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

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

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

There Is a Difference Between Ancient Ancestors and Our Ancestors

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

We Are Creating Primary Sources Right Now

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

Our Fights Will Become Their Myths Unless We Explain Them

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

The Third Generation Will Not Be Impressed That We Were Pioneers

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

What Do I Want to Be Remembered For?

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

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

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

The Seven Rabbits Come Together Here

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

That May Be the Point

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

Keep the Fire. Leave the Rabbit Loose.

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

When the Sacred Place Is Gone: Can a Land-Based Tradition Survive Leaving the Land?

Six people in cloaks standing around a stone altar with candles, herbs, and a map outdoors in mountains.

When the Sacred Place Is Gone: Can a Land-Based Tradition Survive Leaving the Land?

There is a problem hidden inside almost every conversation about Pagan inheritance. We talk about handing down rituals. We talk about handing down stories. We talk about handing down values. But many Pagan traditions also talk about land. The local spirits. The grove. The hill. The river. The old tree. The fire pit everyone remembers. The place where ashes were scattered. The festival land where somebody first felt that strange shock of belonging. Then ordinary life happens. The property is sold. The children move away. The landlord changes. The forest is cut. The festival closes. The family scatters. And now the rabbit asks:

If the religion is attached to place, what happens when the people cannot stay?

Place Is Not Just Scenery

Research on religion and place attachment helps explain why this matters. Shampa and Sanjoy Mazumdar describe religious attachment to place as something learned through ritual, story, symbols, artifacts, visits, and the influence of family and community. Sacred place becomes part of identity, not merely a backdrop for religion (Mazumdar & Mazumdar, 2004). That fits Pagan practice particularly well. We often speak as though the land itself participates. A ritual under fluorescent lights in a rented hall is not quite the same experience as one held beside the river you have known for twenty years. The difference is not necessarily theological. It is embodied. You remember where the sun falls. You know when the mosquitoes arrive. You know which tree drops a limb after a storm. You know how the ground smells after rain. Repeated ritual turns geography into memory.

But Paganism Is Also a Religion of Movers

Modern people move. We leave home for work. We relocate after relationships end. We lose property. We inherit property we cannot keep. We spend decades far from where our ancestors lived. Many contemporary Pagans are therefore practising traditions that talk deeply about place while living lives defined by mobility. That creates a tension I recognize personally. What does it mean to honour land when the land beneath your feet is not the land of the myths you read? What does it mean to be Heathen in the Ottawa Valley rather than Scandinavia? What does a Celtic inheritance mean on Algonquin territory? What responsibilities appear when spiritual imagination and actual geography do not neatly overlap? Those questions are more important than pretending we live somewhere else.

The First Responsibility Is to Notice Where We Actually Are

A land-based religion that ignores the actual land is performing scenery. I can read Icelandic sagas in Ontario. I can honour deities whose surviving stories come from Europe. I can carry family heritage across an ocean. But the snow outside my door is Ontario snow. The river has its own history. The trees have their own ecology. The human history of this place did not begin when my family arrived. If Paganism teaches relationship, then relationship begins with paying attention rather than projecting a fantasy landscape over the one already here.

So What Gets Passed Down When the Place Cannot?

Maybe the answer is not to hand down ownership of a sacred place. Maybe we hand down the skills by which places become sacred. Notice. Return. Learn the names. Learn the seasons. Remember what happened there. Care for what can be cared for. Ask whose land you are on. Do not assume spiritual affection gives you ownership. Tell the stories honestly. Leave the place better than you found it when you can. If a child learns those habits, perhaps they can build a real relationship with wherever they eventually live.

Memory Can Carry a Place Without Pretending the Place Moved

Mazumdar and Mazumdar note that religious traditions can maintain attachment to distant places through repeated stories, ritual references, objects, and communal memory (2004). That suggests another possibility. We do not have to choose between forgetting a lost place and pretending we still inhabit it. We can remember it as lost. That distinction matters. “This is where our family used to gather.” “This is the tree that is no longer standing.” “This is the field where the old fire was.” “This is the festival that ended.” “This is the place that changed so much I no longer experience it as home.” Those are legitimate sacred memories. Loss belongs in tradition too.

I Have Been Thinking About Home for a Long Time

Much of my writing, Pagan and otherwise, keeps circling home. What makes somewhere home? What happens when home changes? What happens when people who once belonged together no longer do? What happens when you return somewhere and discover that your memory of it is stronger than your present relationship with it? Those are not exclusively Pagan questions. But Paganism gives me a particular vocabulary for them: land, ancestors, hearth, frith, hospitality, spirits, sacred space, fire. And perhaps that is why the idea of being a fire keeper matters so much to me. The fire is local. You have to tend the one in front of you. You cannot warm your hands over the memory of a fire twenty years ago. But memory can teach you how to build the next one.

Maybe Sacred Place Is a Relationship, Not Real Estate

That does not mean land is interchangeable. Quite the opposite. A relationship is specific. You cannot replace one old friend with another and declare nothing changed. But losing one relationship does not make future relationship impossible. Perhaps a mature land-based Paganism needs both fidelity and portability. Fidelity says: this place mattered, and I will not erase that history. Portability says: if I must move, I will learn to belong responsibly somewhere new rather than spending the rest of my life spiritually pretending I never left.

What Does the Child Inherit Then?

Not necessarily the farm. Not necessarily the grove. Not necessarily the festival. Maybe the child inherits the practice of relationship. They inherit the story of places that formed the family. They inherit the knowledge that places can be lost. They inherit the responsibility not to confuse memory with ownership. And perhaps they inherit one final thing: the knowledge that sacred geography can begin again. Plant the tree. Learn the creek. Feed the birds through winter. Remember the dead. Light the fire where you are. Then, if another generation grows up around that fire, something remarkable happens. What was once new becomes remembered. What was remembered becomes inherited. And suddenly the people who began the custom are no longer merely practitioners. They are the old people in the family story. They are becoming ancestors. That is the final rabbit.

What happens when the first generation of contemporary Pagans becomes the ancestral generation?

References

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

The Right to Leave the Circle: What Happens When Pagan Children Rebel?

An older woman and a middle-aged man talking across a table with books, notebooks, and cups of tea

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

“I don’t believe this.”

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

It Is Easy to Support Freedom When the Child Chooses Us

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

A Religion of Converts May Take Rejection Personally

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

Rebellion Is Part of Inheritance

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

Maybe Retention Is the Wrong Scoreboard

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

The Child Who Leaves May Teach the Tradition Something

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

And What If They Come Back?

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

I Know Something About Leaving and Returning

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

Love the Child More Than the Label

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

But There Is Another Kind of Leaving

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

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

References

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

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

When the Village Builds a Gate: Can Paganism Grow Up Without Building Another Church?

Group of people participating in a colorful outdoor ritual with drums and art in an autumn forest

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

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

Creativity Eventually Meets Administration

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

The Institution Is Not the Enemy

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

What Does the Second Generation Need from Institutions?

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

They can judge the structure by whether it works.

The Danger Is When Structure Starts Pretending to Be Truth

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

Maybe Pagan Institutions Need an Expiry Date on Authority

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

We Need Elders, but We Should Be Careful About Thrones

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

The Gate Should Open Both Ways

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

Because the Child May Leave

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

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

References

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

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

The Child at the Empty Fire: Can a Pagan Tradition Survive Without a Village?

Group of people holding hands in a circle around a campfire in the forest

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

Can a tradition survive without a village?

Paganism Has Become Very Good at Being Solitary

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

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

You Can Practise Alone. Can You Inherit Alone?

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

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

A Community Gives Tradition Depth

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

But What Kind of Village?

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

Festival Is Not the Same as Village

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

The Digital Village Is Real, but It Is Different

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

The Village May Need to Be Smaller Than We Imagine

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

My Own Journey Keeps Coming Back to the Missing Village

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

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

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

What happens when the village we need begins building gates?

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

What does the first generation owe the second?

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

We Owe Them the Truth About Where Things Came From

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

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

We Owe Them Something They Can Actually Practise

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

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

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

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

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

We Owe Them the Right to Ask Why

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

We Owe Them Our Failures Too

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

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

We Owe Them Roots Without Chains

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

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

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

The Fire Is Not Ours

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

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

Can a Pagan tradition survive without a village?

References

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

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

What Happens When Paganism Is Inherited?

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

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

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

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

What happens when someone does not have to find Paganism?

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

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

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

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

Do Pagan Children Get to Rebel Against Paganism?

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

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

But Something Else Happens When a Tradition Has Shape

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

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

And Suddenly All Those Old Questions Change

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

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

That May Be the Moment Paganism Changes Most

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

Memory.

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

And That Makes Me Look at My Own Journey Differently

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

What, if anything, is worth handing forward?

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

Maybe Legacy Is Not Passing Down Answers

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

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

The Child Changes the Religion

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

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

Perhaps That Is the Real Test of a Living Tradition

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

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

References

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

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

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

What Kind of Ancestors Are We Becoming?

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

At some point, every rabbit warren needs an exit.

Not because there are no more tunnels.

There are always more tunnels.

Another question.

Another book.

Another scholar.

Another old festival program.

Another half-forgotten ritual.

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

We could probably chase rabbits forever.

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

That question led us somewhere much larger than I expected.

Relationship.

Responsibility.

Ethics.

Broken relationship.

Frith.

Repair.

Sacredness.

Ownership.

Stewardship.

Legacy.

And eventually we arrived here.

What kind of ancestors are we becoming?

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

We Usually Imagine Ancestors Behind Us

When we speak about ancestors, we usually look backward.

Parents.

Grandparents.

Great-grandparents.

People whose names survive in family records.

People whose names have been lost.

People connected to places.

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

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

There can be ancestors of affinity.

Ancestors of place.

People whose lives shaped paths that others later walked.

Once we accept that possibility, something interesting happens.

We stop being merely descendants.

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

We are future ancestors.

Maybe not biologically.

Maybe nobody will ever pour a drink in our name.

Maybe nobody will remember us personally at all.

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

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

We Are Building Somebody Else’s Past

That thought has been following me around since yesterday.

We are building somebody else’s past right now.

The things we consider ordinary will someday be history.

The festivals happening now will become old festivals.

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

The websites will disappear.

The photos will age.

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

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

Surely someone wrote this down.

Maybe we did.

Maybe we didn’t.

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

Future Pagans Will Inherit More Than Rituals

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

Which rituals survive?

Which books remain in print?

Which festivals continue?

Which sacred places are preserved?

Those things matter.

But future Pagans will inherit much more than ceremonies.

They will inherit our habits.

Our assumptions.

Our language.

Our organizational structures.

Our conflicts.

Our unresolved wounds.

Our approaches to leadership.

Our attitudes toward land.

Our relationship with history.

Our ideas about who belongs.

Our ideas about who gets to speak.

Our ways of dealing with disagreement.

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

Those things become tradition too.

Sometimes without anyone consciously choosing them.

A Tradition Can Inherit a Wound

Families know this.

A hurt happens.

Nobody talks about it.

Years pass.

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

People learn not to mention certain things.

They learn who may be challenged and who may not.

They learn which emotions are permitted.

They learn which family member gets blamed.

Eventually nobody remembers exactly how the pattern started.

They simply call it normal.

Communities can do the same thing.

A conflict happens.

A person leaves.

A leader is never questioned.

A complaint is quietly buried to protect the group.

A bad decision becomes custom.

A temporary rule becomes tradition.

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

That is legacy too.

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

Not Everything Old Deserves Reverence

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

Ancient.

Old ways.

Traditional.

Passed down.

Ancestor wisdom.

Those words carry weight.

Sometimes deservedly.

But age is evidence of survival.

It is not proof of goodness.

Some old things are wise.

Some old things are simply old.

Some survived because they served people well.

Others survived because nobody had enough power to challenge them.

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

They made mistakes.

So will we.

The question is what we do once we recognize them.

Maybe a Good Ancestor Leaves Fewer Burdens

We often imagine legacy as something added.

Build something.

Create something.

Write something.

Start something.

Leave something behind.

But perhaps legacy can also be subtraction.

Remove something harmful.

Correct something false.

End a destructive pattern.

Repair damaged land.

Retire a ritual that no longer serves.

Stop using a story we know is historically untrue.

Build accountability into leadership where previously there was none.

Create boundaries that prevent old harms from becoming inherited customs.

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

Good.

Maybe that is exactly the point.

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

The Best Ancestors May Be the Ones Nobody Knows

Somebody planted the tree.

You sit beneath it.

You do not know their name.

Somebody built the road.

Somebody preserved the manuscript.

Somebody fought to save a piece of land.

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

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

Perhaps Pagan traditions are no different.

The person who organized the first gathering.

The volunteer who stored the archives.

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

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

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

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

Those people may never become celebrated ancestors.

But they shaped what somebody else inherited.

Maybe ancestorhood is not about being remembered.

Maybe it is about having mattered.

What Would We Want From Our Ancestors?

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

I wish they had written more down.

I wish they had labelled the photographs.

I wish they had recorded why certain decisions were made.

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

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

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

I wish conflicts had more than one surviving account.

I wish people had documented why communities changed.

I wish they had admitted mistakes more often.

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

Those wishes tell us something.

Future people may wish the same things of us.

This Is Why Scholarship Matters Again

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

There is a reason.

They preserved voices.

They observed communities.

They recorded rituals.

They examined identity.

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

They did not merely interpret Paganism.

They preserved parts of it.

That distinction may become more important with time.

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

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

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

Scholarship becomes memory.

Memory becomes inheritance.

Inheritance becomes legacy.

We Also Need Ordinary Voices

But scholarship cannot carry everything.

Scholars ask particular questions.

Archives preserve particular things.

Institutions make choices about what deserves attention.

That leaves enormous pieces of lived religion undocumented.

What did the fire smell like?

Who always arrived late?

Which ritual made everybody laugh because something went completely wrong?

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

Who made coffee every morning?

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

What happened after the official ritual ended?

What did ordinary people actually believe?

Those things matter too.

Perhaps journals matter.

Blogs matter.

Photographs matter.

Festival programs matter.

Personal recollections matter.

Old newsletters matter.

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

We are making sources whether we realize it or not.

But We Should Leave Honest Sources

That brings us back to truth.

Future generations deserve more than propaganda.

They do not need us to make ourselves look perfect.

They need enough honesty to understand us.

Tell them what worked.

Tell them what failed.

Tell them why the community split.

Tell them why the ritual changed.

Tell them where the story came from.

Tell them when nobody really knows.

Tell them when memory conflicts.

Leave room for uncertainty.

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

What Are We Teaching Without Realizing It?

Future generations will not inherit only our records.

They will inherit our example.

What does leadership look like?

Do leaders explain decisions?

Can leaders be challenged?

What happens when somebody makes a mistake?

What happens when someone is harmed?

Does community protect reputation or people?

Do elders mentor successors or guard territory?

Do scholars get respected when their findings challenge cherished stories?

Do newcomers get treated as future contributors or permanent outsiders?

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

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

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

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

Someone is watching.

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

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

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

We are going to get things wrong.

That is not pessimism.

It is arithmetic.

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

The dangerous community is not the one that makes mistakes.

It is the one that cannot admit them.

Imagine leaving future Pagans a tradition in which saying:

I was wrong.

We misunderstood this.

New evidence changed what we know.

This practice caused harm.

We need to do this differently.

is considered evidence of maturity rather than weakness.

That might be a legacy worth leaving.

We Should Leave Them Questions Too

Maybe we should resist giving future Pagans all our answers.

Answers become brittle.

Questions travel remarkably well.

What do I owe because I am connected?

What relationships does this practice create?

Who benefits?

Who carries the cost?

What are we preserving?

Why?

What are we changing?

Why?

What did we receive?

What are we handing forward?

Who has power here?

What responsibilities come with it?

What are we calling sacred?

Does our conduct show that we actually believe it?

Those questions could survive many different Pagan traditions.

They do not require everyone to share theology.

They require attention.

Maybe This Is the Common Thread After All

We have wandered a long way from where we began.

Or perhaps we have finally come back to it.

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

We found relationship.

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

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

Relationship is not merely connection.

It is responsibility.

Relationship creates memory.

Relationship can create sacredness.

Relationship can be broken.

Broken relationship creates questions of accountability and repair.

Sacred relationship creates questions of stewardship.

Stewardship extended through time becomes legacy.

And legacy eventually turns us into ancestors.

It is one long thread.

Maybe Paganism becomes visible in how we tend it.

We Are Not the End of the Story

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

We are not the culmination of Paganism.

We are not the generation that finally gets everything right.

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

We are somewhere in the middle.

People came before us.

People will come after.

We inherited fragments.

We reconstructed some things.

We invented others.

We revived.

We misunderstood.

We researched.

We argued.

We built.

We broke things.

Sometimes we repaired them.

And eventually all of it passes onward.

That is humbling.

It should be.

The Firekeeper Has One Final Job

We have used the firekeeper throughout this series.

It seems right to end there.

The firekeeper tends the flame.

Protects it.

Feeds it.

Keeps it from escaping.

Makes sure people are warm.

Teaches others how to tend it.

And then eventually there is one final responsibility.

Move aside.

Let someone else take the chair.

That may be the hardest act of stewardship.

To accept that the fire will burn without us.

That people will tell different stories beside it.

That someone will arrange the wood differently.

Someone may move the stones.

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

Someone may find a better way.

That does not erase what we did.

It completes it.

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

So What Kind of Ancestors Are We Becoming?

I do not know.

We probably cannot know.

Future generations will answer that for themselves.

They will decide what we preserved well.

What we misunderstood.

What we should have changed sooner.

What we should never have abandoned.

They will have the benefit of hindsight.

We do not.

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

Honest history.

Living traditions.

Healthy questions.

Sacred places treated with care.

Communities capable of accountability.

Leadership understood as service.

Enough humility to admit uncertainty.

Enough courage to end harmful inheritances.

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

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

The Rabbit Warren Ends Here

At least this one does.

We started with six scholars.

We ended with ancestors who have not been born yet.

That seems about right for a rabbit hole.

Rabinovitch.

Bowman.

Charbonneau.

Lepage.

Graham McKay.

Davy.

Different people mapping different parts of the forest.

Their work gave us places to stand.

From there we followed the paths a little farther.

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

Perhaps it was a question of posture.

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

Do we possess?

Or tend?

Do we consume?

Or reciprocate?

Do we preserve everything?

Or learn what should continue?

Do we demand harmony?

Or practice accountability?

Do we inherit blindly?

Or inherit consciously?

Do we build monuments to ourselves?

Or plant trees beneath which somebody else may someday sit?

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

Maybe asking them seriously is part of the practice.

For a little while, we have the fire.

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

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

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

Then the chair belongs to someone else.

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

Leave some wood.

Leave some truth.

Leave some room.

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

That will do.

Godspeed.

Scholarly Trail Markers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coming Back Out of the Rabbit Warren

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

Well.

That went farther than expected.

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

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

I expected an interesting comparison.

Perhaps a few shared themes.

Nature.

Identity.

Community.

Ritual.

History.

Instead, the floor gave way.

And down the rabbit hole we went.

Then into another.

And another.

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

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

The First Rabbit: Relationship

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

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

Pagans do not agree enough for that.

We do not share one scripture.

We do not share one understanding of deity.

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

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

And perhaps that has never been the centre anyway.

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

Relationship with gods.

Relationship with ancestors.

Relationship with land.

Relationship with community.

Relationship with history.

Relationship with ritual.

Relationship with identity.

Relationship with memory.

And relationship with ourselves.

That gave us the first working thought of the day:

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

Not identical relationships.

Not identical gods.

Not identical practices.

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

Something older.

Something larger.

Something remembered.

Something living.

The Second Rabbit: Relationship Creates Responsibility

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

Because relationship cannot simply be poetic language.

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

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

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

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

Someone still has to do the work.

Someone still has to welcome the newcomer.

Someone still has to clean up after the feast.

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

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

A relationship creates something between the parties involved.

Memory.

Expectation.

Responsibility.

And suddenly the ethical question was no longer:

What am I allowed to do?

It became:

What do I owe because I am connected?

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

Because that question follows us home.

The Third Rabbit: What Happens When the Web Tears?

Then the obvious problem appeared.

Relationships break.

Trust fails.

Promises are broken.

Hospitality is abused.

Communities fail their members.

People betray one another.

Reciprocity becomes exploitation.

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

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

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

Repair does not necessarily mean restoration.

Some relationships can be rebuilt.

Some cannot.

Some should not be.

Forgiveness is not trust.

Forgiveness is not reconciliation.

Forgiveness is not restored access.

And boundaries are not automatically failures of relationship.

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

That was an important turn.

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

Sometimes the ethical act is rebuilding the bridge.

Sometimes the ethical act is admitting the bridge is gone.

The Fourth Rabbit: What Makes Something Sacred?

From broken relationships we wandered into sacredness.

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

Perhaps sacredness also grows through relationship.

A clearing becomes sacred because people return.

Because ritual happens there.

Because names are spoken there.

Because ashes are scattered there.

Because vows are exchanged.

Because someone grieved beneath that tree.

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

Eventually geography becomes biography.

That led to another working thought:

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

That word again.

Obligation.

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

We approach differently.

We behave differently.

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

And then we discovered something else.

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

A shrine can be violated and remain sacred.

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

A community can disappear while its memory remains.

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

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

The Fifth Rabbit: Ownership Is Not Stewardship

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

Who gets to decide what happens to sacred things?

That took us into ownership and stewardship.

And here we had to be very careful.

Because spirituality does not erase law.

If somebody owns land, they own the land.

Community attachment does not magically transfer the deed.

Years of ritual do not automatically create legal ownership.

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

But neither does ownership answer every ethical question.

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

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

And so another distinction appeared:

Ownership asks who has the right to decide.

Stewardship asks what responsibilities should shape that decision.

Those are not enemies.

They are different questions.

A landowner can also be a steward.

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

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

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

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

The Firekeeper

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

The firekeeper.

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

A firekeeper has authority.

Someone needs to tend the fire.

Someone decides when another log is needed.

Someone watches the sparks.

Someone protects the people around it.

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

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

They did not invent flame.

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

They do not own the stories told beside it.

They do not own the memories people take home.

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

Without responsibility, authority becomes merely control.

Perhaps that is true of more than fires.

Perhaps it is true of elders.

Priests.

Teachers.

Landowners.

Organizers.

Tradition bearers.

Community leaders.

Anyone entrusted with something larger than themselves.

And This Is Where the Scholars Matter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They did not collectively write today’s conclusions.

We should not put our words into their mouths.

But they gave us maps.

Partial maps.

Maps of different sections of the forest.

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

That is part of the value of scholarship.

It does not necessarily hand us the answer.

Sometimes it simply lets us ask a better question.

So What Did We Actually Find Today?

Perhaps something like this.

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

There may be no answer to that question.

But we can ask how Paganism is lived.

And again and again, it appears through relationships.

Those relationships create meaning.

Meaning creates responsibility.

Responsibility creates ethics.

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

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

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

And stewardship eventually forces us to think beyond ourselves.

What did we inherit?

What are we doing with it?

What will we leave behind?

That may be the whole warren in three questions.

What did I receive?

How am I tending it?

What will remain when I am gone?

Maybe Paganism Is Less About Having and More About Tending

That is where I find myself tonight.

Perhaps Paganism is not primarily something we possess.

Not my gods.

My land.

My ancestors.

My tradition.

My community.

My sacred place.

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

Maybe the better image is tending.

I tend a relationship with the gods.

I tend memory of the ancestors.

I tend the land beneath my feet.

I tend the community I participate in.

I tend the traditions I inherited.

I tend the stories I tell.

I tend the promises I make.

I tend the boundaries that keep relationships healthy.

I tend the fire.

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

Or they will not.

Some fires should continue.

Some should be allowed to go out.

Some traditions deserve preservation.

Some need pruning.

Some relationships deserve repair.

Some endings deserve respect.

Some inherited things should be passed forward.

Some should end with us.

Stewardship is knowing the difference as best we can.

For Today, That Is Far Enough

There are more rabbits out there.

There always will be.

Legacy is sitting somewhere ahead of us.

So are ancestors.

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

Those rabbits can wait.

For today, I think we have travelled far enough.

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

We ended somewhere much more personal.

Relationship.

Responsibility.

Accountability.

Sacredness.

Stewardship.

Perhaps those are not separate subjects after all.

Perhaps they are simply different points along the same thread.

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

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

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

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

Beneath the forest floor, nothing looks particularly organized.

Roots cross.

Separate.

Meet again.

Dead things become soil.

Living things feed one another.

Some trees fall.

Others grow into the opening.

No single tree owns the forest.

Yet every tree changes it.

Perhaps we are not terribly different.

We arrive.

We inherit.

We take.

We give.

We damage.

We repair.

We remember.

We forget.

We build things that may outlive us.

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

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

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

Maybe the question was always:

What did we do while it was ours to tend?

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

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

Godspeed.

What Do We Owe Because We Are Connected?

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

There goes the rabbit again.

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

What emerged was not a common theology.

It was relationship.

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

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

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

Relationships have consequences.

They make demands upon us.

And so perhaps the next question is not:

What do Pagans believe is right and wrong?

Perhaps the more interesting question is:

What do we owe because we are connected?

Now we are wandering into ethics.

And this may be where the rabbit gets troublesome.

Where Is the Pagan Rulebook?

There is no single Pagan Ten Commandments.

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

Individual traditions certainly have ethical teachings.

Wiccans may speak of the Rede.

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

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

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

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

But none of these becomes a universal Pagan law.

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

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

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

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

The Gift Is Never Just the Gift

This is where Barbara Jane Davy becomes particularly interesting.

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

That sounds wonderfully academic.

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

We become who we are partly through our relationships.

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

We inherit.

We receive.

We give.

We affect.

We are affected.

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

The gift creates something.

A relationship.

A memory.

An expectation.

Perhaps gratitude.

Perhaps obligation.

Perhaps another gift someday.

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

The important thing is what now exists between those hands.

Think about that for a moment.

Someone gives you something when you desperately need it.

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

But you remember who gave it.

You remember that they were there.

The thing disappears.

The relationship remains.

Then the Circle Gets Bigger

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

What happens when the recipient is not another human being?

An offering is poured onto the earth.

Something is given to a god.

Food is left for ancestors.

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

We can argue endlessly about the metaphysics.

Did the god literally receive the offering?

Does the land possess consciousness?

Did the ancestors hear us?

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

Something also happens to the person making the offering.

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

The moral circle has widened.

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

The river is no longer merely water travelling downhill.

The land is no longer merely property.

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

The relationship changes the way the other is perceived.

And once perception changes, behaviour may follow.

Perhaps this is one way ritual becomes ethical practice.

Not because somebody threatens punishment from above.

But because relationship makes indifference harder.

If the Land Is Sacred, Then What?

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

Pagans frequently speak about nature.

Nature-centred.

Earth-based.

Honouring the land.

Walking lightly.

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

There is no single Pagan relationship with nature.

Good.

That saves us from another easy slogan.

Because saying the land is sacred is remarkably easy.

The interesting part begins five minutes later.

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

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

What does sacred mean when water is being polluted?

What does sacred mean when convenience conflicts with stewardship?

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

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

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

I cannot simply ask:

What does this land give me?

I eventually have to ask:

What am I giving back?

And perhaps:

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

That is a more uncomfortable spirituality.

Which may be precisely why it is useful.

Hospitality Is Beautiful Until Somebody Knocks

Then there is community.

Pagans are very good at certain words.

Welcome.

Inclusive.

Community.

Family.

Tribe.

Folk.

Home.

Beautiful words.

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

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

That tension matters far beyond one community or one study.

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

Welcome into what?

Who designed the rituals?

Whose assumptions are considered normal?

Whose history is being told?

Who is expected to adapt?

Who gets heard?

Who gets interrupted?

Who becomes leadership?

Who quietly stops coming?

That does not mean every difference is evidence of wrongdoing.

It means inclusiveness is not achieved by declaring ourselves inclusive.

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

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

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

And What Happens When the Stranger Changes the Ritual?

Martin Lepage’s work carries the question farther.

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

That word negotiate is important.

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

Sometimes the person fits comfortably within the ritual language.

Sometimes they do not.

What happens then?

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

Can the ritual bend?

Does changing inherited practice destroy tradition?

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

There may be no single Pagan answer.

But there is certainly an ethical question.

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

They arrive carrying lives.

Histories.

Bodies.

Identities.

Wounds.

Wisdom.

Questions.

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

Relationship means we have to hear them.

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

It does mean the other person has become morally relevant.

Who Counts as an Ancestor?

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

Who is an ancestor?

Blood seems like the obvious answer.

Until it isn’t.

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

That loosens something important.

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

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

Someone who walked the path before us.

Someone whose struggle opened a door.

Someone tied to the place where we now live.

Someone whose story we have inherited without inheriting their blood.

And once again relationship becomes ethical.

Because ancestry can be used in two very different directions.

It can become a wall:

This is mine because my blood gives me ownership.

Or it can become an obligation:

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

Those are profoundly different ways of standing before the past.

One asks what ancestry entitles us to.

The other asks what ancestry makes us responsible for.

The Ancestors Were Human Too

There is another danger hiding here.

Honouring ancestors can easily become romanticizing ancestors.

Our ancestors were not wiser simply because they were old.

They were human.

Some were generous.

Some were cruel.

Some were courageous.

Some were cowards.

Some protected people.

Some hurt people.

Some beliefs deserve remembering.

Some deserve studying.

Some deserve leaving in the grave.

Perhaps relationship with the ancestors does not demand obedience.

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

Inheritance is not the same thing as obligation to repeat.

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

Truth Is a Relationship Too

Then we come to history.

This may be one of the quieter Pagan ethical obligations.

Truth telling.

We inherit wonderful stories.

Ancient Druids knew this.

The Vikings always did that.

Witches have practiced this continuously for thousands of years.

This symbol has meant the same thing since antiquity.

This ceremony is ancient.

Sometimes those claims are true.

Sometimes they are partly true.

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

That does not automatically make the modern thing worthless.

A ritual created fifty years ago can be beautiful.

A tradition created yesterday can become meaningful.

Everything old was new once.

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

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

Scholarship puts dates beside stories.

It asks where claims came from.

It separates evidence from assumption.

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

Annoying.

Necessary.

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

What we know.

What we suspect.

What we reconstructed.

What we invented.

And what we simply do not know.

Mystery does not require dishonesty.

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

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

She also wrote directly about magical morality and modern ethics.

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

What does harm mean?

What does responsibility mean?

What happens when intentions and consequences do not match?

How should power be used?

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

A person can speak constantly about love and behave cruelly.

A community can speak about inclusion while quietly excluding.

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

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

A person can preach honour while breaking promises.

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

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

Perhaps Pagan ethics lives partly in that space.

The distance between declaration and conduct.

Community Is What Happens After the Ritual

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

Community is not merely people standing together during ritual.

It is also people doing the work.

Setting up.

Cleaning up.

Maintaining sacred spaces.

Teaching.

Volunteering.

Cooking.

Building.

Returning.

Remembering.

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

There is something wonderfully unromantic about that.

Everybody likes the sacred fire.

Somebody still has to deal with the garbage.

Everybody likes the ritual feast.

Somebody washes the dishes.

Everybody likes sacred land.

Somebody repairs the fence.

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

Reciprocity Is Not Accounting

There is a danger here too.

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

I gave you this.

You owe me that.

I helped you three times.

You helped me twice.

Balance due.

But relationships are rarely so tidy.

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

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

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

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

Perhaps reciprocity is not about equal transactions.

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

I received knowledge.

Teach someone.

I received hospitality.

Offer it when I can.

I inherited a healthy patch of land.

Try not to leave poisoned soil.

I was welcomed when I knew nobody.

Notice the person standing alone at the next gathering.

I inherited stories.

Tell them honestly.

I received kindness during a difficult year.

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

Perhaps that is gift economy at its most human.

The gift keeps moving.

But Relationship Does Not Mean Enduring Everything

This needs saying.

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

That would not be ethics.

That would be captivity dressed in spiritual language.

Some relationships become harmful.

Some communities become unsafe.

Some promises are broken.

Some people abuse hospitality.

Some leaders abuse power.

Some bridges burn because somebody kept setting fire to them.

Relationship includes boundaries.

Reciprocity includes the ability to recognize exploitation.

Hospitality does not require surrendering the house.

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

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

Sometimes responsibility to one relationship requires ending another.

Protecting a child may require breaking relationship with an adult.

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

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

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

Relationship is not endless accommodation.

It is accountability.

And Accountability Requires Power to Enter the Conversation

There is another word Pagans sometimes prefer not to discuss.

Power.

Every community has it.

Even communities that insist they have no hierarchy.

Someone owns the land.

Someone controls the bank account.

Someone decides who teaches.

Someone controls the mailing list.

Someone holds the keys.

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

Someone is charismatic.

Someone knows everybody.

Someone can make a person feel welcome.

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

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

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

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

The teacher has a different responsibility from the student.

The elder has a different responsibility from the newcomer.

The landowner has a different responsibility from the guest.

The organizer has a different responsibility from the attendee.

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

Maybe Pagan Ethics Is a Practice of Attention

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

Pay attention to what you received.

Pay attention to what you take.

Pay attention to who does the work.

Pay attention to who gets heard.

Pay attention to the land after the ritual is finished.

Pay attention to whether your stories are true.

Pay attention to what your promises cost somebody else.

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

Pay attention to whether reciprocity has quietly become exploitation.

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

Pay attention to power.

Pay attention to consequences.

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

Maybe ethics begins there.

What Do I Owe Because I Am Connected?

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

Nor should we pretend that they do.

They studied different things and reached different conclusions.

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

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

Bowman complicates easy assumptions about Pagans and nature.

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

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

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

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

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

What do I owe because I am connected?

Not because a god will strike me down.

Not because a Pagan pope issued instructions.

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

Because I am connected.

I drink the water.

I walk the land.

I inherited stories.

I received knowledge.

I have ancestors.

I have neighbours.

I affect people.

People affect me.

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

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

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

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

The web was here before I arrived.

It will remain after I leave.

For a little while, I get to touch it.

Perhaps ethics is deciding how.

The Rabbit at the Edge of the Firelight

And now we appear to have reached another clearing.

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

And if relationship creates obligation…

Then perhaps Pagan ethics does not begin with:

What am I forbidden to do?

Perhaps it begins with:

What am I responsible for?

That is a very different question.

Rules tell us where the fence stands.

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

Rules can sometimes be obeyed without caring.

Relationship is harder.

Relationship remembers.

Relationship accumulates.

Relationship leaves footprints.

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

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

One tree touches another through soil and fungi and water.

The dead feed the living.

The living eventually become the dead.

Nothing keeps everything it receives.

Everything passes something onward.

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

What did I receive?

What did I take?

What did I give?

What did I damage?

What did I repair?

Who was welcomed?

Who was forgotten?

What will remain because I was here?

And what, perhaps, should end with me?

There is our next rabbit.

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

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

I can already see the ears disappearing into the brush.

Godspeed.

Scholarly Trail Markers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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