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

“I don’t believe this.”

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

It Is Easy to Support Freedom When the Child Chooses Us

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

A Religion of Converts May Take Rejection Personally

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

Rebellion Is Part of Inheritance

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

Maybe Retention Is the Wrong Scoreboard

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

The Child Who Leaves May Teach the Tradition Something

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

And What If They Come Back?

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

I Know Something About Leaving and Returning

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

Love the Child More Than the Label

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

But There Is Another Kind of Leaving

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

Creativity Eventually Meets Administration

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

The Institution Is Not the Enemy

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

What Does the Second Generation Need from Institutions?

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

They can judge the structure by whether it works.

The Danger Is When Structure Starts Pretending to Be Truth

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

Maybe Pagan Institutions Need an Expiry Date on Authority

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

We Need Elders, but We Should Be Careful About Thrones

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

The Gate Should Open Both Ways

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

Because the Child May Leave

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

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

References

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

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

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

Can a tradition survive without a village?

Paganism Has Become Very Good at Being Solitary

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

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

You Can Practise Alone. Can You Inherit Alone?

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

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

A Community Gives Tradition Depth

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

But What Kind of Village?

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

Festival Is Not the Same as Village

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

The Digital Village Is Real, but It Is Different

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

The Village May Need to Be Smaller Than We Imagine

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

My Own Journey Keeps Coming Back to the Missing Village

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

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

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

What happens when the village we need begins building gates?

References

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

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

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

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.