We left the last hole with what sounded like a simple enough question: if something becomes sacred through relationship, who gets to decide what happens to it?
The person who owns the land?
The person who built the shrine?
The priest who tends it?
The community that worships there?
The people whose labour maintained it?
The people whose dead are remembered there?
The people who will inherit it after everyone currently arguing about it is gone?
And immediately we discover that the word ownership is trying to answer several different questions at once.
Legally, ownership can sometimes be quite straightforward. There is a deed. There is a title. There are property lines. Someone has the authority recognized by law to decide who enters, what is built, what is removed, what is sold and how the property is used.
That matters.
Spiritual language does not erase property law.
Twenty years of attending rituals on somebody else’s land does not magically put your name on the deed. Helping build a shrine does not necessarily make you its legal owner. Loving a place does not create a property interest simply because the love is sincere.
But there is another question hiding underneath the legal one.
Does having the right to do something automatically answer whether one ought to do it?
And there is our rabbit.
Ownership and Stewardship Are Not the Same Question
Ownership asks about authority.
Stewardship asks about responsibility.
Ownership says:
This is mine.
Stewardship asks:
What has been placed in my care?
Those statements can exist in the same person.
In fact, perhaps they should.
A person can own a hundred acres and also understand themselves as responsible for what happens to those hundred acres. They may recognize that trees take longer to grow than human plans take to change, that water flows beyond property lines, that wildlife is thoroughly unimpressed by land registries, and that decisions made during one generation can shape the lives of people who will inherit the consequences.
The title says who owns the land.
It does not tell us everything the land means.
That distinction becomes even more important when a place has become sacred to more people than the person holding the deed.
A Place Can Be Privately Owned and Communally Meaningful
This is one reason Raven’s Knoll has become such an interesting example in this series of rabbit holes.
We are not using it here to settle any contemporary dispute, nor to suggest that community attachment somehow overrides private ownership. We are using it because the historical record allows us to watch several different relationships with the same land grow beside one another.
Dodie Graham McKay’s 2017 account of Rites of Raven’s Knoll described privately owned Pagan land that had, through repeated gatherings, accumulated permanent shrines and sacred sites. The book itself brought together twenty-eight voices connected to the land and the events held there.
Barbara Jane Davy later studied Heathen ritual at Raven’s Knoll, examining gifting, reciprocity, wyrd and the relationships formed through ritual practice.
Those things do not transfer legal ownership.
But neither are they nothing.
People prayed there.
People made offerings there.
People married there.
People worked there.
People repaired things.
People created ritual traditions there.
People attached memories to particular trees, stones, fires, clearings and shrines.
Something interesting happens when enough human lives pass repeatedly through the same landscape.
The land acquires more than one biography.
The owner has one.
The volunteer another.
The priest another.
The child who grew up attending festivals another.
The person who exchanged vows there another.
The person who mourned somebody there another.
All of them may be talking about the same hundred acres.
None of them are necessarily talking about the same place.
The Deed Is Real, but It Is Not the Whole Story
I think we sometimes get ourselves into trouble by demanding that one kind of truth erase another.
If the land is privately owned, then some will say the community’s emotional or spiritual attachment is irrelevant.
If the community has invested years of devotion and labour, others may begin speaking as though ownership itself should no longer matter.
Neither position seems particularly useful.
The deed is real.
The relationship is real.
They simply describe different things.
One establishes legal authority.
The other establishes meaning.
And when sacredness enters the conversation, perhaps meaning creates moral questions even when it does not create legal rights.
That is an important distinction.
Moral stake is not necessarily legal ownership.
But legal ownership does not automatically make every decision morally weightless either.
The interesting questions begin precisely where those two truths meet.
The Shrine Someone Else Helped Build
Imagine that I own a piece of land.
On that land is a shrine.
I provided the space, but over thirty years many people carried stones to it. Someone carved the altar. Someone planted trees. Someone replaced the roof. Someone donated the statue. Someone tended the grass. Someone performed the first ritual there. Hundreds of people have since left offerings.
Legally, depending upon the circumstances, the shrine may very well belong to the landowner.
But suppose one morning the owner decides:
I am tired of looking at it. Bring in the excavator.
Maybe they have the legal right.
But surely the ethical conversation does not end with the sentence:
I own it.
At minimum we might ask:
Who should be told?
Who should be consulted?
Can sacred objects be removed respectfully?
Can the history be documented?
Can people say goodbye?
Can some part of what was created be relocated?
Does an obligation arise from having allowed people to invest years of religious meaning into the place?
None of those questions necessarily changes who owns the property.
They change what stewardship might require of the owner.
The Other Side of the Problem
But now turn the rabbit around.
Suppose I have attended that shrine for twenty years.
I love it.
I helped maintain it.
Some of the most important spiritual experiences of my life happened there.
Do those things give me the right to command the person who owns the property?
No.
Not automatically.
My devotion does not turn another person’s property into mine.
My memories do not transfer the deed.
My contribution does not necessarily create permanent authority.
That matters too.
Otherwise the language of sacredness becomes a remarkably effective way of taking control of something somebody else actually owns.
That would not be stewardship.
That would simply be another form of entitlement dressed in religious clothes.
So the ethical burden runs in both directions.
The owner should not necessarily treat communal sacred investment as meaningless.
The community should not necessarily treat sacred investment as ownership.
Between those two positions lives something much more difficult.
Relationship.
Again.
Stewardship Begins Where Entitlement Ends
Perhaps stewardship is what happens when we stop asking only what we are permitted to do.
A steward asks different questions.
What was here before me?
Who depends upon this?
Who has invested themselves here?
What promises have been made?
What expectations have reasonably grown around those promises?
What will my decision change?
Who carries the cost?
What am I passing forward?
What am I destroying that cannot easily be recreated?
And perhaps most importantly:
Am I treating this thing as something entrusted to me, or merely as something available to me?
Those are very different relationships.
The Firekeeper Does Not Own the Fire
I keep returning to the image of the firekeeper.
A firekeeper has authority.
Someone has to decide when another log goes on.
Someone watches the sparks.
Someone makes sure the fire does not escape the ring.
Someone may tell a careless person to step back.
But the firekeeper’s authority exists because they have accepted responsibility for the fire.
The firekeeper does not become the fire.
They do not own everyone’s warmth.
They do not own every story told around the flames.
They do not own the memories people take away from the circle.
Their authority is tied to care.
Separate authority from care and something changes.
The firekeeper becomes merely the person holding the poker.
Perhaps spiritual authority works the same way.
Who Owns a Ritual?
This problem becomes even stranger when the sacred thing is not land.
Who owns a ritual?
The person who wrote it?
The tradition that shaped it?
The people who performed it for thirty years?
The priest who currently leads it?
The community that keeps returning?
What if the original creator dies?
What if the community changes the ritual?
What if somebody claims that changing it is disrespectful?
What if preserving it exactly makes it meaningless to the people now performing it?
This is where Marion Bowman’s work on vernacular religion becomes particularly useful.
Religion as lived by ordinary people does not remain frozen simply because somebody once wrote something down. Tradition moves through human hands. People inherit it, interpret it, perform it, adapt it and sometimes argue furiously about what should happen next.
Maybe ritual is less like owning a statue and more like tending a garden.
You inherit something with a history.
You are not free from that history.
But neither can you keep the garden alive by embalming it.
You prune.
You plant.
You learn which things belong there.
You occasionally discover that something everyone swore had grown there for centuries was planted in 1987.
You laugh.
Hopefully.
Then you keep tending.
Who Owns Tradition?
This may be the larger question underneath the smaller one.
We speak constantly about our tradition.
But what does that possessive actually mean?
Did we create it?
Usually not.
Did we receive it whole and unchanged from antiquity?
Usually not that either.
Tradition is handed forward through layers of people.
Someone remembered something.
Someone forgot something.
Someone wrote something down.
Someone translated it.
Someone misunderstood the translation.
Someone reconstructed the missing pieces.
Someone created a beautiful new practice and later generations assumed it was ancient.
Someone else eventually checked the dates.
And through all of that, tradition lived.
Perhaps we do not own tradition.
Perhaps we receive custody of a portion of it.
For a while.
That creates an interesting obligation.
Preserve what deserves preserving.
Tell the truth about what we actually know.
Do not confuse innovation with antiquity.
Do not confuse antiquity with virtue.
Add carefully.
Remove carefully.
Then hand something onward that is still alive.
And Who Exactly Is “The Community”?
Here the work of Rabinovitch, Charbonneau and Lepage becomes important again.
It is very easy to say:
The community should decide.
Which community?
Who speaks for it?
The founders?
The elders?
The people who attend every week?
The people who attend once a year but have done so for thirty years?
The younger generation?
The people who left?
The people who were pushed out?
The landowners?
The clergy?
The volunteers?
The loudest person in the Facebook group?
There is danger in treating community as though it were a single creature with one mouth.
Rabinovitch’s work helped document just how internally varied modern Paganism is. Charbonneau examined diversity, ethnicity and identity within Pagan community. Lepage showed people negotiating gender and belonging within ritual traditions.
Together they remind us that communities contain differences.
Sometimes profound ones.
So community stewardship cannot simply mean finding one person willing to announce:
I speak for everyone.
They probably don’t.
Stewardship Needs Listening
Maybe this gives us one characteristic of good stewardship.
Listening.
Not endless consultation until nothing can ever happen.
Not giving every person veto power over every decision.
But listening enough to understand what is actually being changed.
If an old shrine is going to be moved, find out who uses it.
If a ritual is going to be discontinued, understand what it means to the people who practiced it.
If sacred land is changing purpose, recognize the history attached to that landscape.
If a tradition is being rewritten, know what is being inherited before declaring what must be discarded.
Consultation does not mean surrendering authority.
It means exercising authority with information rather than merely with power.
“Because I Can” Is a Very Small Moral Philosophy
Perhaps that is the deepest problem with ownership when it becomes detached from stewardship.
I can.
I can cut the tree.
I can remove the shrine.
I can close the gate.
I can change the ritual.
I can sell the land.
I can keep the artifact.
I can exclude the community.
Perhaps.
Sometimes the answer really is yes.
But I can answers only the question of power.
It tells us nothing about wisdom.
Nothing about responsibility.
Nothing about memory.
Nothing about consequence.
Nothing about relationship.
A child eventually learns that being physically capable of doing something is not, by itself, a compelling reason to do it.
Perhaps adults need reminding occasionally too.
The Steward’s Question Is Different
The steward asks:
What happens after I exercise this power?
That question reaches forward.
If I cut this grove, what replaces it?
If I remove this shrine, what memory am I interrupting?
If I change this ritual, what do we gain and what do we lose?
If I close this community, where do the people who depended upon it go?
If I sell this sacred object, am I selling something that was ever truly mine alone to sell?
If I inherited authority, what obligations arrived with it?
That is where stewardship begins to resemble Davy’s relational ethics.
We are not isolated actors making decisions inside a vacuum.
Our choices move outward through relationships.
They enter the web.
And the web remembers.
Sacred Authority Should Carry More Responsibility, Not Less
There is another trap here.
People sometimes imagine sacred authority as a reason they should be questioned less.
I am the priest.
I am the elder.
I am the founder.
I am the landowner.
I am the tradition bearer.
I built this.
I was here first.
Perhaps all of those things are true.
But if the role is genuinely sacred, should it not increase accountability rather than reduce it?
The person entrusted with the well has more responsibility toward the water than the person merely passing through.
The person tending the shrine has more responsibility for its condition than the visitor.
The person who teaches has more responsibility for accuracy than the student.
The person holding community power has more responsibility for how that power affects others.
Authority does not prove stewardship.
Conduct does.
The Vé and the Work Nobody Sees
Graham McKay’s reporting on the Raven’s Knoll Vé offers a wonderfully earthy reminder of this.
The sacred space was not maintained by theology alone.
Posts rotted.
Grass grew.
Overgrowth had to be pushed back.
Repairs required labour.
People had to source materials and physically rebuild parts of the site.
That might be one of the best metaphors we have found during this entire trip.
Everyone enjoys talking about sacredness.
Eventually somebody has to cut the grass.
The shrine does not care how sophisticated our theology is when the roof leaks.
The sacred fire still needs wood.
The ritual field still needs tending.
The community hall still needs cleaning.
The dead still need remembering.
The story still needs telling.
Stewardship is where sacred language acquires calluses.
The Community Has Responsibilities Too
It would be easy at this point to place all responsibility upon whoever holds formal authority.
That would be another mistake.
Communities can consume sacred places too.
People arrive.
Use the facilities.
Attend the rituals.
Enjoy the atmosphere.
Photograph the shrine.
Tell everyone how spiritually important the place is.
Then leave the maintenance to somebody else.
If we believe sacred relationship creates obligation, then stewardship cannot belong only to the owner.
Perhaps the visitor owes something too.
Respect the rules.
Do not damage the land.
Help when help is requested.
Clean up.
Contribute if you can.
Recognize that somebody else is paying the bills.
Do not mistake access for entitlement.
Do not demand ownership simply because something is meaningful to you.
Again we arrive at reciprocity.
If the place gives something to us, perhaps we should occasionally ask what we give back.
What About the People Who Come After Us?
There is another stakeholder who never seems to get invited to the meeting.
The future.
Suppose I inherit sacred land.
I did not build the original shrines.
I did not begin the rituals.
Maybe I do not even share all the beliefs of the people who came before me.
What do I owe them?
And what do I owe people who have not yet arrived?
This may be where stewardship differs most profoundly from possession.
Possession is centred upon the present holder.
Stewardship has a longer memory.
It looks backward:
What did I receive?
And forward:
What will I leave?
A grove planted today may not reach maturity during the planter’s lifetime.
A shrine built carefully may outlive its builder.
A tradition protected honestly may be practiced by people whose names we will never know.
Perhaps stewardship is a conversation among the dead, the living and the unborn.
We happen to hold the talking stick for a little while.
We Should Be Careful With the Word Stewardship Too
There is a danger in romanticizing this word.
Anyone can call themselves a steward.
Corporations do it.
Politicians do it.
Religious leaders do it.
Landowners do it.
Organizations put the word into mission statements.
The word itself proves nothing.
A steward can still make bad decisions.
A steward can become controlling.
A steward can confuse caretaking with ownership of other people’s spiritual lives.
A steward can decide that because they work hardest, nobody else deserves a voice.
And perhaps most dangerously, a steward can begin believing that whatever they want must automatically be good for the thing they claim to serve.
So stewardship itself requires accountability.
The question cannot merely be:
Do I call myself a steward?
It must become:
What does my conduct reveal that I am actually serving?
Land?
Community?
Tradition?
The gods?
History?
Future generations?
Or simply myself?
That question may sting.
Good questions occasionally do.
Maybe the Sacred Is Held in Trust
I keep circling around another phrase.
Held in trust.
Not in the strict legal meaning of a trust.
I mean something older and more ordinary.
To be trusted with something.
A story.
A place.
An object.
A ritual.
A responsibility.
Another person’s confidence.
You possess access to it, perhaps even authority over it, but the relationship itself tells you that your freedom is not absolute.
Someone trusted you.
Something was entrusted to you.
That changes what your hands mean.
The old book in your possession may legally be yours to throw into the fire.
But if it contains the only surviving record of your community’s rituals, perhaps the ethical question is larger than ownership.
The tree may be yours to cut.
But if generations have gathered beneath it, perhaps one pauses before starting the chainsaw.
The shrine may stand on your land.
But perhaps thirty years of offerings ask for a conversation before the bulldozer arrives.
Not because ownership vanished.
Because stewardship appeared beside it.
The Sacred Pushes Back Against Possession
Perhaps this is ultimately what sacredness does.
It puts a limit on possession.
Not necessarily a legal limit.
A moral one.
Something sacred says:
You may hold me, but I am not merely yours.
The land existed before the deed.
The river flowed before the survey.
The gods, if we believe in them, certainly did not spring into existence when somebody purchased acreage.
The ancestors are not property.
Tradition is not property in the ordinary sense.
Community is definitely not property.
Even our memories refuse to behave like possessions.
We carry them, but they were made with other people.
Perhaps the more sacred something becomes, the less comfortably the language of simple possession fits around it.
So Who Owns the Sacred?
After following this rabbit through the woods, I think the question may contain its own mistake.
Maybe ownership is not the most useful final category.
Somebody may own the land.
Somebody may own the physical object.
Somebody may own copyright in a written ritual.
Those are real things and should not be waved away with spirituality.
But sacredness itself?
I am not sure anybody owns that.
Perhaps sacredness exists in relationship.
And relationships are participated in rather than possessed.
So perhaps the better question is:
Who is responsible for tending the sacred?
Sometimes the answer is the owner.
Sometimes the priest.
Sometimes the community.
Sometimes all of them.
Sometimes responsibility belongs differently to different people.
The landowner controls the property.
The ritual leader tends the ceremony.
The historian tends memory.
The community tends belonging.
The volunteer tends the path.
The elder tends knowledge.
The newcomer brings questions that prevent tradition from becoming complacent.
And perhaps nobody gets to say:
Because my responsibility is real, yours is meaningless.
The web is more complicated than that.
The Fire Was Never Ours
Maybe that is where this rabbit finally settles.
We gather around a fire.
Someone owns the land beneath it.
Someone bought the wood.
Someone struck the match.
Someone tends the flames.
Someone tells the stories.
Someone remembers the dead.
Someone sits quietly at the edge of the light and says almost nothing all night.
Morning comes.
The fire dies down.
Everyone carries something different away.
Who owned the fire?
Perhaps nobody.
Perhaps everybody.
Perhaps that is still the wrong question.
The better questions might be:
Who kept it burning?
Who gathered around it?
Who was warmed?
Who got burned?
Who fed it?
Who remembered it?
Who made sure it did not burn down the forest?
And when everyone finally walked away, who made sure it was properly put out?
That is stewardship.
Not possession.
Care.
Responsibility.
Memory.
Restraint.
Knowing when to add another log.
Knowing when not to.
And knowing that having your hand on the poker never made the flame belong to you.
And There Goes the Rabbit Again
Because there is one question sitting underneath stewardship that we have not really touched.
If we are temporary keepers…
If sacred things are inherited…
If communities and traditions stretch backward and forward beyond a single human lifetime…
Then perhaps responsibility does not end with the living.
What do we owe the people who come after us?
Not metaphorically.
Practically.
What traditions do we preserve?
What stories do we document?
What mistakes do we refuse to hand down?
What land do we leave?
What communities do we build?
What debts do we create?
What fires do we expect someone else to tend?
And perhaps the most uncomfortable version of the question:
What will the next generation inherit from the Paganism we are creating right now?
There is the rabbit.
And that one seems to be heading toward legacy.
Godspeed.
Scholarly Trail Markers
This essay is a philosophical synthesis. It does not claim that the scholars below collectively proposed a single theory of ownership or stewardship. Their work provides different pieces of the landscape: lived and vernacular religion, relational responsibility, sacred place, community diversity, ritual practice and the accumulation of religious meaning through repeated participation.
Bowman, M. (2014). Vernacular religion, contemporary spirituality and emergent identities: Lessons from Lauri Honko. Approaching Religion, 4(1).
Davy, B. J. (2022). Reconstructing the Procession of Nerthus: A contemporary Heathen ritual offering of sacrifice. The Pomegranate. https://journal.equinoxpub.com/POM/article/view/24259
Davy, B. J. (2025). Wyrd ecology: Heathen ritual and gifting relations. Oxford University Press. https://academic.oup.com/book/59759
Graham McKay, D. (2016, July 7). Ontario Heathens rebuild Vé. The Wild Hunt. https://wildhunt.org/2016/07/ontario-heathens-rebuild-ve.html
Graham McKay, D. (2017, April 25). Community experience at Raven’s Knoll documented in new book. The Wild Hunt. https://wildhunt.org/2017/04/the-community-experience-at-ravens-knoll-documented-in-new-book.html
