00:04:48.260We're going to talk tonight about Frigg.
00:04:50.040um it's fun for and i think that i think that she is is well known as far as you know our deities go
00:05:02.440but for anybody who doesn't know could you give people kind of a rundown on frigg and who she is
00:05:09.120yeah um first and foremost i wanted to express my condolences um and
00:05:18.520And I know that Frigg is the one in situations like this where I would say definitely seeking spiritual resolve and healing in times of great loss and sadness is one of the things that our folk really should take resolve in.
00:05:46.480is that the Frigga or Frig is the goddess of motherhood.
00:05:56.780She is the Asenia of wisdom, resolve, peace, frith, bounty.
00:06:09.960So much of, I think, that any man and woman in the folk
00:06:13.540knows the power of Frigg from the moment they enter into this world. She is the threshold.
00:06:21.600She is the first door, if you will. And she sets the great process of our folk
00:06:31.800forward in building the foundations of what would be the nation from the tribe and starting with
00:06:42.260the family. She is the pinnacle mother goddess. So, uh, I feel that, uh, for anybody that,
00:06:52.080um, is new to Ausatru that finding this, this moment, um, if you are in need of guidance,
00:07:03.600wisdom, temperance. It is most sought after through Frege. She is often associated with
00:07:14.760birth, but motherhood in general, femininity, especially a type of femininity that is very
00:07:21.380important to the folk. I would say that's the dutiful femininity. Whereas perhaps other
00:07:31.340they uh they may represent different types of femininity or uh chthonic forces of the of the
00:07:40.000earth um friga represents the um that which all things are grown from she's the source of the
00:07:51.920bounty and the fruitfulness of the gods she is the mother of balder and um so she oftentimes i think
00:08:00.540our society and in our culture she is um the paragon of wisdom and all all the duties of a
00:08:10.940woman that's bound in our society as a mother um and that has a lot of implications and a lot of
00:08:16.700people might not understand that um for for us um there are no crones per se as there are the the
00:08:27.500the levels i i think that most people don't realize is uh in like in teutonic culture is
00:08:32.780that there is the maiden or the young the young girl there is the woman and then there is the
00:08:37.740mother and the mother never ceases to be a mother um and so this has uh been established throughout
00:08:45.740you know history in many many verses and stories the the idea of the woman becoming kind of the
00:08:52.780mother of all mother of all the family mother of all the folk mother of all the nation or mother
00:08:58.700of all the gods and so motherhood is a title that is earned and gained through the you know
00:09:08.540sacrifices and the duties that are bore uh quite literally and figuratively from the feminine of the
00:09:18.140universe, and it all kind of pinnacles under Frigg. Yeah, I think absolutely everything you
00:09:28.820just said, and I think it's, I know, very appropriate for me tonight for this to be
00:09:36.440the episode that we're talking about. You know, I was thinking about this yesterday. Like I said,
00:09:42.620It was not unexpected. I'm not, you know, destroyed with grief, but, you know, I am contemplative and it is sad and been thinking a lot.
00:09:53.740One of the things that I think is, I don't know, certainly as men, our ambitions are displayed a lot in relationship to our fathers, either, you know, in order to impress or in spite of, you know, whether you had a good father or a bad father, a lot of what you do as a man is a reflection of that.
00:10:17.160like my dad did all these things wrong. So I'm going to, I'm going to get them all right. I'm
00:10:21.320going to, I'm going to do right where he didn't, or I'm so proud of my dad to look up to him so
00:10:25.960much. I want to make him proud or I want to surpass something he did. But, um, with mothers,
00:10:31.080it's very different. Um, you learn through, through subtle things that build your character
00:10:41.700in terms of the way you treat other people in a lot of ways in the way you instill a lot of our
00:10:49.960virtues in throughout your life and your family place value on um place value on your wife place
00:10:57.880value on the mother of your children place value on hospitality and on kindness and uh and compassion
00:11:05.900and those kind of things and i know my mother really instilled a lot of that in me it's
00:11:11.580interesting the effect mothers have on the raising of of men and certainly of daughters as well but
00:11:20.140i think that frigg in her patronage of or matronage rather of motherhood
00:11:29.660is much more accessible to most people than, you know, we talked about, you know, some of the other
00:11:41.280gods that are focused on more situational things. Or for example, I'm just thinking of the gods
00:11:47.620we've gone over and gods such as Ular or Tyr or Vidar or gods that are associated with
00:11:55.560justice and concepts and, you know, winter activities and all these things are a little
00:12:02.620bit cerebral. We wouldn't be here if we didn't all come from a mother and relating to motherhood
00:12:09.960is something I think. And I think it's different throughout our lives. I think when we're young,
00:12:14.400we can relate to motherhood, you know, as we're the child looking at our mother, whereas as an
00:12:23.300adult, we can look to, to our wives, the mothers of our children, see that in a different way.
00:12:29.420And I would imagine as, as an older man looking at our daughters, mothers of their children.
00:12:37.760I've noticed a number of people over on the side, um, offering their condolences. Thank
00:12:44.440you for that guys. I appreciate it. And I'm dumb. I messed up on the date on the little thingy.
00:12:49.660She passed yesterday, not a month ago. I still thought we were in March for some reason, but that's okay.
00:13:00.440Got a couple of questions stacking up. We also have a paid donation.
00:13:07.300Hail Janet Flavell. Hail the mothers. Love the Clausen family.
00:13:12.320Well, thank you guys. And we certainly appreciate the donation. I'll make sure that goes to good use.
00:13:18.680If anybody is interested in donating to the AFA this evening or in participating in Super Chats, which means we'll either read your statement or answer your questions before we get to the other ones, you can do that over on Entropy.
00:13:41.880I like how they do things, and they've been good partners with us.
00:13:48.840cool we just got a ten dollar donation i'll tell you go the matt and witten spawn
00:13:54.360uh can you explain why our 10th noble virtue is victory and its importance to us also condolences
00:14:01.160also harry goethe hail janet flavel hail the gods hail the folk hail the afa thank you very much
00:14:06.920travis um yeah i'm trying to think of how to go go about um
00:14:15.400why victory is the 10th noble virtue and I
00:14:21.200I got to take responsibility for that that one that one's mine that's all you that I threw on
00:14:29.780the list and here here are my thoughts on it for a couple of reasons um I like that it comes at the
00:14:37.520end of the list of virtues because the idea being if you embody those virtues they should lead
00:14:42.800lead towards a goal of being victorious. But the other thing that I think is lost on people
00:14:50.540in the modern era, and I think is very important to us, is that victory in and of itself was seen
00:14:58.080by our ancestors and should be seen by us as virtuous. In an authentically religious worldview,
00:15:12.800Your success is a measure of, to a degree, your righteousness or your blessings by the gods.
00:15:24.980Our ancestors always looked towards a person that was favored by the gods or a group of people that appeared favored by the gods because of their continued and perhaps conspicuous victories and successes.
00:15:38.520the quality of having victory itself be a sign of virtue is um i mean it's inherent to all
00:15:50.060aryan cultures that that i can recall it that's why we celebrate champions and heroes and um
00:15:58.360you know it was a mark of a person's worthiness to to lead in you know in many instances in our
00:16:06.100ancestors' time? Was that faith placed in their ability to carry something through and to find
00:16:12.360success in it? And success is often a sign of favor from the gods. And it's also, you know,
00:16:20.760determined by people's persistence and their commitment to a goal at all costs,
00:16:26.880to making things happen and to eking out victories where others would turn back.
00:16:32.720and that's why it's so important one of the reasons that i felt it was important to add it
00:16:37.820on there and to talk about it as much as i do is i think that our folk in this day and age have
00:16:45.720to a large degree lost sight of thinking about winning i think that a lot of our people are
00:16:53.880very very discouraged and they don't look at the world in terms of what they can achieve what they
00:17:00.220can accomplish what we together can achieve and accomplish. We need to fix that. So that focus on
00:17:06.660victory, I think, is really important to us. And it's the reason I put it on that list.
00:17:12.120I've got a couple of other questions stacking up.
00:17:18.020Oh, first question. This one came before we were even on the program this evening.
00:17:23.060From James Autry. Are Black people allowed to join OUSA Troop?1.00
00:17:30.220black uh non-white people are not allowed to join the house true folk assembly0.95
00:17:42.060i suppose a person can practice a faith of their choosing but whether that practice is accepted by0.53
00:17:50.220the deities that they're trying to honor or not is a different story and whether that practice
00:17:56.060is appropriate or not is a different story um i saw some follow-up over on the side his next
00:18:05.420question is the follow-up so then he further asks i don't get it is it like a racist thing
00:18:11.580or just black people aren't included i feel like the gods would want everyone
00:18:17.340so it's not about exclusion it's not about exclusion at all it's about inclusion of our
00:18:23.500people and uh and i can understand some confusion on this so and i'm going to take these questions
00:18:31.020assuming that they're genuine so that said um
00:18:37.900and certainly in the west in our culture we're very used to uh christianity and islam being the
00:18:44.700the biggest religions we're probably familiar with and those are universal religions by saying
00:18:51.020that they make claims that their god is everyone's god and that there's one right religion to have
00:18:59.740and everything else is is sinful and literally the devil so there's one right path to to any
00:19:07.900appropriate religiosity in those faiths and that's not the case i don't believe that's the case in
00:19:13.980the world in general it's certainly not the belief of alsatru we're an ethnic faith meaning that we're
00:19:19.980connected to our gods by our our very dna our gods are inherent to us as a people us as a race
00:19:28.300and just like our gods are connected to us the gods of other races are connected to them
00:19:33.340and it would be inappropriate for you know you use the example of black people to worship white man
00:19:39.900gods i think if anything that would be racist um it is much more appropriate for for a black man
00:19:49.340to worship his black gods with pride and with dignity in who he is and same goes for you know
00:19:55.500for other races of folks as well and so that's where it's coming from
00:20:03.180swan do you have anything to add on that at all yeah i i think a lot of the confusion firstly comes
00:20:10.060from uh whether obviously race and and things of that nature but we're talking about race and
00:20:17.100religion a lot of people do come from the idea that there is some sort of universal and all
00:20:22.920pervading divinity that um you know supersedes nations supersedes cultures genetics everything
00:20:31.340just this overarching kind of global or universal which is the proper term but universal in the
00:20:38.640like the literal sense um of faith and a lot of people don't the first hurdle that they have to
00:20:45.360tackle whether they are uh white or black or red or yellow or whatever color is that they the idea
00:20:53.680of ethnicity with faith and for some groups it's easier for us to digest this um if you were you
00:21:01.600know talking to a um perhaps a you know like someone in west africa or um perhaps maybe like
00:21:09.120an indigenous um tribesmen or something like that it would make a lot of sense that their
00:21:15.120folklore and their stories and things uh reflect them they see their the divinity their gods in
00:21:21.440direct connection to them and um they set boundaries about where that the divinity interacts
00:21:28.320with them uh as opposed to say others or things of that nature what they they might represent in the
00:21:34.800in the grand chemistry of everything um so i think that's the biggest problem that a lot of people
00:21:41.040have to to get past and if they can understand that there is this applies to you know groups of
00:21:48.800people in and at large and that we as a group promote that all people seek to do this then it
00:21:56.500starts to i think change the volatility and the hostility of the idea behind it um and so if you
00:22:04.460don't see that the ability for people to have their ethnic like makeup and their language and
00:22:12.060their culture as definitive parts of their faith then you know it's like are you a universalist
00:22:18.380and if you are then that's something you should contend with that in reality no one has any sense
00:22:25.100of those building blocks being part of the religious makeup um and and so that should
00:22:31.180apply across the board and when people get kind of posed with that they suddenly go i don't i
00:22:35.580don't think that's right and it's like well congratulations you know you're the equivalency
00:22:41.500of what we use the word is it's folkish and so that's our language for it and that's our you
00:22:48.540know the word in our language for it so once you come to that i would always express um when i was
00:22:55.020in the marine corps i i actually was good friends with a gentleman who was part of the motor
00:22:59.660transport group and he was black and he followed the yoruban religion from western ghana and his
00:23:07.100faith and the way he dealt with divinity in the world and all of these things came from his
00:23:11.020worldview and from and that included language and genetics and and stories and things like that and
00:23:16.140i would never dream of infringing on that and vice versa he would never dream of infringing upon ours
00:23:22.300and we found i would say mutualism in in that understanding because we both were not universalist
00:23:28.700in our faith and so a lot of people when they tackle divinity try to how can how can that be
00:23:36.540like uh how does how do gods or a god or divinity uh they don't care about race and they don't care
00:23:43.100about creed or or you know where you come from and there's only one overarching thing that you
00:23:49.820know we have to bow down to or you you know are like you said sinful or um to use the greek word
00:23:57.340demonic um i've heard that a lot being tossed around on on twitter and um you know they they
00:24:05.340just they fail to realize that the components of the expression of faith is a lot to do with
00:24:13.900language but language also has to do with society and society has to do with race and ethnicity
00:24:20.140and those things are all kind of dominoed together and so it's within i think anyone's right on the
00:24:26.620planet to express and build their relationship with the divine through themselves through their
00:24:35.420blood through the way that they see themselves how they connect to the divine is is the way they
00:24:41.420correlate directly to themselves and to their their neighbors their their family their friends
00:24:46.060and their their folk um it's when you get into other things it's like you see other people
00:24:52.060and you're like okay well that's their faith and and they deal with the things in there and i don't
00:24:57.420want to intercede i have my own they have their own and i think that that's the biggest hurdle
00:25:03.340if you can get past that then we can talk well and so much of this is a is a matter of
00:25:11.340preconceptions especially in the world we live in today we're so inundated with
00:25:16.140things and race is such a hot button issue it's been said in recent times that race is a social
00:25:24.140construct but on the contrary society is a racial construct and i and i don't think a lot of people
00:25:32.220are aware of that but as social groups were forming they were formed by people with a common
00:25:37.580culture and a common heritage and unfortunately our folk have been demonized lately whenever we
00:25:47.900want to have any pride in ourselves or any kind of anything's just for us but if we look at it
00:25:55.900historically i think you know most people sympathize with the plight of other indigenous0.67
00:26:02.860people that christianity or islam forced to worship their universal religion and destroyed
00:26:10.060their ethnic faiths and i think that that's kind of a it's not the perspective that i think we see
00:26:16.460this from enough but if we looked at it from that perspective i think um i think we might agree more
00:26:23.020and i think that you know even if we didn't agree we might have respect for certainly where we're
00:26:27.740coming as focused folkish faiths. I had Nick post a link that he just popped up now as a list of
00:26:35.780ethnic religions, because this isn't just an Ausatru thing. And that's what I wanted people
00:26:39.660to be aware of with that. When you look at that list, and that's on Wikipedia, and there's
00:26:44.820certainly no great friend of the Ausatru Folk Assembly, but they do point out that these
00:26:50.580indigenous faiths are a great many around the world. I would say that's the religious norm
00:26:56.360uh you know up until the massive conquests of christianity and islam0.86
00:27:02.520i would also like to point out too that universalism has a tendency to create
00:27:07.940that what you started you know said is is that you know there is this kind of everything else is
00:27:14.840not us but it's not only just that it's it's evil and so universalism has a tendency to give the all
00:27:22.880or nothing caveat based on their faith. You're either with them or you're against them. And I
00:27:31.260think that a lot of people don't understand that folk faiths are, there's an understanding that
00:27:37.340there are other people, there are other things, there are other forces. And what truly makes
00:27:43.340those things the antithesis against you is their deeds, their actions, the way things are led about.
00:27:49.380So acting nobly in our faith does extend 100% to our own, to our people, but it also exemplifies the deeds we do to anyone else is we are noble people, so we will act nobly.
00:28:04.400And I think that that's a different preset that a lot of people don't think.
00:28:12.380They think of the political hot button issue, so it's immediately it's villainous or what have you.
00:28:18.840And in a lot of ways, the people that are telling you that stuff need it to be that way, to substantiate either their existence or the framework of their ideology, which might be universal, say, like in Christianity or Islam, or it might be universal in a political sense, like with perhaps a communalism and things like that.
00:28:36.620And so these people need desperately to have the outside, you know, evil, demonic, sinful forces to propagate and spread their ideology.
00:28:50.880And whereas I think for us, we want to keep it within our people.
00:28:56.300We want our children to know the stories of our ancestors.
00:28:59.040There's no differentiation between the past to the future.
00:29:02.340we are part of those building blocks, but we're not trying to step that into other people's lives.
00:29:10.780And I think that a lot of people at least find that as one of the greatest misunderstandings of
00:29:16.460our faith, especially from the Ausatrude Folk Assembly, because the way he posited the question
00:29:21.240was in Ausatrude. And again, you said very well is that the Ausatrude Folk Assembly allows us to
00:29:31.200create our inner guard which is a very important factor in our faith and um all peoples can define
00:29:41.700themselves by the by their titles or you know some some churches and things like that will define
00:29:47.040themselves based on who they they try to bring into their congregations whether it's you know
00:29:52.800economically or linguistically or what have you people do it all the time ours is based on those
00:29:59.100you know, four precepts of really is, is the culture, the heritage, the ethnicity,
00:30:05.500and the language. But the language one is even more along the lines of, I think,
00:30:10.100our ancient language, whether it's, you know, Germanic or Italic, and ultimately the unifying
00:30:15.880language that all of our people once spoke of. But that's, you know, something further on and in.
00:30:21.980so um king of cheese is not with us tonight because he's having a cable outage but he got
00:30:31.480a message through to uh one of his bulk builders i appreciate the commitment on that tony
00:30:38.840termination i really look forward to meeting him um yep but he wants to ask his question he asks
00:30:45.180us every week is uh gentlemen how are we doing this evening swan how are you doing i'm doing
00:30:50.480great i um it's uh if anybody's following the iron mark it's auspicious tonight is the first
00:30:57.840night of summer month it's the uh it's the full moon it's the summer moon we're moving towards
00:31:02.720you know merry moon and the may day and and so we're we're getting up to midsummer so it's
00:31:09.760really really exciting it's a great time it is it's really nice to um i don't know for a lot
00:31:14.000of folks maybe further west right now they're they're hitting the the evening tide of the day
00:31:19.840but for me over here um it's it's warm and it's starting to get that kind of balmy feeling of the
00:31:28.160summer in the air and the moon you know bright and full and um everything's i feel very connected to
00:31:36.880it all so doing great um yeah tony it's mixed bag i'm excited to be here on victory never sleeps
00:31:46.000talking with everybody i look forward to this every week honestly doing pretty good a lot of
00:31:52.160stuff's going great but i am i am uh saddened by my mother's recent passing and uh just doing a lot
00:32:02.080of a lot of thinking about things that way and and uh taking stock and reflecting on some things
00:32:08.320but you know nothing bad just kind of somber but doing doing pretty well i appreciate you asking
00:32:13.840um our next question is worded in a way i have not heard before
00:32:22.280um is vril the wanderer watching right now love your output what are your thoughts svan
00:32:33.160oh oh no i think he's talking about uh real the wanderer in the comment section so a lot of folks
00:32:41.940might not know too that there's like the comment section's pretty it's it's awesome and it can get
00:32:50.100there's a lot of like banter and joking and people saying hello they're also asking like hey where
00:32:55.220you been like a lot of times they communicate to each other via our our show so this is amazing
00:33:00.100and a lot of the input sometimes it gets heated i think there's arguments too but hopefully within
00:33:04.740frith they keep you know it's perfectly fine to have different opinions but um you know but yeah
00:34:01.320The fact that there's so much activity in the comment section is really, really warms my heart.
00:34:06.700good bad or otherwise it's great for everybody to be over there talking and meeting each other
00:34:11.340on this i think that's been a really positive thing about uh about the program um so
00:34:20.380this is interesting i think there's you know infinite ways we could go with this but uh
00:34:27.180from jennifer and justin young can we get homework something to study on and put into our everyday
00:34:34.540life. So I've got some thoughts, but Svon, do you have any ideas of some stuff folks could do for
00:34:42.920homework that could be done and impactful to their everyday life? Yeah, I think first and
00:34:52.040And foremost, I always talk about this at the Hoff, is build your faith-like drive, or basically exercise your mind and your heart and your body all at the same time through building faith.
00:35:13.920And that is what we call a bloat. It comes from the old word meaning to blood.
00:35:19.640So I would say start giving bloat now.
00:35:25.780And yes, there is right ways or perhaps even more correct ways of doing things.
00:35:31.240But the ultimate right way is to do it.
00:35:36.340So, you know, even if that comes down to gathering pictures of your ancestors, because all of us can gather, you know,
00:35:47.140or traces back somewhere in some way maybe you don't know any of uh actual named ancestors but
00:35:53.540you might know where your people come from um or you know like lands that they may have lived in
00:35:59.060before uh there's lots of ways that you can build connectivity and uh it could be something quite as
00:36:07.060simple as um uh you know lighting a candle to them um and praying to them and then offering them
00:36:18.260a drink by sharing it with them and then placing it within a receptacle one that is not just like
00:36:25.460a bowl is usually what we use but that bowl becomes dedicated to this process um so you know
00:36:33.460speaking their names out loud this is the hardest part is the time in between lighting that candle
00:36:39.620and and pouring or drinking the drink is where a lot of people i think fall um
00:36:46.100not short but they just kind of get lost um and one of the things that's worth
00:36:51.060considering is just speaking out loud um speaking their names speaking telling their stories even
00:36:57.620if it's like i just learned about you and i went on the internet and i i uh found these pages and
00:37:05.700i found this out and and telling your emotional and mental um thoughts out into the air while
00:37:14.580you know looking upon a a picture of your ancestors and then you know maybe choosing
00:37:21.620something very special a a drink that you're not going to drink the entirety of so uh you know
00:37:27.780something even if you bought it doesn't matter or you made it um and you you know you pour it into
00:37:34.340a cup and you drink it and then you pour the rest into the bowl and then you thank your ancestors
00:37:42.500for uh guiding you or ask for guidance that's you know and blessings and if you're found worthy you
00:37:49.060know you ask it hey if you believe that i am worthy of your your love and your your guidance
00:37:55.380please i'm open and i'm i'm ready and i'm willing and then you take that offering and place it
00:38:01.220somewhere outside you're pouring it out uh someplace that usually people find like a tree
00:38:06.580or or something that's notable and um and then they they clean up and you know um
00:38:14.020kind of move from there and that's the i would say that's one of the best things to do
00:38:20.740is that that homework of of physical practice um as you go you will learn more but if you don't
00:38:28.980learn how to initiate your conversation with the divine and with the the the spiritual world
00:38:38.540I think that a lot of people end up in the long run having to climb that hurdle later.
00:38:44.500And a lot of times it can be obfuscated with details and steps and things like that.
00:38:50.520You can learn all of that and become finely tuned, but it all is based on the fuel you put in you.
00:38:58.960And that fuel is that initiation of faith.
00:39:03.720yes fawn answered that pretty comprehensively i i don't really have anything to add i think
00:39:11.440you know those are the things that i would have suggested and i think that uh with any of that
00:39:19.100please keep in mind not to let perfect be the enemy of good all these things grow over time
00:39:26.140um you know there's some people that have elaborate and amazing and beautiful altars where
00:39:32.140they do their worship at. It's also really, really good just to sit and put a candle on a shelf
00:39:41.700and start there. You don't need the world's most elaborate altar to start worshiping our gods.
00:39:49.520You don't need to have composed the most beautiful poem to honor them with. Just speaking from your
00:39:57.680heart to your gods is a powerful thing in and of itself, and it all has to start somewhere. So
00:40:05.120the time is now. Katie asks, good evening, gentlemen. What are some ways that we can
00:40:13.740celebrate the upcoming months if we are unable to make it to the Hoffs? So
00:40:19.200a couple of different things to this question first
00:40:27.420if you can't make it to the hoffs do that's awesome if you can't one thing that is really
00:40:34.900special about the afa and all of the growth that we've had in the last few years there's a chance
00:40:40.340that you may very well have afa members very close to you um so i think that you know all
00:40:46.940effort should be given to trying to practice our faith in a community amongst other other outs that
00:40:53.100you are if you find yourself alone with just your family um there's plenty of things you can do
00:41:02.780depending on the holiday as far as you know activities or whatnot absolutely with each
00:41:08.780of our holidays you could do your own personal bloat like swan just uh just talked so eloquently
00:41:14.460about um but it's very special that even if you do go and celebrate the holidays of the hof
00:41:25.180that you do something and you observe our our holy tides in your home as well if it's you and
00:41:29.980your family even if it's you by yourself things you can do around your house to decorate make
00:41:35.340it special and celebrate that literally brings it home and it um instills tradition in families
00:41:45.260and in children and the more we can do with that the better what do you what are your thoughts
00:41:51.980spawn on ways folk that can uh celebrate our upcoming holidays if they're unable to make it
00:41:57.820into the halves well one thing to remember is right now is that it's it's summertime so the
00:42:05.500bounty and the beauty of the world around you uh is to be celebrated so honoring the the house and
00:42:13.100our senior or gods and goddesses of this time is good so um you know celebrating uh little things
00:42:21.820it could be something as simple as if you go out with your children to a festival flowering
00:42:26.940festival um i know they just had one recently here uh where i was at and um the idea of spending time
00:42:33.980with your family taking that moment even if you're not doing like an actual uh you know like
00:42:39.820ceremonial placement but taking that moment to give thanks to your ancestors to give thanks to
00:42:44.940the gods and then go home and do that you know light a candle share a libation because the some
00:42:52.940this the the the deep symbolic sense of of sharing the the the liquid between yourself
00:43:00.060to your ancestors and to the gods uh during this time in thanks of the turning of the seasons
00:43:05.580um some of the ouse and our senior to look at uh around this time in in particular of course is
00:43:13.340the lord frey and the lady or freya um a lot of folks right now are turning their minds towards
00:43:20.700that though to be honest uh lord fray is uh very much the summer tides uh season uh he's he's the
00:43:29.100house we often pray to from charming of the plow all the way to fray faxie he is the viralta god
00:43:35.740he's the god of the world right now and he is he is the blooming and and and the light and his
00:43:42.300retinue of of leo salvar are busy uh instigating growth so a lot of times uh giving thanks to frey
00:43:52.220is uh i would say a a good starting point if you need one um uh but all you know whether you want
00:44:00.700to hey i i heard about like speaking to the divine of course with with with uh reverence but i heard
00:44:10.220about um you at victory never sleeps so i would like to give thanks to you uh lady frigg and then
00:44:18.460and hold a ceremony to lady frick you know it's it's all within kind of what you're willing and
00:44:27.340able to do um i think the biggest thing is uh come at it with a point of reverence um but
00:44:35.340Our faith is not necessarily like separate from our lives.
00:44:41.160And so you would look at a bloat as like we're physically doing something because a big part of our faith is about combining our thoughts with our deeds.
00:44:54.180And so physically weaving yourself into the time of the year is very important.
00:45:01.220That's why a lot of our holidays are based on the tidings of the year.
00:45:05.340um and and but it doesn't have to be only that i mean any time that you want to uh
00:45:13.500you know simply again cross that threshold that's the hurdle that a lot of people have is where
00:45:18.780they feel that they're going to do something wrong or do something foolish and the best
00:45:22.700route to go about is is to you know open your your your mind and your heart to the gods or to
00:45:31.340your ancestors i say the ancestors a lot because i know for a lot of folks approaching the gods
00:45:36.140which should be this is the case i think it should be the case is that you want to approach the gods
00:45:40.620with a little bit more gravity to understanding and building that relationship with them but we
00:45:46.940do have a very clear connection to our ancestors right away so in a lot of ways building your
00:45:54.220connection to your ancestors is a way to help further in building your relationship to the
00:46:01.660eldest of your ancestors which are the gods um so that's why i keep saying that but um
00:46:08.860yeah the the one thing that's really hard about this time of year is this time of year is
00:46:14.620built around community it always has been so the the the big holiday that's coming up now is the
00:46:20.300night of the witches hexanot and uh there's a lot of confusion around that and um a lot of times it
00:46:28.300it it it's built around the people coming out of their houses right now our folk were coming out
00:46:34.380of their homes their farmlands they were getting on the road and they were starting to walk to each
00:46:38.940other or ride to each other or take a wagon or there's a lot of movement that started right
00:46:43.100around this time of year and the big thing was the preparation of the ground the preparation
00:46:49.820of the seed the preparation of your equipment um and you know blessings asking the gods to bless
00:46:56.700our folk to bless the livestock when they go out and you know past the um you know the guard
00:47:02.940past the hedges out into the fields so hexanach was born from that and so too was mayday and so
00:47:11.500both of these holidays are really built around community um you're you know anybody that's
00:47:18.060gonna be unable to get to the hops are gonna see the maypoles coming out and that's like
00:47:24.540that's something as a standard or a banner of of testament to the fact that there's
00:47:31.500you know a large group of people coming together to dance around the maple
00:47:35.260and i for many years i did not have that many many years so i totally understand where you're
00:47:41.580coming from by if you're unable to make it or you don't have anyone around you and so oftentimes
00:47:50.620you know um this time of year i i would pray to freya i would pray to fray i would give thanks
00:47:57.420and ask for protection and i would give thanks for all the bounty i would do things by like placing
00:48:03.340gifts um i think that's another threshold that a lot of people have to understand is getting
00:48:09.740through is our sense of giving physical items as a um devotional act and giving the spirit of
00:48:19.340something is um really integral to our faith um so you know uh even if it was uh placing loaves
00:48:28.060of bread into a hole that i dug and then pouring wine on top of that and then placing the dirt and
00:48:34.220just you know giving thanks there's little things you can do there's no um starting out there's
00:48:42.220really no nothing that should hold you back you shouldn't be thinking that you're gonna
00:48:47.260go the wrong direction as you do get more experience though and you if you do have an
00:48:51.100ability to go to the hoffs one of the best things about the hoffs are that when you go there you get
00:48:55.820to see kind of like the the faith at large and you get to see some of the tenants and some of the
00:49:02.940the the processes that we do and you can then carry those home um but you know you could uh
00:49:11.660emailing a folk builder emailing a gothar and asking them hey what you know what can i do or
00:49:16.780is there anybody in my area um but if you're you know by yourself or with family definitely
00:49:24.620you know celebrate the season make flower crowns with your kids um you know bake bread
00:49:32.140or make make a dish and and and then gift that um you know or a part of it at least
00:49:39.500um that could be you know anything from a loaf of bread to wine to flowers to fruit and all of
00:49:45.420these things because the acts of what you're doing are part of the devotion that's that's what i tell
00:49:51.900people at thor's office like the very fact that you got on the road and started out this morning
00:49:56.700traveling to us that's that that's all part of the devotional process and so it starts small
00:50:05.580and it starts with you just doing little things and trying to build more into that
00:50:13.740all right uh next question is is an interesting one um sarah asks does frig not like her other
00:50:22.060children uh hother and uh her mother and i think
00:50:33.660i think that's really interesting interesting one i'm not sure if you have theories or ideas on
00:50:37.660this fawn is that the entirety of the question i didn't see it come up yeah
00:50:42.460i certainly don't think that she has um malice or hatred uh especially if we're talking about
00:50:55.580holder um i i would say sadness and the great sense of loss but when we're talking about the
00:51:03.900gods in like uh the um you know i think in the in the calls before that we've been we've done we
00:51:11.500talked about euhemerism and humanizing the gods and i think that we do that to a certain sense
00:51:16.300in our stories especially um to better understand again it's another way for us to understand the
00:51:24.140divine and um one of the things i i i have a tendency to see the gods um outside of the of
00:51:33.980the stories solely and see uh you know to me frigga is the epitome of mother motherliness motherhood
00:51:45.660and i and i can't speak for her but i would feel that a mother would not hold um that level
00:51:57.020of malice especially when your hand was guided by someone who you trusted
00:52:01.500um and that's another reason why in the also true folk assembly we do not abide um the devotional
00:52:10.260um kind of uh I don't even know what it would be called can't even find the the the word for it0.81
00:52:21.720um loki or the you know we call him the kinslayer because again hov was tricked by hand
00:52:32.600he was tricked by the one that was trusted and if we're talking about the stories again
00:52:37.080and we're talking about them as as you're kind of you hemorrizing them just a little bit
00:52:41.960Loki plighted against Hogg utilizing a weakness, his inability to see. And even beyond that,
00:52:54.820not fully even knowing the entirety of the story about the green and leafy, the innocence of
00:53:01.540the mistletoe. But if you look outside, now let's break it back out again. What we're seeing is
00:53:08.420One brother is tricked to slay another brother with something that seems innocent, much like a good intention or an abidement of that which is good.
00:53:17.780And you can see that in our world today amongst the folk.
00:53:21.080There are many people who would readily attack their fellow brothers and sisters based on the idea that they are abiding by some grand virtue.
00:53:33.900and that virtue is what they see is is innocence but they don't realize it's the key to
00:53:39.420causing such great pain and and and uh misery and and ultimately dissipating the start of the
00:53:45.420dissipation of that which is orderly so it's so funny to me i i often think about it's like the
00:53:52.300the dissipation of order amongst the cosmic gods of law was is the innocent mistletoe
00:54:01.980but it's not the mistletoe itself it's everything surrounding it the ignorance of the brother the
00:54:07.020maliciousness of the outsider you know and the connivingness of the outsider the embitterment
00:54:12.220that he held um and then ultimately the subsequent things that follow from there
00:54:17.740now with with hermoth that's an interesting one i don't recall anywhere in the stories where that's
00:54:24.300that's even inclined um hermoth is uh the the name the etymology of the name means uh battle strength
00:54:32.460and um the story is kind of placed as an as a unique i think poetic switch because we don't
00:54:39.820see it elsewhere and we know that that uh lord odin has gone down to the under to the underneath
00:54:47.740the place separated from time the place beyond the veil the place beyond the cave nipa cave um
00:54:54.300And so in this sense, it's that he was so bestricken by grief that he could not.
00:54:59.960And so one of his sons, Hermod, took the mission up for his father.
00:55:09.420There's a lot of theories about Hermod as well.
00:55:14.080But from the stories, his son takes his horse and rides to see his brother.
00:55:20.460and sees it and and if you're reading all of the stories you know it's known that odin knows where
00:55:26.280he is odin knows where he resides odin knows the process but the idea that the battle strength
00:55:33.480that is needed by even the great god odin to to convey the message to one of the outs that are
00:55:43.240is now has shifted from one place where the gods reside to the ultimate separation where it's it's
00:55:52.520very hard i think for the gods and you know it's it's it's the place away from time it's a place
00:55:57.560away from the material and it seems throughout the stories consistently remark that it's a great deed
00:56:05.240for the gods to to transcend that threshold and go down into that place
00:56:11.240and um that primordial place and uh so his son does and i don't so i don't think there's any
00:56:19.080uh indication in anywhere that i could think of in which perhaps uh frig would even have
00:56:24.280that the inclination or it wasn't mentioned anywhere um but i would feel and i feel in my
00:56:31.000heart that uh you know frigg is the epitome of the feminine and of the virtue feminine of of the
00:56:38.520power of within culture within society she's the queen she is the the mother she has uh so much to
00:56:47.160to uphold um that and in great wisdom she would never even entertain the idea of malice but
00:56:56.840would hold great sadness and that's that's referred to as well and her dedication to protecting
00:57:03.000her her son baldur is is noted as well so i you know protection and and lament
00:57:10.920yeah i think it's a it's an interesting question i'm not sure what prompts the question about
00:57:15.640uh her mother um because not only does she not you know dislike but it was it was
00:57:26.120mentioned one of the you know in a way the reward for him going and being the messenger of the gods
00:57:33.320to uh beseech hell to release balder was you know frig offered she tried to get all you know any of
00:57:42.040the isir to go and she said if anyone would win my my love and my favor um i think my my everlasting
00:57:51.720love and favor uh you know who would do this for me and he was the one who went and did it so i
00:57:57.640think that she certainly you know holds her mother in high regard um as far as uh hother goes i
00:58:11.240speak for frig in this regard um what i will say is that in in the story in the lore um
00:58:23.480it's but it actually in the gilfaggening where we get our our list of the 12 gods
00:58:28.360of the 12 ice here that we are constructing our hofs to um
00:58:33.000His name is mentioned in a list of Isir, but it's said that the gods don't want even anyone to mention his name because the memory of what happened to Balder is so painful that by acknowledging Hother, they're reminded of that pain.
00:58:55.840um so i can't say that i can't say that she does have fond feelings of him or not and i think
00:59:05.820that's a i don't know it's not for me to say um but what i will say that i think this illustrates
00:59:18.860in an interesting way is that to our ancestors like the worst thing that could happen is strife
00:59:27.580amongst kinsmen and the the slaying of one family member by another because when someone outside
00:59:35.980of your family wrongs you you can take vengeance and you can your family can be compensated for
00:59:44.060or the loss that it suffered in some way.
00:59:46.840But when it's people in your own house that are taking from one another,
00:59:51.040there's no way to recoup that loss because further, you know,
00:59:56.340further punishing your own kin for something that they did to a kinsman of
01:00:00.580yours just continues to diminish the might and the hymenia of your family.
01:00:07.180And there was no resolution and no, no right answer to those questions.
01:00:11.500And that's why being a kinslayer was such a powerful transgression amongst our ancestors and why this situation is particularly tragic.
01:00:25.400And I think that's what elevates the level of this tragedy in such a mythic scale.
01:00:31.780and uh yeah so i i don't presume to to say that frig what frig might or might not feel about
01:00:41.600hother but i think that she's absolutely her mother fan um that's attested to in the lore
01:00:47.780and he you know he daringly braves situations that others that others fear to do in order to
01:00:56.460secure her love and her favor so i think that's well earned uh i would like to even say because
01:01:02.380something that you you have mentioned before in our conversations um which are always really
01:01:07.740insightful is uh when you talk about olden being the god of consciousness for the folk
01:01:15.020i'll often try to apply that understanding to all things bigger pictures patterns and the way things
01:01:23.740that they they lay out and whether we can we you hemorrize the gods as as human and in in a
01:01:30.220mythical sense or i never i try to say avoid the literal but in the mythical sense um but also too
01:01:36.860if if odin is the god of consciousness and frigg is then i would say the heart or the the um the
01:01:45.100wisdom and the spiritual guidance as the core of the folk, and of course Balder is the consciousness,
01:01:59.100then in a lot of ways the consciousness was slayed by ignorance at the hand of the deceiving
01:02:05.740outside outsider and it takes a lot of hermos battle strength for us to regain that so if we're
01:02:16.460talking about the soul of the people or we're talking about the soul of the self hermo definitely
01:02:21.340represents the the consciousness and the the heart and the great strength that it takes in order to
01:02:29.580reach down and rekindle and relight the light the soul of uh that's in the darkness so there's a lot
01:02:38.540of there's a lot of allegoric sense that can be there it takes great strength if someone is is
01:02:43.980in a point where their mind and their heart are completely devoid of light and they're falling
01:02:48.780into this dark place it takes great battle strength to reach down to go low into themselves
01:02:54.460and pull that light out of that darkness so and i think hermoth kind of represents that strength
01:03:00.140that that's you know in his name it represents that whether it's we're applying it to the folk
01:03:05.820or whether we're applying it to the individual or of course ultimately to the gods so
01:03:16.140so uh next question is from rachel still catching up on the video so i'm minutes behind
01:03:23.100but wondering why we do not celebrate sigur bloat tonight the full moon in april um you're welcome
01:03:32.300go ahead it's fun oh in april yeah so i was going to say um by all means you're welcome to do that
01:03:39.500if you'd like the reason that the afa doesn't do that is a couple of things so first
01:03:46.220there are a number of our holy days that are based on that are based on nature
01:03:55.700um you know the equinox happen when the equinox happens uh the the solstices happen when the
01:04:03.680solstices happen but there's other of our celebrations that aren't so tied to a natural
01:04:13.580cycle. And Sigurbloat was one of those. It was celebrated in a particular time, and the attestation
01:04:20.900that we have is during the Viking Age, where this is the time of year where stuff is thought enough
01:04:29.080that they could go and start mounting their raids for raiding season. And that was very specific to
01:04:39.820certain geographical instance as opposed to to a larger you know a larger natural truth but the
01:04:46.860truth of that was to celebrate a to have a celebration to celebrate victory to beseech
01:04:57.500the gods to bless them with victory and to to instill victory amongst the folk by sharing
01:05:04.940in a in a communal context and that's something that we do still do as the astro folk assembly
01:05:10.780but we've chosen to do that in july um so
01:05:19.020in constructing the modern afa calendar it was very important for us to have
01:05:24.540a monthly a monthly focus and a monthly ritual for folks to do and we can certainly do more than
01:05:31.740that but at the very least we want to celebrate one of our religious functions every month to get
01:05:39.340our folk together to worship the gods together to get our folk to come to the hof and worship
01:05:44.540the gods together or even just meet up with with their fellow afa members and uh and celebrate a
01:05:51.420bloat we want folks to do that at least once a month um july was the month that we didn't have
01:05:57.740something. And April was a month that we did. And what was happening was we had Hexenacht
01:06:04.620at the very end of April, at the 30th of April. And then on the 1st of May, we had May Day.
01:06:12.340And so rather than celebrate those two things differently, what we would have is because they
01:06:19.240were directly next to each other, people would get together and celebrate one and not the other.
01:06:27.000And so one of those very important holy celebrations was always left out.
01:06:32.820The other thing that we'd see is sometimes in order to do that, they wouldn't celebrate
01:06:39.380Sigur Bloat this time of year because that wasn't a, you know, a for sure in stone thing.
01:06:44.840They would celebrate May Day instead of Hexenacht because they're kind of both together and0.93
01:06:50.220they didn't really know what to do for Hexenacht.
01:06:52.460So then both of those important celebrations would get skipped.
01:06:56.360And what we do now is we try to separate Hexanach and May Day, unless you're able to celebrate them over the weekend.
01:07:03.660If you're able to have an overnight and celebrate the one on one day and then the next following it on a separate day, that's great.
01:07:10.660There's absolutely nothing wrong with doing it. That's probably the ideal if you can.
01:07:15.280but um to facilitate monthly uh worship at our hofs we separate those by a month to where hex
01:07:23.760and not can get its full focus and its full attention it deserves and mayday can get the
01:07:28.880full focus and attention that it deserves and it can still happen sequentially and then also to
01:07:35.360facilitate us getting together once a month and uh you know july is kind of a fun month to do it
01:07:41.360because it's you know it's during that that high period of summer where things are are vibrant and
01:07:47.760alive and it's a it's a fun time to celebrate victory and to talk about victories and because
01:07:54.240we experience victory in you know certainly us in the united states in 2023 celebrate victory
01:08:02.560in a very different way than we would have if we were in the middle of um you know medieval or
01:08:10.480pre-medieval warfare to where we needed to wait for uh for the ice to thaw for us to go and and
01:08:17.120engage in any of the struggles we engage in we're seeking victory all year long so there's not
01:08:22.720really a bad time to to celebrate a secret vote uh it's fine do you have any more to add on that
01:08:30.560uh yeah i think a lot of what you said is is the the groundwork of understanding uh i think that uh
01:08:37.040a lot of people might get confused or think that we're trying to do something
01:08:40.720but your openness about it about what we were doing and what we were intending is because
01:08:46.800cultural evolution you know the 12 hours we have 12 months so we have you know and set up things
01:08:53.520devotionally within the hof uh siger bloat was one of those holidays that very much are like
01:09:01.280Alvarblot and DÃsrblot. Now, we have attestments to this in Iceland, and we have a general idea.0.96
01:09:10.440Our ancestors saw at the beginning of winter, because of the two tidings, before mid-summer,
01:09:17.800I mean, before mid-winter, excuse me, Yule, DÃsrblot was generally held. And sometime in
01:09:24.760around february alfar bloat was held but the entirety of our faith is not strictly just the
01:09:35.320icelandic evolution of their tidings at that time that snapshot uh so there's a lot of room that
01:09:44.040needs to be made for certain things and also too also true has kind of evolved since the 70s
01:09:50.680on its own incorporating certain things even down to like uh hexanact or or you know like in sweden
01:09:57.240and stuff it's sometimes referred to as like volsbergenacht and that you know extends into
01:10:01.160germany and and things of that nature um siger bloat was one of those it was one of those holy
01:10:07.640tides that uh fell right around in between our during austra or you know uh during hexanacta
01:10:16.600mayday and so a lot of people didn't know and we already had austra and austra has such a
01:10:23.400a vibrant connection to our people especially here in america and in england because
01:10:28.280these traditions have long been established um you know even even with over arching christian
01:10:36.040culture um and so the eggs and the celebration of austra was one that we naturally gravitated
01:10:44.360towards but not losing sick or bloat in mindset and so it's one thing worth noting that right
01:10:49.960around in the middle of the summer oftentimes there were great moots or um our fingers or
01:10:55.560like meetings in which the folk got together to celebrate you know the first half of their
01:11:00.840harvests um to get together and hold you know they were crafting things and selling things and
01:11:07.080law was discussed um and so there was a lot of stuff going on at that time so it was again like
01:11:15.320i was here ago they said it was a great time to view as this is a time when our folk are getting
01:11:19.240together both in the past and in the present and it's a great time to celebrate our victories
01:11:24.600and to focus ourselves towards the end of the harvest time and to also gird ourselves towards
01:11:31.960the eventual you know falling of the year into the winter tidying so sigur bloat instead of it being
01:11:39.560um you know x'd out it was it was brought over um and again when i was in uh when coming into
01:11:50.520house true back in the early early 90s i did see this like kindreds and groups some of them
01:11:56.280celebrated austra some of them celebrated sigurbloat some of them did hexanacht but couldn't
01:12:02.040make mayday because they couldn't have people over for overnight or scheduling because the gregorian
01:12:07.880calendar may 1st falls sometimes on a weekday so it caused a lot of logistic issues as well
01:12:14.360and so sometimes those holidays would get kind of diffused or interlaced or and things so we
01:12:21.480you know bringing them apart and and focusing on the season of um you know may day and the flowers
01:12:28.360but also to april's time frame was the time which the herdsmen were starting to get prepared to
01:12:34.280head out into the wild and they were going to face chthonic forces um and i think uh you know hex
01:12:42.680hexanoct is one of those holidays that a lot of people are uh very very um they don't have a lot
01:12:50.920on that and that's unfortunate because this is the time in which our our women folk bless the
01:12:57.720the men and the children and protect them with their love with their weirding way with their
01:13:03.000magic the magic that was passed down from our ancestors whether it's you know through
01:13:07.000herbs and lore and spell and these women you know creating uh sacred fire and the smoke
01:13:15.880you know blessing us as we begin our approach into the summer um i think is really really
01:13:22.200important and and it it kind of gives a glimpse to a cultural thing that a lot of people don't
01:13:27.720think about the chthonic forces that we talk about of course in the in the old norse they
01:13:32.040were often referred to as like troll riding witches and and uh giants or trolls that um0.82
01:13:39.240that were malicious and you know out on the edges of things and our ancestors knew that they they
01:13:46.760saw that kind of um that visceral hatred the kind of the almost like the anti-mother um energy out
01:13:54.920there the thing that pulls the family apart or pulls the clan apart or pulls the tribe or the
01:13:59.800nation apart and it was seen as no this is a time for the women folk to protect their people and as
01:14:06.440they start to head out and so there's a lot to it that has evolved both modernly and pulling
01:14:13.400from sources of the past and uh so i think it's it it's becoming a transitional state that a lot
01:14:20.520of the folk are accepting as soon as especially once they understand what's going on and why
01:14:26.040what our intentions are and our intentions are always built on piety devotion and making sure
01:14:31.560that everything is covered well uh and and culturally feasible so uh logistics and things
01:14:39.080of that nature are always kind of considered as well when it comes to families and kindreds and
01:14:44.600the temples so that would be the reason i mean elsewhere go the dead just straight out covered
01:14:51.400it that's why we did it but but uh but yeah there's a lot to it as we evolve
01:15:01.560All right. Our next question. I've been very interested in learning more about the folk
01:15:10.220mother lately. This episode about Frigg seems like a good chance to ask, where can I learn
01:15:15.800more about our folk mother, Elsie Christensen? Ms. Fon, do you have a good suggestion on that?
01:15:22.540oh there's definitely uh i mean one of our our hawks is is directly connected to every half has
01:15:32.360kind of a patron or a matron uh a hero that it's dedicated to and it just it's really good that
01:15:40.660balder's half has a lot of connectivity to elsa christensen and her contributions and her coming
01:15:47.720to understanding the gods and then spreading it to her people, even under a lot of external
01:15:57.360and divisive forces. So first and foremost, I would say Baldershof's website is a great
01:16:07.700place. There's a lot of, again, the internet is wonderful as well. Again, you have to pick
01:16:15.140and peace through and there could be you know forces that are of dissipation that are that
01:16:20.660you might run into but again you will be guided um you know even holding honor to her and asking
01:16:27.460for that guidance is perfectly within the realm of of of our faith so um you know there's whether
01:16:36.260you're talking about personal experiences a lot of people you know have written down written down
01:16:40.660what their their interactions uh her struggle and her plight and uh even you know um some of
01:16:47.780the things that she endured are readily available there as well um yeah it's when it comes to uh
01:16:57.300frigg and her epitome of of motherhood there is to the the the point of the god the goddess the
01:17:04.820mother her standing up for her people her holding her her chest up her chin up and being a a bearer
01:17:14.340of what is right versus what is wrong and sometimes it takes the the feminine to
01:17:22.580ignite that that um again like with the the dichotomy between um frigg and hermo is that
01:17:33.700the men the folk men should look at the women as the bestowing of that by their standards by their
01:17:44.900what they believe is right and wrong and the menfolk will naturally look to that and want to
01:17:49.700achieve supersede and make the women of their folk look proudly upon them so a lot of that that
01:17:57.460that uh power is in frig is about you know when when odin goes out she she may give counsel and
01:18:06.580say i don't think that's wise but if you are drawn to do it then then come back safely and
01:18:14.660so she she gives counsel and she promotes the the instigation of gaining um title and i think a lot
01:18:24.740of a lot of that is represented both in intrigue and in elsa christensen um you know this is one
01:18:34.260thing that is unfortunate and it's something behind the scenes that the afa is really working on
01:18:40.740is compiling more of our history um a lot of these people live very important very meaningful lives
01:18:49.860but then when you want to find out more and you want to find out about these these great people
01:18:54.580it's, it's often hard to get a lot of information. I would suggest, you know, that about going on
01:19:02.200Baldershoff website, absolutely. Sarah Alt is going to come on this program when we get to
01:19:11.340Elsie and our heroes episodes. And I think that'll happen sometime next month. And we'll be able to
01:19:17.520talk a little bit about her. What I'd suggest if you can, is if you can get in touch with old
01:19:25.020timers that knew her and interacted with her, that's a really good way to learn about Elsie.
01:19:34.140I never had the honor of interacting with her myself, but I've been able to speak to some
01:19:39.800folks who have. So I think finding ways to talk to people who knew her is a good way to do that.
01:19:47.520But I think getting real stories from real people is always the best if you have the availability and her, you know, living so close to our time, we're still able to get some of that information, which is awesome.
01:20:04.820Next question is for you specifically, Svon, is there anything to the overlap of attributes of Freya and the attributes of Frigg?
01:20:14.440yeah i i think that first and foremost before we go down this road there is a lot of confusion
01:20:22.200about this subject and there's no shortage of opinions on this as far as things go but
01:20:29.720uh the asa true folk assembly looks upon divinity in its in its uh pluralism in its in its uh you
01:20:38.620multiplicity if you will and so we do not hypostasis or mash the gods together we don't say that
01:20:47.260that austera is really you know just not the goddess of night amongst the nords we don't say
01:20:55.340that um you know that that perhaps nervous of the ancient germans uh is really just this other
01:21:03.740goddess and then that goddess is just a hypostasis of this goddess so we don't bunch we have a
01:21:10.780tendency to look at their the exceptionalism between them and that's the first and foremost
01:21:18.060drive outside of that we do see a lot of overlap uh i mean obviously the the the strength of
01:21:26.220femininity within and we're most likely going to cover um uh freya in a separate episode
01:21:36.140so i don't want to go too much but the the biggest thing i would say is the femininity
01:21:44.620is the clear overlap the representations of their domains within the lives of the folk
01:21:50.380especially in relation to the woman um but whereas frigga represents a kind of escalation into the
01:21:59.100into societal strata into the obligations of oath and of marriage and that is a big focus
01:22:08.700around frigg um and a lot of people you know might say oh what do you mean obligation what do you
01:22:15.260mean uh this or that or what have you is that it's clear in our society that men and women when they
01:22:22.060reach a certain point in their life escalate themselves into the inter integral workings
01:22:28.300of the community i think now things are atomized you know uh that um used you know a man is a father
01:22:36.700a man a woman is a mother and they might be only unto themselves as a family but that wasn't
01:22:43.180always the way it worked is father and mother is very much like a title it's a threshold
01:22:50.620and again any person that is a parent knows this threshold knows this interconnectivity
01:22:57.260uh you know it's something as simple as when you see a parent struggling with a child and
01:23:02.860they're just throwing a fit and you look across there and you're like i totally get it as opposed
01:23:07.180to perhaps somebody who's doesn't have a child isn't obligated or duty bound in their life to
01:23:12.140the community to their family or to other people and so freya in essence represents the internalized
01:23:20.940feminine and frigga is the external and at the same time they also represent how the external
01:23:29.740becomes receptive and the internal becomes projective that's a very strange dichotomy
01:23:36.380for a lot of people to wrap their heads around but i think it's the best way to look at is
01:23:40.220is um when when one projects themselves out into society when they become duty-bound by by oath to
01:23:51.340another when they become duty-bound to perhaps a higher calling of the folk or to to by blood
01:23:58.140through children um what is required is that they have already kind of um projected themselves
01:24:05.740out words and now it is a time to integrate themselves within to the understanding you'll
01:24:14.140notice this right away um first time mothers first time children they might immediately start asking
01:24:20.700their mother their grandparents friends uh about things uh my child has a you know a a block tear
01:24:28.860duck what do i do you know and so going you know sometimes nowadays because things are atomized
01:24:34.460people will go online uh and that that's information is good again you just have to
01:24:39.020pick through it but you know um when that when that woman is she's projected herself into the
01:24:46.780strata of things um i don't know if i was lost oh sorry okay so um i don't know if you guys could
01:24:55.340me when that happens um the uh the idea of being receptive but also being projected out into society
01:25:05.100is you are being uh watched you're being looked at uh both men and women in that point of your life
01:25:12.620you have to be a pinnacle of of of um you know being the moral bedrock during tragedy and also
01:25:21.340you know a lot of people are looking at the way you project yourselves into the world but you also
01:25:24.940have to be very receptive to the people around you guidance is a big thing so i think frega
01:25:31.500represents that whereas freya is about galvanizing the self of of the feminine uh i think the biggest
01:25:41.500thing is and it's a huge problem within our society is is that um the determinant of worth
01:25:46.780I think that people often miscue Freya as being some determinant of worth only around sexuality,
01:25:55.240and I think that's a grave, grave mistake. I think that's modernism kind of injecting itself
01:26:01.180into things. We see it on the masculine, but we're talking about the feminine now, and the
01:26:08.740application of simply basing self-worth around perhaps like oh seeing frigga or you hammerizing
01:26:16.820for guys some sort of just uh you know carnal based only is i think it's it's it's misguided
01:26:26.900because the the accusations from the enemies that have been levied towards freya are the ones saying
01:26:34.020that. So placing stock in the accusation over the god or goddess themselves, I think, is not
01:26:41.740the right path to go. But to look at other things, like the tendance and discipline of worth,
01:26:47.480the understanding that the femininity and the desire from the masculine to the feminine, and
01:26:54.800the composure of that worth. Numerous times you see Freyja as being this object to be desired
01:27:06.860from an outside source, and she continually says, no, I will not partake in any of this.
01:27:12.200Or she gets rageful because she has, in essence, the determinant of worth internally to say no.
01:27:22.480and so that is that standard building i think uh like young men who look upon women and want to
01:27:29.920gain their affections they understand this the most when the woman says and again we do this
01:27:34.480during like the the mayday when the men folk are carrying the may the maypole they ask you know may
01:27:40.400they place the pole um to start the ceremony and the women always state a like a standard
01:27:51.760a point in which they expect the men that they are mingling with that they are interacting with
01:27:58.160be men of virtue men of backbone men of character men of the desire for glory and all of those
01:28:06.080things that's very important in the realm of freya frigga has already crossed that bridge that
01:28:12.560threshold frig knows the character of that which she has duty-bound herself to the union there
01:28:20.240so she you know i think represents two sides of or they they both represent the overlap is that the
01:28:29.040the uh the admixture of femininity within nature um as far as lore and things go there's a lot of
01:28:39.040confusion because there's mention of uh freya being married to a divine power named other
01:28:48.880and other and odin obviously very very close in in uh linguistic etymology especially around the
01:28:56.640the ideals of um fury and of inspiration and there's a lot of stuff and i think we would
01:29:04.320cover some of that more in in uh freya's episode but that's i think a big part of the overall
01:29:13.840mystery of freya that is not it's been solved in frig frig has attained the understanding she
01:29:23.440has attained the the connection um and she in her own right has you know determined the way she
01:29:31.040she learns of the information about the the goings-on in the world um she has the the handmaidens
01:29:37.680the maidens of fensalar the goddesses that implement all of the powers that she presides
01:29:43.120over within our society uh freya is is more connected to uh in particular a type of death
01:29:51.520and psychopump uh functionality within our culture especially around the the corpus of battle
01:29:57.840um and that is not so there's a lot more i would say distinction between the two
01:30:03.280than there is a huge overlap um other than that i would say you know frigg is born of the earth
01:30:12.080um it is said that she is born of the earth and she is born of the mountain she is born of uh
01:30:17.840The interesting thing is the writing down of her parentage is very limited, but it is mentioned in both the masculine and the feminine form.
01:30:27.400So a lot of folks have taken that to be the twinning or the coupling of the earth, both in the masculine and the feminine.
01:30:38.340So that would, of course, gear our minds towards the Vanir, especially when you see this in Frey and Freyja, or you see this in Njörð or Nörtheth, or Jörð or Nörren, as you may have been called at one point.
01:30:53.820You see this coupling, the masculine and feminine, connected to the earth and the water.
01:30:58.240So I would say the greatest overlap that I would like to point out is that our folk should understand that Frigga does source herself from the same place as Freya, but that she came after the unification of the gods, after cosmic order and natural law aligned themselves.
01:31:22.120it was at that moment which again isn't hugely covered in the poetics because again poems are
01:31:28.700limited in their scope um after the gods created that union between each other um she came about
01:31:37.740and and made union with ovin ovin you know and her linked there's very little about a sense of
01:31:45.900courtship of that and things um but there is reference a lot to the to again the naysay
01:31:52.460the uh accusations against um both freya and frigga so there's an overlap there i think in
01:31:58.540the poems um and even in some of the sagas there's accusations but again you're looking at loki the
01:32:08.780outsider the betrayer the kinslayer because bound in blood um but you also see it with like saxo
01:32:16.540grammaticus who was a christian who hated the old faith but yet wrote about the origins of the danes
01:32:23.740and used a ton of the war but he you have raised the gods into literal humans and he accused frig
01:32:31.260of being promiscuous as well and so i think one thing that's worth noting is both with freya
01:32:38.540and with Frigg, the idea of promiscuity is something that our ancestors, when they were
01:32:45.900hearing the story, when the accusation was leveled, was seen negatively. And that tells a lot about
01:32:54.220the feminine in our society, even in olden days. To be accused of being promiscuous was seen as
01:33:00.940not a good thing and that's because in reality a woman who lacks understanding of self-worth or0.93
01:33:11.660worth within society and i think that's the biggest problem uh and that overlap is there0.90
01:33:18.220the accusation of promiscuity by uh towards frig and the accusation of uh of promiscuity towards
01:33:25.340freya are all placed with a negative context and i think that lends to knowing that societally our
01:33:32.940ancestors saw that as a negative thing the feminine understanding its worth internally
01:33:39.100and understanding its worth externally the feminine power the feminine uh energy of our
01:33:45.820tribe and of our nation was seen as that it needed to determine worth because it could be
01:33:53.180that was the thing that was attacked so i think there's overlap there as well um and i think it's
01:33:59.900kind of also a common trope that's utilized when the when somebody of uh you know anti
01:34:07.100or malicious intent or uh anti-cohesion will will target uh the feminine immediately and start to
01:34:17.100try to dissipate from there um so there's overlap in there as well i think if you know reading the
01:34:23.100lore and stuff you can definitely find that there so sarah asks how did our ancestors
01:34:34.460treat the elderly of their tribe um and i think this is a that's a great question well it's a
01:34:43.420it's an interesting question because i don't when people say how did our ancestors do x
01:34:50.140especially on this program, very often we talk about, you know, the Arsh Ousatru period of,
01:34:57.820you know, the Viking Age or before. But up until very, very recently, our ancestors and, you know,
01:35:10.380most all people of worth treated their elders with a great amount of reverence and respect
01:35:16.780Um, for a number of different reasons, you know, I, I think that in a fundamental way, living long, and especially the harder life was reaching an advanced age was an accomplishment in and of itself.
01:35:38.780um but an elder a number of things so and that's an obvious one another various very obvious one
01:35:51.880is the amount of life experience and wisdom that they've gained through through all of their time
01:35:58.680and all of their years and in uh in another way that i think maybe is less thought about
01:36:05.640our elders are our literal link to the past you know I said a minute ago if you want to know more
01:36:14.420about Elsie or the heroes of of days gone by you ask ask some old timers and they can tell you
01:36:21.840about the good old days they can tell you about the generations that preceded you so that wisdom's
01:36:29.040not lost so those stories don't die so you learn the wisdom of the past um but no the wisdom and
01:36:37.920experience of our elders was was celebrated and linguistically um that's why there's an overlap
01:36:45.600between to to worship something being to venerate it and something of great age being referred to
01:36:51.760as venerable um because we we celebrated that as a people and you know in the afa we still do that
01:37:00.800today um in my parents generation you were hyper respectful to your elders i think it's only in
01:37:12.080in my generation and the generation that's come since that uh that has not been the norm in
01:37:19.680western culture and that's disgraceful and something we aim to fix do you have something
01:37:25.280to add on that's fun yeah i i was going to say at what time because you know we were talking about
01:37:31.760like the evolution of our holiday holidays our holy tides and how things kind of evolve
01:37:36.160well our ancestors had an evolution of lots of things especially dealing with
01:37:42.720um people in their latter stages of life the silver ages the golden ages of their lives
01:37:48.720uh sometimes very very harsh the the the nature of of our our lives especially during like the
01:37:54.720migration period and things like that so i immediately want to like you know push the
01:38:00.280glasses up and say well at what time you know like let's talk about this time bronze age
01:38:05.460migration period uh you know and all the way through um i think overall the respect towards
01:38:12.940the elderly was always seen in a sense of both um care a folk that had elderly women mothers
01:38:25.260uh that have become grandmothers or mothers of the people that was a sign and a testament to
01:38:29.580the security of the menfolk that they had the ability to have elderly um women in the in the
01:38:37.420halls that were there teaching the young girls how to do things and and to learn from things
01:38:45.020um and oftentimes that was at the sacrifice of their men folk and so you know a lot of times
01:38:52.060the men folk would go out and defend and fight and do things and so a lot of times it was the
01:38:58.460the mother that was a testament to the security of of the people um so i i definitely think i mean
01:39:06.540whether we talk about ancient or even like i you know i i'm here in the south and and uh it doesn't
01:39:13.020matter really who the person is and it really doesn't always even matter the type of life they
01:39:18.300may have lived but when they reach a certain age there is a a heavy level of respect to the person
01:39:25.820at least given initially until they wash that away or give reason for their not to be there
01:39:31.740the immediate go-to is to respect that age because of the wisdom that they've gained
01:39:37.920and perhaps and hopefully the self-reflection that they have or again as a reminder of the
01:39:46.120frailty of our brief existence here in the long line of all of our ancestors and that we too will
01:39:53.480become ancestors one day ourselves, respecting our elders and trying to care for them in the
01:40:02.640best way that we can. And anybody who's ever been a caretaker knows this is a very hard and
01:40:11.220just extremely testing time of the self. Caretakers are oftentimes the ones that
01:40:20.180might even go beyond just the treatment of our elders when they're mobile, but when they're no
01:40:25.900longer mobile, when they're no longer able to speak or do things. That's very, very hard on
01:40:31.380our folk, but it's always done with the idea of what's in best of care or what's in best of mind
01:40:37.260or what's the best ability. And that's changed throughout history. In migration period times,
01:40:44.000I think our elders, there's even reference to a scribe by the name of Procopius who said that a lot of times during the migration period, our folk were moving around.
01:40:54.740And if people fell sick and were unable to get better, or if they were of an advanced age to the point where they could not maintain the movement of the people as all of the livestock and all of the men folk and women folk and children folk, sometimes, yeah, there was the ending of life was done.
01:41:22.960and and that's one of the things like the evolution right now in alsatru one of the big
01:41:27.920things is about you know don't be a kinslayer and we know that was important even to our ancestors
01:41:33.600all the way back in those very very harsh and dark times because during those moments not anyone of
01:41:40.240the blood but someone of the tribe or the clan or of the people they would do it but not someone
01:41:46.960directly of the blood because that was seen as such an egregious act but yet at the same time
01:41:54.000they're evolving during this time and we're talking about the roman you know empire is is
01:42:00.800out and there's that life the life of our ancestors was extremely harsh but understanding
01:42:07.920that our elderly become ancestors that's one of the things that i think our faith brings when we
01:42:13.440lose someone we know that they are not alone that they go back to the many the plethora of many
01:42:20.640the ones that came before us it's a it's a reunion in reality that we too will experience
01:42:27.120and so we take a great solace and a great joy in the idea we take sadness and the loss of them
01:42:33.680here but we carry them on a name we speak of them often we talk about them but where the rubber meets
01:42:40.800the road is that we understand that they go back to the great lines of of those that came before us
01:42:47.280those that experienced dreadfully harsh times and still we are here they brought us to this point
01:42:55.520and so you know taking that solace in into the ultimate attestment um i think a lot of other
01:43:04.080religions try to apply on that that fear and that speculation they try to use death as a caveat
01:43:10.800to project their ideology further and i think there's nothing more cowardly um or even just0.97
01:43:17.840absolutely misaligned and and poisonous venomous if you will um where they you know they try to
01:43:26.080you know take that away from us you have to you know you're you're you know the the worth of your
01:43:32.960soul is entirely on you and and your ancestors may you know not be there because they didn't
01:43:40.000follow some criteria or something of that nature for us no um we know that folk should strive to
01:43:47.040do good and the biggest hope is that our ancestors will accept us when we do pass on and enter allow
01:43:53.760us back into that reunion that's the greatest travesties to be separated from them and uh they
01:43:58.880have the choice of doing that when they look upon your deeds through your life but if you have tried
01:44:05.040very hard to live a normal life you know the the elderly become introspective and they start to0.99
01:44:12.800teach and i think that's something that our culture has always taken into absolute high stock
01:44:18.080and it's that it's even more tragic when you meet like an old man who's just embittered by life and0.98
01:44:24.320and and is not willing to see himself in the grand scale of society of his people and um
01:44:32.560that you know his weird has woven him into a corner where he has to you know spend that
01:44:38.320time kind of shaking his fist at things we we don't want to be that person and we shouldn't
01:44:44.000strive to be that person and if we find an elderly person who is not that that they're
01:44:48.560willing to pass that information on gravitate towards them spend time with them hold hold them
01:44:56.240and listen to them when you can and i think that's been with our our folk since a memorable time
01:45:05.280all right um next question what would be a good meal for hexanod you know it kind
01:45:13.120of depends on where you're at and what sounds delicious to you um it all it all really depends
01:45:23.440uh there's so many subjective things that can go into that and i don't think that there's really a
01:45:31.200hyper-traditional right or wrong way to that some people i know to uh some of our holidays
01:45:38.160or certainly some of our days for our heroes they'll try to look back culturally to something
01:45:44.080that's you know the origin of those things and get a meal from that cuisine uh hexenock was kind
01:45:51.600of uh you know the attestations we have was it being a german a german celebration and a german
01:45:58.400day so i think that uh you know some german food would probably be awesome for that um i think that
01:46:10.160every occasion. There's a good occasion for schnitzel. Sauerbraten would be good.
01:46:22.560Rote Kohl's awesome. I like clove flavor though, so a lot of people that don't necessarily.
01:46:30.080But yeah, I think a good German meal would be awesome for it. Other people, because the time
01:46:34.980of the year may want to go with something that's more of a springtime dish.
01:46:40.160Um, but yeah, I, I think that's entirely up to you and what you and your family want to eat that
01:46:47.820you think is going to be going to be tasty and thematic. I don't know if you're going to make,
01:46:53.260uh, get crafty and decorate up some stuff. Maybe you want to bust out some Halloween stuff. I
01:47:00.000don't know. It's, it's up to you as far as what your theme wants to be. As long as it's significant
01:47:04.720and, and meaningful to you and your celebration of it, I think, you know, go for it and cook
01:47:10.920whatever you like. What are your, what are your thoughts, Swan? Ooh, well, I was, you know, a lot
01:47:16.320of, I don't know, a lot of folks might not know this or not, but I think I mentioned it before my
01:47:20.220culinary, um, I was in culinary school, I used to be a chef and things like that. So, um, one of the
01:47:29.240things I would say is if you were looking at the time of year, one of the big things that even
01:47:35.280the charms of Hexanoc that are utilized involve herbs that are fast growers, because right now
01:47:42.860the planted things are not in full growth. They usually, you know, that first harvest hits right
01:47:49.340around mid-summer. So a lot of things to incorporate right now would be wild or free
01:47:57.220fast growing herbs um and so that really depends on where you live and what you're what you're able
01:48:03.220to grow or what you're able to get another thing to think about like with with austria you know
01:48:08.420hassen pfeffer and rabbits and and all of that uh have placement but a good all-around year
01:48:15.300food that our ancestors definitely you know understood was pork was especially when they
01:48:20.260they were trying to clear the pin of older animals. They had, you know, right before
01:48:26.380mid winter, they were clearing the pork out to have smoked meats and things that would
01:48:32.880last through the winter because that was a dangerous time and you needed to make sure
01:48:36.340you had long lasting food. But now we're heading towards mid summer. And so a lot of times
01:48:40.960the older um uh swine that were that are in you know in the uh pins that might be big and you've
01:48:50.240got maybe young you know swinelets that are that need more room so pork is always i think a a good
01:48:56.160one to to go to um at any time of the year and so like a perfect example just throwing this out there
01:49:03.040because fast fast cheeses fast herbs and pork you could do a uh like a butterflied pork loin
01:49:11.480and put in like feta cheese or or a type of fast maybe dry cheese that survived the winter and
01:49:18.540maybe do fresh like uh dandelion greens in there and maybe some pine nuts and then roll that bad
01:49:25.480boy up wrap it in twine and bake it make pinwheels serve that with like um you know sauerkraut or
01:49:33.240some of the stuff that's survived the winter if you will if you're looking for thematic
01:49:37.320kind of attachment to the cycles of things that would be a great meal that sounds tasty
01:49:45.720um next question is for you swan swan could you expound upon frig and her weaving
01:49:51.640yes um well clearly yes the the uh the spinning wheel and the distaff are deeply connected to
01:50:06.040frig and also to now this is where before we were talking about the um the mashing of divinities but
01:50:16.240So I won't go towards that, but there seems clearly cultural significances that align the North Europe with Central Europe. And one of those big connections is Frau Hola. And the origin of that name is an interesting one, and I would recommend anybody to look that up.
01:50:36.420But she is also deeply connected to weaving, symbolizing with the flax and the distaff and the spinning wheel and perched in the lowlands of Germany.
01:50:47.600So, again, the evolutions of these names are interesting and important to look at.
01:50:55.280But one unifying factor is that the weaving.
01:50:59.620so um in a folklore sense especially amongst the scandinavians it's it's kind of known that
01:51:06.660you had to have new clothes by midwinter now the icelanders even have this with the with the yule
01:51:11.540cat and the idea is is that the kids would ask their parents make sure you got clothes for me
01:51:18.340or the yule cat's gonna get me because he only eats children that don't have new clothes for
01:51:24.820the winter and what that is is a kind of a societal folklore story to uh that reflects back to an
01:51:31.140ancient practice in which all of the flax and all of the thread and everything that needed to be done
01:51:36.660from second harvest to midwinter needed to be done by then and so that way it could there could be
01:51:43.060weaving that was done so for new clothes and warmth and socks and mittens and hats and so on
01:51:48.900and so forth so right out the gate there's clearly those connections and those connections are always
01:51:55.220related to motherhood because one of the biggest things that women had when they brought their
01:52:02.340dowry and a lot of people think of a dowry as some sort of payment but that was not what we
01:52:09.860especially historically have seen no the dowry was her property the dowry was that which was
01:52:14.740given to her by her family to carry over to the new farmstead or homestead and one of those big
01:52:21.300things was the loom the distaff and the spinning wheel the ability for the woman to create
01:52:29.860thread and clothing for her family now you can see in our lore there's tons of connections to thread
01:52:37.300weaving the nornir the witches uh and and they're they're the threads of fate of man uh and you know
01:52:44.100the ability of the idea of twisting um we see this again in wending or witcha the word witch
01:52:50.820in english means to twist or to twine so uh clearly weaving in and of itself has a huge
01:52:56.180just feminine connection but this one is unique because it's really focused in on as a product
01:53:03.860something provided quite literally over your your children over your husband over you you were a
01:53:12.180source of like much needed life-saving equipment if you will um most people don't think of clothing
01:53:19.380that way anymore but that is absolutely the truth um even down to like linen socks having
01:53:26.580linen socks so that you you know your feet didn't get cold you didn't get pneumonia or you didn't
01:53:31.060you know get a blister and that got infected and you could possibly die from that so like
01:53:36.260very important stuff um that our ancestors had to deal with and so that connection there is
01:53:41.860about the prowess of the mother and her power within the household is about uh kind of producing
01:53:50.740protective elements and this is kind of extended to frig being a frith weaver or um one who who um
01:53:59.140connects uh forces together it's it's referred to that she knows much but speaks very little
01:54:06.820and that i think is kind of again a reference to like uh sometimes when you you meet women who are
01:54:12.180knitters i always find them uh fascinating when they're in the corner just knitting and they're
01:54:17.300listening and but they're just going about they're gathering this information they're hearing things
01:54:22.980they're kind of it's it's like one of those things where you become like the fly on the wall if you
01:54:27.380will and um they know much they they hear much they know much they see much i think that's a
01:54:33.860a reference to that as well um that the the the central point which all factors kind of relate
01:54:40.580and so i've always taken uh frigg and her distaff that's kind of like the feminine center the um
01:54:48.700the much akin to the the axis mundi or and this is something that's played over and over and over
01:54:55.740again in our in our stories and in our faith is that there's always this kind of central vertical
01:54:59.820And in this point, she's she's taking the raw and the on or barely processed and turning it into that next level of something that is, you know, quite literally tying and weaving everything together.
01:55:16.180um there's references i i can't like just pull them out i don't i don't have them on my notes
01:55:23.040like a link or specific quotes but general uh references to women singing songs or
01:55:31.200speaking spells while they weave and um this i i can attest to with um like my grandmother used
01:55:42.620to sing while she knitted um and you know making icelandic sweaters and stuff and a lot of times
01:55:50.220too it's kind of funny because the elderly folk would like the uh seeing like you know a grandpa
01:55:56.080watching television you know like watching sports and he's got his hands up and he's holding the
01:56:02.200the thread in between his hands he's just watching and you know occasionally grabbing his his drink
01:56:07.780and drinking it and he's holding it while she's pulling this thread and she's you know knitting
01:56:12.440sweaters for her grandchildren is is a that is a very common sight in the olden
01:56:18.600you know ways of things and i know my grandparents did it so um but yeah there's there's a lot of
01:56:24.600connection in that just in the feminine in and of itself and so when we talk about weaving one of
01:56:30.360the big things again like with the nornir and um with other feminine powers within our divinities
01:56:38.440the thread binding and weaving is integral to their uh one of the biggest things that
01:56:47.720that women and the feminine do within our culture is weave people together
01:56:52.040um i think that a lot of hyper individualism in this day and age has caused both men and women to
01:56:57.960have that not as a so much of a societal thing but a long time ago it was very very common
01:57:04.280uh to get things done on grand scale often involved huge amounts of teamwork but that thread
01:57:11.160that's spinning um the the concept of the dsir the dsir are is a title and it's a feminine power
01:57:20.440but you have to understand that even the goddesses were referred to as dsir like there's the vana
01:57:26.040dies which is freya you know ausa dies or or organs dies which is frig that um they are in essence
01:57:35.320kind of weavers around them they bestow upon them this power that they have placed their hands their
01:57:43.800deeds their mind their their will into um and so there's a huge connection there as well and so i
01:57:49.960think one of the one great devotional act towards Frigg would be getting into learning those arts
01:57:59.080you know whether it's modern you know the ability to create clothing and again
01:58:05.640clothing and fashion and so much has been even in the modern age especially western dress and
01:58:10.840things of that nature is slowly bleeding out of our people and it's it's a shame and so a lot of
01:58:15.960of us are, you know, trying to acknowledge that, bring homage to it and bring it back. But even if
01:58:21.620it's down to, you know, knitting blankets, all of the women folk in the AFA, when a mother has a0.59
01:58:28.160new baby, there's a blanket coming. And that was knitted by someone in the folk in the AFA. And
01:58:34.800that is that power, that kind of testament to the love, affection, and protection that Freg provides.
01:58:41.940all right uh what do you think a mom can take away from the story of
01:58:48.660frigga trying to protect her son from his fate and falling short um
01:58:57.460one thing that i love about our lore is that
01:59:01.220our our stories are layered and there's lots of dimensionality to the truths that they tell
01:59:13.140and they reveal different things to different people at different times and you know all of
01:59:22.180those things can be true simultaneously one thing that i think is profoundly important
01:59:29.380is the depth of Frigg's love for her son that she would literally go to the ends of the earth
01:59:36.980to every living thing to secure a promise that that they would not harm her child
01:59:45.220and to go you know try to get every living thing to shed a tear um
01:59:50.980Um, caring that much in that deeply for your son is, uh, it's a beautiful and it's a special
01:59:59.520Testament. I think there's also lessons about some things in fate are unavoidable. Um, one of the
02:00:08.620problematic things about Freya's wisdom or, uh, Frigga's wisdom rather, is she, uh,
02:00:16.520And she sees all of these things. She knows things that are to come. And sometimes when you have that and there's not the possibility of doing anything to fix it, there's there's a stress there.
02:00:35.520um but i think that the the beauty of the story and the takeaway is that here was a mother that
02:00:43.280loved her son so much that she was willing to go to those to the most extreme possible lengths
02:00:50.880to to try to keep him safe and to to show her love for him and i think that's really special
02:00:57.280um what do you what do you see in that story uh that uh that a mom can take away it's fun
02:01:02.160well i think it's it's an overarching theme in every aspect about our testing of will in the
02:01:11.680world um we see it with the gods facing ragnarok we see it with uh frigg and and uh doing absolute
02:01:24.240and all her will to save balder so it's a it's a uh we see it like in uh ael skallagrimson's saga
02:01:32.720um when a devoted warrior of ovin doesn't get chosen doesn't get plucked up by the the lord
02:01:44.800the the choosing father um and he has to contend with a lot of that loss around the fire and some
02:01:52.160of his later poems are written about that sadness and lament so i think it's a it is very much a
02:01:59.280common theme in the stories but it's it's a 100 understandable theme within our lives
02:02:12.480i think a lot of people cope with survival guilt in a lot of things so the the answer that to that
02:02:20.000is is is a very hard one in the sense did you do enough because most people would say no or they
02:02:24.660they would they'll plot something to devastate themselves and saying i could have done this or
02:02:30.240i should have done that and and so on and so forth but with the moment you have and the power you
02:02:36.660have whatever it may be to do the absolute most is all you can do um and oftentimes again the weaving
02:02:46.660of weird in our lives um doesn't always garner peaceful or happy outcomes so i think the overall
02:02:57.180testament there is is about um the the oftentimes those that give the most love especially a mother
02:03:05.880obviously a mother the the physical attachment the thread between the mother and the child being
02:03:13.140severed at birth through the umbilical cord um there's a lot of analogous to
02:03:19.300parenthood and especially the loss that any any um father or mother can attest to is that you try
02:03:28.220your your absolute most to to give the best to do the best to be there um and it you know sometimes
02:03:34.380we fall short sometimes we just get it right and you you know you you celebrate the victories and
02:03:41.840you try to adjust for the failure. But ultimately, doing everything that you have within your power
02:03:49.280to do is what a mother, what you should do, or what a father should do in those times.
02:04:00.160It's just, I think it's a great understanding of that, even despite all,
02:04:04.860uh the way things roll out do not always roll out for the benefit that perhaps we even understand
02:04:13.240uh we see it as a great loss but in in some ways it can be a great victory it kind of reminds me
02:04:20.700of the story of the of the um the farmer who you know his son falls off the horse and breaks his
02:04:26.440leg and everyone says you should be sad and he says maybe like and then it ends up stopping him
02:04:32.660getting you know conscripted into an army and and at the end of the story the the farmer just says
02:04:39.540maybe maybe it's good maybe it's bad i think there's a an understanding to that but but more
02:04:44.980so the power that you have expending that power you know and i think societally are are in our
02:04:51.700culture germanic women um teutonic women or just arian women in general have always been
02:04:57.460highly noted for fierceness towards protection of their children fierceness towards protection
02:05:02.820of their loved ones um so i think this is also a grand reflection of that as well culturally it was
02:05:09.940it was understood what she was doing and that was the sadness of the the ultimate doom of it
02:05:17.540but does it lead to better things perhaps outside of the scope of of understanding that's the big
02:05:23.700thing about the gods when we hear the stories and we we we hear the stories and like why didn't ovin
02:05:28.820know he knows all why didn't friggin know she knows all the point isn't for frigga or for oh
02:05:35.780then it's it's for you it's for the folk to learn that perennial truth you know a a couple of other
02:05:46.340elements to that um first i think that one lesson that our lord teaches us is there's honor in the
02:05:56.740struggle whether whether the outcome leads to the victory you want there's a value in doing
02:06:05.220the right things whether it all works out or it doesn't because you can say that you did your best
02:06:11.860And that means something. It's kind of a, well, something that, something that I do, and Svon knows this and other AFA leaders I talk to about sometimes.
02:06:28.800but there's so many different things that factor in to the afa's successes or failures
02:06:42.400a lot of those things are determined by the blessings of our gods and by things that are
02:06:50.260out of my hands but what i don't ever want to have happen is me not do enough
02:06:57.080me not try hard enough. This comes, and I mean this with everything in the AFA,
02:07:04.300but very specifically, this comes into play when we're, you know, really trying to get a hoff,
02:07:10.600and we'll get really close, and the deal will fall through, or, you know, things will seem
02:07:15.080perfect, then we'll have an inspection, and there's mold, and we just can't do it, and
02:07:19.000And whatever that case is, I want to make sure that I am absolutely obsessed with getting it right and leaving it all on the field, trying my best.
02:07:31.260I don't want the thing that's the difference between our gods receiving their Hoff or not be me being lazy or some foolish that I did or didn't do.
02:07:43.820and if you can do that there's a tremendous amount of peace of mind not in just saying that
02:07:51.280you did your best but in knowing that you absolutely did all that you can do so you don't
02:07:58.760have regrets if things don't work out the way you'd like it to because you have the peace of
02:08:04.840knowing you did everything you could and I think that's a lesson of that story and another thing
02:08:11.660i think is kind of a a side note to the story balder's death was tremendously tragic but one
02:08:20.220thing that happened was it spared him the conflict of ragnarok and the destruction that occurred then
02:08:29.020and at the fulfillment of ragnarok balder comes back and inherits and he returns to asgard and
02:08:41.660And that's, I think, a part in that story that that is important.
02:08:48.660All right. To change it up a little bit, Lou's got a question. Hi, driving home from work. This brings up a question I had. Obviously, we don't hail Loki in our Hoffs or group rituals at all. Are people who do so privately still welcome in the AFA? No.
02:10:50.200I've always found congruence for myself to be, you know, by the fire.
02:10:54.920or uh in particular i i had a um a handmade um uh goldstead or godstead uh an image of um frigg
02:11:07.940above my my stove um as a symbol of this is the heart of the home where the food is produced and
02:11:15.500much of the strength of the family comes from and again being you know a being a cook that i
02:11:22.360that it was uh me and my wife both cook but you know we're both there in the kitchen doing things
02:11:27.320so it became a unifying factor so yes i also saw someone say near a marsh uh that's in reference i
02:11:34.280think for a lot of people who might not understand is that there is a a lot of um connection to friga
02:11:41.160and the maidens of fensaler being in the pervasion pervading area of mist between the earth and the
02:11:48.680sky and that takes form in the fen and the positive version of the fen versus the negative
02:11:56.120like for fenris the dweller in the swamps this is the marsh um but it's wherever you find those
02:12:03.720connective um tissues if you will for your faith and to where you feel comfortable um
02:12:12.120you know you could even set up a harrow inside your you know child's bedroom especially if they're
02:12:17.400a baby and that might be a great place to honor uh frig and the maidens um or just a law on the
02:12:25.640harrow along with all the other godsteads that are dedicated to the gods um but yeah it's it's more
02:12:32.280more about where you find connective tissue all right have either of you read the book odin's
02:12:39.800wife by william reeves uh it is a recent work i have not i have seen it i've seen people with it
02:12:47.080I can picture the cover in my mind right now, but no, I have not read it. What about you, Svon?
02:12:52.840I don't own a copy. I've read excerpts and pieces and things of that nature. There's a couple of
02:13:01.240things with the sourcing of this that do bring to mind, again, some things that we've already
02:13:11.240established are kind of uh not in the the the moral structure that we have been following
02:13:21.240within our faith is that again uh hypostasis um one of the big things about um the book is the
02:13:30.160establishment that jord is freak and um then that would imply perhaps that like uh the the mystery
02:13:42.240around neuron or uh or nerthus in the in tacitus germania and all of this um one of the big
02:13:50.560motivations behind this point is i think again a hypostasis ing of the feminine
02:13:57.120to create an earth mother mother that establishes a sky father um and i think one of the modern
02:14:06.020problems that a lot of people are doing right now is they are again mashing the gods into a like
02:14:12.320singular masculine and singular feminine when we can see very early on in the expansion of our
02:14:20.060people the arian people saw these establishments of hierarchy uh not as hypostasis not as oh well
02:14:31.100one god is just really this god or that god and it just kind of like origami folds into one god
02:14:36.940an over-pervading lord and an over-pervading lady and we can clearly see that with with uh
02:14:43.740with frigg and freya so again if we start going down that path what you end up getting is a lot
02:14:52.300of matching at what point do you stop and so there's clear indication it i from what i've
02:14:59.820read too it kind of points out some of the inconsistencies of snorri snorri sturdoson
02:15:04.460did have a lot of inconsistencies he had things with mimicking greek euhemerism and like greek
02:15:12.220um which was the you know the pinnacle of literature at the time that kind of uh motif
02:15:18.140he was clearly going for it uh there's some christian stuff as well especially in his
02:15:22.460painting of the afterlife and and and the world of the undead i mean of the dead and the undead i
02:15:28.780guess so you know when you're dealing with spirits and evil things uh and some of like the ingital
02:15:34.220and stuff um the uh the the so that that that kind of attack on snorty i think is warranted and is a
02:15:44.380positive sense of understanding that snorty was influenced by other things and certainly wasn't
02:15:48.700just built around his faith but it goes to state that he is closer to our ancestors and their
02:15:56.460understanding of the gods than we are so that's at least a a point in in a direction that's that
02:16:04.860we don't readily have and so the the kind of uh i guess the overall argument to be made if your is
02:16:21.340is uh frigga or frig and and we're talking about again when she's born of fjorgan um and the the
02:16:29.900references of these things there's clearly some other times in which uh like people take that
02:16:35.100like the maiden of fensal or hlin is mentioned as the just that when odin dies is the despair of
02:16:40.860hlin so now was that a a text you know or a poetic force was it a text-like mistake or was it a poetic
02:16:49.180kind of jamming in because of meter um perhaps there's a story or a relationship because we
02:16:55.260know that odin has relationship with sauga and so on and so forth so maybe there's context that
02:17:00.380we're missing but when we go down that road we end up doing a lot of things that um i think
02:17:12.060people have already established that they're against uh for instance the the the thoughts of
02:17:18.540like the seeing the the goddesses the our senior especially when we talk about the earth we see
02:17:29.180frigga or freak we see gaird we see grither we see render we see all of these our senior that are
02:17:38.140clearly showing variant structures and fastenings of the earth and that the earth like the sun and
02:17:44.460the moon we're not seen as in the the entity itself but yet more a primordial warden of it
02:17:53.580like the spark of muspelheim is the sun and thus the the warden of it is suna or the or mauni is
02:18:01.420the the warden of the primordial piece that is from the beginning that is the moon uh and so
02:18:07.740to the earth again most people would can see the the connection between the earth and the flesh of
02:18:13.740emir so that the gods become they hold thrones or dominion over primordial forces because they order
02:18:22.140things they order things and create them into channels that flow within the material and within
02:18:27.660the spiritual but to say that they are all the same despite their many dominions is a dangerous
02:18:33.900path to go down and so i've had big contentions with snorri's labeling of um divine powers of
02:18:42.460being jotuns clearly if you know i've all often brought up the if if a jotun which the gods are
02:18:50.460descended to from and a lot of people try to think them as like different races um but yet mimir
02:18:57.740odin's uncle is a jotun or it's it's about that loyalty of those powers and ordering
02:19:04.380once they join the ordering they become house they become not primordial ancients but
02:19:12.460orderly cosmic adjudicators, or they hold domain over cosmic order. And we see this in Yordh and
02:19:23.100with GrÃðr. So that's a perfect example right there. When we see Yordh, we see the giving earth,
02:19:29.760we see the mother of Thor. But then we oftentimes fail to see or hear about the story of GrÃðr,
02:19:41.340the jotanus of the earth that helps thor as well and so you you're left with okay well maybe your
02:19:48.500than grither are the same and then we start mashing stuff together to fit into a narrative
02:19:55.660and again it's the same with the sky father i think ultimately the misguided sense of it is
02:20:02.920i'm not saying there isn't a sky father but what i'm saying is is that there is a hierarchy or a
02:20:09.040faceting of the rules of the sky and there's just as much a faceting in an individual domains of
02:20:16.400earth and our ancestors did that our arian ancestors be were polytheistic they weren't
02:20:21.920like bi-theistic um and so if we do that we kind of end up going down the path very much like what
02:20:30.000wicca has done where they you know there's a lord and a lady and ultimately the stories boil down
02:20:36.000to them just being the masculine and the feminine force um and i think that that structuring and
02:20:42.080understanding divinity and and the polytheism of of polytheistic religions is starting to get
02:20:49.920kind of wishy-washy in in in works like that um and again that's because some of the scope of it
02:20:58.960if you know it's it comes down to an understanding so it's very easy to just say oh they're all
02:21:03.440frigga and frigga is the earth mother and she's married to odin who is the sky father
02:21:10.720and that's it that's that's easy but we see again arian mythos always works in the tripartite
02:21:17.920especially in involving the sky you know there's always the stasis throne the dynamic throne and
02:21:24.160the catalytic throne and there's always different gods in those thrones so you have a dilemma and
02:21:29.440And that dilemma is very simple. Are all those gods, the same God, just in different name?
02:21:34.100And are we then cramming all of our gods into one kind of just God form? Or are they individual willful divinity powers that have their own movement in weird?
02:21:50.680And I think polytheism is the belief that all things, whether from creation to destruction, always work in multiplicity.
02:22:01.480And so that's the one problem I have with some of the stuff I've been reading is, again, and we've established this in our calls.
02:22:08.200We've established this as a church. This is the way we go. It is better to individually honor as opposed to mash things together.
02:22:16.680and i think that people are desperately trying to make things easier and in doing so they're
02:22:24.520they're attacking like the lore in a way that crams the circle into the square crams the the
02:22:32.840square into the circle um and if we go by what we have in lore you know uh um frig is mentioned as
02:22:43.080being a born of the earth just as much as you know thor is born of the earth um we see again
02:22:51.080the uh the primordial power and then the dominion or the throne that is the threshold in which that
02:22:57.080power flows i think that's a big difference that we should focus on is looking at the gods as their
02:23:03.560ability to one move throughout creation and the levels of the world with dominion and power but
02:23:12.120But that they also become a threshold of a coursing part of power that is part of a whole, whether it's the primordial power of the earth or material, or they are, in essence, conduits and thrones of dominion, and behind them projects the power that makes them, that they contain, which is cosmic order.
02:23:32.860so i i want to be careful about mashing the gods into like all into one title one name because it
02:23:40.800becomes very dissipative when uh uh people try to force like oh thor is you know he's the thunder
02:23:50.460god he's minor sky versus greater sky and or dellinger and and mundalfari and they're all
02:23:58.140just really you know names for odin or that's i don't think the way i poly our ancestors and
02:24:04.860polytheism works so and this is you know well beyond the scope of the question but um
02:24:17.260and i say this a lot in these in these discussions but i think it can't be restated enough
02:24:28.140our faith is not a science project it is building a relationship with living entities that exist
02:24:38.840so the damage of let's just make it easy and pretend they're just all one thing
02:24:45.620that's good enough isn't it well no that leaves people out that leaves spiritual personages
02:24:54.280that are worthy and deserving of our worship out from receiving it, because it's more convenient
02:25:01.780for us to treat it like a science project and assume two things are the same when we don't
02:25:09.640have reason to. It's impious. As people who want to express our piety and are moved and motivated
02:25:22.200by piety the last thing we would want to do is be disrespectful to our gods so we would we would
02:25:30.360err on the side of caution because if you you know if you honor a god by two different names
02:25:40.120that god is still receiving your praise and your honor but if you assume they're the same one and
02:25:46.200you only honor one not the other then one of those gods who is worthy of worship does not get
02:25:52.280worshiped and that's an extreme disrespect and it's unacceptable so as a church that believes in
02:26:00.200our gods we want to err on the side of being the most pious and the most respectful as opposed to
02:26:07.320run the risk of of causing offense by guessing wrong poorly on things like that our ultimate goal
02:26:16.840isn't to make the lore more understandable and easier for us to digest our goal is to worship
02:26:27.400our gods as best as we can in the most pious and authentic way we can and those goals are very often
02:26:35.160I did want to point out, too, that some people might say, oh, well, you guys are discounting, say, like, etymology or something like that. We greatly try to place about with that in mind for lore.
02:26:54.040i mean if we look at nerthus and her etymological name being derivative of like the word earth
02:27:01.000and ersa or hearth or hertha and we see this kind of growth of the name from sourcing from nerthus
02:27:08.120from from uh tacitus germania and then we see your yard being the nordic word for the earth
02:27:17.480um and we see that etymological connection but there is a big step there immediately between
02:27:24.760yarth and the precious one frig which the closest that we can gain especially with all of the
02:27:31.800iterations of of uh frig's name whether it's it's frico or frijo or fria or free which causes even
02:27:41.080more infinite confusion with freya um that's a pretty big etymological jump the other thing is
02:27:48.680is not too far after snorty aside and the sagas aside and the prosetas is that we do know that
02:27:56.120continental germanic folk honored like frico and i'm referring to the lombardic story in which she's
02:28:03.720clearly and cleanly mentioned um and that's during the migration period which is even
02:28:09.160far closer to tacitus's time and they're that that referencing that correlation doesn't there's no
02:28:18.480connective tissue she's seen very much as the individual goddess that we call frig so i would
02:28:27.080you know i would argue that unless there's like perhaps maybe some more etymological evidence
02:28:33.640that that bridges that big gap and again people do that they will bridge that gap in any way they
02:28:39.420see it and sometimes that can cause a lot of problems but ultimately at the end of the day
02:28:44.100it's not a science project it's something that we work towards but when we honor them
02:28:49.200we honor them like correctively as we know them in order to again if on the back end
02:28:56.880secretly somebody says you know swan doesn't know what he's talking about
02:29:00.740because frig frig and yours are clearly the same well i honor your and i honor frig i am not any at
02:29:10.020the loss of reverence but if you choose to mash them together and and and put their names together
02:29:18.100and say their name is fjord at that point you're doing disservice to divinity and that is where
02:29:25.700that it causes more complications there's a lot of complications on that nashing road if you will
02:29:32.020that's the thing with the best of intentions sometimes there are divinities that
02:29:41.380that are um confused because they're coming from different sources and they're named different
02:29:47.220things wherein they're really a singular divinity of course that of course that happens in the body
02:29:52.420of of our literature at some point but there's a far cry from picking those that we have solid
02:30:00.020foundation and solid reason to believe are the same and trying to mash lots of them together
02:30:08.580because it just makes it easier the end of the day if these are just archetypes and this is all
02:30:14.900just kind of a a symbolic our rituals are a a symbolic game that we play mentally to focus on
02:30:21.540different archetypes then it doesn't matter why don't we just you know make it as simple and as
02:30:27.380clean as we can because that would be really easy but they're not they are literal gods and literal
02:30:35.780goddesses and therefore our building an actual personal relationship with them is the purpose
02:30:44.900of our religion and the practice of our religion it's the purpose of being also true and so we
02:30:52.020endeavor to do that with a mind towards individual personality as best as we can
02:30:59.860and i i think too something worth like we see the gods as like vessels and each vessel um may
02:31:07.860contain the the visceral power of order and and the overall power of the divinity but each vessel
02:31:16.260is its own and in a way turns that when that when that the fluid flows into that vessel it leaves
02:31:25.380that vessel differently and that's one of the things that i try to point out when we talk about
02:31:30.180dominions or thrones of power is the liquid going in may be labeled as like say cosmic order but
02:31:37.540when it enters the vessel of say the goddess air we're talking about healing when it leaves the
02:31:45.540vessel of thor where you know we're strength and might and and protection and power these vessels
02:31:51.620are very important to the the the that which binds them together so to say that they're the same
02:31:58.900vessels is is where the disrespect kind of level comes in and i and the other thing that really
02:32:03.700kind of gets me is and this is something recently developed that i've been thinking about one of our
02:32:08.260witten members brought up and i just hit the ball right out of the park and got me thinking about
02:32:14.020stuff is is um the the concept of like say golvey and perhaps we'll talk more about that with freya
02:32:21.940but golvey the thirst gold thirst being freya is a lot of the same mash path as your brain being uh
02:32:33.700And a lot of the people that really do condone a lot of Rieb's work will gladly soak up the path, that mash path of Yorv is Frigga because they need her to be the Earth Mother, you know, directly in correlation to Sky Father.0.55
02:32:51.920But they will gnash their teeth at Golvay and Freyja, that mash path.0.80
02:32:56.500And I thought that was an interesting point.0.93
02:32:58.100And I was like, wow, I never even thought of it that way.
02:33:00.260But again, we are consistently holding to our moral framework.
02:33:02.940And so that's something worth considering. I'm going to get the book. I'm going to read it because knowledge is knowledge and it's very, very good. But you've got to be able to kind of stick to your framework and piece through information and, again, learn from everything.
02:33:20.580but don't compromise oneself based off of, you know, just something kind of falling in your lap.
02:33:27.700It takes a lot of time and process to digest and organically change if there is evidence to prove
02:33:35.700otherwise or concentric. All right. Our next question. Could the story of Balder's death
02:33:45.040be a warning of the dangers of overprotecting one's children if she hadn't made everything
02:33:51.360promise not to hurt him he wouldn't have felt invulnerable and no one would have thrown anything
02:33:57.520at him is this a good or a bad way to interpret the story um like i said earlier there's
02:34:07.040a lot of truths in each of these stories they're meaty with truth
02:34:15.040Yes, I think that there's something in there about when you try to escape fate, fate gets you in the end anyway.
02:34:28.120And, you know, there's plenty of folklore about those things happening.
02:34:32.820You know, if it wouldn't have happened that way, it would have happened a different way.
02:35:00.100Yeah, I think like the overall and arching wisdom of the tragedy.
02:35:06.360And again, this does place in Hellenic circles as well.
02:35:10.740A lot of Hellenic stories follow the same path, is that the path you take to avoid your fate often brings you to it.
02:35:18.680And this is, again, I think this is an interesting debate amongst the folk in relation to willful action or fatalism, as it's often referred to on the other side, where it doesn't matter what you do.
02:35:31.740your fate is your fate and other you know or is it a certain mixture of will and fate and things
02:35:37.680like that i think that also was part of the the the real drive of the story and so i think it's
02:35:45.820ultimately a warning a warning about uh in the face of danger we we laugh oftentimes i think
02:35:54.960culturally for most people on this call will know like what i mean by we laugh in the face of danger
02:35:59.740we meet our end smiling and we go forth in glory and and that is culturally an aspect of our lives
02:36:06.860um this is kind of saying be careful about hubris versus thumos and i'm using the greek
02:36:14.060words because those are a little bit easier to kind of um like allocate on on the internet if0.93
02:36:19.980you look up you know and again that's very hellenic too so there's a an over arching uh0.69
02:36:27.340concept of thumos is about bravery and about honor and about living a bright life hubris0.88
02:36:35.180is when you take it too far and you um you fail wisdom and so you know courageousness tempered
02:36:45.020by wisdom is thumos and courageousness without it is hubris in a lot of ways so um yeah it
02:36:54.140i would say it would be a warning i don't know if it's necessarily a warning to a mother um again
02:36:59.500but the overall arching point of the story is is that we must do all that we can because the
02:37:05.180option to do nothing is is would seem far worse so do all that you can but um when when the gods
02:37:12.620are throwing things at balder that is definitely a painting of that kind of hubris moment that allows
02:37:20.220for the deceitfulness of loki to sneak in to find the blind and to guide his hand and he searched
02:37:30.220for the gentle mistletoe that that frail and tiny and and and joyous peace the child of the oak and
02:37:38.540the the one thing that wouldn't do any harm does the greatest harm there's a lot of things we can
02:37:43.500see in like the grim fairy tales and even in like slavic lore and hellenic lore there's a lot of
02:37:48.460that those adages in there were kind of woven it's really beautiful story it's great but yeah i think
02:37:54.780hubris is the warning overall and it's not necessarily on frigga's part but on all of the
02:37:59.820gods and perhaps even of balder but yeah the way that snorty again paints balder is kind of you know
02:38:07.340i think he's influenced by christianity and you see this kind of like childlike innocence also
02:38:11.740involved with him as well whereas clearly his name denotes boldness courage and strength but uh so i
02:38:19.980would say that perhaps even on on his part if even if you remove the christ-like imagery out of it it
02:38:26.700was you know everything is oath you know to not touch me you know let's let's see where this goes
02:38:34.940let's see how this plays out and then everyone's doing things and everything's affirming that the
02:38:39.420that that it is correct but that allows the avenue for the deceitful one to slip in and kill
02:38:46.940his brother's son his blood brother son if you will all right uh do you all have a go-to book
02:38:56.620of scripture sort of like a bible uh no we don't and i think that any comparison would be really
02:39:03.580really loose but i would say our our closest thing to a go-to source for our lore would be
02:39:10.220the prose and pose and poetic eddas um they're where the majority of the stories of our gods
02:39:16.860come from in you know the most i don't know the most detailed and meaningful ways and i think
02:39:28.700that's the closest thing you'd get to but it's not something that we believe is you know the
02:39:35.900divine word of the gods um but it is our are the traditions of our folk and our faith as was
02:39:43.820recorded in the 1200s and it's the closest that we have um but it is the the most the best go-to
02:39:53.500compilation of the stories of our gods that we have available i've got a okay next question is
02:40:02.220i'm kind of confused uh hother being blind was tricked into killing balder by loki
02:40:09.900vowley kills hother his kin but he is not called kinslayer why is this
02:40:16.140this loki should be the one valley kills right and i think there's layers to that one of the
02:40:23.340reasons that i mentioned earlier about how how strife amongst kinsmen was such a horrible curse
02:40:34.860because there is no right answer it's your job to avenge your kinsmen
02:40:41.100but if your kinsman's killed by another one of your kinsmen
02:40:46.140what are you supposed to do either way is wrong there's no right answer and that's that's why it's
02:40:54.300an imperfect solution because an impossible and a terrible situation was created and i think this
02:41:01.740speaks to that um vengeance needed to happen especially for a god a personage the stature of
02:41:35.540What I will say is you're right, a lot of it
02:41:38.320needed to be placed, the blame needed to be placed on Loki.
02:41:43.320Hothr was killed as an implement of the murder, but Loki was the problem.
02:41:50.800And Vali is involved in the binding of Loki.
02:41:54.300And when the gods formed a posse to go get Loki, Vali was involved in binding Loki with Loki's son's entrails.
02:42:04.100So he was instrumental in delivering vengeance to Loki as well.
02:42:09.560Um, but yeah, it's really unfortunate. And I think it points out the, the tragedy of when something like that happens between Ken is there, there is no right answer.
02:42:23.380Um, and the cycle of vengeance doesn't have an end and you got to kind of figure out where to stop with it and what's the best of a terrible situation.
02:42:32.700And yeah, it's all bad at that point. That's why it was such a horrible curse to our ancestors.
02:42:40.480Do you have anything to add on that? It's fun.
02:42:43.540Yes. One thing worth noting, and you mentioned it, but to kind of go a little bit into it,
02:42:50.800one of the things is once you commit the atrocity, you become severed from
02:42:56.040the connection of it all. And that's why it's such a scary thing.
02:43:02.700When, for instance, when we look at the story, we look at Baldr, the bright, the light, the shining, the visible, the bold, the heart, in juxtaposition to Hodor, the blind, the dark, and the ignorant, if you will.
02:43:20.260He's ignorant of what's about to happen and so much and so forth.
02:43:23.240But what this is, is an adherence to correct law, an adherence to correct action, an adherence to correct way.
02:43:33.500And so Vali represents, because he is birthed from, like he's birthed at this moment in his entirety to correct that which is out of balance.
02:43:43.640And so Holder is, in essence, tragically separated from the whole, but is, in a way, it's because he must be united with Balder. They are together in their correlation to each other.
02:44:00.580So when Balder dies, then so too must the correct action be that Hodder dies, that they become back in the equalness of each other and the powers that they are, the gods that they are and what they represent.
02:50:58.540than Israel's right to return or Native Indian tribes' generic tests for membership.
02:51:06.580At what membership size do you imagine we will see fair treatment?
02:51:11.900I don't imagine that a membership size will determine our fair treatment unless that membership size is, you know, 100%.
02:51:21.600I don't think there's a membership threshold that does that.
02:51:26.620I don't think our membership numbers affect us, but the distance between us and where those numbers would be big enough to make a difference is vast.
02:51:40.820I mean, we would need to have the equivalency of like Catholics or all the Jews or, you know, a huge group of millions, tens of millions of also true practitioners in order for that to, I think, move that needle on us treated fairly.
02:52:05.140i don't think the issue right now preventing us from being treated fairly is one of the numbers
02:52:09.220outside of those kind of titanic numbers i think the thing that's
02:52:13.620bothering us is the political climate that we live in um we support all of the things that
02:52:22.900woke is against and that's the thing that's that's very difficult um the political current
02:52:30.580in the west is very very toxic and askew from all things traditional and we represent uh traditional
02:52:42.980values and traditional understanding and i think that is the struggle that we face um
02:52:54.340i know better than to expect fairness from
02:52:57.220the media uh from from randoms and i don't think we're going to get fairness from from the media
02:53:07.400i do think and i do expect fairness well when i say expect i'm prepared for this not to be the
02:53:14.720case but i do hope for and feel entitled to respect um from legal entities and so far that's been
02:53:25.680that's been upheld and that's been the case um and we do get treated fairly by people who actually
02:53:33.120know us that's something we've seen every place we have hoffs and where we actually exist as real
02:53:38.720people and not internet boogeymen or whatever the media paints us as no those people have treated
02:53:46.960us very fairly um and the the white people in those communities but very but overwhelmingly
02:53:54.800the minorities in those communities have treated us very fairly and so i appreciate that
02:54:06.320have you considered annually recognizing the highest monetary and non-monetary contributors
02:54:13.120official recognition may engage the competitive spirit of our people into outdoing one another
02:54:19.440even more i really like the idea of that what i found to be the reality with especially our
02:54:27.760our largest economic contributors is they don't they're very humble people and they don't want
02:54:34.240a lot of attention um the people that have donated the most to us have specifically asked that we
02:54:41.200don't mention them um so we try to respect that i do always look for ways of honoring those people
02:54:50.240we've got uh plaques that are hoffs of people who've contributed significantly to those i think
02:54:57.120finding ways to recognize and honor people that contribute to what we're doing as you mentioned
02:55:02.160monetarily and non-monetarily is really important it's easier and we don't run into the same
02:55:10.000resistance on honoring folks who've contributed non-monetarily. And we try to do that as best we
02:55:17.180can and recognize those people when we get together. But something definitely to think
02:55:23.320about. I think utilizing the competitive nature of our people to make ourselves better, to make
02:55:30.040our church better, to do more good things for stuff we all believe in is a net positive for
02:55:36.420everybody. I know that comes into play at our auctions. Our auctions are a lot of fun and we
02:55:41.440see a lot of competition at those and the AFA always wins on how that competition goes. So
02:55:48.700that always works out really good. Something to add to that just a little bit, I think for a lot
02:55:57.100of people that might not know, we have a subscriptive support member, but we do have a lot of
02:56:03.680folk that also go into Hoftholler and to contribute in, you know, in that way is a huge
02:56:10.580benefit because of how it, it, it aids us and keeps us away from people that are constantly,
02:56:17.320you know, trying to demonize us. So I'm, I'm glad that you mentioned that because folks may not
02:56:22.600be aware of it or, you know, maybe a new concept or maybe people don't understand it.
02:56:29.100Hoftholler has been something we've done the past few years and it's been a really,
02:56:32.380really big benefit to us. Ultimately, we want to move away from a, you know, a set dollar figure
02:56:41.640monthly dues membership kind of thing. That's much more the model of a club or of an organization.
02:56:51.640What we have been moving towards and where we want to get is into a percentage-based giving
02:56:59.820situation that is the ex the expectation and the culture of our church like pretty much all um
02:57:08.780functional religions around the world do and call it different things uh the word hof toller is an
02:57:15.420actual term that that our ancestors used to use and it was um a toll or a tax that supported the
02:57:21.420hoffs and the and the gothar and uh so the idea and we didn't want to we didn't want to go in
02:57:30.300and ask too much we don't want to be money grubbing we need money to keep the lights on we need money
02:57:35.740to do the great things that we're trying so hard to do but it's not about that so we ask that you
02:57:43.980know one percent be that minimum for off told we've got a lot of people that do that now that'll um
02:57:50.060Um, there's ways you can do it on your own. There's ways that some folks can have their employer, uh, take it out of the paycheck. That way it is more tax advantageous. Um, again, any of your donations or membership to us, uh, is tax deductible because we're, you know, a 501c3, uh, non-profit church, at least in the United States.
02:58:14.800um so yeah so the hoff toller is a big deal and that minimum is one percent there are people out
02:58:21.680there that give you know i think about 10 is the most that i've heard and there's people all the
02:58:27.120way in between there and that makes a huge difference one of the cool things about that is
02:58:33.440is it's very um it's very fair to use the word like if you're having a hard time
02:58:41.260you know, then if your total that comes in is, is less than that percentage is a much smaller
02:58:48.160number. If you're doing awesome and you know, the AFA is a part of that in some way, then we can
02:58:53.140share in that and we can share in each other's success. And that's a really important thing for
02:58:58.660us too. But, uh, but yeah, that's where we're trying to go. We would love to have all of our
02:59:03.400folk on Hofftoller so we could stop hounding people about monthly dues. We could have a
02:59:10.300culture of giving, so we don't do that. I'll tell you this. I have to push on our folk builders
02:59:16.740hard to do that. None of our folk builders, if they ever bother you about dues, that's the last
02:59:23.200thing they want to do. Nobody likes to do that. I hated that when I was a folk builder. It's
02:59:29.780awful. It's what we got to do, and I don't apologize for it. It's why we have four Hoffs
02:59:36.960to to our gods and uh we're doing really well that way but nobody likes to have to do that
02:59:44.080and we'd love to move away from that and that's we're trying hard to do and something else yeah
02:59:48.320go ahead i was gonna say something else that people might not know uh clergy i i am on half
02:59:54.640toller i pay off toller so it's it's a it's not something that's done you know like a pressed
03:00:02.400down or something like that is the gothar you know they give as well we get i'm on ten percent
03:00:08.480so just to i guess because competition he said competition and recognition and all this
03:00:13.600we don't shy away from that that is part of our culture is being able to boast and to brag and
03:00:18.480i'm very proud to say even despite the fact being gothar being witten i give half toller because
03:00:25.040it's important and it gets and then that on top of things that we need at the at the uh at the
03:00:31.360hoff you know it's often time i would just get get it myself um to to help and to do whatever so
03:00:40.880that's something worth noting as well i think it's it's important all of our growth are involved
03:00:45.920even as well it doesn't make them outside of it we've got some really really generous folks and
03:00:51.600i want to thank all of you guys who've donated and been generous i think this is as good a time as
03:00:56.240any to bring up kind of where we're at with um with new york's hof so we have new york's hof
03:01:03.520but in order to do that we had to um take out two two uh personal loans for that um
03:01:11.920one individual uh was or is an afa member the other individual is you know in our larger circles
03:01:18.480that is supportive of things that we do and um yeah so anyways we took out those two loans and
03:01:25.040it was the biggest dollar value value of Hoff that we've purchased so far. And so.
03:01:33.280Yeah, so we did that. And in order to pay it off, because that's the first step for us getting
03:01:38.560phrase off is to pay off all the loans from yours off, then we can start moving towards that. So
03:01:48.240this last month, I was very happy to say we were able to pay off one of the two loans that we had
03:01:53.520one of those two one of those is completely paid off that person made whole we're on the
03:01:58.000other side of it and we have one more left one more loan left on that hoff um overall cost of
03:02:05.840that hoff was 245 000 are yeah and then uh we we now have that whittled down to just over
03:02:16.800112 000 so we're we're getting there these big numbers but they're getting chipped away
03:02:22.960If you'll remember, we bought that off in July.
03:02:27.980So in a very short amount of time, we've been able to pay off the first loan and make good progress on the second.
03:02:35.760And that's because you guys are generous and we really appreciate it.
03:03:35.660So we've been really discussing about where we are going from here.
03:03:41.580one of the things like tonight i didn't know if we were gonna you know we discuss we we always
03:03:46.140discuss divinity and then we kind of move into questions and and that can be a wild ride because
03:03:50.460we have no idea what's coming and and we don't prep for this so we just shoot from the hip but
03:03:56.060i mean uh you know discussing like the maidens of fen solid and the the goddesses surrounding
03:04:01.980frigg i didn't know if we were going to broach that threshold tonight or if that's perhaps
03:04:05.900something for future um i mean clearly the first thing uh about our structure of of
03:04:13.580the ausenir or the goddesses is is really based around frig and freya and then we move out from
03:04:21.500there with the maidens of fensal and and also to the um the divine powers that are you know aligned
03:04:29.500with the gods outside of that and there's a lot of discussion as to where they where all of that
03:04:33.900fits because when it comes to the goddesses in our it's it's the house are very upright and pillared
03:04:40.220and easy to to focus on it's the the inner weaving of the our senior uh that becomes very um
03:04:48.700not complicated but intricate if you will and um so you know utilizing uh
03:04:56.460uh discussions further i don't know uh you know whether it's like alphany or or nahelania or um
03:05:05.020you know of some of the uh or frau frau hola or perched which i had mentioned earlier i don't know
03:05:13.580where we're where we're going with that and i do know that you know we don't i i i know members
03:05:21.020of the afa some of them would like say hold uh you know um votive like prayers to specific goddesses
03:05:31.660that are correlated through maybe their ancestry if they're german ancestry they'll hold uh faith
03:05:37.260to like to perch if they're you know lowland germans their highland germans or swiss they
03:05:43.260mention fra hola and they hold ceremony to that or even with some of the anglo-saxon you know
03:05:48.300i don't think that um when it gets into that field we don't get super it's better to be devotional
03:05:56.700and to to have that faith so we don't get super uh laser pointed on that so i don't know where
03:06:03.820we're gonna go with that that's a great question it's one of the things with with our goddesses
03:06:08.780and that's always been kind of an indo-european thing is our gods are written in these big bold
03:06:14.540letters and they're very they're very solid and they they move with our people and they're
03:06:23.980omnipresent whereas so many of our goddesses are are much smaller in scale are much more localized
03:06:30.840are related to natural things that exist in one place on midgard you know goddesses of of rivers
03:06:39.100and lakes or groves and special places like that. So, you know, we've certainly we've got Frigg and
03:06:47.000Freya that are that are, you know, the great goddesses of our folk. And then we have several
03:06:52.380that are much smaller in figuring out votive worship of those and how best to do that is kind
03:06:59.140of an interesting challenge that we, you know, embrace now trying to figure out. But there's
03:07:07.340certainly a level of might difference there seems to be between goddesses like Frigg and Freya and
03:07:21.040some of these smaller, more localized goddesses. And so acknowledging that, too, goes into, you
03:07:28.280know, what our plans are. We're currently discussing what our next Matt and Svan topics are
03:07:33.380going to be alternating on these other weeks here. We have episodes on our heroes. They're
03:07:38.960really important. Our heroes absolutely need to be talked about and celebrated. We are two episodes
03:07:44.980into our hero episodes, and there has been not one question asked about any of these heroes we've
03:07:51.560done episodes on during the episode. That's okay. We're going to keep doing them anyway,
03:07:55.820because it's really important, and these people deserve to be talked about. Their story is being
03:07:59.480told um one thought i had too is there's no no shortages of of discussion about holy tides
03:08:07.160again that was brought up about sigur bloat and austera and and hexenacht and and midsummer so
03:08:13.320making some of that clarified and then of course just the conversations that come out of that
03:08:18.600seem to be really good so i don't know that's the thing any of these thematic shows you know today
03:08:23.080we've talked a lot about uh about frig actually but a lot of these thematic shows will have you
03:08:28.600you know, maybe half an hour, 45 minutes of topical discussion about the theme. And then
03:08:34.800the rest of the show is just kind of taking it wherever the current leads, depending on y'all's
03:08:40.580questions. And that's very organic. I like the way it works that way. You guys have really good
03:08:45.520questions and seems to be working out pretty well that way. Next question. Has anyone heard
03:08:54.360about goddesses like uh free agabis or nahelania yes i mentioned nahelania yes svan just mentioned
03:09:03.920her and uh yeah free agabi i actually when i was studying to be a gothi i had to do a little bit
03:09:12.760of research on on more obscure gods and goddesses and that was one that uh that i did was you know
03:09:22.400looking into to what i could learn about free agape um so yeah i don't think they're well known
03:09:29.600though um next question also from the same person question i did indo-european deity study and
03:09:39.760there is a goddess of the tripartite society warlike priest and fertility aspects of all
03:09:48.160within her would frig be our reflex uh of that goddess what do you think swan well again that's
03:09:58.320one of the things where we talk about the war aspect in correlation to freya and then the uh
03:10:04.320queenly aspect and the frith weaver and establisher of like uh sovereign femininity and uh correlation
03:10:13.920to to you know oath boundness between marriage and and children and and training and teaching
03:10:20.080the next generation and and all that the reflex of that is is a little hard i because again we
03:10:27.280kind of hit that before and i i think that was from um ryan and i think he just came in but
03:10:34.320earlier on in the show we were discussing about the internalized being projected feminine and the
03:10:40.960externalized being uh receptive feminine in in regards to uh freya and frig and so um you know
03:10:52.080the the warlike aspect again when there's correlation to say freya and the vow the
03:10:58.000the valkyrie or the valkyries as they're often we know in english so uh there's a lot of warlike
03:11:05.760connectivity and um you know i was in again that same discussion and that same witten member placed
03:11:13.200some good stuff on that discussion that night and he was talking about how um freya does first and
03:11:20.160foremost kind of epitomize a an elder and more um bronze age or older i'm just i'm putting bronze
03:11:30.640is just out there but imagine it if you will like an iron age versus a bronze age the requirements
03:11:37.040of the women folk may have been more harsh more brutal more determinant um as as opposed to say
03:11:47.200maybe later on in the iron age uh you know tacitus referring to um the germanic women standing on the
03:11:53.680edges of the battlefields you know while their men folk were fighting and things like that versus
03:11:58.240perhaps you know what women folk uh holding down the the home while the men folk were away in the
03:12:04.640nordic iron age there's a there's a difference there um and again you know when we look at the
03:12:10.480time scale of the gods from our stories you know we we see this time where um after the slaying of
03:12:18.240emir and the deluge and the sources of primordial resistance that come from bergelmer are coming
03:12:24.240from the east uh into the middle world in the west there is the world of the vana the the place of
03:12:31.840life and so earth is seen in its encapsulation as going on it's happening and it's it's it's moving
03:12:41.600and then three outs come down and shape something new and then leave and the uh you know the the
03:12:54.240progression of of humanity of the folk happen in this state and so a lot of times you'll hear the
03:13:00.400term like the vana are the old gods and that's really because humanity you know is shaped and
03:13:07.840the interactions that they have with the divine in the middle the the gods attached to natural
03:13:13.360law are the first ones we truly interacted with even though we are sourced from
03:13:18.400cosmic order and they came down but they there was time there so freya is of the older gods
03:13:26.400in the sense that after we were shaped and given on and and and uh the primordial resistance sees0.94
03:13:33.680these the slayers of their source that's the slayers of emir have have once again trifled on
03:13:39.980the middle earth by that time there was already established powers there were the dvergar or the0.98
03:13:45.700svart alvar and the leosalvar were already in process and in the east there was the primordial
03:13:51.300resistance the jotits and in the west there were the van the waning ones the ones connected to the
03:13:56.340material and those were the first gods we really encountered while the outs were above and kind of
03:14:03.880not quite in full incorporation yet until of course after their war because the witnessing
03:14:11.280of the war between the gods is a huge point of our faith and after seeing that war and their
03:14:16.920alignment that's when they come down again unified because now heimdall or rig comes down
03:14:24.100to intercede into the folk and teach us and make us better it's after that union so i think that
03:14:32.240it's worth noting that freya is the elder uh concept of i think femininity when we talk about
03:14:40.580a lot of that the that savageness that reflex when we when we see frigg it's of an expanded time
03:14:49.820in which both Frigg is seen as a maiden of the earth.
03:14:54.380She's born of Fjörgen and she is that maiden.
03:14:57.040And that maiden comes about after the union or she at least joins the house and becomes the bride of Lord Odin after their union.
03:15:08.820And so she is coming after a time of strife when there is stability, when cosmic order and natural law are in their correct pace.
03:15:19.420So the reflex of war and things, I think, is kind of like seeing the war goddess, seeing the violence part of connected to femininity is either one in association with elder times when things were rough or when things are rough.
03:15:34.320That's a sign of that kind of displacement.
03:15:38.840When the war and the struggle bleeds over into the feminine, we've got dire situations.0.75
03:15:46.580when when when we're circling the wagons and even the women folk are grabbing guns that's not a good0.87
03:15:52.500time so the the warness and and all of that it really does fall upon the mantled shoulders of
03:15:58.580the men folk represents that she is the goddess of femininity in a stable and well society in
03:16:07.940which things are working organically natural law and cosmic order are moving like a well-oiled
03:16:14.580machine so as far as um you know theorized older indo-european goddesses go what i think is really
03:16:27.780significant in this book that i that i like called deep ancestors um i have to call it the wheel and
03:16:35.540the donkey because on the cover it's got wheel and a donkey um but i enjoy it the guy's a lefty
03:16:43.620but if you take his little intro out of it and you read the information it's really good um
03:16:50.500but what he talks about in there that i think is perfectly personified in the the difference
03:16:57.540between frig and freya is the idea of the the cow goddess versus the mayor goddess about
03:17:05.300a goddess associated with with the home with women in a structured society in a position
03:17:15.780as wife and mother and uh you know wise woman of the of the tribe versus the the wild passionate
03:17:27.060the lover, the unbridled feminine youth, and that passion and magical nature and mystery that that
03:17:39.160involves. And those are two very different sides to femininity that each of these goddesses
03:17:44.860represents in a very special way. And that's where I think the overlap between primal Indo-European
03:17:52.000divinity is. I think that's where that, how that's come to us in its most direct form.
03:18:01.620Allie asks, is there something we as the AFA could be doing better or start doing to honor
03:18:07.920not only our own mothers, but the elderly women who have become mothers of the folk?
03:18:16.220Yes. First, the answer to that question will always be yes. There's always more we could do
03:18:21.120better than that we could do on that not sure what exactly some of those ideas are i know people have
03:18:27.840talked about maybe um honoring women who have uh lots of children in the afa um i think we try to
03:18:38.560do a very good job of getting mothers in the afa to be celebrated and honored i think that that
03:18:44.160happens a lot naturally in our afa groups and things but one thing and this is not female
03:18:52.800specific but dealing with elderly women who become mothers of the folk um i think this goes with all
03:19:00.800of our elders and i think it probably disproportionately is relevant to women
03:19:05.680because they do tend to live longer than men do um one thing that we want so badly to do
03:19:13.040at sigerheim and i think this is kind of a outside the scope of your question but i think it's a good
03:19:17.200time to bring it up is to when we're getting you know this is probably phase two or three
03:19:24.800but when we're getting housing and lodging there for apartments or cottages or small you know
03:19:33.840places for elderly people to live if they find themselves to where they need to live around
03:19:39.120others because they need help with things or because they financially have found themselves
03:19:44.860elderly and not doing well financially. Or, you know, if they just want to, we'd love to have
03:19:51.640them there with us. But that's certainly a way that I look forward to us taking care of our
03:19:56.880elderly in the relatively near future and being able to, you know, if we've got little cottages
03:20:04.660or dorms or bunk houses or whatever we've got to where there's a place where elderly people can
03:20:11.040live. They can have heat. They can be warm. They can be safe. They can be around people who love
03:20:17.040them and care about them. They can be connected there to their faith. And I can't promise them
03:20:22.880deliciousness, but if they get to the main hall there, they can have beans and rice all day long
03:20:28.780if they want so they can be you know hung they won't have to worry about being hungry or cold
03:20:34.140or alone or isolated from from their their religious practice of their community and that
03:20:39.420is a dream we can absolutely make true and we're gonna we're going to do that hopefully we'll be
03:20:45.100able to do that sooner than later um it's one of those things that you know it takes money to do
03:20:50.140it but that's something that we're very much committed to doing um it's fun do you know of any
03:20:56.220ways off the top of your head we could do better to honor mothers or the elderly mothers who are
03:21:01.580are the mothers of our folk i would say maybe looking at um local um community centers
03:21:13.020both in the elderly sense there are a lot of like uh community centers that
03:21:18.780gather and hold events or or perhaps you know um
03:21:23.100Um, uh, they, I think they even hold classes that are available to people to come in at
03:21:28.320these, these women know how to do things and they want to teach younger women that that's
03:21:33.500I think also looking at recreational centers, like community recreational centers might
03:21:38.560be a good place to start, uh, looking at where a lot of the older folks come in and want
03:21:44.600to, they have a hobby and that hobby is actually something from, you know, like decades past
03:21:52.500that was very very popular and that's a great way to kind of get involved whether it's knitting and
03:21:57.540sewing or or just just getting out there and and and you know giving company um find find the
03:22:05.780climate of the situation you might be able to bring your kids and and a lot of you know some
03:22:10.420certain folk homes and um at recreational centers children are seen as a as a boon um where they
03:22:17.460want to see kids and maybe they don't get visitations a lot from immediate family or
03:22:22.460you know circumstances might have you know happen or what have you search it out you know that's a
03:22:28.640thing um my mom for the last uh three years has been living or she was living at uh an old folks
03:22:38.340home and when i bring aubrey in there man those old ladies would just light up you know everybody
03:22:44.200in that light up the staff the old man or whatever but the old ladies especially would just light up
03:22:49.480seeing uh seeing a young child in there and getting excited about her so that's always a nice thing to
03:22:54.040do um next question orion's belt is slash was called freya's distaff symbol of authority in
03:23:04.680the home right swan do you know much about um germanic uh astro uh astronom or astrological
03:23:15.640ah well i i suppose but that has more of an esoteric meaning to it but yeah do you know
03:23:22.200anything about how how germanic ancestors perceived astronomy and astrology that way
03:23:27.320um so one thing that's really hard about that is we know that our ancestors especially the nordic
03:23:37.560seafaring all the way back to the migration period understood stars have understood how
03:23:42.040to use them for navigation but what's really sad is the the what is left of that is so scant
03:23:49.880that it's it's dreadful um the uh i mean the immediately the the three things that come to
03:23:57.240my mind is of course oh uh friggs friggs distaff and orion um which again i've looked into and i
03:24:05.880honestly don't know if where that's sourced in an elder literature um because i know like
03:24:13.800correlatively orion and uh and hercules and the association with thor and the arian um
03:24:25.800i guess titling of the belted warrior bearing a club is the striker motif again sometimes it's
03:24:33.720taken in a mortal form and sometimes obviously it's divine based uh the striker is divine but
03:24:40.360he seems to also some cultures have kind of over time lost connection to him and relegated him
03:24:47.880into a mortal sense so i've often been looking at the orion hercules um and thor connectivity on on
03:24:57.080the um like in patterns of the stars but when we talk about patterns of stars we're talking about
03:25:02.840you know the first the babylonians and then eventually the greeks and their additions and
03:25:07.560things but we do know uh the major two is uh arendil's toe and thiazi's eyes are directly
03:25:16.920correlated to stars the problem is we don't know which one and the only thing that that we have is
03:25:24.120arendil is associated with the east and so perhaps we don't know but it might be referring to uh
03:25:32.600serious this the the the dog star um but that's not 100 and that is one thing that's terrible
03:25:40.920and when we the only person that i've ever read and studied on that has ever kind of covered the
03:25:47.880topic both the esoteric astrology and the scientific astronomy is a runic um like uh
03:25:56.600author and um thinker is uh nigel pennock who has a book dedicated to that uh i think it's runes and
03:26:05.720and the um uh i honestly can't i can't recall it's a very old book i have it upstairs
03:26:15.720um it's uh it has an the the the 24 hours and 12 hour uh dial with runes uh around it each
03:26:24.760one representing each you know the 24 runes representing each of the 24 hours and he goes
03:26:29.560into um about the astrological significance of both the runes and stories of the gods and how
03:26:37.320our seafaring ancestors would have um had a lot more but it's unfortunately a lot of it hasn't
03:26:43.480survived and most of it in folklore and in sailor folklore in like the nordic countries has fallen
03:26:49.720to the wayside for you know christian lore or even just secular names for the stars so it's
03:26:56.200really kind of unfortunate because it's pretty much like we we we very much know we just like
03:27:02.520we know that our ancestors were very very heavily influenced with music string instruments and wind
03:27:07.480instruments but they're so scant because of poetic eras that you would think you know like nobody's
03:27:15.080nothing's ever mentioned of a drum but we know the drum is the most ancient instrument or the
03:27:20.760animals like uh there's lots of animals mentioned but there's never a mention of an owl which i
03:27:26.200always thought was so strange being that you know like the the boreal owl the gray owl is such a
03:27:32.840common fixture in um nordic folklore and just known um uh so there's a lot lost there unfortunately
03:27:43.480And just from my own knowledge, I haven't super, super kind of hound-dogged into it, but I don't know where the ancient source of Frigga's distaff comes from in reference to the constellation, and I've only been really looking at more of the evolution of the Orion and Herculean connection there.
03:28:06.940But yeah, I don't have much to offer on that. I'm sorry.
03:28:09.700Yeah, you know, neither do I. I've heard that about Freya's diff stuff forever, but I don't recall ever seeing where that's attested in any way. And, you know, I think it depends. I think there's probably, you know, more esoteric astrological connections in all of the ancient cultures about the stars to one degree or another.
03:28:36.560but i think that also the reason i was struggling with the word for it is i think it's
03:28:41.600i think it counts as astronomy if you're just recognizing pictures um but it's when you add
03:28:48.880the overlay of deeper esoteric meanings to them that it becomes astrology but either way i'm sure
03:28:56.000that our people had a wealth of that's one of the things if you consider you know what to do
03:29:02.960people didn't sit around and watch Netflix and play around on their computer and read books and
03:29:08.740do stuff. Our most ancient ancestors at night, they talked around the fire, they watched the
03:29:15.300fire, they looked up at the sky. And especially if you can do that away from the ambient light
03:29:24.220of cities and towns. I remember growing up in Alaska, that's something we used to love to do
03:29:29.200we'd go camp is it'd be dark up there in the middle of night we'd just go out in the middle
03:29:33.280of the frozen lake and just look up and you could see forever and you could see the northern lights
03:29:38.000you could see the stars and it's such a primally mysterious and fascinating thing that our ancestors
03:29:46.480must have stared at for millennia um and i i guarantee you there's a lot of lore to that
03:29:54.160that we've lost over time. Next question. I'm not sure if it was asked. Any updates on
03:30:04.000Sigurheim and Pioneers? Thanks. Yeah, absolutely. Got one guy that's living close by in a
03:30:16.880RV situation waiting to get some services established at Sigurheim before he moves
03:30:23.200onto the property got another guy that uh is currently selling his house and packing up
03:30:32.080and going to be moving out to sigurheim you know next to immediately and our third but our first
03:30:38.800person that's going to actually make landfall on sigurheim as far as any kind of permanency
03:30:45.200she is fixing to do that as we speak. I think she may, in fact, get on the road tomorrow to do that,
03:30:56.020to head that direction. So we are getting that figured out. We've had people,
03:31:02.920I mentioned the last call, but I don't know if you're here. We had a expedition out there a
03:31:07.340couple of weeks ago with some of our folks to take some more specific measurements and to talk
03:31:12.800to a septic guy and to lay out some different plans so we're absolutely moving forward on that
03:31:18.520it's uh it's really really exciting um our tennessee folk builder is hosting a moot on
03:31:25.960siggerheim uh on the 22nd of this month and yeah we're planning stuff and and we're going to have1.00
03:31:33.860a big regional event there on july the 22nd we're going to have sigger bloat at siggerheim1.00
03:31:42.280I'm very excited to be at that and to see as many of you at that who'd like to be there.1.00
03:31:47.460It's going to be awesome. It's a beautiful and amazing place, and I'd love to show that off to each of you guys.
03:31:57.060Next question. What happens to the Asenur during Ragnarok?
03:32:02.620I can't remember ever reading anything beyond Frigg crying out at Odin's death.
03:32:08.620Do we know, if not, in your belief, are we not meant to?
03:32:18.680I don't recall anything in regards to that, but that's not terribly surprising to me.
03:32:28.460The story of Ragnarok is about opposing forces meeting on a field and fighting.
03:32:35.400and i don't you know the non-combatants are not part of part of those kind of battle tales i
03:32:42.680don't think it really fits the story narrative i don't think there's necessarily some great reason
03:32:50.280that we don't know what happened but uh but no i don't uh i don't recall any any specifics of that
03:32:58.840in our lore and i'm i don't think there's a profound mystery to it personally what what
03:33:05.240do you think svan well i i do know of there is um a unique mention of freya and njord surviving
03:33:15.560ragnarok it's just briefly mentioned that they returned to the land of the vanir they
03:33:21.400return to the source of the west um but as far as frig uh or any of the other ausenir
03:33:31.400it's not mentioned and i think again that's because poetic meter and and verse it's it's about
03:33:37.160the you know they're clearly showing and the immediacy of forces fighting jormungandr and thor
03:33:45.240heimdall and loki and you know it's it it's really about the things coming to head
03:33:51.400but it is mentioned that the survivors too like magna and movi um you know but there's no mention
03:33:57.480of through um the uh the source i i yeah i think it's more important to realize that the forces
03:34:06.920that are coming together are disseminating and in reality the gods will will make themselves known
03:34:14.680after the fact magne and modhi uh you know valley and vidar um balder all of the gods that supersede
03:34:24.200the threshold of ragnarok will make themselves known to the generation that comes out of the tree
03:34:30.040which is life and the will to live or the thirst or the the desire to live and they
03:34:36.920that generation because you know we're not talking about an actual just singular individual
03:34:41.880one man one woman especially when their their name is life and the will to live but that is
03:34:49.680the new folk the the folk that survive they will they will then build those relationships with the
03:34:55.180gods because those are the gods that remain and they will they will be known to them and um and
03:35:01.320then we may come to know them if we ever move through that threshold of our bloodlines but
03:35:07.720it's not i think something that we deeply uh need to ponder because that threshold will be
03:35:14.680uh as it as it is said you know it's very very detrimental to the cosmic order and the natural
03:35:20.440law things get broken down and then they will return slowly again and that that is as we know
03:35:28.200it but yeah i do know that north and freya are mentioned as returning to the west so that's the
03:35:35.880only you know one that i absolutely have based off lore all right uh next question i think there's a
03:35:44.520misunderstanding that this is a good chance for you to clear up question for svan why do you take
03:35:50.920your as frig i know there's a little theory about a possibility of common epithets but everything
03:35:59.400points to yord as a jotun just like gerder as far as i know
03:36:08.360okay so that is a misunderstanding i do not that was a little earlier back obsidian we were talking
03:36:16.680about that and i do not like that's actually i was arguing in uh in in opposition to that
03:36:24.120that train of thought um no i i honor um i honor your separate from frigg and have have honored
03:36:36.440them uh in their own rights uh i've honored gareth but i i'm a big proponent for uh
03:36:44.920the pushing that that snorri did slap jotin as a title on a lot of things without fully
03:36:50.600understanding the scope of all of it for the sake of organization and i do i have always held in my
03:36:57.080personal belief that there are also near and then there are also near who birth gods or marry the
03:37:03.960gods and thus align themselves with the gods and since they are not like different races they are
03:37:10.840you know the the joten uh and the house are different because of their the powers that they
03:37:18.920are that once you align yourself with the powers of of the house you become an house or you birth
03:37:24.040an house and that alignment shows the only unique one that ever ever points out is the primordial
03:37:30.360connection the seat of the blood of emir the primordial connection is hosted by ayur and
03:37:37.560raun the two jotuns that are that they don't marry into the gods because they're already married
03:37:42.920so that's a complete male and feminine power that's showing completion and they rest in the
03:37:49.080primordial bowl of emir's blood which is the ocean the one place where primordial life truly comes
03:37:55.800from and we see animals inside the blood of emir that clearly resonate all the way back to when the
03:38:01.800jotens were springing from him uh and this kind of leads into a question or a statement just above so
03:38:08.280So I'm not trying to defer, but Ryberg talked about the two giant clans of Ymir, the upper body noble and the lower body base.
03:38:14.960I think it's also worth mentioning that, yes, there could have been some correlation to ancient caste systems, just like the story of Rigg having the Thrall, Carl and Jarl is lending to those caste systems, which is perfectly fine.
03:38:31.900But beyond that, there's a greater arching part of that story is that all of the Jotuns are killed in the Deluge, that the only two that survive are Ber-Yelmer and his wife, who is unnamed, and they escape.0.97
03:38:46.680And from them, the descendants of both good or like, I guess, less than terrible Jotuns and terrible Jotuns descend from them.0.97