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

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.

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.

Cancel Culture, Selective Memory, and the Pagan Past

Community gathering with text: “OUR HISTORICAL MEMORY & ANCESTRAL THREADS” and “COMMUNITY VALUES & ACCOUNTABILITY.”

When Accountability Becomes Erasure

I keep following rabbits into the past, and lately one of them keeps leading me back to an uncomfortable question: what happens when a community decides that part of its own history has become inconvenient?

We have already talked about Pagan memory, inheritance, archives, traditions, founders, community ancestors, sacred places, and what future generations may inherit from the Pagan communities that exist today. Somewhere in all of that, another word kept hovering around the edges of the conversation.

Cancel culture.

I hesitate to use the phrase because it has become so politically loaded that sometimes simply saying it ends the conversation before the conversation can begin. People hear the words and immediately choose a side.

But strip away the politics for a moment.

There is something very real underneath the phrase that deserves attention.

A person becomes unacceptable.

A relationship collapses.

A community fractures.

Someone leaves, is removed, or simply becomes someone nobody particularly wants to talk about anymore.

And then something curious starts happening.

Their present unacceptability begins reaching backward into the past.

Their contribution becomes uncomfortable to acknowledge. Their name is mentioned less often. The things they helped build remain, but the story of how those things came into existence begins changing. Photographs disappear from circulation. Stories become shorter. New people arrive and receive an increasingly simplified version of what happened before them.

Nobody has to formally announce that someone has been erased.

Eventually silence does the work.

That is where cancel culture and selective memory begin to overlap.

And I think Pagan communities need to be very careful about it.

This is not an argument against accountability.

People sometimes need to leave communities. Leaders sometimes need to lose authority. Relationships sometimes become unhealthy enough that they need to end. Someone who contributed greatly yesterday can behave terribly tomorrow.

Community does not require endless tolerance.

But there is an enormous difference between saying:

You should no longer hold this position.

and saying:

You were never important here.

Those are not the same judgment.

History does not require us to choose between sainthood and oblivion.

Someone can have done something valuable and later done something harmful.

Someone can have helped build a community and later become unwelcome in it.

Someone can have created a ritual, organized a gathering, built infrastructure, taught people, written material, solved problems, hauled garbage, cooked meals, tended fires, fixed broken equipment, welcomed newcomers, and contributed years of labour—and still eventually have a serious falling out with the people around them.

The ending does not erase everything that came before it.

Neither does everything good that came before excuse whatever happened at the end.

Both things can be true.

That should not be a radical position.

Unfortunately, human beings seem to have trouble holding complicated people in memory.

We like saints.

We understand villains.

Someone who was generous on Monday, difficult on Tuesday, brilliant on Wednesday, selfish on Thursday and absolutely indispensable on Friday is much harder to fit into a story.

But that is what people are actually like.

Pagan history was made by people.

Therefore Pagan history is going to be complicated.

The Old Tractor

I think of something as ordinary as an old tractor.

At one time it may simply be part of community life. It hauls the garbage scow. It pulls a parade float. It carries people from one side of a gathering to another. Somebody drives it. People climb aboard. Somebody tells a joke. Someone takes a photograph.

Nobody stops and thinks, We are creating historical evidence.

They’re just trying to move the garbage.

Then people change.

Relationships change.

The community changes.

Eventually the tractor sits.

A newcomer sees an old machine.

What they cannot see is the web of human relationships that once surrounded it.

They cannot hear the laughter.

They do not know who drove it.

They do not know why somebody gave it a name.

They do not know what it carried.

They do not know why photographs of it might make someone smile—or make someone hurt.

The tractor remains.

The provenance disappears.

And provenance matters.

Where did this come from?

Who created it?

Who maintained it?

Who changed it?

Why did it change?

Why do we do things this way now?

Communities are full of these invisible histories.

An old song nobody sings.

A ritual whose author is no longer mentioned.

A policy created because of an argument nobody remembers.

A tradition credited vaguely to “the community” even though someone actually invented it.

A building somebody spent years maintaining.

A trail somebody cleared.

An annual event that began with three people sitting around a kitchen table.

A photograph filled with people whose names nobody bothered writing down.

An empty space where something once happened.

Some of those things disappear naturally.

Memory fades.

People die.

Records get lost.

Hard drives fail.

Websites disappear.

Stories mutate each time they are told.

That is simply history doing what history does.

But sometimes forgetting is encouraged.

That is different.

When Forgetting Becomes Selective

Sometimes remembering someone becomes socially uncomfortable.

People learn that mentioning a particular person creates tension, so they mention them less.

The next retelling leaves out a detail.

The version after that leaves out a name.

Eventually the story works perfectly well without the inconvenient person.

Then another generation arrives.

For them, nothing has been erased because they never knew anything was missing.

That may be one of the most effective forms of cancellation.

You don’t destroy the history.

You simply stop transmitting it.

This should bother Pagans especially because we spend so much time complaining about exactly this problem in ancient history.

We desperately want to know what people actually believed.

Who performed the rituals?

Why was something done a particular way?

What did a symbol mean?

Which practices were widespread and which were local?

What changed after political upheaval?

What was written by outsiders?

What disappeared because nobody recorded it?

We sift fragments trying to reconstruct worlds whose context has vanished.

And then we create new Pagan communities surrounded by cameras, computers, websites, email archives, social media, newsletters, books, photographs and people capable of writing things down—and still manage to lose our own history.

There is something absurd about that.

Future Pagans should not have to reconstruct us archaeologically.

They should not have to discover an old festival program and suddenly realize that people existed whom nobody ever mentioned.

They should not have to reverse-engineer why a ritual changed.

They should not have to compare old photographs to current stories and wonder why the two seem to describe different communities.

They should not have to recreate solutions because nobody bothered preserving the fact that someone already solved the problem.

And they certainly should not inherit a mythology pretending everything moved smoothly from one generation to another.

It didn’t.

Nothing human does.

Memory Should Not Become a Weapon

But there is another side to this.

Preserving memory cannot mean preserving every grievance forever.

That becomes its own poison.

An archive should not become an ammunition dump.

History should not become a courtroom where people keep retrying conflicts decades after everyone involved has either moved on or died.

There has to be room for healing.

There has to be room for people to change.

There has to be room for communities to say, “We dealt with this, learned from it, and moved forward.”

The difference is that moving forward does not require pretending nothing happened.

We should be capable of saying:

Something happened.

People were hurt.

People disagree about what happened.

Relationships changed.

The community changed because of it.

Different people remember it differently.

We learned what we could.

And we moved on.

That is not keeping a wound open.

That is putting a marker beside the trail.

Something happened here.

Future travellers do not necessarily need every detail.

But they deserve to know the ground shifted.

Remembering Is Not Endorsing

That distinction becomes particularly important when people themselves become controversial.

Remembering somebody is not honouring them.

Documenting somebody is not endorsing them.

Acknowledging a contribution is not absolution.

History is not a hall of fame.

We should be perfectly capable of saying:

This person helped create something important.

This person later behaved in ways the community could not accept.

Both statements belong in the record.

Anything less turns history into public relations.

And that is where selective memory becomes dangerous.

Once communities become comfortable removing inconvenient people from their histories, the surviving story inevitably begins favouring whoever remains.

The people still holding authority become the natural inheritors.

The people who left become footnotes.

The people who were removed become warnings.

The people who died become whatever the survivors say they were.

The people nobody likes become increasingly unnecessary to the official story.

Eventually history stops asking:

What happened?

and begins answering:

Why the people currently in charge deserve to be here.

That is not memory.

That is mythology.

And mythology about ourselves is especially dangerous because it usually feels like history while we are creating it.

Who Owns Pagan Memory?

This is why I keep coming back to the idea that nobody owns Pagan memory.

Not founders.

Not leaders.

Not landowners.

Not boards.

Not priests or priestesses.

Not elders.

Not the person who stayed.

Not the person who left.

Not the person who was hurt.

Not even the person doing the remembering.

We each possess pieces of the story.

Those pieces may contradict one another.

That’s fine.

In fact, contradiction may sometimes be evidence that we are preserving real history rather than manufacturing an official version.

“This is what I remember.”

“This is what you remember.”

“Here is what the surviving documentation shows.”

“Here is where neither of us actually knows.”

That is intellectually messy.

Good.

History is messy.

Paganism is messy.

Human beings around fires are exceptionally messy.

I would much rather future Pagans inherit three conflicting accounts than one beautifully polished lie.

Because they can investigate conflicting accounts.

They cannot investigate something nobody told them existed.

Does Accountability Rewrite the Past?

And this brings us back to cancel culture.

The greatest danger may not be someone being removed from a social media platform or excluded from a gathering. Those are contemporary decisions made by contemporary people and they can be debated on their own merits.

The historical danger comes afterward.

Does removing someone from the present also give us permission to remove them from the past?

I don’t think it does.

Accountability concerns what we do now.

History concerns what happened then.

They interact, but they are not interchangeable.

A community mature enough to practise accountability should also be mature enough to preserve uncomfortable history.

Maybe especially uncomfortable history.

Because the uncomfortable pieces often explain the present better than the comfortable ones.

Why does that rule exist?

Why did this ritual change?

Why is that tradition important?

Why does nobody use that space anymore?

Why is this person missing from the photographs?

Why did everyone suddenly start doing something differently?

Why does that old tractor have a name?

Those questions contain history.

And answering them does not mean we have to go backward.

Quite the opposite.

Evolution Is Not Amnesia

I want Paganism to evolve.

I want people to change things.

I want future generations to look at something we considered indispensable and decide they have a better idea.

Good.

Change it.

Build something better.

Follow another rabbit.

But know what you are changing.

Evolution and amnesia are not the same thing.

Evolution takes what came before, understands it, alters it and moves onward.

Amnesia keeps rebuilding the same road because nobody remembers that somebody already built it.

That wastes experience.

It wastes labour.

It wastes knowledge.

And sometimes it causes people to repeat injuries that somebody else already learned how to avoid.

We should want future Pagans to begin where we ended.

Not where we began.

Leave the Trail

For that to happen, we have to leave them the trail.

Not an official trail scrubbed clean of everyone who became inconvenient.

Not a monument to the winners.

Not an endless catalogue of grudges.

The real trail.

Here is what we built.

Here is who helped.

Here is what worked.

Here is what failed.

Here is where relationships broke.

Here is what changed afterward.

Here is where memories disagree.

Here is what we know.

Here is what we don’t.

Here is where someone got hurt.

Here is where something beautiful happened.

Here is where both happened at once.

Then let the next generation decide what any of it means.

That may be the part of memory we have the hardest time accepting.

Eventually we lose control of it.

People after us will judge us differently than we judge ourselves.

They will probably admire people we disliked.

They may criticize people we revered.

They will discover mistakes we normalized.

They may rehabilitate ideas we discarded.

They may throw away things we considered sacred.

They may look at some enormous community argument and wonder why anyone cared.

Good.

That means the history survived long enough for them to argue with it.

Maybe that is what we should be aiming for.

Not immortality.

Not vindication.

Not an official version in which our side won.

Just enough honest memory that the people following us do not have to start again.

Cancel someone from leadership if accountability requires it.

End a relationship if it needs to end.

Change the ritual.

Change the organization.

Change the gathering.

Move the fire.

But don’t pretend the old fire never burned.

Don’t erase the hands that once tended it simply because those hands later became difficult to remember.

We do not have to worship the ashes.

We do not have to keep the wounds bleeding.

But we should stop sweeping away the footprints.

Leave the trail.

Leave the uncomfortable parts too.

Then let the people who come after us go farther.

What Are We Leaving Behind?

Family gathered around a table reviewing photographs, journals, and handmade objects

The Breadcrumbs at the End of the Warren

I did not expect this rabbit hole to end here.

Then again, that is probably becoming the unofficial motto of Unplugged Pagan.

I started with a simple thought.

Third-generation Pagans.

I realized I did not think I had knowingly met one. I knew second-generation Pagans. I knew people who grew up around Paganism and sometimes described it, affectionately or otherwise, as the weird thing their parents did.

Some still came to gatherings.

Some retained pieces of the culture even if they did not retain the religion.

And some are now old enough to have children of their own.

That raised the question of what those children are inheriting.

Which led to tradition.

Tradition led to memory.

Memory led to archives.

Archives led to history.

History led to mythology.

Mythology led to founders.

Founders led to succession.

And succession eventually dropped me here.

Legacy.

What are we leaving behind?

I do not mean that in the grand sense of monuments or famous books or organizations carrying someone’s name for a century.

I mean the smaller things.

The things communities are actually made from.

A photograph with names written on the back.

A ritual someone bothered to type out.

A song recorded before the person who wrote it was gone.

A festival program saved instead of thrown away.

A story written down while someone was still alive to say, “No, that isn’t quite how it happened.”

A child remembering that once every summer their parents took them somewhere strange and wonderful where adults danced around fires.

Those are breadcrumbs.

And perhaps that is what I have been leaving without quite realizing it.

I started chasing rabbits because I wanted answers.

Something would catch my attention. A name. A gathering. A claim. A symbol. A connection between communities. An old tradition. Something somebody remembered differently from the way I remembered it.

So I followed it.

Sometimes the rabbit went nowhere.

Sometimes it opened into an entire warren.

But every time I wrote the journey down, something else happened.

A record was created.

Not the record.

That distinction matters.

I am not an omniscient narrator of Pagan history. Nobody is. I see events through my own experience, relationships, memories, disagreements, loyalties, disappointments, and curiosity.

Someone else who stood beside me at the same fire may remember it differently.

Good.

They should write their version too.

That may be the real lesson at the end of this warren.

History becomes healthier when more people leave records.

Not because every record agrees.

Because they do not.

Future historians learn as much from disagreement as agreement. Two people remembering the same event differently tells us something. A newspaper account contradicting community memory tells us something. An old festival program challenging a story repeated for twenty years tells us something.

The goal should not be creating one authorized Pagan history.

That sounds dreadful.

The goal should be leaving enough pieces that somebody later can reconstruct something resembling the truth.

That means our stories matter.

Our photographs matter.

Our old newsletters matter.

Our defunct websites matter.

Our arguments sometimes matter.

Even our ridiculous moments matter because communities are not built entirely from solemn rituals and profound spiritual revelations.

Sometimes community is the thing that happened when the tent collapsed in the rain and six people tried to fix it while everybody else laughed.

That belongs to history too.

And perhaps this is where the third generation circles back into the story.

Someday somebody may ask:

What was Paganism like before I was born?

Not ancient Paganism.

Ours.

What were the gatherings like?

What did people argue about?

What did they believe?

Which traditions already existed?

Which ones were being invented?

Who were the elders?

What disappeared?

What survived?

Why?

Those questions cannot be answered entirely from archaeology or medieval manuscripts.

The answers are sitting in our basements.

They are on old hard drives.

They are disappearing from the internet.

They are inside the memories of people getting older.

They are in songs nobody has recorded.

They are in photographs whose subjects have never been identified.

And they are in stories we keep assuming everyone already knows.

Everyone does know them.

Until suddenly nobody does.

So perhaps recording these things is not vanity.

Perhaps it is stewardship.

Not preserving ourselves because we believe future Pagans desperately need to know what we thought about everything.

Leaving evidence.

Leaving context.

Leaving breadcrumbs.

The people who come after us can decide which ones are worth following.

That may be the appropriate ending to this particular warren.

We spend a remarkable amount of time in Paganism searching for the people who came before us.

Perhaps occasionally we should remember that someday we will be the people who came before.

And somebody we will never meet may come looking for us.

Leave them something to find.

From Revival to Tradition

People gathered around a stone fire pit during a woodland ceremony

When Does Modern Paganism Stop Being Modern?

Modern Paganism has an odd relationship with time.

We look backward constantly.

We read old myths, old laws, old poems, old folklore, archaeological reports, medieval manuscripts, surviving prayers, place names, inscriptions, and anything else that might tell us how pre-Christian people understood their world.

Then we take those fragments and attempt to build something we can actually live.

That process has been called revival, reconstruction, reimagining, restoration, reinvention, and occasionally several less polite things.

But there is a question hiding underneath all of those words.

How long can a revival remain a revival?

Suppose a Pagan tradition is established in 1970.

People practise it for fifty years.

Children are raised within it.

Those children raise children.

Rituals are repeated thousands of times.

Songs are written and become customary.

Gatherings develop annual rhythms.

Elders die and are remembered.

Stories about the early years begin to circulate.

At what point are we no longer merely reviving something?

We may still draw inspiration from ancient religion, but the community itself now has history.

Its own history.

This is something I think modern Paganism occasionally overlooks because we are so fascinated by antiquity.

We keep asking whether our practices are authentic because they resemble something done a thousand or two thousand years ago.

Perhaps there is another kind of authenticity.

Lived authenticity.

A ritual can be historically informed and still be modern.

A ritual can be completely modern and still become traditional.

Those statements do not contradict each other.

Tradition is not necessarily antiquity.

Tradition is transmission.

It is something received, practised, altered, and handed onward.

That distinction matters because otherwise Pagan communities can become trapped in an impossible authenticity contest.

Who has the oldest source?

Who reconstructed the most accurately?

Who can produce the most impressive lineage?

Who is closest to what ancient people supposedly did?

Historical research matters enormously, especially when people make historical claims. If we say something was practised by ancient Norse people, Iron Age Celts, Romans, Greeks, or anyone else, we should be able to show why we believe that.

But history and religion do not have to perform the same job.

History can tell us what evidence survives.

Religion has to tell us what we are going to do tonight.

There will always be a gap between those two things.

No amount of scholarship can recreate the lived religious world of people who died a thousand years ago. Too much is gone. Context is gone. Assumptions everybody understood and nobody bothered writing down are gone. Regional variation is gone. Ordinary people’s voices are mostly gone.

So modern Paganism inevitably creates.

We fill gaps.

We make choices.

We adapt.

We borrow.

We experiment.

And occasionally something works well enough that people keep doing it.

That is where tradition begins.

Not when somebody discovers an ancient source.

When somebody hands something onward.

This makes the second and third generations enormously important.

The convert generation asks, “What can we recover?”

The second generation asks, “What did our parents build?”

The third may eventually ask, “What do we want to keep?”

That final question is the beginning of maturity.

Because inheritance is not the same as obedience.

You can inherit something and decide not to keep all of it.

Families do that constantly.

Cultures do it.

Religions do it.

The third generation may inherit rituals they cherish and governance structures they hate.

They may retain seasonal festivals while abandoning theological arguments their grandparents considered vital.

They may rediscover practices the second generation ignored.

They may create completely new traditions that their grandchildren will eventually assume are ancient.

And perhaps that is exactly what living religion looks like.

Not preservation under glass.

Continuity with change.

We sometimes speak of modern Paganism as though it is permanently standing outside history, looking backward at the real Paganism that happened long ago.

But that cannot be true forever.

We are history now.

The gatherings of the 1980s are history.

The newsletters of the 1990s are history.

The arguments on early internet forums are history.

The first generation of permanent Pagan land projects is history.

The people who built the early organizations are becoming historical figures within their own communities.

And somewhere a child may be growing up hearing stories about those people the way earlier generations heard stories about grandparents who founded churches, farms, lodges, unions, or community halls.

That does not make modern Paganism ancient.

It makes it ours.

Perhaps one day the word modern will become increasingly unnecessary.

Not because we have somehow recreated the ancient world.

Because enough generations will have lived Paganism that Pagan history will no longer be something we only search for in distant centuries.

We will have our own.

Which leaves one final question.

If we are creating history now, what exactly are we leaving behind?

When the Founders Are Gone

Older woman passes a lit torch to a woman beside a young boy in a forest gathering

Did We Build a Community, or Did We Build It Around Ourselves?

Every community eventually encounters a question it would rather postpone.

What happens when the founders are gone?

Not necessarily dead. People retire. They move. They burn out. Relationships change. Health changes. Families change. Sometimes founders simply decide they have given enough.

The result is the same.

The community must discover whether it actually learned how to exist without them.

This is not uniquely Pagan. Churches, clubs, charities, businesses, political organizations, volunteer groups, and social movements all struggle with founder dependence.

But Pagan communities may be particularly vulnerable because so many of them begin with very small groups of intensely committed people.

Someone owns the land.

Someone has the ritual knowledge.

Someone organizes the gathering.

Someone handles the money.

Someone knows everybody.

Someone remembers why things are done the way they are.

Someone becomes the person everyone calls when something goes wrong.

After ten, twenty, or thirty years, that person may feel inseparable from the community itself.

And sometimes the community feels the same way.

That creates a strange contradiction.

A founder may spend decades trying to create something that will outlive them while unintentionally making themselves indispensable to it.

If every decision still needs the founder’s approval, the community has not really inherited authority.

If nobody else knows how the finances work, the community has not inherited the organization.

If nobody else can lead the rituals, the community has not inherited the practice.

If nobody is permitted to reinterpret the founder’s ideas, the community has inherited a museum.

Tradition requires continuity, but continuity does not mean freezing something forever.

Living traditions change.

That is one of the things history keeps showing us. Religions that survive for centuries change languages, calendars, leadership structures, buildings, music, theology, customs, and relationships with the surrounding culture. They argue about those changes constantly, but they change.

A tradition that cannot change when circumstances change may not be strong.

It may simply be brittle.

The second generation becomes important here because they are often the first people to say, “We love this place, but we would not run it the way our parents did.”

That can sound like disrespect.

Sometimes it probably is.

But sometimes it is succession.

A generation that inherits a community also inherits its unresolved problems.

Old feuds.

Unclear rules.

Informal arrangements nobody wrote down.

Traditions that made sense under conditions that no longer exist.

Authority structures built around personalities rather than offices.

And the most dangerous phrase of all:

“That’s how the founders wanted it.”

Perhaps they did.

But the dead cannot govern the living forever.

Ancestor respect is not ancestor government.

There is a difference between honouring the people who built something and requiring every later generation to reproduce their decisions indefinitely.

In fact, a founder’s greatest legacy may be creating something strong enough to survive being changed by people they never met.

That requires something difficult from both generations.

Founders have to relinquish control.

Successors have to accept responsibility.

Neither is easy.

The founder knows where all the bodies are buried, figuratively speaking. They remember the disasters that nearly destroyed the community. They know why certain rules exist. They know which seemingly brilliant ideas were tried fifteen years earlier and failed spectacularly.

The successor sees possibilities the founder may no longer see.

They grew up in a different culture. They communicate differently. They may have different expectations around governance, inclusion, privacy, consent, finances, leadership, technology, or accountability.

Both perspectives contain something valuable.

The healthiest transition may happen when the story moves from “This is mine” to “This is ours” and eventually to “This will belong to people who are not here yet.”

That final step changes everything.

If you genuinely believe a community belongs partly to future generations, record keeping stops being bureaucracy and becomes stewardship.

Succession planning stops being an insult and becomes responsibility.

Teaching younger people stops being optional.

Sharing authority stops being a threat.

And criticism becomes less dangerous because the goal is no longer preserving a founder’s personal vision exactly as it was.

The goal becomes preserving whatever was valuable enough to deserve another generation.

Perhaps that is the real test.

Not whether the founder is remembered.

They probably will be.

The test is whether the fire is still burning after nobody remembers exactly who lit it first.

If it is, something remarkable has happened.

A project has become a tradition.

Which leaves another rabbit sitting beside the fire.

At what point does a revival stop being a revival?

History, Memory and Myth

Four people studying illustrated manuscripts, maps, and coded writings in a library

“We Have Always Done It This Way”

There may be five words more dangerous to community history than almost any others:

We have always done it this way.

Have we?

Maybe.

But humans are remarkably unreliable historians, particularly when the history involves ourselves.

Memory is not a recording. We remember pieces. We fill gaps. We simplify complicated events. We forget people we disliked and enlarge the roles of people we admired. Stories become cleaner with repetition. Motives that were confusing at the time become obvious in hindsight.

Eventually community history can become community mythology.

That is not necessarily malicious.

It is human.

A gathering may begin for complicated reasons involving several people, competing ideas, limited money, a borrowed campground, and somebody who happened to own a vehicle large enough to move everything.

Twenty-five years later the story becomes something much cleaner:

“The founders created this place so Pagans could have a home.”

That may capture the spirit of what happened.

It may not capture what actually happened.

Those are different things.

This is where archives become wonderfully inconvenient.

The old newsletter does not remember the story the way we do.

The festival program lists someone we forgot.

The photograph shows that the thing everyone remembers being built in one year apparently existed several years earlier.

An old message reveals that the supposedly unanimous decision was anything but unanimous.

The evidence interrupts the legend.

Good.

It should.

If Paganism is going to become an intergenerational religious culture, we owe future generations more than good stories. We should leave them enough evidence to challenge our stories.

That might sound strange coming from someone who values bardic tradition.

I do value it.

The bard and the historian are not enemies. They answer different questions.

The historian asks, What happened?

The bard asks, What did it mean?

Trouble begins when either one claims to answer both perfectly.

This matters within Paganism for another reason: we already have a complicated relationship with historical authenticity.

Modern Pagan traditions may draw inspiration from ancient religions, folklore, archaeology, medieval literature, nineteenth-century romanticism, ceremonial magic, twentieth-century occultism, counterculture, environmentalism, feminism, reconstructionist scholarship, personal revelation, and modern invention.

Those ingredients can become tangled very quickly.

Something practised for thirty years can start being described as ancient simply because nobody remembers who introduced it.

A chant written at a festival can gradually become “traditional.”

A ritual created to solve one practical problem can later be explained as though it contained deep theological symbolism from the beginning.

A local custom can be mistaken for something practised everywhere.

This is how myth grows around communities.

But here is the part I think Paganism sometimes gets wrong: admitting that something is modern does not make it meaningless.

Suppose somebody created a ritual at a gathering decades ago.

People loved it.

They repeated it the next year.

Then again.

Children grew up participating in it.

Eventually adults who had participated as children began leading it themselves.

That ritual is not ancient.

It is tradition.

Those two words do not have to mean the same thing.

In fact, distinguishing them allows us to appreciate both.

An ancient practice tells us something about people who lived long before us.

A modern tradition tells us something about the community that created and maintained it.

Both have stories worth preserving.

The problem appears when modern communities become embarrassed by their own newness and start borrowing age as a source of legitimacy.

Perhaps we do not need to.

A religion that is confident enough to say, “We began doing this thirty years ago because it mattered to us,” may be healthier than one that needs to insist everything came from an unbroken secret tradition stretching into antiquity.

There is dignity in knowing where something began.

There is dignity in saying, “Our grandparents started this.”

That may eventually become one of the great differences between first-generation and third-generation Paganism.

The first generation sometimes searches for ancestors in ancient history.

The third generation may actually have Pagan ancestors.

And those ancestors will not be legendary figures.

They will have names, photographs, mistakes, arguments, unfinished projects, questionable fashion choices, embarrassing stories, and perhaps boxes of poorly organized documents in somebody’s basement.

In other words, they will be human.

That may be better than mythology.

Because once founders become legends, communities can become trapped by them.

The story becomes sacred.

The founder’s preferences become traditions.

The founder’s decisions become precedent.

And eventually somebody has to ask a very difficult question:

What happens when the founders are gone?

Who Keeps the Pagan Memory?

Four people studying manuscripts and runic texts in a stone library

Archivists, Historians, Bards and the People Who Remember

If Paganism is beginning to produce generations rather than merely converts, then Pagan memory suddenly becomes important.

This rabbit feels particularly close to home because when I think about Pagan communities I have known, I can immediately think of people who have tried, in very different ways, to preserve pieces of that history.

Some tried to build archives.

Some informally became historians.

Some became bards and storytellers.

Some simply remembered.

They are not doing the same job.

An archive preserves evidence. Programs, newsletters, photographs, posters, correspondence, minutes, ritual outlines, recordings, websites, maps, membership material, workshop notes, and all the other seemingly ordinary scraps that accumulate around a living community.

A historian attempts to make sense of those scraps. Who did what? When did something begin? Why did a gathering move? When did a practice change? Which story came first? What was the sequence?

A bard preserves something else.

Meaning.

An old program can tell me who was scheduled to perform on Thursday night. A storyteller may remember why that performance became legendary.

A photograph can show twenty people standing around a fire. Someone who was there remembers why everyone was laughing.

Meeting notes might record that a decision was made. A participant remembers the argument beforehand, the personalities in the room, who stormed away, who brought people back together, and why the decision mattered.

History lives somewhere among all of those things.

There is documentary history.

There is oral history.

There is community memory.

There is folklore.

And there is mythology.

The dangerous part is that, given enough time, we forget which is which.

This is particularly easy in Pagan communities because so much of our history has been informal and fragile.

A gathering disappears and eventually its website disappears with it. An old discussion group shuts down. A social media page becomes inactive. A domain expires. Someone dies and their collection of newsletters ends up in a box nobody knows what to do with. Photographs remain on an old hard drive. Recordings sit on obsolete media. Stories that everyone once knew gradually become stories three people remember, then one person remembers, then nobody remembers.

Suddenly a thirty-year history has vanished.

When the community is young, this may not feel particularly urgent. Everyone who matters was there. If somebody wants to know what happened, they ask someone.

That works beautifully until the people who were there are no longer there.

The second generation starts asking questions.

The third generation may ask even more.

Who started this gathering?

Why do we sing this song?

Why is that place considered sacred?

Who carved this?

Why does everyone tell that particular story every year?

What happened here before I was born?

If nobody preserved the answers, the community will create answers.

That is not necessarily dishonesty. Humans dislike empty spaces in stories. We connect dots. We simplify. We remember what makes sense now rather than what made sense then.

That is exactly why the different keepers of memory matter.

The archivist says, “Here is what survived.”

The historian says, “Here is what I think happened.”

The bard says, “Here is what it meant to us.”

The elder says, “Here is what I remember.”

None of them should be treated as infallible.

All of them are valuable.

Perhaps healthy Pagan communities need these roles more than we have realized. Not official positions necessarily. I am not suggesting every gathering needs a Ministry of Pagan Historical Accuracy.

But somebody should be keeping the old programs.

Somebody should be labeling the photographs.

Somebody should be interviewing the elders.

Somebody should be recording the songs and asking where they came from.

Somebody should write down the story behind the ritual while the people who created it are still alive to correct the story.

And perhaps there is another role that sits somewhere between archivist and storyteller.

The rabbit chaser.

The person who notices a loose thread and asks where it goes.

Who finds an old reference and wonders what it means.

Who compares memories against documents.

Who discovers that something everyone thought happened in one year apparently happened three years earlier.

Who asks whether two stories that have circulated for decades can both be true.

Not because there must be a scandal hiding underneath every inconsistency.

Sometimes simply because somebody should write it down.

I did not really set out to think of my own rabbit chasing in that way. I was following questions because they interested me.

But when you follow enough rabbits, something strange happens.

You begin creating a map.

You notice where stories connect. You notice where they contradict one another. You find people, gatherings, ideas, organizations, and traditions intersecting in ways that were obvious to the people living through them but may be invisible twenty years later.

That is a kind of record keeping whether we intended it or not.

And if Paganism is becoming intergenerational, that record may matter to people we will never meet.

But records create another problem.

The documents rarely tell the story exactly the way we remember it.

Which leads us into the next hole.

History, memory, and myth.