Tag: writing

The Work Must Outlive Its Founder

Hands pass firekeeping tools beside a communal woodland fire

A rabbit has emerged from the undergrowth between our look at The Heathen Underground and our return to Declaration 127. It is not another rabbit about folkism, Facebook or declarations. It is carrying a ring of old keys in its mouth and appears to be wondering who will open the doors when the person who built the house is no longer standing there.

The Heathen Underground began under Heather O’Brien. In 2017, responsibility for it passed to Nicole Butler, who publicly thanked Heather for trusting her with what she described as the torch. Declaration 127 followed a different path. It was created by a team, maintained by a committee and then left without an active home after that committee burned out and its website disappeared. In 2024, Rob Schreiwer transferred stewardship of Declaration 127 and its associated assets to The Troth.

These are separate projects with separate histories. Their leadership changes do not demonstrate shared ownership, coordination or some hidden organizational structure. What they share is a much more ordinary—and much more important—problem faced by nearly every volunteer Pagan undertaking.

How does the work continue after the people who began it can no longer carry it?

The Founder and the Work

Founders matter. Someone has to be the first person to strike the match, register the domain, create the group, write the declaration, rent the field, call the meeting or place the first stone. Without that first stubborn person, many of the things we later call community would never exist.

The difficulty begins when the founder and the work become indistinguishable. The project becomes known as one person’s group, one person’s festival, one person’s ritual or one person’s vision. Every decision returns to the same hands. Knowledge stays in one head. Passwords remain in one notebook. Other people may help, but they are never given enough knowledge or authority to continue without the founder.

That arrangement can survive for years. It may even look efficient because everyone knows who makes the decisions. Then the founder becomes tired, ill, overwhelmed, disillusioned or simply ready to walk another path. Suddenly the community discovers that it was not standing around a shared hearth. It was standing around someone else’s campfire.

When that person leaves, the flame goes with them.

This is not necessarily the result of selfishness. Founders often keep doing everything because no one else volunteers, because explaining a task takes longer than doing it, or because previous attempts to share responsibility ended badly. A person may carry something alone for so long that they stop noticing how much of its structure exists only inside their own memory.

Eventually, however, a community project must become larger than its founder if it is going to become an inheritance.

Legacy Begins Where Control Ends

We often confuse legacy with control. We imagine preserving someone’s legacy means freezing their creation at the moment they last touched it. Nothing may be moved, questioned, repaired or reinterpreted because “that is how the founder wanted it.” The founder’s name becomes a kind of permanent veto held over people who must live with circumstances the founder never encountered.

That is not legacy. That is embalming.

A living tradition cannot remain exactly as it was. New people arrive. Language changes. Problems emerge. Communities learn things that their founders did not know. A project that cannot respond to any of this may preserve its original shape, but it will do so in the manner of an abandoned building. The walls remain while the life inside them disappears.

Real legacy is what remains after control has been released. It is found in the people who learned how to carry the work, the records that allow its history to be remembered and the values strong enough to survive examination. It is also found in the freedom of later stewards to repair what no longer works.

The successor’s responsibility is not to impersonate the founder. It is to understand what was entrusted to them, preserve what remains valuable and make the changes necessary for the work to continue. That may mean taking it in directions the founder never imagined.

The original log does not remain forever in the hearth. It gives its heat to the next piece of wood.

When the Torch Is Passed

The Heathen Underground provides one version of succession. A founder trusted another person to take responsibility for an existing public project. The name continued, the audience remained and the work developed under different stewardship. Whatever private conversations or practical arrangements accompanied that transition are not ours to invent. What is visible is that there was a handoff and that the project continued afterward.

Declaration 127 shows the more difficult version. The declaration survived as an idea even when the structure maintaining it did not. Its committee burned out. Its website disappeared. The words continued to circulate, but there was no longer an active body maintaining the signatories, answering questions or deciding how the declaration should evolve.

That gap matters. A document may be copied indefinitely, but stewardship involves more than keeping a page online. Someone must maintain the archive, answer for changes, examine whether signatories still live by the principles they endorsed and decide what happens when the community outgrows the original wording.

The Troth accepted that responsibility in 2024. That does not make The Troth the owner of inclusive Heathenry or the final authority over every person who invokes Hávamál 127. It means the organization accepted responsibility for carrying one particular piece of modern Heathen history forward. The declaration gained a home, a visible steward and the possibility of continued development.

The important word here is not ownership. It is responsibility.

The Unseen Structure of Community

Pagan communities are often uncomfortable with structure. Many of us arrived here after leaving institutions that had too much authority, too many rules or too little room for individual experience. Informality can feel like freedom. We gather around a fire, share the work and tell ourselves that no one is really in charge.

Yet someone still owns the account. Someone controls the mailing list. Someone knows where the records are stored. Someone decides who may post, who receives a key, who handles the money and whose version of the story becomes the official memory.

Undefined authority does not disappear. It merely becomes harder to see and more difficult to challenge.

A project does not necessarily need a corporation, a board or a shelf full of bylaws. Its structure should fit its size and purpose. It does, however, need to know who is responsible for what and what happens if that person can no longer do it. Even a small group can keep shared records, provide more than one trusted person with access, document recurring tasks and teach others how the work is done.

That is not bureaucracy for its own sake. It is care for the people who would otherwise inherit confusion.

The Cost of Having No Successor

When no one has been prepared to continue the work, the burden often falls upon whoever happens to be standing closest when the founder leaves. That person receives the public expectations without the knowledge, resources or authority required to meet them. They may not know which bills must be paid, who owns the photographs, where agreements were stored or why certain decisions were made.

The community may then blame the successor for failing to reproduce work that previously depended upon years of invisible knowledge. Alternatively, the project may simply disappear. Its social-media page becomes quiet, its website expires and its history survives as fragments in search results and personal recollections.

This is where volunteer exhaustion becomes more than an administrative problem. It becomes an ethical one. If a community continually depends upon people sacrificing themselves to keep it alive, then it is consuming its caretakers as fuel.

We are usually very good at thanking the person tending the fire. We are less skilled at noticing when they have been standing there alone for twelve hours and no one has brought them water.

Preparing the Next Firekeeper

Succession begins long before someone announces that they are leaving. It begins when knowledge is shared instead of guarded. It begins when another person is allowed to perform the task imperfectly and learn from doing it. It begins when records are kept, decisions are explained and authority is made visible.

It also requires founders to accept that their successors will not do everything the same way. If every difference is treated as betrayal, then no successor can ever truly assume stewardship. They can only serve as a caretaker under the permanent shadow of someone who is no longer carrying the daily burden.

Successors have obligations as well. Taking responsibility for an existing project does not grant permission to erase the people who built it. Change should not require pretending that the earlier work never happened. The names, labour, mistakes and contributions of those who came before remain part of the story.

Healthy succession holds both truths at once: the founder deserves to be remembered, and the successor must be allowed to lead.

There should also be permission for an honourable ending. Not every project must survive forever. Sometimes the responsible choice is to preserve its records, explain why the work is ending and close the door carefully. An honest ending protects more memory than leaving an abandoned page to slowly disappear without explanation.

What Are We Actually Building?

This rabbit reaches beyond The Heathen Underground and Declaration 127. It reaches every Pagan gathering, archive, teaching circle, festival, grove, kindred, website and piece of community land. It reaches anything built by people who quietly assume there will always be someone available to carry it tomorrow.

If a project cannot continue without one particular person, then it has not yet become a community inheritance. It remains a personal undertaking supported by a community. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, provided everyone understands the distinction.

But if we say we are building something for the generations that follow, then we must build doors that other hands can open. We must leave maps, records, tools and room for those who come next to add something of their own.

Founding is an act of creation. Stewardship is an act of endurance. Succession is an act of trust.

The work outlives its founder when the founder is no longer required to stand at its centre, when the successor does not need to erase the founder to find their own place and when the community understands that responsibility belongs to more than the person currently holding the keys.

Somewhere beyond the gate, a new firekeeper is adding wood to a flame they did not start. They are not stealing the fire. They are fulfilling the reason it was lit.

There goes the rabbit again. Godspeed.

Sources and Further Reading

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?

You Were There Too: Help Me Build a Pagan History

Group of adults gathered around a campfire at a forest campsite

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

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

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

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

Some People Already Tried to Do This

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can find Bragafull here:
Bragafull – Amazon Canada

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

I think they were right.

Most Pagan History Doesn’t Happen in Books

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

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

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

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

That’s history too.

And a great deal of it disappears.

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

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

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

So Tell Me Your Story

Maybe we need to start recording some of this.

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

Pagan community.

Your Pagan community, wherever that happened to be.

I want to hear your stories.

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

Maybe you have a funny story.

Actually, please send me the funny stories.

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

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

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

That never existed.

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

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

Those deserve remembering too.

Chasing Rabbits: A Pagan Journey

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

Originally, I thought that journey was mostly mine.

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

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

That’s how communities work.

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

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

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

Tell the story. Let history decide that later.

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

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

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

I don’t know.

That’s the wonderful thing about rabbits.

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

You Were There Too

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

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

You were there too.

And maybe somebody fifty years from now should know that.

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

Maybe it’s time we preserved a few more.

So tell me your story.

Let’s leave them something to find.

Let’s build a history book.

I Was There When We Built It

Group building a decorated wooden structure among trees in a forest

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

And there was a great deal that was good.

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

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

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

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

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

I worked.

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

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

Then something changes.

The poles went into the earth.

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

“Thunor Wéoh.”

Hallow this.

Make this holy.

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

I was just there.

Helping.

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

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

They grow.

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

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

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

I remember being part of that work too.

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

They weren’t monuments.

They were useful.

They allowed someone to get from here to there.

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

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

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

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

I remember digging that firepit.

I remember tending those fires.

Gods, do I remember tending those fires.

Many, many, many hours.

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

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

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

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

Sometimes there’s a fire.

And somebody has to keep it.

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

The fire is.

The people around it are.

The laughter is.

The drums are.

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

And that’s okay.

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

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

Legacy can simply mean you were one of the hands.

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

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

That’s unfortunate.

Because they weren’t the whole story.

Not remotely.

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

There were nights when the drums carried through the trees.

There were mornings when everything was quiet again.

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

There was dirt under my fingernails.

There was smoke in my clothing.

There were friends.

There was community.

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

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

That is pretty damned cool.

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

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

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

That’s how places work.

But forgetting something does not make it unhappen.

Those holes were dug.

Those poles were carried.

Those offerings were made.

Those words were spoken.

Those bridges were built.

Those fires burned.

And I was there.

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

Maybe that’s the kind of legacy worth having.

Not ownership.

Not recognition.

Participation.

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

And I got to be one of the hands.

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

Joy.

I was happy there.

I was proud of what we were building.

I was excited to see what it might become.

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

Not every ghost needs exorcising.

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

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

And there was a great deal that was good.

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

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

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

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

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

I worked.

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

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

Then something changes.

The poles went into the earth.

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

“Thunor Wéoh.”

Hallow this.

Make this holy.

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

I was just there.

Helping.

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

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

They grow.

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

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

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

I remember being part of that work too.

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

They weren’t monuments.

They were useful.

They allowed someone to get from here to there.

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

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

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

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

I remember digging that firepit.

I remember tending those fires.

Gods, do I remember tending those fires.

Many, many, many hours.

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

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

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

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

Sometimes there’s a fire.

And somebody has to keep it.

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

The fire is.

The people around it are.

The laughter is.

The drums are.

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

And that’s okay.

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

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

Legacy can simply mean you were one of the hands.

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

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

That’s unfortunate.

Because they weren’t the whole story.

Not remotely.

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

There were nights when the drums carried through the trees.

There were mornings when everything was quiet again.

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

There was dirt under my fingernails.

There was smoke in my clothing.

There were friends.

There was community.

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

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

That is pretty damned cool.

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

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

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

That’s how places work.

But forgetting something does not make it unhappen.

Those holes were dug.

Those poles were carried.

Those offerings were made.

Those words were spoken.

Those bridges were built.

Those fires burned.

And I was there.

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

Maybe that’s the kind of legacy worth having.

Not ownership.

Not recognition.

Participation.

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

And I got to be one of the hands.

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

Joy.

I was happy there.

I was proud of what we were building.

I was excited to see what it might become.

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

Not every ghost needs exorcising.

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

Cancel Culture, Selective Memory, and the Pagan Past

Community gathering with text: “OUR HISTORICAL MEMORY & ANCESTRAL THREADS” and “COMMUNITY VALUES & ACCOUNTABILITY.”

When Accountability Becomes Erasure

I keep following rabbits into the past, and lately one of them keeps leading me back to an uncomfortable question: what happens when a community decides that part of its own history has become inconvenient?

We have already talked about Pagan memory, inheritance, archives, traditions, founders, community ancestors, sacred places, and what future generations may inherit from the Pagan communities that exist today. Somewhere in all of that, another word kept hovering around the edges of the conversation.

Cancel culture.

I hesitate to use the phrase because it has become so politically loaded that sometimes simply saying it ends the conversation before the conversation can begin. People hear the words and immediately choose a side.

But strip away the politics for a moment.

There is something very real underneath the phrase that deserves attention.

A person becomes unacceptable.

A relationship collapses.

A community fractures.

Someone leaves, is removed, or simply becomes someone nobody particularly wants to talk about anymore.

And then something curious starts happening.

Their present unacceptability begins reaching backward into the past.

Their contribution becomes uncomfortable to acknowledge. Their name is mentioned less often. The things they helped build remain, but the story of how those things came into existence begins changing. Photographs disappear from circulation. Stories become shorter. New people arrive and receive an increasingly simplified version of what happened before them.

Nobody has to formally announce that someone has been erased.

Eventually silence does the work.

That is where cancel culture and selective memory begin to overlap.

And I think Pagan communities need to be very careful about it.

This is not an argument against accountability.

People sometimes need to leave communities. Leaders sometimes need to lose authority. Relationships sometimes become unhealthy enough that they need to end. Someone who contributed greatly yesterday can behave terribly tomorrow.

Community does not require endless tolerance.

But there is an enormous difference between saying:

You should no longer hold this position.

and saying:

You were never important here.

Those are not the same judgment.

History does not require us to choose between sainthood and oblivion.

Someone can have done something valuable and later done something harmful.

Someone can have helped build a community and later become unwelcome in it.

Someone can have created a ritual, organized a gathering, built infrastructure, taught people, written material, solved problems, hauled garbage, cooked meals, tended fires, fixed broken equipment, welcomed newcomers, and contributed years of labour—and still eventually have a serious falling out with the people around them.

The ending does not erase everything that came before it.

Neither does everything good that came before excuse whatever happened at the end.

Both things can be true.

That should not be a radical position.

Unfortunately, human beings seem to have trouble holding complicated people in memory.

We like saints.

We understand villains.

Someone who was generous on Monday, difficult on Tuesday, brilliant on Wednesday, selfish on Thursday and absolutely indispensable on Friday is much harder to fit into a story.

But that is what people are actually like.

Pagan history was made by people.

Therefore Pagan history is going to be complicated.

The Old Tractor

I think of something as ordinary as an old tractor.

At one time it may simply be part of community life. It hauls the garbage scow. It pulls a parade float. It carries people from one side of a gathering to another. Somebody drives it. People climb aboard. Somebody tells a joke. Someone takes a photograph.

Nobody stops and thinks, We are creating historical evidence.

They’re just trying to move the garbage.

Then people change.

Relationships change.

The community changes.

Eventually the tractor sits.

A newcomer sees an old machine.

What they cannot see is the web of human relationships that once surrounded it.

They cannot hear the laughter.

They do not know who drove it.

They do not know why somebody gave it a name.

They do not know what it carried.

They do not know why photographs of it might make someone smile—or make someone hurt.

The tractor remains.

The provenance disappears.

And provenance matters.

Where did this come from?

Who created it?

Who maintained it?

Who changed it?

Why did it change?

Why do we do things this way now?

Communities are full of these invisible histories.

An old song nobody sings.

A ritual whose author is no longer mentioned.

A policy created because of an argument nobody remembers.

A tradition credited vaguely to “the community” even though someone actually invented it.

A building somebody spent years maintaining.

A trail somebody cleared.

An annual event that began with three people sitting around a kitchen table.

A photograph filled with people whose names nobody bothered writing down.

An empty space where something once happened.

Some of those things disappear naturally.

Memory fades.

People die.

Records get lost.

Hard drives fail.

Websites disappear.

Stories mutate each time they are told.

That is simply history doing what history does.

But sometimes forgetting is encouraged.

That is different.

When Forgetting Becomes Selective

Sometimes remembering someone becomes socially uncomfortable.

People learn that mentioning a particular person creates tension, so they mention them less.

The next retelling leaves out a detail.

The version after that leaves out a name.

Eventually the story works perfectly well without the inconvenient person.

Then another generation arrives.

For them, nothing has been erased because they never knew anything was missing.

That may be one of the most effective forms of cancellation.

You don’t destroy the history.

You simply stop transmitting it.

This should bother Pagans especially because we spend so much time complaining about exactly this problem in ancient history.

We desperately want to know what people actually believed.

Who performed the rituals?

Why was something done a particular way?

What did a symbol mean?

Which practices were widespread and which were local?

What changed after political upheaval?

What was written by outsiders?

What disappeared because nobody recorded it?

We sift fragments trying to reconstruct worlds whose context has vanished.

And then we create new Pagan communities surrounded by cameras, computers, websites, email archives, social media, newsletters, books, photographs and people capable of writing things down—and still manage to lose our own history.

There is something absurd about that.

Future Pagans should not have to reconstruct us archaeologically.

They should not have to discover an old festival program and suddenly realize that people existed whom nobody ever mentioned.

They should not have to reverse-engineer why a ritual changed.

They should not have to compare old photographs to current stories and wonder why the two seem to describe different communities.

They should not have to recreate solutions because nobody bothered preserving the fact that someone already solved the problem.

And they certainly should not inherit a mythology pretending everything moved smoothly from one generation to another.

It didn’t.

Nothing human does.

Memory Should Not Become a Weapon

But there is another side to this.

Preserving memory cannot mean preserving every grievance forever.

That becomes its own poison.

An archive should not become an ammunition dump.

History should not become a courtroom where people keep retrying conflicts decades after everyone involved has either moved on or died.

There has to be room for healing.

There has to be room for people to change.

There has to be room for communities to say, “We dealt with this, learned from it, and moved forward.”

The difference is that moving forward does not require pretending nothing happened.

We should be capable of saying:

Something happened.

People were hurt.

People disagree about what happened.

Relationships changed.

The community changed because of it.

Different people remember it differently.

We learned what we could.

And we moved on.

That is not keeping a wound open.

That is putting a marker beside the trail.

Something happened here.

Future travellers do not necessarily need every detail.

But they deserve to know the ground shifted.

Remembering Is Not Endorsing

That distinction becomes particularly important when people themselves become controversial.

Remembering somebody is not honouring them.

Documenting somebody is not endorsing them.

Acknowledging a contribution is not absolution.

History is not a hall of fame.

We should be perfectly capable of saying:

This person helped create something important.

This person later behaved in ways the community could not accept.

Both statements belong in the record.

Anything less turns history into public relations.

And that is where selective memory becomes dangerous.

Once communities become comfortable removing inconvenient people from their histories, the surviving story inevitably begins favouring whoever remains.

The people still holding authority become the natural inheritors.

The people who left become footnotes.

The people who were removed become warnings.

The people who died become whatever the survivors say they were.

The people nobody likes become increasingly unnecessary to the official story.

Eventually history stops asking:

What happened?

and begins answering:

Why the people currently in charge deserve to be here.

That is not memory.

That is mythology.

And mythology about ourselves is especially dangerous because it usually feels like history while we are creating it.

Who Owns Pagan Memory?

This is why I keep coming back to the idea that nobody owns Pagan memory.

Not founders.

Not leaders.

Not landowners.

Not boards.

Not priests or priestesses.

Not elders.

Not the person who stayed.

Not the person who left.

Not the person who was hurt.

Not even the person doing the remembering.

We each possess pieces of the story.

Those pieces may contradict one another.

That’s fine.

In fact, contradiction may sometimes be evidence that we are preserving real history rather than manufacturing an official version.

“This is what I remember.”

“This is what you remember.”

“Here is what the surviving documentation shows.”

“Here is where neither of us actually knows.”

That is intellectually messy.

Good.

History is messy.

Paganism is messy.

Human beings around fires are exceptionally messy.

I would much rather future Pagans inherit three conflicting accounts than one beautifully polished lie.

Because they can investigate conflicting accounts.

They cannot investigate something nobody told them existed.

Does Accountability Rewrite the Past?

And this brings us back to cancel culture.

The greatest danger may not be someone being removed from a social media platform or excluded from a gathering. Those are contemporary decisions made by contemporary people and they can be debated on their own merits.

The historical danger comes afterward.

Does removing someone from the present also give us permission to remove them from the past?

I don’t think it does.

Accountability concerns what we do now.

History concerns what happened then.

They interact, but they are not interchangeable.

A community mature enough to practise accountability should also be mature enough to preserve uncomfortable history.

Maybe especially uncomfortable history.

Because the uncomfortable pieces often explain the present better than the comfortable ones.

Why does that rule exist?

Why did this ritual change?

Why is that tradition important?

Why does nobody use that space anymore?

Why is this person missing from the photographs?

Why did everyone suddenly start doing something differently?

Why does that old tractor have a name?

Those questions contain history.

And answering them does not mean we have to go backward.

Quite the opposite.

Evolution Is Not Amnesia

I want Paganism to evolve.

I want people to change things.

I want future generations to look at something we considered indispensable and decide they have a better idea.

Good.

Change it.

Build something better.

Follow another rabbit.

But know what you are changing.

Evolution and amnesia are not the same thing.

Evolution takes what came before, understands it, alters it and moves onward.

Amnesia keeps rebuilding the same road because nobody remembers that somebody already built it.

That wastes experience.

It wastes labour.

It wastes knowledge.

And sometimes it causes people to repeat injuries that somebody else already learned how to avoid.

We should want future Pagans to begin where we ended.

Not where we began.

Leave the Trail

For that to happen, we have to leave them the trail.

Not an official trail scrubbed clean of everyone who became inconvenient.

Not a monument to the winners.

Not an endless catalogue of grudges.

The real trail.

Here is what we built.

Here is who helped.

Here is what worked.

Here is what failed.

Here is where relationships broke.

Here is what changed afterward.

Here is where memories disagree.

Here is what we know.

Here is what we don’t.

Here is where someone got hurt.

Here is where something beautiful happened.

Here is where both happened at once.

Then let the next generation decide what any of it means.

That may be the part of memory we have the hardest time accepting.

Eventually we lose control of it.

People after us will judge us differently than we judge ourselves.

They will probably admire people we disliked.

They may criticize people we revered.

They will discover mistakes we normalized.

They may rehabilitate ideas we discarded.

They may throw away things we considered sacred.

They may look at some enormous community argument and wonder why anyone cared.

Good.

That means the history survived long enough for them to argue with it.

Maybe that is what we should be aiming for.

Not immortality.

Not vindication.

Not an official version in which our side won.

Just enough honest memory that the people following us do not have to start again.

Cancel someone from leadership if accountability requires it.

End a relationship if it needs to end.

Change the ritual.

Change the organization.

Change the gathering.

Move the fire.

But don’t pretend the old fire never burned.

Don’t erase the hands that once tended it simply because those hands later became difficult to remember.

We do not have to worship the ashes.

We do not have to keep the wounds bleeding.

But we should stop sweeping away the footprints.

Leave the trail.

Leave the uncomfortable parts too.

Then let the people who come after us go farther.

What Are We Leaving Behind?

Family gathered around a table reviewing photographs, journals, and handmade objects

The Breadcrumbs at the End of the Warren

I did not expect this rabbit hole to end here.

Then again, that is probably becoming the unofficial motto of Unplugged Pagan.

I started with a simple thought.

Third-generation Pagans.

I realized I did not think I had knowingly met one. I knew second-generation Pagans. I knew people who grew up around Paganism and sometimes described it, affectionately or otherwise, as the weird thing their parents did.

Some still came to gatherings.

Some retained pieces of the culture even if they did not retain the religion.

And some are now old enough to have children of their own.

That raised the question of what those children are inheriting.

Which led to tradition.

Tradition led to memory.

Memory led to archives.

Archives led to history.

History led to mythology.

Mythology led to founders.

Founders led to succession.

And succession eventually dropped me here.

Legacy.

What are we leaving behind?

I do not mean that in the grand sense of monuments or famous books or organizations carrying someone’s name for a century.

I mean the smaller things.

The things communities are actually made from.

A photograph with names written on the back.

A ritual someone bothered to type out.

A song recorded before the person who wrote it was gone.

A festival program saved instead of thrown away.

A story written down while someone was still alive to say, “No, that isn’t quite how it happened.”

A child remembering that once every summer their parents took them somewhere strange and wonderful where adults danced around fires.

Those are breadcrumbs.

And perhaps that is what I have been leaving without quite realizing it.

I started chasing rabbits because I wanted answers.

Something would catch my attention. A name. A gathering. A claim. A symbol. A connection between communities. An old tradition. Something somebody remembered differently from the way I remembered it.

So I followed it.

Sometimes the rabbit went nowhere.

Sometimes it opened into an entire warren.

But every time I wrote the journey down, something else happened.

A record was created.

Not the record.

That distinction matters.

I am not an omniscient narrator of Pagan history. Nobody is. I see events through my own experience, relationships, memories, disagreements, loyalties, disappointments, and curiosity.

Someone else who stood beside me at the same fire may remember it differently.

Good.

They should write their version too.

That may be the real lesson at the end of this warren.

History becomes healthier when more people leave records.

Not because every record agrees.

Because they do not.

Future historians learn as much from disagreement as agreement. Two people remembering the same event differently tells us something. A newspaper account contradicting community memory tells us something. An old festival program challenging a story repeated for twenty years tells us something.

The goal should not be creating one authorized Pagan history.

That sounds dreadful.

The goal should be leaving enough pieces that somebody later can reconstruct something resembling the truth.

That means our stories matter.

Our photographs matter.

Our old newsletters matter.

Our defunct websites matter.

Our arguments sometimes matter.

Even our ridiculous moments matter because communities are not built entirely from solemn rituals and profound spiritual revelations.

Sometimes community is the thing that happened when the tent collapsed in the rain and six people tried to fix it while everybody else laughed.

That belongs to history too.

And perhaps this is where the third generation circles back into the story.

Someday somebody may ask:

What was Paganism like before I was born?

Not ancient Paganism.

Ours.

What were the gatherings like?

What did people argue about?

What did they believe?

Which traditions already existed?

Which ones were being invented?

Who were the elders?

What disappeared?

What survived?

Why?

Those questions cannot be answered entirely from archaeology or medieval manuscripts.

The answers are sitting in our basements.

They are on old hard drives.

They are disappearing from the internet.

They are inside the memories of people getting older.

They are in songs nobody has recorded.

They are in photographs whose subjects have never been identified.

And they are in stories we keep assuming everyone already knows.

Everyone does know them.

Until suddenly nobody does.

So perhaps recording these things is not vanity.

Perhaps it is stewardship.

Not preserving ourselves because we believe future Pagans desperately need to know what we thought about everything.

Leaving evidence.

Leaving context.

Leaving breadcrumbs.

The people who come after us can decide which ones are worth following.

That may be the appropriate ending to this particular warren.

We spend a remarkable amount of time in Paganism searching for the people who came before us.

Perhaps occasionally we should remember that someday we will be the people who came before.

And somebody we will never meet may come looking for us.

Leave them something to find.

When the Founders Are Gone

Older woman passes a lit torch to a woman beside a young boy in a forest gathering

Did We Build a Community, or Did We Build It Around Ourselves?

Every community eventually encounters a question it would rather postpone.

What happens when the founders are gone?

Not necessarily dead. People retire. They move. They burn out. Relationships change. Health changes. Families change. Sometimes founders simply decide they have given enough.

The result is the same.

The community must discover whether it actually learned how to exist without them.

This is not uniquely Pagan. Churches, clubs, charities, businesses, political organizations, volunteer groups, and social movements all struggle with founder dependence.

But Pagan communities may be particularly vulnerable because so many of them begin with very small groups of intensely committed people.

Someone owns the land.

Someone has the ritual knowledge.

Someone organizes the gathering.

Someone handles the money.

Someone knows everybody.

Someone remembers why things are done the way they are.

Someone becomes the person everyone calls when something goes wrong.

After ten, twenty, or thirty years, that person may feel inseparable from the community itself.

And sometimes the community feels the same way.

That creates a strange contradiction.

A founder may spend decades trying to create something that will outlive them while unintentionally making themselves indispensable to it.

If every decision still needs the founder’s approval, the community has not really inherited authority.

If nobody else knows how the finances work, the community has not inherited the organization.

If nobody else can lead the rituals, the community has not inherited the practice.

If nobody is permitted to reinterpret the founder’s ideas, the community has inherited a museum.

Tradition requires continuity, but continuity does not mean freezing something forever.

Living traditions change.

That is one of the things history keeps showing us. Religions that survive for centuries change languages, calendars, leadership structures, buildings, music, theology, customs, and relationships with the surrounding culture. They argue about those changes constantly, but they change.

A tradition that cannot change when circumstances change may not be strong.

It may simply be brittle.

The second generation becomes important here because they are often the first people to say, “We love this place, but we would not run it the way our parents did.”

That can sound like disrespect.

Sometimes it probably is.

But sometimes it is succession.

A generation that inherits a community also inherits its unresolved problems.

Old feuds.

Unclear rules.

Informal arrangements nobody wrote down.

Traditions that made sense under conditions that no longer exist.

Authority structures built around personalities rather than offices.

And the most dangerous phrase of all:

“That’s how the founders wanted it.”

Perhaps they did.

But the dead cannot govern the living forever.

Ancestor respect is not ancestor government.

There is a difference between honouring the people who built something and requiring every later generation to reproduce their decisions indefinitely.

In fact, a founder’s greatest legacy may be creating something strong enough to survive being changed by people they never met.

That requires something difficult from both generations.

Founders have to relinquish control.

Successors have to accept responsibility.

Neither is easy.

The founder knows where all the bodies are buried, figuratively speaking. They remember the disasters that nearly destroyed the community. They know why certain rules exist. They know which seemingly brilliant ideas were tried fifteen years earlier and failed spectacularly.

The successor sees possibilities the founder may no longer see.

They grew up in a different culture. They communicate differently. They may have different expectations around governance, inclusion, privacy, consent, finances, leadership, technology, or accountability.

Both perspectives contain something valuable.

The healthiest transition may happen when the story moves from “This is mine” to “This is ours” and eventually to “This will belong to people who are not here yet.”

That final step changes everything.

If you genuinely believe a community belongs partly to future generations, record keeping stops being bureaucracy and becomes stewardship.

Succession planning stops being an insult and becomes responsibility.

Teaching younger people stops being optional.

Sharing authority stops being a threat.

And criticism becomes less dangerous because the goal is no longer preserving a founder’s personal vision exactly as it was.

The goal becomes preserving whatever was valuable enough to deserve another generation.

Perhaps that is the real test.

Not whether the founder is remembered.

They probably will be.

The test is whether the fire is still burning after nobody remembers exactly who lit it first.

If it is, something remarkable has happened.

A project has become a tradition.

Which leaves another rabbit sitting beside the fire.

At what point does a revival stop being a revival?

History, Memory and Myth

Four people studying illustrated manuscripts, maps, and coded writings in a library

“We Have Always Done It This Way”

There may be five words more dangerous to community history than almost any others:

We have always done it this way.

Have we?

Maybe.

But humans are remarkably unreliable historians, particularly when the history involves ourselves.

Memory is not a recording. We remember pieces. We fill gaps. We simplify complicated events. We forget people we disliked and enlarge the roles of people we admired. Stories become cleaner with repetition. Motives that were confusing at the time become obvious in hindsight.

Eventually community history can become community mythology.

That is not necessarily malicious.

It is human.

A gathering may begin for complicated reasons involving several people, competing ideas, limited money, a borrowed campground, and somebody who happened to own a vehicle large enough to move everything.

Twenty-five years later the story becomes something much cleaner:

“The founders created this place so Pagans could have a home.”

That may capture the spirit of what happened.

It may not capture what actually happened.

Those are different things.

This is where archives become wonderfully inconvenient.

The old newsletter does not remember the story the way we do.

The festival program lists someone we forgot.

The photograph shows that the thing everyone remembers being built in one year apparently existed several years earlier.

An old message reveals that the supposedly unanimous decision was anything but unanimous.

The evidence interrupts the legend.

Good.

It should.

If Paganism is going to become an intergenerational religious culture, we owe future generations more than good stories. We should leave them enough evidence to challenge our stories.

That might sound strange coming from someone who values bardic tradition.

I do value it.

The bard and the historian are not enemies. They answer different questions.

The historian asks, What happened?

The bard asks, What did it mean?

Trouble begins when either one claims to answer both perfectly.

This matters within Paganism for another reason: we already have a complicated relationship with historical authenticity.

Modern Pagan traditions may draw inspiration from ancient religions, folklore, archaeology, medieval literature, nineteenth-century romanticism, ceremonial magic, twentieth-century occultism, counterculture, environmentalism, feminism, reconstructionist scholarship, personal revelation, and modern invention.

Those ingredients can become tangled very quickly.

Something practised for thirty years can start being described as ancient simply because nobody remembers who introduced it.

A chant written at a festival can gradually become “traditional.”

A ritual created to solve one practical problem can later be explained as though it contained deep theological symbolism from the beginning.

A local custom can be mistaken for something practised everywhere.

This is how myth grows around communities.

But here is the part I think Paganism sometimes gets wrong: admitting that something is modern does not make it meaningless.

Suppose somebody created a ritual at a gathering decades ago.

People loved it.

They repeated it the next year.

Then again.

Children grew up participating in it.

Eventually adults who had participated as children began leading it themselves.

That ritual is not ancient.

It is tradition.

Those two words do not have to mean the same thing.

In fact, distinguishing them allows us to appreciate both.

An ancient practice tells us something about people who lived long before us.

A modern tradition tells us something about the community that created and maintained it.

Both have stories worth preserving.

The problem appears when modern communities become embarrassed by their own newness and start borrowing age as a source of legitimacy.

Perhaps we do not need to.

A religion that is confident enough to say, “We began doing this thirty years ago because it mattered to us,” may be healthier than one that needs to insist everything came from an unbroken secret tradition stretching into antiquity.

There is dignity in knowing where something began.

There is dignity in saying, “Our grandparents started this.”

That may eventually become one of the great differences between first-generation and third-generation Paganism.

The first generation sometimes searches for ancestors in ancient history.

The third generation may actually have Pagan ancestors.

And those ancestors will not be legendary figures.

They will have names, photographs, mistakes, arguments, unfinished projects, questionable fashion choices, embarrassing stories, and perhaps boxes of poorly organized documents in somebody’s basement.

In other words, they will be human.

That may be better than mythology.

Because once founders become legends, communities can become trapped by them.

The story becomes sacred.

The founder’s preferences become traditions.

The founder’s decisions become precedent.

And eventually somebody has to ask a very difficult question:

What happens when the founders are gone?

Who Keeps the Pagan Memory?

Four people studying manuscripts and runic texts in a stone library

Archivists, Historians, Bards and the People Who Remember

If Paganism is beginning to produce generations rather than merely converts, then Pagan memory suddenly becomes important.

This rabbit feels particularly close to home because when I think about Pagan communities I have known, I can immediately think of people who have tried, in very different ways, to preserve pieces of that history.

Some tried to build archives.

Some informally became historians.

Some became bards and storytellers.

Some simply remembered.

They are not doing the same job.

An archive preserves evidence. Programs, newsletters, photographs, posters, correspondence, minutes, ritual outlines, recordings, websites, maps, membership material, workshop notes, and all the other seemingly ordinary scraps that accumulate around a living community.

A historian attempts to make sense of those scraps. Who did what? When did something begin? Why did a gathering move? When did a practice change? Which story came first? What was the sequence?

A bard preserves something else.

Meaning.

An old program can tell me who was scheduled to perform on Thursday night. A storyteller may remember why that performance became legendary.

A photograph can show twenty people standing around a fire. Someone who was there remembers why everyone was laughing.

Meeting notes might record that a decision was made. A participant remembers the argument beforehand, the personalities in the room, who stormed away, who brought people back together, and why the decision mattered.

History lives somewhere among all of those things.

There is documentary history.

There is oral history.

There is community memory.

There is folklore.

And there is mythology.

The dangerous part is that, given enough time, we forget which is which.

This is particularly easy in Pagan communities because so much of our history has been informal and fragile.

A gathering disappears and eventually its website disappears with it. An old discussion group shuts down. A social media page becomes inactive. A domain expires. Someone dies and their collection of newsletters ends up in a box nobody knows what to do with. Photographs remain on an old hard drive. Recordings sit on obsolete media. Stories that everyone once knew gradually become stories three people remember, then one person remembers, then nobody remembers.

Suddenly a thirty-year history has vanished.

When the community is young, this may not feel particularly urgent. Everyone who matters was there. If somebody wants to know what happened, they ask someone.

That works beautifully until the people who were there are no longer there.

The second generation starts asking questions.

The third generation may ask even more.

Who started this gathering?

Why do we sing this song?

Why is that place considered sacred?

Who carved this?

Why does everyone tell that particular story every year?

What happened here before I was born?

If nobody preserved the answers, the community will create answers.

That is not necessarily dishonesty. Humans dislike empty spaces in stories. We connect dots. We simplify. We remember what makes sense now rather than what made sense then.

That is exactly why the different keepers of memory matter.

The archivist says, “Here is what survived.”

The historian says, “Here is what I think happened.”

The bard says, “Here is what it meant to us.”

The elder says, “Here is what I remember.”

None of them should be treated as infallible.

All of them are valuable.

Perhaps healthy Pagan communities need these roles more than we have realized. Not official positions necessarily. I am not suggesting every gathering needs a Ministry of Pagan Historical Accuracy.

But somebody should be keeping the old programs.

Somebody should be labeling the photographs.

Somebody should be interviewing the elders.

Somebody should be recording the songs and asking where they came from.

Somebody should write down the story behind the ritual while the people who created it are still alive to correct the story.

And perhaps there is another role that sits somewhere between archivist and storyteller.

The rabbit chaser.

The person who notices a loose thread and asks where it goes.

Who finds an old reference and wonders what it means.

Who compares memories against documents.

Who discovers that something everyone thought happened in one year apparently happened three years earlier.

Who asks whether two stories that have circulated for decades can both be true.

Not because there must be a scandal hiding underneath every inconsistency.

Sometimes simply because somebody should write it down.

I did not really set out to think of my own rabbit chasing in that way. I was following questions because they interested me.

But when you follow enough rabbits, something strange happens.

You begin creating a map.

You notice where stories connect. You notice where they contradict one another. You find people, gatherings, ideas, organizations, and traditions intersecting in ways that were obvious to the people living through them but may be invisible twenty years later.

That is a kind of record keeping whether we intended it or not.

And if Paganism is becoming intergenerational, that record may matter to people we will never meet.

But records create another problem.

The documents rarely tell the story exactly the way we remember it.

Which leads us into the next hole.

History, memory, and myth.

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

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

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

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

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

Place Is Not Just Scenery

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

But Paganism Is Also a Religion of Movers

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

The First Responsibility Is to Notice Where We Actually Are

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

So What Gets Passed Down When the Place Cannot?

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

Memory Can Carry a Place Without Pretending the Place Moved

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

I Have Been Thinking About Home for a Long Time

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

Maybe Sacred Place Is a Relationship, Not Real Estate

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

What Does the Child Inherit Then?

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

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

References

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