Cancel Culture, Selective Memory, and the Pagan Past

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

When Accountability Becomes Erasure

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

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

Cancel culture.

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

But strip away the politics for a moment.

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

A person becomes unacceptable.

A relationship collapses.

A community fractures.

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

And then something curious starts happening.

Their present unacceptability begins reaching backward into the past.

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

Nobody has to formally announce that someone has been erased.

Eventually silence does the work.

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

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

This is not an argument against accountability.

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

Community does not require endless tolerance.

But there is an enormous difference between saying:

You should no longer hold this position.

and saying:

You were never important here.

Those are not the same judgment.

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

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

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

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

The ending does not erase everything that came before it.

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

Both things can be true.

That should not be a radical position.

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

We like saints.

We understand villains.

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

But that is what people are actually like.

Pagan history was made by people.

Therefore Pagan history is going to be complicated.

The Old Tractor

I think of something as ordinary as an old tractor.

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

Nobody stops and thinks, We are creating historical evidence.

They’re just trying to move the garbage.

Then people change.

Relationships change.

The community changes.

Eventually the tractor sits.

A newcomer sees an old machine.

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

They cannot hear the laughter.

They do not know who drove it.

They do not know why somebody gave it a name.

They do not know what it carried.

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

The tractor remains.

The provenance disappears.

And provenance matters.

Where did this come from?

Who created it?

Who maintained it?

Who changed it?

Why did it change?

Why do we do things this way now?

Communities are full of these invisible histories.

An old song nobody sings.

A ritual whose author is no longer mentioned.

A policy created because of an argument nobody remembers.

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

A building somebody spent years maintaining.

A trail somebody cleared.

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

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

An empty space where something once happened.

Some of those things disappear naturally.

Memory fades.

People die.

Records get lost.

Hard drives fail.

Websites disappear.

Stories mutate each time they are told.

That is simply history doing what history does.

But sometimes forgetting is encouraged.

That is different.

When Forgetting Becomes Selective

Sometimes remembering someone becomes socially uncomfortable.

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

The next retelling leaves out a detail.

The version after that leaves out a name.

Eventually the story works perfectly well without the inconvenient person.

Then another generation arrives.

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

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

You don’t destroy the history.

You simply stop transmitting it.

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

We desperately want to know what people actually believed.

Who performed the rituals?

Why was something done a particular way?

What did a symbol mean?

Which practices were widespread and which were local?

What changed after political upheaval?

What was written by outsiders?

What disappeared because nobody recorded it?

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

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

There is something absurd about that.

Future Pagans should not have to reconstruct us archaeologically.

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

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

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

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

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

It didn’t.

Nothing human does.

Memory Should Not Become a Weapon

But there is another side to this.

Preserving memory cannot mean preserving every grievance forever.

That becomes its own poison.

An archive should not become an ammunition dump.

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

There has to be room for healing.

There has to be room for people to change.

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

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

We should be capable of saying:

Something happened.

People were hurt.

People disagree about what happened.

Relationships changed.

The community changed because of it.

Different people remember it differently.

We learned what we could.

And we moved on.

That is not keeping a wound open.

That is putting a marker beside the trail.

Something happened here.

Future travellers do not necessarily need every detail.

But they deserve to know the ground shifted.

Remembering Is Not Endorsing

That distinction becomes particularly important when people themselves become controversial.

Remembering somebody is not honouring them.

Documenting somebody is not endorsing them.

Acknowledging a contribution is not absolution.

History is not a hall of fame.

We should be perfectly capable of saying:

This person helped create something important.

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

Both statements belong in the record.

Anything less turns history into public relations.

And that is where selective memory becomes dangerous.

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

The people still holding authority become the natural inheritors.

The people who left become footnotes.

The people who were removed become warnings.

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

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

Eventually history stops asking:

What happened?

and begins answering:

Why the people currently in charge deserve to be here.

That is not memory.

That is mythology.

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

Who Owns Pagan Memory?

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

Not founders.

Not leaders.

Not landowners.

Not boards.

Not priests or priestesses.

Not elders.

Not the person who stayed.

Not the person who left.

Not the person who was hurt.

Not even the person doing the remembering.

We each possess pieces of the story.

Those pieces may contradict one another.

That’s fine.

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

“This is what I remember.”

“This is what you remember.”

“Here is what the surviving documentation shows.”

“Here is where neither of us actually knows.”

That is intellectually messy.

Good.

History is messy.

Paganism is messy.

Human beings around fires are exceptionally messy.

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

Because they can investigate conflicting accounts.

They cannot investigate something nobody told them existed.

Does Accountability Rewrite the Past?

And this brings us back to cancel culture.

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

The historical danger comes afterward.

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

I don’t think it does.

Accountability concerns what we do now.

History concerns what happened then.

They interact, but they are not interchangeable.

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

Maybe especially uncomfortable history.

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

Why does that rule exist?

Why did this ritual change?

Why is that tradition important?

Why does nobody use that space anymore?

Why is this person missing from the photographs?

Why did everyone suddenly start doing something differently?

Why does that old tractor have a name?

Those questions contain history.

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

Quite the opposite.

Evolution Is Not Amnesia

I want Paganism to evolve.

I want people to change things.

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

Good.

Change it.

Build something better.

Follow another rabbit.

But know what you are changing.

Evolution and amnesia are not the same thing.

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

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

That wastes experience.

It wastes labour.

It wastes knowledge.

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

We should want future Pagans to begin where we ended.

Not where we began.

Leave the Trail

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

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

Not a monument to the winners.

Not an endless catalogue of grudges.

The real trail.

Here is what we built.

Here is who helped.

Here is what worked.

Here is what failed.

Here is where relationships broke.

Here is what changed afterward.

Here is where memories disagree.

Here is what we know.

Here is what we don’t.

Here is where someone got hurt.

Here is where something beautiful happened.

Here is where both happened at once.

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

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

Eventually we lose control of it.

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

They will probably admire people we disliked.

They may criticize people we revered.

They will discover mistakes we normalized.

They may rehabilitate ideas we discarded.

They may throw away things we considered sacred.

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

Good.

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

Maybe that is what we should be aiming for.

Not immortality.

Not vindication.

Not an official version in which our side won.

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

Cancel someone from leadership if accountability requires it.

End a relationship if it needs to end.

Change the ritual.

Change the organization.

Change the gathering.

Move the fire.

But don’t pretend the old fire never burned.

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

We do not have to worship the ashes.

We do not have to keep the wounds bleeding.

But we should stop sweeping away the footprints.

Leave the trail.

Leave the uncomfortable parts too.

Then let the people who come after us go farther.

What Are We Leaving Behind?

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

The Breadcrumbs at the End of the Warren

I did not expect this rabbit hole to end here.

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

I started with a simple thought.

Third-generation Pagans.

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

Some still came to gatherings.

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

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

That raised the question of what those children are inheriting.

Which led to tradition.

Tradition led to memory.

Memory led to archives.

Archives led to history.

History led to mythology.

Mythology led to founders.

Founders led to succession.

And succession eventually dropped me here.

Legacy.

What are we leaving behind?

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

I mean the smaller things.

The things communities are actually made from.

A photograph with names written on the back.

A ritual someone bothered to type out.

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

A festival program saved instead of thrown away.

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

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

Those are breadcrumbs.

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

I started chasing rabbits because I wanted answers.

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

So I followed it.

Sometimes the rabbit went nowhere.

Sometimes it opened into an entire warren.

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

A record was created.

Not the record.

That distinction matters.

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

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

Good.

They should write their version too.

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

History becomes healthier when more people leave records.

Not because every record agrees.

Because they do not.

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

The goal should not be creating one authorized Pagan history.

That sounds dreadful.

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

That means our stories matter.

Our photographs matter.

Our old newsletters matter.

Our defunct websites matter.

Our arguments sometimes matter.

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

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

That belongs to history too.

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

Someday somebody may ask:

What was Paganism like before I was born?

Not ancient Paganism.

Ours.

What were the gatherings like?

What did people argue about?

What did they believe?

Which traditions already existed?

Which ones were being invented?

Who were the elders?

What disappeared?

What survived?

Why?

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

The answers are sitting in our basements.

They are on old hard drives.

They are disappearing from the internet.

They are inside the memories of people getting older.

They are in songs nobody has recorded.

They are in photographs whose subjects have never been identified.

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

Everyone does know them.

Until suddenly nobody does.

So perhaps recording these things is not vanity.

Perhaps it is stewardship.

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

Leaving evidence.

Leaving context.

Leaving breadcrumbs.

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

That may be the appropriate ending to this particular warren.

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

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

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

Leave them something to find.

From Revival to Tradition

People gathered around a stone fire pit during a woodland ceremony

When Does Modern Paganism Stop Being Modern?

Modern Paganism has an odd relationship with time.

We look backward constantly.

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

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

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

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

How long can a revival remain a revival?

Suppose a Pagan tradition is established in 1970.

People practise it for fifty years.

Children are raised within it.

Those children raise children.

Rituals are repeated thousands of times.

Songs are written and become customary.

Gatherings develop annual rhythms.

Elders die and are remembered.

Stories about the early years begin to circulate.

At what point are we no longer merely reviving something?

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

Its own history.

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

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

Perhaps there is another kind of authenticity.

Lived authenticity.

A ritual can be historically informed and still be modern.

A ritual can be completely modern and still become traditional.

Those statements do not contradict each other.

Tradition is not necessarily antiquity.

Tradition is transmission.

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

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

Who has the oldest source?

Who reconstructed the most accurately?

Who can produce the most impressive lineage?

Who is closest to what ancient people supposedly did?

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

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

History can tell us what evidence survives.

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

There will always be a gap between those two things.

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

So modern Paganism inevitably creates.

We fill gaps.

We make choices.

We adapt.

We borrow.

We experiment.

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

That is where tradition begins.

Not when somebody discovers an ancient source.

When somebody hands something onward.

This makes the second and third generations enormously important.

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

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

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

That final question is the beginning of maturity.

Because inheritance is not the same as obedience.

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

Families do that constantly.

Cultures do it.

Religions do it.

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

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

They may rediscover practices the second generation ignored.

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

And perhaps that is exactly what living religion looks like.

Not preservation under glass.

Continuity with change.

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

But that cannot be true forever.

We are history now.

The gatherings of the 1980s are history.

The newsletters of the 1990s are history.

The arguments on early internet forums are history.

The first generation of permanent Pagan land projects is history.

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

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

That does not make modern Paganism ancient.

It makes it ours.

Perhaps one day the word modern will become increasingly unnecessary.

Not because we have somehow recreated the ancient world.

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

We will have our own.

Which leaves one final question.

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

When the Founders Are Gone

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

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

Every community eventually encounters a question it would rather postpone.

What happens when the founders are gone?

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

The result is the same.

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

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

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

Someone owns the land.

Someone has the ritual knowledge.

Someone organizes the gathering.

Someone handles the money.

Someone knows everybody.

Someone remembers why things are done the way they are.

Someone becomes the person everyone calls when something goes wrong.

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

And sometimes the community feels the same way.

That creates a strange contradiction.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Living traditions change.

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

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

It may simply be brittle.

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

That can sound like disrespect.

Sometimes it probably is.

But sometimes it is succession.

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

Old feuds.

Unclear rules.

Informal arrangements nobody wrote down.

Traditions that made sense under conditions that no longer exist.

Authority structures built around personalities rather than offices.

And the most dangerous phrase of all:

“That’s how the founders wanted it.”

Perhaps they did.

But the dead cannot govern the living forever.

Ancestor respect is not ancestor government.

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

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

That requires something difficult from both generations.

Founders have to relinquish control.

Successors have to accept responsibility.

Neither is easy.

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

The successor sees possibilities the founder may no longer see.

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

Both perspectives contain something valuable.

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

That final step changes everything.

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

Succession planning stops being an insult and becomes responsibility.

Teaching younger people stops being optional.

Sharing authority stops being a threat.

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

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

Perhaps that is the real test.

Not whether the founder is remembered.

They probably will be.

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

If it is, something remarkable has happened.

A project has become a tradition.

Which leaves another rabbit sitting beside the fire.

At what point does a revival stop being a revival?

History, Memory and Myth

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

“We Have Always Done It This Way”

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

We have always done it this way.

Have we?

Maybe.

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

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

Eventually community history can become community mythology.

That is not necessarily malicious.

It is human.

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

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

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

That may capture the spirit of what happened.

It may not capture what actually happened.

Those are different things.

This is where archives become wonderfully inconvenient.

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

The festival program lists someone we forgot.

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

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

The evidence interrupts the legend.

Good.

It should.

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

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

I do value it.

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

The historian asks, What happened?

The bard asks, What did it mean?

Trouble begins when either one claims to answer both perfectly.

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

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

Those ingredients can become tangled very quickly.

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

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

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

A local custom can be mistaken for something practised everywhere.

This is how myth grows around communities.

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

Suppose somebody created a ritual at a gathering decades ago.

People loved it.

They repeated it the next year.

Then again.

Children grew up participating in it.

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

That ritual is not ancient.

It is tradition.

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

In fact, distinguishing them allows us to appreciate both.

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

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

Both have stories worth preserving.

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

Perhaps we do not need to.

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

There is dignity in knowing where something began.

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

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

The first generation sometimes searches for ancestors in ancient history.

The third generation may actually have Pagan ancestors.

And those ancestors will not be legendary figures.

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

In other words, they will be human.

That may be better than mythology.

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

The story becomes sacred.

The founder’s preferences become traditions.

The founder’s decisions become precedent.

And eventually somebody has to ask a very difficult question:

What happens when the founders are gone?

Who Keeps the Pagan Memory?

Four people studying manuscripts and runic texts in a stone library

Archivists, Historians, Bards and the People Who Remember

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

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

Some tried to build archives.

Some informally became historians.

Some became bards and storytellers.

Some simply remembered.

They are not doing the same job.

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

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

A bard preserves something else.

Meaning.

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

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

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

History lives somewhere among all of those things.

There is documentary history.

There is oral history.

There is community memory.

There is folklore.

And there is mythology.

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

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

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

Suddenly a thirty-year history has vanished.

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

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

The second generation starts asking questions.

The third generation may ask even more.

Who started this gathering?

Why do we sing this song?

Why is that place considered sacred?

Who carved this?

Why does everyone tell that particular story every year?

What happened here before I was born?

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

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

That is exactly why the different keepers of memory matter.

The archivist says, “Here is what survived.”

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

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

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

None of them should be treated as infallible.

All of them are valuable.

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

But somebody should be keeping the old programs.

Somebody should be labeling the photographs.

Somebody should be interviewing the elders.

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

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

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

The rabbit chaser.

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

Who finds an old reference and wonders what it means.

Who compares memories against documents.

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

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

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

Sometimes simply because somebody should write it down.

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

But when you follow enough rabbits, something strange happens.

You begin creating a map.

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

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

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

But records create another problem.

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

Which leads us into the next hole.

History, memory, and myth.

The Third Generation

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

When Revival Becomes Something You Inherit

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

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

That will change.

And when it does, I think something important happens.

Imagine three generations.

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

Their child grows up with those traditions.

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

Then that child has a child.

Now we reach the third generation.

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

The grandchild may know none of that.

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

There is the transformation.

The grandparent reconstructed something.

The parent participated in something.

The grandchild inherited something.

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

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

But traditions have to begin somewhere.

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

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

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

I do not think so.

Historical honesty and lived history can exist together.

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

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

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

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

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

That last point fascinates me.

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

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

That is not reconstruction.

That is continuity.

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

Family continuity.

Community continuity.

Lived continuity.

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

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

And that creates responsibilities.

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

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

Why do we do this?

Who started it?

Was it based on historical evidence?

Was it borrowed from another tradition?

Did someone invent it around a campfire thirty years ago?

Was it originally a joke that became serious?

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

That is how living traditions are born.

It is also how historical nonsense is born.

The difference between the two is memory.

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

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

And that brings us to the next rabbit.

Who keeps the Pagan memory?

The Weird Thing My Parents Do

Multigenerational family gathered around a decorated stone altar in a forest

When Paganism Reaches the Second Generation

I have been thinking about second-generation Pagans.

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

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

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

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

Their children did not.

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

That is a completely different religious experience.

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

And that difference matters.

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

But absorption does not guarantee belief.

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

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

That is admirable, but it creates a peculiar paradox.

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

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

The second generation says, “Okay.”

And sometimes that path leads somewhere else.

Yet something often remains.

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

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

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

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

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

Religiously, perhaps they are no longer Pagan.

Culturally, things become considerably more complicated.

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

But perhaps transmission can happen differently.

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

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

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

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

And that is where this rabbit becomes interesting.

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

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

But that means something new is beginning.

Grandparents discovered Paganism.

Parents grew up around Paganism.

Children may inherit Paganism as part of their family history.

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

Either way, the question is coming.

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

We may be watching the beginning of tradition.

Apparently I’m an ISFP 6w5 so/sp

Woman holding a leather journal beside a candlelit garden gathering

What the Hel Does That Have to Do With Paganism?

Yesterday’s rabbit came with letters and numbers.

ISFP 6w5 so/sp.

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

But there was another rabbit hiding underneath that one.

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

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

Quite a bit, apparently.

The Paganism I Practice Has to Mean Something

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

I can learn traditions.

I can read books.

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

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

Does this actually mean something to me?

That may explain a great deal about my Pagan journey.

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

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

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

I need some living meaning underneath the form.

That does not mean throwing tradition away.

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

My Paganism Begins With Things I Can Touch

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

My Paganism is not entirely philosophical.

It is fire.

Land.

Cold air.

Rain.

Gardens.

Animals.

Food.

Wood smoke.

Changing seasons.

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

People gathered around something physical and sharing an experience together.

Then comes the intuitive part.

What does this mean?

What is underneath it?

Why did this particular experience affect me?

Why does this place feel different?

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

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

I notice something.

Then I want to understand what lives underneath it.

Then Type Six Asks Whether the Community Is Real

This is where things get considerably more uncomfortable.

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

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

Who are my people?

What does it mean when we call ourselves a community?

What obligations do we have toward one another?

What is loyalty?

What is frith?

What happens when trust is broken?

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

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

What happens when community language and individual behaviour stop matching?

Those are not merely organizational questions for me.

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

I Want Pagan Community

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

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

I can practice alone.

That is different.

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

I want community.

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

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

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

That distinction has become increasingly important to me.

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

Maybe not agreement.

Probably not uniformity.

Certainly not obedience.

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

The Five Wing Wants the Footnotes

Then there is the 5 wing.

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

Six asks whether something can be trusted.

Five responds by looking it up.

Where did this tradition come from?

Who actually said this?

When did this practice appear?

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

How did Wicca affect modern Paganism?

Who influenced Canadian Pagan communities?

What did the scholars record?

What did the people who were actually there remember?

What happened to the gatherings that disappeared?

Who kept records?

Who did not?

And suddenly there goes another rabbit.

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

Both can have value.

They are not necessarily the same thing.

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

The Social Instinct Changes Everything

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

The so means Social instinct comes first.

Again, that does not mean being a social butterfly.

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

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

Second-generation Pagans.

Third-generation Pagans.

Who keeps our history?

What happens when founders die?

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

What happens to traditions when nobody remembers why they existed?

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

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

These are not simply historical questions.

They are social questions.

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

And Self-Preservation Asks Whether It Can Survive

Then comes the secondary Self-Preservation instinct.

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

How are we actually going to keep this going?

Someone needs to maintain the land.

Someone needs to build the fire.

Someone needs to organize the gathering.

Someone needs to clean the toilets.

Someone needs to preserve the records.

Someone needs to teach the newcomer how something works.

Someone needs to make sure the bills are paid.

Someone needs to remember what happened twenty years ago.

Ritual may create sacred space.

But eventually someone also has to stack the chairs.

That is not separate from community.

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

Maybe That Is Why Legacy Keeps Appearing

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

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

I mean continuity.

What remains?

What survives?

What gets passed forward?

What disappears because nobody thought it was worth writing down?

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

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

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

That is a strange thought.

But perhaps it is an important one.

The Fire Keeper

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

The fire keeper.

The fire keeper does not necessarily own the fire.

They do not control everyone sitting around it.

They do not decide what everyone must believe.

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

Someone watches it.

Someone adds wood.

Someone notices when it is dying down.

Someone remembers how it was started.

Someone teaches the next person how to tend it.

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

Not authority.

Not ownership.

Stewardship.

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

There Is a Danger Here Too

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

If trust matters deeply, suspicion can become too easy.

If patterns matter, unrelated events can begin looking connected.

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

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

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

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

It is to find out what is true.

Sometimes those are the same thing.

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

That is not a failed rabbit hunt.

That is exactly what the hunt is supposed to do.

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

Maybe nothing.

Maybe everything.

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

But personality probably affects the questions we bring with us.

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

I want Paganism to mean something personally.

I want to understand where it came from.

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

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

I want us to build things capable of surviving us.

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

Perhaps that is why I keep chasing these particular rabbits.

Maybe I am not merely trying to understand Paganism.

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

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

That rabbit may keep me occupied for a while.

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

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

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

There Is a Difference Between Ancient Ancestors and Our Ancestors

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

We Are Creating Primary Sources Right Now

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

Our Fights Will Become Their Myths Unless We Explain Them

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

The Third Generation Will Not Be Impressed That We Were Pioneers

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

What Do I Want to Be Remembered For?

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

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

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

The Seven Rabbits Come Together Here

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

That May Be the Point

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

Keep the Fire. Leave the Rabbit Loose.

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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