magic.”

And then selling whatever comes out under the name of an author who never existed.

The machine has never stood beneath a full moon.

It has never tended a ritual fire.

It has never disagreed with somebody across that fire and had to work beside them the next morning.

It has never buried a friend.

It has never watched a festival site change over twenty years.

It has never felt rain arrive halfway through ritual.

It has never sat alone in the woods wondering whether the gods are listening.

It has never had the experience of suddenly realizing that something you believed twenty years ago no longer makes sense.

It can process descriptions of those things.

It cannot have them.

Maybe That Is the Thread Connecting All of This

Tonight the Earth is casting its shadow across the Moon.

More than six thousand years ago, people built a massive ritual enclosure that appears to have helped them track the movements of that same sky.

Today Pagan writers are worrying about losing lived spiritual experience to machine-generated books.

Other Pagans are worrying that online interaction has replaced human community.

And still others are attempting to build digital spaces where algorithms and artificial content are deliberately excluded.

Those stories initially looked completely unrelated.

I don’t think they are.

They are all asking the same question.

Where does meaning actually come from?

Maybe it comes from participation.

Watching instead of merely reading about watching.

Doing instead of endlessly consuming instructions about doing.

Gathering instead of merely following.

Remembering instead of allowing an algorithm to decide what history appears in our feed.

Learning from people while remembering that people are fallible.

Using tools without allowing the tools to become substitutes for experience.

Perhaps that is something modern Paganism needs to think seriously about.

We have more Pagan information available to us today than at any other point in modern history.

Books. Podcasts. YouTube. Websites. Archives. Academic papers. Social networks. Digital libraries. Artificial intelligence.

And yet information is not necessarily wisdom.

A correspondence chart is not a relationship with the Moon.

A Facebook group is not automatically a community.

A book is not automatically tradition.

An ancient archaeological site is not automatically evidence for whatever modern belief we would like it to support.

And technology is neither automatically our salvation nor automatically our enemy.

They’re tools.

The question is what we do with them.

Meanwhile, There Is an Eclipse Happening

And after wandering through 6,500 years of human history, Pagan community, archaeology, artificial intelligence and the future of spiritual publishing, I find myself coming back to where this started.

The Moon.

Tonight I don’t particularly need somebody to tell me what the eclipse is supposed to mean.

I think I’d rather look at it.

Because perhaps one of the oldest Pagan practices available to us is also one of the simplest.

Pay attention.

To the sky.

To the land.

To the people around the fire.

To the stories being handed to us.

To who wrote them.

To what is real.

To what we merely want to be real.

And every now and then, put the damned screen down and look up.

The Moon was here long before Pagan social media.

It was here long before our books.

It was here long before Stonehenge.

And tonight the shadow of the Earth is slowly moving across it.

That seems worth stepping outside for.

Sources and further reading: NASA Scientific Visualization Studio, August 27–28, 2026 Deep Partial Lunar Eclipse; Timeanddate, August 28, 2026 Partial Lunar Eclipse in Ottawa, Ontario; The Wild Hunt, Study Reports AI-Generated Books Flood Witchcraft and Religious Publishing; The Wild Hunt, A Thousand Years Before Stonehenge: Ancient Czech Sanctuary Tracked Sun and Moon; The Wild Hunt, Ecumenical Occulture: The Importance of In-Person Connection; FolkRealms, About FolkRealms.

Why Is a Viking Group in Manitoba Named After an Irish God?

Festival-goers raise hands beneath a Hiberno-Norse Heritage Festival sign

Well, this is what happens when you chase rabbits.

I was digging into Íslendingadagurinn, the Icelandic Festival of Manitoba held in Gimli, because it had wandered into another question I’ve been asking lately: what survives when a religion disappears but a culture keeps remembering? Íslendingadagurinn is not a Pagan festival. It is an Icelandic-Canadian cultural festival with roots going back to 1890, and yet within it we find sagas, Viking history, folklore, old imagery and a reconstructed Viking Village. Then, buried rather innocently on the official Viking Village page, I noticed the name of the living-history group helping make that village happen.

Hands of Lugh.

Hang on.

Lugh?

Not Odin. Not Thor. Not Freyr. Not Tyr.

Lugh.

One of the great figures of the old Irish mythological tradition.

So why, in the middle of an Icelandic festival in Gimli, Manitoba, is a Viking living-history organization carrying the name of an Irish god?

At first glance it looks like one of those wonderful historical mismatches that modern Paganism produces from time to time: Celtic thing over here, Norse thing over there, someone likes both, mash them together and carry on. Except the deeper I went, the less mismatched it became. In fact, the problem may not be Hands of Lugh at all.

The problem may be the filing cabinets we use to organize history.

First, Who Are Hands of Lugh?

Hands of Lugh describes itself quite simply as “Viking Age Living History.” This isn’t just a bunch of people putting on horned helmets and beating on shields for tourists. In fact, their own authenticity guidelines specifically prohibit horned helmets, along with a number of other things that belong more to modern Viking fantasy than the archaeological record.

The group reconstructs aspects of Viking Age life through clothing, cooking, textiles, metalworking, woodworking, archery, slings, combat and other everyday skills. Their material is researched, recreated and then actually used within a living-history setting. At Íslendingadagurinn, the Icelandic Festival’s own Viking Village page says its reenactors have spent thousands of hours researching and recreating objects from the period. Hands of Lugh is named directly as a partner in that village.

And this isn’t their only appearance. Hands of Lugh also turns up at Manitoba heritage events, Highland gatherings, medieval festivals and the Gimli Ice Festival. An older Manitoba Highland Gathering page identifies the group as “formerly called Sons of Lugh.” So the name isn’t some recent branding choice created specifically for Íslendingadagurinn. Lugh has apparently been along for the ride for quite some time.

That older name gives us another little breadcrumb. Search around the group’s older presence online and you will find references to the Sons of Lugh associated with Hiberno-Norse or Norse-Gaelic reenactment. But we don’t even have to depend entirely on old social-media descriptions to make the Irish connection, because the current Hands of Lugh authenticity guide tells us exactly what historical world they are interested in reconstructing.

And this is where the rabbit gets interesting.

Look at Their Map, Not Just Their Name

The Hands of Lugh Authenticity Guide says that a core objective of the Viking Village is an accurate portrayal of the later Viking Age with a particular focus on Iceland. Fair enough. We are standing in New Iceland, at an Icelandic festival. You would expect Iceland.

But then they explain where they look for material evidence.

The guide says objects should generally reflect Viking Age northwestern Europe, particularly the western diaspora, and actually gives examples: Hedeby, York and Dublin. Their preferred period is roughly 950–1000 CE. Icelandic archaeological material is considered ideal, but because surviving Icelandic finds can be fragmentary, they draw carefully from related places within that western Viking world.

There it is.

Dublin.

Suddenly the Irish name on the Viking group isn’t sitting quite so awkwardly anymore.

Because the Viking Age was not a neat little Scandinavian box.

The Vikings Went to Ireland — And Then Ireland Happened to Them

The first recorded Viking raids on Ireland occurred near the end of the eighth century. Raiding eventually became settlement. Dublin became a fortified Viking base in the ninth century, while Dublin, Waterford, Limerick, Cork and Wexford developed into major centres of Viking settlement and trade. According to the National Museum of Ireland, these settlements helped create Ireland’s first towns and profoundly altered Irish economic and cultural life.

But cultures have a bad habit of refusing to remain separate once human beings actually start living beside one another.

Norse settlers traded with Irish people. They fought Irish people. Irish kings allied with Norse rulers. Norse rulers allied with Irish kings. People married. Children were born. Languages rubbed against each other. Clothing, jewellery, technology, art and stories crossed boundaries. Eventually there were people who could no longer be described particularly well by saying simply “Irish” or “Norse.”

They are commonly called Hiberno-Norse or Norse-Gaels.

Heritage Ireland describes the Hiberno-Norse as emerging from Irish-Norse relationships and mixed communities beginning during the Viking Age. These were people growing up inside cultural households that could contain both Irish and Norse influences. The National Museum goes even further into the archaeological problem: by the end of the tenth century, as Viking communities in Ireland adopted Christianity and the cultures increasingly fused, it can sometimes become difficult to tell whether an object should even be classified as Viking or Irish.

Think about that for a moment.

We like our labels.

Celtic.

Norse.

Irish.

Icelandic.

Viking.

Heathen.

Separate shelves. Separate books. Separate pantheons. Separate symbols.

The archaeological record basically shrugs at us and says, “Good luck with that.”

And then Hands of Lugh walks into an Icelandic festival carrying the name of an Irish god and accidentally demonstrates the entire problem.

But Why Lugh?

This is where I want to be careful.

I have not found a statement from Hands of Lugh saying, “We chose this name for the following religious or historical reason.” Unless somebody from the organization tells us directly, anything more specific than the evidence allows becomes speculation.

But the choice is certainly interesting.

Lugh — Lug in older Irish material — appears prominently in Cath Maige Tuired, the Second Battle of Mag Tuired, one of the major surviving texts dealing with the Túatha Dé Danann. The University College Cork Corpus of Electronic Texts provides Elizabeth A. Gray’s translation of the story.

In one of Lugh’s most famous scenes, he arrives at Tara and is stopped by the doorkeeper. He needs to demonstrate that he has something to offer the court.

So Lugh starts listing skills.

Builder.

Smith.

Champion.

Harper.

Warrior.

Poet and historian.

Sorcerer.

Physician.

Cupbearer.

Brazier.

Each time the doorkeeper essentially tells him, “We’ve already got one of those.”

Finally Lugh asks the question that changes everything: do you have one person who possesses all of these arts?

They don’t.

He is admitted.

The text calls him Samildánach, the one skilled in many arts. His importance isn’t that he alone knows how to swing a weapon. It is precisely the opposite. Lugh embodies breadth of skill. Craftsmanship, knowledge, music, medicine, martial ability, leadership and practical competence all exist in the same figure.

Now go back and look at Hands of Lugh.

Metalworking.

Woodworking.

Textiles.

Cooking.

Archery.

Combat.

Historical research.

Reconstruction.

A group of people attempting to recover and demonstrate the many skills required to recreate a functioning slice of Viking Age life.

Does that prove they chose Lugh because he was Samildánach?

No.

But if you were going to choose an Irish mythological figure as the namesake of a hands-on historical-reconstruction group built around mastering many different crafts, you could certainly do worse.

And the later change from Sons of Lugh to Hands of Lugh makes the imagery even better, whether intentionally or accidentally.

These are quite literally the hands doing the work.

The Icelandic Connection Is More Celtic Than We Sometimes Remember

There is another reason we should be careful about imagining Icelandic history as exclusively Scandinavian.

The settlement of Iceland itself involved people from both the Scandinavian world and the British Isles. Modern genetic research has confirmed what historical and genealogical scholarship had long suggested: the founding population of Iceland contained substantial Norse and Gaelic ancestry.

A major ancient-DNA study published in Science examined genomes from Iceland’s early population and found that the founders had both Gaelic and Norse origins. That does not mean “Iceland was secretly Celtic,” any more than finding Norse ancestry in Ireland means “Ireland was secretly Scandinavian.” It means the actual North Atlantic world was connected.

People moved.

And they carried other people with them, sometimes voluntarily and sometimes very much not. We should not romanticize that process. Viking expansion included slavery, captive-taking and violence. Some of the Gaelic presence in Iceland almost certainly came through people taken from Ireland and Britain into Norse-controlled networks. Other movement occurred through marriage, settlement, alliance and migration.

The result, however, was that when Iceland emerged as a distinct society, its human roots did not come solely from Scandinavia.

So when an Iceland-focused historical group looks westward toward Dublin and the Norse-Gaelic world for comparative archaeological material, it isn’t wandering off topic.

It’s following the roads the Vikings themselves travelled.

Maybe “Celtic Versus Norse” Was Always the Wrong Question

This is where I think modern Paganism can learn something from the reenactors.

We have become very good at taxonomy.

This deity belongs to this pantheon. This symbol belongs to that culture. This practice came from these people. This reconstruction belongs on this shelf. Heathenry goes here. Celtic Paganism goes there. Druidry goes over there. Don’t mix the folders.

There are good reasons for some of that. Historical specificity matters. Cultural appropriation matters. Claiming that every European tradition was secretly one universal religion does violence to the differences between those cultures. We shouldn’t erase distinctions merely because it makes our modern spiritual lives tidier.

But going too far in the opposite direction creates another fiction.

People in the past were not museum exhibits.

The Irish Sea was not a wall.

The North Atlantic was not divided by modern national borders.

A ship leaving Norway could touch Scotland, Ireland, the Isle of Man, Iceland and beyond. Dublin was part of a Viking trade network reaching far beyond Ireland. York was another enormous cultural crossroads. Iceland’s settlers carried Scandinavian and Gaelic ancestry. Norse-Gaelic societies emerged precisely because people didn’t remain conveniently inside the categories we later invented for them.

So perhaps the question isn’t:

“Why is there an Irish god in a Viking group?”

Perhaps the better question is:

“Why did we assume the Irish and Viking worlds were separate enough that this should surprise us?”

That’s a much better rabbit.

Then There Is the Question of Religion

There is another distinction worth making because this is Unplugged Pagan and sooner or later somebody is going to ask it.

Does calling the organization Hands of Lugh make it a Pagan group?

Not from anything I can find.

The organization’s public material presents Hands of Lugh as a Viking Age living-history organization. Its website concentrates on historical accuracy, material culture, crafts, combat and education. I have found no statement requiring members to worship Lugh, practice Irish Paganism, follow Heathenry or hold any particular religious belief.

In fact, the group has published a statement called Vikings Against Racism, explicitly rejecting discrimination based on race, religion or gender and pushing back against the racist appropriation of Viking imagery.

That matters.

Because again we encounter this strange territory between religion, history and cultural memory.

Here is the name of an old Irish divine figure being carried by a modern Canadian organization that does not appear to require religious devotion to him.

Lugh’s name survives.

The crafts survive — or are reconstructed.

The stories survive because manuscripts survived.

The Viking material survives because archaeologists dug it out of the ground.

The Hiberno-Norse world survives because historians, museums and researchers piece together the evidence.

Then living historians pick all of this material up with their hands and make it tangible again.

There is something wonderfully appropriate about that.

Reconstruction Is Memory Done Deliberately

This brings us straight back to the rabbit that started this whole thing.

I’ve been asking what happens when communities disappear and what survives when nobody deliberately records their history. Íslendingadagurinn gave us one answer: cultural memory can survive for generations when people continue gathering, telling stories and building institutions around that memory.

Hands of Lugh gives us another.

Sometimes memory isn’t enough.

Sometimes you have to reconstruct.

You find the object.

You read the excavation report.

You compare several finds.

You work out how the thing might have been made.

You discover your first attempt doesn’t work.

You make it again.

You wear the clothing instead of merely looking at it behind glass. You cook with the utensils. You work the metal. You split the wood. You spin the fibre. You carry the shield. You discover which historical assumptions survive contact with actual human hands.

That’s a different form of remembering.

It is remembering through doing.

And there may be something here for modern Paganism that goes beyond Vikings, Ireland or Iceland.

We’ve become very good at preserving information.

Books.

Websites.

PDF files.

Archives.

Photographs.

Posts like this one.

But culture is not information alone.

Some things have to be done.

A song that nobody sings is preserved, but it isn’t quite alive.

A ritual nobody performs can remain perfectly documented and still be dead.

A craft described in a book survives intellectually, but something changes when somebody puts tool to material and discovers what the written description left out.

A story can sit safely inside an archive for a thousand years, but it becomes something different when human beings gather and tell it again.

Hands matter.

Perhaps that’s why I keep coming back to the name.

The Hands of Lugh

I don’t know exactly why the founders chose it.

Maybe someone from the organization will eventually tell me and this entire rabbit will acquire another tunnel.

But knowing what we now know, the name no longer looks strange.

A living-history group reconstructing the western Viking diaspora, including material connected with Dublin and the Hiberno-Norse world, carries the name of an Irish mythological figure famous for possessing many skills. That group then helps build a Viking Village at an Icelandic-Canadian festival in a community created by descendants of Icelandic immigrants, themselves heirs to an Icelandic population whose founding ancestry included both Norse and Gaelic people.

That isn’t a historical contradiction.

That’s the North Atlantic world.

Messy.

Connected.

Borrowing.

Trading.

Fighting.

Marrying.

Migrating.

Remembering.

Forgetting.

And reconstructing.

Maybe our modern categories are useful maps, but we should stop mistaking the map for the landscape.

Because somewhere in Manitoba, at an Icelandic festival, a group named for an Irish god is reconstructing Viking Age life using evidence from Iceland, Scandinavia, York, Dublin and the wider western Viking diaspora.

And somehow, after following the rabbit far enough, that stops looking strange altogether.

In fact, it starts looking remarkably appropriate.

Maybe Lugh wasn’t lost in the wrong pantheon.

Maybe we were the ones who put up walls where history never had them.

Sources and Further Reading

What Remains When the Gods Are Gone?

Crowd at Íslendingadagurinn Icelandic Heritage Festival beside waterfront stage and Viking ship

Íslendingadagurinn and the Survival of Cultural Memory

I’ve been chasing this particular rabbit for a while now without really knowing where it was going. We’ve been talking about Pagan history, about memory, about second-generation Pagans, third-generation Pagans, communities disappearing, traditions changing and the uncomfortable question of what actually survives when the people who built something are no longer there to explain it. Then I stumbled across Íslendingadagurinn, the Icelandic Festival of Manitoba, and suddenly there was another version of the question sitting right in front of me.

Íslendingadagurinn means, roughly, “Day of the Icelanders.” It began in Winnipeg in 1890 and eventually moved permanently to Gimli, Manitoba, in 1932. Gimli itself sits inside what was historically known as New Iceland, one of the major Icelandic settlement areas in Canada. Icelandic immigrants began arriving there in significant numbers during the nineteenth century, bringing with them language, stories, customs, identity and, like most Icelanders of that period, Christianity. That last bit matters, because Íslendingadagurinn is not a Pagan festival. It was not created as a Heathen gathering. It is not some uninterrupted survival of pre-Christian Norse religion hiding on the shores of Lake Winnipeg.

And that is precisely why I find it so interesting.

Because more than a century later, look at what remains.

There is a Viking Village. There are demonstrations of Norse crafts and daily life. There are discussions of the Alþingi, settlement, law, trade and the sagas. Icelandic folklore remains visible. Trolls and elves haven’t entirely disappeared from the cultural landscape. Norse imagery remains recognizable. The festival still celebrates the history of the Icelandic people who came to Canada and built a community there, and generations of descendants have continued participating in that celebration long after the original immigrants were gone.

Then there is the Fjallkona, the “Lady of the Mountain,” a symbolic personification of Iceland. Íslendingadagurinn has selected a Fjallkona since 1924. She represents Iceland itself, with Icelanders poetically understood as her children. The symbolism surrounding the figure reaches into older Icelandic imagery involving mountains, ravens, runes and the landscape of Iceland itself. Again, this does not make the ceremony Pagan. Symbols have a strange habit of surviving religions, governments and centuries. Sometimes we remember where they came from. Sometimes we don’t.

And that’s where this rabbit turned around and looked at me.

We’ve been asking what happens when Pagan communities disappear. What survives when the gatherings end, the organizations collapse, the elders die, the newsletters stop being printed and nobody remembers who started what or why something was done a certain way. We tend to think that if the religion survives, the tradition survives. Íslendingadagurinn presents us with almost the opposite experiment.

What happens when the old religion disappears, but the culture keeps remembering?

Apparently, quite a bit survives.

The sagas survive. The ancestral stories survive. Names survive. Food survives. Music survives. Folklore survives. Symbols survive. Historical memory survives. Even pieces of the worldview that produced the old religion can survive, though the people carrying them may no longer understand those things as religious at all.

There is an important distinction here, because I don’t want to commit the same mistake modern Paganism sometimes makes when looking backward. Cultural survival is not the same thing as religious survival. A Viking reenactor is not automatically Heathen. Someone celebrating Icelandic ancestry is not secretly worshipping Odin. A raven on a banner does not turn a cultural festival into a blót. We do ourselves no favours by claiming everything remotely Norse as evidence that the old religion somehow survived intact.

It didn’t.

But perhaps the more interesting question is whether anything ever survives intact.

Maybe religions don’t survive as sealed boxes handed from one generation to the next. Maybe they dissolve into stories, customs, sayings, festivals, family habits, art, language and identity. Some pieces disappear completely. Others get renamed. Some become folklore. Some become children’s stories. Some become cultural symbols. Then, generations later, somebody goes digging through the attic of history and discovers that the supposedly decorative object on the shelf once meant something entirely different.

Modern Paganism has done a great deal of that digging.

Heathenry, Ásatrú, modern Druidry and many other reconstructed or revived traditions exist partly because people deliberately went looking for fragments. Archaeology. Folklore. Sagas. Place names. Medieval manuscripts. Legal codes. Folk customs. Songs. Archaeological remains. The writings of people who were often documenting traditions after conversion had already taken place. We reconstruct because continuity was broken.

But Gimli suggests that broken continuity does not necessarily mean cultural amnesia.

There is another piece of this that interests me even more. Íslendingadagurinn has been carried forward through generations. Children attended with parents. Grandchildren attended with grandparents. Volunteers followed relatives into the organization. People grew up knowing that this thing existed because their family and community kept showing up to do it.

That should sound familiar to anyone who has been following my recent rabbits.

I’ve been wondering where the third-generation Pagans are. I’ve met second-generation Pagans. I’ve met people who grew up at gatherings and festivals and now describe Paganism as “that weird thing my parents did.” Some still attend gatherings because those places are part of their childhood landscape even when the religion itself no longer means quite the same thing to them. Some now have children of their own. Somewhere out there, third-generation Paganism is beginning whether we have noticed it or not.

But what exactly are we handing them?

That may be the lesson hiding inside Íslendingadagurinn.

The Icelandic Canadians of Manitoba did not preserve their identity by writing a manifesto saying Icelandic culture must survive. They preserved it by continuing to do things. They gathered. They told stories. They celebrated. They remembered names. They created institutions. They taught children what the symbols meant. They created something worth returning to, even for descendants whose relationship with Iceland itself became increasingly distant with every generation.

Modern Paganism has spent an enormous amount of energy arguing about belief, legitimacy, labels, lineage and who is Pagan enough to call themselves Pagan. Those conversations sometimes matter. But perhaps we have underestimated the much more mundane machinery of cultural survival.

Who cooks the food?

Who keeps the photographs?

Who tells the story about the year the tent blew away?

Who remembers why the procession goes left instead of right?

Who keeps the old newsletters?

Who teaches the songs?

Who brings their children back?

Who writes down the names of the people in the photograph before everyone who recognizes them is dead?

That is how culture survives.

And perhaps this connects directly to another rabbit we’ve been chasing: maybe Paganism isn’t supposed to survive intact.

That sentence sounds almost heretical when you first say it. Surely preservation is the goal. Surely we want future Pagans to know exactly what we believed, exactly what we practiced and exactly why we did it. But that’s not really how living cultures work. Every generation forgets something. Every generation adds something. Every generation throws away practices that no longer make sense and accidentally preserves things nobody expected to matter.

The Icelandic settlers who arrived in Manitoba could not possibly have known what their descendants would still care about a century and a half later. They couldn’t have predicted Viking reenactors, tourism, heritage parks or modern Canadians rediscovering Icelandic ancestry through genealogy and the internet. They simply created communities and traditions strong enough that later generations had something to inherit.

Maybe that should change the question we ask about Paganism.

Instead of asking, “How do we make sure Paganism survives exactly as we practice it?” perhaps we should ask, “What are we creating that someone will still find worth remembering a hundred years from now?”

That is a much harder question.

Organizations disappear. Festivals end. Websites vanish. Leaders fall out of favour. Communities fracture. The Paganism somebody encounters fifty years from now may barely resemble the Paganism we recognize today.

But perhaps somebody will still light a fire.

Perhaps someone will still tell the stories.

Perhaps a child who spent summers running around a Pagan gathering will bring their own grandchildren back to the same piece of land and say, “This is something our family used to do.”

They may understand it differently.

They may call it something different.

They may even forget why we thought it mattered.

But something will have survived.

Íslendingadagurinn has been doing exactly that for more than a century. Not preserving an ancient Norse religion, but carrying Icelandic cultural memory across generations on Canadian soil.

And maybe the rabbit hiding underneath all of this is surprisingly simple.

Religion can disappear while culture remembers.

Which leaves those of us creating Pagan culture today with a rather uncomfortable question.

What are we doing that is worth remembering?

And if nobody writes any of it down, how will they know?

What Is Left When You Take the Pagan Community Away?

Cloaked woman walking through forest with ghostly figures and standing stones

Fine. Take away the festivals. Take away the organizations, the councils, the temples, the covens, the kindreds, the groves and all the committees that inevitably seem to appear whenever more than three Pagans gather in the same place. Take away the authors whose books told many of us what Paganism was supposed to look like, the historians who tried to record what actually happened, the personalities, the politics, Facebook, Reddit and all the other places where we have spent an astonishing amount of time arguing about who is Pagan enough, who isn’t Pagan at all and who has apparently been doing Paganism wrong since breakfast.

Now what?

Are you still Pagan?

I’ve spent a ridiculous amount of time lately chasing rabbits through Pagan history, community, festivals, scholars, organizations, personalities, memory, selective memory and the question of what actually gets preserved when a community starts telling its own history. It has been fascinating, occasionally frustrating and, as rabbits tend to do, it has led me somewhere I wasn’t really expecting to go. Because eventually you have to ask what all of those things have to do with Paganism itself.

Organizations aren’t Paganism. Festivals aren’t Paganism. Authors aren’t Paganism. Historians aren’t Paganism. Community politics certainly aren’t Paganism, although sometimes you’d be forgiven for thinking they were one of our principal devotional practices. All of those things can carry Paganism, influence it, teach it, preserve it, distort it, package it, organize it and occasionally make an absolute dog’s breakfast of it, but none of them are actually the thing itself.

So suppose tomorrow all of that disappeared. There is no gathering next month. No group meeting Tuesday night. No elder to call. No author telling you which direction to face or what colour candle belongs where. Nobody watching you. Nobody approving of what you’re doing and nobody standing nearby waiting to explain that you’re doing it wrong.

There is just you.

Maybe there is a fire. Maybe there is a tree you’ve known for years. Maybe there is a bowl of water, an offering, a handful of herbs, an old song or simply a place where you have learned to become quiet. Maybe there is nothing particularly dramatic at all. You step outside, notice the season changing and acknowledge it in whatever way has become yours.

Do you stop being Pagan because nobody else is there?

I don’t think so, and that is where this rabbit gets interesting. Because if Paganism can continue without the institutions surrounding it, then perhaps Paganism does not primarily live in those institutions. Maybe it lives in relationship and repetition. Not repetition for its own sake, but the things we do again because doing them once wasn’t enough. We light the fire again. We make the offering again. We acknowledge the season again. We speak the names again. We return to the same place, tell the same story, remember the dead, notice the moon, leave something for the land, or teach somebody younger why this particular day matters to us.

Somewhere in all of that, practice starts becoming tradition.

And then, naturally, another rabbit sticks its head out of the hole.

If nobody writes those Pagan things down, how do we know they happened?

That question has been bothering me more and more as I’ve been digging through Pagan history, because history has a bias toward things that leave evidence. Books leave evidence. Meeting minutes leave evidence. Organizations leave records. Festivals print programs. Scholars write papers. Websites get archived. Arguments leave enormous amounts of evidence because human beings apparently become excellent archivists when sufficiently annoyed with one another.

Ordinary practice is quieter.

Who writes down the person who always tended the fire? Who records the joke everybody knew? Who documents the little gesture someone always made before entering ritual space, or the food that somehow appeared every year without anyone ever officially declaring it traditional? Who records the person who wasn’t clergy, wasn’t an organizer and wasn’t particularly famous, but somehow became the person newcomers went to when they didn’t understand what was going on?

Usually nobody.

Yet those things are culture too. In fact, I suspect they may be a much larger part of culture than the stuff that makes it into the official record.

We tend to think of tradition as something carefully handed from one person to another, intact and labelled. Someone knows a thing, preserves the thing, teaches the thing and the next generation receives the thing exactly as it was given. Nice and tidy.

I don’t think human beings work that way either.

I suspect tradition is usually handed down crooked. Somebody remembers most of it. Somebody else remembers it differently. One person forgets a piece entirely. Another adds something because it makes sense to them. The next generation keeps the part that speaks to them and quietly stops doing the part nobody can explain anymore. Thirty years pass and eventually somebody says, “We’ve always done it this way.”

Have we?

Maybe. Probably not exactly.

And perhaps that isn’t necessarily a problem.

That leads to a thought that initially sounds almost heretical when we’re talking about preserving Pagan history: maybe Paganism isn’t supposed to survive intact.

I don’t mean Paganism should disappear. I mean maybe nothing that is genuinely alive survives completely intact.

A preserved thing and a living thing are not necessarily the same thing. Put something in a museum and you can preserve it remarkably well. Control the temperature, control the humidity, keep the light off it, don’t touch it and don’t change anything. It may survive for centuries.

But it isn’t alive.

Living traditions are messier. They encounter new people, new places and new circumstances. They borrow. They forget. They reinterpret. They discover that something which made perfect sense fifty years ago doesn’t make much sense anymore. They encounter questions their predecessors never had to answer and situations their predecessors couldn’t possibly have anticipated.

So they change.

That makes us uncomfortable because we tend to associate continuity with authenticity. If something changes too much, is it still the same thing? That’s a fair question. But I think the opposite question deserves just as much attention: if a tradition can survive only by freezing itself at one particular moment, have we preserved the tradition or merely preserved a photograph of it?

Paganism has never been particularly easy to photograph in the first place. Even the word itself is troublesome. We use “Paganism” as though we’re describing one coherent religion when we’re really talking about an enormous landscape of traditions, reconstructions, revivals, devotional practices, magical practices, philosophies and personal spiritual paths, some of which have considerably less in common with each other than the umbrella term suggests.

Maybe that diversity isn’t a defect. Maybe it tells us something about how this whole strange thing survives.

Perhaps Paganism doesn’t survive because somebody manages to preserve every piece. Perhaps it survives because somebody keeps picking pieces up.

One generation finds an old story and gives it meaning again. Somebody else reconstructs a ritual from fragments. Another person couldn’t care less about reconstruction but develops a deep relationship with the land beneath their feet. Somebody inherits a practice from their parents and changes the language around it. Somebody reads an old book and finds one idea worth keeping. Somebody attends a gathering, hears a song around the fire and carries it home. Someone teaches their child to leave the first portion of something outside, and that child may not completely understand why until twenty years later.

Some things disappear. Some mutate. Some are abandoned because they should be. Some return after being forgotten. Occasionally something completely new becomes old simply because enough people keep doing it long enough.

Which brings me back to the original question. Take the Pagan community away. What remains?

For me, I think what remains is relationship expressed through practice. Relationship with place. Relationship with the seasons. Relationship with gods, spirits, ancestors or whatever language a person uses for those things they experience beyond themselves. Relationship with memory. Relationship with those who came before us and, perhaps, some responsibility toward the people who may come afterward.

Not simply believing something, but doing something because of it.

That may be one of the simplest answers I’ve found in this whole rabbit warren.

A community can disappear and practice can continue. An organization can collapse and practice can continue. A festival can end and practice can continue. A famous Pagan can fall out of favour and practice can continue. Books go out of print. Websites vanish. Traditions split. Communities fracture. People move away. People grow old. People die.

And somewhere, somebody still lights the fire.

Maybe that’s how we know.

Not because every Pagan thing gets written down. It doesn’t. Not because every generation receives a perfect copy of what came before. It won’t. We know because something continues to be done, even if it has changed a little, even if parts have been forgotten, even if someone added something that a Pagan a century earlier wouldn’t recognize at all.

Somebody does the thing. Somebody else sees it and asks why. A story gets told. Maybe they try it themselves. Maybe they change it. Maybe their children change it again.

And for a little while longer, whatever this enormous, untidy collection of things we call Paganism actually is remains alive.

Maybe our job isn’t to preserve Paganism intact. Maybe our job is to carry what seems worth carrying, remember what we can, write down what deserves recording, question what needs questioning and leave enough behind that someone walking this road after us has something to pick up.

They probably won’t carry it exactly the way we did.

Good.

Neither did we.

You Were There Too: Help Me Build a Pagan History

Group of adults gathered around a campfire at a forest campsite

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.

I Was There When We Built It

Group building a decorated wooden structure among trees in a forest

I’ve spent a lot of time lately chasing rabbits through Pagan history, memory, legacy, and the strange ways communities remember themselves. Somewhere along the way I realized that I have been looking so hard at what has been lost, forgotten, or changed that I have sometimes forgotten to look at what was simply good.

And there was a great deal that was good.

So I want to go back to one of those memories. Not to settle an argument. Not to correct anybody’s version of history. Not to stake a claim to anything. Just because I was there, and I am finally beginning to remember how happy I was to be there.

One of my earliest real experiences of participating in something larger than myself in the Pagan community was the creation of the Vé at Raven’s Knoll.

At the time I don’t think I understood what we were doing. I certainly didn’t understand what it would eventually mean to me.

The idea of creating a Heathen sacred space had been developing for some time. Eventually a clearing was discovered beyond what was then a much less developed part of the property. An old logging route provided part of the way in, and a deer trail entered the clearing from another direction. That deer trail would eventually become part of what we came to know as the Shrine Trail.

When the time came to actually build the Vé, I did what I tended to do around the Knoll in those days.

I worked.

Duchess, the old Massey Ferguson tractor, came along for the adventure. I hooked up the post-hole digger and took her back there to dig the holes that had been marked for the poles. Later the poles themselves had to be carried into the clearing by hand.

That is one of those wonderfully ordinary details that memory keeps. Sacred space sounds terribly grand when you say it years later. In reality, sacred space sometimes begins with a tractor, sweat, dirt, somebody carrying something heavy through the woods, and somebody else wondering whether the damned hole is deep enough.

Then something changes.

The poles went into the earth.

Offerings were placed before them. I remember tobacco. I seem to remember mead. Words were spoken over the poles as they were placed.

“Thunor Wéoh.”

Hallow this.

Make this holy.

I was still relatively new to Heathenry. I don’t think I fully understood the ritual language, much less the significance of what was happening around me. I wasn’t standing there thinking about history. I wasn’t thinking about legacy. I wasn’t wondering whether somebody might write about that place someday.

I was just there.

Helping.

And somehow that afternoon became one of the anchors of my Pagan journey.

The funny thing is that sacred places don’t appear fully formed.

They grow.

Someone clears a path. Someone carries a board. Someone digs a hole. Someone puts a bridge across a wet patch because spring comes and suddenly the trail that was perfectly usable in August has turned into something better suited to ducks.

Someone thinks about the person who might not be able to simply jump across the mud and asks how we can make the trail accessible to them too.

The Shrine Trail grew out of an old deer trail through the woods. It was widened and developed so humans could travel it, including people using wheelchairs. Small bridges crossed the troublesome places. A resting area gave people somewhere to simply sit halfway through the forest.

I remember being part of that work too.

And those bridges matter to me now in a way I probably couldn’t have understood then.

They weren’t monuments.

They were useful.

They allowed someone to get from here to there.

Maybe that’s one of the better definitions of community work I’ve stumbled across during all these rabbits: build something that allows the next person to get farther than they could have without you.

Around that same period, other parts of what would become the familiar landscape of the Knoll were taking shape.

The firepit. The Cauldron. The swimming areas. The trails.

The places where people would eventually dance, drum, swim, worship, laugh, argue, fall in love, mourn people they had lost, and sit around fires until ridiculous hours of the morning solving absolutely none of the world’s problems while being completely convinced that we had.

I remember digging that firepit.

I remember tending those fires.

Gods, do I remember tending those fires.

Many, many, many hours.

Firekeeping became one of the things I was known for there. Most of the time I wasn’t particularly concerned about whether I was officially staff or unofficially staff. There was a fire that needed tending, so I tended it.

Feed it. Watch it. Move things around. Make sure it doesn’t get out of hand. Keep it alive.

There is something wonderfully Pagan about that now that I think about it.

Nobody needs to appoint you Keeper of the Sacred Flaming Thing.

Sometimes there’s a fire.

And somebody has to keep it.

For a very brief period I eventually did carry an official staff role, but the title isn’t really the memory.

The fire is.

The people around it are.

The laughter is.

The drums are.

Looking back at photographs and old writing about Raven’s Knoll, something else strikes me. Those places eventually became landmarks. People came to know the Vé, the Shrine Trail, the Cauldron, and the firepit without necessarily knowing who had moved dirt, carried lumber, dug holes, cleared brush, or spent an afternoon sweating behind a tractor years before.

And that’s okay.

Actually, I think I’m becoming increasingly okay with that.

Legacy isn’t necessarily having your name attached to something.

Legacy can simply mean you were one of the hands.

That realization matters to me because my memories of Raven’s Knoll have become complicated over the last few years. There has been sadness there. Anger. Disappointment. Things I wish had happened differently. Things I still struggle to understand.

For a while those later emotions became so loud that they drowned out what came before them.

That’s unfortunate.

Because they weren’t the whole story.

Not remotely.

There were beautiful days there. There were ridiculous days there. There were exhausting days when everyone smelled like smoke, bug spray, and whatever questionable thing somebody had been cooking over a fire.

There were nights when the drums carried through the trees.

There were mornings when everything was quiet again.

There were winter trips into the Vé on snowshoes when the only regular congregation seemed to be the deer who had decided our sacred space made an excellent bedroom.

There was dirt under my fingernails.

There was smoke in my clothing.

There were friends.

There was community.

And there was that afternoon when some poles were carried into a clearing and put into holes in the ground.

I didn’t know it then, but I was participating in the creation of something that would outlast that afternoon and become spiritually significant to people I had never met.

That is pretty damned cool.

And here’s the part about legacy I think I’m finally understanding.

Nobody can give that experience back to me because nobody took it away.

Someone can forget that I was there. A history can someday omit my name. People who arrive later can walk across a bridge without ever wondering who helped put it there. Someone can stand in the Vé without knowing anything about the guy who once drove an old Massey Ferguson into the woods with a post-hole digger.

That’s how places work.

But forgetting something does not make it unhappen.

Those holes were dug.

Those poles were carried.

Those offerings were made.

Those words were spoken.

Those bridges were built.

Those fires burned.

And I was there.

I don’t need my name carved into anything to know that.

Maybe that’s the kind of legacy worth having.

Not ownership.

Not recognition.

Participation.

For a little while, in one little patch of forest in the Ottawa Valley, a bunch of Pagans decided to build something together.

And I got to be one of the hands.

When I strip away everything that happened afterward and allow myself to remember that moment for what it actually was, I discover something I haven’t talked nearly enough about while chasing all these rabbits.

Joy.

I was happy there.

I was proud of what we were building.

I was excited to see what it might become.

And regardless of where everyone’s roads eventually led, I think those memories deserve to be remembered that way.

Not every ghost needs exorcising.

Some of them just need to be invited back to the fire.

And there was a great deal that was good.

One of my earliest real experiences of participating in something larger than myself in the Pagan community was the creation of the Vé at Raven’s Knoll.

At the time I don’t think I understood what we were doing. I certainly didn’t understand what it would eventually mean to me.

When the time came to actually build the Vé, I did what I tended to do around the Knoll in those days.

I worked.

Then something changes.

The poles went into the earth.

Offerings were placed before them. I remember tobacco. I seem to remember mead. Words were spoken over the poles as they were placed.

“Thunor Wéoh.”

Hallow this.

Make this holy.

I was just there.

Helping.

And somehow that afternoon became one of the anchors of my Pagan journey.

The funny thing is that sacred places don’t appear fully formed.

They grow.

Someone thinks about the person who might not be able to simply jump across the mud and asks how we can make the trail accessible to them too.

I remember being part of that work too.

And those bridges matter to me now in a way I probably couldn’t have understood then.

They weren’t monuments.

They were useful.

They allowed someone to get from here to there.

Around that same period, other parts of what would become the familiar landscape of the Knoll were taking shape.

The firepit. The Cauldron. The swimming areas. The trails.

I remember digging that firepit.

I remember tending those fires.

Gods, do I remember tending those fires.

Many, many, many hours.

Feed it. Watch it. Move things around. Make sure it doesn’t get out of hand. Keep it alive.

There is something wonderfully Pagan about that now that I think about it.

Nobody needs to appoint you Keeper of the Sacred Flaming Thing.

Sometimes there’s a fire.

And somebody has to keep it.

For a very brief period I eventually did carry an official staff role, but the title isn’t really the memory.

The fire is.

The people around it are.

The laughter is.

The drums are.

And that’s okay.

Actually, I think I’m becoming increasingly okay with that.

Legacy isn’t necessarily having your name attached to something.

Legacy can simply mean you were one of the hands.

For a while those later emotions became so loud that they drowned out what came before them.

That’s unfortunate.

Because they weren’t the whole story.

Not remotely.

There were nights when the drums carried through the trees.

There were mornings when everything was quiet again.

There were winter trips into the Vé on snowshoes when the only regular congregation seemed to be the deer who had decided our sacred space made an excellent bedroom.

There was dirt under my fingernails.

There was smoke in my clothing.

There were friends.

There was community.

And there was that afternoon when some poles were carried into a clearing and put into holes in the ground.

I didn’t know it then, but I was participating in the creation of something that would outlast that afternoon and become spiritually significant to people I had never met.

That is pretty damned cool.

And here’s the part about legacy I think I’m finally understanding.

Nobody can give that experience back to me because nobody took it away.

That’s how places work.

But forgetting something does not make it unhappen.

Those holes were dug.

Those poles were carried.

Those offerings were made.

Those words were spoken.

Those bridges were built.

Those fires burned.

And I was there.

I don’t need my name carved into anything to know that.

Maybe that’s the kind of legacy worth having.

Not ownership.

Not recognition.

Participation.

For a little while, in one little patch of forest in the Ottawa Valley, a bunch of Pagans decided to build something together.

And I got to be one of the hands.

Joy.

I was happy there.

I was proud of what we were building.

I was excited to see what it might become.

And regardless of where everyone’s roads eventually led, I think those memories deserve to be remembered that way.

Not every ghost needs exorcising.

Some of them just need to be invited back to the fire.