Category: Reflections

Leaving More Than Ashes: What Does the First Pagan Generation Owe the Second?

Five people outdoors participating in a pagan ritual with a book and magical artifacts

The last rabbit left me with a question I cannot quite shake. If contemporary Paganism is old enough now to have children who did not convert into it, then those of us who came to Paganism by searching are no longer responsible only for our own paths. That does not mean we are responsible for producing little copies of ourselves. Quite the opposite. It means that for the first time, a sizable part of modern Paganism has to think seriously about stewardship.

What does the first generation owe the second?

Not what should we make them believe. Not how do we keep them Pagan. Not how do we prevent them from wandering off. What do we owe them? That is a different question entirely.

We Owe Them the Truth About Where Things Came From

I think the first obligation is intellectual honesty. That sounds dry for a Pagan discussion, but it may be one of the most important things we can hand forward. I have spent enough time chasing rabbits through Pagan history to know how easily a beautiful story becomes a fact simply because enough people repeat it. A nineteenth-century idea becomes ancient Celtic wisdom. A twentieth-century ritual becomes an unbroken survival. A modern symbol acquires an imaginary pedigree. Something that began in one tradition gets lifted into another until nobody remembers where it came from. The temptation is understandable. A young religious movement wants roots. Converts especially want roots. If we walked away from one religious inheritance, we naturally look for another inheritance that feels older, deeper, more native to us, or more honest. But our children should not have to unlearn our exaggerations.

If a practice is ancient, say it is ancient. If it is reconstructed from fragmentary evidence, say that. If it is inspired by folklore, say that. If it was written by somebody in 1978 and everyone liked it enough to keep doing it, say that too. There is no shame in a modern tradition being modern. The shame would be knowing better and handing the next generation a false history anyway.

We Owe Them Something They Can Actually Practise

Then comes the harder part. Spiritual freedom by itself is not a tradition. Kermani found that many Pagan parents emphasized tolerance and spiritual independence more than transmitting a fixed body of belief (Kermani, 2013). I sympathize strongly with that instinct. Many people came to Paganism precisely because they did not want somebody else deciding what they were required to believe. But if we pass down nothing except freedom, what exactly have we passed down? Fennell and Wildman-Hanlon found, in their small study of adults raised Pagan, that those raised in more clearly defined paths such as Wicca and Druidry were more likely to remain Pagan than those raised with the looser label of eclectic Paganism (Fennell & Wildman-Hanlon, 2017). I do not read that as an argument for dogma. I read it as an argument for shape. A child needs something they can touch.

A seasonal meal. A story told every winter. A way of marking the dead. A song. An offering. A walk to a particular tree. A custom around the first fire of spring. A way of welcoming somebody into the home. A way of saying goodbye. It does not need to be compulsory to be real. But there has to be enough there that, twenty years later, memory has something to grab hold of.

We Owe Them Communities That Are Safer Than the Ones We Inherited

This is where the question stops being theoretical. The first generation of a religious movement gets to make a lot of mistakes. Sometimes it has no choice. Nobody handed us a complete operating manual for how to build healthy Pagan communities. But the second generation should not have to repeat every mistake just because we call the mistakes tradition. If communities have learned anything about unhealthy power, charismatic leaders, whisper networks, sexual boundaries, bullying, factionalism, financial opacity, racism, exclusion, harassment, or the use of spiritual language to excuse ordinary bad behaviour, then that knowledge belongs in the inheritance too. We cannot brag about being free of centralized religious authority while ignoring what happens when informal authority becomes unaccountable authority. We owe the next generation better governance than “everybody knows who is in charge.” We owe them transparent rules where rules are necessary.

We owe them boundaries. We owe them ways to complain without being socially exiled. We owe them elders who understand that being respected is not the same as being unquestionable. And perhaps most importantly, we owe them the willingness to admit when something we built did not work.

We Owe Them the Right to Ask Why

A living tradition should be able to survive a child asking why. Why do we do this? Why do we honour that god? Why is this story important? Why do you say this is Celtic? Why do you say this rune means that? Why does this person get to lead? Why are women allowed here but not there? Why is this person excluded? Why do we need this rule? Why do we keep going to this place? If the answer is “because I said so,” we have not handed them Paganism. We have handed them authority with Pagan decorations. I am increasingly convinced that one of the healthiest things a Pagan elder can say is, “I do not know. Let us find out.” That is not weakness. That may be the rabbit trail becoming hereditary.

We Owe Them Our Failures Too

This one matters to me personally. There is a temptation when talking about legacy to edit ourselves. We want to leave the wisdom and quietly throw away the wreckage. But sometimes the wreckage is the wisdom. My own Pagan journey has not been a straight line through sacred groves and neatly organized revelations. It has included belonging and not belonging. Community and isolation. Trust and disappointment. Finding things I believed were solid and discovering they were considerably more complicated. Watching communities change. Watching places change. Watching people change. Watching myself change. I have called myself, at times, a Pagan fire keeper without a Pagan community. There is a lesson hidden in that sentence. Not every fire survives because an institution protects it. Sometimes one person keeps it alive because they decide it still matters.

But I would not want the next generation to inherit only that loneliness. If we learned why communities fracture, then tell them. If we learned why good intentions are not enough, tell them. If we learned that spiritual language does not magically make people ethical, tell them. If we learned that a sacred place can become entangled with ordinary human politics, money, ego, and conflict, tell them. A polished mythology of our own generation will help them less than an honest map showing where we fell into holes.

We Owe Them Roots Without Chains

That may be the balance. Roots without chains. Give them enough tradition that they know where they came from. Give them enough freedom that they can decide where to go. Those two things are not enemies unless we make them enemies. We can say, “This is what I was taught.” We can say, “This is what I discovered.” We can say, “This is what our family does.” We can say, “This is what our community believes.” And then we can add the sentence that changes everything:

“Now you have to decide what you will do with it.”

That is a harder form of inheritance than indoctrination because it requires us to let go of the outcome. But perhaps that is precisely why it is worth doing.

The Fire Is Not Ours

The old fire-keeper image keeps returning for me. A fire keeper does not own the fire. The job is to make sure there is still enough heat in the coals for somebody else to use. You protect it from the rain. You feed it when necessary. You do not smother it under so much fuel that it cannot breathe. And eventually somebody else takes the watch. Maybe that is what the first Pagan generation owes the second. Not obedience. Not certainty. Not a perfect institution. Not a counterfeit antiquity. We owe them honest history, usable practices, healthier communities, permission to question us, the lessons hidden inside our failures, and enough freedom to decide whether the fire means to them what it meant to us. Which leads to the next hole.

Because even if the family does all of that, a religion cannot live inside a single household forever.

Can a Pagan tradition survive without a village?

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.

What Happens When Paganism Is Inherited?

Elderly woman and children weaving ribbons near fireplace in cozy living room

When the Rabbit Trail Begins at Home: What Happens When Paganism Is Inherited?

There is a strange little turn in the rabbit trail that I do not think I have spent enough time looking at. Most of the Pagan stories I know are stories of finding. Someone grows up Christian, Catholic, vaguely religious, completely non-religious, or simply dissatisfied with whatever explanation of the world they were handed. Then something starts scratching at the back of the mind. Maybe it is mythology. Maybe it is the old gods. Maybe it is the woods. Maybe it is a book on witchcraft found somewhere it probably was not supposed to be. Maybe it is a rune, a drumbeat, a festival, an ancestor, a dream, or simply the nagging feeling that there ought to be another way of understanding our place in the world. Then off we go. Down the rabbit hole. I certainly did.

A fair amount of what Unplugged Pagan has become is me doing exactly that: asking where something came from, who influenced whom, what the scholars found, what the practitioners changed, what survived, what was reconstructed, what was invented, and what any of it means when the books are finally closed and a person has to actually live a Pagan life. But here is the rabbit I had not really considered.

What happens when someone does not have to find Paganism?

What happens when Paganism is simply there? What happens when the Wheel of the Year is something you remember from childhood? When Samhain is not something discovered in a book at twenty-seven but something your family did every autumn? When your first encounter with Thor is not Marvel or an encyclopedia but a story told by a parent? When offerings, ancestors, spirits, gods, land, solstice fires, divination, sacred trees, household rituals, or whatever particular practices your family keeps are simply part of the furniture of childhood? That changes the question completely.

The Religion of the Seeker Meets the Child Who Never Had to Seek

Scholar S. Zohreh Kermani pointed directly at this change in Pagan Family Values. For much of the history of contemporary Paganism, she argues, Paganism has largely been a religion of converts. Increasingly, however, there are second-generation Pagans for whom Paganism is not something reached through a spiritual quest. It is a family tradition (Kermani, 2013). That sounds like a small distinction. I do not think it is. The convert and the inheritor begin in entirely different places. The convert asks, What do I believe? The inheritor may eventually ask, Do I believe what my family believes? The convert often has to construct identity. The inheritor may have to separate identity from inheritance. The convert may experience Paganism as liberation from the religion or worldview of childhood. The Pagan child might someday experience Paganism as the religion of childhood. And there is the uncomfortable part.

We Pagans tend to be rather fond of the story in which we are the ones who escaped somebody else’s box. Eventually we have to admit that we are capable of building boxes too.

Do Pagan Children Get to Rebel Against Paganism?

I find this question fascinating because so much contemporary Pagan identity is built around spiritual independence. Kermani’s research found that many Pagan parents were less interested in transmitting a fixed set of beliefs than in passing along values such as religious tolerance and spiritual independence. In other words, the goal was often not necessarily to create another Pagan, but to raise a person capable of making meaningful spiritual choices for themselves (Kermani, 2013). There is something about that which I find deeply Pagan. But it creates a delicious contradiction. Suppose you raise your child to question authority. Then one day they question your authority. Suppose you teach them that no priest, church, book, elder, organization, scholar, influencer, or tradition owns their relationship with the sacred. Eventually they may apply the same rule to you. What happens if a Pagan child grows up and becomes Christian?

Or Buddhist? Or atheist? Or decides the gods are stories rather than beings? Or keeps the gods but rejects ritual? Or becomes far more traditional than their eclectic parents ever were? If we actually believe spiritual autonomy is a value, then the freedom to inherit Paganism must include the freedom to refuse it. Otherwise it was never freedom. It was simply another form of expectation wearing antlers.

But Something Else Happens When a Tradition Has Shape

Here is where the rabbit gets even more interesting. Julie Fennell and Laura Wildman-Hanlon studied adults who had been raised Pagan. Their 2017 study used a small convenience internet sample of 183 people, so we should not pretend that its percentages describe every Pagan family everywhere. Still, the findings are worth thinking about. Forty-five percent of the sample continued actively practising Paganism as adults, while another 25 percent described themselves as spiritually Pagan. The researchers also found that people raised within more clearly defined Pagan paths, including Wicca and Druidism, were more likely to remain Pagan than those raised under a more vaguely defined eclectic Pagan identity (Fennell & Wildman-Hanlon, 2017). Now that interests me. Because Paganism has spent a great deal of energy celebrating the absence of walls.

Yet apparently a path still needs enough stones underfoot for someone to know that they are walking one. A child cannot inherit “whatever feels right” in quite the same way they can inherit stories, practices, songs, seasonal observances, family customs, ethical expectations, sacred places, relationships with gods, relationships with ancestors, and ways of behaving toward the land. You can rebel against a tradition. You can modify a tradition. You can return to a tradition. You can even reject a tradition. But first there has to be something recognizable enough to be called a tradition.

And Suddenly All Those Old Questions Change

This is where this rabbit connects back into so many of the holes I have already crawled through. I have spent a lot of time asking whether modern Pagan practices are ancient, reconstructed, revived, borrowed, invented, adapted, or some untidy combination of all five. But give something to a child and the question begins changing. Suppose a Pagan family creates a particular solstice custom in 1995. The parents know they created it. Their child grows up doing it every year. That child eventually has children. Now those children know it as something Grandma and Grandpa always did. Another generation passes. At what point does it stop being a newly invented practice and become a family tradition? Not ancient. Not medieval. Not something handed down secretly from pre-Christian Europe. Just genuinely inherited. That distinction matters.

Because perhaps contemporary Paganism does not need to manufacture ancient pedigrees forever. We are now old enough to have grandparents. We are becoming old enough to have our own ancestors.

That May Be the Moment Paganism Changes Most

A religion of converts constantly looks backward for legitimacy. Where did this ritual come from? Did the Celts really do this? Did the Norse really believe that? Is this historically attested? What did the Druids actually practise? Is this Wiccan influence? Is that nineteenth-century Romanticism? Was this reconstructed in the twentieth century? Those are good questions. I have asked a great many of them myself, and I intend to keep asking them. But an inherited religion gains another source of legitimacy.

Memory.

“This is what my family did.” That statement proves absolutely nothing about the Iron Age. But it can tell us something very real about tradition. A practice does not have to be two thousand years old before it matters. It only has to be honestly represented for what it is. There is an enormous difference between saying, “My ancestors performed this exact ritual for a thousand years,” when we cannot possibly demonstrate that, and saying, “My grandmother began doing this at midsummer. My mother continued it. Now I do it with my children.” The second claim may be historically modest. But it is also real.

And That Makes Me Look at My Own Journey Differently

I came to much of this by searching. I followed rabbits. I read scholars. I pulled apart organizations. I looked at old sources, newer movements, reconstructed religions, festivals, communities, personalities, conflicts, histories, myths, symbols, and the strange winding network through which ideas become accepted as “Pagan.” Sometimes I found old roots. Sometimes I found modern roots dressed up to look old. Sometimes I found things nobody could trace particularly well. And sometimes I found that the historical origin mattered considerably less to me than what a practice was doing in the life of the person actually practising it. Maybe that has been part of my own transition without my realizing it. I began by asking, What did they do? Increasingly I find myself asking, What am I doing? And now this rabbit forces another question:

What, if anything, is worth handing forward?

Not what can I prove came from the ninth century. Not what can I convince somebody else is authentically Pagan. Not what organization gets to stamp it with approval. What deserves another generation?

Maybe Legacy Is Not Passing Down Answers

I think this is where the idea of legacy changes for me. Legacy does not have to mean creating followers. I am becoming increasingly suspicious of that idea anyway. Maybe Pagan legacy is not making certain that somebody else believes exactly what I believe. Maybe it is handing forward enough that the next person does not have to begin in an empty room. A story. A book. A tree planted deliberately. A name remembered. A way of greeting the land. A reason for lighting a fire. An understanding that hospitality matters. A relationship with ancestors that goes beyond genealogy. A willingness to question anybody who claims spiritual authority, including me. A habit of checking the history before repeating the myth. A willingness to admit that something is modern without deciding that modern means meaningless. Perhaps even the habit of chasing rabbits.

That might actually be the most useful thing to leave behind.

The Child Changes the Religion

Kermani makes another important point: raising children does not merely transmit Paganism. It changes Paganism. Parents have to decide what is important enough to teach, what can be discarded, what needs explaining, what children may participate in, what boundaries matter, and what values sit underneath the ritual (Kermani, 2013). That means the second generation is not simply receiving contemporary Paganism. Its existence forces the first generation to define it. And perhaps that is why this particular rabbit matters so much. For decades, modern Pagans have been able to answer difficult questions with some variation of, “My path is personal.” Fair enough. But eventually a child asks: Why? Why do we leave that offering? Why do we light this fire? Why do you honour that god? Why is this tree important? Why do we remember these people? Why do we call ourselves Pagan?

And “because it feels right to me” may not always be enough. Children have an irritating habit of asking one more why. Come to think of it, so do rabbits.

Perhaps That Is the Real Test of a Living Tradition

Not whether it can prove that every word survived untouched for a thousand years. Not whether everybody agrees on theology. Not whether it has a central authority. Not whether somebody published an official handbook. Maybe the test is simpler. Can it be lived? Can it be explained? Can it be questioned? Can it change without forgetting what it changed from? Can it survive somebody walking away? Can it welcome them if they walk back? And can one generation hand something meaningful to the next without closing the next generation’s fist around it? I do not know. But I think that may be one of the most important questions contemporary Paganism is going to have to answer. Because for the first generation, Paganism was often the thing at the end of the rabbit trail.

For the generations being raised inside it, Paganism may simply be where the rabbit trail begins. And I cannot help wondering where they are going to lead us.

References

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.

What Kind of Ancestors Are We Becoming?

Group walking through moss-covered forest with standing stones and guides in traditional attire

At some point, every rabbit warren needs an exit.

Not because there are no more tunnels.

There are always more tunnels.

Another question.

Another book.

Another scholar.

Another old festival program.

Another half-forgotten ritual.

Another story somebody swears happened exactly one way while somebody else remembers it entirely differently.

We could probably chase rabbits forever.

But this particular warren began with a fairly simple question: if we put the work of Shelley Rabinovitch, Dodie Graham McKay, Martin Lepage, Marisol Charbonneau, Marion Bowman and Barbara Jane Davy beside one another, is there some common thread running through what they have observed about Paganism?

That question led us somewhere much larger than I expected.

Relationship.

Responsibility.

Ethics.

Broken relationship.

Frith.

Repair.

Sacredness.

Ownership.

Stewardship.

Legacy.

And eventually we arrived here.

What kind of ancestors are we becoming?

That may be the question that gathers all the others together.

We Usually Imagine Ancestors Behind Us

When we speak about ancestors, we usually look backward.

Parents.

Grandparents.

Great-grandparents.

People whose names survive in family records.

People whose names have been lost.

People connected to places.

People connected through tradition, affinity, struggle, craft or spiritual inheritance.

Barbara Jane Davy’s work with inclusive Heathens helped complicate the idea of ancestry by showing that ancestry need not be understood only through blood.

There can be ancestors of affinity.

Ancestors of place.

People whose lives shaped paths that others later walked.

Once we accept that possibility, something interesting happens.

We stop being merely descendants.

We begin realizing that someday we will occupy the other side of that relationship.

We are future ancestors.

Maybe not biologically.

Maybe nobody will ever pour a drink in our name.

Maybe nobody will remember us personally at all.

But the world we are making will still become somebody else’s inheritance.

That makes ancestorhood less a condition of death than a condition of consequence.

We Are Building Somebody Else’s Past

That thought has been following me around since yesterday.

We are building somebody else’s past right now.

The things we consider ordinary will someday be history.

The festivals happening now will become old festivals.

The arguments happening now will become the conflicts somebody tries to reconstruct from surviving fragments.

The websites will disappear.

The photos will age.

The people who know why something happened will gradually become fewer.

Today will eventually become one of those strange historical periods where somebody says:

Surely someone wrote this down.

Maybe we did.

Maybe we didn’t.

Either way, people in the future will inherit the result.

Future Pagans Will Inherit More Than Rituals

It is tempting to think of Pagan legacy in terms of practices.

Which rituals survive?

Which books remain in print?

Which festivals continue?

Which sacred places are preserved?

Those things matter.

But future Pagans will inherit much more than ceremonies.

They will inherit our habits.

Our assumptions.

Our language.

Our organizational structures.

Our conflicts.

Our unresolved wounds.

Our approaches to leadership.

Our attitudes toward land.

Our relationship with history.

Our ideas about who belongs.

Our ideas about who gets to speak.

Our ways of dealing with disagreement.

Our willingness—or unwillingness—to admit when we were wrong.

Those things become tradition too.

Sometimes without anyone consciously choosing them.

A Tradition Can Inherit a Wound

Families know this.

A hurt happens.

Nobody talks about it.

Years pass.

The original event becomes fuzzy, but the behaviour created by it remains.

People learn not to mention certain things.

They learn who may be challenged and who may not.

They learn which emotions are permitted.

They learn which family member gets blamed.

Eventually nobody remembers exactly how the pattern started.

They simply call it normal.

Communities can do the same thing.

A conflict happens.

A person leaves.

A leader is never questioned.

A complaint is quietly buried to protect the group.

A bad decision becomes custom.

A temporary rule becomes tradition.

Ten years later newcomers inherit the behaviour without inheriting the explanation.

That is legacy too.

Perhaps one of the responsibilities of becoming a good ancestor is asking which wounds we are preparing to hand forward merely because we never dealt with them ourselves.

Not Everything Old Deserves Reverence

We Pagans can be particularly vulnerable to the romance of age.

Ancient.

Old ways.

Traditional.

Passed down.

Ancestor wisdom.

Those words carry weight.

Sometimes deservedly.

But age is evidence of survival.

It is not proof of goodness.

Some old things are wise.

Some old things are simply old.

Some survived because they served people well.

Others survived because nobody had enough power to challenge them.

If we are serious about honouring ancestors, then perhaps we should honour them as human beings rather than turning them into saints.

They made mistakes.

So will we.

The question is what we do once we recognize them.

Maybe a Good Ancestor Leaves Fewer Burdens

We often imagine legacy as something added.

Build something.

Create something.

Write something.

Start something.

Leave something behind.

But perhaps legacy can also be subtraction.

Remove something harmful.

Correct something false.

End a destructive pattern.

Repair damaged land.

Retire a ritual that no longer serves.

Stop using a story we know is historically untrue.

Build accountability into leadership where previously there was none.

Create boundaries that prevent old harms from becoming inherited customs.

A future generation may never know we did any of those things.

Good.

Maybe that is exactly the point.

If they never have to carry the burden, why should they remember the person who removed it?

The Best Ancestors May Be the Ones Nobody Knows

Somebody planted the tree.

You sit beneath it.

You do not know their name.

Somebody built the road.

Somebody preserved the manuscript.

Somebody fought to save a piece of land.

Somebody taught someone who later taught someone who eventually taught you.

Most of civilization rests upon the work of people whose names disappeared.

Perhaps Pagan traditions are no different.

The person who organized the first gathering.

The volunteer who stored the archives.

The person who kept showing up with a hammer during work weekends.

The one who remembered the old ritual accurately enough that someone could write it down.

The person who challenged a harmful practice even though doing so made them unpopular.

The person who welcomed someone standing alone at the edge of the circle.

Those people may never become celebrated ancestors.

But they shaped what somebody else inherited.

Maybe ancestorhood is not about being remembered.

Maybe it is about having mattered.

What Would We Want From Our Ancestors?

Perhaps one way to answer what future people need from us is to ask what we wish our own predecessors had left.

I wish they had written more down.

I wish they had labelled the photographs.

I wish they had recorded why certain decisions were made.

I wish they had distinguished what they knew from what they believed.

I wish they had told us when something was reconstructed rather than pretending it had always existed.

I wish more ordinary people had recorded their experiences rather than leaving history entirely to leaders.

I wish conflicts had more than one surviving account.

I wish people had documented why communities changed.

I wish they had admitted mistakes more often.

I wish they had preserved more voices from the edges rather than only from the centre.

Those wishes tell us something.

Future people may wish the same things of us.

This Is Why Scholarship Matters Again

We have returned repeatedly to Shelley Rabinovitch, Marion Bowman, Marisol Charbonneau, Martin Lepage, Dodie Graham McKay and Barbara Jane Davy throughout this warren.

There is a reason.

They preserved voices.

They observed communities.

They recorded rituals.

They examined identity.

They asked questions about nature, ethnicity, gender, ancestry, place, gifting, ecology and belonging.

They did not merely interpret Paganism.

They preserved parts of it.

That distinction may become more important with time.

A doctoral dissertation that seems very contemporary today may become primary historical evidence fifty years from now.

An academic article about a festival may someday be one of the few surviving descriptions of what that gathering felt like when it was alive.

An interview conducted now may preserve the voice of someone nobody can interview later.

Scholarship becomes memory.

Memory becomes inheritance.

Inheritance becomes legacy.

We Also Need Ordinary Voices

But scholarship cannot carry everything.

Scholars ask particular questions.

Archives preserve particular things.

Institutions make choices about what deserves attention.

That leaves enormous pieces of lived religion undocumented.

What did the fire smell like?

Who always arrived late?

Which ritual made everybody laugh because something went completely wrong?

What was it like bringing your child to their first gathering?

Who made coffee every morning?

Which elder quietly helped everyone without ever appearing in a program?

What happened after the official ritual ended?

What did ordinary people actually believe?

Those things matter too.

Perhaps journals matter.

Blogs matter.

Photographs matter.

Festival programs matter.

Personal recollections matter.

Old newsletters matter.

Even social media posts may someday become strange little archaeological fragments of early twenty-first-century religion.

We are making sources whether we realize it or not.

But We Should Leave Honest Sources

That brings us back to truth.

Future generations deserve more than propaganda.

They do not need us to make ourselves look perfect.

They need enough honesty to understand us.

Tell them what worked.

Tell them what failed.

Tell them why the community split.

Tell them why the ritual changed.

Tell them where the story came from.

Tell them when nobody really knows.

Tell them when memory conflicts.

Leave room for uncertainty.

One of the greatest gifts we can offer the future may simply be refusing to make their research harder by lying to make ourselves look better.

What Are We Teaching Without Realizing It?

Future generations will not inherit only our records.

They will inherit our example.

What does leadership look like?

Do leaders explain decisions?

Can leaders be challenged?

What happens when somebody makes a mistake?

What happens when someone is harmed?

Does community protect reputation or people?

Do elders mentor successors or guard territory?

Do scholars get respected when their findings challenge cherished stories?

Do newcomers get treated as future contributors or permanent outsiders?

Do we honour land only in ritual, or in the decisions we make about it?

Do we talk about reciprocity while expecting volunteers to carry everything?

Do we talk about sacredness while treating sacred spaces as endlessly exploitable?

Do we talk about frith while punishing people who name breaches of trust?

Someone is watching.

Someone is learning what Pagan community means from how we behave right now.

Future Ancestors Should Probably Learn to Say “I Was Wrong”

There may be no more useful inheritance than a culture capable of correction.

We are going to get things wrong.

That is not pessimism.

It is arithmetic.

Thousands of people making thousands of decisions across decades will eventually make bad ones.

The dangerous community is not the one that makes mistakes.

It is the one that cannot admit them.

Imagine leaving future Pagans a tradition in which saying:

I was wrong.

We misunderstood this.

New evidence changed what we know.

This practice caused harm.

We need to do this differently.

is considered evidence of maturity rather than weakness.

That might be a legacy worth leaving.

We Should Leave Them Questions Too

Maybe we should resist giving future Pagans all our answers.

Answers become brittle.

Questions travel remarkably well.

What do I owe because I am connected?

What relationships does this practice create?

Who benefits?

Who carries the cost?

What are we preserving?

Why?

What are we changing?

Why?

What did we receive?

What are we handing forward?

Who has power here?

What responsibilities come with it?

What are we calling sacred?

Does our conduct show that we actually believe it?

Those questions could survive many different Pagan traditions.

They do not require everyone to share theology.

They require attention.

Maybe This Is the Common Thread After All

We have wandered a long way from where we began.

Or perhaps we have finally come back to it.

We originally asked what common thread might run through these very different scholarly examinations of Paganism.

We found relationship.

After all these rabbit holes, I still think that holds.

But perhaps now we can see more of what relationship means.

Relationship is not merely connection.

It is responsibility.

Relationship creates memory.

Relationship can create sacredness.

Relationship can be broken.

Broken relationship creates questions of accountability and repair.

Sacred relationship creates questions of stewardship.

Stewardship extended through time becomes legacy.

And legacy eventually turns us into ancestors.

It is one long thread.

Maybe Paganism becomes visible in how we tend it.

We Are Not the End of the Story

That may be the thought I want to leave this rabbit warren with.

We are not the culmination of Paganism.

We are not the generation that finally gets everything right.

We are not standing at the end of the road looking backward at everyone who came before.

We are somewhere in the middle.

People came before us.

People will come after.

We inherited fragments.

We reconstructed some things.

We invented others.

We revived.

We misunderstood.

We researched.

We argued.

We built.

We broke things.

Sometimes we repaired them.

And eventually all of it passes onward.

That is humbling.

It should be.

The Firekeeper Has One Final Job

We have used the firekeeper throughout this series.

It seems right to end there.

The firekeeper tends the flame.

Protects it.

Feeds it.

Keeps it from escaping.

Makes sure people are warm.

Teaches others how to tend it.

And then eventually there is one final responsibility.

Move aside.

Let someone else take the chair.

That may be the hardest act of stewardship.

To accept that the fire will burn without us.

That people will tell different stories beside it.

That someone will arrange the wood differently.

Someone may move the stones.

Someone may decide a ritual we loved no longer belongs there.

Someone may find a better way.

That does not erase what we did.

It completes it.

A firekeeper who refuses to hand over the fire was never really preparing the next keeper.

So What Kind of Ancestors Are We Becoming?

I do not know.

We probably cannot know.

Future generations will answer that for themselves.

They will decide what we preserved well.

What we misunderstood.

What we should have changed sooner.

What we should never have abandoned.

They will have the benefit of hindsight.

We do not.

All we can do is try to leave them good material.

Honest history.

Living traditions.

Healthy questions.

Sacred places treated with care.

Communities capable of accountability.

Leadership understood as service.

Enough humility to admit uncertainty.

Enough courage to end harmful inheritances.

Enough generosity to teach somebody else how to tend the fire.

And perhaps enough wisdom not to demand that they become us.

The Rabbit Warren Ends Here

At least this one does.

We started with six scholars.

We ended with ancestors who have not been born yet.

That seems about right for a rabbit hole.

Rabinovitch.

Bowman.

Charbonneau.

Lepage.

Graham McKay.

Davy.

Different people mapping different parts of the forest.

Their work gave us places to stand.

From there we followed the paths a little farther.

And perhaps what we found was not a definition of Paganism at all.

Perhaps it was a question of posture.

How do we stand in relationship with gods, land, ancestors, community, memory, history and one another?

Do we possess?

Or tend?

Do we consume?

Or reciprocate?

Do we preserve everything?

Or learn what should continue?

Do we demand harmony?

Or practice accountability?

Do we inherit blindly?

Or inherit consciously?

Do we build monuments to ourselves?

Or plant trees beneath which somebody else may someday sit?

Maybe Paganism does not need one universal answer to those questions.

Maybe asking them seriously is part of the practice.

For a little while, we have the fire.

For a little while, we have the land beneath our feet.

For a little while, we hold stories other people handed us.

For a little while, somebody younger is watching what we do.

Then the chair belongs to someone else.

Perhaps legacy is nothing more complicated than making sure that when we stand up, we have not left them nothing but ash.

Leave some wood.

Leave some truth.

Leave some room.

And if we are very fortunate, leave the fire a little healthier than we found it.

That will do.

Godspeed.

Scholarly Trail Markers

This final reflection is a synthesis of the rabbit warren explored across this series. It does not claim that the scholars below collectively proposed a single theory of Paganism, legacy or ancestorhood. Their work provided different pieces of the landscape from which these questions developed.

Bowman, M. (2000). Nature, the natural and Pagan identity. DISKUS, 6.

Charbonneau, M. (2007). The melting cauldron: Ethnicity, diversity, and identity in a contemporary Pagan subculture. The Pomegranate, 9(1), 5–21.

Davy, B. J. (2023). Inclusive Heathens practice ancestor veneration, but not pride in ancestry. Nova Religio, 26(3), 30–51.

Davy, B. J. (2025). Wyrd ecology: Heathen ritual and gifting relations. Oxford University Press.

Graham McKay, D. (2014, June 20). Pagan festival season in Ontario. The Wild Hunt.

Graham McKay, D. (2017, April 25). Community experience at Raven’s Knoll documented in new book. The Wild Hunt.

Lepage, M. (2017). “Why be king? I’m already a queen!”: Performances rituelles et négociations queer dans la communauté néo-païenne de Montréal [Doctoral dissertation, Université du Québec à Montréal].

Rabinovitch, S. T., & Macdonald, M. (Eds.). (2004). An ye harm none: Magical morality and modern ethics. Citadel Press.

What Will Remain When We Are Gone?

An elderly woman giving a vintage pocket watch on a chain to a young woman outdoors

Yesterday we finally climbed out of the rabbit warren.

Or at least we pretended to.

We had followed relationship into responsibility, responsibility into ethics, ethics into broken relationship, broken relationship into sacredness, and sacredness into stewardship.

And somewhere near the end, another question appeared.

What will remain when we are gone?

That is the rabbit called legacy.

It is a strange word.

Legacy sounds grand.

Monuments.

Books.

Institutions.

Names carved into stone.

Things people say about us after we are dead.

But I suspect most legacies are much quieter than that.

A path someone still walks.

A tree someone else sits beneath.

A story repeated around a fire.

A ritual whose creator nobody remembers anymore.

A piece of advice passed from one person to another until its origin disappears.

A kindness remembered by someone who later offers the same kindness to somebody else.

A wound somebody finally decided not to pass forward.

Perhaps legacy is simply what continues after we no longer control the story.

The Firekeeper Eventually Leaves the Fire

We ended yesterday with the image of the firekeeper.

Someone tends the fire.

Adds wood.

Protects the flame.

Watches for sparks.

Keeps people warm.

Then eventually that person leaves.

They have to.

No one tends a fire forever.

Someone else takes the chair.

Or the fire goes out.

And perhaps that is the moment stewardship becomes legacy.

What condition did we leave the fire in?

Did we leave dry wood nearby?

Did we teach anyone how to tend it?

Did we make the task so dependent upon ourselves that nobody knew what to do when we were gone?

Did we keep everyone else away from the flames because we liked being the only person holding the poker?

Did we leave a healthy fire?

Or a pile of ashes everyone else was expected to call tradition?

That question applies to considerably more than campfires.

Traditions Have Ancestors Too

We often talk about our ancestors.

Blood ancestors.

Ancestors of place.

Ancestors of spirit.

Ancestors of affinity.

People whose lives, work, ideas or sacrifices created pathways we now walk.

But traditions have ancestors as well.

Someone taught the ritual.

Someone wrote the book.

Someone organized the gathering.

Someone kept an old newsletter.

Someone remembered the story accurately enough to tell it twenty years later.

Someone did research nobody else wanted to do.

Someone asked an inconvenient question.

Someone corrected a false history.

Someone created a practice that worked so well everyone eventually forgot it had ever been new.

We inherit those things.

And inheritance creates responsibility.

There is that word again.

We receive something from people who may never know our names.

Then, for a while, it passes through our hands.

Inheritance Is Not Preservation in Amber

There is a temptation when talking about legacy to imagine that our duty is simply preservation.

Keep everything exactly as it was.

Repeat the same ritual.

Use the same words.

Protect the same structure.

Never question the elders.

Never move the stones.

Never alter the story.

Otherwise tradition will be lost.

But living things do not survive by remaining unchanged.

A forest that never changed would not be a living forest.

Trees fall.

Seeds germinate.

Fire passes through.

Species move.

Water changes course.

Some things disappear.

Others arrive.

The forest remains the forest precisely because it changes.

Perhaps tradition works the same way.

Stewardship does not mean freezing something at the moment we received it.

It means knowing what must be protected, what can change, what needs pruning, and what should probably never have been planted there in the first place.

Some Things Should End With Us

This may be the uncomfortable part of legacy.

Not everything we inherit deserves descendants.

We inherit wisdom.

We also inherit prejudice.

We inherit beautiful rituals.

We also inherit bad habits disguised as tradition.

We inherit community stories.

We also inherit old grudges.

We inherit teachings.

We also inherit misinformation.

We inherit structures built for circumstances that no longer exist.

We inherit wounds people stopped questioning because everyone became accustomed to carrying them.

Honouring our predecessors cannot mean repeating every mistake they made.

Sometimes respect for the past means understanding it well enough to know what not to reproduce.

Perhaps one of the greatest legacies a generation can leave is the thing it finally refuses to hand down.

The prejudice stops here.

The lie stops here.

The abuse stops here.

The silence stops here.

The false history stops here.

The idea that leadership means unquestionable authority stops here.

The expectation that someone must endure harm to preserve community stops here.

Some traditions deserve descendants.

Some ghosts deserve rest.

But Who Decides?

Of course that immediately creates another problem.

Who decides what should continue?

The elders?

The young?

The scholar?

The priest?

The practitioner?

The founder?

The person who has been there longest?

The person asking the question nobody else wants asked?

Probably no single one of them.

Legacy becomes dangerous when one generation imagines it has the right to write the future in permanent ink.

We do not know what future Pagans will need.

We cannot.

They will live in circumstances we cannot completely imagine.

They will ask questions we have not thought to ask.

They will probably find some of our assumptions ridiculous.

Good.

We have done the same thing to generations before us.

Perhaps our responsibility is not to decide everything for them.

Perhaps our responsibility is to leave them enough truth, memory, tools and freedom to decide wisely for themselves.

What Do We Leave Them?

That may be the real legacy question.

Not:

Will they remember my name?

But:

What will they have because we were here?

Will they inherit healthy land?

Will they inherit sacred places that were cared for rather than consumed?

Will they know how those places became sacred?

Will anyone have written the history down?

Will photographs have names attached to them?

Will ritual texts explain where they came from?

Will reconstructed practices be labelled honestly as reconstruction?

Will modern inventions be allowed to be modern without being dressed in fake antiquity?

Will the mistakes be documented as carefully as the victories?

Will someone know why a tradition changed?

Or will they inherit fragments and myths and spend another generation trying to reconstruct what actually happened?

Legacy is partly memory.

And memory requires work.

The Archivist Is a Kind of Firekeeper

We tend to romanticize the visible roles.

The priest.

The ritual leader.

The musician.

The person standing beside the sacred fire.

But there are quieter firekeepers.

The person who saves the old newsletters.

The one who labels photographs.

The one who writes down the names of the dead.

The one who records who built the shrine.

The one who remembers that a tradition everyone now calls ancient actually began at a gathering in 1994.

The scholar who interviews people before those memories disappear.

The community historian who keeps copies when websites vanish.

The practitioner who writes:

This is what we did, this is why we did it, and this is what I remember.

That work may not look particularly magical.

Neither does stacking firewood.

But the fire lasts longer because someone did it.

This Is Where Scholarship Becomes Legacy

Our entire rabbit warren began because people did that work.

Shelley Rabinovitch documented people, communities and movements that might otherwise have disappeared into memory.

Marion Bowman recorded lived religion, sacred places and the way ordinary people actually experience religious worlds.

Marisol Charbonneau documented a particular moment in Montreal Paganism.

Martin Lepage captured voices and negotiations around identity that might otherwise survive only as vague recollection.

Dodie Graham McKay wrote about festivals, gatherings, people and sacred places while many of them were still living stories rather than distant history.

Barbara Jane Davy documented Heathen practices, rituals, gifting relationships, ancestry and ecological thought as they were being lived.

That is not merely scholarship.

It becomes part of the historical record.

Years from now, someone asking what Paganism looked like in Canada during this period may find those works.

They will know more because someone bothered to observe carefully.

That is legacy.

Not necessarily being remembered.

Making remembering possible.

Community Memory Is Fragile

We tend to assume someone will remember.

Someone always knows.

Ask so-and-so.

They were there.

Until one day they aren’t.

A hard drive fails.

A website disappears.

A box of papers gets thrown away during a move.

A Facebook group vanishes.

The person who knew the story dies.

Twenty-five years of community history can disappear surprisingly quickly.

Then myths grow in the empty space.

Someone vaguely remembers.

Someone else’s memory disagrees.

The date shifts.

The founder becomes someone else.

A modern ritual ages fifty years in three retellings.

Eventually everybody is certain.

Nobody has evidence.

Perhaps documentation is one of the least glamorous forms of sacred stewardship.

But if memory matters, somebody has to tend it.

Legacy Is Also Conduct

Documents are not the only things we leave behind.

We leave patterns.

A newcomer watches how elders behave.

A student watches how a teacher handles disagreement.

Children watch how adults speak about people who are not present.

Communities watch what leaders do when someone reports harm.

People notice whether rules apply to everyone.

They notice whether apologies lead to change.

They notice whether service creates authority or authority creates entitlement.

Then those behaviours become normal.

That may be one of the most powerful forms of legacy.

Not what we taught.

What we demonstrated.

A community can write beautiful values statements and still teach the next generation hypocrisy.

Another community may have no formal ethics document at all and quietly teach generosity, honesty and accountability through daily behaviour.

The next generation learns both.

Perhaps tradition is transmitted as much through imitation as instruction.

The Stories We Tell About Ourselves Matter

Legacy also becomes mythology.

Every community tells stories about itself.

How it began.

Who founded it.

What hardships were overcome.

Why certain rituals exist.

Why certain people left.

Why one tradition ended and another began.

Those stories create identity.

But stories simplify.

They turn messy history into clean narrative.

The founder becomes hero.

The conflict becomes misunderstanding.

The inconvenient person disappears.

The unsuccessful experiment is forgotten.

The community’s present identity gets projected backward until it appears that everything was always leading inevitably to today.

That is how memory becomes mythology.

Sometimes mythology gives a community strength.

Sometimes it hides things people need to understand.

Perhaps responsible legacy means allowing future generations to inherit complicated ancestors.

Not saints.

Not villains.

People.

Our Ancestors Were Complicated; So Are We

We often wish our ancestors had left clearer records.

What exactly did they believe?

How did this ritual work?

What did this symbol mean?

Why did they make this offering?

What did ordinary people think?

We stare at fragments and wish somebody had written more down.

Then we live our own religious lives as though future people will somehow understand us automatically.

Perhaps that is worth considering.

We are somebody’s ancestors too.

Maybe not biologically.

But culturally.

Spiritually.

Intellectually.

Practically.

Someone fifty years from now may practice something influenced by choices being made today.

They may stand before a shrine we built.

They may inherit a festival we created.

They may use language we normalized.

They may spend years trying to undo something we handed them thoughtlessly.

Or they may be grateful we did the difficult work before they arrived.

We will probably never know which.

Planting Trees We Will Never Sit Beneath

There is an old idea found in many cultures: plant trees whose shade you will never enjoy.

That may be one of the clearest images of legacy.

Do something useful without requiring yourself to remain at the centre of it.

Build something you are willing to let other people inherit.

Teach someone who may eventually do it better than you.

Document something you will not personally benefit from preserving.

Repair damage whose consequences would otherwise belong to people not yet born.

Give away knowledge.

Make room.

That last one may be difficult.

Make room.

Legacy eventually requires stepping aside.

A Good Ancestor Knows When to Become an Ancestor

There may be no sadder form of leadership than someone who cannot imagine the community surviving without them.

The founder who must always remain the founder.

The elder who cannot allow younger voices to develop.

The teacher who needs students to remain students forever.

The organizer who controls everything because nobody else can possibly understand.

The firekeeper who never lets anyone else near the fire.

That may preserve authority.

It does not create legacy.

Legacy requires succession.

Someone else learns the ritual.

Someone else gets the keys.

Someone else edits the newsletter.

Someone else leads.

And eventually they change things.

Of course they do.

They are alive.

Perhaps a good ancestor does not ask future generations to become copies.

Perhaps a good ancestor leaves them roots strong enough that they can grow branches we never imagined.

What Kind of Ancestor Are We Becoming?

That may be the question hiding inside legacy.

We usually think ancestorhood begins when someone dies.

Perhaps becoming an ancestor begins much earlier.

Every decision becomes part of what future people inherit.

Every tradition we normalize.

Every story we preserve.

Every lie we allow to remain convenient.

Every piece of land we tend or neglect.

Every boundary we establish.

Every person we teach.

Every wound we heal.

Every wound we hand forward.

We are building somebody else’s past right now.

That thought is both terrifying and strangely beautiful.

Legacy Is Not Immortality

There is another trap in all this.

Wanting legacy can become wanting immortality.

Remember my name.

Keep my ritual unchanged.

Protect my title.

Tell my version of the story.

Do not let what I built become something I did not intend.

But eventually every legacy escapes its creator.

Stories change.

Books are interpreted.

Traditions evolve.

Buildings are repurposed.

Organizations change direction.

People remember things we thought insignificant and forget things we thought would define us forever.

Legacy is not control after death.

Quite the opposite.

Legacy begins when control ends.

What remains must stand without us.

Perhaps the Best Legacy Is Useful

Maybe that is enough.

Not famous.

Not permanent.

Useful.

A path that makes someone’s journey easier.

A record that answers a question.

A tradition with enough roots to survive change.

A community healthier because somebody confronted an unhealthy pattern.

A piece of land in better condition than we received it.

A young practitioner who knows they are allowed to ask questions.

An old story preserved honestly.

A mistake documented so someone else does not need to repeat it.

A fire ready for the next keeper.

What Will Remain?

So perhaps the legacy question is not really about death.

It is about stewardship stretched across time.

Yesterday we asked:

What did I receive?

How am I tending it?

What will remain when I am gone?

Today I think we can add another:

Will what remains help the people who come after me live more wisely than I did?

That may be too much to ask.

Maybe wisdom cannot be inherited.

Perhaps every generation has to earn its own.

But we can leave better material.

Better records.

Healthier soil.

More honest stories.

Fewer inherited lies.

Traditions sturdy enough to change without collapsing.

Communities that understand authority as responsibility.

Sacred places cared for rather than merely claimed.

And perhaps one or two fewer wounds for someone else to carry.

That would not be a bad legacy.

The Fire Will Belong to Someone Else

Someday somebody else will sit where we sit.

They will look back at us the way we look back at those who came before.

They will wonder what we believed.

Why we did certain things.

Why we fought over others.

Why we preserved one tradition and let another disappear.

They will probably misunderstand us sometimes.

They will almost certainly criticize us.

They may thank us for things we barely noticed doing.

They may curse us for problems we thought somebody else would eventually solve.

That is how generations work.

We cannot control their judgement.

We can only decide what material we leave them to judge.

And perhaps that is all legacy ever was.

The fire passes from hand to hand.

No keeper owns it forever.

We inherit flame from people we never met.

We keep it for a while.

We add our own wood.

Our own stories.

Our own mistakes.

Our own lessons.

Then eventually somebody else reaches for the poker.

Perhaps our final responsibility is simply to hand it over without pretending the fire was ever ours alone.

And to leave enough wood nearby that they do not have to begin again in the dark.

Godspeed.

Scholarly Trail Markers

This reflection grows from the scholarly rabbit warren explored in the preceding posts. The scholars below did not collectively propose a single theory of Pagan legacy. Their work preserves different parts of contemporary Pagan history, identity, ritual, community and sacred relationship, making the very act of scholarly documentation part of the legacy discussed here.

Bowman, M. (2000). Nature, the natural and Pagan identity. DISKUS, 6.

Charbonneau, M. (2007). The melting cauldron: Ethnicity, diversity, and identity in a contemporary Pagan subculture. The Pomegranate, 9(1), 5–21.

Davy, B. J. (2023). Inclusive Heathens practice ancestor veneration, but not pride in ancestry. Nova Religio, 26(3), 30–51.

Davy, B. J. (2025). Wyrd ecology: Heathen ritual and gifting relations. Oxford University Press.

Graham McKay, D. (2014, June 20). Pagan festival season in Ontario. The Wild Hunt.

Graham McKay, D. (2017, April 25). Community experience at Raven’s Knoll documented in new book. The Wild Hunt.

Lepage, M. (2017). “Why be king? I’m already a queen!”: Performances rituelles et négociations queer dans la communauté néo-païenne de Montréal [Doctoral dissertation, Université du Québec à Montréal].

Rabinovitch, S. T., & Macdonald, M. (Eds.). (2004). An ye harm none: Magical morality and modern ethics. Citadel Press.

Coming Back Out of the Rabbit Warren

Woman arranging flowers at a symbolic outdoor memorial with stones and candles, people sitting by a campfire in background

Well.

That went farther than expected.

We started this morning with what seemed like a fairly innocent question.

If we put the work of Shelley Rabinovitch, Dodie Graham McKay, Martin Lepage, Marisol Charbonneau, Marion Bowman and Barbara Jane Davy beside one another, is there some common thread running through what they have been telling us about Paganism?

I expected an interesting comparison.

Perhaps a few shared themes.

Nature.

Identity.

Community.

Ritual.

History.

Instead, the floor gave way.

And down the rabbit hole we went.

Then into another.

And another.

Until what began as a question about scholarship became a much larger question about what Paganism actually asks of the people who live it.

So before we chase anything else, perhaps we should sit at the edge of the hole for a moment, brush the dirt off our clothes, and look back at where we have been.

The First Rabbit: Relationship

The first thing that emerged from those scholars was surprisingly simple.

The common thread did not appear to be a common theology.

Pagans do not agree enough for that.

We do not share one scripture.

We do not share one understanding of deity.

We do not share one account of what happens after death.

We do not share one ritual system, one history, one hierarchy or one authority.

And perhaps that has never been the centre anyway.

What kept appearing across all those different bodies of work was relationship.

Relationship with gods.

Relationship with ancestors.

Relationship with land.

Relationship with community.

Relationship with history.

Relationship with ritual.

Relationship with identity.

Relationship with memory.

And relationship with ourselves.

That gave us the first working thought of the day:

Perhaps Paganism is held together less by common belief than by common ways of entering into relationship.

Not identical relationships.

Not identical gods.

Not identical practices.

But the repeated movement outward from the isolated self toward something else.

Something older.

Something larger.

Something remembered.

Something living.

The Second Rabbit: Relationship Creates Responsibility

Of course that pleasant little idea lasted about five minutes before the next rabbit appeared.

Because relationship cannot simply be poetic language.

If I am truly in relationship with something, then my behaviour toward it matters.

If I say I honour the land, the question eventually becomes how I treat the land.

If I say I honour ancestors, the question becomes what I do with what I inherited from them.

If I say community matters, then community cannot only mean the parts I enjoy.

Someone still has to do the work.

Someone still has to welcome the newcomer.

Someone still has to clean up after the feast.

Someone still has to tend the fire when everyone else has gone to bed.

Barbara Jane Davy’s work on gifting, reciprocity and relationality helped push that question into clearer focus.

A relationship creates something between the parties involved.

Memory.

Expectation.

Responsibility.

And suddenly the ethical question was no longer:

What am I allowed to do?

It became:

What do I owe because I am connected?

That may have been the moment this stopped being merely an academic rabbit hole.

Because that question follows us home.

The Third Rabbit: What Happens When the Web Tears?

Then the obvious problem appeared.

Relationships break.

Trust fails.

Promises are broken.

Hospitality is abused.

Communities fail their members.

People betray one another.

Reciprocity becomes exploitation.

And suddenly an ethic of relationship needs an ethic for broken relationship.

That led us into frith, betrayal, restitution, boundaries, forgiveness and repair.

And perhaps the most important thing we found there was this:

Repair does not necessarily mean restoration.

Some relationships can be rebuilt.

Some cannot.

Some should not be.

Forgiveness is not trust.

Forgiveness is not reconciliation.

Forgiveness is not restored access.

And boundaries are not automatically failures of relationship.

Sometimes boundaries are how we protect the wider web from further harm.

That was an important turn.

Because relational spirituality can become dangerous if it quietly teaches people that maintaining connection is always more sacred than protecting themselves or others.

Sometimes the ethical act is rebuilding the bridge.

Sometimes the ethical act is admitting the bridge is gone.

The Fourth Rabbit: What Makes Something Sacred?

From broken relationships we wandered into sacredness.

If relationships create meaning, then perhaps sacredness is not merely something inherent in an object, place or tradition.

Perhaps sacredness also grows through relationship.

A clearing becomes sacred because people return.

Because ritual happens there.

Because names are spoken there.

Because ashes are scattered there.

Because vows are exchanged.

Because someone grieved beneath that tree.

Because someone made an offering beside that well every year until the path itself became memory.

Eventually geography becomes biography.

That led to another working thought:

Something may become sacred when relationship gives it meaning deep enough to create obligation.

That word again.

Obligation.

If something is sacred, ordinary entitlement begins to feel insufficient.

We approach differently.

We behave differently.

We recognize that the thing before us is not simply available for whatever use happens to be convenient.

And then we discovered something else.

Desecration and the end of sacredness are not necessarily the same thing.

A shrine can be violated and remain sacred.

A sacred place can be physically damaged while its meaning survives.

A community can disappear while its memory remains.

A place can stop being an active sacred home and still remain sacred in memory.

The fire can go out without proving it was never sacred.

The Fifth Rabbit: Ownership Is Not Stewardship

Then came the question that was probably waiting underneath everything else:

Who gets to decide what happens to sacred things?

That took us into ownership and stewardship.

And here we had to be very careful.

Because spirituality does not erase law.

If somebody owns land, they own the land.

Community attachment does not magically transfer the deed.

Years of ritual do not automatically create legal ownership.

Memories do not become property rights simply because they are powerful.

But neither does ownership answer every ethical question.

The deed may tell us who has the legal authority to decide.

It does not necessarily tell us what a wise or responsible decision looks like.

And so another distinction appeared:

Ownership asks who has the right to decide.

Stewardship asks what responsibilities should shape that decision.

Those are not enemies.

They are different questions.

A landowner can also be a steward.

A community can have genuine moral attachment without owning the land.

A person can love a sacred place without being entitled to control it.

An owner can possess legal authority without every possible use of that authority being ethically identical.

And somewhere in that tension sits the difference between possession and care.

The Firekeeper

By the end of all this, one image kept returning.

The firekeeper.

I think perhaps that image gathers most of today’s rabbit warren into one place.

A firekeeper has authority.

Someone needs to tend the fire.

Someone decides when another log is needed.

Someone watches the sparks.

Someone protects the people around it.

Someone makes sure the fire does not escape into the forest.

But the firekeeper does not own the fire in every meaningful sense of the word.

They did not invent flame.

They do not own the warmth received by everyone sitting around it.

They do not own the stories told beside it.

They do not own the memories people take home.

The firekeeper’s authority makes sense because it is tied to responsibility.

Without responsibility, authority becomes merely control.

Perhaps that is true of more than fires.

Perhaps it is true of elders.

Priests.

Teachers.

Landowners.

Organizers.

Tradition bearers.

Community leaders.

Anyone entrusted with something larger than themselves.

And This Is Where the Scholars Matter

We should come back to the people who helped us enter this warren in the first place.

Shelley Rabinovitch helped document the enormous diversity of modern Paganism and took questions of Pagan ethics seriously.

Marion Bowman showed why lived and vernacular religion matters, and why we should pay attention to what people actually do with religion rather than only what official definitions say.

Marisol Charbonneau showed Paganism taking shape within actual cultural, linguistic and social environments rather than existing as some floating universal abstraction.

Martin Lepage showed people negotiating identity, gender and belonging within contemporary Pagan ritual and community.

Dodie Graham McKay documented Canadian Pagan community from the ground: festivals, people, sacred spaces, labour, memory and what happens when a place accumulates years of meaning.

Barbara Jane Davy gave us particularly useful language for relationship, reciprocity, gifting, ancestry, ecology and the ethical web that can emerge from those connections.

They did not collectively write today’s conclusions.

We should not put our words into their mouths.

But they gave us maps.

Partial maps.

Maps of different sections of the forest.

And because those maps exist, we were able to lay them beside one another and notice something larger.

That is part of the value of scholarship.

It does not necessarily hand us the answer.

Sometimes it simply lets us ask a better question.

So What Did We Actually Find Today?

Perhaps something like this.

Paganism may not be most clearly understood by asking what every Pagan believes.

There may be no answer to that question.

But we can ask how Paganism is lived.

And again and again, it appears through relationships.

Those relationships create meaning.

Meaning creates responsibility.

Responsibility creates ethics.

When relationships break, ethics requires us to think about accountability, repair and boundaries.

When relationships deepen, they may produce what we call sacredness.

When sacred things come under human control, sacredness raises questions of stewardship.

And stewardship eventually forces us to think beyond ourselves.

What did we inherit?

What are we doing with it?

What will we leave behind?

That may be the whole warren in three questions.

What did I receive?

How am I tending it?

What will remain when I am gone?

Maybe Paganism Is Less About Having and More About Tending

That is where I find myself tonight.

Perhaps Paganism is not primarily something we possess.

Not my gods.

My land.

My ancestors.

My tradition.

My community.

My sacred place.

Perhaps all those possessive words are useful grammar and dangerous philosophy.

Maybe the better image is tending.

I tend a relationship with the gods.

I tend memory of the ancestors.

I tend the land beneath my feet.

I tend the community I participate in.

I tend the traditions I inherited.

I tend the stories I tell.

I tend the promises I make.

I tend the boundaries that keep relationships healthy.

I tend the fire.

And I know that one day somebody else will be sitting beside it.

Or they will not.

Some fires should continue.

Some should be allowed to go out.

Some traditions deserve preservation.

Some need pruning.

Some relationships deserve repair.

Some endings deserve respect.

Some inherited things should be passed forward.

Some should end with us.

Stewardship is knowing the difference as best we can.

For Today, That Is Far Enough

There are more rabbits out there.

There always will be.

Legacy is sitting somewhere ahead of us.

So are ancestors.

So is the question of what future Pagans will think of the religious world we are creating for them right now.

Those rabbits can wait.

For today, I think we have travelled far enough.

We began by asking what six scholars might collectively tell us about Paganism.

We ended somewhere much more personal.

Relationship.

Responsibility.

Accountability.

Sacredness.

Stewardship.

Perhaps those are not separate subjects after all.

Perhaps they are simply different points along the same thread.

A thread running through gods and land, ancestors and community, memory and obligation, past and future.

A thread reminding us that nothing we touch remains entirely untouched by us.

And that we, in turn, do not leave our relationships unchanged.

Maybe that is why the image of roots keeps following us.

Beneath the forest floor, nothing looks particularly organized.

Roots cross.

Separate.

Meet again.

Dead things become soil.

Living things feed one another.

Some trees fall.

Others grow into the opening.

No single tree owns the forest.

Yet every tree changes it.

Perhaps we are not terribly different.

We arrive.

We inherit.

We take.

We give.

We damage.

We repair.

We remember.

We forget.

We build things that may outlive us.

We leave behind things other people will eventually have to deal with.

And for a little while, we get to stand beside the fire.

Maybe the question was never whether the fire belonged to us.

Maybe the question was always:

What did we do while it was ours to tend?

That seems like a good place to leave today’s rabbits.

At least until one of them sticks its head out again.

Godspeed.

Who Owns the Sacred? Stewardship, Authority, and the Problem of Possession

Two side-by-side stone circles, one fenced as private property and the other open as a community sacred grove with people tending the land

We left the last hole with what sounded like a simple enough question: if something becomes sacred through relationship, who gets to decide what happens to it?

The person who owns the land?

The person who built the shrine?

The priest who tends it?

The community that worships there?

The people whose labour maintained it?

The people whose dead are remembered there?

The people who will inherit it after everyone currently arguing about it is gone?

And immediately we discover that the word ownership is trying to answer several different questions at once.

Legally, ownership can sometimes be quite straightforward. There is a deed. There is a title. There are property lines. Someone has the authority recognized by law to decide who enters, what is built, what is removed, what is sold and how the property is used.

That matters.

Spiritual language does not erase property law.

Twenty years of attending rituals on somebody else’s land does not magically put your name on the deed. Helping build a shrine does not necessarily make you its legal owner. Loving a place does not create a property interest simply because the love is sincere.

But there is another question hiding underneath the legal one.

Does having the right to do something automatically answer whether one ought to do it?

And there is our rabbit.

Ownership and Stewardship Are Not the Same Question

Ownership asks about authority.

Stewardship asks about responsibility.

Ownership says:

This is mine.

Stewardship asks:

What has been placed in my care?

Those statements can exist in the same person.

In fact, perhaps they should.

A person can own a hundred acres and also understand themselves as responsible for what happens to those hundred acres. They may recognize that trees take longer to grow than human plans take to change, that water flows beyond property lines, that wildlife is thoroughly unimpressed by land registries, and that decisions made during one generation can shape the lives of people who will inherit the consequences.

The title says who owns the land.

It does not tell us everything the land means.

That distinction becomes even more important when a place has become sacred to more people than the person holding the deed.

A Place Can Be Privately Owned and Communally Meaningful

This is one reason Raven’s Knoll has become such an interesting example in this series of rabbit holes.

We are not using it here to settle any contemporary dispute, nor to suggest that community attachment somehow overrides private ownership. We are using it because the historical record allows us to watch several different relationships with the same land grow beside one another.

Dodie Graham McKay’s 2017 account of Rites of Raven’s Knoll described privately owned Pagan land that had, through repeated gatherings, accumulated permanent shrines and sacred sites. The book itself brought together twenty-eight voices connected to the land and the events held there.

Barbara Jane Davy later studied Heathen ritual at Raven’s Knoll, examining gifting, reciprocity, wyrd and the relationships formed through ritual practice.

Those things do not transfer legal ownership.

But neither are they nothing.

People prayed there.

People made offerings there.

People married there.

People worked there.

People repaired things.

People created ritual traditions there.

People attached memories to particular trees, stones, fires, clearings and shrines.

Something interesting happens when enough human lives pass repeatedly through the same landscape.

The land acquires more than one biography.

The owner has one.

The volunteer another.

The priest another.

The child who grew up attending festivals another.

The person who exchanged vows there another.

The person who mourned somebody there another.

All of them may be talking about the same hundred acres.

None of them are necessarily talking about the same place.

The Deed Is Real, but It Is Not the Whole Story

I think we sometimes get ourselves into trouble by demanding that one kind of truth erase another.

If the land is privately owned, then some will say the community’s emotional or spiritual attachment is irrelevant.

If the community has invested years of devotion and labour, others may begin speaking as though ownership itself should no longer matter.

Neither position seems particularly useful.

The deed is real.

The relationship is real.

They simply describe different things.

One establishes legal authority.

The other establishes meaning.

And when sacredness enters the conversation, perhaps meaning creates moral questions even when it does not create legal rights.

That is an important distinction.

Moral stake is not necessarily legal ownership.

But legal ownership does not automatically make every decision morally weightless either.

The interesting questions begin precisely where those two truths meet.

The Shrine Someone Else Helped Build

Imagine that I own a piece of land.

On that land is a shrine.

I provided the space, but over thirty years many people carried stones to it. Someone carved the altar. Someone planted trees. Someone replaced the roof. Someone donated the statue. Someone tended the grass. Someone performed the first ritual there. Hundreds of people have since left offerings.

Legally, depending upon the circumstances, the shrine may very well belong to the landowner.

But suppose one morning the owner decides:

I am tired of looking at it. Bring in the excavator.

Maybe they have the legal right.

But surely the ethical conversation does not end with the sentence:

I own it.

At minimum we might ask:

Who should be told?

Who should be consulted?

Can sacred objects be removed respectfully?

Can the history be documented?

Can people say goodbye?

Can some part of what was created be relocated?

Does an obligation arise from having allowed people to invest years of religious meaning into the place?

None of those questions necessarily changes who owns the property.

They change what stewardship might require of the owner.

The Other Side of the Problem

But now turn the rabbit around.

Suppose I have attended that shrine for twenty years.

I love it.

I helped maintain it.

Some of the most important spiritual experiences of my life happened there.

Do those things give me the right to command the person who owns the property?

No.

Not automatically.

My devotion does not turn another person’s property into mine.

My memories do not transfer the deed.

My contribution does not necessarily create permanent authority.

That matters too.

Otherwise the language of sacredness becomes a remarkably effective way of taking control of something somebody else actually owns.

That would not be stewardship.

That would simply be another form of entitlement dressed in religious clothes.

So the ethical burden runs in both directions.

The owner should not necessarily treat communal sacred investment as meaningless.

The community should not necessarily treat sacred investment as ownership.

Between those two positions lives something much more difficult.

Relationship.

Again.

Stewardship Begins Where Entitlement Ends

Perhaps stewardship is what happens when we stop asking only what we are permitted to do.

A steward asks different questions.

What was here before me?

Who depends upon this?

Who has invested themselves here?

What promises have been made?

What expectations have reasonably grown around those promises?

What will my decision change?

Who carries the cost?

What am I passing forward?

What am I destroying that cannot easily be recreated?

And perhaps most importantly:

Am I treating this thing as something entrusted to me, or merely as something available to me?

Those are very different relationships.

The Firekeeper Does Not Own the Fire

I keep returning to the image of the firekeeper.

A firekeeper has authority.

Someone has to decide when another log goes on.

Someone watches the sparks.

Someone makes sure the fire does not escape the ring.

Someone may tell a careless person to step back.

But the firekeeper’s authority exists because they have accepted responsibility for the fire.

The firekeeper does not become the fire.

They do not own everyone’s warmth.

They do not own every story told around the flames.

They do not own the memories people take away from the circle.

Their authority is tied to care.

Separate authority from care and something changes.

The firekeeper becomes merely the person holding the poker.

Perhaps spiritual authority works the same way.

Who Owns a Ritual?

This problem becomes even stranger when the sacred thing is not land.

Who owns a ritual?

The person who wrote it?

The tradition that shaped it?

The people who performed it for thirty years?

The priest who currently leads it?

The community that keeps returning?

What if the original creator dies?

What if the community changes the ritual?

What if somebody claims that changing it is disrespectful?

What if preserving it exactly makes it meaningless to the people now performing it?

This is where Marion Bowman’s work on vernacular religion becomes particularly useful.

Religion as lived by ordinary people does not remain frozen simply because somebody once wrote something down. Tradition moves through human hands. People inherit it, interpret it, perform it, adapt it and sometimes argue furiously about what should happen next.

Maybe ritual is less like owning a statue and more like tending a garden.

You inherit something with a history.

You are not free from that history.

But neither can you keep the garden alive by embalming it.

You prune.

You plant.

You learn which things belong there.

You occasionally discover that something everyone swore had grown there for centuries was planted in 1987.

You laugh.

Hopefully.

Then you keep tending.

Who Owns Tradition?

This may be the larger question underneath the smaller one.

We speak constantly about our tradition.

But what does that possessive actually mean?

Did we create it?

Usually not.

Did we receive it whole and unchanged from antiquity?

Usually not that either.

Tradition is handed forward through layers of people.

Someone remembered something.

Someone forgot something.

Someone wrote something down.

Someone translated it.

Someone misunderstood the translation.

Someone reconstructed the missing pieces.

Someone created a beautiful new practice and later generations assumed it was ancient.

Someone else eventually checked the dates.

And through all of that, tradition lived.

Perhaps we do not own tradition.

Perhaps we receive custody of a portion of it.

For a while.

That creates an interesting obligation.

Preserve what deserves preserving.

Tell the truth about what we actually know.

Do not confuse innovation with antiquity.

Do not confuse antiquity with virtue.

Add carefully.

Remove carefully.

Then hand something onward that is still alive.

And Who Exactly Is “The Community”?

Here the work of Rabinovitch, Charbonneau and Lepage becomes important again.

It is very easy to say:

The community should decide.

Which community?

Who speaks for it?

The founders?

The elders?

The people who attend every week?

The people who attend once a year but have done so for thirty years?

The younger generation?

The people who left?

The people who were pushed out?

The landowners?

The clergy?

The volunteers?

The loudest person in the Facebook group?

There is danger in treating community as though it were a single creature with one mouth.

Rabinovitch’s work helped document just how internally varied modern Paganism is. Charbonneau examined diversity, ethnicity and identity within Pagan community. Lepage showed people negotiating gender and belonging within ritual traditions.

Together they remind us that communities contain differences.

Sometimes profound ones.

So community stewardship cannot simply mean finding one person willing to announce:

I speak for everyone.

They probably don’t.

Stewardship Needs Listening

Maybe this gives us one characteristic of good stewardship.

Listening.

Not endless consultation until nothing can ever happen.

Not giving every person veto power over every decision.

But listening enough to understand what is actually being changed.

If an old shrine is going to be moved, find out who uses it.

If a ritual is going to be discontinued, understand what it means to the people who practiced it.

If sacred land is changing purpose, recognize the history attached to that landscape.

If a tradition is being rewritten, know what is being inherited before declaring what must be discarded.

Consultation does not mean surrendering authority.

It means exercising authority with information rather than merely with power.

“Because I Can” Is a Very Small Moral Philosophy

Perhaps that is the deepest problem with ownership when it becomes detached from stewardship.

I can.

I can cut the tree.

I can remove the shrine.

I can close the gate.

I can change the ritual.

I can sell the land.

I can keep the artifact.

I can exclude the community.

Perhaps.

Sometimes the answer really is yes.

But I can answers only the question of power.

It tells us nothing about wisdom.

Nothing about responsibility.

Nothing about memory.

Nothing about consequence.

Nothing about relationship.

A child eventually learns that being physically capable of doing something is not, by itself, a compelling reason to do it.

Perhaps adults need reminding occasionally too.

The Steward’s Question Is Different

The steward asks:

What happens after I exercise this power?

That question reaches forward.

If I cut this grove, what replaces it?

If I remove this shrine, what memory am I interrupting?

If I change this ritual, what do we gain and what do we lose?

If I close this community, where do the people who depended upon it go?

If I sell this sacred object, am I selling something that was ever truly mine alone to sell?

If I inherited authority, what obligations arrived with it?

That is where stewardship begins to resemble Davy’s relational ethics.

We are not isolated actors making decisions inside a vacuum.

Our choices move outward through relationships.

They enter the web.

And the web remembers.

Sacred Authority Should Carry More Responsibility, Not Less

There is another trap here.

People sometimes imagine sacred authority as a reason they should be questioned less.

I am the priest.

I am the elder.

I am the founder.

I am the landowner.

I am the tradition bearer.

I built this.

I was here first.

Perhaps all of those things are true.

But if the role is genuinely sacred, should it not increase accountability rather than reduce it?

The person entrusted with the well has more responsibility toward the water than the person merely passing through.

The person tending the shrine has more responsibility for its condition than the visitor.

The person who teaches has more responsibility for accuracy than the student.

The person holding community power has more responsibility for how that power affects others.

Authority does not prove stewardship.

Conduct does.

The Vé and the Work Nobody Sees

Graham McKay’s reporting on the Raven’s Knoll Vé offers a wonderfully earthy reminder of this.

The sacred space was not maintained by theology alone.

Posts rotted.

Grass grew.

Overgrowth had to be pushed back.

Repairs required labour.

People had to source materials and physically rebuild parts of the site.

That might be one of the best metaphors we have found during this entire trip.

Everyone enjoys talking about sacredness.

Eventually somebody has to cut the grass.

The shrine does not care how sophisticated our theology is when the roof leaks.

The sacred fire still needs wood.

The ritual field still needs tending.

The community hall still needs cleaning.

The dead still need remembering.

The story still needs telling.

Stewardship is where sacred language acquires calluses.

The Community Has Responsibilities Too

It would be easy at this point to place all responsibility upon whoever holds formal authority.

That would be another mistake.

Communities can consume sacred places too.

People arrive.

Use the facilities.

Attend the rituals.

Enjoy the atmosphere.

Photograph the shrine.

Tell everyone how spiritually important the place is.

Then leave the maintenance to somebody else.

If we believe sacred relationship creates obligation, then stewardship cannot belong only to the owner.

Perhaps the visitor owes something too.

Respect the rules.

Do not damage the land.

Help when help is requested.

Clean up.

Contribute if you can.

Recognize that somebody else is paying the bills.

Do not mistake access for entitlement.

Do not demand ownership simply because something is meaningful to you.

Again we arrive at reciprocity.

If the place gives something to us, perhaps we should occasionally ask what we give back.

What About the People Who Come After Us?

There is another stakeholder who never seems to get invited to the meeting.

The future.

Suppose I inherit sacred land.

I did not build the original shrines.

I did not begin the rituals.

Maybe I do not even share all the beliefs of the people who came before me.

What do I owe them?

And what do I owe people who have not yet arrived?

This may be where stewardship differs most profoundly from possession.

Possession is centred upon the present holder.

Stewardship has a longer memory.

It looks backward:

What did I receive?

And forward:

What will I leave?

A grove planted today may not reach maturity during the planter’s lifetime.

A shrine built carefully may outlive its builder.

A tradition protected honestly may be practiced by people whose names we will never know.

Perhaps stewardship is a conversation among the dead, the living and the unborn.

We happen to hold the talking stick for a little while.

We Should Be Careful With the Word Stewardship Too

There is a danger in romanticizing this word.

Anyone can call themselves a steward.

Corporations do it.

Politicians do it.

Religious leaders do it.

Landowners do it.

Organizations put the word into mission statements.

The word itself proves nothing.

A steward can still make bad decisions.

A steward can become controlling.

A steward can confuse caretaking with ownership of other people’s spiritual lives.

A steward can decide that because they work hardest, nobody else deserves a voice.

And perhaps most dangerously, a steward can begin believing that whatever they want must automatically be good for the thing they claim to serve.

So stewardship itself requires accountability.

The question cannot merely be:

Do I call myself a steward?

It must become:

What does my conduct reveal that I am actually serving?

Land?

Community?

Tradition?

The gods?

History?

Future generations?

Or simply myself?

That question may sting.

Good questions occasionally do.

Maybe the Sacred Is Held in Trust

I keep circling around another phrase.

Held in trust.

Not in the strict legal meaning of a trust.

I mean something older and more ordinary.

To be trusted with something.

A story.

A place.

An object.

A ritual.

A responsibility.

Another person’s confidence.

You possess access to it, perhaps even authority over it, but the relationship itself tells you that your freedom is not absolute.

Someone trusted you.

Something was entrusted to you.

That changes what your hands mean.

The old book in your possession may legally be yours to throw into the fire.

But if it contains the only surviving record of your community’s rituals, perhaps the ethical question is larger than ownership.

The tree may be yours to cut.

But if generations have gathered beneath it, perhaps one pauses before starting the chainsaw.

The shrine may stand on your land.

But perhaps thirty years of offerings ask for a conversation before the bulldozer arrives.

Not because ownership vanished.

Because stewardship appeared beside it.

The Sacred Pushes Back Against Possession

Perhaps this is ultimately what sacredness does.

It puts a limit on possession.

Not necessarily a legal limit.

A moral one.

Something sacred says:

You may hold me, but I am not merely yours.

The land existed before the deed.

The river flowed before the survey.

The gods, if we believe in them, certainly did not spring into existence when somebody purchased acreage.

The ancestors are not property.

Tradition is not property in the ordinary sense.

Community is definitely not property.

Even our memories refuse to behave like possessions.

We carry them, but they were made with other people.

Perhaps the more sacred something becomes, the less comfortably the language of simple possession fits around it.

So Who Owns the Sacred?

After following this rabbit through the woods, I think the question may contain its own mistake.

Maybe ownership is not the most useful final category.

Somebody may own the land.

Somebody may own the physical object.

Somebody may own copyright in a written ritual.

Those are real things and should not be waved away with spirituality.

But sacredness itself?

I am not sure anybody owns that.

Perhaps sacredness exists in relationship.

And relationships are participated in rather than possessed.

So perhaps the better question is:

Who is responsible for tending the sacred?

Sometimes the answer is the owner.

Sometimes the priest.

Sometimes the community.

Sometimes all of them.

Sometimes responsibility belongs differently to different people.

The landowner controls the property.

The ritual leader tends the ceremony.

The historian tends memory.

The community tends belonging.

The volunteer tends the path.

The elder tends knowledge.

The newcomer brings questions that prevent tradition from becoming complacent.

And perhaps nobody gets to say:

Because my responsibility is real, yours is meaningless.

The web is more complicated than that.

The Fire Was Never Ours

Maybe that is where this rabbit finally settles.

We gather around a fire.

Someone owns the land beneath it.

Someone bought the wood.

Someone struck the match.

Someone tends the flames.

Someone tells the stories.

Someone remembers the dead.

Someone sits quietly at the edge of the light and says almost nothing all night.

Morning comes.

The fire dies down.

Everyone carries something different away.

Who owned the fire?

Perhaps nobody.

Perhaps everybody.

Perhaps that is still the wrong question.

The better questions might be:

Who kept it burning?

Who gathered around it?

Who was warmed?

Who got burned?

Who fed it?

Who remembered it?

Who made sure it did not burn down the forest?

And when everyone finally walked away, who made sure it was properly put out?

That is stewardship.

Not possession.

Care.

Responsibility.

Memory.

Restraint.

Knowing when to add another log.

Knowing when not to.

And knowing that having your hand on the poker never made the flame belong to you.

And There Goes the Rabbit Again

Because there is one question sitting underneath stewardship that we have not really touched.

If we are temporary keepers…

If sacred things are inherited…

If communities and traditions stretch backward and forward beyond a single human lifetime…

Then perhaps responsibility does not end with the living.

What do we owe the people who come after us?

Not metaphorically.

Practically.

What traditions do we preserve?

What stories do we document?

What mistakes do we refuse to hand down?

What land do we leave?

What communities do we build?

What debts do we create?

What fires do we expect someone else to tend?

And perhaps the most uncomfortable version of the question:

What will the next generation inherit from the Paganism we are creating right now?

There is the rabbit.

And that one seems to be heading toward legacy.

Godspeed.

Scholarly Trail Markers

This essay is a philosophical synthesis. It does not claim that the scholars below collectively proposed a single theory of ownership or stewardship. Their work provides different pieces of the landscape: lived and vernacular religion, relational responsibility, sacred place, community diversity, ritual practice and the accumulation of religious meaning through repeated participation.

Bowman, M. (2014). Vernacular religion, contemporary spirituality and emergent identities: Lessons from Lauri Honko. Approaching Religion, 4(1).

Davy, B. J. (2022). Reconstructing the Procession of Nerthus: A contemporary Heathen ritual offering of sacrifice. The Pomegranate. https://journal.equinoxpub.com/POM/article/view/24259

Davy, B. J. (2025). Wyrd ecology: Heathen ritual and gifting relations. Oxford University Press. https://academic.oup.com/book/59759

Graham McKay, D. (2016, July 7). Ontario Heathens rebuild Vé. The Wild Hunt. https://wildhunt.org/2016/07/ontario-heathens-rebuild-ve.html

Graham McKay, D. (2017, April 25). Community experience at Raven’s Knoll documented in new book. The Wild Hunt. https://wildhunt.org/2017/04/the-community-experience-at-ravens-knoll-documented-in-new-book.html

When Does a Place Become Sacred—and Can It Stop Being Sacred?

Group of people in cloaks gathered around a stone fire pit in forest during sunset

We began several holes ago by asking whether there was a common thread running through the scholarly work we had been reading about Paganism.

We found relationship.

Then relationship led us to responsibility.

Responsibility led us to broken relationship, betrayal, frith, boundaries and repair.

And sitting just beyond that last clearing was another rabbit.

Because if relationships can be created…

If relationships can deepen…

If relationships can be broken…

Then what happens to the things we call sacred?

What makes something sacred in the first place?

A god?

A ritual?

A priest?

A community?

History?

Memory?

Repeated use?

Something inherent in the place itself?

And then comes the more uncomfortable question.

Can something that was once sacred cease to be sacred?

A grove.

A shrine.

A community.

A ritual.

An object.

A promise.

A relationship.

A home.

Now that is a rabbit worth following.

What Do We Mean by Sacred?

We use the word rather freely.

Sacred land.

Sacred fire.

Sacred circle.

Sacred object.

Sacred relationship.

Sacred duty.

Sacred space.

Sometimes sacred simply seems to mean very important to me.

But that feels too thin.

My coffee may be extremely important to me at three in the morning.

I am reluctant to describe the coffee maker as holy.

So sacredness appears to require something more.

Marion Bowman’s work is useful here because much of her scholarship asks us to pay attention not merely to what institutions declare sacred, but to what ordinary people actually experience, interpret and treat as sacred.

That distinction matters enormously for Paganism.

We do not have a central authority capable of drawing a circle around a place on a map and declaring:

This is now officially Pagan sacred land.

Instead, sacredness often appears from below.

Someone encounters a place.

Something happens there.

Someone returns.

A story develops.

A ritual happens.

Then happens again.

Other people enter the story.

Offerings are made.

Names are spoken.

Memory gathers.

And gradually the place becomes different from the ground five hundred feet away.

Not necessarily physically different.

Relationally different.

We begin treating it differently.

Perhaps that is one of the simplest places to begin.

The sacred is something toward which ordinary behaviour is no longer considered sufficient.

We approach differently.

We speak differently.

We behave differently.

We remember differently.

Something has been set apart, not necessarily by a fence, but by relationship.

The Clearing Was Once Just a Clearing

Imagine a patch of woodland.

Nothing particularly distinguishes it from the rest of the forest.

Maple.

Pine.

Stone.

Leaf litter.

Mosquitoes doing their sacred duty of driving everyone completely insane.

Then someone holds a ritual there.

Perhaps nothing dramatic happens.

People gather.

Words are spoken.

An offering is given.

They leave.

The forest continues being a forest.

Next year they return.

Someone remembers where they stood.

Another ritual happens.

Someone places a stone.

Then another.

Years pass.

A child participates.

Someone makes an oath there.

A couple exchanges vows.

Someone mourns a dead friend beneath the trees.

Someone leaves an offering because they have nowhere else to put their grief.

Someone else goes there alone at dawn.

Eventually newcomers are told:

This is the place where we…

Notice those words.

The place where we.

Something has happened.

The geography has acquired memory.

That ordinary clearing has become attached to human lives, ritual actions, stories, perhaps gods or spirits, perhaps ancestors, perhaps all of them at once.

It has become part of a religious landscape.

Not because the soil changed.

Because relationship accumulated.

Sacredness May Be Something We Build Without Owning

This creates an interesting problem.

Who owns sacredness?

Suppose the clearing is on private property.

The title to the land has a name on it.

Legally, ownership may be perfectly clear.

But after twenty years of community rituals, marriages, memorials, offerings, festivals and stories, is legal ownership the only relationship that matters?

Of course not.

Legal ownership still matters.

Someone pays the taxes.

Someone carries liability.

Someone maintains the road.

Someone has legal authority over the property.

We should not pretend those realities disappear because spirituality enters the picture.

But sacredness and ownership are different categories.

You can own land without finding it sacred.

You can consider land sacred without owning a single square foot of it.

A cemetery provides an obvious example.

People visit graves on land they do not own because relationship gives that ground meaning.

The deed and the devotion answer different questions.

One asks:

Who legally controls this place?

The other asks:

What does this place mean, and to whom?

Sometimes those answers overlap beautifully.

Sometimes they do not.

And when they do not, things can become painful very quickly.

Raven’s Knoll Gives Us a Living Example

This is one reason the scholarship and writing surrounding Raven’s Knoll has been so useful in our recent rabbit holes.

Not because Raven’s Knoll provides some universal model of Pagan sacredness.

It does not.

But because we can actually watch sacred geography developing there through the historical record.

Dodie Graham McKay documented a place where repeated community use led to permanent shrines and sacred sites.

Barbara Jane Davy later studied Heathen rituals occurring on that same land, including the Procession of Nerthus and the relational world surrounding ritual, offerings, gifting and place.

The Vé provides an especially clear example.

It was constructed as sacred ground.

People entered according to particular ritual expectations.

There were taboos concerning conduct.

There were god-poles.

There was an altar.

There were rituals.

There was an expectation that people entering that space behaved differently because they had crossed from ordinary campground into holy space.

That is fascinating.

Not because we need to decide whether everyone reading this accepts the same gods, metaphysics or ritual theology.

Because we can observe sacralization happening.

People create a boundary.

People develop rules.

People perform rituals.

People return.

People repair the site when weather and time damage it.

People tell stories about it.

The place gathers significance.

Again:

Relationship accumulates.

Perhaps Sacredness Is a Relationship Under Obligation

That phrase has been following me through this rabbit hole.

A relationship under obligation.

Because sacredness seems to ask something of us.

If something is merely valuable, I may enjoy it.

If something is sacred, my behaviour toward it changes.

A sacred fire is not merely useful heat.

A sacred well is not merely convenient water.

A sacred grove is not merely unused timber.

A sacred object is not merely decoration.

A sacred promise is not merely something I said last Tuesday.

Once something is sacred, we begin talking about obligations.

Respect.

Care.

Attention.

Memory.

Boundaries.

Stewardship.

Perhaps offerings.

Perhaps ritual cleanliness.

Perhaps silence.

Perhaps simply behaving as though the thing before us matters beyond our immediate convenience.

That ties this rabbit directly back to the previous one.

If relationship creates responsibility, perhaps sacredness describes a relationship in which responsibility has become particularly intense.

Not merely:

I like this place.

But:

I owe something to how I behave here.

Then What Is Desecration?

This is where things become interesting.

If sacredness can be built through relationship, can it be destroyed through violation?

Suppose someone walks into a sacred grove and vandalizes it.

Have they made it less sacred?

Perhaps not.

In fact, our reaction may reveal precisely the opposite.

We call the act desecration because we still believe the place is sacred.

If someone kicks over a random pile of stones beside a road, we may call it vandalism.

If someone deliberately destroys a shrine, something feels different.

The outrage comes from the relationship.

The violation does not necessarily remove sacredness.

It may expose it.

We discover how much something mattered when somebody treats it as though it did not.

Perhaps desecration and desacralization are therefore not the same thing.

Desecration violates the sacred.

Desacralization would mean the thing is no longer treated, experienced or understood as sacred.

Those are very different processes.

A Broken Shrine Can Still Be a Shrine

Imagine a shrine destroyed by a storm.

The tree falls.

The stones scatter.

The offerings are buried beneath branches.

Has the sacred place vanished?

Most people connected with it would probably say no.

They may rebuild.

They may leave it as it fell.

They may create a new shrine nearby.

But the story remains.

The memory remains.

The relationship remains.

The physical form was damaged.

The sacredness may continue.

Now suppose nobody returns.

One year passes.

Then five.

Then twenty.

The stones disappear beneath moss.

The people who remember it age.

Stories stop being told.

A generation comes along that does not know a ritual ever happened there.

Now what?

Is it still sacred?

That question cannot be answered quite so easily.

Does Sacredness Require Someone to Remember?

Here we run directly into theology.

If you believe a god, spirit or other sacred power objectively inhabits or claims a place, then human memory may be irrelevant.

The place can remain holy even if nobody remembers why.

If you understand sacredness primarily as something created through human experience and community practice, then forgotten sacredness becomes a stranger idea.

Without relationship, what remains?

I suspect Paganism allows both possibilities to sit rather uneasily beside one another.

Perhaps the land remembers even when humans do not.

Perhaps the gods remember.

Perhaps spirits remain.

Or perhaps sacredness requires somebody still willing to recognize the relationship.

I do not know.

And I am increasingly comfortable saying those three words.

I do not know.

They may be among the healthiest words available to anyone wandering through religion.

But we can say something about human sacredness.

Among human beings, memory matters.

Tell the story and something survives.

Stop telling it and eventually something changes.

Perhaps There Are Different Kinds of Sacredness

Maybe part of the problem is that we have been asking one word to do too much work.

A place might be sacred because people believe a deity or spirit dwells there.

Another might be sacred because rituals have been performed there for generations.

Another because somebody died there.

Another because ancestors are buried there.

Another because an extraordinary personal experience happened there.

Another because a community deliberately set it apart for ritual use.

Another because history itself has made the place morally significant.

These may overlap.

But they are not identical.

Perhaps we need room for:

Sacred by presence.

Sacred by practice.

Sacred by memory.

Sacred by dedication.

Sacred by grief.

Sacred by inheritance.

Sacred by relationship.

And perhaps a place can move between those forms across time.

A Sacred Place Can Outlive Its Community

Walk through the ruins of an old church.

No congregation remains.

The roof may be gone.

Grass grows where pews once stood.

Birds nest where sermons were preached.

Is it still sacred?

Maybe.

Maybe not in the same way.

It may no longer be a functioning sacred place.

No one gathers for worship.

No ritual calendar structures the year.

But memory clings.

People still lower their voices.

They notice gravestones.

They recognize that lives passed through this place.

The sacred has changed tense.

It has moved from we do this here to people once did this here.

That may be a kind of sacredness too.

Not living ritual.

Sacred memory.

And a Community Can Become a Sacred Place

This rabbit is not only about geography.

We also call relationships sacred.

Marriage.

Friendship.

Kinship.

Community.

Coven.

Kindred.

Grove.

Home.

Perhaps communities become sacred in much the same way places do.

Time.

Repetition.

Memory.

Shared labour.

Ritual.

Loss.

Celebration.

Returning.

The community stops being merely a group of people who happen to know one another.

It becomes part of how somebody understands themselves.

These are my people.

That sentence carries enormous weight.

Which means its breaking carries enormous weight too.

Can a Community Stop Being Sacred?

Now we are back in the difficult woods.

Suppose a community once gave you belonging.

You celebrated there.

You learned there.

You contributed labour.

You tended fires.

You formed friendships.

You marked parts of your life there.

It was home.

Then something changes.

Perhaps leadership changes.

Perhaps values change.

Perhaps you change.

Perhaps trust breaks.

Perhaps the place still exists but you no longer recognize what it has become.

Does that erase what it once meant?

I do not think so.

This is where the last rabbit hole becomes important.

Something can have been sacred and no longer be an active sacred relationship.

That does not require declaring the past fraudulent.

The old fire was still warm because it is cold now.

The friendship was still real because it later ended.

The community may genuinely have been home even if you can no longer live there.

The sacredness belonged to the relationship as it existed.

When the relationship changes, the form of sacredness may change with it.

Present sacredness may become remembered sacredness.

And grief may be the bridge between the two.

Maybe That Is Why Leaving Sacred Places Hurts

Leaving an ordinary place is logistics.

Boxes.

Keys.

Address changes.

Leaving a sacred place is different.

Part of yourself remains attached to the landscape.

The tree where something happened.

The fire.

The campsite.

The shrine.

The person you used to be when you stood there.

Maybe that is why people sometimes return physically to places they have already left emotionally.

They are checking whether the old relationship is still there.

Perhaps they hope the land will recognize them.

Perhaps they hope they will recognize themselves.

Sometimes they do.

Sometimes they don’t.

And that can be its own kind of mourning.

Ownership Cannot Command Sacredness

This is another important point.

You can control access to a sacred place.

You cannot necessarily control what the place means to everyone who has known it.

You can change its use.

Rename things.

Move shrines.

Close rituals.

Open new ones.

Sell property.

Build fences.

Change programming.

Those things affect living relationships enormously.

But memory does not obey property boundaries particularly well.

Someone can stand miles away and still carry a place inside them.

Likewise, a community cannot order someone to continue experiencing something as sacred.

Sacredness cannot be maintained by press release.

If the relationship is gone, insisting that the old language still applies may accomplish nothing.

You cannot command belonging.

You cannot legislate home.

You cannot demand reverence.

Those things have to remain alive in relationship.

Can We Desecrate a Relationship?

Now take the idea away from land entirely.

Suppose a promise is sacred.

What makes it sacred?

Perhaps not the words alone.

Perhaps the fact that another person trusted their future to those words.

Break the promise and something happens beyond simple disagreement.

A relationship once placed under obligation has been violated.

That sounds remarkably similar to desecration.

Something treated as sacred was handled as though it were disposable.

Perhaps betrayal hurts so deeply for precisely that reason.

The wound says:

I thought this meant more.

That sentence could be spoken over a broken oath.

A broken friendship.

A damaged shrine.

A lost community.

A polluted river.

A bulldozed grove.

Different things.

Same grief.

I thought this meant more.

But Sacredness Cannot Become a Weapon

There is danger here too.

If something is called sacred, people may use the word to prevent questioning.

You cannot criticize this tradition.

It is sacred.

You cannot challenge this elder.

They are sacred to the community.

You cannot leave.

Your oath was sacred.

You cannot change the ritual.

It is sacred.

You cannot question what happened here.

This place is sacred.

No.

Sacredness should deepen responsibility.

It should not eliminate accountability.

If anything, the more sacred something is claimed to be, the greater the obligation to examine how it is being treated.

A sacred office does not excuse abuse of power.

A sacred tradition does not make every inherited practice good.

A sacred community does not acquire the right to harm its members.

A sacred promise does not require one party to endure whatever the other does forever.

A sacred place does not mean questions about stewardship become forbidden.

Perhaps sacredness makes those questions more necessary.

Because the claim itself says:

This matters.

Very well.

Then act like it matters.

Maybe Sacredness Is Revealed by Conduct

That keeps returning too.

Conduct.

Perhaps we learn what people truly hold sacred by watching what they protect when protection becomes inconvenient.

Anyone can call a forest sacred while enjoying a sunset.

What happens when stewardship costs money?

Anyone can call community sacred while everyone agrees.

What happens when someone is harmed?

Anyone can call hospitality sacred while the guest is pleasant.

What happens when the stranger is difficult?

Anyone can call truth sacred when truth supports their story.

What happens when evidence contradicts it?

Anyone can call an oath sacred while keeping it is easy.

What happens when keeping it costs something?

Perhaps sacredness is not demonstrated by how beautifully we speak about something.

Perhaps sacredness becomes visible in what we are willing to do—or refuse to do—because of the relationship.

So Can Something Stop Being Sacred?

After wandering this far, I think my answer is:

Yes.

And also:

No.

Useful, isn’t it?

But hear me out.

If sacredness exists partly through relationship, then a living sacred relationship can certainly end.

A ritual can cease.

A community can dissolve.

A shrine can be abandoned.

A promise can be broken.

A person can leave.

A place can cease functioning as sacred space.

In that sense, yes.

Sacredness can fade, change or end.

But what was sacred does not necessarily become meaningless.

It may move into memory.

History.

Grief.

Story.

Identity.

A former sacred relationship can continue shaping us long after we stop participating in it.

In that sense, perhaps sacredness leaves residue.

Like smoke in clothing after the fire has gone out.

You are no longer standing beside the flame.

But part of you still carries its scent.

The Sacred May Change Form

Maybe that is the better answer.

Sacredness does not always disappear.

Sometimes it changes form.

The living shrine becomes an archaeological site.

The active ritual becomes family folklore.

The community becomes memory.

The sacred home becomes the place where we once belonged.

The promise becomes a lesson about promises.

The lost relationship becomes part of the person we became afterward.

The tree falls.

The roots remain underground for a while.

The trunk begins returning to soil.

Nothing is restored exactly as it was.

But neither does it simply vanish.

Perhaps sacredness can be like that.

And Perhaps Sacredness Is Never Possession

There is one last thought sitting beneath this entire rabbit hole.

Maybe we make a mistake whenever we say:

My sacred place.

My gods.

My ancestors.

My tradition.

My community.

The possessive grammar is convenient.

But perhaps sacred relationships are not possessions at all.

They are things entrusted to us for a time.

We tend them.

Participate in them.

Receive from them.

Give to them.

Sometimes repair them.

Sometimes leave them.

Eventually someone else will stand where we stood.

Someone else will tell the stories.

Or they won’t.

The forest will continue either way.

The land was there before our ritual.

The stones were old before we called them sacred.

The river was moving before we gave it a name.

And long after the last person who remembers our particular ceremony is gone, water will still find its way downhill.

There is humility in that.

We do not own sacredness.

Perhaps we enter into it.

For a while.

What Makes Something Sacred?

So after all this wandering, I find myself reluctant to offer a neat definition.

But perhaps we can offer a working thought.

Something becomes sacred when relationship gives it meaning deep enough to create obligation.

A place.

A god.

An ancestor.

A community.

A promise.

A ritual.

A memory.

The form changes.

But somewhere inside the word sacred is the recognition:

This is not merely mine to use however I please.

That may be the heart of it.

Sacredness limits entitlement.

It asks us to approach rather than simply possess.

To listen before taking.

To remember.

To tend.

To recognize that relationship existed before our convenience entered the conversation.

And perhaps when sacredness ends, the final obligation is not always to restore it.

Sometimes the obligation is simply to remember honestly what it was.

Without pretending.

Without rewriting.

Without demanding that yesterday become tomorrow again.

The fire was sacred.

The fire went out.

Both statements can be true.

The place was home.

It is not home anymore.

Both statements can be true.

The relationship mattered.

The relationship ended.

Both statements can be true.

Maybe maturity lives somewhere in our ability to carry both truths without forcing one to destroy the other.

And There Goes the Rabbit Again

Because now we have another problem.

If sacredness creates obligation…

If sacred places, traditions and communities can change…

If nobody truly owns the sacred…

Then who gets to decide what happens to sacred things?

Who is the steward?

The landowner?

The priest?

The elder?

The person who built the shrine?

The community that used it?

The people who remember it?

The next generation?

And what happens when those people disagree?

Who owns the sacred—and what is the difference between ownership and stewardship?

There is our rabbit.

I can see its ears already.

Godspeed.

Scholarly Trail Markers

This essay is a philosophical synthesis rather than a claim that the scholars below developed a single theory of sacredness. Their research provides several of the trails followed here: lived and vernacular experiences of the sacred, Pagan relationships with nature, the formation of sacred places through recurring practice, and contemporary Heathen ritual relationships with land.

Bowman, M. (1998). Belief, legend and perceptions of the sacred in contemporary Bath.

Bowman, M. (2000). Nature, the natural and Pagan identity. DISKUS, 6.

Davy, B. J. (2022). Reconstructing the Procession of Nerthus: A contemporary Heathen ritual offering of sacrifice. The Pomegranate.

Davy, B. J. (2025). Wyrd ecology: Heathen ritual and gifting relations. Oxford University Press.

Graham McKay, D. (2016, July 7). Ontario Heathens rebuild Vé. The Wild Hunt.

Graham McKay, D. (2017, April 25). Community experience at Raven’s Knoll documented in new book. The Wild Hunt.

When the Web Tears: Broken Frith, Betrayal, and the Ethics of Repair

Spider web stretched between tree branches in a forest

There goes the rabbit again.

In the last rabbit hole we ended with what seemed, at first, like a fairly simple question:

What do I owe because I am connected?

We had followed Shelley Rabinovitch, Dodie Graham McKay, Martin Lepage, Marisol Charbonneau, Marion Bowman and Barbara Jane Davy far enough into the woods to begin seeing Paganism not merely as a collection of beliefs, but as a web of relationships.

Relationship with gods.

Relationship with ancestors.

Relationship with land.

Relationship with community.

Relationship with memory, tradition and ourselves.

And from there came another idea: if relationship matters, then relationship creates responsibility.

Fine.

But forests are not made entirely of healthy trees.

Branches break. Roots rot. Storms come through. Lightning strikes. Sometimes one tree falls and tears down three others with it.

So what happens when the relationship itself breaks?

What happens when trust is betrayed?

When hospitality is abused?

When someone takes but never gives?

When promises become convenient fiction?

When community language remains beautiful but conduct beneath it becomes ugly?

What happens when someone says kin, folk, family, community, frith or home, but behaves as though those words create obligations only for everyone else?

Now the rabbit has led us somewhere considerably less comfortable.

Because an ethic built around relationship eventually needs an ethic for broken relationship.

Frith Is Easy When Nobody Has Broken It

Barbara Jane Davy’s work on contemporary Heathen ritual gives us an interesting place to begin.

In Wyrd Ecology, Davy examines gifting, reciprocity, relationship and the ethical sensibilities that can grow through those practices. In the Heathen communities she studies, people are not imagined as isolated individuals occasionally bumping into one another. They exist within webs of relationship that are continually being shaped by gifts, promises, memory, ritual and conduct.

Frith appears within that relational world.

I am deliberately being careful with that word.

Modern Heathens can use frith in different ways, and we should resist turning one interpretation into another universal Pagan commandment.

But the important idea for our rabbit hole is not difficult to grasp.

Relationship creates a kind of space between people.

Trust lives there.

Memory lives there.

Expectation lives there.

What I have done for you lives there.

What you have done for me lives there.

The promises we have made live there.

The things we know about one another live there.

Eventually the relationship becomes more than two individuals standing beside each other.

It develops a history of its own.

And that history matters.

That may be why betrayal hurts differently from ordinary harm.

A stranger can injure us.

But betrayal requires relationship.

The wound is not simply what happened.

The wound is also what the act did to everything that existed between us before it happened.

The Cup Was Already Full of Memory

Imagine someone hands you a drinking horn.

It is only an object.

Wood, perhaps. Horn. Metal. Whatever it happens to be made from.

But then you use it together year after year.

Promises are spoken over it.

Toasts are made.

Names of the dead are remembered.

Friends drink from it.

Stories gather around it.

Twenty years later, the object has become much more than its material.

It contains relationship.

Not magically, necessarily.

Humanly.

Then imagine that someone deliberately smashes it.

The loss is not the replacement cost of the horn.

The real loss cannot be found on a receipt.

Something carrying relationship has been violated.

Perhaps betrayal works in much the same way.

The act happens today.

But it reaches backward.

Suddenly yesterday is questioned.

Was the friendship real?

Did the promise ever mean anything?

Did I misunderstand what we were?

Was I foolish to trust?

The present wound begins rewriting memory.

That is one of betrayal’s cruellest tricks.

It damages not only the relationship we have now, but our understanding of the relationship we thought we had.

So What Is Owed After Harm?

If relationship creates obligation, then breaking relationship should create obligations too.

That seems almost unavoidable.

Yet we often skip over this part.

Somebody causes harm.

Then comes the pressure to forgive.

Move on.

Restore harmony.

Think positively.

Do not hold grudges.

Protect the community.

Remember all the good years.

Be the bigger person.

Those phrases can occasionally contain wisdom.

They can also become extraordinarily useful tools for avoiding accountability.

Because restoration without accountability is not repair.

It is restoration of access.

The person who caused the damage gets the relationship back while the person who was harmed gets responsibility for making everyone comfortable again.

That is not reciprocity.

That is another taking.

Repair Has a Price

Suppose I break something belonging to you.

If it can be repaired, I might repair it.

If it cannot, perhaps I replace it.

If neither is possible, I can at least acknowledge what I destroyed.

Human relationships are obviously far more complicated than broken furniture, but the underlying principle is not entirely different.

Repair requires something from the person who caused the breach.

Perhaps the first thing is truth.

I did this.

Not:

You made me do it.

Not:

Everybody was doing it.

Not:

You misunderstood.

Not:

I’m sorry you feel that way.

Not an explanation carefully engineered so that responsibility evaporates halfway through the sentence.

Just truth.

I did this.

Then perhaps comes recognition.

This is what my action cost you.

That may be harder.

Human beings are wonderfully talented at measuring harm according to what we intended rather than what somebody else experienced.

I didn’t mean it that way.

Perhaps not.

Intent matters.

But consequence exists too.

If I accidentally step on your foot, I did not intend to hurt you.

Your foot still hurts.

Acknowledging consequence does not require pretending intent never matters.

It simply requires accepting that both things can be true at once.

Then comes perhaps the most difficult question:

What am I prepared to do differently?

Because without change, apology eventually becomes ritual without substance.

Words are spoken.

Nothing changes.

The same wound appears again.

And again.

And eventually the apology itself becomes part of the pattern causing harm.

Restitution Is Not Punishment

There is an old and deeply human idea hiding here: when something has been taken, damaged or violated, attempts should be made to put something back into balance.

Not everything can be restored.

You cannot return lost years.

You cannot unsay every word.

You cannot restore every reputation.

You cannot resurrect trust simply because you now miss having it.

But restitution begins with the acknowledgement that saying sorry does not magically erase consequence.

If I took something, perhaps I return it.

If I damaged something, perhaps I repair it.

If I lied publicly, perhaps correction also needs to be public.

If I benefited from someone else’s labour, perhaps the debt cannot be settled merely by thanking them.

If I broke a promise upon which somebody reasonably relied, perhaps I have some responsibility toward the consequences created by that breach.

This is not revenge.

It is taking consequence seriously.

Perhaps that is one form of reciprocity after harm.

The scales need not become mathematically perfect.

They probably never can.

But the person who caused the damage should be carrying some of the weight of repairing it.

Forgiveness Is Not Reconciliation

This rabbit keeps circling one word.

Forgiveness.

Religion has sometimes treated forgiveness as though it automatically means restoration of relationship.

I am not convinced those are the same thing.

Someone may forgive and never speak to the person again.

Someone may release anger without restoring trust.

Someone may understand why another person acted as they did and still decide they cannot safely return.

Someone may stop wishing punishment upon another person while keeping the gate firmly closed.

And perhaps someone may never use the word forgive at all, yet still eventually put down the burden and continue living.

These things are deeply personal.

I do not think Paganism gives us a universal requirement here.

Nor do I think it should.

But we can distinguish a few things.

Forgiveness is not trust.

Trust belongs to the future and is built through conduct.

Forgiveness is not reconciliation.

Reconciliation requires participation from both sides.

Forgiveness is not forgetting.

Memory may be precisely what prevents the harm from recurring.

Forgiveness is not access.

Nobody automatically earns a place back in another person’s life simply because they apologized.

And perhaps most importantly:

Forgiveness cannot substitute for accountability.

Sometimes the Fence Is Sacred Too

We have spent several rabbit holes talking about connection.

Roots touching beneath the soil.

Communities gathering around fires.

People entering relationship with land, gods, ancestors and one another.

Beautiful imagery.

But perhaps we need to honour the fence as well.

Boundaries are also relationships.

A boundary says:

You may come this far.

This is what I will participate in.

This is what I will not.

This behaviour changes our relationship.

This action ends it.

That is not necessarily hostility.

Sometimes it is stewardship.

We understand this easily with land.

A sacred grove may have a boundary.

A wildlife habitat may need people kept out during certain seasons.

A fire needs a ring around it precisely because fire matters.

A garden needs a fence not because the gardener hates deer, but because something inside the boundary requires protection.

Why would human relationships be entirely different?

Sometimes saying no farther may be the most responsible act available.

Even Inclusive Communities Exclude Something

Barbara Jane Davy’s research on inclusive Heathens gives us a useful paradox.

The communities she examines describe themselves as inclusive, yet inclusiveness does not mean that absolutely every behaviour must be welcomed.

Racist and discriminatory conduct can place someone outside the community’s accepted boundaries.

That is worth thinking about.

Because every functioning community excludes something.

The question is not whether boundaries exist.

The question is what those boundaries protect.

A community that says everyone is welcome regardless of race, gender or sexual orientation may have to exclude someone who insists upon discriminating against people on precisely those grounds.

That is not necessarily a contradiction.

It may be what makes the original promise meaningful.

If everyone is welcome, including the person determined to make somebody else unwelcome, then eventually the person being targeted discovers that the promise of inclusion was only decorative.

Sometimes protecting relationship requires confronting behaviour that destroys relationship.

Frith Cannot Mean Silence

This brings us to something communities of every kind struggle with.

The temptation to preserve peace by silencing conflict.

Do not bring that up.

Do not make trouble.

We are family.

Think about the community.

This is not the place.

Let the past stay in the past.

There is a form of peace that is really just quiet.

The surface of the pond is perfectly still because everyone has been forbidden from throwing stones.

The poison remains in the water.

If frith means meaningful right relationship, then silence cannot automatically preserve it.

Sometimes speaking about the breach is the attempt to preserve what the relationship was supposed to mean.

Conflict and destruction are not synonyms.

A disagreement can strengthen a relationship if people can speak honestly, listen, accept correction and negotiate what happens next.

The greater danger may be a community where disagreement is impossible.

Because when people cannot safely say, this harmed me, the appearance of harmony has been purchased with somebody’s silence.

What About the Person Who Will Not Repair?

Here we reach the wall.

What happens when someone simply refuses?

They deny.

Deflect.

Blame.

Rewrite history.

Demand forgiveness.

Recruit allies.

Wait for everyone to become tired enough that the matter disappears.

What obligation does relationship create then?

Perhaps none toward restoration.

This may be one of the most important distinctions in the entire rabbit hole.

We can be responsible for offering the possibility of repair without being responsible for accomplishing repair alone.

A bridge has two ends.

One person cannot rebuild both while the other continues setting fire to their side.

At some point the ethical question changes.

It is no longer:

How do I save this relationship?

It becomes:

What relationships am I responsible for protecting from this one?

My relationship with myself.

My relationship with family.

My relationship with community.

My relationship with the land.

My relationship with truth.

My relationship with whatever I understand as sacred.

Sometimes loyalty to the web requires cutting one damaged strand before it tears through the rest.

But Cutting the Strand Has Consequences Too

That does not make separation painless.

Ending relationship is itself an action.

It has consequences.

Communities divide.

Friends choose sides.

Stories are retold.

Places once shared become awkward territory.

Ritual calendars change.

People disappear from gatherings.

Traditions split.

A fire once shared may become two fires burning on opposite sides of the woods.

That is grief.

And perhaps we do ourselves no favours by pretending every necessary ending should feel triumphant.

Sometimes there is no victory.

There is simply the recognition that continuing the old relationship would cost more than ending it.

Sometimes the ethical choice still hurts.

Sometimes the right boundary leaves an empty chair beside the fire.

Broken Relationship Does Not Erase What Was Good

There is another strange thing about betrayal.

We often feel compelled to rewrite the entire relationship.

If it ended badly, perhaps it was always bad.

If someone betrayed us, perhaps nothing before the betrayal was real.

Sometimes that may be true.

Sometimes it probably is not.

People change.

Communities change.

Power changes.

Circumstances change.

A relationship may have been meaningful and still become harmful.

A community may once have been home and later cease to be.

Someone may once have acted honourably and later fail to do so.

We do not necessarily dishonour our present by admitting there was once something worth loving in the past.

Perhaps mature memory can carry both truths.

This mattered to me.

And:

I cannot return to it.

Those statements can sit beside one another.

Repairing the Web May Not Mean Reconnecting the Same Threads

This may be where our forest metaphor becomes useful again.

When a great tree falls, the forest does not put the tree upright and pretend nothing happened.

The canopy changes.

Light reaches places it could not reach before.

Plants appear.

Fungi begin their work.

The fallen tree slowly becomes something else.

What died becomes material from which new life grows.

The forest repairs itself without restoring its previous shape.

Perhaps human beings sometimes repair the same way.

We spend enormous energy trying to get back to before.

Before the betrayal.

Before the argument.

Before the loss.

Before we knew what we know now.

But before no longer exists.

Repair may not mean restoration.

Repair may mean integration.

Learning what happened.

Carrying the lesson.

Changing boundaries.

Building different relationships.

Remembering without living inside the memory.

Allowing the broken thing to become part of the soil rather than demanding that it become the old tree again.

What Does Pagan Ethics Ask After Betrayal?

I do not think there is one Pagan answer.

That has been part of the point of this entire journey.

Rabinovitch and Macdonald’s work on magical morality reminds us that Pagan ethics reaches far beyond ritual into relationships, sexuality, environment, money, community and the everyday use of power.

Davy’s work gives us another set of tools: relationship, gift, reciprocity, frith, moral community and relational accountability.

Put those ideas beside the broader scholarly work we have been following and perhaps we can sketch—not a commandment, but a series of questions.

What relationship existed?

What obligation grew from it?

What was broken?

Who was harmed?

Who benefited?

Has the truth been acknowledged?

Has responsibility been accepted?

Has restitution been attempted?

Has behaviour changed?

Is trust being rebuilt through conduct, or merely demanded through words?

Would restoring this relationship protect the wider web?

Or would restoring it expose the wider web to further harm?

Those questions may take us farther than asking whether someone deserves forgiveness.

Perhaps the Sacred Thing Is Not Harmony

There is one final thought waiting at the bottom of this hole.

Maybe harmony is not the highest value.

That sounds strange after several essays about relationship.

But perhaps the sacred thing is not preserving every relationship.

Perhaps the sacred thing is maintaining relationships that can carry reciprocity, honesty, responsibility and respect.

A community where nobody argues may not possess frith.

It may simply possess fear.

A friendship preserved through silence may not possess trust.

It may simply possess history.

A family held together by one person enduring harm is not necessarily whole.

A spiritual community protecting its reputation at the expense of people within it is not necessarily protecting community.

Sometimes the breach needs to be named.

Sometimes restitution needs to be demanded.

Sometimes forgiveness may come.

Sometimes it may not.

Sometimes the relationship can be rebuilt.

Sometimes the wisest thing anyone can build is a boundary.

And sometimes, after the old tree falls, the task is simply to stop trying to stand it back up.

The Web Remains

We began these rabbit holes with the idea that Paganism may be fundamentally relational.

That sounded beautiful.

Gods.

Ancestors.

Land.

Community.

Memory.

Self.

All connected.

But relationship is not beautiful merely because it exists.

Relationship can nourish.

Relationship can also wound.

Connection creates responsibility, but responsibility sometimes requires repair, sometimes restitution, sometimes boundaries and sometimes departure.

Perhaps that is part of what relational ethics really means.

Not preserving every strand.

Caring for the web.

And caring for the web may occasionally require looking at a broken strand and admitting:

This cannot continue in the form it had before.

That is not necessarily failure.

The forest does not fail when a tree falls.

It changes.

Memory becomes soil.

Loss opens light.

New roots eventually find the space.

The shape of the forest changes, but the forest remains.

Perhaps we do too.

And now I can see another rabbit sitting just beyond the firelight.

Because if a relationship can be broken, and if repair does not necessarily mean restoration, then there is another question waiting for us:

What makes something sacred in the first place—and can something we once considered sacred cease to be sacred?

Places.

Communities.

Objects.

Traditions.

Promises.

Even relationships.

I think that rabbit knows exactly where it is going.

Godspeed.

Scholarly Trail Markers

This essay is a philosophical synthesis inspired by the scholarly work below. It should not be read as claiming that these scholars collectively proposed a single Pagan doctrine of betrayal, forgiveness or repair.

Davy, B. J. (2023). Inclusive Heathens practice ancestor veneration, but not pride in ancestry. Nova Religio, 26(3), 30–51.

Davy, B. J. (2025). Wyrd ecology: Heathen ritual and gifting relations. Oxford University Press.

Rabinovitch, S. T., & Macdonald, M. (2004). An ye harm none: Magical morality and modern ethics. Citadel Press.

What Do We Owe Because We Are Connected?

Tree of Life connecting deities above with humans and nature below under a cosmic sky

There goes the rabbit again.

In the last rabbit hole we wandered through the work of Shelley Rabinovitch, Dodie Graham McKay, Martin Lepage, Marisol Charbonneau, Marion Bowman and Barbara Jane Davy, looking for some common thread running beneath their very different examinations of Paganism.

What emerged was not a common theology.

It was relationship.

Again and again Paganism seemed to appear not so much in the things themselves, but in the spaces between them: human and god, human and land, living and dead, individual and community, present and past, identity and tradition, gift and receiver.

That left us standing at the mouth of another rabbit hole.

Because if relationship really is one of the threads running through Paganism, then relationship cannot simply be a pretty spiritual word.

Relationships have consequences.

They make demands upon us.

And so perhaps the next question is not:

What do Pagans believe is right and wrong?

Perhaps the more interesting question is:

What do we owe because we are connected?

Now we are wandering into ethics.

And this may be where the rabbit gets troublesome.

Where Is the Pagan Rulebook?

There is no single Pagan Ten Commandments.

There is no council somewhere issuing universally binding moral instructions to every Wiccan, Heathen, Druid, reconstructionist, polytheist, witch, animist and solitary practitioner.

Individual traditions certainly have ethical teachings.

Wiccans may speak of the Rede.

Heathens may turn toward the Hávamál, reciprocity, honour, hospitality, oath keeping and frith.

Druid traditions have developed their own teachings concerning virtue, truth, service, creativity, land and relationship.

Individual covens, groves, kindreds and communities develop expectations of conduct.

And individual Pagans carry moral ideas inherited from families, cultures, previous religions, philosophy, law and ordinary human experience.

But none of these becomes a universal Pagan law.

That might appear, at first glance, to leave us with a problem.

If there is no single authority, where does Pagan ethics come from?

Perhaps we have made the same mistake here that we made when asking what Pagans believe.

Perhaps we are looking for a law when we should be looking for a relationship.

The Gift Is Never Just the Gift

This is where Barbara Jane Davy becomes particularly interesting.

Her work on contemporary Heathen ritual examines gifting, reciprocity, wyrd, ecology and what she describes through the language of relational ontology.

That sounds wonderfully academic.

Strip away the terminology and there is a beautifully simple idea beneath it.

We become who we are partly through our relationships.

We are not sealed little islands drifting through the world untouched by everyone and everything around us.

We inherit.

We receive.

We give.

We affect.

We are affected.

Davy’s examination of Heathen gifting ritual goes beyond the notion that one person hands another person an object and everybody goes home.

The gift creates something.

A relationship.

A memory.

An expectation.

Perhaps gratitude.

Perhaps obligation.

Perhaps another gift someday.

And suddenly the exchange is no longer about the cup, the horn, the food, the offering or whatever else moved from one pair of hands to another.

The important thing is what now exists between those hands.

Think about that for a moment.

Someone gives you something when you desperately need it.

Twenty years later you may have forgotten exactly what the object looked like.

But you remember who gave it.

You remember that they were there.

The thing disappears.

The relationship remains.

Then the Circle Gets Bigger

Davy’s work takes the idea somewhere even more interesting.

What happens when the recipient is not another human being?

An offering is poured onto the earth.

Something is given to a god.

Food is left for ancestors.

A ritual acknowledges a river, a tree, a spirit, a place or another part of the more-than-human world.

We can argue endlessly about the metaphysics.

Did the god literally receive the offering?

Does the land possess consciousness?

Did the ancestors hear us?

Those are worthwhile religious questions, but they may not be the only questions.

Something also happens to the person making the offering.

The giver has recognized something beyond themselves as worthy of consideration.

The moral circle has widened.

The tree is no longer merely lumber that has not been cut down yet.

The river is no longer merely water travelling downhill.

The land is no longer merely property.

The ancestor is no longer merely a name written on a genealogy chart.

The relationship changes the way the other is perceived.

And once perception changes, behaviour may follow.

Perhaps this is one way ritual becomes ethical practice.

Not because somebody threatens punishment from above.

But because relationship makes indifference harder.

If the Land Is Sacred, Then What?

This brings us back to something Marion Bowman’s work complicates in a useful way.

Pagans frequently speak about nature.

Nature-centred.

Earth-based.

Honouring the land.

Walking lightly.

But Bowman reminds us that Pagans do not necessarily mean the same thing when they use those words.

There is no single Pagan relationship with nature.

Good.

That saves us from another easy slogan.

Because saying the land is sacred is remarkably easy.

The interesting part begins five minutes later.

What does sacred mean when somebody wants to cut down the tree?

What does sacred mean when garbage is left beside the fire?

What does sacred mean when water is being polluted?

What does sacred mean when convenience conflicts with stewardship?

What does sacred mean when the place we claim to love requires work rather than ceremony?

Perhaps an ethic of relationship asks us to move one step beyond declaration.

If I say I am in relationship with this place, then my conduct becomes part of that relationship.

I cannot simply ask:

What does this land give me?

I eventually have to ask:

What am I giving back?

And perhaps:

What am I taking that I have no need to take?

That is a more uncomfortable spirituality.

Which may be precisely why it is useful.

Hospitality Is Beautiful Until Somebody Knocks

Then there is community.

Pagans are very good at certain words.

Welcome.

Inclusive.

Community.

Family.

Tribe.

Folk.

Home.

Beautiful words.

But Marisol Charbonneau’s research gives us reason to be cautious about assuming that saying a value and living a value are the same thing.

Her examination of contemporary Paganism looked directly at the tension between Pagan ideals of inclusiveness and diversity and the actual social composition of Pagan communities.

That tension matters far beyond one community or one study.

Every community eventually discovers that it is much easier to write everyone is welcome than to answer the question:

Welcome into what?

Who designed the rituals?

Whose assumptions are considered normal?

Whose history is being told?

Who is expected to adapt?

Who gets heard?

Who gets interrupted?

Who becomes leadership?

Who quietly stops coming?

That does not mean every difference is evidence of wrongdoing.

It means inclusiveness is not achieved by declaring ourselves inclusive.

Relationship has to survive contact with another person who is genuinely different from us.

Hospitality is easy when the visitor thinks exactly like the host.

The old stories about hospitality become interesting precisely because the stranger is a stranger.

And What Happens When the Stranger Changes the Ritual?

Martin Lepage’s work carries the question farther.

His research into queer and transgender experience in contemporary Paganism examined how people negotiate gender through ritual and magical practice.

That word negotiate is important.

Because traditions are inherited, but human beings arrive inside them as themselves.

Sometimes the person fits comfortably within the ritual language.

Sometimes they do not.

What happens then?

Does the person have to bend until they fit the ritual?

Can the ritual bend?

Does changing inherited practice destroy tradition?

Or can a tradition remain alive precisely because people continue wrestling with it?

There may be no single Pagan answer.

But there is certainly an ethical question.

If community is relationship, then other people cannot merely be props in our preferred version of tradition.

They arrive carrying lives.

Histories.

Bodies.

Identities.

Wounds.

Wisdom.

Questions.

And occasionally they arrive carrying questions our traditions have never answered particularly well.

Relationship means we have to hear them.

That does not automatically tell us what answer we must reach.

It does mean the other person has become morally relevant.

Who Counts as an Ancestor?

Davy raises another wonderfully troublesome question through her work with inclusive Heathens.

Who is an ancestor?

Blood seems like the obvious answer.

Until it isn’t.

Her research describes inclusive Heathens venerating not only biological ancestors but ancestors of affinity, imagination and place.

That loosens something important.

Ancestor ceases to mean simply the people whose DNA eventually produced me.

An ancestor might also be someone whose work made our lives possible.

Someone who walked the path before us.

Someone whose struggle opened a door.

Someone tied to the place where we now live.

Someone whose story we have inherited without inheriting their blood.

And once again relationship becomes ethical.

Because ancestry can be used in two very different directions.

It can become a wall:

This is mine because my blood gives me ownership.

Or it can become an obligation:

I received something from those who came before me. What will I do with what I received?

Those are profoundly different ways of standing before the past.

One asks what ancestry entitles us to.

The other asks what ancestry makes us responsible for.

The Ancestors Were Human Too

There is another danger hiding here.

Honouring ancestors can easily become romanticizing ancestors.

Our ancestors were not wiser simply because they were old.

They were human.

Some were generous.

Some were cruel.

Some were courageous.

Some were cowards.

Some protected people.

Some hurt people.

Some beliefs deserve remembering.

Some deserve studying.

Some deserve leaving in the grave.

Perhaps relationship with the ancestors does not demand obedience.

Perhaps sometimes honouring those who came before us means carrying forward what was worthy and refusing to hand another generation what was harmful.

Inheritance is not the same thing as obligation to repeat.

Sometimes the most important gift we give our descendants may be ending something.

Truth Is a Relationship Too

Then we come to history.

This may be one of the quieter Pagan ethical obligations.

Truth telling.

We inherit wonderful stories.

Ancient Druids knew this.

The Vikings always did that.

Witches have practiced this continuously for thousands of years.

This symbol has meant the same thing since antiquity.

This ceremony is ancient.

Sometimes those claims are true.

Sometimes they are partly true.

Sometimes they are twentieth-century inventions wearing an Iron Age hat.

That does not automatically make the modern thing worthless.

A ritual created fifty years ago can be beautiful.

A tradition created yesterday can become meaningful.

Everything old was new once.

The ethical problem begins when we need the modern thing to be ancient so badly that we start lying about it.

This is another place where scholars like Rabinovitch, Bowman, Charbonneau, Lepage and Davy have done us a service.

Scholarship puts dates beside stories.

It asks where claims came from.

It separates evidence from assumption.

It occasionally walks into a beautiful legend carrying a bucket of cold archival water.

Annoying.

Necessary.

Perhaps relationship with our traditions includes enough respect to tell the truth about them.

What we know.

What we suspect.

What we reconstructed.

What we invented.

And what we simply do not know.

Mystery does not require dishonesty.

Maybe Ethics Lives in the Gap Between What We Say and What We Do

Shelley Rabinovitch’s work deserves a special mention in this particular rabbit hole because she did not merely document Paganism.

She also wrote directly about magical morality and modern ethics.

That reminds us that Pagan practitioners themselves have been wrestling with these questions for a long time.

What does harm mean?

What does responsibility mean?

What happens when intentions and consequences do not match?

How should power be used?

These questions become especially important in spiritual environments because spiritual language can hide ordinary human behaviour surprisingly well.

A person can speak constantly about love and behave cruelly.

A community can speak about inclusion while quietly excluding.

A group can call itself family while treating belonging as conditional.

Someone can claim reverence for land while treating land as disposable.

A person can preach honour while breaking promises.

Someone can talk about ancestors while using ancestry to diminish another human being.

We can know every correspondence for every herb on the altar and still behave terribly toward the person standing beside us.

Perhaps Pagan ethics lives partly in that space.

The distance between declaration and conduct.

Community Is What Happens After the Ritual

Dodie Graham McKay’s documentation of Pagan festivals and communities gives this discussion dirt beneath its fingernails.

Community is not merely people standing together during ritual.

It is also people doing the work.

Setting up.

Cleaning up.

Maintaining sacred spaces.

Teaching.

Volunteering.

Cooking.

Building.

Returning.

Remembering.

In her writing about Ontario Pagan festivals and Raven’s Knoll, Graham McKay documented a community-driven place where volunteers gathered for work weekends and people contributed to maintaining the land and events.

There is something wonderfully unromantic about that.

Everybody likes the sacred fire.

Somebody still has to deal with the garbage.

Everybody likes the ritual feast.

Somebody washes the dishes.

Everybody likes sacred land.

Somebody repairs the fence.

Maybe ethics sometimes looks less like philosophy and more like noticing that the work needs doing and getting up to help.

Reciprocity Is Not Accounting

There is a danger here too.

If we start talking about reciprocity, gift and obligation, it can quickly become bookkeeping.

I gave you this.

You owe me that.

I helped you three times.

You helped me twice.

Balance due.

But relationships are rarely so tidy.

Sometimes a person gives when another person cannot return the gift.

Sometimes we receive from people who died centuries before we were born.

Sometimes we plant trees beneath whose shade we will never sit.

Sometimes our debt to the past can only be repaid forward.

Perhaps reciprocity is not about equal transactions.

Perhaps it is about refusing to imagine that receiving creates no responsibility at all.

I received knowledge.

Teach someone.

I received hospitality.

Offer it when I can.

I inherited a healthy patch of land.

Try not to leave poisoned soil.

I was welcomed when I knew nobody.

Notice the person standing alone at the next gathering.

I inherited stories.

Tell them honestly.

I received kindness during a difficult year.

Remember what kindness looked like when somebody else’s difficult year arrives.

Perhaps that is gift economy at its most human.

The gift keeps moving.

But Relationship Does Not Mean Enduring Everything

This needs saying.

An ethic of relationship cannot mean that every relationship must be preserved forever.

That would not be ethics.

That would be captivity dressed in spiritual language.

Some relationships become harmful.

Some communities become unsafe.

Some promises are broken.

Some people abuse hospitality.

Some leaders abuse power.

Some bridges burn because somebody kept setting fire to them.

Relationship includes boundaries.

Reciprocity includes the ability to recognize exploitation.

Hospitality does not require surrendering the house.

Forgiveness, where it is meaningful at all, does not require restored access.

Community does not mean nobody may ever be asked to leave.

Sometimes responsibility to one relationship requires ending another.

Protecting a child may require breaking relationship with an adult.

Protecting a community may require removing someone who repeatedly harms its members.

Protecting land may require saying no to someone who wants to use it.

Protecting yourself may require walking away from people you once called kin.

Relationship is not endless accommodation.

It is accountability.

And Accountability Requires Power to Enter the Conversation

There is another word Pagans sometimes prefer not to discuss.

Power.

Every community has it.

Even communities that insist they have no hierarchy.

Someone owns the land.

Someone controls the bank account.

Someone decides who teaches.

Someone controls the mailing list.

Someone holds the keys.

Someone has been there thirty years while someone else arrived yesterday.

Someone is charismatic.

Someone knows everybody.

Someone can make a person feel welcome.

Someone can make a person disappear from community life without ever formally banning them.

Power does not vanish simply because we refuse to name it.

If Pagan ethics is relational, then power becomes part of the ethical landscape because power changes what people can demand from one another.

The person who controls access has a different responsibility from the person asking for access.

The teacher has a different responsibility from the student.

The elder has a different responsibility from the newcomer.

The landowner has a different responsibility from the guest.

The organizer has a different responsibility from the attendee.

Perhaps the greater the power within a relationship, the greater the obligation to examine how that power is being used.

Maybe Pagan Ethics Is a Practice of Attention

After wandering this far, I am beginning to suspect Pagan ethics may be less about memorizing universal rules and more about learning to pay attention.

Pay attention to what you received.

Pay attention to what you take.

Pay attention to who does the work.

Pay attention to who gets heard.

Pay attention to the land after the ritual is finished.

Pay attention to whether your stories are true.

Pay attention to what your promises cost somebody else.

Pay attention to who is standing at the edge of the circle.

Pay attention to whether reciprocity has quietly become exploitation.

Pay attention to whether tradition is being honoured or merely used as armour.

Pay attention to power.

Pay attention to consequences.

Pay attention to the difference between what you say is sacred and what your behaviour reveals you actually consider sacred.

Maybe ethics begins there.

What Do I Owe Because I Am Connected?

I do not think Rabinovitch, Graham McKay, Lepage, Charbonneau, Bowman and Davy collectively provide us with a Pagan moral code.

Nor should we pretend that they do.

They studied different things and reached different conclusions.

But once again, placing their work beside one another gives us somewhere interesting to stand.

Davy shows us relationship, gifting, reciprocity and relational accountability.

Bowman complicates easy assumptions about Pagans and nature.

Charbonneau reminds us that an ideal such as inclusiveness must be examined against lived community.

Lepage shows identity and tradition being negotiated through actual bodies and actual lives.

Rabinovitch takes questions of magical morality and ethical responsibility seriously rather than treating ethics as an afterthought to practice.

Graham McKay shows us community not merely proclaimed but built, maintained and remembered through participation.

And when I stand amid those different pieces, I keep returning to one question.

What do I owe because I am connected?

Not because a god will strike me down.

Not because a Pagan pope issued instructions.

Not because everybody beneath the Pagan umbrella agreed upon a rule.

Because I am connected.

I drink the water.

I walk the land.

I inherited stories.

I received knowledge.

I have ancestors.

I have neighbours.

I affect people.

People affect me.

I receive gifts I can never return to the original giver.

I benefit from work performed by people whose names I will never know.

I live among creatures that never consented to becoming resources for me.

I will leave things behind for people who have not yet been born.

The web was here before I arrived.

It will remain after I leave.

For a little while, I get to touch it.

Perhaps ethics is deciding how.

The Rabbit at the Edge of the Firelight

And now we appear to have reached another clearing.

If Paganism can be understood, at least in part, as relationship…

And if relationship creates obligation…

Then perhaps Pagan ethics does not begin with:

What am I forbidden to do?

Perhaps it begins with:

What am I responsible for?

That is a very different question.

Rules tell us where the fence stands.

Responsibility asks what kind of person we are becoming on either side of it.

Rules can sometimes be obeyed without caring.

Relationship is harder.

Relationship remembers.

Relationship accumulates.

Relationship leaves footprints.

Perhaps that is why the old image of roots keeps returning.

Beneath the forest floor, roots cross boundaries we cannot see.

One tree touches another through soil and fungi and water.

The dead feed the living.

The living eventually become the dead.

Nothing keeps everything it receives.

Everything passes something onward.

Maybe the ethical question is simply whether we will do that carelessly or consciously.

What did I receive?

What did I take?

What did I give?

What did I damage?

What did I repair?

Who was welcomed?

Who was forgotten?

What will remain because I was here?

And what, perhaps, should end with me?

There is our next rabbit.

If relationship creates responsibility, what happens when the relationship is broken?

What does Paganism have to say about betrayal, broken frith, failed reciprocity, restitution, forgiveness and repair?

I can already see the ears disappearing into the brush.

Godspeed.

Scholarly Trail Markers

The reflections above are a synthesis and interpretation, not a claim that the scholars below collectively proposed a single theory of Pagan ethics. Their work provides different pieces of the landscape from which this rabbit hole developed.

Bowman, M. (2000). Nature, the natural and Pagan identity. DISKUS, 6.

Charbonneau, M. (2007). The melting cauldron: Ethnicity, diversity, and identity in a contemporary Pagan subculture. The Pomegranate, 9(1), 5–21.

Davy, B. J. (2023). Inclusive Heathens practice ancestor veneration, but not pride in ancestry. Nova Religio, 26(3), 30–51.

Davy, B. J. (2025). Wyrd ecology: Heathen ritual and gifting relations. Oxford University Press.

Graham McKay, D. (2014, June 20). Pagan festival season in Ontario. The Wild Hunt.

Lepage, M. (2017). Queerness and transgender identity: Negotiations in contemporary Paganism. Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses.

Rabinovitch, S. T., & Macdonald, M. (2004). An ye harm none: Magical morality and modern ethics. Citadel Press.

What if we Have Been Asking the Wrong Question About Paganism

Six diverse people dressed in symbol-decorated clothing linked by vines under a tree with mountains in background

Yesterday we were talking about rabbits.

Not the sort that sit politely at the edge of the garden, but the troublesome ones. The ones that appear for half a second, vanish into the undergrowth, and somehow convince you that following them is a perfectly reasonable way to spend an afternoon.

We have been doing quite a bit of that lately on Unplugged Pagan.

Following names.

Following books.

Following old festivals and forgotten communities.

Following ideas through academic papers, fieldwork, memories, rituals, histories and places until one question becomes another question, and that question opens a door into something we were not really looking for when we began.

This particular rabbit started with six names:

Shelley Rabinovitch. Dodie Graham McKay. Martin Lepage. Marisol Charbonneau. Marion Bowman. Barbara Jane Davy.

They did not all ask the same questions.

They did not all study the same communities.

They did not all approach Paganism from the same academic discipline, the same period, or even the same relationship to the communities they were describing.

And that matters.

Before we go any farther down this rabbit hole, there is something worth saying clearly.

The observations that follow did not simply appear out of thin air.

They exist because people did the work.

They interviewed practitioners. They attended gatherings. They observed rituals. They read histories. They documented communities that might otherwise have left very little public record. They wrestled with questions of identity, ethnicity, gender, ancestry, nature, ecology, ritual and belonging.

Some of them spent years doing it.

There is a tendency, especially online, to grab one interesting sentence from a scholarly work, turn it into a meme-sized idea, and forget the person who spent hundreds or thousands of hours getting us to that sentence.

I do not want to do that here.

So this rabbit hole is partly ours.

But the trail was cut by others long before we arrived.

What Happens When We Put Their Work Beside One Another?

At first I expected the common thread to simply be Paganism.

That would be the obvious answer.

Rabinovitch documented modern Pagan and Witchcraft communities and helped map the extraordinary diversity existing beneath those labels.

Charbonneau examined contemporary Paganism in Montreal and explored how ethnicity, language, diversity and cultural setting influenced the form Paganism took there.

Lepage went deeper into that same Montreal landscape and examined ritual, gender, sexuality and queer identity.

Bowman studied nature, Pagan identity and what scholars often call vernacular religion: religion not merely as institutions define it, but as ordinary people actually live it.

Graham McKay documented Canadian Pagan communities from within their lived world: gatherings, festivals, sacred places, people, stories and the strange collection of relationships that eventually turns an event into a community.

Davy has examined contemporary Heathen ritual, ancestors, gifting, ecology, reciprocity and the relationships created among humans, land, gods, ancestors and other-than-human beings.

Six people.

Six bodies of work.

Many different questions.

But when those bodies of work are placed beside one another, something begins appearing beneath the differences.

And I do not think that something is belief.

I think it is relationship.

Perhaps that is where we have been looking in the wrong direction all along.

Maybe Belief Was Never the Centre

When we ask what a religion is, we have been trained to begin with belief.

What do its followers believe about God?

What do they believe about death?

What scripture do they follow?

What commandments govern them?

What doctrines define who belongs and who does not?

That works reasonably well when discussing religions built around formal creeds, scriptures and institutions.

Then we wander into Paganism carrying the same measuring stick and immediately run into trouble.

What do Pagans believe about the gods?

Well.

Which Pagans?

Some speak to gods as beings with wills, personalities and presence.

Some understand them through myth and archetype.

Some speak primarily of spirits.

Some of ancestors.

Some of land.

Some of divinity woven through nature.

Some comfortably hold several of those possibilities at once and feel no great need to solve the theological puzzle for anyone else.

Ask what happens after death and the trail branches again.

Ask which scripture defines Paganism and there is silence.

Ask who has the authority to decide what Paganism believes and somewhere, I suspect, a thousand Pagans begin arguing before the question has even finished being asked.

Perhaps that is not a weakness.

Perhaps we have simply been asking Paganism to behave like religions built very differently from it.

Maybe the question is not:

What must Pagans believe?

Maybe the more revealing question is:

What relationships are Pagans trying to establish, maintain and understand?

Once you ask that, the landscape changes.

Paganism Happens Between Things

This is where I think the work of these scholars begins quietly speaking to one another.

Not because they all made the same argument.

They did not.

This is my synthesis of what becomes visible when their work is viewed together.

Paganism keeps appearing in the spaces between things.

Between a person and a god.

Between a person and the land beneath their feet.

Between the living and the dead.

Between a community and the place where it gathers.

Between inherited tradition and contemporary experience.

Between personal identity and collective expectation.

Between memory and the present.

Between who we were told we should be and whoever we are slowly becoming.

Marion Bowman’s work is especially valuable here because vernacular religion asks us to pay attention to religion as people actually live it.

Religion does not exist only in books, temples or official statements.

It happens around kitchen tables.

At gravesides.

On pilgrimages.

In family traditions.

At festivals.

In stories.

Around fires.

In the strange little practices people repeat because somewhere along the line those practices became meaningful.

People inherit traditions, but they also interpret them.

They adapt them.

They combine them.

They forget parts.

Recover others.

Create something new.

Religion remains alive because someone keeps entering into relationship with it.

Marisol Charbonneau’s work in Montreal shows us another part of that process.

Paganism grows somewhere.

And wherever it grows leaves fingerprints upon it.

Language matters.

Ethnicity matters.

Culture matters.

History matters.

The people in the room matter.

The city outside the ritual space matters.

Montreal is not merely the location where Paganism happens.

Montreal becomes part of the Paganism being lived there.

Martin Lepage follows another trail through that same forest and encounters gender, sexuality and queer identity.

Again, Paganism is doing more than transmitting doctrine.

Ritual becomes a place where human beings ask questions about themselves.

Who am I?

What was assigned to me?

What did I inherit?

What do I accept?

What do I reject?

What may I become?

And what happens when those questions are carried into sacred space?

Shelley Rabinovitch’s work helps us see just how diverse the modern Pagan landscape actually is.

The word Pagan does not resolve the differences.

It contains them.

Witches, reconstructionists, polytheists, ceremonial practitioners, nature-centred traditions, magical traditions, devotional traditions and all manner of things living somewhere around their edges.

That diversity itself becomes important.

There may never have been a single theological centre to discover.

Dodie Graham McKay brings us out of theory and onto the ground.

Festivals.

Communities.

Campgrounds.

Work weekends.

Rituals.

Stories.

People returning year after year.

People teaching.

People building things.

People remembering.

People arguing.

People belonging.

Her work reminds us that religion is not only what a community says it believes.

It is what people actually do together.

And then Barbara Jane Davy takes us into a particularly deep part of the woods.

Gift.

Reciprocity.

Ancestor.

Ritual.

Land.

Ecology.

Relationship.

Her work on contemporary Heathenry gives scholarly language to something that practitioners may understand almost instinctively:

We do not exist alone.

We exist within networks of relationship.

And relationships create consequences.

Nothing Stands Alone

There is something quietly Pagan about that idea even before we attach the name of a god to it.

Nothing stands entirely by itself.

The tree outside the window exists in relationship with soil, water, fungi, insects, birds, sunlight and weather.

The fire exists because someone gathered wood.

The wood exists because something grew.

The person tending the fire learned how from someone, somewhere.

Perhaps from a parent.

Perhaps from another Pagan.

Perhaps from a book written by someone long dead.

The story being told beside that fire came from another story.

The ritual contains gestures borrowed from another ritual.

The words have histories.

The symbols have travelled.

Even the solitary Pagan sitting alone beneath a tree is surrounded by relationships.

The solitude is real.

But so is the web.

Perhaps Paganism has always lived somewhere inside that tension.

Individual experience woven into something larger.

Not in the object.

In the connection.

The Land Remembers

This also changes how we understand sacred places.

Land is spoken about rather casually in modern spirituality.

Connect with nature.

Honour the land.

Walk barefoot.

Sit beneath a tree.

All fine things.

But relationship with place becomes very different when time enters the picture.

Walk the same path for twenty years and it is no longer simply a path.

Light the same fire every autumn and eventually that fire carries memory.

Hold rituals beside the same well.

Scatter ashes beneath the same trees.

Celebrate births there.

Mourn deaths there.

Meet friends there.

Lose friends there.

Work the soil.

Carry stones.

Repair fences.

Build shrines.

Tell the story about what happened beneath a certain tree fifteen summers ago.

Eventually the landscape stops being scenery.

It becomes biography.

This is part of what makes Davy’s work around Heathen ritual and Raven’s Knoll so interesting.

A ritual performed repeatedly in a place does something more than commemorate an old story.

It creates relationships among the participants, the ritual, the remembered past and the land where the ritual occurs.

That does not require us to solve every metaphysical question about sacred places.

We can observe what happens.

People remember.

People return.

People care for places.

They attach stories to them.

They behave differently toward them.

The geography gathers meaning.

A place becomes sacred not because someone printed the word sacred on a map.

It becomes sacred because relationships accumulate there.

And perhaps, sometimes, the place returns the favour.

Community Is Built the Same Way

Community may not be terribly different.

We sometimes speak about Pagan community as though it comes automatically with the label.

A Pagan festival is announced.

Pagans arrive.

Therefore Pagan community exists.

But the work documented by people like Graham McKay, Charbonneau, Lepage, Rabinovitch and Davy suggests something far more complicated.

Perhaps community is not simply a noun.

Perhaps community is something people keep doing.

Someone arrives early and helps another person put up a tent.

Someone teaches a workshop.

Someone brings extra coffee.

Someone tends the fire after most people have gone to bed.

Someone welcomes the newcomer standing awkwardly at the edge of the circle.

Someone cooks.

Someone cleans.

Someone performs ritual.

Someone remembers the names of people who are no longer there.

Someone keeps returning.

Years pass.

Children grow up.

People age.

Traditions change.

Arguments happen.

Friendships form.

Friendships break.

New people arrive.

Old stories become community folklore.

And somewhere along the way a collection of individuals becomes something resembling a people.

That may be why the loss of spiritual community can hurt so deeply.

You have not merely lost access to an event.

You may have lost relationships.

A fire you knew.

A path you walked.

A ritual calendar that helped divide your year.

Jokes nobody outside the group understands.

People who remember earlier versions of you.

Places where pieces of your life happened.

When people say, “It was home,” perhaps they are not speaking metaphorically at all.

Perhaps home is simply what we call a place where enough relationships have gathered.

Even the Past Is a Relationship

Then there is history.

Pagans can become wonderfully obsessive about history.

Was this ritual really ancient?

Did the Norse actually do this?

Did Druids believe that?

Where did this symbol come from?

Is this authentic?

Was this reconstructed in 1973 and then somehow transported backward into the Iron Age by the internet?

Those questions matter.

The scholars matter here too.

Part of the gift of scholarship is that somebody does the uncomfortable work of checking our stories.

They compare sources.

They question assumptions.

They distinguish evidence from folklore.

They point out when a beautiful story is probably modern.

Sometimes that ruins a perfectly good legend.

Good.

History deserves better than being used merely as decoration.

But scholarship can also teach us something subtler.

The past reaches us in fragments.

Stories.

Artifacts.

Names.

Folklore.

Burial goods.

Poetry.

Language.

Later accounts.

Archaeology.

Reconstructed possibilities.

And enormous stretches of silence.

We are not ancient Celts.

We are not Viking Age Norse farmers.

We are not living in pre-Christian Europe.

We stand here.

Now.

So every attempt to build a modern Pagan practice from the past requires a relationship between evidence and imagination.

Between inheritance and reconstruction.

Between what we know and what we desperately wish we knew.

Honesty lives somewhere inside that space.

Perhaps we do not honour the past by pretending the centuries between us never happened.

Perhaps we honour it by acknowledging the distance.

Learning what can be learned.

Admitting what cannot be known.

And still finding ways to carry something living forward.

Relationship Is Not Always Comfortable

And then the rabbit reaches the difficult part.

Relationships create obligations.

Barbara Jane Davy’s work on reciprocity and gifting makes this particularly difficult to ignore, but I think the question echoes through the work of all six.

If I claim relationship with land, what do I owe the land?

If I claim relationship with gods, what does devotion ask of me?

If I claim relationship with ancestors, which ancestors do I mean?

If I claim relationship with history, what obligation do I have to tell the truth about it?

If I claim relationship with community, what happens when community becomes inconvenient?

If I call someone kin, what does that word mean when agreement disappears?

If I borrow ritual or symbolism from another culture, what responsibilities come with that borrowing?

If I say a place is sacred, how should I behave toward it?

Suddenly Paganism is no longer merely about identity.

It becomes a question of conduct.

Not:

What label do I wear?

But:

What do my relationships require of me?

That is a much harder question.

An altar can be photographed.

A necklace can be worn.

A label can be placed in a biography.

Relationship has to be lived.

So What Is Paganism?

After wandering through the work of Rabinovitch, Graham McKay, Lepage, Charbonneau, Bowman and Davy, I find myself circling around a definition we have been slowly developing here at Unplugged Pagan.

Not because these scholars collectively wrote this definition.

They did not.

This is my synthesis of the landscape their work helps reveal.

And it should be presented as exactly that.

A reader standing upon foundations laid by people who spent years examining different pieces of the Pagan world and asking what those pieces might tell us.

From that vantage point, perhaps we can say:

Paganism is a lived and relational religious practice through which people establish and maintain relationships with gods, ancestors, land, community, memory and self, using historical inheritance, personal experience and contemporary reconstruction while remaining accountable for how those relationships are represented and enacted.

It is not a creed.

It is not the definition.

I doubt the Pagan world would tolerate a definitive definition for more than fifteen minutes anyway.

But perhaps it describes the shape of something.

The gods differ.

The myths differ.

The rituals differ.

The histories differ.

Languages differ.

Traditions disagree.

Practitioners contradict one another.

And yet again and again, in community after community and study after study, human beings appear reaching outward.

Toward gods.

Toward land.

Toward ancestors.

Toward one another.

Toward story.

Toward memory.

Toward identity.

Toward something beyond the small border of the individual self.

Perhaps Paganism is not a single road.

Perhaps it is more like an old forest.

There are hundreds of paths through it.

Some ancient.

Some newly cut.

Some carefully reconstructed from old maps.

Some little more than deer trails vanishing beneath the ferns.

And scattered through that forest are people who have spent years mapping portions of it.

Rabinovitch mapped some trails.

Bowman mapped others.

Charbonneau walked through Montreal.

Lepage followed paths through ritual and identity.

Graham McKay recorded the gathering places.

Davy followed the trail into ritual, gifting, ancestors and ecology.

None mapped the entire forest.

Neither will we.

But because they walked carefully, took notes, asked questions and left markers behind, those of us coming later can see farther than we could have seen alone.

That is worth acknowledging.

Scholarship does not remove the mystery from Paganism.

At its best, it teaches us where the mystery actually begins.

And perhaps beneath all those paths are roots.

Crossing.

Entangling.

Sharing soil.

Touching things we cannot see from the surface.

Maybe that is the common thread.

Not that Pagans believe the same things.

We quite obviously do not.

Perhaps the common thread is that Paganism repeatedly asks us to enter into relationship.

With something.

With someone.

With somewhere.

And then, sooner or later, comes the question that may matter far more than what we call ourselves:

What does that relationship ask of us?

Six scholars helped lead us to the edge of that question.

We simply followed the rabbit a little farther.

There it goes again.

Godspeed.