Yesterday we finally climbed out of the rabbit warren.
Or at least we pretended to.
We had followed relationship into responsibility, responsibility into ethics, ethics into broken relationship, broken relationship into sacredness, and sacredness into stewardship.
And somewhere near the end, another question appeared.
What will remain when we are gone?
That is the rabbit called legacy.
It is a strange word.
Legacy sounds grand.
Monuments.
Books.
Institutions.
Names carved into stone.
Things people say about us after we are dead.
But I suspect most legacies are much quieter than that.
A path someone still walks.
A tree someone else sits beneath.
A story repeated around a fire.
A ritual whose creator nobody remembers anymore.
A piece of advice passed from one person to another until its origin disappears.
A kindness remembered by someone who later offers the same kindness to somebody else.
A wound somebody finally decided not to pass forward.
Perhaps legacy is simply what continues after we no longer control the story.
The Firekeeper Eventually Leaves the Fire
We ended yesterday with the image of the firekeeper.
Someone tends the fire.
Adds wood.
Protects the flame.
Watches for sparks.
Keeps people warm.
Then eventually that person leaves.
They have to.
No one tends a fire forever.
Someone else takes the chair.
Or the fire goes out.
And perhaps that is the moment stewardship becomes legacy.
What condition did we leave the fire in?
Did we leave dry wood nearby?
Did we teach anyone how to tend it?
Did we make the task so dependent upon ourselves that nobody knew what to do when we were gone?
Did we keep everyone else away from the flames because we liked being the only person holding the poker?
Did we leave a healthy fire?
Or a pile of ashes everyone else was expected to call tradition?
That question applies to considerably more than campfires.
Traditions Have Ancestors Too
We often talk about our ancestors.
Blood ancestors.
Ancestors of place.
Ancestors of spirit.
Ancestors of affinity.
People whose lives, work, ideas or sacrifices created pathways we now walk.
But traditions have ancestors as well.
Someone taught the ritual.
Someone wrote the book.
Someone organized the gathering.
Someone kept an old newsletter.
Someone remembered the story accurately enough to tell it twenty years later.
Someone did research nobody else wanted to do.
Someone asked an inconvenient question.
Someone corrected a false history.
Someone created a practice that worked so well everyone eventually forgot it had ever been new.
We inherit those things.
And inheritance creates responsibility.
There is that word again.
We receive something from people who may never know our names.
Then, for a while, it passes through our hands.
Inheritance Is Not Preservation in Amber
There is a temptation when talking about legacy to imagine that our duty is simply preservation.
Keep everything exactly as it was.
Repeat the same ritual.
Use the same words.
Protect the same structure.
Never question the elders.
Never move the stones.
Never alter the story.
Otherwise tradition will be lost.
But living things do not survive by remaining unchanged.
A forest that never changed would not be a living forest.
Trees fall.
Seeds germinate.
Fire passes through.
Species move.
Water changes course.
Some things disappear.
Others arrive.
The forest remains the forest precisely because it changes.
Perhaps tradition works the same way.
Stewardship does not mean freezing something at the moment we received it.
It means knowing what must be protected, what can change, what needs pruning, and what should probably never have been planted there in the first place.
Some Things Should End With Us
This may be the uncomfortable part of legacy.
Not everything we inherit deserves descendants.
We inherit wisdom.
We also inherit prejudice.
We inherit beautiful rituals.
We also inherit bad habits disguised as tradition.
We inherit community stories.
We also inherit old grudges.
We inherit teachings.
We also inherit misinformation.
We inherit structures built for circumstances that no longer exist.
We inherit wounds people stopped questioning because everyone became accustomed to carrying them.
Honouring our predecessors cannot mean repeating every mistake they made.
Sometimes respect for the past means understanding it well enough to know what not to reproduce.
Perhaps one of the greatest legacies a generation can leave is the thing it finally refuses to hand down.
The prejudice stops here.
The lie stops here.
The abuse stops here.
The silence stops here.
The false history stops here.
The idea that leadership means unquestionable authority stops here.
The expectation that someone must endure harm to preserve community stops here.
Some traditions deserve descendants.
Some ghosts deserve rest.
But Who Decides?
Of course that immediately creates another problem.
Who decides what should continue?
The elders?
The young?
The scholar?
The priest?
The practitioner?
The founder?
The person who has been there longest?
The person asking the question nobody else wants asked?
Probably no single one of them.
Legacy becomes dangerous when one generation imagines it has the right to write the future in permanent ink.
We do not know what future Pagans will need.
We cannot.
They will live in circumstances we cannot completely imagine.
They will ask questions we have not thought to ask.
They will probably find some of our assumptions ridiculous.
Good.
We have done the same thing to generations before us.
Perhaps our responsibility is not to decide everything for them.
Perhaps our responsibility is to leave them enough truth, memory, tools and freedom to decide wisely for themselves.
What Do We Leave Them?
That may be the real legacy question.
Not:
Will they remember my name?
But:
What will they have because we were here?
Will they inherit healthy land?
Will they inherit sacred places that were cared for rather than consumed?
Will they know how those places became sacred?
Will anyone have written the history down?
Will photographs have names attached to them?
Will ritual texts explain where they came from?
Will reconstructed practices be labelled honestly as reconstruction?
Will modern inventions be allowed to be modern without being dressed in fake antiquity?
Will the mistakes be documented as carefully as the victories?
Will someone know why a tradition changed?
Or will they inherit fragments and myths and spend another generation trying to reconstruct what actually happened?
Legacy is partly memory.
And memory requires work.
The Archivist Is a Kind of Firekeeper
We tend to romanticize the visible roles.
The priest.
The ritual leader.
The musician.
The person standing beside the sacred fire.
But there are quieter firekeepers.
The person who saves the old newsletters.
The one who labels photographs.
The one who writes down the names of the dead.
The one who records who built the shrine.
The one who remembers that a tradition everyone now calls ancient actually began at a gathering in 1994.
The scholar who interviews people before those memories disappear.
The community historian who keeps copies when websites vanish.
The practitioner who writes:
This is what we did, this is why we did it, and this is what I remember.
That work may not look particularly magical.
Neither does stacking firewood.
But the fire lasts longer because someone did it.
This Is Where Scholarship Becomes Legacy
Our entire rabbit warren began because people did that work.
Shelley Rabinovitch documented people, communities and movements that might otherwise have disappeared into memory.
Marion Bowman recorded lived religion, sacred places and the way ordinary people actually experience religious worlds.
Marisol Charbonneau documented a particular moment in Montreal Paganism.
Martin Lepage captured voices and negotiations around identity that might otherwise survive only as vague recollection.
Dodie Graham McKay wrote about festivals, gatherings, people and sacred places while many of them were still living stories rather than distant history.
Barbara Jane Davy documented Heathen practices, rituals, gifting relationships, ancestry and ecological thought as they were being lived.
That is not merely scholarship.
It becomes part of the historical record.
Years from now, someone asking what Paganism looked like in Canada during this period may find those works.
They will know more because someone bothered to observe carefully.
That is legacy.
Not necessarily being remembered.
Making remembering possible.
Community Memory Is Fragile
We tend to assume someone will remember.
Someone always knows.
Ask so-and-so.
They were there.
Until one day they aren’t.
A hard drive fails.
A website disappears.
A box of papers gets thrown away during a move.
A Facebook group vanishes.
The person who knew the story dies.
Twenty-five years of community history can disappear surprisingly quickly.
Then myths grow in the empty space.
Someone vaguely remembers.
Someone else’s memory disagrees.
The date shifts.
The founder becomes someone else.
A modern ritual ages fifty years in three retellings.
Eventually everybody is certain.
Nobody has evidence.
Perhaps documentation is one of the least glamorous forms of sacred stewardship.
But if memory matters, somebody has to tend it.
Legacy Is Also Conduct
Documents are not the only things we leave behind.
We leave patterns.
A newcomer watches how elders behave.
A student watches how a teacher handles disagreement.
Children watch how adults speak about people who are not present.
Communities watch what leaders do when someone reports harm.
People notice whether rules apply to everyone.
They notice whether apologies lead to change.
They notice whether service creates authority or authority creates entitlement.
Then those behaviours become normal.
That may be one of the most powerful forms of legacy.
Not what we taught.
What we demonstrated.
A community can write beautiful values statements and still teach the next generation hypocrisy.
Another community may have no formal ethics document at all and quietly teach generosity, honesty and accountability through daily behaviour.
The next generation learns both.
Perhaps tradition is transmitted as much through imitation as instruction.
The Stories We Tell About Ourselves Matter
Legacy also becomes mythology.
Every community tells stories about itself.
How it began.
Who founded it.
What hardships were overcome.
Why certain rituals exist.
Why certain people left.
Why one tradition ended and another began.
Those stories create identity.
But stories simplify.
They turn messy history into clean narrative.
The founder becomes hero.
The conflict becomes misunderstanding.
The inconvenient person disappears.
The unsuccessful experiment is forgotten.
The community’s present identity gets projected backward until it appears that everything was always leading inevitably to today.
That is how memory becomes mythology.
Sometimes mythology gives a community strength.
Sometimes it hides things people need to understand.
Perhaps responsible legacy means allowing future generations to inherit complicated ancestors.
Not saints.
Not villains.
People.
Our Ancestors Were Complicated; So Are We
We often wish our ancestors had left clearer records.
What exactly did they believe?
How did this ritual work?
What did this symbol mean?
Why did they make this offering?
What did ordinary people think?
We stare at fragments and wish somebody had written more down.
Then we live our own religious lives as though future people will somehow understand us automatically.
Perhaps that is worth considering.
We are somebody’s ancestors too.
Maybe not biologically.
But culturally.
Spiritually.
Intellectually.
Practically.
Someone fifty years from now may practice something influenced by choices being made today.
They may stand before a shrine we built.
They may inherit a festival we created.
They may use language we normalized.
They may spend years trying to undo something we handed them thoughtlessly.
Or they may be grateful we did the difficult work before they arrived.
We will probably never know which.
Planting Trees We Will Never Sit Beneath
There is an old idea found in many cultures: plant trees whose shade you will never enjoy.
That may be one of the clearest images of legacy.
Do something useful without requiring yourself to remain at the centre of it.
Build something you are willing to let other people inherit.
Teach someone who may eventually do it better than you.
Document something you will not personally benefit from preserving.
Repair damage whose consequences would otherwise belong to people not yet born.
Give away knowledge.
Make room.
That last one may be difficult.
Make room.
Legacy eventually requires stepping aside.
A Good Ancestor Knows When to Become an Ancestor
There may be no sadder form of leadership than someone who cannot imagine the community surviving without them.
The founder who must always remain the founder.
The elder who cannot allow younger voices to develop.
The teacher who needs students to remain students forever.
The organizer who controls everything because nobody else can possibly understand.
The firekeeper who never lets anyone else near the fire.
That may preserve authority.
It does not create legacy.
Legacy requires succession.
Someone else learns the ritual.
Someone else gets the keys.
Someone else edits the newsletter.
Someone else leads.
And eventually they change things.
Of course they do.
They are alive.
Perhaps a good ancestor does not ask future generations to become copies.
Perhaps a good ancestor leaves them roots strong enough that they can grow branches we never imagined.
What Kind of Ancestor Are We Becoming?
That may be the question hiding inside legacy.
We usually think ancestorhood begins when someone dies.
Perhaps becoming an ancestor begins much earlier.
Every decision becomes part of what future people inherit.
Every tradition we normalize.
Every story we preserve.
Every lie we allow to remain convenient.
Every piece of land we tend or neglect.
Every boundary we establish.
Every person we teach.
Every wound we heal.
Every wound we hand forward.
We are building somebody else’s past right now.
That thought is both terrifying and strangely beautiful.
Legacy Is Not Immortality
There is another trap in all this.
Wanting legacy can become wanting immortality.
Remember my name.
Keep my ritual unchanged.
Protect my title.
Tell my version of the story.
Do not let what I built become something I did not intend.
But eventually every legacy escapes its creator.
Stories change.
Books are interpreted.
Traditions evolve.
Buildings are repurposed.
Organizations change direction.
People remember things we thought insignificant and forget things we thought would define us forever.
Legacy is not control after death.
Quite the opposite.
Legacy begins when control ends.
What remains must stand without us.
Perhaps the Best Legacy Is Useful
Maybe that is enough.
Not famous.
Not permanent.
Useful.
A path that makes someone’s journey easier.
A record that answers a question.
A tradition with enough roots to survive change.
A community healthier because somebody confronted an unhealthy pattern.
A piece of land in better condition than we received it.
A young practitioner who knows they are allowed to ask questions.
An old story preserved honestly.
A mistake documented so someone else does not need to repeat it.
A fire ready for the next keeper.
What Will Remain?
So perhaps the legacy question is not really about death.
It is about stewardship stretched across time.
Yesterday we asked:
What did I receive?
How am I tending it?
What will remain when I am gone?
Today I think we can add another:
Will what remains help the people who come after me live more wisely than I did?
That may be too much to ask.
Maybe wisdom cannot be inherited.
Perhaps every generation has to earn its own.
But we can leave better material.
Better records.
Healthier soil.
More honest stories.
Fewer inherited lies.
Traditions sturdy enough to change without collapsing.
Communities that understand authority as responsibility.
Sacred places cared for rather than merely claimed.
And perhaps one or two fewer wounds for someone else to carry.
That would not be a bad legacy.
The Fire Will Belong to Someone Else
Someday somebody else will sit where we sit.
They will look back at us the way we look back at those who came before.
They will wonder what we believed.
Why we did certain things.
Why we fought over others.
Why we preserved one tradition and let another disappear.
They will probably misunderstand us sometimes.
They will almost certainly criticize us.
They may thank us for things we barely noticed doing.
They may curse us for problems we thought somebody else would eventually solve.
That is how generations work.
We cannot control their judgement.
We can only decide what material we leave them to judge.
And perhaps that is all legacy ever was.
The fire passes from hand to hand.
No keeper owns it forever.
We inherit flame from people we never met.
We keep it for a while.
We add our own wood.
Our own stories.
Our own mistakes.
Our own lessons.
Then eventually somebody else reaches for the poker.
Perhaps our final responsibility is simply to hand it over without pretending the fire was ever ours alone.
And to leave enough wood nearby that they do not have to begin again in the dark.
Godspeed.
Scholarly Trail Markers
This reflection grows from the scholarly rabbit warren explored in the preceding posts. The scholars below did not collectively propose a single theory of Pagan legacy. Their work preserves different parts of contemporary Pagan history, identity, ritual, community and sacred relationship, making the very act of scholarly documentation part of the legacy discussed here.
Bowman, M. (2000). Nature, the natural and Pagan identity. DISKUS, 6.
Charbonneau, M. (2007). The melting cauldron: Ethnicity, diversity, and identity in a contemporary Pagan subculture. The Pomegranate, 9(1), 5–21.
Davy, B. J. (2023). Inclusive Heathens practice ancestor veneration, but not pride in ancestry. Nova Religio, 26(3), 30–51.
Davy, B. J. (2025). Wyrd ecology: Heathen ritual and gifting relations. Oxford University Press.
Graham McKay, D. (2014, June 20). Pagan festival season in Ontario. The Wild Hunt.
Graham McKay, D. (2017, April 25). Community experience at Raven’s Knoll documented in new book. The Wild Hunt.
Lepage, M. (2017). “Why be king? I’m already a queen!”: Performances rituelles et négociations queer dans la communauté néo-païenne de Montréal [Doctoral dissertation, Université du Québec à Montréal].
Rabinovitch, S. T., & Macdonald, M. (Eds.). (2004). An ye harm none: Magical morality and modern ethics. Citadel Press.
