A rabbit has emerged from the undergrowth between our look at The Heathen Underground and our return to Declaration 127. It is not another rabbit about folkism, Facebook or declarations. It is carrying a ring of old keys in its mouth and appears to be wondering who will open the doors when the person who built the house is no longer standing there.
The Heathen Underground began under Heather O’Brien. In 2017, responsibility for it passed to Nicole Butler, who publicly thanked Heather for trusting her with what she described as the torch. Declaration 127 followed a different path. It was created by a team, maintained by a committee and then left without an active home after that committee burned out and its website disappeared. In 2024, Rob Schreiwer transferred stewardship of Declaration 127 and its associated assets to The Troth.
These are separate projects with separate histories. Their leadership changes do not demonstrate shared ownership, coordination or some hidden organizational structure. What they share is a much more ordinary—and much more important—problem faced by nearly every volunteer Pagan undertaking.
How does the work continue after the people who began it can no longer carry it?
The Founder and the Work
Founders matter. Someone has to be the first person to strike the match, register the domain, create the group, write the declaration, rent the field, call the meeting or place the first stone. Without that first stubborn person, many of the things we later call community would never exist.
The difficulty begins when the founder and the work become indistinguishable. The project becomes known as one person’s group, one person’s festival, one person’s ritual or one person’s vision. Every decision returns to the same hands. Knowledge stays in one head. Passwords remain in one notebook. Other people may help, but they are never given enough knowledge or authority to continue without the founder.
That arrangement can survive for years. It may even look efficient because everyone knows who makes the decisions. Then the founder becomes tired, ill, overwhelmed, disillusioned or simply ready to walk another path. Suddenly the community discovers that it was not standing around a shared hearth. It was standing around someone else’s campfire.
When that person leaves, the flame goes with them.
This is not necessarily the result of selfishness. Founders often keep doing everything because no one else volunteers, because explaining a task takes longer than doing it, or because previous attempts to share responsibility ended badly. A person may carry something alone for so long that they stop noticing how much of its structure exists only inside their own memory.
Eventually, however, a community project must become larger than its founder if it is going to become an inheritance.
Legacy Begins Where Control Ends
We often confuse legacy with control. We imagine preserving someone’s legacy means freezing their creation at the moment they last touched it. Nothing may be moved, questioned, repaired or reinterpreted because “that is how the founder wanted it.” The founder’s name becomes a kind of permanent veto held over people who must live with circumstances the founder never encountered.
That is not legacy. That is embalming.
A living tradition cannot remain exactly as it was. New people arrive. Language changes. Problems emerge. Communities learn things that their founders did not know. A project that cannot respond to any of this may preserve its original shape, but it will do so in the manner of an abandoned building. The walls remain while the life inside them disappears.
Real legacy is what remains after control has been released. It is found in the people who learned how to carry the work, the records that allow its history to be remembered and the values strong enough to survive examination. It is also found in the freedom of later stewards to repair what no longer works.
The successor’s responsibility is not to impersonate the founder. It is to understand what was entrusted to them, preserve what remains valuable and make the changes necessary for the work to continue. That may mean taking it in directions the founder never imagined.
The original log does not remain forever in the hearth. It gives its heat to the next piece of wood.
When the Torch Is Passed
The Heathen Underground provides one version of succession. A founder trusted another person to take responsibility for an existing public project. The name continued, the audience remained and the work developed under different stewardship. Whatever private conversations or practical arrangements accompanied that transition are not ours to invent. What is visible is that there was a handoff and that the project continued afterward.
Declaration 127 shows the more difficult version. The declaration survived as an idea even when the structure maintaining it did not. Its committee burned out. Its website disappeared. The words continued to circulate, but there was no longer an active body maintaining the signatories, answering questions or deciding how the declaration should evolve.
That gap matters. A document may be copied indefinitely, but stewardship involves more than keeping a page online. Someone must maintain the archive, answer for changes, examine whether signatories still live by the principles they endorsed and decide what happens when the community outgrows the original wording.
The Troth accepted that responsibility in 2024. That does not make The Troth the owner of inclusive Heathenry or the final authority over every person who invokes Hávamál 127. It means the organization accepted responsibility for carrying one particular piece of modern Heathen history forward. The declaration gained a home, a visible steward and the possibility of continued development.
The important word here is not ownership. It is responsibility.
The Unseen Structure of Community
Pagan communities are often uncomfortable with structure. Many of us arrived here after leaving institutions that had too much authority, too many rules or too little room for individual experience. Informality can feel like freedom. We gather around a fire, share the work and tell ourselves that no one is really in charge.
Yet someone still owns the account. Someone controls the mailing list. Someone knows where the records are stored. Someone decides who may post, who receives a key, who handles the money and whose version of the story becomes the official memory.
Undefined authority does not disappear. It merely becomes harder to see and more difficult to challenge.
A project does not necessarily need a corporation, a board or a shelf full of bylaws. Its structure should fit its size and purpose. It does, however, need to know who is responsible for what and what happens if that person can no longer do it. Even a small group can keep shared records, provide more than one trusted person with access, document recurring tasks and teach others how the work is done.
That is not bureaucracy for its own sake. It is care for the people who would otherwise inherit confusion.
The Cost of Having No Successor
When no one has been prepared to continue the work, the burden often falls upon whoever happens to be standing closest when the founder leaves. That person receives the public expectations without the knowledge, resources or authority required to meet them. They may not know which bills must be paid, who owns the photographs, where agreements were stored or why certain decisions were made.
The community may then blame the successor for failing to reproduce work that previously depended upon years of invisible knowledge. Alternatively, the project may simply disappear. Its social-media page becomes quiet, its website expires and its history survives as fragments in search results and personal recollections.
This is where volunteer exhaustion becomes more than an administrative problem. It becomes an ethical one. If a community continually depends upon people sacrificing themselves to keep it alive, then it is consuming its caretakers as fuel.
We are usually very good at thanking the person tending the fire. We are less skilled at noticing when they have been standing there alone for twelve hours and no one has brought them water.
Preparing the Next Firekeeper
Succession begins long before someone announces that they are leaving. It begins when knowledge is shared instead of guarded. It begins when another person is allowed to perform the task imperfectly and learn from doing it. It begins when records are kept, decisions are explained and authority is made visible.
It also requires founders to accept that their successors will not do everything the same way. If every difference is treated as betrayal, then no successor can ever truly assume stewardship. They can only serve as a caretaker under the permanent shadow of someone who is no longer carrying the daily burden.
Successors have obligations as well. Taking responsibility for an existing project does not grant permission to erase the people who built it. Change should not require pretending that the earlier work never happened. The names, labour, mistakes and contributions of those who came before remain part of the story.
Healthy succession holds both truths at once: the founder deserves to be remembered, and the successor must be allowed to lead.
There should also be permission for an honourable ending. Not every project must survive forever. Sometimes the responsible choice is to preserve its records, explain why the work is ending and close the door carefully. An honest ending protects more memory than leaving an abandoned page to slowly disappear without explanation.
What Are We Actually Building?
This rabbit reaches beyond The Heathen Underground and Declaration 127. It reaches every Pagan gathering, archive, teaching circle, festival, grove, kindred, website and piece of community land. It reaches anything built by people who quietly assume there will always be someone available to carry it tomorrow.
If a project cannot continue without one particular person, then it has not yet become a community inheritance. It remains a personal undertaking supported by a community. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, provided everyone understands the distinction.
But if we say we are building something for the generations that follow, then we must build doors that other hands can open. We must leave maps, records, tools and room for those who come next to add something of their own.
Founding is an act of creation. Stewardship is an act of endurance. Succession is an act of trust.
The work outlives its founder when the founder is no longer required to stand at its centre, when the successor does not need to erase the founder to find their own place and when the community understands that responsibility belongs to more than the person currently holding the keys.
Somewhere beyond the gate, a new firekeeper is adding wood to a flame they did not start. They are not stealing the fire. They are fulfilling the reason it was lit.
There goes the rabbit again. Godspeed.
