Asatru Folk Assembly - 12⧸20⧸23 Victory Never Sleeps, Episode 76 - Witan Erickson

00:00:00.000 Transcription by CastingWords

00:00:30.000 We'll be right back.

00:01:00.000 Thank you.

00:01:30.000 Thank you.

00:02:00.000 Thank you.

00:02:30.000 We'll be right back.

00:03:00.000 hello everybody um welcome to another

00:03:28.000 exciting edition of Victory Never Sleeps, and happy first day of Yuletide.

00:03:36.640 I hope you guys are surrounded by friends and family and cheer.

00:03:44.540 Tonight I've got, returning for, I don't know, like third time or something, very special guest,

00:03:51.940 Good friend of mine, invaluable leader in the Outstreet Folk Assembly, Witten Clifford Erickson.

00:04:01.180 He's going to join me, and you guys may notice we don't have a specific topic for tonight.

00:04:08.240 I think the idea is to just have a good time with each other, with you, to answer questions if folks have them,

00:04:16.940 talk a little bit about our year, a little bit about the year we've got to come, and

00:04:21.560 to be in a celebratory spirit. So, happy Yule and welcome. Cliff, how are the Ericsons doing

00:04:31.020 this evening? We are doing quite well. We were out doing some late-minute, not quite last-minute

00:04:39.760 uh shopping for yuletide celebrations you know having family over uh over the weekend um

00:04:47.540 so we got back about an hour ago and uh quickly got set up for for being uh you know as i as i

00:04:55.700 tell the kids on tv today and um we as i was telling you a little bit before the show we

00:05:03.240 usually on on mother's night at the beginning of yuletide that's when we decorate our tree so

00:05:09.040 You'll notice behind me, the tree is up and lit, but we don't have our ornaments up or any of that yet.

00:05:17.140 And we may share some of that with y'all as we do that through the evening.

00:05:23.140 The kids are up getting a bath and probably some super adorable jammies on right now.

00:05:28.660 We'll have to see if they're more or less adorable than yours, Matt.

00:05:32.920 But, yeah, I mean, it's Yuletide.

00:05:36.460 i'm it's it's funny how quickly it sneaks up on you you know all the preparation all of the

00:05:44.060 oh yep yuletide is going to be here soon and then wham we're so um that's where we're at tonight and

00:05:52.700 i'm i'm in a great mood so you're all very lucky there you go um yeah it really does sneak up i uh

00:06:03.820 I suppose in some ways that's a good thing as you get older, but in other ways, man, time flies.

00:06:15.540 I often let things that I want to do that I plan to do, I just don't quite get to them in time

00:06:22.080 because it sneaks up. This year, proud of myself, I've got two pig faces in my freezer,

00:06:29.060 having folks over to uh to celebrate on about my uh ulterior gothic dinner those you guys that may

00:06:35.940 not know every month i host a uh dinner at my house and try to find something interesting to

00:06:43.620 cook and you know an interesting cocktail or something to to share with folks and uh this

00:06:50.360 year we're going to try blog because you guys brought it on my radar two weeks a couple of

00:06:55.960 weeks ago when Svon and I talked about Yule. And at long last, I'm going to try Svon's idea for

00:07:03.440 cooking up some pig faces. I think that'll be a fun party favorite. Did some research on it and

00:07:08.660 was able to get some ordered pretty easy. So cultural note that I found out. So I live in

00:07:18.300 uh, in Reno, Nevada. And we have, we have a lot of, uh, Mexicans that live here and they have a lot of

00:07:25.740 Mexican, uh, carnes serias. I think they call them the like Mexican meat shops with other

00:07:35.280 Mexican, like grocery store stuff. Um, I figured they might be able to help me cause they do some

00:07:40.600 butchering, but everyone I called immediately hung up on me when I asked if they had pig heads.

00:07:46.860 so i think i think i stepped on a cultural faux pas might have caused some offense but uh luckily

00:07:54.400 the the caucasian butcher shop was able to hook me up and i'm excited and i'll tell you guys how

00:08:01.600 that turns out either way it's going to be fun i hear the cheeks are what you want to go for

00:08:07.580 the hog jowl i didn't i didn't know it was a thing living in alaska i it's a big thing down

00:08:13.900 south when i moved to florida uh 20 december of 2014 they introduced me to the hog jowl and it's

00:08:25.020 it's delicious if you slice it thin it's like the best bacon you've ever had it's amazing

00:08:30.540 it sounds delicious i would love to try it i'm uh i'm a culinary imperialist is how i like to put

00:08:38.220 it uh everybody's food should be our food unless we think it's gross and we decide that we're going

00:08:43.340 going to pass on it but absolutely yeah i gotta i still have to stock up on a few things i need to

00:08:49.440 get myself some pickled herring and creamed herring and some of the other you know uh yuletide

00:08:56.900 seafood type things i i passed on the smoked salmon this year but you know there's all that

00:09:02.020 that world of stuff um i'm going on the inexpensive route this year so no crab dips or anything like

00:09:09.800 that yeah they've got a good salmon dip at costco this time of year every year so i think i'm going

00:09:17.800 to get some of that too reminds me of reminds me of home a little bit it's been very hard to get

00:09:25.960 into uh any kind of salmon outside of living in alaska because well a couple of things growing

00:09:34.600 up in alaska everyone has salmon in their freezer like it's it's a staple thing that's in the

00:09:41.720 freezer that you have and if you need salmon your neighbor has plenty of salmon in their freezer

00:09:48.040 and it's all good and whatever it's it'll break the bank trying to get salmon you know

00:09:55.480 any other way i was spoiled with that and the other thing um either you know up there i would

00:10:01.240 get them either from fly fishing in the kenai river or i'd get them dip netting in the copper

00:10:06.440 river but uh kenai or copper river reds are just about the best in the world any of these

00:10:14.680 very light pink almost white farm salmon just don't have the same flavor

00:10:23.640 yeah i've got a up my fishing game i've been i've i haven't been fishing really since i was in my

00:10:28.760 like early 20s um don't think i've caught anything since i was a kid going fishing with my dad but

00:10:34.440 i live two miles from lake erie now and uh there there's a lot of opportunity there and i don't

00:10:40.520 mean to cause any controversies but um steelhead trout is one of the the big fish to catch in this

00:10:49.080 area and if you've ever tried it it's basically freshwater salmon there's a almost there's a

00:10:54.760 scientific debate about whether or not they're the same species and that the difference is that

00:10:59.720 salmon go out to saltwater seas before they come back um for spawning whereas the the steelhead

00:11:08.680 trout um stay in freshwater lakes but otherwise you you'd be hard-pressed to tell the difference

00:11:15.880 if you had two fillets right next to each other it's it's a pink meat it's not like usually you

00:11:22.200 think of trout and it's like white right yeah this is not like that this looks like salmon

00:11:27.800 so i don't know how why it's called trout but um anyway they're all over the lake so i should be

00:11:34.520 catching them absolutely i you should not only catch them you should put one in your freezer

00:11:44.920 and hand it off to me next time i see you i'm anxious to try that yeah absolutely um once i

00:11:51.080 once i manage to to catch them i will i will let you know um fortunately there's a lot of a lot of

00:11:56.200 good clubs and stuff like that around here for me to to skill back up um so yeah that's that's an

00:12:03.880 exciting thing you know i've i've been really fortunate i never i wasn't the point guy on most

00:12:12.200 of that i was always you know i had family or friends that were set up real good for fishing

00:12:17.240 so i would go with them and happen to fish as opposed to you know going out by myself and

00:12:23.800 making all the fishing happen so i was able to use you know other people's boats and

00:12:30.760 other people's nets and other people's stuff i was able to basically mooch my way through

00:12:34.920 fishing in alaska but i appreciated it that's nice yeah i last time i caught anything it was

00:12:41.080 like me and my dad we went out and caught like 30 crappies i spent more time cleaning them than

00:12:45.320 eating them but we kept them because they were big enough we used to dip net for subsistence salmon

00:12:57.720 30 per family i think so you know 30 per household so if you went with a couple of

00:13:02.920 different people you could get and i went to one where we got 120 salmon you know in the course of

00:13:08.680 two days and hearts are pretty good but it's kind of a you know waste if you're just getting a couple

00:13:16.040 to get a couple of hearts out of them but if you get um you know a big number like that we got up

00:13:21.320 the got the uh fish hearts and fried them up like you would chicken hearts and that was delicious

00:13:28.680 nice looks like your organs starting to go up that blue ball that owen uh showed you all by

00:13:36.760 the way was a gift from folk builder mike malillo to our family um when we went to his home for

00:13:44.600 his yuletide celebration this past weekend um every family that was there got one from him

00:13:50.520 i believe and it's uh uh you know a blue glass ball with an urban soul on it it's very nice

00:13:58.200 that's awesome that's we're we're starting to have quite the collection of uh proper

00:14:04.120 yule ornaments you know also true themed ornaments that uh that myself and katie started to collect

00:14:09.880 over the years to the point now where we don't have any real generic ornaments that go up anymore

00:14:16.520 which is nice except a few for the kids i think we have like a scooby-doo ornament somewhere

00:14:23.560 excellent um so producer nick wants me to plug a few things at the top of the show um

00:14:31.560 um we are broadcasting live on youtube on entropy on vk odyssey rumble um twitter

00:14:48.120 and uh twitch which i'm not very familiar with um yeah we're all those places

00:14:57.000 if anybody on those listening on if first if anybody's on those platforms listening right now

00:15:01.800 uh we are glad to have you in the audience and we have people monitoring those so please feel free

00:15:08.040 to ask any questions and get those questions answered and include you all in the conversation

00:15:14.040 if anybody wants to be involved in any kind of donations or monetizing those questions any

00:15:20.600 donations and certainly any questions attached to donations we'll put to the front of the line

00:15:28.040 the ways to do that are in the show description um and on the little scanny thing that nick just put

00:15:35.320 up and there's lots of lots of fun and exciting and perhaps obnoxious ways to uh do those do the

00:15:43.480 things they're very much appreciated we got a lot of really important things we're trying to

00:15:47.800 accomplish going through some stuff with nick and our tech guys it would be super duper helpful if

00:15:55.640 everybody listening to this if you like it if you appreciate it you just want to inflict it upon

00:16:00.760 more people who like share subscribe the more features you get on the different platforms

00:16:09.320 more uh more the algorithm feeds them to more people but also the more cool stuff you can do

00:16:19.060 with it but some of those levels of being able to get this seen in different ways require certain

00:16:24.760 numbers of subscribers on youtube for instance we are getting very very close to 3 000 subscribers

00:16:32.280 we've got 2960 as of the start of this broadcast i'll check with nick because my screen is tiny

00:16:39.720 but i see we got a donation right now that's awesome i will acknowledge you properly donor

00:16:46.680 as soon as nick gets it in my queue here and at least there's anything else at the top of the

00:16:55.240 program okay so one thing oh actually cool it just came through daniel skinner thank you so much

00:17:08.200 ten dollar donation says hail the gods hail the folk baldertoff is the best hawk question for y'all

00:17:17.000 why do you think so many find the gods in prison

00:17:20.280 do you have any theories on that well i've never been in prison so i'm not i don't have a you know

00:17:30.040 uh an experienced perspective on that but i've i've worked with some of our members who have been

00:17:36.520 um and i have some relatives who have been in prison although they didn't find the guys while

00:17:42.600 they were there um and and thank you daniel for the donation and for asking that i think um

00:17:47.560 perhaps a reason why so many of our folk find the gods while they're in prison is because they need

00:17:57.000 to. There's a lot of scenarios outside of prison where when people fall on hard times

00:18:07.160 because of either family issues or substance abuse issues, financial issues, where that makes

00:18:16.100 them, I think, more primed to be open to hearing the call of their ancestors, which would in turn

00:18:27.780 lead to them hearing the call of our most ancient ancestors, the Aesir. Also, just as a practical

00:18:36.980 matter um it it happens that that that also true or odinism as it's probably called um there more

00:18:45.220 is fairly prominent in um in in the prison population so um if you if you find yourself

00:18:52.340 there your odds of getting exposed to it are i think greatly increased

00:18:59.780 yeah it's uh i don't know it's weird that this question comes up i was just talking to

00:19:05.460 james are all earlier this evening um he's the guy that runs our our prison ministry program

00:19:12.420 and we were talking about you know some things coming up for a couple of institutions

00:19:19.940 for one we're helping to

00:19:24.820 i suppose it requires a little bit of explanation but i guess not much in order for

00:19:29.300 for guys who are incarcerated to have one of their they get a certain number of religious feasts

00:19:38.160 like religious special meals they're able to have per year and in order to do that they need an

00:19:44.080 outside sponsor so we were helping out some guys in Folsom be able to do that and I'm planning to

00:19:52.600 go and, and actually be at their feast with them. If I can get that squared away here on

00:19:58.080 the 26th. So I am, uh, looking forward to doing that, but it's, it's something that's

00:20:06.800 been kind of on my mind today. Like I mentioned, talking to James, um, again, I've, I've been

00:20:15.320 fortunate and being incarcerated has not been part of my life experience. And, uh, I hope,

00:20:22.360 hope that remains that way i have gone in and done ritual with folks who've been incarcerated a few

00:20:31.960 times now and i and of course i've i've interacted with a lot of guys that have that have had that

00:20:39.400 in their past um necessity is such an important thing you know it's such an important factor

00:20:48.360 When life gets – it's a similar reason, I think, to the expression there's no atheists in foxholes.

00:21:03.560 When life gets very life or death and things get very serious, there is a natural recourse to seeking the divine and reevaluating your life.

00:21:19.160 I also think that being in a situation like prison, a lot of the distractions of the free world aren't available.

00:21:33.560 And there's a lot of time to focus, there's a lot of time to read, there's a lot of time to reevaluate who you are, why you are the way you are, what you want out of life.

00:21:45.500 And so it's a really nice thing, but you'll find it's not just absolutely true.

00:21:50.060 I mean, prison, not a lot of atheists in prison.

00:21:53.900 prison is where you, you know, people find prison Jesus or prison Allah or whatever the case might

00:22:03.360 be. But prison has always been a very fertile ground for people to find religion and a person

00:22:11.480 certainly very well yeah so i appreciate your donation daniel and i appreciate you kind of

00:22:32.760 getting us started tonight i know we got some questions stacking up

00:22:37.080 and i figure we will get to those um one of the goals that i really like to achieve

00:22:51.000 in 2024 and i think that it's apropos to talk about this when uh cliff's on here with me

00:23:00.200 we are very excited about getting phrase off i know you guys have been hearing about that for

00:23:08.040 a while it's something that we're very very excited to do and the first step in that has

00:23:14.060 always been to clear our debt from york's off that puts us in the spot to start making things

00:23:23.280 happen and getting phrase off and the distance between that debt clearing and us getting phrase

00:23:28.500 off is much much smaller than you know anything that comes before that um so

00:23:41.300 we are as of this last month we dipped below 100 000 of remaining debt if you see that

00:23:49.940 the nice pretty uh pretty green graphic on this thermometer for those of us listening

00:23:54.420 listening as a podcast, you can't see it. But so you know, there is well over 60 some odd percent

00:24:02.540 of that thing taken care of. We have paid off somewhere around $146,000 of that debt,

00:24:10.780 got about $99,000 remaining. And with your guys' generosity and your help,

00:24:16.440 that's something very attainable in 2024 is to go ahead and get on the other side of that debt.

00:24:22.580 And then we are in a spot where at that point we are looking at properties and seriously evaluating the particulars of what we're doing for Frayshoff.

00:24:32.300 So I want to get us there. And I think that if we try really hard, we can in 2024.

00:24:37.700 We'll get there regardless, but we'll get there a lot faster if everybody is pitching in and helping out.

00:24:45.020 So we would encourage everybody who can to help us with that.

00:24:49.440 And I thank you.

00:24:52.580 Katie and I are very excited to be hitting the road looking at properties for Frazehoff again.

00:25:02.120 I remember, I mean, gosh, it was probably four and a half or five years ago now when we were looking for properties that could have possibly been Thorshoff before the Thunder found his best home in North Carolina because we weren't the only ones looking.

00:25:21.020 But it's really exciting when you're in that mode of checking out properties, trying to get everything, you know, but also being realistic and assessing what the needs of our local congregation will be and, you know, whether a property is realistic both on the high end and the low end.

00:25:43.300 um yeah so that's that's going to be very exciting to get our teeth back into that kind of

00:25:53.560 property hunt are you excited about phrase off who's excited about phrase off

00:25:57.820 they're excited about phrase good they should be uh i am too and i'm silly even though knowing that

00:26:07.120 the things that are currently on the market will likely not be on the market then i still look

00:26:12.620 every single month at what our options look like if nothing else it gives me kind of an idea of

00:26:18.460 what's out there at what price point but that part of the country that uh

00:26:27.500 western pennsylvania eastern ohio area has always been very very appealing with the kind of

00:26:35.100 of real estate available for the talk so i'm very excited about it and we will certainly keep

00:26:42.780 everybody updated as we get closer but uh i appreciate you guys all being a part of

00:26:49.020 getting us there and making that happen for lord frere um first question we've got tonight first

00:26:56.460 non-monetized question we got tonight is coming to us i forget the route it's coming to us but

00:27:04.060 but it's coming to us before the broadcast

00:27:07.040 in the email from Dustin.

00:27:10.140 I'm in the process of creating an altar.

00:27:12.960 For getting idols of the gods,

00:27:14.720 are there any AFA rules to follow?

00:27:23.060 Oh, wow, okay.

00:27:24.740 I've just looked at the graphic

00:27:26.020 of how Nick put that up on the screen.

00:27:27.560 That was very dynamic.

00:27:29.500 Cliff, do you have any thoughts up top for that?

00:27:36.120 I wouldn't say that there are rules.

00:27:40.080 You know, people's artistic sensibilities can vary wildly.

00:27:45.420 Some are going to prefer almost like Roman Greco marble statue type appearances for statuary or idols.

00:27:55.720 Others are going to prefer a lot more, you know, historic replica types, you know, that are found in archaeological finds from Scandinavia, Germany, Finland, and other locations, England.

00:28:12.140 And others are going to go in a more modern direction where it's an interpretation of a modern artist of what one of our deities' appearances might be based on the materials available combined with their imagination and their skill at artistry and how well they can pull off what's in their mind's eye.

00:28:37.000 um you know it's it's easy to say you know oh make sure that you get it from someone who's

00:28:44.340 who's one of our folk um that's that's one of my preferences but i don't think that it's

00:28:49.340 sacrilegious to have um you know items from other sources um you know i don't i don't want to

00:28:58.340 specifically um you know plug anyone um because if i do i'll leave people out and i don't want to

00:29:06.900 you know pick favorites or offend someone and and i don't know all of uh all of our our great

00:29:13.820 artisans that are in the afa but as an afa member i would uh i would check out our afa marketplace

00:29:18.960 first because i know we have people in the afa that are very skilled at carving wood some of

00:29:26.580 them can probably do some sand casting if you're you know looking for something in resin or in in

00:29:33.160 metal um and you know at least entertain the possibility of um you know getting the the idol

00:29:41.720 or statue that you want from one of our folk in the afa if they don't have what you want in terms

00:29:50.020 of style or price or whatever your other, you know, practical requirements might be.

00:29:58.540 I would just make sure to look at a large selection of things. You might not even know

00:30:03.020 what is going to inspire you or make you feel closer to the God that you're,

00:30:08.840 you know, dedicating that altar to until you really take a wide look around.

00:30:14.980 You know, the internet's a big place. You can find so many different things. And even if you don't,

00:30:20.420 purchase it off of the internet you may be able to take somebody else's um design to an afa art

00:30:27.060 and say hey i want something like this except change these three things um yeah and and budget

00:30:34.180 will dictate quite a bit i think you know um if only they could all be eight foot solid gold

00:30:40.820 our gods would deserve that wouldn't be wrong absolutely and i think that

00:30:50.020 i absolutely respect the question um i don't think that there is

00:30:57.460 such a such an abundance of idols out there that

00:31:06.500 rules on that have become necessary um

00:31:11.380 everything that cliff just said is absolutely the case as far as rules and guidelines on it from the

00:31:17.940 afa as we've said on this show many times intent is everything um doing it with a pious heart

00:31:29.460 and trying to be reverent with your idols

00:31:34.900 makes all the rest of it a matter of personal preference uh you know why you're selecting a

00:31:42.100 particular item a particular idol a particular idol that is if you i mean don't get goofy

00:31:52.420 obviously ridiculous or obviously comical idols i would say um

00:32:01.460 some people who aren't approaching this religiously or perhaps who are and are

00:32:08.180 grossly mistaken will include loki in their in their sets of idols you wouldn't want to have an

00:32:15.860 idol to loki um but the the importance is in you know what is your purpose in getting this

00:32:26.540 does this inspire you does this bring that god into your home in a way that you connect with

00:32:33.000 and that's reverent towards our gods.

00:32:35.560 I think that's the most important thing.

00:32:37.360 There's all kinds of varieties.

00:32:39.040 There's plenty of custom things.

00:32:41.580 There is, you know, I got a number.

00:32:47.280 On my altar right now, I have a few of the idols are from Dryad Designs, I think.

00:32:57.080 um they're resin but made to look like they're wood carved idols um but i've got one that's

00:33:08.020 resin that's made to look like it's a like it's a bronze one of the all-father that i really like

00:33:13.140 a lot of that's just your own uh aesthetic of of what you what you find power in um

00:33:21.220 And, you know, I'm trying to think, and I haven't really seen anyone's idols that are offensive, or I would say no to, or that were, you know, done wrong.

00:33:35.380 um one thing i would suggest that's always a good choice and i'm not sure how many he has right now

00:33:43.920 i know that he did a really beautiful odin one and a really beautiful uh thor one is our afa

00:33:51.980 member andrews in sweden and if you reach out to your folk builder on the side he can connect you

00:33:57.100 to to a way to make those purchases but he he's done some really beautiful things and i've

00:34:03.660 You know, when when I visited Sweden on an AFA leadership trip a few years ago, I was in his garage and saw his kind of workshop for them.

00:34:13.140 And that was that was really cool. So getting something like that to where you have a personal connection is always a nice thing.

00:34:18.960 Just keeping the back of your head.

00:34:21.700 If you're plugging people, then I have to also throw in Gilbert Page, who has made some fantastic idols for our halls.

00:34:31.060 he he's really talented donated a treasure hoard of wood carvings to the auction table at winter

00:34:40.280 nights and um yeah getting kind of really good work yep uh do you know where he's located like

00:34:48.800 what state georgia i believe georgia florida all right um before we move on to the next one

00:34:56.680 uh we have a donation

00:35:01.000 so nick just sent me a reminder about it but i saw it we got a donation from the phelps

00:35:05.400 family of twenty dollars wishing all a joyous yuletide thank you for a wonderful year

00:35:11.960 year hail victory and hail the afa well uh hail the phelps's um a lovely family uh

00:35:21.400 And Zach and Lydia are both folk builders with the AFA.

00:35:26.800 They've been really helpful this year in a lot of ways.

00:35:36.040 Lydia's been a big part of kind of upgrading the way we do Victory Never Sleeps and getting that squared away and incorporating some new things.

00:35:45.000 And she's got some more ideas on that.

00:35:47.320 But she's also helping with our websites.

00:35:49.780 That's something that's a work in progress.

00:35:52.700 But each of our websites, and Nick can throw the addresses to them up,

00:35:58.260 even while Njortov, I believe, is currently being worked on.

00:36:04.760 She's done a beautiful job on bringing those up closer to worthy of our gods.

00:36:14.100 Nothing's ever going to be perfect, but I think they look really nice.

00:36:16.900 so please make sure you check those out and nick's got the addresses up on the screen right now

00:36:22.580 probably a few minutes or a few seconds earlier but i got a little lag on the display i'm looking

00:36:27.000 at but yeah we appreciate you guys thank you and you may notice they have been driving a whole lot

00:36:35.580 of the the little the um little graphic donations here that we have every week uh they've been huge

00:36:44.980 on that and trying to move that forward and that's that's much appreciated um next up

00:36:56.340 from human manipulation nation oh i truly hope everyone has the yuletide cheer a big hail to

00:37:06.020 everyone uh that brings this to us all uh all year and all the folk out there first question

00:37:14.100 Favorite song of the season?

00:37:20.000 What's your favorite holiday song, Cliff?

00:37:27.760 Mine?

00:37:28.760 Oh, gosh.

00:37:29.580 Well, I will admit that some of the old Christian hymns I still love the sound of.

00:37:39.480 But I guess because I've got the little kids right now, my favorite Yuletide song is Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.

00:37:50.860 It's just fun.

00:37:55.020 I'm anti-fun.

00:37:58.020 I want to officially from my swole Santa sweater and Santa hat wearing self say that I'm anti-fun.

00:38:09.480 The comedic songs have never done it for me, but I feel blasphemous.

00:38:17.120 O Come All Ye Faithful is probably my favorite.

00:38:21.000 It is not appropriate.

00:38:22.440 It is not exalting our gods.

00:38:26.360 It is exalting a god that casts our gods as demons and wants to force us, with a consequence of death, to abandon them.

00:38:36.760 so i can't really support that but it is very well done and it sticks in my head a lot this time

00:38:44.840 as far as the uh the the the religious songs that i was brought up in i've

00:38:49.720 i've always been partial to the little drummer boy

00:38:55.720 if i listen to it and in do not distract myself i will shed a tear if i listen to

00:39:03.560 Bob Seger's cover of

00:39:06.220 Little Drummer Boy.

00:39:09.000 But yeah, I think that's a powerful

00:39:10.520 song.

00:39:13.880 You know what?

00:39:14.940 One that I think is

00:39:16.660 a song of the season that I'm

00:39:20.400 not blaspheming by being

00:39:22.480 in support of and celebrating is

00:39:24.360 Auld Lang Syne. I think that

00:39:26.340 song's awesome. It's also very moving.

00:39:29.920 And it

00:39:30.340 I'm going to try to maneuver

00:39:35.280 that one into my favorite song of the season

00:39:37.600 category

00:39:38.200 One of the songs I think we should use

00:39:42.020 as Assature that we don't

00:39:43.680 have to modify, we don't have to

00:39:45.380 scratch out Christmas and put

00:39:47.760 Yuletide in is Deck the Halls

00:39:49.880 Deck the Halls is a fantastic song

00:39:51.700 as is

00:39:52.500 Agreed

00:39:53.860 um what's up next also from human humanipulation nation second question i came early how about any

00:40:12.800 recommendations to celebrate tomorrow fire and a brew are planned have a great season good folk

00:40:21.280 um do the ericsson's have any specific tomorrow recommendations for day two of yuletide which

00:40:34.180 happens this year to encompass the moment of solstice so yeah we we very much follow the uh

00:40:45.100 the, the, the, the newest AFA prescription, if you will, that is, that is modeled on the,

00:40:51.300 the, the Harold family traditions. Although I admit we have simplified it a little bit for our

00:40:57.820 own personal use. Just a minute, please. Katie, are you down here? Would you mind explaining what

00:41:07.160 we do in, in more detail on Suna's day? Because Katie really is the keeper of our Yuletide

00:41:13.100 traditions and can speak to it better than than i can i'm gonna um i'm gonna apologize in advance

00:41:20.620 i've had a cold and today's the first day i can kind of talk hey guys sorry um so on soon as night

00:41:31.740 we that's usually the night when we build a sun wheel uh we go out into the yard and we find pine

00:41:37.180 trees or pine branches and and pine cones and stuff and we build a pine well sudden will from

00:41:45.660 scratch and then um we usually end up doing it in the evening after the sun has gone down because of

00:41:51.340 cj's work schedule but ideally as the sunny sorry cliff his dad is also cliff so he's cj at home

00:41:59.700 We also – we usually light a fire, and we let the kids put the Sunwell into the fire.

00:42:07.320 So on our Suna, they're coming – the lengthening of the days.

00:42:13.040 I'm sorry.

00:42:13.480 I'm very distracted by the children.

00:42:15.880 There's a whole thing going on down there while we're talking to you.

00:42:19.620 You know, we can hear that.

00:42:21.240 I think that's – I think that goes over well.

00:42:26.080 The house is alive here.

00:42:27.900 And they're up a little bit past their bedtime, quite a bit past their bedtime.

00:42:32.160 So their energy is. Yeah, that's awesome.

00:42:36.580 Thank you. I think we all are excited about that.

00:42:39.800 It was good hearing it.

00:42:44.460 So I am trying to slowly incorporate the Harrell family festivities.

00:42:54.320 One thing that so tomorrow night is the longest night of the year because solstice is falling, you know, after sundown tomorrow.

00:43:05.960 So what we will continue to do to this year and has always been something that that I have done is I say always.

00:43:21.200 I'm sure there have been times that I've botched it or not, but my tradition.

00:43:28.660 OK, so Cliff just posted a strange and cool looking little avatar.

00:43:35.160 are. Anyways, that aside, I do a ritual lighting of a flame at around sundown. And the idea being

00:43:50.640 to hold vigil and be keepers of the light during the darkest night of the year.

00:43:59.260 um it's something that was always a big deal celebrating yule up in alaska

00:44:06.240 the requirements were much longer up there than uh other places i've found myself because longest

00:44:14.540 night up in anchorage is like three in the afternoon to 11 in the morning or something

00:44:24.740 So it's a pretty long time, but we're going to we're going to light some light some candles tomorrow night and keep watch over the flame and have them going throughout the night and protect them and take care of them and then ritually put them out in the morning when the sun has returned.

00:44:44.960 So that's what we're going to be doing at my house tomorrow night, along with miscellaneous festivities as they occur.

00:44:55.520 But that's always the important thing to me since I found Ossetru in the celebration of Yule, is that kind of vigil over the light during the longest night.

00:45:10.840 For the record, I do not know about this avatar.

00:45:13.440 I turned my camera off for a moment.

00:45:15.920 So the software selected the avatar.

00:45:21.160 Yeah, there's some...

00:45:24.120 Yes, I just got a message from Nick on the back end

00:45:27.200 that there's a...

00:45:29.440 AI has assisted into turning us into Yule-themed avatars

00:45:35.240 should something like that occur.

00:45:37.960 So that's kind of cool.

00:45:39.060 It looked good.

00:45:40.540 I don't know if you saw it on your end, but it looked cool.

00:45:43.440 No, I have no idea what it looks like. I'm super curious right now.

00:45:47.580 You should be, but it looks awesome. Like not comically so, just genuinely so. It looked good.

00:45:53.900 Our next question from The Wolf Throne. Matt, you said on a previous stream that the venom dripping from snakes is a metaphor for the disillusion of the soul.

00:46:05.720 Does this mean that you believe Nastrund is not a real place?

00:46:13.440 it's funny and I don't in any way mean to evade the question some of that depends on how you

00:46:25.200 define real and how you define place yes it is real in the sense it exists is it a geographical

00:46:33.960 place that you could find a treasure map and walk to no I don't believe that is the case

00:46:41.880 it does absolutely exist the form that it takes i don't believe there are literal reptilian snakes

00:46:52.220 that dangle above people and drip various forms of snake venom on them and i don't mean to make

00:46:59.820 it silly i'm not i'm not patronizing at all i just want to be really specific in what i'm saying on

00:47:04.260 because there are people that very much do.

00:47:08.580 There's absolutely a place where the souls of those who are not worthy to ascend,

00:47:20.200 not worthy to be welcomed by their family,

00:47:23.920 and not worthy to continue in any kind of whole or individualized personality form.

00:47:36.380 Those souls go to a place and in that place they are dissolved

00:47:41.280 and their component parts recycled into the folk soul.

00:47:50.520 So yes, I absolutely believe that it's real.

00:47:53.920 But I don't necessarily think that it is physical or temporal in a sense where it could be traveled to outside of miraculous metaphysical means.

00:48:09.080 I don't mean for that to be obtuse, but it's one of the things with the myths.

00:48:13.080 the myths are taking profound metaphysical truth and trying to filter it and portray it in a way

00:48:26.580 that is fitting to our imaginations to our understanding and to our language and our

00:48:34.840 our best attempts, and we talked about idols earlier, our best attempts at making idols

00:48:44.580 will never fully capture the glory of one of our gods. Hopefully, it inspires us towards that.

00:48:54.300 But we can't fully comprehend nor depict all of their glory with, you know, even the height of

00:49:02.860 our powers, and hopefully we get closer and closer and closer to that, but that's one of the things

00:49:09.000 that makes them gods, is that they are beyond our ability to fully conceive in that way.

00:49:21.640 What else do we got tonight? I might, I think, yeah, please. I look at Nastrond a lot of times as a

00:49:29.840 a bifurcation of components of the soul where, you know, it's about, you know, for those whose parts of their soul,

00:49:39.660 the soul complex doesn't all go to these places, I don't think.

00:49:42.760 You know, there's parts of the soul that do other things, but it's, you know, the breaking up and dissolution of the soul, I think.

00:49:56.040 And I think that it's real.

00:50:03.720 Is it a place or a time is hard to answer because, you know, not to be flippant, like you were saying, Matt, but like only the dead really know that and the gods, right?

00:50:12.840 We can't know that sort of thing in a literal, testable, physical kind of way here in Midgard.

00:50:20.120 But I do think that it's our ancestors' way of trying to understand what it would feel like for your soul to break apart and dissolve into nothingness.

00:50:36.940 You know, it's the ultimate defeat of the soul.

00:50:39.140 yeah one of the uh

00:50:44.260 and this is seen all the way through western i would say western religious tradition as well as

00:50:54.900 western magical tradition is the idea of passing into the next life intact or as intact as you can

00:51:05.620 with as much of your individualization and your personal sense of self as you can.

00:51:14.200 The idea of being dissolved and having venom dripped upon you on the strand

00:51:19.340 is that you lose that.

00:51:20.640 You're not worthy of that.

00:51:23.260 Other forms of ascension, you keep much more of that

00:51:27.880 as you ascend to something better.

00:51:32.180 there's and we've gone through this on an episode with swan where there's a really nice diagram

00:51:38.540 that he had but there's many different parts of the soul there's certain parts that make you

00:51:45.120 definably you losing those parts are what you know that complete disillusion is is a part of

00:51:53.900 And it's interesting that that is our, well, and it also is isolation and loneliness.

00:52:04.480 The imagery of the strand is that you are out away from your folk in a desolate place and in a place of painful rending apart.

00:52:17.180 It's isolating and away from folk.

00:52:20.640 So the idea of getting out of our folk relationships and merging into nothingness is our, you know, in a lot of ways, our ultimate punishment.

00:52:36.860 And in some Eastern faiths, that's their goal is that, you know, being merged into nothingness.

00:52:45.900 and so it's a really interesting way to approach a very similar concept

00:52:52.000 next up do you do fishing on ice or is that not or is it not that cold up there

00:53:02.820 cliff in erie is there ice fishing that goes on a lot

00:53:05.880 there is i i don't participate in it yet as um you know i kind of indicated um towards the the

00:53:13.760 top of the show. But yeah, Lake Erie will freeze over. So ice fishing is a big tourist attraction

00:53:21.320 up here, as is trout fishing at different times of year. The fun fact, actually, the stream that

00:53:30.900 is one of the borders of my property is called Trout Run. Now, I'm sure there's lots of trout

00:53:35.540 runs all over the world and all over the country. But this is the trout run that goes out into Lake

00:53:42.840 about two miles from here. And that's where they, the Pennsylvania Game Commission gets all of the

00:53:51.500 row for stocking all of the other waters in the state of Pennsylvania. So lots of fish here. I

00:53:58.420 really need to seize that. Yeah, I did. When I was spending time with my cousins up in Fairbanks,

00:54:07.740 i did a fair amount of of ice fishing in different ways now i think that the ice fishing that a lot

00:54:14.540 of folks do in like wisconsin and minnesota where they you know have cabins out on the ice that they

00:54:20.860 basically hang out in and you know stand over a hole with a with a rod and reel i did a little

00:54:27.580 bit of that but most of what we did up there was my cousins had a a cabin

00:54:34.060 out on harding lake up around fairbanks and we'd sit in the cabin it was on the lake and we'd look

00:54:43.740 out we would set tip-ups out in you know a number of different holes that we'd augured out

00:54:51.020 and those either had a flag or a little light depending on whether it was day or night

00:54:57.500 that we had them out there and then we'd get on snow machines go out and check them or whatever

00:55:02.460 when the when the whatever disturbed them made the light pop up or the uh or the flag pop up

00:55:12.300 so we would go we would do that pretty regular for um

00:55:20.300 pike and burbot mainly up there but my cousin david my cousin david

00:55:27.740 alaska is the most perfect environment for him and he is amazing my uncle raised david and you

00:55:38.840 know doing a lot of outdoorsmanship my uncle worked as a biologist for fish and game my

00:55:44.400 cousin david he's now a hunting guide man that guy we'd be up there in negative anywhere between

00:55:52.620 negative 30 and negative negative 60 is about the coldest I've seen this happen be augering out a

00:56:00.960 hole and he would be in there you know barehanded dipping ice out of the dipping ice out of the

00:56:07.980 water and playing with the hook and playing with the fish and do whatever he's doing and

00:56:12.100 reaching down in the in the frozen lake after we'd augured feet of ice through it

00:56:18.040 like nothing ever happened. Like he was so conditioned to his environment and to a very

00:56:24.680 inhospitable environment. It was really amazing to see. He was a, he was a great trapper as a

00:56:32.760 high schooler. I remember one time it was terrifying. We're out running his trap line

00:56:37.940 at negative 60, negative 65 ish. And man, we got way out there and it occurred to me,

00:56:46.300 If anything mechanical happened to that snow machine and we were stuck out there, we're done.

00:56:51.440 But, no, he was catching river otter and stuff that seasoned trappers would have a very hard time with.

00:56:59.280 He was, you know, adept at when he was in high school.

00:57:02.280 So he is an amazing outdoorsman and fortunately took me with him sometimes when we'd go do some ice fishing.

00:57:10.880 And that was really nice.

00:57:16.300 So in the meantime, Sarah donated $10, says, greetings, all Terry Goethe and Wynton-Cliff.

00:57:22.880 Could you explain Hoftholler and how it's a great option for members, please?

00:57:28.660 Cliff, you want to take first swing at that?

00:57:34.060 I sure can.

00:57:35.140 So Hoftholler is literally a Hof tax.

00:57:40.460 That's where we have the name for it from the Old Norse.

00:57:43.200 And it is contribution or percentage-based to the Austro Folk Assembly.

00:57:53.060 Christians call it tithing.

00:57:55.860 And what we're asking for is a minimum of 1% from each of our earners or of household income, which should end up being the same difference.

00:58:09.160 um there's a lot of different ways um as far as the the mechanism um by which people can make a

00:58:17.760 half dollar donation i use direct deposit um through my employer um they they use the common

00:58:25.560 payroll uh system adp which makes it really easy um i just had to add the afa's half dollar deposit

00:58:33.680 account to my ADP system, and then I can go in there and adjust the information for what happens

00:58:44.520 every time the paychecks come out. Not all payroll departments or payroll systems allow you to do

00:58:53.660 that. Some don't allow you to split your deposit. They may limit you to just one, in which case,

00:58:59.600 i assume that rightly it's going to be your own personal checking account um and in in that

00:59:06.640 situation or in situations for for people where you know they they get a paper check or if you

00:59:12.400 are are self-employed um an entrepreneur or deal in you know in cash um you know if you are in a

00:59:21.600 in a service industry or something like that we will um happily help you set up a recurring um

00:59:28.880 hoftaler donation um which can be on your schedule you tell us how frequently you want

00:59:35.280 that to occur and it can be to a credit card or debit card or bank account um you know with your

00:59:43.520 your account number and your routing number and we will work with you to make it as easy for you

00:59:51.040 and you know those are the the mechanical details of it i suppose but it's really important

00:59:55.920 from a devotional aspect and a cultural aspect because this is how we get our gods the glory

01:00:05.360 and midgard that they deserve this is how we get things done um you know the the christians give

01:00:12.800 10 to their church and they wield immense power in our civilization they have you know marble

01:00:23.440 and gold-plated idols and statuary and their temples to the foreign god. If we do one-tenth

01:00:32.400 of that, we can accomplish a great deal in moving Auschoo forward and bringing our folk home and in

01:00:41.120 restoring the rightful place of honor and worship that the Aesir deserve from our folk here in

01:00:48.560 in midgard um so if you're interested in doing that talk to your local folk builder they can

01:00:54.940 help you get it set up if you attend uh hoff regularly you can talk to the the hoff gothi

01:01:01.840 there about that you can even do your half dollar contributions in person you know if you're one of

01:01:07.560 those um you know cash based people like i was talking about we take bitcoins on our website we

01:01:13.980 can you know any mechanism we will work with you on um the automatic recurring contributions and

01:01:25.020 the direct deposit are are by far the the most convenient and um the the least maintenance and

01:01:32.300 effort for you know both the person making the donation and for the austral folk assembly

01:01:37.980 But yeah, the cultural significance of it, I really can't understate.

01:01:44.620 The thing that makes the Ostertifolk Assembly different from all of the other, gosh, I'll probably make some enemies by saying this, but it wouldn't be the first time.

01:01:54.200 All the other heathen pretenders out there is that our folk put their money where their mouth is and they put their effort where their mouth is.

01:02:05.600 We are also true, and we are also true in a verbal sense, as in, you know, the part of speech.

01:02:19.180 We actualize also true.

01:02:21.800 We make real-world devotion to the Aesir, and that helps bring more people back to our faith and to our gods.

01:02:34.620 And the more of that we can do, the better.

01:02:39.220 You know, if you aren't giving to the AFA a half taller right now, please consider it.

01:02:45.060 If you are, you know, can consider increasing it if you're able to.

01:02:49.700 I know, you know, times have been tough for a lot of people, so it might not be exactly the right year to be pitching that kind of thing.

01:02:55.800 Then again, if, you know, you just got a real big raise at the end of the year or something, it's something to think about.

01:03:01.180 um but it's really important for the afa moving forward because our you know our goal right now

01:03:08.860 we talked about praisehoff and then um we we have tearshoff in line behind that and then we have

01:03:17.560 that would be six so we have six more hoffs the gods and then 12 goddesses to cover and

01:03:25.440 And we, you know, we don't plan on stopping dedicating Hoffs ever, you know, until there is a Hoff in your town.

01:03:32.500 We're not done. So please do what you can.

01:03:38.360 And, you know, Hoff dollars can even be traded in kind if you are nearby to one of our Hoffs and you have a trade skill

01:03:46.580 and are willing to do, you know, substantial amount of work

01:03:53.680 that would have, you know, a real billable value

01:03:58.780 that would be a big contribution to that Hoff,

01:04:02.180 then talk to your Hoff Goethe about that.

01:04:05.260 You know, we need your help to get this done.

01:04:08.980 We have a lot of good people who put in time volunteering.

01:04:12.580 Our Goethear put in tremendous hours doing all this work,

01:04:15.660 But we can't do any of it without the support of our folk to make it possible to do all the wonderful things that we do.

01:04:26.600 You know, you mentioned that when, you know, people are struggling economically, that, you know, may not be the time to bring it up, but it always is the time to bring it up.

01:04:39.640 And this is the reason, this is one of the cool things that Hof Toler does.

01:04:45.660 So, okay, percent is eminently fair, and it factors all of those things in.

01:05:01.740 So Cliff mentioned 1%.

01:05:03.840 That's the minimum Hoftholler.

01:05:05.480 There are some people that do two.

01:05:07.660 There are some people that do five.

01:05:09.360 There are a few people that do 10.

01:05:11.080 If everyone in the AFA did a 10% Hofftoller, like Christians do, we would, it would be extremely noticeable to everyone listening, to everyone in the world, to our gods and our ancestors, how much we were accomplishing.

01:05:33.880 but the you know the floor of that the minimum is one percent

01:05:40.120 one percent and this is this what i mean about percent being relative if you're having

01:05:48.580 a terrible year and times are down and there's pay cuts and somebody in the family lost the job

01:05:54.720 And, you know, worst case scenario, 1% of zero is zero.

01:06:02.700 HopToller is never going to take you into debt.

01:06:06.320 But, you know, 1% of a dollar is a penny.

01:06:13.380 I'm going to catch myself up here trying to go too fast.

01:06:16.340 I'm like, oh, 1% of a million dollars.

01:06:18.040 Hold on.

01:06:18.560 What is that?

01:06:19.480 A thousand?

01:06:21.460 but the point being when you are struggling your one percent is a small amount of money

01:06:32.020 if you're very successful your one percent may be a very large amount of money

01:06:38.580 hoftoller evens it out to us when some of our people are having hard times and others are

01:06:45.140 you know doing very well the afa rises accordingly if we're all struggling then we all share that

01:06:54.260 burden and we handle that accordingly if we're all just out there killing it and doing great

01:07:00.260 then we all succeed together but by having that same percentage stake in there it helps us rise

01:07:08.740 and fall together as a community as a faith community as a family and as a folk it's really

01:07:15.380 important i uh you know there's the inevitable grumblings of people that's what christians do

01:07:25.460 it's why they have really nice things the more i've looked into it that's what every

01:07:32.980 serious religion that is successful does one of the things i did when i

01:07:39.860 first became alzharia goethe was trying to figure this out

01:07:45.300 our economic situation was very different then and

01:07:51.460 i wanted to figure out what we do with that and how we do the very best with what we have

01:07:57.140 and how we generate better things for our gods and our folk and our faith and you know

01:08:06.420 everybody looks at raffles or at uh you know charitable gaming or you know what people do

01:08:14.820 and fundraisers and this that and the other the single thing that makes all of this work or not

01:08:21.220 work in every serious religious organization that i've been able to find this example and looked into

01:08:29.700 is percentage-based giving um we obviously know that and see that through christianity but it's

01:08:38.180 also the case through a number of non-abrahamic faiths it's how this works and it's how it works

01:08:43.620 well and the term hoftoller is an actual term from our ancestors it's not just something phonetically

01:08:50.580 that we made up that that works it certainly does but it was a real thing that was meant to support

01:08:59.220 hoff's sacred groves and the gothar and

01:09:06.980 that's that's what it is going towards today the idea of hoff toller

01:09:14.260 when we started implementing hoff toller and you know i forget the percentage cliff and i

01:09:19.300 looked at the stats on that of how me afa members are currently on hoff toller but

01:09:26.100 it's not it's not most yet and we want to get there we want to get to where everybody's on

01:09:33.140 but looking at it when we started um hoff toller being one of the ways people donate to to our

01:09:41.540 church we went from having one half and a debt that seemed insurmountable to pay off that half

01:09:52.260 to having three paid off hofs and one half that were you know whatever 65 of the way paid off on

01:10:01.060 and plans for our next two already already there the amazing things that we've been blessed with

01:10:09.380 and the amazing things we've been able to accomplish have been helped along very significantly

01:10:14.720 by folks who donated by Hoftholler. One of the things Sarah asked us to talk about a little bit

01:10:20.020 on Hoftholler is why it's a good option for families. It's important to us that every adult

01:10:32.960 member of your family becomes a member of the AFA family. That's really important and something

01:10:41.380 that should be done with families. Sometimes if it's a one income family, you know, there may be

01:10:49.740 a feeling of, well, the husband can afford it, but the wife really can't afford membership and

01:10:54.440 this and that. We don't ever want that to be the case. Hoftholler can be based on household income.

01:11:00.940 So depending on your work situation in your household and how that runs down, your household can pay a percentage based on the household income and include the adults in that household in that.

01:11:15.060 And it's a very convenient way to do that.

01:11:17.940 Cliff mentioned that a lot of employers, especially here in the United States, are set up to take donations just directly out of out of payroll that way.

01:11:31.000 And it's very convenient. The people I've spoken to who are on that don't notice, don't notice the decrease, but the AFA sure notices the increase.

01:11:41.140 and we really appreciate it um it's something that that could come out and be barely if at all

01:11:50.920 felt but that makes a huge impact on what we do and it's set up very well for that

01:11:55.340 but maybe you're maybe your job doesn't do that maybe that's not the kind of work you're in

01:11:59.800 maybe you are in um in a field where you're an entrepreneur where your work is seasonal

01:12:07.720 That's fine.

01:12:08.860 We have people that pay it by, you know, whatever means they want.

01:12:12.720 Some people pay quarterly.

01:12:14.240 Some people pay monthly.

01:12:15.540 Some people pay every two weeks when the paycheck comes out.

01:12:18.680 Some people pay yearly.

01:12:20.540 That's fine.

01:12:22.220 We're not out to dig in anybody's records and ascertain, you know, the dollars and cents of it.

01:12:29.920 No, if you're willing to contribute to our church in that way, then we take you at your word.

01:12:34.820 a fair one percent at a minimum and however much beyond that that you'd like to give

01:12:41.320 that's really done a lot to move us forward and that's that's hoff told

01:12:45.560 so now i'm all curious what the what nick's pet robot makes me look like if i'm not on here

01:12:56.660 um so our next question um and this is kind of combining two uh it's one from real madrid fan

01:13:11.560 but also one from mary minchel happy you'll mary i'm glad you're here with us tonight

01:13:15.720 so uh real madrid fan asks is it just me that or i'm sorry is it just men that find the gods in

01:13:24.320 prison? Have there been cases where women have found the gods in prison? And Mary immediately

01:13:30.220 after asks, thank you for the chat on the AFA ministry for incarcerated men. Is there a ministry

01:13:36.420 for women in the same situation? Cliff, do you want to address this first?

01:13:44.780 Sure. My addressing of it will be brief, though. I do not know personally of any women who have

01:13:50.800 found our gods while incarcerated but my reasoning tells me that that surely that must be a thing

01:13:58.480 um as far as um ministry ministering to to women's prisons um i think that falls under the purview of

01:14:09.940 our our afa prison ministry um but i don't have details on if we are are currently doing that so

01:14:18.700 matt maybe you can flesh that out some more i'm not the most knowledgeable person on this particular

01:14:24.140 topic so i'm not either um i think as a you know we've certainly seen this with our applications

01:14:40.620 and in our membership, the percentage of ladies that are, you know, of our folk that are

01:14:50.300 incarcerated is much, much smaller than the percentage of men. Are there women who have

01:15:00.800 found this in prisons? Absolutely there are. I'm going to say that. All we got to do is find one

01:15:07.480 to prove me right, I'll go out on a limb and just own that. Yes, absolutely. To what degree? I'm

01:15:13.520 really not sure. And it's something that we've talked about internally. And that being said,

01:15:17.880 I know that there are groups of women that practice house to true in prisons.

01:15:26.140 We've talked about that a little bit in the prison ministry, you know, planning situation.

01:15:33.340 our prison ministry as it is now is very much in its infancy and one of the reasons for that is

01:15:44.440 i get put on the spot when we come to numbers i like to give you guys specifics

01:15:52.160 because i think they're very tangible and i think it's

01:15:55.900 it's important to not just guess cliff may know this um nick may know this on the side so if one

01:16:04.580 of you could tell me exactly how many ordained go thar do we have at present

01:16:09.760 while nick is tabulating that number or having that ai bot that made the cartoon cliff go and

01:16:19.500 extrapolate that for us or whatever the case might be, the problem with the AFA for forever,

01:16:28.680 and we're just coming to the other side of that problem and making progress on it, is

01:16:33.920 having the right people in the right places. We started out so small and so centralized

01:16:41.460 in northern california way back when that the idea of you know all right so let me do this

01:16:53.600 i apologize it's a little bit disjointed but there's a lot of different prongs to it

01:16:57.800 and i'm trying to think of the best way to to express it so

01:17:02.160 early on there was quite a bit of prison mail

01:17:07.040 when I became all seriogothy, I thought, well, I'll answer this stuff. We'll make this happen.

01:17:15.940 We'll get to the bottom of it. And then I discovered more than 90% of it is, hey, do you

01:17:23.920 guys have free stuff? I want some stuff. Or, hey, do you guys have a catalog where I can order some

01:17:31.240 stuff i don't fault any of those questions neither of those are bad questions but one no we don't

01:17:38.600 have free stuff two no we don't have a catalog of stuff that y'all can order from and so that

01:17:46.040 meant that prison ministry in terms of answering letters i have yet to see a letter about hey i'm

01:17:52.920 trying to start this kindred inside and i wanted some spiritual advice hey i'm struggling with my

01:17:58.600 faith and i wanted um to know something

01:18:07.720 all right this okay i'll get to that in a second but hey i'm struggling i would

01:18:11.800 like some counseling there's no way to minister through the letters that we've received

01:18:17.720 so what that limited it to was having gothar that were able to go into institutions and

01:18:26.280 serve the folk there, perform rituals there, instruct people inside on how to do things,

01:18:34.800 provide counseling, do those things. Well, the trouble with that is, you know, we would have

01:18:41.080 someone across the country that would reach out and we didn't have anybody within a thousand

01:18:48.180 miles of them. The AFA has had such success that we now have a good geographical spread of people.

01:18:58.440 But still, when Nick gets that AI number for me on our number of Gothar, and I say that and I

01:19:05.300 tease that, but I think the number is honestly somewhere around 12 to 14. I could be astonished

01:19:12.080 if we get a different number but that's serving the entire world the odds of having one of those

01:19:21.040 12 or 13 or 14 or whatever the case might be within close proximity to a prison and them be

01:19:32.400 in a spot in their life in their situation where that's something they are comfortable with doing

01:19:37.280 is a challenge in and of itself.

01:19:42.140 But then we go, we're not just going to random prisons.

01:19:47.980 We are responding to specific inmates

01:19:51.300 that have reached out and asked that we provide a go-thee

01:19:56.020 to help take care of their spiritual needs.

01:19:59.480 So that makes it even smaller subset.

01:20:05.140 Fortunately, I find myself within a couple hours of two institutions where we have had people at that want to have an AFA go-fee come in and help them out.

01:20:22.140 um high desert in uh near susanville california and then folsom and i should be going to folsom

01:20:35.000 next week to share a meal with the gentleman there and uh i've been in high desert a couple

01:20:41.540 of times to uh to deal with our men who are incarcerated there um we're just to that point

01:20:49.560 where we're having gothar being able to go in and so far in those two places exclusively what i got

01:20:56.120 on the side from james gentleman that i mentioned that runs our prison program our prison ministry

01:21:02.200 program that is he uh he was just telling me that he has some female inmates that he's trying to

01:21:06.920 connect with one of our githias right now so there are ladies who are incarcerated that are also true

01:21:12.840 and that do want our services.

01:21:15.940 And he's working with a few of them as it is.

01:21:21.160 So yeah, that's kind of where that stands.

01:21:23.560 And like I say, it's baby steps

01:21:26.460 and there's a lot of hoops and red tape

01:21:29.300 and figuring the system out.

01:21:32.040 But I will say this,

01:21:34.060 it's something that I've wanted to make happen

01:21:37.580 since I became Osheri Guthy in 2016.

01:21:40.020 We have had a lot of people start and try and not find immediate success and for various reasons not follow through or not be able to continue pushing towards victory.

01:21:54.740 um james alt has done the best at that of anybody we've ever had and continues to do so and it's

01:22:05.020 it's slow going but i'm excited that we're that we're doing that and that uh that's steadily

01:22:11.620 moving forward um so i am looking at our next question here

01:22:22.680 uh also from the wolf okay so my fault he found uh nick found it we have 16 ordained gothar

01:22:38.040 as it is so i was underestimating our capabilities a bit i apologize to the

01:22:45.000 the two gothar that got left out in that in that whichever two those might be

01:22:50.300 The Wolf Throne asks, I can't remember exactly which episode it was. Maybe the Thor episode. It was mentioned that historically Thor was placed in the middle of the altar with Odin and Freyja on the sides. Do you remember where Odin and Freyja are placed?

01:23:06.340 uh odin supposed is odin supposed to be on the left and freya on the right

01:23:12.580 or the other way around not sure if you remember but i'm asking because i'm trying to decide

01:23:18.480 where to place my idols on the altar

01:23:21.680 so first that wasn't a general rule of thumb but it was a very specific

01:23:30.280 account of the placement of the idols in the temple at Uppsala.

01:23:38.700 Cliff, do you have anything to add on that?

01:23:42.380 Do you know anything about which side which might have been placed on?

01:23:49.320 Not really.

01:23:50.160 I think Uppsala is one of the few well-documented temple layouts

01:23:55.860 that we take care of.

01:23:57.740 So a lot of that is speculative.

01:24:00.280 As far as my own personal practices in our home, we tend to rotate the idols to positions of prominence based on, you know, whether we are near one of their high holy days or based on, you know, if we are making votes specifically to that God.

01:24:24.820 so you know we we don't have a static altar set up we adjust it to

01:24:34.900 our needs and the season and the holy day that we're observing

01:24:46.180 i'm looking at two really specific things in here to add some flavor to it

01:24:53.860 One sec.

01:24:59.280 So the account of the arrangement of that altar in Uppsala was from Adam of Bremen.

01:25:14.640 And as far as I can tell in the text, he simply states that Thor is in the center and that Odin and Frey are on either side of him.

01:25:26.120 But he doesn't specify as far as I can tell on which side.

01:25:30.260 And I'm trying to, the other thing that I, that isn't from that period, but just as a point of inspiration that I think was inspired by the Temple of Uppsala was the piece of art in, and I feel bad I can't remember the artist's names right, the artist's name right now.

01:25:55.360 But the piece, I believe, is called Midventerblot by Carl Larsson in the Swedish National Museum depicts a sacrifice that I believe is at Uppsala.

01:26:12.400 But in that picture, just Thor is depicted in a central location without Odin or Frey on either side.

01:26:20.520 So I couldn't tell you.

01:26:21.880 um but yeah that's we've got very small amounts of information on that and with what we have

01:26:29.060 there's there's really no way to say for sure on that

01:26:32.080 um just checking

01:26:46.840 all right so next up

01:26:57.560 from finn wraith do you guys do ice skating on frozen water and if yes do you play any hockey

01:27:06.180 cliff do you ice skate and do you play hockey i have ice skated but i don't think i'll be

01:27:13.660 proper to say that i ice skate um folks around here do do those things um on the lake and you

01:27:20.760 know in in rinks i have never played ice hockey um used to play some street hockey as a kid a

01:27:28.620 little bit but i didn't have the net so it depended on you know if my neighbor with with the net was

01:27:33.940 around um or you know just lining up some trash cans or something like that but uh it's a thing

01:27:39.860 people do around here i think anywhere where the ice freezes you're going to find that that's pretty

01:27:44.340 common where the water freezes that's what ice is that's what i meant to say

01:27:52.900 i miss when kids used to play in the street i have not seen that in a very very long time

01:28:02.900 i remember countless instances as a kid of having games of whatever else in the street

01:28:09.460 because wide open space and having to stop because cars were coming and restart when the car passed by

01:28:18.420 i really really missed that

01:28:22.980 so growing up i never

01:28:31.300 i used to always as a kid have trouble tying my skates up tight enough on the ankle

01:28:36.260 it's like i could never get them quite tied tight enough so there was always loose and it was always

01:28:41.800 wonky on my ankles they would uh on my own no i never used to go you know out to a lake and ice

01:28:48.580 skate or out to a lake and play hockey it just wasn't big where i was at um individually at or

01:28:56.600 individually in school in elementary school we had a ice rink that they would you know

01:29:04.240 run the hose out in or whatever when it got cold enough that we would do that for gym class but

01:29:11.060 gym class in elementary school at least where I went to school was like 30 minutes or 45 it was

01:29:17.360 some really small chunk of time and I remember on those days it was just a pain because by the time

01:29:24.220 you got dressed up in your snowsuit or your snow pants and jacket and all your stuff and got your

01:29:31.080 skates tied up and got everything done and got out there it was just about time to come back in

01:29:35.380 so that was always kind of a nice idea but not something we really executed a lot but

01:29:41.020 yes i have had occasion to skate outside and i think even sort of play hockey that way a couple

01:29:50.900 of times but it was never something i was really into or pursued on my own so did you own a pair

01:29:58.340 skates of your own mat or were yours rentals like mine i only ever used the rentals with like the

01:30:04.340 real thick blade where i could basically just walk on them it wasn't like a razor it was like you

01:30:11.780 know a piece of iron almost a half an inch wide and flat at the bottom so the one place i remember

01:30:21.620 was the diamond center and it was this mall in anchorage that a lot of it there were like two

01:30:30.980 chunks of it there was an old section that was like a two-story kind of mall and then there was

01:30:35.780 the new section of it that i don't know quite a bit higher than that a lot of office space up to

01:30:42.500 the top of it but i think like four or five levels where they were shopping at the bottom level in

01:30:47.940 the center you know area where you could look down over the railing from all the other levels

01:30:51.860 there was an ice skating rink i never did that there you could rent the skates and do it just

01:30:58.180 like a roller rink or whatever else but i never did that in school they made up i think they

01:31:03.860 required us to purchase a pair of ice skates and it was always kind of the if you had the regular

01:31:12.260 ice skates and you were a little boy you would catch hard time for that so if you were a little

01:31:20.180 boy you needed to have the hockey skates and i remember you know when i was like a little kid i

01:31:25.460 had the the ice skate ice skates and i couldn't get the hockey skates fast enough so i was out of that

01:31:31.380 effete category of a skater and yeah so i own my own pair and had to replace them as i went

01:31:42.500 through elementary school but i was out of those by uh by sixth grade and haven't had to replace

01:31:49.140 that i've heard from people who have kids that are in hockey getting hockey gear it's one of the

01:31:54.320 more expensive sports for a kid to play because it requires so much gear i think it's even more

01:32:00.340 expensive than football yep i believe so yeah um

01:32:10.900 our next question from the wolf throne i know it's talked about a lot and i would love it if

01:32:17.300 it happened really would but i have to ask what do you think having a hof on every street corner

01:32:23.460 would really look like do you think the current pc climate in america would allow it

01:32:29.060 if there was actually a whites-only church on every street corner?

01:32:35.180 I would think riots would break out at the very least, if not worse.

01:32:39.920 What new challenges do you think a reality like this would present?

01:32:48.540 What are your thoughts on that, Cliff?

01:32:52.100 I think that the question is kind of imaginary in a way.

01:32:55.660 There's no real world scenario where we're going to be able to implement Hoffs on every corner where the popular culture and the demographics are the same as what we're in right now.

01:33:12.560 Our establishing of Hoffs in communities is going to change the culture and the country and the world little bit by little bit so that by the time we have a Hoff, maybe every corner might be too much.

01:33:33.100 I mean, you don't have churches on every corner now, so that might be even a bit overstated as far as what a practical goal was.

01:33:42.860 But if we say every town, by the time we would actually, you know, have that, Asatru would be the predominant culture of, you know, of Aryan nations, of all the countries where our people live.

01:34:04.000 um that would take a long time and other changes would would inevitably have to occur

01:34:13.680 in in all kinds of terms for it to be practical to do that um you know we have we have four

01:34:22.440 hoffs right now um it'll be an awful long time before we have 50 you know one for each u.s state

01:34:30.780 Although that's probably not how that would play out. We'd probably have some in Europe or Canada or Australia or other places before we would have one in Rhode Island and in Connecticut because they're so close to each other.

01:34:47.760 But, yeah, I don't think that – I don't think it's unachievable.

01:34:57.540 I think that we're talking dozens of generations for something like that to be something that will materialize.

01:35:09.740 i'd like to be wrong about that maybe you know our folk have a a great awakening and start coming

01:35:15.280 back to us at a rate where you know we can we can barely manage to to to keep count of them and keep

01:35:22.220 track of them um but yeah that's that's that's not the real scenario on the ground right now

01:35:30.540 What I think it looks like in real terms is we put hoffs where we have clusters of folk who are practicing asatru and have stable congregations with properly trained and ordained clergy.

01:35:53.500 and that once those Hoffs are established,

01:35:57.280 that we see people ideally moving to those areas

01:36:01.000 so that there's something of a population shift,

01:36:05.680 although in the greater terms of, you know,

01:36:07.920 a country the size of the United States,

01:36:09.520 it's not any more significant than most other, you know,

01:36:14.120 people moving around.

01:36:15.920 You know, I think people moving from New York to Florida

01:36:18.360 is still going to outweigh anything that we might cause as far as population shifts by establishing

01:36:25.720 a hof somewhere, but that we get people building local communities around hofs and that we see

01:36:36.240 more and more of those so that people have more options for where they can go to and that they

01:36:42.460 are closer and closer together you know for for example um right now it's an awfully long drive

01:36:50.140 from thorshoff to baldershoff but in four years maybe there will be two hoffs to stop at on the

01:37:00.540 whale on that drive so we can bring everybody closer together by having them go to our hoffs

01:37:09.180 and then settle near them and also having hoffs pop up in between them so that the actual travel

01:37:16.380 time is less but um yeah i don't know a half on every corner that

01:37:25.820 that doesn't seem real to me i don't think that that's a problem we're ever going to

01:37:28.780 actually have to deal with well so here's the thing the question

01:37:33.020 i don't think that the person who asked the question really

01:37:41.180 really means that quite that literal so i started thinking about it

01:37:47.420 i mean there's not a christian church on every corner that's not every single corner would be

01:37:56.060 inefficient and just wouldn't make any sense and there's there would not be enough housing

01:38:04.780 per hoff to make it make sense to have that many um in any circumstance unless we had big like

01:38:11.260 judge dread mega cities that went super high maybe then every corner it would make sense um

01:38:18.060 Um, but more to the meat of the matter, I looked and, you know, there's somewhere just

01:38:25.260 north of 20,000 Catholic churches in the United States.

01:38:29.900 Um, there's like 18,000 Mormon congregations, but, um, I forget how they put it, but I couldn't

01:38:44.740 an exact number of how many buildings some of multiple congregations are sharing a building

01:38:49.380 or whatnot but numbers like that realistically

01:38:55.940 it presupposes some things there's no scenario

01:39:03.220 if magically we had a hoff or you know a hoff pop-up for every

01:39:10.740 five thousand people in the united states where you had cities that had four and five hoffs in

01:39:18.080 them and you had a hoff in every town if that magically happened tomorrow then a miracle has

01:39:24.080 taken place and i think that miraculous things would change our understanding of reality of how

01:39:31.100 things work and if that miracle occurred then i think we'd have a whole lot of people converting

01:39:36.460 house of true and we'd be good more realistically if we saw in the course of our lifetime house of

01:39:42.700 true develop such momentum that we're able to add that many hofs it presupposes a few things

01:39:53.020 in order for us to establish a hof we look and we make sure it has a congregation that can support it

01:40:00.060 But that said, and this isn't a hard and fast rule, but the understanding for a Christian congregation to support a church building is somewhere around an average of 200 members.

01:40:18.220 When looking at the AFA's membership, that's kind of similar to what has been able to support the Hoffs that we have.

01:40:26.640 if we had 200 folkish Asitur, 200 AFA members per each of those Hoffs that we had in every

01:40:39.380 single town, multiple of in cities, we would have an overwhelming amount of white people

01:40:51.940 practicing our ancestral faith where I don't think there would be those problems at all.

01:40:56.640 Because we would control the narrative at that point.

01:41:00.060 The culture shift and the Overton window and all of those things would be completely and totally in our favor at the point where we had that wide of a spread.

01:41:12.520 So by the time that happened, absolutely.

01:41:14.860 If one of the things that we are seeing happen every single time we've gotten Hoff so far, the Hoff develops a population around it that is forced to confront the disparity between what the media tells them and what's true.

01:41:39.240 they may or may not ideologically align with us but they stop seeing us as

01:41:48.840 you know mustache twirling like sinister cartoon villains and they see us as good neighbors

01:41:57.840 that happens every single place that we have a half if we increased that to cover the entirety

01:42:06.000 of the civilized United States with communities to where the people see us as regular humans

01:42:14.160 that are good people, I think that would change things tremendously for the better.

01:42:22.020 I do think we look at, I'm not naive, and I do think we look at something demographically

01:42:26.260 very different when we're in the inner city.

01:42:28.520 You mentioned about riots, or at least someone did in the comments.

01:42:32.340 that would be really different if all of a sudden but again we're strategic about where we put our

01:42:38.980 hoffs we're not opening up the south central hoff or like you know the compton hoff the the detroit

01:42:45.940 hoff the you know center of gangland in baltimore hoff we're not doing that and that doesn't make

01:42:54.660 sense to go in that order but if we had such a density to where that's where strategically the

01:42:59.300 next one would go i think that helps us way more than any potential that it hurts us

01:43:05.700 um for example white uh white springs florida so murdoch minnesota is ethnically very largely

01:43:16.580 white folks uh and it's it's you know it's relatively rural so that's a specific case

01:43:25.540 brownsville california also majority white population that's where odenshoff is linden

01:43:33.380 north carolina is different it depends on where you go on the little towns next to it but there's

01:43:38.660 quite a substantial black population there that get along with us wonderfully that's one of the

01:43:45.300 things i kind of wanted to talk tonight about a little bit is about our yule celebrations

01:43:49.300 They had an amazing Yule there. And part of what happened on the days that we celebrated Yule this month at our Hoffs, where they coincided with our food pantries and our toy giveaways.

01:44:06.440 So every year at Yule time at each of our Hoffs, we get toys donated and we distribute those to community members that come through.

01:44:16.280 that's a very positive experience in that community and it's a really nice thing and

01:44:23.540 they had great interactions there and with people who you know were not our folk with members of

01:44:30.200 the community seeing what we are seeing who we are seeing us there with our families practicing

01:44:35.500 our faith being good people and it worked tremendously one lady said at thorshof she said

01:44:42.340 man you know when you guys first moved here we all you know none of us wanted you guys here like

01:44:50.440 how dare you guys come in here and you know do this do that whatever you're doing I how dare you

01:44:58.580 and they were very unhappy and she said but now now that you guys have been here for a while I

01:45:05.160 can't find anyone that has a negative thing to say about y'all she said you guys we don't care

01:45:11.460 what you guys believe because we see what you guys do and that's what it is we are our needs

01:45:18.180 that community and i believe this was a black lady if not there was a another black lady that

01:45:23.500 went there and she was laughing as uh one of our one of our gothar was helping load food in her car

01:45:31.720 with some donated toys for her children she's you know she's like she's scoffed and and he's like

01:45:39.300 you know is everything all right and she's you know she said something to the effect of

01:45:43.780 yeah look look at the look at the evil white supremacists and at the white supremacist

01:45:50.100 compound helping me out with my groceries because we're nice people doing nice things

01:45:56.340 um at uh in white springs florida what i was going to say with new york's hoff that is a

01:46:03.120 predominantly black community that we have our Hoff in the middle of. Again, because they've

01:46:09.520 seen us, they've been in the presence of one of our Hoffs and around us as people.

01:46:14.940 They've done a tremendous job with building community relations there. We have no problems.

01:46:22.460 There's no riots, there's no chaos. We're surrounded by the black community and they've

01:46:29.760 been very kind to us. They had questions and concerns when within the first month we did one

01:46:36.740 of our food pantries, those all like immediately stopped. And with their questions and concerns,

01:46:42.560 they weren't horribly mean spirited. They were concerned. And honestly, if I was black and the

01:46:48.860 AFA moved into my community and I Googled us, I would be very scared and concerned too, because

01:46:54.160 the media is dishonest. But, you know, I had three different black citizens of White Springs

01:47:02.820 that were reaching out to me that were going to ask me a bunch of questions. They immediately

01:47:07.440 stopped the second that food pantry happened. Haven't heard another peep about it since. And

01:47:12.040 we try to monitor, you know, local social media so we can answer any questions or, you know,

01:47:18.820 respond to anything that way and that dies off very quickly when we're there and folks get to

01:47:24.820 meet us and interact with us and i think that would happen you know a thousand fold when we

01:47:31.140 had hoffs even close to the scenario you suggest so maybe a long long-winded answer but no i don't

01:47:38.020 i don't in that envision that being problematic because it would happen gradually regardless

01:47:43.780 if we had a massive boom in membership that's one speed if we didn't and it took us the speed

01:47:50.340 we're going now it would still happen gradually over time there's no scenario it would happen

01:48:03.060 next question that we've got um what problems do you foresee happening to the afa in the future

01:48:11.780 and how are you preparing for them um cliff what do you what do you foresee as problems that are

01:48:19.960 going to happen in the afa's future and uh what preparations do you think we're we've got underway

01:48:26.480 to address those hmm well i can say for sure there there will be problems it's sometimes

01:48:35.640 it's definitely more difficult to forecast what they what they might be that would uh almost

01:48:40.760 preclude them actually end up being problems if we knew they were going to occur but um

01:48:48.440 you know there's always the unforeseen and we've we've weathered problems in the past and we'll

01:48:52.280 we'll do so again i think that in terms of um you know maybe good problems like growth oriented

01:48:58.680 problems that we can perhaps plan around or anticipate is um the growth of the ossaroo academy

01:49:06.120 And that, you know, maybe within five or 10 years, there's the realistic possibility that we'll need to be looking at having some types of schoolhouses or classrooms at the Hoffs.

01:49:20.140 as these communities that we were just talking about um around our hoffs gain um more you know

01:49:28.360 greater greater numbers of population and more children that there may be you know branches of

01:49:35.380 the asatru academy where there are like physical schoolhouses and then that would come with all

01:49:40.000 sorts of i'm sure insurance and liability issues we'd have to address um you know in a business

01:49:47.060 manner. We, you know, would face the possibility of perhaps having to hire school teachers at

01:49:54.600 these locations, that type of thing. I hope that, you know, on our Witten calls in five years,

01:50:02.180 we are talking about those problems and how we deal with them. That would be fantastic.

01:50:08.040 Definitely up to the challenge on something like that. There's going to be,

01:50:16.300 you know

01:50:17.340 there's going to be

01:50:21.100 people who are displeased with some

01:50:23.380 decision that

01:50:24.920 Alshir Gothi Matt makes or

01:50:27.300 that you know

01:50:28.960 is implemented on a more local level

01:50:31.160 by our Witten or our Gothar

01:50:33.380 or you know just something

01:50:35.100 a folk builder said or something a member said

01:50:37.040 to somebody there's going to be

01:50:38.440 whatever the

01:50:40.780 controversy

01:50:42.540 or social dispute

01:50:44.920 of the

01:50:45.820 the season or the year is um we've seen them you know cyclically through the years um you know in

01:50:54.820 i think it's 10 years that i've been in the yasashi folk assembly now i've seen you know at

01:51:01.300 least three or four kind of big shifts in in the afa as far as our um as far as our congregation

01:51:11.440 and, you know, personality disputes and differences of opinion getting in the way of us implementing

01:51:19.300 our Declaration of Purpose where people will, or folk like to talk about being part of something

01:51:28.540 greater than themselves a lot. A lot of people like to believe that they are team oriented,

01:51:38.300 But then when there's a, you know, when the coach makes a call of a play that isn't the one you would make, you know, sometimes people take their ball and leave.

01:51:46.580 So we're going to face troubles like that in the future.

01:51:48.740 And we've always persevered through those.

01:51:53.160 You know, there's going to be some natural disaster that affects one of our Hoffs one of these days.

01:52:00.280 I hope it's a long time in the future, but sooner or later, a tree is going to fall or something is going to flood or something like that.

01:52:08.060 And, you know, obviously we have insurance policies at the Hoffs that prepare for a lot of that, and we have good members around who will rally around those Hoffs and get done whatever needs to get done, hopefully in advance.

01:52:23.660 You know, it's better to sandbag a storm than to have to go and get a pump and pump the water out later or whatever the specifics might be.

01:52:31.680 I suppose, you know, in a perhaps longer term sense or a more broad sense, there's the possibility, if not over time, the inevitability of some sort of theological dispute where something new happens in the world or in Western culture.

01:52:58.160 that's not something that we had thought about or answered before and having to address the world as

01:53:08.120 it is and make sure that we are acting in ethical, responsible, right ways, consistent with the

01:53:18.740 values of our people and our worldview. There's always somebody that, you know, isn't happy with

01:53:25.200 that. It never breaks 100 to zero. All sorts of things, I'm sure. But I'm very confident that we

01:53:35.420 have a steady, stable leadership team in place, starting with Alistair Guthi, Matt, all the way

01:53:43.620 down to our folk builders and our members, so that we would weather anything that is going to

01:53:50.300 come up and, on the whole, grow through it. You know, there's something that we talk about

01:53:57.680 amongst our leaders, and probably many of our membership has heard this sort of thing as well,

01:54:02.960 where every time, you know, some news organization runs a hit piece on the Asishu Folk Assembly,

01:54:08.900 usually around the time we open a hall somewhere, but not always. There's always someone trying to

01:54:13.980 make their name, and they think they've found the, you know, the sensational story of the

01:54:19.880 century when they realized that we're a thing. And we almost always gain members out of something

01:54:26.960 like that, even if we're treated incredibly unfairly, almost in particular, when we're

01:54:31.020 treated incredibly unfairly, you know, the, you know, that will portray us as, as being evil,

01:54:38.660 and all sorts of other things. I can't even properly express it, because I don't understand

01:54:43.880 how they're thinking but they'll say all these mean things about us but perhaps accurately describe

01:54:48.920 some of our views and that is inevitably going to catch some um you know reasonable-minded

01:54:56.120 person's attention and they'll find it attractive and seek us out and want to know more as a result

01:55:01.400 of that um so yeah i mean there's all sorts of things i can try to imagine up that that aren't

01:55:09.000 real yet and there's all sorts of things that have perhaps happened in the past that i think we've

01:55:12.840 we've learned from um both in you know our successes and how we've dealt with things and

01:55:18.600 and our our failures mistakes we know not to repeat um but we're that we are going to be

01:55:26.920 growing asa true um for our fold forever uh the austral folk assembly is here to stay so whatever

01:55:33.960 is coming we will either springboard off of it to new levels of success or we'll weather it until

01:55:41.800 um you know it's it's not a rainy day again

01:55:47.560 absolutely i think that was well done i think that was uh comprehensive um

01:55:58.440 asking people to predict the future i mean i suppose it's within bounds to ask cliff rye

01:56:05.080 to try to do some kind of rune reading on it uh realistically

01:56:11.160 they're first these things are true the afa will run into a variety of problems

01:56:20.660 life is like that and that's just what happens some problems just come with growth and those

01:56:29.740 are problems that i welcome um we talk about this a lot but there's levels of problems there's you

01:56:38.560 know coup attempts and you know mass defections and you know legal there's big problems that are

01:56:48.320 much more hurtful and then there's simple administrative problems like hey we've gotten

01:56:54.160 too big for this model what do we adjust to to the next level hey wow you know this hoff district

01:57:00.060 thing is great but what you know what happened you know like you guys mentioned earlier well

01:57:04.180 what happens when there's three hoffs in my town? You know,

01:57:07.660 how do we divide it further than the districts? Um, why you guys got,

01:57:13.200 you know, what, five people on the Witten? Well,

01:57:16.620 now we've got a million members. Shouldn't we have a couple of people,

01:57:19.780 more people on the, you know, on the Witten? Well, sure.

01:57:22.220 We should figure something out. Um, Hey,

01:57:25.640 you guys are doing so great with your, you know, house true Academy. Uh,

01:57:30.360 what happens if we want to have real, you know, schoolhouse experience?

01:57:34.180 at like cliff said maybe we'll have to worry about you know the problem of hiring educators

01:57:40.380 and having physical structures for that it sounds like an awesome problem to have

01:57:44.180 um you know the biggest way to express it i think was we've run into it a number of times

01:57:54.400 in different scenarios but having people over in my house and realizing oh where are people

01:58:00.780 going to sit. We don't have enough chairs for all the people that showed up. What an awesome

01:58:06.500 problem that is to have. I welcome those problems. And there'll be a lot of those. And I know that

01:58:12.020 kind of avoids the intent of the question, but that's worth noting. Those are real problems that

01:58:18.260 happen um as far as legal problems i don't foresee at first our first so problems that we just try to

01:58:33.380 be prepared for in case legal things are always scary there's all kind of rules and nonsense that

01:58:41.140 go on even in a supposedly free country so our first step to handle any potential problems that

01:58:49.540 way are we try to make sure we're doing things right in the beginning like at the start of a

01:58:56.340 project or an idea we talk to and this is we're really fortunate right now in the afa we have two

01:59:02.820 lawyers who are members of the leadership one of which is a law speaker alan turnage who's been on

01:59:08.420 the program and has been such a help over the years to ask legal questions and get legal answers

01:59:15.540 on before we pursue something and then to make sure that we're doing it the right legal and

01:59:20.740 appropriate way and that we're prepared in case any dispute would come up that we are

01:59:29.220 in the right zone as far as how that's handled so that's a huge part of it

01:59:32.820 So Cliff mentioned, you know, any kind of natural disasters or something, you know, a fire or a tornado hitting or whatever at one of our Hoffs.

01:59:43.900 So to protect from that, first, all of our Hoffs are insured.

01:59:47.820 And secondly, we budget accordingly.

01:59:52.020 So you guys hear me try to raise funds a lot for our different Hoffs.

01:59:56.800 um we have been blessed to the point of getting a new hof isn't a

02:00:06.480 i don't want to say that it's not difficult it certainly is but it's not an insurmountable

02:00:13.200 challenge the struggle isn't so much the initial purchase of a hof

02:00:17.260 but what's essential is that we're budgeted to support and maintain that hof

02:00:25.200 and take care of it while still having the liquidity to handle any other emergencies

02:00:34.480 that may come up or unexpected expenses that may come up.

02:00:37.940 So we budget accordingly for that.

02:00:42.300 As it stands right now, we make sure that the AFA could maintain all of the recurring

02:00:51.080 bills at all of our hoffs for one quarter of or less of our overall income in the afa so there's

02:01:00.280 75 income to be spent discretionarily so that if something did happen we would have that whole other

02:01:09.400 section of our um our general fund to allocate if an emergency were to happen at one of our

02:01:16.520 off so we try to prepare really steadily for that um stuff happens to members and their families

02:01:27.160 i also consider that problems for the afa and not just for the member in regards to that we have

02:01:34.120 since 2014 yeah i think 2014 officially but it seems like it was a little bit earlier than that

02:01:41.480 that the idea was was started but we've had uh folk services and the idea of folk services we

02:01:49.480 have a fund that we've collected over the years as well as we run specific fundraisers to where

02:01:56.920 if a member of their family is struggling and has a particular problem that we're able to

02:02:04.040 help support them as a folk and help get them through to a place where their immediate needs

02:02:10.360 are met and they're and they're doing all right and we've used that countless times you guys have

02:02:16.280 been extremely generous to so many of those endeavors and when i say you guys yes everyone

02:02:22.040 listening in the periphery or whatever else but even immediately during the course of these shows

02:02:27.240 we've had people donate money to those and our folk are really thankful so those have helped out

02:02:32.680 What I have learned is the common problem, unfortunately, is other quote-unquote folkish

02:02:49.920 that have an unhealthy compulsion towards strife and chaos.

02:03:12.160 Every time the AFA has had a major problem that has significantly affected our membership,

02:03:17.960 it has been because other groups of people who claim to share the same values that we claim

02:03:25.560 have decided to cause strife, cause problems, defect, have coup attempts,

02:03:36.960 because everybody wants to be the king or because everybody wants to find something to purity spiral

02:03:47.160 about i've talked about this before and one day i'll come up with a really cool name for it or

02:03:52.360 something but i don't have it yet but there is a moth to flame tendency amongst our folk that has

02:03:58.840 hurt us immeasurably throughout our history of a instinctive aversion to success

02:04:10.200 every time we're winning or something good is happening there's a segment of our people that

02:04:17.460 can't accept it can't contemplate how something truly good or how we could possibly win

02:04:26.220 so their mind creates

02:04:28.420 excuses or or imaginary foils or villains or something to delegitimize it because the only

02:04:38.600 way they can conceive of something good happening is through something nefarious and that's

02:04:47.080 it makes me really angry when it's directed at me but at a distance it makes me very sad

02:04:54.600 that our people are broken in that way and i hope one of the things about the afa's successes

02:05:03.560 is it's my sincere hope that the more we're able to accomplish and show our people that

02:05:08.600 success is possible that good things are very possible for us to do that it strengthens them

02:05:15.320 in a way that they can actually try for things instead of being convinced that it must all be

02:05:22.920 you know it must all be phony or it must all be a op or it must all be whatever they want to claim

02:05:31.560 to where they don't even try and that's the biggest success our enemies have ever had is

02:05:36.520 convincing us as a race that we can't possibly ever win anything so we shouldn't even try

02:05:45.080 and that's that's hurt us immensely and it's hurt our children and we're doing cliff and i

02:05:51.380 and the afa are doing everything we can to reverse course on that and turn that around

02:05:56.240 that's what i see

02:05:58.080 all right matt where'd you get the awesome sweater

02:06:10.800 ah got it on amazon a number of years ago because we were going to go on a

02:06:18.760 quote-unquote ugly sweater wine walk the sweater is beautiful it is not ugly but it is festive

02:06:25.960 And so we went on a local, you know, thematic wine walk in Reno.

02:06:30.480 Man, it's been a little while now, but it doesn't feel like it's been that long ago.

02:06:34.960 But that's where I got it.

02:06:38.560 Next question from the Wolf Throne.

02:06:40.500 Is the sign of the hammer copying the sign of the crucifix, or is the sign of the crucifix copying the sign of the hammer?

02:06:48.740 i am assuming that he means in our um like meal blessings

02:06:57.440 for anyone who doesn't know and if you can see this it very much looks like the sign of the cross

02:07:07.920 not gonna lie it certainly does we will typically do something along the lines of

02:07:14.640 or steve mcnalen would do this and and this is typically what i do in uh carrying on that

02:07:21.840 tradition sign of the hammer and the holy names of odin balder fray and thor i bless this meal

02:07:32.880 and whatever else i'd like to say um

02:07:36.480 I don't know the first recorded Christian use of doing the sign of the cross

02:07:46.000 when they're doing a meal blessing or saying grace or whatever that ritual is to them.

02:07:54.420 The instance in our lore that I am aware of is a Christian king was doing,

02:08:01.580 making the sign of the cross

02:08:03.640 at a religious

02:08:05.920 festival. I think it was at a

02:08:07.800 Yule feast, if I recall correctly.

02:08:11.280 And

02:08:11.620 his, you know, Alistair

02:08:13.640 folks at the feast were hot

02:08:15.880 about it, like, hey, what are you doing? You know, don't

02:08:17.780 do that Jesus stuff here. And he's like, hey,

02:08:20.480 no, hold on. I'm

02:08:22.160 making the sign of the hammer. I mean,

02:08:23.980 don't you guys make the sign of Thor's hammer

02:08:26.060 before you, you know, to bless your food?

02:08:28.420 And then they backed off.

02:08:31.580 It presupposes that people there were, that one, the king was familiar with the idea of making the sign of the cross to ward himself against the evil pagan Yule boar or whatever, but also that the people there wouldn't think it ridiculous that he was making a sign of Thor's hammer to bless stuff.

02:08:53.560 The actual motions, honestly, it probably was something Jesus-y.

02:08:58.320 The concept of blessing something with an image or a reference to the hammer of Thor goes all the way back to deepest parts of our lore.

02:09:12.340 Thor's hammer was not just for striking down foes of the Iser, but it was also to hallow something and make it holy.

02:09:20.740 We see that as he raises his goats from the dead in our lore.

02:09:27.780 We see that in the marriage ceremony where they would use that to bless the womb of a bride.

02:09:35.140 The hammer of Thor sanctifying something is very traditional to our folk.

02:09:40.420 The hand gesture, sure, I think there's plenty of reason to believe that that might have been inspired by the Christian sign of the cross.

02:09:48.360 Um, but the concept is, is absolutely ours and not in imitation of anything else. Cliff, do you have anything to add on, on your understanding of that story or anything?

02:10:01.360 Anything?

02:10:06.520 My understanding of the story is virtually the same as yours.

02:10:10.580 I think it was one of the king's earls who calmed down the vassals or bannermen

02:10:18.900 who were upset when King Hakon was making the sign of the cross

02:10:25.080 to ward himself from pagan magics or whatever.

02:10:31.360 and offended his still, I think, vastly majority heathen nobility or vassals.

02:10:44.320 And I also, being familiar enough with it to look it up, I cheated and looked it up.

02:10:49.860 So if anyone is interested in checking out the reference for it, check out Hack on the Goods Saga.

02:10:57.260 You can get to it on Gutenberg.org.

02:11:00.020 It's Chapter 18, King Hakon Offers Sacrifices.

02:11:04.860 And like Al-Sharigothi Matt says, the explanation was such that, you know,

02:11:13.000 it was an explanation for what they noticed that it was a sign of the cross.

02:11:19.700 But it's similar enough to the sign of the hammer that they were familiar with

02:11:23.520 that um the the earl was able to uh keep the king from having any problems from that

02:11:36.480 um and that's that is the way to do it that's absolutely what i do if i'm completely unfamiliar

02:11:43.440 i will throw it to the guest and then i will google it and then i will look like i have all

02:11:47.200 their answers um so that's that's the smart play uh are the are there afa members in

02:11:54.080 countries where whites are a minority

02:12:00.160 maybe i don't know enough about the particular demographics of argentina we have a member in

02:12:06.560 argentina right now and i think that probably technically it is a majority non-white nation

02:12:15.120 although a great deal of the uh more upper class folks in that country are certainly you know

02:12:27.440 spaniards um the other thing and we don't have unfortunately we currently do not have any south

02:12:36.800 african members but quite often we have had members in south africa and they whites are a minority in

02:12:53.120 the next question i'll let cliff answer first from the wolf throne have you heard

02:12:59.920 of ermine folk their group photo looks a lot like the afa

02:13:06.800 I have heard of the Urban Folk. I used to be good friends with some of them. I haven't

02:13:14.680 seen their recent group photos. I can say that in the time that I was going to their

02:13:21.560 events, there was a lot of crossover between they and the Austria Folk Assembly six, seven,

02:13:28.520 eight years ago, maybe a little bit longer ago. Um, there was, um, similarities and dissimilarities.

02:13:37.220 The, the, there was a lot more traditional or, um, like throwback garb that they would, um,

02:13:49.100 would utilize. Um, yeah, there's some, there's some complicated relationships for me and my

02:13:57.860 family there because we were very good friends with um the the urban folk until some irreconcilable

02:14:03.220 differences came up and um we are no longer friends with them

02:14:13.220 that was that was very kind of you cliff that was a very generous um description of the ermine

02:14:20.500 folk that cliff just gave and uh and that was nice um i too have heard of the ermine folk

02:14:28.660 for a time the ermine folk were members of the afa um

02:14:36.580 i don't know who all they have in their membership now and i'm not sure who all they invite to their

02:14:44.020 gatherings now i because i haven't because of our history i have not looked into even their

02:14:53.700 current leadership now the gentleman and his closest associates who were leading the ermine folk

02:15:05.060 when they were part of the afa and i think that um that relationship was severed

02:15:11.300 2017.

02:15:20.500 That person is a terrible person.

02:15:24.280 And his closest associates at that time are terrible people.

02:15:30.800 They are grossly dishonest.

02:15:34.700 They're extremely opportunistic and

02:15:38.240 And much more concerned about secret, squirreled, democracy, larp, shady machinations than they are about principle.

02:15:55.340 And yeah, that was an attempt, a really ham-fisted and poorly done coup attempt thing that happened that was kind of the first one that I saw under my leadership of the AFA.

02:16:08.940 Now I say that even at the time there were some members of the urban folk that

02:16:13.820 were, that were really good people. Um, whatever they've got going now,

02:16:18.720 I have no idea how many of those people, you know,

02:16:21.140 I don't know their relationship. I don't know how good or how not good they are.

02:16:26.600 I know they associate with some really terrible people still to this day. Um,

02:16:32.020 but the guy that ran stuff back then, if he still does now, he makes cool stuff.

02:16:38.240 It makes cool products. They're able to put on nice events. I think the reason that their aesthetic looks similar to ours in some way was hopefully due to some of that rubbing off on them during the time that they were members of the AFA.

02:16:58.180 um when we first met them it was either viking larp clothes or fatigues and paramilitary clothing

02:17:10.180 so if they're dressing nice now then good i think that's that's nice to see

02:17:19.140 like i said not sure who's running things now not sure how it's changed

02:17:23.940 since we had a relationship with them

02:17:28.180 But they were very bad people at that time, at the top, making decisions and behaving extremely dishonorably to myself, to my family, and to the AFA.

02:17:41.960 Yeah, and I share a lot of those sentiments.

02:17:44.880 I try as a rule not to talk bad about my exes.

02:17:50.400 If someone asks me a direct question, I'll give them direct information.

02:17:53.600 But if someone asked me, oh, have you heard of them, I'll say yes.

02:17:59.100 And we don't associate anymore.

02:18:03.760 Thing is, I saw so much dishonesty and so much trickery that I think it would be improper not to warn people to steer clear of that.

02:18:18.820 one thing that i don't think is me um putting my own spin on it or i'm certainly trying really hard

02:18:26.580 not to and i saw this with a number of situations there their preferred way of dealing with things

02:18:36.900 was always

02:18:41.940 some kind of behind the scenes

02:18:48.820 arranging of circumstances in certain ways or it was very much going around the point at hand of

02:18:57.620 finding some um some secretive clandestine way of arranging events to where what they

02:19:08.820 wanted to happen would happen or what they wanted not to happen would avoid happening um

02:19:14.820 and they were very uncomfortable with us as the afame specifically in leadership making

02:19:23.940 decisions that were overt that i stood in front of and said hey we do support this we don't support

02:19:30.500 that there was always a political machination which is contrary to our values of doing right

02:19:39.060 and fearing no one they function in a much more um behind the scenes

02:19:50.980 um i'm trying to find the right words here and i and i hope i think cliff understands what i'm

02:19:56.740 saying but i don't feel like uh i'm necessarily saying that in a way that everybody can get

02:20:02.980 because i'm trying to trying to not be overtly insulting i think a big difference between the

02:20:09.540 culture of the ossaroo folk assembly both then and now and the culture of the ermine folk at least

02:20:16.980 then since i'm at least six years separated from that and you know i was good friends with a lot

02:20:24.340 of these people slept over their houses went to their their their private rituals their private

02:20:30.660 bloats and all that so um very well acquainted um with them and considered for a time and you

02:20:37.540 know formally joining um with them at their at their kindred level um i think the biggest

02:20:43.780 difference that i observed and that really ended up being the major irreconcilable difference that

02:20:50.180 I referred to earlier is that the Asatru Folk Assembly is practicing Asatru in the open and

02:21:02.900 we will deal with the consequences of that in our lives as they come. We are not going to hide who

02:21:10.900 we are um to make our lives easier or more convenient because we've been called back to

02:21:20.340 our gods by ancestors and by people still living today including stephen mcdallin who have

02:21:29.940 done a lot of things at great personal cost that paved the way for us to be able to do this

02:21:34.740 And that if we don't shoulder some of that responsibility, some of that cost, then we're doing a disservice to our peers, our fellow folk that are alive today who, you know, maybe have never heard the word Asitru or who are still hiding behind the electric glow of their computer screen and haven't actually done Asitru yet.

02:21:57.740 um whereas like like i was sure got gothi matt referred to um the the ermine folk culture was

02:22:07.540 very much underground secretive um everything is dangerous so we can't be open about it

02:22:17.320 um and that's just not something that i could agree with you know there there certainly could

02:22:24.420 be, you know, consequences for me being openly ossitrue, but I'm man enough to address those

02:22:34.420 head on and directly. All right. So we got some follow-ups, but I think those are coming

02:22:45.560 a little bit later in our question stream here. On the next question, do you think there should

02:22:53.860 be some sort of practice or training on how to conduct a bloat or stumble or any other ceremony

02:23:00.100 or at least uh edict on what to do during such events for people who don't get to experience

02:23:07.940 them enough to learn uh such as myself i cannot go or i can't go to many moots or even or events

02:23:16.680 and the ones i do go to i feel lost because it's just not something i do enough

02:23:22.920 so that's something that we've thought about

02:23:30.000 the answer is kind of yes and no as far as edicts on how to behave during them or what goes into

02:23:40.660 them or how they work for a person first attending and i'm not criticizing the people that you may

02:23:49.880 have attended their bloats or sambals because i forget you know there have been many times

02:23:55.560 i have forgotten to do this myself ideally those people and any of us performing rituals

02:24:05.640 with people who are who are new or if there's a chance or somebody who's new

02:24:10.600 should give folks a little bit of a rundown beforehand on what to do what to avoid doing

02:24:17.720 how to conduct themselves you know any any moving parts that they may be required to participate in

02:24:27.160 any special verbiage that they may not be familiar with

02:24:32.600 those things should be explained before you're in a ritual and you know again all of us have

02:24:40.360 forgotten to or have not done so as thoroughly as we wish we had and we make adjustments as we move

02:24:45.240 forward but we thought about it earlier and there's the idea of producing written material

02:24:51.880 on how people do this but one of the things that we wanted to do was preserve the sanctity of our

02:24:58.600 priesthood it's not that it's not okay for individuals to perform these rituals

02:25:06.280 in their own homes or where there's not a gothi present but we want our people to employ our

02:25:15.780 gothar to do these things we want our gothar to be providing this for our folk and there is a

02:25:23.760 difference between a gothi or a githya performing these rituals and just a regular member or head

02:25:33.140 the household performing them anyone performing them you know any of our folk who are well

02:25:38.260 intentioned performing bloat ensemble is better than no one doing it certainly but when it's

02:25:45.860 available it's best done by an ordained priest of our faith and so yes and no any questions that you

02:25:55.380 have your folk builder would be very happy to answer any and all of them for you

02:26:00.340 the gothar near you would be happy to answer any and all of those questions and i personally would

02:26:07.300 be very happy to walk you through any of those things or help with any of them that you might

02:26:11.380 have questions on cliff do you have anything to add to that well i think in at least the context

02:26:19.300 of a uh personal bloat uh you know a personal devotion to a god a goddess or an ancestor or

02:26:25.940 or a family bloat, or a small remote kindred bloat,

02:26:32.280 somewhere where there is no Gothi or Githia to defer to.

02:26:38.560 I think it's important that folks understand

02:26:41.400 that bloat is the gift exchange between the folk and the gods.

02:26:49.820 wherever possible you want a gothi or a githya um acting as the the the godhead or as the uh

02:27:03.580 not sure if it's the best word to use or not but the you know the the the spokesperson um

02:27:09.100 on behalf of the folk um to the gods and vice versa um and if you're you know if you are

02:27:17.100 all by yourself and you are making a a personal offering to your ancestor or a personal offering

02:27:24.700 to thor or you know you're you're going to be doing a uh you know a a frigga or or dc or bloat

02:27:32.220 after this show ends because it's mother's night you know you're going to do that with your family

02:27:37.100 um you know make sure that you have a sacred space set aside to do that if not make one

02:27:43.820 that's the first part of conducting a bloat and there are multiple ways to do that i won't get

02:27:50.380 into that because i could talk about this for a while the next step would be to invoke the entity

02:27:56.620 that you are intending to give a gift to so you call your ancestor you call the god or goddess

02:28:04.140 and then you give them a gift that can be a physical good you know it could be

02:28:15.360 cookies it could be produce from your garden a lot of times in afa bloats it will be a a horn

02:28:23.660 of mead that's been charged with intent from the folk you give that to them and then you

02:28:31.040 humbly and piously

02:28:33.760 ask them to

02:28:37.000 continue the gift cycle with you

02:28:39.900 if you're worthy. I never like to say that you

02:28:41.740 ask them for blessings or for anything

02:28:43.820 specific because we are

02:28:45.340 they're lessers and

02:28:47.820 we are the beneficiaries

02:28:50.140 of the gift cycle. The gods

02:28:52.120 started it and everything we give

02:28:54.120 to them is

02:28:55.840 from what they gave

02:28:58.100 to us. You cannot give Frey

02:28:59.960 a tomato that he didn't have something to do with um or a great deal to do with really same thing

02:29:07.560 with any of our gods and goddesses everything that we can think of even our intent comes from

02:29:13.160 our lives which we owe to them from our world which we owe to them um

02:29:20.600 and then sharing the blessings with the folk who are present if that's just you

02:29:27.160 it's basically done already if it's your family you

02:29:31.800 you know sometimes the argothar will um you know asperge or sprinkle uh mead from a uh

02:29:40.040 a blessing horn separate from the the gifting horn that we give to the gods

02:29:44.600 um there's a lot of different mechanical ways to do it but understanding that it's a gift exchange

02:29:49.160 and that we are returning essentially gifts that the gods gave to us initially in the hopes

02:29:56.120 that they find us worthy to continue to give gifts to is the the point of what we do that for

02:30:08.360 um

02:30:12.200 all right so a question that apparently i skipped i'm i apologize i didn't mean to skip it certainly

02:30:19.560 uh i was wondering if anyone had any experience or knowledge of children drawing runes before

02:30:25.080 they knew anything about them also drawing or making models slash game characters of the all-father

02:30:36.600 cliff do you have any any thoughts in that regard or any experience to share on that um

02:30:46.840 it sounds like a multiple prompt kind of question i mean as far as

02:30:52.120 like the last part of it as far as games and avatars there's all sorts of stuff in the pop

02:30:56.800 culture um that references our divinities sometimes partially respectfully other times

02:31:04.260 completely disrespectfully don't know if that's the intended question but that's what i get from

02:31:09.900 it when i hear games and avatars i'm you know wondering if you're talking about um like

02:31:16.840 assassin's creed ragnarok or if you're talking about talos or something like that um if not

02:31:23.620 then you know i don't know of anyone that has specifically made um like a properly pious

02:31:30.660 asatru video game or anything like that there are there are viking video games but that's not the

02:31:38.800 same thing um as far as um what was the other part of the question like like drawings or

02:31:46.620 cartoons or something like that yeah you're saying d like kids that will draw runes oh yeah

02:31:52.440 knowing about it or without any previous exposure to wounds um i mean i don't have any personal

02:32:01.920 experience with that in in as much as me seeing it as you know something supernatural or spooky

02:32:09.720 I think that a lot of our runes are naturally occurring.

02:32:16.240 You know, when I first joined the AFA, I was talking to a fellow named Brad who knew a lot of things that I didn't.

02:32:26.300 And he was telling me about how, you know, everywhere he goes, he sees the runes.

02:32:30.720 Because if you look at architecture, if you look at, you know, the wood framing in houses,

02:32:35.960 you can start to see algies and you can start to see Gabo because, I mean, sometimes they're

02:32:43.420 geometrical symbols. They're going to be there just because. And I think that that can come out

02:32:49.060 in, you know, children's art too. I mean, if they draw a line, is it an Issa? I don't know.

02:32:57.580 It's too simple. And I don't mean to diminish the question. I just, you know, I think that

02:33:05.940 it's better for us to teach our children about the runes and to teach them the intent of the

02:33:12.020 runes, to teach them what has been handed down to us from our ancestors and the gods about the

02:33:18.680 runes. And I don't doubt that they can discover some of that on their own, but

02:33:23.100 I don't see why we would not give them the advantage of the knowledge that we have.

02:33:31.980 Yeah, I think the meat and taters here is, you know, do we have experience with children having an inherent knowledge of some of our lore from blood memory or from inspiration from the gods?

02:34:01.860 without being taught by by people sure i certainly open i'm open to that possibility what i think is

02:34:17.220 especially in the case of the rooms what i think is the most likely

02:34:21.860 is that our brains draw patterns once you know about the rooms and you've internalized the rooms

02:34:31.860 the runes are everywhere because our runes are a relatively simple collection of straight lines

02:34:42.580 that if i took a box of matches and tossed them up in the air

02:34:48.500 runes would appear on the ground if i look hard enough of course i could see them

02:34:53.780 because they're straight lines connected by other straight lines they're everywhere what i think is

02:35:00.660 meaningful and cool is it's not just the brain applying patterns to things but it's applying

02:35:09.940 patterns with meanings that you are familiar with into things once you are familiar with the rooms

02:35:19.540 then you're viewing your life with key touchstones that define us as a folk

02:35:26.340 in how we interpret information in how we understand the mysteries of existence

02:35:33.300 and you are reminded of those or you see those and things around you on occasion and when they

02:35:40.180 are most meaningful to you you can recognize them and apply them and i think that's awesome

02:35:46.660 there's nothing wrong or not good about that that's great um what's important to realize

02:35:55.540 a rune is not the collection of straight lines that is the sigil that

02:36:06.180 represents the room the ruin is the mystery that it represents

02:36:11.940 and that has undoubtedly taken different shapes over time but the fact that you see

02:36:18.340 architecture and the support struts remind you or make you aware of our folk reaching up to our gods

02:36:30.820 or of the elk that is out algaes that's awesome or that you see gabo in you know structural

02:36:39.060 supports you being reminded of the give and take of the gift cycle and to be a good host

02:36:44.660 and to be a good guest and to exchange regularly to build relationships, that's amazing.

02:36:51.780 But it's important to recognize that's not necessarily miraculous.

02:36:57.720 It comes from you being familiar with those things and utilizing them.

02:37:02.660 Um, but our, our runic structures are fairly, um, fairly common in the sense that they're,

02:37:15.140 they're simple line drawings. So they appear in a lot of different forms in different contexts

02:37:22.980 throughout the world. And so I wouldn't necessarily ascribe some kind of special

02:37:29.920 meaning to that when children do it other than, hey, look, do you know what you just made there?

02:37:36.040 You just made Bircano. Here's what Bircano means. Use that as a learning opportunity to teach your

02:37:42.260 children. That's what I would suggest on that. Matt and Cliff, how is runic galder practiced?

02:37:54.580 Is it just meditating on a particular rune?

02:37:58.480 I'm new to it, and I want to learn how to actually do it.

02:38:03.640 Cliff, do you have words of wisdom on runic galdr for the wolf throne?

02:38:08.860 I have words, at least.

02:38:12.480 So, it's kind of meant to be punny.

02:38:17.880 No, galdring is not just meditating on the runes.

02:38:21.900 It's really important that you're vocalizing them.

02:38:24.580 You know, Galdr is often described as a runic chanting, and I like to encourage people when I Galdr with them to give the Galdr their own personality or to let the Galdr take them where they're going to go with it.

02:38:49.960 A lot of times we will fall in the habit when guldering as a group, when we're in bloat, of everyone guldering at the same pace, on the same pitches.

02:39:04.660 And I think that it really works best when people don't do that.

02:39:11.480 when um each person is individually

02:39:15.840 the the rune or runes it doesn't have to be one you can go over a series of runes um depends on

02:39:26.160 your intent and that should be thought through before you do it um but that they allow their

02:39:31.960 pitch and their rhythm to go where the meditation sort of leads them so that if it's a group that

02:39:40.600 that all forms uh medley together and hopefully can reveal something a bit greater than it would

02:39:48.920 if everyone were just you know doing it like it's a gregorian chant or something like that

02:39:55.880 um as far as doing it on your own um it's a a type of meditation or a meditative practice

02:40:05.080 um but the the reflection on the sound of the rune the sound of the name of the rune

02:40:16.200 as opposed to like the phonetic sound of the rune um and you know in your mind's eye the

02:40:24.120 the shape of the sigil of the rune like like matt described it and the deeper meaning of the rune

02:40:31.000 is all important and the vocalized guldering can help you get there or explore that that's

02:40:39.080 that's why i want when when i'm leading a bloat and i employ gold i like for people to

02:40:47.560 be open about it and just let it go where it's going to go rather than feel like they have to

02:40:51.640 copy everybody or stay in lockstep with it because i think that we all get more out of it that way

02:40:57.240 and the same when you are you know practicing galder um privately it's easy to use your

02:41:07.080 you know comfortable vocal range or to always be loud or always be quiet it's uh i think more

02:41:14.280 effective to move around in your vocal range and in your volume um and in how long you

02:41:23.080 you know, take to vocalize the rune and to really let it flow.

02:41:32.560 I mean, it's supposed to be a type of singing, so it shouldn't, can't be all drums, right?

02:41:38.660 Okay. So there are a lot of right ways to do it. There's a difference between group

02:41:59.880 galder and individual galder so cliff is of the mind that the best thing to do is everybody

02:42:07.880 individually do it in a group and see where that takes you there are times where that is completely

02:42:14.920 appropriate and where that yields a certain type of result there are other times where the harmony

02:42:21.720 yields result but what i want to say as probably one of the certainly the person i've heard in the

02:42:29.160 afa that is most vocal about them liking harmony and i always like the harmony that's my point

02:42:34.280 that's what i go for when i'm doing ritual that's what i want to that's where i want to end up is

02:42:40.520 harmony but i think that for folks that don't see that the way i do or don't express it the way i do

02:42:48.920 I don't ever want you to try to harmonize.

02:42:55.520 What happens where I've found harmony

02:42:59.600 is when it automatically merges and becomes harmonious.

02:43:08.400 I think that's a really beautiful moment.

02:43:11.220 In my own personal rune at Galder,

02:43:14.200 the most the best the zone i want to get to and it is you know so the original question

02:43:24.220 is it just a meditative practice no not at all is it meditative it certainly can be

02:43:30.680 and just like hindus use uh mantras in their meditation i like to use galder in mine

02:43:39.120 um my mind doesn't just go still that doesn't work i can't meditate and just release all my

02:43:47.240 thoughts i have a million different things that will come to mind that are worth my attention

02:43:54.980 that need to be focused on so what helps me to get to that place is through sound

02:44:01.440 um in galder work there's a moment that i've found personally when i'm galdering for a certain

02:44:13.640 amount of time and it's repetitive and it's the same rune over and over and over again the same

02:44:17.800 intonations or the same series usually if i'm doing a series it'll be three runes

02:44:23.660 a lot of people have one rune they're focused on and just do that over and over that's something

02:44:29.560 i very often do sometimes i'll have a sequence that's a three-run sequence i don't typically

02:44:36.360 go beyond that it's harder to focus on and it's a dance that's more effective when you're just

02:44:42.840 dancing than if you're trying to remember steps if that makes sense so when i galder

02:44:50.680 there becomes a point where i'm doing it over and over and over

02:44:54.120 and at some point my brain disengages i'm no longer

02:45:01.240 consciously directing my voice to make the noise and at that moment my consciousness bifurcates

02:45:11.420 like i am separate from the noise my mouth and body are making and that's when i reach meditation

02:45:19.160 and that doesn't always happen that's very hard to get when i get there that's how i know it works

02:45:25.980 um and something similar happens when there's a group galder and all of a sudden we're united

02:45:35.220 and it rises and falls in a similar way without us directing it it just does and that's a beautiful

02:45:43.880 place to hit i've also had group galder to where that breaks off in a couple of different pieces

02:45:51.000 and it's musical and you have some people doing it one way a different group of people doing it

02:45:55.880 a different way that complement each other and that's really neat the only thing i'd say to

02:46:01.960 avoid doing first follow the instructions of your gofi if he's going for a particular intent

02:46:08.920 go with that in mind because again there's there's good cause to do both

02:46:16.280 when left to your own devices

02:46:21.400 galder to galder don't galder to show off sometimes we'll do a group galder and one person

02:46:30.600 needs to be louder and more obnoxious than everyone else so they can be a special snowflake

02:46:37.160 that's distracting when it happens and I'm thinking of a couple of I'm thinking of a handful

02:46:44.560 of people in my mind so anybody out here listening if you think it's you stop it but it's probably

02:46:49.260 not just you that I'm thinking of because I know a number of people that do it um but there's a lot

02:46:55.480 of right ways to do it and in order to answer your question um the room that I wanted folks

02:47:03.340 to galder when i did uh yule bloat at odenshof this last weekend was wunyo

02:47:12.060 each rune has a vocal spot where you feel like your breath should be or your voice should come

02:47:23.900 from that sounds hokey and whatever there's some rooms that you want runes that you want

02:47:29.900 coming from your diaphragm there's some that feel better when they're projected from your chest

02:47:36.460 there's some that feel better when they're more nasally and higher up in and i think that depends

02:47:42.300 a lot of that's feeling out for yourself if you want to know how runic galler works um

02:47:49.580 a simple one doing rune or doing ruño goes like this

02:47:59.900 O NIO

02:48:06.900 O NIO

02:48:17.900 O NIO

02:48:22.900 kind of the minimum amount people seem to like to do is in threes as you know at least three

02:48:44.380 um it is intoning a rune it is chanting it that's the root of the term enchantment is speaking those

02:48:56.060 kind of magical things into existence and a lot of emphasis is placed on the vowel sound

02:49:03.200 um and that's kind of in our modern tradition something people have always focused on is

02:49:10.720 taking time with the with the full vowel noise and uh that's how i would do that you want to

02:49:22.860 you know typically it's done in one breath like that so you exhale all of your air in

02:49:31.280 the rune and then you take a breath and you do it again

02:49:36.240 and that's repeated as many times as you want.

02:49:40.260 I've done it for a certain number of times.

02:49:42.400 I've certainly also done it for 10 minutes or 15 minutes or 20 minutes

02:49:47.800 with a timer set so that I can do it.

02:49:51.020 But that's how I do Rune Galder.

02:50:03.520 All right.

02:50:04.680 VrilMage14, I have a question. If slash when I win the lottery, would the AFA be interested in

02:50:13.540 10%? Absolutely, we would. And we would be able to keep the 10%. And if you gave it to us off the

02:50:21.040 top, because we are a recognized charity, and we don't owe the tax on that. So if you wanted to

02:50:27.920 adjust your tax burden by giving us large percentages of things, we will gladly take them.

02:50:33.520 uh please send good fehu energy my way if so i'd love to single-handedly fund the next five

02:50:41.980 hoffs or more we would love that too keep us in mind that would be amazing and in the meantime

02:50:49.420 we appreciate any contribution that you feel compelled to make

02:50:53.700 um next question is the person that you're talking about mike ceginario

02:51:03.320 he's the current leader of the ermine folk yes that is the person i'm talking about he's a very

02:51:08.060 bad person um in a very serious way um

02:51:13.400 these are factual things

02:51:22.640 he tried at one point to take over the afa or to install himself in as the leader of the afa in

02:51:37.060 some way i can't really speak to his motives but he started this coup attempt thing and he started

02:51:44.320 laying out facts that were not facts and were humorous in retrospect, very frustrating at the

02:51:53.360 time, I was looking at our database while he was publicly just spouting off as if things were true

02:52:01.860 statistics and facts and numbers that I'm looking at in front of me that are not true.

02:52:07.580 Um, he's been very dishonest in his dealings. He has very either, either blatantly dishonest

02:52:25.600 lies that he tells people, or he is mentally very far removed from reality in his accusations.

02:52:34.840 And I think that both are probably true.

02:52:38.640 I think that he is a dangerous person to associate with.

02:52:46.600 I have not seen him be a person who acts with good moral character or with good intentions.

02:52:53.000 He is a bad actor, whether he would admit to that or not.

02:52:58.320 And I don't know always the motivation for it.

02:53:01.000 And I know that he regularly has people attend his gatherings that he absolutely hates, but it looks good for his numbers and it looks good for the sale of his products.

02:53:15.360 So he invites them year after year, even though he claims to fundamentally disagree with everything they stand for and their core values.

02:53:24.180 and I would be remiss in not also saying

02:53:32.200 he has a very

02:53:36.240 concerning criminal history that

02:53:40.040 the nature and location of the offenses

02:53:43.940 seem very, very

02:53:47.760 not matching up with the proportionality of

02:53:52.280 time served for those offenses, it really makes me feel very uneasy with him being involved in

02:54:01.700 anything. I would caution other people not to be involved with him.

02:54:09.620 Now that he has been named, Cliff, do you have anything that you want to add or amend

02:54:14.320 to what I said?

02:54:17.500 Nothing to

02:54:18.340 amend.

02:54:19.920 I will let

02:54:21.880 everyone do their own homework.

02:54:25.220 Mike's nickname

02:54:26.260 is The Bomb. Do some

02:54:28.300 Googling.

02:54:32.040 Yeah.

02:54:34.440 And that's the thing.

02:54:35.720 I don't want to go out of my way and attack

02:54:38.180 people. That's not something I want to do.

02:54:40.260 But I do want to answer people honestly

02:54:42.120 and I do want to

02:54:44.320 you know say things that i believe and i i don't think that's a good person to spend time around

02:54:51.440 or to be involved with um thoughts on ouija boards real or fake cliff

02:55:02.160 i have seen them in spencer's gifts they are real um whether or not they are a conduit of

02:55:09.600 any kind of supernatural or psychic power um i i doubt it i've never used one so you know

02:55:18.960 i think it's probably more

02:55:22.960 teenage girls pushing the needle where they want it to go and having a fun game of it but um you

02:55:29.840 know i i've never used one and i i don't think that it's uh the best tool even if it is actual

02:55:39.600 We have a lot better tools for divination and getting real communications and relationships through the gift cycle with our ancestors than buying something from a store like that.

02:56:01.800 It's a board game.

02:56:09.600 if it's a binary choice, real or fake, I say real.

02:56:17.360 But I would say well north of 99% of the time,

02:56:24.740 yeah, Cliff's absolutely right.

02:56:26.160 It's BS, it's teenage girls giggling

02:56:31.880 and making it say whatever they want it to say.

02:56:36.120 I think that, and I mentioned this earlier,

02:56:39.600 So much of magic is about intent, or I said so much, you know, whatever.

02:56:46.680 Anything spiritual, anything that's not physical,

02:56:51.880 and I even mean that emotionally or in any other communication, intent means a lot.

02:57:00.420 if you have a context if you are clearly trying to make contact with something external if you

02:57:11.280 have a focused intent certainly that can be a means that something on the other side with a

02:57:20.040 focused intent could reach out to you from. One of my favorite sayings or quotes is the caution

02:57:32.500 not to stare too long into the abyss because it might stare back at you. And that's a thing.

02:57:38.900 When you reach out beyond the veil, you open up the possibility of

02:57:44.460 forces beyond the veil reaching back to you i think the ouija board is one of a vast many mediums

02:57:58.720 haha i see what i did there wasn't on purpose but it is a medium um for that to occur

02:58:04.960 and there's cliff's point is absolutely correct there's a number of better ways there is a number

02:58:13.360 of less cheesy ways, but certainly if that is your intent, when you sit down with your Ouija board

02:58:21.020 with your friends and you invite stuff, if stuff happens to be listening and in a mind to, okay,

02:58:28.040 cool, you open the door, I'm going to come through it, stuff happens. I'm watching the chat and I

02:58:38.200 I appreciate Githya Anna and her comments.

02:58:42.220 That's something that always bothered me too.

02:58:43.860 She's referencing Ghost Adventures where Zach Bagans will go try to provoke ghosts.

02:58:52.160 And then the slightest time anything happens, he's like, ah, and he's terrified.

02:58:56.900 I always found that funny.

02:58:59.020 Random side note, I enjoy that show.

02:59:00.980 There's a lot of things about it that I like, and I get teased about it.

02:59:04.300 So for argument's sake, Matt, do you think that the same arguments that you made about intent could be applied to a magic eight ball?

02:59:11.800 so here's where i come with intent there are quite a few people even if they are

02:59:22.680 you know teenage goth girls that use a ouija board with a very specific

02:59:31.460 desire and intent to communicate with the beyond i have never met somebody that genuinely thinks

02:59:39.340 there's magic behind the magic eight ball if they did then sure and i think that's why we see so

02:59:50.780 many it's easy to look at it as silly when you see it in a very commercialized context like

02:59:57.980 a ouija board or magic eight ball but if you look at it most of our means of divination are

03:00:07.020 extremely nebulous and seem kind of silly the point comes in with the intent from our side

03:00:17.460 and the intent from the other side and it's like when the when the old lady what is she

03:00:22.900 the witch in uh in Robin Hood what does she do she like has some blood in the thing and she like

03:00:30.920 spits in it and starts moving around with her fingernail yeah the painted man he haunts my

03:00:37.320 dreams and she does the little thing there's all kind of like little scrying and horror specs

03:00:48.040 reading the entrails of animals or looking at the flight of birds or any other numerous

03:00:57.560 seemingly off the wall things whereas if you did if somebody at random did them as a party trick

03:01:04.200 it would be stupid but a trained priestess of our gods in ancient times reading the entrails

03:01:12.200 we would who and on it would be very meaningful because her intent is very very focused

03:01:17.480 um i suppose in the most theoretical possible way but it would be really cheesy and really silly

03:01:24.520 optics yeah if you're super focused and you want to use the magic late ball and there's a possibility

03:01:31.100 something could happen with it i suppose how much credence i would give that how meaningful that

03:01:37.940 would be objectively when you say that to other people would depend a lot to me on the source

03:01:44.780 if patricia hall came to me out of the blue hadn't talked to her in

03:01:51.720 seven years and she said matt i had to talk to you i was consulting my magic eight ball

03:02:00.100 and i think you need to know this i would absolutely buy into it

03:02:07.360 soon. Oh yeah, but I don't think she would do that. I think that the intent is sort of revealed

03:02:15.680 if you are, you know, only committed enough in that intent to call on Parker Brothers, you know,

03:02:28.560 to provide the means for it. And in a more serious vein, I think that, you know, a lot of times,

03:02:36.640 like you know these like gift shop um you know mass-produced rune sets are probably less effective

03:02:43.760 than than rune sets that you know maybe someone went out to a stream and picked the stones and

03:02:49.280 carved them and you know formed a personal kind of intent with their their rune set um not that

03:02:57.840 you cannot use a store-bought rune set to do actual divination i just think that um

03:03:06.640 You know, Katie would speak a lot better on this than I would, and if Anne is in the chat there, she might be able to contribute some insight that's better than mine.

03:03:15.820 But I think that you can charge these instruments just like you can charge a place or other religious instruments with intent and with power.

03:03:29.660 and that the store-bought version probably requires more charging

03:03:35.400 than the one that has been homegrown, so to speak.

03:03:42.560 Not that, like, handcrafted is necessarily better.

03:03:45.120 That's not what I'm getting at.

03:03:46.040 I just mean that the least amount of effort went into going to the –

03:03:52.040 I don't know where you can buy toys anymore,

03:03:55.220 but we'll say the KB Toy Store and buying the Ouija board off the shelf

03:03:58.880 for the Walmart, you can probably get them at Walmart, than other, you know, I guess what people

03:04:06.960 would consider more serious approaches. Absolutely. And, you know, the thing that you said and that

03:04:13.500 you're focusing on in there is intent. Yeah, if you focus your will through you crafting these

03:04:21.080 things, through ritual, through blooding it with your own blood, through a tree that is from some

03:04:28.380 meaningful place to you you are much more focused in your intent but something else that invokes

03:04:36.980 chaos quite well often seems to be people who are emotionally unstable the line between crazy and

03:04:46.860 touched by the other world is very thin and it overlaps quite a bit and specifically your

03:04:54.200 you know goth teenage girls doing stuff

03:04:57.860 i think a certain amount of angst and crazy and

03:05:04.780 desperation in a time of emotional upheaval also has power to open things but in an undirected way

03:05:19.520 to where stuff can happen so i i do believe that's a thing and i don't think it's always

03:05:25.840 interacting with the gods or whatever i think that sometimes it's interacting with

03:05:33.360 the ancestors other other dead people that are not your ancestors

03:05:41.760 land vetir whatever might be going on in the area that you're in

03:05:45.360 there is the chance when you reach out that something reaches back and i know that there

03:05:51.760 are people that have a lot of belief when they do that with a ouija board so again i'm not

03:05:57.920 recommending that but i i'm not going to say that it never works um only has to work once to be a

03:06:06.320 thing right that's the thing there you go so all right next question is from real mage 14.

03:06:16.320 have you heard of goddard and elmer jr channel talking about shocking the position the or no the

03:06:26.720 positive shocking depositron um changing the future by envisioning it in a state between

03:06:33.520 wakefulness and sleep do you do this cliff do you know about shocking the positron i'm afraid i do

03:06:47.600 not but i will be googling it and then i will know more than i know now i have heard about

03:06:55.280 different things as far as through visualization changing your reality

03:07:05.600 i

03:07:08.800 again i think that focused intent towards a goal

03:07:15.200 can sometimes have some sort of an effect but what i also want to say on this

03:07:19.680 i hold my i hold my mind and my heart open to accept some of these things have

03:07:30.720 some magical things having efficacy and i know that they do but that is so shockingly rare

03:07:41.920 that if you want things in your life to change

03:07:46.480 if you want a girlfriend

03:07:53.280 staying up at night and visualizing you having a girlfriend may put you in the mindset that you are

03:08:00.240 more open to the idea or that you are it may adjust you in a way that somehow helps you

03:08:08.800 it helps you a lot more if you get up you go out and you go to where you want to find a girl and

03:08:13.040 you start talking to girls um i've said this a million times the most you know whoever wants to

03:08:20.080 be the most highfalutin also true vitki in the world stand at one end of a football field i'll

03:08:26.800 stand at the other and we will battle you can cast spells at me while i run at you and start

03:08:33.360 laying in blows on you i will defeat you before your spell defeats me that's just the thing we

03:08:39.760 all know that if you want to you know if you want to build a house you're not going to sit back and

03:08:47.200 chant it into existence you're going to get a hammer and nails and build it

03:08:51.280 or you're going to hire someone who can do that

03:08:55.840 that's not to mean that i don't think that the esoteric can make differences it can but a lot

03:09:02.160 of the differences it makes is empowering or helping material people do material things in

03:09:11.600 the material world um that just works you know hey i wonder what's in the mailbox maybe i can

03:09:24.800 sit here and astral project and somehow divine what's in the mailbox but i guarantee you i can

03:09:32.720 do it faster and better by going down you know going out to the mailbox getting my mail and

03:09:38.300 opening it and i don't again it i don't mean to make light of it it's just that's so much more

03:09:46.300 important hoping and wishing doesn't make stuff happen doing things make something happen

03:09:52.220 And if you do things, and you are also pious, and you also have built a relationship with your gods and ancestors and have built a mighty hymenia, then your doing can be more effective than another person's doing.

03:10:10.300 Your luck, things can break in your favor more than they would otherwise.

03:10:14.680 but it's like you know people sitting in mom's basement wishing for a girlfriend

03:10:19.960 not a lot of girls in mom's basement to choose from that doesn't really work that way

03:10:25.580 going out so for example there's somebody in the room guild that um

03:10:30.320 once said they went to a room guild moot and there was this you know room full of all these

03:10:37.060 exalted room maguses and not one of them could conjure themselves up to girlfriend

03:10:41.000 it um being a doer and living a life of noble action of proactive doing and of piety

03:10:55.000 positions you much much better for success than living an action of contemplation and of you know

03:11:05.560 casting spells your magical efficacy is the frosting that's put upon an amazing cake you

03:11:19.720 don't just have frosting and you don't start with frosting you start with getting the cake right

03:11:25.540 once you have built an amazing cake recipe and you have an awesome cake

03:11:31.540 then sure, it can be enhanced by good frosting.

03:11:36.580 But you're eating cake.

03:11:38.900 You ask for a piece of cake.

03:11:40.440 Nobody just serves you up a piece of frosting.

03:11:44.720 There's not a perfect analogy to this, but it's real.

03:11:49.000 That is the accent piece to a noble life.

03:11:52.600 It's not in and of itself.

03:11:55.100 It does not take the place of that.

03:11:57.220 It never has and it never will.

03:11:58.700 but it is much much easier and it is a way to delude yourself into thinking that you are making

03:12:08.940 an accomplishment without actually having to put skin in the game and so it's dangerous in that

03:12:14.760 regard and i would be cautious of that just for the record i am gross and i will eat just frosting

03:12:22.440 serious uh i you can get away with it because you are not morbidly obese

03:12:31.880 but there's a lot of morbidly obese people that would would agree in that regard not yet anyway

03:12:37.720 speaking of now i'm now i'm really hungry for some cake um

03:12:47.240 uh next question matt can you galder fayhu on stream to help me out

03:12:55.760 sure why not

03:12:59.600 Feel

03:13:07.600 Feel

03:13:29.600 No joke, I expect that 10% if the lottery comes through for you.

03:13:53.160 What do you think of tarot cards?

03:13:59.600 Yes, you can cross-apply anything I said to the Ouija board with the tarot cards, other than I think there's people who practice those much more seriously than the Ouija board.

03:14:11.780 But I am not very familiar with the mechanics or exactly how tarot cards work.

03:14:18.440 Cliff, do you have any specific thoughts on tarot cards?

03:14:23.700 Same themes as with the Ouija board and the Magic 8-Ball.

03:14:27.240 i think if somebody were to you know hand sketch their set i bet that one's going to be a lot more

03:14:33.320 effective than you know the lord of the rings rings of power edition you know um i think um

03:14:42.920 we do have ladies in the afa who are quite familiar with tarot and how it works so um

03:14:52.440 i'm not sure who asked the question but there are probably people that could give more

03:14:56.520 insightful answers than than matt or i so one thing that tarot has in common with

03:15:03.560 runes that's different than ouija board or match gate ball match gate ball you know whatever uh

03:15:18.040 shoot am i going to get an a on my test most likely like it's a specific answer and

03:15:26.520 it doesn't leave a lot of room for the magician's um

03:15:40.680 wisdom to play into it

03:15:44.440 uh just like if the ouija board says something it spells out a word it either does or it doesn't

03:15:50.360 it when you're looking at tarot cards or runes and i'll default to runes because that's what i'm most

03:15:59.000 familiar with the rune pull by itself is meaningless the context comes in how the

03:16:10.520 viki interprets the runes and in what they add to it it's not a yes or a no binary equation

03:16:20.360 um drawing a room for any reason doesn't give you a yes or no answer it is a complex art that

03:16:32.860 the practitioner adds so much of their intuition their hymenia their uh their wisdom into that add

03:16:44.060 the value to it. So I think if somebody is doing a tarot card reading, it's very similar in that

03:16:50.100 regard. It's not a yes or a no. It's a, hey, this is a principle. How does this apply within the

03:16:57.840 context? And there's a lot more to be done with that. I think, you know, I was talking about how

03:17:05.500 like objects can be charged with an energy or an intent too. I think that the tradition behind

03:17:11.340 tarot cards that may hold up for as well i think that they've been treated more seriously for a

03:17:16.540 longer period of time than ouija boards have for example um yep yeah absolutely and again

03:17:29.500 they're taken seriously if you go into it thinking something silly

03:17:33.020 then you're gonna have a much harder time

03:17:35.580 getting something meaningful out of it if you go into it with the expectation that wow this is

03:17:45.180 this is sacred or this is scary or this is whatever that might be you're much more susceptible

03:17:54.080 to feeling something powerful from it so if the acadias here and actually knows some stuff about

03:18:01.920 this maybe uh sure to provide some insight what have you got he invited me so it's his fault

03:18:14.640 so there's clearly historical evidence that women have been used or have used tools for divination

03:18:22.240 for a really long time right our vulvas and our safe gonos used to throw bones for the kings to

03:18:27.840 give them wisdom and to answer their questions um osteomancy or through bone throwing is um a super

03:18:38.240 popular like i'm particularly fond of that method of um divination if you will uh

03:18:50.720 Ouija boards are kind of like a toy they can be a lot of fun I do believe that if you have people

03:18:59.920 who are actually practiced with like feminine lady magic and whatever Ouija boards can be used

03:19:08.720 as a tool but I think for the most part it's just a toy it's fun tarot cards I think are more like

03:19:16.260 a meditation you're not really going to get answers to the universe or divination answers

03:19:23.600 or things like that but you will kind of it's a self-reflection tool you ask a question you lay

03:19:30.400 out the cards you interpret the cards based on your own feelings about things i know every card

03:19:37.760 is supposed to have its own meaning and everything but really it's how you put the meanings to the

03:19:43.360 cards more than it is that the universe is telling you something anyways i think it's more of like a

03:19:49.280 self-reflection tool and a meditation than it is an actual like source of divination if you will

03:19:56.080 just my two cents on that though i'm not super huge fan of the tarot cards though

03:20:01.760 i'll ask you mancy on the other hand and i know uh whit and brandy is a big fan of cartomancy so

03:20:08.320 So if you want some answers about divination, ask her about that.

03:20:13.120 She could talk forever.

03:20:14.860 For those not in the know, what is cartomancy?

03:20:18.440 It's kind of similar to charot card reading, but it's using playing cards instead.

03:20:24.800 I do not know almost anything about cartomancy, so I couldn't really tell you other than that.

03:20:31.080 All right. Thanks.

03:20:32.540 Bye.

03:20:38.320 so yeah if you're interested in divination reach out to our githias

03:20:47.360 they know about this stuff some of our our gothies probably do too but um i know that

03:20:55.860 i think all of our githias are are knowledgeable on this topic

03:21:01.060 whereas i know i am not at least not for the questions that have been asked tonight

03:21:06.820 my avatar is terrible um i just uh turned my thing along enough to see it and i'm shocked

03:21:19.120 and offended by the face on it um thank you katie for sharing that with with everybody

03:21:25.780 all right what um from the wolf throne what are your thoughts on ghost hunters and paranormal

03:21:35.120 enthusiasts like those ghost hunting shows on netflix cliff do you have thoughts on those

03:21:45.600 no i do not give them any thoughts

03:21:50.640 i don't know yeah i don't know if they're real any more than like a game show is i mean they

03:21:57.600 maybe i i just i don't know much about them i don't really i give them some thoughts

03:22:05.120 I give Ghost Adventures with Zach Bagans probably the most of the thoughts, but largely because they entertain me.

03:22:16.720 I believe in the concepts that ghosts exist, but I also know that those shows are highly, you know, in general, I think that those shows are very often staged.

03:22:31.300 I think that things are exaggerated, and in this day and age, it's so hard to take any of, you can fake anything now, and that's one of the things that is really unfortunate.

03:22:47.440 Any of those kind of shows, you can use special effects to make anything you want happen, so it's really hard to put a lot of credence in those.

03:23:00.120 I enjoy them I mean it's fun sometimes if it's a well-made show sometimes they're cool because

03:23:07.480 they'll give you interesting history about a certain place or a certain you know a certain

03:23:12.640 subject and yeah I'll try to suspend my disbelief and enjoy them and I think that undoubtedly some

03:23:21.460 of them probably have something real to some of the things that they're saying at some point

03:23:25.240 it's just really hard to get anything meaningful out of them that you know uh and so it's hard to

03:23:35.280 trust i think they're really entertaining sometimes um but i can't

03:23:42.100 go ahead um i'm pretty skeptical in a lot of my answers i think on on some of these things and i

03:23:52.240 want to make it clear that i do believe in things like ghosts and in divination and in magic um and

03:23:59.680 and so on and so forth but i think that a lot of the a lot of the people that speak about these

03:24:06.800 things the loudest or who boast about their abilities or who have commercialized them are

03:24:12.560 full of um and and that's where i i lose interest i think that the people who who can do these

03:24:19.120 things tend to be guarded about it because either um it is spiritually and emotionally and physically

03:24:26.080 draining for them to actually do these things or because they just don't want everybody bothering

03:24:31.120 them about it like would happen um and if if someone i mean not universally across the board

03:24:38.240 but generally speaking if there's a whole lot of money being made on it you're probably just

03:24:42.720 looking at some kind of entertainment industry yeah i think you know as cliff said earlier in

03:24:50.640 the show they don't all have to be right just one of them has to for it to be a thing

03:24:58.480 it's thing i think that absolutely the more

03:25:05.520 the in my experience and this is hard because i don't know anyone who has

03:25:12.720 who I take very seriously, but who has also become wildly media popular with these things.

03:25:24.700 The people that are always running around and every day is some kind of profound interaction with forces on the other side and with the paranormal.

03:25:42.720 i don't typically believe those the more casual they make the miraculous sound

03:25:51.520 the less i tend to put faith in what they're saying

03:25:56.460 on any paranormal stuff you have the person that i was abducted by aliens

03:26:08.640 and then a couple years later i saw bigfoot

03:26:11.520 and then

03:26:13.800 it's the damnedest thing

03:26:15.540 my house is haunted

03:26:16.720 those people are probably

03:26:20.000 most often just lying to you

03:26:22.220 and at best

03:26:24.060 they're mentally ill

03:26:25.140 but

03:26:26.920 when all of those things happen all of the time

03:26:30.580 it says something about

03:26:32.160 the way your brain is set up

03:26:34.400 the people that I know

03:26:38.160 in my life

03:26:39.040 that have experienced

03:26:40.680 profound spiritual experience or experience with the ancestors in the form of ghosts

03:26:48.720 they most often are very uncomfortable talking about it

03:26:56.380 when they do talk about it even if they're not uncomfortable

03:27:01.880 you can see the visceral reaction they have when recounting the experience

03:27:08.280 and they treat it with a certain amount of reverence to not cheapen it and to not make it

03:27:17.400 silly because it is such a defining moment for them and in their person and that's something

03:27:26.540 that i found a lot of truth in in being involved in this sphere for as long as i have

03:27:33.420 um we have a donation of ten dollars from uh ryan orio ryan orion i assume

03:27:46.720 but it's there's a typo here that's fine ten dollars i appreciate it thank you

03:27:52.900 hail fehu hail the afa may the gods bless my lottery tickets

03:27:58.020 i cool i hope that you do win the lottery and i hope that you give us that 10 that would be

03:28:06.560 awesome thank you ryan you will know if they have blessed your tickets after the numbers are

03:28:12.140 announced yes that would be that would be very cool and uh yeah let's hope that works for you

03:28:19.520 i appreciate the ten dollars either way thank you um our next question what do you think of people

03:28:29.920 who claim to have psychic powers do you think any of them are real again i think that that realm of

03:28:43.280 thing is possible but once people actually start talking about it i am much more skeptical about

03:28:54.560 that than even the other because it's so demonstrable it doesn't

03:29:04.480 having psychic powers doesn't rely on an external element to validate it you know

03:29:11.280 if you're trying to do medium work like ah the spirits aren't listening to me today i can't do

03:29:16.560 it today it's not my fault spirits just don't want to talk to me okay you know i'm trying to do the

03:29:22.960 the horuspex thing or whatever but the entrails are unclear it's it's unclear there's counter

03:29:28.640 signals going today's not a good day i'll entreat the spirits at a different time you can do that a

03:29:34.880 lot with that um you could do that and be honest or you could do that and be a charlatan but if you

03:29:47.760 you know you put that to the test pretty easy hey i know what mail is in my mailbox cool tell me what

03:29:54.160 mail is in your mailbox i'll go down there and check it right now well i didn't i didn't mean

03:29:59.200 today, I meant like in general sometimes. Oh, okay. Cool. I can see, I can remote view.

03:30:11.600 Cool. I can test that immediately. And people have tried to do this many times and there's not

03:30:16.660 a lot of amazing examples of it working. Well, great. I'll go in the other room and I'll hold

03:30:22.780 up some fingers and you tell me how many I'm holding up. Well, no, I can only do it at noon

03:30:28.880 on a lunar, you know, when the sun, when the moon is at three quarters crescent, they come up with

03:30:36.740 excuses. But if you have the power to remote view, then you can remote view, or you can't.

03:30:43.480 If you can levitate, cool. Where you at? Let's come over. I'm right here. Levitate. Cool. How

03:30:49.600 about you? No, no. Come over here where I'm at and levitate. Well, you see, oh, okay. So those

03:30:57.520 things are very easy to put to the test but i don't see them put to the test in a way that

03:31:06.240 validates them ever so i hold out i hold out belief that that could be possible but i have

03:31:18.500 seen no reason to believe that those kind of psychic powers are possible let's say you cliff

03:31:24.900 um i i think that almost anything is possible um but like a lot of the other

03:31:34.640 things that we've talked about in in this you know general um supernatural occult abilities realm

03:31:45.040 um you know the the people who actually can do this stuff and i've i've known

03:31:51.440 maybe one person depending um that they uh they don't try to they they don't boast about it it's

03:32:01.340 it's like if you have a room full of men for whatever um the guy who's bragging about his

03:32:10.300 claymore is probably not the toughest guy in the room the guy who was a navy seal probably doesn't

03:32:17.440 tell you that but it could kill you in 13 to 300 different ways and that's about how it is i think

03:32:24.000 with most skill sets the person who's actually really good at something doesn't have anything to

03:32:28.080 prove i have found that literally true um when i was bouncing in anchorage

03:32:38.480 we had a number of guys who were like special forces guys that

03:32:43.120 saw a lot that were in the bar because we were close to a base yeah we're close to a joint base

03:32:50.540 almendorf richardson we had a lot of guys that got deployed and you know and no disrespect to

03:32:56.680 it but they didn't see a lot of action they did a lot of mechanic work or other things

03:33:02.080 in a relatively safe environment we learned some of these guys the people that were getting in

03:33:08.980 fights and being jerks and talking about how badass they were those those guys typically did

03:33:17.000 not see a lot the guys that didn't want any problem that just wanted to leave finish their

03:33:22.860 drink and go home when pressed and we find out about those guys those guys seeing some stuff

03:33:30.900 and uh you know we had guys in the military that worked on our staff that were able to back no you

03:33:36.820 That guy over there, let me tell you about him.

03:33:39.440 Most unassuming, polite.

03:33:41.600 He doesn't want there to be a problem.

03:33:42.980 He's just, hey, let me pay for my stuff and go home.

03:33:47.180 Yeah, I've seen that to be true time and time again.

03:33:53.740 What are your thoughts on Ron McVann's

03:33:55.820 wotenist brand of astrology in the book, Creed of Iron?

03:34:00.060 Do you think it is valid?

03:34:01.460 And does astrology have a place in Oustre?

03:34:06.820 So, I have never found anything meaningful out of astrology ever.

03:34:21.280 There are people that I think are complete lunatics that think it's the best thing in the world and the most meaningful thing ever.

03:34:30.760 There are some people who I respect as professionals in their field.

03:34:37.060 that think it's very important and it's one of those it has been around and

03:34:47.220 a meaningful part of

03:34:52.980 a number of branches of you know aryan civilization for a very very long time

03:35:01.860 it lends me to think that in the right context or if a person has the right wisdom to

03:35:10.860 make some sense of it that there might be something there

03:35:14.320 I have never found it to be meaningful I don't know enough about it to find

03:35:24.560 the useful part of it, what has always confounded me is free will exists. It just does. Any

03:35:38.700 pretending that it, any suggestion, be it of a completely fatalistic understanding that all of

03:35:46.920 our decisions are preordained, it's just not true. It's very demonstrably not true. You can come up

03:35:55.680 with the most convoluted situation to suggest that it's true, but free will is essential to

03:36:02.580 human existence. Making choices, we make choices every second of every day that we're awake and

03:36:12.460 conscious those are not all dictated by movement of planets or any other external force one of the

03:36:23.200 most sacred principles of oustertrude is that is that of will will matters our intention the

03:36:31.800 manifestation of our will matters our personal autonomy to choose to engage in a gift cycle

03:36:40.000 with our gods, our ancestors, our brothers and sisters, matters.

03:36:45.380 Our choices, our actions, matter because they come from a place of choice.

03:36:54.960 The way that astrology has very commonly been explained to me negates that,

03:37:02.760 and I don't find that valuable.

03:37:04.720 But there has to be something to it somewhere,

03:37:06.880 and i don't mean to disparage the whole field because i will be the first to admit i know very

03:37:14.380 very little about it but it has always seemed rather off-putting to me and i've known a lot

03:37:19.560 of people that are not mentally well that think it's the best thing in the world

03:37:25.220 as to ron mcvan's version of it i think trying to take something that has a clear western expression

03:37:34.160 and rework it and slap a Viking coat of paint on it.

03:37:39.660 I don't find there to be a lot of value with that,

03:37:42.180 and I don't find that to be particularly authentic.

03:37:45.080 Cliff, what are your thoughts?

03:37:48.940 Generally speaking about astrology,

03:37:50.800 I think that it probably has some minor value,

03:37:55.580 but I think that it primarily lost its way

03:37:58.720 when it diverged from astronomy.

03:38:01.380 I think in ancient times before astrology and astronomy split that using, you know, the stars and the planets as a calendar and as a way to predict different types of events and all of that probably had a lot more legitimacy.

03:38:20.160 and that that that the parts of it that were valid evolved into astronomy as as we know it today

03:38:31.420 you know timekeeping seasonal rotations even you know seasons um within the solar system or within

03:38:41.240 the galaxy things like that that that you know in in the scientific sense are are true that could

03:38:48.580 affect us in some ways but as far as um you know other parts of it that um that people focus on

03:38:56.480 today the parts that basically astronomy abandoned um i don't know that those have a whole lot of

03:39:02.540 validity um with the the exception that there's probably something of worth still left there just

03:39:09.320 that um i i think it's lost its way and it's original intent you know um as far as um

03:39:18.560 ron mcmahon's version of it i'm i'm frankly not familiar

03:39:23.040 so

03:39:27.520 i'm trying to i'm trying to google something for the uh next question here um

03:39:38.720 All right.

03:39:50.480 Okay, it's not the next question, but it is an upcoming question.

03:39:54.900 All right, so the next question,

03:39:56.360 will Stephen McNallan's recent interviews with Full House and Folk FM Radio

03:40:00.980 be uploaded to the Ask True Folk Assembly channel?

03:40:05.440 I don't know.

03:40:08.720 And I'm not sure if the sources of those would like them uploaded to the AstroFolk Assembly channel, especially the Folk FM one.

03:40:19.140 And I'm not sure if Steve would like those uploaded to our channel, but I'm certainly open to it.

03:40:27.960 And this is the question I was getting at.

03:40:30.580 So, Matt, Cliff, what are your thoughts and opinions on Julius Evola's introduction to magic?

03:40:37.700 Cliff, what are your thoughts and opinions?

03:40:45.980 Sorry, I had to flip around to unmute myself.

03:40:49.140 My thoughts and opinions are that I haven't read it, but that it is a book that I would like to one day read,

03:40:54.780 but I can't really give any additional insight into something that I haven't read.

03:41:07.220 And so you, but you have afforded me enough time to look at the table of contents because I was going to, I was going to talk about one of the authors, but those of you not familiar, there's three volumes set that Julius Evola and the group of magical initiates he was part of in the 1920s, the Ur group, put together this three volume introduction to magic set.

03:41:37.220 and they all have magical pseudonyms for whatever reason but this is a long-standing magical

03:41:49.180 practice people will take their magical name and so every member of this group wrote under

03:41:58.920 an assumed name so i wanted to look at it because i don't i i there's not one monolithic

03:42:07.920 opinion of the three works because it is you know it's like a hundred different essays by

03:42:16.180 you know 10 15 different people um some things in there i found completely and totally worthless

03:42:26.600 some things in there I thought were really good

03:42:30.340 and useful, some things in there

03:42:32.360 I've used in my own life and found beneficial

03:42:34.520 the guy in there with the

03:42:42.560 goes by Abraxas

03:42:46.640 in the later volumes, Abraxa

03:42:48.700 I don't know if that's a translation issue

03:42:50.980 his stuff's good

03:42:53.680 I found his stuff to be

03:42:56.140 probably the most accessible in the book.

03:43:01.580 There was a couple of,

03:43:05.020 and when I say the stuff that is worthless to me,

03:43:09.700 please take that the way I mean it.

03:43:11.760 A lot of deeper things to me

03:43:14.680 didn't have a value up front

03:43:17.360 because I lacked context and understanding.

03:43:20.280 when i matured and learned more and came back to them later i thought there was a lot of

03:43:28.960 brilliant things in there that i missed the first time um

03:43:33.060 the secret of the rooms by von liszt i thought was nonsense when i first read it going back and

03:43:45.380 reading it, you know, probably 10 years after the first time I attempted to read it, there was a lot

03:43:51.620 of wisdom in there that I just didn't have the context to understand the first time I read it.

03:43:57.520 Julius Evola. I love Evola. I've read everything from Evola that's been translated into English,

03:44:05.440 and I thoroughly enjoy reading Evola. But my first attempt reading Evola, I went from zero to I tried

03:44:13.560 to read Ride the Tiger. And I had, I didn't understand his way of speaking. I didn't understand

03:44:20.560 his points of reference. So I couldn't finish the book all the way through because it was just

03:44:27.880 like, I didn't get it. What's the deal with this? This is crap. Going back later and understanding

03:44:36.500 those things, I really enjoy it. I got a lot out of the book. So I'm not disparaging it. Many of

03:44:42.320 these articles may be profound I just don't necessarily have the context for them at this

03:44:47.300 point uh all that to say this um the and I forget what the titles were the magic the magic of the

03:44:58.520 the symbol I think is really important there's a lot to that anything in there about sigil magic

03:45:06.920 there was a practice in there they talked about I couldn't remember the name of the

03:45:11.660 article but it's about work involving the mirror and i believe it's an abraxas article

03:45:18.860 that was really valuable to me and i've had some really profound experiences doing

03:45:26.140 work with a mirror that way and there was another article and i couldn't remember who who wrote it

03:45:34.460 it but it was a couple things I don't know if this is the same article or not but if not they

03:45:47.600 were in the same volume one was about visualizing certain things when you went to bed between awake

03:45:56.840 can sleep visualizing the idea of your conscious self giving way and going to rest while your

03:46:10.840 unconscious self comes into prominence and takes his seat on a throne

03:46:18.520 being active as you go to sleep and imagining you know visualizing that part of yourself that

03:46:26.200 is active during the dream state and during your restive part

03:46:33.960 separating those two parts of yourself and trying to make them function independently

03:46:42.520 was useful to me and i tried that a little bit to work with that there was another exercise

03:46:48.920 which involved conceiving of yourself outside yourself so having your true self look at the

03:46:57.080 ceiling and focus on it and project outside of your body outside of yourself and then rolling

03:47:05.160 over and doing different things yet still maintaining your very clear view of the ceiling

03:47:12.120 and it sounds hokey and it's not like the most meaningful thing in the world to me

03:47:17.960 But projecting the idea of myself as existing in front of my eyes, in front of what would be referred to as the third eye, I got to experience something strange in a meditation while doing that.

03:47:36.660 that sticks with me to today that did a little bit of separating my sense of self

03:47:44.660 from just being confined into the material element of my body.

03:47:52.540 And all this sounds ridiculous when I'm talking about it,

03:47:56.520 and I don't do it much justice articulating it,

03:47:59.780 but they were things that I did pick up through Introduction to Magic,

03:48:04.440 And I think more heavily in volume one than the other two volumes.

03:48:09.980 But, I mean, I thought they were useful.

03:48:12.700 I certainly bought the third one as soon as it came out in translation just a couple of years ago.

03:48:18.900 So, yeah, I think that's definitely something we need to look into.

03:48:27.280 What else do we got?

03:48:34.440 Next question is, are Sunnah and Manny just the sun and the moon personified, or are they

03:48:47.840 real deities?

03:48:49.160 And if so, is it beneficial to pray and make offerings to them?

03:48:55.960 Cliff, do you have thoughts on this?

03:48:59.380 Sure.

03:48:59.940 Sure. No, they are not simply the sun and the moon personified. And it is beneficial to make offerings to them.

03:49:14.740 Even in the stories that we have in the lore, they're not described simply as the celestial bodies of the sun and the moon.

03:49:25.800 And I think Witness Fawn has categorized them for us as celestial wardens.

03:49:39.260 And, you know, it's like Thor is not simply thunder, right?

03:49:45.680 It's important to recognize that when our ancestors are telling the stories in our oral traditions that were eventually written down, that they're describing their interaction with the divine.

03:50:02.060 They're describing their understanding of the divine in terms that can be understood.

03:50:08.120 but they are, I don't believe anthropomorphizing the natural world, the gods and goddesses

03:50:18.480 and celestial wardens in this case are real entities that exist and can exert influence

03:50:27.060 in the world, separate from the natural phenomenon that we may associate with them.

03:50:38.120 yeah I think that's a I think that is a complicated question years back I very

03:50:48.960 much did think that Sunna and many were just personifications of the Sun and the

03:50:56.460 moon I think you find in the Edda's characters that are that that are clever

03:51:04.000 plays on words or poetic devices but the more we try to practice this faith piously the more

03:51:17.080 the details like that matter

03:51:21.400 I have not had any personal interaction that I have felt with Suna or Manny

03:51:34.000 Um, there are gods of the Aesir that are most beneficial to interact with, and that's why we have the list that we do, but over time, I certainly, I agree with Cliff that they are actual deities and entities.

03:52:01.680 And secondly, what we want to make real sure that we do is that we treat all of these people as if they were to err on the side of piety.

03:52:20.720 unless you know for a fact

03:52:24.240 that one is not

03:52:26.160 then the default

03:52:30.380 position should be yes they are

03:52:32.560 and we're going to piously interact

03:52:34.560 with them

03:52:35.100 now

03:52:36.860 the Isir gods

03:52:40.480 are

03:52:41.280 our folks

03:52:44.180 relationship with them is much more

03:52:46.280 well established much more

03:52:48.200 fleshed out

03:52:48.980 and the gift cycling and interaction is much more straightforward.

03:53:01.340 But yes, to open our minds and our hearts to the divine,

03:53:06.200 we should absolutely treat these deities and others that we come across

03:53:14.700 if we have a question about their legitimacy

03:53:19.180 we should err on the side of giving them

03:53:23.120 due deference, due respect, and where appropriate

03:53:26.700 due worship

03:53:27.660 because that's the path of piety

03:53:31.860 I would rather

03:53:32.700 I would rather something turn out

03:53:37.800 not to be the right understanding of a deity

03:53:41.160 but we still gave worship and expressed piety

03:53:44.300 than for it to turn out that one of our holy gods

03:53:48.140 was not receiving worship from us

03:53:50.800 because we intellectualized them out of existence

03:53:54.920 in our mind and in our lives.

03:53:59.060 But I absolutely understand the question,

03:54:01.740 and a number of years ago I felt differently about it

03:54:04.500 than I do today.

03:54:11.300 That said, Cliff, do you have any

03:54:13.980 thoughts you would like to leave

03:54:16.300 folks with tonight?

03:54:21.660 Yeah, it is Yuletide.

03:54:24.820 Do your best

03:54:26.260 to be with

03:54:28.280 your family, to be with your

03:54:30.280 folk. If you have a

03:54:32.320 kindred, if you haven't already gotten together with

03:54:34.320 them, do that.

03:54:36.960 Make sure that you

03:54:38.380 are available to people who

03:54:40.520 may need you

03:54:42.520 more than you know it um because um as an awesome truer you are

03:54:49.240 a beacon to the folk just like our fault our folk builders are and um

03:54:56.600 you know i'll share go with the match share with our our gothar um in the lead up to yuletide to

03:55:04.080 remember that is you know as joyous a time that this yuletide season is for so many of our folk

03:55:10.700 it's also uh you know a very lonely and sad time for others and um we should bring our folk in

03:55:18.620 bring them to our meals bring them to our hearts make sure that they know um that we care about

03:55:25.020 them uh that they we want them to stand shoulder to shoulder with us um and that they matter

03:55:35.020 yeah for everybody out there um

03:55:40.700 Make the time to get the most out of Yule.

03:55:44.800 Celebrate.

03:55:46.000 Spend time with people.

03:55:48.420 Incorporate our gods into the lives of you and your families.

03:55:53.960 Spend time with your families.

03:55:57.100 And challenge yourself for the next, you know, next 11 days.

03:56:05.340 spend time away from the keyboard

03:56:11.060 and away from intellectualizing

03:56:13.960 and in doing and just celebrating.

03:56:19.600 Don't contemplate

03:56:22.800 the philosophical basis of our worship.

03:56:28.840 Just go worship the gods.

03:56:31.160 Just exchange a gift.

03:56:33.400 Just share.

03:56:35.820 Just be in the moment with your family, with your gods, with your folk, and see what happens.

03:56:42.160 And let yourself get caught up in the moment.

03:56:44.660 Experience Yule together with people.

03:56:48.840 It sounds so very fundamentally simple, but in 2023, it in and of itself is a revolutionary concept to some people.

03:57:00.080 Be in the moment and get the most out of this Yule.

03:57:02.720 I wish that for all of you.

03:57:05.340 but yeah, I hope everybody has an amazing Yule Tide.

03:57:10.080 I will talk to, you know,

03:57:11.360 I'm sure I'll talk to plenty of you between now and then,

03:57:13.800 but if not, I will definitely see you next week,

03:57:18.460 which will still be in our 12 days of Yule,

03:57:22.960 and I look forward to that.

03:57:26.700 Yeah, I wish you guys all a happy and fulfilling

03:57:31.080 and warm, amazing Yule.

03:57:33.700 so until next time

03:57:36.060 hi Owen

03:57:38.020 until next time

03:57:39.540 hail the gods

03:57:40.580 hail the folk

03:57:41.940 hail the AFA

03:57:43.180 and remember

03:57:44.160 the country never sleeps

03:57:45.580 good night everybody

03:57:48.200 he's up way late

03:57:49.600 good night guys

03:58:03.700 We'll be right back.

03:58:33.700 We'll be right back.

03:59:03.700 Thank you.

03:59:33.700 Thank you.

04:00:03.700 Thank you.

04:00:33.700 Thank you.

Asatru Folk Assembly - December 21, 2023

12⧸20⧸23 Victory Never Sleeps, Episode 76 - Witan Erickson

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