Asatru Folk Assembly - 11⧸30⧸22 Victory Never Sleeps, Episode 21 - Njörðr

00:00:00.000 To be continued...

00:00:30.000 Thank you.

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00:01:30.000 Thank you.

00:02:00.000 Thank you.

00:02:30.000 Thank you.

00:03:00.000 Hello, everybody, and welcome once again to Victory Never Sleeps.

00:03:17.880 This week, we have Witten Svahn joining us once again to talk about one of our holy gods.

00:03:24.920 This week, we will be focusing our conversation on Nyordher.

00:03:29.180 this is the most recent of our gods that we have dedicated a temple to and so we're going to have

00:03:40.480 a little bit of that to talk about tonight and then going from here are all gods that

00:03:45.760 that are waiting on their temples and we're going to try to get to those as quickly as we can to

00:03:50.320 make those reality but yeah thinking if there's anything top of top of the program we need to

00:03:58.700 talk about tonight um updates i guess are in order we are we're getting very much closer to uh making

00:04:09.100 sigerheim a reality um i'm very excited about that we got a lot of exciting things going on

00:04:14.780 trying to make that happen um got just over 17 and a half percent of the down payment taken care of

00:04:24.140 as far as y'all's generous donations so please keep those coming in if you are able and i should

00:04:30.460 have something pretty exciting to tell you in relatively short order um and we are also

00:04:36.540 continuing and doing very well on uh paying off njordshoff which will be our our uh first or

00:04:45.580 whatever step we're on on uh acquiring phrasehoff next but first we need to pay off the hoff for

00:04:53.500 the god that we are celebrating and discussing this evening um yeah those of you wondering where

00:05:02.780 to catch us we are here on youtube we're over on entropy if you guys want to participate in super

00:05:08.860 chats or if you guys want to throw us any tips we really appreciate that um or on odyssey or vk

00:05:18.380 and uh every friday this program is up on spotify as a podcast if you if you don't catch it live

00:05:27.540 you're you're always welcome to catch it there so get us started tonight svan what uh what do

00:05:35.560 you think folks need to know about nyorder that they may not already be coming into the show aware

00:05:42.240 of or you know run that down for us briefly if you would uh sure biggest thing i would say is uh

00:05:50.960 this is where we start to uh touch base on the the the alignments of the gods the families or the

00:06:00.160 the allegiances or the uh it could be even viewed as like um powers and those powers i guess the

00:06:09.360 best way would be to relate it would be like um ideologies amongst humans these powers these

00:06:16.720 positions these uh forces we're starting to broach into uh you know as we go down the list

00:06:24.720 this is where we start to touch into the vanir and that is a big one to understand and try to

00:06:31.200 get our minds around what the Vanir are in relation to the Aesir, and how the Vanir are

00:06:42.280 now also the Aesir, and it also kind of helps us correlate some of the confusion around

00:06:49.120 Snorri Stutlason's Jotuns and Ettenbrides, or Jotunbrides as some people have called

00:06:57.000 them we start to really broach that subject with nyord uh nyorder is um you know not really seen

00:07:07.960 or correction is not very mentioned by name in continental germania um before the nordic periods

00:07:15.960 but is after and what we see is a linguistic connection almost immediately with uh nerthus

00:07:24.760 and Njörður. And there is some hints and things in the late Nordic period of a feminine,

00:07:32.300 the wife of Njörður is mentioned. So the correlation of understanding that the twin

00:07:39.100 divinities, the idea of the lord and lady, the masculine feminine is deeply vanic in its

00:07:49.640 corpus, in its flow. But understanding that the differences between the Vanek and the Aesir

00:07:59.220 were necessary and purposeful and required, I think, one of the biggest precepts that

00:08:07.660 Aesitru makes poignantly known that differentiates it somewhat from other, say,

00:08:15.780 like just European or European paganism or something of that nature is the idea of the

00:08:21.980 Aesir and the Vanir and this conflict coming into alignment and what that means as opposed to just

00:08:29.980 having the gods fight the primordial powers. They also fight a third party and then they align with

00:08:39.520 them. So that's the first time I think when we talk about New Earth, you know, the bounty of

00:08:46.900 peace and the truce between heaven and earth, I think is really a broad kind of understanding of

00:08:56.280 where I think I wanted to kind of go tonight. So, yeah. No, that's fantastic. And I think it sets

00:09:06.740 the stage really nicely for uh tonight's discussion um in the meantime while you were

00:09:14.260 speaking we got a question and we also got a 50 donation uh from rolling uh roland blake this is

00:09:24.180 not his first substantial donation and it is much much appreciated with folks like you we will we'll

00:09:31.220 be able to make this happen in no time very excited and very appreciative uh we have a

00:09:36.900 question from sarah accompanied by five dollars thank you so much sarah uh nick can you put up

00:09:44.980 the picture of nyord's mural so that we can discuss a feature of it

00:09:53.780 all right oh never mind all right disregard first no keep it up there it's cool but the the

00:10:00.980 so some of you that may not know one of the cool things and different things about uh in your top

00:10:06.180 especially in the mural space is the way the walls are there there's this uh feature that you're

00:10:12.660 looking at right now that's flat on the main wall but it also has two and i realize the hand gestures

00:10:19.060 i'm making are off the screen now so that's kind of dumb anyways it's got two walls that go off at

00:10:24.820 an angle so this mural actually is it is a three paneled mural um and question for any of you who

00:10:32.740 have seen it is witten swan there we go swan's fans clearing it up for me witten swan who is the

00:10:40.100 female in the forest in the new yorkshoff mural yeah uh that again that's kind of what we just

00:10:48.900 i just briefly touched on was um the vanic uh traditions the the one of the deep intrinsic

00:10:58.180 things that happened from continental germania all the way to the nordic period is the procession of

00:11:04.740 either a boat or a wane and a wane is a wagon or where in essence the vonir get their namesake from

00:11:14.100 and so the connection between uh germanic religiosity of our ancestors and nordic

00:11:22.660 religiosity of our ancestors or orthopraxy that they were conducting is seen in both which is

00:11:28.820 very rare you don't usually see a deep connectivity between the two but you do in the form of

00:11:34.500 processions with wanes and and and boats and and this really ties in with tacitus's uh accounts of

00:11:48.020 worshiping nerthus and he also makes an account about isis but i think that by that time the roman

00:11:56.100 empire was pulling in foreign religions um pretty regularly and he was a product of his time he was

00:12:03.700 associating the cult of isis in rome with what the germanics were doing even though the germanics

00:12:10.900 weren't pulling any foreign religion in so there was just some some uh you know similarities and

00:12:16.740 he was trying to connect that so uh that image of the woman or the the maiden or the lady is uh

00:12:26.820 is nerthus or as she's known in in tacitus uh tacitus germania though she may be may be known

00:12:36.580 amongst the um the nords as nioran because it is mentioned in lokasana uh which i don't again

00:12:44.820 there's a lot of stuff to digest about that poem in and of itself and about its purpose and who

00:12:50.340 wrote it and what time it was written um the it is mentioned that njord has a sister or a female

00:13:01.380 counterpart named neuron and so there's speculation that nervous formed into neuron or um

00:13:10.420 um may have even shifted into like nertha or ertha and uh eventually into yorth and so thus

00:13:20.640 there's njorth and yorth um so some people speculate that yorth even though she's mentioned

00:13:28.580 as a jotun by snorri is really nerthus of the continental germania and that the linguistics

00:13:40.140 was the thing that really kind of evolutionized that uh she's wearing a braided dress from the

00:13:47.380 bronze age and that i was just i wanted to um connect they had found braided dresses in danish

00:13:56.720 and uh northern german bogs in which they were like a hemp rope that was braided down both in

00:14:03.940 chest piece and in a kind of like a skirt of a fairly short skirt with a golden or bronze um

00:14:12.180 belt buckle so and these are attested and found so i thought that would be fitting to place that

00:14:19.940 imagery upon her and of course to the veil because in tacitus's accounts he says that the godstead

00:14:28.580 that was being carried around was veiled so that that her face was not seen and so and again this

00:14:37.060 has attestments to the idea of the name nerthus and of njord meaning or having reference to the

00:14:44.340 same like linguistic roots as nether to be underneath or beneath something like water or

00:14:50.340 the earth or both um as you as you would in a in a in a marsh or a spring so uh the the connections

00:14:58.980 to that being that which is hidden underneath and um so that's the reason why i gave her a floral

00:15:07.940 uh wreath around her head and a veil she's wearing a bronze age braid and she is hidden

00:15:14.900 in the trees because of tacitus's references that the the priesthood they kept the um the wane on a

00:15:24.100 special island and it was completely separated and shown away um it is mentioned that tacitus

00:15:30.740 said that there were um war slaves or people that were indentured because of capture or whatever and

00:15:37.300 they were brought around they they carried the wane around and then when they went to the island

00:15:42.020 Now, he was either told or – it's most likely he did not see this, but he was told that when they go there, they were sacrificed along with this, and there's not 100% on that.

00:15:58.360 I would say that the biggest thing is we know that there were bog sacrifices, but Tacitus also makes point that the bog sacrifices weren't always good.

00:16:07.980 They were based on societal things that were seen as unnatural, unseemly, dishonorable, or non-moral.

00:16:15.680 They were actually anti-moral.

00:16:18.680 And they would commit a lot of those people to the bogs.

00:16:24.340 But there's a lot of argument and contention in between whether that was the case or simply it was made to be kept a secret or, you know, there's no real furtherance on that.

00:16:38.800 So there's two separate things about the Wayne and Nerthus, which he does call Terra Mater, which is another thing he may have gotten wrong.

00:16:48.600 In the sense that the Romans and the Greeks were viewing Terra Mater, one, as a primordial, so kind of Jotun-esque, but that they considered more of the earth, earth, not necessarily like the places between like water and earth, like springs or marshes.

00:17:07.620 Oh, wow. Nice. I'm amazed every time. Yes. So what I wanted to do here was really point in the Vanek cycles of what I would call dualistic divinity, in which the Vaner are very, very, very poignantly strong about masculine and feminine polarities.

00:17:34.780 And not against each other, but in complement to each other.

00:17:38.800 And so when we're talking about divinities, you know, of course, the human connection in which I think our ancestors either applied siblinghood or applied marriage is about the unification or the relation between the masculine and feminine power of those gods.

00:18:04.880 And it's seen as symbolic, whether it's their brother and sister or whether they're seen as, you know, husband and wife.

00:18:12.020 And even it's referenced, you know, that if you look at in the Euhemeric kind of view, when Snorty was talking about the gods in the Gilfagining, he kind of references that the Vana are a – or Vanir are like a tribe that still allow intermarriage between siblings.

00:18:33.520 and that the Aesir were against that.

00:18:35.820 But I think that, again, is him kind of logically trying to correlate them

00:18:41.400 into a kind of human tribalistic conflict that's coming to head.

00:18:47.480 And so, again, one of the points of contention was to set that up.

00:18:53.240 But when we talk about divine and we talk about the gods

00:18:56.540 and we talk about true divine powers

00:18:59.360 and how they seem to be able to move between the thrones of their, what I call the thrones

00:19:06.120 of their dominion, where they expand their powers into the material world, we see that

00:19:11.660 the Van Eyre really emphasize the masculine feminine, heavily so.

00:19:17.800 And I think over the last decade or so, people have tried to, again, blur those lines.

00:19:23.580 and i think that's extremely um misplaced because you can see it so clearly and it affected um

00:19:33.020 if if you there's a book called uh by uh dr flowers called um witchdom of the true that

00:19:39.420 really goes into how much the vanic cults or the vanic religiosity and orthopraxy that was

00:19:46.140 predominant in the producing class of the teutonic arians um when they came over to the isles and

00:19:54.540 they had um their folk magic their root magic was you know uh heavily influenced by it and of course

00:20:01.660 that eventually led to the influence of um gardenerian style vicha or vic vicas as it later

00:20:09.820 became known. And so you can see where the older kind of, I guess, contrarian 60s,

00:20:22.340 they were kind of dabbling in English folk magic mixed with other forms, including some that

00:20:28.900 aren't even really rooted in European magic systems, but maybe perhaps more towards even

00:20:35.000 And like the Hermetics and Egyptian-style magics, they were pulling the Lord and the Lady from the polarity dynamics of the Vanic cults.

00:20:47.440 And so that's a great book to look in if you really want to kind of delve into the relationships and how they move forward.

00:20:56.400 But yes, so to answer your question, that's Nerthus.

00:21:00.840 Sorry, I'll get on those rants.

00:21:03.040 no that's uh those rants are welcome in the first couple of hours come a little bit less

00:21:09.360 though in our in the latter five hurry up hurry up

00:21:13.760 no but that was a meaty one and i think it was really really important and i think uh you know

00:21:20.560 we noticed for comments over in the in the side chat i think people really appreciate those kind

00:21:26.160 of, I don't know, those kind of tangents on points that are very relevant to our worship

00:21:33.820 and what we do. So Allie asks, Njord is chosen by Skadi for his perfectly shaped feet. Do

00:21:44.160 you feel that the feet in the mural are the best you've ever painted?

00:21:47.740 oh um okay feet and hands are notoriously hard to do and especially transitioning between tanned

00:22:01.720 like sun kissed skin to a paler shade and trying to make it not look like you know like a tanning

00:22:11.320 bed or spray or something i was it was very very hard to kind of transition down in there um

00:22:19.480 i think they might be the only feet i've ever painted that's why i was laughing um very very

00:22:27.800 hard i did not i wanted to add more shadow and more dimension and i couldn't because that would

00:22:34.600 could blur and and and get away from the value of that part of the story is that his connection

00:22:41.440 to the water and his connection to the water is of course symbolically brought about in the idea

00:22:47.300 of of his feet being clean so yeah i think these are about the only feet i've ever painted i had

00:22:56.660 a lot of trouble trying to uh when we came to the when i came to the hof excuse me when i came to

00:23:03.900 hoff i didn't know what i was working with i didn't know what space i had uh i had this

00:23:09.580 back wall and then there was these two side walls and immediately i asked can i have these two

00:23:14.380 side walls because i didn't know if the folks there were going to have some sort of alternate

00:23:19.260 usage for these walls and they they kind of did and i was like i really want these walls to make

00:23:26.620 a panoramic because i realized i didn't have a high spot but since we're talking about the lord

00:23:33.260 of waters and we're talking about the lords of rivers and estuaries and the and the beach i wanted

00:23:40.780 a panoramic view of the ocean so but uh yes scotty scotty choosing by his feet um we don't

00:23:50.860 have any attestments to this being a wedding game it culturally just like there's references to when

00:23:56.380 thor gains the hammer on his lap in order to uh bless bless a marriage um this uh this is

00:24:03.740 a cultural reference but yet we don't have any other references to this being uh a that type

00:24:10.220 of game perhaps where the um the bride-to-be is trying to choose her husband's feet um

00:24:18.140 or perhaps maybe the the the wedding party was engaging in this maybe very similar to like

00:24:23.900 throwing the bouquet in which a maid of honor or a maid representative of the bride's side would try

00:24:30.200 to pick a certain person. And if she got it right, maybe that was some fortuitous sense towards

00:24:36.100 marriage. We don't know. I haven't found any references to it being done or observed or

00:24:43.480 written down. But again, I think the biggest point is when Skadi comes, she's coming for revenge

00:24:52.780 against the gods. And she's coming from a different polarity, not a Vanek one, not an

00:25:00.360 Aesir one. And now that these two are aligned, she's coming from an outside source to avenge

00:25:06.480 her father who tried to kill the gods. And the gods tried to seek a different way. And it's in

00:25:14.400 particular fitting that Njordr is picked, one, because he's diametrically opposite from the

00:25:21.160 mountains and from the ice and the cold he's the warmth and the water and the fish and uh you know

00:25:27.560 pulling the bounty of the ocean during the summer tides and so there's clearly an essence there of

00:25:37.000 mountain and and water uh but there's also i think a a point that's kind of missed is that

00:25:44.600 Njörðr, if we look back into the corpus of Njörðr and look at certain things, we begin to see

00:25:51.000 that Njörðr is very similar to the Gothic or Guten-ish references to the lake god Danas.

00:26:00.960 And Danas and Danube, I think, may have been the twin dichotomy in the Eastern Germanic slash

00:26:10.820 Gallic or Celtic, as the Greeks called them, that he was seen as the river god of peace and

00:26:20.120 truce. And so one of the things that I really wanted to point out was that he's the bringer

00:26:26.980 of peace. He's the one that seals the deal. He's the one that settles things so that both sides

00:26:33.380 are amicable and both sides receive the best of the situation so i think that that's very poignant

00:26:41.620 that that's also the the god that made that union between them and brings scotty into the fold

00:26:48.980 through marriage

00:26:52.980 all right and king of cheese is with us and asks as he always does how are the two of us doing

00:27:01.860 tonight it's fun how are you doing i am doing great much better than last time

00:27:10.420 i was in panic mode last time i'm i'm good now i'm doing great good deal um tony thank you very

00:27:17.540 much for asking um it's always a nice thing to check in on doing fantastic as usual um i am

00:27:31.860 So I'm trying to think of still certainly positive. I am because of a lot of events going on the side that depending on how they turn out, I'll talk to you all about very soon. I am.

00:27:45.040 ecstatic, quite literally. I'm really overcome mentally with inspiration about some things and

00:27:55.800 with excitement about some things about our future. So hopefully in the coming weeks,

00:28:00.200 I'll have some good stuff to tell you. But I'm so much so that I'm having trouble sleeping.

00:28:05.680 Like I'm really, my head is in a really specific place right now, in a very good place about some

00:28:11.940 things so i'm in kind of a kind of a literally a weird spot right now middly but it's all good

00:28:18.100 and it's all to the positive it's stuff i'm very excited about so we should have some really cool

00:28:22.020 things coming up here in the coming weeks months and years um next uh finn asked didn't the marriage

00:28:31.380 between njord and scotty fail uh yes absolutely you're correct and svan's probably got some

00:28:38.580 theories on, I don't know, some of the larger relevance of that.

00:28:44.600 Well, when we talk about the failure, or I think what it's worth noting is that,

00:28:53.800 one, there's no mention of a casting out, but more or less, I think it represents the

00:29:01.720 the resetting of a cycle, because I believe that the marriage, again, and in the way that we speak,

00:29:10.320 these cosmic powers are intertwining with each other with reason, purpose, and to show

00:29:17.580 cycles and cyclic dominions, powers that they preside over. And so one thought that I've really

00:29:29.240 kind of felt was important to make was the idea that the the the mountain to the sea transference

00:29:38.280 the ability and uh for both to share one one going up one coming down i think that this is a

00:29:47.240 cycle showing the cycle or understanding of the cycle and perhaps uh i'm not one to say that our

00:29:54.040 ancestors didn't know these things but that perhaps it was a hidden cycle that was you know

00:30:01.080 as the stories come to us we have to remember that the the stories are not the gods the gods

00:30:07.240 are in the stories and so and the stories come from them ultimately now they have you know

00:30:15.080 inflections and have have changed but you it's not that you see the gods through the stories

00:30:21.720 that the gods have influenced the stories and know the nature of of where they're going to roll out

00:30:28.520 and so as they roll out because they understand these things because they're gods this painting

00:30:35.000 of a cycle this painting of the water or the ice or ice flows glacier flows coming down creating

00:30:43.880 rivers coming to the oceans creating estuaries creating lagoons and things of that nature

00:30:49.880 uh and then seeing the the rain and the the storm coming off the waters and going up to

00:30:56.040 the mountains i think is a really deep and poignant uh place to understand there's no

00:31:05.080 reference that to to um scotty being cast out uh or or or that to be you know ended but in a remark

00:31:14.680 that it was that it didn't work out between them um but there was even you know uh

00:31:21.880 it's kind of left with a a dot dot dot at the end of it and i think that this kind of correlates

00:31:27.640 the idea of a cycle happening and breaking and again we see conflict resolution disbursement

00:31:34.840 conflict resolution disbursement and these these cycles are very important i think in a lot of

00:31:40.760 arian stories in especially in teutonic ones so

00:31:47.160 all right so uh nick has a question also about the mural he said okay so uh we know nerthus was the

00:31:55.960 one or was on the right side of the mural in the back then who are the two blondes in white up front

00:32:03.720 on that side well uh that was a that was a that was a request can you throw that back up the picture

00:32:13.040 back up yeah so that that was a request um and and i thought it was beautiful and i the request

00:32:25.940 was not something i was fighting it was great it was every time i come to um the hoffs you know

00:32:32.000 talking to the folk there i kind of get an idea of where people want to go with it and um godie lane

00:32:42.800 wanted he wanted to have uh fray and freya as children in in the in the mural itself

00:32:53.520 and i think that one it does correlate an idea of time and we're not necessarily always going

00:33:00.800 for linear concepts of time, but at the same time, it's nice to break away from a set concept

00:33:10.560 of the way the gods look, but to see them in relation to other gods in, say, childlike form,

00:33:17.380 in which brother and sister are playing on the beach, and each of them having, again,

00:33:23.760 and correlative senses. Freya is standing on a wane, a wagon, and the wagon is untethered.

00:33:33.080 And so it's not quite in position of movement. It hasn't been attained yet. And so then we see

00:33:41.580 Freya holding a kitten with another kitten rubbing its head against her shin,

00:33:47.800 against uh or you know along her leg like cats are off to do so uh clearly there and again too

00:33:55.560 they have the sun and rod around their head and this denotes the powers of divinity and alignment

00:34:02.660 to the vana as they become part of the asa or the the icier are that alignment so i wanted to

00:34:11.220 to bring that into perspective based off of just a, you know, a request to kind of

00:34:17.700 break things up and show something or a feeling that was coming from a member down in

00:34:25.020 Norsoff and how he wanted to kind of relate. And I wanted to accommodate that because I think

00:34:31.500 that's really important. It's not just kind of me showing up and just slinging what I want.

00:34:37.940 it's it's a combination of a lot of things um so when i looked at the side panels i didn't really

00:34:43.540 know what to do i just wanted them and i knew a horizon would be great but what to put in and how

00:34:48.900 to put in was formulated over you know like two or three days this uh the good thing about this mural

00:34:55.780 was i got more time than i think i i had on any of the others other than thor's off so that was

00:35:02.100 that was good i managed to take off a good chunk of work and and come down there during the middle

00:35:06.900 of the week and um and attend to this so yeah that's that's frey and freya

00:35:19.060 i think that we are all so very impressed with just

00:35:25.140 the beauty not just the beauty but the power of these murals that you create um it's just it's

00:35:32.100 making me very proud looking at him again it's uh it's really special what you do there thanks

00:35:42.820 um so also from also from nick uh so i'm guessing now that on the other side it's scotty but the

00:35:56.260 goats and he's guessing they're perhaps uh thor's goats or some random goats

00:36:05.460 okay so that one was kind of fun and that that's that's uh that's brought about a lot of questions

00:36:12.340 but really it's it's it's not too deep or esoteric in a way as opposed um so there's references of

00:36:20.580 of course, to the howling of wolves, that when Jörðr lives in Thrymheim with Skadi as part of

00:36:28.480 the mutualism, you know, he can't stand the baying of the wolves just as much as she can't stand

00:36:33.980 the crowing of the seagulls, or I don't know, the bleating, or I don't even know what it would be

00:36:40.860 of the seagulls, and so a lot of people do connect wolves to Skadi and to the mountains,

00:36:49.000 But for the most part, understanding wolves and understanding their placement in the mountains or around the forests at the base of the mountains, one thing that I really got inspired by was if this was a traveling moment where she was down by the beach, one, I felt a forlorn sorrow or a sense of wanting to be home.

00:37:13.200 So I wanted to draw her staring off into the ocean

00:37:18.380 As I think anybody can relate to

00:37:20.060 Going to the ocean

00:37:21.300 I live near the ocean

00:37:23.080 And so being, you know, just looking out and thinking

00:37:26.900 Almost like as if you were looking upon a fire

00:37:29.040 You can look upon the ocean

00:37:30.600 And just kind of reminisce about the past

00:37:32.900 So I really utilized that

00:37:35.560 But I thought about, you know

00:37:37.120 She's traveling away from the mountains

00:37:39.760 So I wanted to choose some animals that represented the mountains, but were not wolves.

00:37:49.120 I think I didn't, you know, I already had wolves at Baldershof and I had wolves at Odenshof.

00:37:56.620 So I, you know, with Gary and Frecky.

00:37:59.020 So I was, I wanted to do something different because I didn't want to over repeat.

00:38:03.740 So one of the things that I immediately looked at was alpine ibexes.

00:38:08.420 and those two goats are actually alpine ibexes or alpine mountain goats so to make a connection

00:38:18.160 again there to europe and to uh the centralizing uh mountains of europe and um where i think the

00:38:25.120 germanic folk would see um the movement between the glaciers uh and their you know descendants

00:38:32.760 down into what is eventually denmark and the marshlands there again bringing up this the the

00:38:40.120 the idea of the the lit uh liminal space between the earth and the ocean and so i just kind of

00:38:48.840 threw that in there it wasn't it wasn't deeply esoteric i just didn't want to repeat something

00:38:54.040 and i wanted to to to make note of a beautiful mountain creature that i think is extremely

00:39:01.400 powerful and when you see those horns i mean they're just they're they're awe-inspiring so i

00:39:07.720 was like oh travel animals and um i chose to do two uh the the first one sitting uh down is actually

00:39:16.280 from a photograph of an alpine ibix laying down with his with his legs kind of tucked under its

00:39:22.040 body. And then the second one, I just, I wanted to not leave a big patch of brown there. I wanted

00:39:31.160 to break it up a little bit. I know that we were dealing with light sockets and switches and

00:39:35.680 things like that. So I wanted to kind of put something there to draw your eye away from the

00:39:39.640 utility of certain parts of the wall. And as you can see in the background between the mountains

00:39:46.140 uh is a over stylized very very prominent uh glacier as a kind of reference to the cyclical

00:39:55.280 nature of the creation of rivers um and so uh it is over stylized it's it's not i would say what

00:40:02.700 a natural glacier moving through a valley would look like at all but i want it to catch the eye

00:40:08.740 to catch reference and to make it very very poignant and give something again for the eye

00:40:13.640 to, to notice and look around and see. So that's what I did. Uh, I also placed her in a barney

00:40:20.520 and, uh, she's carrying a sword that's laid on the ground and, uh, a shield and a spear that are

00:40:27.260 not being touched. And that's symbolic of the peace truce. Um, you know, after a seeking

00:40:33.520 vengeance and then realizing that, you know, the, the, the priorities of the gods have changed in

00:40:39.000 which Odin sought truce instead of more bloodshed, as it already had happened with her father.

00:40:53.340 There's so much backed into the murals, and I like that you're getting an opportunity to explain

00:40:59.800 those to folks. We've got another question. Hi, just wondering what your thoughts on

00:41:06.920 Lithuanian paganism. What is your thoughts on Lithuanian paganism? How does it differ from

00:41:13.280 Norse paganism? Lithuanians were the last pagans in Europe. Svan, what are your thoughts on

00:41:23.140 Lithuanian paganism? Well, I really think it is that stepping stone. You can see the connectivity

00:41:30.760 between uh the rodonovi like slavic which is highly um it's uh it has denominations within

00:41:41.320 itself there's there's western slavic eastern slavic northern slavic southern slavic and you

00:41:47.700 know latvians are kind of and the baltic slavs are brought into this but again at the same time

00:41:53.380 the lithuanians speak a language that is very very close to indo-european structure uh it's it's i

00:42:01.680 would say even closer in relation to like gutinish or gothic uh eastern germanic mixed with a little

00:42:08.540 bit of a slavic uh rus um through throughout you know time but as far as like the connectivity

00:42:17.480 between them you can really see certain things where they kind of go more heavy slavic or they

00:42:23.200 go more heavy nordic and um you know those connections between them uh seeing the striker

00:42:29.840 uh again always having the trinity they always have the tripartite and um and seeing certain

00:42:36.720 things like um the way that the thrones for them and the way that they relate to them uh in

00:42:44.160 is different than nordic very very different i would say where they you see a dichotomy between

00:42:50.160 um catalystic tripartite and um stasis or or uh and dynamicism or sorry yeah the difference

00:43:00.380 with a catalystic and dynamic where they where they have uh velez or or and i'm probably

00:43:05.480 because there's so many different um slavic like variations of the names um and i'm probably

00:43:13.080 butchering them, but between like, say, Veles and Percolet or Perkonos or Perun and this

00:43:22.020 kind of antithesis between them. And it does reflect a little bit in the Nordic stories where

00:43:31.060 we see the story of Haurbarth and Thor having this kind of interaction. And I've often wondered

00:43:38.560 if that was an influence in which direction that might have come from if it was an influence at all

00:43:44.400 but um i do see some of that and and so i think that one of the major differences is the way then

00:43:50.800 the nordic folk viewed the tripartite and how dynamicism was more important to them

00:43:57.120 and that the stasis and catalystic thrones were seen as less um important and or maybe

00:44:05.520 switched around but by snorri's time was the dynamic throne was highly highlighted whereas

00:44:12.880 when we see like the lithuanians we see it very different where the stasis is seen as the high and

00:44:19.120 kind of un untouched unmoving observing station of svaura or uh dievs i believe is the lithuanian

00:44:28.560 um uh stasis uh throne and we see velas and perun like and their their correlations together so

00:44:38.800 i see a lot of differences but i also see some similarities and i i've often pondered whether or

00:44:43.680 not they influenced each other because the nords and uh the baltic people the the pomerania people

00:44:50.320 are the uh what would eventually become the prussians and poles um and their movements

00:44:56.160 around the baltic and how all of those people were were kind of interacting with each other

00:45:01.680 through maritime movements especially um during the summer so i i don't know i see i see a lot of

00:45:10.480 similarities but some very very stark differences as well you know i certainly think that um

00:45:19.360 lithuanian paganism uh is relevant and akin to our to our paganism i certainly

00:45:30.720 you know think the connection is there and i think that the tales of the divine are there

00:45:36.080 uh interpreted in a different way through a different cultural lens but still very very

00:45:40.400 relevant but the point that you brought up at the end is what fascinates me about uh

00:45:45.760 lithuanian paganism is the fact that it was they were the last group of practicing pagans

00:45:52.240 to to be converted um it lingered there for

00:46:00.800 over 500 years longer than it did in scandinavia um so it's that in and of itself is very

00:46:10.960 interesting because that and baltic paganism and things in that area coexisting with powerful

00:46:20.640 christian kingdoms to either side of them for a very long time i find that i find that fascinating

00:46:28.160 um whereas other places it was a very quick changeover that wasn't the case there and i

00:46:33.600 think that's really interesting and i think that's one of the reasons that you see

00:46:36.880 the paganism in that area being as resurgent as it is today and i think that it's often from what

00:46:43.200 i see today resurgent in archaic forms but resurgent nonetheless and i think that's beautiful to see

00:46:53.840 um tony asks i was planning on saving this question for the fray episode but i'll ask

00:47:00.960 it here i've recently made the decision to make a dedication to fray and i'm working on developing

00:47:07.440 a good relationship with him so that he may help me with an issue that i'd rather keep private

00:47:14.960 how do i keep from committing monotheism while keeping uh to my dedication to fray

00:47:22.720 what are your thoughts swan yeah i i think that it's important to understand that full trui

00:47:29.760 or troth to uh a a an icier or an house or an our senior uh is i think it's clearly seen we see it

00:47:42.720 remarked upon in the in the past but i also think that again it was about the gods and how they

00:47:50.320 interacted with the folk at the time i think that it's also important from the folk to the gods

00:47:57.440 as you said you you have a need and that need or desire is another motivating factor to build these

00:48:03.760 connectivities um i think it's first really just important to know that having a trough in one

00:48:12.400 direction is fine as long as it's not singularly and all other things drop off because you can't

00:48:19.040 you cannot spurn the forest for one tree um and so as long as you understand that and understand that

00:48:27.840 the the you know being as we are polytheists that are hard polytheists and and understanding that

00:48:34.320 these powers interact with each other in a like an ecosystem or uh in in a uh you know balancing

00:48:42.720 the forces and powers and things that are all nexusing together in the material um you know as

00:48:48.400 As long as you hold that in your mind and I think don't lose that, having devotion or particular friendship or desire to a specific house or a specific house in you, I think is totally okay.

00:49:06.360 I've never had an issue with that as a pathway in our faith.

00:49:12.900 And I think it's also important to know that it changes as we grow older.

00:49:15.700 Sometimes we have evolutions in our lives that make us realize certain things or events that happen in our life that make us want to devotionally focus on aspects of the divinity of the gods for different reasons.

00:49:34.860 Whether it's, you know, prosperity or, you know, having a family or finding bounty and then seeking that.

00:49:46.160 And then, you know, if you're blessed by the gods in this way, then, you know, giving devotional thanks back for, you know, out of that necessity.

00:49:59.160 I would say just be careful. Don't overly ask, but seek in understanding the power and dominion that they have. It's like a sailor finding a tide. It's finding a current in the ocean and knowing that this current is going to get you where you need to go.

00:50:21.760 it's going to make you intimate with that current it's you're going to learn uh there there could be

00:50:27.040 ups and downs there could be follies and things and decisions that you make that you know can

00:50:31.980 affect things during that movement and tied with with that power but um you know if you feel the

00:50:39.380 the drive and you feel the need or if you feel that the specific house or are talking to you

00:50:45.740 it's incumbent i would say to to fully take that moment and and like go with it um and try to

00:50:55.640 you know build that relationship and um i think that that's a lot of the relationships that

00:51:02.600 also truer have with the gods uh as they grow older and i think some other religious like

00:51:10.320 concept uh i guess like polytheistic light or if we're talking about some other things when they

00:51:16.100 when they talk about the gods in transition as a um you know as a hunter and a husband and then

00:51:22.640 like a chieftain or as a a maiden and a mother and then an elder mother uh these are kind of

00:51:32.500 the same things it's about the necessity or the tide or the current that you might run into in

00:51:38.500 certain parts of your life. It's not the gods changing their form. It's you and how the gods

00:51:43.440 can kind of apply to you at different times in your life based off of need or desire or, you know,

00:51:53.180 just overall spiritual evolution. Yeah, I think it's an interesting question that you ask. And

00:52:03.740 And I don't think it's a question that would have been a big deal to our ancestors.

00:52:09.420 I think it is a big deal to us to ask because monotheism is so prevalent in the world that we live in.

00:52:18.640 One of the ideas or I guess the core concepts behind Ausatru is troth to the Aesir.

00:52:26.540 That's the reason that the AFA calls what we do Ausatru and not Odinism.

00:52:32.540 Colloquially, it is Odinism, it's the same thing

00:52:36.600 But linguistically, the difference is

00:52:39.900 We are loyal to the tribe of the Aesir

00:52:41.920 The tribe of the Aesir is headed up by the All-Father Odin

00:52:46.880 But there doesn't have to be a competition

00:52:53.880 Or a disparity between showing worship to many of our gods

00:52:58.960 It's one of the core values of polytheism

00:53:02.160 you can be a phrase man and still honor the gods all of the other gods appropriately and still

00:53:10.040 build appropriate relations to them with him having a place of of precedence or having a

00:53:16.600 special relationship that way it's not that it's not mutually exclusive our gods are on the same

00:53:23.560 team there is a hierarchy amongst our gods but one of the things about our gods that i think

00:53:32.520 is a misunderstanding our gods are noble and are not petty um it's it's interesting that the

00:53:43.560 christians would look at our gods as being savage and imperfect yet they claim perfection for theirs

00:53:51.640 but they describe theirs all the time as being extremely petty and extremely jealous of any

00:53:56.920 attention to anything but him. Our gods don't function that way. I think our gods are big

00:54:04.040 enough that Frey is not offended if you give honor to, for example, to his father or to any of the

00:54:12.360 other Iser or the people that, you know, the personalities that he is in alignment and in

00:54:18.220 in unison with in his role as a god so i don't think that there's a worry that uh

00:54:25.500 frey is going to be mad at you if you if you show worship to other gods as well as long as they are

00:54:31.100 they're isere um but what i think is is more of a concern is that you simply will neglect that

00:54:42.940 because there will be such a frayer primacy in your mind and by asking the question you

00:54:49.100 take the first step in not doing that um by being aware and making making time and making

00:54:58.220 space in your heart for the other gods making a point to show them veneration when when it's

00:55:05.500 appropriate and to to keep up those relationships even if you do have a more elevated or a more

00:55:13.340 special relationship to frayer and i think that i think that's part of the subtle art of of

00:55:22.460 relationships in general and being being a person in general is it's really easy to this i mean no

00:55:30.700 disrespect i think this trivializes it too much but i think it is the core that we build from

00:55:38.940 when you have friends you learn that as an adult as your priorities change and as your life changes

00:55:45.420 and as perhaps you move places it becomes a it becomes an effort it becomes work to maintain

00:55:53.740 friendships that you value that same idea of working to maintain friendships that you value

00:56:01.260 when your focus in life changes is the same principle that i would say if you're focusing

00:56:06.860 a special attention on frayer that you haven't done before to make the point of maintaining your

00:56:12.700 relationships with the other gods even though your focus in your life perhaps is ship perhaps

00:56:18.620 has shifted in a way and i i don't mean to make it sound that that simple but i do think that's

00:56:26.540 part of the mindset to build from um another question a question from finn if santa claus

00:56:37.740 is a pagan figure do you think krampus is a pagan figure too and is he really evil or just

00:56:46.220 misrepresented by Christians. What are your thoughts, Svon?

00:56:53.980 This is kind of a, I don't know, this might be, growing up in a culture that had a,

00:57:03.500 I don't know what it would be called, but I grew up when I was younger,

00:57:09.180 uh for us in iceland it was grilla and having that that uh moral motivator is a good thing in

00:57:18.860 one in one respect i think that uh the overall arching concept of the moral motivator uh is

00:57:27.640 to be good um or you know bad things can happen or something of that nature and then also too

00:57:35.500 there's the caveat, a lot of times that the moral motivator can be defeated by the children

00:57:40.020 through good behavior. So there is a concept of moralism that I think is genuinely good.

00:57:48.540 And I don't think that that's entirely a Christian thing. I think that, you know,

00:57:55.020 whether we look at the land spirits or the individual whites of those cultures and what

00:58:03.200 they consider, you know, um, if we're looking again as a, as a mountain spirit and, and clearly

00:58:10.500 having horns like an Ibex, um, when you talk about Krampus in specifics and how, uh, influential he

00:58:17.460 is in Southern Germany, uh, you know, you can see a lot of things going on there, but there's clearly

00:58:24.440 some transmutation of that spirit into a sinister and devilish and uh dark sense and um again

00:58:36.060 over emphasizing the the moral the opponent of uh you know to maintain moralism and to defeat

00:58:44.460 uh the you know the scarier and more threatening the more the reward is uh to fight against um but

00:58:52.800 Yeah, there is certainly, I would say, some Christianization of that.

00:58:57.900 And I think that there needed to be in order for it to survive as a tradition amongst the populace as the church became more dominant.

00:59:08.760 You know, as far as the usage of it, it seems to be more prevalent after Christianization, or at least it was remarked more.

00:59:20.380 So, again, that's why it could be a product of the Christianization of native folk things, or it just became more aggressive and more antagonistic with the concepts of shifting from Christianity where they see your soul is in balance between good and evil,

00:59:46.900 which comes from the groundwork that was laid in the Middle East, whereas I would say for the Teutonic Arians and the Gaulish Arians, the idea between tribe and chaos or order and the centralism to that which is outside that is chaos and things that needed to be battled.

01:00:12.060 There seems to be something's happening there where I see a lot of this. And in the Yule traditions that we do here at my house, and I don't necessarily have this moral adjudicant, we call the Yule Alpha, that he despises miserliness amongst the children.

01:00:32.740 And so that if he doesn't have a giving heart during the time of Yule, when the folk are in most need, that he punishes the children by giving them charred wood or charcoal.

01:00:46.520 And so I see, too, that there seems to be – the farther back we go, there seems to be that the giving of good and bad was placed upon the Yule spirit.

01:00:56.480 and then over time it diverged into having this saintly figure with this kind of either a demonic

01:01:05.500 figure or kind of a clownish figure or kind of a like the icelanders went they just hit full

01:01:12.140 full press on the diesel and went for like a troll flesh-eating witch so uh you know it's

01:01:19.660 uh you know it seems to come about i think a lot more after christian christianization

01:01:25.500 Um, and so I view Krampus as more of a German and not necessarily a universal European or Teutonic Aryan tradition, just because of simply like Grilla or like with the Dutch and Svartapit and, uh, and then the Anglos didn't have it at all.

01:01:44.340 uh from what i can see they father christmas or uh father yule um you know was perfectly capable

01:01:52.020 of being uh someone you didn't cross because he could be just as mean as he could be giving

01:01:58.980 and so you know take that for for what you will with with that um that's my take on on

01:02:06.660 the crampus and the and the overall yule antagonists yeah i was just going to ask

01:02:12.580 what you what you thought as far as connections between Krampus and and and chocolate pea

01:02:19.380 yes smart smart to Pete uh I I you know I think the biggest thing there is there's an emphasis

01:02:24.580 on the coal on the idea of charcoal or coal and coal boxes and peat houses and the idea that um

01:02:33.380 um in reference to the sootiness and to the um you know the overall kind of you know getting these

01:02:44.240 you know burnt pieces of wood or burnt pieces of peat or burnt pieces of charcoal

01:02:48.820 in punishment that becomes it needs to be separated onto a figure uh as you know the

01:02:56.840 more saintly you know saint nicholas kind of uh you know church especially when you look at

01:03:05.080 saint nicholas in correlation to svarta pete you see him carrying the the the curled crook of the

01:03:12.920 of the um catholic church style of um staff and he's wearing the very large you know uh

01:03:21.240 papal hat and so you have this dichotomy but yet smart to pete's not necessarily seen as a nefarious

01:03:28.040 figure but more like a trickster and so um whereas you know you look at krampus in the alpines he's

01:03:34.440 you know stealing children and beating them with reeds and then you know like as in the same

01:03:39.960 light as like with grilla capturing the children and placing them in bags um you know i i

01:03:46.680 you see this uh after christianization the yuletide traditions of europe become very

01:03:55.240 drastically divergent and it it's it goes away from yule in and of itself and more towards kind

01:04:02.440 of the you know some of the happenings of yule and and or what eventually you know chris christian

01:04:08.840 christmas and the eucharist and all of that you see a lot more emphasis and so things get kind of

01:04:14.200 of very scattered amongst the folk after that. So yeah, you know, I know that Svartepit in Holland

01:04:24.560 and Belgium and in the land of the Frigians where they once reigned, that's been a hot topic

01:04:32.120 because of his like blackface caricature and that, you know, failing, I think on a lot of

01:04:40.680 people's parts to realize that his idea of of him being the the white in the coal house or the white

01:04:47.860 in the peat like house that was being dried for fire and so again there's always correlations to

01:04:53.700 a fireplace there's always correlations to to um the burning of wood in a sacred place and an

01:04:58.980 ingle nook or something of that nature so he's kind of placed there and and they're having a

01:05:03.960 hard time trying to keep that but it's also interesting to see like smart to be dressed up

01:05:07.960 in his like vatican guard style clothing if you look at the guards of the vatican and you look

01:05:13.820 at smart to pete you notice there's a the same style of clothing is coming about um and then

01:05:21.380 when you look at the the papal uh catholic style dress of saint nicholas amongst these people

01:05:29.380 um you start to see that they're playing on other tropes there so

01:05:33.160 hey

01:05:35.640 daughter is joining us and my wife is playing with my lighting because it was

01:05:40.920 terrible and i appreciate that it was bugging me there for a minute

01:05:45.380 um shay asks would you differentiate njord from agar and if if you please uh thank you for these

01:05:55.940 wonderful conversations victory never sleeps is sorry my daughter has a lot to say victory

01:06:02.040 never sleeps is definitely a high point each week i'm very glad that you enjoy these uh

01:06:08.120 these programs i look it's a high point of my week as well and i know it's something that

01:06:13.240 our presenters look forward to is also um absolutely we we differentiate differentiate

01:06:20.120 between new order and agar um i think swan's probably got a lot to say on the subject but i

01:06:28.120 think one of the key things it comes down to is the dichotomy between nature that has been civilized

01:06:42.200 and nature that is scary and chaotic and the dualism between forces like that water force

01:06:51.160 that is benevolent to man and that water force that is terrifying and uh and destructive and i

01:07:00.120 think spawn's got some more to say on that so go ahead witness von um yeah i would say uh most

01:07:08.840 certainly there is a differentiation in understanding about the way our ancestors

01:07:13.880 dealt with primordial things uh primordial uh parts because it was an under it was understood

01:07:22.600 that jotunheim is connected to the middle is connected to the middle world just like leo

01:07:29.720 southheim and svartalfheim and vanaheim they're all processing into the center to create the

01:07:37.880 material and i think that it's important to know that understanding that emir or all our yelmer

01:07:45.080 uh ymir is the source of the creation of the middle um from those primordial powers and

01:07:54.520 ayya represents uh that just at the threshold between where i think the jotens um and their

01:08:04.280 allegiances towards order and or towards cosmic order and towards natural law and understanding

01:08:09.720 some of their placement in in the middle is deeply represented in in ayer um you know uh

01:08:20.680 there were there were accounts of which there was um gifts given to ayer for safe travel

01:08:27.160 There's mentions of the Jotanus Raun, his wife, who is the ensnare of the sailor's souls who drowned, and that it was good to carry a piece of gold on you so that you could make peace into offering.

01:08:47.300 Again, deep connections to the idea of gold and the water, both on the Vanek side and it seems to be in this sense with Ayer and Raon.

01:08:58.320 However, I don't think they were necessarily prayed to except in immediate need or an immediate sense or an understanding that there was thresholds that you were passing through in which you were entering the primordial states where there was no land, there was no ecosystem that was beneficial to you as a human.

01:09:15.640 uh you know there this was you were in a place outside of where you could exist peacefully and

01:09:22.680 in the center of that chaotic ocean and anybody that's been on the ocean uh i have um you know

01:09:30.380 and seeing that the both the jotuns and the gods again interact in the middle through primordial

01:09:37.440 powers or through powers that are linked either to cosmic order natural law or primordial chaos

01:09:45.540 And in a way, Ayer represents kind of a more allowanced chaos in between the worlds of natural law and cosmic order.

01:09:57.320 You know, in the stories, he's said to be fathered by a Jotun named Mr. Blindi.

01:10:03.980 Mr. Blindi means like blinded by the mists or could be, you know, blinded by the stirring.

01:10:11.100 There's a lot of etymology debate on that.

01:10:14.220 And so when you, you know, seeing Ayr as the primordial source or that which is a vestige that has survived since the deluge, I think is worth noting.

01:10:30.600 And I think it's also important to understand that that's why, like, there is – there seems to be blurring in the late Nordic period between Jotun's and the Vanir, and I think that there is a – there should be more and is kind of also a clear distinction when we look at, like, Njord and Ayr.

01:10:47.740 nyodr is giving and good and the currents are are well and you know the the uh the effects of the

01:10:56.340 of the ocean are beneficial but when you go out there and you can no longer see land and and things

01:11:01.460 become a little bit more of a different stage you end up kind of stepping in the dominion of a

01:11:07.900 primordial force that has made an allegiance with the gods not through marriage not through uh the

01:11:13.820 uh giving of children as as you know in other um connections to the gods um but through a truce

01:11:22.460 and it is mentioned that you know the gods come to him and they they they

01:11:28.860 like dip themselves into this primordial state in the middle world that the gods and

01:11:34.460 divinity are always in correlation and connection to the ocean and um

01:11:39.740 Um, at the same time, it is remarked that he goes above and resides amongst the gods and feasts with them as a welcomed guest.

01:11:49.280 So, you know, you see this allegiance there that's built, and it's one of the only cases in which a Jotun or an Etin, um, is, is made an allegiance without marriage or, or child rearing.

01:12:02.340 And, of course, the entire story of the gaining of the cauldron to brew, again, may have deep correlations to current changes and sea level changes that I think the gods were trying to express to their children to understand, or perhaps to understand later in our times, or maybe even in the future, a better understanding.

01:12:28.600 But yeah, Ayr is – it's worth noting that Ayr is loosely known amongst the Anglo-Saxons, and I think it was because of the Danes and the Norwegians coming in.

01:12:39.860 There's no real mention of strictly a outer sea god, but the translations of Eor, which is E-O-G-A-R, amongst, I guess, would be the Anglo-Saxon reconstruction of it, has been kind of adopted and seen in connectivity there.

01:13:01.200 I know that there was a brief talk about a mentioning of Oceanus, but I think that, again, might be a Roman influence in the British Isles, particularly in the south, before they receded back.

01:13:18.400 um yeah there i mean there's a lot of stuff about ayur and ron that are around that are

01:13:25.800 interesting and i think really again with nyorth and i knew that we were going to be broaching

01:13:31.320 these subjects about the allegiances between these forces again a triplicate of forces

01:13:37.700 cosmic order amongst the icier natural law and the alignment between those two that make them

01:13:45.260 collectively one and then you see primordial or chaotic forces that subdue themselves

01:13:52.460 in order to complement the other two and then again there's a rejection on that side as well

01:13:58.300 in which they make themselves an antithesis or an antagonistic nature as they are consumers

01:14:03.660 and they want to break down the order that the other two have truced to maintain so

01:14:11.660 yeah i definitely see the correlation between um you're there and poseidon and oceanus and uh and

01:14:22.460 idea um i think that that's the closest correlation that i see very directly with another with another

01:14:29.580 myth cycle um cliffs here and asks uh gentlemen our lord talks about the vanir as another tribe

01:14:40.780 of gods that were once in conflict with the isir until a mutual resolution was reached what are

01:14:47.180 your thoughts on the origins of the vanir i'm this isn't something i think you and i have talked

01:14:54.380 about much spawn what are what are your thoughts on the the origins of the vanir well the vanir

01:15:01.500 always always remarked as the wise vanir and the wise again correlating to to time perhaps uh

01:15:11.100 less direct activity perhaps more a cyclic um resonant nature in which kind of permeating

01:15:20.940 from the earth and the water um the origins aren't i mean from lore not uh extremely prevalent

01:15:30.300 um you know we we always see a correlation between fire water and the earth and so we see these

01:15:35.900 earthly elements and so the concept of the vanir being of the middle in vanaheim

01:15:46.620 almost like in polaric sense to jotunheim in the middle plane it would then denote that they were

01:15:54.620 uh residing here in the in the middle whereas the icier are of course in the above or in the

01:16:01.980 in the heavenly realm in the the of air of light and of fire um and wind so you know there's been

01:16:12.460 speculation as to that they you know they formulated as the the world itself began to

01:16:19.660 you know again bring itself into natural law or that as they emerged natural law became

01:16:27.340 the uh case in which the ecosystem was finding balance with life while combating chaos and

01:16:37.180 the primordial nature of the jotuns in the middle um and so that you know there was this time in

01:16:44.300 which the gods were again in stasis they were above and the vanir were moving and having

01:16:53.200 application and power in the middle realms sometime between the formulation and eventually

01:16:59.840 the war. And again, when we talk about time to the gods, especially in mythic timescale,

01:17:05.340 it isn't very linear and there could be all kinds of interpretations of how long that might be.

01:17:11.000 Some people have proposed the idea that in the deluge of the blood of Emhyr,

01:17:16.820 the um it is spoken that the the jotuns are reduced down to a polaric force of masculine

01:17:23.740 feminine in um bergelmer bergelmer and his wife who is unnamed in the lore um and some people

01:17:32.180 have speculated that adhumla uh as emir is transformed so is adhumla and adhumla bear in

01:17:39.960 mind too means the peaceful cow the cow without horns uh again this the name meaning or a soft

01:17:47.680 um in essence like a i guess would be translation wise is like trying to find the meaning of the of

01:17:54.800 of that to be the the peaceful heifer if you will is humla the idea of the the not projected oxen

01:18:05.040 primordial but more of a beneficial um and feminine power uh some people have proposed that

01:18:13.600 you know in the slaying of emir and in the deluge the power and the essence of ad humla was then

01:18:19.680 also dissipated and gave source to the vanir um but that's not again that's that's uh that is a

01:18:29.600 a huge gap that is not fully um fleshed out i think in the lore that especially that snorri

01:18:37.360 uh or the in the adas that um is definitely one hard to pin down um you know as far as

01:18:46.480 whether that is the case or not i i i have a belief that the the the power of at least the

01:18:53.280 life-giving nature and the bounty of the milk of of humla um if whether it was in symbolic in the

01:19:00.560 drowning of the deluge or whether it was simply just the dissipation um in which then gave life

01:19:07.520 to the fruitfulness of the vana or the vanir and again correlations between oxen and and the wanes

01:19:14.320 or wagons could very well uh have clear correlation there uh when we talk about the idea of stallions

01:19:22.400 amongst the the the icier and cattle amongst the vanir we see a full understanding the dichotomy

01:19:30.640 between ruling powers warlike powers the horse was used in war the horse was used to travel the

01:19:37.120 horse was used to to gain dominance and to carry the chariot whereas the cattle was to follow and

01:19:44.160 gave life and food and clothing and all and milk and and all of these things so i don't think that

01:19:51.360 there's this uh cultish difference like the uh you know that this cow cult was somehow

01:19:59.840 not understood by our ancestors to be something foreign no instead they were just in different

01:20:05.520 alignments and as they you know as all alignments when they come together there has to be some sense

01:20:12.720 of conflict there's always a kind of um a taming of the side you can clearly see the masculine

01:20:19.920 and the feminine interacting and there's always the sense of the chase or the sense of the

01:20:24.400 the conflict or the sense of the of the dominance of will and power uh and projection um setting

01:20:33.840 calmness to that which cultivates which is the earth and which is the giving and feminine form

01:20:39.600 and the power so i i would think that if the vanya represent that cyclic nature of femininity

01:20:46.880 and the earth in all of their multiplicity then of humla would be a great source of understanding

01:20:54.720 that uh overall comes from her power her essence perhaps that is the leaning of which they

01:21:04.480 they sprung forth but again if we're talking strictly about lorewood there is no direct

01:21:09.760 correlation so we have to do with what we will on that and i i think that it's it's good to meditate

01:21:16.080 upon that yeah i think that's that's always been kind of a fascinating subject um it's something

01:21:24.720 that i've i've you know thought on and uh and read about since i first i came home to house a true

01:21:33.040 there's a lot of and again this is done from a sociological slash archaeological standpoint

01:21:41.600 and not a not a religious one but there's a lot of correlation between the cultures of old europe

01:21:48.800 and more primitive neolithic if you will

01:21:58.400 peoples that occupied europe and then an influx during the aryan migration of genetically similar

01:22:05.840 peoples reconnecting with these different developed value systems and i do think there's

01:22:14.480 something to that but i think it's functioning through the wrong direction

01:22:18.800 um i don't think our gods are a reflection of that human conflict but perhaps that human

01:22:23.920 conflict is a reflection of our gods um it's i think that what we do know to take from that

01:22:34.640 is that the the vanir are old and wise and old in a old in a primal sense old in an ur sense

01:22:51.120 there there is that sense of of this voice of the past this voice from the earth this voice from

01:22:57.360 from below from the vegetative from the primal and you see that played out with the vanir

01:23:06.660 um and then you even see that with those elements then put under

01:23:11.340 the control of order once they're they're assimilated into the isir tribe

01:23:16.200 but yeah it's interesting and our lore it doesn't talk about that in the stories

01:23:26.740 of Odin, Vili, and Vey shaping the world from Ymir in the destruction of Ymir and the building

01:23:34.140 of the cosmos as we know it, that part is left obscure. And so were those gods around at that

01:23:44.940 point? Were they around at some point later? It's hard to tell. One of the things that I think is

01:23:51.280 an important juxtaposition, though, is the Vanir are a primal. It's hard because we spend so much

01:24:04.320 time focusing on the astral, on the higher, on the forces of will and consciousness, which the

01:24:10.580 IC are absolutely representative of, that it's easy to downplay the more chthonic or the more

01:24:18.040 primal and primitive forces within us. And I think that without either of those

01:24:25.600 components, our soul is incomplete and our consciousness is incomplete. Those primal

01:24:32.660 lower forces and, you know, lower in quotation mark forces are absolutely important. But the key

01:24:41.200 is and you see this you see this in our myths you see it in also true you also see it in various other

01:24:48.320 understandings of alchemy and hermetics that

01:24:52.180 the higher the will the the ordered the forces of consciousness have to be in the driver's seat

01:25:01.000 and when that relationship works like that as you see with the reconciliation between the

01:25:06.080 Aesir and the Vanir, the gods of consciousness and order won out over the more primal and

01:25:13.340 chthonic forces, and then can exist in harmony with that headship being from the Aesir.

01:25:21.380 And I think that bringing that force connected in that way is a key component to the soul of

01:25:30.020 our people and you see that so whatever their specific origins in the course of our myth cycle

01:25:38.660 that coming together is absolutely a coming together of those primal currents those as

01:25:47.160 fun likes to talk about natural law currents coming under the order and control of of the

01:25:53.460 astral of the higher of the will of the consciousness and by those powers combined

01:25:59.180 we have we're full people and we can call upon those different parts of ourselves in a structured

01:26:05.260 and ordered way if that makes sense and it's really good to point out what you just said about

01:26:11.500 how humanity reflects the gods because we are of them we are from them and so they don't reflect

01:26:21.180 us perhaps we relate to them with the stories that we interchange with ourselves but we do

01:26:25.660 definitely reflect their powers in the way that we act and the way that our society is built the

01:26:31.580 the man the woman the husband the wife and how these these things that work and we know when we

01:26:36.540 look at what works as our tribes as our nations have moved we understand that that that cosmic

01:26:43.900 order and that natural law in conjunction and complementing each other do great things nations

01:26:49.740 are born from this. And so, yeah, I think that that is because we are reflecting the correct way

01:26:57.320 of the gods. And you mentioned this earlier, one of the key themes of Vanek existence is the

01:27:08.780 polarity, is the duality of there's man, there's woman, there's this polarity. I think that's much

01:27:15.700 in keeping with the Vanir as a tribe being assimilated and defeated by the Aesir through

01:27:23.380 great struggle and then brought into order. It's still that polarity of the primal and the astral.

01:27:37.380 Tony asks, I forget if I've asked before, so I'll ask again. What's the general opinion

01:27:43.780 on east arian paganism india and other eastern territories and is there a value

01:27:52.260 in learning about it for us as more western pagans um

01:28:06.900 context is everything for that is there value in learning about it sure

01:28:11.860 there's value in learning about most things just i'll just say that generally there's always value

01:28:18.900 in learning about stuff to discern what parts of it we have in common and what parts of it ought to

01:28:26.820 be uh utilized in a better understanding of our faith that often is very murky because

01:28:34.260 Because those folks who practice that faith, not only are the countries they reside in trying to think of the best wording here, but irreversibly mixed with other races of people in those areas that with that admixture has brought in other other forms of religion.

01:29:04.260 and other concepts that aren't related to our divinity um so it becomes really hard to

01:29:12.340 to decipher some of that but it's certainly fascinating and i do think it's important

01:29:17.480 to look at um and i know that you know in recent years there's been a an emphasis on

01:29:24.980 you know giving a reconsideration or a rethought to uh zoroastrianism and to

01:29:32.240 ancient Persian religion, which has always been common as the relation to Hinduism,

01:29:40.820 but the relation to Zoroastrianism, there's relatively newly a lot of emphasis has been put

01:29:47.060 on it. And I do think it's really interesting. I think what's important to consider in both of

01:29:53.200 those cases. Modern Hinduism looks very, very little like the original concepts that it's

01:30:03.640 drawn from. But I think if you go back to the Vedic period, there's a lot there to be drawn

01:30:12.480 from that is ours that we share, that I think it's important. So I think that the older the

01:30:19.200 older the indian tradition the more value it is to look into and perhaps you know modes of worship

01:30:25.680 or how they conduct things in a as society industrialized is is interesting to consider

01:30:32.320 as our paganism had had died out during that period um so i think that's valuable

01:30:40.800 one thing that's really interesting when you consider zoroastrianism

01:30:45.040 is that's not the original Persian faith, that's a modification, or honestly, it's a reaction

01:30:52.220 against the original Persian faith and the original Persian paganism. Now, I think that is

01:30:59.760 really interesting to look at. Iran translates to land of the Aryans exactly as Ireland does

01:31:10.000 on the far extremes of where our people traveled.

01:31:14.020 And the Persians, one of their biggest sources of pride

01:31:21.360 was talking about how they were Aryans.

01:31:24.160 And that was such a big thing to them.

01:31:26.840 And so I think that if you look back

01:31:28.360 to their most ancient paganism,

01:31:30.720 there's a lot to wonder about and to learn from there.

01:31:37.060 But you will notice one of the differences

01:31:39.660 between um the vedic period indians and zoroastrians is zoroaster flips those gods on their head

01:31:55.340 he creates you know demons of their gods and celebrates their demons as gods he completely

01:32:05.100 flips that system and i think that that's often lost on modern people that look at zoroastrianism

01:32:10.940 as a sister faith um but yeah i think there's i think there's some value to that i think it's

01:32:18.300 certainly fascinating and i think that we do ourselves a disservice to cut off learning from

01:32:23.180 from any source that we can learn from

01:32:25.020 but the best thing I think for that is to fill in holes that we have or to approach filling in

01:32:37.340 holes that we have rather than in trying to reconstruct or compare the two and take points

01:32:42.480 that we like from each taking ours as a whole system and where there's where there's gray area

01:32:49.780 where there's confusion or where there's pieces that we find missing, then certainly looking

01:32:56.020 to those sister interpretations of Aryan faith is a valuable tool. I just think it's a much

01:33:03.160 more valuable tool looking towards Eastern Europe or towards Celtic Europe or even towards Southern

01:33:11.300 Europe than going as far afield with as diverse and different a people as modern Iranians and

01:33:19.140 modern Indians. What are your thoughts on it, Swan? I'm going to paint just broad strokes,

01:33:24.320 and because you covered a great amount of it, and what I would say too is, but big broad strokes is

01:33:30.580 if you were to look at our people as kind of like being the middle and northerly in territory,

01:33:38.080 you find this kind of phenoergic, Siberian admixture of tribal faith, and we certainly

01:33:45.780 can see influence up there from our ancestral core it's the same with the lower half and so

01:33:52.420 what i would say is i generally try to break things up into six houses you've got the teutonic

01:33:58.260 which is of course i'm going to say first because that's where we are from and that's who we are

01:34:02.660 so i would say teutonic gaulish or celtic um i always say because that's a greek word but uh

01:34:10.100 gaulish people and um and the slavs are like one of the three the other the first three houses

01:34:16.660 and i say those two because they're so closely correlated with us southern europe too involving

01:34:22.760 especially like with the etruscans as they called their gods i essier they called the their their

01:34:28.500 gods were essier and so i think that's very poignant to know but when you look at the other

01:34:34.120 three houses we would look at like the hellenic and then we would look at uh middle eastern and

01:34:39.780 i say that because it could be persian it could be hittite it could be louisian uh admixture there

01:34:46.980 and then you go further east and you see the vedic so if you see these the first three houses are more

01:34:52.800 correlated to us as we are one of those and then we start to see the bordering nation of the aryan

01:34:59.640 uh migrations and and um invasions in which uh they start to mix with the whether it's the uh

01:35:07.300 the Semitic people or whether it's with the Dravidians or something of that nature, we start

01:35:11.800 to see divergences there. And I certainly think that if we look at the cores of things, and then

01:35:18.080 there's the big debate of whether or not, like for instance, with how much of Buddhism is connected

01:35:24.180 to the Brahmin class and the Brahmin class, of course, connected to Vedic Arianism. And I think

01:35:31.780 that's all awesome to, especially I lurk on a lot of those conversations that I run into

01:35:37.180 because I don't have a huge stance. And I think it's important that if I'm not wise in it,

01:35:42.380 shut my mouth and listen and just kind of picture and digest what they're saying in correlation to

01:35:51.020 my people. So I would just say one great thing to think about is the three houses that are

01:35:58.800 connected to us or are us and the two houses being Gaulish and Slavs. And then looking at

01:36:05.400 hellenics and the middle eastern persian hittite louian um group and the and the vedics as all

01:36:13.640 correlative but go to those first three houses first whether you're talking about continental

01:36:18.920 germanicism angelo isle germanicism or nordic germanicism and baltic germanicism and then look

01:36:26.200 at slavic and gallic and then start to spread into the other houses there's value there for sure um

01:36:34.440 and i think a lot of people i i think there's a lot of wisdom in all of those houses that

01:36:40.040 can apply to us i just i'm weary of people who search for the exotic to a point where they

01:36:45.960 they go against the uh the system that is innate in them that is they're living in that culture

01:36:52.360 they speak a germanic teutonic anglo-saxon uh language and they have a spiritualism that is

01:37:00.360 there uh and and they're gravitating towards the esoteric exoticism for reasons you know unto their

01:37:09.240 own whether it's modernity that's that's killing all forms of spiritualism in the west and we could

01:37:13.720 go on about that and and and all of those would have a bit of a red hand in all of that but um

01:37:21.320 you know it's i'm weary of it and so i i like to treat it with respect and i i want to treat it

01:37:27.880 with um an observation in correlation to the source where i come from first before i just

01:37:35.560 say entirely one way or another

01:37:40.440 i think that's a really good point that you brought up was the uh the exotic fetishism

01:37:48.680 um and i want to address that in one second i just want to point out we've got one question left

01:37:53.880 in the line over here it's been an hour and a half every conversation with spawn doesn't need

01:37:58.520 to be five hours but if you guys got questions and things that you'd like to ask please do throw in

01:38:04.360 some questions um but if not i'm going to rant about the exoticism thing for a second and then

01:38:10.840 we'll hit our last question so if we get more questions by then awesome if not it's been a

01:38:15.640 really good discussion so far um we see we see the exotic fetishism and i think that that in itself

01:38:28.680 is a form of escapism instead of fixing what we have and building what's ours so often westerners

01:38:39.480 like to just reject what we have and try to find a life raft somewhere else or something else they

01:38:47.160 can grab onto and if it they can feel like it's still racially relevant to them all the better

01:38:57.080 but i think it's one of the things that

01:39:00.120 you know you certainly see this in uh the 1800s and in the early 1900s when you have

01:39:10.920 a spiritual reawakening in a way a pagan reawakening and a rejection of

01:39:17.960 the christianity that they had but rather than explore what they have

01:39:23.640 very often people of that time would look to to india they would look to the far east they

01:39:28.120 would look to the exotic um you certainly see that now and i've watched it as a current within

01:39:34.920 aussitrue um people will embrace aussitrue and if they don't feel like they got what they wanted

01:39:44.120 in aussitrue then they'll take you know another step towards the bazaar and then they'll take an

01:39:50.280 even further step. And they keep trying to jump to new lily pads rather than make what they have

01:39:58.980 something beautiful. And I thought that, yeah, let's just say I've seen that a lot with people

01:40:07.160 and I don't think that the motive is right. So I don't think that the mind is discerning on that

01:40:14.940 sometimes. One of the other things you see when people jump around on that is people that don't

01:40:20.520 ever want to settle down and conform to something. They always want to do something new and different,

01:40:26.180 and they'll seek whatever that new frontier is. Sometimes lately, that new frontier happens to be

01:40:33.760 Vedic practice or Zoroastrian practice. And I think that if that became the mainstream of

01:40:44.420 Aryan pagan thought, they would then move to some other thing. Or you often see people go

01:40:52.100 from Alcetru to Zoroastrian and Indian stuff to Eastern Orthodox Christianity.

01:41:00.740 You see these jumps between things due to lack of satisfaction as opposed to

01:41:06.180 in a constructive way to build Aryan paganism.

01:41:10.620 um yeah so I'm with Svan on the houses you should go to are the people and the the cultures that

01:41:19.880 are similar to yours if you need to look for added perspective or an added angle on it um

01:41:27.120 the Celtic and the um and the Slavic are much much more closer related much easier for us

01:41:38.160 as a as a racial group to digest and much more relevant to what we're doing finding the

01:41:45.480 commonalities and all of them are great if you find a commonality in all of those houses then

01:41:50.220 you know it's rock solid and that's something that's that's absolutely ours and fundamental

01:41:54.640 um dealing with some of the more exotic elements I do think are helpful if you have the discernment

01:42:00.840 to to pick and choose what's relevant and what's not but it gets very very confusing and very hard

01:42:07.200 to uh very hard to differentiate once you get beyond that um and nick's add-on question to

01:42:15.520 this was would it be considered a bad thing to basically ignore generic eastern or indo-european

01:42:23.360 or eastern indo-european and just focus on norse alone yes i think that if you are intentionally

01:42:32.080 closing your eyes and ears to knowledge that is useful and helpful to you i think that that

01:42:38.240 process is in and of itself a bad thing i think going through the effort of educating yourself

01:42:46.080 on these other things is beneficial in and of itself and the other thing i think that's important

01:42:51.680 and this is i don't know this is something that gets discussed or asked about the afa

01:43:01.120 is not only pan-european we are also pan-aryan and we have people of our our folk our greater

01:43:12.080 arian folk that exists over a widespread of the world trying to think of the best way to phrase

01:43:25.040 this to where it's clear and it makes sense but alsatru has won the primacy to carry the arian

01:43:34.160 banner forward by doing that we reintegrate the things that are authentic and valuable

01:43:41.440 of different traditions under the arian umbrella because the way our gods revealed themselves to

01:43:50.480 the germanics and to the norse is what has won in the end is what has brought us to where we

01:43:56.320 are today is what has inspired us to move forward is what's successful and what's winning

01:44:01.200 so we choose to honor the divinities under those names under those parameters

01:44:07.920 but we don't want to lose out on the beauty of some of these people that are a little bit more

01:44:12.800 on the fringe of geographically that age if there's something to offer and if there's

01:44:17.920 something that's genuinely ours there and i think we run that risk we don't want to throw the baby

01:44:23.600 out with the bath water and we do want to learn from and get the best from the influx of all our

01:44:30.240 arian folk that we're bringing home to our gods and i know that opens up a whole can of worms and

01:44:36.080 there's a lot of variables to that that i'm happy to discuss but that's why i think it is essential

01:44:41.920 that we keep our eyes ears and hearts open to these other things to educate our practice and

01:44:48.880 even if even if by looking at them we eliminate all of them as inauthentic and in and irrelevant

01:44:56.880 in and of itself there is a value in that thought process there is a value

01:45:01.920 in going through making that decision because it reaffirms what we're already doing in that case

01:45:06.560 um another question how would you two explain the emotion of grief and how do you counsel those who

01:45:20.540 greatly suffer from its effects it's a really interesting question uh it's fine go ahead and

01:45:26.840 take the first crack at that I've been talking for a little bit here the emotion of grief

01:45:32.320 um wow i mean i think grief follows us deeply in the wake of fear i think that

01:45:45.360 a lot of times grief comes from loss and loss in its true true form is is and i don't mean

01:45:54.220 fear in some sort of a weak way i think fear of losing those that we love and then when it

01:46:01.280 actually happens and and i guess the grand irony of it is that we know it's all going to happen

01:46:07.040 again the natural law of things the cycle of things is that that we will lose and uh we will

01:46:12.720 lose things dear to us and um and so we fear that and then when it happens it's followed in its wake

01:46:20.000 is is grief um grief can be a blight upon the soul i think if it's left to fester

01:46:29.680 I think also, too, that a lot of times it's about our perception of the world around us.

01:46:36.660 Sometimes we lose perception in the divinity of the gods.

01:46:39.920 We can be placed into things in our life and in the world around us that make us forget.

01:46:45.420 There's like a fog or a din that holds over our heads, and it can obfuscate the way we see things.

01:46:56.540 Perhaps we speak of things in high moralism, but the moment we encounter problems and loss and things like that, we do become confused and that grief does weigh over us like a mist or a smoke and it obfuscates us from the great picture.

01:47:13.560 And so seeking our way through grief is ultimately seeking a return back to clarity of the way the gods and all of the forces of divinity and the material world and the cycles that we all go through, we have to seek clarity again.

01:47:34.840 And that comes with healing the emotion, healing the heart, because I think partially that obfuscation from clarity is an internal point in which we must find the sources that grieve our heart, that cause the scars, that fear has cut into us.

01:47:55.960 And so we have to take the time to identify what it is. And then I think the first and foremost, and this is through my own experiences, the way to find the source of grief in order to begin to heal it is to look at the symptoms in which your grief is manifesting.

01:48:16.600 oftentimes it's manifested in in in a variety of ways whether it's outbursts or um disassociation or

01:48:24.520 substance abuse there are lots of different ways in which our grief manifests in the material and

01:48:31.160 we need that's the first and foremost is to recognize those things and then to begin to

01:48:37.240 attack why those things are happening what is the source of them i think that seeking counsel

01:48:43.480 whether with gothar with your family with um fellow uh folks like i i sought counsel too with

01:48:52.280 fellow peers uh that were in military service and saw things and were had experienced things

01:48:59.240 that caused great fear and thus great grief upon their hearts and um you know identifying those

01:49:05.960 problems and and working my way back and into the core of these things and beginning to heal them

01:49:11.240 and understand that fate, our destinies, oftentimes will lead us into great dark places.

01:49:21.080 And we were always given the ability to rise and shine again from those dark places,

01:49:27.360 like Balder rising from Helgard.

01:49:30.520 We have that ability innately in us, and we have to go through that cycle in order to rise.

01:49:37.160 So once you find the scars and the pain and source, and you've cut off the vices that are kind of materializing from it, and if you have none, that's good. That means you just go straight to the source.

01:49:51.360 But some people don't. In their confusion and the din and in the midst of it all, they don't realize that they have this great despair until they see it manifest in some other form and it starts to affect the people around them, their children, their loved ones, their husbands, their wives or friends and things.

01:50:09.360 um once you begin to heal those sources of where they come from to come into terms with them to

01:50:18.240 find both the truth and peace between the conflict within your soul and in your heart about the idea

01:50:24.160 of it and then you begin to see the great clarity of things that we will lose and that ultimately

01:50:30.320 we don't lose it's that things transfer around us that we don't want to change we don't want

01:50:37.760 them to move into different states we don't want ourselves to move into those different states we

01:50:42.880 always want to seek a wholeness that is very that the word holiness and wholeness amongst arians is

01:50:51.440 together for a reason we see things as being in the in the apex of their wholeness as being the

01:50:57.600 best of a situation being the best of the of the body the best of the heart the best of the mind

01:51:03.120 And the gods are that. So when we see something that's not that, we become deeply hurt. And so we need to return to wholeness by finding those things and attacking them.

01:51:18.260 so i'm really glad that you asked this question because it's

01:51:30.660 a lot of folks think initially when they first find house a true or when they're new to our faith

01:51:39.380 they think in the future about them becoming a gothi and at an entry level when you think of

01:51:45.540 what gothar do it's about talking about the lore or about officiating rituals and doing those things

01:51:56.180 it's about you know getting to getting to be the center of attention in the middle of a circle you

01:52:02.340 know hollering up at the heavens and i can do that with the best of them that's absolutely that's

01:52:08.980 part of it but what i think we spend the most of our time doing is counseling people and one of

01:52:18.020 the things that is most often something to counsel about is grief grief just it's it's a loss but

01:52:26.500 it's not just the passing away of a person you can grieve the loss of the loss of anything

01:52:32.260 anything that matters to you on a really deep level. And I think that

01:52:40.100 I think that's what the issue is, is with loss. Now, as Svon said, that loss is accompanied by

01:52:49.300 a fear of, okay, now that, as our ancestors would describe, there's a hole in your kin fence.

01:52:57.280 You know, now that I've lost this person, then there's a fear of what to do next or what to do going forward. There's a fear associated with it.

01:53:06.960 But one of the things that I find most troubling to people about grief is the idea that a door has been shut that can never be reopened.

01:53:16.840 And you're flooded with all the regrets and all of the woulda, coulda, shoulda, all of those thoughts.

01:53:24.300 and if those things remain unresolved they can eat away at you for years or for the rest of your life

01:53:31.500 depending um so counseling on that is really um it's really challenging so first

01:53:42.600 as far in a couple of things on counseling here but I'd say first

01:53:47.860 in my experience, the most important thing you can do in counseling people isn't actually

01:53:58.460 counseling them. It's being an active and engaged listener and letting them say the things they need

01:54:10.480 to say. One of the most therapeutic things that I have found with people is just let them get the

01:54:19.740 things off their chest to somebody who's they don't think is going to judge them harshly or

01:54:25.980 use it against them. Or, you know, when they come to me as a priest, I'm not that guy that's in

01:54:32.180 whatever drama they're part of. I'm a party that they know is going to treat what they have to say

01:54:37.300 respectfully and with a degree of confidentiality, just letting them get off the chest and say what

01:54:43.440 they need to say and be mad and rant if they need to, cry if they need to, tell me the stories that

01:54:50.760 they wish they would have done, whatever they got to do to get that off their chest. Having that

01:54:57.240 weight on the chest is a very very real thing it is a real pressure and burden that one carries

01:55:07.000 until you can get that off your chest so first i'd say listening is very very important um

01:55:15.160 there's situations where terrible stuff happens if there's nothing i can do that's going to say

01:55:19.880 something that's going to make it right or it's going to fix it or whatever and honestly a lot

01:55:24.680 of the time when people go to you for counseling they don't want that they just want to be heard

01:55:31.560 and they want somebody to acknowledge or validate what they're going through sometimes just

01:55:38.760 listening and if it's in person giving somebody a hug if it's over the phone like that is terrible

01:55:45.880 i'm so sorry you had that happen to you if there is anything i can do please let me know

01:55:52.840 but i hear you and i care about what you're saying sometimes that is all you can do and sometimes

01:56:00.680 that makes a lot of the difference now onto the more meat and potatoes of what you asked

01:56:06.200 and i think this is goes into the philosophy of this show and its title the idea that victory

01:56:12.920 never sleeps so much of what is fundamental to me in my belief system is being active is taking

01:56:22.600 actions one of the things with any setback or any loss whenever you find yourself put in a

01:56:32.680 disadvantageous position your deck is reshuffled and you have a new set of options that you can

01:56:42.360 or avenues that you can take to be successful if you're always stressed over what you've lost

01:56:49.160 and you sit around gnashing your teeth over what you've lost and that's your focus then you lose

01:56:54.040 sight of the other opportunities you have you know getting knocked on your butt provides you

01:56:59.640 opportunities that you didn't have when you were standing up there's things that are provided to

01:57:04.920 you if you get fired yes that is bad but now you have an opportunity to pursue different things

01:57:14.760 you have an opportunity to collect unemployment you have an opportunity to pursue a different

01:57:19.160 career you have an opportunity to travel perhaps if you have money saved there's other things you

01:57:25.160 have an opportunity for and it's a double loss if you remain focused on the initial hit and

01:57:31.320 you miss the other opportunities i think that's similar when you're grieving

01:57:39.080 um for a loved one or for something that you've lost that's deeper than something material

01:57:45.240 because focusing on the loss prevents you from any other gain in the meantime and you see this

01:57:52.440 you see this with people who have family members pass and they'll neglect their other family

01:57:57.560 because they're so focused on this one member they've lost that they squander time with these

01:58:02.920 others so i try to transition things into action if you have regrets that you didn't do something

01:58:10.920 with one member of your family and you didn't show them enough uh enough love or enough time

01:58:17.400 enough attention then double your efforts to make sure that that does not happen with anybody else

01:58:24.520 go all out being the best son the best dad the best husband the best friend that you can be to

01:58:31.400 the people and that you have left put that grieving energy into action moving you forward

01:58:40.600 i also think because so much of that like i said was a door being shut

01:58:47.240 and this goes into more esoterics than the other things i've suggested

01:58:53.880 But I believe very much that this isn't a permanent severing.

01:58:58.880 We believe fundamentally in Ausatru that our ancestors and the dead still can interact with us, still can hear us, still can receive gifts, still can give gifts.

01:59:11.480 It's not the same. I would never tell somebody I was counseling. No, it's all good. They're still here. You just can't see them.

01:59:17.580 that is so trite and diminishes the very real physical loss. But there is a kernel of truth.

01:59:27.060 That person can still hear you. You can still say the things that you should have said.

01:59:34.200 You can at least say them at your altar. Doing things to honor. We also believe in the idea of

01:59:43.020 posthumous ascension. So you can further help and elevate the reputation of a deceased loved one in

01:59:49.960 the afterlife by celebrating them, by raising, you know, as our ancestors would say, raising a

01:59:56.960 cairn on the side of the road, making a runestone for them, things that way. But in a more modern

02:00:02.600 sense, by telling their stories, by celebrating them, by doing great things in their name and

02:00:08.500 attributing it to them. You can earn them afterlife points that way and feel like you

02:00:14.860 are doing something for someone you loved and have lost. Finding ways to do, to achieve, to put

02:00:22.920 deeds and effort in is a tangible way. And once you've done those actions, they exist.

02:00:29.780 You can look at them, you can see them, you can remember them, and you can hold on to them.

02:00:35.100 Whereas mental gymnastics and fluff, you can't hold on to it's, it's sand. It runs through your fingers. If you try to grab it, deeds are solid. Deeds are iron. You can hold on to them. And that's how I approach counseling with grief. But like I said, every situation is very, very different. And there's some stuff that, that you just can't fix.

02:01:05.100 but i try to give people tools of things they can do to make what they have better and to

02:01:13.020 you know where they can repair things that may be broken or lost that's about the best i got on that

02:01:22.140 um another question i am a heathen from germany does the afa have any connections to pagan

02:01:29.660 organizations in germany no but we would sure love to have some members in germany um

02:01:38.220 yes that is a shameless plug to get you and your and your comrades to join us but uh i i have no

02:01:44.780 shame in that because i think that's what should happen that being said i do know that there are

02:01:49.180 some very good uh folkish pagan organizations in germany but because of the rules there they are so

02:01:55.900 no underground secret handshake that they're hard to see um the one German organization that

02:02:04.540 uh I and other AFA leadership have had contact with is an organization called uh Der Artsgemeinschaft

02:02:13.020 and uh they seem they seem great we saw you know pictures and footage of them with with big

02:02:20.860 of people celebrating our heritage there. They're a folkish organization. I got to meet their leader.

02:02:29.560 I don't know what his title was that way because it's different. It may have been something

02:02:35.040 different in translation, but I got to meet him, his second-in-command, and their families

02:02:41.920 at an event we had in Sweden a number of years ago, and that was really nice. They were fantastic

02:02:47.660 people and definitely group of people that if I'm ever in the fatherland again, I will try to

02:02:54.840 look up and reconnect with because I was very impressed with them. So that's the only organization

02:03:01.120 in Germany that I have any interaction with. And if you were curious or you wrote me on the side,

02:03:06.780 I could try to see about making some connection there if you'd like.

02:03:11.500 um actually just a side thing hey swan do you have any connections with any germ uh pagans

02:03:19.760 in germany or pagan organizations in germany no no i not not ever since you you spoke of when uh

02:03:26.260 you got to you know build some frith between the folks there in sweden at nothing of that level

02:03:32.880 yeah i mean you're all right yeah fair enough fun question from cliff uh favorite viking or heroic

02:03:43.920 movie swan go oh why do you always throw me up first because i want time to think i know

02:03:53.040 oh wait is it viking or heroic yes it can be viking and heroic

02:03:59.920 believe it or not i've never seen past the first episode of the viking show and i haven't seen

02:04:11.080 northman yet i know that a lot of people are probably aghast by that or i i don't know i just

02:04:16.320 i don't have a lot of time and to get out and go see things at movies and i usually find them way

02:04:23.880 later um so i immediately kind of go back to old old stuff um i i don't know why but the first

02:04:35.000 thing that popped into my head was the old the vikings uh i think i believe it came out in in

02:04:43.560 the early 60s um the uh i don't know that it was the the oldest one with kurt douglas the one where

02:04:55.840 they they actually show them going across the the oars while they're you know as they're just this

02:05:01.620 like most machismo moment they're coming back from from it and they to celebrate they're hopping

02:05:07.560 between the oars and they're falling and they're hitting the oars and flipping back into the water

02:05:12.300 and everybody's laughing and having a joke.

02:05:14.420 I think that – I didn't actually see that movie until way later, actually.

02:05:19.860 I had already become Ausatru.

02:05:22.320 I had given my troth to the gods and then saw that later.

02:05:28.080 And it just was so cool as far as the color and the brightness.

02:05:34.400 It was pretty edgy for its time.

02:05:36.600 there was an actual fight and slaying in the beginning of the movie that you know was very

02:05:41.740 controversial at the time and i remember researching the movie and just kind of that was one of the big

02:05:46.280 things was like it was showing this level of like aggression and violence between warring peoples

02:05:52.360 that was very rarely captured on film at the time um i also remember researching about when they did

02:05:59.000 that jumping from oar to oar uh what they found out was uh from the replicas of the boats that

02:06:04.720 had pulled up the oars were closer on on the older boats because i guess we as folk are are growing

02:06:13.760 we're getting bigger and over generations and so uh even the northmen who were large overall

02:06:23.120 amongst the folk uh they were still they had to make the boat bigger in order to fit the rowing

02:06:30.160 men in uh so they were originally trying to follow that the replica of the i believe it was the

02:06:36.160 osberg ship and they were trying to make a perfect replica and they realized they had to make it

02:06:40.640 longer i just i thought there were some really cool elements in there uh you know of course too

02:06:45.920 there's a a uh a rune corner that is talked about in the movie and you see that later on that almost

02:06:53.120 exact same scene is in uh michael crichton's uh eaters of the dead but he in the movie the 13th

02:07:01.280 warrior that was like an adaptation of an adaptation um you saw like i saw a lot of that

02:07:06.400 link so one of the cool movies that i really like is is the viking i just thought it was so brazenly

02:07:11.840 cool uh that they were doing stuff out of the box they were throwing axes up the uh the gate and

02:07:17.760 using them as like climbing things to get over the wall i when i was watching that i was like this is

02:07:23.840 this is amazing you probably not you know clearly not historically accurate especially in in

02:07:30.560 relations to rock not but it was still cool i can't you know and then of course just the the

02:07:38.560 the heroicism at the end just give me a sword so i can die and then then yelling out odin and

02:07:43.920 jumping into the pit it was so it was so cool that's me on that one sorry about that my daughter

02:07:53.680 is trying to evade bedtime bag them and bag them and drag them there you go um

02:08:09.200 man i used to so when it first came out i really really liked braveheart

02:08:13.120 and i think it's awesome movie and if they would have just changed the names and the settings i

02:08:18.560 would still love that movie and think it was amazing as somebody who values actual history

02:08:24.320 i am so grossly offended by that movie that i can't enjoy it anymore which is really unfortunate

02:08:36.320 edward longshanks should have been a hero because he's awesome it goes into another

02:08:41.200 question down here, but I, uh, suppose I didn't read it, but it was an audio book I listened to

02:08:45.960 in the gym, uh, about him. That was fantastic. Anyways, on the movie question, uh, heroic movie,

02:08:52.980 one of my favorites. Okay. I'll take it is what it is. I'd say Rocky one and Rocky four are my

02:09:00.720 favorite heroic movies. They are not Viking movies, but they are in fact heroic. And I think

02:09:06.340 that the personal overcoming of that story is really profound and I think that that's why the

02:09:17.260 the first one was such a good movie and just the epic scale of him defeating communism

02:09:22.940 and I'm laughing because it sounds so ridiculous but it was so fun to watch especially as a kid

02:09:32.060 And it was one of those, I don't know, as a kid, it was one of those things that really puffed me up and made me feel inspired for heroic things.

02:09:43.300 Our next question, which is also tricky, I'm also going to make Svon answer first.

02:09:50.640 Gentlemen, good evening. Great stream, as usual. Five favorite books, any topic from both of you, please. Not counting Edda's or Rune books. Thank you.

02:10:00.540 it's fine this one's on you oh uh five favorite books

02:10:08.700 crap uh so um

02:10:14.180 that is that is really hard uh i'm just trying i'm i'm answering what comes to my head

02:10:23.420 and and i would probably i'm gonna stay up the rest of the night going

02:10:26.860 i should have said this and i should have said that okay so i'll give you i'll give you a second

02:10:32.040 to think on that because i'm reading the side chat uh nick just said we got members in at least 10

02:10:37.840 other countries for anybody interested we have members in uh 14 countries i believe 15 now

02:10:44.120 because we just got a new member in the netherlands um artsgemeinschaft was wonderful when i met them

02:10:51.000 i read that the gentleman who asked the question is joining that organization that's fantastic

02:10:56.180 They're doing great things. We would love to have German AFA members. We have many different European nations represented in the Astru Folk Assembly and a great many members over there.

02:11:08.800 With Sweden still has our biggest European membership. But just as a point of information, Nesvan, tell us about those books.

02:11:16.580 i'm trying to think i think

02:11:25.540 this is rough uh when we talk about books are we talking about books that are and i can't i don't

02:11:39.100 want to dissect the question when we're talking about books are we talking about books that are

02:11:44.140 uh that teach lessons or have religious kind of connotations um or are we talking was any topic

02:11:52.220 but it can't be one of the eddas or a room book

02:11:58.220 uh

02:11:58.460 Hmm. I would say just outside by and by, but connected to religious stuff, I did rather enjoy Deep Ancestors.

02:12:17.000 That was a really provocative book for me as far as getting my thought patterns to perceive the gods in a Pan-Aryan sense.

02:12:29.380 I know that there is kind of like this, again, just like with Snorri, there's this disclaimer in the beginning that's kind of garbage.

02:12:35.680 But yeah, I cut right through that and go right into the meat and potatoes, and it's there.

02:12:40.340 Another book I would say that was really influential to me that I found kind of beautiful and poetic was Hage Kure is Hidden Behind the Leaves by Tetsuo – I think it's Yamashiro.

02:13:00.160 i i can't remember his is um i know it's tetsuo and then something else uh japanese book uh the

02:13:09.600 ruminations of a retired samurai uh that is now in a monastic life and he's kind of reflecting upon

02:13:15.600 upon correct action according to the ethos of of his warrior caste and um i don't i never really

02:13:22.400 kind of saw or had some sort of fetishism towards that i i knew that he it was just interesting to

02:13:29.280 see his um kind of reflection and remorse on the future of his cast and where they were going and

02:13:37.280 some of the ideals that he felt that they were losing and some of the proverbs in there are just

02:13:42.160 they hit real hard when you when you uh encounter certain things in life and just seeing that kind

02:13:50.700 of universal wisdom there was pretty, pretty good. Um, Gates of Fire was a huge book for me

02:13:59.180 when I was in, um, in Iraq, I read that book. Um, and the Gates of Fire, uh, I believe is Brian,

02:14:09.880 ah, because we're on the cuff here, please forgive me. Uh, but the Gates of Fire, uh,

02:14:16.120 was a huge book that really fleshed out and brought to life some heroic aspects of the spartans

02:14:24.120 in a such a military sense that i could easily understand it correlate it digest it and it

02:14:32.920 just made it all the more visceral as to what they were doing and why they were there and

02:14:39.320 some of the great points of how their poetic understanding the the need for poetry the need

02:14:44.680 for music the need for uh to be able to kind of stand this uh psychological hazing where they

02:14:51.480 would kind of joke each other and to the point where and if you lost your cool you you you lost

02:14:56.200 and and that happens in the military and so you know just all of that so the gates of fire is

02:15:01.880 certainly a book in there that just immediately like popped into my mind um um the way of weird

02:15:11.000 by brian bates that's another one that's it's uh it's historical fiction it's kind of like in the

02:15:18.120 same cut of uh of um the gates of fire and that you know the the conversion of of a priest coming

02:15:29.080 across into the anglo-saxons of of uh england proper and um and you know he's taken around by a

02:15:39.960 uh vitki or a a govi vitki of that time and it's kind of spoken of the the ideals and precepts of

02:15:49.640 magic and and um spiritualism and divinity from an anglo-saxon source being spoken to

02:15:57.720 a fellow european but who was clearly inundated with a foreign way of thinking i thought was a

02:16:03.000 really interesting dichotomy that really does paint a a grain in modern day now when we do

02:16:09.880 talk to our brothers and sisters who are of a different idea um is that that's four right or five

02:16:18.440 i'm at a loss um wow that really stumped me all right you picked the wrong people to ask

02:16:36.760 this question i think spawn and i both way over analyze the question you're just hoping we throw

02:16:43.480 five books out there that are kind of interesting japanese we're like comparing them and like well

02:16:50.360 so anyway it's hard question i'm not going to pretend these are my five favorite books i'm

02:16:53.880 going to tell you these are five really good books that i have enjoyed a lot and felt really well

02:17:00.040 done first one i teased in the question above and uh that's one of the reasons i was down here

02:17:05.880 playing with my phone i want to make sure i got the the full titles of a couple of these right

02:17:11.480 because you guys should absolutely read them if you don't read them you should do what i do

02:17:16.040 to uh these last these first two ones i'm going to mention and listen to them on audio books

02:17:20.440 because they're fantastic um this guy ian mortimer a historian did a whole series of

02:17:26.760 really good uh biographies of a whole succession of english kings um and they're fantastic his

02:17:35.320 biography on uh edward the first that i mentioned earlier is fantastic a great and terrible king

02:17:42.280 edward the first and the forging of britain um oh actually this is not by ian mortimer aha that's

02:17:48.120 why i knew it was different ian mortimer does ones after this but this book is awesome it still

02:17:52.920 stands it's one of the favorite ones that i read uh by mark morris so the ian mortimer one is that

02:18:00.200 this one is a little bit better but it's also i find this king more inspirational but

02:18:07.240 they are both absolutely amazing and heroes in my book uh edward the third the perfect king is

02:18:14.280 in fact by ian mortimer i didn't lie to you guys this time and it is it is fantastic and i don't

02:18:18.840 think very many people know about edward the third and they should because he's one of the

02:18:23.880 the most amazing people I've ever read about. Those two books are fantastic. The Mystery of

02:18:33.900 the Grail by Julius Evola, I really like and I got a lot out of and it really set me on a thing

02:18:42.360 in my mind that has stayed with me and taught me a lot of connectivity that I think is really

02:18:49.220 important something i read recently but it's fascinating in the way that it was written and

02:18:55.300 i couldn't put it down and now i'm cool i'll find that the author for you here in just a second

02:19:02.500 but is a biography of uh general nathan bedford forest um and it was written

02:19:09.940 at the very end, I think it was published in 1904. So it was written by a person who could

02:19:20.560 write at a time where you're still enthused and you didn't have to couch everything you say

02:19:27.260 in political correctness. And you could write unabashedly about heroes, no matter whether

02:19:33.800 they're popular in the area you're at and you could afford like that's one of the things the

02:19:40.760 way this book was written um it was so

02:19:48.520 so fair you didn't need to paint one side the bad guys in order to make the guy you're writing about

02:19:57.000 be one of the good guys you could acknowledge heroes from both sides of the conflict and you

02:20:03.000 could speak glowingly about some of the finest gentlemen and the the greatest heroes america's

02:20:10.600 ever produced um but that devil forest by that devil forest life of general nathan bedford forest

02:20:18.520 by john allen wyeth w-y-e-t-h just read it recently and it's like i said it's fantastic

02:20:26.520 the way it's written is really well done and the author wrote it at a time where he could correspond

02:20:32.440 with so many people that knew general forest that could add relevant things from battles and

02:20:38.840 situations within their own lifetime and i think that's a really powerful source um another thing

02:20:45.320 can't say it's one of the greatest things ever but it's also something i can't put down and i'm

02:20:48.920 super impressed that it is a 10-part biography um and again i don't want to mess up titles here uh

02:20:58.760 but it's a 10 part biography on the leader of the West Virginia Hari Krishnas. And it's really

02:21:09.600 interesting. And I found out about it because the author was doing a show relatively close to mine

02:21:17.660 when I did an interview on Expedition Truth, which was a radio show or an internet radio show that I

02:21:24.920 did with Reverend Jack Ashcraft. And it was really cool. So the author, Henry Doktorski,

02:21:32.420 he's actually, I've corresponded with him since because I was so impressed about this book.

02:21:41.680 I'm just looking up the title to make sure I get it in the right order because I get it in the

02:21:45.240 wrong order frequently. Okay. Gold, Guns, and God. And it's a 10-part biography. Eight parts are out.

02:21:52.460 i'm currently reading the eighth i get them as soon as they come out it's fascinating um

02:21:59.100 it's not necessarily inspirational but it's super super interesting and this guy being able to write

02:22:05.980 a 10-part biography on it is fantastic and i find it just fascinating so uh yeah that that's one

02:22:14.940 yeah that's five that's five i i got i got more but that's five and we'll leave it at that for

02:22:22.120 this evening um i do have my last one it was given give it to us oh it's i i recall because

02:22:29.460 it was given by one of the members of the uh of of the assembly uh he was uh jacob gave me this

02:22:36.100 book called the darkening age and it it was really really interesting um it talks about the fall of

02:22:43.100 rome and and one of the big things that it it does is it goes in adverse to christian triumphantism

02:22:50.700 of rome where uh most of roman history is seen as like being super cruel uh and and degenerate

02:22:58.960 and terrible and it goes into kind of painting a more overarching view of of how rome had ascended

02:23:05.520 into its position as an empire as opposed to a nation but then it also talked about elements of

02:23:10.440 foreign cults and in particular it takes a hard grain focus on uh like the christian rebellions

02:23:18.060 and the defacements of temples the vandalism uh even the cross vandalism with other cults like

02:23:24.260 the there was times when like the christians and the mithras were fighting each other

02:23:28.000 and talks about the vandalism that they did on some of the mithra temples and so it was really

02:23:32.820 really interesting to kind of see that uh dark like venomous turmoil within rome during that

02:23:42.780 time and it really focuses in on just a lot of like the destruction and religious theosophical

02:23:49.180 warring like almost like gangs fighting each other amongst the populace so i thought that

02:23:55.820 was very interesting the darkening age by and i was going to say her name was catherine nix but

02:24:00.100 it's nixie uh or nixie n-i-x-e-y catherine nixie or nixie that was a that was a really interesting

02:24:09.380 book that sounds like a fascinating read um last question last question of the night

02:24:17.860 do you have a favorite philosopher that influenced you svan

02:24:22.740 philosopher

02:24:30.420 i guess again depending on who you would consider a philosopher or not but um

02:24:38.740 um i mean seneca that's the first thing that pops into my head and he was gratefully

02:24:47.260 greatly influenced stoicism is a weird bag though i'm not advocating stoicism in some

02:24:52.520 of its apathetic forms but at you know uh i think seneca was a huge influence to me during my

02:25:04.060 military service and and by and large the extensions of him as well when we talk about

02:25:10.800 like marcus aurelius's you know meditations and stuff like that but stoicism from a warrior's

02:25:16.640 perspective, I think was one of the most influential philosophical schools on my life

02:25:25.020 at a time in my life. Now is a different story per se, but that I would say is like a big,

02:25:34.000 big mountain on the topographical or timeline, Seneca and the Stoics. But again, now I have

02:25:45.060 some disagreements, but I got to give credit where credit is due. So never fear. We have a

02:25:53.160 paid question that popped up. We will absolutely get to your question, Shane. Don't know, no harm,

02:25:58.520 no foul. I have never, I've never been that philosophy guy because I think action has

02:26:12.980 mattered to me much more. My heroes have always been

02:26:23.900 to say they've been actors is wrong. I don't mean film actors,

02:26:27.360 but people that took action, military leaders, statesmen,

02:26:32.920 kings, people who are active in, in doing. And that doesn't

02:26:38.480 negate all philosophers. It just means that philosophy is not

02:26:41.740 something I've spent a lot of time on because very often the people philosophizing are removed

02:26:49.120 from active involvement in life. And I think that the person I'm going to mention is certainly one

02:26:53.900 of those in a lot of ways. Julius Evola is very interesting to me. I can't say that he has

02:27:00.840 fundamentally formed or influenced the way I see the world, but he has contextualized a lot of

02:27:07.780 things and I think added to or solidified a lot of my understandings of stuff. And I think he's

02:27:14.520 fascinating to read. But again, I think he gets carried away with ivory tower situations that

02:27:22.260 are far removed from actual action and living of life. So I certainly don't agree with him on

02:27:28.260 everything, but I find his information very valuable. And I will say that I've read, you know,

02:27:33.360 everything he's written that's been translated into English that I'm able to find.

02:27:37.780 And I'm, you know, always looking for new work or works that are newly translated to read.

02:27:44.780 But I don't think it's, you know, I don't think it has shaped how I see the world, but I do think how I see the world has benefited from it.

02:27:55.780 And then the actual last question is accompanied by $20 from Shane. Thank you, Shane. We appreciate that.

02:28:03.780 that. Hello, Shane Duffy here, Matt and Svahn. Do you think there could be a prayer and study

02:28:11.160 retreat hosted by Gothar before Tiershoff comes about? As a waterfarer, it would be an honor to

02:28:21.280 make pilgrimage to Njordshoff and take part in something more reading and deeply spiritually

02:28:26.840 focused. So yes, timeline and when and where, I don't know, but it is something that we've

02:28:38.220 absolutely talked about. And with us acquiring Sigurheim, hopefully very, very soon here,

02:28:45.300 that is absolutely something that we want to do there. And I've talked with our law speaker,

02:28:51.040 Alan Turnage on that. That's something he'd like to be involved in. But yes, we would love to do

02:28:56.300 things like that, not just a one-time thing, but to do things like that regularly at Sigerheim.

02:29:02.220 Before then, I'm certainly open to having that conversation. Perhaps a couple of days early

02:29:10.640 from a national event at one of our other Hoffs. That's just an idea. Svon, would you be interested

02:29:17.800 in something like that? Absolutely. Again, it's just location. You mentioned you're a seafarer

02:29:23.300 and you have close relations with that, that affects with the dominion of Njörð.

02:29:29.120 So, you know, when we talk about Baldursov and Njörðsóf and their diametrics

02:29:34.620 and then the diametrics of Odinsóf and Þórðsóf, that location would be one thing.

02:29:39.440 And, of course, Sigurheim becomes a huge focal point of that.

02:29:44.480 But, you know, weather-wise, Njörðsóf has, I would say,

02:29:49.300 the most amicable weather at the longest amount of time.

02:29:52.440 so that wouldn't you know in enable us to maybe set something up at a time when travel isn't like

02:29:59.280 traveling to florida in the summertime has a lot of logistic and implications all around but yet

02:30:06.780 at the same time it might be a great place to go to say post yule or um you know in between say like

02:30:14.520 um winter nights and yule that would be i think those would be two great times to kind of organize

02:30:21.120 something like that and uh you know being that new york's office weather amicable that would

02:30:28.640 probably be a great place to focus in on or balder's off in the summertime you know something

02:30:36.000 of that nature i don't know that would be great yeah we'd absolutely love to do something like

02:30:42.080 that and we will do stuff like that just a matter of figuring out logistics on when but please you

02:30:48.160 know if you're interested in that please talk with me about it offline and we'll we'll try

02:30:52.080 to move something forward on making that happen sooner rather than later um all right guys thank

02:30:57.280 you so much for for another great show we appreciate everybody's participation

02:31:02.320 and uh we certainly appreciate our guest this evening uh witness fawn um

02:31:10.400 he blows us away every time with the the valuable things he adds to this program

02:31:16.640 thank you so much we really appreciate you thank you so much for having me again all right well

02:31:22.480 you guys have a good night and uh hail the gods hail the folk hail the afa always remember that

02:31:31.040 victory never sleeps.

02:32:01.040 Transcription by CastingWords

02:32:31.040 Thank you.

02:33:01.040 Thank you.

02:33:31.040 Thank you.

02:34:01.040 We'll be right back.

02:34:31.040 We'll be right back.

Asatru Folk Assembly - December 01, 2022

11⧸30⧸22 Victory Never Sleeps, Episode 21 - Njörðr

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