Asatru Folk Assembly - 1⧸14⧸26 Victory Never Sleeps, Ep 184 - Rainbow 🌈 in the Dark

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00:00:30.000 Transcription by CastingWords

00:01:00.000 Thank you.

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00:02:00.000 We'll be right back.

00:02:30.000 Thank you.

00:03:00.000 Hello, everyone, and welcome to this week's exciting edition of Victory Never Sleeps.

00:03:12.620 We are in for a special episode this evening. I have wanted to get Chris on to do this episode

00:03:21.320 for a while now and lining up stuff to where there is time and availability.

00:03:27.520 we finally bring it to you today

00:03:30.820 Chris thank you for joining us

00:03:35.240 your episodes are always awesome

00:03:37.560 Chris is a

00:03:40.400 an extraordinary historical mind

00:03:45.220 that can

00:03:46.100 regale us with

00:03:48.860 riveting tales of the past

00:03:52.020 he does a great job with that

00:03:54.840 I'm always looking forward to his episodes

00:03:56.180 they're awesome and they're something that you all in the audience seem also to enjoy uh

00:04:04.340 top of the show stuff

00:04:08.180 if you are able or if you are you know if you desire to make yourself able we would love to

00:04:13.940 see you guys at uh disa thing at new words off in white springs florida that's coming up in february

00:04:20.980 February the 20th through the 22nd. It's going to be an amazing time with amazing people

00:04:27.720 in a truly amazing place. So that's awesome. If you can make it there, we'd love to see you there.

00:04:33.960 I will be in attendance. It is kind of the big event for New York's Hof. So you should be able

00:04:43.320 to meet a lot of wonderful people there. And I would like to meet you guys there. So

00:04:47.800 So, yeah, member or not, if it's something you're interested in attending, contact a local folk builder.

00:04:54.700 They can get you all set up, and we'd love to see you there.

00:04:58.340 Other news.

00:05:03.420 Working on the payoff of Frazehoff, we are getting closer all the time.

00:05:10.420 We are at 34.3% paid off, which is fantastic.

00:05:15.100 We have 82,118 remaining. If every single member were able to donate $112 today, that would be entirely paid off, just to get kind of an idea of the scope of it.

00:05:36.220 guys have been extraordinarily generous much appreciated you guys are awesome if you want to

00:05:43.020 runestone.org donate and you can help us contribute to paying that off

00:05:51.820 speaking of generosity gw farnsworth as always started us out with a 50 donation half towards

00:05:59.100 this program and half towards folk services we appreciate you so much you really do set

00:06:04.860 the example of generosity for our folk which is really amazing and like i said very much appreciated

00:06:11.740 um top of the show flavel family note we are very excited we will be moving to tennessee

00:06:22.300 at the end of this month so that's awesome stay tuned to you know see that or any you know

00:06:32.860 any adjustments that might need to be made please send us feedback or share feedback with us

00:06:39.340 if you want as far as do we like the time slot of when victory never sleeps is currently or do we

00:06:45.660 have a bunch of audience that wants to participate and listen live that ends up missing it it's

00:06:51.500 opportunity for a reshuffle or not so that's something that we are kind of discussing a little

00:06:56.620 bit um i think that's what i've got for the top of the show the idea of tonight's show is kind of

00:07:08.780 far ranging there's some things that will coalesce around but we welcome

00:07:13.820 you know questions from the audience as always if you have questions please just ask them in

00:07:19.820 the chat or you can send them now or in the future to vns runestone.org and we'd be happy

00:07:25.980 to answer them when we as soon as the next available opportunity from when we get them

00:07:32.460 we have a couple folks already sent some in for tonight

00:07:37.900 yeah concept tonight is what did alsatru look like when it was officially suppressed and no longer

00:07:48.060 a socially acceptable or legally viable option for the vast majority of our ancestors

00:07:56.640 the uh the call of our folk soul and the trough to the isere was on simmer and there were a number

00:08:04.360 of people and there's a number of echoes through it during that time as well as some standout

00:08:10.140 practitioners um so kind of discussing what that looked like in the period between the official

00:08:19.020 conversions and between uh the romantic period are what we're discussing tonight um

00:08:27.820 I wondered if we want to get all the tips, we've got some questions already at the top

00:08:40.000 of the show.

00:08:41.000 I think we may want to get those questions first and get into the topic related to the

00:08:51.820 topic.

00:08:52.820 might be a bit random all right first question why as white people does society and school systems

00:09:07.700 teach us to feel bad for being white as kids used to say they hate us because they ain't us

00:09:17.220 I really do think that there is, I mean, we could discuss that question for the entirety of the show and beyond, but I think there's some common themes that we're all aware of.

00:09:31.000 forces of chaos out there take many forms. There has been a conscious effort by subversive elements

00:09:42.860 in society that are chaotic and that are anti-white, anti-tradition, to tear down

00:09:49.360 Western civilization and rebuild it in a universalist, communist, you can apply different 0.53

00:09:57.880 political names to it depending on the decade but we still see the continuation of that the forces

00:10:04.920 of you know progressive anti-tradition want to destabilize that which has created tradition

00:10:16.280 and upheld tradition in the west that is the heterosexual white man so there has been a

00:10:24.500 conscious push in the school system and in political elements of society to

00:10:32.540 make us the bad guy and make everyone who's not us somehow oppressed or the good guy.

00:10:40.340 And we've seen that for a very long time. The idea is to

00:10:44.420 destabilize civilization and rebuild something in a way that benefits chaotic and destructive

00:10:57.060 elements instead of traditional um traditional western elements that have literally built

00:11:03.800 civilization and we see that a lot they hit us especially in the school system because as

00:11:10.540 everyone knows for good or for ill, your opportunity to make the most lasting impact is on young

00:11:16.580 impressionable minds. And so they take full opportunity of that to advance their goals and

00:11:24.700 their efforts. And I really do think it's not merely a political thing. It's absolutely a

00:11:29.260 spiritual struggle that we are under. And it's one that a lot of our folk thankfully are waking

00:11:35.880 up to though uh chris do you have anything to add on that um just on the on the individual end i

00:11:44.760 think i think ignorance is part of it i think it's a chain of ignorance it's a chain of people not

00:11:52.200 knowing how they are supposed to behave as white people and what that means for them to do and

00:12:01.480 And so when they are presented with the alternative, the communism, then they sort of roll with 0.51

00:12:10.840 that instead of taking the time to stop and think, well, wait, no, this is wrong.

00:12:16.720 At the opposite end from the big picture, the small picture, I think a lot of it comes

00:12:20.680 down to ignorance.

00:12:22.000 I think a lot of it comes down to people unfortunately not knowing any better. 1.00

00:12:26.760 And I also think it comes down to a lot of useful idiots. 0.99

00:12:29.300 and i mean that in you know i mean that in all the senses of the word um if you create 0.99

00:12:41.120 i don't know if you create and you propagate through the means of communication in society

00:12:51.020 and you virtue signal hard enough that one group of people is the bad guy and is evil and is what's

00:12:59.900 wrong with everything all the time and you push that message enough you develop a momentum of its

00:13:07.340 own amongst people who are largely historically ignorant and genuinely have no idea and i think

00:13:15.660 that because the media and the means of communication has been monopolized for a very

00:13:20.860 long time by people who are in that camp by people that want to destabilize and demonize

00:13:28.860 specifically heterosexual white men but white people in general and western civilization

00:13:35.740 it's very easy for a lot of you know not evil intention but just people who don't know any

00:13:41.900 better to accept that as truth and continue the momentum so while we're just kind of forced go

00:13:50.300 ahead just to say while we're just kind of musing on this i think that a lot of white people these

00:13:54.860 days also do not feel consequences for being white either good or bad so just as an example if you

00:14:04.220 were like a ziti or a druze or some one of these ethnic minorities in the middle east

00:14:10.620 if you counter signal your own existence the results of that are a lot different than if you

00:14:17.340 are someone living in i'm just pulling one out of a hat south dakota counter signaling your own

00:14:23.340 existence and your people's civilization the the consequences are not nearly as dire in that case

00:14:32.860 um so again we could literally talk about that topic all day every day for a very very long

00:14:38.940 time and many people do what is the title of speckinger in the afa it is literally the old

00:14:47.820 norse equivalent of witten which is the current title and it means the exact same thing in an afa

00:14:53.900 context and it means virtually the exact same thing in a historical context i have been trying

00:15:00.460 um i've been trying steadily for a couple of years now to unify our um to unify our language

00:15:10.720 in how we talk about spiritual things it is always completely appropriate to use common

00:15:17.220 modern english to describe the things we do that is fine nobody's trying to force anyone to learn

00:15:22.700 old norse or force you to do something outside of your comfort zone but one thing that is important

00:15:29.200 in our maturing as a faith, as a church, and moving forward in the best unified way.

00:15:39.660 And again, our gods are gods of order and are in opposition to force of the chaos.

00:15:44.260 So for a while, because the rediscovering and reforging of Ausatru involved

00:15:52.120 And learning from diverse regions and diverse tribes over diverse centuries, we get mixes of Gothic, of Icelandic, of German, of Swedish, of Norwegian, of Anglo-Saxon language, and mix and match throughout our use of terms.

00:16:19.220 And in some cases, like weird and urd, they genuinely cause a certain amount of confusion because we're using different languages and different words that literally mean the same thing to describe different nuance.

00:16:35.740 And specifically, it's just incongruent.

00:16:39.260 So you can use regular English for anything you want.

00:16:42.160 Nobody's going to scold anybody for calling it the Witten.

00:16:46.000 but um speckinger is the same title it means wise man or sage and was applied to um advisors

00:16:55.840 or counselors to norwegian kings and in that way it's very similar to the witten in a anglo-saxon

00:17:04.400 kingship model to where literally the wise men which is what that word means to advise that king

00:17:12.080 were it's the exact equivalent um so yeah that i hope that clears up any confusion there and

00:17:19.920 i was trying not to bombard everybody with everything all at once a couple years ago

00:17:23.840 so that's why wait until the first of the year to start using it we do have a lot of varying

00:17:31.120 people who pay attention though because i've there's been like 20 people that have asked

00:17:35.760 and we didn't even and we just rolled that name out there under the radar

00:17:39.840 good well i'm really i'm it is it's good that people are noticing and good that people are

00:17:46.560 paying attention and we welcome any and all questions on this kind of stuff so thank you for

00:17:51.360 asking kayla if somebody had to do community service as part of some sort of criminal sentence

00:17:58.640 or prerequisite for a degree could it be completed by working at the hof could it be done in person

00:18:05.920 if the person was not folk

00:18:09.840 Yes. Yes. In all of those cases, if they weren't folk, I think the circumstance might matter. But is it legally acceptable? Absolutely. Just as it would be working in any other church related community service.

00:18:27.260 We have had people who have needed to do that for punitive reasons, but also we've had scout troops needing to do that for community service merit badge qualifications.

00:18:41.840 People have had to do that for various school projects.

00:18:44.960 There's been a variety of people that have needed to find something to log hours for community service.

00:18:51.280 and specifically with our food pantries.

00:18:54.700 That's been something that a number of people have done over the years.

00:19:01.980 Can you think of any direct interventions by our gods within living memory?

00:19:14.200 The hand on your shoulder and Founder McDowell getting turned invisible.

00:19:18.600 Well, so I was going to say it depends on how direct.

00:19:23.820 I mean, in a lot of ways, there are a lot of things that many of us see and experience as direct interventions.

00:19:30.360 But I think the three very obvious ones that come to mind, but it's not exhaustive, are when Sveinbjorn Vientinsson and his associates went to get Alstertru officially recognized as a religion in Iceland.

00:19:54.360 You know, Iceland is not known to have thunderstorms, but Asathor has always been particularly revered in Iceland.

00:20:09.680 And originally they weren't taken serious and the government was disinclined to grant them recognition.

00:20:16.860 And when they went to visit the governing authority to make that happen, as soon as they're kind of like, no, we're not doing this, a massive thunderstorm hit Iceland and knocked out power to a substantial portion of the island, if not the entirety of it.

00:20:38.200 And that caused the legislators to immediately rethink and give them the appropriate recognition.

00:20:48.720 And so I think that was a very standout one.

00:20:52.980 Our founder, Steve McNallan, and he's told the story on the show, but I think he certainly tells it better.

00:21:02.840 but he did a lot of um reporting from war zones uh in the late 80s and very early 90s and that

00:21:12.660 was a time of significant political upheaval in specifically in africa and he was he found

00:21:22.260 himself in a strange spot where a revolution occurred like while he's in the air and he finds

00:21:28.800 he doesn't have the right papers to travel to the country he was going to and previously

00:21:34.960 um there had been people who were summarily taken off the the landing area and executed for such an

00:21:42.320 infraction so when the you know the party that was in power and you know their their uh military

00:21:51.600 guards at the at the airfield were lining people up and they you know they all had their aks and

00:21:56.240 and we're getting people in line and checking everybody's papers, Steve didn't have the right

00:22:01.920 papers. And he was, you know, in a very, very real danger of losing his life. And he went through

00:22:12.120 line. And the way he describes it is the, the guard that was checking papers was very meticulous

00:22:21.360 checking every single person's papers and giving them a thorough examination as they went through

00:22:27.920 and he you know checked the guy in front of steve thoroughly looked him in the eye

00:22:32.800 made sure his papers matched waved him through and then as if he looked right through steve and

00:22:39.040 steve wasn't even there went to the person behind steve and went through the same process

00:22:45.200 when steve you know realized that the guy had moved past steve he kind of cautiously moved

00:22:50.560 forward and went about his business and no more was said of it and uh i don't know if steve was

00:22:58.000 turned invisible or if the guard was blinded or mesmerized in some way or exactly the mechanics

00:23:07.040 but the guy whose job it was to remove steve and shoot him was oblivious to steve's existence and

00:23:15.520 you know in front of him you know as clear as the nose you know nose on your face so

00:23:20.960 that was a very important one that sparing of steve that day allowed this to take root and

00:23:28.240 happen and you're still celebrating the fruits of it and then in a personal way um

00:23:37.520 one year after i had started leading the astro folk assembly it was a very

00:23:43.280 difficult year of uh challenges and one that it was a year of testing

00:23:54.400 was at uh ostara of 2016 ostara in the south uh at a camp i believe in georgia and

00:24:05.200 i was uh

00:24:09.440 so when

00:24:10.080 there's a change and again i'm going to misstate this in a scientific way and it's not intended

00:24:18.020 to be scientific there's a change in the air pressure or something sometimes when things are

00:24:26.000 spiritually dense sometimes you just feel a presence sometimes you just feel

00:24:32.180 something's different there's something in the air and this was a particularly

00:24:38.220 special time and one that I think was ripe with that kind of feeling um and I was as I was going

00:24:47.340 to bless the horn and stand up to do a high sumble that evening I was particularly feeling

00:24:54.340 the gravity of the moment and the gravity of the responsibility and as I got up to uh to bless the

00:25:02.160 horn and begin stumble someone put a hand on my shoulder and it was just a really really nice

00:25:10.680 thing to do you know it was the perfect thing I needed at the moment that filled me with reassurance

00:25:17.200 and appreciation and it was like the most loving and perfect nice thing at the time and so I turned

00:25:24.860 around to you know give kind of a nod of thanks to to whoever had done it I assumed it was you know

00:25:29.880 maybe Alan or, you know, another one of our leaders, there was no one behind me, there was

00:25:35.120 no one within arm's reach. But it wasn't as if a hand was on my shoulder, a hand was on my

00:25:41.220 shoulder. And I believe very much that was, you know, the hand of the Allfather. And I think 0.90

00:25:49.460 that's, you know, in my life, the most specific, like direct, was the question,

00:25:55.700 um direct intervention that i that i felt i hope that touches on it i

00:26:02.080 yeah i think that gets to the meat of the question just to throw some context on the

00:26:09.580 the story about the all-father placing the hidden helm upon the herald's brow um he had been serving

00:26:17.260 in the armed forces in germany up until this time and then he decided to take what is called a

00:26:23.300 european out which is basically where the military gives you like a plane ticket back to the u.s and

00:26:30.180 you can just use it wherever right so you just party around europe end up wherever get on the

00:26:36.100 plane go back home and he decides to uh go to africa um to have some some in to interact with

00:26:45.220 some interesting people down there and after that he was going to come home and dedicate himself

00:26:51.300 to the cause of asa true so in in the sense of this would not be here had this not happened

00:26:59.780 there's a lot there's more gravitas there this would literally not be here had this

00:27:04.740 not happened this was like the and then he goes home and does this moment right

00:27:10.340 yeah um yeah and our our situation our world would look really different and this broadcast

00:27:21.460 would not be happening so um does the afa believe there's anything to fear in death

00:27:28.740 slash the afterlife or is it something to be looked forward to on some level yes

00:27:36.180 yes to all but with a couple of you know a couple of clarifications

00:27:51.380 i think there is always a gravity when you get to find out a verdict

00:27:58.980 and i don't think that you are you know necessarily judged at the time of death i

00:28:07.040 think you're being judged right now and perpetually by both your ancestors and the isere

00:28:13.820 i think you find out what that looks like when it's time for you to have you know a warm reception

00:28:23.260 a frosty reception or no reception at all on the other side of the veil i think for the vast

00:28:30.060 majority of us there's much to look forward to a reunion with with loved ones um a special

00:28:40.720 increase in knowledge and you know of understanding things that you didn't in in the course of your

00:28:51.220 life but i think that's as variable as it is to you know to those of us here for people who have

00:28:59.140 been found worthy and are amazing people and have lived amazing lives then you know celebration is

00:29:06.100 an order um and the the lore speaks of celebration after the death of heroes uh but for people that

00:29:15.780 have been getting by with being dishonorable and uh being ignoble i think their their fate and

00:29:27.700 you know being judged receiving the judgment of their ancestors and the gods

00:29:33.220 it's probably something to be worried about in a time of unpleasantness i think for a select

00:29:38.740 few that are just inherently villainous it's you know i think it's something to be feared

00:29:44.820 I think it's probably also something to look forward to. So the misery of their existence is

00:29:49.080 done. But again, it's, there's not a simple answer to that, because our, our existence is not simple.

00:29:57.680 But no, I don't think it is inherently something that ought to inspire fear.

00:30:01.820 But I think we have fear about it, all of us, because uncertainty breeds fear.

00:30:06.600 uh just to say real quick the the fate of the particularly villainous is something

00:30:14.540 you know there is something to be said about be a good person because the fate of

00:30:20.540 people who are really bad people is not not good you know um you should you should behave

00:30:28.900 lest bad things happen to you in the afterlife i think that would be something to be said about

00:30:34.720 if you had to fear something in the afterlife you know not being being so ignoble i wouldn't

00:30:41.860 want that to happen and as you know the most scary thing i think in the afterlife is

00:30:47.860 we don't know exactly how everything works or exactly the amount of wisdom

00:30:55.900 that exists there in the form of our ancestors or whatever else but

00:31:00.760 the the mystery and your ability to hide things i think isn't present there i think if you have

00:31:09.880 been escaping justice and escaping consequence for being a bad person i think things that you

00:31:20.400 can hide or you know con the people around you in life i don't think you have that same ability to

00:31:29.000 to lie to yourself to lie to your ancestors and to lie to the spiritual powers beyond the veil

00:31:41.220 I think those people are able to those beings are able to perceive beyond your ability to

00:31:49.060 con them or bamboozle them so people who've lived dishonestly I think have something in

00:31:53.760 particular to feel, because fear, rather, because truth, I think, is attainable there in a different

00:32:01.180 way than it is here on this side. As I'll tell you, Goethe, which stanza of the Habamal do you

00:32:16.680 think is the most important? All right. So these are the questions that you don't ask me if you

00:32:28.680 want a quick answer or if you want to not have a bunch of dead air. Because when asked absolutes,

00:32:37.260 I have a hard time. Like if this were something simple and not waiting, Matt,

00:32:41.300 what is the best breakfast cereal? I think the answer you're supposed to give is you just come

00:32:46.220 with one you like and throw it out but i would sit there and like analyze the pros and cons of like

00:32:53.980 you know frosted city corn based cereal versus a you know versus a rice based one and you could go

00:33:02.540 through forever weighing them there's some one of the things that i think is particularly

00:33:08.460 useful and beautiful about the have them all is it has wisdom for

00:33:15.820 the priority of what is the most important verse has everything to do with your circumstance

00:33:23.080 and the season in your life that you find it there are verses that are going to mean a lot

00:33:30.220 as a young man who's setting out on his own going to mean a different thing as a father

00:33:34.900 gonna mean a different thing as um you know somebody who is on the receiving end of something

00:33:44.260 if you're a woman and you're interacting with men verses are going to be more important to you than

00:33:49.180 others if you're a man interacting with women they there's so much there to so what's the

00:33:54.660 ultimate one that's the most important i don't think i could i don't think i could give you the

00:34:00.900 honest answer on that one that is one of my favorites. And again, I'd have to go and find

00:34:07.740 the, uh, the stanza, but man, now that I'm, now that I'm saying that I'm even going back

00:34:18.180 and forth on my head of like, but it, but is it the most important? Which one is, which

00:34:23.320 one isn't tons of them are I think that I don't want to butcher it and normally if I would have

00:34:39.200 pre-read the question I couldn't have thrown it to Chris because he couldn't answer as I was

00:34:43.280 Terry Goethy. So the pressure's all on me. The one about loyalty and about

00:34:48.700 not being, not making deals with and not being a friend to your friend's enemies.

00:35:01.740 Loyalty is an easy thing for us to talk about, but it's something that I've seen

00:35:06.660 particularly lacking in our folk, if we're honest with ourselves. And I've seen

00:35:13.260 a lot of our people that get it in the term of a slogan, don't apply it or contemplate it in the

00:35:22.820 terms of their real life. So I'd have to find the number and I will as soon as I throw it back to

00:35:28.120 Chris, I will find you the exact quote and the exact number. But the idea of, you know, be loyal

00:35:33.900 to your friends and and give gifts to your friends but don't ever be on the side of your friend's

00:35:39.260 enemy we are part of connected relationships and loyalty is more than just being nice to

00:35:46.140 the person across from you it's also aligning your alliances in life with theirs to be loyal

00:35:55.980 it's not to aid the enemies of your friends because that is disloyal and a lot of our again

00:36:04.240 a lot of our folk um have trouble internalizing that so i think that one's particularly valuable

00:36:10.340 for our day and age um just because chris is there a favorite one that you have or one you

00:36:16.900 think is particularly important for our folk at this time um the two that came to my mind

00:36:25.200 immediately as i frantically tried to break deer in the headlights there for when this got past to

00:36:31.560 me was um the one about man being the joy of man about not squirreling yourself away and being

00:36:40.880 alone i think that's really important these days i think it's really important to keep in mind that

00:36:46.880 there's a lot of forces out there knowingly unknowingly inherently and intentionally

00:36:53.220 nefariously, perhaps not as intentionally nefariously, trying to drive people into

00:37:00.000 being these hyper atomized individuals with no connections to anyone. Loyalty

00:37:07.140 doesn't matter in the slightest if you have no one and if no one has you. And

00:37:13.200 the other one that came to mind was 127, the one about separating good from evil.

00:37:19.140 I think that's something important to keep in mind um yeah I also just to comment on loyalty

00:37:27.820 real quick I think there's also something to be said about the fact that the nine one of the nine

00:37:31.120 noble virtues is fidelity it's not just about saying you're on the team it's actually about

00:37:38.360 doing the thing when it comes time to it's about uh

00:37:43.540 it's about being true to the person or whatever your fidelity is to it's about

00:37:52.700 living true to them it's not just about saying yeah i like this i like that i don't like this

00:37:58.940 i don't like that it's about when the chips are down you actually do the thing when you are

00:38:06.040 required to you know put your money where your mouth is or shut up you actually put your money

00:38:12.100 where your mouth is that is something that's very important in this day and age i think

00:38:19.020 yeah the verse i was thinking of was stanza 43 um man shall always be a friend to friends

00:38:27.140 and to the friend of a friend but never a friend to a friend's enemies

00:38:31.060 um what what ways can we learn more about also true other than reading books i'm not a big fan

00:38:45.220 of reading and i want to learn more so i appreciate that because that's honest

00:38:51.140 one of the other things i've noticed about our people we live in the age of the virtue signal

00:38:57.840 And it's easy to see it when, you know, woke us virtue signal, but our team virtue signals a lot to every one of us is the greatest athlete.

00:39:08.540 We only eat the healthiest food and we read all the time and most studious.

00:39:13.680 And, you know, there's a lot of people that, you know, maybe reading is not their thing or maybe it's hard for them to find time in their day to do it.

00:39:20.300 so you know what actually chris take that i've got my answer is twofold but i want chris to take a

00:39:30.140 shot at it first yeah so this program is a good one to learn a lot about asatru on because very

00:39:41.740 often when people ask about learning about asatru they're given these like huge weighty tomes

00:39:49.580 like lady with a mead cup lady with a mead cup is great but there's

00:39:57.180 asa asa true the religion deriving from the eternal principles of the gods and then there's

00:40:03.900 anthropological trivia about the the cheruski circa 50 bc which is fun and all but it's not

00:40:16.420 asatru and given these weighty tomes you have to do a lot of sorting to figure out does any of this

00:40:23.100 does this matter is this was this worth thinking about given that it might actually be completely

00:40:29.500 useless to know this at least if you're trying to live in accordance with divine will so i think

00:40:36.040 programs like this which are directly aimed at you know talking about asatru today are very important

00:40:44.520 And as far as listening, consuming things like the poetic edigos, there is readings of these things on the internet that you can listen to.

00:40:55.920 If you work a job where you can listen to podcasts, for example, you can get through a lot of material by listening to it read to you.

00:41:04.580 There's a lot of classical books.

00:41:06.280 I don't know if the Eddas are on YouTube, but I know, for example, a lot of the works of Plato have been read and uploaded to YouTube and you can listen to a platonic dialogue, which is actually what you're supposed to have done.

00:41:20.000 So certainly the episodes of Victory Never Sleeps where the Altair Goethe and Speckinger Svon Harrell read through the poetic edda, I mean, that is how, in oral tradition, these poems is meant to be consumed.

00:41:33.740 You're meant to hear it, you know, declaimed to you by a poet.

00:41:37.700 so i think that is a very good way to do to learn this material if you have to go in

00:41:47.140 you know reading these texts yourself as it were i think i think in the future we'll be getting a

00:41:54.180 lot more material on youtube for educating people on this stuff so well i was gonna say reading is

00:42:02.980 awesome. I love to read. But our ancestors who practice this faith. I want to say it.

00:42:19.140 In the, you know, the Ark Ausitru period didn't read it. It was transmitted orally. In fact,

00:42:29.780 you know the etta translates into something akin to like your grandmother's tales you would learn

00:42:37.960 this from your elders or from the gothar and they would teach these things as they became relevant

00:42:43.980 they would tell stories as those stories had a place in a in a time and they would set context

00:42:51.260 shameless plug but yes you can listen to this program and hopefully this is a

00:42:58.080 so i if i didn't think this is a good way for you to learn about austro i wouldn't be doing it

00:43:04.320 so it is genuine i hope that you guys feel that way um that is the aim of the program and i do

00:43:11.040 think it's really valuable resource not only to get like fed stuff about also true but also to

00:43:19.120 relate to other people that may be in a similar place you are that may have questions that you've

00:43:24.980 you know had or that have occurred to you that you haven't been able to ask and you can see those

00:43:29.860 questions get answered um to real people and in a way that hopefully relates to you and you can

00:43:36.740 find useful you know ideally if you listen to all the shows you'd find many of the same questions

00:43:41.940 answered in different ways for a different person in a different situation um i think also though

00:43:48.340 So doing Ausatru is a good way to learn about Ausatru.

00:43:53.700 Going to your Hoff, going to a group of AFA members who are doing bloat and doing Ausatru,

00:44:04.860 you can learn a lot and you learn in a participatory and authentic way

00:44:13.360 by building that relationship with the iser and i think in a subtle way

00:44:19.280 do those things but then apply that knowledge to things you do on your own when you make offerings

00:44:27.800 at your altar and when you find ways to incorporate asa true in your daily life

00:44:33.960 but i think that participation and listening to actual practitioners of asa true

00:44:40.240 and the priests of our faith, the Gothar, I think that's a very good way and is the most

00:44:47.700 quote-unquote traditional way to learn about Alcetree.

00:44:52.140 Take this time to say Nick in Ohio donated $10 each to Sigurheim and to Frazehoff. Thank you so

00:44:59.420 much, Nick in Ohio. We appreciate you. And Gilbert, also a stalwart of our amazing donors. We

00:45:08.480 appreciate you so much he donated 150 towards beautifying thorshoff so thank you for that gilbert

00:45:16.720 um so these are the ones i saw we're gonna get more stuff as we go on but i do want to get into

00:45:23.360 the uh the main meat of where we're at tonight i also want to mention two more donations as well

00:45:29.120 you missed i didn't i was getting to them then let me finish my sentence so i'm literally looking

00:45:36.080 at them right now. And I was going to mention them before we got into the stuff as I was scrolling

00:45:39.840 down. Leroy in Michigan donated $20 towards Frazehoff. Thank you, Leroy. We appreciate you.

00:45:46.220 And Steve bought us two coffees. Thank you for buying us the coffees. That I believe is a $10

00:45:52.160 donation. So thank you for that. We appreciate it. And if you are in Michigan, you should get

00:45:57.060 in contact with me at csavage at runestone.org. Nick can throw that up on the screen. I would

00:46:05.020 love to hear from any Michiganders who are in the audience. That's what you guys call yourselves?

00:46:11.980 Michiganders? Yeah. First time encountering that term. Yeah, Lincoln gave it to us.

00:46:21.180 Not a fan. Not as a good name. Not as a good name. All right, Chris. So

00:46:27.420 So you may begin.

00:46:31.440 All right.

00:46:32.420 So we are covering here the understanding, engagement with, conceptualization practice of Asatru between the period that we refer to as the end of the conversion and the romantic period.

00:46:51.760 So this is a kind of period in between a getting rid of this stuff and then a subsequent finding out about it again.

00:47:02.740 So a brief history of Scandinavia, actually brief, real quick regarding religion here.

00:47:09.940 So 950 in Norway, Hakan the Good allows Christian evangelists in, 960 in Denmark, Harold Bluetooth apostatizes to get the Holy Roman Empire's backing, 995 in Sweden, Olof Skötung, Skötung, excuse me, he does the same in 1000 in Iceland, the All Thing declares Christianity to be the state religion.

00:47:33.240 we'll come back to that one because that one's important in 1087 king blotsvain of sweden is

00:47:39.480 murdered in gottland the gutter lagen declares bloat illegal due to uh falling under the dominion

00:47:46.280 of the swedish legal codes in 1238 burger yarrow leads the second swedish crusade into finland

00:47:53.240 And in 1484, one of our heroes, Rogvald Odens Karl, dies.

00:47:59.200 In 1492, Erik Klawison dies.

00:48:02.140 And in 1693, in Finland, Lars Nilsson dies.

00:48:06.120 Lars Nilsson is not one of our heroes.

00:48:07.980 He's a Finnish shaman, if I recall.

00:48:10.280 Now, that sounds very depressing because it's a list of bad things happening.

00:48:13.820 But you'll also notice that there's about 600-plus years of engagement with Asatru as something that is bad 0.90

00:48:22.840 and to get rid of. And it's not really talked about much. At least these days it isn't. So

00:48:28.740 when Christianity came into Northern Europe, its relationship with the punishment of the 0.77

00:48:36.820 practice of Asatru was that of instructing each node in the feudal hierarchy to enforce 0.90

00:48:46.000 christianity upon the node below it so in catholicism um yahweh gives supreme authority

00:48:54.480 to the pope the pope gives it to the king the king gives it to his dukes the dukes give it to

00:49:00.280 the counts the counts give it to the barons the barons give it to the yeomen the yeomen give it

00:49:04.800 to the uh serfs and each one of these nodes in the pyramid has to enforce things on the ones

00:49:13.400 bloat, right? There's no central law enforcement outside of the king is physically here and will

00:49:20.940 send a goon to hogtie you. So this resulted in a sort of trickling down of the intensity and

00:49:32.460 fervor of the enforcement of these laws and ideologies. And this results in Asatru and

00:49:37.720 related material moving into the domains of folklore and magic as we would call them today

00:49:45.880 um so first we're going to talk about two individuals who continued to practice asatru

00:49:53.400 even after it became um literally illegal to do so punishable by death in fact

00:49:59.080 So the first is Raghvald Odinskarl. That name, Odinskarl, is almost certainly not his surname. He would have had a patronymic at the time anyways, and Odinskarl literally means Odin's man. He's Odin's guy, you know.

00:50:17.020 So on 1484 is October 27th, he confessed in custody to having stolen from four separate churches, one of them actually twice, and that he had served Odin, that's an important term that we'll look at, for seven years.

00:50:37.260 He had an accomplice by the name of Joan Land. For this crime, Rogvald was put to death. He confessed in custody to the worship of Odin, and he did not, as far as we're told, recant, so he was fed to the flames.

00:50:54.180 So Joan Land actually has a bit more going on for him in terms of sheer attestations because no one vouched for him to defend his honor or his Christian piety.

00:51:08.180 So on 1485, March 14th, he asked to be an executioner instead.

00:51:14.900 And this was actually really common.

00:51:16.700 um executioners were either people who had committed crimes worthy of putting them to death

00:51:22.760 or they were um typically also uh knackers knackers a knacker is someone who connects

00:51:30.880 collects night soil that's human feces and urine to be spread on fields as uh manure

00:51:38.180 so just a quick digression here um ireland's most famous executioner was actually a woman 0.79

00:51:45.860 by the name of um white betty so she had gone through a uh a period of madness that resulted

00:51:54.740 in her murdering her own son but she didn't know it was him it's absolutely fairy tale but

00:52:01.220 her gaelic name was uh i pronounce i probably i apologize to any gales listening her name was

00:52:10.020 um she murdered her adult son in a fit of madness and so she was sentenced to the gallows 1.00

00:52:14.820 for it. And on that same day, there were to be hanged 25 other men, sheep and cattle rustlers,

00:52:22.040 several white boys, as they were called, aka Nabuchayi Labana, or Queen Shia Ulta's children. 0.74

00:52:31.600 Queen Shia Ulta is the demigoddess who gave birth to Ossian, who's like Irish Homer, basically. 0.58

00:52:38.300 So these guys were a terrorist organization who were opposing the colonization of Ireland by the 0.94

00:52:44.420 english and the destruction of common grazing lands and uh on the days she was set to hang

00:52:50.780 betty's hangman fell ill and so they're they're like oh but we can't hang any of them we'll have

00:52:57.960 to put off the execution and betty yells out oh i'll do it if you make me the executioner

00:53:03.380 and so they let her become the executioner and she proceeded to hang all 25 of the white boys

00:53:08.540 and lived like another 60 years hanging people this did not happen to joan we are told at least

00:53:16.480 we're not confirmed about his fate um uh he asked for this but it was we're not told if it was given

00:53:25.980 to him so the epithet for ragwald there odin's carl so he's actually written as being odin's carl

00:53:36.700 twice in the the source text and in the margin there's actually a very interesting um little

00:53:44.140 scribble of it's it's odin's ragval like odin's ragwald right or ragwald um ragwald is a

00:53:52.940 dialectical variant of wagenwald which means power of the rulers um it's it this dialectical

00:53:59.580 variant is actually attested elsewhere by the way so academics try to hand wave away the name

00:54:06.620 But it literally says Odin's Karl, and it's written the correct way.

00:54:16.220 So it's a part of the genitive compound. It means Odin's Karl, the Karl of Odin, right?

00:54:24.140 The specific words used to describe his loyalty to the Allfather is tianthodnom, which means loyalty to Odin, not the Pope.

00:54:34.140 at this time in scandinavia there's a lot of concern wrapped up regarding religion over are

00:54:40.780 you loyal to odin who spoiler is the devil but not satan the fallen angel um or are you loyal to

00:54:49.740 the pope so we're told that so not really a flag on the play but a point of

00:54:56.940 of, I think it's worth putting here. The argument is made that the word Ausatru means belief in the

00:55:07.980 Aesir, and it does. I always say, and the AFA asserts that Ausatru means loyalty to the Aesir,

00:55:16.240 and it does when you follow the etymology the belief in is like the fidelity of the trust

00:55:26.300 that's exchanged literally in fidelity if you trace it back through its origins and that's

00:55:33.780 the thing that i want to say is belief as it's come down to us in english means different things

00:55:40.680 it's a mental concept fidelity to doesn't mean the same thing it means loyalty it means you are

00:55:51.880 odin's man or odin's carl and so it's important as we look at this the question isn't belief in

00:56:01.560 odin or belief in christ here the authorities believe in odin it's whether you are loyal to

00:56:09.320 odin or not because they believe that odin exists as a demon as the demon depending on how you want

00:56:17.400 to parse that in medieval understanding but there is a real fear of him as a spiritual force

00:56:25.400 and the question isn't one of belief it's a question of loyalty quite literally uh rakvald

00:56:32.040 is also true and also true he was true enough to go to the fire because of this he would have been

00:56:44.120 given the chance to actually repent and accept jesus as his lord and savior and blah blah blah

00:56:49.880 blah the fact that we're not told about that indicates he he went to the fire for this he went

00:56:55.080 he you know committed theft in the service of his god and died for it and he wasn't just a guy they

00:57:04.200 accused of witchcraft or a guy they accused of being in league with you know their northern

00:57:11.360 devil odin like that's his name that's his like title that he goes by that's how he's known

00:57:17.720 as a person is through his allegiance to the Allfather. And so the text goes on and what they

00:57:26.380 end up doing is they end up asking a lot of people, I'm not going to count them all, it's like

00:57:33.160 12 of them, if they would defend Joan Land or Rogbald, and none of them would. Now, defend in

00:57:40.480 this case means basically saying like, yeah, he's my buddy, don't kill him. It's a very, compared to

00:57:46.800 modern jurisprudence this is actually an incredibly crappy uh you know criminal investigation given

00:57:52.560 that there was actual theft occurring but the fact that none of them would stand up for this

00:57:57.640 guy is telling because none of them wanted to get involved with you know the the guy who is known to

00:58:03.980 worship and steal for odin right this this phrase that is used um tienth odin means to serve odin

00:58:14.780 So again, it's not, strictly speaking, that he's disagreeing with Christian, he's not, it's not that he's not holding Christian doctrines in his head, it's that he's doing stuff for, with Odin, right?

00:58:30.780 this term comes up in um other sources too so the the poetic edda actually has a text um

00:58:39.820 which details i mean the goddess freya more or less tells a guy serving odin gets you rich

00:58:50.680 that's an extreme oversimplification but she's not telling him it makes him poor right

00:58:56.340 but much later after the uh writing down of olavus petri circa 1530 um he says that he

00:59:06.980 that people that he knew by name still served odin tiana odin served odin to attain wealth

00:59:16.820 in 1693 petr rudbeck says that in smaland that those who wished to acquire wealth invited odin

00:59:24.820 into their home as a guest on the ninth thursday he would arrive drawn in a massive ensemble of

00:59:32.020 black clad fiery-eyed riders pulling a midnight colored carriage with midnight colored steeds

00:59:40.340 flanked by two large black dogs this is actually really interesting because this is like this is

00:59:45.140 so odin but it's a later it's an actually 1693 that's an early modern description of the all

00:59:52.500 Allfather, right? This is not a Viking description of the Allfather. But this here, those who

00:59:59.800 wish to acquire wealth ultimately end up serving him, right? This is important because this

01:00:06.800 is an attestation to a guy who is, while we might today, if we're being honest, necessarily

01:00:12.640 quibble about the orthodoxy or orthopraxy of his beliefs, he is serving Odin. He is put

01:00:18.400 to death for it he chose to serve odin to the degree that it would kill him right like he was

01:00:24.540 true to an os it's also interesting that this continues on for so long again remember like

01:00:33.940 995 in sweden olaf skutknum comes along and you know christianity 1693 that's like 700 years later

01:00:45.340 This idea of serving Odin for wealth appears.

01:00:49.180 Now, there's another interesting bit here.

01:00:51.200 On the 9th Thursday, Petr Rudbeck talks about.

01:00:55.960 So let's move on to our second hero, another man.

01:00:59.840 Okay, before we do, pause for a sec.

01:01:08.100 Sorry, I'm also sending Nick something.

01:01:10.160 I try to multitask.

01:01:11.400 It's always cool when I have a guest because it affords me a second on the back end.

01:01:15.820 I never know the best way to interject.

01:01:17.700 One of the things on here that I'm still, you know, figuring out the best solution for

01:01:23.740 is how to interject because the chat room's live.

01:01:29.100 And so I don't want people to, you know, two, three hours from now get their question answered

01:01:32.980 or whatever.

01:01:33.700 We'll go back to some questions that aren't really time specific.

01:01:36.380 But I did want to acknowledge Isom Rauch.

01:01:39.940 It is absolutely a Dio reference.

01:01:43.760 I thought it apropos, and I am a fan of Ronnie James,

01:01:48.300 so I'm glad that you picked up on it.

01:01:51.360 It would have made me sad if nobody picked up on it,

01:01:53.640 but it's definitely intentional.

01:01:58.360 Carry on.

01:01:59.840 Right.

01:02:00.360 So the second hero we have to talk about is Eric Claussen.

01:02:04.760 So on 1492's June 13th, a servant, Tienkre, modern Swedish Tienare, I think that's pronounced, of Hans Persons confessed in custody that he had renounced God and all of his holy company, partaking in nine trips on nine Thursday evenings, going withershins, that means counterclockwise, in a cemetery, he gave himself to Odin for money.

01:02:34.760 um Thursday is associated with Odin a few times else so just to kind of digress wait a minute why

01:02:45.360 is he doing it on Thursday why isn't it Wednesday so the I talked about this on the Oera Linda book

01:02:51.120 episode the days of the week are ultimately associated with this idea of them being

01:02:55.900 ruled by a god or goddess um in around 100 AD the Anglo-Saxons decide to adopt a

01:03:04.500 local variant of the roman week and so wednesday is 10 mercurri um mercurius excuse me um thursday

01:03:17.240 is 10 joey right so wednesday is the day of mercury thursday is the day of jupiter and

01:03:24.840 there's some disagreement in like historical disagreement this isn't me and the altar really

01:03:31.480 disagreeing or something here this is people a thousand years ago disagreeing how do you

01:03:36.180 translate classic uh greco-roman and you know scandinavian stuff back and forth how do you say

01:03:44.940 that this god is that god or that god it's not clear it's really messy and there's disagreement

01:03:49.700 as to whether to attach odin or thor to jupiter things so like thursday becomes

01:03:56.020 ds joey becomes four's day but there is also association of odin with thursday

01:04:04.300 independent seemingly of the days of the week necessarily it's not entirely clear why but this

01:04:11.200 idea of do something on thursday odin that that does show up a number of times so

01:04:18.620 um as i was saying this this man eric clausen made nine trips on nine thursday evenings going

01:04:27.460 withershim's withershim's in a cemetery he gave himself to odin for money giving oneself to odin

01:04:33.620 to enter the service of odin right um it's used as a threat a few times in the sagas because it

01:04:40.480 means to kill someone but it also i mean he's entering into the service of odin here's this

01:04:46.240 again, for money, right? What Eric Claussen actually did that got him in trouble was he had

01:04:51.240 stolen money from he had stolen money from his master and conveyed it to his tenants. And this

01:04:56.420 is interesting because he had tenants. This means that Eric was a landowner. He was a lesser land

01:05:02.660 owner because he had a master of some kind. Go on, sir. Oh, no, I was just saying the graphic is not

01:05:08.040 readable by me, at least. The dark on dark makes it. No, I know what we're posting. I'm just saying

01:05:15.820 for people who are watching this at a later time.

01:05:23.220 Go on.

01:05:24.160 Oh, I was not going to interrupt you.

01:05:25.780 I was just –

01:05:26.360 Oh, I thought Nick was going to –

01:05:27.560 I was going to send Nick a text on the side about it.

01:05:29.800 There's no need to – well, since I did, Nick, throw up the picture.

01:05:38.720 He said just say the word and he would have it up, but he did not.

01:05:41.800 Oh, there we go.

01:05:43.960 And then he teased me with the flash.

01:05:45.340 so I just want to make this point it's interesting to understand that our ancestors conceived Odin

01:05:55.900 in a contemporary way when he was described a few minutes ago in the tale from the 1600s

01:06:01.780 about how he appears in a black carriage with you know 1600s stuff this manuscript you know

01:06:10.300 from renaissance period has them with like a foul shown and like uh you know they got renaissance

01:06:16.300 odin and you'll see you know in this same manuscript the other gods are wearing

01:06:21.660 you know pantaloons like puffy pantaloons and renaissance era clothing it wasn't

01:06:30.780 it has become since the romantic era very popular we all do it i do it myself

01:06:36.220 to conceive of the gods in viking clothes but it's important to always keep in mind that our

01:06:43.440 gods are timeless and one of the um fallacies of modern you know the modern outs are true that

01:06:51.300 people struggle with is they act as though they are practicing an ancient religion instead of

01:07:00.840 realizing that they are practicing a current religion and projecting towards our children

01:07:09.460 practicing a future religion so our gods exist and are relevant to our folk since our folk

01:07:17.880 existed and for the entirety of our folks existence and they're not just limited to one

01:07:24.280 time period so i think that all of that sounds like common sense but far too many people

01:07:30.240 act as though it's some ancient thing and not that you know the viking age depiction in the

01:07:38.780 eddas is because they lived in the viking age those same stories you know a thousand years prior

01:07:47.920 would have them looking far more like um you know like neolithic peoples

01:07:55.000 in the future we may conceive of them in a very different way that's contemporary to the time but

01:08:01.520 our gods always remain powerful and relevant and you see people here in the in the you know

01:08:07.840 tales that we're telling of these two heroes i mean almost 500 years after the outlawing of their

01:08:17.360 worship is still engaged in relationship and in fealty to the iser specifically to the all-father

01:08:27.520 go ahead carry on chris and i didn't mean to interrupt on that no no so this is actually

01:08:31.600 useful uh nick i just okay okay if you see what he's wearing here right that on his head is a

01:08:38.480 crown that is a medieval crown asatru kings didn't wear crowns the ulcerative and i were actually

01:08:46.320 talking about this a few days ago um the crown like the the headband with the points on it

01:08:54.420 that is an importation from the mediterranean world it's supposed to mimic a halo with solar

01:09:02.440 rays right like the points on it are supposed to be the sun rays coming out from the the light of

01:09:09.060 one's head that's what that's supposed to like look like and it just gets deterred re-territorialized

01:09:15.200 until it becomes this thing another interesting thing is that if you look at depictions of odin

01:09:21.440 from this time this one included there's a few others you can find on google you'll notice he

01:09:26.160 doesn't have like an eye patch he just has like a a bum eye right which is is that's just something

01:09:35.280 to point out the eye patch but like this depiction is of him as a king at the time that the the

01:09:41.760 artist was living. It's not of what a Viking king, a Klonungur, would look like circa 980.

01:09:51.240 No, and you see he has a scepter, and he's got, you know, and again, this, and this picture is

01:09:57.400 just as legitimate, just as valid, and just as real a depiction of Odin as, you know, a rock

01:10:05.620 carving from 700 years previous also while we have a pause in the conversation i i'm looking

01:10:12.580 over at the side i want to acknowledge uh 40 and broke um he says the old uh i assume he i'm sorry

01:10:21.700 uh they say the only vns episode the old vns episodes have truly deepened my faith and i've

01:10:29.380 been practicing alsatrus since 99 or 2000 thank you for saying so and i'm really glad that they've

01:10:35.780 been beneficial to you it means a lot for you to give us the feedback um so yeah thank you for

01:10:41.060 saying so and i'm glad that you've been watching the all of our episodes of certainly the old

01:10:45.140 episodes carry on so eric is interesting because he's actually a bit of a robin hood figure as

01:10:55.140 we're told that he had stolen money from his master and conveyed it to his tenants so he was a a land

01:11:01.560 landowner or lord of some kind and was basically not kicking money up the chain so how feudalism

01:11:08.380 worked i told you that the king has the the dukes the pope has the king the pope has the kings the

01:11:15.520 kings have the dukes the dukes have the counts the counts have the barons the barons have the

01:11:18.800 human the human have the serfs and at each one they're supposed to like till the soil and then 0.56

01:11:24.480 they pass like 10 percent up the chain and then each node gets 10 percent of the nodes below them

01:11:31.660 right so the king gets a bunch of stuff from a bunch of people but it's all a very small amount

01:11:37.020 right so what what eric is actually doing here is he's not passing up money that is supposed to go

01:11:44.320 to his the node above him he's instead taking it and giving it back to the people below him his

01:11:51.720 his subjects let's just call them and he went to the fire too he also could have he could have

01:12:00.900 turned tail he could have you know accepted jesus as his lord and savior and he didn't he went to

01:12:11.720 the fire for it he uh he also actually got tortured for it we're told uh he went to the

01:12:20.280 wheel end of the rope uh hanging so they they actually tortured him and then and then burnt

01:12:25.900 him to death or burnt his corpse um so the nine trips on nine thursday evenings is interesting

01:12:34.940 right that's that's clearly some kind of mystical uh function there that's not just random nonsense

01:12:42.860 he went to the flames for his loyalty to the isere and he was ultimately helping the people

01:12:49.280 below him. Now, there's an interesting question here of, okay, we're told that these guys

01:12:59.840 worshipped Odin. One of them even was called the Karl of Odin, because he just worshipped

01:13:05.760 Odin so worshipfully. But could they, in fact, be Christian heretics? What if they didn't

01:13:15.300 worship odin what if that was just written down for no reason that sounds stupid you would be 0.99

01:13:22.220 surprised how many academics at are like when they look at this time say no no no no everyone 0.96

01:13:28.220 forgot about odin circa 1080 and so what was this guy doing clearly he had to be a christian heretic

01:13:36.640 Let's talk about heresy.

01:13:39.300 So in Scandinavia, if you worshipped Odin, that's a crime.

01:13:45.320 You would be taken before civil magistrates, the sheriff, the mayor, a bunch of government officials.

01:13:52.340 You would be tried.

01:13:54.520 If you were found guilty, you would be asked to accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior.

01:14:00.980 If you didn't, you'd be executed.

01:14:04.540 You know who would not be present? 0.96

01:14:07.040 Priest.

01:14:08.240 You know who wouldn't be in the room?

01:14:10.620 Inquisitors.

01:14:12.000 You know what they wouldn't ask you about?

01:14:14.280 Christian theology.

01:14:16.520 Because it was just a simple black and white, you're either loyal to the Pope or you're loyal to Odin. 0.88

01:14:22.000 You get to pick one.

01:14:23.000 You got to pick one. 0.99

01:14:24.940 So, what if you were a Christian heretic? 0.93

01:14:30.020 What would that look like? 0.93

01:14:31.240 But what would happen is you would not be brought before the civil magistrates and the sheriff and the mayor. 0.71

01:14:36.600 You would be brought before a Christian priest. 0.80

01:14:38.880 That priest would then go to the inquisitors.

01:14:41.680 The inquisitors would then come to you, and they would then interrogate you about the orthodoxy of your Christian belief.

01:14:47.040 And they would pass judgment upon you to the civil magistrates and the sheriff and the mayor.

01:14:51.260 And then they would enact the sentence.

01:14:53.520 There would be no secular trial in what we now refer to as a criminal court.

01:14:57.860 heresy is a religious crime ultimately prosecuted by the catholic church

01:15:04.300 heathenry is a a secular crime prosecuted in a criminal court without recourse or reference to

01:15:14.600 christian priests right this is amply attested it continues after lutheranism becomes the state

01:15:21.420 religion in scandinavia they just swap out the catholic church for the lutheran church right

01:15:25.660 So why do I bring this up? In the 1800s and 1900s in Germany, there was this attempt by academics to use Christianity as an attempt to unearth some kind of original lost native European Christianity.

01:15:41.540 So one of the best examples of this is Alfred Rosenberg, the guy who wrote Myth of the 20th Century.

01:15:51.560 He has this bizarre obsession with, people call him Meister because I can't remember his actual first name, but Meister Eckhart's musings.

01:16:00.500 And Meister Eckhart was this Christian thinker in the medieval era who was a heretic and blah, blah, blah.

01:16:05.580 And Rosenberg, amongst others, is like trying to chart this long, glorious, hidden history, uniting the Bogomils and the Cathars and every other random little Christian heretical sect into this like traditional positive Christian sect that was like, they're all long. 0.68

01:16:25.060 We can just unearth it and return to it. 0.97

01:16:27.780 It's bullcrap. 0.98

01:16:28.840 Horse hockey. 1.00

01:16:29.620 Complete nonsense. 0.87

01:16:30.920 How do we know heresy from heathenry?

01:16:32.840 as i said heathenry is a heathenry you know this is the jurisprudential term in a christian court

01:16:40.120 right heathenry is a secular crime it is amply attested by humorously enough the finnish heathens

01:16:48.260 remember how i mentioned about burger jarl going on the second finnish crusade so for about 400

01:16:54.520 years sweden was at war with finland at large and was enforcing christianity upon them so if you go

01:17:02.320 looking for pagan martyrs, if you will, in medieval Scandinavia, a lot of them are actually

01:17:09.740 Finns because they were basically the victims of a war by a foreign state. So what does heresy

01:17:19.260 look like? We've talked about this, you know, punishment of worshipping Odin or Perkele in a 0.99

01:17:26.800 criminal court, what about being a heretic? Are there any examples of what that looks like? Sure. 0.77

01:17:33.720 Archbishop Jacob Erlandson was accused of altering the Lord's Prayer and the Creed.

01:17:37.880 These are both really big. I don't know of American civil religion equivalent other than

01:17:46.180 altering the U.S. Constitution and the Pledge of Allegiance. This is a big deal in Christianity. 0.99

01:17:55.160 So, the Haino parish, the parish priest of Haino, we are told, argued that it was a sin to attend mass performed by a sinning priest.

01:18:05.660 That's actually a really nuanced debate within Christianity.

01:18:09.660 It's also one that the Catholic Church doesn't like people holding that opinion regarding.

01:18:16.660 um we're told of a man by the name of hemming that said he was a messenger of mary and he was

01:18:22.580 a proponent of antinomianism um he was tortured and then publicly humiliated and forced to you

01:18:31.600 know not say that stuff the beguine community in vadstena was defrocked discalked they were denunned

01:18:40.800 over concerns over their orthodoxy.

01:18:44.960 You know who no one is ever concerned

01:18:46.860 about the Christian orthodoxy of?

01:18:49.040 People who worship Odin.

01:18:51.500 Us. 0.61

01:18:53.480 So, there's a fella by the name of Botolf 0.99

01:18:57.200 who is the poor example of this. 0.75

01:19:02.360 So, just to recap,

01:19:04.360 if you worship Odin,

01:19:05.760 you go to a criminal court,

01:19:07.200 you get tried,

01:19:08.320 you get found guilty, 1.00

01:19:09.080 you're given a chance to convert or you die if you're a heretic the priest comes in he talks to 0.83

01:19:16.440 you he talks to the inquisition the inquisition the inquisition is actually like a christian 0.93

01:19:21.820 belief court people hear like nobody expects the spanish inquisition and they think like

01:19:26.600 warhammer 40k inquisitors exterminata sing a planet no they're like church belief cops they

01:19:34.020 They don't, they aren't actually that cool, right?

01:19:37.600 The Inquisition finds you guilty or not, and then tells the criminal court what to do with you.

01:19:43.280 So, let me find it in my notes here.

01:19:49.160 So, Botolf was this guy, he had this ordeal that took place over almost a decade,

01:19:57.220 in which he was in repeated and constant contact with Christian religious authorities.

01:20:02.840 You know who is absent from the stories of Eric Clauesson and Ragnarvold Owenskarl?

01:20:07.840 Christian clerics.

01:20:09.840 So, one of the people that Botolf was in contact with was the bishop that performed the weekly sacrament of the Eucharist that Botolf partook in every weekend.

01:20:22.840 So, Botolf committed a Christological error in 1303 and was rebuked for it.

01:20:28.840 We're told of him committing another error in 1310, after he finished penance and tried to regain standing in the Christian community.

01:20:35.340 Before he was allowed to receive communion, he was interrogated, like, in front of other parishioners.

01:20:41.840 Like, he was in line to go up and get the host wafer, and the priest is like,

01:20:45.640 Hold up, bud. Let's talk theology first.

01:20:52.840 So the priest interrogates him on the nature of the Eucharist,

01:20:56.840 And Botolf professes his loyalty to Jesus and said that if the host is really the body of Jesus, then surely Jesus would be outraged at Christians eating it.

01:21:09.920 For you see, just as a man would be outraged at someone eating his loved ones, surely Jesus must be infuriated at the idea of people eating his body.

01:21:20.460 um so botolf's naive theology here is uh kicking open a massive hornet's nest that has been 0.75

01:21:31.840 happening since the eucharist was invented and will no doubt continue until the last eucharist

01:21:38.160 is consumed um so botolf then gets dragged before the inquisition and uh ultimately ends up dying

01:21:48.000 because of that statement there so this guy went to church every weekend and he argued with a priest

01:21:57.360 about the nature of a christian ritual and what jesus wants christians to do and he willingly

01:22:04.200 came to a church to to you know receive mass this guy is a heretic you know who's not present

01:22:12.180 in Botolf's story?

01:22:15.500 Odin.

01:22:16.440 You know what's not present in Botolf's story? 1.00

01:22:18.360 Going with her shins around 1.00

01:22:20.400 a signpost on 0.67

01:22:22.380 the 9th Thursday, nine times in a row.

01:22:25.720 There is

01:22:26.620 this fanciful attempt

01:22:28.660 at hand-waving

01:22:30.740 away, like with the Odin's Carl

01:22:32.620 thing. You can find academics

01:22:34.360 who are trying to say, oh, it's not

01:22:36.360 Odin's Carl. It actually

01:22:38.240 is supposed to be, you know, like

01:22:40.120 Odin's Carl, which means like

01:22:42.120 the mad one or something but it it just doesn't it obviously says odin's call the etymology

01:22:47.960 doesn't work out of this proposed alternative and frankly the theology of this proposed

01:22:53.080 alternative doesn't work out either christians have no need to declare that heretics worship odin

01:23:01.320 because getting christian theology wrong is a crime unto itself one that's a very grievous one

01:23:07.080 and one that's very offensive to their deities. They don't need to like bring Odin into the

01:23:13.880 mix. Like there's not even a devil present in any of these narratives.

01:23:19.720 At this time in medieval Scandinavia, go on, sir.

01:23:23.400 Something I want to mention is there's also not the suspicion or the accusation of,

01:23:30.440 and we see that a lot in later we see that in heresy trials a lot like hey you say you're a

01:23:40.440 good christian but this guy over here says that you did this thing that's askew from the true 0.95

01:23:46.520 the true doctrine is that true it's a different scenario when hey i reject your jewish zombie god

01:23:57.080 i'm not not about that life i worship odin you don't have the same points of argumentation you 0.62

01:24:04.280 don't have to try to there's a process of trying to prove that you are a orthodox

01:24:13.800 i guess that term has a different meaning but that you are a correctly practicing christian

01:24:18.760 than rejecting it out of hand and like no i don't worship jesus that's a different thing and it

01:24:31.080 separates in a really interesting way and i think that's evidenced a lot by these legal trials even

01:24:37.720 when there's like witch trials they're having to establish that this person is in fact a witch

01:24:44.280 doing which stuff it's real different than hey i'm a witch this is what i do

01:24:54.840 let's deal with that there's always this evidentiary trying to prove on the basis

01:25:00.040 of christian doctrine and what i think is interesting is because this is a situation

01:25:04.440 a lot of us face that's kind of odd when people want to argue with us about stuff

01:25:11.080 they want to try to argue with us about jesus things and then we're in a spot like cool i get

01:25:19.740 what you're saying and that's you know i don't necessarily agree or disagree with your take on

01:25:24.060 the gospels i just don't want the gospels at all that's something people aren't familiar with

01:25:30.260 and the existence of the other in a significant enough way to where it is recognized nobody's

01:25:37.560 like Odin who these people are like oh wow okay that's a different thing we got to consign this

01:25:45.300 to the flames immediately we're not going through this there's not a trial involved and uh I think

01:25:52.080 that separates it in and of itself and it points out the holy other nature of them practicing a

01:25:59.320 different religion and not them you know somehow secretly practicing some anti-christianity or some

01:26:07.060 heretical Christianity.

01:26:10.780 And just to kind of back this up here,

01:26:12.880 like, let's look at, like, I gave a bunch of

01:26:14.840 examples here of Christian heretics. 0.86

01:26:17.180 And each one of these guys is like,

01:26:19.080 now see here, Mr. Pope,

01:26:20.640 I have disagreements with you on

01:26:22.840 the Christological nature of the

01:26:24.680 Theotokos, and you see,

01:26:26.820 if we follow the homeocean,

01:26:28.300 and then there's

01:26:31.220 Ragbald Odin's Karl and Eric

01:26:32.560 Claussen, who worshipped

01:26:34.540 Odin, and did so

01:26:36.320 to the flames notice that the level of concern over arguing with like um i'm trying to grab his

01:26:45.320 name with like uh with archbishop jacob urlinson he was argued with we're not told about anyone

01:26:52.880 arguing with eric and ragwald like okay are you going to convert nope okay well we're going to

01:26:59.100 kill you there was no concern about their beliefs at all and when there is concern about people's

01:27:04.980 beliefs it shows up like the beguine community in badstina concerns over their orthodoxy orthodoxy

01:27:13.960 they're correct in it the correctness of their beliefs the beliefs of ragwald and eric never

01:27:19.480 come up no now frankly i you know you might almost they might not have even been asked beyond do you

01:27:25.600 serve odin right because again these are two fundally fundamentally different crimes in

01:27:33.680 medieval Scandinavian jurisprudence right now I just want to comment down

01:27:37.820 here real quick um in medieval Scandinavia there is this the devil

01:27:46.580 refers to oh devils refers to the Aesir right and people in southern Europe or

01:27:57.740 you know they served the devil and that that is referring to like the worship of

01:28:03.320 satan the fallen angel in northern europe specifically medieval scandinavia it has a

01:28:08.120 very different context and i mean when people say the devil they just clearly mean odin in some of

01:28:13.960 these contexts or they're trying to merge these two figures together because remember here

01:28:20.040 the devil is actually a like mythological construct done by christians throughout history

01:28:27.400 it's not like there's a guy whose name is the devil in the bible there's a bunch of characters

01:28:33.800 that show up and then christian theologians say these guys are all this one entity and here's his

01:28:40.360 backstory right um devil actually comes from greek diabolos from i'm sorry latin diabolos

01:28:49.960 from uh greek diabolos which means um the slanderer the accuser this gets into stuff

01:28:56.680 regarding judaism and the like which isn't too important here but this this word is extremely

01:29:04.120 flexible and just kind of means bad guy i mean from the perspective of a medieval scandinavian

01:29:10.680 christian odin is the bad guy the the villain looming large in the background right do you want

01:29:17.800 to go right into the golderbucker here sir or do you want to let's take a let's take a recess for

01:29:24.680 a second um and get to some of the questions as they line up because i think some of them will um

01:29:34.040 some of them will get us back into or i guess will be good prerequisites

01:29:40.520 and the other thing that i want to note as just something to ponder that i think is important

01:29:47.800 it's interesting to conceive of or construct the like

01:29:54.840 what does one do when and this is a situation that honestly

01:30:03.600 I think many of the early participants in modern house tree found themselves in

01:30:10.980 How do you practice Ausatru when you have a revelation and you know the truth of the Iser, but there's not a church, there's not a structure to inform your practice?

01:30:29.380 How do you know what to do?

01:30:32.480 What do you do with that?

01:30:35.720 And what we have access to now is a tremendous wealth of data.

01:30:40.400 but these people don't these people can't just go read about the lore the lore is not available

01:30:49.520 to these people outside of a select learned few in monasteries in icelander or in iceland or like

01:30:59.520 you know there is a very select few places that you could learn any of the lore

01:31:05.840 you don't have you know the great gothar of your folk to go to you can't go to a hof and learn these

01:31:13.200 things so i guess a a thought that i want everybody to have is cool so what do you do and you

01:31:25.920 cherish the things that you do know and that you do have and you have to reach out personally

01:31:32.720 and rebuild those connections between you and the gods in the best way that you know how and it's

01:31:41.600 going to look different in different places at different times and it's going to have a wide

01:31:46.800 arc of correctness or not but the fact that you can reach out in a time of complete and total

01:31:54.560 isolation from the ancestral faith without a functioning priesthood or you know existent

01:32:06.360 religious body and you can reconnect with the iser you can claim your birthright as also true

01:32:15.480 and you can go from there and you can enter into a relationship with the all father i think that's

01:32:23.020 worth appreciating for a moment because it's very challenging for these people. And as you can see,

01:32:30.660 their choice to do so has a, you know, potential consequence of very unpleasant death.

01:32:41.700 So it's kind of an example to all of us of loyalty and of steadfastness, literally under the flames of

01:32:48.840 execution and that you can be also true without the endless study of ancient tomes

01:33:04.920 or you know those things you can practice by reaching out to the gods and building a relationship

01:33:14.600 that way and i think that's important for all of our folk to know and to take to heart

01:33:21.080 is that even in the darkest you know the darkest times with the least access to information

01:33:27.440 in isolation your gods are with you if you reach out to them your gods hear you if you call out to

01:33:35.780 them you are not as long as you know your blood courses through your veins these are your gods

01:33:45.840 and they're there for you to reconnect with and i think that's an important message for all of us

01:33:53.740 um so just real quick here um talk about eric claus and rag bald odin's carl not knowing

01:34:01.580 anything, metaphorically speaking. That continued for a very long time. Let's remember here that it

01:34:07.960 was in the Ostertur Free Assembly that publishers were thinking of just not making poetic or just

01:34:14.720 not making eddas anymore. We just won't sell this book. So the Ostertur Free Assembly started like

01:34:21.020 a letter writing campaign to keep these in publication because of the, I mean, we would

01:34:27.060 call it like spiritual and religious importance, but you know, like the importance to Western

01:34:30.780 civilization of this text like no you can't stop printing this thing you have like a duty to do

01:34:37.020 this the asatru free assembly had to do a letter writing campaign you know what you would do in

01:34:43.620 those days if you wanted to go get one of these books because very often you could go to the

01:34:48.260 library and you could check them out which means you could read it in the library you couldn't

01:34:52.260 necessarily take it home you would then make photocopies of every page and pay for the photocopies

01:34:59.480 and take this huge stack of paper home because you had to like go search a physical book

01:35:06.020 you couldn't just google things or ask chat gpt or control plus f you had to like read books and

01:35:14.160 trawl through massive amounts of information and with some people they might never have heard of

01:35:22.020 any of this before in in the in this modern period when we think about people doing things

01:35:30.340 we sometimes in the past we sometimes like ah was that the right did he is that ah

01:35:36.660 remember there was a time when knowing that there was two eddas

01:35:44.100 there were two eddas was hyper specialized knowledge known only by a select few knowing

01:35:53.140 that there were eddas period oh there's there's books that talk about what the vikings believed

01:35:57.640 like from that period wow that's novel that was beyond most people there were also 10 000 years

01:36:06.880 plus there were thousands and thousands of years where there were no eddas and our folk were still

01:36:12.160 also true yeah it was oral only for such a large portion of our folks existence the other thing

01:36:20.520 that i want to say and again some of these things get out of our tonight's specific time bracket

01:36:27.580 but you know maybe we'll do a show on you know the romantic era until steve at some point but

01:36:37.180 But when people in the 1800s or the early 1900s have some hokey ideas, it is not only do I think it's important, but I think it is incumbent upon us as noble Aryan people to judge them fairly.

01:36:58.520 they're trying to rediscover something that is buried and lost in the best way that they have

01:37:05.480 access to they don't have the wealth of information that we have they don't have the collected works

01:37:13.160 of scholars from around the world over you know periods of time with archaeological

01:37:19.000 discoveries that were still buried beneath the earth at the time um

01:37:23.480 it's very hindsight is always 2020 and it's very easy to you know look at how silly some things

01:37:34.920 were at a different time in a different place but it's also worth considering with a certain amount

01:37:41.720 of self you know self-reflection that our children our children's children may very well discover

01:37:50.760 different things that we don't have they may discover you know ancient manuscripts somewhere

01:37:58.640 that add to our corpus of lore they may discover archaeological finds that you know make some

01:38:05.000 things that you know that we do look less than the idea is at the time doing your very best

01:38:14.980 to be true to the I see-er the best way you know it.

01:38:19.960 That is infinitely more value than infinitely sitting on the fence,

01:38:25.120 hoping for that perfect moment where once you know everything

01:38:28.600 and you know 100%, then you'll be asked to true.

01:38:32.460 Then you'll do stuff.

01:38:35.120 There's some of our folk that had very little access to information

01:38:38.360 but had a full measure of faith and of loyalty

01:38:41.820 and that stood unto death with our gods.

01:38:48.420 They stand with heroes, and the fence centers don't stand at all.

01:38:55.440 But that said, we've got some questions stacking.

01:38:58.360 So would you explain the concept of magic within Ausitru?

01:39:02.660 And these are a couple of questions that I do think will be relevant

01:39:05.180 to our next section here.

01:39:11.820 there is the word economy on that versus the like depth of potential answers is immense

01:39:21.680 i don't think there is an exhaustive answer that can cover it in a short segment of the

01:39:30.080 program we could do again several episodes just on the concept but

01:39:34.680 okay there's a couple of ways to go about it but i think the first and most obvious

01:39:45.940 is magic as practiced in ouster true tends to be in two different categories there is

01:39:54.800 galder magic and there is sailor magic

01:39:59.840 again those things mean different things to different people and i think that they are

01:40:06.360 imprecise and there might be a lot of things that you find overlapping there is a magic that involves

01:40:13.580 runes that involves the carving of sigils or spells. And when I say carving, the

01:40:21.600 carving slash depicting sigils and spells. And also in that category, I would say

01:40:33.400 vocalizing incantations, singing a spell, chanting a runic incantation.

01:40:44.840 Voice is a powerful tool in Ausatru magic to manifest something, to take something from the

01:40:56.020 world of thought and idea, and to birth it into the world with a potency. And then say their magic

01:41:05.240 is very often the idea of

01:41:10.140 So on the spot here, I apologize, my verbiage is going to be imprecise, but

01:41:26.020 The traveling to other planes of existence to interact in a out of body way with the with powers not normally in the mundane reality.

01:41:56.020 across the veil perhaps um with gods or spirits that way sometimes say their practice is

01:42:03.580 letting spirits enter your body and to work through you in the sense of oracular save

01:42:11.680 say there is a mysterious art that's often linked to a form of shamanism and using the term shamanism

01:42:22.940 is, um, contentious in general. So I had a discussion with some folks the other day about

01:42:31.020 this. There's a school of thought that says, ah, shamanism's an Asiatic thing that's not relevant

01:42:36.960 to Tando Europeans. And in the sense that it is a branded and specific technique and the word

01:42:44.660 comes from Asiatics and their, their Indian, Indian American offspring that populated North

01:42:59.140 America and South America for a time. That's a unique thing, but the technique of through

01:43:08.700 ordeal or through other means, transcending realms to get occult knowledge from said realms and bring

01:43:21.820 those into the mundane realm is certainly attested to in our practice. And I think that that's part

01:43:30.560 of that category. But again, when we deal with this, it's very imprecise and there's a lot of

01:43:35.980 overlap of technique i would say the fundamental concept of magic is

01:43:46.060 involves a perception of the subtle realm or of the tapestry of erther

01:43:56.140 being able to see that as it unfolds and manifests and then secondly the ability to

01:44:05.980 shape things in a way that influences that or to capitalize on the same synchronisms of that

01:44:15.420 to be able through your personal force or through tapping into another magical force

01:44:21.440 to bring forth useful synchronicity towards willful purpose and it sounds like

01:44:30.980 i just you know spewed a bunch of words stew at you i hope that it makes sense i think to some

01:44:38.880 it might and i'm happy to answer additional questions uh in you know towards how that

01:44:45.280 might be confusing um chris do you have a something you'd like to add to what also true

01:44:52.620 magic is or to what you know you have something you'd like to add yes uh but it's kind of in

01:45:00.100 the in the the galder box stuff so i guess let me think um you don't have to you know we can get to

01:45:08.320 it when you get to it so do whatever you'd like oh i want to say what the altar really said but

01:45:13.700 um i think maybe this is is silly but i think at a certain level it's important to remember that

01:45:23.500 what we think about as being magic today is a very specific thing that people in the past

01:45:33.140 didn't necessarily have as a concept or think about. Like, when we think about magic, we usually

01:45:41.020 think about it as in opposition or contrast to science, right? And people in the past didn't

01:45:48.940 think in that term like we think about like astrology as like nonsense woo these days but

01:45:56.920 like you look back in the past and people used to be dead serious about astrology it was an iron

01:46:02.680 clad rigid thing and doubting its efficacy and causal potency was like bordering on mental

01:46:10.240 illness so when we talk about how do people in the past interact with magic we are taking this

01:46:18.500 you know circle we've drawn around certain things and we're going back into the past and we're

01:46:25.040 drawing that circle around things but we have to understand that the people we're looking at

01:46:29.880 didn't draw that circle they didn't make this distinction between like oh we have like the

01:46:36.400 rational stuff that works and then we've got like irrational nonsense but sometimes it works man

01:46:43.460 they just had stuff right and i will get into the etymology of magic which kind of explains

01:46:53.140 why we do that today um i know that's not super fun to hear but it makes sense in the context of

01:47:00.500 where we're going all right so what do you gentlemen consider the quote everyday magic

01:47:11.460 unquote of also true so and i've said this about a number of things and i hope we can follow the

01:47:21.620 this i don't know the thread here

01:47:26.020 some of this is directionality magic magic exists because it exists and if we call it different

01:47:34.180 things it doesn't fundamentally change it we've created a word magic to describe certain stuff

01:47:39.860 but it's imprecise um so some of it is directionality um

01:47:51.220 i'm gonna i'm gonna nerd out here i apologize for people who thought better of me um but

01:47:59.060 keeping it a buck so

01:48:00.420 all right there is wizard spells and there is cleric spells and they work different in the

01:48:14.500 world of understanding that in reality i don't think it works that way because in real world

01:48:20.560 you don't have to choose class specifications in the same way so for example

01:48:28.500 there are some things that

01:48:32.740 some things rely on your personal magical efficacy

01:48:40.500 your skill or inherent ability as somebody who is either gifted or well practiced at

01:48:50.080 those kind of arts. And other things involve a more

01:48:57.120 working within the ordered framework of interacting with the Aesir, interacting with

01:49:08.460 those who've passed beyond the veil, or interacting with other spiritual forces

01:49:15.060 beyond the mundane and I think that there's not a clean distinction between those things

01:49:24.520 and you can have both of those things present in the same magical action

01:49:31.500 you guys may notice that we don't talk a lot about magical things in the AFA in general

01:49:41.200 and it's not because we don't believe in them it's not because of any shade towards them

01:49:46.480 it's because there's a lot of basement wizards that have zero magical efficacy

01:49:52.560 that have made the whole thing seem ridiculous and because we believe in them so much

01:50:00.880 and we value the real expression of that in such a high regard that we don't want to cheapen it by 0.96

01:50:10.320 getting in the muck and the mire with charlatans and delusional hot topic basement wizards

01:50:20.280 so and getting to what's everyday magic i think that there is a lot of things that go into

01:50:34.920 what that looks like. Some of that looks like

01:50:43.680 runic galldher for meditation. Some of it is in intentional runic galldher towards a goal.

01:50:55.220 Some of it is rune pulling and stuff to have a focus spiritually for your day or for something

01:51:03.800 you're going through it also extends to some people that will try to use um

01:51:11.000 runic divination to as they ponder you know important questions or decisions in their life 0.99

01:51:19.080 i think there's a variety of different techniques that ladies use magically for a variety of things

01:51:27.560 around the house intending children intending animals intending food preparation you can

01:51:34.920 incorporate spiritual practice be it clerical or wizardry in whatever you're doing in a lot

01:51:45.640 of different ways i know a number of people who are craftsmen that do things to where they will

01:51:51.960 incorporate runes in their craft or in something they do i also know people who prepare food that

01:51:59.240 carve runic things into you know a piece of cheese before they melt it or into the butter before they

01:52:04.760 throw it into the pan with an intention either with a galder or an invocation of their own

01:52:11.720 magical potency to the thing that they're doing or with a prayer and i think that that often happens

01:52:19.160 I think that prayer and work to attune yourself with the Aesir and to develop the skill of being able to listen and to recognize when forces beyond the veil are interacting with you in a meaningful way is also a potent everyday practice that would be quote unquote magical.

01:52:43.360 but again that's a subject that's very the details matter and there's a lot of different

01:52:50.820 right ways to characterize it and I wouldn't want to go too far afield on that do you have

01:52:55.900 anything to add to that Chris um I'm trying to find the question here so I can make sure I'm

01:53:03.940 not giving a dumb answer here so you took that at a high level I kind of took that at a little

01:53:11.260 simpler of you know having a life that is in alignment with you know cosmic order and natural

01:53:21.940 law of knowing how to move forwards with myself and you know myself as the head of my family

01:53:32.020 of being part of a family of a church that is you know doing things as we should

01:53:43.200 of doing things in such a manner that produces good results just kind of almost without having

01:53:52.880 to try in a certain sense not to say we don't you know like things work and it's not a shock that

01:54:01.080 they do. I think even simpler than things like rune magic or

01:54:07.720 prayer or anything like that, aligning yourself with divine

01:54:11.940 will, and then experiencing all the joys that come with that is

01:54:16.620 a very simple, basic everyday magic, if I may say so.

01:54:20.520 Well, so that's a point that I think is worth making here. And

01:54:30.180 again this isn't for those of us who've done this for a while and once we I don't know hopefully

01:54:39.180 through the course of years gain wisdom it's easy to look back and scoff at or or whatever

01:54:44.540 and I'm not doing that we all start in different places there's a lot of people that want to jump

01:54:51.580 in and do magic stuff.

01:54:55.640 Like, cool, I discovered Alistair last week. 0.95

01:54:59.060 How do I become a Vidki? Which is an old Norse word

01:55:02.940 for like a wizard.

01:55:11.220 Basements are

01:55:13.100 full of that and it doesn't

01:55:17.100 usually make it past that.

01:55:18.340 and i think there's a good reason behind them the other thing is you know

01:55:24.120 there's a number of people that you've seen come through also true that have

01:55:28.260 that talk a lot about their magical efficacy

01:55:34.740 and about one organization of of you know ask true wizards or something i've heard from one

01:55:44.140 their long-time practitioners and members you know man we get get a room full of these these

01:55:51.340 exalted something to the effect of we got a room full of all of these exalted runemaguses

01:55:56.220 and not one of them can conjure themselves up a girlfriend

01:56:02.300 it says something your life should demonstrate the efficacy of your magical potency

01:56:11.020 And the vast majority of people that I know that claim to be these high-functioning wizards are perpetually broke and unsuccessful and unhappy, and their life does not demonstrate that they have efficacy in the things that they say or do.

01:56:36.920 I'll say this. Paul Wagner of the Wolves of Vinland.

01:56:49.380 I think that of people that I am aware of and have talked to might be the most effective left hand path wizard that I'm aware of.

01:57:02.940 and i hear good things about his brother matthias as well in terms of magical practice

01:57:09.680 because their life demonstrates that the things they try to achieve are the things that they want

01:57:19.340 they have efficacy in achieving i'll also say this he made a really cool grimoire and this will

01:57:27.980 bring us back to the text here he made us or not back to the text i'm used to doing the shows with

01:57:33.900 swan this will bring us back to the topic that we're we're on this evening and back to uh chris's

01:57:38.720 lesson for us paul did this really cool grimoire like 10 years ago and it's you know it's got a

01:57:49.480 particular gothic dark uh imagery to it but it's almost like a kind of a graphic novel-y artwork

01:58:01.000 on it and it talks about among other things sigil magic in a really digestible way i don't even know

01:58:09.680 if you can still get a hold of it again i'm not saying that their religious teaching is in line

01:58:16.020 with the Aus-True Folk Assembly or anything,

01:58:17.920 but this was a really good take on magic practice

01:58:25.700 in a digestible and no-nonsense way,

01:58:30.100 and I do have a lot of respect for the Wagner brothers

01:58:34.600 when it comes to magical efficacy.

01:58:37.220 Again, I'm not vouching for them as far as Aus-True practice

01:58:41.620 or whatever.

01:58:42.440 There's critical things I could say,

01:58:44.240 but completely positively, they're effective at magical practice. And I think that's something

01:58:50.840 to contemplate. Chris has disappeared on me right as I telegraphed that we were going to go back

01:59:02.660 into his material. So that is an interesting choice, but we will get back with him. We do

01:59:07.500 have other questions lined up and I'll get to those here. All right. So I'll answer this one

01:59:14.800 because it's kind of a, all right. Is a DISA thing akin to the DISA bloat at Vetter Niter?

01:59:29.820 So DSEER is an interesting word and we've been through this a lot. Sometimes some things are

01:59:34.000 imprecise dsir means priestess and female ancestor spirit that watches over folks and goddess

01:59:47.360 depending on context it can mean all of those things so in that sense that it's

01:59:53.600 magical and female yes there's a kinship there specifically and i don't this is to differentiate

02:00:02.240 because we celebrate the Deesir with Deesablote at Vetterneider to differentiate.

02:00:11.140 The Deesir thing is the thing or the assembly of the goddesses.

02:00:16.660 So it's a time where traditionally we charm the plow and the goddesses are preparing the male energy

02:00:28.060 and preparing us to go out into the world and to do and to achieve.

02:00:36.520 They are preparing us to go out into the arena,

02:00:44.860 into the field of the world to accomplish and to implement our will and to do things.

02:00:51.220 They're literally charming the plow.

02:00:54.100 They are prepping us, us generally, and the masculine in specific, to go out into the world and to do and to achieve.

02:01:07.380 Whereas D sub bloat during Veteran Niter is a bloat honoring our female ancestors that are watching on and that are caring for us from beyond the veil. 0.87

02:01:22.420 and so they're different in that way and Chris has returned to us yeah take us back into your

02:01:31.420 your lecture for us if you would sure so we use this term Galder today to refer to

02:01:42.820 chanting the or simplicity names of the runes and there's a degree of musicality to it there's a

02:01:51.100 degree of intonation to it but it is this very specific thing in the older the elder ostrich

02:01:58.780 period galder is this sort of more generic term to refer to regular speech acts so it's a prayer

02:02:09.280 it's um the words of a magic spell so on and so forth it's a lot more general than how we use it

02:02:19.340 today so the the faith of our forefathers ends up becoming increasingly sidelined as it is literally

02:02:30.300 punishable by death in medieval scandinavia and it increasingly enters this peripheral territory

02:02:39.260 and anything that enters peripheral territory enters this you know it attracts

02:02:44.220 peripheral people and that can be good and that can be bad and so a lot of the knowledge that

02:02:53.000 gets written down is stuff to do with magic there's this odin guy how can i use that for

02:03:02.560 my advantage there's this thor fella what can he give me that's how people kind of look at

02:03:10.500 this sort of stuff. There's ancestral wisdom. How can I use it to prevent witches from stealing

02:03:17.120 my butter? Stuff like that. Utilitarian and regular. What we would refer to nowadays as a

02:03:26.880 magic spell. So, Galdraboks, I'm just going to call them Galdraboks rather than trying to use

02:03:34.280 the the norse or icelandic plurals because they there's a bunch of terms for these are

02:03:41.560 medieval scandinavian magical grimoires i'll explain what a grimoire is in a minute

02:03:49.320 so there are multiple of these but there is one specific one that is referred to as

02:03:56.200 the Galdrebok, right? Galdrebok means Book of Galdr, right? So most of these have names that are

02:04:08.520 absolutely terrible to say out loud, like Galdrakver LBS14388VO. That's one specific book.

02:04:18.120 Another is Islenskärthjózsóger og aftilliný, one specific book.

02:04:25.200 Then there's The Galdröbock. There is a book by Stephen Flowers, by Dr. Stephen Flowers,

02:04:32.160 Idrin Thorsen, on The Galdröbock, which has become authoritative in magical circles.

02:04:40.020 Unfortunately, there are some errors. Granted, it's from 1989, da-da-da-da-da.

02:04:45.880 um so you can find a lot of these medieval scandinavian magical books if you want to do

02:04:56.440 stuff involving that be careful where you're looking and what you're reading because some

02:05:03.500 of the translations aren't as good as they should be there are errors in some there are misprints

02:05:08.320 and some some texts were made using a translation that was made by someone who was translating a

02:05:17.840 work with the translator not having seen the original text it gets really complicated because

02:05:22.960 we're talking about multiple books so let's do some background here brief icelandic history

02:05:32.800 somewhere around like 800 a fellow by the name of nadod discovers iceland in 868

02:05:40.280 leaves to confirm the existence of iceland then in 874 leaves to settle iceland for settler

02:05:50.980 then in 930 the all thingy is established in 1080 christianity becomes the state religion

02:05:57.660 This is the bit where the law speaker sleeps on the mound.

02:06:02.700 So, Iceland adopts Christianity as the state religion under internal duress between these two factions, the pro-independence faction and the pro-Norway faction.

02:06:15.140 And when Christianity is adopted as a state religion, it's this sort of like, yeah, sure, we're Christian now.

02:06:22.180 You can practice Assature in private.

02:06:24.020 And the Gothar, the priest politicians of Iceland, are still technically, to some degree, like pagan priests, but the state religion is Christianity, so it's not really clear what this means.

02:06:39.800 A period begins called the Friderold, which is basically like the friendship period.

02:06:50.140 So, Iceland adopts this mindset of public Christian-private pagan.

02:06:58.860 Because this essentially satiates the people in Norway,

02:07:03.300 the pro-norway faction in iceland loses all power and an era of good feelings begins

02:07:11.540 this results in a lot of icelanders being spread abroad entering into contact with people in

02:07:21.440 scandinavia proper on the continent a lot of connections are made in 1118 a.d the frithereld

02:07:30.180 ends, and the age of the

02:07:32.240 Stirlungs begins. This is a period 1.00

02:07:34.020 when the

02:07:35.080 Stirlung family,

02:07:38.000 Snorri Stirlesson, 0.99

02:07:39.240 assumes power.

02:07:42.580 It's during this period,

02:07:44.040 the, you know,

02:07:45.960 1100 to 1200, when

02:07:48.060 a lot of Asatru lore

02:07:50.000 gets written down, because

02:07:52.120 there is this,

02:07:53.440 hold on a second.

02:07:56.180 Sorry, I didn't want to do that with my mic on.

02:07:58.140 There is this great,

02:07:59.600 openness, great learning coming into Iceland from the continent, but there's actually a lot of

02:08:07.400 intellectual freedom in Iceland. You can think a lot of things in Iceland that you're not allowed

02:08:12.120 to think elsewhere. Iceland opens up its mind, but not its soul, to the continent, right? And so

02:08:20.780 writing and the importance of writing comes into Iceland, and people are like,

02:08:26.080 what we we can talk about same under for the and story source and elsewhere it already has been

02:08:32.580 done elsewhere in other episodes of this program so but but there are people who say oh my goodness

02:08:37.280 oh my oh my gods we have to write this stuff down or it might be lost forever and they do so they do

02:08:42.760 that with a lot of stuff just random stories a lot of these random stories are what we call

02:08:48.300 the sagas. So 1262, Norwegian yoke. The Norwegian kingdom just formally absorbs

02:08:57.660 Iceland because the Norwegian faction comes back. 1380, the Kalmar Union occurs. Denmark takes over.

02:09:06.120 1528, Christian III of Denmark makes Lutheran the state religion of Denmark and Norway and by

02:09:11.920 Association, Iceland. 1550, the last Catholic partisan is beheaded in

02:09:17.260 Iceland. Officially, Iceland is now a Lutheran state. And until 1923, there are

02:09:23.620 no... 1923 is when the first literate Catholic cleric sets foot in Iceland.

02:09:30.160 There are a few monks at some points, but this is the first time a

02:09:33.400 Catholic bishop that is literate shows up. 1944, the Germans conquered Denmark,

02:09:38.680 freeing Iceland. So continental contact with Iceland was extremely free of

02:09:47.500 Vatican oversight and there was a private pagan public Christian sort of

02:09:55.000 culture and mindset. In part this is because as far as the Pope was

02:10:00.520 concerned Scandinavia was the armpit of Europe and Iceland was the armpit of

02:10:05.140 Scandinavia so this gives the Icelanders a tremendous degree of freedom to sort

02:10:12.940 of absorb and accommodate Christianity on their own terms but there was never

02:10:20.500 a literate Christian bishop there was never any real Christian clerical

02:10:24.600 establishment in any real sense in Iceland so like celibacy was never

02:10:30.260 required of icelandic clerics but marriage was forbidden so they just have like harems and get

02:10:37.600 into like wacky polyamory shenanigans rather than like forcing people to not talk about thor

02:10:44.540 so this is why there's so much lore in iceland it is the last place to you know outside of like

02:10:55.620 the Baltics, right? It's the last place to be closed off by Christianity. And that leaves a

02:11:04.300 lot of knowledge about a lot of things in Iceland. So a grimoire is a hand-copied book of magical

02:11:14.580 spells. Grimoire, from the French, which is a dialectical variant of which comes from Old

02:11:23.680 french which literally means bookist like now that dude can read that means he's cast in spells

02:11:33.520 so this this means sorcerer a bookist a sorcerer this is from the latin gramaticus meaning related

02:11:40.880 to grammar from greek gramaticos meaning literate so we have this chain of like literate related to

02:11:48.240 grammar someone who can read a wizard the wizard's spell book right these are uh could you put up

02:11:57.840 messy book.png nick could you answer gothi bode's question how do you spell that first uh

02:12:07.440 i need to look where which word the french ones oh uh grimoire oh like all of them are just grimoire

02:12:16.080 it's a joke dang it it's a joke oh wow that's french so there's two m's

02:12:25.360 so these are terribly formatted books because paper is expensive ink is expensive most people

02:12:36.800 are very bad at writing like they we in in public school today spent a lot of time figuring out how 0.95

02:12:42.240 to write people did not write often so their handwriting is crap they don't know how to write 0.92

02:12:47.040 in like a space-saving manner so they just make these these terrible books that are just full of

02:12:54.400 very bad handwriting a grimoire is a node in a chain so this book here is some guy's collection

02:13:04.640 of magic spells and he would meet up with other wizards he'd go to wizard con or whatever and

02:13:10.800 they'd exchange spells and then he'd hastily scribble it down in his book and any magic spell

02:13:16.320 some guy got his hands on he'd write down in his book and occasionally what they would do is they

02:13:21.360 would be either you would give your book to someone else or you would exchange books or whatever and

02:13:26.960 so you would either take spells from his book like copy them down or you would just combine the pages

02:13:34.960 together and make a bigger book so these grimoires are all over europe they're not just in scandinavia

02:13:43.680 they are handmade and they are chains of transmission but people are also making up

02:13:50.080 their own spells right so if you take a given spell you can generally either source it to

02:13:56.480 the first text when it appears or to a prior text right a spell is either novel or it probably came

02:14:05.760 from someone else but if it comes from someone else it doesn't necessarily come from a book

02:14:10.480 because it might have been transmitted orally right so as i said some of these have chains of

02:14:16.880 owners like i've got this grimoire i added pages to it but the guy i got it from added pages to it

02:14:24.960 he got it from another guy who added pages to it who got it from the original owner so some of these

02:14:31.680 have dates that if you just like look at the book it's like oh yeah this book is from 1940

02:14:38.240 but actually it's like 500 years old because some guy in 1500 wrote down on some quires of paper

02:14:47.520 again um whether you take the stack of paper you fold it in half you

02:14:51.360 bind it with with staples nowadays or glue but in the old days it was string so you have like a

02:14:58.480 choir right and you have multiple choirs that make up a book so um the first choir would have been

02:15:06.640 made in 1500 and then the second choir was made by another guy in 1600 and so on until the final

02:15:13.360 academic who gets its hands on it is in 1940 so how to reference portions of this these texts is

02:15:21.920 really difficult because it's like oh well this is a handmade copy of a book that someone else got

02:15:27.400 so the handmade copy was made in like 1832 we don't necessarily know how old the original that

02:15:35.700 he copied it from was let alone the information because if it's like a copy of a copy of a copy

02:15:40.960 done within a year from a text that was written in like 1200 well if that copying was done in like

02:15:48.160 1890 then technically it was made in 1890 but actually it's from really far long ago so

02:15:59.120 authorship is really really hard to establish with these a lot of these books are just like

02:16:06.960 yeah i found them in my grandma's attic did your grandma write it well no grandma was illiterate

02:16:13.840 so then who wrote it who put it in the attic right in swedish these are called uh svarth

02:16:20.240 constbooker or troldomsbooker in norwegian they're svarthaboker in icelandic they're

02:16:25.760 gallerbacker so like black books they're sometimes called black wizardry sorcery the devil you get

02:16:32.400 the idea so a third of witchcraft trials in iceland involve grimoire ownership um sigils

02:16:42.320 or magical signs sometimes those are on things we're going to get into what a sigil and the like

02:16:47.760 is in a minute here so again i have to stress these are multiple books there are multiple books

02:16:55.520 that survive to us there's very little unity in them because every single one is some wizards

02:17:02.400 personal spell book. Every one of them is unique. If you have some familiarity with Wicca, you might

02:17:08.940 have heard of the Book of Shadows. Every single Wiccan is supposed to make their own Book of 0.83

02:17:14.380 Shadows. Theoretically, there's a lineage of these Books of Shadows, Book of Shadowses, whatever, 0.99

02:17:21.680 going back to Gerald Gardner's original Book of Shadows, which he copied from the New Forest

02:17:28.020 coven witches whether that's actually true or not how that works out in reality that's that's

02:17:34.900 not really the point theoretically there's this chain of each wiccan witches spellbook back to

02:17:42.260 the original as they keep adding them and branching to them and adding to them and saying no this

02:17:47.140 didn't work no this did this and not that it's very messy so a few things about these one

02:17:55.860 medieval scandinavian magic is very concerned with symbols we'll show you some of these symbols

02:18:03.660 in a little bit but it's very concerned with symbols these are extremely fluid what any

02:18:14.040 given symbol means probably has multiple uses or definitions and what any given the symbol is the

02:18:21.260 form like what it does is the content so for any given form there's multiple contents for

02:18:26.700 any given content there's multiple forms uh we'll talk about this in a minute but i just

02:18:33.660 as an example the nine helms of awe to be used 99 times there's a lot of things here

02:18:40.860 yes these are some examples of symbols there's a lot of them some of them look really wacky so

02:18:47.260 So there are actually references to the makers of some of these Galdarstaffers, such as there's like the Voldemar who made Varnarstaffer Voldemars, so Voldemars Varnarstaffer.

02:19:01.600 There's many attestations of these. There's huge numbers of attestations of books of magic.

02:19:07.660 Not a lot of them survive compared to the sheer number of attestation of them.

02:19:12.640 Common themes that appear are empowerment by Thor, empowerment by Odin, the Helm of Awe.

02:19:22.640 We'll talk about how it's pronounced later. The Helm of Awe.

02:19:27.640 So another term you might hear about is leech book.

02:19:31.020 These show up in England, too.

02:19:34.280 Leech, leek book, magic meant for healing or the opposite of healing, which makes sense in context.

02:19:43.520 So in really old Indo-European lore, snakes are the givers and takers of life and death.

02:19:51.740 Like the snake can bite you and poison you, right?

02:19:54.600 which means it also has like but it doesn't die from its own poison right because it lives

02:19:58.960 so it's also got mad like healing in it this is why hermes's staff has snakes and blah blah blah

02:20:06.680 anyways um why do books of medicine also have books have spells about killing because the two

02:20:14.040 are intimately if you can heal you can kill and vice versa so these have increasing references

02:20:24.220 to the icier the further you go back some of these sigils these symbols are given names that are

02:20:31.500 actually heiti of the gods right so like there will be i'm just making this one up i didn't

02:20:37.180 actually write a heidi down i'm sorry about that but like there will be a sigil that's called lord

02:20:41.660 of the world like named after frere right and these are also wildly syncretic a thing about

02:20:52.620 magic is that magicians don't care about the theory behind it they just want it to work they

02:20:59.660 don't care what they have to do to cast magic missile if they cast magic missile they'll do

02:21:04.460 whatever so you see throughout europe in in scandinavia particularly iceland it's important

02:21:12.100 for it's why we care because there's the ice here involved but like you'll see like 15th century

02:21:17.260 german magical spells that invoke like three of the olympians three christian saints the trinity

02:21:24.860 three demons three separate names for satan like just random lists of whoever's listening help me

02:21:32.980 out right um so like there's one magic spell in one of these galder box uh that invokes uh loki

02:21:42.420 asking him to afflict someone with lethal flatulence i don't know if the intention was

02:21:48.160 that they like inflate and blow up or they just like art themselves to death neither seem

02:21:54.620 neither seem all that appealing like but you get the idea they're like okay i'm gonna you're gonna

02:22:02.580 ask the bad guy to kill someone for you that's a little dangerous doesn't it when we're talking

02:22:10.200 about magical spells here we're talking about things that are not immoral but amoral the

02:22:17.840 concerns of the people writing these down are not how do i live as a good asatra they are very often

02:22:25.560 in these galderbacher or galderbox how do i get thor to do something for me to help me out or

02:22:33.320 replace thor with the archangel michael or king shlomo or alzabub or whoever okay so i want to

02:22:41.320 make a point here this is kind of why this is here and we front loaded with the people that

02:22:47.560 actually had some kind of loyalty to the ice here but what is important as a as a historical note

02:22:56.040 So isn't the moral thrust of the magic, but the fact that during this time period, it's not as though belief in these other powers ceased and like, oh, that was foolish. 0.70

02:23:17.360 our ancestors were just silly and misguided now we worship you know the the the jewish god 0.81

02:23:28.480 no these people there was a significant portion or certainly substrata of society 0.99

02:23:35.760 that believe in the efficacy of these beings and thought that the spiritual plane had

02:23:44.560 many different forces there and though they were kind of mercenary and who to call on and who not

02:23:52.500 to and mentioning you know christian figures as well as you know also true gods and goddesses

02:23:58.980 in the same breath they felt that the legitimacy was there was some kind of equivalency in

02:24:07.640 legitimacy, which is important because it speaks to the mindset. When we look at history,

02:24:20.200 the further we are removed from our own time and our own space, we have a tendency to shut off

02:24:27.340 empathy or like, I don't mean that in emotional sense, but just like considering the reality of

02:24:34.100 people really thought or like these are real people doing stuff we just look at dates that

02:24:41.220 signify breaks in history as if they're you know as if in iceland at the the all thing and in 1000

02:24:50.420 they just all of a sudden like okay as of today everyone in iceland forsakes the icer and we

02:24:58.100 don't mention them again ever cool everybody's synchronized and it doesn't work that way these 0.97

02:25:04.500 traditions live in the folk memory for a very long time and our ancestors at no point are stupid

02:25:13.460 and the further we look in history we tend to make um two-dimensional caricatures of people

02:25:21.060 rather than consider that they're actual humans that have similar

02:25:24.820 capacity for thought that you and I do. It's not like they went from, oh, we believe these things

02:25:32.640 are very real in a very big part of our life. Oh, wow, now they're completely not. That makes no

02:25:37.560 sense. No, there was a significant time where the belief in their existence didn't change.

02:25:47.280 There was an allegiance shift, or there was an ability to practice publicly that wasn't there.

02:25:53.320 But we have throughout this whole period, there is a substrata in belief of things beyond what they're told by the Catholic and the Lutheran Church.

02:26:08.980 And so that's kind of why this is relevant.

02:26:10.860 It's not that these practitioners were devout, but it is about these people very much believed that the gods and many other spiritual forces existed and had spiritual potency.

02:26:26.520 There was a potential for these forces to work in their favor.

02:26:30.020 and academics are generally very bad at conceptualizing and dealing with that because

02:26:38.160 academics today have to be so hyper focused on specifics so like academics can't in a certain

02:26:47.420 sense afford to ask like well what what was going through ragball odin's carl's head what kind of

02:26:54.760 society did he have to live in that could produce a guy like this in events like this they can't do

02:26:59.880 that that has too many non-answers it's too inconclusive they focus on things that are

02:27:08.820 grounded and provable and that leads to them over focusing on facts and figures like

02:27:16.700 after a certain point people stop talking about odin clearly they must have forgotten about him

02:27:22.220 well that means that you know like the people who are writing don't write about odin so if

02:27:28.980 there's a shift in who's writing and what they're writing about that doesn't actually have anything

02:27:33.480 to do with what's in people's heads right um digression but i want to go into something here

02:27:40.140 with these grimoires these icelandic and scandinavian grimoires there is two magical

02:27:45.640 traditions that we're going to deal with here there's medieval scandinavian viking age magic

02:27:52.220 and then it goes into you know later medieval magic then there's the earlier classical greco

02:28:01.340 roman egyptian magic that continues into medieval europe and then splices into that later um

02:28:12.540 medieval scandinavian magic but there is an original core northern scandinavian magical

02:28:21.260 tradition that we can separate from mediterranean influences right we can actually and this is

02:28:29.340 another thing because academics generally don't care what people think like historical people

02:28:35.660 they're really bad at separating things that are separatable by virtue of what people think about

02:28:45.020 them right and we'll see what you'll see what i'm talking about in a bit here but understand that

02:28:49.180 these these grimoires these medieval scanning and grimoires do have you know they do have

02:28:56.700 mediterranean stuff they do have what some i i don't know if this is like proper to call it but

02:29:02.940 what people usually call like christian magic in them many of them do and do ask jesus and satan

02:29:09.820 to do things in many of these spells do right so here's an example of an extremely old little

02:29:15.820 bit of magic in some of these um there's a sator square in futhark circa 1300s in sweden so the

02:29:24.780 sator square is this two um you can flip it either way it says uh rotos rotas operas tenet

02:29:33.580 reposator or it says satorra repo tenet opera rotas which um arepo is thought to be a personal

02:29:41.340 a person's name like a given name like john or something so depending on which version you have

02:29:46.780 again it's the same thing just rotated so it's in the other order it either says the farmer areppo

02:29:52.540 works his wheels or the wheels guide the work of areppo the farmer right and so you have this bit

02:30:00.140 of syncretism you have this extremely old greco-roman magical formula in an icelandic or

02:30:07.980 Swedish grimoire in Futhark. So someone translated this thing to the Futhark. Now a thing you end up

02:30:16.380 seeing a lot of regarding magic is that when some wizard gets it he de-territorializes it. He removes

02:30:22.780 it from its original context and he re-territorializes it. He puts it in a new context.

02:30:28.080 So the Sator Square as a thing means basically nothing because any given wizard can take it and

02:30:36.220 do whatever the whatever they want with it there are so many interpretations of this thing that

02:30:43.980 it's it's almost impossible to come up with the right one because there's just so many

02:30:47.980 right and that's very important with these magical spells and with the symbols of them

02:30:53.020 right all right so i'd like to make a note here um

02:30:55.980 there there are certain things that are just real and exist and have power

02:31:11.440 we occupy a shared space in midgard with other

02:31:17.440 with other earth fauna that have other ways of doing things

02:31:23.480 Some magic stuff works because it works and because there's a certain amount of shared efficacy in the shared world that we live in.

02:31:34.480 in i don't you know clearly the austral folk assembly doesn't advocate for eclecticism

02:31:44.720 but when you see it magically it's because people take techniques that

02:31:49.520 work in different contexts and they're just very often out for effect and so you see

02:31:57.600 you know whatever works calling upon whatever spirits seem to be powerful trying to invoke

02:32:05.040 whatever technique works that you observe you know some italian satanist doing something has

02:32:12.880 a power that can easily be coupled with an egyptian raw worshiper and whatever else

02:32:21.040 And I mean, you see that obviously today in modern Wicca or whatever else.

02:32:26.640 I think the efficacy in all of those cases is dubious.

02:32:31.160 But what is common a lot of the time is you see a certain grouping of people that are either desperate or unscrupulous or whatever.

02:32:43.040 What I will say, harmonizing what you do to where the practice is more uniform and to where you are, where all of the pieces synergize and work together is much, much, much more effective.

02:33:02.560 it's one of the things in an overarching theme about focusness about

02:33:11.260 our alignment with making things match and ordered when everything matches up and synchronizes

02:33:23.620 it accelerates efficacy and propriety and that is felt in the subtle realms as well

02:33:33.220 as in the more obvious and the more mundane so the more authentic and um

02:33:40.560 synchronized a magical practice in my in things that i have seen known and experienced in my life

02:33:52.400 the more potent and more effective it is but a lot of the time in the middle time period the

02:33:57.520 medieval time period you have a lot of borrowing and it comes from a variety of different sources

02:34:05.840 and oftentimes it gets borrowed several times over by the time it makes it to the far reaches

02:34:14.240 of northern europe iceland is a is a backwater that you know like it is the last place that news

02:34:22.560 reaches on the continent or anything else if you have magical stuff that goes on the silk road

02:34:28.800 and is practiced in the orient then in the middle east then in greece and the balkans

02:34:36.160 then in central i mean by the time it makes it to iceland it's been through

02:34:42.720 many many hands and it's something to consider when you know wondering about this stuff um

02:34:52.880 and just because there are exotic elements involved doesn't mean that we can't

02:35:00.720 like notice the ones that aren't and recognize and and uh find value in them we can also

02:35:10.240 separate out a lot of the eclecticism that I think eclecticism is the right word

02:35:18.960 from renaissance and medieval magic practice if we're judicious in what we do

02:35:26.800 carry on so a thing to keep in mind with these then is that there's another group of people

02:35:35.360 or institution as it were that doesn't like these grimoires that's the catholic church

02:35:42.400 catholic church thinks magic is bad catholic clerics they can perform magic you plebs off

02:35:51.520 limits right so this creates the the fun sort of fun sort of effect of like a lot of magic is done

02:36:03.760 by catholic christian clerics because they're the ones who are literate and have access to books

02:36:09.360 but they're also like punishing each other for doing this thing that like all of them are doing

02:36:14.800 right so legally these were marked for destruction so we have a lot of references to these things

02:36:25.680 and we have a lot of them we have so many more references to them than we have the physical

02:36:30.960 copies because they are supposed to be destroyed right so there is a distinction here that's worth

02:36:41.620 noting that continental scandinavian galderbacher tend to cite the olympians and judeo-christian

02:36:48.280 deities like mary or satan whereas the icelandic galderbocks they tend to cite the icier right

02:36:55.140 so you can see in the magic there's more attestations of the isir the more asatru there

02:37:04.220 is remaining in the area right so let's get into some of what's in these all right there are nine

02:37:12.680 parts of the soul right the leak the hammer the other the on or the earned the huir the mini the

02:37:19.760 saw the philgia and the minya the body the shape inspiration breath perception reflection the shade

02:37:28.040 the magical extension and the collective luck so there's a lot of things there right what we see

02:37:36.020 is there's a separation between body and mind shape from body there's inspiration animating

02:37:43.160 force perception perception and reflection is how i have it in my notes here but it's like

02:37:49.140 analysis and memory there's a kind of core part of you that continues on into the afterlife

02:37:57.200 but then there's this magical extension of you and then there's causal potency

02:38:03.080 so in the galder box there's an animating or vital principle there's a personal image

02:38:11.780 there's a separable power entity which sends things or is sent to do things there's an

02:38:19.100 essential core faculty of heart and mind of memory and reason as related but separate

02:38:26.440 these features tend to be absent in syncretic spells or the eclectic spells so

02:38:35.020 So, a spell that asks, I'm just making this up, Thor to do something is more likely to use an Asatru framework of, we call it the soul complex, but honestly we should probably just, it's probably more accurately to say it's the person complex.

02:38:51.060 A spell that cites Mary and King Shlomo and 13 Jewish patriarchs, that is not going to have pagan concepts of the soul.

02:39:05.660 It's going to have Christian concepts of the soul, right?

02:39:10.000 So, form versus content.

02:39:15.040 The form is the symbol.

02:39:16.960 The content is what it does.

02:39:18.300 the form the symbol is more like genealogy rather than content as i said these symbols

02:39:25.420 every single galderbock has its own set of symbols they disagree on what the symbols do

02:39:31.220 they disagree on what you use the symbols for so some of the symbols in the galderbocks do appear

02:39:39.920 to be from continental europe right but some are clearly native inventions so there's like a compass

02:39:45.760 rose design which is most famous with the uh the helm of all and the viking compass we'll get there

02:39:51.760 there's also a uh scepter and rod design which is is continental some of them have writing in them

02:39:59.280 there's one christian one that has an alpha and an omega in it like it it says alpha and then it

02:40:07.820 says Omega right like in Latin letters however despite what you can

02:40:14.000 occasionally hear none that I were able to find are straight importations from

02:40:19.760 the lesser key of Solomon even if they do use the scepter and rod design

02:40:24.980 language however they also do not match the general pattern of them so given

02:40:31.800 this what likely happened is that medieval scandinavian wizards were getting these texts

02:40:40.040 from the mediterranean but they weren't necessarily being told how to use them right because you you

02:40:47.240 could just buy these it was illegal to do so but like now there were like you know mischievous

02:40:53.760 merchants who would import these beneath their like you know mountain of rugs that they brought

02:40:59.840 in a wagon and then they'd sell them and then they'd sneak out of town and they just oh they

02:41:03.820 didn't sell any books they're a rug salesman right so the books were being imported the ideas were

02:41:12.340 being imported some of the some of these imports might have just been single pages right like a

02:41:16.860 single page of symbols that do something and the scandinavian mage would take the symbols and like

02:41:23.200 Okay, I can use this to do something, right?

02:41:27.940 So it's important to remember here,

02:41:33.420 magicians are constantly making stuff up.

02:41:37.180 They're constantly making up new spells.

02:41:40.180 They're constantly making up how to use them.

02:41:43.420 They're constantly tinkering with them.

02:41:47.500 Hang on, I've got to send Nick another picture

02:41:50.060 because I just thought of a good one here to include.

02:41:53.200 Magic is really messy and complicated, so we see attached mythology show up, and occasionally there are these claims that get made, like binding Odin to King Shlomo and the like, but remember, we're talking about multiple texts here,

02:42:18.560 and generally when you see like redditors well actually on the internet they are combining

02:42:24.000 multiple texts into like one singular thing as if there was just one singular idea of how any of

02:42:30.720 this worked that's not correct to do so what are we actually talking about here what are we talking

02:42:40.000 about when we talk about magic and sigil magic what are these symbols so we're going to talk about

02:42:45.840 about two, really three, but one is from Northern Europe and one is from, two are from Southern

02:42:53.040 Europe, some ideas of what magic actually is and what you're trying to do. In continental Europe,

02:43:00.740 deriving from Mediterranean forms, there are two ideas. One, the summoning of diamonds. Diamond

02:43:08.940 from daimonis is a greek word that basically means intermediary you are summoning an intermediary

02:43:17.620 entity and using them to do things the other form of mediterranean magic is what's called what i'm

02:43:24.700 going to call light guidance i'll explain what that means in a bit so uh yes the word the greek

02:43:33.900 word daimonis is where we get demon from. Demon comes to us through Christian ideological blah

02:43:41.380 bitty blah. Daimonis does not have negative implications in the Greek. Again, it just means

02:43:45.800 intermediary. So the Neoplatonists posited that the gods live in heaven and they're so amazing

02:43:53.960 and so cool that they cannot simply be bothered to come down and interact with us. So they have

02:43:59.920 daimonis intermediaries and these are the things we technically interact with via religion in like 1.00

02:44:06.400 a lay sense so like when you perform a sacrifice it's the daimonis that gets the sacrifice it's

02:44:11.600 not actually zeus right so these sorts of summings have a few symbol a few a few things going on in

02:44:20.560 them they have a lot of preparation there's a circle there's a conjuration of a spirit

02:44:27.120 there's an addressing to the spirit and instruction and there's a license to depart

02:44:33.120 so what you're basically doing is you're setting up things you're summoning this entity

02:44:38.560 you're telling it what to do you're telling it to go and then you're preventing it from

02:44:44.720 getting back at you right the other kind of magic that that light guidance

02:44:51.120 so Aristotle posited that there were uh 45 44 to 52 somewhere around that many gods who were the

02:45:01.320 Olympians who are the planets and they because the gods are perfect their bodies were spheres

02:45:07.580 and so they moved in circles because of course right their bodies were made out of quintessence

02:45:13.140 the fifth element and as they'd spin they'd pull around the celestial spheres and the spheres moving

02:45:18.940 behind the gods out of love for them would result in causality occurring right and this got

02:45:25.780 interpreted by muslim thinkers as light so like the planet mars emits certain light how does

02:45:34.560 astrology work well at certain times the light combinations hit like a child in the womb and

02:45:40.740 this gives them certain characteristics it's an extremely oversimplification of how astrology works

02:45:46.900 So what a wizard could do in this second form of Mediterranean magic is you could basically make a prism that harnesses the light, right?

02:45:56.900 It harnesses the light, and then it makes something happen.

02:45:59.900 In both of these forms of Mediterranean magic, we see preparation, we see assemblage of the magical apparatus, and then we see a deconstruction of the magical apparatus.

02:46:13.900 Preparation is usually astrologically bound.

02:46:18.100 People in the olden days cared a lot about what was going on in the sky.

02:46:23.000 So it's also very literary in nature.

02:46:27.900 The magician must consult books of vast knowledge.

02:46:31.400 The sigil, or sigils, the stuff that the magician draws on the ground,

02:46:37.900 It's either something that the magician, or the summoned entity, or the light stands in, or on, or it's what houses the spirit.

02:46:47.900 It's usually on the floor.

02:46:49.900 The alternative is the light apparatus, where the magician doesn't have to be in it, but the light from the planets goes into the apparatus.

02:46:58.900 Again, I'm being a little overly simplistic because magic is really complicated, but you'll see why this simplification is justified in a minute.

02:47:09.260 When they get to entities, these Mediterranean forms of magic are very concerned with binding, with controlling, with housing the entities that are called upon.

02:47:20.220 The spirits are enslaved to a hostile magician's will.

02:47:23.860 There's a lot of concern over correct shape, of correct technical procedure.

02:47:29.580 Failure to follow the correct technical procedure and make the correct shapes produces disaster.

02:47:37.060 So one I've read from the Greek Magical Pyre, these are really old magical spells from Greek people living in Egypt.

02:47:47.680 And one of them has this complex ritual to summon Kronos, like Zeus's dad.

02:47:53.860 the bad guy and you have to do the whole thing with your eyes shut because you summon chronos

02:48:01.140 and then you'll hear like the clinking and the chinking of the chains that bind him in tartarus

02:48:06.560 and you cannot open your eyes because if you do he will be set free and have total mastery and

02:48:13.760 power over you that's actually really spooky like he's the bad guy you do not want to summon this

02:48:21.740 guy and yet here you are and you're gonna what command him they're like go make a woman fall

02:48:27.480 in love with you or something right um so again summation concern over correct shape

02:48:36.060 assemblage of things astrology deconstruction of things so in these northern magical texts

02:48:43.620 we see a lot of concern over symbols there's a total absence of astrology there's no concern

02:48:49.500 Go on, sir.

02:48:51.140 So I wanted to make a mention of it before I forget,

02:48:54.260 and this is kind of a side note,

02:48:56.560 and I didn't get a link to Nick, but it,

02:49:09.560 in Introduction to Magic Volume One by the Urr Group,

02:49:15.400 which was a magical think tank,

02:49:19.500 supergroup, I guess, of

02:49:24.860 Italian magical experimenters that Julius Evolo is part of.

02:49:36.820 There is an article in there that I thought was really useful when I read it years ago

02:49:42.900 called The Knowledge of the Symbol by Pietro Negri.

02:49:46.400 and I got a lot out of that there's a lot of this book that I didn't get a lot out of

02:49:54.440 but there are little pearls of things I did and that's one that I did find really interesting and

02:50:01.300 useful and I think especially as we talk about sigils sigil magic and runes and bind runes as

02:50:11.180 sigils is valuable to consult if anybody wants to dig deeper so i just wanted to put that out there

02:50:18.720 so northern european magic scandinavian magic at the time we're talking about right 1400s 1500s

02:50:31.040 total absence of astrology there's not a lot of concern regarding when you do this and again

02:50:38.300 remember we're not talking about like do this on thursday we're talking about like now make sure

02:50:42.380 that venus is in conjunction with pluto in the uranian sphere according to the lunar calculations

02:50:49.100 it's really complicated right it's not simple when we talk about astrology in european magic

02:50:57.980 the sigils are generally on things they're not on the floor for a working some of them are like

02:51:05.180 carve this into your forehead um there's one that's like put this on the sole of your shoe

02:51:12.460 for like wrestling there's one that helps a woman that makes like a woman fall in love with you

02:51:17.100 that you're supposed to put in your pocket right these go on things they go on items 0.99

02:51:23.180 including your body right there's little preparation if any again compared to like

02:51:29.900 drawing out a really complicated design on the floor and saying certain words

02:51:33.980 these are relatively simple the entities invoked in scandinavian magic here are not controlled

02:51:43.500 they sort of just help the magician they very rarely are actually asked to

02:51:48.060 do something they very often are simply put asked to empower the magus the wizard the sorcerer

02:51:56.300 there's zero protection or control of the entities involved there's no attempt at banishing there's

02:52:04.400 no attempt at making them go away there's no attempt at protecting you from them Mediterranean

02:52:09.140 magic is extremely concerned with preventing entities from screwing you over these symbols

02:52:16.040 and magical traditions in northern Europe are oral in nature the magician memorizes a small

02:52:22.280 set of basic concepts and words to make a language that is used to build complex structures.

02:52:29.480 There's little concern for correct shape grimoire to grimoire, magus to magus. The shape of a spell

02:52:41.360 matters but there's not a correct shape in an objective sense and I'll explain why in a minute

02:52:47.420 here um that's very important there's not a lot of concern with the shape generally it looks like

02:52:59.520 there was some kind of internal spiritual empowerment that the magician was really using

02:53:04.400 and the symbol is just a way of expressing that so this is sort of how rune magic works

02:53:14.700 in in the older period where like the actual magic comes from the room the symbol or the the the

02:53:25.040 transcendent meaning it doesn't come from like the little lines that are used to write with

02:53:30.820 right so we see this idea present from an older period but it has i guess you could say evolved

02:53:39.140 degraded either way right it's no longer an alphabet a symbolic alphabet it's instead just

02:53:45.780 kind of a symbolic reference right and this is why the symbols don't matter they are used by

02:53:51.900 the wizard to enact causal will but they're not really important the alter ego the and i could

02:54:01.740 cast the same spell with different symbols the same effect and the symbols would have to look

02:54:08.440 the same for me and for him but not for each other my symbol doesn't necessarily have to look

02:54:15.160 like his symbol right that is different from how it works in the mediterranean we're like

02:54:20.840 wizards argue over the correct symbol to use in scandinavia i mean whatever works for you bro

02:54:28.600 right compare rune magic from the etic period right we have three basic techniques that are

02:54:41.700 done here carve the runes and carve doesn't necessarily literally mean etch them but

02:54:47.120 in most cases it actually does color them then speak some kind of incantation right

02:54:53.820 so for example uh skirnir threatens to do this um eagles call the grim saga has a a very the the

02:55:04.480 scene where he like makes the horn blow up like he carves runes onto the horn he like pricks his

02:55:10.480 finger and uses blood i think right sir to to color the runes on the horn he definitely bloodies

02:55:18.140 them i don't know if it's pricking his own finger the exact way of extraction but he does color them

02:55:24.940 right yeah okay and then he speaks some kind of incantation and then in this case he carves

02:55:30.860 runes that'll make the horn blow up if there's poison in it so what we see here is he has

02:55:37.020 a symbolic language that he can use to enact causal will upon the world due to internal

02:55:43.340 empowerment this is not what a medieval european like you know italian southern german wizard

02:55:51.820 would do right the medieval european wizard was using knowledge of mechanisms of reality

02:56:00.700 he wasn't working with a symbolic vocabulary so i want uh could you put up the the harley manuscript

02:56:08.540 image that i just sent you nick uh i wish this was bigger so this shows you a number of these sigils

02:56:19.260 this is from a byzantine manuscript notice how they're all in a circle right and if you like

02:56:27.340 lean in or squint you can kind of see it here there's a few designs there's these compass

02:56:32.700 rose kind of designs where there's like a central point and a bunch of stuff coming off it

02:56:36.540 then there's the i i call them rod and scepter designs it's like a line with a circle and then

02:56:45.600 another line right um then you can see a number of these that have these kind of like just odd

02:56:53.560 designs there's a lot of uh stars this is mediterranean magic right here right notice how

02:57:02.260 some of them have writing in them like they have letters like this one here has like e p backwards

02:57:08.380 c t some kind of swiggle right um this page here comes up when we talk about the uh the helm of all

02:57:18.440 and the the viking compass so could you put up the nine uh helms of all 99 times nick

02:57:25.940 now here is magic from a gallerbock these are the nine helms of awe you're supposed to use

02:57:33.940 them 99 times to achieve some effect i think this one is the one that makes your opponent scared

02:57:38.940 um notice here how there's a lot of this little compass kind of design but there's other stuff

02:57:48.300 too right this design framework of like a central point with stuff coming out is very common in the

02:57:55.480 Gullabox. But then there's also other wacky ones, right? Notice that these are not the Futhark.

02:58:05.440 These are not runes as we know them, right? There are some holdovers. There are a few

02:58:12.300 Golderstaffer, which are called, like, named things that are also the names of runes. Like,

02:58:18.740 one of them is named Hagal in one manuscript, like Hagalaz, right? These are individual works

02:58:26.160 of art, basically, by individual magicians. They are not a unified theology. They're not a unified

02:58:30.900 doctrine or dogma. They are chains of symbols. So some guy having a spell named Hagal doesn't

02:58:38.520 mean that he personally knew anything about room magic, but he did hear or see a spell from someone

02:58:45.100 who knew at minimum knew about the spell right now we should talk about the figure of king shlomo

02:58:53.500 aka uh solomonos as he's called in greek shlomo is a generic figure of magical

02:59:00.140 origination in medieval europe you can attach anything to shlomo to metaphorically and

02:59:05.340 figuratively and literally baptize it any nonsense you want is okay as long as you say that shlomo 0.74

02:59:12.460 is involved summoning demons to kill your rival oh that's okay you learned it from shlomo because 0.89

02:59:19.960 shlomo is one of the jewish patriarchs and is therefore tucked into christianity and he was 0.78

02:59:26.200 like a master demon summoner in in the bible right that was like his gimmick right he was like this 0.76

02:59:32.320 rabbi wizard so you see attributions of just all sorts of random stuff to shlomo in european 0.81

02:59:41.580 magical texts and these are no these are not any different right shlomo fulfills for christianity

02:59:47.500 a kind of role that odin does in being the kind of master of magic we're like yeah he knows a lot

02:59:55.100 he didn't tell us everything that one time he told us stuff that's where i got this from okay

03:00:00.060 that's legitimate that's a legitimate and acceptable way to introduce magic in this period

03:00:07.100 right so any random thing can be attributed to it this is important because um in flowers

03:00:14.460 the galdrabok he has sigil 11 as being solomon's in sigli um this has caused confusion amongst

03:00:24.220 well actuallys on the internet so um i already talked about odin as the devil magic is a tool

03:00:33.600 Magic in medieval Europe is not moral, per se, even though the Catholic Church tries really hard to make it moral.

03:00:40.820 So, for example, there are stories about Semunder the Wise, Frode, Frode, Semunder Frode, you know, Semunder the Wise.

03:00:50.400 But there's also the evil bishop Gottskalk Niklasen, the Cruel, who is a Christian bishop that, like, uses magic to abuse his parishioners and gain wealth and stuff. 0.76

03:01:05.040 Both of them learned magic from the Christian deity, Odin, and or the devil, right? 0.71

03:01:12.640 So magic at this time isn't really moralized per se, right?

03:01:20.400 So, let's talk about the Galdrubach, which is the famous one and the one that Dr. Flowers wrote a book about. So, it's originally from the late 1500s. There were four scribes. So, one scribe wrote spells 1 through 10. The second one wrote spells 11 through 39. The third one did spells 40 through 44 in the 17th century.

03:01:44.460 And that one in the 1600s actually contains many references to the Aesir.

03:01:49.780 Then spells 45 through 47 were actually done in Denmark by the last author.

03:01:56.280 So there's a few kinds of magic.

03:02:00.260 There's eight spells that are effectively prayers to higher powers.

03:02:04.380 You'll notice here, if you kill a cow as part of a lunar invocation

03:02:09.760 of the sublunar, extra lunar, lunar, lunar, Venus in conjunction with Pluto working to Jupiter

03:02:17.020 to get him to do something, how are you not just sacrificing to Jupiter and asking for him to do

03:02:24.780 something in return? Past a certain point, you aren't. There is a degree to which prayer becomes

03:02:32.600 a kind of prayer to polytheistic deities becomes a kind of acceptable medium or mechanism by being

03:02:42.580 laundered into magic because the the classical world knew that there was an association between

03:02:49.360 the gods and the planets when christianity came along the gods could be reduced to mere natural

03:02:55.720 phenomena as the planets right therefore to a certain degree magic is acceptable this actually

03:03:04.020 gets into a really nuanced christian discussion about christian astrology because it's like well

03:03:10.400 if yahweh ordained the planets to do certain things that's not really off limits to look at

03:03:16.300 them like if he didn't want you looking at the planets he wouldn't have put them there right

03:03:20.280 um so back to the galderbach eight spells are effectively prayers to higher powers

03:03:26.860 23 spells are essentially will extenders via symbols 33 and 35 like symbol a spell number

03:03:35.000 33 spell number 35 45 use prayer and symbols and three spells use natural substances

03:03:40.920 there is a very syncretic theology 21 invoke the icier or the devil nine are purely christian

03:03:50.140 Eight are Judeo-Gnostic, and five are Asatru Christian Syncretic.

03:03:56.300 Four of these actually come from the last two scribes, which is interesting because there's stuff in the later period.

03:04:04.700 Some guy who was writing in this book, which had gotten passed from author to author in the 1600s, knew about the Isir.

03:04:14.000 I mean, of course he did. We've been talking about that.

03:04:16.220 But, like, this guy was writing about Odin in the 1600s.

03:04:20.140 At minimum, this wizard knew Odin is a figure you can invoke to get to make things happen.

03:04:27.500 So the last two scribes would have been Lutherans, presumably,

03:04:33.260 so Osatru and Catholicism were both equally off-limits, which is interesting because

03:04:39.020 Catholicism then enters that kind of periphery from the Lutheran perspective.

03:04:44.300 However, there's a general Christianization of how the magic works over time in this text.

03:04:48.620 so why are you actually casting these spells what what are the what are they involved what are what

03:04:54.980 are they for 18 of them are for protection nine are for good fortune six are for discovering thieves

03:05:01.640 um that's a very interesting concern at this time in scandinavia so a lot of runes uh runic

03:05:11.180 inscriptions are like, Ragnar Herdersen owned this boot. This helmet belongs to Grugnolf.

03:05:20.740 So there's a question of why does that happen, because that doesn't really happen all that

03:05:26.160 much in Greece and Rome. Sometimes there's a spear. So sometimes on weapons, it's clearly

03:05:35.160 the weapon's name. I can't remember what the Norse and Gothic is, but there are two separate

03:05:41.020 spears from like the same period of time and they both have a name that means reckoner or tester

03:05:48.000 get it because it's a spear like here's the test you either pass or fail and it's the same name

03:05:54.300 but with a slight variation based on norse versus gothic right so some of this is just clear magic

03:06:02.660 but there's also a theory that some of this is like labeling like how do like oh no my shoe was

03:06:08.660 stolen i'll go to the authorities and tell them it's like how will they know whose shoe is the

03:06:13.420 shoe well it has my name on it right so the the there's a theory that the concern with theft and

03:06:20.300 like magically figuring out who the thief is particularly seeing who the thief is not just like

03:06:26.760 asking thor and jacob and the devil to help you find your boot but like showing you who the thief

03:06:35.380 was visually with the eye um there's a theory that this comes about because traditional methods

03:06:43.360 of jurisprudence basically labeling everything had fallen apart because for one you weren't

03:06:49.380 allowed to label things with runes and for two christian yes yes um thank you nick brownie us

03:06:57.100 um and then the the norse one is like uh rainier or something like that and that distinction

03:07:05.240 between like a rainier versus around the oz and anyways um so in absence of being able to label

03:07:14.320 things and being able to go to a legal system that accepts yup it's labeled it's clearly his

03:07:20.980 magic solves that purpose by filling in the gap right um invisibility is there's one invisibility

03:07:31.660 spell in the galderbog and there's 10 magical attacks uh four of them are like mean you know

03:07:39.900 so entities mentioned in this book ovin thor loki as a fiend who is bound by the gods frig

03:07:48.840 balder and freya icier that icier that are mentioned there's no organization or formulas

03:07:55.520 when they come up it's just lists the same is true with the non-obstature deities with the

03:07:59.660 jewish patriarchs with angels it's just i know this many names maybe one of y'all will help me

03:08:05.400 out interestingly valhalla does show up in one of these spells um so now we'll get into

03:08:14.140 it's usually spelled uh is hjalmur but it's in old norse it's uh various hjalmur because

03:08:25.820 the one with the ash the a and the e that's merged together is the modern icelandic name

03:08:30.440 not the old norse name this is the helm of all so in fafnismal fafnir is said to wear the helm of

03:08:38.340 all which might just be a reference to him being scary but then sigur there kills fafnir and like

03:08:46.300 puts the helm of all on but maybe that's poetic language because um even kelda is said to have

03:08:54.540 put on the helm the the hidden helm um when he casts a spell of invisibility and then goes out

03:09:01.800 and plays magical pranks on i think it's trivisan um it doesn't matter so i would i this is something

03:09:09.640 i i wish i had the time to do but it would be interesting to go through and see if there are

03:09:14.420 any other like helm of x references in the literature if this is like an a regular figure

03:09:22.200 of speech right do you know anything about that sir not really

03:09:35.320 yeah not not not that i can add because it's like there's these two here and it's like okay

03:09:41.720 that's almost a pattern but if it's just two it doesn't help at all you know um but

03:09:49.800 this idea kind of goes dormant then if it doesn't show up you know the helm of all is not a big deal

03:09:58.120 in the edits outside of this bit right no so i mean i want to

03:10:09.640 to solidify the point about the symbol and like the form versus the content

03:10:19.800 I'm trying to think of the best way to explain this that doesn't sound odd or whatever.

03:10:37.480 When you have the squiggly snake line, that line doesn't make an S sound.

03:10:47.760 That line's not an S. That line isn't a S noise. We have all collectively agreed that that symbol equals S. So in a way like runes, the rune isn't the straight lines that are connected that make a design.

03:11:12.720 The rune is the mystery. Those lines that are stuck together are a touchstone for our mind to, oh, that mystery. They're a way to convey a greater concept with a symbol that we all understand what the symbol means so we can communicate it to others.

03:11:38.340 so

03:11:39.960 the August Helmer

03:11:44.100 is a thing that exists

03:11:47.060 it is a concept, it exists

03:11:49.040 it's talked about in the lore

03:11:50.720 the

03:11:52.500 sigil with the

03:11:54.940 snowflake pattern

03:11:56.060 is

03:11:58.960 the representation

03:12:00.900 of what that

03:12:02.740 magical helmet

03:12:04.340 is

03:12:05.380 the concept is an also true concept the drawing of stick figures to mean a thing

03:12:19.340 is also an also true concept the snowflake stick symbol stick figure thing doesn't exist

03:12:30.140 in a outside true concept context per se, but it is the first writing down of what symbol would

03:12:40.780 represent that real outside true thing. So I guess, and again, I realized that what I said

03:12:47.640 is a bunch of gobbledygook. It makes a little bit of sense, but it's important to understand

03:12:54.880 the difference between concept and symbol and the directionality of how that comes about

03:13:04.140 there's different ways to symbolize concepts that are extremely valid and perfectly usable

03:13:10.280 just because the symbol didn't get written down until later doesn't mean that the concept's not

03:13:18.260 spiritually valid an example is the runes our people did not

03:13:25.500 make use of the runes in written format until a certain period but the runes have existed since

03:13:34.240 the dawn of creation the runes were gifted to humanity by the all-father at a particular time

03:13:44.200 in history in a in a symbolic form but that's not the beginning of that rune it's just when we had a

03:13:50.760 symbol to write that room down if any of that made sense and i apologize if it doesn't it's

03:13:58.640 very hard to put words to some of these concepts no no that's that's good so the the kind of point

03:14:04.800 with the helm of awe is that it shows up as this thing in the sigurd and fafnir mythology let's

03:14:12.540 call it right it's this thing that sigurd gets from fafnir now in other germanic literature

03:14:18.540 and actually in celtic literature heroes are described as having like glowing eyes flashing

03:14:25.020 eyes they have like fire from their head they they emit heat right they go super saiyan right

03:14:34.300 right so one thesis is that this helm of awe is a kind of poetic term for that sort of phenomena

03:14:42.800 it's not like this is a hat that shows up repeatedly outside of fafnir and sigur which

03:14:50.220 is why it shows up or it's showing up in these magical texts is interesting because it's actually

03:14:56.100 as far as we can tell a not obscure but relatively minor piece of lore right so

03:15:04.240 the symbol in its general usage as being used for terrible for terror is pretty consistent

03:15:13.540 but one grimoire has it as you has the symbol the symbol which we'll get to in a second used for

03:15:19.740 healing cows and wooing girls, and another set of symbols is used as the Helm of Awe.

03:15:26.860 Presumably the assumption by that mage was that Helm of Awe is a category of spells,

03:15:34.000 so could you throw up the Ischelmer Gelderbach 1590, Nick?

03:15:42.120 So here, these are two Helms of Awe, right, used at one point.

03:15:49.740 sorry i'm looking for something here uh buh buh buh um so where does this first show up

03:16:00.800 could you put up the uh ice helmer from galder vacher 1670 nick here is i believe this is the

03:16:10.580 first time this symbol the the canonical one shows up right um could you throw up the the nice

03:16:21.580 black and white one for the is helmer nick this this symbol here right in it

03:16:26.580 which i know yeah this is this one here this symbol is actually pretty consistent as meaning

03:16:34.500 terror when it shows up right um so if you go online you can find a well i read it well actually

03:16:45.680 who assumes that this idea comes from the harley ms 5596 manuscript the one with all the little

03:16:54.840 circles on it that i had nick put up a while ago the one with the block of writing on the right

03:16:58.660 um therefore the sieger their tail and the whole enterprise is of magic in iceland is

03:17:06.520 actually christian whatever that's supposed to mean um because it somehow belongs to solomon

03:17:14.680 but when it shows up in iceland it's not attached to solomon and the symbols in the harley ms 5596

03:17:21.660 are actually not this they look remarkably similar but they're not this um they it has

03:17:27.960 square tridents and two of these little arm slashes instead of three right well the differences are

03:17:34.580 minor any differences in the symbol matters because while i could have a symbol and the

03:17:42.980 alzharigoli could have a symbol that do the same thing the symbol matters my symbol has to be

03:17:50.560 consistent for me his symbol has to be consistent for him right so the symbol is inspiration for

03:18:00.340 the wizard it's not like the symbol does the thing in the sense that like iron like an iron atom is

03:18:07.720 already an iron atom right and an iron atom is always an iron atom it's not like that um now

03:18:16.500 uh another that there's like a symbolic language at play here by people who don't actually speak

03:18:24.400 the language another grimoire does attach the symbol to to moisha so i mean i guess you could

03:18:32.740 say it's christian then but like i it's just attributing this to some random guy right that

03:18:40.560 happens a lot with magic random figures are attached to these symbols it's like oh yeah

03:18:45.900 king shlomo made this who cares like what huh um now this is this is a competing idea about

03:18:58.020 where the compass rose kind of center thing with all the arms coming out symbolic language comes

03:19:05.620 from that could totally be of english or greek origin but it's being attached to two native

03:19:11.780 germanic ideas one the helm of awe and two this idea of the symbol as a personal tool used for

03:19:20.420 the expression of inner empowerment right the other one is the uh the uh vegasphere you want

03:19:29.140 want to throw that one up, Nick? This here, this one, it's actually asymmetrical. So I was actually

03:19:38.460 hoping the background would be white. That's my bad. It's transparent. Anyways, this one here is

03:19:43.300 actually asymmetrical. If you look at it, each of these arms is a little different. So this one

03:19:50.480 shows up in the Hald manuscript, the Galdrachver, and the Galdrathscrathia. Buffoons on the internet

03:19:57.580 I usually combine it with the Ischallmer and with Shlomo's Insigli, which is a different symbol, 0.55

03:20:04.900 and argue that rune magic and such are actually Christian because in the Galdrachver,

03:20:10.600 not in the Hald Manuscript or the Galdrath Skravia, in the Galdrachver, which is one book,

03:20:18.080 it says that this spell only works if you profess to be a Christian.

03:20:22.840 Like, that's part of the spell.

03:20:24.040 like the magical incantation involves professing to be a christian and then doing other things

03:20:29.320 right um this confusion gets worse because reddit debunkers uh usually compact the is

03:20:39.760 the vegasphere and solomon's insignia into one symbol that's like but they're they're three

03:20:46.840 different this is not the ishelmer uh i it they're literally different symbols right um i also looked

03:20:56.300 and i couldn't find this in the uh harley ms 5596 i could only find images of it i couldn't find an

03:21:04.620 actual sort of like viewable copy so i'm willing to be wrong on the ishelmer but the the design

03:21:11.980 that i've seen people cite for this i'm sorry for the the vegasphere i'm willing to be wrong

03:21:18.300 but like i haven't seen anyone actually demonstrate this design or the is helmer

03:21:24.380 coming from the harley ms 5596 similar designs yes not these this one actually um

03:21:33.740 oh i can't i can't remember the genealogy off of it off the top of my head but this symbol

03:21:38.620 actually comes specifically from a tattoo that uh bjork has like on her left arm right um

03:21:47.040 and she popularized this specific one as like the viking compass right um do you want to throw

03:21:55.520 throw up some of the fun the the goofy ones yeah is this uh nabrookstaffer

03:22:02.640 yeah okay this is the necropants one so this this is a really bizarre magical little so you you 0.98

03:22:14.640 kill you it's this is it's done by a man and you kill someone and you skin them and you have to be

03:22:21.620 careful not to puncture the skin and then you take their their skin from the waist down off 1.00

03:22:29.220 right and then you put them on and then they cinch up and through various means gold will

03:22:38.800 be generated and it will will gather in the the uh polite term used is the pocket of the necropants

03:22:47.400 like that that that refers to the uh the scrotum of the pants because it's literally a dead man's

03:22:54.600 skin from the waist down and there's like there's usually like uh basically rules like if you you 0.51

03:23:01.880 can't do this or that or the money will stop or the pants tighten and kill you or this or that

03:23:07.560 or the other thing um you want to throw up the fox one yeah this is to ward off foxes

03:23:18.440 you should put the one of the barrel up the the barrel that's the third one from the top

03:23:24.600 oh it'll take me a second but okay okay sure i'll keep so this all is a good this

03:23:32.700 the reason i am talking about the is khalmer and the vegasphere is because these are popular

03:23:39.800 targets of well actually debunker types to attack as this kind of well actually we don't know

03:23:48.140 anything about the vikings so you're not allowed to know anything about the vikings kind of mindset

03:23:51.820 right and this is why it's important to like read about these things before going off on them

03:24:00.360 because it's usually really complicated and it's not as simple as some of these types make it out

03:24:05.920 to be and this is why i warned at the beginning like if you want i'm not a go the i'm not the

03:24:13.600 ulcerer go these so i can't give a church condemnation of making necropants probably

03:24:19.840 shouldn't try and make necro pants it sounds really gross it's definitely illegal um wearing

03:24:27.100 another man's skin from the waist down might technically violate the no homosexuality thing

03:24:35.000 um you gotta get the gold out of the pocket right uh but okay sorry i'll keep going and 0.89

03:24:43.200 put up the, this here is Ungergapi, which is carved on the ends of barrels to prevent

03:24:49.640 leaking. And I don't know if this is supposed to be a smiley face or not, but he looks pretty,

03:24:56.280 he looks pretty certain about the water tightness of this barrel.

03:25:00.300 Yeah, it'd be hard to imagine it's not a smiley face.

03:25:03.840 He's got like eyebrows.

03:25:05.340 People had the same faces back then as they got now.

03:25:08.080 you can look these symbols up and there's a lot of them and they do all sorts of stuff like

03:25:15.620 one is to find out if butter was made using milk stolen by a witch or a fairy uh one is

03:25:25.400 to like protect against drowning one is for luck in fishing there's a lot of these that do just all

03:25:32.300 sorts of stuff the wrestling ones i always thought were cool yeah so uh gap alder and

03:25:39.060 gynfaxi which are two staves kept in the shoes gap alder under the heel of the right foot and

03:25:45.040 gynfaxi under the toes of the left foot to magically ensure victory in bouts of icelandic

03:25:50.520 wrestling in glima so like compare that to some of these really complicated rituals from the

03:26:00.100 Mediterranean. There was a comment in the chat that I saw. Yes, there is star lore in

03:26:06.700 Scandinavian literature. But when I say astrology, I mean these really, really complicated,

03:26:14.620 the science of the planets, the degree of complexity that shows up in the Mediterranean

03:26:20.480 is not found in Scandinavian magic. I've mentioned this a lot at various times

03:26:27.000 in uh on the program i think it is true with religion without a true religion but i think

03:26:38.080 it's also true with magical practice

03:26:40.460 in our expression it is much more of an art than a science

03:26:49.700 um and

03:26:54.300 i mean that in a couple of ways so and i'm contrasting uh chris's very analytical and

03:27:06.120 well-sourced um presentation with you know just some some general thoughts um

03:27:12.460 a lot of

03:27:20.860 out of true efficacy

03:27:24.380 religiously and magically

03:27:30.640 has to do with the

03:27:34.260 again i apologize words to convey these concepts are not as precise as i'd like

03:27:45.940 the magical efficacy the magical might stored within the practitioner and his

03:27:53.660 reputation before the spirit world and his force of will

03:28:03.620 channeled into a thing if that thing is an offering if that thing is a

03:28:12.140 magical spell if that whatever that is to imbue it or to um animate it with the

03:28:24.020 vitki or the gothi's spiritual might that's where a lot of it comes from it doesn't come

03:28:32.700 from like a precise mixing of the elements

03:28:39.000 to invoke some other creature to do a thing.

03:28:45.500 It is much more about harnessing

03:28:51.300 and focusing the intensity of willpower

03:28:54.720 through the lens of a sigil,

03:28:58.640 through the lens of a concept,

03:29:00.000 through the medium of an offering

03:29:03.180 or through the medium of an incantation.

03:29:07.280 And so it's very operative in that way.

03:29:09.940 And again, I'm talking about Galdra magic

03:29:12.900 as opposed to, say, they're different animals.

03:29:18.640 But in this type of magical operation,

03:29:22.320 it is much more of an art

03:29:25.540 than a science to make stuff work.

03:29:30.000 so art versus science is a really apt thing to point out as is the emphasis emphasis on reputation

03:29:40.300 so the mediterranean magic nat by definition almost has a depersonalization of the divine

03:29:52.280 forces which remember for aristotle and plato were willful entities they didn't necessarily have

03:29:59.000 minds that cared about things like we care about but they were thinking entities and as this

03:30:07.160 philosophy goes on and is spliced into abrahamic religion particularly islam so i mentioned that

03:30:14.400 um the aristotelian light bending stuff comes from islamic origin so what what ended up happening

03:30:22.060 is when the christians came in they were really against philosophy because it was pagan when the

03:30:27.900 muslims came in they kind of like essentially freed the regions that they conquered from

03:30:36.100 christian tyranny isn't the right word but like zealotry and so the philosophers were like hey

03:30:43.420 can we do philosophy and the muslims were like sure as long as you like affirm the oneness of 0.81

03:30:50.600 allah and all that and you know remember this was like attached to the byzantine empire had like a 0.90

03:30:57.760 95 tax rate or something and then the muslims are like yeah you're you're a dahimi so give us 15 0.98

03:31:03.520 of your income and we'll call it good like there is a great release of pressure in the wake of the 0.98

03:31:09.960 islamic conquests and so we see a much greater interaction with greco-roman philosophy because

03:31:16.920 intense pressure for to enforce islamic orthodoxy didn't exist at the time and so a lot of this

03:31:25.160 magic stuff is in the orient in the middle east and that's where this theory that the gods are

03:31:34.340 like the planets the literal you can look up and see zeus going in circles around us right

03:31:39.580 um it's in the islamic world that a lot of this attempts to harmonize abrahamic religion and

03:31:47.720 philosophy starts and then it gets imported into christian europe and there's a big song and dance

03:31:54.000 about this causing problems it's ultimately why aquinas wrote all of his stuff the depersonalization

03:32:01.980 of the divine and of the natural world is a big thing in mediterranean magic where it's almost

03:32:09.220 like you read some of the depict the the these magical spells and it's like how is this different

03:32:15.560 from like a gravitational telescope like the way we detect gravity waves is they set up a really

03:32:21.780 long laser right and they know how long it takes for the laser to reach one end and bounce back

03:32:26.740 and they have a very finely tuned little monitor and if a gravity wave comes by it literally makes

03:32:33.020 the distance between the two shorter so like the time it takes for the laser to get back changes

03:32:39.280 some of the descriptions of magic in the mediterranean world are almost like that

03:32:46.860 where it's just like oh yeah

03:32:48.520 Mars is just this like

03:32:50.400 force of nature in the world that doesn't

03:32:52.880 think this

03:32:54.440 Scandinavian magic is just like

03:32:56.900 almost naively

03:32:58.560 certain that like yeah Thor is a person

03:33:00.800 he has opinions of you

03:33:02.320 you can get him to do stuff

03:33:03.840 by asking him to do stuff

03:33:05.840 the same way you'd ask your neighbor

03:33:08.080 to do stuff

03:33:09.240 with your mouth

03:33:11.800 this is a

03:33:13.240 this is something that needs be said

03:33:18.740 where magic becomes extremely impious

03:33:25.680 is when 0.99

03:33:28.020 fat pasty hot topic wizard

03:33:32.040 thinks that in grandma's basement

03:33:34.960 he can command gods to do stuff

03:33:39.840 it's ridiculous on the face of it but it is a very common um

03:33:49.680 it's a very common silliness that occurs and it occurs at this point too it's like if you 0.69

03:34:01.080 spin around in a circle the right number of times and say the right magical you know

03:34:08.020 So if you repeat the right magical formula, then somehow the great gods of anything are – or even, shoot, even demons and stuff are somehow compelled to do what you tell them to do.

03:34:27.160 That's preposterous, and it's preposterous on the face of it.

03:34:32.300 and you can see this with just to interrupt real quick though not to necessarily defend

03:34:40.220 mediterranean magic here i don't have a stake in the fight it's like okay you're gonna try and boss

03:34:47.560 satan around yeah it makes sense to take to it makes sense to wear protection for that dance

03:34:53.020 it makes sense to care about like a banishing ritual after you've invoked the devil but then

03:34:59.820 one of like the fart spell the fart the spell asking loki to kill someone with someone with

03:35:04.840 farting it's like are you sure you want to open that box up like you sure you want him knowing

03:35:10.660 where you live no so here's and it's again one of the reasons i said what i said earlier on and i

03:35:17.800 know that the material on this is much larger than that about our heroes at the beginning of the show

03:35:24.640 so i don't want people to get this misunderstood

03:35:27.540 magic isn't good or bad magic is a tool you can there are good applications of magical things

03:35:39.240 there are grossly impious and improper applications of magical things

03:35:44.820 this is to mention also true currents that continue to stay alive and keep

03:35:59.520 ancestral knowledge amongst the folk during the time of of darkness more than it is a celebration

03:36:08.700 that any of these particular vitkar are you know virtuous aussitru are but there are people that

03:36:19.260 practice aussitru in little pockets little places by themselves betwixt them and the gods as you

03:36:28.460 know as we spoke about you know rack involved and uh and eric um

03:36:37.260 those so this isn't like an endorsement of all of those things but it does bring

03:36:43.500 something into context that i think is important um

03:36:51.020 it's one of those things somebody who is favorite of the gods and has a powerful reputation

03:36:58.460 beyond the veil is able to

03:37:03.080 exp

03:37:04.600 so

03:37:11.440 this ventures into the concept

03:37:14.840 of luck and hymenia

03:37:16.500 if you build up a certain amount

03:37:20.860 of reputation

03:37:22.980 and

03:37:23.800 spiritual might

03:37:28.300 okay i meant to say this earlier on too i apologize i'm just going to put a pin here

03:37:34.080 because it's something i meant to say earlier

03:37:35.500 all the hot topic wizards want to immediately jump in and start being a being a wizard

03:37:43.040 magic and things that would go into the you know magic category of house of true are

03:37:53.920 i've likened it to frosting on a cake but i think it's even beyond that it's like sprinkles

03:38:02.240 on the frosting on a cake if you you have to first have a really good cake

03:38:09.920 you're eating cake you're not eating frosting unless you're a fatty um

03:38:18.700 The thing is, the cake is the thing. You need to have the foundation of a solid religious practice and a meaningful efficacy in all of the realms in order for you to be effective in your attempts to manipulate subtle energies or affect the world around you in a magical context.

03:38:47.080 people like to use it as a shortcut and I don't think that it is at all

03:38:50.860 and I'm not saying this is some great wizard or something

03:38:54.780 but I see this a lot

03:38:59.820 and it's important

03:39:03.700 to have the solid foundation

03:39:05.820 of efficacy as a person

03:39:10.020 before you can start playing with

03:39:13.800 things that are beyond most of our beyond all of our under our full understanding

03:39:22.120 and that only a very few get a glimpse at in a meaningful way

03:39:29.320 chris mission is a second ago about um you know doing special wardings to prevent

03:39:35.320 bad stuff from happening to you summoning and evoking and attempting to contact

03:39:47.400 malevolent forces is a really bad idea and it opens yourself to bringing in negative things

03:39:56.840 that you don't like and that's not to think that you can just like sit around and like

03:40:02.360 wish for cert to enter your body and possess you and do stuff he may very well have better things

03:40:10.680 to do because he is the cosmic giant of destructive fire and whatever and you're the

03:40:18.440 hot topic wizard but in reality if you had the slightest thing to bring that attention

03:40:24.840 you open yourself to bad stuff but in in the inverse and i'll say this and this is just

03:40:33.140 random stuff thrown in it may not seem like it goes here but i think that it does

03:40:37.340 in early modern house to true there was a very heavy um emphasis on doing wardings and banishings

03:40:47.200 and, like, hammer hallowings of space in a defensive way

03:40:54.340 to, like, banish evil spirits or not let bad juju in.

03:41:05.220 I respect where people are coming from,

03:41:08.020 and I'm not trying to say that's illegitimate.

03:41:10.800 what i think is important is having a confidence in your spiritual efficacy

03:41:21.320 and projecting that across the realms i think that the more we treat spiritual forces as other

03:41:30.820 the less connected we are and the less effective we are spiritually in our own lives and in

03:41:39.380 interaction with things beyond the veil or with subtle forces in the world around us i think when we

03:41:53.300 develop reputation and spiritual and moral rectitude in our own lives

03:42:02.820 we are better equipped to work in harmony with

03:42:10.820 well-aligned spiritual forces be they ghosts the spirits of heroes the spirits of ancestors

03:42:22.200 land veteer or if we were you know somehow to get the the attention or favor of one of our our gods

03:42:32.820 I think we are in the best position and best suited if we are healthy, if we are mentally, spiritually, and physically healthy, and if we have reputation and might that speaks well of us in all the realms.

03:42:47.340 There are things and forces that observe us, and, you know, we talk about the philia.

03:42:56.780 There are spiritual forces that also follow us and have attachment to us in the subtle realm or the realm beyond the veil or whatever we want to call it, be it our desir, be it the philia, be it other things that take an interest in our well-being.

03:43:17.340 reputation matters reputation matters in this world and reputation matters in the next world

03:43:25.440 and the better you are able to build reputation for yourself the more other forces in the world

03:43:33.700 and the universe respond to your attempts to work through them or with them in some way

03:43:41.540 Again, I feel almost embarrassed every time I open my mouth on this because it flows out like gobbledygook. There's an intention, but it all sounds so, and I've admitted this before.

03:43:57.000 There's discomfort on talking about some of these things because I don't want to sound ridiculous, but.

03:44:04.540 It would be disrespectful not to admit to the truth of some of these things being legitimate, and I wouldn't want to do that.

03:44:15.140 Go ahead.

03:44:15.840 Just to say here, we like Ragbald Odenskarl and Eric Klawison, simply put, because they died for Asatru, not because they stole from Christians.

03:44:27.000 Right? The magic is an interesting, in the case of these two men, it's almost a kind of like trivia. Whatever they were using magic for, they chose to die rather than be disloyal to their gods.

03:44:43.660 And it's important to restate, and you mentioned it at the time, but it's important to restate, with those two heroes in specific, they had the option.

03:44:54.180 um the church at the time that was a thing converting the pagans is like the number one

03:45:03.300 job of a christian evangelist so you know if they want to repent and forsake uh odin in order to

03:45:13.620 spare their life that's yeah that's always on the table that's a thing and

03:45:20.260 it's very meaningful that they didn't um we have people around us all the time

03:45:31.000 that pretend to be something not ausitru not an afa member not whatever their deal is

03:45:40.880 they will do that to save their job to save their marriage to win a child custody thing

03:45:49.420 that they think it reflects strangely on them for to not lose friends to not be uncomfortable

03:45:57.580 at thanksgiving to all of these things and i'm not joking

03:46:04.380 they're very willing to renounce their faith for

03:46:11.500 fairly minimal comfort these two men when their life is in the balance refuse to renounce

03:46:19.340 their allegiance to the Allfather. And that's, you know, I can't imagine a larger testimony to

03:46:26.980 their commitment to that loyalty. So let's, let's get to the end of the lecture here.

03:46:35.700 Sure.

03:46:37.500 As kind of a recap, King Blotswain dies in 1087. Richard Wagner begins composing

03:46:45.240 in 1848 what happens in between i'm just using bogner as like a vague marker of the romantic

03:46:54.640 period so snorri wrote the prose eta around 1220 the poetic eta was written composed somewhere

03:47:04.020 around 1000 a.d ish depending on how you date certain texts the codex regius was written like

03:47:11.640 physically put to paper around 12 or 1270 flourishing of knowledge due to public

03:47:17.960 the public christian private pagan kind of mindset resulted in this stuff getting written down and

03:47:25.160 all but certainly there's actually two copies of the poetic of the the prose excuse me it's late

03:47:31.640 the poetic ada there's the codex regius and hawksbock so at minimum there was an attempt to

03:47:38.680 copy some of these texts because it was important for these things to survive it was more than just

03:47:44.040 say munder and snorri right so the codex regius actually was lost for a while um it wasn't until

03:47:54.200 1643 that uh brunjolf sveinsson luther and bishop was sent it he then sent it to king

03:48:02.600 frederick iii of denmark who kept it in the royal library of copenhagen for study

03:48:07.080 where it remained until 1971 and then it went back to iceland um they actually moved it by boat at

03:48:12.840 the time because air travel was not considered secure enough for such precious cargo at the time

03:48:20.200 so for about 400 years there most academic understanding of ossature was through the proseta

03:48:30.680 which was the accessible text barring these sort of like academics sometimes have this

03:48:36.680 this hard time because they can't they can't admit folklore exists right some guy can't hear about

03:48:43.960 fafnir because his grandma told him about it he has to have access to the ada to read it right

03:48:53.560 um so hauksbach was written in 1300 ad um it is the earliest source of various sagas and

03:49:01.960 that are attested, described, or written elsewhere. It wasn't until after the Codex Regis,

03:49:08.840 however, that it was written. So, sorry. So, how did people know about this stuff for about three

03:49:17.280 years, or 300 years, between 1300 and 1643, and a little bit after, because it took a while for

03:49:24.020 the poetic aida to actually be translated, read, studied, etc. They had the prosaida,

03:49:30.440 they had oral tradition and folklore um in oral tradition works by breaking things up into units

03:49:39.700 and then conveying them right um oral tradition is remarkably good at conveying certain things

03:49:47.560 because it breaks them up into units right and if one unit changes it doesn't mean that other units

03:49:53.980 will right so we also have grimoires and you know we have people like ragwald and eric who

03:50:02.620 attest to continued knowledge in some form in between right so it's not like ossature was

03:50:10.300 entirely rediscovered in 1643 or sometime after that rather the the study of it was bolstered

03:50:18.380 by access to these edic poems right olavis petri was writing in the 1530s and petter rooted uh

03:50:26.300 rudbeck in this in 1693 which attests to pre regius folklore now yes uh petter rudbeck is

03:50:34.220 writing after the the rediscovery of the codex regius but it wouldn't have been accessible to him

03:50:40.220 um petri in particular is viewed as an unreliable source by some academics because he actually went

03:50:49.800 and studied icelandic lore by like talking to icelanders and and reading stuff and so academics

03:50:57.300 uh some academics very they poo-poo on him in that regard because oh well we can't be certain

03:51:02.480 that he's not making it up or reading things into it because he could have gotten the icelandic

03:51:07.960 and then contaminated the swedish samples that is actually why he is a more reliable source

03:51:14.240 he went to the icelanders he got a purer strain he can be better trusted to separate the the you

03:51:23.060 know simply put the innovations from the ostrich archaisms right because there is there is drift

03:51:30.200 over time in oral tradition but it's a lot slower than people think right particularly once it

03:51:37.100 becomes folklore people stop viewing it as dangerous there is a sense that when odin becomes

03:51:43.020 this character from the before times and is no longer the top deity of the enemy he's no longer

03:51:50.800 dangerous so you can go back to telling stories about him right so this is why olavus petri is

03:51:56.400 actually an important source he is capable of saying oh this odin fella he's important this is

03:52:03.760 a god right um so johan wolfgang von goethe publishes in 1774 which starts the romantic

03:52:15.400 period which was critical of a lot of enlightenment rationalism and the romantic

03:52:21.360 period brings in a lot there's there's this return to nature kind of mindset return to

03:52:29.180 exterior nature but also an interior nature and it's around this time in the romantic period

03:52:35.260 that people start getting into hey maybe we should go back and read this stuff there's one

03:52:42.280 very important person who said hey instead of having schizophrenic delusions why don't we go

03:52:48.200 read this stuff and that man was guido von list who is born um 1848 october 5th and no doubt will

03:52:58.480 be someone I'm out here talking about at some point in the future. But not tonight, not tonight.

03:53:03.140 There you go. So Chris has now signed on to give us part two, the romantic period to Steve

03:53:12.440 McNallan. So we will do that at some point in the future. But Chris, thank you for that.

03:53:20.180 That's a lot of information. I think it's very good information that a lot of folks will be

03:53:24.920 interested in we do have some more questions tonight but i think this will be one that a lot

03:53:31.320 of people take a listen to and get something out of so on a completely different topic but

03:53:40.680 speaking of rainbows 0.96

03:53:44.420 i know that there is no allowing homosexuals in the church but if a gay man or woman wants to find 0.68

03:53:53.020 some kind of redemption outside of the church is it possible for them

03:53:58.260 so this is a truth that might be unpopular people might not like but it is truth

03:54:06.880 kind of apples and oranges with men and women

03:54:11.340 so it's treated a little bit different i think that women making whatever adventurous choices 0.97

03:54:18.800 sure they can change their life around and fix that

03:54:26.000 but we know as men and again i want to want to preface the issue is

03:54:36.140 choosing to participate people that were victimized you know possibly as adults

03:54:45.560 certainly as children I'm not saying they're forever in the gay camp because somebody did

03:54:52.980 something to them that's awful um but if you choose to engage you know if a man chooses to 0.55

03:55:01.700 engage in homosexuality that is a bridge you can't really uncross um as far as some kind 0.57

03:55:12.060 redemption in the eyes of the ice here in the eyes of their ancestors they're welcome to try 0.96

03:55:19.580 and to do the best they can and i leave that judgment up to them their membership in the

03:55:24.460 astro focus simply is a different matter homosexuality amongst males specifically is

03:55:34.940 spread by vampirism it is one of those things that is

03:55:42.060 i mean we're never going to have a hundred percent of the sample size but shockingly

03:55:47.340 disproportionately beyond all reckoning is spread through childhood abuse and then passed on through

03:55:56.780 childhood abuse um male homosexuality is fundamentally a threat to the well-being of

03:56:05.580 our children and we can't allow that into our inning guard and that is what that is it's not 0.96

03:56:14.540 to say that every male homosexual is some kind of horrible person or is somebody that is going to 0.51

03:56:20.780 molest children i'm not saying that i wouldn't make that accusation but that risk is statistically

03:56:27.580 exponentially dangerous and something that we can't in good conscience have in our in our

03:56:35.340 guard, even if we even if we wanted to. Another question. Not a question a Nick and Chris side

03:56:46.820 conversation. So I got Nick putting the questions over in a in like a private chat, but it also has

03:56:52.460 our internal dialogue two. So the next question I got is, somewhat of a tangent, I would love to

03:57:01.580 hear your take on the validity of reconstruction of proto-Indo-European beliefs, deus pater and

03:57:09.320 whatnot, since we are on the topic of timelessness. Timelines. Oh, timelines. Okay, cool. Reading. I

03:57:19.520 I guess timelessness works though.

03:57:21.500 Cool, so reading its thing,

03:57:24.760 having old eyes and not wanting to squint

03:57:27.700 is a counter indicative thing.

03:57:31.040 And so those two are at play here.

03:57:33.820 So timelines, I,

03:57:41.940 I'm trying to think of the context to put the question in.

03:57:44.760 if we're starting fresh if the austral folk assembly doesn't exist and if we're having this

03:57:55.080 conversation in 1950 pretend that proto-indo-european reconstruction isn't a new thing let's say that

03:58:06.680 we're aware of the existence of it in 1950 there were a lot of good ways this could have been done

03:58:17.560 so i appreciate you pointing that out

03:58:21.280 our gods didn't spring into existence once old norse was invented or once aryan peoples migrated

03:58:32.140 into scandinavia that doesn't bear out logically our gods were the gods of our race since the very

03:58:40.980 dawn of our race and our uniqueness as a people they crafted us they crafted our souls

03:58:48.620 the gods that we worship were the gods of our folk in the very beginning and that takes us to

03:58:56.640 this Proto-Indo-European time it also means that the gods and the conceptions we have of Arian

03:59:06.580 divinity are all they go back to a common source and that I mean that is inherently a valid way to

03:59:24.520 do this so there's a bunch of different right ways we could have done things

03:59:32.440 we could you know instead of using old norse we could do everything in german or you know medieval

03:59:38.440 high german or uh we could do it in gothic we could do it in anglo-saxon there's a number of

03:59:50.200 right ways to do this that could have happened another right way that could have happened

03:59:57.000 is for us to try to do everything in a um reconstructed proto-injo-european nomenclature

04:00:09.080 that would have been just fine and i don't um fault the validity of that i don't you know

04:00:14.840 that is not bad because it's bad here are the reasons that i think what we are currently doing

04:00:21.360 is better because we're midstream of doing it this way and this way is shown that it is blessed

04:00:28.560 by the iser that is a huge one but even if it weren't proto-indo-european reconstruction isn't

04:00:38.400 we don't have proto-indo-european sources we theorize based on commonalities amongst

04:00:50.960 other better attested developments amongst aryan peoples to trace back

04:00:58.120 what we assume a root religion would have looked like and i don't think that's wrong or invalid

04:01:05.020 but we have access to in the most complete and the best and the best attested way

04:01:15.600 Aryan religiosity as was practiced in Old Norse in a period in Scandinavia where we have literature

04:01:26.200 that is the most complete most connected version of the authentic faith of our ancestors that we

04:01:37.680 have and as i mentioned earlier when stuff synchronizes and all the pieces fit together

04:01:44.300 cleanly it makes everything function with a exponentially potent power

04:01:50.980 practicing this in the old norse nomenclature with so much almost all of our lore being written

04:02:02.080 in that conception in that worldview in that cohesive nomenclature is the best and most

04:02:13.100 useful route towards getting to those our shared gods it is also and i think this is very meaningful

04:02:26.080 there was many opportunities for things to be successful the thing that was successful is the

04:02:33.560 all father awakening the soul of our founder steve mcnallan under the name odin under the practice

04:02:44.760 of ausitru in the nomenclature of the sagas and the eddas that is what took root that is what has

04:02:55.400 thrived that's what is existent in a way that is moving forward and that is currently bringing

04:03:03.160 worship and glory to the Aesir, to the shared gods of the Indo-European Aryan people. That's

04:03:11.780 what's working. If our troth is to the Aesir, if our loyalty is to those Proto-Indo-European gods, 0.96

04:03:22.620 this is the thing that is bringing them temples. This is the thing that is bringing our folk home 1.00

04:03:30.580 to their worship. This is the thing that is working, and all Aryan peoples should get behind 1.00

04:03:38.000 this to glorify our gods and to bring our folk back into trough with them. But yes, as a concept, 0.91

04:03:48.400 no, I don't think that, you know, reconstruction of proto-Indo-European belief is wrong in any way.

04:03:54.340 I think reconstruction and re-understanding of what that looked like can inform and help, you know, add richness and add dimension to our practice.

04:04:07.640 Absolutely.

04:04:09.280 Nick mentioned a book in the chat, The Wheel and Donkey, Deep Ancestors.

04:04:17.420 And I think Deep Ancestors touches on a lot of those.

04:04:20.500 I know it's been, you know, treated in a number of different books and different papers and such.

04:04:27.440 Deep Ancestors, I think, is one that was that I read that really struck a chord with me that talks about those common roots that tie our peoples together in, you know, Aryan or Proto and European conceptualization and language.

04:04:44.020 I think that's really important.

04:04:45.460 So, yeah, I think that's fascinating and good, but I don't think we should sacrifice this for that.

04:04:53.320 I think we should roll that into this, help that shape the way we practice this.

04:04:59.860 i think i think that people sometimes get into this problem where like christians in america

04:05:10.220 often view biblical israel as this sort of golden age to be mimicked and they view religion

04:05:17.860 christianity as being about basically making our society more like biblical israel

04:05:24.160 and that mindset gets transposed onto other religions like if you're a taoist you want to

04:05:33.780 you know make america look like warring states china you're a buddhist you want to make america

04:05:39.740 look like india circa 550 bc right and that's not really the case with us like we haven't 0.70

04:05:52.340 You know, Jews have been given explicit commandments by their deity, or so they claim to, like, dress a certain way. 0.84

04:05:59.220 We haven't. 0.98

04:06:01.080 We have no reason to privilege the Old Norse period over the Proto-Indo-European period, or vice versa,

04:06:10.120 except in as much as they are useful in bringing us to the gods.

04:06:14.460 We worship the gods here, now, today.

04:06:16.920 our aunts our descendants are going to use different names for the gods in how they speak

04:06:25.280 unless they start speaking old norse again and if they do then it becomes a living language

04:06:30.260 new norse young norse and then they're going to start calling the gods different names eventually

04:06:36.940 anyways frankly it's kind of in my opinion a foolish prospect to think that one language could

04:06:43.720 like thor is bigger than us surely his name is bigger than our ability to pronounce so then

04:06:53.960 what are you really trying to achieve by being archaic in like oh we should worship in the

04:07:03.320 proto-indo-european fashion i'm not saying we shouldn't be informed by that stuff certainly not

04:07:07.960 But we're worshiping today, not 7000 BC.

04:07:13.200 Well, yeah.

04:07:13.640 And I mean, the same thing gets said about today versus the old Norse period.

04:07:19.380 And the thing is, you pick something and go with it.

04:07:22.380 And this is what we've picked and what we're going with and what's taken us in a way that's successful and has brought everything together in a meaningful whole that all connects.

04:07:33.600 but fundamentally and i think this is important to

04:07:36.400 make a note of and i think it's especially relevant on today's episode

04:07:44.160 eric and and racking rackingwald um

04:07:50.240 they weren't scholars on old norse they didn't try to do viking stuff or pretend they're vikings

04:07:59.120 um they were late medieval renaissance era swedes not pretending they were anything other than who

04:08:12.880 they are reaching out and establishing troth with odin and the isir you can do this in a lot of

04:08:25.520 right ways. Yes, you should do this with the House of True Folk Assembly, because together

04:08:32.740 we harness our collective ability to move this forward. When we're dispersed, we're disordered,

04:08:42.360 and we don't move this forward. But, and I've said this before, if we find ourselves on some

04:08:49.120 distant planet at some distant time and all of the source knowledge is irradiated and we don't have

04:08:56.140 it we still have access to our gods they are still our gods whatever language we use at the time

04:09:05.600 is still effective to communicate with them so thank you thank you i was i've literally spent

04:09:14.280 last three minutes waiting for my turn just so i could say that very thing saying about your your

04:09:20.840 space arians i totally wanted to quote that but now let's skip to the last question because it's

04:09:28.040 in the same vein of what we're talking about and then you know that sure let me scroll to it cool

04:09:34.360 in regards to the mediterranean area how does the afa feel about hellenic polytheism and the ancient

04:09:41.160 Greek religion. Okay, so I want to say this is a fundamental truth that transcends anything else,

04:09:55.580 any other consideration. Anything that glorifies and elevates our gods is good.

04:10:06.380 And I would never stand in the way of or disrespect that.

04:10:14.100 That said, I think that the Hellenic version of our faith is more...

04:10:28.380 the knowledge that we have of it in modern day has been very much

04:10:39.300 um tainted by a couple of different currents there was a significant mixture of other of

04:10:51.660 not Aryan religiosity that made its way into Hellenic polytheism in the ancestral period

04:10:59.180 and then we have very little source material from pious polytheistic

04:11:09.520 loyal to the Olympians Greeks we have a lot of material from later atheistic

04:11:21.660 humanism uh uh you humorized philosophical treatises where the gods are like

04:11:31.980 characters to make their point but to where the people are

04:11:37.080 have very little piety or are straight up impious and sacrilegious i don't think we have

04:11:48.540 the clear conception

04:11:50.680 of what

04:11:51.940 Hellenic polytheism

04:11:54.420 looked like in a very

04:11:56.400 pious age in the same way

04:11:58.460 and I

04:12:00.460 think that the modern

04:12:02.260 attempts at it again that have

04:12:04.460 been enough to where I've seen them

04:12:06.400 and I'm aware of them

04:12:07.580 are almost exclusively 0.64

04:12:10.780 degenerate

04:12:12.080 I don't see 1.00

04:12:16.580 pious worship and again this is i am certain that somebody out there

04:12:24.480 there's some you know greek man out there that does these things so this is a general statement

04:12:31.620 on what has gotten enough attention that it's come to my awareness but i don't see pious

04:12:38.020 worshipers of apollo or pious worshipers of zeus what i see is it's immediately

04:12:47.860 backic orgies it goes from zero to just complete hedonistic abandon of moral rectitude immediately

04:12:58.820 i don't see a lot of

04:13:01.140 morally upright virtuous behavior that way i see it go almost immediately to like

04:13:17.700 an excuse for um degeneracy an excuse for uh for sexual extremism and not

04:13:26.900 a call to virtue and that's something that i that i don't see with and this is the case not just

04:13:34.820 with that but with almost all returns to or attempts to reconstruct a form of paganism

04:13:42.220 and i don't mean that so much with um slavic or baltic countries i mean that really specifically

04:13:50.200 with like celtic paganism and mediterranean paganism it very very quickly becomes degenerate

04:13:59.980 and i don't think that again that's a very broad brush so i want to qualify it that way

04:14:05.480 uh what say you chris with regards to the united states i agree with your uh bleak assessment

04:14:16.760 um i haven't seen anything equivalent to us worshiping zeus and apollo in the united states

04:14:25.020 in i've done a bit more research on how things are going in greece um

04:14:30.360 i think if you're greek in greece it's it's one thing to do you know um greece is an interesting

04:14:41.960 case for the return to piety in europe because the orthodox church is still deeply in bed

04:14:50.240 with the government in a lot of ways um so like i remember i was reading about this because

04:14:56.440 there's like one group uh its acronym is y-s-e-e which is the acronym from greek the name is the

04:15:05.140 supreme council of ethnic hellenes which is an absolutely amazing name for a group by the way

04:15:10.000 um but the they wanted to do like marriages and funerals and in order to uh so the way that as

04:15:20.140 i understand it the way it was related related to me the greek state was set up so that the only

04:15:25.480 religions it legally recognized were christianity islam and judaism greece had freedom to practice

04:15:32.020 religion but only those three could interface with the government and so like if you were a buddhist

04:15:36.920 you wanted to do a funeral you had to get a greek bishop to sign off on it and there was like an

04:15:41.800 internal agreement between the rabbis bishops and imams of greece they just weren't going to give any

04:15:49.000 legitimacy to the the hellenists the zeus worshipers so there was like a row about about

04:15:57.720 that of them basically being denied their constitutional rights um i know they have

04:16:03.800 temples i don't know the degree of their piety or how organizationally coherent they are um

04:16:13.160 again this is in greece which i think is a little different from the implicitly american answer that

04:16:20.680 you gave would that be would that is where you were giving an american answer am i correct in

04:16:24.840 that assessment sir i was giving a stuff that has made its way to my attention answer which

04:16:32.040 those are likely one in the same but details matter um i like greek people i like greek stuff

04:16:42.840 i'm i like baklava yeah temple yeah baklava and greek temples are nice um i like feta

04:16:51.160 the back of the bacchic orgies let's not have that um but uh i think it's important to remember

04:17:00.280 here that a lot, just expanding

04:17:02.100 on what the Altair Yothi said about source material,

04:17:04.760 a lot of what we

04:17:08.200 know about Hellenic religion comes to

04:17:10.160 us through media that was

04:17:12.160 made for entertainment, and

04:17:14.140 that carries with

04:17:16.180 it certain, I

04:17:18.240 don't want to say errors, but like as

04:17:20.120 an example, Aeschylus

04:17:22.180 made a play in which he depicted

04:17:24.180 Achilles and

04:17:26.100 Patroclus as homosexual lovers 1.00

04:17:28.040 and the 0.93

04:17:29.700 crowd found that to be so blasphemous because they weren't homosexual lovers that they stormed

04:17:37.640 the stage and tried to murder him and he only escaped by like physically fleeing for his life

04:17:43.700 like presumably the rest of the actors slowed down the mob that was trying to kill him

04:17:47.940 and so that clear authorial whatever it's called when a an author just takes a decision and makes

04:17:58.740 that into the story, gets like theological attention where it really shouldn't, that

04:18:09.700 doesn't actually, that shouldn't be accounted for in trying to understand the

04:18:14.340 mindset of these people and reconstruct, or sorry, and find eternal principles in

04:18:20.640 in these these ancient uh as to attestations of practice and theology and

04:18:29.840 my con my thought would be we do have stuff in the norse corpus that was made by people

04:18:39.440 who were trying to educate people in the future trying to fling a light into the future trying

04:18:45.680 to make future generations aware of what this stuff was and what was important it's the poetic

04:18:51.560 in proseta and the gilfagening of the proseta namely a little plug for a future episode that

04:18:57.600 will be coming down the pipeline as i understand it um i've spent a lot of time reading classical

04:19:05.060 literature and the like and i i'm not aware of anyone who sat down and was like all right

04:19:10.280 let's start with the basics zeus is in charge short of like homer and it's a little cheap to

04:19:18.480 start with homer you know we don't have any kind of here's the basics guides for theology and even

04:19:28.880 practice in a certain sense like we get with the poetic ada and the gilfaggoning and various texts

04:19:34.380 like that and what you do have is so is like you like you both said it's so watched and such like

04:19:43.500 you mentioned the bacchanalian orgies obviously bacchus being the roman version but yeah but if

04:19:51.260 we're going to greek dionysus dionysian orgies yeah but that's not even a with the with the

04:19:59.580 what i would call the legitimate or like that that that's such uh modern and by modern i mean like

04:20:09.020 like uh middle eastern take on it yeah because if you really look at dionysus

04:20:18.780 his thing is liminality and thresholds and that's why that's why drinking is involved

04:20:25.020 in into a way because that puts you in a very liminal mind space he has a lot of attributes

04:20:30.140 very that i could actually relate straight to owen but there's so much trash from elsewhere

04:20:39.820 and from the agnostic atheist platonic philosophizing that just gets washed onto greek 0.84

04:20:48.860 that you're you're you're looking for a needle in a haystack to get to actually any truth

04:20:56.080 and anything that was actually arian i think i think part of the problem there also is you

04:21:02.360 bring this up with like the dionysian mysteries the philosophers have a tendency to move towards

04:21:09.580 like their skepticism brings them towards impiety at times but you have the opposite

04:21:15.160 problem with the mysteries where let's just ignore the question of legitimacy or anything and just

04:21:20.020 assume they're legitimate these are extremely specific in-depth cults for a specific audience

04:21:27.180 who had already fulfilled their obligations in their traditional ethnic religion that's not to

04:21:32.640 say that again without actually referring to any one set of mystery religion here you know that's

04:21:38.360 not to say that they're legitimate or illegitimate it's to say that that's not really the point like

04:21:44.340 we in the present day obviously care about starting at the basics the advanced stuff

04:21:52.240 is not it's it's this is kind of silly but this is like a christian example you see this with

04:21:59.380 people who like are really interested in high level russian orthodox monk mysticism

04:22:06.600 but they haven't gone through catechesis like they haven't undergone the basic change of the

04:22:12.880 soul that their religion requires them to do before they can even think about doing mysticism.

04:22:18.420 The mystery cults of the Hellenic world would require of one a fulfillment of effectively what 0.80

04:22:26.640 we're trying to do here before one, like you couldn't participate in the Aloysian mysteries 0.72

04:22:32.300 if you weren't, among other things, essentially a catechized member of the, I'm tired, so I'm just 0.77

04:22:40.160 saying the simple hellenic church don't let those basement wizards hear you say that you 0.84

04:22:44.880 don't have to do the deed for 30 years before you can do the magic come on

04:22:53.120 do we have any more questions so we don't we're at an end um i think there there's the one that

04:23:02.400 go the mayo sent in i don't i i'm sorry i'm really tired i wasn't sure of the seriousness of that one

04:23:08.600 I don't know what he's doing.

04:23:09.880 You violate the rules of the chat when I'm like, ah, there's none left.

04:23:14.440 I don't know if that's there.

04:23:15.400 I just didn't want to talk about it.

04:23:16.800 So, Chris, all right, here we go.

04:23:25.860 Chris, tell us about the fisherman that was accused of consulting a fin

04:23:31.880 to give him good wins.

04:23:34.360 Go.

04:23:35.920 I have no – I'm sorry.

04:23:37.340 I don't know.

04:23:39.320 Sometimes there's reasons when they come internally while I'm like,

04:23:43.740 ah, we're out of questions tonight.

04:23:45.800 He was going to skip my question too, so don't feel bad, Goathebode. 0.74

04:23:50.440 Wait, what was your question, Nick? 0.99

04:23:52.780 Mine's the one with the two question marks to start with it.

04:23:55.740 Well, so, Nick, yours is confusing because you're in the chat as Nick,

04:23:59.580 and I don't know if it's a question or if it's you, like,

04:24:03.140 talking to Chris about your nonsense.

04:24:04.920 well you should not mix the two don't blur the lines uh anyways bode we will get to it i genuinely

04:24:15.560 have never heard this tale that you're talking about about this i know they're so i need to i

04:24:20.600 need to do some research before i can adequately address that um truth is one of our virtues so i

04:24:27.480 will i will admit i'm unaware of that i do hold the liberty of i don't have to answer internal

04:24:32.120 questions from uh afa leadership so i take those kind of when i want to when i don't i've i've

04:24:38.280 read stuff about fins and their persecution by the swedes i just don't know if this is yeah

04:24:43.640 fins are kind of a the fins and the sammy are the the poetic go-to's for like yeah getting you know

04:24:50.520 strange wizard insight on stuff so okay next question so especially with the mediterranean

04:24:56.600 versions of all the astrology blah waiting weeks and weeks for just stuff to line up memorizing

04:25:03.260 all that jazz and killing the cow just to beg for your hangnail to stop hurting at what point 0.99

04:25:10.640 with all of this does it just become better to do it your damn self if you want good fortune 0.99

04:25:16.580 get a job so point taken and i want to 0.97

04:25:22.100 all right i will farm it out to chris first but i want to speak on this because i

04:25:28.600 like where your head's at and i'm not plus that says darn there's a space between there's a little

04:25:34.960 break between that r and that n i can't see it because i'm old and i'm squinting and it's late

04:25:41.340 at night. So let the record indicate I said, damn, not him. Go ahead. 0.98

04:25:49.200 Speaking of the Hellenic world, there is a phrase that goes something like the gods help those who

04:25:55.200 help themselves. And Greeks actually, to this day, continue to say something to the tune of,

04:26:00.980 you know, Athena guide my hand as I do this.

04:26:06.240 I think in an older time, people knew a lot less about how the world works.

04:26:13.160 People were a lot weaker in the amount of causal power they had over the world.

04:26:18.660 And magic was very appealing to people who couldn't get a job

04:26:23.840 because they were experiencing a famine, not because they were lazy.

04:26:30.980 I'm not trying to knock magic or, frankly, religion here when I say this.

04:26:35.060 I think that people turn to anything when they are legitimately desperate.

04:26:40.680 I think your, if I may summarize it, there's no, you can't magic your way out of being a loser is completely correct.

04:26:50.300 um i think there is a degree of legitimacy to the idea of using magic as a way of conceptualizing

04:26:59.260 how to act i've never really done that i've never felt the need to i'm not trying to brag when i say

04:27:05.540 that it's just a fact um i think if you're using magic to try and solve a problem that is

04:27:12.440 fundamentally caused by your lack of virtue though then that's a that is like a put your

04:27:18.800 house in order before you start telling other people what to do kind of a thing. I know that

04:27:23.100 I feel kind of bad saying that because I'm telling other people what to do by saying that,

04:27:28.240 but you get the metaphor I'm trying to make here.

04:27:32.280 So I want to say, I'm going to throw this out there. I think you're making a really good point.

04:27:41.860 This is the difference. I don't know. Again, it's late.

04:27:48.800 One time, when I was living in St. Augustine and trying to get my feet under me, I was dangerously low on funds.

04:28:03.460 And the ends weren't meeting, and I was in a spot where we were about to go on a trip up to Winter Nights in Pennsylvania.

04:28:12.220 in and i was at a you know the point where you know a couple dollars here and there really mattered

04:28:23.420 and so i did a rune galder um

04:28:31.340 you know i feel silly calling it magical working but i did a rune galder um directed incantation

04:28:40.700 thing about Fehu and about, you know, the situation I was in to hope that I would find

04:28:52.220 a boon. And then within a week, I had a couple of interesting occurrences I had at the bar I was

04:29:02.940 working at i had um i'd found money which i don't do but i found like you know 20s and stuff

04:29:16.940 i had someone tip me money which they don't typically tip the bouncing staff

04:29:23.580 and then and again it's it's small change but it was really meaningful for me at the time

04:29:28.540 when we were driving up to um winter nights we stopped in bethesda maryland to gas up and at the

04:29:41.500 gas station i found a wallet with four hundred dollars in it no identification in it no cards

04:29:52.180 no anything else an empty blank wallet with 400 in it so there was no like oh i should turn this

04:30:02.660 in i should find the owner i should do this or that i am not saying a million percent that that

04:30:11.220 is magic happening and it's a miracle but that's the only time in my life that's happened and it

04:30:19.460 It happened directly following my very rare attempt at trying to cause something like that to happen.

04:30:32.740 So I think a lot of the time magic is born out of, or the use of magical practice is born out of desperation and out of need.

04:30:43.360 And I think there's a power in that.

04:30:45.340 I think there's something that happens embodied in, you know, the mystery of Nauthees to where that adds an authenticity to the energy you are putting into a magical circumstance.

04:31:02.960 I think magic might be best used when you don't have anything else to do.

04:31:08.600 And if you've gone the distance you can go, you pray and you use magic and you hope for the best.

04:31:14.580 Again, I don't think the gods are great on wanting to necessarily answer prayer outside of you making the efforts.

04:31:25.280 And I believe that very much.

04:31:26.780 And I think that involves magic, but I think it also involves just general piety.

04:31:33.020 I think that there are times that the gods are well disposed to want to answer calls for help.

04:31:41.900 if you are doing your part to make things happen but again you know as nick says you know you do

04:31:51.460 magic about good fortune go get a job so yeah if you are trying to do something magical to

04:31:57.740 bring good fortune your way you should also be putting in applications and trying to do what

04:32:06.140 you can do and then you should be baking the cake and then if you want to add some frosting to it

04:32:13.460 okay um you know somebody put kind of in the comments I don't know how I don't know how 0.98

04:32:20.480 intentional it is or how not but it's a valid point it's like fat people are bad hot topic

04:32:25.940 wizards I think something about that too if you're in bad shape go to the gym do the work

04:32:36.140 if you need help cool but be doing the work in order to get it and i think a truth in that

04:32:44.940 comment is also build your foundation to where it is solid before you try to work on the little

04:32:51.340 fine tuning of of mysticism i've said before to some of the basement wizards i'm like cool

04:32:58.300 how about i stand at one end of the football field you stand at the other

04:33:01.660 and I start coming at you and you start casting spells

04:33:05.360 and you see what happens first, you know, who's going to win?

04:33:10.240 Am I going to get to you and beat you down?

04:33:12.740 Or is your magic missile going to hit before I get there?

04:33:18.780 And it's funny because when put in a practical real-world scenario,

04:33:23.920 it doesn't work like these people suggest that it does.

04:33:29.320 and the people that suggest that it does it doesn't a kind of a thing to put out there on

04:33:37.300 magic people conceive that you're going to cast a spell and you're going to shoot out the hadoukens

04:33:43.840 when you do the do the right little semicircle on the on the the directional pad 0.99

04:33:49.640 magic isn't about like shooting fireballs and like calling down lightning strikes and whatever

04:33:57.660 very, very often is about very subtle things that others might not perceive, but that the person

04:34:05.400 practitioners, you know, the practitioner of subtle arts will notice and can, you know,

04:34:12.380 nudge something. It's not about altering the fundamentals of reality that we all understand

04:34:19.440 And in a big, jarring, ridiculous way that challenges belief, it's about recognizing synchronicity and harnessing synchronicity towards a willed end.

04:34:32.560 And in reality, that doesn't look like it does in a movie or something fantastical.

04:34:41.480 But we've kind of it. I like this episode a lot. I like the information Chris presented.

04:34:47.300 but I also really like we're talking about a topic in depth that we don't often spend a lot

04:34:56.420 of time on. And I hope that our audience appreciates the subtleties of it. Again,

04:35:02.200 it's not the majority of stuff we talk about, but it is important and it is relevant. And I think

04:35:08.480 that there's a segment of our audience that wishes that we addressed it a little bit more.

04:35:14.520 I'm glad we got an opportunity tonight. Chris, thank you for joining us. We appreciate you.

04:35:19.720 Your episodes are always awesome. You prepare and do your research and you are able to,

04:35:25.800 in relatively short notice, develop a mastery of a topic to present to us, which is awesome.

04:35:34.280 And so thank you for being on tonight. It's a pleasure as always, sir.

04:35:39.960 all right well been a good show uh as he alluded to earlier next week speckinger's fawn and i will

04:35:50.520 be on to talk about and begin our study of snorries etta we will talk about the introduction

04:35:59.380 and we will begin the gilf beginning so we're very excited about that and we're excited to

04:36:06.400 have you guys with us. Until then, hail the Iser, hail the folk, hail the AFA. Remember, victory never sleeps.

04:36:36.400 We'll be right back.

04:37:06.400 Transcription by CastingWords

04:37:36.400 Thank you.

04:38:06.400 Thank you.

04:38:36.400 Thank you.

04:39:06.400 Thank you.

Asatru Folk Assembly - January 15, 2026

1⧸14⧸26 Victory Never Sleeps, Ep 184 - Rainbow 🌈 in the Dark

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