There goes the rabbit again.
In the last rabbit hole we wandered through the work of Shelley Rabinovitch, Dodie Graham McKay, Martin Lepage, Marisol Charbonneau, Marion Bowman and Barbara Jane Davy, looking for some common thread running beneath their very different examinations of Paganism.
What emerged was not a common theology.
It was relationship.
Again and again Paganism seemed to appear not so much in the things themselves, but in the spaces between them: human and god, human and land, living and dead, individual and community, present and past, identity and tradition, gift and receiver.
That left us standing at the mouth of another rabbit hole.
Because if relationship really is one of the threads running through Paganism, then relationship cannot simply be a pretty spiritual word.
Relationships have consequences.
They make demands upon us.
And so perhaps the next question is not:
What do Pagans believe is right and wrong?
Perhaps the more interesting question is:
What do we owe because we are connected?
Now we are wandering into ethics.
And this may be where the rabbit gets troublesome.
Where Is the Pagan Rulebook?
There is no single Pagan Ten Commandments.
There is no council somewhere issuing universally binding moral instructions to every Wiccan, Heathen, Druid, reconstructionist, polytheist, witch, animist and solitary practitioner.
Individual traditions certainly have ethical teachings.
Wiccans may speak of the Rede.
Heathens may turn toward the Hávamál, reciprocity, honour, hospitality, oath keeping and frith.
Druid traditions have developed their own teachings concerning virtue, truth, service, creativity, land and relationship.
Individual covens, groves, kindreds and communities develop expectations of conduct.
And individual Pagans carry moral ideas inherited from families, cultures, previous religions, philosophy, law and ordinary human experience.
But none of these becomes a universal Pagan law.
That might appear, at first glance, to leave us with a problem.
If there is no single authority, where does Pagan ethics come from?
Perhaps we have made the same mistake here that we made when asking what Pagans believe.
Perhaps we are looking for a law when we should be looking for a relationship.
The Gift Is Never Just the Gift
This is where Barbara Jane Davy becomes particularly interesting.
Her work on contemporary Heathen ritual examines gifting, reciprocity, wyrd, ecology and what she describes through the language of relational ontology.
That sounds wonderfully academic.
Strip away the terminology and there is a beautifully simple idea beneath it.
We become who we are partly through our relationships.
We are not sealed little islands drifting through the world untouched by everyone and everything around us.
We inherit.
We receive.
We give.
We affect.
We are affected.
Davy’s examination of Heathen gifting ritual goes beyond the notion that one person hands another person an object and everybody goes home.
The gift creates something.
A relationship.
A memory.
An expectation.
Perhaps gratitude.
Perhaps obligation.
Perhaps another gift someday.
And suddenly the exchange is no longer about the cup, the horn, the food, the offering or whatever else moved from one pair of hands to another.
The important thing is what now exists between those hands.
Think about that for a moment.
Someone gives you something when you desperately need it.
Twenty years later you may have forgotten exactly what the object looked like.
But you remember who gave it.
You remember that they were there.
The thing disappears.
The relationship remains.
Then the Circle Gets Bigger
Davy’s work takes the idea somewhere even more interesting.
What happens when the recipient is not another human being?
An offering is poured onto the earth.
Something is given to a god.
Food is left for ancestors.
A ritual acknowledges a river, a tree, a spirit, a place or another part of the more-than-human world.
We can argue endlessly about the metaphysics.
Did the god literally receive the offering?
Does the land possess consciousness?
Did the ancestors hear us?
Those are worthwhile religious questions, but they may not be the only questions.
Something also happens to the person making the offering.
The giver has recognized something beyond themselves as worthy of consideration.
The moral circle has widened.
The tree is no longer merely lumber that has not been cut down yet.
The river is no longer merely water travelling downhill.
The land is no longer merely property.
The ancestor is no longer merely a name written on a genealogy chart.
The relationship changes the way the other is perceived.
And once perception changes, behaviour may follow.
Perhaps this is one way ritual becomes ethical practice.
Not because somebody threatens punishment from above.
But because relationship makes indifference harder.
If the Land Is Sacred, Then What?
This brings us back to something Marion Bowman’s work complicates in a useful way.
Pagans frequently speak about nature.
Nature-centred.
Earth-based.
Honouring the land.
Walking lightly.
But Bowman reminds us that Pagans do not necessarily mean the same thing when they use those words.
There is no single Pagan relationship with nature.
Good.
That saves us from another easy slogan.
Because saying the land is sacred is remarkably easy.
The interesting part begins five minutes later.
What does sacred mean when somebody wants to cut down the tree?
What does sacred mean when garbage is left beside the fire?
What does sacred mean when water is being polluted?
What does sacred mean when convenience conflicts with stewardship?
What does sacred mean when the place we claim to love requires work rather than ceremony?
Perhaps an ethic of relationship asks us to move one step beyond declaration.
If I say I am in relationship with this place, then my conduct becomes part of that relationship.
I cannot simply ask:
What does this land give me?
I eventually have to ask:
What am I giving back?
And perhaps:
What am I taking that I have no need to take?
That is a more uncomfortable spirituality.
Which may be precisely why it is useful.
Hospitality Is Beautiful Until Somebody Knocks
Then there is community.
Pagans are very good at certain words.
Welcome.
Inclusive.
Community.
Family.
Tribe.
Folk.
Home.
Beautiful words.
But Marisol Charbonneau’s research gives us reason to be cautious about assuming that saying a value and living a value are the same thing.
Her examination of contemporary Paganism looked directly at the tension between Pagan ideals of inclusiveness and diversity and the actual social composition of Pagan communities.
That tension matters far beyond one community or one study.
Every community eventually discovers that it is much easier to write everyone is welcome than to answer the question:
Welcome into what?
Who designed the rituals?
Whose assumptions are considered normal?
Whose history is being told?
Who is expected to adapt?
Who gets heard?
Who gets interrupted?
Who becomes leadership?
Who quietly stops coming?
That does not mean every difference is evidence of wrongdoing.
It means inclusiveness is not achieved by declaring ourselves inclusive.
Relationship has to survive contact with another person who is genuinely different from us.
Hospitality is easy when the visitor thinks exactly like the host.
The old stories about hospitality become interesting precisely because the stranger is a stranger.
And What Happens When the Stranger Changes the Ritual?
Martin Lepage’s work carries the question farther.
His research into queer and transgender experience in contemporary Paganism examined how people negotiate gender through ritual and magical practice.
That word negotiate is important.
Because traditions are inherited, but human beings arrive inside them as themselves.
Sometimes the person fits comfortably within the ritual language.
Sometimes they do not.
What happens then?
Does the person have to bend until they fit the ritual?
Can the ritual bend?
Does changing inherited practice destroy tradition?
Or can a tradition remain alive precisely because people continue wrestling with it?
There may be no single Pagan answer.
But there is certainly an ethical question.
If community is relationship, then other people cannot merely be props in our preferred version of tradition.
They arrive carrying lives.
Histories.
Bodies.
Identities.
Wounds.
Wisdom.
Questions.
And occasionally they arrive carrying questions our traditions have never answered particularly well.
Relationship means we have to hear them.
That does not automatically tell us what answer we must reach.
It does mean the other person has become morally relevant.
Who Counts as an Ancestor?
Davy raises another wonderfully troublesome question through her work with inclusive Heathens.
Who is an ancestor?
Blood seems like the obvious answer.
Until it isn’t.
Her research describes inclusive Heathens venerating not only biological ancestors but ancestors of affinity, imagination and place.
That loosens something important.
Ancestor ceases to mean simply the people whose DNA eventually produced me.
An ancestor might also be someone whose work made our lives possible.
Someone who walked the path before us.
Someone whose struggle opened a door.
Someone tied to the place where we now live.
Someone whose story we have inherited without inheriting their blood.
And once again relationship becomes ethical.
Because ancestry can be used in two very different directions.
It can become a wall:
This is mine because my blood gives me ownership.
Or it can become an obligation:
I received something from those who came before me. What will I do with what I received?
Those are profoundly different ways of standing before the past.
One asks what ancestry entitles us to.
The other asks what ancestry makes us responsible for.
The Ancestors Were Human Too
There is another danger hiding here.
Honouring ancestors can easily become romanticizing ancestors.
Our ancestors were not wiser simply because they were old.
They were human.
Some were generous.
Some were cruel.
Some were courageous.
Some were cowards.
Some protected people.
Some hurt people.
Some beliefs deserve remembering.
Some deserve studying.
Some deserve leaving in the grave.
Perhaps relationship with the ancestors does not demand obedience.
Perhaps sometimes honouring those who came before us means carrying forward what was worthy and refusing to hand another generation what was harmful.
Inheritance is not the same thing as obligation to repeat.
Sometimes the most important gift we give our descendants may be ending something.
Truth Is a Relationship Too
Then we come to history.
This may be one of the quieter Pagan ethical obligations.
Truth telling.
We inherit wonderful stories.
Ancient Druids knew this.
The Vikings always did that.
Witches have practiced this continuously for thousands of years.
This symbol has meant the same thing since antiquity.
This ceremony is ancient.
Sometimes those claims are true.
Sometimes they are partly true.
Sometimes they are twentieth-century inventions wearing an Iron Age hat.
That does not automatically make the modern thing worthless.
A ritual created fifty years ago can be beautiful.
A tradition created yesterday can become meaningful.
Everything old was new once.
The ethical problem begins when we need the modern thing to be ancient so badly that we start lying about it.
This is another place where scholars like Rabinovitch, Bowman, Charbonneau, Lepage and Davy have done us a service.
Scholarship puts dates beside stories.
It asks where claims came from.
It separates evidence from assumption.
It occasionally walks into a beautiful legend carrying a bucket of cold archival water.
Annoying.
Necessary.
Perhaps relationship with our traditions includes enough respect to tell the truth about them.
What we know.
What we suspect.
What we reconstructed.
What we invented.
And what we simply do not know.
Mystery does not require dishonesty.
Maybe Ethics Lives in the Gap Between What We Say and What We Do
Shelley Rabinovitch’s work deserves a special mention in this particular rabbit hole because she did not merely document Paganism.
She also wrote directly about magical morality and modern ethics.
That reminds us that Pagan practitioners themselves have been wrestling with these questions for a long time.
What does harm mean?
What does responsibility mean?
What happens when intentions and consequences do not match?
How should power be used?
These questions become especially important in spiritual environments because spiritual language can hide ordinary human behaviour surprisingly well.
A person can speak constantly about love and behave cruelly.
A community can speak about inclusion while quietly excluding.
A group can call itself family while treating belonging as conditional.
Someone can claim reverence for land while treating land as disposable.
A person can preach honour while breaking promises.
Someone can talk about ancestors while using ancestry to diminish another human being.
We can know every correspondence for every herb on the altar and still behave terribly toward the person standing beside us.
Perhaps Pagan ethics lives partly in that space.
The distance between declaration and conduct.
Community Is What Happens After the Ritual
Dodie Graham McKay’s documentation of Pagan festivals and communities gives this discussion dirt beneath its fingernails.
Community is not merely people standing together during ritual.
It is also people doing the work.
Setting up.
Cleaning up.
Maintaining sacred spaces.
Teaching.
Volunteering.
Cooking.
Building.
Returning.
Remembering.
In her writing about Ontario Pagan festivals and Raven’s Knoll, Graham McKay documented a community-driven place where volunteers gathered for work weekends and people contributed to maintaining the land and events.
There is something wonderfully unromantic about that.
Everybody likes the sacred fire.
Somebody still has to deal with the garbage.
Everybody likes the ritual feast.
Somebody washes the dishes.
Everybody likes sacred land.
Somebody repairs the fence.
Maybe ethics sometimes looks less like philosophy and more like noticing that the work needs doing and getting up to help.
Reciprocity Is Not Accounting
There is a danger here too.
If we start talking about reciprocity, gift and obligation, it can quickly become bookkeeping.
I gave you this.
You owe me that.
I helped you three times.
You helped me twice.
Balance due.
But relationships are rarely so tidy.
Sometimes a person gives when another person cannot return the gift.
Sometimes we receive from people who died centuries before we were born.
Sometimes we plant trees beneath whose shade we will never sit.
Sometimes our debt to the past can only be repaid forward.
Perhaps reciprocity is not about equal transactions.
Perhaps it is about refusing to imagine that receiving creates no responsibility at all.
I received knowledge.
Teach someone.
I received hospitality.
Offer it when I can.
I inherited a healthy patch of land.
Try not to leave poisoned soil.
I was welcomed when I knew nobody.
Notice the person standing alone at the next gathering.
I inherited stories.
Tell them honestly.
I received kindness during a difficult year.
Remember what kindness looked like when somebody else’s difficult year arrives.
Perhaps that is gift economy at its most human.
The gift keeps moving.
But Relationship Does Not Mean Enduring Everything
This needs saying.
An ethic of relationship cannot mean that every relationship must be preserved forever.
That would not be ethics.
That would be captivity dressed in spiritual language.
Some relationships become harmful.
Some communities become unsafe.
Some promises are broken.
Some people abuse hospitality.
Some leaders abuse power.
Some bridges burn because somebody kept setting fire to them.
Relationship includes boundaries.
Reciprocity includes the ability to recognize exploitation.
Hospitality does not require surrendering the house.
Forgiveness, where it is meaningful at all, does not require restored access.
Community does not mean nobody may ever be asked to leave.
Sometimes responsibility to one relationship requires ending another.
Protecting a child may require breaking relationship with an adult.
Protecting a community may require removing someone who repeatedly harms its members.
Protecting land may require saying no to someone who wants to use it.
Protecting yourself may require walking away from people you once called kin.
Relationship is not endless accommodation.
It is accountability.
And Accountability Requires Power to Enter the Conversation
There is another word Pagans sometimes prefer not to discuss.
Power.
Every community has it.
Even communities that insist they have no hierarchy.
Someone owns the land.
Someone controls the bank account.
Someone decides who teaches.
Someone controls the mailing list.
Someone holds the keys.
Someone has been there thirty years while someone else arrived yesterday.
Someone is charismatic.
Someone knows everybody.
Someone can make a person feel welcome.
Someone can make a person disappear from community life without ever formally banning them.
Power does not vanish simply because we refuse to name it.
If Pagan ethics is relational, then power becomes part of the ethical landscape because power changes what people can demand from one another.
The person who controls access has a different responsibility from the person asking for access.
The teacher has a different responsibility from the student.
The elder has a different responsibility from the newcomer.
The landowner has a different responsibility from the guest.
The organizer has a different responsibility from the attendee.
Perhaps the greater the power within a relationship, the greater the obligation to examine how that power is being used.
Maybe Pagan Ethics Is a Practice of Attention
After wandering this far, I am beginning to suspect Pagan ethics may be less about memorizing universal rules and more about learning to pay attention.
Pay attention to what you received.
Pay attention to what you take.
Pay attention to who does the work.
Pay attention to who gets heard.
Pay attention to the land after the ritual is finished.
Pay attention to whether your stories are true.
Pay attention to what your promises cost somebody else.
Pay attention to who is standing at the edge of the circle.
Pay attention to whether reciprocity has quietly become exploitation.
Pay attention to whether tradition is being honoured or merely used as armour.
Pay attention to power.
Pay attention to consequences.
Pay attention to the difference between what you say is sacred and what your behaviour reveals you actually consider sacred.
Maybe ethics begins there.
What Do I Owe Because I Am Connected?
I do not think Rabinovitch, Graham McKay, Lepage, Charbonneau, Bowman and Davy collectively provide us with a Pagan moral code.
Nor should we pretend that they do.
They studied different things and reached different conclusions.
But once again, placing their work beside one another gives us somewhere interesting to stand.
Davy shows us relationship, gifting, reciprocity and relational accountability.
Bowman complicates easy assumptions about Pagans and nature.
Charbonneau reminds us that an ideal such as inclusiveness must be examined against lived community.
Lepage shows identity and tradition being negotiated through actual bodies and actual lives.
Rabinovitch takes questions of magical morality and ethical responsibility seriously rather than treating ethics as an afterthought to practice.
Graham McKay shows us community not merely proclaimed but built, maintained and remembered through participation.
And when I stand amid those different pieces, I keep returning to one question.
What do I owe because I am connected?
Not because a god will strike me down.
Not because a Pagan pope issued instructions.
Not because everybody beneath the Pagan umbrella agreed upon a rule.
Because I am connected.
I drink the water.
I walk the land.
I inherited stories.
I received knowledge.
I have ancestors.
I have neighbours.
I affect people.
People affect me.
I receive gifts I can never return to the original giver.
I benefit from work performed by people whose names I will never know.
I live among creatures that never consented to becoming resources for me.
I will leave things behind for people who have not yet been born.
The web was here before I arrived.
It will remain after I leave.
For a little while, I get to touch it.
Perhaps ethics is deciding how.
The Rabbit at the Edge of the Firelight
And now we appear to have reached another clearing.
If Paganism can be understood, at least in part, as relationship…
And if relationship creates obligation…
Then perhaps Pagan ethics does not begin with:
What am I forbidden to do?
Perhaps it begins with:
What am I responsible for?
That is a very different question.
Rules tell us where the fence stands.
Responsibility asks what kind of person we are becoming on either side of it.
Rules can sometimes be obeyed without caring.
Relationship is harder.
Relationship remembers.
Relationship accumulates.
Relationship leaves footprints.
Perhaps that is why the old image of roots keeps returning.
Beneath the forest floor, roots cross boundaries we cannot see.
One tree touches another through soil and fungi and water.
The dead feed the living.
The living eventually become the dead.
Nothing keeps everything it receives.
Everything passes something onward.
Maybe the ethical question is simply whether we will do that carelessly or consciously.
What did I receive?
What did I take?
What did I give?
What did I damage?
What did I repair?
Who was welcomed?
Who was forgotten?
What will remain because I was here?
And what, perhaps, should end with me?
There is our next rabbit.
If relationship creates responsibility, what happens when the relationship is broken?
What does Paganism have to say about betrayal, broken frith, failed reciprocity, restitution, forgiveness and repair?
I can already see the ears disappearing into the brush.
Godspeed.
Scholarly Trail Markers
The reflections above are a synthesis and interpretation, not a claim that the scholars below collectively proposed a single theory of Pagan ethics. Their work provides different pieces of the landscape from which this rabbit hole developed.
Bowman, M. (2000). Nature, the natural and Pagan identity. DISKUS, 6.
Charbonneau, M. (2007). The melting cauldron: Ethnicity, diversity, and identity in a contemporary Pagan subculture. The Pomegranate, 9(1), 5–21.
Davy, B. J. (2023). Inclusive Heathens practice ancestor veneration, but not pride in ancestry. Nova Religio, 26(3), 30–51.
Davy, B. J. (2025). Wyrd ecology: Heathen ritual and gifting relations. Oxford University Press.
Graham McKay, D. (2014, June 20). Pagan festival season in Ontario. The Wild Hunt.
Lepage, M. (2017). Queerness and transgender identity: Negotiations in contemporary Paganism. Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses.
Rabinovitch, S. T., & Macdonald, M. (2004). An ye harm none: Magical morality and modern ethics. Citadel Press.
