Tag: life

The Work Must Outlive Its Founder

Hands pass firekeeping tools beside a communal woodland fire

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.

Sources and Further Reading

You Were There Too: Help Me Build a Pagan History

Group of adults gathered around a campfire at a forest campsite

I’ve been chasing another rabbit, although I suspect this one has been following me around for quite some time and I simply hadn’t noticed it.

We’ve been talking about legacy, memory, and what it means to have participated in something even when your name isn’t necessarily attached to it forever. In the last rabbit, I went back to some of my happier memories of Raven’s Knoll: helping create the Vé, working on the Shrine Trail, putting in bridges, digging the firepit, tending fires, and simply being one of the many hands that helped build something.

That brought me to another realization: maybe legacy isn’t being remembered. Maybe legacy is having participated.

But there is another part to that. Someone has to record it. Otherwise, eventually, all those little stories disappear.

Some People Already Tried to Do This

There are two books connected with Raven’s Knoll that tried to preserve exactly this sort of history, and if you’re interested in the history of the place or the communities that gathered there, they’re worth knowing about.

The first is Rites of Raven’s Knoll. It brings together essays, poetry, rituals, songs, recollections, and experiences from people connected with Raven’s Knoll. What makes a book like this valuable isn’t simply that it tells us what Raven’s Knoll was. It allows people who were actually there to tell us what the place and the community meant to them.

You can find it here:
Rites of Raven’s Knoll – Amazon Canada

The second book is Bragafull, published in connection with the Hail and Horn Gathering community. The title itself refers to the “best-cup” or “Bragi’s-cup,” which is wonderfully appropriate for a book built around remembrance, story, Heathen experience, and the voices of the people who gathered together.

Bragafull commemorates the Hail and Horn Gathering through stories, poems, art, retellings, ritual material, and recollections from the people who participated in that community.

And somewhere inside Bragafull is one of my own stories: my recollection of the creation of the Vé.

You can find Bragafull here:
Bragafull – Amazon Canada

Looking at those books now, years later, I understand their importance differently than I probably did when they were created. Somebody stopped and said, in effect, these stories are worth recording.

I think they were right.

Most Pagan History Doesn’t Happen in Books

Here’s the problem with Pagan history: most of it doesn’t happen in books.

It happens around fires. It happens in campsites. It happens while somebody is helping someone else put up a tent in the rain. It happens in somebody’s living room with six people sitting in a circle wondering whether they’re doing the ritual correctly. It happens at festivals, moots, covens, groves, kindreds, temples, kitchen tables, workshops, drum circles, potlucks, online groups, and tiny gatherings that may never appear in any official historical record.

It happens when somebody attends their first Pagan gathering and suddenly realizes, Oh. There are other people like me.

It happens when an older Pagan teaches a younger Pagan something without even realizing they’re teaching them. It happens when somebody builds a shrine, keeps a fire, writes a ritual, sings a song nobody thought to record, or tells a story at three o’clock in the morning that everybody around the fire remembers for twenty years before suddenly realizing nobody can remember who originally told it.

That’s history too.

And a great deal of it disappears.

The famous people usually survive history. Organizations leave paperwork. Authors leave books. Festivals leave programs. Websites sometimes survive in archives. But ordinary Pagans disappear surprisingly easily.

The person who hauled the lumber. The person who cooked breakfast for fifty people. The person who quietly tended the shrine every morning. The person who welcomed the terrified newcomer and said, “Come sit with us.” The firekeeper. The bridge builder. The volunteer who showed up every year without ever needing their name on anything.

Without those people, there wouldn’t have been much of a community to write a history about in the first place.

So Tell Me Your Story

Maybe we need to start recording some of this.

Not just Raven’s Knoll. Not just Kaleidoscope. Not just Hail and Horn. Not just Ontario. Not just Canada.

Pagan community.

Your Pagan community, wherever that happened to be.

I want to hear your stories.

Maybe you were there in the early days of a festival. Maybe you belonged to a coven that hasn’t existed for thirty years. Maybe there was a Pagan shop that became the centre of your little community. Maybe your first experience was five people sitting around someone’s kitchen table. Maybe you remember your first ritual, your first bonfire, your first Pagan Pride Day, your first moot, your first blót, or the first time you stood in a circle and realized the strange spiritual road you had been walking alone wasn’t quite as lonely as you thought.

Maybe you have a funny story.

Actually, please send me the funny stories.

History has enough solemn people standing around looking important. I want the ritual that went completely sideways, the tent that collapsed, the raccoon that stole dinner, the person who forgot their lines, the storm that arrived halfway through the ceremony, and the night somebody said something so absurd around the fire that decades later your entire group can still make one another laugh simply by repeating three words.

I want the beautiful memories too: the ritual that worked, the friendship that lasted, the teacher you never forgot, the place that felt like home, or the moment something clicked and you realized that this strange collection of beliefs, practices, gods, spirits, ancestors, stories, people, trees, fires, drums, and rabbit holes had somehow become part of who you were.

And yes, there can be difficult memories. Pagan community has never been perfect because people aren’t perfect, communities aren’t perfect, and memory certainly isn’t perfect. I’m not interested in manufacturing some imaginary golden age where everybody loved everybody else and we all danced happily around bonfires while woodland creatures applauded.

That never existed.

But neither should our failures become the only things we preserve.

There was joy. There was discovery. There was friendship. There was ridiculousness. There was belonging. There were moments when something extraordinary happened among very ordinary people.

Those deserve remembering too.

Chasing Rabbits: A Pagan Journey

Which brings me to another project I’ve been working on: a book with the working title Chasing Rabbits: A Pagan Journey.

Originally, I thought that journey was mostly mine.

I’m beginning to wonder whether that’s entirely true.

My journey crossed other people’s journeys. Their stories influenced mine. People taught me things. Places shaped me. Communities shaped me. People I barely remember may have said something decades ago that quietly changed the direction of my life.

That’s how communities work.

So perhaps Chasing Rabbits needs some other voices wandering through the warren.

If you have a Pagan memory you think deserves to survive, I’d like to hear it. It does not have to involve Raven’s Knoll. It doesn’t have to involve anybody famous. It doesn’t have to be something you think historians would consider important.

Actually, don’t worry about deciding whether it’s historically important.

Tell the story. Let history decide that later.

Tell me roughly when it happened. Tell me where, if you’re comfortable doing so. Tell me what happened and what you remember. Most importantly, tell me why you still remember it, because that’s usually where the interesting part lives.

For written submissions that may become part of the project, there will be a simple contributor agreement. You will retain ownership of your own writing while granting permission for material that is accepted to be edited and published as part of the project. Nobody is being asked to surrender ownership of their own history simply because they choose to share it.

I’m not promising that everything submitted will necessarily appear in Chasing Rabbits. There are privacy considerations, permissions, editing, space, and about a thousand other practical rabbits hiding down that particular hole. Some stories might inspire future Unplugged Pagan pieces. Some may fit the book. Maybe eventually enough material develops for something else entirely.

I don’t know.

That’s the wonderful thing about rabbits.

You don’t always know where they’re going when you start following them.

You Were There Too

What I do know is that Pagan history shouldn’t consist entirely of the people whose names ended up on book covers.

A community is the sum of the people who showed up: the people who built things, worshipped, argued, laughed, cooked, sang, taught, learned, tended fires, cleaned up afterward, came for one weekend and disappeared again, or kept returning for decades.

You were there too.

And maybe somebody fifty years from now should know that.

Rites of Raven’s Knoll and Bragafull already preserved pieces of one community’s story. I’m glad somebody thought to do it.

Maybe it’s time we preserved a few more.

So tell me your story.

Let’s leave them something to find.

Let’s build a history book.

I Was There When We Built It

Group building a decorated wooden structure among trees in a forest

I’ve spent a lot of time lately chasing rabbits through Pagan history, memory, legacy, and the strange ways communities remember themselves. Somewhere along the way I realized that I have been looking so hard at what has been lost, forgotten, or changed that I have sometimes forgotten to look at what was simply good.

And there was a great deal that was good.

So I want to go back to one of those memories. Not to settle an argument. Not to correct anybody’s version of history. Not to stake a claim to anything. Just because I was there, and I am finally beginning to remember how happy I was to be there.

One of my earliest real experiences of participating in something larger than myself in the Pagan community was the creation of the Vé at Raven’s Knoll.

At the time I don’t think I understood what we were doing. I certainly didn’t understand what it would eventually mean to me.

The idea of creating a Heathen sacred space had been developing for some time. Eventually a clearing was discovered beyond what was then a much less developed part of the property. An old logging route provided part of the way in, and a deer trail entered the clearing from another direction. That deer trail would eventually become part of what we came to know as the Shrine Trail.

When the time came to actually build the Vé, I did what I tended to do around the Knoll in those days.

I worked.

Duchess, the old Massey Ferguson tractor, came along for the adventure. I hooked up the post-hole digger and took her back there to dig the holes that had been marked for the poles. Later the poles themselves had to be carried into the clearing by hand.

That is one of those wonderfully ordinary details that memory keeps. Sacred space sounds terribly grand when you say it years later. In reality, sacred space sometimes begins with a tractor, sweat, dirt, somebody carrying something heavy through the woods, and somebody else wondering whether the damned hole is deep enough.

Then something changes.

The poles went into the earth.

Offerings were placed before them. I remember tobacco. I seem to remember mead. Words were spoken over the poles as they were placed.

“Thunor Wéoh.”

Hallow this.

Make this holy.

I was still relatively new to Heathenry. I don’t think I fully understood the ritual language, much less the significance of what was happening around me. I wasn’t standing there thinking about history. I wasn’t thinking about legacy. I wasn’t wondering whether somebody might write about that place someday.

I was just there.

Helping.

And somehow that afternoon became one of the anchors of my Pagan journey.

The funny thing is that sacred places don’t appear fully formed.

They grow.

Someone clears a path. Someone carries a board. Someone digs a hole. Someone puts a bridge across a wet patch because spring comes and suddenly the trail that was perfectly usable in August has turned into something better suited to ducks.

Someone thinks about the person who might not be able to simply jump across the mud and asks how we can make the trail accessible to them too.

The Shrine Trail grew out of an old deer trail through the woods. It was widened and developed so humans could travel it, including people using wheelchairs. Small bridges crossed the troublesome places. A resting area gave people somewhere to simply sit halfway through the forest.

I remember being part of that work too.

And those bridges matter to me now in a way I probably couldn’t have understood then.

They weren’t monuments.

They were useful.

They allowed someone to get from here to there.

Maybe that’s one of the better definitions of community work I’ve stumbled across during all these rabbits: build something that allows the next person to get farther than they could have without you.

Around that same period, other parts of what would become the familiar landscape of the Knoll were taking shape.

The firepit. The Cauldron. The swimming areas. The trails.

The places where people would eventually dance, drum, swim, worship, laugh, argue, fall in love, mourn people they had lost, and sit around fires until ridiculous hours of the morning solving absolutely none of the world’s problems while being completely convinced that we had.

I remember digging that firepit.

I remember tending those fires.

Gods, do I remember tending those fires.

Many, many, many hours.

Firekeeping became one of the things I was known for there. Most of the time I wasn’t particularly concerned about whether I was officially staff or unofficially staff. There was a fire that needed tending, so I tended it.

Feed it. Watch it. Move things around. Make sure it doesn’t get out of hand. Keep it alive.

There is something wonderfully Pagan about that now that I think about it.

Nobody needs to appoint you Keeper of the Sacred Flaming Thing.

Sometimes there’s a fire.

And somebody has to keep it.

For a very brief period I eventually did carry an official staff role, but the title isn’t really the memory.

The fire is.

The people around it are.

The laughter is.

The drums are.

Looking back at photographs and old writing about Raven’s Knoll, something else strikes me. Those places eventually became landmarks. People came to know the Vé, the Shrine Trail, the Cauldron, and the firepit without necessarily knowing who had moved dirt, carried lumber, dug holes, cleared brush, or spent an afternoon sweating behind a tractor years before.

And that’s okay.

Actually, I think I’m becoming increasingly okay with that.

Legacy isn’t necessarily having your name attached to something.

Legacy can simply mean you were one of the hands.

That realization matters to me because my memories of Raven’s Knoll have become complicated over the last few years. There has been sadness there. Anger. Disappointment. Things I wish had happened differently. Things I still struggle to understand.

For a while those later emotions became so loud that they drowned out what came before them.

That’s unfortunate.

Because they weren’t the whole story.

Not remotely.

There were beautiful days there. There were ridiculous days there. There were exhausting days when everyone smelled like smoke, bug spray, and whatever questionable thing somebody had been cooking over a fire.

There were nights when the drums carried through the trees.

There were mornings when everything was quiet again.

There were winter trips into the Vé on snowshoes when the only regular congregation seemed to be the deer who had decided our sacred space made an excellent bedroom.

There was dirt under my fingernails.

There was smoke in my clothing.

There were friends.

There was community.

And there was that afternoon when some poles were carried into a clearing and put into holes in the ground.

I didn’t know it then, but I was participating in the creation of something that would outlast that afternoon and become spiritually significant to people I had never met.

That is pretty damned cool.

And here’s the part about legacy I think I’m finally understanding.

Nobody can give that experience back to me because nobody took it away.

Someone can forget that I was there. A history can someday omit my name. People who arrive later can walk across a bridge without ever wondering who helped put it there. Someone can stand in the Vé without knowing anything about the guy who once drove an old Massey Ferguson into the woods with a post-hole digger.

That’s how places work.

But forgetting something does not make it unhappen.

Those holes were dug.

Those poles were carried.

Those offerings were made.

Those words were spoken.

Those bridges were built.

Those fires burned.

And I was there.

I don’t need my name carved into anything to know that.

Maybe that’s the kind of legacy worth having.

Not ownership.

Not recognition.

Participation.

For a little while, in one little patch of forest in the Ottawa Valley, a bunch of Pagans decided to build something together.

And I got to be one of the hands.

When I strip away everything that happened afterward and allow myself to remember that moment for what it actually was, I discover something I haven’t talked nearly enough about while chasing all these rabbits.

Joy.

I was happy there.

I was proud of what we were building.

I was excited to see what it might become.

And regardless of where everyone’s roads eventually led, I think those memories deserve to be remembered that way.

Not every ghost needs exorcising.

Some of them just need to be invited back to the fire.

I’ve spent a lot of time lately chasing rabbits through Pagan history, memory, legacy, and the strange ways communities remember themselves. Somewhere along the way I realized that I have been looking so hard at what has been lost, forgotten, or changed that I have sometimes forgotten to look at what was simply good.

And there was a great deal that was good.

So I want to go back to one of those memories. Not to settle an argument. Not to correct anybody’s version of history. Not to stake a claim to anything. Just because I was there, and I am finally beginning to remember how happy I was to be there.

One of my earliest real experiences of participating in something larger than myself in the Pagan community was the creation of the Vé at Raven’s Knoll.

At the time I don’t think I understood what we were doing. I certainly didn’t understand what it would eventually mean to me.

The idea of creating a Heathen sacred space had been developing for some time. Eventually a clearing was discovered beyond what was then a much less developed part of the property. An old logging route provided part of the way in, and a deer trail entered the clearing from another direction. That deer trail would eventually become part of what we came to know as the Shrine Trail.

When the time came to actually build the Vé, I did what I tended to do around the Knoll in those days.

I worked.

Duchess, the old Massey Ferguson tractor, came along for the adventure. I hooked up the post-hole digger and took her back there to dig the holes that had been marked for the poles. Later the poles themselves had to be carried into the clearing by hand.

That is one of those wonderfully ordinary details that memory keeps. Sacred space sounds terribly grand when you say it years later. In reality, sacred space sometimes begins with a tractor, sweat, dirt, somebody carrying something heavy through the woods, and somebody else wondering whether the damned hole is deep enough.

Then something changes.

The poles went into the earth.

Offerings were placed before them. I remember tobacco. I seem to remember mead. Words were spoken over the poles as they were placed.

“Thunor Wéoh.”

Hallow this.

Make this holy.

I was still relatively new to Heathenry. I don’t think I fully understood the ritual language, much less the significance of what was happening around me. I wasn’t standing there thinking about history. I wasn’t thinking about legacy. I wasn’t wondering whether somebody might write about that place someday.

I was just there.

Helping.

And somehow that afternoon became one of the anchors of my Pagan journey.

The funny thing is that sacred places don’t appear fully formed.

They grow.

Someone clears a path. Someone carries a board. Someone digs a hole. Someone puts a bridge across a wet patch because spring comes and suddenly the trail that was perfectly usable in August has turned into something better suited to ducks.

Someone thinks about the person who might not be able to simply jump across the mud and asks how we can make the trail accessible to them too.

The Shrine Trail grew out of an old deer trail through the woods. It was widened and developed so humans could travel it, including people using wheelchairs. Small bridges crossed the troublesome places. A resting area gave people somewhere to simply sit halfway through the forest.

I remember being part of that work too.

And those bridges matter to me now in a way I probably couldn’t have understood then.

They weren’t monuments.

They were useful.

They allowed someone to get from here to there.

Maybe that’s one of the better definitions of community work I’ve stumbled across during all these rabbits: build something that allows the next person to get farther than they could have without you.

Around that same period, other parts of what would become the familiar landscape of the Knoll were taking shape.

The firepit. The Cauldron. The swimming areas. The trails.

The places where people would eventually dance, drum, swim, worship, laugh, argue, fall in love, mourn people they had lost, and sit around fires until ridiculous hours of the morning solving absolutely none of the world’s problems while being completely convinced that we had.

I remember digging that firepit.

I remember tending those fires.

Gods, do I remember tending those fires.

Many, many, many hours.

Firekeeping became one of the things I was known for there. Most of the time I wasn’t particularly concerned about whether I was officially staff or unofficially staff. There was a fire that needed tending, so I tended it.

Feed it. Watch it. Move things around. Make sure it doesn’t get out of hand. Keep it alive.

There is something wonderfully Pagan about that now that I think about it.

Nobody needs to appoint you Keeper of the Sacred Flaming Thing.

Sometimes there’s a fire.

And somebody has to keep it.

For a very brief period I eventually did carry an official staff role, but the title isn’t really the memory.

The fire is.

The people around it are.

The laughter is.

The drums are.

Looking back at photographs and old writing about Raven’s Knoll, something else strikes me. Those places eventually became landmarks. People came to know the Vé, the Shrine Trail, the Cauldron, and the firepit without necessarily knowing who had moved dirt, carried lumber, dug holes, cleared brush, or spent an afternoon sweating behind a tractor years before.

And that’s okay.

Actually, I think I’m becoming increasingly okay with that.

Legacy isn’t necessarily having your name attached to something.

Legacy can simply mean you were one of the hands.

That realization matters to me because my memories of Raven’s Knoll have become complicated over the last few years. There has been sadness there. Anger. Disappointment. Things I wish had happened differently. Things I still struggle to understand.

For a while those later emotions became so loud that they drowned out what came before them.

That’s unfortunate.

Because they weren’t the whole story.

Not remotely.

There were beautiful days there. There were ridiculous days there. There were exhausting days when everyone smelled like smoke, bug spray, and whatever questionable thing somebody had been cooking over a fire.

There were nights when the drums carried through the trees.

There were mornings when everything was quiet again.

There were winter trips into the Vé on snowshoes when the only regular congregation seemed to be the deer who had decided our sacred space made an excellent bedroom.

There was dirt under my fingernails.

There was smoke in my clothing.

There were friends.

There was community.

And there was that afternoon when some poles were carried into a clearing and put into holes in the ground.

I didn’t know it then, but I was participating in the creation of something that would outlast that afternoon and become spiritually significant to people I had never met.

That is pretty damned cool.

And here’s the part about legacy I think I’m finally understanding.

Nobody can give that experience back to me because nobody took it away.

Someone can forget that I was there. A history can someday omit my name. People who arrive later can walk across a bridge without ever wondering who helped put it there. Someone can stand in the Vé without knowing anything about the guy who once drove an old Massey Ferguson into the woods with a post-hole digger.

That’s how places work.

But forgetting something does not make it unhappen.

Those holes were dug.

Those poles were carried.

Those offerings were made.

Those words were spoken.

Those bridges were built.

Those fires burned.

And I was there.

I don’t need my name carved into anything to know that.

Maybe that’s the kind of legacy worth having.

Not ownership.

Not recognition.

Participation.

For a little while, in one little patch of forest in the Ottawa Valley, a bunch of Pagans decided to build something together.

And I got to be one of the hands.

When I strip away everything that happened afterward and allow myself to remember that moment for what it actually was, I discover something I haven’t talked nearly enough about while chasing all these rabbits.

Joy.

I was happy there.

I was proud of what we were building.

I was excited to see what it might become.

And regardless of where everyone’s roads eventually led, I think those memories deserve to be remembered that way.

Not every ghost needs exorcising.

Some of them just need to be invited back to the fire.

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.

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?

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.

What Kind of Ancestors Are We Becoming?

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

At some point, every rabbit warren needs an exit.

Not because there are no more tunnels.

There are always more tunnels.

Another question.

Another book.

Another scholar.

Another old festival program.

Another half-forgotten ritual.

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

We could probably chase rabbits forever.

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

That question led us somewhere much larger than I expected.

Relationship.

Responsibility.

Ethics.

Broken relationship.

Frith.

Repair.

Sacredness.

Ownership.

Stewardship.

Legacy.

And eventually we arrived here.

What kind of ancestors are we becoming?

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

We Usually Imagine Ancestors Behind Us

When we speak about ancestors, we usually look backward.

Parents.

Grandparents.

Great-grandparents.

People whose names survive in family records.

People whose names have been lost.

People connected to places.

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

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

There can be ancestors of affinity.

Ancestors of place.

People whose lives shaped paths that others later walked.

Once we accept that possibility, something interesting happens.

We stop being merely descendants.

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

We are future ancestors.

Maybe not biologically.

Maybe nobody will ever pour a drink in our name.

Maybe nobody will remember us personally at all.

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

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

We Are Building Somebody Else’s Past

That thought has been following me around since yesterday.

We are building somebody else’s past right now.

The things we consider ordinary will someday be history.

The festivals happening now will become old festivals.

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

The websites will disappear.

The photos will age.

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

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

Surely someone wrote this down.

Maybe we did.

Maybe we didn’t.

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

Future Pagans Will Inherit More Than Rituals

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

Which rituals survive?

Which books remain in print?

Which festivals continue?

Which sacred places are preserved?

Those things matter.

But future Pagans will inherit much more than ceremonies.

They will inherit our habits.

Our assumptions.

Our language.

Our organizational structures.

Our conflicts.

Our unresolved wounds.

Our approaches to leadership.

Our attitudes toward land.

Our relationship with history.

Our ideas about who belongs.

Our ideas about who gets to speak.

Our ways of dealing with disagreement.

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

Those things become tradition too.

Sometimes without anyone consciously choosing them.

A Tradition Can Inherit a Wound

Families know this.

A hurt happens.

Nobody talks about it.

Years pass.

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

People learn not to mention certain things.

They learn who may be challenged and who may not.

They learn which emotions are permitted.

They learn which family member gets blamed.

Eventually nobody remembers exactly how the pattern started.

They simply call it normal.

Communities can do the same thing.

A conflict happens.

A person leaves.

A leader is never questioned.

A complaint is quietly buried to protect the group.

A bad decision becomes custom.

A temporary rule becomes tradition.

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

That is legacy too.

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

Not Everything Old Deserves Reverence

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

Ancient.

Old ways.

Traditional.

Passed down.

Ancestor wisdom.

Those words carry weight.

Sometimes deservedly.

But age is evidence of survival.

It is not proof of goodness.

Some old things are wise.

Some old things are simply old.

Some survived because they served people well.

Others survived because nobody had enough power to challenge them.

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

They made mistakes.

So will we.

The question is what we do once we recognize them.

Maybe a Good Ancestor Leaves Fewer Burdens

We often imagine legacy as something added.

Build something.

Create something.

Write something.

Start something.

Leave something behind.

But perhaps legacy can also be subtraction.

Remove something harmful.

Correct something false.

End a destructive pattern.

Repair damaged land.

Retire a ritual that no longer serves.

Stop using a story we know is historically untrue.

Build accountability into leadership where previously there was none.

Create boundaries that prevent old harms from becoming inherited customs.

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

Good.

Maybe that is exactly the point.

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

The Best Ancestors May Be the Ones Nobody Knows

Somebody planted the tree.

You sit beneath it.

You do not know their name.

Somebody built the road.

Somebody preserved the manuscript.

Somebody fought to save a piece of land.

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

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

Perhaps Pagan traditions are no different.

The person who organized the first gathering.

The volunteer who stored the archives.

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

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

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

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

Those people may never become celebrated ancestors.

But they shaped what somebody else inherited.

Maybe ancestorhood is not about being remembered.

Maybe it is about having mattered.

What Would We Want From Our Ancestors?

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

I wish they had written more down.

I wish they had labelled the photographs.

I wish they had recorded why certain decisions were made.

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

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

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

I wish conflicts had more than one surviving account.

I wish people had documented why communities changed.

I wish they had admitted mistakes more often.

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

Those wishes tell us something.

Future people may wish the same things of us.

This Is Why Scholarship Matters Again

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

There is a reason.

They preserved voices.

They observed communities.

They recorded rituals.

They examined identity.

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

They did not merely interpret Paganism.

They preserved parts of it.

That distinction may become more important with time.

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

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

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

Scholarship becomes memory.

Memory becomes inheritance.

Inheritance becomes legacy.

We Also Need Ordinary Voices

But scholarship cannot carry everything.

Scholars ask particular questions.

Archives preserve particular things.

Institutions make choices about what deserves attention.

That leaves enormous pieces of lived religion undocumented.

What did the fire smell like?

Who always arrived late?

Which ritual made everybody laugh because something went completely wrong?

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

Who made coffee every morning?

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

What happened after the official ritual ended?

What did ordinary people actually believe?

Those things matter too.

Perhaps journals matter.

Blogs matter.

Photographs matter.

Festival programs matter.

Personal recollections matter.

Old newsletters matter.

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

We are making sources whether we realize it or not.

But We Should Leave Honest Sources

That brings us back to truth.

Future generations deserve more than propaganda.

They do not need us to make ourselves look perfect.

They need enough honesty to understand us.

Tell them what worked.

Tell them what failed.

Tell them why the community split.

Tell them why the ritual changed.

Tell them where the story came from.

Tell them when nobody really knows.

Tell them when memory conflicts.

Leave room for uncertainty.

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

What Are We Teaching Without Realizing It?

Future generations will not inherit only our records.

They will inherit our example.

What does leadership look like?

Do leaders explain decisions?

Can leaders be challenged?

What happens when somebody makes a mistake?

What happens when someone is harmed?

Does community protect reputation or people?

Do elders mentor successors or guard territory?

Do scholars get respected when their findings challenge cherished stories?

Do newcomers get treated as future contributors or permanent outsiders?

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

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

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

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

Someone is watching.

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

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

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

We are going to get things wrong.

That is not pessimism.

It is arithmetic.

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

The dangerous community is not the one that makes mistakes.

It is the one that cannot admit them.

Imagine leaving future Pagans a tradition in which saying:

I was wrong.

We misunderstood this.

New evidence changed what we know.

This practice caused harm.

We need to do this differently.

is considered evidence of maturity rather than weakness.

That might be a legacy worth leaving.

We Should Leave Them Questions Too

Maybe we should resist giving future Pagans all our answers.

Answers become brittle.

Questions travel remarkably well.

What do I owe because I am connected?

What relationships does this practice create?

Who benefits?

Who carries the cost?

What are we preserving?

Why?

What are we changing?

Why?

What did we receive?

What are we handing forward?

Who has power here?

What responsibilities come with it?

What are we calling sacred?

Does our conduct show that we actually believe it?

Those questions could survive many different Pagan traditions.

They do not require everyone to share theology.

They require attention.

Maybe This Is the Common Thread After All

We have wandered a long way from where we began.

Or perhaps we have finally come back to it.

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

We found relationship.

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

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

Relationship is not merely connection.

It is responsibility.

Relationship creates memory.

Relationship can create sacredness.

Relationship can be broken.

Broken relationship creates questions of accountability and repair.

Sacred relationship creates questions of stewardship.

Stewardship extended through time becomes legacy.

And legacy eventually turns us into ancestors.

It is one long thread.

Maybe Paganism becomes visible in how we tend it.

We Are Not the End of the Story

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

We are not the culmination of Paganism.

We are not the generation that finally gets everything right.

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

We are somewhere in the middle.

People came before us.

People will come after.

We inherited fragments.

We reconstructed some things.

We invented others.

We revived.

We misunderstood.

We researched.

We argued.

We built.

We broke things.

Sometimes we repaired them.

And eventually all of it passes onward.

That is humbling.

It should be.

The Firekeeper Has One Final Job

We have used the firekeeper throughout this series.

It seems right to end there.

The firekeeper tends the flame.

Protects it.

Feeds it.

Keeps it from escaping.

Makes sure people are warm.

Teaches others how to tend it.

And then eventually there is one final responsibility.

Move aside.

Let someone else take the chair.

That may be the hardest act of stewardship.

To accept that the fire will burn without us.

That people will tell different stories beside it.

That someone will arrange the wood differently.

Someone may move the stones.

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

Someone may find a better way.

That does not erase what we did.

It completes it.

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

So What Kind of Ancestors Are We Becoming?

I do not know.

We probably cannot know.

Future generations will answer that for themselves.

They will decide what we preserved well.

What we misunderstood.

What we should have changed sooner.

What we should never have abandoned.

They will have the benefit of hindsight.

We do not.

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

Honest history.

Living traditions.

Healthy questions.

Sacred places treated with care.

Communities capable of accountability.

Leadership understood as service.

Enough humility to admit uncertainty.

Enough courage to end harmful inheritances.

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

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

The Rabbit Warren Ends Here

At least this one does.

We started with six scholars.

We ended with ancestors who have not been born yet.

That seems about right for a rabbit hole.

Rabinovitch.

Bowman.

Charbonneau.

Lepage.

Graham McKay.

Davy.

Different people mapping different parts of the forest.

Their work gave us places to stand.

From there we followed the paths a little farther.

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

Perhaps it was a question of posture.

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

Do we possess?

Or tend?

Do we consume?

Or reciprocate?

Do we preserve everything?

Or learn what should continue?

Do we demand harmony?

Or practice accountability?

Do we inherit blindly?

Or inherit consciously?

Do we build monuments to ourselves?

Or plant trees beneath which somebody else may someday sit?

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

Maybe asking them seriously is part of the practice.

For a little while, we have the fire.

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

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

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

Then the chair belongs to someone else.

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

Leave some wood.

Leave some truth.

Leave some room.

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

That will do.

Godspeed.

Scholarly Trail Markers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Will Remain When We Are Gone?

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

Yesterday we finally climbed out of the rabbit warren.

Or at least we pretended to.

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

And somewhere near the end, another question appeared.

What will remain when we are gone?

That is the rabbit called legacy.

It is a strange word.

Legacy sounds grand.

Monuments.

Books.

Institutions.

Names carved into stone.

Things people say about us after we are dead.

But I suspect most legacies are much quieter than that.

A path someone still walks.

A tree someone else sits beneath.

A story repeated around a fire.

A ritual whose creator nobody remembers anymore.

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

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

A wound somebody finally decided not to pass forward.

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

The Firekeeper Eventually Leaves the Fire

We ended yesterday with the image of the firekeeper.

Someone tends the fire.

Adds wood.

Protects the flame.

Watches for sparks.

Keeps people warm.

Then eventually that person leaves.

They have to.

No one tends a fire forever.

Someone else takes the chair.

Or the fire goes out.

And perhaps that is the moment stewardship becomes legacy.

What condition did we leave the fire in?

Did we leave dry wood nearby?

Did we teach anyone how to tend it?

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

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

Did we leave a healthy fire?

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

That question applies to considerably more than campfires.

Traditions Have Ancestors Too

We often talk about our ancestors.

Blood ancestors.

Ancestors of place.

Ancestors of spirit.

Ancestors of affinity.

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

But traditions have ancestors as well.

Someone taught the ritual.

Someone wrote the book.

Someone organized the gathering.

Someone kept an old newsletter.

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

Someone did research nobody else wanted to do.

Someone asked an inconvenient question.

Someone corrected a false history.

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

We inherit those things.

And inheritance creates responsibility.

There is that word again.

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

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

Inheritance Is Not Preservation in Amber

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

Keep everything exactly as it was.

Repeat the same ritual.

Use the same words.

Protect the same structure.

Never question the elders.

Never move the stones.

Never alter the story.

Otherwise tradition will be lost.

But living things do not survive by remaining unchanged.

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

Trees fall.

Seeds germinate.

Fire passes through.

Species move.

Water changes course.

Some things disappear.

Others arrive.

The forest remains the forest precisely because it changes.

Perhaps tradition works the same way.

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

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

Some Things Should End With Us

This may be the uncomfortable part of legacy.

Not everything we inherit deserves descendants.

We inherit wisdom.

We also inherit prejudice.

We inherit beautiful rituals.

We also inherit bad habits disguised as tradition.

We inherit community stories.

We also inherit old grudges.

We inherit teachings.

We also inherit misinformation.

We inherit structures built for circumstances that no longer exist.

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

Honouring our predecessors cannot mean repeating every mistake they made.

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

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

The prejudice stops here.

The lie stops here.

The abuse stops here.

The silence stops here.

The false history stops here.

The idea that leadership means unquestionable authority stops here.

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

Some traditions deserve descendants.

Some ghosts deserve rest.

But Who Decides?

Of course that immediately creates another problem.

Who decides what should continue?

The elders?

The young?

The scholar?

The priest?

The practitioner?

The founder?

The person who has been there longest?

The person asking the question nobody else wants asked?

Probably no single one of them.

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

We do not know what future Pagans will need.

We cannot.

They will live in circumstances we cannot completely imagine.

They will ask questions we have not thought to ask.

They will probably find some of our assumptions ridiculous.

Good.

We have done the same thing to generations before us.

Perhaps our responsibility is not to decide everything for them.

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

What Do We Leave Them?

That may be the real legacy question.

Not:

Will they remember my name?

But:

What will they have because we were here?

Will they inherit healthy land?

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

Will they know how those places became sacred?

Will anyone have written the history down?

Will photographs have names attached to them?

Will ritual texts explain where they came from?

Will reconstructed practices be labelled honestly as reconstruction?

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

Will the mistakes be documented as carefully as the victories?

Will someone know why a tradition changed?

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

Legacy is partly memory.

And memory requires work.

The Archivist Is a Kind of Firekeeper

We tend to romanticize the visible roles.

The priest.

The ritual leader.

The musician.

The person standing beside the sacred fire.

But there are quieter firekeepers.

The person who saves the old newsletters.

The one who labels photographs.

The one who writes down the names of the dead.

The one who records who built the shrine.

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

The scholar who interviews people before those memories disappear.

The community historian who keeps copies when websites vanish.

The practitioner who writes:

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

That work may not look particularly magical.

Neither does stacking firewood.

But the fire lasts longer because someone did it.

This Is Where Scholarship Becomes Legacy

Our entire rabbit warren began because people did that work.

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

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

Marisol Charbonneau documented a particular moment in Montreal Paganism.

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

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

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

That is not merely scholarship.

It becomes part of the historical record.

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

They will know more because someone bothered to observe carefully.

That is legacy.

Not necessarily being remembered.

Making remembering possible.

Community Memory Is Fragile

We tend to assume someone will remember.

Someone always knows.

Ask so-and-so.

They were there.

Until one day they aren’t.

A hard drive fails.

A website disappears.

A box of papers gets thrown away during a move.

A Facebook group vanishes.

The person who knew the story dies.

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

Then myths grow in the empty space.

Someone vaguely remembers.

Someone else’s memory disagrees.

The date shifts.

The founder becomes someone else.

A modern ritual ages fifty years in three retellings.

Eventually everybody is certain.

Nobody has evidence.

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

But if memory matters, somebody has to tend it.

Legacy Is Also Conduct

Documents are not the only things we leave behind.

We leave patterns.

A newcomer watches how elders behave.

A student watches how a teacher handles disagreement.

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

Communities watch what leaders do when someone reports harm.

People notice whether rules apply to everyone.

They notice whether apologies lead to change.

They notice whether service creates authority or authority creates entitlement.

Then those behaviours become normal.

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

Not what we taught.

What we demonstrated.

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

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

The next generation learns both.

Perhaps tradition is transmitted as much through imitation as instruction.

The Stories We Tell About Ourselves Matter

Legacy also becomes mythology.

Every community tells stories about itself.

How it began.

Who founded it.

What hardships were overcome.

Why certain rituals exist.

Why certain people left.

Why one tradition ended and another began.

Those stories create identity.

But stories simplify.

They turn messy history into clean narrative.

The founder becomes hero.

The conflict becomes misunderstanding.

The inconvenient person disappears.

The unsuccessful experiment is forgotten.

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

That is how memory becomes mythology.

Sometimes mythology gives a community strength.

Sometimes it hides things people need to understand.

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

Not saints.

Not villains.

People.

Our Ancestors Were Complicated; So Are We

We often wish our ancestors had left clearer records.

What exactly did they believe?

How did this ritual work?

What did this symbol mean?

Why did they make this offering?

What did ordinary people think?

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

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

Perhaps that is worth considering.

We are somebody’s ancestors too.

Maybe not biologically.

But culturally.

Spiritually.

Intellectually.

Practically.

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

They may stand before a shrine we built.

They may inherit a festival we created.

They may use language we normalized.

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

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

We will probably never know which.

Planting Trees We Will Never Sit Beneath

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

That may be one of the clearest images of legacy.

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

Build something you are willing to let other people inherit.

Teach someone who may eventually do it better than you.

Document something you will not personally benefit from preserving.

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

Give away knowledge.

Make room.

That last one may be difficult.

Make room.

Legacy eventually requires stepping aside.

A Good Ancestor Knows When to Become an Ancestor

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

The founder who must always remain the founder.

The elder who cannot allow younger voices to develop.

The teacher who needs students to remain students forever.

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

The firekeeper who never lets anyone else near the fire.

That may preserve authority.

It does not create legacy.

Legacy requires succession.

Someone else learns the ritual.

Someone else gets the keys.

Someone else edits the newsletter.

Someone else leads.

And eventually they change things.

Of course they do.

They are alive.

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

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

What Kind of Ancestor Are We Becoming?

That may be the question hiding inside legacy.

We usually think ancestorhood begins when someone dies.

Perhaps becoming an ancestor begins much earlier.

Every decision becomes part of what future people inherit.

Every tradition we normalize.

Every story we preserve.

Every lie we allow to remain convenient.

Every piece of land we tend or neglect.

Every boundary we establish.

Every person we teach.

Every wound we heal.

Every wound we hand forward.

We are building somebody else’s past right now.

That thought is both terrifying and strangely beautiful.

Legacy Is Not Immortality

There is another trap in all this.

Wanting legacy can become wanting immortality.

Remember my name.

Keep my ritual unchanged.

Protect my title.

Tell my version of the story.

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

But eventually every legacy escapes its creator.

Stories change.

Books are interpreted.

Traditions evolve.

Buildings are repurposed.

Organizations change direction.

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

Legacy is not control after death.

Quite the opposite.

Legacy begins when control ends.

What remains must stand without us.

Perhaps the Best Legacy Is Useful

Maybe that is enough.

Not famous.

Not permanent.

Useful.

A path that makes someone’s journey easier.

A record that answers a question.

A tradition with enough roots to survive change.

A community healthier because somebody confronted an unhealthy pattern.

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

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

An old story preserved honestly.

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

A fire ready for the next keeper.

What Will Remain?

So perhaps the legacy question is not really about death.

It is about stewardship stretched across time.

Yesterday we asked:

What did I receive?

How am I tending it?

What will remain when I am gone?

Today I think we can add another:

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

That may be too much to ask.

Maybe wisdom cannot be inherited.

Perhaps every generation has to earn its own.

But we can leave better material.

Better records.

Healthier soil.

More honest stories.

Fewer inherited lies.

Traditions sturdy enough to change without collapsing.

Communities that understand authority as responsibility.

Sacred places cared for rather than merely claimed.

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

That would not be a bad legacy.

The Fire Will Belong to Someone Else

Someday somebody else will sit where we sit.

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

They will wonder what we believed.

Why we did certain things.

Why we fought over others.

Why we preserved one tradition and let another disappear.

They will probably misunderstand us sometimes.

They will almost certainly criticize us.

They may thank us for things we barely noticed doing.

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

That is how generations work.

We cannot control their judgement.

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

And perhaps that is all legacy ever was.

The fire passes from hand to hand.

No keeper owns it forever.

We inherit flame from people we never met.

We keep it for a while.

We add our own wood.

Our own stories.

Our own mistakes.

Our own lessons.

Then eventually somebody else reaches for the poker.

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

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

Godspeed.

Scholarly Trail Markers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Keyboard Can Keep Time

Person with dual glowing silhouettes merging together

This is the third in a three part reflection on community, spiritual practice, identity, and what has changed.

At different points in my life, I have used different names to describe myself.

Kevin is the name connected to work, bills, legal documents, responsibilities, mistakes, survival, and the ordinary weight of being a person in the world.

Lugh Sulian became connected to writing, Pagan identity, spiritual exploration, history, fire, ritual, and the part of me that was looking for a language large enough to hold everything I carried.

For a time, those identities felt almost separate.

One belonged to the practical world.

The other belonged beside the fire.

When Lugh and Kevin Were Separate

In From Lugh to Kevin: My Evolving Identity Story, I looked back at why the name Lugh Sulian appeared in the first place.

Lugh began partly as privacy and partly as separation.

Kevin dealt with employers, paperwork, bills, contracts, responsibilities, and the machinery of ordinary life.

Lugh had space to read cards, honour the gods, tend fires, think symbolically, write spiritually, and move through Pagan spaces without bringing every part of my public identity into the room.

That separation once served a purpose.

Eventually, though, it stopped making sense to treat them as different men.

In Kevin and Lugh: Integration Without Performance, I described them as two doors into the same house.

That remains true.

The difference now is that the doors are usually open.

Two Sites, One Road

Standing on the Ledge and Unplugged Pagan may appear to be two different projects, but they increasingly tell the same story from different sides.

Standing on the Ledge asks how a person continues after life collapses.

Unplugged Pagan asks what remains sacred while that person is rebuilding.

One deals with tools, systems, psychology, work, exhaustion, money, habits, conflict, and recovery.

The other deals with meaning, ancestors, gods, land, honour, belonging, memory, and fire.

They meet in the same place.

They meet in the question of how to remain yourself when the structures you trusted have failed.

That connection is no longer something I need to hide or keep in separate compartments.

The practical and spiritual parts of my life need each other.

Ritual without practical action can become avoidance.

Practical action without meaning can become endless machinery.

The candle does not pay the bill, but it may steady the hand that opens it.

The tarot card does not make the decision, but it may expose the fear shaping it.

The prayer does not complete the work, but it may remind me why the work matters.

The spreadsheet does not create purpose, but it can protect the conditions in which purpose has room to live.

Letting the Record Stand

In earlier writing, conflict often occupied a great deal of space.

There were reasons for that.

Silence can protect harmful behaviour. Naming what happened can be necessary, particularly when others would prefer that the record disappear.

But I am learning that not every truth needs to be repeated forever in order to remain true.

Sometimes the record can stand.

Sometimes a boundary is more useful than another argument.

Sometimes the best answer to something destructive is to stop feeding it and build something that can live without it.

That does not mean becoming silent.

It means becoming more deliberate about when speaking adds something useful.

Am I bringing forward new evidence?

Am I explaining something more clearly?

Am I offering a tool another person can use?

Am I marking real change?

Or am I hoping that one more explanation will finally force the past to provide a different answer?

That distinction is not always comfortable.

It is necessary.

A New Creative Purpose

This is where my new creative purpose is emerging.

Writing is no longer only a way to describe what happened to me.

It is becoming a way to create something for the people who arrive later.

A person may find Unplugged Pagan because they have lost their spiritual community.

Someone may find Standing on the Ledge because they have lost a job, a relationship, financial stability, confidence, direction, or the life they expected to have.

They may not need me to have solved everything.

They may need evidence that someone can remain unfinished and still continue.

They may need a tool, a story, a question, or a few honest words that help them through one difficult night.

That changes the purpose of the writing.

The injury may explain why I began.

Service can explain why I continue.

A Different Kind of Gathering Place

I once found belonging through gatherings, shared spaces, festivals, drums, and fires.

Those things still have value.

I have not stopped believing in their power.

But a keyboard can also keep time.

A page can become a gathering place.

A reader I may never meet can still sit beside the same fire.

That does not replace physical community.

It does widen my understanding of where community can exist.

Community can form through recognition.

One person tells the truth about an experience, and someone elsewhere recognizes part of their own life in it.

For a moment, neither person is carrying the experience entirely alone.

That is not a festival.

It is not a grove.

It is not a formal ritual.

But it is still connection.

Kevin and Lugh Now

My identity is becoming less dependent on choosing between Kevin and Lugh.

They are not rivals.

Lugh gives language to things Kevin has lived.

Kevin gives weight and experience to the things Lugh writes.

The spiritual and practical selves are not separate people.

They are two ways of looking at the same road.

Kevin is not only the tired worker, the bill payer, or the person carrying legal and practical burdens.

Lugh is not only the firekeeper, Pagan voice, or spiritual figure standing dramatically beside the flame.

Kevin has fire in him.

Lugh still has to live in the real world.

Most days, both are doing both.

Movement Rather Than Erasure

I am still learning how to handle conflict without allowing it to consume all available space.

I am still learning the difference between speaking because something must be said and speaking because I am hoping the past will finally provide a different answer.

Progress rarely arrives as a clean break.

But I can see movement.

I am spending less time asking whether I still belong in places that changed without me.

I am spending more time asking what I can create with the life, knowledge, failures, skills, and stories that remain.

That is the direction now.

Not erasing the past.

Not living inside it.

Using it.

Turning memory into writing.

Turning writing into tools.

Turning tools into small points of light.

Turning those lights into something another person might follow when their own road becomes difficult.

Maybe that is what firekeeping looks like for me now.

Not guarding one sacred flame in one permanent place.

Carrying enough fire to light the next one.

Godspeed.

This concludes the three part series. The fire moved from community, through practice, and into creative purpose. The road continues from here.

Before Raven’s Knoll: The Early History of the Kaleidoscope Gathering, 1989–2009

Group of people in medieval costumes holding hands dancing around bonfire at outdoor festival

Before there was a Raven’s Knoll, a permanent village of tents, ritual spaces, workshops, merchants, musicians, and familiar faces, there was a small gathering on Gina Ellis’s land in Lanark County.

This history has been compiled with all publicly available material; no interviews were conducted in its creation process – Kevin/Lugh

It was called MiniFest.

The surviving historical record is incomplete. The official online collection of Kaleidoscope Gathering programs begins with the Raven’s Knoll period, while much of the earlier community history was shared through printed programs, newsletters, email lists, Yahoo Groups, private photographs, and oral storytelling. Many of those materials have disappeared from the publicly searchable internet.

What remains, however, is enough to reconstruct the major outline of how a small Lammas gathering became one of Canada’s most enduring Pagan festivals.

A Lammas Gathering on Gina Ellis’s Land

The strongest available evidence places the founding of the gathering in 1989.

The official 2011 Kaleidoscope Gathering program described the event as having begun 22 years earlier when Gina Ellis hosted what it called a “Lammas meeting of souls” on her own land. Counting back from 2011 places the first gathering in 1989. The 2011 event was also identified as the 22nd annual Kaleidoscope Gathering, reinforcing that date (Kaleidoscope Gathering, 2011).

View the 2011 Kaleidoscope Gathering program.

Martin Lepage’s doctoral research independently gives the same year. Lepage identifies Gina Ellis as the founder, states that the event was originally called Minifest, and places it on Gina’s former land near Perth, Ontario. Lepage also describes Ellis as a significant figure connecting the Pagan communities of Ottawa and Montreal and as the founder of the Silver Wheel coven (Lepage, 2017, pp. 31–34).

Read Martin Lepage’s doctoral dissertation.

A near-contemporary academic reference offers additional confirmation. Religious studies scholar Marion Bowman wrote that MiniFest was in its sixth year in 1995. Depending on whether the first gathering was counted as year one, that also places its beginning in approximately 1989 or 1990. When combined with the official anniversary count and Lepage’s research, 1989 is the best-supported founding date (Bowman, 2000).

Read Marion Bowman’s article.

The original site is usually described as being near Perth. Community histories locate it more specifically near McDonald’s Corners, southwest of Perth, on land associated with Gina Ellis and the Silver Wheel coven.

That land became known within the community as Witch Hollow and was used for coven activities, seasonal observances, initiations, women’s gatherings, a men’s gathering, Hecate’s Web events, and later the smaller InFest gathering (Seccaspina, 2016).

Read “The Witch Hollow of Lanark County”.

This matters because MiniFest did not begin as a commercial festival imposed upon a rented campground. It emerged from an existing spiritual community and a living ritual landscape. The earliest gathering was closely connected to the land, the coven, and the relationships already formed around them.

Why “MiniFest” Was an Accurate Name

Later descriptions consistently characterize the earliest gatherings as intimate and informal.

A history quoted by The Wild Hunt described Kaleidoscope’s development as beginning with something resembling a “kitchen party,” then expanding through a widening circle of friends before becoming a mobile or “roaming” gathering. A longtime attendee responding to the article remembered the earliest form as friends inviting more friends until the gathering became substantially larger (McKay, 2014).

Read The Wild Hunt’s history of Ontario Pagan festivals.

A publicly indexed recollection from an early attendee states that their first gathering was on Gina Ellis’s land in 1995 and that it was still being called MiniFest. Although personal memories cannot carry the same historical weight as dated programs or academic studies, this recollection is consistent with Bowman’s chronology and the documented location.

View the publicly available participant recollection.

MiniFest appears to have been less a miniature version of the later festival than a different kind of event. It was a small gathering rooted in personal relationships, shared ritual, and hospitality. Its identity grew from the people who attended rather than from a permanent venue, formal infrastructure, or public brand.

That intimacy did not survive unchanged because the gathering became far more successful than its original setting could accommodate.

The Gathering That Outgrew Its Home

Lepage reports that, a few years after MiniFest began, approximately 300 unexpected people arrived. The crowd was too large for the original site, forcing the gathering to find a larger location (Lepage, 2017, p. 32).

An entry concerning Gina Ellis in The Encyclopedia of Modern Witchcraft and Neo-Paganism supplies an important additional detail. It states that MiniFest had grown beyond the capacity of Ellis’s acreage and that its manager, Pamela Fletcher, renamed the event Kaleidoscope and moved it to larger camping accommodations (Rabinovitch, 2011, p. 92).

The precise year of the name change has not been established from a surviving dated program. The available evidence indicates that the gathering was still remembered as MiniFest in 1995, while later sources describe the renaming and relocation as part of its expansion during the 1990s.

It would therefore be misleading to assign a specific year without locating an original program, announcement, or organizational record.

What can be stated with reasonable confidence is that four developments were connected:

  1. MiniFest attracted more people than Gina’s land could safely or comfortably hold.
  2. Pamela Fletcher assumed a major management role.
  3. The event was renamed Kaleidoscope Gathering.
  4. It began moving among larger venues.

This was the beginning of the roaming period remembered in later KG histories.

Pamela Fletcher and the Development of Kaleidoscope

Pamela Fletcher, widely known within the community as Lady Pamilla, became one of the central figures in the gathering’s pre-Raven’s Knoll development.

The encyclopedia account associates her directly with the transition from MiniFest to Kaleidoscope and with the move away from Gina Ellis’s land. By July 2006, a public Toronto Pagan community announcement explicitly identified Pamela Fletcher as the director of Kaleidoscope Gathering. She had donated a weekend pass for the August 4–7, 2006 festival to a community fundraiser (Rabinovitch, 2011; Plutopsyche, 2006).

View the 2006 Toronto LiveJournal announcement.

The 2011 KG program states that Pamela had retired before the new Raven’s Knoll organizers assumed responsibility for the gathering. It describes 2011 as Maryanne Pearce and Austin Lawrence’s second year as organizers following Fletcher’s retirement, placing the organizational transition in 2010 (Kaleidoscope Gathering, 2011).

Pamela’s enduring influence is also preserved in the gathering’s stated educational principle. Official KG registration material continues to associate her with the motto:

“Everyone has something to learn and something to teach.”

The present organization identifies that idea as a fundamental principle of KG (Kaleidoscope Gathering, n.d.-a).

View the official KG registration page.

That principle helps explain how Kaleidoscope developed. It was not structured solely around recognized clergy, published authors, or professional presenters. Knowledge could move through the community horizontally.

People came as students, teachers, ritual participants, musicians, performers, merchants, volunteers, and storytellers, often occupying several of those roles during the same gathering.

A Gathering Between Ottawa, Eastern Ontario, and Montreal

Although the gathering began on Ontario land, it was never only a local Lanark County event.

Lepage describes Gina Ellis as one of the best-known figures in a Pagan community extending between Ottawa and Montreal. He later identifies Kaleidoscope as the Pagan festival most popular among Montreal Pagans and as one of the gatherings bringing together the greatest variety of Pagan traditions and individuals (Lepage, 2017, pp. 31–34).

Marisol Charbonneau chose the 2007 Kaleidoscope Gathering as a fieldwork location for her University of Ottawa research because the event was regularly attended by Montreal Pagans. She used the gathering to meet people who were not participating in the Montreal Pagan community’s electronic discussion lists.

This shows how KG functioned as a physical meeting place for networks that otherwise communicated through stores, brunches, newsletters, and early online forums (Charbonneau, 2008, pp. 5–6).

Read Charbonneau’s research.

This cross-regional character helps explain the diversity that became one of KG’s defining features. It brought together English-speaking and French-speaking participants, coven-based Wiccans, solitary practitioners, ceremonial magicians, Druids, Heathens, Goddess worshippers, queer Pagan communities, musicians, and people who did not fit comfortably within a single formal tradition.

A study of diversity in Canadian Paganism records that one of the principal events at the 2006 Kaleidoscope Gathering was a Vodoun ritual. The same source identifies that year’s program theme as “Myths and Legends.”

This is significant because it demonstrates that, by 2006, KG’s programming was already extending beyond a narrowly European or exclusively Wiccan presentation of Pagan religion (Charbonneau, 2007, p. 14).

Read “The Melting Cauldron”.

Later retrospectives describe KG traditions including the Bardic Competition, nightly music and drumming, Pride activities, gender-specific and third-gender rituals, the Stag King, and the Trials of Artemis.

Not every one of these traditions can presently be dated to the pre-2010 period, but the list illustrates the broad participatory culture that had grown from the earlier gathering (McKay, 2014).

A published author biography also claims that a work won Kaleidoscope’s Bardic Competition in 1995 and again in 2006. Because this information survives as biographical material rather than an official list of winners, it should be treated cautiously. It nevertheless suggests that the Bardic Competition may have been established by the mid-1990s (Puhvel, 2007).

The Documented Whispering Pines Years

The complete list of pre-Raven’s Knoll locations has not been recovered. Later histories call KG a roaming gathering, but the publicly indexed record does not identify every campground or provide a year-by-year location chronology.

The best-documented later venue was Whispering Pines Campground, near Plantagenet and Curran in eastern Ontario.

Charbonneau’s fieldwork places the August 2007 gathering at Whispering Pines in Plantagenet. She describes KG as a Pagan camping festival held over the Civic Holiday weekend and notes its substantial Montreal attendance (Charbonneau, 2008, pp. 5–6).

A surviving Temple of the Sacred Grove community page independently records the 2007 event as taking place from August 1 to August 6 at Whispering Pines Campground.

The same page records InFest later that summer on Gina’s land near McDonald’s Corners, attended by approximately 35 returning and new friends (Temple of the Sacred Grove, 2008).

Visit the Temple of the Sacred Grove website.

That pairing is historically revealing. By 2007, Kaleidoscope had become large enough to occupy a commercial campground, while InFest continued the smaller, relationship-based gathering at the original site.

In effect, the two events preserved different parts of the original MiniFest experience. Kaleidoscope carried forward the expanding public festival, while InFest retained greater intimacy.

The Temple page also preserves unusually detailed information about the 2008 gathering. KG ran from Wednesday, July 30, through Monday, August 4, with the theme “Fairies and Elves and Gnomes! Oh My!”

Whispering Pines was closed for the gathering’s exclusive use. The site offered a beach, an in-ground swimming pool, drive-up campsites, two showers, and relatively level, rock-free camping areas. The notice also reminded participants to respect the resident campground owners and prohibited pets other than guide dogs (Temple of the Sacred Grove, 2008).

These practical details show how far the gathering had travelled from its kitchen-party beginnings. Registration procedures, campground agreements, accessibility rules, themed programming, and several days of scheduled activity required an established organizing structure and a substantial volunteer base.

A later participant remembered Whispering Pines as one of KG’s former homes and described it as evoking the intimacy of the earlier gathering. That recollection is consistent with the dated 2007 and 2008 notices, although it does not establish the first or final year KG used the campground (McKay, 2014).

The Fragmentary Early Internet Record

Kaleidoscope existed before social media centralized community communication. Its online presence was spread among personal webpages, email lists, Yahoo Groups, LiveJournal, newsgroup signatures, and successive domain names.

The Temple of the Sacred Grove page links to the old Kaleidoscope-Gathering.com address and to numerous Yahoo Groups serving Ottawa-area Pagans. The page also mentions a Facebook group, a Yahoo group, and Yahoo email distributions, illustrating the mixture of old and emerging platforms being used during the late 2000s (Temple of the Sacred Grove, 2008).

A 2001 Usenet post contains an email signature promoting “Kaleidoscope 2002” and the old Kaleidoscope-Gathering.com domain. However, the signature also contains a reference to Lawrencetown, Nova Scotia, and provides no reliable context about KG’s Ontario venue or organization.

It is evidence that the name and domain were circulating online by 2001, but it should not be used to establish a festival location (Pearce, 2001).

View the surviving 2001 Google Groups post.

The Toronto LiveJournal notice from 2006 is more useful. It supplies dates for that year’s gathering and identifies Pamela Fletcher as director. Together with the Temple pages, it shows that Pagan community blogs and event boards were important parts of KG’s publicity network before Facebook became dominant (Plutopsyche, 2006).

Most Yahoo Groups material is no longer publicly searchable, and the original KG domain has since been repurposed for unrelated content. The disappearance of these platforms is one reason the pre-2010 history now appears thinner than the gathering’s age and importance would suggest.

2009: The Twentieth Anniversary

The strongest surviving audiovisual record of the pre-Raven’s Knoll era was created in 2009.

Francis Perron produced the documentary Merry Meet: The Story of the Kaleidoscope Gathering for KG’s twentieth anniversary. The film contains interviews with participants and organizers, music, storytelling, and sections devoted to the gathering’s beginnings, Lady Pamelia, and memorable festival anecdotes.

Perron described it as an independently produced film created while he learned the necessary equipment and editing tools (Perron, 2009).

Watch the documentary:
Merry Meet: The Story of the Kaleidoscope Gathering

A separate publicly available video connected with Gina Ellis also remains online.

Watch the Gina Ellis video:
Gina Ellis video on YouTube

Research note: Dependable title, creator, and upload-date metadata were not available during the original research. The video is therefore linked without assigning uncertain bibliographic details.

The twentieth-anniversary year also brought a visual marker of change. The official KG history states that the Rainbow Dragonfly logo was unveiled at the 2009 gathering. The dragonfly subsequently became closely associated with the festival’s identity (Kaleidoscope Gathering, n.d.-b).

Read the official history of the Rainbow Dragonfly.

The Road to Permanent Land

For roughly two decades, the gathering’s continuity came from its people rather than from ownership of a particular site.

The official KG history describes the event’s evolution from a small gathering among friends into a roaming spiritual community. That movement could accommodate growth, but it also meant negotiating repeatedly with campgrounds, adapting ritual and workshop spaces, transporting infrastructure, and relying upon venues whose long-term availability was never guaranteed (McKay, 2014).

In 2009, the incoming organizers purchased land intended to provide a permanent Pagan gathering place. The first Kaleidoscope Gathering at Raven’s Knoll was held in 2010.

The 2011 program confirms that 2011 was KG’s second year there and the second year of the new organizing leadership following Pamela Fletcher’s retirement (Kaleidoscope Gathering, n.d.-c; Kaleidoscope Gathering, 2011).

Read the official Kaleidoscope Gathering FAQ.

That move did not create Kaleidoscope Gathering. It gave an already mature gathering a permanent home.

By the time KG reached Raven’s Knoll, it had already existed for approximately 20 years. It had begun on Gina Ellis’s land, outgrown that land, acquired a new name, survived multiple moves, developed a cross-regional community, established recurring traditions, and built an identity strong enough to remain recognizable without being tied to one campground.

What Can Be Documented and What Remains Missing

The surviving public record supports the following historical outline:

  • 1989: Gina Ellis establishes MiniFest as a Lammas gathering on her land near McDonald’s Corners and Perth.
  • 1995: Academic evidence places MiniFest in approximately its sixth year, while attendee memory still associates the MiniFest name with the gathering on Gina’s land.
  • Later 1990s: The gathering outgrows the original site after a crowd reported at approximately 300 people. Pamela Fletcher manages the transition, and MiniFest becomes Kaleidoscope Gathering.
  • By 2001: The Kaleidoscope name and an early festival domain are being circulated online.
  • By 2006: Pamela Fletcher is publicly identified as KG’s director. That year’s program theme is documented as “Myths and Legends,” and a major Vodoun ritual forms part of the programming.
  • 2007–2008: KG is securely documented at Whispering Pines Campground near Plantagenet.
  • 2009: KG observes its twentieth anniversary, Francis Perron releases Merry Meet, and the Rainbow Dragonfly logo is unveiled.
  • 2010: The first Kaleidoscope Gathering is held at Raven’s Knoll.

Several important questions remain unanswered by the publicly accessible record. The exact year in which MiniFest was formally renamed has not been located. No complete list of the gathering’s roaming venues has surfaced. Programs from most pre-2010 years are not included in the official online archive.

Nor is there a publicly available master list of early organizers, workshop presenters, ritual leaders, musicians, Bardic winners, or annual attendance.

Those records may still exist in private collections, old printed programs, photographs, newsletters, hard drives, or the memories of longtime participants. Their absence online should not be mistaken for an absence of history.

Remembering the Gathering Before the Land

The history of Kaleidoscope Gathering did not begin when a sign was placed at Raven’s Knoll.

It began when Gina Ellis opened her land for a Lammas gathering. It continued as more friends arrived, then more friends of friends, until a gathering intended to be small became too large for its birthplace.

Pamela Fletcher helped carry it through the difficult transformation from MiniFest into a larger, mobile festival. Participants and volunteers then preserved it across different locations until permanent land became possible.

The pre-Raven’s Knoll history is therefore not merely an introductory chapter. It explains what Kaleidoscope originally was:

A community that existed before it possessed a permanent home.

The land eventually gave that community stability.

The community, however, came first.

Publicly Available Historical Record

The following materials remain among the most useful publicly accessible sources for researching KG’s pre-Raven’s Knoll history:

  • The 2000 article by Marion Bowman, containing the near-contemporary statement that MiniFest was in its sixth year in 1995.
  • Shelley Rabinovitch’s encyclopedia entry concerning Gina Ellis, MiniFest, Pamela Fletcher, the renaming, and the relocation.
  • Marisol Charbonneau’s 2007 article documenting KG’s 2006 “Myths and Legends” program and Vodoun ritual.
  • Charbonneau’s 2008 master’s thesis documenting the 2007 gathering at Whispering Pines and its importance to Montreal Pagans.
  • The Temple of the Sacred Grove webpage preserving the dates and venue for KG 2007 and detailed information about KG 2008.
  • The 2006 Toronto LiveJournal notice identifying Pamela Fletcher as director.
  • Francis Perron’s 2009 documentary.
  • The official 2011 festival program containing Gina Ellis’s biographical note and the 22-year anniversary calculation.
  • The official KG FAQ, Dragonfly history, and program archive.
  • Dodie Graham McKay’s 2014 retrospective in The Wild Hunt.
  • Linda Seccaspina’s community history of Witch Hollow.
  • Martin Lepage’s 2017 doctoral dissertation.
  • Publicly indexed participant memories concerning MiniFest and Gina Ellis’s land.

References

Bowman, M. (2000). Nature, the natural and Pagan identity. DISKUS, 6. https://jbasr.com/basr/diskus/diskus1-6/bowman6.txt

Charbonneau, M. (2007). The melting cauldron: Ethnicity, diversity, and identity in a contemporary Pagan subculture. The Pomegranate, 9(1), 5–21. https://journal.equinoxpub.com/POM/article/view/2899

Charbonneau, M. (2008). A distinct Paganism: The contemporary Pagan revival in Montreal at the turn of the millennium [Master’s thesis, University of Ottawa]. https://www.academia.edu/9965797/A_Distinct_Paganism_The_Contemporary_Pagan_Revival_in_Montreal_At_the_Turn_of_the_Millennium

Kaleidoscope Gathering. (2011). Voyages: The 22nd annual Kaleidoscope Gathering [Festival program]. https://kg.ravensknoll.ca/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/KG-2011-Program_final_display-3.pdf

Kaleidoscope Gathering. (n.d.-a). Registration. https://kg.ravensknoll.ca/registration/

Kaleidoscope Gathering. (n.d.-b). The dragonfly. https://kg.ravensknoll.ca/information/the-dragonfly/

Kaleidoscope Gathering. (n.d.-c). FAQ. https://kg.ravensknoll.ca/information/faq/

Lepage, M. (2017). “Why be king? I’m already a queen!”: Performances rituelles et négociations queer dans la communauté néo-païenne de Montréal [Doctoral dissertation, Université du Québec à Montréal]. Archipel. https://archipel.uqam.ca/10924/1/D3311.pdf

McKay, D. G. (2014, June 20). Column: Pagan festival season in Ontario. The Wild Hunt. https://wildhunt.org/2014/06/walking-the-world-pagan-festival-season-in-ontario.html

Pearce, R. (2001, November 7). Re: Windows XP and BIOS strange things happen [Newsgroup post]. Google Groups. https://groups.google.com/g/comp.windows.misc/c/EXZMrirC3rQ

Perron, F. (Director). (2009). Merry Meet: The story of the Kaleidoscope Gathering [Documentary film]. https://www.thewicca.ca/culture/video/francis-perron-merry-meet.php

Plutopsyche. (2006, July 19). Tomorrow night: Wine, Dine & Divine @ Mitzi’s Sister [Online community post]. Toronto LiveJournal. https://toronto.livejournal.com/4467634.html

Rabinovitch, S. T. (2011). The encyclopedia of modern witchcraft and neo-paganism (2nd ed.). Kendall Hunt.

Seccaspina, L. (2016, March 3). The Witch Hollow of Lanark County. Linda Seccaspina’s Blog. https://lindaseccaspina.wordpress.com/2016/03/03/the-witch-hollow-of-lanark-county/

Temple of the Sacred Grove. (2008). Temple events and events upcoming. https://www.templesacredgrove.org/