Tag: religion

What Remains When the Gods Are Gone?

Crowd at Íslendingadagurinn Icelandic Heritage Festival beside waterfront stage and Viking ship

Íslendingadagurinn and the Survival of Cultural Memory

I’ve been chasing this particular rabbit for a while now without really knowing where it was going. We’ve been talking about Pagan history, about memory, about second-generation Pagans, third-generation Pagans, communities disappearing, traditions changing and the uncomfortable question of what actually survives when the people who built something are no longer there to explain it. Then I stumbled across Íslendingadagurinn, the Icelandic Festival of Manitoba, and suddenly there was another version of the question sitting right in front of me.

Íslendingadagurinn means, roughly, “Day of the Icelanders.” It began in Winnipeg in 1890 and eventually moved permanently to Gimli, Manitoba, in 1932. Gimli itself sits inside what was historically known as New Iceland, one of the major Icelandic settlement areas in Canada. Icelandic immigrants began arriving there in significant numbers during the nineteenth century, bringing with them language, stories, customs, identity and, like most Icelanders of that period, Christianity. That last bit matters, because Íslendingadagurinn is not a Pagan festival. It was not created as a Heathen gathering. It is not some uninterrupted survival of pre-Christian Norse religion hiding on the shores of Lake Winnipeg.

And that is precisely why I find it so interesting.

Because more than a century later, look at what remains.

There is a Viking Village. There are demonstrations of Norse crafts and daily life. There are discussions of the Alþingi, settlement, law, trade and the sagas. Icelandic folklore remains visible. Trolls and elves haven’t entirely disappeared from the cultural landscape. Norse imagery remains recognizable. The festival still celebrates the history of the Icelandic people who came to Canada and built a community there, and generations of descendants have continued participating in that celebration long after the original immigrants were gone.

Then there is the Fjallkona, the “Lady of the Mountain,” a symbolic personification of Iceland. Íslendingadagurinn has selected a Fjallkona since 1924. She represents Iceland itself, with Icelanders poetically understood as her children. The symbolism surrounding the figure reaches into older Icelandic imagery involving mountains, ravens, runes and the landscape of Iceland itself. Again, this does not make the ceremony Pagan. Symbols have a strange habit of surviving religions, governments and centuries. Sometimes we remember where they came from. Sometimes we don’t.

And that’s where this rabbit turned around and looked at me.

We’ve been asking what happens when Pagan communities disappear. What survives when the gatherings end, the organizations collapse, the elders die, the newsletters stop being printed and nobody remembers who started what or why something was done a certain way. We tend to think that if the religion survives, the tradition survives. Íslendingadagurinn presents us with almost the opposite experiment.

What happens when the old religion disappears, but the culture keeps remembering?

Apparently, quite a bit survives.

The sagas survive. The ancestral stories survive. Names survive. Food survives. Music survives. Folklore survives. Symbols survive. Historical memory survives. Even pieces of the worldview that produced the old religion can survive, though the people carrying them may no longer understand those things as religious at all.

There is an important distinction here, because I don’t want to commit the same mistake modern Paganism sometimes makes when looking backward. Cultural survival is not the same thing as religious survival. A Viking reenactor is not automatically Heathen. Someone celebrating Icelandic ancestry is not secretly worshipping Odin. A raven on a banner does not turn a cultural festival into a blót. We do ourselves no favours by claiming everything remotely Norse as evidence that the old religion somehow survived intact.

It didn’t.

But perhaps the more interesting question is whether anything ever survives intact.

Maybe religions don’t survive as sealed boxes handed from one generation to the next. Maybe they dissolve into stories, customs, sayings, festivals, family habits, art, language and identity. Some pieces disappear completely. Others get renamed. Some become folklore. Some become children’s stories. Some become cultural symbols. Then, generations later, somebody goes digging through the attic of history and discovers that the supposedly decorative object on the shelf once meant something entirely different.

Modern Paganism has done a great deal of that digging.

Heathenry, Ásatrú, modern Druidry and many other reconstructed or revived traditions exist partly because people deliberately went looking for fragments. Archaeology. Folklore. Sagas. Place names. Medieval manuscripts. Legal codes. Folk customs. Songs. Archaeological remains. The writings of people who were often documenting traditions after conversion had already taken place. We reconstruct because continuity was broken.

But Gimli suggests that broken continuity does not necessarily mean cultural amnesia.

There is another piece of this that interests me even more. Íslendingadagurinn has been carried forward through generations. Children attended with parents. Grandchildren attended with grandparents. Volunteers followed relatives into the organization. People grew up knowing that this thing existed because their family and community kept showing up to do it.

That should sound familiar to anyone who has been following my recent rabbits.

I’ve been wondering where the third-generation Pagans are. I’ve met second-generation Pagans. I’ve met people who grew up at gatherings and festivals and now describe Paganism as “that weird thing my parents did.” Some still attend gatherings because those places are part of their childhood landscape even when the religion itself no longer means quite the same thing to them. Some now have children of their own. Somewhere out there, third-generation Paganism is beginning whether we have noticed it or not.

But what exactly are we handing them?

That may be the lesson hiding inside Íslendingadagurinn.

The Icelandic Canadians of Manitoba did not preserve their identity by writing a manifesto saying Icelandic culture must survive. They preserved it by continuing to do things. They gathered. They told stories. They celebrated. They remembered names. They created institutions. They taught children what the symbols meant. They created something worth returning to, even for descendants whose relationship with Iceland itself became increasingly distant with every generation.

Modern Paganism has spent an enormous amount of energy arguing about belief, legitimacy, labels, lineage and who is Pagan enough to call themselves Pagan. Those conversations sometimes matter. But perhaps we have underestimated the much more mundane machinery of cultural survival.

Who cooks the food?

Who keeps the photographs?

Who tells the story about the year the tent blew away?

Who remembers why the procession goes left instead of right?

Who keeps the old newsletters?

Who teaches the songs?

Who brings their children back?

Who writes down the names of the people in the photograph before everyone who recognizes them is dead?

That is how culture survives.

And perhaps this connects directly to another rabbit we’ve been chasing: maybe Paganism isn’t supposed to survive intact.

That sentence sounds almost heretical when you first say it. Surely preservation is the goal. Surely we want future Pagans to know exactly what we believed, exactly what we practiced and exactly why we did it. But that’s not really how living cultures work. Every generation forgets something. Every generation adds something. Every generation throws away practices that no longer make sense and accidentally preserves things nobody expected to matter.

The Icelandic settlers who arrived in Manitoba could not possibly have known what their descendants would still care about a century and a half later. They couldn’t have predicted Viking reenactors, tourism, heritage parks or modern Canadians rediscovering Icelandic ancestry through genealogy and the internet. They simply created communities and traditions strong enough that later generations had something to inherit.

Maybe that should change the question we ask about Paganism.

Instead of asking, “How do we make sure Paganism survives exactly as we practice it?” perhaps we should ask, “What are we creating that someone will still find worth remembering a hundred years from now?”

That is a much harder question.

Organizations disappear. Festivals end. Websites vanish. Leaders fall out of favour. Communities fracture. The Paganism somebody encounters fifty years from now may barely resemble the Paganism we recognize today.

But perhaps somebody will still light a fire.

Perhaps someone will still tell the stories.

Perhaps a child who spent summers running around a Pagan gathering will bring their own grandchildren back to the same piece of land and say, “This is something our family used to do.”

They may understand it differently.

They may call it something different.

They may even forget why we thought it mattered.

But something will have survived.

Íslendingadagurinn has been doing exactly that for more than a century. Not preserving an ancient Norse religion, but carrying Icelandic cultural memory across generations on Canadian soil.

And maybe the rabbit hiding underneath all of this is surprisingly simple.

Religion can disappear while culture remembers.

Which leaves those of us creating Pagan culture today with a rather uncomfortable question.

What are we doing that is worth remembering?

And if nobody writes any of it down, how will they know?

Who Owns the Sacred? Stewardship, Authority, and the Problem of Possession

Two side-by-side stone circles, one fenced as private property and the other open as a community sacred grove with people tending the land

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

When Does a Place Become Sacred—and Can It Stop Being Sacred?

Group of people in cloaks gathered around a stone fire pit in forest during sunset

We began several holes ago by asking whether there was a common thread running through the scholarly work we had been reading about Paganism.

We found relationship.

Then relationship led us to responsibility.

Responsibility led us to broken relationship, betrayal, frith, boundaries and repair.

And sitting just beyond that last clearing was another rabbit.

Because if relationships can be created…

If relationships can deepen…

If relationships can be broken…

Then what happens to the things we call sacred?

What makes something sacred in the first place?

A god?

A ritual?

A priest?

A community?

History?

Memory?

Repeated use?

Something inherent in the place itself?

And then comes the more uncomfortable question.

Can something that was once sacred cease to be sacred?

A grove.

A shrine.

A community.

A ritual.

An object.

A promise.

A relationship.

A home.

Now that is a rabbit worth following.

What Do We Mean by Sacred?

We use the word rather freely.

Sacred land.

Sacred fire.

Sacred circle.

Sacred object.

Sacred relationship.

Sacred duty.

Sacred space.

Sometimes sacred simply seems to mean very important to me.

But that feels too thin.

My coffee may be extremely important to me at three in the morning.

I am reluctant to describe the coffee maker as holy.

So sacredness appears to require something more.

Marion Bowman’s work is useful here because much of her scholarship asks us to pay attention not merely to what institutions declare sacred, but to what ordinary people actually experience, interpret and treat as sacred.

That distinction matters enormously for Paganism.

We do not have a central authority capable of drawing a circle around a place on a map and declaring:

This is now officially Pagan sacred land.

Instead, sacredness often appears from below.

Someone encounters a place.

Something happens there.

Someone returns.

A story develops.

A ritual happens.

Then happens again.

Other people enter the story.

Offerings are made.

Names are spoken.

Memory gathers.

And gradually the place becomes different from the ground five hundred feet away.

Not necessarily physically different.

Relationally different.

We begin treating it differently.

Perhaps that is one of the simplest places to begin.

The sacred is something toward which ordinary behaviour is no longer considered sufficient.

We approach differently.

We speak differently.

We behave differently.

We remember differently.

Something has been set apart, not necessarily by a fence, but by relationship.

The Clearing Was Once Just a Clearing

Imagine a patch of woodland.

Nothing particularly distinguishes it from the rest of the forest.

Maple.

Pine.

Stone.

Leaf litter.

Mosquitoes doing their sacred duty of driving everyone completely insane.

Then someone holds a ritual there.

Perhaps nothing dramatic happens.

People gather.

Words are spoken.

An offering is given.

They leave.

The forest continues being a forest.

Next year they return.

Someone remembers where they stood.

Another ritual happens.

Someone places a stone.

Then another.

Years pass.

A child participates.

Someone makes an oath there.

A couple exchanges vows.

Someone mourns a dead friend beneath the trees.

Someone leaves an offering because they have nowhere else to put their grief.

Someone else goes there alone at dawn.

Eventually newcomers are told:

This is the place where we…

Notice those words.

The place where we.

Something has happened.

The geography has acquired memory.

That ordinary clearing has become attached to human lives, ritual actions, stories, perhaps gods or spirits, perhaps ancestors, perhaps all of them at once.

It has become part of a religious landscape.

Not because the soil changed.

Because relationship accumulated.

Sacredness May Be Something We Build Without Owning

This creates an interesting problem.

Who owns sacredness?

Suppose the clearing is on private property.

The title to the land has a name on it.

Legally, ownership may be perfectly clear.

But after twenty years of community rituals, marriages, memorials, offerings, festivals and stories, is legal ownership the only relationship that matters?

Of course not.

Legal ownership still matters.

Someone pays the taxes.

Someone carries liability.

Someone maintains the road.

Someone has legal authority over the property.

We should not pretend those realities disappear because spirituality enters the picture.

But sacredness and ownership are different categories.

You can own land without finding it sacred.

You can consider land sacred without owning a single square foot of it.

A cemetery provides an obvious example.

People visit graves on land they do not own because relationship gives that ground meaning.

The deed and the devotion answer different questions.

One asks:

Who legally controls this place?

The other asks:

What does this place mean, and to whom?

Sometimes those answers overlap beautifully.

Sometimes they do not.

And when they do not, things can become painful very quickly.

Raven’s Knoll Gives Us a Living Example

This is one reason the scholarship and writing surrounding Raven’s Knoll has been so useful in our recent rabbit holes.

Not because Raven’s Knoll provides some universal model of Pagan sacredness.

It does not.

But because we can actually watch sacred geography developing there through the historical record.

Dodie Graham McKay documented a place where repeated community use led to permanent shrines and sacred sites.

Barbara Jane Davy later studied Heathen rituals occurring on that same land, including the Procession of Nerthus and the relational world surrounding ritual, offerings, gifting and place.

The Vé provides an especially clear example.

It was constructed as sacred ground.

People entered according to particular ritual expectations.

There were taboos concerning conduct.

There were god-poles.

There was an altar.

There were rituals.

There was an expectation that people entering that space behaved differently because they had crossed from ordinary campground into holy space.

That is fascinating.

Not because we need to decide whether everyone reading this accepts the same gods, metaphysics or ritual theology.

Because we can observe sacralization happening.

People create a boundary.

People develop rules.

People perform rituals.

People return.

People repair the site when weather and time damage it.

People tell stories about it.

The place gathers significance.

Again:

Relationship accumulates.

Perhaps Sacredness Is a Relationship Under Obligation

That phrase has been following me through this rabbit hole.

A relationship under obligation.

Because sacredness seems to ask something of us.

If something is merely valuable, I may enjoy it.

If something is sacred, my behaviour toward it changes.

A sacred fire is not merely useful heat.

A sacred well is not merely convenient water.

A sacred grove is not merely unused timber.

A sacred object is not merely decoration.

A sacred promise is not merely something I said last Tuesday.

Once something is sacred, we begin talking about obligations.

Respect.

Care.

Attention.

Memory.

Boundaries.

Stewardship.

Perhaps offerings.

Perhaps ritual cleanliness.

Perhaps silence.

Perhaps simply behaving as though the thing before us matters beyond our immediate convenience.

That ties this rabbit directly back to the previous one.

If relationship creates responsibility, perhaps sacredness describes a relationship in which responsibility has become particularly intense.

Not merely:

I like this place.

But:

I owe something to how I behave here.

Then What Is Desecration?

This is where things become interesting.

If sacredness can be built through relationship, can it be destroyed through violation?

Suppose someone walks into a sacred grove and vandalizes it.

Have they made it less sacred?

Perhaps not.

In fact, our reaction may reveal precisely the opposite.

We call the act desecration because we still believe the place is sacred.

If someone kicks over a random pile of stones beside a road, we may call it vandalism.

If someone deliberately destroys a shrine, something feels different.

The outrage comes from the relationship.

The violation does not necessarily remove sacredness.

It may expose it.

We discover how much something mattered when somebody treats it as though it did not.

Perhaps desecration and desacralization are therefore not the same thing.

Desecration violates the sacred.

Desacralization would mean the thing is no longer treated, experienced or understood as sacred.

Those are very different processes.

A Broken Shrine Can Still Be a Shrine

Imagine a shrine destroyed by a storm.

The tree falls.

The stones scatter.

The offerings are buried beneath branches.

Has the sacred place vanished?

Most people connected with it would probably say no.

They may rebuild.

They may leave it as it fell.

They may create a new shrine nearby.

But the story remains.

The memory remains.

The relationship remains.

The physical form was damaged.

The sacredness may continue.

Now suppose nobody returns.

One year passes.

Then five.

Then twenty.

The stones disappear beneath moss.

The people who remember it age.

Stories stop being told.

A generation comes along that does not know a ritual ever happened there.

Now what?

Is it still sacred?

That question cannot be answered quite so easily.

Does Sacredness Require Someone to Remember?

Here we run directly into theology.

If you believe a god, spirit or other sacred power objectively inhabits or claims a place, then human memory may be irrelevant.

The place can remain holy even if nobody remembers why.

If you understand sacredness primarily as something created through human experience and community practice, then forgotten sacredness becomes a stranger idea.

Without relationship, what remains?

I suspect Paganism allows both possibilities to sit rather uneasily beside one another.

Perhaps the land remembers even when humans do not.

Perhaps the gods remember.

Perhaps spirits remain.

Or perhaps sacredness requires somebody still willing to recognize the relationship.

I do not know.

And I am increasingly comfortable saying those three words.

I do not know.

They may be among the healthiest words available to anyone wandering through religion.

But we can say something about human sacredness.

Among human beings, memory matters.

Tell the story and something survives.

Stop telling it and eventually something changes.

Perhaps There Are Different Kinds of Sacredness

Maybe part of the problem is that we have been asking one word to do too much work.

A place might be sacred because people believe a deity or spirit dwells there.

Another might be sacred because rituals have been performed there for generations.

Another because somebody died there.

Another because ancestors are buried there.

Another because an extraordinary personal experience happened there.

Another because a community deliberately set it apart for ritual use.

Another because history itself has made the place morally significant.

These may overlap.

But they are not identical.

Perhaps we need room for:

Sacred by presence.

Sacred by practice.

Sacred by memory.

Sacred by dedication.

Sacred by grief.

Sacred by inheritance.

Sacred by relationship.

And perhaps a place can move between those forms across time.

A Sacred Place Can Outlive Its Community

Walk through the ruins of an old church.

No congregation remains.

The roof may be gone.

Grass grows where pews once stood.

Birds nest where sermons were preached.

Is it still sacred?

Maybe.

Maybe not in the same way.

It may no longer be a functioning sacred place.

No one gathers for worship.

No ritual calendar structures the year.

But memory clings.

People still lower their voices.

They notice gravestones.

They recognize that lives passed through this place.

The sacred has changed tense.

It has moved from we do this here to people once did this here.

That may be a kind of sacredness too.

Not living ritual.

Sacred memory.

And a Community Can Become a Sacred Place

This rabbit is not only about geography.

We also call relationships sacred.

Marriage.

Friendship.

Kinship.

Community.

Coven.

Kindred.

Grove.

Home.

Perhaps communities become sacred in much the same way places do.

Time.

Repetition.

Memory.

Shared labour.

Ritual.

Loss.

Celebration.

Returning.

The community stops being merely a group of people who happen to know one another.

It becomes part of how somebody understands themselves.

These are my people.

That sentence carries enormous weight.

Which means its breaking carries enormous weight too.

Can a Community Stop Being Sacred?

Now we are back in the difficult woods.

Suppose a community once gave you belonging.

You celebrated there.

You learned there.

You contributed labour.

You tended fires.

You formed friendships.

You marked parts of your life there.

It was home.

Then something changes.

Perhaps leadership changes.

Perhaps values change.

Perhaps you change.

Perhaps trust breaks.

Perhaps the place still exists but you no longer recognize what it has become.

Does that erase what it once meant?

I do not think so.

This is where the last rabbit hole becomes important.

Something can have been sacred and no longer be an active sacred relationship.

That does not require declaring the past fraudulent.

The old fire was still warm because it is cold now.

The friendship was still real because it later ended.

The community may genuinely have been home even if you can no longer live there.

The sacredness belonged to the relationship as it existed.

When the relationship changes, the form of sacredness may change with it.

Present sacredness may become remembered sacredness.

And grief may be the bridge between the two.

Maybe That Is Why Leaving Sacred Places Hurts

Leaving an ordinary place is logistics.

Boxes.

Keys.

Address changes.

Leaving a sacred place is different.

Part of yourself remains attached to the landscape.

The tree where something happened.

The fire.

The campsite.

The shrine.

The person you used to be when you stood there.

Maybe that is why people sometimes return physically to places they have already left emotionally.

They are checking whether the old relationship is still there.

Perhaps they hope the land will recognize them.

Perhaps they hope they will recognize themselves.

Sometimes they do.

Sometimes they don’t.

And that can be its own kind of mourning.

Ownership Cannot Command Sacredness

This is another important point.

You can control access to a sacred place.

You cannot necessarily control what the place means to everyone who has known it.

You can change its use.

Rename things.

Move shrines.

Close rituals.

Open new ones.

Sell property.

Build fences.

Change programming.

Those things affect living relationships enormously.

But memory does not obey property boundaries particularly well.

Someone can stand miles away and still carry a place inside them.

Likewise, a community cannot order someone to continue experiencing something as sacred.

Sacredness cannot be maintained by press release.

If the relationship is gone, insisting that the old language still applies may accomplish nothing.

You cannot command belonging.

You cannot legislate home.

You cannot demand reverence.

Those things have to remain alive in relationship.

Can We Desecrate a Relationship?

Now take the idea away from land entirely.

Suppose a promise is sacred.

What makes it sacred?

Perhaps not the words alone.

Perhaps the fact that another person trusted their future to those words.

Break the promise and something happens beyond simple disagreement.

A relationship once placed under obligation has been violated.

That sounds remarkably similar to desecration.

Something treated as sacred was handled as though it were disposable.

Perhaps betrayal hurts so deeply for precisely that reason.

The wound says:

I thought this meant more.

That sentence could be spoken over a broken oath.

A broken friendship.

A damaged shrine.

A lost community.

A polluted river.

A bulldozed grove.

Different things.

Same grief.

I thought this meant more.

But Sacredness Cannot Become a Weapon

There is danger here too.

If something is called sacred, people may use the word to prevent questioning.

You cannot criticize this tradition.

It is sacred.

You cannot challenge this elder.

They are sacred to the community.

You cannot leave.

Your oath was sacred.

You cannot change the ritual.

It is sacred.

You cannot question what happened here.

This place is sacred.

No.

Sacredness should deepen responsibility.

It should not eliminate accountability.

If anything, the more sacred something is claimed to be, the greater the obligation to examine how it is being treated.

A sacred office does not excuse abuse of power.

A sacred tradition does not make every inherited practice good.

A sacred community does not acquire the right to harm its members.

A sacred promise does not require one party to endure whatever the other does forever.

A sacred place does not mean questions about stewardship become forbidden.

Perhaps sacredness makes those questions more necessary.

Because the claim itself says:

This matters.

Very well.

Then act like it matters.

Maybe Sacredness Is Revealed by Conduct

That keeps returning too.

Conduct.

Perhaps we learn what people truly hold sacred by watching what they protect when protection becomes inconvenient.

Anyone can call a forest sacred while enjoying a sunset.

What happens when stewardship costs money?

Anyone can call community sacred while everyone agrees.

What happens when someone is harmed?

Anyone can call hospitality sacred while the guest is pleasant.

What happens when the stranger is difficult?

Anyone can call truth sacred when truth supports their story.

What happens when evidence contradicts it?

Anyone can call an oath sacred while keeping it is easy.

What happens when keeping it costs something?

Perhaps sacredness is not demonstrated by how beautifully we speak about something.

Perhaps sacredness becomes visible in what we are willing to do—or refuse to do—because of the relationship.

So Can Something Stop Being Sacred?

After wandering this far, I think my answer is:

Yes.

And also:

No.

Useful, isn’t it?

But hear me out.

If sacredness exists partly through relationship, then a living sacred relationship can certainly end.

A ritual can cease.

A community can dissolve.

A shrine can be abandoned.

A promise can be broken.

A person can leave.

A place can cease functioning as sacred space.

In that sense, yes.

Sacredness can fade, change or end.

But what was sacred does not necessarily become meaningless.

It may move into memory.

History.

Grief.

Story.

Identity.

A former sacred relationship can continue shaping us long after we stop participating in it.

In that sense, perhaps sacredness leaves residue.

Like smoke in clothing after the fire has gone out.

You are no longer standing beside the flame.

But part of you still carries its scent.

The Sacred May Change Form

Maybe that is the better answer.

Sacredness does not always disappear.

Sometimes it changes form.

The living shrine becomes an archaeological site.

The active ritual becomes family folklore.

The community becomes memory.

The sacred home becomes the place where we once belonged.

The promise becomes a lesson about promises.

The lost relationship becomes part of the person we became afterward.

The tree falls.

The roots remain underground for a while.

The trunk begins returning to soil.

Nothing is restored exactly as it was.

But neither does it simply vanish.

Perhaps sacredness can be like that.

And Perhaps Sacredness Is Never Possession

There is one last thought sitting beneath this entire rabbit hole.

Maybe we make a mistake whenever we say:

My sacred place.

My gods.

My ancestors.

My tradition.

My community.

The possessive grammar is convenient.

But perhaps sacred relationships are not possessions at all.

They are things entrusted to us for a time.

We tend them.

Participate in them.

Receive from them.

Give to them.

Sometimes repair them.

Sometimes leave them.

Eventually someone else will stand where we stood.

Someone else will tell the stories.

Or they won’t.

The forest will continue either way.

The land was there before our ritual.

The stones were old before we called them sacred.

The river was moving before we gave it a name.

And long after the last person who remembers our particular ceremony is gone, water will still find its way downhill.

There is humility in that.

We do not own sacredness.

Perhaps we enter into it.

For a while.

What Makes Something Sacred?

So after all this wandering, I find myself reluctant to offer a neat definition.

But perhaps we can offer a working thought.

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

A place.

A god.

An ancestor.

A community.

A promise.

A ritual.

A memory.

The form changes.

But somewhere inside the word sacred is the recognition:

This is not merely mine to use however I please.

That may be the heart of it.

Sacredness limits entitlement.

It asks us to approach rather than simply possess.

To listen before taking.

To remember.

To tend.

To recognize that relationship existed before our convenience entered the conversation.

And perhaps when sacredness ends, the final obligation is not always to restore it.

Sometimes the obligation is simply to remember honestly what it was.

Without pretending.

Without rewriting.

Without demanding that yesterday become tomorrow again.

The fire was sacred.

The fire went out.

Both statements can be true.

The place was home.

It is not home anymore.

Both statements can be true.

The relationship mattered.

The relationship ended.

Both statements can be true.

Maybe maturity lives somewhere in our ability to carry both truths without forcing one to destroy the other.

And There Goes the Rabbit Again

Because now we have another problem.

If sacredness creates obligation…

If sacred places, traditions and communities can change…

If nobody truly owns the sacred…

Then who gets to decide what happens to sacred things?

Who is the steward?

The landowner?

The priest?

The elder?

The person who built the shrine?

The community that used it?

The people who remember it?

The next generation?

And what happens when those people disagree?

Who owns the sacred—and what is the difference between ownership and stewardship?

There is our rabbit.

I can see its ears already.

Godspeed.

Scholarly Trail Markers

This essay is a philosophical synthesis rather than a claim that the scholars below developed a single theory of sacredness. Their research provides several of the trails followed here: lived and vernacular experiences of the sacred, Pagan relationships with nature, the formation of sacred places through recurring practice, and contemporary Heathen ritual relationships with land.

Bowman, M. (1998). Belief, legend and perceptions of the sacred in contemporary Bath.

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

Davy, B. J. (2022). Reconstructing the Procession of Nerthus: A contemporary Heathen ritual offering of sacrifice. The Pomegranate.

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

Graham McKay, D. (2016, July 7). Ontario Heathens rebuild Vé. The Wild Hunt.

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

Inside the Rainbow Family: Spirituality, Community and Contradiction

Group of people sitting and standing in a circle around a campfire in a forest campground

The Rainbow Family: Peace, Community, Spirituality and the Problems of a Leaderless Utopia

Every once in a while, while researching one part of the Pagan and alternative-spirituality world, I stumble across another community that has apparently been sitting just off to the side all along.

This time it was the Rainbow Family of Living Light.

Not to be confused with The Family International, formerly known as the Children of God. Completely different group.

The Rainbow Family is harder to define because, in a very deliberate way, it does not really want to be defined as an organization at all. There is no conventional membership list, central headquarters, president, governing board or universally recognized leadership. Participants have sometimes jokingly described it as the world’s largest “non-organization” of “non-members.”

Yet for more than fifty years people associated with the Rainbow Family have managed to create enormous temporary communities known as Rainbow Gatherings. Researchers have consequently described the Rainbow Family as an intentional community, countercultural movement and spiritual community rather than a conventional religious denomination or organization (Berger, 2006; Walker, 2008).

And that makes it particularly interesting from a Pagan perspective.

Where Did the Rainbow Family Come From?

The first major Rainbow Gathering took place in Colorado in 1972. Its roots lay squarely in the American counterculture that had developed during the 1960s and early 1970s: communal living, opposition to consumer culture, experimentation with alternative spirituality, environmental consciousness, music festivals and the idea that people might temporarily create a different way of living together.

Cornell University’s archival collection on the Rainbow Family traces the first Gathering to Strawberry Lake, Colorado, and notes the influence of the large communal music festivals of the period. Instead of merely attending a concert and going home, however, the idea was to create a functioning temporary community based around peaceful alternatives to mainstream consumer society.

That first experiment did not disappear.

Gatherings continued. Regional Rainbow communities developed. Eventually Rainbow Gatherings appeared outside the United States as well. Canada has had its own Rainbow activity, including regional Ontario gatherings and the attempted 2013 World Rainbow Gathering on northern Vancouver Island.

So What Do They Believe?

This is where things become wonderfully complicated.

There isn’t a Rainbow catechism.

There isn’t a sacred book telling everyone what a Rainbow must believe.

You can find people influenced by Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Paganism, Indigenous spirituality, New Age traditions, anarchism, environmentalism, yoga, psychedelia, communalism and various combinations of all of the above.

Anthropologist Adam Berger, who conducted doctoral research on the Rainbow Family, described it as an intentional society devoted to the pursuit of world peace through spiritual healing. Other academic research examining Rainbow Gatherings found significant religious characteristics without concluding that Rainbow represents a single conventional religion (Berger, 2006; Walker, 2008).

That distinction is important.

Rainbow is less about believing the same thing and more about temporarily attempting to live according to certain shared ideals.

Peace.

Community.

Sharing.

Non-commercialism.

Connection with the land.

Personal spiritual exploration.

Resistance to hierarchy.

And the idea, perhaps idealistically, that strangers can come together and construct a functioning community without reproducing all of the institutions of the society they temporarily left behind.

Building a Town Without a Government

This is probably the part of Rainbow culture I find most interesting.

A Rainbow Gathering isn’t simply several thousand people pitching tents independently in the woods.

Infrastructure develops.

There are communal kitchens. Water systems have to be established. Sanitation must be dealt with. Food needs to be transported. Medical problems occur. Disputes happen. Lost people need assistance. Camps develop around particular interests or functions. People arrive before the Gathering to establish the site during what is commonly called Seed Camp, and others remain afterward for cleanup and restoration. Academic descriptions of Rainbow infrastructure document kitchens, sanitation, water systems, work crews and numerous other functions required to make the temporary settlement work.

But theoretically there is no mayor.

Instead, people who take responsibility for making something happen are often called focalizers.

Decisions are generally supposed to emerge through councils and consensus rather than through majority rule imposed by an executive authority.

Need something purchased from outside the Gathering?

There is traditionally the Magic Hat, into which people voluntarily contribute money. That money can then be used for communal necessities. Internally, however, Rainbow culture has traditionally discouraged ordinary commercial buying and selling in favour of sharing, gifting and barter.

There is something fascinating about this.

Whether you believe it works perfectly is another question entirely.

But Rainbow Gatherings are effectively repeated experiments in temporary community building.

What Happens When Something Goes Wrong?

Here we encounter another piece of Rainbow terminology: Shanti Sena.

The phrase roughly means “peace army.”

It isn’t supposed to function like a conventional police department. There isn’t necessarily a permanent Shanti Sena force wandering around with badges. Instead, conflict and emergencies can produce a call for Shanti Sena, with capable people responding and attempting to de-escalate the situation.

Researchers have studied this as an unusual form of internal social control within an intentionally decentralized community. The system has sometimes worked cooperatively with authorities, while at other Gatherings the relationship between Rainbow participants, informal peacekeepers and law enforcement has been much more confrontational.

And this begins exposing the central contradiction of Rainbow culture.

If nobody is in charge, who is responsible?

That question follows the Rainbow Family almost everywhere it goes.

The Permit Problem

The Rainbow principle of having no official leaders creates a fascinating philosophical problem when it encounters the modern administrative state.

Someone has to sign the permit.

The United States Forest Service requires permits for large non-commercial groups using National Forest lands. Rainbow Gatherings have historically resisted that requirement, in part because participants maintain that there is no authorized leader who can sign a permit on behalf of everyone else.

The Forest Service does not accept that as an exemption. As recently as 2026 it reiterated that large gatherings require permits and that courts have upheld the government’s authority to enforce those requirements.

This has produced decades of tension.

From the Rainbow perspective, forcing someone to become the legally responsible representative of a leaderless gathering arguably destroys the very structure the gathering is attempting to create.

From the government’s perspective, thousands of people cannot simply arrive on public land and declare that nobody is accountable for sanitation, environmental protection, emergency access or damage because the group doesn’t believe in leaders.

I can understand both arguments.

Canada Has Seen This Problem Too

Canada isn’t outside this story.

In 2013 a World Rainbow Gathering was proposed for Raft Cove Provincial Park on northern Vancouver Island. Thousands of people were reportedly expected or invited to attend the remote location.

Local residents and provincial authorities raised concerns about environmental protection, sanitation, emergency response and the sheer difficulty of accommodating a large population in an isolated provincial park.

B.C. Parks ultimately closed the park. Authorities stated that rapidly increasing visitor numbers created risks involving public health, safety, environmental protection and preservation of park values. The Gathering at that particular location consequently broke apart.

Ontario, meanwhile, has developed its own regional Rainbow community. Public Ontario Rainbow Family material discusses recurring gatherings and the practical work involved in organizing them.

So this isn’t merely an American historical curiosity.

Where Paganism Enters the Picture

Now we get to the reason the Rainbow Family is interesting to me.

The Rainbow Family itself is not a Pagan organization.

But spend enough time looking around Pagan festivals, alternative spirituality gatherings, yoga communities, ecstatic dance, kirtan, transformational festivals, intentional communities and environmental spirituality and eventually some of the circles begin overlapping.

That isn’t especially mysterious.

They share cultural territory.

Nature as spiritually meaningful.

Community outside conventional religious institutions.

Ritual created through participation rather than clergy.

Drumming.

Fire.

Song.

Shared meals.

Circles.

Alternative healing practices.

Personal religious experience.

An often eclectic willingness to borrow concepts from several spiritual traditions.

Academic research into Rainbow spirituality describes precisely this kind of loose association of spiritual seekers rather than a unified creed (Berger, 2006).

That makes Rainbow culture familiar territory to anyone who has spent enough time around modern Pagan festivals.

Familiar, however, does not mean identical.

And Here We Need to Talk About Cultural Appropriation

This is one of the less comfortable parts of Rainbow history, but ignoring it wouldn’t produce an honest article.

Rainbow culture has sometimes incorporated supposed Indigenous prophecies, ceremonial language, talking circles, feathers, sacred fires and other practices presented as Indigenous traditions.

Some Indigenous people have strongly objected.

In 2015 Indigenous academics, writers and activists protesting a Rainbow Gathering in the Black Hills argued that participants were engaging in cultural exploitation and performing faux Native ceremonies on lands sacred to Indigenous peoples.

One particularly persistent Rainbow story concerns a supposed Indigenous prophecy concerning “Rainbow Warriors” who would someday unite humanity.

The problem is that research into the story has found that versions circulated as ancient Hopi prophecy do not have the Indigenous origin frequently claimed for them. Researcher Michael Niman traced a major source of the modern story to a 1962 publication by non-Indigenous Christian authors rather than an ancient Hopi teaching.

That is worth remembering within Paganism as well.

Something does not become authentic simply because it sounds old, mystical and Indigenous.

Respecting another people’s spirituality also means respecting their right to tell us when something isn’t theirs.

The Beautiful Idea and the Messy Human Reality

I think this is ultimately what makes the Rainbow Family worth studying.

It is very easy to romanticize it.

Thousands of people enter the woods.

They create kitchens.

They feed strangers.

People make music.

Money becomes less important.

Decisions are made through councils.

People meditate, pray, dance, sing, argue, fall in love, fall out with each other, make friendships and attempt to build community.

Then they dismantle the community and return to ordinary society.

There is something almost archetypal about that.

But human beings do not cease being human because they walk into the forest.

Leaderlessness does not eliminate power.

Consensus does not eliminate conflict.

Spiritual intention does not eliminate irresponsible behaviour.

Calling everyone family does not guarantee that everyone will behave like good family.

And believing that the Earth is sacred does not automatically resolve the very practical environmental consequences of putting thousands of people onto a piece of land.

Those contradictions have followed Rainbow Gatherings throughout their history and remain part of the relationship between the movement, public authorities and surrounding communities.

Perhaps That Is the Real Lesson

I don’t think the most interesting question is whether the Rainbow Family is good or bad.

That’s much too easy.

The more interesting question is what happens when people sincerely attempt to build a community around ideals of peace, equality, spirituality, generosity and freedom while deliberately removing many of the structures normally used to enforce responsibility.

Sometimes you apparently get something remarkable.

Sometimes you get chaos.

Frequently you get both.

And maybe that is why the Rainbow Family has survived for more than half a century.

It isn’t simply a festival.

It isn’t quite a religion.

It isn’t really an organization.

It is an ongoing experiment.

An attempt, repeated again and again, to step outside what Rainbow culture sometimes calls “Babylon,” enter the woods and ask:

Can we live differently?

The answer after more than fifty years appears to be:

Yes.

But living differently does not make the difficult parts of being human disappear.

And that, perhaps more than all the colourful clothing, drums, campfires and talk of peace and love, is what makes the Rainbow Family worth understanding.

References

Berger, A. (2006). The Rainbow Family: An ethnography of spiritual postmodernism [Doctoral dissertation, University of St Andrews].

Cornell University Library. (n.d.). The Rainbow Family of Living Light & Rainbow Gathering collection. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections.

Falcon-Freeman, J. (2010). The Rainbow Family of Living Light: Anarchy, individuality, and community in a utopian experiment [Honors thesis, Louisiana State University].

Times Colonist. (2013, August 9). Editorial: A rainbow at Cape Scott.

United States Forest Service. (2026). Unauthorized group use: Rainbow Family Gathering incident update.

Walker, S. M. (2008). Broadening the spectrum: The religious dimensions of the Rainbow Gatherings [Master’s thesis, University of South Florida].

Suggested category: Pagan Community

Suggested tags: Rainbow Family, Rainbow Gathering, Pagan Community, Alternative Spirituality, Intentional Community, Counterculture, Spiritual Community, Festivals, Cultural Appropriation, Community, Nature Spirituality, Ontario Rainbow Family

No Frith with Folkism Means Reckoning with the Nine Noble Virtues

A vintage scale balancing symbols of reciprocity on one side and responsibility on the other

After reading The Wild Hunt’s recent opinion piece, “No Frith with Folkism,” I found myself agreeing with the surface statement while still feeling that something deeper needed to be said.

Yes, Folkism has no rightful place in Heathenry.

Yes, racism, white supremacy, blood-gatekeeping, and ancestry-as-spiritual-ownership need to be rejected.

But that led me to the harder question:

What happens when parts of modern Heathenry were built, shaped, repeated, or popularized inside the same ideological weather system that inclusive Heathens now say they reject?

That question brought me back to the Nine Noble Virtues.

The Nine Noble Virtues are often presented as if they are ancient Heathen ethics. They are not. They are a modern construction. The Wild Hunt has previously reported that the Nine Noble Virtues were created by John Yeowell and John Gibbs-Bailey of the Odinic Rite in 1974, and that Yeowell had ties to white supremacist and fascist movements. The Troth also states plainly that the Nine Noble Virtues are neither authentically from the Viking Age nor really ethics in the ancient sense, and that they were originally developed by the Odinic Rite.

That matters.

Not because courage is racist.

Not because truth is racist.

Not because honour, fidelity, discipline, hospitality, self-reliance, industriousness, or perseverance are bad words.

But because the package matters. The origin matters. The framework matters. The assumptions matter.

Modern Heathenry, especially in North America, has had to wrestle for years with white supremacist appropriation of its symbols and language. The Wild Hunt itself has reported Heathen voices saying that the tie between white supremacy and Heathenry in America goes back to the beginning of organized modern movements, and that modern Heathens have had to keep fighting the misuse of their symbols by extremists.

So I submitted an opinion piece to The Wild Hunt for consideration.

Partly because I think the question deserves to be asked.

Partly because “no frith with Folkism” cannot stop at rejecting obvious racism. It also has to examine inherited structures, moral frameworks, beginner materials, and community assumptions that may have been normalized through Folkish or far-right-adjacent spaces.

And partly, yes, to see whether this kind of internal critique will be given room.

It is one thing to say “we reject Folkism” when the target is safely outside the door.

It is harder to ask whether the floorboards inside the hall were cut from the same forest.

We shall see.

Below is the opinion piece submitted to The Wild Hunt for consideration.

No Frith with Folkism Means Reckoning with the Nine Noble Virtues

By Kevin McLaughlin
writing as Lugh Sulian

The recent Wild Hunt opinion piece “No Frith with Folkism” says something that needed saying clearly: Folkism has no rightful place in Heathenry.

I agree.

But I also think the statement opens a harder and more uncomfortable question. If there is no frith with Folkism, then what do we do with the parts of modern Heathenry that were shaped inside the same ideological weather system?

The Nine Noble Virtues are the obvious example.

Courage. Truth. Honour. Fidelity. Discipline. Hospitality. Self-reliance. Industriousness. Perseverance.

To many modern Heathens, these are treated almost like a sacred ethical foundation. They appear on websites, beginner guides, social media graphics, teaching materials, kindred pages, and personal practice statements. They are often presented as if they are ancient Heathen ethics handed down from the Viking Age.

They are not.

The Nine Noble Virtues are a modern construction. They were codified in the twentieth century, not preserved as a formal moral code from pre-Christian Germanic religion. The Wild Hunt has previously reported that the Nine Noble Virtues were created by John Yeowell and John Gibbs-Bailey of the Odinic Rite in 1974, and that Yeowell had ties to white supremacist and fascist movements. The Troth has also described the Nine Noble Virtues as the most famous modern attempt at creating a Heathen ethical code, originally developed by the Odinic Rite, while making clear that they are not Viking Age ethics.

That history matters.

It does not mean that courage is racist.

It does not mean truth is racist.

It does not mean honour, fidelity, discipline, hospitality, self-reliance, industriousness, or perseverance are bad things.

But it does mean the package deserves scrutiny.

When modern Heathen communities say “no frith with Folkism” while continuing to treat the Nine Noble Virtues as a central moral framework, they risk rejecting the visible racism while preserving some of the architecture that racism helped popularize.

That is the uncomfortable part.

The problem is not only who wrote the list. If that were the only issue, the solution would be simple: acknowledge the source, strip away the bad actors, and reclaim the useful pieces.

But the deeper issue is the shape of the code itself.

Why these nine virtues?

Why this emphasis?

Why courage, discipline, self-reliance, industriousness, perseverance, fidelity, and honour as the central moral vocabulary?

Where are compassion, humility, repair, interdependence, care for the vulnerable, accountability after harm, ecological responsibility, or the hard work of restoring broken relationship?

Hospitality is there, yes. But even hospitality can be flattened into a performance of courtesy if it is not tied to genuine openness, protection, and obligation toward the stranger.

The Nine Noble Virtues produce a particular moral atmosphere. It is hard-edged. It favours strength, endurance, self-mastery, loyalty, labour, and personal toughness. Those can be meaningful values. They can also sit very comfortably inside authoritarian, exclusionary, and Folkish ideas of struggle, hierarchy, purity, and worth.

That does not make every person who uses the Nine Noble Virtues a Folkist. It does not make every kindred that references them racist. Many inclusive Heathens have used them sincerely, often because they were presented as standard beginner material.

But sincerity does not erase origin.

And use does not make a thing ancient.

A community serious about rejecting Folkism should be willing to ask whether its inherited ethics still carry Folkish assumptions, even after the racial language has been removed.

That is where “no frith with Folkism” must become more than a slogan.

Frith is not merely the absence of conflict. It is right relationship. It is trust, order, obligation, and peace maintained through honesty and accountability. If Folkism has distorted modern Heathenry, then restoring frith requires more than disavowing explicitly racist organizations. It requires examining the ideas, habits, symbols, and teaching tools that were normalized through those same networks.

The Nine Noble Virtues should not be treated as Heathen scripture.

They should not be treated as the Ten Commandments in Viking clothing.

They should not be placed at the centre of beginner Heathen education without context.

At most, they should be taught historically: as a modern ethical construction, emerging from specific twentieth-century Odinist and Folkish-adjacent environments, later adopted and adapted by many people who often did not know or fully examine that history.

That is a very different thing from treating them as the moral backbone of the faith.

If inclusive Heathenry wants to build something healthier, it needs more than a cleaned-up version of inherited Folkish-era ethics. It needs an ethic rooted in reciprocity, hospitality, responsibility, and repair. It needs to honour ancestors without turning ancestry into ownership. It needs to value courage without glorifying domination. It needs to value honour without turning honour into ego armour. It needs to value kinship without narrowing kinship into blood purity. It needs to value frith without confusing frith with silence.

There is an old temptation in modern Paganism to fill gaps quickly. When reconstructing broken traditions, we reach for lists, codes, symbols, slogans, and simplified teaching tools. That is understandable. People want something solid under their feet.

But not everything solid is sacred.

Sometimes the thing that feels like foundation is just old scaffolding from someone else’s project.

The Nine Noble Virtues may have helped some people articulate discipline, courage, and responsibility. That personal meaning does not have to be denied. But personal usefulness is not the same as communal legitimacy. A tool can be useful and still require retirement when its history and limitations become clear.

Inclusive Heathenry does not need to reclaim the Nine Noble Virtues.

It needs to demote them.

Study them. Contextualize them. Critique them. Understand why they spread. Understand why they appealed to people. Understand why they still appeal to people. But stop pretending they are ancient. Stop pretending they are neutral. Stop pretending they are the natural ethical centre of Heathen practice.

No frith with Folkism means no unexamined inheritance from Folkism either.

If the hall is to be rebuilt, we have to inspect the beams.

Not just the banner over the door.

References

The Nine Noble Virtues: Ancient Heathen Wisdom or Modern Viking Wallpaper?

Open aged book with a quote about the Nine Noble Virtues and symbols, feather quill in ink pot, and pendant on wooden table
THIS IS AN OPINION PIECE BUILT FOR REFLECTION, CAUTION THIS MAY UPSET SOME

Ásatrú. Heathenry. Norse Paganism. Odinism. Northern Tradition.

The names are not always interchangeable, and some carry considerably more political baggage than others, but sooner or later almost everyone exploring a Norse-based spiritual path encounters something called the Nine Noble Virtues.

They are frequently presented on posters surrounded by runes, ravens, axes and stern-looking Vikings. Sometimes they are described as the ancient moral code of the Norse. Occasionally they are treated almost like the Heathen equivalent of the Ten Commandments.

That raises a fairly simple question:

Are the Nine Noble Virtues actually ancient Heathen teachings, or are they modern reconstructionist crap dressed in a bearskin?

The honest answer is that they are modern—but that does not necessarily make every idea within them worthless.

What Are the Nine Noble Virtues?

The standard list is:

  1. Courage — facing danger, hardship and uncomfortable truths rather than always choosing the safest path.
  2. Truth — speaking honestly and refusing deliberate deception.
  3. Honour — living in a manner worthy of respect and accepting responsibility for one’s actions.
  4. Fidelity — remaining loyal to family, friends, community, commitments and chosen principles.
  5. Discipline — controlling one’s impulses and doing what must be done even when motivation disappears.
  6. Hospitality — welcoming and caring for guests while respecting the responsibilities between host and visitor.
  7. Self-reliance — developing the ability to support oneself and not placing every burden upon others.
  8. Industriousness — working productively, developing skills and contributing something useful.
  9. Perseverance — continuing through hardship rather than abandoning every difficult undertaking.

As a collection of personal qualities, there is nothing immediately outrageous about them. Most would look perfectly respectable printed in a workplace handbook, a Scout manual or on the wall of somebody’s home gym.

The problem is not necessarily what they say.

The problem is what people claim they are.

No, They Are Not an Ancient Viking Code

There is no surviving Viking Age document called The Nine Noble Virtues. They do not appear together in the Poetic Edda, the Prose Edda, the Icelandic sagas, a rune inscription or an ancient law code.

The code was formulated during the modern revival of Germanic Pagan religion in the twentieth century. It is generally associated with the British Odinic Rite and with John Yeowell and John Gibbs-Bailey during the early 1970s.

Its creators drew inspiration from texts such as the Hávamál and the Sigrdrífumál, but the nine-part list itself is modern.

That settles the basic historical question.

The Nine Noble Virtues are not an ancient Viking moral code.

They are a modern interpretation of values that modern Heathens believed could be extracted from the surviving Norse literature.

Strictly speaking, the word is reconstructionist, not recreationist—although considering how often modern inventions are marketed as secret Viking wisdom, the accidental wording sometimes feels appropriate.

But Are They Based on Anything Real?

Here the answer becomes more complicated.

The Hávamál is not merely a modern fantasy text. It is an Old Norse wisdom poem preserved in the thirteenth-century Codex Regius. Parts of it are believed to preserve ideas and oral material that may be considerably older than the surviving manuscript.

The poem contains advice about hospitality, generosity, friendship, reputation, caution, moderation, preparation, drinking, speaking wisely and knowing when it is time to leave someone else’s home.

It praises courage in some circumstances, but it also praises silence, observation and good judgment. It warns against pride, greed, drunkenness, foolish talk and trusting too easily.

So yes, several of the Nine Noble Virtues resemble values found in the surviving literature.

Hospitality is undeniably present. Courage is present. Loyalty between friends is present. Personal reputation matters enormously. Wisdom, preparation and productive effort are praised. The importance of continuing through hardship appears throughout the heroic literature.

But the ancient sources never gather those ideas into this particular list.

The Nine Noble Virtues are therefore not completely invented from nothing. They are better understood as nine modern labels selectively extracted from a much larger, messier and more contradictory body of literature.

That distinction matters.

What Was Left Out?

Whenever someone distils hundreds of verses and generations of stories into nine words, choices are being made.

Why courage but not caution?

Why self-reliance but not reciprocity?

Why industriousness but not wisdom?

Why fidelity but not justice?

Why perseverance but not knowing when to stop?

Why honour but not humility?

The Hávamál spends considerable time discussing moderation, restraint, friendship, mutual gift-giving, measured speech and the responsibilities created by relationships.

Its world is not populated entirely by isolated warriors proving their personal toughness. People survive through households, kinship, friendship, reputation and reciprocal obligation.

Even hospitality is more complicated than simply opening the door to everyone. The guest has obligations too. A guest should behave properly, avoid creating conflict and leave before becoming a burden.

Hospitality is a relationship—not endless submission by the host.

There are also uncomfortable passages. The old poems contain mistrust, manipulation, sexism, violence and stories in which Odin himself acts deceptively.

That does not fit neatly onto a poster declaring TRUTH and FIDELITY in large runic letters.

The old stories are rarely that simple. They present choices, consequences and contradictions. They ask the listener to exercise judgment rather than merely obey a checklist.

The Political Baggage Cannot Be Ignored

There is another uncomfortable part of the story.

Some of the people and organizations involved in the early development of modern Odinism and the Nine Noble Virtues had connections to far-right politics, ethnic nationalism and racial ideology.

That does not mean everyone who has ever used the Nine Noble Virtues is a fascist, racist or white supremacist.

Plenty of ordinary Heathens encountered the list in a book, on a website or through another practitioner without knowing anything about its origins.

Guilt by accidental association accomplishes very little.

However, knowing the origin should make us ask why these particular qualities were selected.

Courage, discipline, fidelity, industriousness, self-reliance and honour can easily be arranged into a romantic image of the obedient, self-sufficient tribal warrior.

Generosity, compassion, curiosity, stewardship, mutual care and responsibility toward outsiders do not fit quite as comfortably into that image.

Modern Heathens themselves disagree about what to do with the list. Some continue to use the virtues as a practical ethical guide. Others reject them as historically misleading, politically tainted or inadequate as a complete moral system.

There is no universal Heathen position because there has never been one central Heathen church capable of declaring one.

So—Fact, Fiction or Reconstructionist Crap?

Here is my verdict.

Fact: The Nine Noble Virtues are genuinely used by parts of modern Heathenry.

Fiction: They are not an ancient Viking moral code handed down intact from the pre-Christian past.

Reconstruction: They were assembled by modern people who selected certain ideas from medieval Norse literature and arranged them into a convenient ethical package.

Crap: Only when someone lies about their origins, presents them as divine commandments or uses them to avoid reading the actual sources.

A modern spiritual teaching does not become worthless merely because it is modern. Every living religion interprets, adapts and creates.

The dishonesty begins when reconstruction is presented as archaeology and personal interpretation is presented as ancient law.

Putting the Virtues to Work

The virtues may still be useful when treated as questions rather than commandments:

  • Is this courage, or am I being reckless?
  • Is this truth, or am I using honesty as a weapon?
  • Is this honour, or merely wounded pride?
  • Is this fidelity, or loyalty to someone who no longer deserves it?
  • Is this discipline, or needless self-punishment?
  • Is this hospitality, or failure to maintain boundaries?
  • Is this self-reliance, or fear of accepting help?
  • Is this industriousness, or exploitation disguised as virtue?
  • Is this perseverance, or refusal to admit that the road is leading nowhere?

That is where a list of words begins to become an ethical practice.

I would not throw the Nine Noble Virtues entirely into the fire. There is wisdom within them.

But neither would I carve them into stone and pretend Odin delivered them to the Vikings on a mountaintop.

They are a modern map drawn from fragments of an older landscape.

A map can still be useful.

Just do not mistake it for the land.