Category: Reflections

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.

The Third Generation

Three people gather around a fire in a forest, with an open book and carved figures.

When Revival Becomes Something You Inherit

So here is the rabbit that started this particular warren: third-generation Pagans.

I know they must exist. Modern Pagan communities have been around long enough for them to exist, and I know second-generation Pagans who are now old enough to have children themselves. Yet I cannot remember often sitting around a fire with someone who introduced themselves by saying, in effect, “My grandparents were Pagan, my parents were Pagan, and I grew up Pagan.”

That will change.

And when it does, I think something important happens.

Imagine three generations.

The first generation discovers Paganism sometime in adulthood. Maybe they begin reading. Maybe they find Wicca, Druidry, Heathenry, reconstructionism, witchcraft, or something that refuses to fit neatly into any category. Maybe they attend a festival, join a group, construct rituals, and gradually develop household traditions.

Their child grows up with those traditions.

For the child, much of the mystery is already gone. The gods are not discoveries in an old book. The altar has always been sitting there. Going to a gathering is not stepping into a strange new world. It is what the family does every summer.

Then that child has a child.

Now we reach the third generation.

Suppose the grandparent created a particular Yule tradition decades earlier. Maybe some of it came from historical sources. Some came from a book. Some came from something another Pagan taught them. Some was invented because it felt appropriate at the time.

The grandchild may know none of that.

The grandchild simply knows: this is what our family does at Yule.

There is the transformation.

The grandparent reconstructed something.

The parent participated in something.

The grandchild inherited something.

At what point does it stop mattering that a family practice began in 1987 rather than 987?

I am not suggesting that invented history should suddenly be passed off as ancient history. Quite the opposite. We should know where practices come from whenever possible. Historical honesty matters.

But traditions have to begin somewhere.

Every old tradition was once new. Someone sang the song first. Someone told the story first. Someone decided that a particular place was where the community would gather. Someone established the feast. Someone carved the first object. Someone lit the first fire.

We often judge authenticity in Paganism by asking how old something is. Perhaps another question is whether people cared enough to keep doing it.

If three generations gather around the same fire, does the third generation need archaeological evidence proving that people a thousand years ago did exactly the same thing before that fire can mean something?

I do not think so.

Historical honesty and lived history can exist together.

That might be one of the most interesting developments modern Paganism is approaching. Many people involved in Pagan revival spent enormous energy looking backward. They tried to recover old gods, old stories, old seasonal practices, folklore, archaeology, magical systems, and forgotten ways of understanding the world.

The third generation may have the luxury of looking backward only as far as Grandma or Grandpa.

That does not connect them directly to the Iron Age. It does not magically create an unbroken ancient lineage.

But it gives them something the first generation often did not have: a Pagan childhood.

They may have family stories involving Pagan elders. Photographs of their parents as children at gatherings. Places where grandparents performed rituals. Objects made by Pagan relatives who are now ancestors themselves.

That last point fascinates me.

Ancestor veneration changes when some of the ancestors being honoured were themselves Pagan.

The first generation may have had to negotiate relationships with ancestors whose religious beliefs were completely different from their own. A third-generation Pagan may pour a drink for a grandmother who once poured an offering to the same gods.

That is not reconstruction.

That is continuity.

Not ancient continuity. Not an unbroken line back into pre-Christian Europe. Something much more modest, much more honest, and perhaps much more important.

Family continuity.

Community continuity.

Lived continuity.

This is where the language of “new religious movement” starts becoming awkward. How long can something remain new? One generation? Two? Five? A century?

At some point the children of the people who revived or created a tradition stop thinking of it as something revived or created. It becomes the world they inherited.

And that creates responsibilities.

The first generation had the luxury of improvisation because there often was no local precedent.

The third generation may want to know why the precedent exists.

Why do we do this?

Who started it?

Was it based on historical evidence?

Was it borrowed from another tradition?

Did someone invent it around a campfire thirty years ago?

Was it originally a joke that became serious?

If nobody remembers, the answer eventually becomes, “We have always done it this way.”

That is how living traditions are born.

It is also how historical nonsense is born.

The difference between the two is memory.

Which means if Paganism really is reaching a third generation, someone needs to preserve more than the rituals.

Someone needs to preserve the story of how those rituals came to exist.

And that brings us to the next rabbit.

Who keeps the Pagan memory?

The Weird Thing My Parents Do

Multigenerational family gathered around a decorated stone altar in a forest

When Paganism Reaches the Second Generation

I have been thinking about second-generation Pagans.

Not converts. Not people who found a book, wandered into a metaphysical shop, discovered a coven or kindred, attended their first gathering, or eventually realized that there was a name for whatever they had been searching for. I mean people who simply grew up around this stuff.

I have known some of them, and one description I have heard, in one form or another, has always amused me: “Paganism is that weird thing my parents do.”

That sentence may be much more important than it initially appears.

For many people in the generation that helped build modern Pagan communities, becoming Pagan involved discovery. Sometimes it involved rebellion. Sometimes searching. Sometimes books, correspondence, festivals, workshops, initiations, or long conversations around fires with people who finally seemed to speak the same language. They chose Paganism.

Their children did not.

The children inherited the camping trips. They inherited the strange adults wearing cloaks, drums at midnight, circles in fields, songs around fires, people invoking gods with names their classmates had never heard, adults disappearing into workshops, merchants selling things that definitely did not appear at the local department store, and the annual migration to whatever campground or piece of land had temporarily become home.

That is a completely different religious experience.

The first generation often experiences Paganism as discovery. The second generation experiences it as environment.

And that difference matters.

A person who chooses Paganism in adulthood may spend years learning the language, symbols, stories, ritual structures, seasonal calendar, taboos, jokes, and social customs of the community. A child raised around it absorbs much of that without trying. They may know when to be quiet during a ritual without remembering anyone ever teaching them. They may recognize a chant before they understand what it means. They may know which adults can be trusted, which stories get told around the fire every year, and which gathering traditions are considered sacred without ever having sat through a formal lesson.

But absorption does not guarantee belief.

That may be one of the uncomfortable truths facing any religion that reaches a second generation. Parents can transmit a culture. They cannot guarantee conviction.

This is particularly interesting in modern Paganism because so many Pagans value personal spiritual autonomy. Many parents who rejected imposed religion are understandably reluctant to impose Paganism on their own children. The message is often something like: learn, explore, decide for yourself.

That is admirable, but it creates a peculiar paradox.

A religious movement built largely by people who rejected inherited religion eventually has to figure out what inherited Paganism looks like.

The first generation says, “Find your own path.”

The second generation says, “Okay.”

And sometimes that path leads somewhere else.

Yet something often remains.

The stories remain. The friendships remain. The places remain. The jokes nobody outside the community understands remain. The memory of sleeping in a tent while drums echoed somewhere across the campground remains. The knowledge remains that once or twice a year a group of people who seemed perfectly ordinary during the rest of their lives gathered somewhere and temporarily created another world.

So what do we call the person who no longer identifies as Pagan but still attends the gathering?

What about someone who does not perform ritual at home but knows exactly what to do when the circle begins?

What about someone who rolls their eyes when a parent starts talking about the gods but still considers people from the old gathering part of their extended family?

What about the person who follows another spiritual path entirely but still feels that something is missing if nobody lights a fire around the solstice?

Religiously, perhaps they are no longer Pagan.

Culturally, things become considerably more complicated.

Maybe we have been asking the wrong question when we talk about whether Paganism successfully passes from one generation to the next. We tend to imagine transmission as belief moving neatly from parent to child: beliefs, rituals, gods, worldview.

But perhaps transmission can happen differently.

Perhaps belief becomes culture. Culture becomes memory. Memory becomes identity. Identity becomes tradition.

That does not mean every second-generation Pagan will return to active practice. It does not mean every child raised around Paganism will even want the label. Nor should they be required to.

But it does mean that leaving a religion and leaving a culture may not be the same thing.

I have watched people who describe Paganism as the weird thing their parents do continue to show up at gatherings anyway. They come because their friends are there. They come because they grew up together. They come because the place is familiar. They come because, whatever they believe now, that community forms part of their biography.

And that is where this rabbit becomes interesting.

Some of those second-generation Pagans are now adults with children of their own.

Those children may be too young yet to understand what Paganism is. They may simply know that there are fires, tents, music, odd holidays, old stories, and a collection of unrelated adults who somehow count as family.

But that means something new is beginning.

Grandparents discovered Paganism.

Parents grew up around Paganism.

Children may inherit Paganism as part of their family history.

I do not think I have knowingly met many people who could clearly say they are third-generation Pagans. Perhaps some are already among us and simply do not use that language. Perhaps the generation is only now becoming old enough to articulate what they inherited.

Either way, the question is coming.

And once Paganism reaches the third generation, we are no longer talking only about revival.

We may be watching the beginning of tradition.

Apparently I’m an ISFP 6w5 so/sp

Woman holding a leather journal beside a candlelit garden gathering

What the Hel Does That Have to Do With Paganism?

Yesterday’s rabbit came with letters and numbers.

ISFP 6w5 so/sp.

I went looking at personality types and found one that seems to describe me rather better than I expected. That exploration belongs mostly over on Standing on the Ledge, because ultimately it is a discussion about me: how I think, why trust matters so much, why I research things into the ground, why I want people around me while still being extremely selective about whom I trust.

But there was another rabbit hiding underneath that one.

Because once I began looking at the description, I found myself asking the inevitable question:

What the hell does any of this have to do with Paganism?

Quite a bit, apparently.

The Paganism I Practice Has to Mean Something

The ISFP part begins with something called Introverted Feeling, or Fi. Strip away the psychological terminology and what remains is a strong internal value system.

I can learn traditions.

I can read books.

I can listen to elders, scholars, priests, teachers, community leaders, reconstructionists, historians, witches, Heathens, Druids, and the person sitting across the fire who has been doing this for forty years.

But eventually something still has to pass through my own internal filter.

Does this actually mean something to me?

That may explain a great deal about my Pagan journey.

I have never been particularly interested in belief merely because somebody tells me I am supposed to believe it.

A ritual performed only because the instructions say to perform it leaves me rather cold.

A tradition means considerably more when I understand why people did it, what it represented, how it connected them to their gods, their ancestors, their land, or one another.

I need some living meaning underneath the form.

That does not mean throwing tradition away.

If anything, it makes me want to understand tradition more deeply.

My Paganism Begins With Things I Can Touch

The sensing side of ISFP also makes an interesting amount of sense here.

My Paganism is not entirely philosophical.

It is fire.

Land.

Cold air.

Rain.

Gardens.

Animals.

Food.

Wood smoke.

Changing seasons.

A place that has been walked repeatedly until memories have accumulated upon it.

People gathered around something physical and sharing an experience together.

Then comes the intuitive part.

What does this mean?

What is underneath it?

Why did this particular experience affect me?

Why does this place feel different?

Why did our ancestors attach meaning to this season, this animal, this tree, this fire, this story?

That process is probably one reason so many of the rabbits on Unplugged Pagan begin with something very ordinary and end somewhere philosophical.

I notice something.

Then I want to understand what lives underneath it.

Then Type Six Asks Whether the Community Is Real

This is where things get considerably more uncomfortable.

The central questions associated with Enneagram Six concern trust, loyalty, security, reliability, and belonging.

Put that into a Pagan context and suddenly a lot of my writing makes sense.

Who are my people?

What does it mean when we call ourselves a community?

What obligations do we have toward one another?

What is loyalty?

What is frith?

What happens when trust is broken?

When somebody says that a place belongs to the community, what exactly does that mean?

When somebody speaks for a tradition, where does their authority come from?

What happens when community language and individual behaviour stop matching?

Those are not merely organizational questions for me.

Apparently they strike directly at one of the ways I understand belonging.

I Want Pagan Community

This needs saying clearly because introversion is so often mistaken for wanting isolation.

I do not want Paganism to be something I practice entirely alone.

I can practice alone.

That is different.

I would much rather have the fires, gatherings, conversations, shared meals, rituals, arguments, laughter, storytelling, music, work parties, and all the strange little interactions that happen when people build history together.

I want community.

I want people around me who understand at least some of the same language.

I want people who can sit around a fire until some ridiculous hour discussing gods, history, philosophy, mundane life, and complete nonsense without any clear boundary between them.

What I apparently do not want is the appearance of community without the obligations of community.

That distinction has become increasingly important to me.

If we call ourselves a community, then surely the word should imply something.

Maybe not agreement.

Probably not uniformity.

Certainly not obedience.

But perhaps some combination of reciprocity, memory, responsibility, hospitality, respect, and recognition that none of us exists entirely independently of everyone else.

The Five Wing Wants the Footnotes

Then there is the 5 wing.

This may be responsible for an unreasonable percentage of the material appearing on this blog lately.

Six asks whether something can be trusted.

Five responds by looking it up.

Where did this tradition come from?

Who actually said this?

When did this practice appear?

Was this ancient, or did somebody invent it in 1973?

How did Wicca affect modern Paganism?

Who influenced Canadian Pagan communities?

What did the scholars record?

What did the people who were actually there remember?

What happened to the gatherings that disappeared?

Who kept records?

Who did not?

And suddenly there goes another rabbit.

This is one of the reasons I have become increasingly interested in separating history from mythology about our history.

Both can have value.

They are not necessarily the same thing.

If we are going to understand where modern Paganism came from, then somebody has to ask inconvenient questions about what we actually know.

The Social Instinct Changes Everything

The part of the personality description that really caught my attention was so/sp.

The so means Social instinct comes first.

Again, that does not mean being a social butterfly.

It means that questions involving belonging, groups, roles, responsibility, continuity, and shared identity tend to carry considerable weight.

And suddenly the rabbits I have been chasing recently look remarkably consistent.

Second-generation Pagans.

Third-generation Pagans.

Who keeps our history?

What happens when founders die?

How does a gathering change when the people who created it are no longer there?

What happens to traditions when nobody remembers why they existed?

Can a Pagan community become old enough to have institutional memory?

Can we transmit something to another generation without turning it into dogma?

These are not simply historical questions.

They are social questions.

They ask whether Paganism is merely something individuals happen to practice at the same time, or whether we are capable of creating communities that persist beyond the people who originally built them.

And Self-Preservation Asks Whether It Can Survive

Then comes the secondary Self-Preservation instinct.

This is the part that looks at all those lovely ideals and asks a rather mundane question:

How are we actually going to keep this going?

Someone needs to maintain the land.

Someone needs to build the fire.

Someone needs to organize the gathering.

Someone needs to clean the toilets.

Someone needs to preserve the records.

Someone needs to teach the newcomer how something works.

Someone needs to make sure the bills are paid.

Someone needs to remember what happened twenty years ago.

Ritual may create sacred space.

But eventually someone also has to stack the chairs.

That is not separate from community.

I increasingly think it is one of the ways community reveals whether it actually exists.

Maybe That Is Why Legacy Keeps Appearing

Over the last little while I have repeatedly found myself coming back to legacy.

Not legacy in the sense of wanting my name carved onto something.

I mean continuity.

What remains?

What survives?

What gets passed forward?

What disappears because nobody thought it was worth writing down?

What happens when Paganism becomes old enough that people entering it have no living memory of its formative years?

What happens when second-generation Pagans become parents and third-generation Pagan children begin appearing?

At some point we stop being merely participants in a young religious movement and become ancestors of whatever comes next.

That is a strange thought.

But perhaps it is an important one.

The Fire Keeper

There is an image in all of this that I keep coming back to.

The fire keeper.

The fire keeper does not necessarily own the fire.

They do not control everyone sitting around it.

They do not decide what everyone must believe.

They simply understand that if nobody feeds the fire, eventually it goes out.

Someone watches it.

Someone adds wood.

Someone notices when it is dying down.

Someone remembers how it was started.

Someone teaches the next person how to tend it.

Perhaps that is part of what I have been searching for when I talk about Pagan community.

Not authority.

Not ownership.

Stewardship.

People willing to keep something alive long enough to hand it to somebody else.

There Is a Danger Here Too

The same personality traits that make someone interested in history and community can also lead them badly astray.

If trust matters deeply, suspicion can become too easy.

If patterns matter, unrelated events can begin looking connected.

If research provides security, it can become difficult to stop researching.

If community matters, changes within that community can feel more personal than perhaps they actually are.

That means I have to remember something whenever I chase these rabbits:

The purpose of research is not to prove that I am right.

It is to find out what is true.

Sometimes those are the same thing.

Sometimes the rabbit should lead directly to evidence that forces me to change my mind.

That is not a failed rabbit hunt.

That is exactly what the hunt is supposed to do.

So What Does ISFP 6w5 so/sp Have to Do With Paganism?

Maybe nothing.

Maybe everything.

I do not think personality determines religion. I certainly do not believe all Pagans of a particular personality type will practice anything like I do.

But personality probably affects the questions we bring with us.

And apparently I bring questions about authenticity, trust, community, history, responsibility, and continuity.

I want Paganism to mean something personally.

I want to understand where it came from.

I want community, but I want that word to have substance.

I want us to remember the people and places that brought us here.

I want us to build things capable of surviving us.

And I want to know that when the people around today’s fires are gone, somebody will still remember how to light the next one.

Perhaps that is why I keep chasing these particular rabbits.

Maybe I am not merely trying to understand Paganism.

Maybe somewhere underneath all these questions I have been asking something else:

What are we building together that will still exist when we are gone?

That rabbit may keep me occupied for a while.

When We Become the Ancestors: What Will the Third Pagan Generation Remember About Us?

Three elderly people reading and writing from old books at a wooden table with herbs and crystals

We started this rabbit by asking what happens when Paganism is inherited. Somewhere along the way, the rabbit turned around and began looking at us. Because if there is a second generation, eventually there can be a third. And by then something changes that contemporary Paganism has not had to think about very much. The people who rebuilt, revived, invented, argued over, organized, researched, practised, and carried these modern traditions will begin dying in large numbers. Some already have. The convert generation becomes the grandparent generation. Then the ancestor generation. That may be when contemporary Paganism finally stops being able to describe itself primarily as a revival. It will have its own dead.

There Is a Difference Between Ancient Ancestors and Our Ancestors

Pagans often speak about ancestors in enormous historical terms. The Norse. The Celts. The pre-Christian Europeans. The ancestors before conversion. Sometimes those ancestors are genealogical. Sometimes cultural. Sometimes imagined as spiritual predecessors. But the third generation of modern Paganism may have another category available to it. They may know the names. “My grandmother was Wiccan.” “My grandfather kept a Heathen hearth.” “My parents met at that festival.” “This altar belonged to my aunt.” “That song was written by someone my mother actually knew.” “Our family has done this at Samhain since before I was born.” Those claims are not ancient. They are stronger in another way. They are remembered.

We Are Creating Primary Sources Right Now

This thought makes me slightly uncomfortable as a writer. Every blog post, ritual script, argument, photograph, festival program, newsletter, social media archive, meeting minute, book, podcast, and personal journal may become somebody else’s historical evidence. We spend a great deal of time complaining about gaps in the historical record of pre-Christian religions. Meanwhile we are generating mountains of records about ourselves and still managing to lose context at astonishing speed. That means stewardship includes archives. Who keeps the records? What happens when websites disappear? Who preserves community newsletters? Does anyone write down why a ritual changed? When an organization closes, do its records vanish into somebody’s basement? When a founder dies, does the history become whatever the loudest surviving person remembers? These questions sound administrative until twenty-five years pass. Then they become history.

Our Fights Will Become Their Myths Unless We Explain Them

This may be one of the stranger inheritances. Every community has conflicts that feel enormous while they are happening. Years later, the details disappear. One side becomes the villains. One side becomes the heroes. A complicated dispute becomes a sentence. “They split because of politics.” “She ruined the group.” “They betrayed the old ways.” “That festival changed.” “Those people took over.” Future generations inherit conclusions without context. I have spent enough time trying to reverse-engineer Pagan networks and histories to know how frustrating that is. Perhaps one thing we owe the future is the humility to record conflict without turning our own interpretation into scripture. Say what happened. Keep the documents. Admit what we do not know. Let the next generation make its own judgment.

The Third Generation Will Not Be Impressed That We Were Pioneers

This is worth remembering. The first generation often has founder energy. We discovered things. We built organizations. We created festivals. We wrote books. We fought for recognition. We established spaces where Pagan practice could happen openly. That deserves recognition. But grandchildren are merciless historians. They may appreciate what we built while also asking why we tolerated obvious problems. Why did you let that leader behave that way? Why did nobody keep proper records? Why did the community fracture over something so small? Why did you repeat history you already knew was wrong? Why did you talk about nature while neglecting the land you actually lived on? Why did you say everyone was welcome when clearly everyone was not? I hope they ask those questions. It would mean they inherited the rabbit.

What Do I Want to Be Remembered For?

This is where the series stops being about Paganism in the abstract. Because eventually every legacy question becomes personal. I do not control whether anybody remembers me. I certainly do not control what they remember. But I can influence what I leave behind. I can leave polished certainty. Or I can leave the trail. I think I prefer the trail. Here is what I thought. Here is what I got wrong. Here is the source I found. Here is the source I could not find. Here is why I changed my mind. Here is the community I loved. Here is where I became disappointed. Here is the practice that still mattered afterward. Here is the tree. Here is the fire. Here is the rabbit hole. Keep going if you want to know more.

Maybe the Best Ancestor Is Not the One with All the Answers

There is a certain arrogance hidden in imagining oneself as an ancestor. It is easy to picture future people reverently quoting us. Reality will probably be much funnier. Some future Pagan may discover one of our old arguments and wonder why anyone cared. They may find our ritual unbearably wordy. They may laugh at our technology. They may reject half our theology. Good. An ancestor does not need to win every argument after death. Maybe a useful ancestor leaves tools rather than commandments.

The Seven Rabbits Come Together Here

What happens when Paganism is inherited? The seeker religion becomes a family memory. What does the first generation owe the second? Truth, usable practice, safer communities, and freedom. Can the tradition survive without a village? For a while, yes. But relationship gives inheritance depth. What happens when the village builds gates? Structure becomes necessary, and authority must remain answerable. Does the child have the right to leave? If our talk of spiritual independence means anything, yes. What happens when sacred place is lost? Memory carries the old place while relationship begins again where we stand. And finally: What happens when we become the ancestors? We lose control of the story.

That May Be the Point

A living tradition eventually belongs to people its founders never met. If it cannot survive that loss of control, it is not a tradition. It is a personal project. The third generation will choose what is useful. They will discard things we thought essential. They will revive things we forgot. They will misunderstand us. They will correct us. They will probably invent traditions and swear they have always done them. Human beings are remarkably consistent that way. But perhaps they will also inherit a healthier habit from us. Maybe they will check. Maybe they will say, “We do this because our grandparents began doing it in the early twenty-first century.” And perhaps that will be enough.

Keep the Fire. Leave the Rabbit Loose.

I began this series thinking about children raised Pagan. I end it thinking about dead Pagans. That seems appropriate. Religion lives in the movement between those two groups. The living receive something. They alter it. They add their own experience. Then eventually they hand it forward. My own Pagan journey has been one long attempt to connect dots without pretending the dots make a cleaner picture than they do. I suspect that is what I would want to pass on most. Not a demand that somebody arrive at my conclusions. A permission slip to keep asking. Question the history. Question the institution. Question the elder. Question yourself. But do not become so devoted to questioning that you forget to live something worth questioning later. Light a fire. Feed somebody. Remember a name. Plant something. Keep a promise. Write down what happened.

And when a rabbit disappears into the brush, follow it occasionally. You never know what the grandchildren may need to find.

References

Berger, H. A. (1999). A community of witches: Contemporary Neo-Paganism and witchcraft in the United States. University of South Carolina Press.

Bengtson, V. L., Putney, N. M., & Harris, S. C. (2013). Families and faith: How religion is passed down across generations. Oxford University Press.

Fennell, J., & Wildman-Hanlon, L. A. (2017). The children of converts: Beyond the first generation of contemporary Pagans. Social Compass, 64(2), 288–306. https://doi.org/10.1177/0037768617704165

Kermani, S. Z. (2013). Pagan family values: Childhood and the religious imagination in contemporary American Paganism. New York University Press.

Mazumdar, S., & Mazumdar, S. (2004). Religion and place attachment: A study of sacred places. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 24(3), 385–397. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2004.08.005

When the Sacred Place Is Gone: Can a Land-Based Tradition Survive Leaving the Land?

Six people in cloaks standing around a stone altar with candles, herbs, and a map outdoors in mountains.

When the Sacred Place Is Gone: Can a Land-Based Tradition Survive Leaving the Land?

There is a problem hidden inside almost every conversation about Pagan inheritance. We talk about handing down rituals. We talk about handing down stories. We talk about handing down values. But many Pagan traditions also talk about land. The local spirits. The grove. The hill. The river. The old tree. The fire pit everyone remembers. The place where ashes were scattered. The festival land where somebody first felt that strange shock of belonging. Then ordinary life happens. The property is sold. The children move away. The landlord changes. The forest is cut. The festival closes. The family scatters. And now the rabbit asks:

If the religion is attached to place, what happens when the people cannot stay?

Place Is Not Just Scenery

Research on religion and place attachment helps explain why this matters. Shampa and Sanjoy Mazumdar describe religious attachment to place as something learned through ritual, story, symbols, artifacts, visits, and the influence of family and community. Sacred place becomes part of identity, not merely a backdrop for religion (Mazumdar & Mazumdar, 2004). That fits Pagan practice particularly well. We often speak as though the land itself participates. A ritual under fluorescent lights in a rented hall is not quite the same experience as one held beside the river you have known for twenty years. The difference is not necessarily theological. It is embodied. You remember where the sun falls. You know when the mosquitoes arrive. You know which tree drops a limb after a storm. You know how the ground smells after rain. Repeated ritual turns geography into memory.

But Paganism Is Also a Religion of Movers

Modern people move. We leave home for work. We relocate after relationships end. We lose property. We inherit property we cannot keep. We spend decades far from where our ancestors lived. Many contemporary Pagans are therefore practising traditions that talk deeply about place while living lives defined by mobility. That creates a tension I recognize personally. What does it mean to honour land when the land beneath your feet is not the land of the myths you read? What does it mean to be Heathen in the Ottawa Valley rather than Scandinavia? What does a Celtic inheritance mean on Algonquin territory? What responsibilities appear when spiritual imagination and actual geography do not neatly overlap? Those questions are more important than pretending we live somewhere else.

The First Responsibility Is to Notice Where We Actually Are

A land-based religion that ignores the actual land is performing scenery. I can read Icelandic sagas in Ontario. I can honour deities whose surviving stories come from Europe. I can carry family heritage across an ocean. But the snow outside my door is Ontario snow. The river has its own history. The trees have their own ecology. The human history of this place did not begin when my family arrived. If Paganism teaches relationship, then relationship begins with paying attention rather than projecting a fantasy landscape over the one already here.

So What Gets Passed Down When the Place Cannot?

Maybe the answer is not to hand down ownership of a sacred place. Maybe we hand down the skills by which places become sacred. Notice. Return. Learn the names. Learn the seasons. Remember what happened there. Care for what can be cared for. Ask whose land you are on. Do not assume spiritual affection gives you ownership. Tell the stories honestly. Leave the place better than you found it when you can. If a child learns those habits, perhaps they can build a real relationship with wherever they eventually live.

Memory Can Carry a Place Without Pretending the Place Moved

Mazumdar and Mazumdar note that religious traditions can maintain attachment to distant places through repeated stories, ritual references, objects, and communal memory (2004). That suggests another possibility. We do not have to choose between forgetting a lost place and pretending we still inhabit it. We can remember it as lost. That distinction matters. “This is where our family used to gather.” “This is the tree that is no longer standing.” “This is the field where the old fire was.” “This is the festival that ended.” “This is the place that changed so much I no longer experience it as home.” Those are legitimate sacred memories. Loss belongs in tradition too.

I Have Been Thinking About Home for a Long Time

Much of my writing, Pagan and otherwise, keeps circling home. What makes somewhere home? What happens when home changes? What happens when people who once belonged together no longer do? What happens when you return somewhere and discover that your memory of it is stronger than your present relationship with it? Those are not exclusively Pagan questions. But Paganism gives me a particular vocabulary for them: land, ancestors, hearth, frith, hospitality, spirits, sacred space, fire. And perhaps that is why the idea of being a fire keeper matters so much to me. The fire is local. You have to tend the one in front of you. You cannot warm your hands over the memory of a fire twenty years ago. But memory can teach you how to build the next one.

Maybe Sacred Place Is a Relationship, Not Real Estate

That does not mean land is interchangeable. Quite the opposite. A relationship is specific. You cannot replace one old friend with another and declare nothing changed. But losing one relationship does not make future relationship impossible. Perhaps a mature land-based Paganism needs both fidelity and portability. Fidelity says: this place mattered, and I will not erase that history. Portability says: if I must move, I will learn to belong responsibly somewhere new rather than spending the rest of my life spiritually pretending I never left.

What Does the Child Inherit Then?

Not necessarily the farm. Not necessarily the grove. Not necessarily the festival. Maybe the child inherits the practice of relationship. They inherit the story of places that formed the family. They inherit the knowledge that places can be lost. They inherit the responsibility not to confuse memory with ownership. And perhaps they inherit one final thing: the knowledge that sacred geography can begin again. Plant the tree. Learn the creek. Feed the birds through winter. Remember the dead. Light the fire where you are. Then, if another generation grows up around that fire, something remarkable happens. What was once new becomes remembered. What was remembered becomes inherited. And suddenly the people who began the custom are no longer merely practitioners. They are the old people in the family story. They are becoming ancestors. That is the final rabbit.

What happens when the first generation of contemporary Pagans becomes the ancestral generation?

References

Mazumdar, S., & Mazumdar, S. (2004). Religion and place attachment: A study of sacred places. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 24(3), 385–397. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2004.08.005

The Right to Leave the Circle: What Happens When Pagan Children Rebel?

An older woman and a middle-aged man talking across a table with books, notebooks, and cups of tea

Every religion that survives long enough eventually produces apostates. That sentence sounds much more dramatic than it needs to. Sometimes apostasy is a theological earthquake. Sometimes it is a teenager rolling their eyes and saying, “I don’t want to go.” If contemporary Paganism becomes genuinely intergenerational, then sooner or later a Pagan parent is going to hear words that generations of Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and other religious parents have heard:

“I don’t believe this.”

And what happens next may tell us more about Pagan values than a hundred statements about spiritual freedom.

It Is Easy to Support Freedom When the Child Chooses Us

Paganism often celebrates individual spiritual autonomy. Kermani found that many Pagan parents in her research emphasized tolerance and independence rather than requiring their children to maintain a particular Pagan identity (Kermani, 2013). That sounds admirable. But every principle gets tested at the point where it costs us something. It is easy to say, “My child can choose their own path,” when the child chooses a path close to ours. What happens when they become Catholic? Evangelical? Muslim? Atheist? What happens when they decide witchcraft is embarrassing? What happens when they refuse to honour the gods we honour? What happens when they explain our religion to their friends as “that weird thing my parents do”? Suddenly spiritual independence becomes less poetic.

A Religion of Converts May Take Rejection Personally

This is one place where contemporary Paganism may have a peculiar vulnerability. For many first-generation Pagans, choosing Paganism was not casual. It may have cost family peace. It may have required rebuilding an entire worldview. It may have brought ridicule, secrecy, discrimination, or the long effort of finding community. The path may feel hard-won. So imagine carrying all of that into parenthood and then hearing your child say they do not want it. The parent may hear more than disagreement. They may hear rejection of the struggle that brought them there. But the child did not make that journey. They cannot owe us gratitude for escaping a cage they never lived in.

Rebellion Is Part of Inheritance

Children do not simply receive culture. They edit it. Every generation does. Sometimes the editing is gentle. They change the songs. They drop a ritual nobody likes. They take environmental ethics more seriously than their parents did. They are more historically rigorous. Or less. They care less about labels. They combine things their parents kept separate. Sometimes the editing is severe. They leave. That does not necessarily mean the transmission failed. This is where I think we need a different measure of success.

Maybe Retention Is the Wrong Scoreboard

Fennell and Wildman-Hanlon asked an important sociological question: which children raised Pagan remain Pagan as adults? Their sample suggested that stronger childhood Pagan religiosity and more defined traditions were associated with greater adult retention (Fennell & Wildman-Hanlon, 2017). Useful information. But a parent is not a denomination measuring market share. Suppose a child grows up Pagan, becomes atheist, and still carries forward hospitality, reverence for land, intellectual honesty, care for ancestors, respect for religious difference, and the willingness to question authority. Did Pagan upbringing fail? Suppose another child calls themselves Pagan forever but becomes cruel, dishonest, exploitative, and obsessed with controlling other people’s spirituality. Did retention make that a success? The label may be the least interesting part of the inheritance.

The Child Who Leaves May Teach the Tradition Something

This is where institutions especially need to listen. People who leave can see things insiders stop seeing. Sometimes they leave because they simply believe something else. Sometimes they leave because the community hurt them. Sometimes they leave because the tradition never gave them enough substance to care about. Sometimes they leave because an inherited identity feels like somebody else’s clothing. If every departure is dismissed as immaturity, betrayal, negativity, or spiritual failure, the tradition loses information. A community that cannot listen to former members is a community intentionally destroying part of its own memory.

And What If They Come Back?

This may be the most interesting part. A person raised Pagan might leave at eighteen and return at forty. But they would not return as the same person who left. They might suddenly value the seasonal customs they once found boring. They might remember a grandparent’s altar differently after that grandparent dies. A childhood song might become sacred because nobody else remembers all the words. A ritual they rejected as a teenager might become the way they teach their own child about death. That is the strange power of inheritance. You can put it down without completely losing it. Sometimes you do not discover what you inherited until you try to leave it behind.

I Know Something About Leaving and Returning

My own journey has involved departures too. Not necessarily from Paganism itself, but from places, communities, identities, expectations, and versions of myself I once assumed were permanent. Leaving changes the meaning of home. You notice things from a distance that were invisible when you stood in the middle of them. And sometimes returning does not restore what existed before. It shows you that both you and the place have changed. That is part of why I am reluctant to define Pagan legacy as keeping people inside a circle. A circle that cannot be left is not sacred. It is confinement.

Love the Child More Than the Label

That may be the simplest rule in this entire rabbit warren. If we tell the next generation that spiritual freedom matters, then we have to mean it on the day they use that freedom against our hopes. Leave the door open. Keep a place at the table. Do not turn disagreement into exile. Do not make the ancestors into weapons. Do not tell a child the gods will punish them for disappointing us. Do not confuse their path with our reputation. And if they return, resist the temptation to say, “I told you so.” Maybe just move over and make room near the fire.

But There Is Another Kind of Leaving

A child can leave a religion. A family can also leave a place. The farm gets sold. The sacred grove becomes a subdivision. The festival land changes hands. People move across provinces, countries, and continents. A tree dies. A community disappears. If Pagan practice is deeply tied to land, locality, ancestors, and place, then inheritance has another problem.

What happens when the sacred place itself is no longer there?

References

Fennell, J., & Wildman-Hanlon, L. A. (2017). The children of converts: Beyond the first generation of contemporary Pagans. Social Compass, 64(2), 288–306. https://doi.org/10.1177/0037768617704165

Kermani, S. Z. (2013). Pagan family values: Childhood and the religious imagination in contemporary American Paganism. New York University Press.

When the Village Builds a Gate: Can Paganism Grow Up Without Building Another Church?

Group of people participating in a colorful outdoor ritual with drums and art in an autumn forest

Eventually somebody has to organize the potluck. That may be the least mystical sentence I have ever written about Paganism, but it contains an entire religious problem. The moment a few people begin doing something together repeatedly, structure appears. Someone keeps the calendar. Someone controls the bank account. Someone has the key to the land. Someone knows the ritual better than everyone else. Someone becomes the person newcomers are told to talk to. And before long a community that proudly insists it has no hierarchy discovers that it has one anyway. That is the next rabbit.

Can Paganism grow old enough to transmit itself without building the very kinds of institutions many Pagans originally fled?

Creativity Eventually Meets Administration

Helen Berger described this problem decades ago as the “routinization of creativity.” Her research on American Wicca and Neo-Paganism examined the tension between a movement that prized fluidity, innovation, and weak central authority and the pressures toward more formal organization as communities grew and aged (Berger, 1999). It makes sense. A spontaneous ritual needs inspiration. A recurring public festival also needs insurance. A circle of friends can pass a hat. An organization that owns land needs bookkeeping. A teacher can mentor two people informally. A community teaching fifty children starts asking who is qualified, who has been screened, who is responsible, and what happens if something goes wrong. Those are not signs of spiritual corruption. They are signs that people have begun living with consequences.

The Institution Is Not the Enemy

I think Pagans sometimes make a mistake here. Because many of us associate institution with the religions or organizations we distrusted, we begin treating the absence of structure as inherently virtuous. It is not. No structure often means invisible structure. No leadership sometimes means leadership nobody is allowed to name. No rules can mean the most socially powerful person decides what happens each time. No formal complaint process can mean the complaint process is gossip. No recognized authority can mean charismatic authority becomes even harder to challenge because everyone insists it does not exist. A gate is not automatically bad. Sometimes you need a gate because there are children inside the yard. The question is who controls it, why it is there, and whether the gatekeeper can be questioned.

What Does the Second Generation Need from Institutions?

A convert can tolerate chaos for a surprisingly long time because the search itself is meaningful. For the second generation, chaos can simply look like incompetence. Imagine growing up hearing that your tradition values community, only to discover nobody can maintain a meeting schedule. Imagine being told elders deserve respect while watching conflicts get buried because nobody wants to “bring negativity into the circle.” Imagine being taught that Paganism is inclusive while discovering that membership decisions happen through private social networks. Imagine being raised in a spiritual tradition that talks constantly about honour while nobody will explain where the money went. The second generation may force Pagan institutions to become more adult because inherited religion is less impressed by novelty. They did not arrive because the unusualness of Paganism dazzled them. They have seen the altar since childhood.

They can judge the structure by whether it works.

The Danger Is When Structure Starts Pretending to Be Truth

Organization becomes dangerous when a useful procedure turns into a sacred boundary. This is how “we need somebody to coordinate the ritual” slowly becomes “only this kind of person can speak to the gods.” It is how “we created standards for teachers” can become “our organization decides who is a legitimate Pagan.” It is how “we bought land so the community would have a home” can become “the owners of the land own the meaning of the community.” Institutions are very good at forgetting that they began as tools. I have followed enough organizational rabbit holes, both Pagan and otherwise, to recognize that problem. The structure begins serving the mission. Then the mission begins serving the structure. And eventually people defend the structure because its survival has become confused with the survival of the thing it was built to protect.

Maybe Pagan Institutions Need an Expiry Date on Authority

Not literally, perhaps. But I like the idea. Every rule should periodically have to answer: What problem were you created to solve? Does that problem still exist? Are you solving it? What damage are you causing? Who benefits from keeping you? Who is excluded by you? Could the same goal be achieved with less control? That sounds suspiciously like organizational behaviour rather than Pagan theology. Maybe that is exactly why it belongs here. A spiritual community is still an organization whenever people coordinate resources, authority, roles, expectations, and behaviour. The gods do not repeal group dynamics.

We Need Elders, but We Should Be Careful About Thrones

I do believe elderhood matters. Experience matters. Someone who has kept a practice for thirty years knows things a newcomer cannot know after thirty days. Someone who remembers why a tradition changed can preserve context that disappears from written rules. Someone who has watched the same seasonal rite through births, divorces, deaths, illnesses, arguments, reconciliations, and generations holds a kind of knowledge no certification can manufacture. But elder is a relationship, not a throne. The healthiest elder may be the one willing to become less central as younger people become capable. That may be the real test of intergenerational Pagan leadership. Can we hand over the keys?

The Gate Should Open Both Ways

A good institution protects a community without imprisoning it. It preserves records. It remembers agreements. It handles money openly. It creates safer processes. It coordinates things too large for one household. It makes continuity possible when charismatic founders disappear. And then it stays humble enough to remember that none of those functions make it the owner of Paganism. The gate exists so people can enter safely and leave freely. That last part matters.

Because the Child May Leave

This series began with the realization that a Pagan child does not have the same story as a Pagan convert. And if Paganism becomes an inherited religion, it eventually has to face the most ordinary religious event imaginable. Some of its children are going to reject it. Some will walk out of the village. Some will criticize the elders. Some will say the rituals are boring. Some will decide the gods are not real. Some will join another religion. Some may return decades later. If the gates only work in one direction, we have built a trap rather than a tradition. Which brings us directly to the next rabbit.

Does an inherited Pagan have the right to leave the circle?

References

Berger, H. A. (1999). A community of witches: Contemporary Neo-Paganism and witchcraft in the United States. University of South Carolina Press.

Kermani, S. Z. (2013). Pagan family values: Childhood and the religious imagination in contemporary American Paganism. New York University Press.

The Child at the Empty Fire: Can a Pagan Tradition Survive Without a Village?

Group of people holding hands in a circle around a campfire in the forest

So we leave the child some roots. We tell the truth about where our practices came from. We give them rituals with enough shape to be remembered. We teach them to ask questions. We try to leave them better boundaries than the ones we inherited. Then what? Suppose the child looks around and discovers there is nobody else there. No coven. No grove. No kindred. No temple. No festival within driving distance. No other Pagan children at school. Maybe not even another Pagan family they know personally. Now the rabbit gets practical.

Can a tradition survive without a village?

Paganism Has Become Very Good at Being Solitary

Modern Paganism is unusually well adapted to solitary practice. Books taught people how to practise alone long before social media existed, and the internet later made it possible for geographically scattered practitioners to learn from many of the same sources and remain loosely connected even without belonging to a local group. Helen Berger’s work on solitary Pagans treats that shift not as a marginal curiosity but as a major feature of contemporary Pagan life (Berger, 2019). I understand the attraction. I have lived it. A solitary practice does not require permission. It does not require committee meetings. It does not require tolerating somebody else’s drama in order to honour your gods. The woods do not ask for membership dues. The ancestors do not require a board of directors. A hearth ritual can be done whether ten people show up or nobody does.

There is strength in that. But something changes when we start talking about inheritance.

You Can Practise Alone. Can You Inherit Alone?

A convert can build a solitary religion out of books, experience, research, intuition, and selected practices. A child raised inside a tradition is learning something else as well. They are learning what kind of people belong to this thing. They are learning whether Paganism exists outside Mom’s altar or Dad’s stories. They are learning whether there are elders who are not their parents. They are learning whether there are peers. They are learning whether ritual is something a family does privately or something that can gather a room full of people into a shared moment. Religion is not merely a set of propositions about gods. It is also social memory. Who remembers the song when you forget it? Who tells you that your family does the ritual one way but another family does it differently?

Who gives a child the liberating discovery that their parents are not the sole representatives of Paganism? That last one may be more important than it sounds.

A Community Gives Tradition Depth

Families transmit religion, but broader communities provide comparison, reinforcement, correction, and alternative models. Research on religious transmission generally shows that family matters enormously, but family is not the only socializing environment in which religion is learned and made meaningful. For a Pagan child, community might be where a private household custom becomes part of a larger world. They discover another household celebrates the same season differently. They meet a Heathen who does not believe exactly what their Heathen parent believes. They encounter a Druid, a Wiccan, a polytheist, an animist, a witch, or a Pagan who does not use any of those labels comfortably. Suddenly Paganism is not merely inherited authority. It becomes a conversation. That may be one of the great gifts of community. It complicates us.

But What Kind of Village?

Here is where I hesitate. Because “community” is one of those words we tend to bless before examining it. Community can support. Community can also police. Community can teach. Community can spread nonsense with remarkable efficiency. Community can protect vulnerable people. Community can protect powerful people from consequences. Community can give a child belonging. Community can also teach them exactly who is considered an outsider. So the answer cannot simply be that Paganism needs more groups. We need villages worth inheriting.

Festival Is Not the Same as Village

This is another lesson I keep returning to from my own rabbit holes. Pagan festivals can create astonishing moments of temporary community. For a weekend, a week, or a season, people gather. Ritual happens. Workshops happen. Fires are lit. Children see adults wearing symbols and speaking openly about things that may be invisible in ordinary life. A person who spends the rest of the year solitary can suddenly stand inside a crowd where their spirituality is normal. That matters. But a festival is not necessarily a village. A village is there when somebody gets sick. A village remembers who died. A village notices that a teenager has stopped coming. A village handles disagreement when everybody cannot simply pack the tent and drive home. A village has to live with the consequences of its culture. That is much harder than producing a good weekend.

The Digital Village Is Real, but It Is Different

The internet solved one of Paganism’s oldest problems: isolation. A person in a tiny town can now learn from practitioners around the world. But the digital village has its own strange physics. Authority can be measured in followers rather than wisdom. A beautifully edited thirty-second video can outrun a carefully researched book. A practice can move from one tradition to another so quickly that its origin disappears. Arguments that would have burned themselves out around one campfire can now recruit thousands of spectators. And yet I would be foolish to dismiss online Paganism. For many people, it is where the village actually is. Perhaps the question is not whether online community is real. It is what kinds of things it is good at carrying. Information? Very good. Introductions? Excellent. Shared ritual? Sometimes. Long-term accountability? Much harder. Embodied memory? Harder still.

The Village May Need to Be Smaller Than We Imagine

Maybe I am making the word village too grand. Perhaps a tradition does not need hundreds of people. Maybe it needs three households that remember each other. A few adults who can say, “Your parent is wrong about that one.” Someone older who is not trying to become a guru. A younger person who changes the music. A shared meal. A place where the dead are named. A tradition of helping when someone is in trouble. A child who grows up knowing there are other children like them. That might be enough to transform an isolated household custom into a communal inheritance.

My Own Journey Keeps Coming Back to the Missing Village

I have described myself as a fire keeper without a Pagan community because the phrase captures something I have felt for a long time. I can keep a fire. I can read. I can write. I can remember. I can honour gods and land and ancestors without anybody standing beside me. But I also know that something is missing when nobody else remembers the same fire. That is partly why I keep writing. Writing becomes a strange substitute for the village. I throw a thought into the world and somewhere, perhaps, somebody recognizes it. Maybe that is not community in the old sense. But perhaps it is one of the ways scattered people begin finding each other.

A Tradition Can Survive Without a Village. I Am Not Sure It Can Flourish Forever Without One.

I think that is where I land. A solitary person can carry a tradition across a gap. A family can preserve practices across years of isolation. Books and digital spaces can keep knowledge alive when local community disappears. But if a tradition is going to become generational rather than merely personal, eventually somebody has to encounter somebody else. Not because the gods require a crowd. Because inheritance requires more than memory. It requires relationship. And the moment we build relationships, we begin building structures. Somebody organizes the gathering. Somebody owns the land. Somebody keeps the money. Somebody teaches. Somebody decides what counts. Somebody eventually stands near the gate. Which opens the next hole.

What happens when the village we need begins building gates?

References

Berger, H. A. (2019). Solitary Pagans: Contemporary witches, Wiccans, and others who practice alone. University of South Carolina Press.

Bengtson, V. L., Putney, N. M., & Harris, S. C. (2013). Families and faith: How religion is passed down across generations. Oxford University Press.

Kermani, S. Z. (2013). Pagan family values: Childhood and the religious imagination in contemporary American Paganism. New York University Press.